Yesterday was a beautiful spring day in the Bronx, and I spent part of it with South Bronx Unite, a group that has lead the pushback against the relocation of Fresh Direct from Queens to a public waterfront in the Port Morris section of the Bronx. About 100 people were there, singing and chanting to […]
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Spike Lee’s now-famous rant against gentrification is a mixed blessing. As an extremely high profile New York voice, Lee commands headlines and brings even more visibility to an increasingly hot topic. But his unfortunate characterization as a racial lightning rod, as well as the contradictions raised by his own profiting from the New York real […]
Read moreI’m starting to get bummed out here. Too many good people are dying. The Knicks are terrible. The weather is deteriorating into some Blade Runner perpetual thunderstorm shit. Polar vortexting, tweeting, and Instagramming in a vacuum, searching for meaning. Puerto Rico is a sinking ship but now that the New York State Attorney General has […]
Read moreFrom the New York Daily News this morning, a quote from City Councilwoman Rosie Méndez, who made the mistake of being too late to support the candidacy of the new City Council Speaker and was not rewarded with a plum committee assignment and lulu. “It’s politics,” said Méndez. “That’s life.” I imagine this is true but it […]
Read moreMy fellow Boricuas, our long national nightmare is over. No longer do we have to be inundated by daily tidal waves of tales of Chickengate, Low to Moderate Income Townhouse-gate, Casabe Houses-gate, even Jewish Nursing Home on the Upper West Side Rezoning-gate. No longer do we have to live without ever having seen a Latin@ […]
Read moreThe worst thing about today’s stories in the Daily News and the Unmentionable Murdoch Propaganda Tabloid (I refuse to link to it, so find it for yourself) about “El Barrio Chickengate,” besides the fact that they are at times sloppily written and racist, is that they are in danger of giving thoughtful criticism of the probable […]
Read moreThe recent rumblings over Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s choice for City Council Speaker, District 8 Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, have unearthed some of the gnarly underbelly of East Harlem political strife, and raised difficult questions about progressive politics. De Blasio’s involvement in “pushing” Mark-Viverito’s candidacy is being questioned because it apparently doesn’t have a recent precedent. […]
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About three years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote something in the New Yorker about how the social media’s role in political activism was overrated, and some people got upset. Let’s not even mention where Egypt is at lately. It might be that Gladwell is one weird-looking dude, and there was a recent study that backed him […]
Read moreBill de Blasio’s victory in the mayoral election tonight may seem like a triumph of progressivism and a rejection of outgoing Mayor Bloomberg’s Wall Street agenda, but it is clearly an accident, and it remains to be seen what lies in New York’s future. It’s got to be more than a big red sign that […]
Read moreThis morning the Times has a prominent feature on mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio that amounts to a classic piece of red-baiting. The issues raised in the article have next to nothing to do with the mayoral race, and features much of the same kind of jaundiced bias toward leftist activists that have appeared in the mainstream […]
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