"[It] leaves us with the feeling," he concludes, "that, as the bonus culture thrives while others lose their jobs, the lessons of this vast collapse have still to be learned".
But the triumph of the evening is that it renders Enron's rise and fall in exciting theatrical terms, and leaves us with the feeling that, as the bonus culture thrives while others lose their jobs, the lessons of this vast collapse have still to be learned.
The title and the opening dialogue of that play, about tempting, dangerous life in moldy warehouses on a river, recall the West Street piers of the meatpacking district, and their vast, collapsing sheds that for two decades were sex resorts for venturesome gay men.
None of these categories can be lumped into a "Muslim culture" because the Muslim world is simply too vast to collapse into a cultural category.
It experienced a vast speculative financial collapse in the 19th century, known as the Failure.
Even within that definition, the time frame is vast, from the collapse of the Han dynasty in A.D. 220 and into the Tang, which began in 618.
Their story of a vast empire's collapse and rejuvenation caught the imagination of the leaders of AUM Shinrikyo, a Japanese new religious group, and shaped the thinking that resulted in the group's gas attack on Tokyo's subway in 1995.
Every turn in the cycle justifies itself by the one that came before, but it's a single movement, one vast lurch towards collapse.
Before starting the company this summer, Mr. Macklowe, known as Billy, was the chief executive of his father's company, Macklowe Properties, whose vast property empire collapsed with the real estate market.
In the old downtown, where a vast sewing sweatshop collapsed, some two hundred workers, many said to be Central American migrants, are believed to have been killed; a similar tragedy occurred at nearly the same place in 1985.
The scale of its collapse seems vast at present.
