COLD WATER

We have been reading The Fires, a great book by Joe Flood about the (mostly devastating) consequences of Mayor Lindsay's decision to enlist the RAND Corporation and their "new budget science" to help New York City's Fire Department do more with less in the 1970s. There's a lot we could say about the book, which we are finding fairly riveting, but for now, suffice it to say that we have another entry in the Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion: COLD WATER. Flood writes that Robert Moses didn't heat pools in white neighborhoods near black ones because he didn't think blacks would swim in cold water. Awesome!