A Year In New York

The battle for New York City’s green future arrived in my mailbox last week. It took the form of a fundraising appeal from MillionTreesNYC, a campaign to plant 100,000 trees every year for a decade, and bore the signature of that eminent environmentalist, Bette Midler. Which immediately brought questions to mind. Who made the star […]

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I looked out the window this morning. Still raining after yesterday’s deluge. I got my things together to spend the day at Paragraph, the writing space where I work, and attend an evening workshop on WordPress, the software that runs this site. Before leaving, I opened my computer and got this email: “We’re closing Paragraph […]

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In winter the New York streets are a gray asphalt tundra. Then one day in April…Daffodils! They nod at you on the sidewalk, bright as sunlight, gentle as Easter. Surrounding them is a tiny, valiant iron fence. I saw a woman on 65th Street reach past the fence with one hand – the other held […]

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Early this morning a congregation of about 150 Jews stood by the United Nations building and did something that seemed almost pagan: They blessed the rising sun.

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The other night I attended a fundraiser at Greenhouse, the SoHo club that claims to be New York’s first eco-disco. The rumors said Stevie Nicks would be there. Even more than her purring vocals, I sought a bigger hit:  Can a hipster nightclub really be “sustainable,” or is it an illusion?

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