New york

Monday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Veteran journalist Edward Wong on his memoir of food and feud

From 2008 to 2016, Edward Wong reported on China for the New York Times, heading up its Beijing bureau. Last year, the veteran journalist, now the Times’s diplomatic correspondent, published his first book: a blend of family memoir, narrative history, political observation and personal reckoning. At the Edge of Empire tracks Wong’s father, Yook Kearn Wong, as he moves from fervent support of the Chinese Communist Party and its ideological goals to disillusionment and disappointment. It is also a book about what makes an empire. Born in Hong Kong before moving to Guangdong Province as a child, after joining the military as a young man Yook Kearn was posted to remote Xinjiang province, in China’s northwest corner.

Wong

Tuesday

Teresa Mull

Red states sue New York for punitive climate change bill

In what could find itself deemed a new “war of Northern Aggression,” West Virginia and twenty-one other states are looking to defend themselves against New York for what they allege are climate-related crimes. A new lawsuit targets New York’s recently passed “Climate Change Superfund Act.” ABC27 reports the law requires polluters “to pay for environmental damage based on how many tons of fossil fuels they emitted during a specific period of time.” States could be on the hook for as much as $75 billion in fines for emissions going back years. At the time of the act’s passage, State Senator Liz Krueger, co-sponsor of the bill, said, “The Climate Change Superfund Act is now law, and New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world.

climate change

Friday

Tessa Coleman

Emil Sands’s unique body of work

Jet lagged, frozen, wrapped in multiple layers against the polar winds of a New York January storm, it was a thrill to walk into a gallery space full of sun-drenched summer scenes. At first glance, these are beautiful paintings of beautiful young people on beaches, but look again and you realize they are a meditation on the fragility of body image and how illusory perfection is. This is a topic Emil Sands is uniquely qualified to portray — more on that later. But first, the paintings: a longer look reveals that the beaches are serving as stage sets and mindscapes for an exploration of vulnerability and exposure — an experience intrinsically tied to the act of sharing space with other near-naked bodies.

emil sands

Thursday

Dave Seminara

Splitsville: separatist movements are gaining steam in blue states

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

separatist

Thursday

Saffron Swire

Why Alice Neel remains a vital presence

There is no portrait by Alice Neel quite as radical as her own. The artist was one of the first octogenarian women to exhibit a nude of herself with 1980’s “Self-Portrait.” In the painting, Neel grasps her paintbrush and sits exposed at the edge of a blue-and-white striped armchair. There’s no doubt about it; this is a woman of conviction who demands, “Look at me, in all my senescent glory: my silver hair, wrinkled face, sagging breasts, this is a life lived and here are its marks.” It’s only in the last decade or so that Neel has risen from relative obscurity to be acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s greatest portraitists.

Neel

Monday

Roger Kimball

Trump calls for America’s New Golden Age at Madison Square Garden

No one with an open mind — you can even scratch the adjective — no sentient sapiens period can have witnessed Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally without a frisson of awe. Even the most tireless Trump supporter must be a little jaded with Trump’s rallies by now. Just as in 2016, they have been building to a crescendo in both size and frequency. And even avid politicos might be forgiven for thinking they had been there, done that.  But Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden was something different. Perhaps other rallies were as large. We’re told that the MSG event boasted a capacity crowd of nearly 20,000 with more than 70,000 lined up to view the festivities on screens set up outside.

madison square garden

Monday

Bill Kauffman

‘Democracy’ in New York State

Batavia, New York Election Day in New York just ain’t the same anymore, thanks to nepo numbskulls George W. Bush and Andrew Cuomo. Though I always vote for longshots and losers, radicals and reactionaries, I have such happy memories of early November Tuesdays. Mr. Milward, dressed as Uncle Sam, would tour the polling places of my hometown, benign and reassuring in a way that his model — the autocratic “I Want You!” martinet — was not. When I was a tyke, I trailed my mother as she cast a 1964 ballot for LBJ. The gray-haired election inspectors panicked — “There’s a child in the voting booth!” — but my violation of polling-place etiquette paled in comparison to Landslide Lyndon’s stolen US Senate election of 1948.

Kennedy

Thursday

Cockburn

New York mayor Eric Adams indicted on federal charges

Talk about making history: New York City mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a federal grand jury, the first sitting NYC mayor to face a federal charge while in post. Adams, who has served as mayor for three years, has been the subject of a federal investigation into whether his campaign was on the receiving end of illegal foreign donations from the Turkish government. New York is currently hosting the annual United Nations General Assembly; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's president, left the city hours before Adams's indictment. The indictment itself remains sealed, with more details expected to be revealed later today. Adams previously served as Brooklyn borough president and was an officer in New York City police forces for two decades.

eric adams

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Why New York is a city built on the written word

When I visited New York for the first time in a decade recently, one of its most famous living writers, Paul Auster, died on the day I arrived. This was not, I hope, anything to do with my presence in the city he spent decades memorializing; he had been suffering from terminal cancer for a considerable time. Yet as I sat at my desk at the first hotel I was visiting, the Frederick in Tribeca — a comfortable and well-located spot, let down slightly by its surly and unhelpful staff, but redeemed by stylish touches like a tiled map of nineteenth-century Manhattan built into the well-appointed shower — and started to write a tribute to Auster for our website, it made me wonder what, exactly, I was trying to find out about literary New York. Was I exploring its distinguished past?

new york

Tuesday

Juan P. Villasmil

Trump’s ‘hush-money’ sentencing delayed to September

Donald Trump’s sentencing in the controversial New York “hush-money” case, which was set for July 11, has been postponed. “The July 11, 2024, sentencing date is... vacated,” reads a letter from Judge Juan Merchan to the former president’s defense team. “The Court's decision will be rendered off-calendar on September 6, 2024 and the matter is adjourned to September 18, 2024, at 10 a.m. for the imposition of sentence, if such is still necessary, or other proceedings.

donald trump sentencing

Wednesday

Cockburn

Where will Melania Trump live in her husband’s potential second term?

Melania Trump might not return to DC full-time for Trump’s possible second term, according to Axios. The article is predicated on a survey of a “handful of Melania-ologists,” because a spokesperson for Melania didn’t respond to Axios’s request for comment. As the article mentioned: “Melania does what Melania wants” — and Cockburn doesn’t blame her one bit. In February, when asked if Melania would be on the campaign trail much, Donald Trump said: “She was a very successful model, very, very successful, and yet she was a private person. She’s going to be out a lot. Not because she likes doing it, but she likes the results.” The former first lady, however, has not been in attendance at most of Trump’s campaign events.

melania trump

Monday

Charles Lipson

Turbulence after the Trump verdict

We live in tumultuous times. Donald Trump’s adversaries blame much of it on him — his hyperbole and personal attacks, the unrestrained actions that cross the bounds of propriety — even, perhaps, of the Constitution. Trump’s supporters see the same things and celebrate. They appreciate the brickbats he throws at a judicial system they think is mobilized against him. They love his denunciation of Washington bureaucrats and lobbyists who, they believe, run the country for their own benefit, and not very well at that. Both sides are right that Trump is a destabilizing figure, but there are deeper issues at play, most notably the significant social changes upending norms that have long governed American politics.

Trump
Bosker
Laura Allsop

Bianca Bosker’s snapshot of the art scene

Early on in her entertaining account of five years immersed in the New York art scene, author Bianca Bosker is informed that, as far as the art world is concerned, because she is a journalist, she is the “enemy.” Given that the job of a journalist is to find things out, then explain and communicate those findings, it is unsurprising that a hermetic, deeply self-protective society like the art world would be resistant to journalistic inquiry. In reality it’s not just Bosker’s profession that makes it difficult for her to get past art’s gatekeepers, but a whole litany of personal and social failings that are gleefully enumerated by an art dealer early on.

Friday

Ben Domenech

The ungaggable Donald Trump flames his ‘enemies’ at Trump Tower

In the same building where he once descended down a golden elevator and embarked on a campaign that would forever change American politics, this morning Donald Trump lumbered up to the mic in New York City to launch napalm at all his enemies, particularly Judge Juan Merchan, Alvin Bragg and Michael Cohen — who he didn't mention by name, other than calling him a "sleazebag" and saying that he didn't qualify as a "fixer." The idea of a gag order for this man is so ridiculous, I love that they even tried to do it. It was classic Trump: meandering, angry, darkly comic, rhetorical guns blasting away at everyone around him, golden hair blown out and wearing a bright crimson tie as wide as his head.

donald trump press conference

Thursday

Freddy Gray

A guilty verdict won’t sink Trump

This is an extremely strange moment for American democracy. Polls suggest that Independent voters — the people who decide American elections — will not vote for a man who is a convicted felon. But now Donald Trump, currently the favorite to win re-election in November, has been found guilty on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records — and nobody knows if that verdict will make him more popular or less. On one hand, Trump has been traduced — thirty-four times over — because a court has decided that, yes, he deliberately altered his financial accounts, possibly for election campaign reasons, back in 2016. He is now a convict. Trump has a murky past. That past has now caught up with him.

donald trump guilty
donald trump guilty
Roger Kimball

Trump found guilty in America’s first-ever Stalinist trial

“What happens now?” That was the question flooding my inbox and what used to be called the Twittersphere. Why? Because shortly after 5 p.m. on May 30, Anno Domini 2024, the verdict in America’s first-ever Stalinist trial came down: Trump was guilty on all counts in the so-called “hush money trial” in New York. I always say “so-called” hush money trial because it was really designed to be a "hush Trump" trial. Rather, a “hush Trump” inquisition. So now the proximate legal fate of Donald Trump, former and very possibly future president of the United States, is settled. What happens next? Trump appeals, but that case is not heard until after the election. What happens next?

Friday

Roger Kimball

Trump’s bumper Bronx rally is a bad omen for Biden

Future historians, psephologists, and political analysts, searching for the day and time that Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign imploded beyond recovery, are likely to settle on Thursday May 23, 2024, at approximately 7 p.m. It was then that Trump’s surprising rally in Crotona Park in the South Bronx really got underway. I didn’t hear any actual bells tolling, but if you listened carefully you could discern the mournful obligato that signaled the end of Joe Biden’s hopes in New York — and therefore the country. No Republican has taken New York since Ronald Reagan’s great landslide in 1984. Why then would Trump waste time coming to the South Bronx? Because, to adapt Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A Changin’." Joe Biden won New York in 2020 by twenty-three points.

donald trump the bronx

Wednesday

Josie Cox

Dispatch from an unloved borough

Once a year, Nick, a surgeon who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, visits Staten Island. Almost as soon as he arrives, he literally runs back to where he just came from. Nick is a marathon runner — he’s done New York seven times — and like millions of similarly masochistic athletes and wannabes, he’s lined up at the mouth of the Verrazzano Bridge, the eastern edge of New York City’s least exalted borough, with the sole aim of getting back to more familiar territory as briskly as his legs can carry him. “Of course I don’t have anything against Staten Island,” he explains. “There’s just not that much of a reason to go there.” Many others, it turns out, feel the same. I moved to Manhattan just over four years ago.

Staten

Wednesday

A.G. Hamilton

Choosing mob rule at UCLA 

A big part of the social contract for a modern society is an agreement that citizens will grant the state a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in exchange for that state protecting its subjects, including from mobs within the state and other illegal behavior. The expectation is that the rules will be enforced fairly and equally, or the contract loses legitimacy.  The United States has a First Amendment that protects speech to a level that doesn’t exist in other countries, including speech that is openly supportive of terrorism and mass murder. In this regard, the groups organizing campus protests are putting on a fine civics lesson for everyday Americans exhibited by the main groups behind many of the current college protests we are witnessing.

ucla
paul auster
Alexander Larman

Remembering the postmodern Paul Auster

In Salman Rushdie’s new memoir Knife, there is a powerful and moving moment — amid the many other powerful and moving moments — in which Rushdie visits his ailing friend Paul Auster at the latter’s house in Brooklyn and describes his sorrow at seeing him so reduced by illness. It may have been that the extent of the cancer that killed Auster had not been made public knowledge, although a statement was released about his condition, until Rushdie’s description of his encounter — and some might accuse him of indiscretion or indelicacy. Yet the news of Auster’s death, anticipated though it undoubtedly was, has meant that such questions recede almost immediately — and instead a consideration of his legacy as a writer, rather than an invalid, can begin.