Photo by Scott Matthews, who has sparked quite a discussion on Authenticity in the Age of Instagram.

January 18, 2016 Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high of 30 degrees.

Notices:
Lots of free music, readings and many more events are on our calendar.

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Read the speech he gave at Riverside Church on the UWS in 1967 to protest the Vietnam War. “For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.”

News:
An Upper West Sider picks up the pieces of her life after a fire guts her apartment. And she offers advice to other people. “Fire billowing through shattered hi-rise building windows, fire fighters armed with hoses blasting torrents of water at high pressure—all familiar images of evening news fare. Never would I have imagined this scenario in my own home. But not even a fire-proof building, as ours was, could shield us from the hazards of a shoddy hot plate, an appliance prohibited in college dorms; the type that caused the fire in a Brooklyn home last spring, wiping out almost an entire family of 10.”

An armed robber held up the Unique News & Smoke shop on Broadway near W. 79th St. on the night of Jan. 5.

A Good Samaritan took off his own shirt on the A train between 125th and 59th to give it to a homeless man. Someone caught it on video.

It’s still not clear whether developers will get the go-ahead to turn a landmarked church into condos at 96th street and Central Park West.

The 73-year-old pedestrian who was hit by a motorcyclist on Amsterdam Avenue and 96th street last week has died. If you know anything about the man, please let us know, as one reader says he’s well-known in the community.

Comptroller Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Letitia James held a rally at Goddard Riverside this weekend to urge e-cigarette companies to stop marketing to young people. Read his release here.