Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 227

Hobby Lobby: Your Thoughts, Ctd

The in-tray remains full of your insights. One reader writes:

Your first reader’s reaction - that it’s troubling the Court made a point to protect only an evangelical Christian belief – is really interesting. This whole case hinges on construing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and RFRA was a direct legislative response to very similar reasoning in Smith v. Oregon.

In that majority opinion, Justice Scalia said Smith had no constitutional right to exercise the religious practice in question (use of peyote in a Native American ritual). Or rather, he said the state of Oregon’s interest in preventing abuse of peyote outweighed Smith’s religious freedom. He made a point of saying part of the balancing act was the fact that the religion Smith adhered to was not widely practiced, and therefore very few people’s religious rights were trammeled by Oregon’s law.

The dissent put the question to Scalia: what happens if a state outlaws use of sacramental wine in the interest of preventing alcohol abuse? Scalia’s explicit reply was: oh please, that will never happen because Catholicism, and other denominations, have so many adherents. Such a law could never be supported democratically, so the issue would never arise. He stood the Religion Clauses on their head; they weren’t there to protect religious minorities from the democratic will of “overweening majorities”; they were there to do just the opposite. Many, many people found that outrageous, and Congress (very much including Democrats) passed RFRA as a direct rebuke to Scalia’s opinion.

So, Hobby Lobby is now the second modern case I know of that singles out a widespread religious practice for protection, while denying it to similar practices of smaller faiths. And this case did it while being decided on the basis of legislation passed as an explicit disavowal of that first case. That’s a nifty bit of bendy logic to pull off, and a bit of a “fuck you” to the legislative branch.

Another reader reiterates the fair and important point that this was not about contraception as such, but contraception believed to be a form of abortion:

You stated: “The notion that the executive branch has the right in wartime to seize an American citizen and torture him into incoherence strikes me as a more important question than whether someone can have access to free contraception if her employers disapprove.”

What this ignores, and what most of the responses to the SCOTUS ruling on the Hobby Lobby case ignores, is that the thing that makes this more important to the religious right is that these people think the morning-after pill kills babies (and they believe this even of intrauterine devices); whereas the enemy who is tortured into incoherence is (1) still alive, in most cases, and (2) the corporate entity may be paying for it at a remove, but their taxes are not labeled as “for torturing prisoners.” I’m not defending their crazy views, mind you; but unless we realize that they really, really think this, and that’s what they’re upset about, I don’t see any way of effectively putting this to rest, the way we pretty much have done with blood transfusion refusers and snake handlers.

I hope at least some liberals grasp that being required to finance something you believe to be murder is a legitimate area of conscientious objection.

We’re All Libertarians Now (Except David Brooks)

[Re-posted from earlier today]

In a characteristically astute and bracing essay, Mark Lilla recently remembered - with mixed feelings – “the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989.” It strikes me as an important piece, because it comes at a propitious time to regroup and rethink recent history a bit more seriously. The world really did change in 1989, finally ending a period of two centuries of ideological struggle – a struggle that gave meaning and structure to billions of people on both sides. By the 1990s, the organized, intellectual armies of right and left effectively and slowly peeled away from a battlefield in which democratic capitalism (with varying levels of social welfare) had triumphed by default.

And I think Mark is specifically emphasizing: by default. Yes, the right, in many ways, won the philosophical argument. But the right’s victory left us domestically with a profoundly unreflective libertarianism:

Whatever ideas or beliefs or feelings muted the demand for individual autonomy in the past have atrophied. There were no public debates on this and no votes were taken. Since the cold war ended we have simply found ourselves in a world in which every advance of the principle of freedom in one sphere advances it in the others, whether we wish it to or not.

The core idea of this post-ideological new age was simply expanding the freedom of the individual – and it was embraced economically by the right, socially by the left, and completely by the next generation of pragmatic liberaltarians. Here’s what Mark posits as the core of the libertarian ethos:

This outlook treats as axiomatic the primacy of individual self-determination over traditional social ties, indifference in matters of religion and sex, and the a priori obligation to tolerate others. Of course there have also been powerful reactions against this outlook, even in the West. But outside the Islamic world, where theological principles still have authority, there are fewer and fewer objections that persuade people who have no such principles. The recent, and astonishingly rapid, acceptance of homosexuality and even gay marriage in so many Western countries—a historically unprecedented transformation of traditional morality and customs—says more about our time than anything else.

Think also of the astonishing speed with which marijuana seems on its way to legalization.

One thing I’d emphasize: this outlook also deeply informs our view of the world and America’s place in it, in ways we are less familiar with. Just as government or some governmental authority axiomatically shouldn’t curtail an individual’s right to do what she wants and be who she wants, so a super-power, even a benevolent one, has no right to dictate the choices and fate of any other individual country, however despotic and evil its regime might be. This libertarian foreign policy is observed even in the breach. There is, for example, nothing to stop Putin from annexing Crimea – but he loses international standing and is increasingly isolated as a consequence. Ditto Israel’s constant excesses in the occupied West Bank; it goes on ad infinitum, but so too will Israel’s pariah status as a result. And, of course, the cause célèbre of this entire movement is the Iraq War, a catastrophe now regarded as utterly illegitimate by everybody on the planet, apart from a few Cheney dead-enders and Tony Blair.

In fact, the only addendum I would add to Mark’s argument is that libertarianism has had a much bigger impact in foreign policy than we care to admit.

To wit: if your axiomatic worldview is live and let live, and it permeates all your non-thinking prejudices, then interventionism abroad has a much higher bar to meet than in the past when it was justified by a dangerous and global state enemy or by a firm belief in a world-historical mission. In the wake of the triumph of the West in the 1990s, this was not obvious. So we over-played a somewhat triumphalist hand, expecting Western values, having vanquished Soviet and Nazi ideology, to spread spontaneously around the globe. So we pressed NATO to the Russian border, expanded the EU to 28 states, charted maps of democracy’s invincible rise across Asia and then, in a fit of hubris, actually decided to force it upon Iraq and Afghanistan of all places as a panacea to all the Islamic world’s ills as it struggles fitfully to come to terms with modernity.

We know better now – but that lesson means that the bar for intervention is future is likely to be extremely high. Legitimacy matters – and in the last ten years or so, America has lost most of its international legitimacy, whether the neocons and liberal interventionists recognize it or not. The question is: how do we respond to this? And there are, it seems to me, a liberal and a conservative option.

The liberal one is to fight back in defense of universal values, American droit de seigneur (also known as American exceptionalism), and democratization as a sacred duty. Which is why, when push comes to shove, David Brooks is a liberal. His column in response to Lilla’s essay uses a peculiar word – “spiritual” – to define his crusade:

Such is life in a spiritual recession. Americans have lost faith in their own gospel. This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system. Without the vibrant faith, there is no spiritual counterweight to rampant materialism. Without the faith, the left has grown strangely callous and withdrawing in the face of genocide around the world. The right adopts a zero-sum mentality about immigration and a pinched attitude about foreign affairs. Without the faith, leaders grow small; they have no sacred purpose to align themselves with.

So in response to the end of ideology, Brooks wants a new-old one, a national commitment to “universal democracy” (undefined) that is sacred. If we don’t have that faith, we are somehow reduced. I guess I’m just being an atomized individual, but my own “counter-weight to rampant materialism”, for example, is Christianity. But this faith is, for David, insufficient. It doesn’t strengthen the nation! I must join some collective, secular spiritual mission to complete my life and one, moreover, that goes out into the wider world to find monsters to destroy or countries to civilize. The fact that this ideological mission is deeply out of step with this moment in world history and has just been discredited on a massive, comprehensive scale sails past the need for it to exist in Brooks’ mind. Which is my best read on the cognitive dissonance in the column.

But there is another, saner response to this, and Lilla points the way. It is to re-exercize the intellectual muscles that created and then defended the idea of democratic capitalism – and to use them, first of all, to address the democratic deficits in our own too-often bought-and-paid-for republic, to build and defend intermediate institutions that check individualism’s acidic power – families, churches, neighborhoods, school-boards, sports leagues, AA meetings. And so we match gay freedom with gay marriage and military service, embracing libertarianism but hitching it to institutions that also connect it to the community as a whole. Abroad, the sane response to our political and intellectual moment is to abandon the crude idea that democracy – purple fingers and all – is all that matters, and direct our attention at the specific things that make a difference in very different societies, and away from the grand principles and systems that cannot be imposed by force or even constant suasion.

Lilla puts it this way:

The big surprise in world politics since the cold war’s end is not the advance of liberal democracy but the reappearance of classic forms of non-democratic political rule in modern guises. The break-up of the Soviet empire and the “shock therapy” that followed it produced new oligarchies and kleptocracies that have at their disposal innovative tools of finance and communication; the advance of political Islam has placed millions of Muslims, who make up a quarter of the world’s population, under more restrictive theocratic rule; tribes, clans, and sectarian groups have become the most important actors in the post-colonial states of Africa and the Middle East; China has brought back despotic mercantilism. Each of these political formations has a distinctive nature that needs to be understood in its own terms, not as a lesser or greater form of democracy in potentia. The world of nations remains what it has always been: an aviary.

For which you need an aviarist, not an ideologue.

Even though it seems foolish to deny that most countries still seem headed over time toward Western norms (Fukuyama remains basically correct), in the here and now, all sorts of hybrids are forming and will form, as they always have. Our goal in foreign policy is to understand them better by using the vast apparatus of political philosophy bequeathed to us by our Western canon, and tapping into our collective reserves of diplomatic and military experience, and adjust accordingly. That means bracketing the simple democracy-spectrum and looking for how to deal with various forms of oligarchy, kleptocracy, or emerging democratic society. Now and again, a little nudge might help (see the Balkans in the 1990s). But for the most part, the changes we want will happen without us (Tunisia, anyone?), and the places where we simply act as if the world were a blank page ready to be filled by democracies (Israel, Libya, anyone?) will turn out to be a case study in the frequent destiny of good intentions.

What Mark is saying, it seems to me, is that only conservatism, properly understood, can rise to the challenge of governance in this post-ideological age. And conservatism in America is, alas, as widely misunderstood as it is routinely ignored.

(Photos: 1) Roses stuck in a gap of the memorial of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 2013 on occasion of the 24th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. By Stephanie Pilick/AFP/Getty Images. 2)In the first composite image, a comparison has been made between Berlin in the 1960s and Berlin now in 2014. In the color photo above traffic, cyclists and a horse-drawn carriage carrying tourists make their way across the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse at former Checkpoint Charlie on April 1, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. In the black and white photo Soviet tanks (behind) and U.S. tanks confront one another at the same location on October 26, 1961. By Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images. 3) In the second composite image, the color photo shows a man walking a dog past the memorial to the Church of Reconciliation, which was demolished by East Berlin authorities to make way for a widening of the Berlin Wall, in Bernauer Strasse on February 25, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. In the black and white photo people in West Berlin look at an early version of the Berlin Wall in front of the church at the same location sometime in 1961 or 1962. By Imagno/Hulton Archive via Getty Images.)

Faces Of The Day

Michael Palin and Terry Jones attend a photocall ahead of their upcoming tour at the O2 Arena Monty Python Live at the London Palladium on June 30, 2014 in London, England. By Anthony Harvey/Getty Images.

Dr Zuckerberg Will Treat Your Moods Now, Ctd

Get off Facebook. Get your family off Facebook. If you work there, quit. They're fucking awful.

—
Erin Kissane (@kissane) June 28, 2014

If you a/b test to make more money that's fine, but if you a/b test to advance science that's bad? I don't get it.

—
Chris Dixon (@cdixon) June 29, 2014

Jesse Singal thinks naiveté is partly to blame for all the anger over Facebook’s emotion experiments:

On the one hand, it’s understandable to have a visceral reaction to secretly being the study of a psychological statement — yeah, there’s something creepy about this. But on the other, when you actually look at how Facebook’s news feed works, the anger is a bit of a strange response, to be honest. Facebook is always manipulating you — every time you log in. Your news feed is not some objective record of what your friends are posting that gives all of them equal “air time”; rather, it is shaped by Facebook’s algorithm in very specific ways to get you to click more so Facebook can make more money (for instance, you’ll probably see more posts from friends with whom you’ve interacted a fair amount on Facebook than someone you met once at a party and haven’t spoken with since).

So the folks who are outraged about Facebook’s complicity in this experiment seem to basically be arguing that it’s okay when Facebook manipulates their emotions to get them to click on stuff more, or for the sake of in-house experiments about how to make content “more engaging” (that is, to find out how to get them to click on stuff more), but not when that manipulation is done in service of a psychological experiment. And it’s not like Facebook was serving up users horribly graphic content in an attempt to drive them to the brink of insanity — it just tweaked which of their friends’ content (that is, people they had chosen to follow) was shown.

Michelle N. Meyer extensively explores the motivations of the researchers and comes away sympathetic to their work. One reason? Manipulation is part of life:

Even if you don’t buy that Facebook regularly manipulates users’ emotions (and recall, again, that it’s not clear that the experiment in fact did alter users’ emotions), other actors intentionally manipulate our emotions every day. Consider “fear appeals”—ads and other messages intended to shape the recipient’s behavior by making her feel a negative emotion (usually fear, but also sadness or distress). Examples include “scared straight” programs for youth warning of the dangers of alcohol, smoking, and drugs, and singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan’s ASPCA animal cruelty donation appeal (which I cannot watch without becoming upset—YMMV—and there’s no way on earth I’m being dragged to the “emotional manipulation” that is, according to one critic, The Fault in Our Stars).

She does concede, however, that the study’s subjects should have been told they were involved rather than left to learn about it in blog posts like this one. Brian Keegan agrees with Meyer that this kind of ethical gray area is everywhere:

Somewhere deep in the fine print of every loyalty card’s terms of service or online account’s privacy policy is some language in which you consent to having this data used for “troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research,” which is to say, you and your data can be subject to scientific observation and experimentation. Whether this consent is “informed” by the participant having a conscious understanding of implications and consequences is a very different question that I suspect few companies are prepared to defend. But why does a framing of “scientific research” seem so much more problematic than contributing to “user experience”? How is publishing the results of one A/B test worse than knowing nothing of the thousands of invisble tests? They reflect the same substantive ways of knowing “what works” through the same well-worn scientific methods.

He goes on to argue that Facebook and social scientists should be collaborating more, not less. Along those lines, Tal Yarkoni wonders if users realize how much they benefit from such research:

[B]y definition, every single change Facebook makes to the site alters the user experience, since there simply isn’t any experience to be had on Facebook that isn’t entirely constructed by Facebook. When you log onto Facebook, you’re not seeing a comprehensive list of everything your friends are doing, nor are you seeing a completely random subset of events. In the former case, you would be overwhelmed with information, and in the latter case, you’d get bored of Facebook very quickly. Instead, what you’re presented with is a carefully curated experience that is, from the outset, crafted in such a way as to create a more engaging experience (read: keeps you spending more time on the site, and coming back more often). …

[W]ithout controlled experimentation, the user experience on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. would probably be very, very different–and most likely less pleasant.

Alan Jacobs fumes over that post:

Yarkoni completely forgets that Facebook merely provides a platform — a valuable platform, or else it wouldn’t be so widely used — for content that is provided wholly by its users.

Of course “every single change Facebook makes to the site alters the user experience” — but all changes are not ethically or substantively the same. Some manipulations are more extensive than others; changes in user experience can be made for many different reasons, some of which are better than others. That people accept without question some changes while vigorously protesting others isn’t a sign of inconsistency, it’s a sign that they’re thinking, something that Yarkoni clearly does not want them to do.

Most people who use Facebook understand that they’ve made a deal in which they get a platform to share their lives with people they care about, while Facebook gets to monetize that information in certain restricted ways. They have every right to get upset when they feel that Facebook has unilaterally changed the deal, just as they would if they took their car to the body shop and got it back painted a different color. And in that latter case they would justifiably be upset even if the body shop pointed out that there was small print in the estimate form you signed permitting them to change the color of your car.

Elsewhere, law professor James Grimmelmann hopes the outrage will spark a wave of reform for how companies practice “invisible personalization”. To that end, Poniewozik insists that it’s time for Facebook to grow up:

Suppose The New York Times, or ABC News–or TIME magazine–had tweaked the content it displayed to hundreds of thousands of users to see if certain types of posts put readers in a certain frame of mind. The outcry would be swift and furious–brainwashing! mind control! this is how the biased media learns to manipulate us! It would be decried as not just creepy but professionally unethical. And it’s hard to imagine that the publication’s leadership could survive without promising it would never happen again.

He concludes that “as one of the biggest filters through which people now receive news[,] Facebook has as much ethical obligation to deliver that experience without hidden manipulation as does a newspaper.” This chart we posted recently drives that point home.

Was 1994 The Greatest Year In Hip-Hop?

And Pater Tosiello highlights a handful of retrospectives rolled out for the 20th anniversary:

Chief among the honorees has been Nas’s Illmatic, a debut whose 20th birthday has been celebrated with a two-disc reissue, accompanying tour, three-part Fuse special, and feature-length documentary. The two-decade anniversary of Outkast’s debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik brought about the long-awaited onstage reunion of members Big Boi and Andre 3000. Elsewhere, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has embarked upon a tour commemorating the 20th anniversary of their debut EP Creepin on ah Come Up, and Warren G announced plans for a follow up to his multi-platinum selling 1994 debut Regulate…G Funk Era. Mobb Deep’s new release The Infamous Mobb Deep confusingly shares a title with their breakthrough album and includes a second disc of outtakes from 1994 studio sessions. A few months late to the party, Onyx released their first album in a decade, Wakedafucup, with a title inspired by their debut Bacdafucup, and The Wu-Tang Clan has reported internal strife around their already-delayed album planned for the 20th anniversary of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

But Tosiello finds the anniversary “insanely awkward”:

For each tour and retrospective, middle-aged musicians must assume the personae of their teens and early 20s, overlooking two decades worth of artistic output.

Nas has been beckoned to recite Illmatic’s 10 tracks dozens of times this year at venues ranging from the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra to the Preakness Stakes’ InfieldFest. If these performances have highlighted Illmatic’s timelessness, they’ve also reasserted the consensus that Nas has yet to surpass his debut.  In selecting Coachella for their reunion, Outkast joined a bill mostly composed of electronica artists and a young audience in part predated by Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Of the new Mobb Deep record, Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene wrote, “the album is exactly the sort of hastily tossed-off, forgettable project that legacy acts will sometimes tack onto can’t-miss releases.”

The focus on 1994 also highlights rap’s precarious position today. Hip-hop sales swelled corresponding with the pre-Napster boom at the turn of the century, but in the intervening years rap lost a significant market share. Forty-three of Billboard’s year-end Top 200 Albums were rap records in 2004, but in 2013 only 25 cracked the Top 200. Last fall the 10th annual Rock the Bells Tour, a hip-hop specific concert series that saw the reunions of ’90s icons the Fugees and A Tribe Called Quest, was cancelled due to slow ticket sales. Upon the cancellation, planned performer Kid Cudi tweeted, “Hip hop shows aren’t exciting… People wanna smile and dance.”

“It’s like remaking the same classic movies over and over,” J-Zone says of the recent nostalgia wave. “People are running out of ideas and instead revisiting stuff for interesting content.”

Ain’t No Party Like A Military Party

Venezuela’s supreme court decided last week that military participation in pro-government rallies was not only permissible, but actually a good thing. Juan Nagel decries the ruling for “dramatically eroding what is left of democracy, bringing Venezuela back to its nineteenth-century roots when warlords ruled the land”:

The Venezuelan Constitution clearly establishes the military as a non-partisan entity. According to Articles 328 and 330, active service members “have a right to vote,” but they cannot participate in “acts of propaganda or political partisanship, and they cannot proselytize.” This, apparently, is not clear enough for Venezuela’s highest court. In complete opposition to the text, the court ruled that active military participation in partisan acts “is a high water-mark for democratic participation.” The ruling goes on to hail the use of the military in partisan activities as “a progressive act geared toward the consolidation of civilian-military union.” … The ruling basically sets into law what has been a fact in chavista Venezuela: that the military is the armed faction of the governing party.

He contextualizes the court’s WAR IS PEACE ploy to show how dangerous it really is:

Keeping the military impartial was an important part of Venezuela’s democracy. The military guards all elections in Venezuela, doing everything from manning voting centers to handling voting material. They are also charged with ensuring safety in and around voting centers. Now that they are part of the governing party, how can anyone in the opposition be sure that results will be respected? Asking the military to take care of elections is like asking your dog to guard a stash of freshly cooked bacon.

That may be the only way president Nicolás Maduro can win an election at this point, considering how the country is falling apart:

[R]ampant scarcities of food and basic goods, sky-high inflation, and staggering crime rates have chipped away at Maduro’s popularity, reducing them to record lows. In early February, a rash of street protests and barricades paralyzed the nation, and were violently suppressed by state authorities in a series of crackdowns that saw several notable opposition leaders incarcerated. The resulting negative publicity led even previously supportive international media outlets, such as the The Guardian to become more critical, and when Hollywood stars began chiming in against his government, the 2014 Academy Awards were pulled from the Venezuelan television lineup for the first time in 39 years.

And now this: in the middle of a triumphalist speech for “national journalists day,” broadcast by law on every Venezuelan television and radio station, the lights suddenly went out on Maduro—and on much of the country. Much of Caracas, and areas in nearly all of Venezuela’s other 22 states was affected the country’s aging and poorly maintained power grid struggled to get back online.

(Photo: Venezuelan acting president Nicolas Maduro (2nd-L) and state governor Adam Chavez (L) receive military honors before heading for a campaign rally in the state of Barinas, Venezuela on March 30, 2013, ahead of the presidential election on April 14. By Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)

Cooling Off With Compost

A simple farming technique could help mitigate the effects of climate change on crops:

The technique in question is called “no-till farming,” and it simply involves leaving the debris from previous crops on the surface of the fields rather than plowing the fields and exposing the soil underneath. Observations of test agricultural fields indicate that no-till practices have several effects. To begin with, the debris tends to retain moisture, which limits evaporation; since evaporation cools the surface, this tends to have a warming effect. But this warming is extremely limited on the hottest days, when the intense heat drives evaporation even when plant debris is present.

The agricultural debris also has an effect on albedo, the amount of sunlight that gets reflected back from the Earth’s surface. After a rain storm, the tillage was about as dark as the soil underneath it. But on drier days, the plant material reflected significantly more sunlight than the soil. This effect was amplified further on the hottest days, which are typically cloud-free, which allows the reflected sunlight to escape into space.

Our Mountains’ Majesty Is Melting

John Upton considers what climate change means for the snow-topped mountains of the American West:

New research has painted a vivid picture of the global warming-induced fate of what currently are snow-peaked mountains across the region. Within 50 years, University of Idaho scientists concluded, the lower-elevation peaks could be wholly rained upon instead of receiving mixtures of snow and rain. And across much of the region, the snow season is expected to contract from five months every year to just three months. Those were some of the findings of an attempt to model how global warming will shift rain-snow transition zones upward throughout a vast swath of the United States. It’s a swath of the nation where farmers and residents rely heavily on melting snowpacks for water supplies during the warmer months. That means the change from wintertime snow to rain could worsen both winter floods and summer droughts.

(Photo: A Dish reader’s airplane window view of Mt. Rainier, southeast of Seattle. More VFYAWs here)

Misjudging A Book By Its Cover

William Jordan of YouGov found that Republicans and Democrats are both bad at guessing a book’s politics from its title alone:

We tested the titles of 17 political memoirs from potential 2016 candidates, both Republican and Democrat, asking which book people would be interested to read without saying who had written which book. It turns out that the overall favorite book amongst Republicans is by the Dennis Kucinich (A Prayer for America), a liberal, and the overall favorite amongst Democrats is by Ben Carson (One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future), a conservative.

No Place To Sleep, By Design, Ctd

A reader notices another way that architects are deterring homeless sleeping:

Glad to see this trend getting some air, and some criticism. When we were living in Astoria, I noted the appearance of some curious structures above the M/R subway lines. I assumed they were combination vents and benches, but it turns out they are effectively cowlings or battens placed above the existing tunnel vents, designed to keep floodwaters from penetrating the tunnels and disabling the trains.

They are undeniably elegant – and I appreciate the MTA’s choice of elegance over mere utility – but the undulating vanes were also deliberately peppered with raised sections that don’t affect sitting but make lying down painful. For the homeless – and Astoria has many, including for a time Cadillac Man, who wrote about his life for Esquire - the typical flush-to-the-sidewalk vents had for decades been a source of warmth in the winter months. These new structures struck me then as bitter symbols of the new New York: increasingly wealthy and stylish – but in equal measure increasingly hostile, by choice, to those who didn’t catch the cresting wave.

(Photo by Sean Hopkins)