I now view Hillary with the love/hate of an ex-girlfriend. Bernie’s been a great disappointment. Even Jeb Bush is more appealing at this point. A wimp like him would lead the country with safe inaction. But instead, we’ve got Bernie throwing chairs, and Hillary clutching her pearls in lofty dismay. Instead of demonstrating leadership, my party is in the middle of a bad marriage. Clearly, class issues matter here, too: Uptown girls make arched eyebrows and snide excoriations at Brooklyn street kids who resort to verbal shivs. We don’t talk about that, though.   In 08, feminist philosopher Nancy Frasier criticized Hillary and her supportersRead More →

In the 1800s, the Irish were New York City’s “ghetto thugs” and unwelcome “illegal aliens” (ugly words), much the way we think of people of color today. When they were required to defend the North in the Civil War, to risk life and limb for black slaves that most considered subhuman, well, that just added insult to injury. Irish and other impoverished immigrant males in New York City started the Draft Riots in the 1860s to protest. During that time, the New York police force was heavily populated by Irish. By the end of the 19th century, 70% of the New York police force wereRead More →

John Lithgow and Annette Bening star in King Lear in this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park. Currently I am sitting in line waiting for my tickets. 9:05: We arrived at 6:40. I planned to get here around 6:30, but we got turned around in the park so we were later than intended. The line is surprisingly short given that people often camp out at 3 a.m. for popular shows. This morning’s news reports said the line for last night’s show was long. We came woefully under-prepared with only the hotel blanket, a sweatshirt for a pillow, two bottles of water, and a handful of BlowpopsRead More →

I’m a paper pile person, and although I have an abiding obsession with time management systems, I always felt inspired to let the paper dragon frolic. Now I’m drowning in data and trapped in its undertow. As people around me sign up for various cults of productivity apps, I find myself overwhelmed by choosing which cult to join. The whole thing makes me throw my hands up in the air, which defeats the purpose of organization systems in the first place. After letting the elephant of Evernote, the blue box of Dropbox, and every other eye-candy logo capture my attention, I’ve opted for the simplestRead More →

Many years ago, as a child, I played in Chelsea Park, Manhattan, NYC. In those days, it was concrete with a little bit of green. Today, it’s green with a little bit of concrete. Somewhere in the middle, it was just sand, like a big cat litter box. I’m sure Chelsea Park could be a metaphor for life – from concrete jungle to cat dung to green space – but that is probably over-reading. My country and I have made it through Vietnam, the cold war, and into the next millennium. My country and I have have seen the World Trade Center fall and aRead More →

My grandmother was a grassroots politician, not a legislator. To me that distinction is essential. It gave her a clarity of vision that made things simple; she moved through a world in which the work was hard but the logic was unquestionable. Where she moved, people followed. Yesterday at RootsCamp I heard some of her clarity. The keynote speaker was Frank Curiel, a labor organizer of forty years’ experience, who talked about what grassroots work means. You go to the hall, you see the people there, you talk to them, and you listen. The backdrop of listening, in his case, was the farm and fieldRead More →

I bought several Jack Bilander etchings. Bilander was an artist in Chelsea, my neighborhood growing up in New York City. Lately I’ve had this urge to go there. I’ve built up an obsession, really, to return to my Grandmother’s apartment, to be in her space, to see the cheap 1960s parquet floors of Penn South, smell the esoteric scent of Jewish working class intelligentsia, and view a wall full of images still strikingly memorable forty years later. When I found a suite of Bilander’s pictures on Picasa, I sighed audibly, repeatedly, at how many of them summoned a vivid memory. So indelible and powerful. SomethingRead More →