This important new book, which focuses on the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but which looks back to the earlier decades of the century and has a conclusion dealing with the 1970s to 1990s, maps the world of those known as "trade" -- ostensibly straight men who would engage in homosexual sex -- and hustlers -- those who were paid for it. It was a milieu that was central to the sexual histories of several generations of twentieth-century American men and also influenced American literary and visual culture; the "trade aesthetic" informed the work of a variety of artists, filmmakers, and writers. This sexual culture, though compelling in itself, also allows us to explore some key aspects of modern sexual history. This pioneering work, which draws on a wide range of visual and literary sources, including previously unpublished material from the Kinsey archives, will appeal to a wide range of readers, especially those interested in the histories of sex, the city, masculinity, and American culture.
Imagine having Frank Mathews's Street Smart, Lucky Luciano's Charismatic, John Gotti's stlye & Grace and Nicky Barns's knowledge of the Urban World. Thats just with I did in, Hustlers from Harlem Twenty Years Later. Combining old school hustling with todays hustling.
The author became interested in male prostitution while researching populations susceptible to AIDS. He found such a population in male prostitutes in Times Square which had developed a community to deal with common problems. Among these changing the community were AIDS, crack cocaine, and urban redevelopment. This work is directed to sociologists, social workers, and those interested in popular culture.
One of the seminal artists of contemporary photography, Philip-Lorca diCorcia produces work that exists on a wide spectrum of fictionalized documentary. Yet a thematic and conceptual unity, most often realized in serial form and particularly suited to monograph format marks each series in his oeuvre. With Thousand, diCorcia effectively inverts his own tendency: the monograph is now the work itself. The sheer volume of material, which spans over 20 years of personal and artistic creation, shifts notions of context, narrative, and individual perception. Flipping through the pages of Thousand is not so much a retrospective or summation of the artist s life as it is an exercise in the construction of memory. An unwashed pan soaking in the sink precedes an unknown woman resembling an odalisque; the familiar linoleum aisles of a generic supermarket give way to a verdant swatch of lawn. These images are bothalien and deeply familiar, and just as one moment in our lives may recall another, these photos echo among one another, within the book, within the canon of diCorcia's work, and within our personal experience. The Polaroid proves to be the perfect souvenir unique and subject to reinterpretation, like memory itself. Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1979. Published volumes accompany his solo exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 1995) and PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York (Streetwork 1993-1997, 1997; Heads, 2001; A Storybook Life, 2003). His work is included in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. He has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. DiCorcia lives and works in New York City.
The commercial and cultural explosion of the digital age may have been born in California's Silicon Valley, but it reached its high point of riotous, chaotic exuberance in New York City from 1995 to 2000—in the golden age of Silicon Alley. In that short stretch of time a generation of talented, untested twentysomethings deluged the city, launching thousands of new Internet ventures and attracting billions of dollars in investment capital. Many of these young entrepreneurs were entranced by the infinite promise of the new media; others seemed more captivated by the promise of infinite profits. The innovations they launched—from online advertising to 24-hour Webcasting—propelled both the Internet and the tech-stock boom of the late '90s. And in doing so they sent the city around them into a maelstrom of brainstorming, code-writing, fundraising, drugs, sex, and frenzied hype . . . until April 2000, when the NASDAQ zeppelin finally burst and fell at their feet. In the pages of Digital Hustlers, Alley insiders Casey Kait and Stephen Weiss have captured the excitement and excesses of this remarkable moment in time. Weaving together the voices of more than fifty of the industry's leading characters, this extraordinary oral history offers a ground-zero look at the birth of a new medium. Here are entrepreneurs like Kevin O'Connor of DoubleClick, Fernando Espuelas of StarMedia, and Craig Kanarick of Razorfish; commentators like Omar Wasow of MSNBC and Jason McCabe Calacanis of the Silicon Alley Reporter; and inimitable Alley characters like party diva Courtney Pulitzer and Josh Harris, the clown prince of Pseudo.com. Together they describe a world of sweatshop programmers and paper millionaires, of cocktail-napkin business plans and billion-dollar IPOs, of spectacular successes and flame-outs alike. Candid and open-eyed, bristling with energy and argument, Digital Hustlers is an unforgettable group portrait of a wildly creative culture caught in the headlights of achievement.
Based on police wiretaps and exclusive interviews with drug kingpins and hip-hop insiders, this is the untold story of how the streets and housing projects of southeast Queens took over the rap industry.For years, rappers from Nas to Ja Rule have hero-worshipped the legendary drug dealers who dominated Queens in the 1980s with their violent crimes and flashy lifestyles. Now, for the first time ever, this gripping narrative digs beneath the hip-hop fables to re-create the rise and fall of hustlers like Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols, Gerald “Prince” Miller, Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, and Thomas “Tony Montana” Mickens. Spanning twenty-five years, from the violence of the crack era to Run DMC to the infamous murder of NYPD rookie Edward Byrne to Tupac Shakur to 50 Cent’s battles against Ja Rule and Murder Inc., to the killing of Jam Master Jay, Queens Reigns Supreme is the first inside look at the infamous southeast Queens crews and their connections to gangster culture in hip hop today.
"Barron cuts through the noise and provides a devastating account of a city’s decline under the delusional leadership of socialists and con men.” — GREG KELLY, host of Newsmax Greg Kelly Reports THE LAST DAYS OF NEW YORK: A Reporter's True Tale tells the story of how a corrupted political system hollowed out New York City, leaving it especially vulnerable, all in the name of equity and “fairness.” When, in the future, people ask how New York City fell to pieces, they can be told—quoting Hemingway—“gradually, then suddenly.” New Yorkers awoke from a slumber of ease and prosperity to discover that their glorious city was not only unprepared for crisis, but that the underpinnings of its fortune had been gutted by the reckless mismanagement of Bill de Blasio and the progressive political machine that elevated him to power. Faced with a global pandemic of world-historical proportions, the mayor dithered, offering contradictory, unscientific, and meaningless advice. The city became the world’s epicenter of infection and death. The protests, riots, and looting that followed the death of George Floyd, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement—cheered on and celebrated by the media and political class—accelerated the crash of confidence that New York City needed in order to rebound quickly from the economic disaster. Through reckless financial husbandry; by sowing racial discord and resentment; by enshrining a corrosive pay-to-play political culture that turned City Hall into a ticket office; and by using his office as a platform to advance himself as a national political figure, Bill de Blasio set the stage for the ruin of New York City. He has left the city vulnerable to the social, economic, and cultural shocks that have leveled its confidence and brought into question its capacity to absorb the creative energies of the world, and reflect them back in the form of opportunity and wealth, as it has done for hundreds of years. As New Yorkers slowly adjust to their new reality, they ask themselves how we had been so unprepared—not so much for the coronavirus, which caught everyone by surprise—but for the economic shock, which was at least foreseeable. THE LAST DAYS OF NEW YORK is the story of how a lifelong political operative with no private-sector experience assumed control of a one-party city where almost nobody bothers to vote, and then proceeded to loot the treasury on behalf of the labor unions, race hustlers, and connected insiders who had promoted him to power. Bill de Blasio’s term in office in New York City is a demonstration of what those impulses actually produce: debt, decay, and bloat. THE LAST DAYS OF NEW YORK: A Reporter's True Tale is a history of New York City from its recovery from the recession of 2008-2009 through the triple disaster of the pandemic, civil unrest, and collapse in revenue of 2020. Mayor Bill de Blasio, now widely appreciated as the WORST mayor in the history of the city, is presented as the instrument of decline: a key symptom of the rot that expedited the city’s downfall.
The inside story of a band of entrepreneurial upstarts who made millions selling painkillers—until their scheme unraveled, putting them at the center of a landmark criminal trial. • SOON TO BE THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE PAIN HUSTLERS STARRING EMILY BLUNT AND CHRIS EVANS "Unfolds with the velocity and verve of a Scorsese film…A tour de force."—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. It was the early 2000s, a boom time for painkillers, and he developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market. Kapoor, a brilliant immigrant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. He gathered around him an ambitious group of young lieutenants. His head of sales—an unstable and unmanageable leader, but a genius of persuasion—built a team willing to pull every lever to close a sale, going so far as to recruit an exotic dancer ready to scrape her way up. They zeroed in on the eccentric and suspect doctors receptive to their methods. Employees at headquarters did their part by deceiving insurance companies. The drug was a niche product, approved only for cancer patients in dire condition, but the company’s leadership pushed it more widely, and together they turned Insys into a Wall Street sensation. But several insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle. They sparked a sprawling investigation that would lead to a dramatic courtroom battle, breaking new ground in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids. In The Hard Sell, National Magazine Award–finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He draws on unprecedented access to insiders of the Insys saga, from top executives to foot soldiers, from the patients and staff of far-flung clinics to the Boston investigators who treated the case as a drug-trafficking conspiracy, flipping cooperators and closing in on the key players. With colorful characters and true suspense, The Hard Sell offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream—in the doctor’s office.
In the rush to redefine the place of black Americans in contemporary society, many radical activists and academics have mounted a campaign to destroy traditional American history and replace it with a politicized version that few would recognize. According to the new radical orthodoxy, the United States was founded as a racist nation—and everything that has happened throughout our history must be viewed through the lens of the systemic oppression of black people. Rejecting this false narrative, a collection of the most prominent and respected black scholars and thinkers has come together to correct the record and tell the true story of black Americans in all its complexity, diversity of experience, and poignancy. Collectively, they paint a vivid picture of black people living the grand American experience, however bumpy the road may be along the way. But rather than a people apart, blacks are woven into the united whole that makes this nation unique in history. Featuring Essays by: John Sibley Butler Jason D. Hill Coleman Cruz Hughes John McWhorter Clarence Page Wilfred Reilly Shelby Steele Carol M. Swain Dean Nelson Charles Love Rev. Corey Brook Stephen L. Harris Harold A. Black Stephanie Deutsch Yaya J. Fanusie Ian Rowe John Wood, Jr. Joshua Mitchell Robert Cherry Rev. DeForest Black Soaries, Jr.
