Nick Paumgarten is Awesome!
I am searching for a way to express my fanboy-ness for New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten. From The Pits, discussing NY’s building boom:
Keep an eye on the construction pits that developers dug to make way for the foundations of new buildings. The town is pocked with them.
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What will become of the pits? Can we turn them into half-wild swimming holes, like the granite quarries of New England? Ring them with barbed wire and convert them into debtors’ prisons or internment camps for the culprits who structured synthetic C.D.O.s? They’d make excellent ha-has, for livery horses or livestock. Corn mazes. Extreme-cockfighting arenas. Or perhaps they could serve, over time, as urban tar pits, entrapping and preserving in garbage and white brick dust the occasional unlucky passerby for the scientific edification of future generations, if there turn out to be any. Or they could become parking lots.
He is also the author of another of my favorite articles, Up and Then Down.
