Giuliani and Bloomberg: New York’s Golden Mayors

Former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg transformed New York into one of America’s safest and best-managed cities. Giuliani used crime-pattern analysis to help police officers do their jobs better, and Bloomberg used data to make government more efficient.

Today, it’s a different story. “Over three mayoral terms—two under Bill de Blasio and one under Eric Adams—New York has endured an era of poor governance marked by unsound budgeting, a diminished focus on quality-of-life issues, and a lack of accountability in city agencies and spending programs,” writes Steven Malanga.

Read his take on what the city’s next mayor should prioritize, and what he should learn—and apply—from the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

Earlier this year, New York State’s highest court struck down a 2021 law enabling noncitizens to vote. Progressives, who had initially declared victory, pretended not to notice the law’s seemingly inevitable demise.

“What progressives seek is the appearance of progress—for without the impression of momentum, they falter,” Seth Barron writes in the Spring issue. “Even if their immediate cause for action is an obvious nonstarter, the important thing is to rally the troops and wave the flag, if only to demonstrate their capacity to activate themselves.”

Journalists continue to frame any Trump administration action in the worst possible light, and some are up in arms over changes at the FBI, like its increased focus on international drug-trafficking and the southern border.

But as former special agent James A. Gagliano points out, the bureau has undergone constant reforms over its 117-year history. And director Kash Patel is simply doing what all of his predecessors have done: “adjusting the bureau’s resource allocation to address the most pressing threats facing the United States today,” Gagliano writes.

Christianity consistently has declined in the United States since the middle of the twentieth century. But according to a new Pew poll, Generation Z—those born after the year 2000—are the first generation of Americans in 60 years not to abandon Christianity at the same rate as the preceding generation. In City Journal’s Spring issue, associate editor John Hirschauer argues that the decline in Christian identity may have bottomed out, setting up a potential revival centered on traditional forms of worship.

We’ve lost sight of evil’s enduring, personal reality in our secular age, which prefers to pathologize and rationalize it, Darran Anderson argues. From Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to modern warfare waged at a distance from most of us, our culture has abstracted away the diabolical. But noir fiction, he observes, “remains one of the few places where true evil still gets treated as if it exists.”

Surveying a lineage of noir writers forged in war and hardship, Anderson shows how they made the case that evil can’t be reduced to the structural or psychological. It’s a choice made by ordinary people. “The devil didn’t disappear just because we stopped believing in him,” he writes. “And he never ceased believing in us.”

In I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir, celebrated restaurateur Keith McNally reflects on life in New York, fatherhood, and, of course, his restaurants. Charles F. McElwee calls it “a soulful—and sometimes cantankerous—book of wit, candor, and depth.” Read his review here.

“Progressives don’t like The Success Sequence because it requires personal responsibility. Progressives prefer to blame a 3rd party for failure, especially if it’s the failure of someone they deem ‘disadvantaged.’”

Photo credits: Spencer Platt / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images