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This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Two Saturday mornings ago, I was shopping at the C-Town on 9th Street in Park Slope. In the snack aisle I walked past a guy intently studying two bags of potato chips. He looked a lot like me, only with a shaggy beard and an untucked flannel work shirt, a popular look here. Next to him, an elderly lady asked for help reaching a box of garbage bags on a high shelf. “Just a second,” said the bearded guy, lost in his potato chip labels. “When you have a chance,” the woman said patiently.

I did the obvious thing. Since the other guy wouldn’t, I got the box for the woman. But I also had a very visceral reaction. I wanted to turn to the bearded potato chip scholar, get up in his face, and hiss, “Dude! What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

Fortunately, I didn’t act on that impulse. But the next time I might. And that’s why it’s time to leave Brooklyn.

I am leaving Park Slope because I am increasingly impatient with people too socially deficient to act like good neighbors. People who won’t spare five seconds to help an old lady. People who can’t figure out their way around without checking their iPhones. People who don’t say hi to the neighbors with whom they share a stoop. These things are getting noticeably worse. Rather than stew here and become the local grouch, I’m recognizing that I have passed my expiration date in this neighborhood. Time to exit gracefully.

When I moved to the Slope 8 years ago, the place had a reputation as a friendly neighborhood, especially as a haven for lesbians, writers and young parents. I remember walking through Prospect Park in autumn 2002 and seeing dads in fleece pullovers playing with their kids on the swings. “Those guys look like me in 10 years,” I thought, feeling as if I’d found long-term home. The kids were precocious, but there was a Lake Wobegone-style charm to this urban neighborhood where all the children were above average. Today Park Slope has a different reputation. It’s become an insane pleasure island for new parents with no adult social skills. It’s a place where it’s acceptable to be a mom or a dad and stay up until dawn drinking Jack-and-Cokes on the roof of a warehouse. You pay your dues to the Food Co-Op or the CSA not out of any sense of social responsibility, but as absolution for staying out too late on a Thursday eating wings.

By now, it’s old news that Park Slope parents take their kids everywhere. On any given night, you’ll find young children in the bars with their moms and dads. Walk around after midnight and you see parents out with kids in strollers or on trikes and scooters. I love kids, but I get a little weirded out when I see a toddler in a bar: I guess I can’t cuss here.

Let’s roll back to 2002. When I moved to 21st Street, there was no majority demographic on my block. It was a mix of immigrants (and their kids and grandkids) and young people from the usual menu of New York starter jobs—media, finance, education, advocacy, city government. Strangely enough, these people all got along and looked out for one another. When I got mugged in front of my apartment in 2007, I told one of my neighbors. Before long, three or four other neighbors who’d heard the news reached out to me to apologize. They felt ownership of the block, and they took its security very personally. They felt as if the block had let me down. That’s special.

Since then, developers have put up a few more luxury condominiums, a few nice restaurants opened around the corner, the schools have started to get better reputations, and the great churn of New York City real estate has flooded the Slope with young, progressive couples. People here still want to get along with their neighbors, but a gulf has widened between the multi-generation old-timers and the new residents. The new in-your-face parenting grates on the more conservative parents and the non-parents, and that friction make this place a fractured neighborhood.

About a year ago, a young couple and their two elementary-aged kids moved in next door to my building. My new neighbors have had a hard time fitting in. One of the first things they did was complain that one of the old men on the block played his music too loud. (He turned the volume down.) They installed a graffiti wall in their garden, so their children can practice street art. Their kids play behind a gate, never mingling with the other kids on the street. None of us know any of their names.

I guess these things bother me so much because I empathize with people who have trouble socializing. I’m a nervous guy from a family of shy people, from an awkward generation. Those of us born in the late 1970s and early 1980s were the failure-to-launch generation. We didn’t just watch “Arrested Development,” and were in arrested development. Aware of this, I feel like we have to prove we’re better than the sad expectations older generations set for us. As adults, we have to wise up and be fully functional. We should practice a vocation, care for the less fortunate, cultivate hobbies and interests, and set a good example. When I look around Park Slope, I don’t see this happening. I see too many guys my age who aren’t put together, who slouch when they walk, who can’t order a slice of pizza with confidence, who look fidgety and skittish. A lot of these guys are also fathers. It troubles me.

Now that I’ve indicted an entire neighborhood, I shouldn’t forget that Park Slope has been very good to me. Brooklyn has always been a place you can fit in if you don’t fit in anywhere else. I’m fortunate to have some solid friends here. But good people have been moving away. Chris to Chicago, Carol to Australia, Kelly and Justin to San Francisco, Ned to Los Angeles, Jess and Kip and Emily to the Upper East Side. Even Jonathan Letham, the novelist who helped give Brownstone Brooklyn its literary reputation, recently split for California.

My diagnosis: Park Slope’s reputation as a welcoming place went viral, and brought in new residents who made it a warped exaggeration of itself. Park Slope of 2010 is Park Slope of 2002 viewed through a Coney Island funhouse mirror. I offer no cure for this problem of deteriorated community, but I don’t want to stay here and whine. The borough across the river, to which I’ve commuted every workday for the last 8 years, looks pretty shiny. I made a plan. And so my last day in Brooklyn is November 15. It’s time to cede this neighborhood to the hip and despicable.

Might I encounter some despicable people on Manhattan? Oh yeah. But it’ll be a whole new kind of despicable.

Update: Reader reaction to this post.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

It was so cool that I knew it was only a matter of time before everyone would talk to each other on high-quality digital lines. Calls would become more personal and intimate—Think of the whispers, the breaths, the inflection of a dry joke. You could play music for friends and family, or share the ambient sound of the birds chirping on your porch. I knew once people had tried it, they would never settle for a regular phone again.

As we now know, I was totally wrong! We’ve grown to hate our phones so much that we’ve reverted back to typing. It’s the revenge of the telegraph.

Think of the great strides in communication in the last decade—LCD screens, digital camera chips and streaming Internet video, to name three. Meanwhile, our phone calls have gotten steadily worse.

At least once a week, I have to struggle to conduct a phone interview with somebody who’s calling me with Skype or some other computer-based phone service. I can always tell when I’m on a VOIP call—the caller sounds as if he’s talking through a snorkel. It comes off as cheap and unprofessional, but increasingly, the people I talk to prefer making calls this way.

And let’s consider cell phones. Really: They suck. The mobile companies keep trucking out new features while sacrificing call quality. Digital cell phones sounded worse than the analog ones did, and smart phones sound worse than conventional digital phones. With all the data services the telecom companies are trying to sell, the voice call has become an after-thought. Networks are jammed and reliability is poor. Have you tried using an iPhone in New York City lately?

Gradually, our culture has adjusted to account for the underwhelming experience of making a phone call. I remember having two-hour-long phone conversations with friends, and conducting hour-long source interviews at the newspapers where I worked just a few years ago. But these days, I seldom make calls that last longer than a few minutes. People have shunned their phones and prefer texting, e-mail and social networking messages. Journalists conduct interviews by e-mail. People ask each other out on dates using Facebook. Socially, it’s easier. Phone calls were always a little uncomfortable, right?

I submit that this change happened not because typing is better, but because the experience of talking on the phone has gotten so unpleasant. We have to strain to hear each other, and we worry that our words will be misheard; phone calls have become even more awkward than before. We’ve cut our land-lines and begun using lightweight plastic things that don’t fit well against the sides of our head. We’ve grown accustomed to counting minutes, even for local calls. We’ve donned headsets so we can talk while driving, and turned our laptops into snorkel-phones so we can talk via WiFi at Starbucks. (Is that noise on the line, or an espresso machine?)

This is one of those ways where a small adjustment in technology could have had a radical impact on how we communicate. If phones had drifted toward high-quality lines instead of digital compression—gotten clearer and better, rather than smaller and cheaper—society would be different. We might have developed an improved command of the spoken word. Instead, we evolved super-fast typing fingers.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Which makes me wonder, why own DVDs at all? My modest, tightly-edited DVD collection takes up one shelf of a narrow bookcase. Like my long-obsolete CD collection, seeing it sometimes fills me with buyer’s remorse. Eight discs of “Arrested Development” sit there mocking me, now that every single episode is available free online. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Casablanca,” and “Vertigo” are there too—and also available streaming from Netflix.

Netflix does cost money. But $10 a month seems damn cheap considering the alternatives: Video store rentals, Pay Per View, premium cable. I’m not opposed to occasionally buying shows a la carte. If I want something right away that Netflix doesn’t have for streaming (such as recent episodes of “Mad Men”), I may buy it from iTunes.

It’s the physical DVD I’m happy to live without. With so many shows online, buying a disc that only has one program on it seems like an idea from the distant past. What a model of inefficiency. What a waste of plastic!

I am using my DVD player with such decreasing frequency that I doubt I will ever upgrade to a Blu-Ray player. My next computer, especially if it’s a Mac tablet, might not even have an optical drive. TV shows and movies are all going to be on the cloud. Another point of friction in the media marketplace disappears. There’s one fewer reason to exchange money for “content.”

And Rupert Murdoch thinks I’m going to pay to read the news?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Worst: Years ago, during my first-ever visit to New York City, my friends and I walked to Macy’s Herald Square, rode about 11 flights of escalators, and rode them back down. “The World’s Largest Store” functions adequately as a tourist attraction, but as a place to buy stuff, it’s a debacle. Its floorplan is chaotic, its pricing is erratic, and its salespeople are surly. Macy’s is constantly mailing me 25%-off coupons that seem like good deals, but have fine print so complicated you need the help of an accountant to understand all the exclusions. Twice now I’ve walked out of the store in mid-purchase because a coupon wouldn’t scan, and a sales-clerk blamed it on my failure to be functionally literate. (Am I the first person to think “Menswear” means “men’s clothes”?) And no, I don’t want to save ten percent with a Macy’s card! Macy’s? Over! Happily, in this city I have lots of other options.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Who’s the audience for this bad stand-up schlock? Children? Doesn’t the mess we’re in demand smart, funny, cutting humor? Aren’t we, as Americans, better than this?

We have evolved a lot since the days of Thomas Nast and Boss Tweed. Even our best editorial cartoonists, like Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall, are fading quickly from the landscape as alt weeklies whither. Taking their place are a whole new generation of multimedia humorists. Now we’ve got The Onion, SNL, Comedy Central, and everybody who’s ever cut a snicker-worthy political video for YouTube. While Delonas was finishing his cartoon, a thousand bloggers and a million Twitter users were spewing out witty commentary on the stimulus bill. The stuff you read on Wonkette is better than any op-ed cartoon.

An editor at the Post should have caught the unintended, racist double-meaning of this cartoon and rejected it. But speaking to a bigger issue, why are newspapers still printing totally lame editorial cartoons? The editorial cartoon is dead. Thanks for reminding us, Delonas.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This is how you get a headline: Let it slip that you’re planning to eliminate two entire subway lines!

The Daily News has a story today speculating that the MTA’s upcoming budget proposal will slash jobs and kill the W and Z trains.

As a reminder to those of you who don’t live in New York, subway lines here are not like subway lines in other cities. Most NYC Subway lines share track with other lines, and most stations are served by multiple trains. So when you eliminate a line, there’s always another train to pick up the slack. How would this work if the W and the Z go to the great rail yard in the sky? Time to play Fantasy Subway:

Let’s start with the Z train, since that’s easiest. It’s an express J. They could have called it the J Diamond. A lot of New Yorkers have never even seen a Z train. Kill it. Over!

The W is more complicated. It’s a daytime local on the Broadway line in Manhattan and then runs local up to Astoria in Queens. It stops running after 9 p.m. weekdays and doesn’t run at all on weekends, when the N runs local in Manhattan to haul tourists from Times Square to Ground Zero alleviate crowding. Eliminating the W without making other adjustments will mean the R will be the only local train on the Broadway line on weekdays. I have a hunch the MTA would just put the weekend schedule in effect all week for the Broadway line: No W, R local, N local, Q express. That makes a lot of sense, but they would have to run more Q trains, especially to pick up passengers riding over the Manhattan bridge to and from Brooklyn, and enough N trains for the rush hour riders in Astoria. An alternative would be to ramp up R service on the Broadway local line during rush hours, and stop the weird rush hour M service on the 4th Avenue line in Brooklyn (which has to share track with the R).*

Most likely scenario: Public outcry will pop this trial balloon. The state will cough up a few more bucks, the MTA will raise fairs fares, and the cuts will hit other things that still hurt the quality of the subway experience but that don’t sound so drastic.

* UPDATE: WCBS-TV reports that the MTA is considering cutting the M line in half, which I’m guessing means stop the 4th Avenue rush hour service. Same treatment may be in store for the hapless G train.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I left Charlottesville, Virginia, this morning. I was supposed to board a 10:20 United flight to Dulles. But that plane was already behind schedule, leaving me no time to make my connection. The airline courteously booked me on an on-time U.S. Airways flight to Charlotte, where I could get a connecting flight to Newark. Fine.

Actually, not fine. In Charlotte, my plane left on time and taxied out. It sat on the tarmac for two and a half hours. Then it taxied back. Now I’m part of a planeload of passengers waiting in the terminal while the airline negotiates with air traffic control for permission to land its plane in Newark. The latest word is that we’re supposed to take off at 5:30 – four hours late. The official explanation for the delay? “Weather.” Except it’s an absolutely beautiful day all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and the departure boards show most of the other flights are on time.

If I’d left my hotel this morning and kept driving to Brooklyn, instead of to the airport, I’d be there by now. Now I am further away from home than when I started.

Also of interest: At no point today has anyone asked to see my identification.

Update: The plane landed in Newark more than four hours late. The pilot explained that landings were slow-going into Newark due to “puffy clouds.” My suitcase followed about 20 minutes later, arriving on a different plane.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I may be wrong about Twitter, but I’m pretty sure it’s over. We’ve given it long enough. We’ve been patient. It’s not poised to break out of the nerd community. It’s not the next big thing.

Why is Twitter doomed to be a niche player? It takes too much work to sort through all the noise. Twitter represents the purest form of Web 2.0′s biggest problem: A crowd of people unsure what they want to hear matched with a crowd of people with nothing interesting to say. As a communications tool, it offers very little that the average person can’t get from a blog or Facebook or MySpace.

When Twitter was new, I started an account for lurking purposes. Work-wise, it has been of no help to my reporting. The sources I care most about – the ones who are well-informed about my beat, which is professional photography – are not on Twitter. They don’t know about Twitter. They are too busy. If you explained Twitter to them (“You post just a sentence or two at a time, even a text from your cell phone, telling people what you’re doing all day long”) they would think you were a loser. And they’d be right.

Apart from work, I don’t have any urge to share a minute-by-minute account of my life. When I have something that deserves a mention, I put it here on this blog (via text message if appropriate).

Even though I have never posted anything to my Twitter account, nor told anyone about it until now, 18 people have signed up to follow me. I don’t know who most of them are. I think a few of them are spammers. If you’re one of them, let the record note that I actually do a lot of things. I’m just not one to Twitter about it.

Counterpoint: Charles Cooper: For some reason, Twitter hasn’t yet taken the journalist community by storm.

Update: I had this post cued up in advance and failed to notice my friend Bret was blogging about the same thing. He’s in the Twitter camp. Like I said, I could be wrong about this one.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I’m talking about smoking, in all its glowing sexiness. This hazy cloud shows no sign of dissipating from popular entertainment.

I have a simple relationship with smoking. I don’t smoke because I have a low opinion of cancer. The few times I have smoked cigarettes, I enjoyed them. But I realized that I’m the sort of person who looks kind of dippy holding a cigarette. (The point of your 20s, I think, is to identify the behaviors that make you look or feel ridiculous, and gradually expunge them from your life.)

Moreover, tobacco companies have such a long and well-known history of evildoing that no one with any scruples would work for one today. Therefore, all tobacco company employees are unscrupulous.

Which brings us to celebrity smokers. A voluntary ban on tobacco advertising in magazines took effect last year (Oh, you didn’t know that?). You can’t air cigarette ads on TV or put them on billboards or even name a NASCAR race after them. Tobacco ads are over! – cultural waste to be recycled and mocked by Richard Prince and “Mad Men.”

Backed into a corner, tobacco companies are known to resort to desperate measures. Secret product placements in magazines and films and TV shows – ones that everyone, if asked, can *cough cough* plausibly deny – seem so rational that it’s hard to believe they aren’t happening.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.