Visitors, FutureUse.org is revamping.  Crane operators and ground excavators are toiling the site. In the meantime, visit the old Future Use and read up… http://futureuse.blogspot.com/  

Check out a recent essay by Future Use at tap-shoe hermenaut web journal THE CHISELER: CLEO A profile of the early 1970s warzone between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army, in the context of the FBI adding Assata Shakur to the Top Ten Most Wanted Terrorist List…

Probably no one cares anymore, but early this month, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell claimed “the Left” bugged his office in Louisville and whistleblew the recordings to Mother Jones, a butcher-block political news journal named after Mary Harris Jones, the turn-of-the-century labor provocateuse born in Cork, Ireland.  In 1913, while on trial for organizing coal miners…

Future Use recently posted a couple writings on the ripsnorting history-hitchhike web journal THE CHISELER: The Racket BusterJust before WWII, Special Prosecutor John Harlan Amen led the largest investigation of city corruption in U.S. history.  His target was Brooklyn. From Broadway to BombayMarty Reisman (1930-2012) was a table tennis champ and man-about-town.  He hustled ping-pong…

Future Use was en route to the job interview, waiting for the G train, when across the tracks on the opposite platform, a young man was mugged.  Three youths punched him, snatched his iPhone, and ran. “Owwwww!” cried the young man, in polo shirt, rolled jeans and flipflops.  It sounded like he had just tripped…

“An Email Ain’t a Record?” Governor Andrew Cuomo was under the gun to explain his administration’s policy of failing to save digital correspondence.  Office emails are routinely deleted and Cuomo communicates with his staff strictly using “Blackberry to Blackberry” messaging, which like the private files of J. Edgar Hoover are destroyed by protocol.  The Huffington…

The worlds of politics and genealogy recently converged when Ancestry.com completed the family tree of Barack Obama, which traces the President’s ancestors back to a man called John Punch, who shows up in the 1640s in the Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, and is claimed to be the “first African…

While sitting at John’s Donut Shop on Myrtle Avenue, eating scrambled eggs and drinking coffee, Future Use read two articles. “The Kingpins,” by William Finnegan, in this month’s New Yorker, details the current drug war in Mexico. A 2009 piece by Mary Beard in the The New York Review of Books is about Alexander the…