WHY DOES NEWSWEEK HATE ITS CORE READERSHIP SO? White City: The New Urban Blight Is Rich People:

On the face of it, the New Urbanism is very pretty: Court Street in Brooklyn looks splendid, as does San Francisco’s Valencia Street. The aforementioned travel section of The New York Times has a column, called “Surfacing,” that frequently resorts to profiling some forlorn, blighted neighborhood suddenly graced by taxidermy shops that double as yoga studios. I am, as a matter of fact, writing this from a Whole Foods in West Berkeley, California, a formerly industrial district that was recently “Surfaced” in the Times. The coffee I am drinking was roasted about 20 feet away from my Apple laptop. How’s that for local?

Problem is, surfacing is usually whitening: Gentrification by any other name would taste as hoppy, with the same notes of citrus peel. There is really only one strike against the New Urbanism, but it’s a strike thrown by Nolan Ryan: It turns cities into playgrounds for moneyed, childless whites while pushing out the poor, the working-class, immigrants, seniors and anyone else not plugged into “the knowledge economy.” Right around the time that Michael Bloomberg was remaking Manhattan as a hive for stateless billionaires, I saw a slogan that captured perfectly the new glimmer of the city: “New York: If you can make it here, you probably have a trust fund.”

Marshall McLuhan called this one a half-century ago; in 1967, he told Tom Wolfe, ”Of course, a city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome…”

But why does Newsweek consider its core readers — however many remain — to be “blight?” Particularly when the author himself looks to be both white and doing his best to blend in with moneyed leftwing urban whites?

And note that Alexander Nazaryan is the same Newsweek author who in January compared Ted Cruz and his supporters to Nazis. That’s some seriously Mencken-esque pox-on-all-their-houses level misanthropy, though minus Mencken’s powerful writing chops, of course.