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Joy in a Police State
Although the video of this young girl’s spontaneous dance party has been viewed by millions, energetic outbursts by young children on the subway are more typically followed by a parent threatening or...
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Lights in the Dark and Random Thoughts
During the holidays one of the pleasures of my childhood was the night when my parents drove us around Sacramento to see the decorated houses. There was one street called “Christmas Tree...
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Side Effects of the NYPD’s Slowdown
Matt Taibbi wrote an opinion piece today for Rolling Stone remarking on the unforeseen effects of the NYPD’s significantly reduced arrest numbers in recent days. After Pat Lynch– the head of the...
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Robert Durst: Jinxed by Viral Media
I just finished watching the last episode of HBO’s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, only to find out that Durst was arrested yesterday in connection with the 2000 murder of Susan Berman....
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Louie C.K. and the Virtues of Realism
On the hit show Louie, aside from a token, comedic clip of fantasy in each episode, realism rules the roost. Louie C.K.’s dedication to portraying the struggles of a single-father and stand-up...
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Outdoor Celebration at the Whitney
To my surprise and delight, I like the new Whitney. And that is the consensus of the cities’ major critics. From the outside, all agree that the building is hard to take in. It looks as if a beginner...
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Jane Jacobs: Intuition vs. Evidence
After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I...
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The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties
I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of...
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Eyes on the Street
Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes...
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Harlem Hospital, Patient Navigation, Dr. Freeman
By 1921, more than 200,000 African Americans had migrated to Harlem and about half of them utilized Harlem Hospital. Many of these people had come up from the South with the hope of living a better...
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Haring and Koons–At a Crossroad
A Tale of Two Artists’s Careers Keith Haring (1958-1990) and Jeff Koons (1955-) were born in Pennsylvania and grew up in middle-class families. Their careers as artists took off in the 1980s, at a time...
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Technology in the Age of Inequality
Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the...
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Privacy and Power
Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to...
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CIA, Obstruction of Justice, 9/11
The only good thing that came out of 9/11 was that the building fell on him. –Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA anti-bin Laden task force, testifying before a congressional committee,...
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