it's like a petition.

Written by James Wolcott and signed, with tough-love, by so many of us. "Smugged by Reality," a biting review of Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate in The New Republic.

Do a Google search for Wolcott Gopnik and you'll find a fair number of bloggers and comment-ers who were so tired of Gopnik's kitsch and would ask him to tone it down, just a bit.

At Gawker. The Nation was quick to the punch, though Hansen jabbed lightly.

Most bloggers just link merrily and move on. There's nothing to add, really. Linkers of various stripes:

Roth Brothers, Diary of a Rat, Biffles at the Bijou, Clive Davis, Christopher Hayes, dcat, lowebrow, Rising Hegemon, The Elegant Variation, Penguins on the Equator, Jewcy, gall and gumption, the stood, All Intensive Purposes (notes the Auster, oh yes), Books are my only friends, The Huffington Post, Bruce Feiler, and, tried and true, Madame Emdashes . . .

And how modest and self-effacing is our hero? The groundswell takes Wolcott by surprise, over at his VF blog.

One lonely Dad comes to Gopnik's defense. If you see more, let me know.

when time is like a map of new jersey

Adam Gopnik's "Talk of the Town, Comment, Gothamitis" in the Jan 8 issue caught my attention and held it. Although I've been hearing this particular corporate gentrification sob story from New Yorkers for awhile, Gopnik takes a specific rhetorical event, this Bloomberg speech, and expands on the sort of sad fear it both invokes and attempts to address.

But I don't think I would have read it all the way through - the depressing cliches involving a (cringe) "Greenwich Village bard" and (groan) "Baghdad-on-the-Hudson" - would have scared me off. Except that I had, in the course of my travels to the dark corners and bustling thoroughfares (and concrete bunkers and soul-less main streets) of New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC read Luc Sante's "My Lost City" in The Best American Essays volume (2004) that (of course) Louis Menand edited. Which provides a kind of picturesque backdrop for Gopnik's argument. Weirdly nostalgic, but, then, not entirely. Anyway, they make a nice pair.

Of course, if Mr. Sante really loves burned out buildings to huddle in, he can move to North Philly.

But I guess what I liked about both pieces was the emphasis on how incredibly myopic citizens (of anywhere, really) can be, and the dangers of that. And how, it would seem, no one would have predicted New York in the 1970s decades before, and how no one can explain, exactly, the recovery and how, unless one seizes control of the planning and plotting of these things, no one will be able to account for New York 2030, among other things.

On a maybe related note, about that smell, did they all totally forget that they are RIGHT NEXT TO NEW JERSEY? I wish Mike Davis would write a New York book. Or has he?