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CLOSE Family- friendly spots in NYC Wochit The Hills on Governor's Island. (Photo: Timothy Schenck 2016) During the last two weeks of summer, when summer camp is over but school has yet to begin, getting the kids out of the house is a must. And if you're not jetting off to Europe — or even heading down the shore — you're going to need a plan. Lucky for you, we have one. From a ferry ride out to Governor's Island to a tour of an aircraft carrier, from 65-million-year-old fossils to playful sea lions , very much alive, we have curated six fun trips to New York City that promise to keep your child not only occupied, but entertained. We've even included plans for lunch.  Kids' decor:: Little girls' backyard dream house comes to life Going 'round:: Take a spin on these magnificent carousels Governor's Island Governor's Island is a pretty magical place to escape to for the day, and there really is something for everyone in the family to enjoy. The ...

There’s been a lot happening this month.  I don’t have any great plans of action as to the way forward, but I have some knowledge of the background, in terms of how we got here, that seem worth sharing.  Basically I just need to process, and thought I’d do that out loud.  So here are a few reflections on the events of August, 2017, that may be intimately related to one another. Note:  any links that appear below will take you to songs on the subject, mostly written in the past few weeks… *     *     * The Spanish Civil War has been discussed in the media more in the past few weeks than I can remember in my lifetime.  The media has said more nice things about anarchists in the past few weeks than ever in my lifetime as well, and I’m pretty sure they have covered protests more lately than at any time since 1970 or so. At the beginning of the month I wrote a song, “Rojava,” after getting encrypted messages from the front lines of the war against Islamic State in Syria, sent by an anarchi...

Every metropolitan area in the nation is racially segregated, and Los Angeles is no exception. We tolerate residential segregation because we’re convinced that it happened informally — because of personal choices and private discrimination. But what cemented our separate neighborhoods is something most of us have forgotten — government’s unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century, establishing patterns that persist to this day. The 2010 census data show that 60% of Los Angeles’s African Americans live in neighborhoods where few whites are present. The exposure of blacks to whites is as minimal as it is in Chicago or Newark; concentrated African American poverty is as common in L.A. as in New York or Pittsburgh. The New Deal created the nation’s first civilian public housing in the 1930s, segregated not only in the South, but nationwide. In his autobiography, the African American poet Langston Hughes recounted his adolescence in Worl...