This One Will

For years I’ve taken a route that runs along Cayuga Lake when I visit relatives on another of New York’s Finger Lakes. On the drive there, I reach this stretch just north of Ithaca around noon, and on a sunny day it’s a beautiful 20-minute drive. On the return trip, though, I hit Route 89 early in the morning, when the hilly road glistens with dew and deer.

Most times you see them in adjacent fields, in groups of three and four, always in perfect Christmas card formation, a little mist for effect. Slowing down usually triggers their game of Red Light Green Light 1-2-3, where they scuffle slightly ahead and suddenly stop, bolt briefly and stop again, more of the scuffle-and-bolt until they finally clear the road. You wonder why you didn’t “Seek Alt Route,” like the yellow signs warn when men in lifts are chain-sawing tree limbs. Why did I think it so important to save 20 minutes by going this way and not another?

Continue reading →

All Figured Out

In America, a lot of the discord on the Israel-Hamas War and the complex and frustrating history of Palestinian statehood stems from the need for a villain.

It’s hard to get moral ambiguity on a piece of cardboard from Staples. Instead, you define your villain and make every attribute from the dropdown (colonialism, imperialism, apartheid) stick. With the widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd, the villain began, understandably, as the police. In the aftermath of the major demonstrations, however, it evolved into anyone who was not a self-avowed anti-racist.

After the October 7 Hamas attacks, American progressives who may not have previously embraced the Palestinian cause found in Israelis a villain as clearcut as the one from June 2020. They held up signs with many variations on the word “solution.” All that tedious history of wars and failed negotiations could be rolled up in “colonialism” and other crimes against humanity attributed to the villain.

Continue reading →

Belleville Forever

Why does it feel like Donald Trump still runs America? We know he owns the news hole, if such a thing still exists, but why does his every proclamation set the media agenda? Is it because he can claim all 220 House Republicans as dependents? or because late-night monologues practically write themselves when he adds new riffs to his rally rambles?

The nightmare America that Trump’s presidency conjured always made me think of the gangster-run metropolis in The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s 2003 animated comedy. Trump certainly made our country an omerta system of thugs. Throughout 2019, he leaned on Jerome Powell, the man he picked to run the Federal Reserve, to lower interest rates. By September, he was demanding that Powell cut interest rates to zero or even usher in negative rates, normally a break-glass option during economic crises. At the time, the U.S. economy was growing solidly and consumer spending was strong. Negative rates mean that savers are penalized and borrowers rewarded: there was no logic for such market manipulation.

Continue reading →

Trickle-Down Landmark

New York City has many “privately owned public spaces,” mostly lobbies or courtyards of commercial buildings that, by agreement, anyone can use. They’re a nice amenity for the public and relative chump change when you consider the tax breaks developers and corporations get in return. One of these spaces—the lobby atrium at 60 Wall Street—is in a 47-story postmodern skyscraper that its owner plans to renovate. After a year-long effort by various individuals to landmark both the 1989 building and its lobby that serves as a subway entrance, the city said no; the owner can tear the thing down.

The atrium is a kooky shrine to 1980s excess that has strangely managed to survive almost intact for 33 years. People have called this Cocaine Décor, I suppose after the esthetics of Scarface. But that’s about a decade before this place went up. When I saw the atrium a decade ago, I thought of it as The Bonfire of the Vanities lobby, a mashup of previous mashups. It feels like an initiation into something, with octagonal Egyptian-columns covered by marble tiles resembling Mughal design. The towers erupt into a bric-a-brac mirrored ceiling, framed with more white and trelliswork, with walls adorned by rock sculptures over which water at one time flowed. The white effect has been described as a “winter garden,” which to me conjures Chekhov and wicker chairs, not an airport hanger. Although the various froufrou (including Miami Vice plastic palm trees that have replaced the original Ficus trees) could be taken as garden ornaments, the giant deco columns quash that idea.

Continue reading →

Torch Song

People in the northern United States will not soon forget this orange-sky summer. The Canadian wildfires causing it are still burning, just one of many simultaneous conflagrations across the continent and the world. After multiple deadly wildfires in California over the past decade, after the huge deadly fires in Greece and Australia, and now with the wildfire in Maui, we have entered the Red Flag Age, where fire weather warnings are as everyday as humidity, barometric pressure, and dewpoint.

The sense of everything being combustible is not confined to climate. The Russian war on Ukraine has generated daily explosions since February 2022. In June, I remember reading of a deadly apartment building explosion in Paris alongside a deadly explosion of a barbecue restaurant in China. In August, there were stories of houses in various parts of the United States (Pennsylvania, Tennessee) spontaneously exploding. Right now it feels like everything can go up in a plume or come down in one, like Putin’s dead man walking, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane exploded midair.

Continue reading →

Hellscape Acres

Twice a week, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, writes a column for the New York Times in which he tries to reassure Americans that the economy is OK, that we are on track for a soft landing after the massive disruptions of COVID. Krugman is popular in the opinion section and, unlike other columnists, is not a niche read. But he has a lot of frenemies. Commenters write that he just doesn’t get it. The chide him for not mentioning price gouging and corporate greed. It’s always the price of eggs they bring up. They also point out things like their wages not having increased in five years. This is one of the rare places in the New York Times where you hear from people who literally don’t have enough cash on hand. Leftist populism lives here, and though this is a small demographic in a non-news-reading America, it’s telling.

The inflation—on top of the MAGA insurgency, the continuing workplace and social disruptions from COVID, Putin’s war, and climate disasters—is making those on the left anxious and uncertain. They find it hard to defend Joe Biden because they want something sudden and new to fix it all. They want a reset from . . . from what exactly?

Continue reading →

Six-Minute Service

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.

Continue reading →

Pluto’s Return

For the first time since the time of the American and French revolutions, Pluto is in the astrological sign of Aquarius. Astrologers consider this a very big deal—presumably because everything you heard about the Age of Aquarius in that the song from Hair is true. Astrologers seem to love Pluto, which astronomers only discovered in 1930 and then reclassified as a “dwarf” in 2006. Astrologers wasted little time in obsessively following the planet’s 248-year orbit around the sun, and they call this March 23 crossing “Pluto’s return.”

Since I learned what astrologers think about Pluto’s movements a few years ago, this small, cold planet has been my mascot for earthly behaviors that I don’t understand. For instance, it seems to me that American voters who call themselves independents are secretly longing for some extra-worldly force to knock them heedlessly in love with authoritarian rule. Even those who don’t yet feel it—the MAGA craziness—want to feel it. It seems like they intentionally put themselves in places (i.e., watching Fox News) where such a conversion might silently occur. In the face of so many Americans metaphorically holding up theirs arms and yelling “Take me!,” the magical thinking of astrology doesn’t seem all that weird.

Continue reading →

People

The financial panic that began with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank introduced us to an odd phrase for such a sterile, suburban-backdrop event: being made whole.

Being made whole is an outcome people expect from lovers—naively as it turns out, at least according to songs. What really plucks the heartstrings is not that the people desired often fail to honor this expectation but the way in which those doing the desiring confront reality. This is what reroutes the Love Train into the self-help aisle.

But in regard to banks, whose idea was it to describe a failed bank’s large depositors holding on to every last cent as being “made whole”? Does the simple fact of having assets make you, as an entity, deserve to be whole? I might buy that concept if all depositors were people, but they’re not.

Continue reading →

Bearing All

The Marjorie Taylor Greene in white fur meme had nearly played itself out by the time Michael Che added the coup-de-grâce of “Cocaine Bear.” The pitifully comic spectacle of Green’s incivility at President Biden’s State of the Union address and the gory comic spectacle of a coked-up CGI bear are neck and neck when it comes to insulting real live bears.

We seem to be having a Bear Moment—pure coincidence but nonetheless illuminating. In addition to Cocaine Bear, there’s a Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie, the Iranian film No Bears, and a streaming series The Bear. Since last year we’ve been in a Fed-induced Bear Market, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought the Sleeping Bear of old political cartoons back to life.

Continue reading →