Manhattan

Friday

Cockburn

Creeping critical race theory in Manhattan’s private schools

Cockburn doesn’t have any school-aged children — that he’s aware of, anyway. But a number of his close associates do — and they’ve been complaining a lot recently about schooling. Here’s a brief note from a New York-based mother Cockburn often gets cocktails with, who has a grievance she’d like to air… The ‘closing of the American mind’ is a lament usually reserved for the indoctrination of college students, but it’s now starting far younger. By the time our American students arrive on campus, much of the damage has already been done. K-12 education has been infected with critical race theory, tenets of the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter doctrine and other debunked, destructive ‘religious’ ideologies.

private schools

Monday

Laura K. Jones

On the ground in Manhattan after 9/11

I joke, during this current lockdown, that I am glad I no longer take hallucinogens or mind alterers, but I’m serious. I don’t want to have to think too much about how the globe can pull itself back from this current economic pause, or what I would do if anyone I loved was dying and I couldn’t reach them, because of the new rules. A Taoist monk friend called it a ‘sacred pause’, and in so many ways she is right. Even though I know she was referring to more than wild nature having a rest, I wager it is noticeably nicer to be a bee or a fish right now, with a little more room to maneuver.

9/11 lockdown

Tuesday

Sohrab Ahmari

Can COVID-19 tell whether a protest is progressive?

New York City This past month shattered all my sense of stability and permanence in New York, the city I’ve called home since 2012 (though I’ve spent some of those years in London). The looting mobs that rampaged through Gotham’s streets put me in mind of my native Middle East, a phenomenon I thought I’d left behind ‘over there’, not to be encountered except on the occasional reporting trip to Iraq or Egypt. But no. An unjust police killing in Minneapolis — combined, no doubt, with the effects of a prolonged lockdown — Arab Spring’d the United States, if you will. Or rather, the riots revealed that America’s advanced liberal society isn’t all that different from the Arab client states Washington likes to lecture.

protest

Monday

Luke Thompson

In defense of drinking in the street

A tiki bar opened across the street from my Upper West Side office shortly before all social life in Manhattan ground to a halt due to the pandemic. I visited once, had two to three of their specialty drinks and, despite a mild headache the next morning, could tell the place was going to be a hit. Then the shutdown came. Businesses of all stripes pulled and padlocked their security grilles. Helicopters and airplanes disappeared from the skies. Traffic, except for wailing northbound ambulances, all but disappeared. Genuine fear owned the spring.

lockdown drinking

Wednesday

Kate Hyde

Bill de Blasio unites cops and protesters — in disgust

New York City is crumbling into shambolic lawlessness and its citizens are growing more afraid and frustrated by the day.Why?Because Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have once again proven to be categorically incompetent leaders incapable of working effectively together in a time of crisis.On Tuesday, the Governor was forced to confront the glaring issue that the state’s top concern had shifted from COVID prevention to the demolition of its biggest metropolis by unruly riots. During his daily press conference, Cuomo took the opportunity to chastise the Mayor and the NYPD for the turmoil, calling Mayor de Blasio’s handling of it a ‘disgrace’.

bill de blasio

Tuesday

Nick Gillespie

Mayhem in Manhattan

It’s important — and easy — to tell the difference between protesters and looters. Just as New York should have been opening up after the peak of the coronavirus lockdown, the city is instead retreating further indoors, hunkering down behind increasingly thick barriers of plywood as the evenings become free-for-alls for window-smashing rioters.New York City, America's cultural and economic engine, is rapidly degenerating into a scenario inspired by The Ωmega Man (1971), a post-apocalyptic movie in which Charlton Heston, seemingly the last unaffected survivor of a chemical-weapons attacks, wanders a deserted Los Angeles by day and fends off increasingly brazen bands of mutant hippies who torch the city every night.

manhattan

Tuesday

Chadwick Moore

In Central Park, an unstoppable Karen meets the immovable Karen

If you’ve ever smugly pulled out your cellphone to record a confrontation with a stranger, hoping to publicly humiliate that person and even destroy their life, you’re probably a Karen of the worst ilk. Likewise, if approached by an insufferable busybody who lives to scold people minding their own business, and your first reaction is to call the police, you’re also a Karen. Manhattan is filled with Karens, the meme that once referred to the ‘can I speak to the manager’ lady with stacked hair and chunky highlights that evolved into a way to call out any very annoying person who loves rules and tattling. It is high Karen season across the country.

central park karen

Thursday

Alex Clark

Born again: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed

The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences — Oblomov by way of Tama Janowitz and Elizabeth Wurtzl, Bartleby with a touch of Bright Lights, Big City, a lunatic psychiatrist who melds Ayn Rand and William Burroughs — and unnervingly original. It takes guts, after all, to spin a yarn out of a rich Upper East Side orphan who decides to put herself to sleep for a year in an attempt at rebirth. Beyond the evident — the death of her parents, an obnoxious man in her life — precisely why our narrator wishes to shed her skin remains unclear to us; but her tenacity in pursuing oblivion is unshakeable.