When I worked as a regular newspaper columnist, I absorbed two informal, folkloric strictures on subject matter: No columns based on conversations with cab drivers and none touting jury service as a magisterium of democracy, where one’s faith in the …
Civic Nationalism and the Left
As a love that dared not speak its name and then refused to shut up, homosexuality was officially superseded last October by the breathless, embattled new patriotism of former “Movement” radicals who met in Washington to burst together out of …
When the American Telephone and Telegraph Company announced on March 26th of this year that it would move 1,000 employees from its new Madison Avenue headquarters to Basking Ridge, New Jersey, the Koch administration’s fury was tempered only by its …
Like the mountains that labored and brought forth a mouse, the ongoing eruptions of charges against New York City officials for bribery, extortion, and racketeering over the past two years have brought forth two quips. The first belongs to Murray …
Now that “instant analysis” of the Howard Beach tragedy has given way to the criminal justice process and to the combination of symbolic appropriation and amnesia that envelops such events, we need to retrieve a few lessons about leadership from …
Virtually every column I’ve read on New York City’s unfolding municipal corruption scandals seeks salvation in greater citizen vigilance and participation in public life. A prosecutor warns that only an aroused electorate can wrest reform from foot-dragging politicians. A senator …
Neither liar nor squealer, Jonathan Rieder is something perhaps equally problematic in this book: an ethnographer with an argument, reaching for readers politically engaged. “Any coalition that fails to understand the grievances that collected in places like Canarsie all across …
New York Times employees of every rank and station formed lines outside Sydney Schanberg’s tenth-floor office for several days after his “New York” column was unceremoniously discontinued early last fall. They weren’t all there in support of Schanberg’s liberal-progressive positions …
It’s not a bad idea to remember that there are New Yorkers politically to the right of Ed Koch, a fact often obscured by the mayor’s own penchant for flailing his erstwhile liberal allies. Watching him savage Bella Abzug, you …
Suppose that all of New York City’s black middle-and working-class housing developments were plagued by crime and management neglect. Then a recent court settlement upholding “occupancy controls” in Brooklyn’s Starrett City, the country’s largest federally subsidized housing development, might make …
Not long after attending the Washington Monthly‘s Neoliberal Conference last fall, I had a gnawingly incomplete exchange with one of the panelists about his movement’s prospects. He’s a young writer of fairly typical neoliberal pedigree: prep school, the chilly Harvard …
Retiring Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm bowed out of central Brooklyn politics this winter for the halls of Mount Holyoke College, leaving behind the constituency of American and West Indian blacks whose “mother of the community” she’d been through 14 years of …
“Sorry about this mess, I don’t want to drive down your property values!” exclaims the young hostess, tripping over stray sheetrock and spackling compound toward 30 members of the new block association gathered stiffly in her living room—including a few …
Ed Koch is apt to conclude a boisterous community meeting with a warning. “Just remember,” he chides disgruntled New Yorkers in that shrill, pedantic singsong of his, “if you don’t like what I’m doing, you can vote me out! I’ll …
