Yesterday, I posted on the provinciality of New Yorkers, most of whom hail from the provinces anyway.  In my accidental and ongoing series about New York, then, is this piece by Joan Acocella, where she wonders why New Yorkers seem so rude.  Here’s a good hypothesis: the rest of America spends more time in private, and so we’re ready and rested to put smiles on for the rest of the world when we go outside.  New Yorkers, however, have less domestic space to be alone, and so:

[T]hey make less separation between private and public life. That is, they act on the street as they do in private. In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It’s hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.

If you’re going to the city anytime soon, or if you live there, read the rest, which suggests why New Yorkers act the way they do, and why they seem smarter than everyone else.

Over at WORLDMag.com, Alisa Harris reports on the “cynical response” to last Friday’s acquittal of three New York police detectives in the death of Sean Bell:

The Associated Press noted that the detectives’ race—two of the three shooters were black—may have made the reaction less visceral. On NPR’s News and Notes, Huffington Post’s Trey Ellis hit on another problem—cynicism: “The disposability of black male life, unfortunately, has become common.”

Read her entire article here.

A week after Eliot Spitzer’s ongoing fling with a prostitute was found out, his successor David Paterson, who was sworn in yesterday, has confessed that both he and his wife have had extramarital affairs. “This was a marriage that appeared to be going sour at one point,” Paterson told New York’s Daily News. “But I went to counseling and we decided we wanted to make it work. Michelle is well aware of what went on.”

The Patersons should be praised for admitting to their past indiscretions and for staying together and working out their problems. One has to wonder, though, whether in another time or place they would’ve had to go public with their confession. It’s no doubt the press or a future political opponent would have dug up these skeletons in his closet at some point.

After his expensive, long-term prostitution habit was discovered earlier this week, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer found that he had no choice but to resign this morning. He will remain in office until Monday, when Lt. Gov. David Paterson will assume leadership of the state and become New York’s first black governor. Paterson is also legally blind.

In his resignation statement, Spitzer paraphrased Luke 12:48: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected. I have been given much: the love of my family, the faith and trust of the people of New York, and the chance to lead this state. I am deeply sorry that I did not live up to what was expected of me. To every New Yorker, and to all those who believed in what I tried to stand for, I sincerely apologize.”

Here’s an interesting scenario: If Hillary Clinton becomes president, Paterson, a Democratic superdelegate pledged to Clinton, will be charged with naming her replacement to the U.S. Senate. Before this scandal hit, Paterson was considered a likely replacement for Clinton, so he just might appoint himself. Should that happen, Spitzer political rival Joe Bruno, the Republican majority leader of the New York State Senate who Spitzer had state troopers spy on last year, would be next in line to run the state. Meanwhile, Bruno will take on the responsibilities of lieutenant governor.

Also, this scandal means that Clinton, who only picked up a handful of delegates yesterday in Mississippi, likely will have one less superdelegate (Spitzer) voting for her at the Democratic convention in Denver.

Near the end of Richard Russo’s sprawling new novel Bridge of Sighs, Noonan, a tough adolescent from a dysfunctional family who grows up to be a well-regarded artist, recalls a crucial moment from his senior year in high school.

He enters Ikey Lubin’s, a run-down corner store in Thomaston, a decaying upstate New York town, slowly being poisoned by the tannery chemicals that have turned its river red. Though decrepit, Ikey Lubin’s has become a refuge for the book’s main characters. As Noonan enters the store he realizes that Ikey Lubin’s is a place he could belong. He begins to think about his English teacher, a man “drawn to extremes, both philosophical and dramatic…Small men with small dreams didn’t interest him, even when their dreams demanded enormous faith and endless forbearance. Ikey Lubin’s was a small thing. A small, good thing. You could count on it much like you could count on the Lynches, not for what they didn’t have but for what they did.”

Russo focuses on a small circle of people in a small place. Lou C. Lynch, nicknamed Lucy by unkind children in kindergarten, sits at the novel’s heart, and his recollections of the past, his recounting of town dynamics and events, make up the largest part of the novel. At sixty he’s lived all his life in Thomaston, most of it at Ikey Lubin’s. He married his high school sweetheart and never wanted to leave. In particular he wants to preserve memories of Big Lou, his milkman father, as though by doing so he will make Big Lou’s optimistic worldview—that everything will turn out fine–true. Lucy is a careful chronicler, recording most events in minute detail, but he leaves some thinks out—and the reader understands that Thomaston has its mysteries.

As events in the present undermine his recollections, Lou begins to understand better the father he adored and the mother he resented. “Odd, how I grew up thinking my parents were opposites, my father the optimist, my mother the cynic. In reality, she occupied the middle ground between his willfully blind faith in the basic goodness of his fellow man and Mr. Berg’s [the English teacher] equally blinkered and needy belief in its corruption.”

As the story moves forward we see that most, but not all, the characters walk paths set out for them from birth, without hope in the world. They are like the convicts passing over the bridge in Venice known as the Bridge of Sighs—from which the novel gets its title– headed to prison where all hope is lost. This book is full of hopeless lives, cut short by suicide, war, cancer, alcohol.

But a few characters break free, and the book ends on a note of hope. Lou, who has been so reluctant to leave Thomaston and the ghosts of the past, has changed, and he’s looking forward to upcoming trips: “And in the summer, Italy. This time we’ll go. We will leave this small, good world behind us with the comfort of knowing it’ll be here when we return. But. We will go.”