In 1980, a Washington Post writer named Janet Cooke wrote a heart-wrenching story about an eight-year-old heroin addict in Washington D.C. "Jimmy's World" was a heroic piece of journalism, shedding light on an often unseen world of addiction and poverty and misery.
The Post's 1981 Pulitzer, lost to fraud, ultimately went to the Voice.
It's awards season, and the hyped movies are starting to land in theaters. On this week's Voice Film Club podcast, we talk about Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, starring Michael Keaton, and Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip, and carve out some time to recommend Nothing Bad Can Happen and Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me. All four of those films have received high praise -- though some have been hit with some pretty damning criticism, including the characterization of Iñárritu as a "pretentious fraud," leveled by film critic Scott Tobias of The Dissolve. Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, along with Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, dive into what stirs critics to use loaded words like those when reviewing a movie. Ahh, must be Oscar season.
Photo: Alison Rosa Michael Keaton and Edward Norton put up their dukes in Birdman.
The NYPD is looking for three 
Credit: NYPD video Three guys beat up a young woman and robbed her earlier this month. assholes suspects in Brooklyn (never good to editorialize) who carried out a particularly brutal robbery in Prospect Heights earlier this month.
On April 19, a fire broke out on Bay 30th Street in Far Rockaway, Queens. The first 911 call came in at 11:51 p.m. The first firefighters arrived at the scene five minutes later. They began hosing down the blaze and attempting to rescue the children trapped inside. Firefighters carried two small children out of the house and then searched for any paramedics on the scene, but there were none there.
Wikimedia Commons
Photo Credit: Vincent_AF via Compfight cc These guys are tired of your crap.
New York taxi drivers are mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, cab drivers and chauffeurs accounted for 53 of the 4,405 Americans killed on the job in 2013. Their workplace fatality rate is 130 percent higher than the national average. And in New York, eight cabbies were assaulted in 2014, according to data from the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
That's why drivers rallied in front of City Hall on Tuesday afternoon, urging the City Council to pass a bill that would require that signs be posted in all city-licensed taxis to remind passengers that assaulting a cab driver could land them in jail. For a long time. The signs, as suggested by the council bill, would read:
ASSAULTING A TAXI OR LIVERY DRIVER IS PUNISHABLE BY UP TO 25 YEARS IN PRISON.
Mamnun Ul Haq, a co-founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which has lobbied the council to push for the signs, was joined at the rally by other drivers and councilmembers who supported the bill. He says the idea to propose the signs came to him in a hospital bed as he recovered from being stabbed on the job: "I can't even tell you how painful it was," he tells the Voice.
See more:
How Some Illegal Taxi Drivers Are Fighting Back Against the Green Cab Program
See also: What Happens if an Ebola Case Lands at JFK?
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When the trouble came to 90 Elizabeth Street, it arrived quietly, in a flurry of white papers. They blanketed the mailboxes and the front doors of many of the tenants in the modest Chinatown apartment building, a forbidding snowdrift of eggshell, piled with angry black type. When 43-year-old Betty Eng got home one spring afternoon last year, she found one waiting for her, too. It was a lawsuit, filed by her new landlords against her, her younger brother, her father, and her mother. Eng's mother, who is in her eighties, suffers from Alzheimer's disease and had recently moved into a nursing home. Eng's father had been dead since 2010.
Photos by Jena Cumbo 90 Elizabeth Street, one of many NYC apartments with rent-controlled tenants.
The suit said that the Engs, who had lived in their apartment since 1970, a year before Betty's birth, weren't actually living there full-time, and thus were not legally entitled to the rent-stabilized unit. It warned that an eviction proceeding would be initiated against them. The suit also alleged that the Engs hadn't been paying the rent. But Betty had been paying, she says, sending the checks through certified mail. Each month, Marolda Properties refused to accept them. They piled up, uncashed.
"They were refusing them," Eng says. "The envelopes would just come back."
More »Ruby Taki and Cici James both competed in the cosplay contest at the recent New York Comic Con. One is a Japanese salesperson working in Manhattan; the other owns a sci-fi and fantasy bookstore in DUMBO. Although they come from different cultural backgrounds, the two shared a somewhat unpopular goal at Comic Con -- not being the hottest chick in the Javits Center.
When 18-year-old Willi Adames was held by police in connection with a fatal shooting in June of 2008, he ostensibly waived his right to an attorney before giving a detailed, recorded statement implicating himself in the crime.
Photo Credit: .v1ctor Casale. via Compfight cc A defendant in over his head gives a faulty confession.
It took three years, two mayors, and, ultimately, two city blocks, but tomorrow New York City will finally rename part of one of its streets after George Carlin.
Via Wiki Commons
And the Catholic Church isn't even complaining. At least, not anymore.
Carlin, the comedian and iconoclast known for his profanity-laced rants skewering, among other things, religion and government, grew up on 121st Street and Broadway in Manhattan's Morningside Heights. A few years after his death in 2008, comedian Kevin Bartini -- who idolized, but did not know, Carlin -- learned that he lived only a few blocks from where Carlin grew up. When he walked over to Carlin's street and located his building, he was shocked to find nothing nearby commemorating the trailblazing comic.
See also: Seven Not-So-Dirty Facts About the Street Soon to be Known as George Carlin Way
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When he was running for office last year, candidate Bill de Blasio warned of the "disastrous consequences" low-level marijuana arrests have for both the individuals caught with a small amount of pot, and their families. "These arrests limit one's ability to qualify for student financial aid, and undermine one's ability to stable housing and good jobs," the Public Advocate's campaign literature read. Even more troubling, it noted, was the fact that studies showed "a clear racial bias" in such arrests. As mayor, de Blasio swore he would order the NYPD to stop such arrests, but he hasn't. Low-level pot arrests are actually on the rise in de Blasio's New York.
About 500 longboard skaters raced down Broadway from West 116th Street to the Charging Bull statue in the Financial District on Saturday, in the annual Broadway Bomb. Founded by two longboarding aficionados in the fall of 2002, the event sparked a media frenzy last year after the city imposed a ban, declaring it unlawful and dangerous. The boarders, however, defied the court order and showed up. The NYPD responded with arrests and summonses.
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Photo credit: Doug Kerr via Flickr Buffalo: Your new hipster paradise.
Looking for the young, fabulous people ready to make their mark on the big city?
Forget Brooklyn. It's all about Buffalo now.
At least, that's what this City Observatory report, picked up by the New York Times, suggests. Since 2000, Buffalo has seen a 34 percent spike in the number of recent college grads moving to the Queen City. Buffalo's growth rate for 25- to 34-year-olds came in seventh, after cities like Houston, Nashville, and Portland. Sister cool cities Baltimore and Pittsburgh have seen 32 percent and 29 percent increases, respectively.
And New York? The capital of the hip, the creative, the hungry?
This city's college-educated 25- to 34-year-old population has increased by just 25 percent over the same amount of time.
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Updated at bottom, Monday, October 20, 3:15 p.m. In some bizarro-world, Donald Trump and Randy Credico might have been rivals in an election for New York State governor. (Credico lost the Democratic primary in September; Trump abandoned his bid for the Republican nomination in March.) Instead, the proud pothead (Credico, who campaigned as "the only politician in America who smokes pot...and will admit it") and the avowed teetotaler (Trump) are teaming up to accuse Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of being a total cokehead.
Eric Schneiderman via YouTube.com
Courtesy Talib Abdur-Rashid Muslim leaders denounced religious extremism Tuesday. Today, simultaneous sermons will speak out against violence.
Muslim leaders across NYC are preaching simultaneously today against religious violence. The move was announced earlier this week by the Islamic Leadership Council of New York.
"There are violent extremists who are Muslims, but their acts of terrorism are not Islamic," said council president Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, at a press conference Tuesday. "Our ultimate goal is to raise the level of awareness in a way that helps to inoculate the Muslim community against cries and appeals from elsewhere calling Muslims to violent extremism."
They'll be doing that not only with their sermons, but also with an...erm, unique social-media presence, noted Huffington Post religion reporter Jaweed Kaleem:
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Partly because of the heartbreaking circumstances and partly because of the timing -- shortly before Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an ambitious new initiative to combat pedestrian deaths in New York City -- the story has been repeated in countless articles since.
Last week, the Manhattan district attorney indicted 19 suspected members of East Harlem's East Army gang. The indictment, D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. said on Friday, "will help combat the increasingly violent criminal activity occurring at the East River Houses," the housing project where the gang is based. On Monday we challenged that statement because the East River Houses have not, in fact, been increasingly violent. 
This week, a judge found Donald Trump liable for operating a get-rich-quick school, the erstwhile Trump University, without a license. The case was originally brought against Trump by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office, which, according to the Daily News, alleged that Trump University had "ripped off 5,000 students nationwide by promising to make them rich when instead they were steered into costly and mostly useless seminars."
"Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore 2" by Gage Skidmore - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
While he's already been held liable for the university's operation, Trump will now go to trial to see if he's also liable for defrauding the students.
But history has shown you can't keep The Donald down. After all, this is a man who has recovered from self-inflicted injury again and again:
Subway performers have to rank high on the list of perks that come with living in New York City. 
Credit: Screenshot, Globetrotters video It was much better than whatever you were doing. (Unless you were reading the Voice, in which case carry on.)
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