#175: Pre-Millennium Tension

First, thanks for a fun year—sending this newsletter is rewarding because you read it (even if you stop reading after this sentence), and in 2021 I actually got to meet many of you, which I hope happens more in 2022. I wasn’t planning to send an issue today but I caught an asymptomatic case of COVID which has freed up additional time in a week that already had plenty of it, so I no longer have an excuse, plus New Year’s Eve actually falls on a Friday for once. My personal tragedy is your “bonus content.” I don’t do end-of-year Kneeling Bus recaps but this is always a time when find myself taking stock of what has changed since a year ago (if anything), and rereading my own posts is a good way to do that. Last year that exercise was especially revealing—not in a fun way—because I was comparing the depths of December 2020 COVID bleakness (New York and urban existence more broadly were very “done,” remember?) against the end of 2019 and start of 2020, which we hadn’t known at the time were our final pre-pandemic months. My