Up Over the Manhattan Bridge Overpass

I walk home from work. It's a trip that (according to Mapquest) is five and a half miles door-to-door, and it takes an hour—an hour which I'm afraid says less about my health, and more about my somewhat wasteful use of my free time. But I enjoy it. It relaxes me, and gives me time to think.

My path meanders past the storefronts of Soho and onto the teeming streets of Chinatown, before arriving at the footpath for the Manhattan Bridge, which spans the East River to Brooklyn. The bridge is over a mile long: it takes maybe fifteen minutes to cross; and most days, the footpath is nearly empty.

Fifteen minutes of peace and privacy, watching the sun set over the Hudson. In the midst of the clamor of New York City, this one span is deceptively intimate.

Perhaps, then, I can be forgiven for what happened on my walk today: a man, not unlike myself, was walking in the opposite direction, and when we passed each other, right around the center of the span of the bridge, I looked him in the eye and I said, "Hello."

He scowled at me and brushed past, quickening his pace, and never looked back.

This is New York City, after all.

Where Every American Dream Goes to Die

I'm not a very good driver. You should know that, first of all. This fact doesn't keep me off the road, but I do hit things: I bump into cabs, crash into streetlights, and every now and then, I'll sideswipe a pedestrian in a crosswalk. It's terrible.

It's terrible and it's kind of fun.

I've been doing it for hours.

The self-appointed public watchdogs who attack Grand Theft Auto IV as "gratuitously violent" are chasing their own tails, failing to understand the real appeal—and danger—of the game. It is true that the game's protagonist, Niko Bellic, arrives off the boat from Eastern Europe and finds himself in the midst of an impoverished, crime-ridden city. But during the few hours I played the game, I saved relatives and friends from violence, I spared the life of a man I had been ordered to kill, I helped put down organized crime, and, for the most part, I lived the life of an upstanding citizen: I bowled. I went on dates. I drove a cab (though badly, and sometimes accidentally crashed into things).1

The game—like most games, movies, TV shows, comic books, songs, and news shows—has violence. But the violence is not gratuitous, any more than it is symptomatic of a large societal (or subcultural) ill: antisocial and even violent people may find an outlet in videogames, but the fact that these people are sometimes drawn to games is not to say that they are drawn by them:2

A U.S. Secret Service study from May 2002 found that only 12 percent of those involved in school shootings were attracted to violent video games, while 24 percent read violent books and 27 percent were attracted to violent films. An Australian study from March 2007 found that only children already predisposed to violence were affected by violent games. (U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education.)3

The real menace of videogames is that they are the new opiate of the masses. They don't make us more violent; they make us more complacent. They make us inveterate consumers (game publishers quietly hiked the price of each title from $50 to $60); they cut into our productivity (see "Halo Flu"); and they make other entertainment seem lackluster in comparison (see "Iron Man vs. GTA", or this classic which blames videogames for declining national park attendance).4

The real and present danger of Grand Theft Auto is that I'd planned to go to the gym and a writing workshop today, and instead I'm cruising around Liberty City.

If the American Dream dictates that hard work will lead us to a better life, then perhaps Grand Theft Auto really is "where the American Dream goes to die"—because it supplants our desire for hard work, and even our desire for a better life. Why bother, when we can just play a game? "Keep calm," it tells us, "and carry on."

1. My one intentional, glaring deviance from the law came after a night of drinking with my lonely, troubled cousin, when I got behind the wheel to drive him home. The game warned me in no uncertain terms that it was unsafe for me to drive while intoxicated. As soon as I turned the ignition and started down the road, the police arrested me.

2. Drawn, in the Jessica Rabbit sense.

3. See also, The Effect of Violent Video Games on the Human Psyche, and Caution: Children at Play.

4. I often feel like I'm falling behind in my entertainment: for example, my ever-accruing To Do list tells me that I need to catch up on an episode of Battlestar Galactica, two episodes of Lost, seven different rentals from Netflix, thirteen podcasts, and the small pile of books I've started and not finished—not to mention, of course, Grand Theft Auto, which promises to consume no less than 60 hours of time.

Buy-a-Baby

You've always been an achiever. You put your career first, and you worked hard to get where you are. You and your spouse have a lovely Brooklyn brownstone, an Audi Quattro you never drive, and a combined income that would be, in any other city, above average.

What now?

Just because you gave your healthy breeding years to the workplace doesn't mean you can't have your very own little Alina, Emily or Abigail. You can! After all, what would be the point of making all that money, if you couldn't use it to buy a baby on the Internet?

Browse our selection today and see if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.

Unrecycling

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I am deeply concerned about fossil fuel consumption and the resulting effects on the global climate—but not enough to do very much about it. (Said Michael Pollan in a recent article in the New York Times: "I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in An Inconvenient Truth came ... during the closing credits, when we are asked to ... change our light bulbs.")

So I'll admit that I felt a touch of self-righteousness—certainly more self-righteousness than I deserved—when I schlepped all of those bags of carefully-sorted recyclables down to the curb last night. At one level, I suppose, I should have felt ashamed at my ability to generate so much trash; but on the other hand, I was so proud that I'd taken the trouble to designate it as reusable trash. (That is, I was proud of the fact that I remembered to put it in a separate bag and carry it downstairs on Wednesday instead of Sunday. Go me.)

I was confused, then, when I came home and found one of my bags of bundled newspaper leaning against my front door. "Hmmm." I stared at it for a full minute. "What does this signify...?"

No obvious answer came.

I carried it back upstairs and dropped it in my living room.

The trash collectors of New York City are as finicky as a chef picking over the morning's produce. Trash bags will be left on the curb because they contain a single (recyclable) Coke can or water bottle, or, more often, for reasons unknown. I gazed at my bag of newspaper, trying to imagine what offense it had committed—why it had been deemed unworthy. The other bags were collected without ceremony, but this one—this one otherwise-unremarkable bag was found somehow lacking. Why? What commentary was being made on my recycling ways?

Some mysteries will never be solved.

I dropped it in an opaque Hefty bag and took it downstairs again, this time depositing in the trash. There is a regular pickup on Sunday: they'll take my non-biodegradable bag to a landfill without further incident.

I want to do what's right, I really do. If only I knew how...

The Great Outdoors

It's spring, and I'm surrounded by the most beautiful scenes of nature that one could imagine: just through the window, on the other side of a thin pane of glass, there are rolling hills all the way to the horizon, and above them, an almost boundless sky.

A shame, then, that the "window" is my computer screen, and that the image before me is a photo of a place far from here, a place I probably will never visit, a place that quite possibly doesn't exist at all—a virtual landscape so remodeled by digital retouching and enhancement that it is quite literally nowhere: Utopia.

As we spend more and more time in front of our computers, under slightly green, unnatural fluorescent lights, in windowless cubicles, we're offered correspondingly more and more lavish landscape photos for use as our "desktop wallpaper"1—maybe to help us remember what the outside looks like? Except the colors in the photos are so saturated, it's not actually what the outside does look like.2

Outside gets farther away, while Utopia gets closer.

1. All major operating systems—Windows XP and Vista, the Mac OS, and the most popular distributions of Linux, offer nature-inspired desktop "wallpaper" imagery.

2. "Maybe the machines didn't know what chicken tasted like, so that's why chicken tastes like everything."