The mysterious mole men of New York caught on video

Adam Gabbatt reports from New York for the Guardian:

The first sewer episode happened on 5 May, at 2am. Three people, wearing hip waders and carrying flashlights, walked to a manhole cover in the middle of the road, hauled the circular cover aside, and clambered down into the darkness.

That was that, until Thursday 28 May, when a group of people shifted a manhole cover and climbed into the sewer in south Brooklyn. Hours after that, a group of people lowered themselves into a sewer hole in north Brooklyn.

"I could tell they were up to no good," Aki Jakupovic, who witnessed the first event, told NBC New York. "They went in there, closed the cover, like, you know, they were never here."

He added: "Three random guys walking around in a strange suit. Open the sewer, [and] go in like the Ninja Turtles."

 He goes on to quote an email from the city's department of environmental protection:

"Sewers can contain numerous hazards, including noxious and potentially deadly gases, unstable surfaces, flooding risks, and confined spaces. For these reasons, members of the public should never enter a pipe, drain, catch basin, manhole, or outfall."

No mention of the alligators that are rumoured to live down there, you note.

Whatever these modern ninjas are up to, they are not alone down there. Gabbatt tells us:

The sociologist Terry Williams spent two decades visiting people who live in tunnels, hidden passageways and abandoned railroads, documenting their lives in the 2024 book Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York.

And New York isn’t the only place with a track record of people seeking refuge underground. Hundreds of people live in tunnels beneath Las Vegas, in passageways designed as storm drains to manage flash floods. Last year, Greater Good Charities, a non-profit, estimated that 1,500 people live in 600 miles of tunnels and culverts under the city.

But how many people are there living beneath London?

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"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

Le Tigre: Deceptacon

Who are Le Tigre?

Le Tigre (Kathleen Hanna, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman) formed as an obstinately hopeful, even joyous, post-riot grrrl project in New York City in 1999 – when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and regressive hipster irony (à la VICE Magazine) ruled. 

Abandoning traditional punk instrumentation, the band paired drum-machine beats and looped 8-bit samples with the simplest, serrated guitar riffs and call-and-response vocals to write the songs on their first, self-titled album. Released late that year, they conceived of it as music "for the party after the protest."

Deceptacon was the first track on that album. What's it about? There's a whole BBC programme to tell you.

You can visit Noah's Ark in Williamstown, Kentucky​

Embed from Getty Images

Most Europeans who visit the United States go to New York or California, which are liberal, cosmopolitan places very like Europe. But the rest of the country, as I was told when I visited New York myself, isn't like that.

You can say that again. Here's Alexander Bevilacqua writing in the London Review of Books:

In Williamstown, Kentucky​, no small distance from the "mountains of Ararat", the biblical resting place of Noah's Ark, a 510-foot-long wooden structure rises from a ridge. The Ark Encounter – less than an hour's drive from Cincinnati International Airport and within a day’s drive of much of the Bible Belt – is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. 

A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers Centre, where creationist-friendly science textbooks are on sale next to Noah's Coffee. Outdoor speakers play music reminiscent of a fantasy video game. The Answers Centre looks out across a lake to the main attraction. The ark is massive (roughly the length of St Paul's Cathedral), handsome and very strange.

Entertainments are on offer: a petting zoo; camel rides; zip lines; virtual reality ‘time travel’. There are flashes of humour: visitors can pose as a biblical patriarch in a cut-out panel; the refreshment stands promise "a flood of refills". Yet the attraction serves a serious purpose. 

Built by an evangelical Christian group called Answers in Genesis (AiG) and completed in 2016, the Ark Encounter makes the case that the story of Noah occurred exactly as told in Genesis: that humanity was saved by the eight people who built the vessel and boarded it together with seven pairs ‘of every sort’ of animal, then stayed on it during a deluge that lasted forty days and for a further 150 days when the floodwaters prevailed, plus the better part of a year as the waters receded.

He ends on a more secular note:

AiG doesn’t have a monopoly on contemporary interpretations of the ark. A Dutch carpenter and creationist called Johan Huibers built his "half-size" ark – 230 feet long – after a dream in which he saw his country "disappearing under an enormous mass of water’" (fifty years earlier, in 1953, the North Sea Flood killed almost two thousand people in the Netherlands). 

In 2010, he sold it to the impresario Aad Peters, who turned it into a travelling gallery of Bible stories. When Peters brought the ark to the UK in 2019, Extinction Rebellion activists boarded the vessel. On one side they hung a giant banner bearing the words: "We need a better plan than this."

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"The fallout from the latest revelations has again put survivors secondary to the actions of powerful men. Mandelson, who maintained a friendship with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, initially declined to apologise to Epstein’s victims and distance himself from any knowledge of the financier’s sex crimes." Victims have told us the worst of Epstein’s crimes for decades – and  but they are still being ignored, says Lindsey Blumell.

Stephanie Burt on the organised opposition to ICE in Minnesota: "In January a horde of masked thugs arrived in the Twin Cities as part of Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge to brutalise, kidnap and deport undocumented residents. The goons soon found themselves outnumbered, as well as watched, followed, tracked and sometimes stymied by rapidly organised networks of civilians, who use text chains, plastic whistles, car horns and in one case a trombone to discomfit the would-be kidnappers and warn their potential victims."

Anna Fazackerley and Tam Patachako travel to Southend to see what happens to a city when its university closes.

"The 'laissez-faire' of free trade was ... less an ideological commitment to the free market or a desire to give free rein to rich capitalists as it was an effort to feed the poor, foster world peace and cosmopolitan friendship, and erode the baleful and unjustly got power of land-owning aristocrats." Paul Crider speaks up for Manchester Liberalism.

"She may have been a child of Victorian Wales but she saw nudity as natural." Jonathan Jones goes to see the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum, Cardiff.

Cavan Scott encounters Charles Dickens and Winnie the Pooh in New York.

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Chaminda Jayanetti examines the hidden impact of Labour's disability benefit cuts - from carer's allowance to railcards.

"When they receive the annual service charge statements, they find costs that bear no relation to the services they receive - street lighting for a block of flats, access to facilities they are not allowed to use, or simple paint jobs costing tens of thousands of pounds with no say over who carries out the work or how it is done." Labour MP Kate Osborne says the end of the feudal leasehold system cannot come soon enough.

Seventy years before congestion pricing landed in New York City, Lewis Mumford sounded the alarm on letting automobiles run amok in America’s downtowns. David Zipper tells his story.

Tim Radford reviews The Age of Diagnosis by the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan: "How do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from right-wing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."

"At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn't a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: 'I think you should look into incel culture.'" Jack Thorne on writing Adolescence.

Luka Ivan Jukic casts light on an unexpected corner of European history: Latin remained a live language in Croatia until the middle of the 19th century.

St Vincent: New York

St Vincent - the American singer-songwriter Annie Clarke - has featured here before. New York is a track from her fifth studio album, Masseduction, which came out in 2017.

Laura Snapes reviewed it on Pitchfork:

Presumably the first single from her forthcoming fifth album as St. Vincent ... it surprises by totally forsaking her cosmic guitar playing for simple piano, which blooms beneath her laments for the lost accomplice who made NYC more than just a pile of old bricks. 

Maybe it’s her noted hero Bowie, though Clark’s yearning, gasped entreats suggests a deeper intimacy than distant admiration: “So much for a home run with some blue blood,” she sighs, ruing the loss of “the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me” (possibly the highest compliment a New Yorker can pay).

The radio version of the song - New York did turn out to be the first single from that album - cleverly changes this to "other sucker".

Reader's voice: But do we need swearing at all? I mean, Paul Simon didn't write The Only Living Motherfucker in New York, did he?

Steve Winwood, Sheila E. and Orianthi: Everybody's Everything

This week's music video reminds us of a better world: an American President and First Lady honouring a Mexican immigrant.

Each year Kennedy Center Honors are awarded to prominent figures in the performing arts for their lifetime of contributions to American culture. And in 2013 the recipients were the opera singer Martina Arroyo, Herbie Hancock, Billy Joel, Shirley MacLaine, and Carlos Santana.

Here is part of the segment of the awards ceremony that honoured Santana, with Barack and Michelle Obama in the audience.

Because this is Liberal England, yes, that is Steve Winwood in the Cotswold landowner sideburns that he affected for a while. Winwood has played and recorded with Santana.

With him is the percussionist Sheila E., who collaborated with Prince for many years and is the daughter of one of the members of Santana's original band. 

And on guitar is Orianthi, an Australian singer and songwriter who has played with Alice Cooper.

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"Easy though it is to mock the quality of the Tory leadership hopefuls, enabling and encouraging the worst impulses of the far-right carries dangers for our country and our democracy, as we have seen just this week. We need a serious government, but we also need a serious opposition. Right now the Tories cannot and will not fulfil the latter role." Alistair Carmichael says the Tory leadership contest is revealing that the party’s lurch to far-right is terrifyingly real.

Lauren Crosby Medlicott on what life's like inside a UK women's prison and the need to find other ways of dealing with female offenders.

"To be happy and healthy, children need a decent amount of everyday, sociable play and physical activity. To grow into independent, capable, resilient young adults, they need a chance to experience real life, explore and take risks. To develop a sense of belonging and responsibility for others, they need to be seen and heard in their communities." Alice Ferguson presents a manifesto for restoring children’s freedom and outdoor play.

Corinne Segal takes us to four cities - New York, Baltimore, Auckland, Istanbul - that are bringing buried rivers back into the light of day.

"Detoxification" is a popular concept in wellness but, says Adrienne Matei, it's just another lie.

Rohan Amanda Maitzen understands what it is that makes T.H. White's The Once and Future King great: "The novel’s most ridiculous, delicious flights of fancy (the thwarted romance of the Questing Beast, for instance) are narrated in the same down-to-earth way as the most extreme moments of betrayal or grief or psychic torment ... and so we experience them both as part of the same world of people who may transform into animals, trap unicorns, and perform miracles, but are somehow, bizarrely, wonderfully, just like us."

Odyssey: Native New Yorker

I heard this song twice on Friday. First piped into Tesco's and then again on the soundtrack of the film The Eyes of Laura Mars. I got the message.

Native New Yorker was written by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, and first recorded in 1977 by Fanki Valli. But it was the New York disco band Odyssey who had a hit with it on both sides of the Atlantic: they reached number 5 in the UK singles chart early the following year.

Indeed, Odyssey enjoyed more success over here - three more big hits including a number 1 - and eventually based themselves in Britain.

Lib Dems say sewage is coming up on the doorstep

It's the issue that's sweeping the country, says the Guardian:

Josh Babarinde, a Lib Dem councillor in Eastbourne who is also the candidate for the Conservative-held parliamentary seat, a key target for the party, says sewage is raised spontaneously as often as the NHS during local door knocking. "It is one of the most common issues that comes up on the doorstep. Beaches are the lifeblood of this town."

Over to Ed Davey:

"It’s much bigger than potholes. Potholes are a very serious issue, and they do move votes, but for sewage, the reason why it’s so dramatic is it brings the pollution of our natural environment and the damage that it’s doing to our rivers and our seas, and wildlife and plants and animals, to human health."

And an unnamed Liberal Democrat official says:

"When we started talking about sewage two years ago, the other parties though it was a bit weird. But now they all want to talk about it."

My photo shows the giant poo that Water Aid brought to the New York Millennium Development Goals Summit in 2010. In those days we saw sanitation as an issue for other, poorer countries.

If sewage does come up on the doorstep, don't forget to point for the camera.

Brandon deWilde: Together Again

Born in April 1942, Brandon deWilde* was the darling of Broadway at the age of seven. Acting alongside Ethel Walters and Julie Harris, he played John Henry West in the first production of Carson McCullers’ play The Member of the Wedding.

He took part in 492 performances and won a Donaldson Award for the best male debut in a play. (Charles Boyer had won it the year before: Denholm Elliott was to win it the next.) When he appeared in his second play aged nine, he was on the cover of Life magazine.

And as an 11-year-old he starred in his own comedy series, Jamie. He must have been a pro: it was broadcast live.

deWilde was 10 when The Member of the Wedding was filmed – he naturally won a Golden Globe. You can watch the whole film on YouTube.

But by then he had already recorded a film performance that was to make him immortal.

George Stevens took two years editing Shane, but his care resulted in a Western that the world took at its own high estimation: an instant classic and a candidate for the greatest ever made. And deWilde played Joey, the little boy who cries out "Shane! Come back!" at the end of the film.

Given what a gruelling life this sounds for a boy, it’s nice to know that, put up to it by his screen mother Jean Arthur, he began filming that scene by pulling faces to make Alan Ladd laugh.

deWilde received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but both he and Shane's other nominee Jack Palance lost out to Frank Sinatra.

And that was as good as it got for him, because he suffered from the male child star’s curse: he did not grow tall and kept his boyish looks too long.

He was still playing orphans in peril as a teenager and, in an echo of Shane that directors must have been aware of, his best adult performances saw him cast as a younger relation who first idolised and then saw through a charismatic older man.

So he appeared alongside Warren Beatty in All Fall Down and Paul Newman in Hud. But his characters in these films were 16 or 17 and he was 19 or 20 when he played them. His performance in Hud was widely praised, but you don’t go on to be cast as a leading man from parts like those.

And when he appeared in his second Western as a teenager - Night Passage with James Stewart and Audie Murphy - his character was inevitably called Joey. He had become a walking touchstone of cinematic authenticity while he was still making his way as an actor.

Soon he was going downhill and he was left with little besides Disney films, guest appearances on television shows and work in regional theatres.

In the 1960s he began hanging out with David Crosby and Gram Parsons, and even with the Beatles when they were filming Help! in the Bahamas. Paul McCartney said of him:

"He was a nice guy who was fascinated by what we did. A sort of Brat Pack actor. We chatted endlessly, and I seem to remember writing Wait in front of him, and him being interested to see it being written."

deWilde hoped to have a music career and return to acting at 40 when a wider range of character parts would be open to him. And he must have had talent: it was said that the only person who harmonised better with Gram Parsons than he did was Emmylou Harris.

Together Again appears on a collection of Parsons' early recordings, but the singer is Brandon deWilde.

His music career and return to acting were not to be. He died after crashing his car in July 1972 at the age of 30.

* He was billed as De Wilde in his earlier films and probably changed it to deWilde in an attempt to get people to pronounce it properly. The name is Dutch and has three syllables.

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Jonathan Meades reviews Tina Brown's book on the royal family: "They are out of their depth. The prurient, hypocritical red-top mentality leaves them incredulous and perplexed. They would rather not touch. When they do touch they find they are tiny pions in the dripping maw of cannibalistic brutes."

"Emanuel Gomes was an outsourced Ministry of Justice cleaner. He died after working for five days with suspected COVID symptoms in a near-empty office, because he believed he could not afford to lose income." Caroline Molloy on the government's treatment of low-paid staff.

Tideline Art goes mudlarking in New York, finds an ID tag and opens up a chilling account of the fear of nuclear attack.

"While many mid-20th century writers have fallen in and out of fashion over the past seventy years, Pym has always enjoyed the ardent support of various literary luminaries, including Philip Larkin, Lord David Cecil, Jilly Cooper, Anne Tyler and Alexander McCall Smith - even during the wilderness years." JacquiWine's Journal welcomes Virago Press's glamorous makeover of Barbara Pym.

"Captain Tyler returned in mid-April 1874 for a second inspection. This time four 40 ton engines passed over the viaduct at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour. Although there seemed little in the way of vibrations, when he inspected the upright timbers at ground level, he found many were rotten. Even those which 'appeared sound to the eye, when chopped by the axe, displayed a rotten or hollow core'." Huddersfield Exposed looks at the history of Denby Dale Viaduct.

Tish Farrell goes walking in the Stiperstones.

The man who links the murders of John F. Kennedy and John Lennon

Dive down the JFK assassination rabbit hole and you will find that anti-Castro Cubans, who felt the President had let them down over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, are among the favourite candidates for conspirators.

Fall deep enough and you will come across the name José Sanjenís Perdomo. 

Wikispooks describes his career:

After working in the Cuban police under the command of Batista, Perdomo went into exile in the US after Fidel Castro took power. He joined the CIA, to whom he gave lists of skilled and like-minded people who could be trusted enough to take part in Operation 40. He was a member of Brigade 2506 during the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. His handler was Frank Sturgis.

Perdomo, a chief of police in Cuba before Castro's revolution, features in some theories as an organiser of the shooting of President Kennedy.

He was certainly a mysterious figure and used many aliases. Sturgis, who had been jailed as one of the five Watergate burglars, reported his death in 1974.

But Perdomo was not dead.

When Mark Chapman shot John Lennon outside the Dakota Building in New York, it was the doorman who rushed to help him and then identified his assailant to the police,

"Do you know what you've done?," the doorman demanded of Chapman. "Yes," he calmly replied, "I just shot John Lennon."

That doorman was José Sanjenís Perdomo.

You will find, the internet being what it is, plenty of sites suggesting Perdomo was Lennon's real killer, but let's play out with a Paul Simon song that mentions both shootings...

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"Many Liberal Democrats don’t know that the late great Paddy Ashdown leaned heavily on the concept of a Basic Income as a fundamental component of his 'Citizens' Britain', arguing that 'every step we take towards a basic income liberates power in the hands of the citizen.'" Daniel Mermelstein believes universal basic income is a fundamentally liberal policy and a vote winner.

Shane Burke says the status quo in undercover policing threatens political rights.

"It seemed obvious to me that despite what everyone said, schools were not primarily about education. Formal learning made up a minimal fraction of the activity there (and the part adults later find the least memorable). The real purpose and priority of the school system was to instil the habit of obedience, of deference to our superiors. Learning was to be discouraged if it interfered with this end." Lorna Finlayson explains why she walked out of school at 13.

Henry Grabar looks at what New York could do if it took a quarter of its roads away from cars.

"Upon arrival in Scotland, Heron was thrown in for his debut against Morton in a League Cup tie; the Jamaican adding Celtic’s second goal in a 2-0 win with a 20-yard first-half strike." Did you know Gil Scott-Heron's father played for Celtic? Craig Stephen will tell you all about him.

Stefan Sagrott looks at Edinburgh's Innocent Railway.

The boys from the NYPD choir

On Saturday BBC4 showed The Story of Fairytale of New York, in the course of it we learnt that there is no NYPD choir.

This impressed me enough to tweet about it. But James Tarry, who used to drink with Daniel Farson and must thus be accounted an expert on such matters, put me right.

It is slang term for Saturday-night drunks singing in their police cells, which makes perfect sense in the context of the song.

The photo here shows the Leicester home of Arthur Colahan, who wrote Galway Bay. Note the blue plaque.

Bolivian orchestra stranded at ‘haunted’ German castle surrounded by wolves

Our Headline of the Day Award crosses the Atlantic.

Well done to the New York Post and thank you to the reader who nominated it.

Andrew Cuomo’s nipples take our minds off coronavirus

After meeting by Zoom for the third consecutive day, the judges agreed this blog's Headline of the Day Award should go to the New York Post.

Paul Simon: The Late Great Johnny Ace

A song about three deaths: Johnny Ace, who killed himself in a shooting accident in 1954 when Paul Simon was 13; John F.Kennedy, assassinated in 1963; and John Lennon, murdered in 1980.

This live performance took place during the Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park in 1982, two years after Lennon's death.

When someone rushes on to the stage yelling "I gotta talk to you", there is real danger in the air.

Looking back on the golden age of blogging

One of the stars of the early years of Liberal Democrat blogging was Nick Barlow.

The other day he announced (on Medium) that he had decided to let his blog What You Can Get Away with disappear - though it is still available via the Wayback Machine.

In making that announcement he wrote:

In the way that all ageing men looking back on their youth remember it as a golden age, that period up to around 2005 was the heyday of British blogging, especially political blogging. 

There was a community and a network of writers, reading and responding to each other, fed into by a wave of commenters who’d pop up across a range of blogs to contribute to the debate and it all felt like one big conversation. It could get challenging and angry at times (this was the period of the Iraq War) but it felt like something interesting and different was going on. 

And then, like so many other things, it just got too big. The “blogosphere” (a terrible word, but I never found a better one) started to become a place where people realised they could make a name for themselves, and blogs started becoming more about self-promotion and developing your own community, not just one part of a wider and bigger conversation. 

Twitter and Facebook started nibbling at the edges of what blogging had been, especially the conversational aspects of it, and blogs started becoming more content repositories than anything else.

I would place the good old days a little nearer than that.

In saying that I am thinking of the wonderful unconference Caron Lindsay organised in Edinburgh in 2009 and my trip to New York (courtesy of Oxfam) the following year.

Just after I got back from the US I was given a free pizza by Domino's after posting about them, which means my two best freebies from blogging came back to back.

But whenever the golden age of blogging was, we can agree that it is now long over.

I originally set up Liberal England as a way of promoting a long-vanished site I posted for Lord Bonkers, but blogging soon became my passion.

As you may have noticed, I fell in love with Twitter too, but every time I have got close to having a Facebook page something has happened to put me off. Maybe, deep down, I am afraid that it would supplant this blog.

I am aware that I ought to write more articles and even books, but I remain hooked on the instant rewards that blogging brings.

And I have never found a platform that has tempted me away from dear old Blogger.