The Hôtel de Ville of Paris at dusk.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of puzzled email about World New York: Why the name? What kinds of entries are those? Is it a blog? What? So I revised our “about this site” page: Reams of quality writing appear and disappear on the web each day; this site attempts to direct your attention to some of the good bits before they vanish. We search the Internet’s multitude of magazines, newspapers, journals and web logs, both domestic and international, looking for smart, witty, intelligent, relevant and significant extracts. Really, it’s a little more complicated than that. Our extracts address issues that affect New York City, issues that can be seen reflected in the images of the world’s other great cities: New Delhi, Sydney, London, Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Dublin, Mexico City, Vancouver, Lagos, Rome, wherever. In turn, our extracts also reflect typically American issues that appear reflected in the images of the nation’s other, lesser cities (and we say “lesser” with all the affection of the elder child for the runt): Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City, Seattle, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Boston, Washington DC, New Orleans, Detroit, Philadelphia, Denver, San Francisco, both Portlands and St. Louis. What makes New York City significant as a crossroads of study is this: Up to 40 percent of New York City’s population is made of people born in another country, another 20 percent are people born in another state. So, 60 percent of the city has consciously chosen to be here, for the Great Experiment. Whether they understood the laboratory before arrival, they get it now, because they’ve decided to stay, each resident a participant, fulfilling a role so clearly defined that soon enough they’ll find that their kind of people are being written about in the style sections of the newspapers, that the magazines are doing features on their types of friends, and when they reach the hum-drum stage of unblinking at famous people on the other side of the bar or at three kinds of human fluids on a subway platform, then they’ve won. No, fame and money are not that sign of true achievement here in New York City: the sign of real achievement is the ability to burden yourself with the staggering amount of stress, stupidity and the unresolved domestic disputes of your neighbors, and still think about tripping lightly off to spend a good portion of your paycheck on dinner for the third night in a row with an acquaintance you don’t really like on the off chance you won’t have to pay and can maybe get sex/a record deal/a job/a better agent out of it. Of course, that’s only some of the people that arrive here. There’s another whole batch that have no clue what they’re in for, believing too much in what they see on the television or read in the books, not knowing that everything they were told about the city before arrival was a lie, both good and bad; instead, there’s another whole set of good and bad to fill the void. These are the people who walk down Fifth Avenue on a summer Sunday evening just before sundown, confused—It’s Fifth Avenue! There should be more stores! They should be open! I just want to spend a little money! But we say, here in New York City, keep reading those books, watching those television shows, viewing those movies with their impossible movie-only geography in which a character can go from DUMBO to Central Park in a minute, in which the Empire State Building falls and crumbles at the end of a street that doesn’t exist, we say keep consuming those works, consume them for their myths and education on what the higher ideals of the city are supposed to be, because by God or whoever’s in charge, without the schmucks and suburban chumps, what yard stick of our own progress will we have? That temptation to destroy the familiar skyline of New York, whether with a bomb-loaded rental truck or a screenplay, proves the enduring legend of the city. Unfortunately, the legend is also why we no longer have a Great-White Way, but a Great White Sneaker Way, in which big-haired loud-mouthed tourists try to out-do what they think is the real New York—That’s okay! It’s New York—and then, unexpectedly finding kindness, interest and even love on the part of the supposedly hostile natives, send their amusing letters week after week to the Times‘s Metropolitan Diary. Ha ha! Zabar’s! Cab drivers! Bus drivers! The subway! Those gruff but lovable beggars! So foreign! Ha ha! They won’t be laughing long. We, the nation, are undergoing a massive population shift: immigrants and our young from the less significant places are moving more rapidly into our larger cities and long-time residents are moving out. With this movement comes a transfer of knowledge and culture, and the assumption that the “city is bad” and the countryside is “parochial and provincial” (in the pejorative senses, of course), is blurred, even obliterated, as the solutions used in the city to maintain livability in a high-stress, highly competitive environment are found to be useful in the much-more-complex-than-we-suspected countryside, in the small towns