July Light: Tricks of the Central Park West Druid

Last week on Friday we experienced the late summer alignment of Manhattanhenge. This pet of the head astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium is one of my favorite urban quirks: twice each summer the setting sun aligns perfectly with the crossstreets of Manhattan, and you are given the chance for a figure on Greenwich to cast a shadow onto 2nd Avenue.

Among the many reasons I love this event is, of course, that it is exactly the type of thing I collect in my little birdbrain. More significantly, it is the unexpected source of another, more ephemeral delight for us summer New Yorkers. For a week or so surrounding Manhattanhenge, each long evening takes of a special glow as the long light of the summer afternoon is allowed to penetrate deep into the city. The luminous urban evenings of the Hudson riverbank bleed deep into the grid, and the scene for us pedestrians is lit like a movie set (preferably the evening moments of Rear Window, right before the stage catches on fire). It makes me glad to be here.

Bernard-Henri Lévy Is a Lot Like Jonah Goldberg

From The New Republic:

Barack Obama can win because he is the first African-American to take, by grace of his birth, a step away from the two sides of a deep divide--and the first who may now play the card--not of condemnation or damnation--but of seduction and--as he says over and over--of seduction.

Obtuse punctuation aside, what is it about BHL that can start with a captivating kernel of critic's insight and turn it into such a glaringly false polemic? Besides the final promise of a 'coming together,' what parallel does he find between the seduction and reconciliation that make them the proper synthesis in this logic? It seems abundantly clear that his only real goal is to insert a little sex into the play of politics--something that, frankly, we have no use for this particular time around the horn.