Recession Blues Rot Big Apple

Sure, people everywhere are suffering from the recession, but most of the country is managing to deal with it. Not New York. The Big Apple is “perpetually freaked out,” writes Hugo Lindgren in New York. The city is so packed with people, Lindgren theorizes, that it’s “prone to epidemics of all sorts, especially emotional ones," so banker-depression has seeped into the collective mood.

Worse, the news industry is tanking right alongside the banking one. Maybe the rest of the country can live without newspapers, but New Yorkers need the Times, the Post, the News. But most of all, New Yorkers can’t handle failure. "Out West, hundreds of TV pilots are produced to yield a handful of hits. The makers of the stinkiest box-office bombs land new gigs with ease." In NYC the disgrace of falling off the ladder of success “can drive people underground, or into the dark corners of Starbucks.” (More recession depression stories.)