Steven Thrasher

Brian Lehrer on the air

After publishing our piece yesterday "5 Reasons Why Touré Is Wrong On Blacks, Gay Marriage and Obama," we had the chance to talk about the president's new support for marriage equality with WNYC's Brian Lehrer.

We took calls from black listeners and talked to Lehrer about the many reasons why we believe black angst over gay rights is overplayed and how we strongly believe there will be no major fall out for Obama with black voters. Take a listen.

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A fascinating story on WNYC this morning: a new report finds that the city's largest private employer is the nonprofit sector.

When we wrote our cover story "The Nonprofit 1 Percent," we saw that there are some lucrative posts at the top of some of the city's nonprofit organizations. But we didn't learn, until WNYC reported today on a study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, that nonprofits are the main private employers for workers of all kinds in the city. They play a huge role in the city's private workforce, especially in the outer boroughs and among female workers and workers of color.

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Former Voice columnist and CUNY Journalist-in-Residence Tom Robbins was on the Brian Lehrer Show this morning on WNYC, talking about the fallout from the NYPD showing an anti-Muslim training video to 1,500 personnel.

It was great to hear Robbins credited for breaking this story (a full year before Michael Powell's follow up in the Times) in a January, 2011 Voice column titled "NYPD Cops' Training Included an Anti-Muslim Horror Flick."

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Carl Paladino was pretty much crushed by Andrew Cuomo in the race for governor of New York, and if you thought he was going to be a gracious failed candidate then you weren't paying attention to any of the campaign. Yesterday, he sounded off about the media in a letter to political journalist and Capital Tonight anchor Liz Benjamin, obtained by WNYC's Azi Paybarah. It's typically delusional, rude, almost sad and four pages long. You can read the whole thing below.

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Those in New York City responsible for seeing that the Great American Democratic Process goes smoothly -- the Board of Elections -- has had a complete shitshow of an election season. Or has been the complete shitshow of New York's election season -- which, given Charlie Rangel, Carl Paladino, and the "Rent Is Too Damn High" crackpot...is impressive -- and just somehow managed to get worse.

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​VICTORY! for a New York City newspaper, while the rest are going down, down, in an earlier round. A new, familiar byline at New York's Vulture, and a new, familiar byline at AgencySpy. The iPad is still just The iPad, but Twitter is definitely still Twitter. Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast is still Howard Kurtz. Let's all hack the New Yorker! Press Clips, Day 15, Late and Mostly Scandal-Free Edition, right here. More >>

Remember that time Michael Bloomberg decided he would override the conventional standards in place to avoid politicians usurping too much power by breaking the two term limit on mayors, and run for a third? As it turns out, Mayor Bloomberg thinks the only person good enough to run for three terms is...himself.

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Democracy is a complex process! Never more so, apparently, than in New York City, where our Primary Elections last month turned into a complete and utter shitshow to the nth degree. So, how exactly, is one supposed to vote in New York City? Do we really need instructions to vote?

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Blip.TV CEO Mike Hudack just posted on his blog one of the better things you're going to see today: WNYC has a movie to go with their Radiolab episode on words (entitled, of course, "Words") that's really, really smart and really, really wonderful. It'll take up a little under three minutes of your day, and make it better.

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This week in the Voice, staff writer Steven Thrasher caught up with a few of the three million illegal immigrants who were famously granted amnesty by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, the last time an amnesty was signed into law. Now, not only can you read his piece -- Ronnie's Kids: The Bright Side of "Amnesty" -- but you can also hear him go live with it, too.

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