New York City

CIA, Obstruction of Justice, 9/11

April 17, 2016 by Ed Mooney

The only good thing that came out of 9/11 was that the building fell on him. –Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA anti-bin Laden task force, testifying before a congressional committee, applauding the death of John O’Neill, former head of the FBI’s NYC anti-terrorist task force. The New Yorker has begun to produce short documentaries to view on line. The topics are as varied as the contents of any recent print issue, and the stories might […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: death, ethics, New York City

Power to Intrude, Illustration by Ben Jennings, Prospect Magazine, February 2016

Privacy and Power

March 28, 2016 by William Eaton

Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to call for surveillance of oppressors, or imagine ways that surveillance could be used to create a world devoid of oppression. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about our current obsession with privacy. In The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, criminals, ethics, literature, New York City, philosophy, politics, reading, social justice, technology, women, writing

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Technology in the Age of Inequality

March 13, 2016 by William Eaton

Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the impact of technology on education-as-vocation—a subject on which I recommend Sugata Mitra’s self-organized, child-driven pedagogy. The other panelists focused primarily on digital technology’s impact on educational administration. Debates arose around the development of online-only curricula, apps that send parents reports on how late their children arrive to class, and the ethical implications […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, education, ethics, History, New York City, politics, science, social justice, technology

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Harlem Hospital, Patient Navigation, Dr. Freeman

November 2, 2015 by William Eaton

By 1921, more than 200,000 African Americans had migrated to Harlem and about half of them utilized Harlem Hospital. Many of these people had come up from the South with the hope of living a better life in New York. But, among other things—and reflecting the segregation of the times—Harlem Hospital only provided health care to African Americans on certain days of the week, unless extra fees were paid. Thus, for example, an article from the New York Herald, […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: breast cancer, cancer, discrimination, Harlem, health care, New York City, patient navigation, racism, women's health

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Eyes on the Street

October 5, 2015 by William Eaton

Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street . . . to insure the safety of both residents and strangers” (1992, p. 35). According to Jacobs, this high-density street life not only provides safety, but a shared sense of civic duty. People must take a modicum of […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, History, law, literature, New York City, politics, race, reading, social justice

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The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties

September 20, 2015 by William Eaton

I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The film focuses on many of the well-remembered legacies left by the Panthers–such as their Free Breakfast for Children Program, their armed-yet-non-violent storming of California’s capitol building in Sacramento, and the mass movements to free Huey Newton, the Chicago 7, and the New York 21–as well as a few of the negative […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, art, Black Panthers, capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, film, History, literature, movies, New York City, politics, race, social justice

Jane Jacobs: Intuition vs. Evidence

August 31, 2015 by William Eaton

After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I finally decided it was time to read the original work. Many of the conclusions Jacobs comes to resonate with my personal experience. Critiquing the notion that parks are safer for children than streets, Jacobs writes: “what significant change does occur if children are transferred from a lively city street to […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: books, childhood, children, civil rights, History, literature, New York City, social justice, women, writing

Outdoor Celebration at the Whitney

June 6, 2015 by William Eaton

To my surprise and delight, I like the new Whitney. And that is the consensus of the cities’ major critics. From the outside, all agree that the building is hard to take in. It looks as if a beginner at Legos piled up a variety of horizontal units and they somehow balanced. The eastern and western facades are opposites—closed on the west and wide open on the east—for reasons the architect, Renzo Piano, described in The New Yorker, On the […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, New York City, Renzo Piano, The Whitney Museum of American Art

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Louie C.K. and the Virtues of Realism

June 1, 2015 by William Eaton

On the hit show Louie, aside from a token, comedic clip of fantasy in each episode, realism rules the roost. Louie C.K.’s dedication to portraying the struggles of a single-father and stand-up comedian in NYC in a realistic fashion leaves the show, much like real life, somewhere between a comedy and a drama.

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: art, books, crime, ethics, film, gender, lit, literature, love, New York City, rape, sexual assault, sexuality