What a sad city we live in -- run by bullies. I would like to draw attention to a little remarked result of the Bloomberg administration's relentlessly enforced mass criminalization of minority neighborhoods -- the shocking, obsessive and official brutalization of black women in New York City.

Beyond the...

It's all disappearing. The East 149th Street Post Office disappeared months ago. They took down the flag and padlocked the gate. It was in the South Bronx, and it disappeared.

Months before, the transit booth disappeared at the East 149th Street and Southern Boulevard Subway Station. It's physically there,...

In a recent column, David Brooks takes up the critical issue of "the missing fifth" -- the 20% of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 who just aren't working. Actually, in our collapsed manufacturing areas and "inner" cities, the rate of men in the prime years not...

Whoops. Uh, oh. The new state Medicaid Redesign Panel, composed of 27 health industry leaders appointed by Governor Cuomo, completed its first task -- recommending $2.85 billion in immediate cuts to spending, or 2% of New York's annual Medicaid budget --- in such record speed that it presented the...

It's the end of National Mentoring Month and there are 15 million kids on waiting lists across the United States who hope to have a mentor. This posting, however, is not the perhaps anticipated plea that you consider these numbers of desolate, waiting youth and finally take up the banner...

In the ever drearier aftermath of the dreary election, it's time for a whole new way forward. Google for President!

This idea came to mind with the single thrilling announcement to massively capture the real can-do American potential that seems to have surfaced in all the years since...

Eight years ago, Yannik McKie was arrested on federal charges of running guns and drugs to New York. On Tuesday, November 30th, he will be reading from his new autobiography, Living in the Shadows, which tells of his transformation from a dismayed and angry orphan whose both parents died...

The problem that now confronts the public health structures of New York City and State is that both have not paid for their major community AIDS prevention programs since July. Repeat: the city and state with the most HIV/AIDS cases in the nation simply stopped paying for the community-based AIDS...

Almost anywhere I've gone since the Bronx sodomy attack which saw 10 teen and young adult "gang" members allegedly assault three men they knew or suspected to be gay, it's been hard to escape remarks about the badness of Bronx youth. The repeated statement that they "deserve everything that's coming...

Citizens who'd like to see the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform---commonly known as the "Debt Commission" -- use its unique platform to move the nation in an important new direction, now have a way to be heard -- a grassroots campaign called P$: The Prevention $aves...

Through its six days of presentations for 19,000 attendees, hundreds of seminars and more than 4,000 scientific 'posters' examining every aspect of AIDS, the single message that stands out from the XVIII International AIDS Conference, which ended in Vienna last week, is the cumulative progress on every front -- prevention,...

The XVIII International AIDS Conference opened in Vienna with its 25,000 attendees and its peculiar combination of glitz, tragic desperation, and reasonable hopes.

There was Saturday's Life Ball, Europe's biggest AIDS Charity extravaganza, with an advertised celebrity roster ranging from Whoopi Goldberg to...

The Obama Administration's process for developing a National AIDS Plan was so inclusive and interesting -- with its 14 community forums around the nation plus various meetings with the most affected groups -- that one began to actually expect a National AIDS Plan that was inclusive and interesting. The...

The fact that the progressive "plan" for an extra "stimulus" was not just focused, but obsessed on spending more money to support the employment of government job holders is very discouraging. This focus not only provided a tremendous excuse for Senate Republicans to block some $150 billion in proposed...

Black History Month has ended---with a sorrowful bang. The short period of the shortest month happened to mark multiple downturns in key measures of what used to be called progress, but which now underscore the gathering speed of backwards trends.

Let's look at just three pieces of unsettling data...

What would seem impossible -- a combined program that vastly improves our national health, employs the communities with the most wretched unemployment and reduces Medicaid and Medicare costs by billions -- is quite easy. As we head toward a new job stimulus, for once, let's really do the "timely,...

World AIDS Day looms. Let's ask a few festering questions about the city where 10% of American women with AIDS live. Why, after a decade of steadily decreasing deaths, has New York City's progress in reducing women's AIDS mortality stumbled so badly? Why after years in which women's and men's...

Right now, at the lobby gallery of the Conde Nast building is an exhibit with works of art for auction curated with the theme, "See the Children Through the Trees." The works of art are focused on trees; the theme reflects how AIDS orphans and other parentless children in New...

Right now, at the lobby gallery of the Condé Nast Building is an exhibit with works of art for auction curated with the theme "See the Children Through the Trees." The works of art are focused on trees; the theme reflects how AIDS orphans and other parentless children in New...

It was during the presidential campaign that a distracted nation saw the rise of a new interest -- or, more precisely -- self-interest group. For a force which commanded so much attention, it was, rather oddly, unnamed, perhaps preferring it that way since the only name that comes to mind...