I was shocked at how vividly the contrast of the city's low and high density came to life when I visited the new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. What the model most powerfully shows is that most of the city is actually a suburb of one and two-story buildings. The New York of our minds, towering structures and vast numbers of people, is really quite limited.
All across the United States, in big cities and small towns and even in unincorporated rural places without names, people go to casinos and wish away more than fifty billion dollars each year. There are more than a thousand of them, rooms within rooms filled with men and women spending their paychecks in pursuit of the feeling of having won.