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I GO FOR DRINKS with another writer friend and we argue about the new East Villagers. I tell her they’re boring and don’t belong here and she tells me I can’t know that, not really, not without talking to them. Maybe they’re fascinating people. This reminds me of an op-ed I once read in the Times. …

The Great Invasion began sometime in the late 1990s but didn’t really take shape until after September 11. That’s when the new people found the East Village. The new people, the emphatically normal, come from someplace else, the Midwest, the South, but that’s not what makes them invaders. Many of u…

Somehow, I doubt the new people worry about dying that sort of death. They know they won’t be trapped here. They have other places they can go. But if they don’t worry like New Yorkers worry, can they dream like New Yorkers dream? While they sleep, do the walls of their apartments miraculously open…

MARVEL: The potential of guilt to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is basically zero. I’m not going to police how anybody feels, but I’m not convinced of the efficacy of guilting or shaming people. Whether or not you have a kid, your moral responsibility is to the children who exist in the…

PURDY: One thing that’s struck me so far about the parenting frame is how the appeal to protect one’s own children can play into what you could call ecobarbarism.

On the one hand, there’s a political pressure to share out the burdens and the good things of a finite and stressed world, and find n…