alternate-history

Rielle Hunter Killed Hillary

Pareene · 08/11/08 03:04PM

Former Hillary Clinton spokeshipster Howard Wolfson says Hillary Clinton totally would be president right now if the John Edwards scandal had gone public last year. "I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," he told ABC. And furthermore: Wolfson says the Clintons knew the story but didn't push it. "Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it." Ha. Bullshit. If they had the story, they would've planted it without getting their hands dirty. And furthermore, Edwards would've had to drop out right before Iowa, and not after. And furthermore, their Iowa ground game sucked and Obama's didn't. And frankly their campaign didn't kick into gear until they were losing and started taking shit seriously; being the frontrunner was a liability. But all that aside, playing alternative history is totally fun! So let's all pretend the Edwards revelations broke close enough to the Iowa caucus to force Edwards to drop out but not so far from them that everyone had already forgotten or stopped caring. What would our world look like now?

12 Views Of Manhattan You'll Never See

Nick Denton · 04/16/08 12:01PM

Santiago Calatrava's improbable residential skyscraper on South Street, a tower of boxes as unsteady as Jenga blocks at a late stage of the game, is dead. And the Port Authority is scaling back the Spanish architect's daring design for the financial district's PATH station. The architectural critics will no doubt bemoan the loss of New York's civic ambition, and wonder why rival world cities such as Shanghai and Dubai have taken up the mantle. (Oh, yes: authoritarian regimes, unbridled capitalism and cheap labor, but let's not go there.) Truth is that the drawing boards are littered with visions of Manhattan that were never realized. Here are my dozen favorites.