Birding in Traffic

This chapter describes how the author took a subway to Union Square Park to see a bird they had never seen. The bird, a Scott's oriole, had been noted intermittently behind the statue of Mohandas Gandhi since December, though it took birders several weeks to figure out that it was not in fact an orchard oriole — which would have been unusual enough for winter in Manhattan. Scott's oriole is a bird of the Southwest and has never been recorded in New York. The chapter then discusses the point of bird-watching. “Nature” is not necessarily elsewhere. It is the person holding the binoculars, as much as the bird in the tree, and it is the intersection of these two creatures. Birding in city parks evokes much the same sensation. The parks, and the cities around them, may be human-made, but the wildlife that flashes through is no less real.

Patriotism and protest: Union square as public space, 1832-1932

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Patriotism and protest: Union square as public space, 1832-1932

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A Squeeze of the Hand

We recorded forty-five-minute dialogues for thirty straight days around New York City. Half these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store that we call “W.F.” Other locations included MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park, and a Tribeca parking garage. What follows is our twentieth conversation. Here sickness, emptiness, a train delay, and an argument seem to prefigure disaster and the project’s sudden end. But this disaster—much like the two-character Japanese word for “crisis”: the first one meaning “danger,” the second, “opportunity”—offers clarities perhaps best expressed by a Japanese proverb:Luck turns Wait