Atlas Obscura: How New Year's Eve Came to Times Square

On New Year’s Eve in 1903, there was no countdown to midnight, no ball drop, and no partygoers wearing silly hats in Times Square. In fact, there was no “Times Square.”

But all that changed the following year, when the newspaper publisher Adolph Ochs moved the headquarters of the New York Times from Park Row to West 42nd Street and celebrated with a bash that launched an iconic New Year tradition.

At the turn of the 20th century, Times Square was called Longacre Square. Stables, harness shops and carriage factories—not glitzy theaters and chain stores—lined the intersection of West 42nd Street, Seventh Avenue and Broadway. [...]

August Belmont, the president of the new subway and a New York Times shareholder, was probably the one who suggested the renaming of Longacre Square. He had to have been aware that the Times’ archrival, the New York Herald, had successfully named the intersection of 34th Street, Sixth Avenue, and Broadway – now Herald Square – after itself. “Belmont wanted to get the most bang for the bucks he was putting into the railroad,” said David W. Dunlap, a longtime reporter at the Times’ Metro section.

Mayor George McClellan made the name change official on August 8, 1904. To commemorate the newspaper’s new address, Ochs planned a spectacular street party for December 31, 1904. At the time, New York’s main New Year’s Eve celebration was a relatively somber affair at Trinity Church downtown, where revelers sang hymns and bells clanged at midnight. The Times’ party, in contrast, would usher in 1905 with fireworks, noisemakers and Fanciulli’s Concert Band at the foot of the Times Tower. 

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FiveThirtyEight: How Many Americans Are Married To Their Cousins?

But the estimate that 0.2 percent of U.S. marriages are between people who are second cousins or closer needs to be treated with plenty of caution. For one thing, 25 states ban marriage between first cousins, and another seven states have restrictions on it (for example, in Arizona first-cousin marriage is allowed only if both people are 65 or older, or if one is unable to reproduce). Those laws might make some individuals reluctant to say they are in a consanguineous relationship and result in some undercounting of relationships.

What’s more, the 0.2 percent estimate is based on studies that were conducted in the United States between 1941 and 1981. To find out whether the share has changed since then, I emailed Alan Bittles, a professor at the Centre for Human Genetics at Edith Cowan University, which, like you, is in Western Australia. Bittles has spent almost 40 years researching consanguinity and has published more than 100 papers on the topic. [...]

Since then, Bittles has attempted to piece together a map on the global prevalence of consanguinity. His 2001 findings are summarized in the map below (you can also view and download the numbers here). They include Australia, where it’s estimated that 0.5 percent of all marriages are consanguineous.

You’ll notice that if you take a global perspective, consanguinity is not rare at all. Of the 70 countries studied, only 18 have consanguineous relationships as less than 1 percent of all marriages. In five countries, more than 50 percent of all marriages are between people who are second cousins or closer, and in Burkina Faso, it’s estimated that two of every three marriages are consanguineous.

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The Guardian: Out from the shadows: why cruising had a cultural moment in 2016

On a Saturday afternoon shortly before Christmas, I found myself in the dungeon-like basement of a sex club in Manhattan to see a site-specific performance called Adonis Memories. It was an immersive theater experience based upon oral histories with patrons of the Adonis movie theater, the once opulent movie house-turned-gay porn theater located off Times Square in the 70s and 80s. In its day the Adonis epitomized hedonistic group viewing of pornography, the kind of place where gay, queer and straight men could watch hardcore films together. Meanwhile, just offscreen, it was anything goes between the men in the audience, especially in the theater’s infamous balcony.

The performance, the brainchild of Alan Bounville, a theater artist and activist, makes the audience contend with the gay art of cruising: the practice of fleeting sex between men, usually anonymously and without exchanging names, often in semi-public indoor spaces (bathrooms, saunas) or outdoors (rest stops, forests). Audience members watched actors re-enact Adonis patrons cruising each other, and made them complicit by having them follow the action around the space, deciding what they watched and what they didn’t. [...]

The reasons for this are many. One is that apps like Grindr and Scruff have made cruising possible on your smartphone. Another is that fear of HIV/Aids made the kind of free sexual exchange depicted in the Adonis play extremely dangerous, leading municipalities to shutter many theaters, bathhouses and saunas where cruising flourished. But as Samuel Delaney describes in his beautiful 1999 book Time Square Red, Times Square Blue, cruising was also a victim of gentrification. It was victim to the pressure from real estate developers which led cities like New York to dispatch the NYPD to “clean up” and crack down on any form of sexual assembly, so that places like Times Square could be rebranded as family-friendly and “Disney-esque”. [...]

But one reason it is so surprising to see cruising being taken seriously in theater, gallery art and literature (domains which, no matter how much they may seem to foster the work of gay men, have their gates kept by straight people) is that a fear of possible cruising has been a driving force in American cultural politics. As the writer and scientist Joseph Osmundson wrote, “This has been the year that cruising has reached the literary mainstream,” but also “the year that gay, queer, and especially trans bodies have been made criminal entities simply for existing in public bathrooms.” All over the US, the threat of cruising has created a wave of transphobia, just as cruising is getting an airing in art – from North Carolina’s notorious HB2 “bathroom bill” to 11 states suing the federal government after the Obama administration directed “US public schools to let transgender students use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity”. As Osmundson writes, “it is in bathrooms that these two trends – integration into the mainstream literary canon and a rightwing backlash against gay and trans progress – currently meet.”

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Slate: How Hollywood Gets Nietzsche Wrong

TEDxTallaght: Homosexuality: It's about survival - not sex | James O'Keefe

This passionate talk from Dr. James O'Keefe MD gives us a deeply personal and fascinating insight into why homosexuality is indeed a necessary and extraordinarily useful cog in nature's wheel of perfection.