There are as many differences between your two editors as there are grains of sand in one of those “write your name on a grain of sand!” things. And one of these differences is the predilection of one to read certain things on the internet and others in analog form, and the predilection of the other to do the exact opposite. And so, this morning, as we discussed the various traffic for the day, the stories we would plant and the others we would invent, we brought ourselves around to talking about Key, the New York Times real estate magazine launched with great glory a few years ago. One of us had planned to write about the writing—to get into the stories, to see what was shaking out in the language of the crash—while the other had planned to write about the format—this formerly stand-alone publication’s new home as an in-book supplement to the regular New York Times Magazine.

And so, being ever-cooperative, we’ll touch on both. But first and foremost, the real story. Which is, we believe, the stories. Jonathan Mahler writes an elegy for the city and its Bloomberg-aided development that is, with sentences like “New York is again a city of abandoned lots, half-finished buildings and free-floating anxiety,” worthy of a soundtrack by his namesake. Introducing an element of humanism into that now-epic debate as to whether this recession is good or bad for design and architecture, Mahler says that “the current downturn, like the previous downturns, is not something to celebrate; the city and its residents will suffer.”

Andrew Rice spends six (internet) pages trolling around the Hamptons in search of someone’s buying—rather than closetedly-frantically selling—a property and personalizes the faces of abstracted tragedy, a “the way we live now” approach repeated in Susan Dominus’ profile of super-broker Dolly Lenz, who says, in between less-frequent Four Seasons lunches, that the game is “just not as fun.” Jim Lewis introduces In Sook Kim’s photos, one above, controlled images that are part Rear Window and part Playtime, and a series of sidebars goes from WTF with a lap around Manhattan’s private pools to down-to-earth with a look at the city’s only trailer park, and from obscene to funny (even if New York’s Jessica Pressler infamously did it better—and funnier—four years ago).

The last note is the deepest.

Jami Attenberg writes a love letter to her apartment that is so written, so structured, so utterly clarifying and at the same time dense with intuition and innuendo, that it becomes a perfect microcosm of the kind of writing that is springing up here and there in the wake of the popping of the bubble. We love to practice our imminent destruction, to wallow in its possibilities, to give ourselves over to a sense of maudlin ennui. Writing feels a bit more writerly when it’s about darkness, about the end of our world as we know it and the fucked-up ways we’re going to keep speeding up whatever armageddon the form ends up taking. Puppies and kittens are nice for a limerick, but the richness of the sentences that address our oncoming end of days as we’ve known them is unmistakable. Maybe design doesn’t love a depression, or even a recession. But it seems that writers, somewhat freed from the constraints imposed by writing faster and scoopier than their counterparts—if it’s all slowed down, there’s nothing to do but slow down—can finally get the attention their words deserve. There’s something about going all-in that makes us all just want to go all-out.

As for that second side of the grain? Key isn’t standing alone anymore. And someday soon, it might not stand at all.

After the Bubble [New York Times]
A Cold Season in the Hamptons [New York Times]
The Hard Sell [New York Times]
New Glass City [New York Times]
The Real Lap of Luxury [New York Times]
Single-Wides in the City? [New York Times]
Diners’ Club [New York Times]
Where Is the New Brooklyn? [New York Times]
An Apartment Affair [New York Times]
Image [New York Times]
Jonathan Glancey on the Recession: Eternal Return [Edificial]
In Praise of In Praise of Slowness [Edificial]