New money, old pipes, and a mayor who’s trying to manage both.
CAN A BEATEN-DOWN downtown find a way to thrive without getting pummeled by gentrification? Can longtime residents who have paid their dues welcome newcomers without losing their sense of home? Can a once-handsome, but dilapidated, center rebuild without shiny ugliness? One of the unlikeliest places to come looking for a yes to each of these questions may be Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward, where forlorn history and frantic optimism mix in a distinctive local brew. There’s a snap of fresh money in the air. Cranes are doing slo-mo pirouettes above the skyline. Glossy renderings circulate again, and this time they’re coming to fruition. Yet there are also toxic chemicals in the drinking water: lead in some buildings with corroded pipes and high levels of a possible carcinogen, haloacetic acids, at eight testing sites, including one downtown. You could hardly ask for a starker example of the bifurcation that is plaguing American cities: a glass tower on one block, poisoned water on the next. As faucets in Flint and subways in New York have proved, in a nation with an old and brittle infrastructure, the most basic services can be levers of inequality.
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Early and Often: David Freedlander - Momentum vs. Machine The Trump and Harris campaigns battle it out for every last vote.
WIth two weeks left to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.
Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
The City Politic- The Other Eric Adams Scandal The NYPD shot a fare evader, a cop, and two bystanders. He defends it.
On Sunday, September 15, Derell Mickles hopped a turnstile, got asked to leave by cops, then entered the subway again ten minutes later through an emergency exit. This was at the Sutter Avenue L station, out by his mother's house, five stops from the end of the line. Police said they noticed he was holding a folded knife. They followed him up the stairs to the elevated train, asking him 38 times to drop the weapon.
Can the Media Survive?
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Status Update
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A Matter of Perspective
A Matter of Perspective Steve McQueen's worst film is still a solid WWII drama.
Creator, Destroyer
A retrospective reveals an architect's vision, optimism, and supreme arrogance.
In Praise of Bad Readers
In a time of war, there is a danger in surveying the world as if it were a novel.
Trust the Kieran Culkin Process
First, he nearly dropped out of Oscar hopeful A Real Pain. Then he convinced Jesse Eisenberg to change the way he directs.
The Funniest Vampires on TV
What We Do in the Shadows is coming to an end. Its idiosyncratic brand of comedy may be too.
