New york

Monday

Luke Thompson

Bursting the Cuomo bubble

Andrew Cuomo is having a moment. He enjoys ubiquitous coverage. His press conferences attract viewership second only to the president’s. In media quarters, some whisper his name as a possible Democratic nominee should Joe Biden’s limited and lackluster candidacy finally falter. Democrats are understandably nervous about their all-but-official nominee. Biden’s appearances are uneven at best. He mumbles, loses his train of thought, and frequently mispronounces or downright mis-names, people and things in common use. A recent Washington Post/ABC poll found that only 24 percent of Democratic voters are highly enthusiastic about supporting Biden — the lowest number in the poll’s two-decade history.Furthermore, Cuomo has earned a fair share of praise.

andrew cuomo

Tuesday

Mary Kate Skehan

Why aren’t my exes texting me during quarantine?

A scroll through a millennial’s Twitter feed in the time of coronavirus shows a few dominant themes: adorable pets; extravagant home-cooked meals; worrying scatter charts; and the Text From An Ex.All our exes are bored, the meme goes, and nostalgic, and it’s so annoying, and so typical. 'Crazy times,' they say, 'Hope you’re doing OK ;).' The thing to do is to post the screenshot and complain about the ex’s ham-fisted manipulations while secretly reveling in the attention, smug and secure in the knowledge that we’re the ones who got away.Don’t get me wrong: a ritual ‘checking in’ on significant figures from your past seems to be a harmless, if slightly disingenuous, emotional safety valve in a catastrophe.

exes

Sunday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Tenor badness

In Stephen Spielberg’s 2004 comedy The Terminal, Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) is a native of Krakozhia, a small eastern European country engulfed in civil war. When Navorski lands at JFK, he discovers that his passport is invalid as America does not recognize Krakozhia’s new regime. He’s stuck in the airport for months and unable to accomplish his mission: completing his father’s quest to obtain the autographs of all 57 musicians in Art Kane’s 1958 photograph ‘A Great Day in Harlem’, a who’s who of jazz greats (including Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk), captured on East 126th Street in daylight without their instruments.

benny golson
civilization costs debate
Heather Mac Donald

Consider the costs

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed 'non-essential' businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. 'This is about saving lives,' Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. 'If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.' Cuomo’s assertion that saving 'just one life' justifies an economic shutdown raises questions that have not been acknowledged, much less answered, as public officials across the country compete to impose ever more draconian anti-virus measures: Is there any limit to the damage we are willing inflict on the world economy to mitigate the infection?

Thursday

Chadwick Moore

Americans love living in a disaster movie

In America, we don’t have snow showers anymore. Those meteorological events are now known as Snowmageddons, Snowpocalypses, or Polar Vortices. We’ve even begun to name them, like hurricanes. Each season, as newscasters brace for the arrival of Winter Storm Mephistopheles, inching along the map with its Judgment Day payload of fluffy white powder, most Americans see through the hype, but we’ll ransack grocery store shelves anyway. After all, it might be weeks before another thrill like this comes along. When something truly unnerving arrives, like a global pandemic, America serves up just the right pitch of high-octane, Hollywood disaster-flick pandemonium to make the whole thing a bit zanier and more camp. The world depends on us for that. We invented the genre.

disaster

Tuesday

Cockburn

The brothers Cuomo

If there's one good thing about the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent collective social distancing in the US, it's that families are getting to spend more time together. That is, unless you're one of the brothers Cuomo. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and his CNN anchor brother Chris reignited their intense sibling rivalry on live television Monday night, arguing over which of them is their mom's favorite. Andrew kicked off the nostalgic debate by comparing the coronavirus lockdown to a curfew implemented by his father, Mario, when he was a kid: 'I don't like the word "curfew." Dad tried to have a curfew for me, I never got past the resentment. But I do believe you'll see more heightening if the numbers don't slow.

Andrew and Chris Cuomo

Tuesday

Gavin McInnes

The mob and me: my life in the crosshairs

Millennial journo-geeks have declared cancel culture over. Tim Pool cites Ricky Gervais’s ability to host the Golden Globes despite a campaign to stop him and J.K. Rowling’s refusal to apologize for insisting there are only two genders. TIME magazine’s resident black Muslim Sarah Hagi also claims that cancel culture is a non-issue and tells us, ‘While some powerful men may not have the status they once did, they have hardly been canceled.’ She then goes on to cite Louis C.K.’s recent sold-out shows. She ignores the fact that his sexual transgressions cost him $35 million and forced him into hiding for half a decade. Well, as someone who has been canceled, I can tell you this culture is far from over.

gavin mcinnes

Saturday

James Panero

Stayin’ alive in ’75

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ was the headline of the New York Daily News. To which the City said to Ford, you first. When the Daily News ran that famous headline on October 29 1975, New York was teetering on bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had declared he would veto a federal bailout. It looked like the Big Apple was stewed. The world had written off New York. The feeling was mutual: the city had written off the world. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a million residents, over a tenth of its population. Still, New York attracted people who, against the reigning wisdom, would not or could not live anywhere else.

meryl meisler

Friday

Samuel J. Abrams

A new mob at Sarah Lawrence College

Last year, a progressive student mob came for my job and the faculty and administrators of Sarah Lawrence College did not support me. This week, a student mob again encircled my office — this time because they craved viewpoint diversity.The media portrays America’s students as overwhelmingly ‘woke’ activists obsessed with social justice protests. In reality, Gen Z college students look far more positive. America’s students are intellectually curious, and they want more from college, than is offered by the progressive monoculture encouraged by some professors and many administrators.

sarah lawrence college higher education

Friday

Harry Mount

Show off and tell: the sad death of inconspicuous consumption

O America, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. As an Englishman, I loved the two years I lived in New York as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph over a decade ago. But I’m afraid I never fell for the American cult of conspicuous consumption — even if at times I thoroughly indulged in its worst excesses. At a party at one of the New York Armories, a huge military building now given over to parties and exhibitions (I forget which one, due to overindulgence), I watched, goggle-eyed, as two brave young blondes frolicked in an ice-cold pool around a larger-than-lifesized ice sculpture of a pair of swans. At another party in SoHo, I made my way to the dance floor to find dozens of twentysomethings dancing around a Range Rover — the car company was sponsoring the event.

consumption

Saturday

Revd Steve Morris

In the cart of the city

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.New York City It’s the Sunday before Memorial Day outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the street is filling up with families. Navy servicemen and women stop for a friendly word and a photo. But a tragedy is happening here and there’s nothing anyone seems able to do about it. Elizabeth Rossi, a retired disabled Marine veteran in her early forties, runs a hot-dog stall outside the museum. She served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. ‘On my first day we were bombed; you never forget that,’ she says. Her father, Dan, also a disabled vet, runs the van next door. But they feel that they have been rejected by the city of New York and the world around them.

food cart

Monday

Dominic Green

An American pogrom

An American pogrom is going on in the New York metropolitan area. I use the word deliberately. A pogrom — the word comes from Russian — is a murderous assault on Jews, either incited by or connived at by the authorities. The machete attack that wounded five people in a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York on Saturday night follows eight reported attacks in the week of Chanukah, the massacre at a kosher store in Jersey City earlier this month, a stabbing in Monsey, and a rising tide of assaults over the last three years.There is more than enough Jew-hatred to go around in our sick times. I have no doubt that soon enough we will be back to parsing the digital stormtrooping of the white nationalists or the apocalyptic perversions of the Islamists.

pogrom

Tuesday

Madeleine Kearns

Bowl food: childhood memories have inspired a new craze for cookie dough

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. In Greenwich Village, one block south of Washington Square Park, stands the flagship store of DŌ, ‘New York City’s first ever cookie dough scoop shop’. Opened in 2017 by an American designer with fond childhood memories of baking with her mother, DŌ is now so popular that it requires a special line policy, as in: ‘SINGLE FILE so that pedestrians can still use the sidewalk.’ Often, a line of hundreds of customers can be seen snaking around the block, eagerly awaiting tubs and cones of its buttery, sugary (and uncooked) batter.

cookie dough

Sunday

Benjamin Riley

For duck’s sake: New York’s foie gras ban is classic political posturing

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Drown the Yquem and bury the Burgundy! Cover up the caviar! Abscond with the escargot, and for good measure lock away the langoustines! The class war is coming to New York City. On October 30, the city council, taking a break from doing nothing about the homeless and the garbage, passed a law prohibiting the sale of foie gras — fattened duck or goose liver — beginning in 2022. Of the 51 members, 42 voted in favor and 30 signed on as co-sponsors.

duck foie gras

Thursday

Karol Markowicz

American anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem

If there is one positive thing to come out of the attacks on Jews in Jersey City last weekend, it’s that the pretense that anti-Semitism has a home in one part of American society but not in others is over. That doesn’t, of course, mean that some won’t try to keep the delusion alive but four dead in a kosher market at the hands of Black Hebrew Israelites will have to complicate their argument. For a long time, the left was able to provide cover for the frequent attacks on Jews in America by saying it was only white supremacists engaging in these attacks.

anti-semitism

Monday

Chadwick Moore

Trump vs the cities

Update June 2, 2020: There’s something very wrong with our cities, as the devastating riots this week show. Last year, in the the Spectator's Christmas US edition, I wrote about how in a few short years the liberal city rapidly became the progressive city under an organized insurgency of far-left activists embedding themselves in municipal governments. The results have been devastating, as our once beautiful cities marinate in dirt, disease and strife. Now, they are burning. Failed progressive policies have never been more evident than they are today. With the election five months away, Trump now has an opportunity to pitch himself as the leader who will fight against the degradation of the inner cities.

manhattan

Friday

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff is working on ‘nothing’

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. New York ‘What are you working on?’ is a standard and annoying question often asked of creative types. Finally, I have a good answer: ‘Nothing.’ That was my response at a recent New York dinner party at the home of the Italian journalist Mario Platero and his British wife, Ariadne. The Plateros have been entertaining the New York media class for decades and many of their long-time guests are even older than I am. But they are all still announcing projects. More power to them. They are fighting obsolescence. I’m embracing it. For one thing, it is hard not to be fatalistic if you are a journalist.

michael wolff

Monday

Daniel M. Bring

The race to replace Pete King

Last Monday, Rep. Peter T. King announced his retirement at the end of this, his 14th term. The candidates now running to succeed him will have more than just a congressional seat to fill. You see, Pete King is a New York legend. With his rip-roaring rhetoric and unabashed Irish Catholicism, and without airbrushing or a filter, King has been an enduring holdout of old school New York politics. Moreover, his commitment to national security and justice for 9/11 victims made him a powerful, if controversial, advocate for his Long Island constituency. The 2018 midterms, not great for House Republicans, still saw King returned with a firm six percent majority. His past victory margins ranged up to 45 percent (in 2002).

pete king

Monday

Molly Jong-Fast

Junk food is my American dream

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. I love junk food in an insane, passionate way. Perhaps this is because I was a fat kid and though I am not a particularly fat adult, my fat kid-ness has never left me. I am firmly of the belief that if you were once a fat kid, it is an indelible state that can never be escaped, much as one might try. The state of fatness during those years made me who I am today. Or perhaps my love of junk food is just one of the things that makes me distinctly American. We Americans love our junk food. One in three eats it every single day and they do it because junk food is delicious and because junk food is largely an American way of life.

junk food

Friday

Antonia Hitchens

Hipsters are getting high on an alcohol-free cocktail

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. I met Jen Batchelor at a warehouse space in Brooklyn. She took a square, dark-red leather purse, unclasped it and removed a two-serving mini gold Martini shaker, two ornate cocktail tumblers, specialty bitters and a flask of Kin. Kin, an alcohol-free cocktail concoction that claims to occasion bliss and give rise to euphoria, is made from nootropics, adaptogens and botanics. It resembles a potion; it is not psychoactive. Its devotees will tell you it reconstructs the ritual of drinking.

kin