Good morning. Today is Thursday. We’ll be watching an Instagram video of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs New York City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams. We’ll also be looking at a new way to browse books online.
In recent weeks, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken an increasingly active role in New York politics, criticizing Mayor Eric Adams and supporting the top rival Representative Sean Patrick Maloney faces in the election. primaries in the Democratic Congress.
Like Ocasio-Cortez, Adams is a Democrat, but she is a moderate. The six dissidents largely shared Ocasio-Cortez’s progressive views.
Ocasio-Cortez took issue with what she called “unconscionable” cuts to education and said Adams had stripped funding for community groups supported by dissidents.
“Who guarantees after-school programs for underprivileged children in public houses to score political points?” she speaks. “It’s kind of like a movie villain’s decision-making right there.” She also said she wanted to talk about “what happens when politics gets dirty in your party.”
My colleagues Jeffery C. Mays and Emma G. Fitzsimmons write that the budget includes a $41.6 million endowment controlled by the speaker. At first glance, it appears that none of that money has been allocated to the community groups and programs the six have launched.
That’s not entirely the case, Adams aides said, saying some shows have received money from outside the speaker’s discretionary fund. In other cases, programs receive discretionary funds, but the Board member requesting that amount is not listed as a sponsor.
“Of course my office would enjoy the same credibility that our colleagues receive in campaigning for these important programs,” said Tiffany Cabán, a Queens councilwoman who is an Ocasio ally. -Cortez and who sought funding for the Boys and Girls Club in her place. district. “But the most important thing is that we secure the funds and prevent any service cuts.”
The Boys & Girls Club had hoped for $150,000 but received only half of it – and not from the speaker’s account. And the allocation is not to Cabán but to Shekar Krishnan, a Council member from another district.
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PARKING OUTSIDE
Valid until Monday (June 16).
Federal charges of hate crime against suspect Buffalo
The Ministry of Justice has Charge suspects in Buffalo supermarket massacre with 26 counts of hate crimes and weapons offences. Some charges could lead to the death penalty – a possibility that Attorney General Merrick Garland has not ruled out, though the execution ban you announced 11 months ago.
Garland said the suspect believed in “the lowly theory that only people like him belong in this country.” In an accompanying affidavit criminal complaint filed Wednesday, an FBI agent said the suspect, who is white, wants to “prevent Blacks from displacing whites and eliminating the white race, while also inspiring others to do the same.” similar attacks.”
Garland also said at a news conference that the suspect, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, apologized to a white employee he had shot in the supermarket before continuing to open fire.
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A new app to discover new books
We see book publishing and its place in the city’s economy last month. Some 827 million printed books were sold in 2021, a record, but the tracking system in use is now only operational after 20 years. And as we all know, it’s an online world now, even for booksellers. Surfing the web is different than wandering into a bookstore and picking up a book you’ve never heard of – and can’t put down.
A new app called Tertulia (according to some dictionaries in Spanish, the Spanish word for literary parlor) aims to change the way people find books online. Two of its creators are based in Brooklyn, the third is in Stockholm. I asked my colleague Alexandra Alterwho covers the publishing industry, to put it in context.
You wrote that apps struggled to reproduce the pattern that happened to come from browsing in a bookstore. Have you tried multiple apps?
Yes, there have been several attempts to address this through apps and social media platforms, with varying degrees of success.
Ingram Content Group, the largest book distributor in the United States, has created a book discovery platform called Bookfinity, which assigns its users a “reader type” and has different apps from the others. cute names like Booqsi (which looks a bit weird but is pronounced “Watch the book”).
There are also popular user-generated book recommendation platforms like Goodreads. But it’s not an online discovery tool for books that has succeeded in the same way that Netflix and Spotify have transformed and personalized online entertainment.
Why does Tertulia think it can do better? What is Tertulia doing to give users a sense of discovery – finding a book they weren’t looking for?
Much of the content readers see when they search for a new book online includes books that are already bestsellers or bestsellers booked. Not only do Amazon’s algorithms tend to show bestsellers, but there are cases where publishers spend most of their marketing dollars on books they know will be successful – usually books. of famous people or famous authors.
Tertulia is using a different metric. It is trying to measure and distill online conversations about books, both in terms of quantity and quality.
It has “most talked about lists” in different genres, ranking books by how widely they’ve been mentioned and how positive reviews and conversations are. It also provides personalized recommendations based on a survey that users take, based on the type of author and genre they like, and the type of expert (book reviewer, chef, scientists) they want to see the proposal from.
So it simulates the conversation we would have if I asked you, “Have you read any good books lately?”
But Tertulia can also sell books, right? Is that where it will make money?
Well, that’s another thing that sets Tertulia apart from some other recommendation apps or even Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon but doesn’t sell books directly.
Tertulia is partnering with Ingram, so it has access to Ingram’s 15 million book catalog and can ship directly to customers. It’s only in print for now, but there are plans to add eBooks and audiobooks.
It remains unclear how independent booksellers will react to this new competitor. They have faced such stiff competition from Amazon, and now they have a new online bookseller, however small, to worry about losing customers.
For Tertulia, I think the biggest hurdle was convincing people to download an app and take a survey to get started.
Dear Diary:
My sister, who moved to California over 30 years ago, came to visit. Feeling nostalgic, we decided to go to Coney Island, where we grew up.
Strolling along the boardwalk, we came across a small crowd gathered around a street performer. He was playing the guitar and was accompanied by about 10 parrots of different colors, shapes and sizes that were singing with him, to everyone’s delight.
My sister couldn’t contain her excitement.
“Oh, my lust!” she spoke in her distinctive Brooklyn accent.
A golden-crown Amazon who was the most talented singer in the ensemble had stopped singing.
“Oh, my lust!” it squeaked in perfect imitation of my sister, repeating it over and over and widening its beak to put more emphasis on “gawd”.
