Goodbye New York City | The Spectator

The cruel, cold intellect of DC and San Francisco

New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order. We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

Peachy Keenan

Where can I get some meth?

I was born in Santa Monica, California. So were four of my children. When I was little, Santa Monica was still a sleepy backwater with mom-and-pop stores, a quiet local beach that was never crowded and virtually zero crime. A place where murder or mayhem or even robbery were unthinkable. Then, sometime in the 1990s, Santa Monica was discovered by the rest of the city as a “really nice place to live” and was targeted for destruction. In Los Angeles you are not allowed to have nice things. Every Christmas, Ocean Avenue along the coast was lined with 13 historic, life-size scenes depicting the complete life of Jesus. These famous and beloved displays started in 1953, but in 2015 the city banned them after atheist groups complained.

Ruaridh Nicoll

In Cuba, a revolution is over

If you’ve ever thought of visiting the crocodile-shaped island of Cuba, or run into someone recently returned from sultry nights in the country’s salsa halls, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard the phrase “See it before it changes.” And I don’t mean because of Hurricane Melissa. The idea is that the centrally planned communist state, one of the last on Earth, will soon morph into America and a balmy Brigadoon full of people unencumbered by money, modern cars or Alexa will evaporate. I think most people, if they knew what Cubans have endured, wouldn’t use that phrase, which is up there in its lack of tact with “they’re poor but they’re happy.

Bill Kauffman

Has Los Angeles killed America’s imagination?

The magnificent Griffith Park Observatory turned 90 this year and, as fans of nonagenarians, my wife and I hiked up the south slope of Mount Hollywood – well, our rental car did the hard work – to pay our respects. The city of Los Angeles sprawled out before us; the Hollywood sign loomed ominously above us. I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism, infecting and deadening imaginations from Bangor to Bend. As Morrissey crooned: “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/ London is dead.” But I dunno: it’s my wife’s hometown, I love her Armenian relatives and I’ve always been a sucker for the movies, at least in their pre-CGI, pre-Marvel, pre-woke, pre-franchise age.

Life