You might have noticed that Bill de Blasio’s campaign signage features a lot of...red. The muckrackers at the New York Post might have figured out why. Today the tabloid revealed that in 1983—thirty short years ago—the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor visited the Soviet Union with a group of students from NYU, where the candidate was a presidential scholar. Or, as the Post explains:
Chiara de Blasio, the daughter of New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, is a college sophomore at a school in California. She’s also the subject of dozens of profiles and the star of a well-received campaign ad for her father. Given her recent prominence, we were curious about which school she is attending. Nobody will say.
With less than a month before New York City chooses its next mayor, Republican candidate and non-frontrunner Joe Lhota has begun airing attack ads portraying opponent (and Democrat) Bill de Blasio as so soft on crime—indeed, very possibly pro-crime, because why not?—that his election would deliver Gotham to its dark, stormy, vaguely apocalyptic perdition. Case in point:
"American Secrets: New York City" is an audiovisual attempt at reckoning with Stop and Frisk, gentrification, and coming of age New York City by three young American artists (two emcees, one graphic designer) and their Mayor. The song and video embedded above deal with these hard questions; the lyrics are pasted below.
Horace Mann School in New York City is well-known for its cut-throat, student-eat-student culture. According to Joe Coscarelli at Daily Intelligencer, one very enterprising (and very evil) student there kicked it up a notch by sending a letter to several colleges where one of his or her Horace Mann classmates is planning to apply, intending to torpedo the classmate’s chance of being accepted. (If you have a copy of this letter, or know what it contained, email us immediately.)
Today Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel and controversial orthodox Jewish activist, died at the age of 93 in Jerusalem. As one of Israel’s most prominent religious figures, Yosef frequently ran into trouble for his avid racism. He once claimed, for example, that Hurricane Katrina was black people’s divine punishment for not studying the Torah. That didn’t stop Bill de Blasio, currently the front-runner in New York City’s mayoral race, from praising his legacy.
According to a report in the New York Post, one of the motorcyclists involved in last weekend’s violent road rage incident was an off-duty, undercover NYPD officer. Concerned about blowing his cover, the undercover officer reportedly stood by as Alexian Lien was dragged from his Range Rover and attacked.
With one month left before New York City elects its next mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio has achieved a fifty-point lead over Republican Joe Lhota. As the pollsters at Quinnipiac University put it: “Bill de Blasio's landslide is picking up speed in the New York City mayoral race and threatens to bury Republican Joseph Lhota 71 - 21 percent among likely voters.”
To accompany a profile of the Brooklyn activist Chirlane McCray and her role in her husband Bill de Blasio’s mayoral campaign, The New York Times got its hands on a homemade video of their 1994 wedding. One highlight: De Blasio attempting to b-boy like it’s the last day of his life (more like “spinning around,” as you can see in the GIF above) along with an unidentified relative.
Hers to Lose is a half-hour-long New York Times-produced film about City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s rather epic fall from public favor and subsequent loss to Public Advocate Bill de Blasio in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral race. It’s an immeasurably sad artifact, showing how Quinn, a powerful and ambitious gay woman, paid the ultimate price for compromising her political integrity.
