Today in City Hall Park—from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.—advocates for adult literacy will be protesting the Mayor's proposed budget. You should feel free to join them!

The City's money for literacy programs is a tiny, tiny part of the budget, but it's constantly being hacked at. All told, just $13 million in proposed cuts (in a $65.7 billion budget) impact thousands of people who are trying to master English.

The City should be throwing money at literacy, to make it the greatest city it could be. That something like a third of New York City residents aren't fully literate in English is a waste of human [...]

GIVE ME THAT TEN DOLLARS! No, but for real. Today is allegedly youth literacy day and there is literally nothing I like more than literacy. You can send, via text, or even via "mail" I suppose, a donation to 826NYC, which sees 22,000 young people a year. Go on! Try it! "Make a donation of $8.26 on August 26th by texting 'WRITE' to 20222." Or you can PayPal a donation online. DO YOU SEE THAT CHILD CRYING? THAT CHILD IS CRYING BECAUSE SHE IS NOT LITERATE ENOUGH TO READ WEBSITES THAT FANCY LITERARY PEOPLE CAN BE DISMISSIVE ABOUT. HELP HER!

When you read through the proposed New York City budget for fiscal year 2011, many of the budget cuts don't appear to be so terrible. And we are realists, and we know, when there's not a ton of cash and when the state is mucking one around, cuts gotta come from somewhere! So, they want to close four pools, close a homeless drop-in center, close 50 senior centers, get rid of a bunch of firefighters, and apparently really do in assistance to the libraries. It gets a little more harrowing when you look at the total City worker layoffs and attrition: almost 11,000 people across the board, and more [...]