'The People,' Cont.

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On a more humorous note, here's another piece we published a few years back, in the same vein:


The thirty-seven blocks of residential towers that line the western edge of Central Park, from its lower end at Columbus Circle to the age-old social barrier of Ninety-sixth Street, make up a self-contained world whose sprawling apartments, with their high-ceilinged living rooms, formal dining rooms, and unobtrusive maids' quarters, are home to investment bankers, corporate lawyers, and media executives. And yet in a baffling testament to the failure of Americans to grasp their economic self-interest, the residents of CPW (as locals colloquially call their street) overwhelmingly voted for John Kerry and the Democrats.

This shouldn't be! The very apartment names--the El Dorado, the San Remo, the Majestic, the Dakota--suggest the robber-baron ethos of an age when the Republicans William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge guaranteed low-tax prosperity. And the Bush tax cuts should have eased the burdens on these hard-pressed New Yorkers as they valiantly juggle co-op board assessments, Dalton tuitions, Telluride ski vacations, and East Hampton property taxes. Surely the well-heeled voters in these prestigious climes understand that they will benefit from the president's plan to transform Social Security into an income-transfer program for Wall Street.

A truly nefarious plot bearing all the manipulative and dastardly hallmarks of Team Commie.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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