The Way We Live Now: Besieged. New York City is crumbling into bloody class wars in the street, if selective anecdotes are any indication. Crime will follow you to your hotel! And, locusts! One day:

Because we, the media, use the condition of New York City as a proxy for the condition of America, because we live here, we must ask ourselves, what is the condition of New York City? It's falling the fuck apart! There are actually fewer riders on the subway now. Counterintuitive, since everyone is broke? No, because there are fewer commuters, because everyone has been laid off.

Subway rides are purely recreational. There's nowhere to go for work or pleasure, because our city's parks—the righteous domain of the unemployed—are being taken over by wealthy fashionistas for gloating displays of pomposity that could easily, you must admit, lead the odd layoff victim to start lobbing Molotov cocktails into the midst of the Joseph Abboud fashion launch party in The Cage at West 4th St.

If Joseph Abboud wants to stand on the West 4th basketball court for several hours on end, he'll have to be able to finish and alley-oop, at the very least.

Want to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK? We wish you luck, since "Hotel crime rises in recession," according to the headline of this Drudge-touted story, which promptly goes on to say "The fact is nobody knows how much crime is committed in hotels vs. elsewhere. Police don't keep statistics on that, and no hotel companies responded to USA TODAY's requests for crime data," and then cites a study from 2003 data, but then mentions the CRAIGSLIST KILLER, which balances things out.

At least the locusts haven't come. YET.