Category: News and Opinion

Seeing Bob Turner and David Weprin in debate is one of those rare exercises in democracy which subtracts from the sum total of the world’s knowledge.

I’ve already posted my post-debate thought piece on Weprin, and will finish my Turner piece as soon as the headache he causes me each time I think of him subsides.

David Weprin is, on paper, as close to an ideal Democratic candidate as one can find in today’s Ninth Congressional District.

I haven’t done a “Vines” column in a long time since they always seem to get me in trouble. Anyway let’s give it another try.

My last column (“Sex, Lies, Video and Audiotape”) generated a whole lot of feedback. I am postponing part two for now. 

I hate to say this, but the Weprin campaign would probably not suffer if the entire staff were shot at sunrise (and they've earned it) and were replaced by names randomly selected from the phone listings.

Might even be an improvement.   

Dissent Magazine has a long an honorable tradition of intellectual discourse on the social democratic left, even if, during its heyday in the late 50s through early 70s, some of its most compelling voices, like Irving Howe, were often culturally a bit reactionary (see, for instance, Howe’s vitriolic critiques of Philip Roth).

I want to thank everyone for their show of compassion for my family’s forced evacuation from Lewes Delaware (which faced a tornado on top of the hurricane) and our voluntary evacuation from the vicinity of the Gowanus Canal; your compassion was stunning:

‎7:30 PM, Thursday night on the boardwalk in Rehoboth, Delaware (which the Times that very day accurately called "an island of tolerance in a sea of outlet stores”) I was giving Dybbuk a demonstration of why driving in Brooklyn was good training for operating a bumper car, when Domestic Partner called to tell me that some drunk in

Yes, I am not unaware of the weather, but I’ve not finished that piece, and I’ve all these leftovers laying around, and if the power fails, they just won’t stay fresh.

That was a warning from a friend from Louisiana the last time a tropical storm approached. The wind can launch stuff left outdoors through windows, perhaps yours and perhaps someone else’s. That stuff, including outdoor furniture, garbage pails, etc. needs to be moved and secured. It’s the first thing people who are used to hurricanes do, I was told, but it isn’t mentioned in the city’s literature. Move it inside, or at least out of the wind.