>Yes, I thought that was pretty funny, too. The author of that Salon
>piece, Neal Pollack, is ID'd as "a staff writer for the Chicago Reader."
>I guess you can blame the "lake effect" for his rather modest NYC street
>smarts.
I know Neal (he's was a fellow Inkblot at Chicago Ink when I did some things there). He has interesting politics. He is a nice guy and a good writer. He has some definite "progressive" leanings but little patience or empathy for people to the "left" of him.
He is a true champion of the little guy (he has written some very thoughtful pieces on Daley's crackdown of street vendors) but never really integrated those pieces into a wider economic context. He likes to do things from a very "streetlevel" perspective so in that context I don't think he has a lot of patience for academics in general and academic leftists in particular. There is certainly a lot of merit in making criticisms along those lines, but in my opinion not a big issue.
What he knows about New York I couldn't say.
Peace,
Jim "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one . . . [to set] out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes."
--Jorge Luis Borges