NYT: Serendipity as Urban Curator
For years I’ve ridden the N or Q train into Times Square from Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge, which provides one of the greatest cheap visual feasts in America. For the price of a ride you’re suspended 300 feet above the city, looking out the windows to the southwest across the mouth of the East River toward the choiring strings of the Brooklyn Bridge and, far beyond, the brilliant oxidized green of the Statue of Liberty. In an illusion created by the perspective of the moving subway car, she appears to be gliding along the deck of the bridge — the world’s most famous hunk of French neo-Classicism, disco skating backward into Manhattan.
As we play the government shutdown game again, it’s helpful to see from whence we came. (No not from Newt Gingrich’s 1995 government shutdown because he got a bad seat on Clinton’s Air Force One.) No, I mean the first real government shutdown threat this year (what are we up to now, three, four?). The personal politics at play with the failure of The Supercommitte were near preordained from the start. Even with the ideal legislative conditions for compromise, they won’t act in everyone’s favor unless the pressure is really on, which can only come from a genuine US bond crisis. That’s the only thing that got Italy to get its act together. It’s part of what got the world’s greatest legislative body to get its act together. Sadly that’s perhaps the last resort for Congress.
Meanwhile with the seemingfailure of SOPA I can only echo the sentiment of VC Chris Sacca:
I hope the outrage over SOPA might finally inspire the Internet’s billionaires to buy us all a better Congress.
The Economist has been among Silvio Berlusconi’s best chronicler throughout his times in office. All this motivates me to do is go back through their archives.
The Economist first put Silvio Berlusconi on the cover in 2001, when we ran an investigative story looking at his business dealings. Ten years and several libel suits later, he is standing down. Our slideshow remembers this long relationship.
