They don’t prepare you to give a concession speech. Outside of politics, what is the equivalent? You can’t find it in writing, journalism, or teaching—the fields I worked in before embarking on the wonderful, if exhausting, odyssey of running for office in New York City.
I had such a nice time with you last night. That Vietnamese place hit the spot, and I loved how we had so much to talk about. It’s hard to meet good people these days and make a genuine connection, you know?
In the summer of 1998, Tom Manton of Queens shocked the city’s insular political world by announcing his retirement from Congress. Manton, then 65, had petitioned to get on the ballot and showed all signs of wanting to run for another term.
How do we remember the Russian Revolution? Infused with the noblest of intentions and ideas, it ultimately begat disaster. “We know where this is going,” writes China Miéville in his new study of the revolution, October. “Purges, gulags, starvation, mass murder.”
The three lawyers who run one of the largest Democratic organizations in America have more than one way to get rich.
For 30 years, the same three men have effectively controlled one of the largest Democratic organizations in America.
“I wonder if I understand you rightly,” the Ethiopian prince Lij Tekla Alamaya asks his American friend Gloria Kendall. “Slavery in the Bronx, New York, in the most highly civilized city in the world?”
New York journalists always pine for heroes and villains. A Manichean universe is a convenient one: good guys do good, bad guys do bad, and to the white knight goes the boldest headlines.
Surrounded by cheering activists and elected officials, de Blasio marked one of the early triumphs of his soon-to-be tumultuous tenure: bringing a municipal identification-card program to New York City.
Europeans have always regarded the United States of America with curiosity and awe. We’re the muscular, uncouth youngster never quite knowing our strength, a commander of the World Order with serious impulse control.