Nobody can deny Manhattan's cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding marble lobbies that may last only until the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Sandy destroyed.

The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 20.9 percent of the population living under the poverty line, and it's a brown place, where 55 percent are non-white. In 2011, in a full 123 percent of families living [...]

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So was Nicole Brown Simpson's family when your dad got OJ off. RT @KimKardashian: CASEY ANTHONY FOUND NOT GUILTY!!!! I am speechless!!!Tue Jul 05 18:26:28 via EchofonAmerica's HeroHaHaWhitePPL

Should we hold news organizations to the account over the prominence they award to 9/11 anniversary commemorations? Who cares, it's 9/13 aready. We don't have to think about any of that for another year.

In the wake of the devastation of last week's weather—178 tornadoes in two days! Hundreds dead, many missing—states from Tennessee to Alabama to Texas are beset with looters, we hear. Seven in Ohio! Three in St. Louis! Two in North Carolina! Maybe 20 all told in Alabama! Literally, perhaps three dozens of people have been arrested for looting in the past week.

(Can we have a sidebar? "In Alabama, businesses are prohibited after disasters from increasing the price of items for sale or rent by 25 percent or more above the average price charged in the same area within the last 30 [...]

"He said there had been 50 other similar incidents across the country that day." —That's the most striking sentence in this account of being detained by Homeland Security on a plane on Sunday, written by a woman who sat next to two Indian dudes who needed to pee. According to one FBI officer, at least 50 flights had passengers who saw something stupid and said something stupid, so some Americans got handcuffed and detained. We only even hear about a few of them.