The frozen paddocks of upstate New York are a long way from the sweltering devastation of Puerto Rico. At the ReRun adoption and retraining facility in East Greenbush, New York, about 40 miles south of Saratoga Springs — where the temperature was 2 degrees Fahrenheit (-17 degrees C) on a recent morning, a nine-year-old U.S.…
On a recent Saturday morning at Belmont Park, trainer Rick Schosberg sat in his office, his dozen or so horses in their stalls after morning training. Within minutes, his attention is needed again, not by his barn staff or one of his horses, but by another trainer with a horse whose racing days have come…
If you follow me on Twitter, you’re going to get – in addition to tweets about New York City, politics, feminism, and the New York Rangers – lots of tweets about cats. And cat rescue. And the treatment of animals in factory farms. And cruelty-free products of various sorts. You’re also going to get a…
That’s the question that producer Doug Tribou and host Bill Littlefield asked me a couple of weeks ago, and over the course of an hour in the NPR studio in New York, I tried to answer it. For obvious reasons, the full hour of conversation didn’t make it into the segment, but some of what…
Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park, Queens is the last racetrack in New York City. Across the Belt Parkway from Kennedy Airport, it has its own stop on the subway, and virtually from the day of its opening 1894, it has been disparaged, the down-market cousin of the upscale tracks that used to populate New…
In his six years on the racetrack, Stud Muffin showed a definite predilection for distance: the bulk of his 14 lifetime victories came at a mile and or more, with the gray guy coming from off the pace, often eking out a win, sometimes winning by a length or so. He seldom won by more…
Brooklyn Backstretch 