journalists-from-new-york-city

"And though she has a bad back from the competitive skiing that proved her lift ticket out of Communist Czechoslovakia, Ivana [Trump] is on her way to Aspen for the holidays—and St. Moritz after that. "I can ski backwards on one ski. And foldblinded!" she exults. "But I don't go through moguls very often." This could be an apt metaphor for her love life: She recently announced that after four months of marriage, she'd filed for separation from her fourth husband, Rossano Rubicondi, an actor-slash-model-slash-arm-charm 23 years her junior."

"At trial, it became clear that in the macho, mustache-man world of drug-trafficking, Chapo had as much use for women, seducing them with saccharine forevers, then putting them to work in his stable—as buyers, as Blackberry-tapping go-betweens to preserve his anonymity on deals—involving their family members because there’s no glue stronger than blood."

"“I asked Chapo why he had to kill people,” recalled one former lieutenant on the [witness] stand. “And he said, “either your mom’s going to cry or their mom’s going to cry.""

"People in La Tuna miss Chapo, the town’s greatest, wiliest patrón. The young women debate whether he’s finally lost his looks, having only late-period pale-and-doughy mug shots to go by. (Avoiding stepping outside where one might be seen and subsisting on takeout tacos takes a toll on the body.)"

"Mr. Weiner likes to describe the Mayor as a weak sister, rolling over for the Republicans when he’s not kissing up with donations. Whenever he sees the Mayor, Mr. Weiner said, it’s all reasonably cordial. After all, nothing’s personal in politics. “I think he likes me,” Mr. Weiner ventured. (The Mayor does not, say his aides.)"

"Mr. Weiner grabbed for a pair of spectacles that looked a little like [his mentor] Chuck Schumer’s. These were his driving glasses—even when he wasn’t driving. His press secretary seemed nervous about what Mr. Weiner might say in the car: Mr. Weiner is the of back-seat drivers…“My problem is, I generally know how to get there,” Mr. Weiner explained. “It’s part of the ethos of living in New York—figuring out how to do things in a better way.”"

"Last year, Donald [Trump] (married to ex-model Melania Knauss and father of a baby boy named Barron) announced on The View that if he weren't Ivanka's father, maybe he'd be dating her. "I think it's the human condition to be frequently embarrassed by your parents," Ivanka says, generally speaking."

"When it comes to siblings, Hollywood has a quirky history of power brothers, from such behind-the-desk deal-makers as the Warners, the Cohns, and the Selznicks to forces behind the camera: the Coens, the Safdies, the Sylberts, and the Russos. And then there’s Harvey and Bob Weinstein."

""I wear black all the time," Ivana notes."

"Does Chapo speak in tongues? “I think he has,” [Chapo’s sister] Bernarda told me. By all accounts, he has spent many hours in this church. There’s been some signature Pentecostal healing-hand work, too. “Many brothers who are pastors have laid hands on him and prayed for him, and with a contrite heart, that’s when he cries.”"

"The Hollywood Reporter had published an article about [witness for the prosecution] Kaja Sokola with the headline "Anonymous No More: Inside the Complicated Life of Harvey Weinstein’s Key Accuser." Mr. Weinstein’s publicist, Juda Engelmayer, spotted the writer, Phoebe Eaton, in the courtroom and approached to provide Mr. Weinstein’s take on it: "He said it was fantastic." "I’m not out to please him," she said. "OK, I’ll just ignore you in the courtroom," Mr. Engelmayer said, before heading out to the hallway and toward the elevator."

"Less jowly now thanks to crappy jailhouse cooking—his country-boy haircut and jaunty hunting cap retired for a CEO’s side part—Chapo looked surprisingly guapo in a business suit. (And at 5’ 6”, not nearly as diminutive as his nickname Chapo—“Shorty”—would imply.) U.S. Marshals would knot his necktie just before he entered the room because mirrors can be smashed and weaponized. A former secretary observed in court he’d never seen Chapo in a suit. Early in the trial, Chapo would absently tug at his collar. Months in, he’d grown accustomed to the yoke."

"Prison’s been hard on Harvey [Weinstein] …He’s now living as his assistants once did, in the clutches of a perverse and petty system, overseen by guards who demand utter obeisance, deference, and subjection. Imagine one of the world’s foremost consumers of the luxury-hotel suite and capacious bathroom trying to survive an infirmary dormitory with no-seat toilets. In court, his people had to shut off his iPhone for him; he’d never quite mastered the mechanics. But now there’s no phone—save the one he’s allowed to access for only an hour a day as, maintaining his innocence, he orchestrates his appeal from a room he can use only when no one’s there."

"The hair, an elegant patisserie swirl of butter cream, is as remarkable as the gingerbread slab riding the head of 's equally celebrated ex-husband. Never look a day over 28, famously admonished his then-wife. She recalls this, adding ruefully, "It's going to cost me a fortune.”"

"Phoebe Eaton's New York Magazine look at the blue-collar vs. the blue blood Senate GOP primary in New York provides some excellent insight into John Spencer and KT McFarland and indicates the Clinton campaign may need to rent extra office space simply for the oppo research. However, it is a letter that McFarland wrote to her parents years ago that has garnered the most attention: "Shortly after she discovered [her brother] Mike had AIDS, she wrote her parents lengthy, angry, almost Gothic letters in which she outed her brother, blamed her father for his troubles as well as those of her and her other siblings, and cut off contact with her parents. 'Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other?' she wrote. 'He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.' The father's behavior had surfaced for McFarland as recovered memory. She said a shrink put her up to writing the letter; reached for comment, her mother, Edith Troia -- KT has since made up with her parents -- denied the account. 'Wouldn't that make a great book?' she said. 'Please be kind. You could be casting dark shadows on this whole race.'" Unanswered: where did Eaton get the letters [and] will [K.T. McFarland’s political consultant] Ed Rollins keep talking to the press (or, at least, to Eaton)…?"

"Lately, friends imagine they hear Donald [Trump]'s intonations in Ivanka's surprisingly sexy voice, a voice that sounds like she gargles with Cristal. The inane locutions of her generation — those "like"s and "you know"s — have been almost banished from conversation in favor of the more lawyerly "if you will" and other such Donald-like tropes….Ivanka could tell you about the Putzmeister pump throwing concrete a thousand vertical feet atop what stands to be the tallest residential building in the world, a site she's currently supervising in Chicago and one of 33 construction sites all over the globe. Instead, she is in the living room of her Park Avenue pad, pointing out the subtle architecture of some earrings."

"As a feminist, I want to involve readers in the story and give them time to pause, reflect, argue, and engage."

"the literature that we read in the late sixties--I graduated from university in 1969--was really British literature by middle-class or upper-class white men. My people, working-class people, were not represented in the material I was reading."

"I feel as if I've been trespassing my whole life in one way or another: Literally trespassing, as someone who has lived abroad a lot and traveled widely; but trespassing morally, in the sense that I've made some unconventional choices in my life and, although I certainly am not a practicing Catholic anymore, I still have echoes of a Catholic conscience that tell me that I'm trespassing. I'm also trespassing in the sense of being from the working class and moving into a middle-class environment; and trespassing in the sense of transgressing literary conventions because that book plays with a lot of different forms."

"I'm very much an Irish Republican, in the sense that I believe that the troops should be out of the north and that the north should be part of Eire."

"I think this American reflex judgment that if you write political fiction you are writing didactic fiction is funny because I see my fiction as the opposite. I see myself as somebody who is learning as I write, motivated, mostly, by questions. For me the process of writing a novel is to be thinking about the questions."

"I didn't actually intend to write a murder mystery when I wrote Murder in the English Department. That's just what happened when these people got together. Every book is, in some sense, a mystery."

"I don’t like the term “political correctness” because conservatives tend to employ it to distract from serious racial, class, national, and gender discrimination. It’s a divisive phrase that perpetuates the so-called culture wars. I first heard the term in the 1970s, when it was used among progressive people as a safeguard against our own rigidness and the rigidness of other people on the left. Many political meetings ended with a period of evaluation and this was one of the problems acknowledged as something to avoid. The term has been bowdlerized since then. I welcome a range of opinions in my classroom and we always discuss the importance of genuine disagreement on the first day of term. I aim for a stimulating, surprising, awakening, collegial, and safe classroom, and try to foster this by encouraging everyone to speak and by creating assignments in which students work in a variety of small groups. We speak, we agree, we argue, we laugh, we learn."

"I care a lot about accessible prose. People often fail to see the subtlety in a sentence that has been honed, worked, and reworked, unless it's written by Ernest Hemingway and has a penis in it."

"Literature is the story of our many and diverse lives—in fiction, poetry, drama, and so forth. Unfortunately, women’s books are much less likely to get published then men’s books. They are much less likely to be reviewed then men’s books."

"I am not saying that working-class men started that war. But a number of them were complicit in fighting it. The rhetoric of Vietnam, particularly in the last five years, has made all of the soldiers heroes. Not just survivors, but heroes. And I don't think that's true, and that's one of the things that has led us into further aggression in the Middle East and in Central America. So there is some urgency in confronting this...To say that working-class men during that war were heroes and to exonerate them is the worst kind of castration. It's taking all their power and all their culpability away from them. In the book I am trying to look at working-class protest against the war and support of the war. One of the things that really bothers me is that often working-class lives are presented as having no choices."

"for me, being out as a lesbian has to do with honesty and the vitality I get from honesty. It isn't a moral act or a question of conscience so much as it's a way of engaging more fully in the world by being who I am. In some sense, coming out as a lesbian writer is a process of discovery, a journey, just as coming out as a writer from a working-class family or coming out as an American writer [she laughs]. And it's something that continually surprises me with new dimensions."

"I have come to depend upon Valerie Miner as an uncommonly honest novelist, humorous, acute, and kind."

"Miner is a writer of reach, audacity, range, uniquely important to understanding our time... She gives us the beat of everyday urban life""

"I’ve always regarded writing as a vocation more than a career. Vocation as in “calling,” as in “being summoned,” from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.”"

"I still want to change the world, and if my political principles have remained steady, the belief in my own powers has shifted. Now I can say that the goal of my stories is understanding. As I grow less prescriptive, I hope to become more receptive."

"We also should develop an international consciousness of our work as writers - that's crucial to our own individual welfare and to the kind of imaginative collectivity that I mentioned."

"History shows that often artists first envision the change feminist activists seek to bring about."

"My novels are usually ignited by a question–a philosophical, spiritual, moral, political quandary. My stories are usually imagined from a particular scene. Place is very important in all my fiction. (2021)"

"One of the reasons I became a writer was to try to develop some kind of empathy for my fellow human beings. If I'm always writing about the same kinds of people, I'm not going to get very far."

"to have a steady diet of American writers is like eating Rice Krispies for 365 days; it is boring. I find international literature appealing because, as a writer, I'm curious about place and find it provocative to see what people do with place. I'm very interested in rhythms in language, in seeing and hearing on the page how people write English differently. And, of course, it's fascinating to see how translators translate into English differently."

"As a writer, I still strongly identify as a worker, partially as a consequence of working with those other people [the co-editors of her first two books] and partially as a result of my class background. I see my work emerging from some kind of imaginative collectivity, not from solitary genesis."

"This bourgeois form of art for art's sake is no longerworthy of one's comment or attack. It has only one useful purpose that I can still see: it numbs the minds of the exploiters. Let them continue to support it and be stultified."

"If Hitler consolidates his power we will see a world reaction infinitely worse than that which followed the events of 1848. Every sign of the faintest liberalism amongst the middle class intellectuals will be drowned in blood. The workers will be massacred, terrorized, forced into a medieval serfdom. It is war-time. We must close ranks or be annihilated. Hitlerism will spread over Europe and sweep America. Unless we unite. Unless there is a united front of all the workingclass parties and liberal groups. The Socialists and liberals may form such a front, leaving out the Communists. They may piously ignore the massacre of Communists, deeming themselves more respectable and hence safer. But this is a form of suicide, for Mr. Villard will find himself consigned to the hangman by an American Hitler as swiftly as any Communist. Every anti-fascist is needed in this united front. There must be no base factional quarrels. Leaders who stand in the way of a united front should be swept aside by the rank and file. We are faced with the death of the whole workingclass movement. We cannot waste time. We cannot quibble. How can anyone underestimate this thing? But I feel an apathy in America, a failure to react to the events in Germany that is appalling. Forward to the united front! There need be no hypocrisy or ignoring of basic differences. Each party and each group can retain its individuality. But at once! Let us unite to fling back Hitlerism and crush it forever!"

"Without an understanding of the economic basis of war, no one can be its determined or effective opponent. Sentimental appeals will not hold back a nation inflamed by patriotic lies. Only the man who understands clearly that he is being asked to die for J. P. Morgan's investments abroad, or the markets of the oil and machinery trusts, will be immune to the customary lies about small nations, enemy atrocities, or democracy. That is why it is so necessary to spread a knowledge of Marxian economies; that is why it is so necessary to maintain a clear-cut Marxian platform in politics, based on the realities of the class war. Prepare for the next war! Prepare by studying Marx and Lenin, by studying the Russian Revolution. Prepare to fight Wall Street, instead of dying to protect its wealth. Inoculate yourself against the liberals who will want to lead you into another capitalist war for whatever holy and subtle reason. Prepare against the Walter Lippmanns, the Rabbi Stephen Wises, the Woodrow Wilsons, Spargoes, Bohns, Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kropotkins, Albert Thomases, Arthur Hendersons, of the next war. They are in your midst now; ask them what they will do, SPECIFICALLY, when the nation is mobilized. Prepare."

"We are entering a new period in the history of the American melting pot. Immigration has stopped, for one thing, and assimilation has begun. A bigger factor, however, is the great social change going on in America, a process that inevitably lines up the poor against the money-bags, the trade unionists against the exploiters, the men who battle for human rights against those who fight for property rights. Race lines vanish in such a conflict; the class issue cuts through everything. Even the Negro question is affected and will finally be settled as this fight goes on; and this question is surely the touchstone of all racial problems in America."

"War may have depended at times in the feudal past on the whim of emperors and kings. Today it is a respectable part of Big Business. It is as premeditated as a selling campaign by a large corporation. It is the last resort of national salesmanship."

"The dark ages had returned; modern thought was again burning in the flames of a new inquisition, the Jews again afflicted with the yellow badge of shame."

"Hitler is a demagogue who has falsified history. He succeeds because his followers are too ignorant to know that he lies. The great mass of Jews in the world today are not millionaire bankers, but paupers and workers. I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be told of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto. Yiddish literature is saturated with the ghetto melancholy and poverty. And Jewish bankers are fascists everywhere. Hitler has received their support, both with money and ideas. Some of his most important secret conferences were held in the home of a Jewish banker. They gave large sums to his party before he came to power. Hitler's whole program is to save the banking and profiteering capitalist system. The attack on the Jews is merely a piece of demagogy, to throw the hungry German masses off the trail of their real enemy. No, every Jew is not a millionaire. The majority of Jews belongs to the working-class and to the bankrupt lower middle class. It is natural that in the present hour so many of them are to be found in the Socialist, Communist and trade union ranks. Jewish bankers are fascists; Jewish workers are radicals; the historic class division is true among the Jews as with any other race."

"The idea of money is so dominant in this country that anyone not part of money is made to feel ashamed."

"Mike Gold's initiation into the radical movement occurred in 1914 when he blundered into an unemployment demonstration in Union Square, listened to the "rebel girl" Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and bought a copy of The Masses. Between 1915, when he contributed his first poem to Eastman's magazine, and 1921, when he joined the editorial staff of The Liberator, Gold lived the wandering and exciting life of the Bohemian-anarchist artist. He wrote three one-act plays for the Provincetown Players and spent a summer with the happy and hard-drinking group at the Cape. In New York, after attending rehearsals at the Provincetown Playhouse, he would join Eugene O'Neill and anarchist friends at a saloon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, the "Hell Hole," and listen to O'Neill recite "The Hound of Heaven." Dorothy Day, a "rebel girl" of the Village and, later, the much-admired and selfless editor of the Catholic Worker, remembers at this time that she and Gold were reading Tolstoy together. "He used to make fun of my religious spirit," she wrote later, "but he himself was in sympathy with the Christianity expressed by Tolstoi, a religion without churches or a priesthood. Mike had a religious upbringing in his home on the East Side and liked to sing Yiddish folksongs and Hebrew hymns.""

"Gold is important to recover because he is one of dozens, hundreds of writers whose legacy and output was silenced by the Red Scare and Cold War. Gold’s project was to create a working-class literature written for, by, and about working-class people, and Gold understood that a working-class literature would also have to be a radical literature, and a racial literature. And he understood that such a project required conflict with a literary establishment. It would mean a literary class war."

"There will be another World War soon. Everything we think and do in the next decade will fall within that shadow, as Walt Whitman's generation fell under the Civil War. There is no escape; there is no alternative for the writer as for other men, but struggle or suicide. One will be forced into an attitude. I prefer life. It is life that has created the Communist movement, with a philosophy so tragic and honest that it can face the thought of the next world war, prepare for it, and go on building. No prayers, or pieties, or hocus-pocus of Fascist rhetoric but the habit of facing every day the hardest facts of life; building with them, seeing beyond them, using them for a great new objective. That is the way to write well, and it is Communism."

"It has become necessary now in America to fight against this great fascist lie. Recently, groups of anti-Semitic demagogues have appeared in this country. They are like Hitler, telling the hungry American people that capitalism is Jewish, and that an attack on the Jews is the best way of restoring prosperity. What folly! What criminal deception and bloody fraud! And there are signs that this oldest of swindles will grow in America. The defense of the Jewish race against these fascist liars and butchers has become one of the most necessary tasks for every liberal and radical. This is not only a problem for Jews to meet; it has become the problem of the workers and farmers whose hunger the fascists try to appease with the empty husk of anti-Semitism."

"I have chosen the Communist discipline. Because Communism projects into the future, and not into the past, as does Fascismo, which is only a defense corps trying to save the rottenness of the past."