New Angeles
n.— «At opposite sides of the continent sit the United States’ two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, paired beacons of urban America. New York is the modern city par excellence. Now that the modern age is over, Los Angeles embodies the future of the city, for better or worse. Shallow/deep, tall/sprawling, the dichotomy is so ingrained in our conception of both places it’s hardly necessary to say more, though the universal acceptance of these pairings shows to what extent the two cities derive their identities from one another. Like any good opposition, each extreme bears within it some elements of the other. In the end, it would almost seem natural for the NY-LA dialectic to resolve itself in the formation of a new ur-city-New Angeles?» —“ David Halle, New York & Los Angeles: Politics, Society, and Culture: A Comparative View, University of Chicago Press, 2003″ by Mariana Mogilevich The Next American City Feb., 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...