Most of the time, if not all of the time, when you pick the best images of the week, you are dealing with events happening miles away from where you are. You look at them as a spectator who has limited patience for anything they don't immediately connect with. This week, things are a little bit different. As New Yorkers, we have been strongly affected by natural forces that have profoundly expelled us from our first world nation comfort zone and thrown us off balance for more than a week. Between floods, damaged buildings, loss of power and means of communication, we had to reunite with a long loss sense of immediate survival. Eventually, for the most fortunate ones, things came back to normal rather quickly. 
When the lights came back, the heat and our severed connection to the internet reestablished, we then had to look at how others, mostly from the outside, had seen, and documented our plight.
The task of a photo editor is vastly different when they have personally lived the events that they are asked to illustrate.
It has been hard, mostly because of the huge volume of images (is there anyone without a camera in New York ?), none seem to precisely report what you have lived. Sure, there are images of devastation, of destruction, images of people in line for food or electricity. There are also images of before and after. But what about the emotional damage ? How does one photograph suddenly being ripped from everything you have ever owned ?
New Yorkers don't cry. It is just not built in their DNA. Not that they are stronger than anyone else, but rather, they are so into what's next that they give themselves little or no time to reflect and mourn. They adapt, rebuild and move on. There is no memory in New York. Thus, it is has been extremely difficult to capture a crying new yorker in front of devastation.
What then ? Well, not much. The two images of Sandy picked this week best reflect the emotion some New Yorkers experienced this past week. Flood, darkness and loneliness as well as the unbelievable unfairness of seeing the city separated in two, the have and have not of electricity. Nothing else. Nothing more. 
We since have mostly moved on, a presidential election having taken the news breath out of all media, while some, too many, still suffer. Images of Sandy's devastation are far less and few in volume but the memories, for those who lived thru it will never leave. Maybe New Yorkers have memories after all.

Paul Melcher