The Wire is pretty popular at Campus Progress. But did any of you -- Kay, Jesse -- watch it with inner city drug dealers and see thousands of dollars wagered on what will happen this season? Because Sudhir Venkatesh did, and has a post at the Times Freakonomics blog describing the experience.
Venkatesh is no stranger to inner city thugs; he studied and basically embedded himself with a crack gang in Chicago for years, and even did the job of the gang's leader for a day. He also was a co-author with Steven Levitt of the prostituion study I wrote about yesterday. Basically, Venkatesh is the most badass sociologist ever.
Having moved from my beloved Queens hood to a yuppified corner of Manhattan (you could say “The enemy of Avenue A”) my first blog entry after a rather long absence has to be on my most favorite borough, QNS. It is often stated that Queens County is the most diverse in the entire nation, which is indeed true. This is why, as the New York Times reports today, a professor named Albert Waters from Kuala Lumpur came to Flushing to learn more about the world’s religions: “This dizzyingly diverse corner of Queens is an urban showcase for the varieties of religious experience, where traditions brought over by Asian immigrants coexist alongside those of Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants.” Read More »
At 91, Grace Lee Boggs still regularly travels the country for speaking engagements, providing guidance to activists and organizers on her experience with social justice movements and her vision for the future. All this is done in addition to her usual commitments as an activist in Detroit, running the Boggs Center and participating in labor, civil rights and people of color movements in the city.
On Friday, May 4th, I once again had the chance to hear Grace Lee Boggs speak in New York City. Although I have heard her speak several times in the past, this time the theme of Grace’s speech was Martin and Malcolm—the connections, common threads, and shared lessons we can take from these two visionaries. The event took place at the Brecht Forum in Greenwich Village, as community members packed into the space to hear her words.
In the new issue of City Journal, the neoconservative urban policy magazine associated with the Manhattan Institute, Paul Beston argues against a new law in New York City banning the use of metal bats in high school baseball. Dismissing it as "nannying," Beston links the law to other recent policies in New York City like the smoking ban and the trans-fat ban. He concludes "Banning bats my seem like small ball. But it perfectly expresses the council's and the mayor's underlying belief: too much liberty is hazardous to your health."
This clearly expresses a fundamental tenet of conservative/libertarian thinking: that engaging in risky behavior with serious social costs is an entitlement. People who are injured by metal bats, or fall ill from smoking or fatty food, cost the rest of us money. We pay their emergency room bill, their Medicare bills or their Social Security disablity insurance. Only someone willing to forgo those benefits should have the right to also opt out of public health laws like those passed by the New York City Council, or pre-existing ones requiring that motorcyclists wear helmets and drivers wear seat belts. But Beston, like all conservatives, makes no serious suggestion about offering such an option in our society (much less explaining how it would be practically possible.) Instead he merely sneers at the New York City government's efforts to lower the costs that he, like all other taxpayers, will ultimately bear (and that, should rising health costs force the government to raise taxes, Beston and City Journal would surely bray against as well).
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