Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 505

“My parents adopted me when they were elderly, so they were...

“My parents adopted me when they were elderly, so they were almost like my grandparents. They died a month apart when I was seventeen. I wish I’d treated them a bit better, and saved the drinking and partying for when I was an adult.”

Two months until the HONY book drops on October 15th, and a...

Two months until the HONY book drops on October 15th, and a handful of top-secret, voice-activated advance copies have just now arrived. I handed one off to Anna, the 95 year old master poetess and sex joke encyclopedia who always sits on …the corner. I waited nervously for her review. After a thorough examination, she offered up some superlative-laden quotes:

"Wow, you made a real book!"
"It’s so heavy!"
"Take the picture quick, my arms are tired!"

So take it from Anna. If you want a real, heavy book that will make your arms tired, you have come to the right place.

Humans of New York

*304 full color pages (that’s right, the silky-feeling kind)

*Over 400 meticulously curated, artfully arranged images and captions, gathered over three years of working like a farm horse. (75 of these are new and unseen.)

*If nestled between thick, unread Russian novels on a bookshelf, the HONY book will help to convey an elusive, sexually charged quality of earthy high mindedness. (You can thank me later.)

*Retails for $29.99, but you can preorder now for under $19.

AMAZON: http://amzn.to/10sbtW5
BARNES AND NOBLE: http://bit.ly/16SycBf
INDIEBOUND: http://bit.ly/191EZLF

She asked if I wanted to hear a poem she’d written when...

She asked if I wanted to hear a poem she’d written when she was younger. (At what age, she couldn’t remember) She then recited it from memory. I had her repeat it several times so I could get all the words right:
 

Were I to dream,
then dream I would
of days that have gone by.

Your eyes would gleam
and so would mine,
but joys remembered are no longer mine.

I walk in a garden of memory,
reliving the joys and the sorrows as well.
I walk with a cane down memory lane,
perhaps there, joys remembered will remain.

Perhaps when my hair has turned to gray
and my face is etched with pain,
I’ll walk with a cane down memory lane.
Perhaps there, joys remembered will remain.

The man on the right was from Colombia, and therefore not a...

The man on the right was from Colombia, and therefore not a native English speaker. He couldn’t tell me much about himself, so I started speaking to the man on the left about his newborn daughter. 

"What’s been the biggest surprise of having a child?" I asked.
"How easy it is," he said. "We were worried about what kind of parents we’d be. But having a child was easy. It was second nature to us. Like swimming." 

At this point the Colombian man looked very concerned. He scrunched up his face, and said: “Your wife have birth in swimming pool!?”

Today in microfashion…

Today in microfashion…

Ran into these young women in Chelsea. They told me they’d...

Ran into these young women in Chelsea. They told me they’d just met at a summer programming course called Girls Who Code. “The program tries to close the gender gap in technology,” they told me. “We’ve learned a lot of awesome things. But the best part is that we’ve gotten to meet some really cool female programmers. It’s much less intimidating knowing that there are women in the field who are happy, well-adjusted, and doing awesome things. It’s good to know that programmers aren’t just pale guys who sit alone in their basements.”

"What was the saddest moment of your life?""When my father...

"What was the saddest moment of your life?"
"When my father died."
"How did he die?"
"He was in an accident back in Guyana. He was riding a motorcycle and got thrown into a stream."
"Do you remember a moment when you most admired your father?"
"My father was a carpenter. And when I was growing up, he would take a ferry every morning across the river to find work. It was the Essequibo River. A very dangerous river. When he returned home in the evening, sometimes I would wait by the docks for him. Every once in awhile, the tides were so bad that the boat could not land. And it would wait offshore. If he saw me waiting for him, he would jump off the boat and swim to me. No other man would do that. It was a very dangerous river."

"What do you want to be when you grow up?""An...

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"An architect."
"What’s the hardest part about being an architect?"
"Making the drawings."
"What’s the best part about being an architect?"
"Making places for people to live."

Wanted to tell one more story from YMCA camp. As part of their...

Wanted to tell one more story from YMCA camp. As part of their camp experience, each camper chooses a goal that he/she wishes to accomplish before the end of the session. Each camper is then assigned a counselor to mentor them in pursuit of their goal.

This is Malik from Brooklyn. Last summer, Malik’s goal was to stop bullying at camp.
"How do you do that?" I asked.
"Well, you can’t stop it completely," he said. "But if you see someone getting bullied, you can ask the bully to think about how he would feel if the same thing happened to him."

The coolest part of the story happened after camp ended, when Malik returned home to Brooklyn. He ran for president of his 4th grade class on an anti-bullying platform, and won the election because “there were 15 other kids who got bullied who all voted for him.” After he was elected, he convened a meeting of all the class presidents, and passed a school-wide rule than anyone seen bullying would have to serve detention during both lunch and recess.

Earlier this year we raised over $100,000 to send deserving kids...

Earlier this year we raised over $100,000 to send deserving kids from Bedford-Stuyvesant to summer camp. Yesterday drove 2 hours north of the city, and took a tour of the New York YMCA Sleepaway Camp. (The destination for many of the kids we supported.) Pictured below were my tour guides— Alexa and Emerald. 

Even though it rained during my entire tour, everybody seemed to be having a great time. There was archery, kickball, swimming, volleyball, ceramics, painting, watersports, and hundreds of tacos. 

As told to me by the executive director, Wheaton Griffin: “Our goal is to provide our campers with the same camp experience available to wealthy children. Most of our campers are here on scholarships. But they have just as much fun as kids at expensive camps. We don’t have a lot of the fancy stuff here,” he said. “And we don’t need it, either.”