There are the hours when you are defiant about a coming storm, and then the moment when you concede that those emergency officials and politicians at press conferences may know more than you, and you’d best listen. For any holdouts in New York, that moment may have arrived when a crane cracked over a building on West Fifty-seventh Street. In the late afternoon it was still dangling there, looking like the broken neck of a bird, causing the police to keep people off of several streets, the Times reported. Some apartments in that building are being offered for ninety million dollars. In Manhattan, we live in a landscape of solid cliffs, and don’t think anything can break them, and then it turns out that there is a lot here that isn’t nailed down. Thousands of people in Brooklyn and Queens were losing power; three quarters of a million people up and down the coast already had. And the hurricane hadn’t even made a proper landfall yet. Sandy is slow and heavy, and lumping its way west toward land. It doesn’t seem interested in turning to the sea, which is where hurricanes tend to fall apart.
— one of the best paragraphs i’ve read in the past few weeks
