New York City, May 22, 2013

★★★ Nobody but the toddler was inclined to wake up in the dim morning. It was too humid to feel chilly, but toward noon, the CNN sign over Columbus Circle read 18 degrees lower than the sweltering forecast in the paper. Small schoolchildren out on field trips filled the crosswalk and sidewalk. Air conditioners dripped onto awnings downtown, and anti-fracking activists accosted pedestrians. The afternoon air was beach air, thick and full of glare. In a hot patch of light by a store window, the surface of sun-splashed clothes advertisements briefly seemed to dissolve into the real world. In front of the apartment building, people were sitting out on the stone-block representations of benches, which really serve as parking-space barriers and on which people never sit.