"There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century," Sherman McCoy thinks in Bonfire of the Vanities, eulogizing Manhattan from the Triborough Bridge. That was quoted in yesterday's kinda pointless Times piece about the 20th anniversary of the Tom Wolfe novel and how New York is no longer that fractured, dangerous city. But! Maybe New York is actually the 20th Century Paris of the 21st Century! Look at the evidence!

Oh and also he grew up surrounded by cops and mobsters which is why he's both fascistic and corrupt. His childhood was kinda like Angels With Dirty Faces except he's not as good a dancer as Cagney or as charming as Leo Gorcey.

Growing Up Giuliani [Newsweek]

"I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did." [USA Today: Pilot of plane that dropped Hiroshima bomb dies]

Have you noticed how things are small now? The journalists over at T, the New York Times' glossy style magazine, definitely have, and when they did, they wanted to know why. Really: everything is so small! Even houses are small — have you noticed how every house these days is a pod house? It is. Same with hotel rooms and MP3 players: all pods. The T people were stumped, so in preparation for today's special travel issue, they cracked the book of history and came up with some sentences. Their findings are presented in a slideshow. As they put it in the intro text, "A new wave of budget accommodations are landing everywhere. How did it happen? Here, one plausible story."

One can only hope there were j-school-trained reporters around to adequately reflect the racists' views.

It's amazing that it's been 15 years. But it must bring Mr. King great solace to know that in that time his dream has been realized: Everywhere across the world, we all can just get along.

Did you think we'd let Black History Month go unmentioned? No way, not us. OK, well, actually, we did. But now that February is over we thought it'd be a good time to look back on the month that was. Then we realized we had no idea how to do so. Time to call in Gawker's Special Correspondent for Brown-People Issues, The Assimilated Negro.

A suspect? A suspect? We knew there was a second shooter.

Finally, some good historical news in this otherwise crappy month:

On the upside, at least there was that posthumous vindication. Which we're sure meant a lot to them.

Although apparently the last time anything good happened in August was more than a century ago. Stupid month.

Sure the insurgency rages on in Iraq with no solution in sight, yes the price of oil his a new record high today, true no progress is being made to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program, and granted Iran is about to have nukes of its own. But the Times's "Today's Headlines" email over the last week has been using its on-this-day blurb to considerately remind us of all the other shitty stuff that can happen.

An observant reader points out that on this day in 1967, Manhattan's first air-conditioned subway went into service. Surprisingly, the lucky train was the F. No, that's not a typo: The F line (or the hipster-ghetto lovecoaster, as we like to call it) used to be the nice one. This, of course, has us wondering what sort of warped New York universe existed in during the wonder years, when the F train was the fancy, shiny one — as opposed to dimly lit, medium-speed orange litter mover of today.