NEW YORK — On a particularly humid evening this week, hundreds of cyclists gathered in Washington Square Park for an action reminiscent of the years when AIDS summoned so many to protest bureaucratic indifference to tragedy.
In January 1966, Time magazine published an essay called “The Homosexual in America,’’ which offered a glimpse into mainstream perceptions of gay life. It accepted the consensus that homosexuality was the result of a “disabling fear of the opposite sex,” concluding that such an orientation was “a pathetic, little second-rate substitute” for a meaningful life, a “pernicious sickness.”
It was not until I got to college and met people whose lives, like Vanderbilt’s, were preciously circumscribed by maps guiding them back and forth between the Upper East Side and key leisure destinations on the Atlantic coastline that it became clear what real status was — and how little it had to do with a pair of jeans carried home in a bag from Bloomingdale’s.
NEW YORK — Sam Il-Rumi came to the United States with his parents and brothers in 1980, fleeing the occupied West Bank and settling in New York, where his father opened a pet-food store in the East Village.
NEW YORK — This week, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s presidential campaign, a project that has generated all the promise and enthusiasm of an afternoon in small-claims court, announced that its candidate had received his first endorsements. You might assume that those endorsements came from local elected officials, because that is so often the way of things. They did not. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, he of bass guitars and El Paso, has gained more support from New York congressional representa...
Recently, I sat down with a young real estate executive to talk about an office building his company had bought and renovated to fit the style and tastes of the modern creative-class worker.
NEW YORK — Late last week, Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, trumpeted what he clearly considered was a big win for his office — the conviction of Anna Sorokin, the fictitious heiress, the party-girl swindler, the Robin Hood tipper, the danger to minibars.
NEW YORK — Since its American debut at the Park Avenue Armory last month, “The Lehman Trilogy” has had New Yorkers of a certain breed held tightly at the forearms. A play about money and decline, it has been chewed over by those still on top.
NEW YORK — This week New York City declared a public health emergency because of a measles outbreak that had been escalating since fall in ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn and finally reached the point of crisis.
NEW YORK — This week came the very dispiriting news that despite years of agonized debate over how to diversify New York City’s specialized high schools, only a small percentage of black and Latino children gained admission to them for the upcoming academic year.
If we were living in truly radical times, if the socialist overthrow were really upon us, then someone might have come along to suggest bulldozing the Yulan magnolia and Chinese witch hazel and all the rest of Brooklyn Botanic Garden and using the space to erect apartment buildings for people desperate for somewhere to live.
NEW YORK — Recently Mayor Bill de Blasio went to Iowa, not for the first time, presumably to vision-board a bid for the presidency despite his public equivocations.
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