As Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, campaigns in the Democratic primary for president, he has been forced to account for his more conservative past.
In 2016, not long after Donald Trump’s black swan victory, I wrote a column in the Daily News asking people to stop comparing the reality TV demagogue to Adolf Hitler. My argument was rather simple: Trump is abhorrent, but to liken him to a murderous Nazi minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, World War II, and 20th century fascism.
You might have heard of Adam Neumann, the grifter mastermind behind WeWork, a failing real estate company that claims to be worth many billions. Neumann, like Mark Zuckerberg or Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder, is another offspring of Silicon Valley’s slash and destroy culture, reaping great wealth off a startup that was either actively corrosive or merely unnecessary.
A run-of-the-mill supervised release program was transformed into a viral hit last week. “Gift cards, cell phones and Mets tickets: How NYC spends $12M enticing criminals back to court,” blared the New York Post headline of one of three stories written in the span of a few days about this three-year-old program.
This interview with Jarett Kobek is happening because of Twitter, which is deeply ironic if you’ve read any of his books. One of the keenest and more acidic writers of our era, Kobek built his reputation on ridiculing our capitulation to internet oligarchs.
If Michael Bloomberg actually runs for president, as he’s been threatening to do for over a decade, he will finally put to rest the feverish speculation of a pundit and media class desperate for another foul-mouthed billionaire to join the fray.
There has been a significant and predictable pushback against a recent anti-police brutality protest in our city. The furious march, which packed the streets of downtown Brooklyn the day after Halloween, drew condemnation from commentators on the right and left for its radical rhetoric.
On Saturday night, Donald Trump made another rare public foray, attending a UFC match in New York City. He was roundly booed, though not as aggressively or creatively as he was at a World Series game in Washington last month.
The owners of Industry City, a sprawling retail and manufacturing hub on the Sunset Park waterfront, have decided to move forward on a controversial rezoning, despite skepticism from a local councilmember and fervent opposition from neighborhood activists.
On Tuesday, Facebook announced it would contribute $1bn toward fixing California’s existential housing crisis. This is a seemingly large number that will buy, temporarily, some goodwill for the tech behemoth, which has wreaked havoc on democracies across the world and hoovered revenue from news organizations.