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**tomt** · August 30th, 2018, 01:56 AM

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**tomt** · August 31st, 2018, 03:43 AM

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**tomt** · August 31st, 2018, 09:28 PM

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**tomt** · September 1st, 2018, 02:26 AM

As I said, I was teaching them how to make gold. I said, to make gold, we need mercury and one neutron. And they looked at me, ?But gold is one neutron less atomically than mercury.? I said, ?Yes if you want to take a proton, a neutron, and an electron out of mercury to make it gold, it is a lot of work.

But if you put one neutron in the mercury, which immediately changes to a proton and an electron, then you have unstable mercury, which becomes gold and helium, and we can push it to become energy.

**tomt** · September 1st, 2018, 06:48 PM

News Desk
Three Fros?s for Cynthia Nixon
By Tyler FoggattAugust 30, 2018

The Cynthia Nixon contingent started to boo before her debate with Andrew Cuomo even began, on Wednesday, as the broadcast kicked off by showing a new Cuomo commercial—twice.Photograph by Craig Ruttle / Getty
On Wednesday evening, Governor Andrew Cuomo debated Cynthia Nixon, the actress, activist, and now gubernatorial candidate, at Hofstra University, in the only debate before next month’s Democratic primary. The debate was not open to the public. So people gathered in their apartments, at a gastropub in Queens, at a bar-restaurant-movie-theatre hybrid in Bushwick, and at an Applebee’s in the Bronx, to watch Nixon, a progressive, try to close Cuomo’s thirty-point lead in the polls.

Bleecker Street Bar, which normally would have been showing the Yankees game, used its ten television sets and projector screen to broadcast the Cuomo-Nixon showdown. In the main room, thirty or so people had gathered to send off their co-worker, Rose, who was leaving a software-engineering company after seven years on the job. They bought Rose drinks and reminisced as best they could, while more than a hundred Nixon supporters streamed past the leather booths and dartboards, crowding into the back room, where Nixon campaign volunteers were hosting a party. The group stood out from the other patrons, wearing rainbow-festooned “cynthia for ny” gear, blue buttons with the phrase “Unqualified Lesbian” (how Christine Quinn, the former New York City council speaker and a Cuomo supporter, described Nixon, in March), and shirts with slogans like “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” One woman wore a crop top covered in images of Robert Mueller. “Is that Mueller?” someone asked her. “Yeah,” she confirmed. “I love him.”

The Nixon contingent started to boo before the debate even began, as the broadcast kicked off by showing a new Cuomo commercial—twice. Cuomo and Nixon took the stage, Cuomo wearing a navy suit and blue patterned tie, and Nixon in a sea-foam-green button-up and white blazer. “I’m not an Albany insider like Governor Cuomo,” Nixon said in her first answer. “But I think that experience doesn’t mean that much if you’re not actually good at governing.”

There were cheers and “oohs” in both rooms of the bar. Though not everyone was there for the Nixon party, hardly anyone seemed to be a Cuomo supporter. The candidates sparred over health care, labor laws, campaign-finance reform, and Trump. Cuomo dispelled rumors of running for President in 2020 by declaring that he’ll finish a full term “unless God strikes me dead.” Someone at the back-room party had designed a drinking game for the event. Whenever “Cuomo mansplains,” the rules dictated, “give a sip of your drink to the nearest non-male ID person.” If either candidate brings up immigration, “ask for your next drink without ICE.” The game was quickly abandoned, and people drank their beer and fros? at their own pace (fast). “Had you followed the rules of the game, you would have died from alcohol poisoning,” one attendee said.

By 7:15 p.m., a quarter of the way through the debate, it was getting uncomfortably warm in the back room. A couple of women flipped their heads upside down to put their hair in buns. Natalie James, a Democratic Socialists of America organizer who was wearing a “Dump Cuomo!” button, looked optimistic. (The D.S.A. endorsed Nixon in late July, calling her their “best chance” to win universal rent control and Medicare for all in New York.) James said that she’s been warning her friends against placing too much emphasis on the polls, citing the result of Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, on Tuesday. She noted that Andrew Gillum, who polls had suggested would place third or fourth in the race, defeated Gwen Graham, the frontrunner and daughter of the former Florida governor Bob Graham. “State-level polls are known to be inaccurate. Look at Ocasio and Bernie.”

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James, an attorney who defends tenants against landlords, works in Bed-Stuy. She groaned about being late to the debate because the A and F trains were delayed. “Just another day with Cuomo’s M.T.A.,” she lamented. (She was not the only attendee to complain about the F train specifically.)

Nixon, who was on the offensive for most of the debate, hit Cuomo hard on the subways. “He used the M.T.A. like an A.T.M.,” she said, accusing him of taking funding from the M.T.A. and using it on his “pet projects.” (“My opponent lives in the world of fiction. I live in the world of fact,” Cuomo responded, countering that capital repairs for the subway are paid for by the city, not by the state, though this is a point of some contention.) A woman did a lasso motion and threw her invisible rope at the screen, reeling Cuomo in.

“We’re doing more construction work than at any time since Robert Moses,” Cuomo said.

“Fuck Robert Moses!” a woman shouted.

A young woman in her twenties furiously live-tweeted the entire debate. “Governor Cuomo is like me with Amazon,” she typed. “I put everything I want in my cart, but, when I see the costs of shipping, I say I can’t afford it & make irresponsible decisions based on personal desire.” She told me that she had been leaning toward voting for Nixon, and that the debate solidified her decision—she was less impressed by Nixon than she was disappointed by Cuomo, who she would have found more convincing if he didn’t “make so many excuses.” “I think that, generally speaking, being defensive is off-putting,” she said.

Alex Liao, one of the event’s organizers, entered the room with several boxes of pizza.

“Any vegan options?” someone asked, jokingly.

“No,” Liao said, laughing.

During a lightning round of questions for both candidates, Nixon was asked if she would give up the hundred-and-seventy-nine-thousand-dollar governor’s salary and return it to the state, since she identifies as a Democratic Socialist. She paused and thought about it for a moment before answering, “Sure.”

Abram Thomas Blau, the person clamoring for vegan options, described that as a favorite moment of the debate. “It really looked like she hadn’t necessarily considered one way or another whether she was going to forgo her salary, and then she made the right call in front of us,” Blau said. “I’m not dumb—there’s a possibility that there was a little political theatre there—but, still, getting to watch her do the right thing, in real time, was pretty cool.”

Gillian Feuerberg came to the bar to say goodbye to Rose, but she ended up watching the debate, too. While smoking a cigarette outside, Feuerberg said that Nixon’s rise felt “sudden.” “I love what she’s saying, but I don’t know who she is, or what her voting record is,” Feuerberg explained. “Governor is a huge thing. The gubernatorial race is different than state senate, city council. I feel like she should have started with a really solid district in Manhattan. Going straight for governor? That’s pretty intense. That’s almost like being a reality star and going straight for the Presidency.”

“The Democratic party is in such a weird place right now,” she continued. “I respect Cuomo for debating Nixon, as the incumbent. What’s happened in the last few primaries with these amazing progressives coming out of the woodwork—you have to respect that. You have to respect what has happened with the left going so far left. You can’t be the centrist Democrat anymore, even if you’re elected one.”

When progressives don’t win in Democratic primaries, perhaps the next best thing for them is to have pushed their opponents further left. Since Nixon entered the race, Cuomo has started the process of legalizing marijuana—which he once called a “gateway drug”—in New York. In April, he announced that he’d restore voting rights to felons on parole and declared his support for a ban on plastic bags. (Last year, Cuomo killed a New York City proposal that would have levied a five-cent fee on plastic bags.)

Outside the bar after the debate, Cassandra Leveille, another D.S.A. member, showed off the tattoo on her right arm. It was an illustration of Dorian Corey, a drag queen from the 1991 documentary “Paris is Burning.” She explained that, at the end of the documentary, Corey gives a speech about how everyone wants to make a mark on the world, but, as you grow older, you lower your expectations for success. “You don’t have to bend the whole world,” she paraphrased. “If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.”

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