RECALL COVERAGE
The LAT is collecting its recall-election coverage on this page.
Dynamist Blog
ONLINE BIBLIOGRAPHY
The online bibliography for The Substance of Style is done. (I do hope to get a few more permissions to reprint articles on this site.)
ONE LAST ACCOUNT
Jonathan Gradowski describes the blackout from the point of view of someone who assumes you can get anything at any hour of the day or night in NYC--and hence has no food in his house.
Maybe I'm too far from the action, but it seems remarkable to me how fast the northeast has recovered from such a massive blackout.
BLACKOUT REPORT
Long-time readers will remember Tama Starr's 9/11 reports. Here's her report on the blackout:
On Thursday afternoon when the computers popped off and the lights dimmed -- brownout! -- I said: No prob, I'll walk home. Then I said: Wait a minute, what'll I do when I get there? I live on the 68th floor. Think I'll stay at the office.
In minutes the place emptied out as everyone ran for their cars, arranged rides, hit the trail. A century ago thousands of people walked to and from work over the East River bridges, but they don't now. Only Bob Jackowitz, who lives way out on Long Island via the LIRR, and I were left.
The emergency lights blinked on, and I stopped cursing the architect for forcing us to install so many. Our office is a renovated townhouse, so we'd have sleeping quarters, breakfast food, even hot water. Our humble altitude, only four stories, runs the plumbing on city water pressure: no pumps.
We stingily kept the doors and windows shut to preserve the conditioned air. At dark we went out. Restaurants were closed but the Chippery, a sandwich bar around the corner, was open, twinkling with candlelight like a Byzantine chapel. Everyone was ordering salad "with everything" to make Salad Man's life easier. The woman behind me on line noticed the candles were guttering down and told the owner, working behind the counter, that she'd run home and fetch more. "That's neighborly," I remarked. "Yeah, they cost $65 apiece," she said. Kidding.
Bob and I took our salads to Madison Square Park where we could watch the crowds hustling by on Broadway. Nine at night and not many cars, but hundreds of pedestrians. We couldn't figure out why they were all walking so purposefully. Where did they have to go?
The intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street held a hint of techno-rave. Lots of people carried glo-sticks: not very illuminative, but festive. Faces were lit blue by cell phones. Red emergency flares writhed on the ground, replenished by the ubiquitous police cadets, dipping into the trunk of a cruiser.
We walked down to Union Square. On the corner of 22nd Street and Broadway, Mr. Softee in his garishly-lit truck provided an oasis of icy brightness. Dozens of people perched nearby on the planters and stoops, enjoying their creamy treats, until the last of even the peanut-butter mocha ripple crunch was gone, at around ten.
Small groups of people sat in battered chairs in office-building doorways, iluminated by glowing cigarette-ends like fireflies, each cluster a cluster of sound: laughter, conversation, the tinny rattle of AM news. People shared warmish six-packs, baggies of grapes, DVD movies on laptops. This party went on for miles.
The missing electricity provided a glimpse into a previous century, especially in this old part of town. Windows glowed brownish with candlelight, voices preceded their owners out of the gloom. Cornices and parapets were silhouetted against the sky--and beyond them, to everyone's amazement, stars!
But it wasn't truly dark. This is still a city. Headlights add up, and emergency lights. Some lobbies and windowed stairwells remained lit, and a few focal points like the observatory deck of the Empire State Building. So the sky still reflected light; you could have seen us from space. Also spoiling the old-world illusion was the noise: buses, helicopters, sirens, generators apparently hooked up to nothing. And voices: the blended, helium-filled sound of mass celebration, blocks away.
We weren't really bereft of electricity. We can't be, ever again. We swim in that excited juice. Within the sea of electromagnetic radiation made perceptible by our radios and TVs, we carry our flashlights and cell phones; the cars creeping along the darkened streets like wary whales are globular masses of shimmying electrons.
Back at our office but reluctant to go inside, we lounged on the stoop like people did in pre-air-conditioning days. A group of girls joined us, laughing at the self-important antics of the neighborhood dogs, who were all, unnecessarily, on high alert.
As were the TV people. Unbelievably snarky. On someone's little portable we watched the blow-dried talking heads turning themselves upside down trying to capture some negative waves. "There's no looting -- yet," they announced lugubriously. "But with the night growing ever darker...." They found one woman worrying about her mother in surgery, another willing to complain about the heat, the inconvenience, the lack of authorities "taking charge." But everybody was taking charge. Tiny acts of heroism, like people looking out for the elderlies and disabled, people handing out water, restaurateurs offering free snacks with half-price drinks.
Continuing the theme of pre-a/c times, we decided to sleep on the roof, where there was a whiff of breeze. Bob set up the deck chairs and we settled down facing the Met Life Tower, where the clock was stuck at 4:20. "If it says anything other than 4:20 when we wake up, we'll know the power is back on," Bob said. But it wasn't.
Friday no one showed up at the office, but Jimmy opened the factory. The sign hangers with their truck-mounted equipment installed billboards; the glass room made neon, since the gas lines were working; service electricians went to Times Square to shut off the timeclocks. Even the tourists might not appreciate all the signs' turning on at once if the demand surge re-blew the fuses.
But despite their good example, it was hard to get much done. It was too disorienting. The missing appliances are like phantom limbs. Just below the conscious level, one keeps reaching for the switches. "It's hot...the a/c's not working...why don't I just turn on the fan?" "Coffeemaker's not working...maybe some tea...how about that electric kettle?" "Can't use the computer...I'll just turn on the light and read."
Our auto-pilots aren't sure what's not working either. Does my money still work? (Yes, but not the plastic.) Does anybody on the next block speak English? Is my husband, wherever he is, still the one I married? (I bet with all that revelry last night and the downed commuter lines, plenty of people got confused on that one.)
The power came back on at 7:15 P.M., accompanied by hootin and hollerin out in the street. Sweet cool juice! The energizer. Instantly everyone dropped their 19th-century languor. The computers popped back on. Coffee began perking. By 8 P.M. most of the restaurants on the block were open, and the ice cubes were tinkling. It's Friday night and we're back in business!
Tama's company builds the lighted signs in Times Square. It's an old family company, three generations, built on electricity.
NO MONSTERS
On Reason Online, Nick Gillespie considers the unexpected reaction to the blackout:
Remember the old Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," ranked as one of the series' best by those who care about such matters? A minor classic on Cold War hysteria, it takes place on a typical street in a typical American town, where the power goes out for no apparent reason. Within hours, the neighbors are at each other's throats, accusing one another of treachery and worse. As the lights intermittently come back on and the day turns to night, rioting and shooting occur and the whole place goes to hell in a hand basket. Because it's The Twilight Zone, with its mandatory groan-inducing denouement, we learn at the close of the show that two big-headed aliens, an advance team for a planned invasion of the planet, have been playing the Maple Streeters for suckers. What they did here, they'll soon do all over the country.
By all rights, yesterday's record-setting blackout that left some 50 million without electricity should have been a Maple Street moment, at least in terms of rioting and shooting, if not necessarily politically motivated hysteria.
The monsters didn't show up, of course, and Nick speculates on why, especially in contrast to behavior in the 1977 blackout.
It's hard to know all the reasons for the different responses to the '77 and '03 blackouts (one of the great parlor games in New York after the '77 blackout was figuring out why people had acted so much worse than they did during the great '65 blackout). But one of the reasons has to be the far greater communications network that exist today. Information technology is one of the great antidotes to panic and hysteria.
THE BEST OF TIMES
Great post on the blackout from Megan McArdle (a.k.a. Jane Galt). (Via InstaPundit, who's got zillions of blackout links.)
HE'S BACK
John Ellis has returned to blogging. Actually, he returned two weeks ago, but I didn't realize it until he showed up in my referrer logs. He promises more frequent posts starting next month.
THE RAG TRADE DISCOVERS ME
Today's Women's Wear Daily features a little profile of me. It's a little odd--the author didn't get the joke that I was too cheap to buy a Mini or understand the difference between financial journalism and business/economic journalism--but fun. You can download a .pdf copy here. Pull quote, from the conclusion
If anything, Postrel sees her role as a bridge between typically male and female schools of thought, bringing both parties to the table for a more compelling discussion. With a chuckle, she says, "The most popular editorial I ever wrote was about how you can understand the whole economy by looking at nail salons."
For other advance press and pre-publication comments about The Substance of Style, go here.
EAR OF THE BEHOLDER
In response to my Times column, a friend who's both an economist and a serious audiophile writes:
Bingo! Do I love your piece today! This is the great debate in hi fi. Do we want engineering dweebs to tell us what they think is accurate and what they can measure is the only relevant yardstick for judging sound quality? Or do we let consumers say what they like or don't like without getting hung up over whether it's imaginary or mislabeled or irrelevant? Or even possibly something genuinely important that they can't measure yet?
When the CD first came out engineers insisted that it was identical to the real thing. In particular, CDs of old analog recordings were said to have captured everything on those recordings. Audiophiles vehemently disagreed.
Fast forward 20 years: Not only do we now have a superior standard for those who care to pay for SACD high def cds, but it turns out that even those supposedly crappy analog recordings sound even better through the new medium. This despite the fact that old recordings were supposedly so limited in dynamic range that CDs were just "wasting bits".
At the same time, those who don't much care about subtle distinctions have their MP3s and other such compressed music over the net.
Everyone is happy.****
I NEED TO THROW MORE BOOK PARTIES
Obviously I'm doing something seriously wrong, since I'm in the same general business as Arianna Huffington, live much more modestly (though I can't complain), get smaller book advances (though, again, I can't complain), and pay gobs of federal income taxes. She doesn't. I don't pay state income taxes, but only because I live in Texas--and even then, every time I make a dollar in California, they come after it.