Real Journalism written by people
Fetishizing Black men The thirst for gratification, validation, and power often leads many men, prominent and not, to destroy their own lives as well as the lives of others. The story of Ed Buck and his victims is one that involves wealth, deadly fetishes, meth, and racism. Here’s what you need to know. Fetish: a form of sexual desire in […]
For many newspaper readers in the United States, Brexit feels like the story that simply – almost perversely, given our short attention spans and massive self-absorption – refuses to end: a baffling saga of tortuous parliamentary procedure, protracted negotiations, political flameouts, and missed deadlines, requiring minute-by-minute updates from the international press. In a concise book focused on the crisis’s origins, […]
Two million Americans live in public housing. Because conditions at housing authorities across the country have deteriorated for decades, most of them live in substandard homes – amid rats, lead paint, leaky pipes, mold, broken elevators, and heating outages. Since the government owns public housing and could, using only a small fraction of the federal budget, allocate enough money for […]
You are outraged, and have written a protest song. You’d like it to be a part of the catalyst for change; march out in the streets, sing it, have all the radio stations play it with a new anthem for a better world out there and change on its way. Well…it’s happened before. According to Wikipedia, a protest song is […]
Dear Red Hook Star-Revue, I recently graduated from college so I’m not too far removed from high school, which is usually associated with taking the Regents, but my high school (The Beacon School) used portfolio-based assessments (PBAs) instead, so my experience was a bit different. As mentioned in the article, the only regent I had to take was the ELA […]
A grassroots movement to ‘fix America’s broken healthcare system’ by implementing Medicare for All showed up in Fort Greene on August 8. This came a week after CNN’s telecast of the second round of the Democratic presidential primary debates in Detroit, where candidates lengthily discussed the issue of healthcare. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) officially introduced the Medicare for All Act of […]
In June, the Gowanus Landmarking Coalition, an advocacy group for historic preservation, earned a significant victory – albeit an incomplete one – when the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) agreed to calendar five buildings in Gowanus. This decision increased the likelihood that, in the form of longstanding anchors like the American Can Factory and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Powerhouse, some of […]
I have a friend who watches MSNBC regularly. The other night, a vaguely familiar face filled the screen – someone who was not the usual liberal face. It was a politician from South Carolina known for something that remains forever etched in my mind. If not for that something, I wouldn’t have remembered him. He started a real estate leasing […]
It was 31 long months ago that the polls read conclusively that Hillary would lose and Sanders would win. Yet, thousands of New Yorkers saw their income projections safeguarded in her youthful chagrin. They crowded into the Jacob Javitz Center a few hours after the polls closed and waited for her to claim victory. But as Tuesday rolled into Wednesday […]
The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous, and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, […]
The cities are toxic. The subways are seething. The carbon is cooking. The forests are burning. Siberia’s melting. The ocean is rising. South Asia’s flooding. Our cells are half plastic. Miami’s a puddle. They site nuke plants on rivers. The war is raging. The money is talking. The radio’s braying. The TV is barking. The press has got to be […]
Media, Literally The Human Rights Watch Film Festival comes to New York once a year. So when the director of the film ‘Bellingcat’ — a documentary about a popular European ‘citizen journalism’ site — strongly recommended it, we booked a seat. Citizen Journalism is widely believed to provide a cure for the corporate media model. The concept quite rightly implies […]
Last month in Albany, Board of Regents Chancellor Betty A. Rosa announced that, in the fall, she would assemble a commission to evaluate the possibility of dropping the Regents Examinations as a graduation requirement for high schoolers in New York State. New York remains one of 12 states that require students in public high schools to pass standardized exit exams […]
