(Content Warning: Brief mentions of rape) The Legal Aid Society is a private, not-for-profit legal service in New York whose motto is, “No New Yorker should be denied access to justice because of poverty.” In keeping with this philosophy, Legal Aid Society announced in late February that they’d brought a class action lawsuit against the New…

C4SS Feed 44 presents James C. Wilson‘s “Floating Through New York’s Underground Economy,” — a review of Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy, by Sudhir Venkatesh. It is read by Athena Roberts and edited by Tony Dreher. Readers with libertarian, voluntarist or anti-prohibitionist leanings will be simultaneously pleased…

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy, by Sudhir Venkatesh Penguin Press (2013) Sudhir Venkatesh’s Floating City documents the author’s time in 21st century New York among the city’s “hustlers, strivers, dealers (and) call girls,” as one of the book’s alternate subtitles describes it. The book is largely a…

Re-elected New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s inaugural address was built around the purported necessity of big government since “there is no small solution to big problems.” Cuomo’s exemplar of a big government solution success story from New York state history: The Erie Canal. But that megaproject was not just a prototype for the industrial age’s spectacular engineering…