A bill now before the City Council is another sign of the continuing challenge New York City faces to increase the number of blacks and Hispanics in its fire department.

Last summer a federal judge ruled that the city used qualifying exams that discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants...

Okay, so Obama's bow was low. But if you believe the chattering chihuahuas of the right, I'm one of the few Americans who is not upset, humiliated even, that during his recent visit to Japan, Barack Obama bowed more deeply than was absolutely necessary to Emperor Akihito and his wife.

The New York Post claims that Bill de Blasio's use of photographs of his interracial family in his campaign mailings for the public advocate's job amounts to pandering to black voters. Frankly, I was delighted to see the photographs of the Brooklyn City Councilman's family.

With his...

If New Yorkers are pissed off about Mayor Mike Bloomberg's end run around term limits, think of how Albany residents must feel about Mayor Gerald "Jerry" Jennings.

The product of a political machine that rivals the one created by Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, Democrat Jennings is now in his...

Anyone who has studied New York City history knows about the financial predations of the robber barons, the conspicuous consumption of the Gilded Age and the corrupt political machinations of Tammany Hall. A few have even heard about the 1863 draft riots, although they were nothing like the fictional gang...

The Rev. Brad Braxton's resignation as pastor of The Riverside Church was a sad episode in a battle that has been raging for years over the soul of the historic West Side church.

A concerned group of Riverside members had gone to court seeking to block the installation of...

As the only remaining New Yorker who doesn't own a cellphone, I'm acutely sensitive to the abuses of those who do. The shopper in Fairway who blocks the dangerously crowded aisle while chatting on the phone with her husband about what kind of fish to buy for dinner. The man...

Some days you just feel happy. Not in a cosmic sense of well-being, but in the moment. As in, I'm alive and healthy and living in New York City, it's a beautiful spring day, and it doesn't get much cooler than this.

These moments usually come when I'm riding...