Harry Siegel

Senior editor at the Daily Beast, columnist at the Daily News, creator and co-host of FAQ.NYC. Lots of priors.

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Last 30 daysOct 24, 2020 – Nov 22, 2020
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Nov. 21, 2020

For months, the question was what America would learn from New York City’s brutal experience as the coronavirus rapidly overwhelmed our “disease detectives” and “tracing army” along with our hospitals and morgues before subsiding over the summer even…

Nov. 14, 2020

nydailynews.com

Remedial education for de Blasio: No straight answers on schools closings

There he was Friday morning, abruptly telling us that the city’s public school buildings may be closing and we should have “an alternative plan for beginning as early as Monday, for whatever will help them get through this month.” While parents with…

Nov. 13, 2020

The Daily Beast

Barack Obama’s Promised Land Sounds Like a Better America

If you’re the sort who’s going to read A Promised Land, you won’t leave knowing much more about the first three years of Barack Obama or the first three years of his presidency than you did 700 pages earlier. It’s a book about message control, and a…

Nov. 8, 2020

nydailynews.com

What New York needs to be: We all need space to think, but not too much of it

New York’s a city where birds chirp at three in the morning because many corners are nearly as bright then as they are at three in the afternoon, and where you don’t usually notice the chirping because it’s never that quiet. Walking south from the…

Nov. 1, 2020

nydailynews.com

It’s getting dark early in NYC schools: An extra hour to think about Bill de Blasio and education in the age of COVID

With just one in 10 Manhattan office workers having returned, just over one in four public-school kids having attended even a single in-person class and the subway system closed to the public overnight as overall ridership’s plateaued at just less…

Oct. 25, 2020

nydailynews.com

Fearmongers, cheerleaders and reality: The truth about New York City today

“If you go and look at what’s happened to New York, it’s a ghost town. It’s a ghost town,” reports Florida Man Donald Trump. “For so many years, I loved it. It was vibrant. It’s dying. Everyone’s leaving New York.” The make-stuff-great-again,…

Oct. 16, 2020

nydailynews.com

Will we finally tune him out? Trying to make sense of Trump’s insane town hall

Sad! Donald Trump’s big solo town hall — held after he backed out of what was supposed to be a town hall-style second debate with Joe Biden and then got NBC, the network that made him a star (“and when you’re a star, they let you do it”) with “The…

Oct. 10, 2020

nydailynews.com

Who’s gonna run this town? Our hugely underwhelming mayoral field

“I wouldn’t urge anyone to be mayor of New York City,” the 109th mayor of New York City said this week, half-joking. “It’s a very, very challenging moment.” For once, Bill de Blasio was clear and to the point, though you’d never have known that…

Oct. 5, 2020

The Daily Beast

New York City Shuts Down Schools in Nine ZIP Codes

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday that he’s planning to close schools and all non-essential businesses starting Wednesday in nine ZIP codes in Brooklyn and Queens where coronavirus rates have spiked. The shutdown announcement,…

Oct. 3, 2020

nydailynews.com

The America liberalism fathered: Lessons from and debates with my dad about the left since the 60s

At the risk of giving up any points won over three decades of family dinner arguments, I can relate to the quip, often misattributed to Mark Twain, about how when I was 14, my father was so ignorant it hurt to have him around. By the time I was 24,…

Sep. 18, 2020

nydailynews.com

The de Blasio reopening debacle: How NYC’s mayor and chancellor botched their biggest challenge

With infection and death rates soaring, bodies stacking up faster than they could be buried and public hospitals overflowing even as armories, gyms and Manhattan’s first homeless shelter were converted into sick bays, the city’s health commissioner…

Sep. 13, 2020

nydailynews.com

Contempt, unprofessionalism, disrespect: To whom does the NYPD report? Apparently not to de Blasio

One reason that Bill de Blasio has moved from so-called broken windows or quality of life policing to sloganeering about neighborhood policing and a de facto policy of not-so-benign neglect is that providing real support to people before there’s a…

Sep. 6, 2020

nydailynews.com

The vigilante in the White House

ANARCHIST JURISDICTION — If you’re hunting for a holiday weekend read for this abysmal year, try “Politics as a Vocation,” the brilliant German sociologist Max Weber’s essay looking under the hood of the state — “a human community that (successfully)…

Aug. 29, 2020

nydailynews.com

Making the bad old days great again: Trump, Rudy and the PBA’s cynical ’90s’ NYC fear campaign

No, New York City isn’t America, 1989 isn’t 2020 and David Dinkins — our only living mayor who hasn’t launched a bellyflopping presidential campaign — isn’t Donald Trump, but I kept thinking about our “bad old days” as America’s Mayor™ ripped into…

Aug. 23, 2020

nydailynews.com

Can you feel the city sliding? De Blasio is drifting and the rest of us are hanging on

Time feels weirder than ever in these post-New York Pause days, when things are open again, supposedly, and the governor who says it’s halftime in the fight against the coronavirus is writing a book about his victory over it. Taking just one moment…

Aug. 14, 2020

nydailynews.com

Trump pushes the envelope: How the president is attacking the sanctity of the vote

It wasn’t so long ago that a Republican president with authoritarian tendencies (lordy, there were tapes) sent the military into American cities on what he declared was an urgent mission to restore public order. I’m talking, of course, about March of…

Aug. 8, 2020

nydailynews.com

New York City is really reeling: The mayor and its leadership depend on magical thinking for solutions

I never root against New York City, and I’ve been trying to write in recent weeks about the good that could come out of this mess we’re in, but I’m not feeling optimistic about our prospects. Things feel brittle and ominous, in the stillness after…

Aug. 1, 2020

nydailynews.com

Politicians, parents and a pandemic: Families are stuck in the middle as the school year approaches

Donald Trump, who’s been ranting about moving the election because of the virus, also keeps raving about how schools need to open to help his chances in that election. He’s right that without kids going to school, there’s no chance of opening the…

Jul. 25, 2020

nydailynews.com

NYC, hanging in the balance: We might recover from this crisis; on the other hand...

Bill de Blasio, still yakking daily, accidentally got at something important Friday morning when he went from a dire warning about how precarious things are in New York City to a passive assurance that our problems will solve themselves, like they…

Jul. 19, 2020

nydailynews.com

A really steep learning curve: Parents and kids are at the mercy of politicians sketching out school reopening plans

In small ways and big ones, the New York Pause has been very weird. The city is racing to reopen even as the virus spreads rapidly in the rest of the country, auguring its return here just in time for flu season and the school year. Small weird:…