Celebrating Community
Telephone pranks are usually seen as an entertainment for kids – but international politics has actually discovered that it could also be a very serious issue, moreover if the victim is Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, a front-runner of Ukrainian support. On November 1st, a Russian comic duo, Vovan and Lexus, released online the audio of a prank where Meloni was […]
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in October, about a dozen transportation enthusiasts assembled at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering in Downtown Brooklyn, their predominantly male bodies warming the room and filling it with the scent of body odor. Each room had a different scheduled presentation or discussion topic as part of 2023 Transportation Camp—a conference for those passionate about transportation—and […]
Part One: The Person I Most Admire. Back when The Great Trumpkin first descended the escalator, we were visiting Grandma Miriama at her house in the Slope, at first, she softly growled in gradually ascending volume and then she spat out, “I know his type well; I remember when they marched into Poland.” Miriam recalled “The Prime Minister announced we […]
All major European tourist destination are filled with German tourists. Not young ones, but mostly the elderly, in groups, walking the streets slowly, driven by their guide talking to them through headphones. This situation gets worse in the mountains, where every European camping spot and hiking route is invaded by German tourists of any age, fully equipped, moreso than any […]
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind In today’s sharply divided political world, Hannah Arendt’s words, (in reference to the Holocaust) ring true. Arendt’s assertion that people are not inherently evil is an optimistic worldview – the real […]
Searching for a topic for this month’s column, I realized I had forgotten what most New Yorkers never knew, which is that we had an election coming up. The menu Brownstone voters are being presented with consists of barely contested City Council and Supreme Court races, and an uncontested Countywide Civil Court race. Much of the area also has an […]
I was working at the Phoenix, a community newspaper headquartered in Boerum Hill that was known as the newspaper for Brownstone Brooklyn, when a funny term started floating around the office. This was in the late 1970’s, when formerly industrial neighborhoods in lower Manhattan began changing their names to SoHo, Noho, TriBeca, even LoLita. These terms were understood to be […]
Bait & Tackle capped off an improbable run to win the championship of the Red Hook Locals Softball League on August 17. The league, which has been around since the 2000s, resumed play last year after a long hiatus while waiting for construction at the Red Hook ballfields to be completed. Fields 5-8 were closed in 2015 after toxins were […]
The QVNYC Film Festival’s Opening Party set the stage for a remarkable showcase of diverse stories to come, shedding light on the lives and struggles of marginalized communities. One film, Vice’s series Transnational, brought attention to the devastating murder of Kelly Stough, a Black trans woman in Detroit by pastor Albert Weathers. Through the eyes of journalist Eva Rayne, who […]
By the time August rolled around and I hadn’t seen Barbie yet I was beginning to feel I was on an island far far away from womankind. Along with the rest of humanity living in the developed western world, the summer had turned pink. Like many, I had Barbies growing up and cherished looking at mom’s dolls who lived in their original […]