Twenty-nine thousand runners clogged the streets of Brooklyn this Saturday for the annual half marathon, while across the borough, developers are pushing forward on a 14-story residential tower at 120 Court Street and the final 52-story skyscraper at the Domino Sugar Refinery site.
While the physical landscape of Brooklyn undergoes rapid vertical change, podcasters are treating the borough as a static cultural backdrop for their own professional orbits. On Pivot, Kara Swisher noted the borough's role as a convenient storage unit for her co-host's belongings, remarking, "They're in Brooklyn right now. Anyway, you can stay in Brooklyn anytime. You'll never come to Brooklyn, which is fantastic."
Others view the borough as a laboratory for the hyper-niche. On Hard Fork, Kevin Roose highlighted the emergence of the Strother School of Radical Attention, observing that it is, "in Brooklyn. It's sort of a new-ish program, and they are giving people of all ages the opportunity to study and practice attention."
There is a clear divide in the audio discourse: for some, the borough is a punchline or a storage locker, and for others, it is the epicenter of experimental self-optimization. As Molière in the Park begins its outdoor season at BRIC, expect the friction between these two versions of Brooklyn—the gentrifying construction site and the intellectual playground—to only intensify.