Can I wild out and say that, having lived in both New York and LA, I actually love both? And that what makes them both great is the same thing — that they're huge, teeming, diverse cities with tons of cool stuff large and small? (And yes, urbanistically, LA is infuriating.)

You are allowed to love both.

how embarassing, I tripped on the sidewalk and dropped these books

Great reads! Really really important to keep your BS detector turned on especially with that second one though.

what specifically?

Man eating mountain lions are eating people! Tornados! Like, ok man, this is a fun read. And it’s a big place, stuff happens, but I don’t think these are significant threats and I don’t think they’re shaping the social dynamics of the city.

On the other hand, that fire chapter is unfortunately aging really well, isn’t it?

I don't think he was saying mountain lions will eat everyone, but that the existence of tornadoes in LA is underappreciate and wild life - urban interaction leads to human/animal interaction (and as he discusses in The Monster Enters, disease)

Come on, talk shit about New York. Remind us that it's a filthy shithole where we live without basic appliances and we throw our trash on the street like it's medieval Paris. Tell us that we elected a Batman villain mayor. We can take it.

yeahhh! my kitchen doesn’t have drawers!!

Ok you should probably talk to your landlord about that. He'll send a guy named Gustavo to fix it (Gustavo will not fix it).

There’s literally nowhere to put them but I’m sure we could get a guy to stand around and go hmm

Honestly Mamdani isn't nearly weird enough to be your mayor. Too normal.

This does worry me. The last normal guy we had as mayor was Dinkins.

They should start asking him how he felt about being required to take two semesters of technical drawing as a high school sophomore. If he's anything like me, he'll come off as an angry ranting weirdo.

We deserve a normal guy as mayor. We are due for one.

You are infected with a disgusting level of suburbanism for an alleged "world city." There are townhouses one street over from Central Park. What is the point of allowing dead weight like that? Frankly it's a sign of your depraved immorality that there is a single building under 10 stories in NYC.

I live in the one of the most suburban parts of NYC and there are like 15 different kinds of ethnic cuisine within 5 blocks of my house. I don't have or need a car, but if I did street parking isn't that bad. The answer isn't to cram everyone into NYC but surround every other city with Brooklyn.

listen I agree with you

NYC should have 50 million people instead of 8 and be fully capable of swallowing up everyone who needs to run from red states without even noticing it. Y'all were the city of the world's desire and threw it away because of a crippling fear of tall buildings. For a dream of an open air museum.

It's a wonderful city but I am kind of baffled by the trash can thing.

ONLY IN NEW YAWK BABEY

You don't have air fryers??

I lived in New York (Astoria) and decided it was simply not for me because of the cost of living. Build more apartments, you nerds. That said, it's a cool city and I begrudge no one who likes it. Also, talk shit about Minneapolis and I WILL take you down to a lake and show you a pleasant day.

Minneapolis rocks. It's the nicest Hudson River town in the world.

It very rarely hits temps that high, and the difference between us and LA (and most cities with serious corruption problems) is that we punish the corruption.

But yes, our weather kind of sucks. But we didn't *do* anything to make that happen. LA has perfect weather and yet, look at what you did with it. You made everyone travel in climate-controlled death machines all the time.

Perfect weather aside from the like one time it rains a year that causes mudslides, the arid ass summers that cause wildfires, and the Santa Ana winds

And this isn’t weather, but earthquakes

Our weather is fine, people in Los Angeles act like 11 year olds when the surfaces of their roads are damp. They pull out north face parkas when it’s 62 degrees. New York’s weather is fine.

East coast winters are perfectly fine (pleasant even, if you don't have to deal with shoveling snow off your driveway/car). it's the summers where the west coast is clearly much better

summer humidity in new york gives you the sensation you're in hell's sewer. for all of its great sins, at least la never does that.

??? Eric Adams is still mayor while Mitch Englander and Mark Ridley Thomas went to prison

Donald Trump is the epitome of a New Yorker.

He is our vile id yes

(2) explains a lot lol

Do we? In my experience the NY - LA “rivalry” resembles the Mad Men meme. We don’t think about you at all.