All posts tagged: New York City

Death of a Tree | Benjamin Swett

Published by José

[ad_1] Some years ago I published a book called New York City of Trees. On facing pages of photographs and text, it presented portraits of fifty-five trees in the city’s five boroughs. One was of a Callery pear in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A mid-sized tree covered in white blossoms each spring, glossy green leaves in the summer, and a mass of orange-yellow leaves in the fall, the species is a familiar sight in cities across the US. At the time of my book’s publication it was the second most widely planted species in Manhattan, after the honey locust. Growing on the east side of Eleventh Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, this particular tree stood out for the way its rounded crown, framed by the brick building behind it, glowed in a shaft of late afternoon sun filtered between a post office building and a sanitation depot across the street. I first saw it while walking with my wife, Katherine, in late April 2002, and in that aura of sun the leaves shone …

Is this a teachable moment for Zohran Mamdani?

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] (RNS) — I have not been this depressed about the results of an election since the morning of Nov. 6, 2024, when I realized that Donald Trump had again won the presidency. New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary Tuesday night (June 24). I have given up political prognostication — anything can happen between now and November. That being said, there is a distinct possibility he could become the next mayor of New York.  That prospect disturbs me. But here is what I hope will happen. I am hoping some rabbis and New York Jewish leaders — some of whom are the most influential Jewish leaders in the world — will call Mamdani tomorrow. I am hoping they will ask him: “Can we have a meeting?” At that meeting, I am hoping those leaders will ask him: “Do you know how your remarks and positions have landed on Jewish ears? Can we talk about that? Can we reach an understanding?” Without that, and with Mamdani potentially becoming …

The Mamdani Coalition | Max Rivlin-Nadler

Published by José

[ad_1] In June 2020—three months after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down New York City, killing at least 18,600 residents to that point, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the biggest social uprising in the city’s history—a wave of democratic socialist politicians defeated centrist incumbents and swept into the New York state legislature. Among them was Zohran Mamdani, then twenty-eight years old, who pulled off an upset win in a state assembly race in Astoria, Queens. Shortly afterward he appeared on Inside City Hall, a venerable local politics talk show on the city’s NY1 cable channel, where the current host, Errol Louis, usually skeptical of leftists, asked Mamdani what he meant when he tweeted on election night that “socialism won.” “I’m a socialist,” Mamdani answered, “and this is a socialist campaign…. The crises that we’re facing right now are not simply crises of a moment or crises of the pandemic. These are crises of capitalism.” Louis pressed him on how he would “activate” that socialism. What would it look like for his constituents …

Mornings with Murray | Darryl Pinckney

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Thirty years ago or more, when on my way home to Indiana or on my way back to England, I would stop off in New York City. Barbara Epstein would put me up at her home on West 67th Street. Sometimes I overlapped with Diane Johnson, in from Paris, or Barbara’s daughter, Helen, on her way to Berkeley or London or Kampala. Elizabeth Hardwick said it sounded pretty crowded over there, but it worked, because Barbara and Murray were out all day, whereas she was home all day, and she had only one bathroom. Barbara, too, had only one bathroom, so Lizzie didn’t see how she could stand having us there. Her and Barbara’s apartments were on the same block and were of the same design. Lizzie stressed that however imposing their living rooms were, the rest was tight. I stayed in what had been Barbara’s son Jacob’s room when he was growing up, right off the kitchen. A small beige quilted pillow sat among plants and Murray’s cassette player on Barbara’s kitchen windowsill. …

Spaghetti Underground | Zoe Guttenplan

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] New York Transit Museum/MTA From left: the New York City subway map issued by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 1972, designed by Massimo Vignelli; and the subway map, based on Vignelli’s design, unveiled by the MTA in April 2025 Massimo Vignelli wore a chalk-stripe suit. He stood on the stage of Cooper Union’s Great Hall, one hand holding a microphone with a long, snaking cord, the other gesturing at the transit maps projected onto the screen behind him: Munich, Amsterdam, Philadelphia. A brown circle intersected by long colorful lines jutting out in all directions: “The Moscow subway map, which is really a leftover of the Suprematist time,” he explained. The London Underground map designed by Harry Beck, the “father of all contemporary kinds of subway maps.” Then came his own design for the New York City subway, which he had come downtown to defend.  It was April 20, 1978, and Vignelli was taking part in the New York Subway Map Debate. Eight years earlier the Transit Authority had hired him to redesign the subway’s signage, …

The President of Brooklyn | Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] It has been the curse of many New York City mayors to see themselves as viable presidential candidates, indeed with one foot already in the White House. If Eric Adams nurtured similar ambitions—as some commentators speculated early in his mayoralty—the difference was that his presidency of the mind was unusually focused on foreign policy. “If you are a mayor that only stands on your block, you are not going to solve the problems of the globe,” he said to reporters in 2022. That year, Adams met with the emir of Qatar and representatives from the country’s wealth fund at the World Cup, then stopped by Athens for a dinner with the president of Greece. In 2023 he visited Israel “to learn about Israeli technology” and discuss antisemitism. That same year he visited Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia—where he sported quasi-military fatigues and sunglasses—to dissuade migrants from coming to the United States. “Here’s where I have been,” he said in 2023 at an Arab heritage event in New York City, wearing a fez. “I have been …

How to Turn Cities Into Biketopias? Make it Harder to Drive There

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] A Queens-based bike courier who goes by the mononym of Quentin echoes Berlanga’s sentiment, noting how New York’s streets suddenly feel more spacious than ever. “These just a lot more elbow room now,” Quentin says, admitting that part of him misses the traffic, as the gridlock often made his job more exciting. “The Avenues, especially through Midtown, just seem wide open, and you can tell there are so many less cars on the road.” But it’s not only couriers enjoying the City’s less trafficked streets. Though the city’s bike-sharing platform, CitiBike, has yet to share ridership information from January, there simply appear to be more people on bikes than at comparable times in years past. “Even in this unusually cold winter, we’re seeing more people biking since congestion pricing took effect,” says Ken Podziba, director of the advocacy nonprofit Bike New York. “But the real excitement will come with warmer weather, as we witness a dramatic shift—fewer cars and more bikes filling the city streets.” To Podziba’s point, what might happen when the temperature …

Acts of Self-Erasure | Anahid Nersessian

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] The American Academy of Arts and Letters sits at the back of Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights, flanked by Boricua College and the Hispanic Society Library and Museum. It is one of eight Beaux Arts buildings tucked into this beautiful and disorienting pocket of Manhattan, where the names of Spanish writers, artists, and conquistadors—Cervantes, Velazquez, Columbus, Balboa—are carved into the friezes and a giant bronze sculpture of El Cid dominates the plaza. The site is a throwback to another New York, when the architecture emulated Paris and money flowed into museums instead of half-empty high-rises. Directly behind Arts and Letters is Trinity Cemetery, a nineteenth-century burial ground whose notable residents include Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Ralph Ellison, and Ed Koch. This Wharton-esque scene turns out to be an ideal setting for a spare, acerbic, and utterly thrilling exhibition of selected works by Christine Kozlov, the New York–born and, for a while, New York–based conceptual artist who died in 2005, at the age of fifty-nine. Curated by Rhea Anastas and the artist Nora Schultz, …

The Return of Trump—V | Astra Taylor, Michael Greenberg, Coco Fusco, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Thomas Powers, Anne Enright

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Astra Taylor • Michael Greenberg • Coco Fusco • Verlyn Klinkenborg • Thomas Powers • Anne Enright Astra Taylor On election night, before Harris’s loss set in, some exit polls showed that “democracy” was a top concern for voters. Many liberals took the result as an auspicious sign. But what is democracy? That was the title of a documentary I made during the 2016 presidential campaign. As I conducted dozens of interviews across the United States over many months, I learned that there was hardly a consensus over the word’s meaning. Ordinary people struggled to define it; a recent college graduate asked me if democracy was when “they tell you what to do.” Others, usually men, scoffed that we actually live in a republic, not a democracy, as though that settled the matter. Still others—many of them—found the American political system exasperatingly corrupt: rigged by special interests, permeated by racism, and almost or already irredeemable. I also spoke to young conservatives and attended Donald Trump’s rallies, where he railed against the War on Terror, …

The Return of Trump—IV | Paisley Currah, Trevor Jackson, Kim Phillips-Fein, Ian Frazier, Adam Gaffney, Madeleine Schwartz

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Paisley Currah • Trevor Jackson • Kim Phillips-Fein • Ian Frazier • Adam Gaffney • Madeleine Schwartz Paisley Currah This is what Donald Trump could do to transgender people during his second presidency: discharge all trans service people from the military; impose a nationwide ban on medical care for trans youth; prevent Medicaid and Medicare from paying for transition-related care even for adults; permit private health providers to exclude transgender-related coverage; ban all trans girls from playing on any girls teams regardless of age, sport, or level of competition; deny federal funding to schools that support youth with gender dysphoria; end all programs at federal agencies that “promote” the concept of gender transition, at any age; and, generally, require all federal agencies to recognize only sex assigned at birth. Parents who support their child’s trans, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming identity would be prevented from doing so. The Trump campaign even promised to stop anyone under eighteen from “assuming” a gender identity—one’s internal sense of being male, female, neither, or in-between—to which their parents do not …