My New York

SOMETHING evil is going on in New York. But in order to justify resorting to this strongest of all epithets, I need to tell the story of the twists and turns I personally have witnessed and experienced as a native and lifelong resident of the city.

Perhaps as good a place as any to begin is with a phone call I received some years ago from a woman doing publicity for the Brooklyn division of the New York Public Library system. From her broad mid-western accent alone, I could tell that she came from neither Brooklyn nor anywhere else in New York, but even without that detail, the question she asked me would have proved definitively that she knew next to nothing about the city.

NP

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Norman Podhoretz

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SOMETHING evil is going on in New York. But in order to justify resorting to this strongest of all epithets, I need to tell the story of the twists and turns I personally have witnessed and experienced as a native and lifelong resident of the city.

Perhaps as good a place as any to begin is with a phone call I received some years ago from a woman doing publicity for the Brooklyn division of the New York Public Library system. From her broad mid-western accent alone, I could tell that she came from neither Brooklyn nor anywhere else in New York, but even without that detail, the question she asked me would have proved definitively that she knew next to nothing about the city.