I just had a nice meeting with Harry Siegel, the new editor-in-chief at the New York Press. Contrary to what I was told previously, Harry wants me to continue to cover urban environmental issues for the paper. He mentioned that he has received a lot of mail from readers commenting on my absence and asking that he reinstate my weekly column. If you wrote a letter, thanks.

I'm not going to continue to do a regular weekly gig at the Press but I will likely continue to do articles for them from time to time. Though Harry has been portrayed in New York City gossip media as some sort of arch-conservative, in talking with him, it sounded to me like we have similar politics that don't always fit easily into the left-right, liberal-conservative, Coke-Pepsi mode of today's public discourse. Harry seems really committed to improving the newspaper, when I saw him he hadn't even left the office in 48 hours, and I think good results are already starting to show. Hopefully the paper's management will give him the resources he needs to make the Press into a valuable alternative voice in the New York City mediascape.

I am also stretching out into some other publications. This week I have a shorter version of my New York City hurricane story in New York magazine. I also wrote the cover story for the next issue of Transportation Alternatives magazine and a piece about traffic calming for a local, Park Slope newsletter.

The director of public relations at the New York City Office of Emergency Management said that after Katrina "everyone" was reading my hurricane story. He says that he got calls from most of the city's major editorial boards asking if the information in my story was correct. My story does lean towards the dramatic, worst-case scenario side of things, but yeah, all of the facts and figures are correct and come from readily-available official sources. A category 2 or 3 storm hitting the New York City region is not at all unrealistic and has happened many times in the past. And if a big hurricane does make a direct hit on NYC, southern Brooklyn and Queens and large swaths of Manhattan are very likely fzucked. On the bright side, having spent some time withNew York City's emergency managers, I feel confident that a New York City hurricane aftermath wouldn't be anywhere near as ugly as what we saw in New Orleans, regardless of what the federal government does or doesn't do. NYC has great disaster relief resources and expertise at its disposal and far more competent managers than anything New Orleans, Louisiana or the federal government seem to have.

4:04 PM | Link |