The play, written by 16 women who survived Hurricane Katrina, is being performed Monday at the Apollo Theater in Harlem to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the storm.
Two new books explore the legacies of a former mayor whom history maligned and a governor whose role has been all but forgotten.
An impromptu survey finds that about half of a sample of city offices participate in a 20-year-old program to distribute voter registration forms.
When New York City public schools let out next week, the tests will have just begun for many teens, who will face rising crime and the weakest young adult job market in history.
For Tasnim Huque, the past few months have been full of surprises. Her Muslim parents, who immigrated to New York City from India’s sprawling eastern city of Calcutta in the late 1980s, are gradually allowing the 18-year-old to show some independence. While there’s little inhibiting most seniors at Hunter Science High School in Manhattan from attending the prom— except, perhaps, the cost of limos, gowns and tuxes— Huque was certain that she’d be missing it for a different reason: her 6 p.m. curfew. But her parents recently told her that she could, in fact, attend.“They even bought me a nice Westernized dress,” she says excitedly. And that’s not all she’s excited about.
Times Square. In its colorful and danger-filled heyday of the 1970s and ’80s, porn shops, drug pushers, prostitutes and pistol-toting stickup men were the price of admission. But the venue has been a tourist-friendly commercial strip for some 15 years. In early April, for few minutes, that changed.On Easter night, a series of brawls and violent confrontations broke out in Times Square and nearby Herald Square among roaming bands of youths, reportedly resulting in the shooting of three women and one man, whose ages ranged from 18 to 21. A 20-year-old Bronx man was arrested in two of the shootings.
Kindergarten teacher Alison Brackman of P.S. 230 in Kensington, Brooklyn, tells parents that there are two kinds of books: Meat-and-potatoes reads, which stay with you long after they’re finished, and potato-chip books – momentarily delicious, but utterly forgettable. Summer reading traditionally falls square into the potato-chip camp, but for readers still hungry for substance–especially with a focus on city schools–three recent books are worth a bite. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic Books, 284 pp., $26.95) itemizes New York’s premier education historian’s evolution in school-reform thinking. Long before it was fashionable, Ravitch championed data-based accountability and national curriculum standards, as part of the (first) Bush and Clinton administrations. Yet now that the reform pendulum has swung hard to the accountability pole, Ravich’s book recants her earlier positions, with meticulous explanations of why her beliefs have shifted.
Those calling for an end to party primaries say that they exclude thousands of voters who do not belong to the Democratic party, whose nominees win most races in the city. Photo by: Jarrett Murphy
Those pushing the Charter Revision Commission to propose an end to party primaries say politics has changed since voters rejected a similar bid seven years ago. By: Jarrett Murphy
The city’s Charter Revision Commission on Wednesday night was nearing the end of three hours of expert testimony–most of it about whether nonpartisan elections would be good or bad for New York City’s democracy–when Commissioner Ernie Hart raised a practical question.If a proposal to have nonpartisan elections were put before the voters in 2010, how would the commission do to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2003, when voters rejected such a change by a 70-30 margin?That’s the kind of strategic quandary now facing the 15 mayor-appointed commissioners as they mull ways to improve voter participation in municipal elections, which has dropped almost without interruption since the 1960s. One measure–the percentage of New York’s presidential race voters who return for the mayoral race the following year–fell from 67 percent in 2001 to 45 percent in 2009.Wednesday’s testimony–only the second of five “issue forums” where the panel is hearing from policy experts on areas of the charter that might change–raised a host of thorny issues. How much of the turnout problem is due to the mechanics of voting versus the larger political culture?
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