Sublime

In the first place, the people in the mass that he understood were people of a particular social strata that his own background enabled him to understand: the classes he called “upper” and “comfortable middle.” He had never had any interest in—and therefore had little understanding of—classes he considered beneath his own, the classes who made up s

Throughout this time, Ivar appeared entirely without concern. Although he sensed the increasing panic, along with everyone else, he didn’t want anyone in New York to see him falter, particularly given the market’s decline. He knew markets reflected emotions and perception. In finance, there was no such thing as reality. There was only, as Pierpont

If Hoke had been paid off by mistake, how could anybody take him for Sergeant Wilson? Whoever it was who mixed them up had to be colorblind or badly misinformed.

In road-building in and around New York, he had a dictator’s powers. And he used them.

The old park men saw beauty in their parks. Moses saw beauty there, too, but he also saw power, saw it lying there in those parks unwanted. And he picked it up—and turned it as a weapon on those who had not thought it important and destroyed them with it. Whether or not he so intended, he turned parks, the symbol of man’s quest for serenity and pea

Already predisposed to be friendly toward Moses because he was creator and defender of parks, the city’s thirteen daily newspapers had that friendship cultivated with customary Moses thoroughness.

FDR’s view of Tammany eventually caught up with the times. When Charles Murphy died in 1924, Roosevelt said feelingly, “In Mr. Murphy’s death, the New York City Democratic organization has lost probably the strongest and wisest leader it has had in generations.… He was a genius who kept harmony, and at the same time recognized that the world moves

The younger lawyer was named Marcus, he was from Shaker Heights, he had attended Penn, where he had majored in philosophy and lettered in rowing. After a stint working in a rural Mississippi town with Teach for America, he had gone on to Stanford Law School. He had a lovely wife of Korean ancestry and a six-month-old baby and was just days away fro