VFYW: Calm Before The Storm

For contest #438, we see a charming little city two months before disaster strikes.

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

From the winner of last week’s contest:

What a surprise! I will take the book, please. I am happy to continue paying for the subscription to the Dish, and I look forward to it every week.

I have been to Israel a few times, mostly for work. I always enjoy my time over there, and I even enjoy the often challenging and passionate discussions with the Israelis on work-related issues that I rarely encountered in other countries. My wife has family and friends in Israel, so whenever I make a trip over there I try to squeeze in some time to visit with them. My last visit was some 10 years ago, so I hope that I will be visiting again sometime soon.

By the way, I must admit that I am not a good podcast listener; I prefer to read. Any chance you could make the podcast also available in text format?  

Substack, in fact, auto-transcribes each episode, and you can find the transcript on each podcast page here:

From the sleuth who submitted last week’s view — the super-sleuth on the UWS:

It was very exciting to see my window — well, my Israeli sister-in-law’s window — featured last week! I showed her the results, and she found the entire thing fascinating. I’ll get more feedback on our usual Zoom call this weekend (we missed last week). Although I’ve explained this contest to her before, I know that no simple explanation can capture the full glory of the VFYW write-up. You have to see it to believe it!

Speaking of not believing: that sleuth who spotted a Hasidic-looking guy in another building’s window? What kind of black magic is at work here?? Come on!  

Another followup comes from our Burner super-sleuth:

I enjoy these emails every week, but last week’s made me want to reach and say thank you. It is clearly a lot of work, and I enjoy it week in and week out, but last week stood out. I watched the music videos (wow!) and one of the movies (watching another tomorrow). THANK YOU!

Thanks goes to our resident music critic and movie critic! From a sleuth who guessed Jerusalem last week:

Rehovot, ahhhh! It’s five minutes from my cousin’s kibbutz called Givat Brenner, where I’ve also spent tons of time. And I was just at the Weizmann Institute on my last trip in July, to drop my cousin off for her dance recital, and then I took the train back to Tel Aviv from … Rehovot. No wonder I couldn’t find the window in Jerusalem, but I’m still taking it as a personal win because my gut knew immediately it was Israel.

BTW, I really respected Andrew’s Israel commentary last week. I’ll be writing in about that separately …

The Bethlum super-sleuth also follows up, “with two things inspired by the write-up last week”:

First, the national dog of Israel is the Canaan Dog, which a good friend introduced me to more than 30 years ago. It seems to have some similarities to jackals; it was bred from the wild dogs in the Middle East. It’s a great breed — and very “doggy”, for want of a better description:

Also, damn if I didn’t just watch the episode of West Wing where CJ performs “The Jackal.” Feels synergistic somehow. I’ve been re-watching WW for the fantasy of a functioning government system. Sigh.  

Second, I have also hit the regular, not specialty, VFYW Trifecta: book, super-sleuth, and published view. So yay me! Thanks as always for the contest.

Another followup comes from the musical sleuth in Indy:

That is so cool that you found that video of Asaf Avidan and his Czech Wolfdog! He’s an interesting guy. There was some controversy with him that I just decided to leave out. In a 2015 interview in Le Monde, he said he didn’t feel “Israeli”, adding:

As Israelis, what unites us is the fear. We are always the persecuted, and that is why I am no longer interested in living in Israel, to not feel that fear.

He responded to the backlash with:

In every interview I gave from the first second, I always said I am not an Israeli artist, but an artist from Israel. I am not coming to represent Israel. I am not a politician. I am not a diplomat. And as a son to diplomats I never wanted to be one.

While so many people apologize for what they think or feel, it’s nice that he stuck to his views. I prefer when artists stay away from political commentary, whether I agree with them or not. 

Our “a-maize-ing sleuth in Ann Arbor” corrects my reworking of a sentence last week:

An excerpt of my entry had a quoting error. I wrote, “the Prof. Avraham Hershko Street, named after the Hungarian-Israeli biochemist who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,”; and it became, “named after a Pulitzer Prize-winning chemist.” (No winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has won a Pulitzer Prize. Some winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature had done it: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Bob Dylan.)

That’s my bad — bleary-eyed while editing the contest super late at night. It’s corrected now. On to this week’s view, a sleuth lists some clues:

• Immaculately clean curbs

• Built on rolling hills or small foothills that aren’t steep (yet)

• Not a pickup truck in the whole parking lot (and only two or three sports cars)

• Two large antennae on top of the hills

• Temperate climate, judging by the very fully foliated bushes and small trees

• Very neatly repaired lot with squares over repaired areas that are virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding pavement

• Buildings that all seem to be built in about the same era (say, the ‘70s to 2000)

That sleuth concludes, “Seoul, South Korea?” Here’s the right country, from a sleuth in Ferndale, MI:

My guess is Albany, New York, USA. I have no good reason for saying it. At first I was going to say somewhere in Pennsylvania.

That would have been closer. From the super-sleuth in San Mateo:

My first take on the VFYW Reimagined was inspired by the preponderance of green trees and bushes in the view, leading me to create a cartoon version in which they stand out:

He provides another Reimagined down below, but first, here’s a sleuth in Maine with the right region:

I spent some time over the weekend trying to figure out the VFYW because it looked like a familiar landscape to me. I thought because of the architecture of the buildings on the left and the fenced parking that it could be a state capital, so I went down a rabbit hole with ultimately no luck.

Then I noticed that there were no license plates on the front of the cars, and that coupled with the hilly terrain in the background helped me narrow it down to somewhere in Appalachia.

Our super-sleuth in Bethlum hints at the right place:

From a war zone to a flood zone — two weeks of scenes of destruction, man-made and natural. It was an easier location to find this week, with some iconic buildings in the shot. ID-ing the actual window may be more challenging, though.

Chini circles it, from way above:

The super-sleuth in Providence reveals a major hint:

I’d be curious to see if this particular view has changed significantly since Hurricane Helene (or was it taken post-Helene?). Probably not much, as that part of the city is at an elevation high above the river/floodplains. In any case, nice move! 

It was pre-Helene, in July. From the super-sleuth in Chicagoland:

I feel too sad for the state of that area to go into any more detail, but in other news, I’ve been sitting on a bunch of images I’ve taken from windows on vacation over the years. I’ll try to include a couple for your use each time I submit. The one below was taken in mid July 2023 from a window at a resort near the Arenal volcano in Costa Rica (the closest village is La Palma):

Cool shot! The email for submitting view candidates is contest@andrewsullivan.com, and please, if you can, also submit a photo of the building with the right window circled.

Back to this week’s view, our “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor circles and names the right city: