This time it wasn't mischief, upstate happenstance, or terror: The system was overloaded, and the infrastructure simply…gave way. It was exactly 40 years ago that New York City experienced its Great Blackout.  People in the Upper West Side in that sultry, torpid summer night became a great village reduced to small-town modesties, as people reacted with interpersonal considerations to the evening's unexpected reduction to medieval candles, defunct coolants, softening ice cream, and absent air conditioning. This past afternoon and evening, transformers underground in my New York City neighborhood and the aligned loci across town burst into flame and were the cause of manhole covers mysteriously erupting on the streets – followed by unstoppable belching of black smoke, acrid even when the wind blew in a direction not one's own. People gawked in the streets as the hatchet spew hiccupped and  hiccupped,...(Read Full Post)