A tale of two cities

"People have a good time in London. They drink. They laugh. They don’t spend dinners talking about money and real estate and which school 3-year-old Caleb has tested and tested his way into. Conversation lives. There’s little of that soul-shriveling New York intrusiveness and competitiveness. ... London still cares at some level where you came from — its charm and curse. While there is a lot of power in London, there is more across the water in a nation still youthful. ... [Yet] the Channel is still much wider than the Atlantic." (Roger Cohen, New York Times, "Too Special for Words")