Tag Archives: new-york

And So It Goes

Today is Wednesday, November 5, 2025. Flush over triumphant Democratic victories across the country yesterday on Election Day, today conservative news outlet The Wall Street Journal torches MAGA triumphalism in a hard-hitting editorial published today. An online article by Isaac Schorr entitled “A ‘Warning on ‘Trump’s Unpopularity’: The Wall Street Journal Torches ‘MAGA Triumphalism’ After Election Night” reports about the paper’s editorial which declares “The era of MAGA triumphalism should be over.”

Under the headline, “Democrats Start Their Comeback,” and sub-headline, “A warning for the GOP from New Jersey and Virginia on affordability and Trump’s unpopularity,” the Journal observed that “President Trump rolled to victory in 2024 promising to reduce inflation and make middle-class life more affordable. The warning to Republicans in Tuesday’s election results is that Democrats are turning the tables on affordability, especially when they steer clear of leftist cultural snares.”

After reviewing Democrats’ victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, the conservative newspaper suggested that the Orange Turd played a role in the GOP’s losses. Even though the GOP won both states in 2009 and Virginia in 2021, under Presidents Obama and Biden, “this time Democrats had the advantage of rallying voters upset at President Trump.” Exit polls showed the Orange Turd’s approval rating at 44 percent in New Jersey and 42 percent in Virginia.

The conservative Journal wasn’t the only media entity to acknowledge as much. On the fake news station, Fox News, Brit Hume chalked up Democrats’ triumphs simply to anti-Dump sentiment.

“Today Donald Trump went from a lame duck to a humiliated lame duck,” so states Lawrence O’Donnell on his show tonight, The Last Word. The election of New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani to be New York’s newly elected 111th mayor signals “Donald Trump’s days are numbered,” according to an online Mirror article by Christopher Bucktin entitled “‘New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s win signals Donald Trump’s days are numbered.'” Here the piece boldly declares “the tide has turned” against the fascist in the White House.

I’ll quote some of this lovely piece here: “It is the first major, flashing-neon, impossible-to-spin sign that the American public has begun to reject the catastrophic second presidency of Donald Trump.”

Again, the language here is impossible to not overstate: “New York did not just choose a new mayor. It chose a new direction, a new generation, and a new political vocabulary.”

According to the article, Mamdani built a powerful coalition that Trumpism has never understood and cannot compete with: younger voters, working-class immigrants, and the Black and Latino communities who know too well what it means to be used (by Dump and his horrible party) as political props and then summarily abandoned.

Mamdani didn’t just win, according to the article, he redrew the map of who holds power in New York City. He did it while becoming the city’s first Muslim mayor and the first South Asian to ever hold the office.

So, what did the idiot in the White House do in the wake of these disastrous results? He does what he always does: he shrugs, he deflects, he denies, he snarls, he bursts out in anger. Here he blamed Congress, his staff, the government shutdown, the “media elite,” but always forgetting to blame himself. He was the sole person on the ballot and people came out in droves to vote against him!

This was also on the ballot, according to this well-written article, “his policies, his cruelty, his chaos, his hollow nationalism, his disdain for every person who does not fit his reflection – those were the issues voters saw. And they rejected them.”

All of those states that racked up large Democratic victories were saying one thing very clearly: We are done with the policies of this cruel administration. The conclusion is quite telling: “And Trump, for the first time in this term, looks like a man who knows he is being outplayed.”

In the wake of this wonderful good news, today will be my last blog before next Monday, November 10, because Elliot and I are flying to Nashville, Tennessee, tomorrow morning for a four-day birthday celebration. It was this or a party, but I decided upon going somewhere where I haven’t been to before. One friend is joining us: “Harvey.” He overheard Elliot mentioning our going to Nashville a while ago, and he asked if he could come along. Elliot cheerily said “sure, you can.” He’ll be meeting us in Nashville since he’ll be leaving out of Newark Airport. He is also staying at the same hotel where we’ll be staying. But he will not be accompanying us to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday, November 8. He said he might be going to an ice hockey game. But we’ll join up for some nice meals, that’s for sure.

Have a good four days. Hope to see you on Monday.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Friday, October 10, 2025. One day after the monster-in-chief gave the go-ahead to indict a sitting attorney general in New York for absolutely nothing, that Attorney General, Letitia James, achieved the best single day of fundraising in a nearly 30-year political career. This stunning reality is covered in an online CNN article entitled “Letitia James sees a record fundraising surge and Democratic support after indictment.”

A source familiar with James’s political operation told CNN she brought in $567,000 from over 24,000 donors in the 24 hours after she was indicted yesterday afternoon on felony charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. A little reminder: this monster-in-chief was actually indicted some years back by this same attorney general for doing exactly the same thing. Sounds quite rich to me, don’t you think? Most of the same fundraising came in response to emails her political operation was sending out to capitalize on the news, though some donations came in on their own.

James’s prepared video response to the indictment drew 4.3 million views on X in that same 24 hours.

In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, national and New York Democrats rushed to support her, led by mayoralty candidate Zohran Mamdani, whom James has been helping both on the New York City mayoralty campaign and in gearing up for governing if he wins.

That same candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, spoke in front of the same courthouse where Attorney General James was doing her job – indicting and thrusting the monster-in-chief in front of a jury that eventually ruled against him – and said, “This is a blatant miscarriage of justice; this is a shameless act of political retribution.”

If Mamdani wins the race, it is the avowed promise of the monster-in-chief to pull billions in funding from the nation’s largest city if the 33-year-old candidate is victorious, which seems to be the case. I forgot to mention that the current mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race sometime last week, and I say, “Good riddance!” He is inextricably connected with the monster-in-chief and many staffers in his administration have been arrested and charged for financial crimes. This does not look good in a candidate for mayor, and he probably knew his chances of winning a second term slid into the toilet when the Dump administration dropped charges against him last year. I disliked him for this very reason and his about-face on removing Medicare from over 250,000 city retirees, which he initially said he wouldn’t but when he took office, he did an about-face and changed his mind to deciding to throw all of us in a Managed Care program that met with opposition for many years. This alone turned me on him, and this happened very early in his first – and only – term.

The other candidate for mayor, Andrew Cuomo, was a little reticent when it came to defending the attorney general in her upcoming legal case. It’s very apparent why this was so since it was James who led the investigation and release of a report into sexual misconduct allegations that ultimately resulted in Cuomo’s resignation as New York governor. So it doesn’t seem too farfetched if he is reticent in condemning these charges since James would be considered his opponent who drove him out of office in the first place.

Hours after Mamdani’s rally in Manhattan, Cuomo did issue a new statement calling for universal condemnation of politicizing the justice system. The statement now included a mention of James’s name, but said Cuomo too had been the victim of politically motivated investigations.

In the statement, Cuomo said, “The weaponization and politicization of the justice system is wrong no matter which side you are on – period.” Then he plays the poor victim, saying, “I know firsthand as the White House weaponized the DOJ against me when I was governor of New York and three other democratic states during the height of COVID and it’s wrong that it appears to be happening with AG James and Former FBI Director Comey – it is part of why people have lost faith in the Justice system, the cornerstone of our democracy.”

Mamdani said he had spoken to James shortly after the indictment became public to reassure her of the support she had.

“She told me, ‘Don’t worry about me,'” Mamdani said. He added, “That’s indicative of an attorney general who has spent all of her time worrying about the people of the state.”

Maybe then this monster-in-chief should be worried that James will emerge victorious after these baseless charges against her are either dismissed or she is declared innocent of all of the drummed-up charges against her. She’ll be more powerful after this, not less, and the little, fearful man sitting in the White House will appear ever more weakened altogether.

Dump is the smallest of men who must be stewing in his own Adult Diapers after it was revealed today that he lost the Nobel Peace Prize. The award was given to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, a Latina and a woman, which should enrage the small, petty man in the White House to no end. She was given the prize “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy,” according to a statement from the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Today Elliot and I performed a mitzvah by driving to Long Island to pay a visit to our friend “Joseph,” who is recovering at a rehabilitation center after having surgery for a broken hip sustained in a fall there. We spent less than a hour visiting him since we were parked by a one-hour parking stand. We spoke about our last trip with Joseph and he mentioned how he got into his current predicament. He was sitting in a wheelchair and seemed quite shvach, which is to be expected. He couldn’t tell us precisely when he might be discharged, but he did posit that it could be another four weeks or longer. So there will definitely be further visits with him in the near future.

Have a good weekend, everyone. Unfortunately, it might be quite a wet one this time.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Sunday, July 6, 2025. I wrote that I might not have written my blog today, but here I am! We were indeed very busy, having left Forest Hills at 12 today to get into Manhattan a little before 1 in order to have bagels and coffee at the newly renamed Murray’s Bagels on 8th Avenue and 18th Street. It is now called Zucker’s Bagels, and the interior looks the same as the old Murray’s Bagels, so when we got up to the cashier to pay for our food items, I asked about the change in name. The young woman behind the counter said the establishment is owned by the same people who ran Murray’s Bagels, but just changed the name.

Today we had tickets to see Pilobolus at the Joyce Theater at 2, so we walked in about 1:30. This is not our first time at the rodeo, as they say. We’ve discovered this incredibly athletic and lithe group of modern dancers quite a number of years ago at this venue. We even saw the late actor Paul Newman and his stalwart wife, Joanne Woodward, in the audience of a Pilobolus performance in 2006, I think. Soon after, Newman, sadly, was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer and he died in 2008. So we’ve been attending dance performances of this one particular troupe for many years now.

Today’s program consisted of four performances: “Particle Zoo,” “Bloodlines,” “Flight,” and “Rushes.” Each of them were singularly amazing. The troupe consists of four hunky men and two women. The first segment of the show featured just the men shirtless and all wearing white pants and belts cavorting with each other and on the stage. I believe it was in this segment where one of the men fell out of the sky and was scooped up by his fellow dancers. The audience positively shrieked with delight when the dancer landed safely in the arms of his compatriots. The second segment, “Bloodlines,” featured just the two women in a pas de deux of simple elegance and sisterhood. The third segment, “Flight,” was appropriately named since it did somehow revolve around the majesty of flight, as the dancers revolved around the stage with what looked like paper airplanes. This piece was performed by only four of the principal dancers, while the last segment, “Rushes,” featured the entire cast. At the end of the one hour- and forty-minute performance, the troupe deservedly received a standing ovation.

From the Joyce Theater, Elliot and I walked in the sultry air to Hudson Street to have dinner at the Bus Stop Cafe. As we walked to the restaurant, we commented to one another how the landscape has changed in the West Village. So many businesses we recalled that once thrived there have now been replaced by gaudier, pricier establishments. New York, as you must know, is constantly changing; it’s definitely not static. If you mourn the loss of earlier well-known landmarks that have been razed to make way for sparkling new venues, you should read Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss. It was written some years ago, but now screams for a kind of update.

Anyway, dinner was quite good: Elliot ordered the chicken soup and the meat loaf entree, while I ordered the cream of mushroom soup and had the turkey dinner, replete with mashed potatoes, steamed spinach, and stuffing. Everything was quite tasty.

It is here Elliot and I parted: Elliot went home and I headed east, intending to visit a gay bar and to have coffee somewhere. I found myself on Bleecker Street having a cup of coffee at Rocco’s and having two vanilla sugar cookies.

Eventually I made my way to the Stonewall Inn, where I spent a whole ten minutes surveying the scene. It was about 7 or so and there weren’t many people inside the historic bar. I walked to the wall by the pool table which had a display involving the various kinds of LGBTQ+ flags that have been designed over the years. Did you know that there is a bisexual flag and an asexual flag? I didn’t know. I was just aware of the iconic Pride flag, designed in 1978, I believe.

I had no inclination to stay in Manhattan, so now I made my way back home. I think I got home close to 8 or so. I took the E on West 4th Street.

Now back to grim reality: One silver lining in that passage of Diaper Don’s “big, ugly bill” is this online article in RawStory by David McAfee entitled ‘Bad, bad, bad day’: GOP lawmakers panicky as Trump ‘threatens House majority.'” This article paints these cowardly repugnicans as now being fearful of what their blind obeisance to the Orange Cheeto can do to them in the midterms of 2026, as a piece in Politico today ponders the fate of the repugnicans in Congress who voted to cut health care programs by more than $1 trillion over the next two years. The outlet further quotes Senator Jim Justice (R-WVA) as saying, “You would be foolish not to worry about it . . . If you don’t keep the voters right with you, you’re going to awaken to a bad, bad, bad day.”

According to the report, “adding to the GOP angst,” is that “Democrats are preparing to weaponize the bill as they did Republicans’ failed efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017.”

“That 2018 midterm election led to a GOP wipeout in the House, with the party losing 40 seats, including some districts in Trump-leaning territory,” according to the outlet. Thus “Democrats are planning to again hitch vulnerable Republicans to the cuts to social safety-net programs.” And well as they should!

One senator, Thom Tillis, already retired over his disagreements with parts of the repugnican spending bill.

In an ongoing story, at least 82 people have died in connection with the flash floods that have struck central Texas, according to officials. The terrible toll includes at least 28 children in Kerr County, where 10 girls and one counselor from Camp Mystic are still unaccounted for, authorities said.

Now I don’t know about you, but couldn’t this unnecessary death and destruction be possibly laid at the foot of this disgusting president who has taken a sledgehammer to agencies such as the National Weather Service (NWS) that oversee such disasters? Even though the NWS did issue a slew of alerts before the storm, questions still surround the agency’s staffing [Dump’s meddling!] and ability to reach residents at the time of the calamity. As I recall, one Democratic lawmaker has tied Dump to this Texas event and its tragic aftermath, but I can’t find the article in which his allegations are contained. I do know that comedian Rosie O’Donnell made the connection between Dump and the deaths experienced in central Texas, but she was slammed by despicable red hats on the internet. All they can do is scream at others who tell the truth but will never acknowledge the real truth about their Dear Leader! So far, so many families have been affected by this tragedy that it’s totally incomprehensible.

Anyway, try to have a good week.

And so it went!

Here is today’s playbill from the Piloblous show.

I think this is an article depicting the actual Stonewall Riots in 1969. The paper is the Daily News and the date is July 6, 1969.

Here is a proclamation from the New York City Council on the 85th birthday of Tree Sequoia, legendary bartender at the Stonewall Inn. It was hanging on the wall of the saloon. It’s quite a testimonial to this well-loved and tireless AIDS activist, who has been featured in many outlets like Time magazine, Bloomberg, Reuters, and other outlets.

This is just a lovely street on the way to 6th Avenue and the subway. I should have noted the actual street name, but I didn’t. Sorry!

And So It Goes

Today is Tuesday, June 24, 2025. I forgot to mention in yesterday’s blog that today is New York’s mayoral primary where polls have closed at 9. Where the city was still gripped in 98-degree heat, but that didn’t stop Elliot and me from voting earlier than usual since I woke up at 7:40 which is not the usual time when I wake up. So by 9, we trundled off to the elementary school where Elliot volunteers for a remarkable kindergarten teacher at P.S. 196. Before we voted downstairs, Elliot paid a visit to this teacher on the first floor and I could hear her kids say to Elliot, “Hi, Mr. B.” Then he walked in and hugged his colleague, “Irma.” I followed Elliot into the room and hugged and kissed Irma and was immediately greeted by a young girl who asked how I was related to Elliot. Boy, was she curious. She first inquired if I were a cousin, I believe, then asked if I were a friend. I thought it was easier to say the latter and leave it at that.

Actually, temperatures reached a high of 100 today and I went out at least four times. The first time was to vote; the other times had to do with going to the bank, getting a pedicure, and then going out and having dinner at a local Chinese restaurant since no one was cooking today. I even had to drive to Staples to buy a whole new set of cartridges since my printer warned me yesterday that two cartridges were depleted. I even stupidly sat outside for a very brief spell to read my new book on the Astor family, written by Anderson Cooper, but bounced up as the temperature got sultrier and sultrier. I had just called my friend “Harvey,” whom I was supposed to have met in the city, but this get-together I canceled because of the heat. I was not going to stand on a subway platform where the temps might have been over 100 degrees. And I’m sure they were!

I have not been personally engaged in the mayoralty race because of obvious concern of what’s happening on the national level with this current fascistic regime, so excuse me for not writing about it. An online article in the Mirror provides some early results of the race for mayor and they are quite interesting. The article is written by Falyn Stempler and it’s entitled “Zohran Mamdani leading in early NYC mayoral race exit polls followed by Andrew Cuomo.” As I said, these early results are quite intriguing.

The article states in the first paragraph that Mamdani is currently leading in early exit polling for New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary race. This candidate is a democratic socialist and he has been endorsed by such progressive figures as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and former DNC Vice Chair David Hogg (formerly a survivor of the Parkland high school shooting in Florida on February 14, 2018), who currently leads with 43.8 percent of the votes, followed by former NYC Governor Andrew Cuomo (35.8 percent), NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (11.7 percent), and NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (4.1 percent), according to the Associated Press.

These results reflect approximately 84 percent of votes cast, totaling over 866,000 voters. I’m not sure if that’s an impressive number, considering how many registered Democrats there are in the city.

These results will only reflect the voter’s first choice, including mail-in ballots processed by June 20. The full ranked-choice tabulations will not be available until the beginning of next week.

In the ranked voting system, if no candidate is the first choice on a majority of ballots, then the election will advance to ranked voting.

If Mamdani wins, his would be a historic feat for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as it challenges establishment figure Cuomo who led the city through the horrific COVID-19 pandemic. Cuomo, 67, also faces nearly a dozen accusations of sexual harassment.

Mamdani, 33, is currently a New York State Assembly member who is a registered democratic socialist. He was born in Uganda to a Muslim-Indian family and raised in New York City.

He champions working-class causes and has focused his campaign on the cost-of-living crisis. Among his other progressive proposals are creating affordable housing and free childcare, raising the minimum wage, offering free public bus transit, and creating city-run supermarket stores, according to his website.

If elected, he will be this city’s first Muslim mayor and it highlights the split within the Democratic Party’s older entrenched faction and a new, younger one, as embodied by Mamdani and other young progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Oops, an update: Cuomo has indeed lost the primary and he has conceded to Mamdani. Very interesting. Maybe this young man’s victory has all the earmarks of a fucking backlash to Chump’s supposed victory in November.

Today we heard an actual sitting president use the F-bomb in comments he made to reporters in which he condemned both Israel and Iran for the unraveling of the ceasefire that he supposedly brokered between the two warring nations. But now both Israel and Iran said they will not break the ceasefire unless the other does first, after the two countries traded accusations of truce violations. So Dump lashed out at both parties, saying, in fury, “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” This was heard around the world, as parents will now have to explain to their children how their president can stoop to such vulgar language like everyone else. Maybe this toddler was responding to the reports that those military strikes he deployed on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities did not destroy the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, not years. The assessment was done by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. But we all know that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “have been obliterated.” Maybe they were obliterated – but only in his head.

Tomorrow I was going to see my Long Island friend “Jake” and not write my blog since I usually spend at least 12 hours with him, always ending up coming home past midnight generally. But my friend called me to cancel because of the expected heat and other reasons I won’t mention here. “But I already bought my train ticket,” I told him. Jake responded that it is still good for several months; he’s right – I checked. So we rescheduled to get together in two weeks: on Wednesday, July 9. That’s fine with me; I didn’t really want to ride the subway to the Jamaica LIRR train station. So I can now go to my comic book store as planned.

I should see you tomorrow then if nothing else arises out of the blue.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Monday, December 9, 2024. A breaking story involves that hooded assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week who has now been identified and apprehended in Pennsylvania. The 26-year-old suspect has been identified as Luigi Mangione, and he was ordered held without bail and did not enter a plea in his first court appearance in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. CNN has supplied live updates to this story in an online blurb called “Luigi Mangione, the suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, appears in court,” written by Elise Hammond, Lauren Mascarenhas, Michelle Watson, Steve Almasy, and Taylor Romine.

The young suspect was arrested on a gun charge after being picked up while eating at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, following an employee calling the police, the NYPD chief of detectives said. Mangione had multiple fake IDs and a 3-D printed gun with a suppressor, according to officials.

When officers approached him in Altoona and asked him if he had been to New York recently, he “became visibly nervous” and started “kind of shaking.” Authorities have said the suspect has been in the state for “several days.”

What nails him as the alleged healthcare killer is that he was in possession of a document railing against the healthcare industry, a police official who has seen the document told CNN.

As for the suspect’s personal background, it was discovered that he was an Ivy League graduate from Maryland. In another press briefing, a former roommate of Mangione’s, R.J. Martin, has informed CNN’s Erin Burnett that he’s “beyond shocked” by the news that Mangione could be involved in the Manhattan slaying. Martin said that it’s “unfathomable” that Mangione could be accused of such a crime.

Martin said the two – who lived together in a co-living and co-working community in Hawaii – weren’t just flatmates, they were friends. Describing his former roommate, Martin stated, “He was a very thoughtful person. Communicated really well, was friendly, had good relationships with everyone. He was even, in some ways, a bit of a leader.”

According to Martin, their friendship eventually fizzled out after Mangione confided in him that he had a bad back and that he had surgery earlier this year that left him with screws in his body. He said the suspected assassin called him once after sending him some very “heinous” X-rays of his spine and that he didn’t call him back. What a good friend that was!

This nascent profile of this young killer leaves everyone with just more questions, not answers. However, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said the right thing about Mangione, which undercut all of the buzz from social media nuts portraying him as a hero. He said bluntly, Mangione “is no hero” and went on to state, “In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint.” Shapiro suggested “The real hero in this story is the person who called 911 at McDonald’s this morning.”

In a somewhat related case that was just adjudicated today, a Manhattan jury found the young man accused of killing homeless 30-year-old street artist Jordan Neely on a New York subway car last year not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. Prosecutors were attempting to prove that Daniel Penny, the young former Marine, used actions that were “reckless” and “negligent” in the chokehold that ended Neely’s life in front of other shocked witnesses. Here a 12-person jury decided that Penny’s actions were not criminal in nature. The details of this case are reported in an article for Patch, a Forest Hills online news journal, by David Luces, entitled “Daniel Perry Is Acquitted Of All Charges In NYC Subway Chokehold Case.”

This past Friday, a Manhattan judge agreed to drop the more serious charge of manslaughter in the second degree after jurors twice were not able to come to a verdict on the manslaughter charge, according to multiple media reports.

Defense lawyers for Penny argued that Neely had been shouting and demanding money before the Marine veteran intervened.

The fatal incident occurred on May 1, 2023, on a northbound F train headed toward the Broadway-Lafayette station (there but for the grace of God go I; I usually take this train to that very station to go to my bookstores or to the Angelika Theatre, so I could have been on that train, possibly). I know that I was actually out of the city on that date since I was just beginning our cross-country drive from California to New York with our good friend “Patricia.” Anyway, Penny brought Neely down with the assistance of two other passengers and then proceeded to put him in a chokehold for 6 minutes.

The victim had struggled with homelessness and mental illness and, according to witnesses, had been acting in an aggressive manner before the fatal incident.

Penny’s lawyers claimed that the young man had not intended to kill Neely but was holding him long enough for the police to arrive.

At the time, the controversial case succeeded in polarizing city residents, many of whom have personal experiences with disorder on the subways, and raised broader questions about mental health, race relations, and the line between protector and vigilante. Look, I ride the subway all the time and I do encounter these unfortunate denizens of the underground. I’ve learned to have a sixth sense when there could be trouble afoot and I usually leave the car where imminent danger could be looming or I cast my eyes downward and escape into my book or newspaper (which will be rarer these days because of our moratorium on reading the news).

Personally, I can’t say I’m pleased altogether with this verdict because it might set a dangerous precedent when it comes to perceiving threats on the subway in the near or distant future. How many other Daniel Pennys are out there waiting for their chance of achieving their 15-minute’s worth of fame? At the time, Penny’s actions were gloriously embraced by repulsive far-right figures out in the ether. While those on the left condemned his actions and called him a violent vigilante who took another man’s life.

If you really are interested in learning about our broken mental health system, it’s all documented in the fascinating and detailed work by Jonathan Rosen called The Best Minds in which he provides a heartrending account of his boyfriend friend, Michael Laudor, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and eventually killed his pregnant fiancee because he thought she was a rag doll. Rosen painstakingly writes about the evolution of our treatment of the mentally ill and how it has come up painfully short in many instances. Go read it if you have the time and are interested in knowing why so many mentally ill seem to be on our streets these days. In his book, you will find out why.

And so it went!