New york

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

A great time in the Faddisphere

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. It’s easy enough to write an elegy for the jazz world, a tale of decline and fall, from towering heights to epigones plying their trade in the shadows of the giants. But like most such stories, lachrymose in spirit if not intent, it obscures as much as it reveals. No doubt many of the great clubs that existed in the Fifties and Sixties have faded away, but since the Eighties there has been a distinct revival of more traditional forms of jazz.

faddisphere jon faddis

Wednesday

Bill Kauffman

I am a part of Batavia, New York

This article is the American Life column from The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Batavia, New York, my favorite place in the world, was described by Alexis de Tocqueville on his American tour: ‘Scattered houses then marshes. Rooms built of tree trunks.’ OK, it wasn’t the Frenchman’s most memorable passage. But Tocqueville was more charitable than my landsman John Gardner, the 20th-century novelist who called Batavia a symbol of ‘both spiritual death and the death of civilization’. Gardner, a nomadic academic who had left town years earlier, was responding to the federally funded razing of Batavia’s core in the 1960s under the cruelly misnamed Urban Renewal Program.

batavia new york

Friday

Jarvis Dupont

OK so the ‘eating babies’ woman may have been a hoax, but is it really such a terrible idea?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a town hall congress meeting on Thursday in Corona, New York, at the Queens Public Library, during which an alleged constituent stood up and began by expressing her dismay at the current climate crisis, which ended in her shouting, 'We have to start eating the babies!'At first many of us identified with her anguish as she informed those around her that we only have a few months until the planet is destroyed. This is a very real fear for anyone who admires Greta Thunberg, and so I was fully on board with what she was saying. The woman began by telling Ocasio-Cortez how much she admired her dedication to tackling the climate crisis but declared that limiting the use of fossil fuels isn’t enough.

eating babies

Monday

Hannah Niemeier

Blondie ambition

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Once upon a time in the Seventies, rock ’n’ roll was a man’s game. Then Blondie happened –– or ‘Blondie’ herself, Debbie Harry, platinum bombshell and queen of punk. Actually, before Blondie there was the Runaways, an exploitation act from which the singer, Joan Jett, ran away. There was Patti Smith, who moved to New York City, fell in love with Robert Mapplethorpe and wrote poetry. There was Chrissie Hynde, who moved to London, passed through the rehearsals that generated the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and then, after Blondie had charted in Britain, formed the Pretenders.

debbie harry blondie

Sunday

Daniel M. Bring

Don’t write off Joey Salads

Freshman Democrat Rep. Max Rose must steel himself for a tough re-election scrum in his Republican-leaning district. An unconventional, Trumpian contender, Joseph 'Joey Salads' Saladino, could make for quite an upset to both parties.New York’s 11th district covers Staten Island and a sliver of Brooklyn. Staten Island, New York City’s last GOP bastion, went for Trump over Hillary by 15 points in 2016. The district gave Rose’s Republican predecessor, Dan Donovan, a 26.1-point margin of victory in 2016 before Rose bested him by six points — just over 10,000 votes — in 2018.Seeing an opportunity to reclaim one of the three US congressional seats they lost in 2018, New York’s Republicans are mobilizing to oppose Rose.

joey salads

Wednesday

Caroline McCarthy

WeWork is what happens when New York and Silicon Valley collide

When I moved to New York City in 2006 to take a job in digital media, it seemed like you could fit everyone who worked for a startup or online media outlet in the city into a single room. If you worked in 'technology', you probably worked for a telecom, Bloomberg LP, or maybe an advertising technology company. New York’s startups in the original tech boom had been notably flimsier than those in the Bay Area, so few had made it through the early 2000s, and then there had been the September 11 terrorist attacks. For those of us who actually did work for startups (or in proximity to them, as I was a satellite-office journalist covering the industry for a Bay Area-based outlet) we had a distinct inferiority complex in a city that notoriously likes to be second to no one else.

Friday

Caroline McCarthy

The ballad of Bill de Blasio

This is a story about some kittens and a groundhog, and a politician who should not be allowed to go near kittens and groundhogs. Or anywhere near politics, for that matter. We begin in a very liberal enclave of very liberal Brooklyn, whereupon this Thursday evening, I hosted a group discussion in my backyard to talk about climate change. Because there are still a bunch of Democrats running for president, including several that I am very sick of hearing about, I instituted a ground rule: anyone who derailed the discussion by hyping up a presidential candidate had to put a dollar in the ‘Bill de Blasio Jar’ and it would be donated to his presidential campaign. I took this very seriously.

bill de blasio
bill de blasio
Karol Markowicz

Farewell to Bill de Blasio, 2020’s least consequential candidate

Friday news drops are often saved for surprising or important stories. What NYC mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Morning Joe on Friday morning was neither of those things. His campaign’s demise was clear to anyone except the bumbling mayor who had taken time out of his busy schedule of commuting to his gym in Brooklyn, from the mayoral home in Manhattan, to visit Iowa and give speeches to tens of people. New Yorkers immediately had jokes. ‘That's too bad. I was hoping he'd stay in Iowa,’ tweeted writer Steven Volynets. Of course, President Donald Trump had the best one ‘Oh no, really big political news, perhaps the biggest story in years!

Friday

Michael Tracey

Kirsten Gillibrand blames everyone except herself

When asked by the New York Times why her presidential bid ended in such spectacular failure, Kirsten Gillibrand said, ‘I don’t know… My campaign may well have been ahead of its time.’ Well, that’s one way of putting it. An alternative explanation is that it was a poor choice to construct a campaign specifically to align with the sensibilities of hyper-woke professional class Democratic consultants. Unfortunately for Gillibrand, other female candidates have done perfectly well, with one (Elizabeth Warren) now hovering at second or third place nationally and on a consistent upward trajectory. That kind of precludes Gillibrand from blaming her failure on the unwillingness of voters to embrace a woman as their party’s standard bearer.

kirsten gillibrand

Tuesday

Cockburn

El Presidente vs. El Union Presidente: AOC and Barstool founder clash online

Let's get ready to rumble! Two viral sensations are squaring off on the Twitter. In the blue corner, from Massachusetts Bay, Barstool Sports president and whole pizza-eating aficionado David 'Davey Pageviews' Portnoy. And in the red corner, all the way from the Bronx, it's fiery congresswoman Alexandria 'The Red Scare' Ocasio-Cortez. The spat concerns the hottest new trend in New York media besides developing a substance abuse problem and getting fired: unionizing. Nothing offers comfort to an overcaffeinated 23-year-old fresh out of a liberal arts college quite like a big 'union' laptop sticker on a battered MacBook Air. Springsteen would be proud. The latest cluster of journavists to attempt this strategy hail from sports site The Ringer, a Barstool competitor.

barstool

Wednesday

Chadwick Moore

A letter to our subscribers, from the New York Times

Dear Valued Subscriber, For a mere $39.99 a month, about what you pay your Guatemalan nanny, you depend on us for thought-provoking personal reassurance, award-winning arrogance, hard-hitting sycophancy, and up-to-the-minute coverage of Orange Man – who is very, very bad. The New York Times remains the world’s most prestigious Viewpoint Validation Service because we understand the crippling emptiness permeating the wealthy liberal soul – we are that emptiness – and you entrust us to make you feel good, smart and worthy every day. While News and Opinion whisper watered-down postgrad nothings in your ear, Style and Dining guarantee you’ll be validated on the outside, as well as inside.

new york times

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The Whitney Museum surrenders to the mob

The mob waged war on the Whitney Museum and won. The scalp this time belongs to Warren Kanders, who owns Safariland, a manufacturer of law enforcement and military supplies, and who, until his resignation last week, was a vice-chairman at the Museum. Kanders’s great crime was that his company manufactures tear gas, a non-lethal weapon which has been used — in my view most unfortunately — at the southern border. However you feel about the border crisis — and I’ve been quite clear on my outrage here — most reasonable people should admit that in almost all cases, the use of tear gas makes it likely that lethal crowd-control tactics will not be used. This story is not really about Warren Kanders or his company, and that’s precisely the problem.

warren kanders whitney museum

Thursday

Chadwick Moore

The insufferable wokeness of public art

In the middle of the 20th century, the Central Intelligence Agency executed a commendable troll against the American left. Long rumored to be a joke, documents released in the 1990s revealed that during the Cold War the CIA secretly funded and promoted some of America’s biggest contemporary artists without the knowledge of the artists themselves. It was art as weapon. The US aimed to showcase the intellectual freedom and creative superiority of Western, capitalist societies against the drab, inhibited propagandist art of the Soviet Union by broadcasting this wildly inventive style in vogue at the time. The CIA propped up artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

public art

Tuesday

Libby Emmons

New York progressives want to legalize selling children

New York's current surrogacy laws permit a woman to carry a child for another parent, but they don’t allow her to be paid for doing it. And at the time of birth, the law recognizes the gestational carrier as the legal mother. Governor Cuomo seeks to change both of these laws, bringing New York into line with 47 other US states that permit contractual surrogacy arrangements. That would make 48 states with bad laws. Womb rental is akin to nine months of prolonged prostitution, and manufacturing children for sale. New York’s motive for legalizing surrogacy is to avoid insulting the LGBTQIAP+ community. Along with infertile couples, they are the primary beneficiaries of womb rental. So opposition to surrogacy is called homophobic.

new york surrogacy selling children

Saturday

Justin Cartwright

The world of William Maxwell

A curious thing: the New York literary world is smaller than the London literary world. It also has a strange feeling of being more old-fashioned. I was edited there by the legendary Joe Fox. I don’t think he liked me, but we would have dinner at a hotel restaurant, the last place where he could smoke in New York, and talk about great writers, including William Maxwell. Joe Fox died at his desk in Random House behind a huge pile of copies of the New York Times, cigarette on his lips. William Maxwell himself was one of this relatively small but influential group of New York literary figures. Because of his very long life and his great influence as literary editor of the New Yorker, he knew almost every writer who passed through the city.

william maxwell

Friday

Michael Tracey

Why Bill de Blasio is running for president

Bill de Blasio is the only candidate running for president whose entry into the race is perhaps a tad surprising. With the others, even those with miniscule odds of actually securing the Democratic nomination, there is some modicum of sense: get your name out there, promote your pet issues, accrue some political capital to burnish a future bid for another elected office, and if worst comes to worst you’ll still have ‘former presidential candidate’ in your title – which is sure to bring forth generous speaking fees and book deals. MSNBC might even give you a TV show. But with de Blasio, at least at first blush, the logic gets much hazier. His liabilities are so manifestly obvious that even his own staff reportedly begged him not to run.

bill de blasio

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump faces at-tax from all sides

Give Donald Trump credit for being sporting about the fresh revelation in the New York Times that he racked up a cool $1 billion in losses during the 1990s, a sum that earned him the distinction of being the number one financial loser in America. ‘It was sport,’ he announced on Twitter. Indeed it was. Not everyone gets to play with the sums of money that Trump has splashed about in for decades. Unlike Scrooge McDuck, however, who wallowed in his swimming pool, Trump has followed a rather different ethos. He’s spent his way into bankruptcy repeatedly, only to be bailed out of his predicament by...who?

donald trump tax

Friday

Michael Holroyd

The many lives of Frank Harris

Does anyone today know who Frank Harris was? Are his novels and biographies read at all now? A hundred years ago he was acknowledged ‘by all great men of letters of his time to be . . . greater than his contemporaries because he is a master of life’, or so wrote the critic John Middleton Murry. George Meredith likened his novels to Balzac’s, and Bernard Shaw his short stories to Maupassant’s – high praise which was somewhat deflated by the discovery that one story had actually been lifted from Stendhal. But no one would have been more astonished at his disappearance as a great man of letters than Frank Harris himself. ‘Christ goes deeper than I do,’ he explained, ‘but I have had wider experience.

frank harris

Friday

Rosa Prince

The strange rise of calling kids ‘mama’

The first person I heard refer to their child as ‘mama’ was a friend I met at a prenatal yoga class when I was pregnant with my daughter six years ago. After the babies were born, I would hear her croon to her daughter as she put on her tiny snow suit, ready for the bitter New York winter outside: ‘Come on mama; let’s go mama.’ She does know it was she who gave birth to the child and not the other way around, I would wonder. To begin with I didn’t think much of this somewhat idiosyncratic nickname.

mama mother and child