2,418 words
Tom Wolfe
The Bonfire of the Vanities
New York: Bantam, 1987
When the Left finally gets around to banning (or burning) classic novels, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities will likely be on the top of the list. Unlike Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bonfire’s great sin is not merely being linguistically taboo but substantively taboo as well. (more…)
Jay-Z and Rick Rubin.
2,237 words
Who is Rick Rubin?
If you asked in the early part of his career, he was a member of the provocative hardcore punk band, The Pricks. He would also stress that he was a nobody. Rubin’s purpose for being in the Pricks was, functionally, to piss off his rich Jewish father; (more…)
3,488 words
When They See Us (2019)
Directed by Ava DuVernay
The Central Park Five (2012)
Directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, & David McMahon
Wilding is back in the news, although with a completely different spin than when it showed up the first time in the spring of 1989. (more…)
4,008 words
On April 30, 2017, having had less than two days’ notice, I stepped onto a plane destined for New York City and took my first action as a “real journalist.” I had decided to travel to New York to cover Gilad Atzmon’s appearance on a panel entitled “Trump, Brexit, The Middle East . . . What Next?” alongside Stanley Cohen, Professor Norton Mezvinsky, and Michael Lesher. (more…)
David Bouhadana, who somehow manages to be an award-winning sushi chef in New York’s East Village despite being a Florida native of French-Moroccan descent.
2,468 words
“Libertarianism, like most libertarians, is all about someone else paying for their ethnic dining habits. It’s why they are no longer of any use to the Right.”[1]
“What makes America great is, therefore, less about productivity than about population, less about Google and Stanford than about babies and immigrants.”[2]
The last time I was in New York, in the mid-2000s, I heard that there was finally an answer to one of the most puzzling problems of the metropolis: why can’t you find good Mexican food in New York? (more…)
1,537 words
Fearless Girl, a four-foot statue commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), now stands facing Charging Bull in Lower Manhattan’s Bowling Green park, near Wall Street. Her appearance in the financial district in early March was timed to celebrate International Women’s Day. (more…)
Arthur Clifton Goodwin, Times Square, New York, late 1800s
1,384 words
James Traub’s history of Times Square in New York, The Devil’s Playground (Random House, 2007) provides – perhaps unintentionally – an excellent case study illustrative of when and how American cities went wrong.
In March of 1960, the New York Times ran a long front-page story under the headline ‘Life on 42nd St. A Study in Decay.’ (more…)
5,727 words
David Haden
Walking With Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as Psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26
Amazon Kindle, 2011[1]
“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering . . .” — Thoreau, “Walking”
“Psychogeography is the science fiction of urbanism.” — Asger Jorn[2]
1,480 words
With Bill de Blasio recently being sworn in as New York mayor, following a campaign that included a fair amount of “reverse dog whistling” about how “racist” the highly successful policing policies of previous administrations had been, we can expect to see a return of faux-naivety and political interference in the battle to control crime in Gotham City. (more…)
Henry James, in a 1913 charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent.
4,592 words
Although apparently written back in 2008, long before I began writing about James and Lovecraft, I only recently stumbled across this quote from pioneer Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, which might be said to encapsulate my concern in this series of articles:
The history of Lovecraft’s reputation—his initial rejection by Edmund Wilson and others as a pulp hack; the championing of his work by Derleth, Fritz Leiber, and George T. Wetzel; (more…)
