NY TIMES
Her mother was dying of breast cancer that had spread to her bones.
Almost every morning, the young Ms. Quinn woke her mother, bathed her, made her breakfast and gave her medication.
Her mother had gone deaf, and said that Christine, her younger daughter, was the only one whose lips she could read. So it was up to her daughter to deliver the worsening medical news the family received in doctors’ offices and hospital rooms, which her mother met with disbelief and sometimes anger.
When the sadness and chaos got to be too much, Ms. Quinn would sneak tubs of ice cream and corn muffins up to her bedroom, eat them in a single sitting, and then make herself throw up. The purging brought a momentary sense of relief to what seemed an out-of-control life.
Ms. Quinn, now speaker of the New York City Council and a Democratic candidate for mayor, kept secretly bingeing and purging for 10 years, as she moved from high school to Trinity College and the beginnings of a political career, until she entered a Florida rehabilitation center at age 26.
“I’m embarrassed about it now still,” Ms. Quinn said during an interview on Friday at her City Hall office. “I wish I could say I wasn’t.”
Now, for the first time, Ms. Quinn is making public her bulimia and the alcoholism that accompanied it. She will speak about her experience on Tuesday at Barnard College, and touch on it in a memoir to be published next month.
Ms. Quinn, 46, contacted The New York Times to tell her story, as her aides try to soften her often rough-edged political image and build a campaign that draws heavily on her personal appeal to women.
She said she had come to believe that “until you stop hiding things, you’re hiding things, and hiding things is not healthy.”
“I just want people to know you can get through stuff,” she added. “I hope people can see that in what my life has been and where it is going.”
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City Report Shows a Growing Number Are Near Poverty
NY TIMES
The rise in New York City’s poverty rate as a result of the recession has apparently eased, but not before pushing nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor in 2011, according to an analysis by the Bloomberg administration.
That year, according to the city’s measure, about 46 percent of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a benchmark used to describe people who are not officially poor but who still struggle to get by. That represents a rise of more than three percentage points since 2009, when the nation’s recession officially ended.
By the city’s definition, a family with two adults and two children could earn $46,416 a year and still fall within 150 percent of the city’s poverty level. Unlike the official but rigid federal poverty level, the city’s measure balances the added value of tax credits, food stamps, rent subsidies and other benefits against expenses like health and day care, housing and commuting that reflect New York’s higher living costs. The city says a two-adult, two-child family is poor if it earns less than $30,949 a year. The federal government sets the level at $22,811.
Bike share was easy for New York City to love in the abstract. It was not about adding bike lanes at the expense of something else; it was about sharing something that did not yet exist.
But with the program two weeks away, many New Yorkers have turned against bike share, and for one simple reason: They did not expect it to look like this.
Read more at NY TIMES
City Report Shows a Growing Number Are Near Poverty
NY TIMES
The rise in New York City’s poverty rate as a result of the recession has apparently eased, but not before pushing nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor in 2011, according to an analysis by the Bloomberg administration.
That year, according to the city’s measure, about 46 percent of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a benchmark used to describe people who are not officially poor but who still struggle to get by. That represents a rise of more than three percentage points since 2009, when the nation’s recession officially ended.
By the city’s definition, a family with two adults and two children could earn $46,416 a year and still fall within 150 percent of the city’s poverty level. Unlike the official but rigid federal poverty level, the city’s measure balances the added value of tax credits, food stamps, rent subsidies and other benefits against expenses like health and day care, housing and commuting that reflect New York’s higher living costs. The city says a two-adult, two-child family is poor if it earns less than $30,949 a year. The federal government sets the level at $22,811.
Though more New Yorkers were working in 2011 than the year before, larger shares of children and working adults were classified as poor in 2011, and the proportions of Asians, noncitizens and Queens residents — overlapping groups — each rose by more than four percentage points since 2008.
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Read more at NY TIMES
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Bike share was easy for New York City to love in the abstract. It was not about adding bike lanes at the expense of something else; it was about sharing something that did not yet exist.
But with the program two weeks away, many New Yorkers have turned against bike share, and for one simple reason: They did not expect it to look like this.
In recent weeks, hundreds of stations have sprouted in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — empty husks sprawled 30 or 50 spaces long on city sidewalks and streets, anticipating rows of bicycles that will that will soon protrude from the kiosk slots.
The critics say the kiosks are a blight. They clash with the character of residential areas of the West Village or Fort Greene, Brooklyn. They are already magnets for pigeons, garbage bags and dogs in need of relief.
Lawsuits have been prepared. Kiosks have been defaced