A couple of years ago, I saw a tweet about an entitled white novelist who’d just published a memoir about being entitled. So I read Jonathan Dee’s New York Times review of Quiet Street: On American Privilege, by the novelist Nick McDonell, an exemplar of the “blue-blooded, white upper class” who “reaped enormous benefits from having grown up in hyper-privileged circumstances.” According to Dee, McDonell “sees . . . [his privilege] more clearly now, and he feels bad about it. And so, having unconsciously monetized these unearned advantages all his life . . . he now monetizes his consciousness of them, courtesy of corporate publishing, at a rate of roughly $1,495.73 per page.”

Dee’s is a competent and composed takedown of McDonell’s grossly ironic social transgression. Yet when I looked up Dee’s bio, I learned that he, too, is a successful novelist who graduated from Yale and went straight to work for George Plimpton at The Paris Review. To a probably lesser degree, he himself is one of the entitled . . . which, according to the worldview of the New York Times, is the only way it could be. Why, you couldn’t rightly have some working-class striver review McDonell’s book now, could you? That would be socialist class warfare. No, it could only be someone “internal” to the club.

On a bright, breezy Saturday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its redesigned and reconceived Michael C. Rockefeller wing with holdings from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. At one time or another, I had breezed past the wing’s 1,726 objects before the 2021 renovation began. When friends wanted to check out the architectural bling related to the Oceania rooms—specifically, a reconstructed Ceremonial House Ceiling by Kwoma artists of Papua New Guinea—I went along.

In 1982, the Met had acquired pre-Columbian and African art and artifacts collected by Nelson A. Rockefeller, the politician and oil dynasty scion. Nelson’s son Michael, a young ethnologist, had purchased various artwork from the Pacific islands and Australia before dying in a boat accident in New Guinea in 1961. With the Rockefeller acquisition, the Met built a 40,000-square-foot addition to house it. This renovation changes the floor plan to better integrate the wing with the larger museum, providing a bridge from Greek and Roman galleries that begins with Africa.

Sometimes the things you can’t believe have happened are not only not bad, but actually quite good. Like Manhattan’s congestion pricing plan that finally crawled past the finish line on Sunday.

Drivers now have to pay $9 to enter the busiest part of Manhattan during peak commuting hours, which, if all goes as planned, will unclog the city’s gridlocked streets while raising billions for the MTA. This idea has been stalled for years, most recently by Governor Kathy Hochul. An angry chorus of suburban commuters and public officials has done everything in its power to stop implementation. On Friday, a federal judge rejected a last-minute challenge brought by the state of New Jersey.

It came as no surprise to learn that Kamala Harris will skip this year’s Al Smith dinner, where presidential candidates have historically come together to exchange friendly barbs for the benefit of Catholic Charities. Harris has got far better things to do on October 17 (campaigning) and much better places to be than New York City. It’s not known whether Donald Trump will show for the dinner, though he will be at Madison Square Garden on October 27 for a fond-memories style tribute to the infamous American Nazi party rally of 1939.

Things aren’t good here in the Big Apple. Our indicted mayor refuses to step down amid federal investigations of bribery and corruption within his inner circle, a wave of resignations, and a few arrests. Eric Adams faces five counts of bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign donations. There is no official charge for the chaos and leadership vacuum he has created, but 69% of registered city voters want him to resign or be removed from office by Governor Kathy Hochul, a ribbon-cutter politician with neither vision nor moral backbone.

Since childhood, I’ve been keenly aware of the moment early in February in the Northeast when the sun suddenly, out of nowhere, gets brighter. It’s still winter, but the bareness of deciduous branches against a cloudless blue sky gleams like crystal, stunning the eyes—a celestial antidote to Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light” that makes interior winter afternoons funereal. Something is substantially different.

This year, this late-winter light has been overlaid by a month-earlier spring—a climate story unto itself. But still in Central Park the branches have yet to fluff out, and you can survey the landscape with rare clarity. This is a great opportunity to marvel at the variegated shapes and patterns of the tree crowns, at the way every trunk below seems positioned to always be “in concert” with the whole.

The tragic killing of Jordan Neely—and the tragic situation that everyone on that MTA subway car found themselves in on May 1—has only darkened New York City’s outlook for overcoming pandemic setbacks.

Neely’s death instantly became a cause for young progressives. They want “justice for Jordan” and they want to see Daniel Penny tried for murder, but they are not offering new solutions to the problems that caused this descent for all of us.

As the blizzard in Buffalo raged over Christmas, the unfolding tragedy was all but ignored a couple hours east where I spent the holiday. In New York’s Southern Tier, people were focused on the frozen windows of their cars as they traveled short distances with gifts. It was deadly quiet. All the front-yard blowups had gone airless, frozen to the ground.

Nearly 40 people died in the worst storm to hit the Erie County region since 1977, the mayor and county executive blaming each other days after. Regardless of how extreme weather stages these kinds of ambushes, this was something that shouldn’t have happened in today’s “Empire State,” especially considering that New York’s Governor, Kathy Hochul, hails from Buffalo.

“Where are the people?” one of my friends asked when we saw West Side Story at the Lincoln Square AMC a week before Christmas. We knew the Spielberg musical was tanking at the box office, but we thought that a theater sitting on the actual terrain of the movie plot might be a draw. It was a rainy Saturday night, and I had to assume that the old people—the only viable audience for entertainment set in 1957—were staying away because of that and Omicron. Even with Tony Kushner as screenwriter, these aficionados of the late, great Lincoln Plaza Cinemas (1981-2018) could not be coaxed out.

We live with the scourge of “presentism”—considering the values of your own time as the only valid lens through which to view history. Ironically, lost history and identity is a subtext of Spielberg’s revival—gentrification by rich white people nullifying everything the turf-war combatants stand for. You’d think such a concept would have some presentism resonance for today’s young people—the bitter hatreds on two sides fighting over a mere 20 blocks. But then you’d have to be willing to view history on its own terms—something colleges and universities no longer advocate.

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has historically claimed the whole of December as far as tree media goes. Last year’s conifer drama wasn’t related to COVID but to a tiny saw-whet owl that came as the tree’s unintended plus-one. “Rocky” was described as being “rescued,” as “clinging to the branches,” as a “stowaway.” A Syracuse paper had the most Onion-esque headline: “Oneonta owl found in Rockefeller Christmas tree inspires a children’s book.”

Though there was no Oneonta owl this year, the 79-foot, 12-ton Norway spruce made its customary hyped appearance with the Daily News and the Post dutifully amplifying the fact sheet bullets: more than 50,000 multicolored lights! a 900-pound star with 70 spikes covered in 3 million crystals!