Food in New York exhibition at Museum of the City of New York, 104th Street and Fifth Avenue.
Food is a powerful social network binding New Yorkers to each other and with countless others across the globe. The city’s raucous restaurant scene; its ubiquitous street food; the current activist efforts to source food locally; the world’s largest food market in Hunts Point; and the artists, thinkers, and designers who are imagining new sustainable ways to relate to food, will all be part of Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate. The exhibition will examine the challenging nodes and networks of the city’s food systems. Anchored around issues of sustainability, labor justice, and equitable access to food, the show will explore the ways in which artists and designers are developing solutions to these global and local challenges. Through September, 2023. Online tickets at the MCNY site for Wednesday-Sunday:LINK
We just can’t pass up any opportunity to jam to Adele tracks this summer! Sing the night away at this very special show “Broadway Sings Adele With a Live Orchestra” which is only here on August 14th and 21st at The Cutting Room.
Along with some notable Broadway singers there will also be a full,14-piece orchestra serving the tenderness, attitude and heartbreak we know and love in Adele hits!
Fans will get to hear new renditions of ballad hits like “Someone Like You,” “Hello,” “When We Were Young” and “Easy One Me” The setlist also includes upbeat tracks “Rolling In The Deep” “Water Under The Bridge” “He Won’t Go” and many more. No matter which album was your favorite, there’s something in this setlist for every diehard fan!
“Broadway Sings” is a unique concert series where some of the most talented Broadway singers perform songs from popular artists and this time they will belt out hits from popstar crooner Adele! See and hear these Broadway artists from productions such as “Hamilton,” Kinky Boots,” “Waitress,” “Wicked” and more!
The shows are only happening on August 14th and 21st(two shows per night) at The Cutting Room located at 44 E 32nd St. All ages welcome but you must be 21+ (with valid ID) to consume alcohol. Ticket prices start at $35 with various options available. Get ready Adele fans, this summer will be one to remember!
Harlem Bespoke: One of the local stores to support for the warmer season is Plant Corner on Lenox by West 119th Street which is just over a year old now. Stop for some green gifts including pots and more unique accessory items for the plant lovers in your life. The new brownstone boutique has a lot of hard to find greenery for the indoors and outdoors along with some of the more familiar flora standards for the home. This is the place for plant enthusiasts to check out in Harlem so drop by to see what this cool specialty shop has to offer. More on Plant Corner can be found in our past post: LINK
Embrace your inner ceramic artist at Pottery Studio 1! Their brand new studio is located at 216 West 104th Street on the Upper West Side. You can also enjoy their two additional locations, one in Brooklyn (287 Grand Ave.) and the other in lower Manhattan (136 Bowery).
They have a variety of classes for groups, couples and kids of all ages! You can even plan a creative pottery party or event of five or more people.
Pottery Studio 1
So what can you expect if you’re new or curious about pottery? Depending on your design, you can make your own mug, a bowl, a vase, a candlestick, a planter, etc. in a lesson that’s two hours long. Of course you will have the help of an experienced instructor!
There are also pottery and painting combination classes available where you’ll also be able to bring home a usable dish after learning pottery, hand-building and painting your creation!
Just bring yourself and your creative ideas, Pottery Studio 1 provides everything you need for a memorable experience, a potter’s wheel, clay, aprons and tools for completing your clay in the final firing (heating) process.
So whether you’re in or near Brooklyn or Manhattan, get those innovative juices flowing this summer at Pottery Studio 1!
WASHINGTON (AP) — Only about 1 in 10 U.S. adults give high ratings to the way democracy is working in the United States or how well it represents the interests of most Americans, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Majorities of adults say U.S. laws and policies do a poor job of representing what most Americans want on issues ranging from the economy and government spending to gun policy, immigration and abortion. The poll shows 53% say Congress is doing a bad job of upholding democratic values, compared with just 16% who say it’s doing a good job.
The findings illustrate widespread political alienation as a polarized country limps out of the pandemic and into a recovery haunted by inflation and fears of a recession. In interviews, respondents worried less about the machinery of democracy — voting laws and the tabulation of ballots — and more about the outputs.
Overall, about half the country — 49% — say democracy is not working well in the United States, compared with 10% who say it’s working very or extremely well and 40% only somewhat well. About half also say each of the political parties is doing a bad job of upholding democracy, including 47% who say that about Democrats and even more — 56% — about Republicans.
“I don’t think either of them is doing a good job just because of the state of the economy — inflation is killing us,” said Michael Brown, a 45-year-old worker’s compensation adjuster and father of two in Bristol, Connecticut. “Right now I’m making as much as I ever have, and I’m struggling as much as I ever have.”
A self-described moderate Republican, Brown has seen the United States falling short of its democratic promise ever since learning in high school that the Electoral College allows someone to become president while not winning the majority of national votes. But he’s especially disappointed with Congress now, seeing its obsessions as not reflective of the people’s will.
“They’re fighting over something, and it has nothing to do with the economy,” Brown said, singling out the GOP-controlled House’s investigation of President Joe Biden’s son.
“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked.
The poll shows 53% of Americans say views of “people like you” are not represented well by the government, with 35% saying they’re represented somewhat well and 12% very or extremely well. About 6 in 10 Republicans and independents feel like the government is not representing people like them well, compared with about 4 in 10 Democrats.
Karalyn Kiessling, a researcher at the University of Michigan who participated in the poll, sees troubling signs all around her. A Democrat, she recently moved to a conservative area outside the liberal campus hub of Ann Arbor, and worried that conspiracy theorists who believe former President Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election would show up as poll watchers. Her Republican family members no longer identify with the party and are limiting their political engagement.
Kiessling researches the intersection of public health and politics and sees many other ways to participate in a democracy in addition to voting — from being active in a political party to speaking at a local government meeting. But she fears increased partisan nastiness is scaring people away from these crucial outlets.
“I think people are less willing to get involved because it’s become more contentious,” Kiessling, 29, said.
That leads to alienation at the national level, she said — something she certainly feels when she sees what comes out of Washington. “When you have a base that’s a minority of what general Americans think, but they’re the loudest voices in the room, that’s who politicians listen to,” Kiessling said.
Polarization has transformed some states into single-party dominions, further alienating people like Mark Short, a Republican who lives in Dana Point, California.
“In California, I kind of feel that I throw my vote away every time, and this is just what you get,” said Short, 63, a retired businessman.
The poll shows that the vast majority of Americans — 71% — think what most Americans want should be highly important when laws and policies are made, but only 48% think that’s actually true in practice.
And views are even more negative when it comes to specific issues: About two-thirds of adults say policies on immigration, government spending, abortion policy and gun policy are not representative of most Americans’ views, and nearly that many say the same about the economy as well as gender identity and LGBTQ+ issues. More than half also say policies poorly reflect what Americans want on health care and the environment.
Joseph Derito, an 81-year-old retired baker in Elmyra, New York, sees immigration policy as not representing the views of most Americans. “The government today is all for the people who have nothing — a lot of them are capable of working but get help,” said Derito, a white political independent who leans Republican and voted for Trump. “They just want to give these people everything.”
Sandra Wyatt, a 68-year-old retired data collection worker and Democrat in Cincinnati, blames Trump for what she sees as an erosion in democracy. “When he got in there, it was like, man, you’re trying to take us back to the day, before all the rights and privileges everybody fought for,” said Wyatt, who is Black, adding that she’s voted previously for Republicans as well.
She sees those bad dynamics as lingering after Trump’s presidency. “We always knew there was racism but now they’re emboldened enough to go around and shoot people because of the color of their skin,” Wyatt said.
Stanley Hobbs, a retired autoworker in Detroit and a Democrat, blames “a few Republicans” for what he sees as democracy’s erosion in the U.S. He sees those GOP politicians as beholden to a cabal of big businesses and points to issues like abortion as examples of how the laws no longer represent the views of the majority of Americans.
He’s trying to stay optimistic.
“It seems like this always happens in the U.S. and we always prevail,” Hobbs said, recalling how American politicians sympathetic to Nazi Germany gained prominence before World War II. “I just hope we prevail this time.”
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Riccardi reported from Denver.
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The poll of 1,220 adults was conducted June 22-26 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
According to Forbes.com, statistics from a publicly-available U.S. Department of Education database reveal that six-year graduation rates (a commonly-used metric in higher education) for Black students are higher at Harvard and Princeton than they are for the overall student body (equal at Ivy League sister school Yale), as well as at other highly-selective private institutions like Cal Tech, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Case Western Reserve University, and Wake Forest University.
To quote the article:
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled race-conscious college admissions policies and practices unconstitutional. Affirmative Action opponents have long argued that admitting presumably unqualified applicants of color to highly-selective institutions sets those students up for failure because they can’t do the work.
If completing a bachelor’s degree is a reasonable measure of whether someone has what it takes to succeed in the Ivy League or at another highly-selective university, then federal data from the three institutions where admission slots are among the most coveted in the world confirm that Black students are indeed more than capable and deserving of the opportunities they earned.
At Harvard, it’s 98% for undergraduates overall and 99% for Black collegians. It’s also 99% for Black students at Princeton, compared to 97% of bachelor’s degree seekers there overall. Additionally, 98% of Yale students graduate within six years – the exact same for Black Yalies.
