New york

Thursday

Steerpike

Ed’s love for Bill de Blasio runs deep

The court of Ed has a new hero. Francois Hollande, who was credited with ‘turning the tide’ of austerity by taking a ‘different way forward’, has been usurped by Bill de Blasio, the Democrat Mayor-elect of New York, who Team Ed credit with a ‘different kind’ of politics. Ed’s greybeard Lord Wood has penned a gushing paean to de Blasio in today’s Telegraph. Wood applauds de Blasio’s ‘Disraelian theme: “One New York, Rising Together”’. Mr S can’t see all that much of Disraeli in de Blasio’s mundane slogan — the word ‘one’ seems to have assumed mythic proportions in the minds of Ed’s counsellors. Then again, it’s Lord Wood’s business to talk

Wednesday

Taki

Taki: Ugly people build ugly things — look at New York and London

New York Hot money from China, India, Russia and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, unaffordable is relative. There is a delicate social ecology system pointing in the wrong direction in both metropolises, but — like a stock market gone haywire, as at times markets tend to do — when the correction comes there will be lots and lots of empty luxury lots the poor can move into. London is now essentially a tax haven, and New York

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ed Miliband supports the Boston Red Sox. This is all anyone need know about him.

It is, of course, beyond dismal that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series last night. The only upside to this is that it ensured the St Louis Cardinals, the National League’s most pompous franchise, lost. It is a very meagre upside. The Boston Red Sox: insufferable in defeat, even worse in victory. It comes as no surprise, frankly, that Ed Miliband is a devoted member of what is teeth-grindingly referred to as the Red Sox Nation. Dan Hodges and James Kirkup each salute Ed’s willingness to embrace a cause as unfashionable as baseball. Why, it’s charmingly authentic! Better a proper baseball nerd than a fake soccer fan. There is,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Did America bring Hurricane Sandy upon itself? – Spectator Blogs

Apparently so. You can always count on the British left to sneer at the United States. (You can count on quite a bit of the British right to do so too.) According to Jon Snow, the veteran Channel 4 news presenter, the United States should probably recognise that it brought Hurricane Sandy on itself. If he stops just short of saying America had it coming that’s the pretty clear implication of his latest dispatch: This is the wrong season for hurricanes to hit so far north. What has brought this upon what is – at times, and in some places – the most sophisticated nation on earth? Has what is

Thursday

Taki

Taki: Mayor Bloomberg has sold New York out to the highest bidder

 New York The trouble with driving into the city is nostalgia. Manhattan Island looms into view and it still has the same effect of wonderment as it did long ago. Once walking the streets, however, reality sets in with a bang. And it is a bang! Manhattan is one big building site, cement mixers and drills having replaced the soft tunes of Tin Pan Alley that I first heard when walking to Broadway and 47th Street. Back then it was the haunting voice of Jo Stafford singing ‘No other love can warm my heart’, or Buddy Clark’s mellow tenor voice letting it all hang out in ‘It’s a big wide

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner – review

This bright, burning flame of a novel takes place in the art world of 1970s New York. Our guide to this scene of glittering parties and eccentric characters — such as the White Lady, who wears white and goes to a grocery store to buy ‘milk, white bread, a can of hominy, and two jars of mayonnaise’ — is Reno, a young aspiring artist. Alone and new to the city, Reno asks herself, ‘How do you find people in New York City?’ She relies on chance: ‘Chance shaped things in a way that words, desires, rationales could not. Chance came blowing in, like a gust of wind.’ She chances her

Thursday

Toby Young

Inspired by a New York elementary school

I’m writing this from New York where I’m spending a few days visiting elementary schools. It feels odd to be back, particularly in my new role as an ‘educationalist’. The last time I was here I was enjoying 15 minutes of fame as a judge in an American food reality show called Top Chef. I flew over in business class, courtesy of NBC, and was whisked to Manhattan in a Lincoln Town Car. This time I’m the guest of Civitas, an education think tank, and the experience is very different. They offered to reimburse my taxi fare from JFK but I thought I’d save them a few dollars by using

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Why Britain is, still, the world capital of decency

In the Wall Street Journal today there is a wonderful piece by an American tourist struck by the level of friendliness and civility he found amongst the British people. He starts with our tube etiquette: ‘Three times in the space of 24 hours young men offered their subway seats to my wife, who is neither elderly nor pregnant. They seemed to do this out of a sense that giving up one’s seat to a person at least one generation older was the sort of thing gentlemen did, even though not one of them fit the narrow technical definition of a gentleman. One guy looked like a gangster.’ And then again… ‘At the

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Republican party didn’t leave Michael Bloomberg. He was never really in it. – Spectator Blogs

If two things could have been predicted about Hurricane Sandy it was that, first, far too many people would waste time pondering the likely impact of the storm upon next week’s presidential elections and, second, that someone would look upon Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s steady leadership and ask why he’s not running for President. I had not, however, expected my old friend (and former boss) Iain Martin to be one of those bemoaning Bloomberg’s absence from the national fray. Far less had I expected him to suggest that Bloomberg should have been theRepublicannominee this year. Say what you will about Mitt Romney but he is at least a conservative. Michael Bloomberg

Tuesday

Alex Massie

A Sunny Day in Brooklyn and the American Dream – Spectator Blogs

From Peggy Noonan’s blog which, unusually for a political columnist, is almost always lovely and generous and warmly-acute: “Man needs less to be instructed than reminded,” Dr. Johnson said, but it wasn’t really a reminder I got yesterday, it was a sort of revivifier. I was at the big annual street fair in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Big turnout, beautiful day, many thousands of people clogging Third Avenue from the 60s through the 80s, what looked like more than a hundred booths. The people filling the avenue were an incredible mix—young and old, infants and grandmas, all colors and nationalities, families, kids in groups, all kinds of garb—young Arab women in

Friday

Jonathan Jones

Gove takes on bad teachers

Michael Gove’s giving a robust defence of his plans to make it quicker and easier for schools to sack bad teachers. ‘You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth,’ he says in the Mail. ‘Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?’ And he was similarly forceful in an interview on the Today programme, the full transcript of which we’ve got here. Gove is emphatic about how important this is. ‘The evidence is quite clear,’ he says. ‘If you’re with a bad teacher, you can go back a year; if you’re with a good teacher you can

Sunday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: “New York’s loss is also the world’s”

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Here is the article Matthew Bishop wrote for The Spectator in response: Spirit of the Blitz, Matthew Bishop, 15 September 2001 New York People walk a lot in Manhattan. Its streets are always crowded. But never before like this. An hour after the attack on the World Trade Center, thousands of New Yorkers – refugees in business attire – trudged north as downtown evacuated. Many were covered from head to toe in white ash. Most walked in silence, contemplating the fact that somebody they know is probably dead, and that in the next 24 hours they will

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In New York, the whole world remembers

New York There’s an eerie mood in New York right now, as the city prepares to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Al-Qaeda, or what’s left of it, likes anniversaries. The police have been on overdrive ever since a “credible” tip-off about an attempted truck bomb. Officers are everywhere. Armed guards patrol landmarks and cars from bridges and tunnels are being pulled over and checked. All this reinforces the sense of something alien to New Yorkers (and almost all Americans) until ten years ago: the threat of attack. A common threat has solicited a rather wonderful common response. Shop windows have displays of commemoration; companies take adverts

Friday

Jonathan Jones

From the archives: 9/11

This Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Here is the article Stephen Glover wrote for The Spectator in response: “The terrorists want us to believe the world has ended. We must not fall into their trap.”, Stephen Glover, 15 September 2001 As those who are old enough remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was shot, so we will all recall what we were doing when we heard about the attack on New York. I was reading the controversial new book about Tina Brown and Harry Evans, which I had planned to write about for this column. Then my elder son rang

Tuesday

Alex Massie

New York, New York

Selling New York City to the world must be one of the easier jobs in advertising but this beautiful time-lapse video does it brilliantly, capturing something of the stuff that makes Manhattan such a special place. In a way it’s also a hymn to the wonders of big cities everywhere. Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo. More about it here.  

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Osama Bin Laden’s death: the world responds

We have already seen Barack Obama’s statement on the death of Osama Bin Laden. Below is more reaction from across the world: David Cameron: “The news that Osama Bin Laden is dead will bring great relief to people across the world. Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the worst terrorist atrocities the world has seen – for 9/11 and for so many attacks, which have cost thousands of lives, many of them British. It is a great success that he has been found and will no longer be able to pursue his campaign of global terror. This is a time to remember all those murdered by Osama Bin Laden, and

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Faisal Abdul Rauf: Neoconservative?

I continue to be impressed by how thin the case against Faisal Abdul Rauf is. You’d have thought that by now the staunch defenders of liberty crazies would have found either a smoking gun or a ticking bomb. To be fair, Pamela Geller* certainly thinks she has found evidence that he’s just as bad as his critics would have us believe. Or maybe even – and this may make your (my!) weak dhimmi-flesh creep – worse… But, actually, all she has unearthed from a 2005 talk Rauf gave to, of all places, the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, is evidence that Faisal Abdul Rauf could be considered a neoconservative. That

Thursday

Alex Massie

Faisal Abdul Rauf’s TED Talk

Jeffrey Goldberg reports on a speech Faisal Abdul Rauf gave at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl. It’s worth reading. Secondly, here’s the Imam giving a TED talk last year on the religious backdrop of compassion. Not really my kind of thing but perhaps it is yours. I must say that he doesn’t come across as a dangerous radical but that doubtless makes the disguise all the more cunning. Now, sure, some opponents won’t be swayed by any of this but there must be some for whom it does matter. Right? [Via Alex Knapp]

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Question of Provocation at Ground Zero? Lessons from The Satanic Verses

Despite what some readers and commenters seem to think, I don’t believe that all opponents of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” (which, as one wag put it, is neither at Ground Zero nor any more a mosque than a Vegas casino is a cathedral because it contains a wedding chapel) are bigots or that all opposition to it is necessarily rooted in prejudice. Indeed initially I viewed the proposal with some measure of scepticism. But as the debate has rumbled on and as I’ve thought about it some more I’m increasingly convinced that the arguments against it, however well-meaning, are flawed and flimsy. One of the recurring arguments against the

Saturday

Alex Massie

Preach It, Mr President

According to Sarah Palin, it’s now the “9/11 Mosque” because, you know, of course it’s planned as a tribute to al-Qaeda and of course it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose that all muslims are really just the same and we know what that means don’t we? Of course we do… So, these were probably Barack Obama’s best words in god knows how long: Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities – particularly in New York. Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of lower Manhattan. The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country. The pain and suffering