“You’re old enough,” my cousin Mohammed said before we hopped on his motorcycle. I was 18, and despite our family’s objections, he was going to show me the real India. Up to this point, my Indian experience consisted of nightly dinner engagements with obscure relatives, unsentimental gift giving and marathon video-gaming. Every four years, my mother, my younger brother and I returned to Nasik, a city four hours outside Mumbai where the rest of our family resides, and each visit had been identical. (Continued)
“Later on, I’m going to tell you about the first whiskey distillery in America which was, of course, not founded by the Puritans, but by the good, foolhardy Dutch, and which was destroyed in a subsequent fire, as part of the many wars that were waged on Staten Island in those days.” (Continued)
By now you’ve no doubt heard of Amy Winehouse’s death the horrors that occurred in Norway: a car bombing in downtown Oslo that left seven dead and 15 injured, and a shooting rampage on the island of Utøya that claimed at least 85 lives, most of them teenagers. Early reports attributed the attacks to Helpers of the Global Jihad, an Islamic terrorist group who claimed responsibility on Internet forums. (Continued)
Although private, for-profit prisons have recently come under scrutiny, that should not translate into an endorsement of, consent for, or capitulation to “traditional” public prisons. Private prisons are a mutant horror of state violence and capitalist profit incentive, but public prisons still hold the vast majority of the incarcerated population. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 8.2 percent of the 1,598,780 prisoners in the United States are incarcerated in privately operated facilities. (Continued)
The author’s yearbook photos from Joseph Pulitzer Middle School (left) and Stuyvesant High School (right)
Joseph Pulitzer Middle School, better known as I.S. 145, and Stuyvesant High School, often referred to simply as Stuy, are arguably on opposite ends of the New York City public school spectrum. (Continued)
A padded room at Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, a home for the developmentally disabled
Commenters occasionally accuse Street Carnage of being a “crypto-conservative” website, which doesn’t make much sense. Not only are Gavin McInnes and Jim Goad not exactly shy about their disdain for the Democratic Party and liberal politics, but they’re also offset by guys like Luke O’Neil, a self-proclaimed progressive, and Benjamin Leo, a New York Jew. (Seriously, the only way that guy could become more liberal is if he finally came out of the closet.) (Continued)
Recently, my band was invited to do a tour of England, so we packed up our shit and traveled to the land of bad teeth, tea, terrible weather, fish n’ chips and queens (not the borough nor fags, so much). Here’s what I learned while spending nine days in six different towns throughout the country, from Dorking in the south to Nottingham up north: (Continued)
It was shaping up to be a quiet Saturday night in August of 2009. I was twenty-two and living with my mom in Jackson Heights, Queens, while finishing my last year of college. I had just broken up with my girlfriend and quit my job at H&M, so I had nothing to do and no money to do anything. I was probably settling in to watch TV all night when Daria, a friend from junior high school, called and convinced me to grab a drink with her. (The names of people in this story have been changed to protect their identities; some of them are currently in jail, for reasons unrelated to this story, while others are gearing up to become lawyers.) (Continued)
During my freshman year of high school, in 2002, just before spring semester concluded and summer vacation began, I ran away from home. I made the decision suddenly, at 74th Street, or maybe Junction Boulevard, or one of the stops in between on the local 7 line. My reasons were a combination of the usual suspects, generic enough to be drawn from a Lifetime made-for-TV movie — parents, friends, school, alcohol, drugs, punk rock. I ran away for the same reason all angsty teenagers run away: Because of everything and because of nothing at all. (Continued)
During the early evening of Monday, October 29, Hurricane Sandy reached Coney Island. With her, she brought a 14-foot storm surge, which drove the waves of the Atlantic Ocean over the sands of Coney Island Beach, over the wooden planks of the boardwalk, through the rides, games and attractions of the amusement parks, and onto Surf Avenue. By 7 PM, the streets were desolate. Just before 8 o’clock, power went out. At 9, seawater was covering cars. (Continued)
