The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America

Russell Shorto interview.

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The King of Bollywood in New York

There is no American equivalent to this spectacle, in which actors, joined by dozens of dancers, recreate musical numbers from popular movies. Here, all talents — acting, singing, dancing — are equal. Well, not always singing; in most Bollywood films, vocals are provided by playback singers while the stars on screen lip-sync...

Though the musicians remained onstage for Amitabh Bachchan’s first solo set, they were less consequential. His appearance was more an exercise in collective memory than a great performance. A star of stratospheric proportions, he was celebrated with hagiographical videos and voice-overs. (“Even the way he stands makes an impact.” “They aped his hairstyle.”) The younger Mr. Bachchan performed one of his father’s best-known routines, from “Don,” while images from that film flashed on a screen behind him.

With a silver goatee and short dark hair, the elder Mr. Bachchan cut an august figure. But he, too, was not immune to the pulls of legacy. Toward the end of the show, in a segment that was part spoken-word performance, part “Inside the Actors Studio,” he discussed his own parents with emotion. First, he recited a few lines of “Agneepath,” a poem by his father, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, which was, he said, “written to inspire the Indians.” (Friday was the 61st anniversary of Indian independence.)

Then he spoke about his mother, who died last year, and slipped into his character from the film “Deewaar,” who prays for his mother’s health. As Mr. Bachchan delivered the lines, his voice grew deep, mean and improbably raspy. And then, just as quickly as he had begun, he snapped back to normal and was greeted with the night’s most sincere standing ovation. On a night full of carefully choreographed moments, this blatant blast of acting also proved to be the truest.

-Movie Stars Take to the Stage, Giving ’Em the Old Bollywood Razzle-Dazzle

Assorted

Make decisions like Spock in a downturn

Global Diseases Alert Map

Israel's nuclear logic

How Many Bumper Stickers Make a Bad Driver?

Creative Capitalism

How Chicago shaped Obama

How We Drive

Walk Score

Media mapping of Iran’s missile range

Trying to Track Mortgage Mess

Room Eight

Graduate Junction

NY Fact of the Day

“The city should not be in the business of deciding what goes on, whether there is dancing or not dancing,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in 2004. “We have dance police. This is craziness.'’

The mayor was referring to the city’s 1926 cabaret law, which forbids dancing by three or more people in any establishment that does not have a valid cabaret license — even if the business serves alcohol and plays music. In the past, bars have been padlocked when a few patrons were caught swaying to music, and the Giuliani administration often used the law as a tool against clubs deemed nuisances.

-A New Effort to End the ‘Dance Police’

Islam vs Christianity

Rev. Chloe Breyer and James Pinkerton on Blogging Heads- a bit misleading title. Other topics discussed Columbia University expansion,...

Who's Your City?

You shall not trim the corners of your beard

'I follow every single rule in the Bible, even the ones that contradict themselves'-Ned Flanders



A.J. Jacobs books;

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

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Radical Honesty

The great Harry Potter trial starts

At the Harry Potter Trial, the New York Papers Pile On Steven Vander Ark;

All three major New York newspapers are out in force covering the Trial of the Century in a downtown courthouse. We're speaking, of course, of J.K. Rowling's lawsuit against the prospective publisher of a companion volume to the Harry Potter series. Pity poor Steven Vander Ark, the small-town Harry Potter lexicographer who testified yesterday and was immediately subjected to the harsh glare of the New York media spotlight.

Vander Ark burst into tears when asked about his relationship with the Harry Potter online fan community, which has mostly shunned him since Rowling filed a lawsuit against his publisher last fall. And that's not the worst — the worst was having his haircut made fun of in the New York Times. Which New York paper was the meanest to Steven Vander Ark?

Lush Life

Richard Price talks about his new novel

Logistics of a Communion

New York gets ready for the Pope's visit;

Among the profound — and mundane — questions they are confronting: How do 530 priests and deacons give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?

NY City Budget and how not to do budgets

In her evolution from a campus activist nicknamed Mad Dog to the first female speaker of the City Council and a likely candidate for mayor, Christine C. Quinn has taken care to project an image of reform and an openness about the workings of government.

Since taking office in 2006, Ms. Quinn has devised a more public system for reporting pork-barrel spending and has muscled tough new restrictions on lobbyists through a resistant Council.

But Ms. Quinn, facing her first significant embarrassment as speaker, has spent much of the last 48 hours trying to explain how the Council ran what many government experts have called a strange and even disturbing system for stashing away taxpayer dollars. For years, the Council budgeted millions of dollars for dozens of fictitious community organizations and used the money later for grants to favored neighborhood groups.

The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog organization, was bluntly critical of the practice on Friday: “There is no excuse for fictional items in a budget,” the commission said in a statement. “All elected officials bear responsibility for the budgets that they adopt, and Speaker Quinn, in particular, should be held accountable for the City Council’s fiscal practices.”

Ms. Quinn, despite her reputation as a focused manager with an understanding of the levers of city government, has said she knew nothing of the unorthodox budgeting practice. She and her staff have gone to great lengths to show that she had tried to put an end to it but was stymied by staffers she forced out.

For the moment, no one has stepped forward to contradict her account, and there is no evidence that anything about the system was illegal or that any money was misspent. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has expressed confidence in her, calling her “the most honest person I know.”

But Ms. Quinn’s defense hinges largely on her assertion that when she learned about the practice she immediately ordered it to cease, only to learn that her staff disobeyed her and carried it on for several more months.

“There were meetings, there were oral conversations,” Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, said Thursday. “There were many people in the numerous meetings with myself and the finance staff during the budget process, with many people in the room who can confirm that.”

On Friday, however, when Ms. Quinn’s office was asked to produce some of the “many people” who could confirm it, only her chief of staff stepped forward, saying he had remembered her noting in one meeting that they would no longer use the reserve system.

And numerous former and current City Council officials said Ms. Quinn had during her tenure taken an unusually active role in overseeing the budget, leaving them wondering how she could not have known or, if she had truly objected to the practice, authoritatively ended it.

“It’s an off-line extra budget slush fund within the city’s budget, and it’s used at the discretion of the speaker,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of the Citizens Union, who joined Ms. Quinn to overhaul the lobbying rules and is now calling for all future Council appropriations to be monitored by an outside agency. “Given the speaker’s drive to create more transparency about the Council’s own budget and member items, it would have been appropriate to go public with this bad practice even if it did shine a bad light on the Council.”

Indeed, the revelations have been particularly troubling for Ms. Quinn, consultants said, in part because she has made open government a mantra of her tenure as speaker.

“She’s no Eliot Spitzer,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican political consultant, “but we have a very recent example in the governor’s precipitous fall from grace that the more you crusade as someone having a transparent budget, open to the public, governing according to ethics, then the higher those accountability standards will be.”

-Backer of City Hall Openness Trips on a Budget Maneuver

On New York State Budget

14-year-old Bronx boy charged with manslaughter.

Two teens who watched their buddy attack a Columbia University graduate student will not be charged in the talented scholar's death, cops said Sunday.

After studying surveillance tape and interviewing the two teens, detectives determined only one of the trio punched Minghui Yu - who ran into Broadway to escape the attack and was struck and killed by a southbound Jeep Cherokee.

"We saw that it was only the actions of one of the kids that sent the victim into his flight," a police source said.

A 14-year-old Bronx boy was arrested Saturday and charged with manslaughter. Police said he punched Yu, 24, repeatedly at Broadway, near W.122nd St., as Yu walked back to the Morningside Heights campus at 8:50 p.m. Friday. The student was headed home after dinner with his girlfriend, classmates said.

Cops have not released the suspect's name because of his age.

"It's a mistake. That's it," the boy's aunt said as cops hauled him to a juvenile detention facility early Sunday.

-No charges for teen pals in fatal Columbia chase

Another lawsuit dismissed

Judge Dismisses Suit Over ‘Borat’;

Was Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 film “Borat” a pure slapstick comedy? Does it have a measure of redeeming value as a societal commentary? A federal judge considered these questions before dismissing a lawsuit filed by a man who was randomly accosted — and touched — by Mr. Cohen on a Midtown street. The judge concluded that the movie “appeals to the most childish and vulgar in its viewers” but does make an effort to offer a critique of American society.

NY Tax Basics

Tax Workshop for International students studying in New York

Long-Term Planning and Capital Budgeting for NYC

An interesting event- Citizens Budget Commission Holds Forum on Long-Term Planning and Capital Budgeting for NYC

Citizens Budget Commission President Diana Fortuna




Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the keynote address on the importance of long-term capital planning and infrastructure improvements

Why some people own dogs

Ms. Stevenson picked up Oliver, a 3-year-old cockapoo — half cocker spaniel, half poodle — whom she had rented before.

“Last weekend, I didn’t want to bring him back because we were having the best time,” she said as she ran her fingers through Oliver’s tan curly locks.

The agency was Flexpetz, which rents dogs that have been rescued from animal shelters in the hope that they will eventually be adopted. Flexpetz operates out of the Wet Nose Doggy Gym at 34 East 13th Street, which provides day care and boarding for dogs. The company started in San Diego and opened in Los Angeles in June and in New York in October. It plans to expand to Boston, Washington, San Francisco and London.

“There are a lot of people out there looking for companionship,” said Chris Haddix, 28, who runs the New York branch of Flexpetz. There are usually five or six dogs available for rent, many of them on display in the Wet Nose storefront window, attracting crowds.

Ms. Stevenson explained why she was a customer: “I’m single and moved here from Scotland two years ago, and it’s been difficult to meet people because everyone in New York just kind of goes about their business. But when I’m walking around with Oliver, I seem to get into so many conversations about him. It becomes a nice way to meet people.”

But it isn’t cheap. A monthly membership, which includes four one-day rentals, costs $279.95. Additional rentals cost $45 for a day, or part of a day.

-For a Temporary Best-Friend Fix, Rent a Dog (Kibble Included) for a Day

Mostly Econ Talks

Behavioural Economics: Common Mistakes in Daily Decisions
Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? Why do we repeatedly make the same mistakes when we make our selections? How do our expectations influence our actual opinions and decisions? The answers, as revealed by behavioural economist Professor Dan Ariely of MIT, will surprise you

Why is New York America's largest city?
A lecture with Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University entitled, "Urban Colossus: Why is New York America's Largest City?"

Identity and Homecoming
Rageh Omaar, presenter on the Al-Jazeera English Channell

The scientific basis for projections of climate change (in a nutshell)

Measuring American Power in Today`s Fractured World
Paul Kennedy

Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite
D. Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of Sociology at Rice University

Cuba Libre!
Daniel Drezner talks about the future—and the past—of the Cuban embargo.
Gang Leader for a Day

Financial Crises: Lessons from the Great Depression and the Writings of Ben Bernanke
Download the podcast

China's Quest for Resources

Clay Shirky

Doctoroff's Law

Doctoroff's Law;

Difficulty of Getting Project Approved = 2*a + 4*b + 50*c + infinity if its a stadium for the New York Jets

where:

a = # of city entities involved

b = # of state entities involved

c = whether u have to go thru legislature

via Global Projects Blog

Management Lesson of the Day- ‘You go with what you have’

One way to look at a ComStat meeting is as a live audit of overall police performance, one in which the leadership’s goals sometimes borders on the unreasonable because that’s the only way to ensure at least reasonable results. But before that, a ComStat meeting is a way of sharing crime data that recognizes why the first step to crime reduction itself- the gathering and analyzing of accurate, timely intelligence- has to be quickened by the heat of accountability.

The reason is simple: Most people in the world learn things faster when they know they’re going to be tested on them. Cops are no different. If we had been satisfied to just sit in a circle and chat about the intelligence we all had (which is the way some departments run their knock-off versions of Comstat), a lot of cases in New York would never have been solved and a lot of more people would have been victimized….

When the process started, kids in the suburbs were doing their homework on Pentium machines, but Yohe was punching in crime data from all seventy-six precincts and writing his own code for a simple spreadsheet into a borrowed 386. When we started moving from hand maps to computerized mapping, Yohe quickly found out even the best mapping software around couldn’t plot multiple crimes at any single address. Here we relied on Yohe’s creative ability, because he was able to devise a way to get around the software’s logic and make out hot spots look like real hot spots...

In New York City, we were eventually able to establish drug motive in about 25 percent of all the city’s murders, but we knew that a lot of other people were being gunned down in street disputes in which the drug connection was never firmly established. In the end, the consensus was that, at the very least, 40 percent of the city’s homicides were by-products of the drug trade.

-The Crime Fighter: How You Can Make Your Community Crime Free
by Jack Maple , Chris Mitchell

Power corrupts- absolute power corrupts absolutely

More on the effective and not so effective habits of Eliot Spitzer;

Insider Upbringing

As attorney general, he sent his lawyers to do battle on behalf of the disadvantaged, but hired mostly Harvard and Yale law-school graduates. His family's millions have funded his election campaigns, but he has worn the same pair of shoes for years, even as water seeped through holes in their soles.

His father grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side in a tenement with no hot water. Bernard Spitzer, now in his 80s, made a real-estate fortune that provided his three children with every advantage, but he put them to work early. He sent 7-year-old Eliot to his construction sites and had him scrape concrete from the foundations of high-rise apartments along Manhattan's Central Park South.

Working the Room

Mr. Spitzer's ability to play insider and outsider simultaneously was on display in 2003 during a clash with mutual-fund companies. In a meeting of the New York Society of Securities Analysts in the ornate dining room of the Harvard Club, the attorney general mingled with financial executives, seemingly in his element working the crowded room.

But when he took the podium to give the luncheon speech, his tone changed. He lashed out against mutual funds and brokerage firms for abusing the "little investor" and warned that executives would go to jail for the trading scandals he's prosecuting. A beeper went off, and he flashed his pager, like a cop brandishing a gun. "My beeper goes off every time we indict someone," Mr. Spitzer joked.

Few of the securities-industry officials in the audience laughed.

For Comment; Post your six-word summary of the management lessons from the life of Eliot Spitzer.