Bread, Circuses and 26.2 Miles of Looking Away

Nov 2, 2026

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New York City

Sunday on the Bridges

On Sunday New York did what it does best: it put on a show. The 55th New York City Marathon marked fifty years since the race first ran through all five boroughs. Nearly 60,000 runners were expected, along with as many as 2.5 million spectators on the route. Sweden’s Andreas Almgren won the men’s race in 2:06:01, and Kenya’s Sheila Chepkirui won the women’s in 2:24:36.

Say the good part first. A marathon is a fine thing: strangers on a bridge, cowbells in the Bronx, a free people running for no reason except that they can.

The city guarded it like a fortress. The NYPD put thousands of officers on the course, with drones, helicopters and more than 10,000 barricades, and Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters there were no known credible threats. The mayor handed out 350 free grandstand tickets. Everything was in its place.

Two Days Earlier

At about 8 p.m. on Friday, a 28-year-old runner named Katie Suarez was stabbed in the neck on the Shore Parkway Greenway in Bath Beach, Brooklyn. Reports through Monday describe her as critical, on life support at NYU Langone Brooklyn. As of this writing police have announced no arrest. Crime Stoppers is offering up to $10,000.

Fairness requires the other ledger. The NYPD reports that through Sept. 30 the city recorded 203 murders and 489 shooting incidents, the fewest in recorded history, with robbery down 12.2 percent. Credit the officers. But rape is up 3.7 percent, to 1,594 cases, and felony assault is flat, 22,781 against 22,726. A stabbing on a running path is a felony assault. The numbers are better. The numbers are not a woman on a ventilator.

Dystopia, in the literary sense, is rarely chaos. It is order that has forgotten what it is for.

Bread

The Roman satirist Juvenal said a people who once gave out legions and consulships had come to long for only two things: bread and circuses. New York has both in abundance. The circus ran Sunday. The bread is a ledger.

In May, 570,294 New Yorkers were on cash assistance and 1,685,281 on SNAP, per the city’s own HRA fact sheet. That is lower than a year ago, and the city credits restored work requirements and new federal SNAP rules in part. But it is far above the 408,430 on cash assistance in May 2021. Meanwhile the poverty rate for 2024 stood at 26 percent, a record for the third year running, per Robin Hood and Columbia’s Poverty Tracker: 2.2 million people, about 450,000 of them children. And the City Council adopted a $125.8 billion budget for fiscal 2027, the largest expense budget in its history.

Here is the opinion, labeled as such. A program judged by how many it enrolls has little reason to ask how many it releases. Hilaire Belloc warned in 1912, in The Servile State, that a society which guarantees the poor a minimum while leaving them without property settles into a servile order, not a free one. Compassion that never asks for a way out begins to look like management. A rule that asks a man to work is not cruelty; it is respect.

The Fine Print

Then there are the indictments, all allegations until a jury says otherwise. In June, federal prosecutors charged Frank Carone, Eric Adams’s former chief of staff, with taking $120,000 in bribes to steer a nearly $7 million emergency migrant-shelter contract to a Queens hotel that city staff had judged too small. He and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty. In October, Gothamist reported new federal charges against Adams aide Anthony Herbert, accused of pocketing more than $120,000 in kickbacks from a nonprofit funded by a power company for community programs in public housing.

And last Thursday the Manhattan district attorney indicted eight people for allegedly stealing more than $7 million in food benefits from thousands of cardholders, many never reimbursed, in what prosecutors called essentially a fraud factory run from the back room of a Yonkers deli. Money meant for the poor, taken from the poor. That is not a scandal in a government that works. It is the weather in one that does not.

The Road From Jerusalem

In Luke’s gospel a man is beaten on the road, and a priest and a Levite see him and pass by on the other side. The Samaritan stops. He does not hand the man a form. He binds the wounds, pays the innkeeper, and promises to come back. Help in that story is personal, local, costly and finite. It is a little platoon, not a bureaucracy.

New York will run again next November. The barricades will be stacked and the cameras gone. The poverty rate will still be 26 percent. A runner may still be fighting for her life, and no one will have asked what all that fence was for. Bread and circuses are cheap. Neighbors are not. That is the whole difference between a city and a stage set.

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