Good morning. It's Thursday. We'll look at a summer school class on the presidency. We'll also find out why a beloved Brooklyn hardware store is closing.
The professor in Politics 3316, a class on presidents and the presidency, had talked about how popular Franklin D. Roosevelt had been, how unpopular Harry Truman had been and how historians have come to see Truman more favorably as the years have passed. Natale Cipollina, teaching the class at Baruch College in Manhattan, had also talked about Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. "Both of them are tragic in the sense of ancient Greek mythology — you are brought down by hubris," he said. But Cipollina had not mentioned the current occupant of the White House or his predecessor, now the presumptive Republican nominee. Nor had Cipollina brought up the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. Cipollina said regularly tells students, "If you want a class in current events, go find it." That did not stop Lisbeth Tavarez from giving a current events answer when I asked her, during a break, how Politics 3316 was relevant to today's world. "We need to learn about history to learn about what is going to happen," she said in a conversation that soon jumped to the debate between President Biden and Donald Trump. She said that "Trump focused too much on immigration and the border." "Trump was a little narcissistic," she added. "Biden was not able to defend his ideas." Kylie Jones, another student in the class, said the back-and-forth of the debate had lacked the "professionalism" she remembered when President Barack Obama debated Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, in 2012 — when she was 12 years old. She also lamented social media's role in students' daily lives. "My generation, we just know the title of an article," she said. "We hear one thing on TikTok and run with it." A couple of visitors slipped into Cipollina's class on Tuesday — the president of Baruch College, S. David Wu, and the chancellor of the City University of New York, Félix Matos Rodriguez. I asked Matos Rodriguez the same question I had asked Tavarez. Matos Rodriguez said that Cipollina's class "couldn't be more relevant." "I think it's indispensable in being able to understand the office" of the presidency and presidential power "and important for CUNY," he said. "Forty percent of our students are not born in the U.S. Some are children of immigrants." A class like Cipollina's provides details on how the founders structured the federal government, he said. As for how Cipollina was covering the presidents and the presidency, Matos Rodriguez said, "To his credit, he's doing it in an intellectual, nonpartisan way." And why was the CUNY chancellor sitting in on a summer-school class? "It's important to send the message that we're not in hammocks over the summer," he said. Between in-person classes and online or hybrid sessions, CUNY has 65,000 students taking courses this summer, up 2 percent from last year. CUNY says the bump in summer enrollment followed a 3 percent increase in enrollment in the 2023-24 academic year, compared with 2022-23. Back in class, Cipollina, an adjunct assistant professor at Baruch, talked about two governors who went on to the Oval Office —Jimmy Carter, from Georgia, and Ronald Reagan, from California. Then he reminded the students that they had homework. He had assigned them to write out Lincoln's Gettysburg Address by hand. It is only 272 words long, according to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. "George Will" — the conservative columnist and commentator — "once said the Gettysburg Address was the 19th century's version of a sound bite," Cipollina said later. "I want to make sure they have actually read it. I don't want to test their highlighting, copying and pasting skills. I want them to actually read the thing." WEATHER It will be a mostly sunny day, with temperatures in the high 80s, with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning. Temperatures will settle into the mid-70s in the evening, with a chance of showers overnight. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Aug. 13 (Tisha B'Av). The latest New York news
Arts & Culture
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. A hardware store closes
What about Franklin, the potbellied pig? It was the inevitable question as word spread that Crest Hardware & Urban Garden Center was closing after 62 years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Franklin would root through mulch or nap in the office when his owners, Joe and Liza Franquinha, brought him from home. Joe Franquinha, who runs the store that his father and his uncle opened in 1962, said the closing was prompted by real estate pressures. He is one of four partners who own the building. He was against selling it but was outvoted, he said, adding, "I was told that they had no interest in renewing my lease." Franquinha told me that the building would probably be replaced by condominiums. "I can't say for certain because I'm not a developer," he said, adding that no developer was in the picture "right now." Seeing Franklin — and Finlay, Crest's African gray parrot — was "part of the experience of shopping at Crest," Franquinha said. "It's always easier when a parent has to bring their kid to do an errand. It's all about the angle you work. When you're talking to your kid, instead of saying, 'Let's run these errands,' you say, 'Let's go visit Franklin the pig and Finlay the parrot.' It makes it easier." METROPOLITAN DIARY Elizabeth Street Garden
Dear Diary: It was 11 a.m. at the Elizabeth Street Garden. I took my seat at a table in the sun and opened my book. Moments later, a wedding party shuffled slowly down the gravel path and gathered at the shaded end of the garden. A man to my left sifted through a hefty pile of pages that appeared to be a script. Every few moments he murmured a line or two to himself, licked his finger and flipped the page. Across from him, a woman's face was covered by her laptop. She snapped her fingers and sang a pretty melody into her screen, hurriedly jotting down lyrics in the notebook beside her. All I could see was her curly hair bouncing to the beat. A couple sitting beside the woman shared a Caesar salad with a pair of chopsticks, alternating bites between themselves and the chubby pug that sat by their feet and patiently awaited his next bite as drool dripped from his mouth. To the left of these three, a group of girls pieced together their night out. One asked anxiously: "So, you guys swear on your lives I didn't drunkenly call my boss in the bodega and quit my job?!" "Namaste, Aliya!" one friend yelled back All at once the actor looked up from his lines, the songwriter stopped snapping, the hungry family stopped chewing and the friends quieted down. The garden erupted in applause and stood as the groom kissed his bride. I didn't read a single page of my book that day. — Morgan Weber Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Geordon Wollner and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: A class on presidents that doesn’t mention Biden or Trump
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