Free Republic

389 In the early years of the 20th century, tuberculosis ravaged American cities, taking a particular and often fatal toll on the poor and the young. In 1907, two Rhode Island doctors, Mary Packard and Ellen Stone, had an idea for mitigating transmission among children. Following education trends in Germany, they proposed the creation of an open-air schoolroom. Within a matter of months, the floor of an empty brick building in Providence was converted into a space with ceiling-height windows on every side, kept open at nearly all times. The subsequent New England winter was especially unforgiving, but children stayed...

The New York Times has done some shameless things in its past, but exploiting a man’s death to serve its agenda has to be among its worst. That’s what it did in a recent portrait of, as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it, “a man killed by Fox News”: Ginia Bellafante’s story of the COVID-19 death of Joe Joyce, owner of Brooklyn’s JJ Bubbles bar. On March 1, Joyce and his wife took a cruise to Spain. Joyce was a fan of Fox News, especially host Sean Hannity, who declared on air that Americans were getting “unnecessarily” scared by...

New York Magazine writer and Twitter hot-taker Jonathan Chait shared a New York Times article over the weekend, describing it as a “portrait of a man killed by Fox News.” That tweet got around quite a bit, quote retweeted by dozens of blue check media personalities, ratioed by Twitter users at large, and ultimately becoming a de facto headline for the article, which was actually written by New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante.

Over the past decade or so as $10 million apartments have prevailed in New York and more and more neighborhoods have been given over to the kind of luxury shopping required to fill them, it has been common to say that the city has turned into a “playground for the rich.” At the same time, of course, New York has turned into a playground of the more literal kind, with a child-centric ethos bearing well-established variants of urban nuisance: stroller gridlock in gentrifying areas, car services that cater to 5-year-olds, sidewalk whining that in some cases becomes its own source...