As a transplant from New York (moved to Seattle in 1966 as an infant) I had always wondered why the great city I had heard about from my parents had suffered such a decline.
Your article has renewed my interest in this topic. Thank you.

While reading Myron Magnet's trenchant reexamination of Saul Bellow's novel "Mr. Sammler's Planet," I could not help but be reminded of another character, this one real, who could easily have been in the audience at Sammler's informal talk at Columbia in the late 1960's: Edward Said, then professor of literature at the university. Over the years, Said would refer to the novel with barely concealed contempt in books and interviews right up until his death. He repeatedly cited the novel for what he considered its "racism," "reactionary turn," and "unfortunate presage of the rise of neoconservatism," and found the infamous scene with the black man in the camel's hair coat especially lamentable.

It's interesting to note that throughout the next quarter-century, Said would consistently give his support and prestige to the very forces of disorder and destruction that Bellow saw capturing the elites at that fictional talk -- whether they took the form of vandals on New York's Upper West Side or terrorists on Israel's West Bank. If only the professor had been a closer reader!

Absolutely wonderful. I had no idea Bellow's book dealt with this critical topic. I was at Columbia from 1977-79, and Mr. Magnet's descriptions are, sadly, very familiar to me.

The only thing that seems adequate is "thank you."

Great article. As a younger boomer who watched much of the craziness (the 1968 Democratic Convention, riots in Detroit, awful things in the early 1960s going on in the South) from a television set in a small town in the Midwest, I think many of us observing the decay and violence of the era didn't understand what was going on, but knew we wanted something else. Rudy Giuliani is a hero, not only for New York, but for the whole country. Thanks for this.