Celebrating Community
Summit Academy’s girls basketball team won its first citywide championship last month as it pulled away in the 4th quarter to win the 1A girls basketball playoffs over Manhattan’s School of the Future, 53-45. The game at Long Island University’s Steinberg Wellness Center was packed with fans from both teams. In the semifinals at Queensborough Community College, Summit beat No. […]
Stan Mack is one of the most prolific story tellers of the 20th century. He’s told over 1,500 tales using thick white paper, a pen and black ink to create comic strips about ordinary people, sometimes in extraordinary locations. A thousand were published in the Village Voice every week for two decades. Now 275 of the best of those will […]
Jean-Paul Sartre was right! (maybe) We’ll skip the millennial interview and let a Boomer rant this month. The main threat to society, from my born in the ‘50s point of view, is the trending reduction in human contact. The millennials I have spoken in the past few months don’t seem to be bothered by this, i.e. the dating apps and […]
Sweden is to Europe like the Amazon is to South America. It is a land full of lakes and forests that hug you the very moment of your arrival. Getting on the bus to leave the airport you are driven through a nature scenario, with snowy trees extending miles. If you were sweating in the plane because of your ski […]
Tim O’Brien’s 1990 auto fictional novel based on his time as a young soldier in Vietnam remains a popular choice in high school curriculum across the country. Teaching at a rural school in northern New Hampshire, the average student is removed from the horrors of war and mostly, blessedly, from extreme levels of violence. Although some students do have grandparents […]
Old timers might remember an urban gardener from the last century. Adam Purple, who dressed in purple and drove a purple bike, created a large spiraling garden on the lower East Side which became famous as it was threatened and eventually destroyed by real estate developers. These days, many community gardens in the city are safe from development due to […]
One of the great TV shows was Public TV’s Cosmos. Originally broadcast in the 1980’s, produced by scientist, astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, younger people know the successor shows, Cosmos—A Personal Voyage and Cosmos—A Spacetime Odyssey, both created by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Sagan devotee and astrophysicist, author and science communicator in his own right. Sagan is described in […]
On February 12, a new and improved state-of-the-art media lab opened at the Red Hook Recreation Center, home of the outdoor swimming pool and recently renovated basketball courts weight room and a a gorgeous learning room outfitted and installed by IKEA (see next page). NYC Parks Commissioner, Amazon head of Community Affairs Carley Graham Garcia and community members celebrated the […]
In addition to the new gym, media center and infrastructure upgrades, the Rec Center now offers a beautiful new learning space courtesy of IKEA. The room includes a comfy lounge with nice lighting as well as a full kitchen area. The room is open to everyone with a Red Hook Recreation Center membership, which is free to those under 25. […]
As the Gaza war continues, Europe is hit by demonstrations organized by pro-Palestine activists in every town, notwithstanding its size or importance. In Pisa, a leading university city, last February 23rd, a small and peaceful demonstration organized by local students ended up with many 15-19 year olds beaten by police with truncheons. The case, starting as a local news, soon […]