What Cultural Exile?

Academics from East Coast Universities who speak of cultural "exile" to the Midwest are deluded. A carefully planned and executed trip to New York can include more art in 36 hours than the average New Yorker absorbs in a year, or—in many unfortunate cases—a lifetime. The opportunity to do just this, in conjunction with an essential conference at Yale, gave me a chance to make good on this claim. A flight from Chicago, due to a routing quirk, gave me what was easily the best view of Manhattan I have had—or likely ever will have. For the first time that city in which so many memories reside seemed demystified: it looked like a toy. Times Square's pulsating, optocratic light, its wattage waxing stronger every year, prompted a question: Was it a dazzling sign of precious economic vitality, or (as the early Christians might have insisted), the beating, bloodless heart of a new whore of Babylon? Or both?