The New York Times City Section is another of the numerous newspaper casualties of 2009. It will close in the next few weeks. The section, which is wide open to freelancers, was one of the first places I got a journalistic break in New York. My first article, about Mimi, is one of the few stories I still take pleasure in rereading.

In the current economic climate, I’m not surprised to see the City close. But I do wonder what will happen to all the stories that could have been published there from now on. Undoubtedly, some will find a home in other sections, like Style or Real Estate. But the majority will likely never be published. After all, those other sections are largely written in-house, whereas many of the City’s finest stories originate from far outside Times HQ. Take one of the highlight of this weekend’s edition, for example, a first-person piece by a lecturer on Russian and comparative literature at Baruch College, who writes of his unsuccessful attempt to turn his immigration to America, in the early 1990s, into a period of Dostoevskian suffering:

America — complacent, material America — would become my crucible. I would taste the bread of exile and dream of returning to Russia as other Jews dreamed of returning to Jerusalem.

Initially, however, I found it hard to be miserable in New York in the way I wanted. Survival came obscenely easy: Whereas back in the crisis-crippled Kiev we had to be up by 4 a.m. to assume our turn in grim lines for bread and milk, here one was always steps away from the Whitmanesque bounty of the nearest supermarket.

Whatever the city’s fabled cultural decay, I found the place not so much rotten as dull. The metropolitan gaudiness, the hustle and bustle, the fever and the throb left me cold; it all seemed so predictable, even bland. Where was the angst?

Still, I persevered in mining the city for its pockets of misery. I enrolled in college, dropped out and re-enrolled. I took commissions for family portraits, only to abandon them halfway.

Then, too, there were our Babbitt-like Americanized relatives who came by to speak of cars and loans and mortgages. There were girls who objectified you, therapists who misunderstood you, physicians who misdiagnosed you.

THE trouble, though, was that none of this self-inflicted grief amounted to authentic disaster. It wasn’t just that most of my complaints were, at bottom, predictable immigrant grievances — food has no taste, flowers have no smell, etc. It was also that this city — the big, bad monster I so desperately battled — could also be, as I was beginning to surmise, genuinely, crushingly, inescapably good. The nights out in the Village. The Brooklyn Bridge. What was I to do with all those beguiling plenitudes on this foreign ground I’d been so desperate to oppose?

His answer was to paint.

Via Clive.

A gripping story in the NYT about how American soldiers are now ambushing the Taliban in Afghanistan:

The soldiers waited. The rules of the ambush were long ago drilled into them: no one can move, and no one can fire until the patrol leader gives the order. Then everyone must fire at once.

The third Taliban fighter in the column switched on a flashlight, the soldiers said, and quickly switched it off. About 50 yards separated the two sides, but Lieutenant Smith did not want to start shooting too soon, he said, “because if too many lived then we’d be up there fighting them all night.”

He let the Taliban column continue on. The soldiers trained their weapons’ infrared lasers, which are visible only with night-vision equipment, on the fighters as they drew closer. The lasers mark the path a bullet will fly.

The lead fighter had almost reached the platoon when Pvt. First Class Troy Pacini-Harvey, 19, his laser trained on the lead man’s forehead, moved his rifle’s selector lever from safe to semi-automatic. It made a barely audible click. The Taliban fighter froze. He was six feet away.

More here. (Via jackshafer.)

Looks like there’s a nice few days of spring weather ahead. If you’re heading out on your bike, ride safe.

This recommendation comes via Sofie’s cousin Ruth.

By coincidence, Sofie and I saw Mambo performed live on Broadway the weekend before last at Arthur Laurents’ revival of West Side Story. I have to admit, even on YouTube, the Simón Bolívar Orchestra does a much better job of bringing it to life.

Today’s New York Post has an interesting piece by a former Marine chief warrant officer about the difficulties that faced the US snipers who took part in the pirate stand off at the weekend:

A shot at any range from the pitching deck of a ship underway is very challenging. And this target was a head in the two-foot-square forward window of a bobbing lifeboat tethered by a line.

[...]The snipers, spotters and their team commander all likely took positions hours earlier, under cover of darkness, and remained well hidden in the daylight. (You don’t want to spook the pirates with activity on deck or at sea — you want them to lull in complacency.)

Probably, the snipers chose a hard-hitting rifle and round — such as a .338 Lapua Magnum, now popular among Marine and SEAL Special Operations snipers.

These are awesome guns, highly accurate. The more massive bullet would effectively break through the impact-resistant glass of the lifeboat windows, and retain enough force and integrity to kill the pirates on target.

More here.

This quote of the day comes from an unnamed spokesman for the pro-smoking pressure group Forest (emphasis is mine):

There are far more people smoking roll-ups, partly because of the cost, but partly because of the fashion element. Roll-ups have a slightly more antiestablishment feel to them. Cigarettes are getting more and more expensive, and in a recession you can hardly say they are essentials. No matter how addicted you are to tobacco, you can live without it, it is still a discretionary item. People trade down, especially when they are skint.”

Not bloody likely.

It was a busy day in New York Harbor yesterday. A sighting of a humpback whale. And an enormous container ship set sail from Red Hook.

It’s not really the sort of scene that springs to mind when you think of Brooklyn.