“Stocking up on a few classics, eh?” asked the young cashier at Borders. “Yup,” said I. I have bought: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemmingway, Voltaire’s Candide, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Dick’s Valis, Card’s Ender’s Game, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and three volumes of Ellis’s Transmetropolitan from an authentically New York-feeling [...]

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To paraphrase Juvenal: the wrath of New Yorkers may be great, but they certainly are slow. One day crowd-dodging will be up there with parkour as a sport for the easily annoyed. Gah! Slow people are the bane of modern society: if we all walked a little faster, so much more could get done. In [...]

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…and the humidity’s so bad I can barely use the touchpad. I can’t even come up with a workable analogy for New York, so I’ll just say: it’s dirty, dangerous, frequently bad-smelling, unpleasant, aggressive, nasty - but all these things pale into insignificance because it is the most exciting city in the whole damn world. [...]

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Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I’ll post a bigger update later, but basically I arrived at Sarah’s on Monday, went cycling Tuesday, fell out of a kayak Wednesday, didn’t do much Thursday, and tonight I’m celebrating the victory of the rebels over the legitimate British government. …wait, what?

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