Happy Wednesday in NYC, where construction workers converting the former Pfizer office building at 235 E. 42nd St. into a new residential high-rise had a bit of a scare yesterday.

Around 8 a.m., the city’s Department of Buildings received calls of bricks falling from the 37-story site onto the street below. Inspectors arrived at the scene to find two structural columns on the 21st floor buckling and immediately ordered an emergency response. NYPD officers quickly shut down the entire street between Second and Third Avenue and ordered the evacuation of all neighboring buildings, including a school with 400 children, as fears spread of a possible localized collapse.

“The I-beams are bending like cigarettes in there, which is super dangerous,” Cliff Johnsen, one of the workers installing fire protection at the site, told reporters.

Emergency crews with the fire department were able to shore up the supports throughout the day, as the 21st and 26th floors sagged up to four inches. Residents were allowed to return home in the evening, although traffic restrictions continued into today and some nearby buildings remain under evacuation orders.

The building is currently undergoing a renovation that adds four stories to the structure, the largest such office-to-residential conversion in the city. Johnsen believes all that extra weight without additional structural support is what led to the collapsing beams. “They chose profit over safety and put my members, as well as every construction worker over here, in jeopardy,” Johnsen said of the project’s contractor.

Metro Loft Management, one of the developers behind the massive conversion, raised around $700 million in loans to convert the tower into 1,500 new apartment units.

Nathan Berman, managing principal of Metro Loft, did not seem so rattled by the incident. “This incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,” Berman told the New York Times. “It happens unfortunately far too often on construction sites: falling cranes, people — God forbid — falling off buildings, windows falling out.”

As of this morning, no injuries were reported and the upper floors have been safely stabilized, according to city officials.

We live inside an age of artificial intelligence, infinite feeds and interfaces that quietly mediate every flicker of information we touch. Marshall McLuhan’s core insight, that the medium shapes us long before the message arrives, is no longer abstract. It’s the operating system.

But even that undersells it because McLuhan wasn’t just describing media and technology. He was describing the mind.

A tool sits on the table. A medium envelops you. By the time you pick up the tool, the medium has already rewired your attention — what you notice, what you ignore, what feels natural, what feels strange.

Think about what’s already disappeared in your lifetime. You don’t remember phone numbers. You don’t navigate; you follow the blue line. Mental arithmetic has become a party trick. The map in your head, the address book, the instinct for direction are quietly outsourced one convenience at a time.

You didn’t decide to forget. The medium decided for you.

Read on to learn more.

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