I grew up in a tiny Jewish enclave on Chicago’s South Side. When I first saw New York, in the Sixties, I was awed as by no subsequent marvel of nature: stretching north from Columbus Circle, up the West Side, …
Hip-hop: the last bastion of American freedom
On 11 August 1973, there was a party at an apartment building at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in the Bronx. The host, Cindy Campbell, was a black immigrant teenager from Jamaica who wanted to earn some extra cash to buy back-to-school …
The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America
The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands …
We need to talk about chemsex
When people gather anonymously to talk about dancing in the shadow of drugs and sex, the energy in the room glows with a warm ball of white light. This feeling, I think, must be the immanence of healing. So much …
How New York can survive
In 1912, James Weldon Johnson wrote that New York City is “the most fatally fascinating place in America”. The city, he explained, “sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding …
Millennial Catholics are faking it
Christians of convenience are nothing new. As early as the second century, the sect-hopping Peregrinus milked Christians for money and fame, until they found out he was eating food sacrificed to pagan idols. But there is something shocking about the …
The trial of America’s progressive prosecutors
“Getting here was the easy part,” Chesa Boudin said in a victory speech after his 2019 election to the position of San Francisco district attorney. Three years later, despite presiding over a steep descent into lawlessness in the city on …
New York is betraying rape victims
“For far too long, this city’s answer to every societal problem was to throw people in jail.” In an impassioned speech in 2019, the Mayor of New York City announced comprehensive reforms to the criminal justice system (CJS). “We lost …
How cities killed desire
Crossrail took 20 years, and ran billions over budget, and only one of the three lines is open so far. But it’s open. And that’s something. For over the past decade or so I’ve grown pessimistic about the prospect of …
Buffalo and the myth of racist America
What connects the tragedies of May 25, 2020, and May 14, 2022? The straightforward answer, at least according to many in the media and on the Left, is systemic racism.
On May 25, 2020, a black man was murdered in …
Texas is the future
In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where …
How fear consumed American theatre
We all know our consciousness is corrupt, and a long life, examined, brings the burden of regret, shame, and indeed a horror at our own actions that, at times, becomes scarcely bearable.
The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median …
How gender self-ID is being abused
I assumed Harvey Marcelin was an elderly woman guilty of some sort of financial crime when I first read the charge sheet. The Department of Corrections website describes a six-foot, black female, born in 1938, charged with defrauding the government.…
The failure of Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac, who would have been 100 tomorrow, was the sort of male literary celebrity America doesn’t produce anymore. Shy and sensitive, ambitious to the point of megalomania (he often likened himself to Melville and Shakespeare), and an outrageous drunk, …
Kanye West’s tragic victory
It took me a while to figure out what the first two instalments of the new Netflix documentary jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy reminded me of, this portrait of the artist as a young man trying to get ahead in the …
