Stacy Horn

I wanted to recommend this book, the full title is, From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918. I’ve alway been in favor of reparations, although that is not what this book is about. It just once again raises the issue for me, and there was an op-ed in the Times yesterday about reparations, so I have it on my mind. But if you spend anytime researching American history, at a certain point you’re just “holy mother of God, even if we try for the rest of eternity, how will be ever fix this??”

I know a lot of people think slavery happened so long ago, and no one today is still truly suffering its effects or from all the associated evils of slavery. This book connects the dots between then and now in the most meaningful way (although she stops in 1918, except for the epilogue). You see clearly how the consequences of slavery continue to ripple through from one generation and time period to the next and to destroy. Ta Nehisi Coates did this as well in The Case for Reparations. These two should be read together.

Gunja SenGupta is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. I read her book as research for mine.

An undated photograph of a glee club at the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York City. It was from a booklet published in 1936, so it’s sometime around or before that.

I feel bad for the tree, but I was fascinated for a few minutes, reading the carvings, trying to find a really old date. The oldest I saw was from the 80’s, but most people didn’t date their carving. Some of these could be older. (This is in Central Park.)

I flashed on the Abbott and Costello movie, The Time of Their Lives, a very sweet movie, and not so much a comedy. There’s a scene of a tree carving aging, it begins at 23:18.

This is probably normal for all I know, I don’t spend a lot of time in Central Park, but there were a lot of turtles around the pond in Central Park when I was passing through yesterday.

Flowers I bought myself when I was finished with my yearly Spring Cleaning before …

And after. The trick is to buy flowers before they’ve opened, I’ve learned. That way they last much longer. If you buy them when they’re open you don’t know how long they’ve been open and they could only last a day or two. Hello beautiful Bleeck.

So exhausting. At one point a young girl walked in and said she was told a judge had ruled at 2pm that people registered as independents could vote in the New York primary. It seemed insane that we wouldn’t have been hearing that all over the place, but I called the Board of Elections, who said “no way,” and then I googled it to see if it was in the news. Nope. But I tried. I like seeing younger people passionate about voting. I think there was low turnout among young people during the last presidential election, wasn’t there?

I tried to think how the rule that only democrats and republicans can vote in the democrat and republican primary here in New York may have come about and I came down to two guesses. One, why should you get a say in who my party nominee is if you are not in my party? Two, people outside the party could sabotage the process by voting in a candidate who is less likely to win.

Love the stencil of the top half of Bernie’s head. This was at the top of the stairs to the subway.