Author: Josh Philip Ross

For anyone with more than a passing interest in either New York City or the war on terror, this week’s New Yorker has an article you don’t want to miss (unfortunately not online, but additional Q&A here) on how Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has remade the New York Police Department to defend the city against terrorism.

As author William Finnegan tells it, the NYPD has become a model organization in the fight against terror, developing a wide range of strategies and a complex network of information gatherers the world over, all while avoiding histrionics and bringing down the NYC crime rate more generally.

Among other things, the NYPD has managed to hire (or transfer to anti-terrorism and intelligence units) officers who come from the same places as the terrorists, so it has a surprising number of speakers of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi and other languages spoken in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond. Though the article doesn’t say so, my guess is that this is because the CIA and FBI are seen by many Muslim immigrants as tools of the federal government’s assault on the Muslim world, while the NYPD is seen as a force that protects the immediate communities where many Muslim immigrants live. And because New York cops spend their days enmeshed in the fabric of our multi-ethnic city, the department has taken very naturally to the need to understand the sociopolitical complexities of the Muslim world: it’s not all that different, really, from trying to figure out Italian mob connections, the social patterns behind Irish gangs, the inner workings of the Chinatown or Russian mafias, or any other insular immigrant community that needs policing.

Another important effect of the NYPD’s approach is to make the distinctions between Muslims in general and Islamists in particular a lot clearer to the people fighting against terrorism. Here’s a key passage that shows what I mean:

“We’ve been doing instruction on Islam for the N.Y.P.D.,” [Lieutenant John Rowland, the director of regional training for the counterterrorism bureau,] said. “It’s needed. We’ve got a lot of Catholics in this department.” (I had already noted, in a restroom at the facility, a well-thumbed copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam.”)

[Captain Hugh] O’Rourke said, “We’re trying to get our analysis influenced with the proper cultural perspective, because we’re a long way from southwest Asia. Some of our officers were born there, though.”

“Pashtun tribesmen, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Farsi-speakers, Filipinos, Chinese — you name it,” Rowland said. “They’ve been tremendously helpful. One guy here just made his hajj.”

This is an approach that is sorely lacking in the rest of our government, particularly the Pentagon. New York City should be a model that is followed nationally.

This Day in History

1967…Sweaty straphangers breathe a sigh of relief when the first successful air-conditioned subway train goes into service on the F line.

My father always described his vision of hell as a packed subway train at rush hour, pre-air conditioning, where it just runs and runs and never, ever stops. So let us all give thanks for air-conditioned cars.

In its July 16th survey of America, in an article called Centrifugal Forces, the Economist has this fascinating set of facts:

Consider one of the great hidden stories of the past few years: the return of blacks to the South. For decades, southern labourers sought more money and less prejudice in industrial cities. In the late 1960s, black populations dropped most steeply in places such as Birmingham and Mobile in Alabama or New Orleans, Lafayette and Shreveport in Louisiana. Some of the largest gainers were Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and New York. Yet in 1995-2000, those were the five cities that lost the largest number of blacks. Conversely, Atlanta gained 114,000 African-Americans, followed by Dallas, Charlotte and Orlando. This is helping to erode racial segregation. An index developed by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, two economists, shows that in the medium-sized metro areas of the South, segregation has dropped.

To some extent, this is merely a reflection of a wider trend in internal migration: the movement from Rust Belt to Sun Belt. But it also helps to explain the vague sense many people have that racial politics in places like New York City have changed considerably since the era of the Crown Heights riots of 1991, when conflicts between Hassidic Jews and blacks tore the city apart. The old sense of tension between the city’s entrenched ethnic groups has dissipated, if not disappeared. Perhaps it is the combination of black flight and immigration that has changed the dynamic so noticeably.

Meanwhile, anyone who has paid attention to American pop culture for the last ten years is aware of the startling rise of African-American music from the South: Missy Elliot, Ludacris, Outkast, Goodie Mobb, and on and on. I suppose it was all predicted by Arrested Development back in 1992, in their hit Tennessee:

Go back to from whence you came (home)
My family tree my family name (home)
For some strange reason it had to be (home)
He guided me to Tennessee (home)

Flak Magazine has a short article on the Chapman brothers, creators of the fabulously cool Homestar Runner.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Much has been going on in my personal life — a Yosemite vacation, an upcoming move to a new apartment — while the most interesting goings on at the Mission have been personnel issues that I can’t really discuss.

But much is happening at the UN too, and in the larger world. The North Koreans are gonna talk again, and the September summit at the UN should provide some political fireworks. An interesting question is whether the United States will be represented by the embattled John Bolton or by Acting US Permanent Representative Ambassador Anne W. Patterson.

We have a new apartment!

On Friday night, Jenny and I signed a one-year lease for our new place, a beautifully remodeled second-floor one-bedroom with a spacious living room and sizeable master bedroom. It’s on Court Street between Nelson and Huntington (compare to our current block and notice the lack of private parking lots and shuttered lots). The only other tenants in the building are a realty downstairs and our friend Robert on the third floor. We move in July 30.

A couple of months back, I issued a slightly premature goodbye to the Gowanus Canal and its immediate environs. Jenny and I were sick of the noise, the garbage, the broken sidewalks, the noise, the creepy thug neighbors, the walk every day through the Gowanus Houses projects, the noise, the weird semivacant lots with shanties in them, and did I mention the noise? Last night, for example, our neighbors felt the need to blast reggaeton in their garden until 3 a.m.

As recently as the beginning of July, though, we were thinking that we could hang on through the end of the noisy season, when the warm weather encourages our neighbors and their friends to linger outdoors with various forms of stereo equipment cranked to the gigawatts, and save our pennies for a move next spring. But it was Yosemite’s Curry Village, of all places, that convinced us that waiting was just not an option if we wanted to keep our sanity.

Curry Village, consisting of densely packed rows of canvas tent-cabins with wooden foundations, is my parents’ preferred lodging option for Yosemite Valley. Less grotty and closer to the cafeteria than Housekeeping and less expensive than Yosemite Lodge or the upscale Ahwahnee, and offering showers (unlike the campgrounds), Camp Curry isn’t a bad deal.

But even if you haven’t just spent a few days and nights in the back country, Curry Village can seem weirdly urban. As a kid, I remember thinking that the soundscape there — utility trucks, clashing car stereos, a cacophony of laughing and shouting kids and adults, the hiss of the air-brakes on the Yosemite Valley shuttle buses — closely resembled what I would hear on summer visits to my grandparents’ Upper West Side apartment. On our latest visit, some of the Curry staff decided they would blast Korn until 11:30 at night, defying the camp security. The throbbing music and the rough construction of the tent-cabins felt painfully like being right back home again, and it filled us with dread at returning to the real thing. Then and there, we decided that we had to move as soon as possible.

Back in Brooklyn, we started looking at apartments in earnest, but the one we really wanted to see was downstairs from our friend Robert. The story behind the apartment, which Robert says has been vacant for over a year, is that the landlord — a Chinese-American woman about our age, who seems to be holding the building for her family — had it remodeled so a relative could move in, except that that never happened. So there are certain charmingly Asian features, like the little cabinet for shoes by the door, and the brand-new, super-high-powered grease vent over the stove (“Chinese cooking uses a lot of oil.”), and when we viewed the place, it was stocked with unused Asian-style furniture.

As far as we can gather, the landlord never quite wanted to face the hassle of putting out an ad and interviewing potential renters, so she was thrilled when Robert told her that some friends of his were interested. As for Robert, he’s relieved that he won’t have to adjust to some potentially creepy strangers moving in downstairs in what has been his private domain for some time.

So we’ll be moving into an apartment that has never been used since its remodeling. And what a remodeling! We were pleased to discover that there are eight circuits, which will be a nice step up from the one circuit for our current apartment. We’re hoping that in our new place, we won’t have to turn off the air conditioner before we make toast, and that we could even heat or cool both rooms simultaneously without having to find a flashlight and make a trek to the basement, as we do in our current apartment.

The bathroom has been redone in pale stone tile, with a beautiful glass-encased shower (though no bath, sadly). The living room has recessed lighting on faders, while the dining room light is a ceiling fan whose blades are fake bamboo. In the bedroom, runners have been installed for drapes.

And beyond the features is simply the workmanship. Our current apartment was more or less put together by our super, Hector, who is something short of entirely competent. Sections of doorframes are too short and don’t reach the floor. There are gaps between floors and walls. The back door fits so poorly that we have to tape it up in winter, and the window above it is plastic. There are holes in walls, leaking radiators, holes in ceilings, cabinet doors that open into nothing. The new place is a welcome contrast, with every detail carefully considered and properly executed.

So we are anxious to move. As for the move itself, we’ve eliminated much of the stress by letting Moishe’s pack everything and then schlep it. Then we can spend the next couple of months putting together our new place, and hopefully by October we’ll be fully settled in.

The last time I went backpacking was in 2002, in Nepal, where it’s called trekking, which makes it sound more badass than backpacking, though in fact it’s much simpler because you eat and sleep in trekking lodges (which, admittedly, vary from elegant, well-built hotels to trailside shacks).

And the last time I was in Yosemite? Well, that trip was interrupted by the events of September 11, 2001. Jenny and I were together, reunited after several months apart, and planning to enjoy a short backpack when we heard over the radio in the Glacier Point snack bar that the twin towers in Manhattan were simply gone. Unable to believe what we were hearing, we went ahead with our hike to the Point, fortunately before having seen the images of people tumbling to their deaths from the high floors of the towers. Then we drove down to Curry Village, where the staff had set up a couple of TVs and a crowd had gathered to watch, over and over, the horrifying images: the planes, the explosions, the towers collapsing, the New Yorkers running from the billows of white dust.

So this will be a return to nature and a return to Yosemite that are both long overdue. I don’t think even 9/11 has the power to taint Yosemite for me, but I’d like to go there and come back without there being an act of war against New York City while I’m away, just to make sure.

They have arrived! To satisfy my ongoing fascination with Central Asia — and, to an even greater extent, Jenny’s fascination — I recently ordered a number of books about the region. First of all, there’s Like Hidden Fire, the third book in Peter Hopkirk’s trilogy on the British struggle to keep India safe from a northern invasion. While the first two books — The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia and Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia — deal with Russia’s ambitions, Like Hidden Fire is the story of the German and Turkish plot to launch a pan-Muslim jihad that would take India from the British and the Caucasus from the Soviets.

Then there are a few books by some of the people whose stories Hopkirk has told so vividly. Mission to Tashkent is Colonel F.M. Bailey’s account of his 16 months serving as a British spy in Tashkent during the Russian Civil War, culminating in his being hired, under a false identity, by the fearsome Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, to go to Bokhara and find one Colonel F.M. Bailey, enemy of the state. Hunted Through Central Asia, is by Paul Nazaroff, a White Russian who led a plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks in Central Asia in 1918. When the plot failed, Nazaroff was forced to flee on a circuitous route that took him from Tashkent overland across the Himalayas and finally to the safety of British “Hindustan.”

The Victorian best-seller A Ride to Khiva takes place in 1875, at the height of the Great Game. It tells the story of Captain Frederick Burnaby, a swashbuckling British officer who spoke seven languages, stood six foot four and weighed 200 pounds. Without authorization, he decided to head off on a thousand-mile journey to see what the Russians were up to in Khiva, which they had conquered and closed to the outside two years earlier.

Tommorow will be 1,365 days since September 11, 2001 — the same number of days that passed between the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and the unconditional surrender of Japan (August 6, 1945).

So what have we been up to since the more recent attack — which, remember, killed 3,030, 627 more than died in the Pearl Harbor attack? Well, Slate today examines our progress on airport security, such as it is.

According to today’s New York Times, the New Yorker magazine will soon be publishing “The Complete New Yorker,” which is, yes, every single issue of the New Yorker ever published, right down to the cartoons, spot drawings and even ads. It will be in DVD format, but for the computer, and amazingly, it’ll only cost $100. No word on whether you’ll be able to print pages, but even if not, that’s an incredible resource.

It’s due this autumn, in time for the holiday season.