“With the Bush administration, there was disdain and a lack of respect for multilateral engagement. Now with the Obama administration, the UN is suddenly important for US foreign policy,” said an UN officer who declined to be identified.

According to Matthew Lee, reporter at the Inner City Press, a self-purported “UN watchdog”, however, this is all just big talk. Garnering a small crowd to the side of the gated press area  on the second floor, he described how he had tailed Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon on a trip to Washington D.C. last week. He deemed the event as “the love fest it was supposed to be,” sarcastically referring to the note of optimism and fresh new stamina the Obama administration’s stance towards the UN has been bringing. However there was “a false note reverberating” throughout the meeting, said Lee. He described how Secretary General Moon left a closed-door meeting in the Capitol calling the United States “a deadbeat” in the UN for not utilizing its political capital in the UN to galvanize real change in world affairs – and apparently, for not paying dues.

High hopes for the new US ambassador here may also be too high. Lee also contrasted John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, to his successor, Susan Rice. “John Bolton may have hated the UN, but at least he wa around all the time and knew what he was talking about,” he griped. Rice, though she has expressed support and called for close collaboration with the UN and the Obama administration, is a rare sighting in these halls – and even in New York City, for that matter.

The Obama administration, it seems, has yet to prove itself – but time will tell if it will follower through on all the promises it is making to the United Nations.

Anne Fadiman and Ted Conover kicked off the very first “Primary Sources” series of discussions on contemporary journalism in the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at NYU. Fadiman is an accomplished writer, famous for her work The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, a book on Hmong culture clashing with Western medical culture in the story of little Lia Liang, a Hmong girl with epilepsy. Conover is a journalism professor at NYU currently teaching a class on The Journalism of Empathy (very catchy) and author of several narrative non-fiction bestsellers.

The air grew tense with a slow-growing suspense as we waited for the woman behind the camera to give the cue, a slice of her hand aloft in the air, to Fadiman and Conover to start their conversation in the slightly chilly TV studio on the seventh floor of 20 Cooper Square. After a few false starts, their discussion ranged from exploring each others’ literary backgrounds and their current works, like Conover’s new book (untitled as of yet) on exploring different roads all over the world to what it meant to be a good journalist.

What piqued my interest most was when they shared their experiences of participatory vs. spectator journalism. Anne had written her book by watching and observing the Hmong families around her, while Ted virtually became one of the hobos he traveled with and wrote about and entered into Sing-Sing as a rookie correction officer versus going in as a journalist.

A quirky theme to the conversation was how Anne talked about her work. “It was like falling in love,” she mused. At another point, she exclaimed, “it’s like making me choose which is my favorite child!” You’d think she was talking about people, but she was actually talking about was falling in love with essay-writing and choosing between experiential writing and research-based writing. Anne also emphasized empathy and warmth as the “core set of skills” a journalist must and should have. Are these qualities compatible with different types of reporting? Fadiman and Conover’s discussion left some hanging for those who wanted a note of finality on the subject, but it also left listeners open to possibilities of change.

New York tenants rallied on the steps of City Hall Wednesday morning to call for justice against fraudulent claims and abuse by landlords across New York City.

NY state assembly member Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn’s 57th District joined six other elected officials and their representatives to stand with the tenants. “The $20,000 stove is unacceptable. The $10,000 toilet bowl is unacceptable. The $5,000 doorknob is unacceptable. Tenants are coming under assault, they are being victimized,” he said. Jeffries made a thinly-veiled barb against the landlords, questioning their mental health as he closed with this phrase to whistling and applause: “The inmates should not be allowed to run the asylum.”

They protested against the 1/40th Program, which allows landlords to raise monthly rents on apartments equal to 1/40th the cost of improvements and repairs they’ve made. The tenants and their supporters released a report titled “The $20,000 Stove: How Fraudulent Rent Increases Undermine New York’s Affordable Housing”.
Irene Baldwin, 48, executive director of The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, an advocacy group for New York tenants, says “a glaring loophole” exists in the 1/40th program.
“Landlords don’t need to provide proof of documentation for repairs,” Baldwin said, and they don’t need to get permission for them, either.

“There’s no limit to what the landlords can do. They can do whatever they want,” said Manuel Castro, 42, a member of the Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center, a community board of tenants from Harlem. Seven other community organizations and close to 100 tenants came out along with ANHD and the Mirabal Sisters to City Hall.
For Danielle Holmes, 25, a Brooklyn College student and a member of the Brooklyn Congregation United for Affordable Housing, it’s personal. “I just got married, but my husband and I are living with my mother,” she said with a bubbly voice. But she turned grim as she started to talk about her current housing woes. “Studios cost $1700 a month; that’s ridiculous. And they raised my mother’s rent twice in one year,” she said.

We quickly sobered when he started going into how in the midst of all of this, being gay was a difficult place he was finding himself in coming to terms with his new-found faith and his extremely conservative family back in the Midwest. We listened as he spoke, frustrated, on the hypocrisy he was seeing in the institution of the church, behaviors and the morals of people claiming to be following Jesus, and how he seemed to see his faith as he was coming know it almost at odds with being gay.

We mostly listened (well, on my part at least). But when we spoke, we encouraged Mark to continue grappling with this issues – and to be patient. We even took the liberty of apologizing on behalf of the dysfunctional family that was the church.

I’ll be going to a Community Board Meeting next week in the Village on LGTBQ issues and concerns held in a church, of all places. What are the issues that are going to be addressed? Who’s speaking? Who’ll be listening? Whose concerns will be heard? Whose voices won’t be heard?

I’m hoping for a chance to speak for Luke.

*names changed.