Real Journalism written by people
According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of Americans own a cellphone. In 2024, nine-in-ten Americans are smartphone users, which is up from 35% in Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership from 2011. My own relationship with technology is a standard story for someone born in 1989. I enjoyed my childhood with the most aggressive form of technological […]
I have this theory which I first thought of about ten years ago that there is a special school for people who run public meetings. I’m not sure if that would be the field of public relations, or government relations, or facilitating, but what they are teaching is how to make people think they are taking part in a Democracy […]
The new beautiful people who love to equate social justice with unconstrained real estate development love to say that everybody could get a great place to live whereever they want if only developers were allowed to build anyplace they wanted to, as tall as they like. If you don’t believe me, go to the website of the supposed non-profit, Open […]
My current brain first came into existence in the 1950’s, after the two world wars and the Great Depression—right in the middle of the Cold War. Growing up through the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, we were all taught that the Soviet Union was the big enemy, making the threat of nuclear disaster always lurking. I never really met any […]
From time to time over the years I have written about the possibilities of Red Hook that seem to be limited by the lack of any type of governing authority specific to our unique neighborhood. Obviously we are a part of a much bigger city, but so is City Island, for example. While it is officially part of the Bronx, […]
Believe it or not, I think COVID has given me a precious gift. It’s kind of a long story but I’ve got the room this month so here goes. It all started in December 2019, when a friend of mine who just happened to start the Brooklyn Paper back in the 1970’s, Ed Weintrob, told me that if I hadn’t […]
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is known for concluding that earthly life is mostly misery, but making it all worthwhile is art, specifically music. While I’m a bit more positive about life, his comment about music resonates. Last week I took time off from everyday living to travel to Washington DC to hear Robert Earl Keen, who brought his Christmas […]
In the earlier days of this newspaper, I only occasionally wrote a column. There either had to be something compelling in the local news that I wanted to opine on, or there was extra room in the paper that needed to be filled. But now, as I’m starting to grow up, along with the paper, I’ve made a commitment to […]
A couple weeks ago I was surprised to see the name “Carlos Menchaca” pop up on my phone’s Caller ID. Menchaca has been representing Red Hook in the City Council for the past seven years. During all of that time I have been writing about Red Hook in this newspaper. We’ve never socialized, despite my invitations for dinner to talk […]
Frustrated as we are the almost complete irrelevance of our vote in the Presidential race to the ultimate result, the desire of Brownstone Brooklyn voters to at least send a complete up and down the ballot repudiation to the GOP in its entirety has been cleverly frustrated by the Brooklyn GOP’s decision not to run candidates. Local Republicans in my […]
On July 27, I got an email from Catherine McBride of the Red Hook Initiative which was pretty different than any I have received at this paper since I started it ten years ago. RHI press releases are generally quite vanilla. They are generally about their Red Hook Hub or else something having to do with their fund raising. This […]
During the first half of my twenties, I cared about art, not politics. I skimmed the news about wars and oil spills and participated in elections as a matter of civic duty, but deep down I intuited that nothing good or exciting would ever happen in Washington – or probably anywhere in the real world, which I found alienating and […]
Every day we share ourselves, our thoughts, our preferences knowingly and unknowingly across the web and elsewhere, leaving our digital footprints behind. But why should we care? The first decade of the 2000s saw the birth of several current-day digital marquees: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google. In 2006, I remember uploading pictures and posting status updates on Myspace, the most popular […]
