Essayist Reflects on Burgeoning U.S. Population After it Passes 300 Million

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• NANCY GIBBS, Time Magazine:

  So how does it feel to suddenly live in a country of 300 million people? Do we each feel a little smaller, more cramped by this news?

  It's hard for me to worry too about running out of room, but that's probably because I'm an island girl — Manhattan Island — and we've never had much elbow room. We live in stacks, like books. And when more people come, the shelves just get taller and boroughs around the island just get more crowded.

  Some cities, like Atlanta and Houston, keep oozing outwards in every direction, but island cities can't do that and would lose something if they could. People who come here must like the buzz and breath of crowds, don't mind density, think it makes you nimble and shrewd.

  The greatest achievements in history have tended to arise from the most crowded living conditions, but then so do riots, and plagues, and squalor. So it's remarkable that New York seems to work as well as it does. How is it that the biggest city in the country is also the safest, with so many of us entwined so tight? And why do people keep coming here, when so many other trends suggests that we want to get as far away from each other as possible?

  We migrate to the exurbs, find a gated community, home school, telecommute, order online. How can a tall, tight, insanely expensive city like New York be thriving at a time like this?

  People say that September 11th changed us; we were ennobled by our suffering. But we were never as mean as we looked. During the last blackout, people marched down to the river in an impromptu parade under a big dipper they could see for the first time.