Kay S. Hymowitz > Quotes

“The child-man, then, is the lost son of a host of economic and cultural changes: the demographic shift I call preadulthood, the Playboy philosophy, feminism, the wild west of our new media, and a shrugging iffiness on the subject of husbands and fathers. He has no life script, no special reason to grow up. Of course, you shouldn't feel too bad for him; he's having a good enough time.”
― Kay Hymowitz, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys

“Adults don't emerge. They're made.”
― Kay Hymowitz

“If the port made New York, the Irish made the port,” writes James T. Fisher in On the Irish Waterfront.15 Many of the dockworkers were refugees from the Great Hunger that immiserated the island between 1845 and 1849, a famine so cataclysmic that nearly 1.5 million people were willing to risk voyage to America on the too aptly named “coffin ships.”16 Most of the workers were desperately poor and more than willing to take the dangerous, miserably paid, erratic jobs on the piers of Red Hook and near the Navy Yard. Some of the earliest arrivals had dug the Erie Canal; nearly 500 of those following them built the Atlantic Docks, and many more simply did the more forgettable work of unloading cargo, repairing masts, and braiding ropes.17 Like urban migrants everywhere, the”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“what was once associated with deafening, dangerous, and stultifying work could now be admired as historic creations and greeted with reverential, if only quasi-informed, nostalgia. The”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“Ruth Stanislaus, principal of P.S. 971 in Sunset Park, whose student population is now a little over half Chinese, was taken aback when one mother of a kindergartner—a five-year-old, mind you—announced in faltering English: “My son must go Harvard.” If, as sometimes appears to be the case, “Harvard” is the first English word learned by immigrant Chinese mothers, the second word is probably “Stuyvesant.” Remember”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“You can eat wonderful food in a junked train car on plebeian plates served by waitresses more likely to start dancing with the bartender to the beat of the indie music playing on the sound system than to inquire, “More Dom Pérignon, sir?” Truffles and oysters can still appear on the Brooklyn menu, but more common is old-fashioned “comfort food” turned into something haute: burgers made from grass-fed cattle from a New York farm, butchered in-house, and served on a perfectly grilled brioche bun; mac ‘n’ cheese made from heritage grains and artisanal cow and sheep’s milk. Tarlow was not the only Williamsburg artist unknowingly helping to define a Brooklyn brand at the turn of the millennium. Around the same time he opened up Diner, twenty-six-year-old Lexy Funk and thirty-one-year-old Vahap Avsar were stumbling into creating a successful business in an entirely different discipline. Their beginning was just as inauspicious as Diner’s: a couple in need of some cash found the canvas of a discarded billboard in a Dumpster and thought that it could be turned into cool-looking messenger bags. The fabric on the bags looked worn and damaged, a textile version of Tarlow’s rusted railroad car, but that was part of its charm. Funk and Avsar rented an old factory, created a logo with Williamsburg’s industrial skyline, emblazoned it on T-shirts, and pronounced their enterprise”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“Brownsville has a greater concentration of public housing projects than anywhere in the United States.”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“A Pew study found that only about a fifth of respondents believe that Chinese Americans and whites get along very well. Even fewer say that Chinese Americans get along well with blacks or Hispanics.20”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“In 2008, Kalin was invited to lecture the Masters of the Universe at Davos. In April 2015, Etsy debuted an IPO; it was only the second Brooklyn company to go public.”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“It’s no secret that mainstream American habits are not always leading kids to educational and life success. In Sunset Park, Chinese kids are part of a counter-culture that is reinforced on a daily basis by family members, by other adults, by Chinese television shows, by local test-prep centers. Shopkeepers might ask whether they’ve done their homework. They don’t ask what they want to be when they grow up because the correct answer is all but universally shared. The role models for poor Chinese kids, observers point out, are not basketball players and rap stars but successful businesspeople and professionals. MOVING UP While most eyes have been on the shifting demographics of places like Bush-wick and Greenpoint, the Chinese have been redefining several of southwest Brooklyn’s legendary white ethnic neighborhoods near Sunset Park.”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

“But by the late twentieth century, with more Americans going to college, making more money, and, thanks to more affordable airfares, traveling to Europe and Asia, the market for art was expanding, as were the number of artists.18 A growing educated middle class had the money to support the ballooning number of galleries. David Brooks had noticed the blending of bohemian and bourgeois—or “bobo”—sensibilities in 2000.19 Gentrified neighborhoods are the urban habitus of the bobo, and art galleries are about as good a signifier of gentrification as wine and coffee bars. In fact, many wine and coffee bars in gentrified areas are art galleries where a revolving cast of local artists display their work. By the mid-2000s, “a new kind of ambition was taking hold,” writes Ann Fensterstock of Williamsburg in Art on the Block, a history of the turn-of-the-millennium New York art scene. There was “a thirst for critical attention in the wider, increasingly international art world. The notion of producing art for profit was no longer anathema.”
― Kay S. Hymowitz, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back