During summertime, New York is a party. Hot air swoops down into homes and offices, driving the city’s residents outside. Feckless festivity pervades. Kids frolic next to fire hydrants. People day drink and lounge in folding chairs next to crowded streets in warm evenings. Clothes are short and traffic jams to beaches long. Parks and…
The current pandemic has occurred at an interesting time in the electricity markets. After several decades of regulation, electricity jurisdictions are now increasingly deregulated. Retail Electricity Providers (REPs) have multiplied and play an increasingly important role in providing electricity to customers. The flipside to this arrangement is that REPs are exposed to market forces. As…
Read more Deregulated Electricity Markets and the Covid-19 Crisis
In my previous post, I discussed the financial feasibility of defunding NYPD. Since I published that piece, I’ve read a bunch of articles suggesting changes to policing. There’s been a veritable media storm of suggestions about allocation of funds within police budgets. Some suggest “unbundling” of police. Others want to more funds to reconfigure training…
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death by a police officer in Minneapolis, “Defund the Police” has become a rallying cry for protestors throughout the country and abroad. By tackling the problem’s root cause, that is by sharply cutting the supply of government money to police departments in America, activists contend that police brutality can…
A disconnect exists between expectation and reality in America. There is the promised state of being, of living “the dream” as beamed through television and, more recently, through the Internet. And there is the squalid and mundane reality of everyday existence and the analog world. That disconnect finds expression in various aspects of its society:…
Read more On Reality-Altering Events: Review of Don DeLillo’s White Noise
I started running quite late in life. I was 35 and living in Portland. After a series of work mishaps and visa issues, I became unemployed. My living quarters consisted of an ill-lit single room, furnished with a writing desk, bed, and a closet. During the day, I sat in coffee shops and applied to…
On Christmas Eve in December 2014, roughly a month after moving to New York City, I became homeless. I’d been trying to find work while living at a friend’s place on the Upper West Side. There were gigs in the hospitality industry but they were sporadic and my salary was minimum wage. That evening, a…
Read more On Being Homeless and Lars Eighner’s Travels with Lizbeth
At the end of Anjan Sundaram’s book “Bad News: Last Journalists In a Dictatorship”, there is a list of 60 journalists “who faced difficulties” (or, in simple words, were punished) for criticizing the government in Rwanda. One was left in a coma after a knife attack. Another disappeared. And another was shot dead on the…
Read more Can Journalism Survive in a Dictatorship: A Review of Anjan Sundaram’s Bad News
Libra is a fictional reconstruction of events leading up to and after the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, the man alleged to have assassinated him. Both deaths were equal parts mysterious and sordid. In twenty seconds that stunned the country, Kennedy, a leader who captivated America during a tumultuous time in…
Read more The Slippery Reality of Kennedy’s Assassination. A Review of Don DeLillo’s Libra
