special contract exists between this one kind of victim and her assailant.

50 or 60 million square feet of office space remained unrented (60 million square feet of unrented office space is the equivalent of fifteen darkened World Trade Towers) and

indifferent to the truth or to the sensibilities of whites—which,

Sixty percent believed that it was true or might possibly be true that the government “deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people”.

was of a city systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass.

“handsome and pretty and educated and white”, who, according to the Times, not only “believed they owned the world” but “had reason to”. She was from a Pittsburgh suburb, Upper St. Clair, the daughter of a retired Westinghouse senior manager. She had been Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley, a graduate of the Yale School of Management, a congressional inte

Such divergent interests were instead a lucky break, a ready-made organizing tool, a dramatic illustration of who had the power and who did not, who was making it and who was falling below the line; a metaphor for the sense of victimization felt not only by blacks but by all those Sharpton called “the left-out opposition”.

“With its migratory population, its diversity of cultures and institutions, and its vast resources of infrastructure, capital, and intellect, New York has been the quintessential modern city for more than a century, constantly reinventing itself,” Michael Stone concluded in his New York magazine

The convention assumes, finally, that the victim would be, were this special contract revealed, the natural object of prurient interest; that the act of male penetration involves such potent mysteries that the woman so penetrated (as opposed, say, to having her face crushed with a brick or her brain penetrated with a length of pipe) is permanently