writer: newspapers mostly, books occasionally. Now with the NY Times. Learning patience, eventually.
Mar 15, 2020 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
A few thoughts about the coming days.
1. NYC has been planning for pandemics and bioterrorism since at least 9/11. It has spent billions in preparations and tabletop exercises. Time to take some of those plans off the shelf.
Mar 12, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
1. Things are getting so surreal in the NYC schools that teachers are talking about walking out. Here's a little bit on why. A 14-year old freshman at Stuyvesant High School emailed a teacher first thing Thursday morning. She had gone to the MD on Wednesday with fever & dry cough
2. In the spiral of chaos, she didn't get tested. So the student was letting her teacher know that she’d be back on Friday.
One kid at a time, confusion mounts in a sprawling district where more than one million children, teenagers and adults congregate.
Feb 12, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
1. Stopping & frisking people without good reason is no different than groping a stranger or acquaintance without consent. It demeans their bodily integrity. It's an abuse of power. Here's a picture of former New Jersey governor Christie Todd Whitman. 2. I wrote about this episode in 2000.
Gov. Whitman and husband had been on a "ride along" with a state police SWAT team in Camden, N.J., a place wasted by time and misery. Some 10 men on a streetcorner were told to line up against a wall, and were searched by the troopers.
Jan 14, 2019 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
1. Here are some details about the L train tunnel project and how it changed. It’s long. Some of it is geeky. It is an attempt to explain the small pieces that allowed the big shift in the project.
2. The main reason the tunnel was going to close for 15 months was to do a job that, it now seems, really doesn’t need to be done: demolish 30,126 feet of concrete — nearly six miles — and then build it all back new.
Jan 5, 2019 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
1. It's a dangerous mistake to view the L train fiasco as a drama of Cuomo's imperiousness. It's really a window on incompetence at the region's most vital - and flawed - public agency.
The problem is NOT Cuomo big-footing the MTA's plans, but the plans themselves.
2. For six years since Sandy, it has been an article of faith that damages to the L train tunnel could be fixed in only ONE POSSIBLE WAY.
That was lazy fiction.
