April 2006 Archives
29 things in my apartment which beep
- Alarm clock
- Humidifier
- Electric toothbrush (after every minute brushing)
- 3 telephone handsets
- Clock radio
- 2 desktop computers
- 2 laptop computers (actually, 3 at the moment)
- Washer
- Dryer
- Fridge
- Freezer
- Coffee maker
- Dishwasher
- Oven
- Microwave
- 2 digital cameras
- Fax machine
- 2 printers
- Stud finder
- 2 cellphones
- Security alarm
Posted by Felix at 18:21 EST | Comments (2)
A ticket to the opera
Karita Mattila and Anja Silja are two of the greatest actresses of their respective generations. You haven't seen them in the movies, you probably haven't even seen them on the TV. But if you've seen them on stage, the chances are that you haven't forgotten the experience.
The really amazing thing about Mattila and Silja, of course, is that not only are they superlative actresses but they're also among the finest singers of their respective generations. Mattila has been taking the Met by storm for the past few years, in Jenufa and Salome and various other roles. Silja has performed for decades in all the greatest opera houses of the world. But having seen her Kostelnička at Glyndebourne, I can't imagine she's ever found a more perfect role for her talents.
And now -- and now. Well, to be honest, in February. They're appearing together at the Met: Mattila opposite Silja in one of the most powerful operas of the 20th Century. All I can say is that it isn't a question of whether I'm going: it's a question of how many times I'm going. (Or how many times I can afford to go, more to the point. In most operas, I don't mind if I'm far from the stage, since it's all about the music. But in this case, I want to be up close, for the acting. And that, at the Met, is blood-drainingly expensive.)
The Met is not going to make it easy for me to get tickets, however. At the moment, the only way to get tickets for Jenufa is to buy a full series: tickets for seven or eight operas, all on the same day of the week. Let's say I choose Friday nights. The only series incuding Jenufa runs from October until May, and costs $1,600 per seat for prime orchestra seats. (Premium seats in the Grand Tier are already sold out at $1,960 a pop.) Even way up in the back of the balcony you're paying $544 per seat -- well over $1,000 the pair.
These series are like cellphone minutes: you're forced to buy more than you need. Sure, I'll go see Jenufa and the Tan Dun opera anyway. But I'm also shelling out for Handel (snore) and "Il Trittico", a series of lightweight one-act operas by Puccini which one can't imagine appealing to the Jenufa crowd.
Eventually, the Met will start selling shorter series, and after that they'll start selling trios: sets of three operas. If I'm lucky, there'll be a trio with Jenufa and The First Emperor and something non-awful -- but by that point the good seats will all have been sold to richer people than I. If I wait until single-opera tickets go on sale, the operas I want might well be sold out completely.
None of this, needless to say, engenders much in the way of goodwill on my part towards the Met. (This doesn't stop them from phoning me up on a regular basis and asking me to donate money to them.)
The Met isn't unique in using these tactics: any museum with a membership program does something similar. But the amounts of money involved are larger at the Met than they are anywhere else, and the whole edifice seems expressly designed to make it as hard as possible for people who haven't grown up with opera to lower themselves gently into its waters.
Indeed, the Met seems to go out of its way to avoid advertising or promoting any individual production: the message it sends out, very consistently, is that the way to see the opera is to buy lots of tickets, as far in advance as possible, for things you think you'll like and things you're not so sure about. Which is great if you're a sixtysomething lady of means on Central Park West who can happily organise her calendar a year in advance. But it's not going to attract a younger, poorer, hipper crowd -- the kind of people that the Met increasingly needs as its subscribers move either to Florida or to that great parterre box in the sky.
As Peter Gelb takes over from Joseph Volpe as general manager at the Met, he should shake up the box office. First, and most easily, he should accept returns. New Yorkers are busy creatures, and sometimes, through no fault of their own, they find one or two of their party unable to make it to the opera on a night booked months previously. Often, the tickets are great ones, for a performance which has been sold out for a long time. The fair way to deal with the situation is familiar to any theatregoer who's lived in England. There's a line for returns, and anybody with an extra ticket takes it to the box office, which then sells it to the first person in line. The original ticketholder gets the face value of the ticket back, and makes an opera lover very happy in the process.
But the Met won't let that happen. If you try to return a ticket you can't use, the Met will gladly accept it -- but only as a donation. In other words, if you want your ticket to go to the first person in line, then you have to let the Met sell the same ticket twice, and keep all the proceeds both times. So instead you have to stand outside like some kind of furtive scalper, trying to work out whether and which people might be interested in your ticket. It's a nasty, unpleasant experience -- especially since you're likely to be sitting next to the buyer of your ticket for the next five hours, as you both pretend you didn't just engage in a vaguely illicit-feeling cash transaction.
A lot of people, understandably, don't want to stand outside the Met scalping their own tickets. But because the Met won't pay the owners a penny for their tickets, the owners have no incentive to return the tickets to the box office. So even as opera lovers desperately try to get their hands on tickets to what could be the experience of a lifetime, other tickets, unusable by the original owners, are being desperately given away to people who barely care about opera -- or, worse, are simply wasting away in a drawer somewhere as the likes of Mattila and Silja play to paid-for but tragically empty seats.
Once Gelb has figured out the returns fiasco, he can then turn his attention to the subscriptions. I know that the Met values its subscribers, but ultimately it needs to meet the needs and desires of as many operagoers and would-be operagoers as possible. If it treats New Yorkers well, they are much more likely to repay the goodwill with goodwill of their own. So the Met should make it possible for people to buy good tickets to any opera in the season without having to wait for the monied classes to have their pick first. (The fact that they're monied should be advantage enough.)
The current Met system is weird: it's in some ways the opposite of the way that other wasting assets, like airline seats or hotel rooms, are sold. With airlines and hotels, the earlier you book the less you pay. With the opera, you end up paying the Met much more money if you book early (since the only way of doing so is to buy a big subscription package) than if you try to buy a premium ticket at the last minute.
On the other hand, no one is surprised that good hotel rooms cost more than crappy hotel rooms. At the Met, by contrast, any given seat costs the same amount, no matter what the opera is or who is in it. That's why the Met needs the subscription packages: so that it can fill seats in the less popular operas.
There's a better way, though. Put all seats on sale at the same time, and charge more for the in-demand productions than for the ones that fewer people want to go and see. Verdi will subsidize Monteverdi either way, but this way is much more democratic. It also gives the Met the opportunity to put on really interesting and experimental opera at low enough prices to attract the downtown art-music crowd.
The Met has had a high-handed attitude towards its patrons for far too long, which is one reason it's perceived as snooty and elitist. It's time to break down those barriers.
Posted by Felix at 19:20 EST | Comments (4)
Equal housing opportunity on Central Park West
Anybody who read Clive Thompson's excellent and fair-minded piece on Google in China in the NYT magazine this weekend will have flicked past yet another piece of real-estate porn to get there: a double-page spread from Zeckendorf Development, LLC advertising 15 Central Park West. "Residences from $3,000,000" it says in large yet tasteful white-on-brown.
Lower down, in much smaller type, we find this:
We are pledged to the letter and the spirit of U.S. policy for the achievement of equal housing opportunity throughout the Nation.Seriously, that's what it says. And no, they still won't sell you an apartment for less than $3 million.
Posted by Felix at 22:27 EST | Comments (1)
Roberta Smith on Donald Judd
Roberta Smith gets the front page of the NYT arts section today to gush over the Donald Judd installation at Christie's. She's much less worked up than Tyler Green was over the fact that the Judds aren't going to museums:
Judd might have viewed the sale with a certain pragmatic equanimity. I worked for him briefly in the early 1970's, mostly on his catalogue raisonné. He remarked more than once that one purpose of his smaller, portable sculptures was to make money to pay for larger projects.
The foundation Judd mandated in his will is a very large project. He might even have liked the bold gesture of one big, widely publicized get-it-over-with auction. Besides, he famously hated museums, especially American ones.
Tyler's response to Smith is so weak he essentially concedes the point to her. I'm sure that Smith, like Tyler, in an ideal world would like to have seen the Judd Foundation raise the money in a more considered way. But I'm inclined to agree with Smith's more sanguine view of the sale, if only because Christie's has proved that private institutions are clearly capable of showing Judds in a much better way than any museum. Sold to private collectors, these Judds might well get purpose-built permanent homes, instead of being thrown up willy-nilly on a wall without daylight as part of an incoherent 20th Century collection somewhere.
In any case, anybody who's been to Marfa can understand why the Judd foundation is a little on the dysfunctional side of things: Donald Judd was an egomaniac who treated his children really quite dreadfully. Since those children now run his foundation, one can hardly expect the foundation to be a beacon of art-world best practices.
Posted by Felix at 22:02 EST | Comments (8)
Revkin on climate change
Andrew Revkin has been covering global climate change for the New York Times since 1988. Today, he gets the front page of the Week in Review section to try to answer the key questions, which he puts this way:
Is global warming now a reality? What do scientists know for sure and when are they just guessing?
The resultant article is very disappointing. Revkin is happy to concede that "seas have risen about six to eight inches globally over the last century and the rate of rise has increased in the last decade," but he resolutely refuses to admit that such warming is man-made. Instead, he tells us twice that we can't be sure that recent hurricanes and other extreme weather are the fault of anthropogenic global warming.
Of course, proving anthropogenic causality behind any given weather phenomenon is basically impossible. But by emphasizing that impossibility and ignoring the anthropogenic warming we do know about, Revkin creates the impression of controversy in the outlines of a science where there is actually surprising unanimity.
The headling of the article is "Yelling 'Fire' on a Hot Planet" – clearly giving the impression that Al Gore and his apologists are being more alarmist than reasonable about the whole subject. I understand why the NYT would want to run a think-piece on global climate change around the time of Earth Day. But I don't understand why they have to be so milquetoast on the subject, and emphasize the controversy at the margins rather than the unanimity at the center.
Posted by Felix at 22:20 EST | Comments (3)
Turntable
It was my birthday on Friday. I'd already got a couple of presents early: a wonderful tough & waterproof watch for when my grandfather's very fragile one isn't suitable, and a fabulous lab-flask-to-be-used-as-a-decanter inspired by this post. But then on the actual day I got a wonderful surprise: a turntable!
I've had a few of my favourite records lying around for years now, but haven't been able to play them for lack of a turntable. Now I have one plugged in, I'm rediscovering stuff which even today is unavailable on CD. And the sound is a wonderfully refreshing change. I'm not saying it's better, but the first record I put on (which happened to be the first to reach: there was no real choice involved) was this one from Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie, and you could just sink back into the music, like Matisse's famous armchair, in a way that you just can't with a CD or an MP3. I was hooked all over again.
For I was one of the very last people to give up on vinyl and move to CD. All through university I would seek out the increasingly small number of record shops which still sold LPs, and would play them on a hi-fi system which was much better than any university student really ought to have. I can't say how excited I am to be able to rediscover the few I have here, and maybe bring a bunch more over from England in the coming months.
One thing, though: putting the turntable together – or, more to the point, putting the cartridge together – was decidedly fiddly and non-trivial. I think I managed OK, but the needle seems to have a tendency to slide around the disc when it nears the end of a side – it's fine for all tracks but the last, but then the counterweight system seems to lose traction when the needle's close to the center of the disc. Any idea why this might be or how I can fix it?
Posted by Felix at 11:43 EST | Comments (2)
Chesterfield
Warning: highly digressive post ahead. It starts talking about suburbia and ends up in the more familiar realm of meta-media. Feel free to dip in and out...
No posts for the past week – I was away on a work trip to the Midwest. My days were spent in a cubicle in a bland office building by the side of the highway; my nights were spent at the Homewood Suites in Chesterfied, MO. It was an eye-opening view into suburban life in flyover country, and I learned a lot.
Naturally, the main point of concern was the food situation. My office building had nothing like a cafeteria: the closest that it comes is vending machines selling salty and sugary snacks. So one’s lunch options are limited: you can either bring in your own food from home, or you get in your car and drive along the highway to the shopping mall, which has a typical shopping-mall food court. There are a couple of restaurants which are open for lunch as well: I tried Aquavin, which despite its name and general nautical theme seemed to have little if any fish on the menu. Which might be just as well given its location.
If the selection of restaurants in a midwestern suburb is unsurprisingly unexciting, the selection of foods in a midwestern supermarket is superb. I love US supermarkets (not the ones in New York, of course), and I think that places like Missouri might be home to the very best. Schnuck’s, where I shopped, is by all accounts nothing special by local standards, but I was very impressed by the fresh food and the wide range of (admittedly nearly exclusively Californian) wines.
There’s even genuinely local food if you look hard enough: I found a barbecue place called Smokin’ Al’s where I ordered snoot (that’s pig snout, to you). Crispy, crunchy, a little bit bitter, very interesting. Great local beer, too.
But the vast majority of anything retail-oriented, from restaurants to shops to hotels, is part of a national chain. I suppose there must be huge economies of scale somewhere which allow these chains to make more money than a mom-and-pop operation might be able to make on their own. But I also suspect that most midwesterners simply don’t share the New Yorker’s native mistrust of any chain. Given the choice between Starbucks and a locally-operated coffee shop, they’ll choose Starbucks because in places like Missouri Starbucks is nearly always better than the locally-owned coffee shop.
And the Homewood Suites was a revelation: an enormous two-room suite, complete with two (!) televisions, friendly staff, free breakfast, and even free dinner (which might not have been very good, but hell, it was free). With a corporate discount, I paid $79 per night. Normally when I stay in deeply-discounted hotels, it's clear that they make money on the extras: room service, spa service, the minibar, restaurants, bars, internet service, phone calls, that sort of thing. But the only food service at the Homewood Suites is free, the internet is free, there is no minibar, and everybody uses their cellphone if they want to make a call. Even the beer at dinner is free, if confined to Bud and Bud Light. And there's certainly no spa, although there is a (free) pool which is open in the summer. When you pay the bill, it's the room rate plus taxes: that's it. So how they make money off me I have no idea. After all, they have 24-hour staffing, full maid service, a fully-functional kitchen, the whole bit. No wonder all the hotels are chains: I just can't see how any independent hotel could compete with that.
The Homewood Suites' amenities also helped me to understand why the broad mass of Americans always seem to be so ill-informed whenever surveys are done on what they think they know. The Homewood Suites helpfully provided me with a copy of USA Today every morning, and I rapidly came to the conclusion that it’s the only newspaper in the world about which it can be said that reading it makes you know less than you did before.
I didn’t read much of USA Today: basically just the front page while wolfing down a quick buffet breakfast before heading off to work. But the weird thing was that every story I read seemed to be fundamentally wrong. There was the one which said that the best way to understand the IMF is to think about it as a global central bank: huh? (And no, IMF was not a misprint for BIS.) And then there was the lead front-page story on petrol prices: that was a doozy.
The headline was "Drivers curb use as gas goes up;" the lede was this:
Americans have cut back gasoline use in apparent response to increasing prices, separate surveys by the government and a petroleum trade organization showed Wednesday.
But then you looked at the accompanying chart, which showed US gasoline consumption of 9.1 million barrels per day last year, and, um, 9.1 million barrels per day now. Not much drop there. Indeed, reading on, we were told that
Gas use last month was 0.6% less than a year ago, the American Petroleum Institute reported... The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said gasoline use the past four weeks was up a slight 0.8% vs. a year ago.
Yes, up. One survey said consumption was down a little bit, one survey said consumption was up by a slightly greater amount. And so USA Today leads with a front-page story saying that gasoline use is down.
We then got this priceless quote, presented without any skepticism:
"If everyone decided to drive 3% less the next 30 days, prices would crash," says Tom Kloza, senior analyst at the Oil Price Information Service.
'Cos of course that would be enough to normalise relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and bring full Iraqi capacity back on stream, and create access to Mexican oil reserves, and basically bring oil back down to $35 a barrel. I suppose. I have no idea.
And USA Today, I'm afraid, is what passes for news in Chesterfield. This New Yorker might have made it out there, but The New Yorker certainly doesn't. When I was flying out to St Louis from La Guardia on Monday morning I reminded myself to buy a New Yorker in the airport, but I never got the opportunity. And indeed, once I got to Chesterfield there was no sign of the New Yorker in the huge magazine rack at Schnuck’s. More surprisingly, when I went back to St Louis airport on Friday, the CNBC Newsstand (one would think its sponsor would want to be seen as delivering up-to-the-minute information) still had the previous week’s New Yorker on display – the one with the Sy Hersh story that people were talking about two weeks ago.
I suspect that national distribution of a weekly magazine is a very expensive business, and that the New Yorker is the only nationally-distributed Condé Nast weekly, and that its newsstand sales are very low in any case compared to its subscription sales, and that therefore Condé doesn’t put much effort or money into getting it to big cities and airports on a timely basis. Every time I’ve tried to buy the New Yorker outside New York, I always find a week-old issue for sale. Most distressing.
So instead of being able to read a good magazine on the flight back, I had to make do with Harper’s instead. The May issue still lists Lewis Lapham atop the masthead: why does this dreadful man refuse to go away? After the embarassment of the March issue, which led with a long essay by one of those nutjobs who refuses to accept that HIV causes AIDS, one hoped that Roger Hodge, the new editor, would get rid of Lapham and his atrocious column entirely. But evidently Lapham held on for at least two more gruesome months. The May issue leads with a bad story bearing a very apocalyptic headline: The New Road To Serfdom. Subhed: "An Illustrated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Collapse".
In fact, there’s nothing in the article to make anybody think that housing prices are going to collapse, and everything to make the reader mistrustful of what he reads. The first illustration, for instance, shows a big house representing Mortgage Loans 90%, next to a small box representing all other loans 10%. Do mortgage loans now really make up 90% of all outstanding loans? Of course not. The text in fact gives us a different statistic: “Since 2003, mortgages have made up more than half of the total bank loans in America” – by which the author, Michael Hudson, means not that mortgages became half of the total loans in America in 2003 and have stayed at more than half ever since, but just that mortgages made up more than half of new loans in 2003 and onwards.
This is not surprising. After the stock market collapsed in 2000, US companies found themselves with wildly unbalanced balance sheets: too much debt and not enough equity. So they stopped borrowing money from banks. At the same time, banks discovered that they made much more money from their credit card operations than they did loaning money directly to their customers, so they stopped loaning money to consumers. In other words, mortgage loans were pretty much the only type of loans that banks were still interested in making – so it’s hardly surprising that they made up an increasing proportion of total loans. Nowhere does Hudson give us the numbers on total mortgage lending, in dollar terms, because that would look far less apocalyptic. He does say that total mortgage debt will surpass national GDP by the end of the decade, but that’s a silly ratio: GDP is a measure of annual production, while a mortgage lasts for 30 years. Maybe increase in mortgage debt to GDP would be a useful ratio, but Hudson doesn’t give us that.
And we still haven’t worked out where the 90% number comes from. Looking more closely, we’re told that “Mortgages account for 90% of the net growth in debt since 2000”, in a statistic attributed vaguely enough to the Federal Reserve.
This could mean anything. On the face of it it simply can’t be true: think about the total increase in debt by the federal government alone in that time (Something over $2.5 trillion, according to this page). If mortgage debt really outpaced the growth in federal government debt by a factor of nine to one, then some $22.5 trillion in new mortgages would have to have been written since 2000 – which I'm pretty sure is more than the value of all US residential real estate combined.
So I suspect that Hudson was being incredibly sneaky, and used some measure of debt which didn’t increase very much from 2000 to date – one which excluded the federal government, say. In that time, some types of debt would have increased in size (mortgages, for instance), while other types would have decreased (like, say, unsecured personal lines of credit). Then it's easy to imagine that the total increase in mortgage lending might be 90% of the total increase in whatever measure Hudson was looking at. Could that be what he means? I hope not, because of that box saying that “all other loans” make up 10% of the increase. But that’s only after subtracting all the loan types which shrank in size. Hudson would be comparing the gross increase in mortgage lending to the net increase in all other lending, which seems very misleading. But since his footnotes are so weak, we have no idea what the truth is.
In any case, I certainly read nothing in the May issue of Harper's to make me regret my decision to cancel my subscription. Roger Hodge, the incoming editor of Harper's, said in New York magazine that magazines like his are "sort of the anti-blogs". He's right: all my favourite blogs are much more accountable to their readers, and much more interesting to read, than anything in Harper's.
Posted by Felix at 0:26 EST | Comments (2)
Public schools are better than private schools
Wow. This is HUGE, and no one seems to have noticed it. Back in May 2005, Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher Lubienski published a report in the Phi Delta Kappan saying that after controlling for student background, mathematics achievement in public schools is actualy higher than that in private schools. It's a striking finding: as the authors note,
The study focused solely on student achievement in mathematics -- a subject generally thought to be less influenced by family background and more influenced by institutional effects than other school subjects such as literacy.
In other words, if this is true for mathematics, it's likely to be even more true for other subjects.
The study went all but unnoticed: Google shows the grand total of four web pages linking to it. I only found it because one year later, the Atlantic found 127 words for it in its "Primary Sources" column.
This is a question I've been interested in for a while. In fact, last year, when I was reviewing Freakonomics, I put the question to Steven Levitt in an email:
I'm interested in the practical implications of your parenting chapter. It's long struck me that private primary and secondary education is probably the single most expensive thing in America which nobody ever seems to stop and wonder whether or not it's worth it. I've seen lots of citations of the value of a college education, but I've seen nothing about the marginal value of a private-school education over a public-school education, or even whether it's nonzero. Do you think this is something which private schools can or should be able to provide? Data showing that, after adjusting for parents' income etc etc, privately-educated kids do measurably better than they would have done in their local public schools?
Levitt replied:
Absolutely fantastic question. It is something I have been interested in myself, but haven't done research. It is a tough question, but the best research I have seen suggests that Catholic schools might provide benefits to inner-city black children. I am not aware of any evidence on college prep type of private schools like the one I went to, but it may be out there. My own research, which we touch on in the book, suggests that peer effects are much less important than people tend to think -- folks aren't good at separating inputs from outputs. Which is your point I think. The biggest peer effects we see in my work is on outcomes like going to jail, but almost nothing on test scores or graduation.
Well, now we have some data, and it seems to show that paying for a private-school education is money very badly spent: it's like shelling out for a mediocre car when the government will give you a better one for free.
Here are the graphs showing private-school and public-school achievement in fourth grade and eighth grade, within SES (social-economic status) quartiles:
In all four quartiles in both grades, public-school kids clearly outperform their private-school counterparts. Although private schools do have better mathermatics results than public schools, that's entirely because the kids in those schools are more privileged.
The Lubienskis conclude:
Our findings suggest that it is time for a critical reexamination of common assumptions regarding the effectiveness of public and private schools. As market-style reforms change the public school landscape, prompting many to call for various forms of privatization of schooling options, it is important to examine the evidence regarding whether private schools are, indeed, more effective than public schools. In our study, once we accounted for the fact that private schools tend to have higher-SES students than public schools, we actually found just the opposite of what was expected: public schools outperformed private schools within each SES quartile.
I could put it more simply: send your kids to public school. They'll do better than they would at private school, and with the money you save you can further improve their upbringing, education and lifestyle in many other ways.
UPDATE: It turns out there's a more extensive and later survey, with much the same conclusions, which can be found here and was reported on in the NYT here.
Posted by Felix at 18:41 EST | Comments (6)
NYC question
Here's a question for Curbed types or anybody else: where's the best place in NYC for hailing a cab? I'm looking for somewhere you can get a cab more or less immediately, at more or less any time of day or night. I reckon that the corner of 14th Street and 9th Avenue is hard to beat, but I'd be interested in hearing others' opinions.
Posted by Felix at 0:47 EST | Comments (14)
Antarctica update
My sister's blog has now been spun off to its own site, rhiansalmon.com – which has just been updated with a fascinating post about the results of all the science she was doing in Antarctica.
By measuring lots of different molecules all at the same time, we found out far more than any one, three, or ten could have illuminated. Stéph showed us data of NO and NO2, the concentration of which is ordinarily dominated by oxidant chemistry. Bill, James, and Zoë presented the oxidants: OH, HO2 and CH3O2, normally controlled by NO and NO2. They had each measured their particular molecule successfully but the numbers didn't add up. On their own, the numbers couldn't be reproduced in models, the ultimate test of our understanding. Alfonso then showed us halogen oxides: ClO, BrO and, to everyone's surprise, IO. With the kind of concentrations he observed with that great big telescope, much higher than expected, all the other results can be explained.
At school I had a physics teacher, Nigel Wood as I recall, who was infectiously enthusiastic about the way in which things amazingly all fit together in science. It's pretty impressive in physics, but it's even more impressive when it happens in chemistry, which is far more prone to experimental mishap. And it's more impressive yet when you're not getting the results you expected but they still make perfect sense when you put them all together. Congratulations to all at BAS!
Posted by Felix at 11:20 EST | Comments (0)
An Inconvenient Truth
I've just been to a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, the new film about climate change featuring Al Gore. Gore, it turns out, has spent the past few years perfecting a new stump speech, this one solely dedicated to the issue that he still calls "global warming". This movie is essentially the film of the speech. It's a powerful speech, so it makes a powerful movie.
Gore doesn't go into all the complexities of global climate change – that would be impossible. Rather, he hammers home a simple point: global warming, caused by unprecedentedly high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, could well end up devastating the world as we know it – and sooner rather than later. He spends quite a lot of time emphasizing the importance of the poles, which of course are a region that the Salmon siblings care a lot about, and he might well be able to help educate the world on the importance of the upcoming International Polar Year.
The movie is aimed at Americans, the biggest polluters on the planet, and all Americans should see it – although I'm sure very few will.
I do, however, have two small issues with the film. Firstly, it spends too much time talking about how Al Gore has been pushing this issue for decades while being obstructed by other politicians in Washington. The movie was funded by Hollywood liberals, and all the politicians it bashes are Republicans: Reagan, Bush Sr, Bush Jr, James Inhofe. It will be far too easy for Republicans to dismiss this film as liberal propaganda.
Secondly, the film's official
website is woefully inadequate. I was expecting not only the whole Powerpoint
Keynote presentation, but also links to all the science backing it up, and a
lot of links to related research as well. In fact, there are only nine pages,
including the home page, the presentation isn't there at all, and there's no
science nor any links to science. Anybody who doesn't take Gore fully at face
value, who wants to check up on what he's saying, will get no help from this
website.
As an introduction to the importance of the issue, however, this film is wonderful: tell anybody who wants to know about climate change to go see it. They'll probably be convinced.
Posted by Felix at 20:01 EST | Comments (2)
Residences
Once upon a time, there were "apartment houses", which soon got shortened to apartments. In England, we have flats. Sometimes, when people start talking in real-estate jargon, you might hear about condos and co-ops and duplexes and other such arcana.
But if you're selling a luxury condominium development these days, you don't call it a luxury condo. (Everything is luxury, these days.) Instead, you call the apartments "residences". Or, better yet, "The Residences at [enter name of development here]".
It's weird. For me, at least, "residences" connotes dingy housing for old people, or dingier university dorms. But suddenly it seems to have acquired a parallel, ultra-upscale connotation. It'll be interesting to see (a) how long the "residences" fad lasts, and (b) how long it will be before crappy rental buildings get in on the game and essentially every new development starts carrying the tag.
Posted by Felix at 15:52 EST | Comments (0)
Spam in book form
Lauren Rouleau of ReganBooks just sent me an email asking if I would like a review copy of These Things I Wish, the new book from Lee Pitts. ReganBooks has taken a popular internet meme, which has already been published in 1995 and in 2000 as part of longer books, and put it between hard covers, with illustrations, for $14.95 – or $9.72 at Amazon.
Ms Rouleau calls These Things I Wish an "essay", which might be pushing it for something which is precisely 464 words long. But she has somehow managed to stretch it out into a 64-page book, so maybe that alone gives it fully-fledged essay status. OK, I'll do the maths for you. The book is 7.25 words per page, on average. At that rate, this blog entry would take up 24 pages if you printed it.
Who said publishing is hard? All you need to do is take a much-forwarded email, print it, and sell it. It's true, Judith Regan is some kind of genius.
Posted by Felix at 15:38 EST | Comments (0)
Bill Keller on the Sudan ad
Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, weighs in today on the subject of the Sudan advertorial. Here's what he has to say:
I know that the executives on the business side of The Times argued long and hard about accepting the Sudan ad. In the end, as I understand it, the prevailing argument was that the advertising space in the paper should be as open as possible to points of view, even those our editorial page and columnists vehemently disagree with.
Keller is being very disingenuous here, which is weird, considering that he hand-picked the question to answer it. He would have been better off saying nothing at all.
Firstly, the decision to accept the ad was clearly not made on ethical grounds. The New York Times has no moral or journalistic obligation to run advertisements with widely-varying points of view: in fact, it has lengthy guidelines on what is and what is not acceptable, and says that it will not publish any advertisement that fails to meet the paper's "standards of decency and dignity". It's unclear, to say the least, how a genocidal regime passes the test while a tobacco manufacturer, say, doesn't.
Here are some much more likely reasons the ad was accepted:
- It was produced by Summit Communications, which contributes many millions of dollars a year to the NYT's bottom line. Summit had presumably already produced the ad and promised the Sudanese government that it would appear when the argument at the NYT took place. If the NYT rejected the ad, Summit would be embarrassed in front of its client and would find it much more difficult to sell supplements since it could no longer guarantee placement in the newspaper.
- It represented about $1 million in revenue which would be lost if the ad was not accepted.
- It was bought, ultimately, by a government, and newspapers like to stay on relatively cordial terms with governments. No one at the NYT probably wanted to reject an ad and in doing so have to say to the Sudanese government directly that they were responsible for genocide.
- While genocide is the worst crime in the world, most NYT readers are actually less offended by an advertisement for a genocidal regime than they would be by an advertisement for a cigarette, or an advertisement which showed a female nipple.
No one is saying that the Times should have rejected the ad because Nick Kristof writes about the Sudanese genocide: rather, those of us who found the ad disgusting found so because the genocide is disgusting and the Times should not have profitable business dealings with its architects. So when Keller starts going on about his "editorial page and columnists", he's missing the point entirely: it doesn't matter what they think. But given how loudly Kristof has been shouting about Darfur, the Times can certainly not claim ignorance of what's going on there.
Yet Keller comes very close to doing so, when he characterizes Kristof and the Sudanese government has having no more than opposing "points of view". On the one hand, he seems to be saying, Kristof says one thing. On the other hand, the Sudanese say another thing. Our readers should have the right to make their own minds up.
But as Dan Gillmor says of another part of Keller's article,
When we get “both sides” of issues where one side is essentially (or wholly) telling the truth and the other is not — and then fail to say so in plain words — we betray our principles and insult our communities.
The Sudanese genocide is clearly a situation where Kristof is telling the truth and the Sudanese government is not. To pretend that there are two sides to this story, and to do business with people who have murdered hundreds of thousands of people, is beneath the New York Times, or any self-respecting publication.
Posted by Felix at 18:39 EST | Comments (0)
Journalistic innumeracy, part 873
I love this story about a $218 trillion phone bill.
Yahaya Wahab said he disconnected his late father's phone line in January after he died and settled the 84-ringgit (U.S. $23) bill, the New Straits Times reported.
But Telekom Malaysia later sent him a 806,400,000,000,000.01-ringgit (U.S. $218 trillion) bill for recent telephone calls along with orders to settle within 10 days or face legal proceedings, the newspaper reported.
It wasn't clear whether the bill was a mistake, or if Yahaya's father's phone line was used illegally after his death.
It wasn't clear whether the bill was a mistake???
Let's say that Yahaya's father's phone line was used continuously and illegally after his death, for 90 full days before the phone bill arrived. In order to rack up a $218 trillion bill, the charges would have to be $1.7 billion per minute.
Look at it this way: Malaysia has a population of about 24 million people. If every Malaysian was on the phone at the same time, the average charge would have to be $70 per minute in order to get up to a total of $1.7 billion per minute.
I think we can assume that yes, the bill was a mistake.
Posted by Felix at 14:31 EST | Comments (3)
Sudden percolation
Keith Kelly in the New York Post yesterday:
Art & Antiques has been sold to Curtco Media, which aims to bring a new sense of urgency to a once sleepy cultural backwater of publishing that is suddenly percolating to life.
Two words which, one might think, have surely never before been seen together in print. But a quick google brings up lots more:
Maine is quickly gaining a reputation as a suddenly percolating hotbed of East Coast public access golf.
George Shapiro, the comic's manager and one of the exec producers of "Seinfeld," said Seinfeld hadn't been represented previously for motion pictures and is now looking to do a movie in which he'd have significant creative input -- as he does on his suddenly percolating NBC series, which he produces and co-created with exec producer Larry David.
McClain and Ryan have no grand expectations about their suddenly percolating musical careers. They understand how quickly success can fade.
What could it possibly mean?
Posted by Felix at 13:00 EST | Comments (0)
Report Report Report 3: Alcohol merchandise
You can take your news straight, or you can take it with a generous dose of snark. Either way, the story seems clear. Here's Amy Norton, of Reuters:
Middle-schoolers who sport alcohol-branded T-shirts and caps may start to drink sooner than their peers, according to a new study.
It's uncertain whether clothes or bags with beer logos encourage some kids to start drinking. But the study results are concerning enough that parents and schools should consider keeping the merchandise out of kids' hands, said lead author Dr. Auden McClure of Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Norton gets an A for this story. Everything she writes is accurate, and although she doesn't display any skepticism about the report, she does find space to report, in a short piece, that causality has not been determined and that the study did take into account "factors such as school performance and friends' drinking habits".
What's more, skepticism about the report would not necessarily be justified, in this case. I was not predisposed to be impressed with the study, since the there was a hint of alarmism to the coverage. But in fact, after reading the study, I'm coming around to Dr McClure's point of view.
For one thing, McClure is no absolutist when it comes to underage drinking. The study was careful to exclude a glass of wine at the family dinner table, say: it looked only at drinking of which parents were unaware. If you read the study, there's no "loathing of the alcohol bogeyman," as Consumerist's Ben Popken puts it.
And although underage drinking is nowhere near as harmful as underage smoking, the study makes a pretty convincing case that alcohol merchandise encourages drinking just as it was conclusively proved in the past that tobacco merchandise encourages smoking. After all, the study controlled for " higher grade in school, male gender, exposure to peer drinking, having tried smoking, poorer academic performance, higher levels of sensation seeking and rebelliousness, and less-responsive and restrictive parenting styles." There's pretty strong evidence that there's more going on here than a simple correlation. Yes, the type of kids who drink might well be the same type of kids who express a certain amount of rebellion through wearing beer-branded clothes. But insofar as such things can be controlled for, owners of beer-branded clothes are still significantly more likely to drink than those without such merchandise.
Ultimately, the benefit of banning alcohol-branded merchandise in schools might be small, but then the cost is probably smaller still. It's very easy to forget that advertising works, because most people don't realise when they're being affected by it. But if you wouldn't allow a full-on Budweiser advertisement in a school, why would you allow a Budweiser t-shirt? It has, if anything, an even greater effect.
Posted by Felix at 12:18 EST | Comments (0)
BYOB in NYC
According to Eater, my new neighborhood gastropub, EU, having failed to get its liquor license, has now been barred even from operating as a BYOB: the full story is unclear, but it seems as though the police busted the police for having any liquor at all in the establishment, even if it wasn't served by the restaurant itself. Thus are my dreams shattered.
But Eater raises an interesting question: are any NYC BYOBs, strictly speaking, legal? Do the police just turn a blind eye, or is there some kind of BYOB license one can/should get?
UPDATE: Eater has all the answers.
Posted by Felix at 23:09 EST | Comments (0)
Judd at Christie's
I was wrong. When I came back from Marfa, I was convinced that it didn't really matter what happened to Donald Judd's gallery works, because his real masterpieces are permanently installed at Marfa. But now I've seen the show at Christie's, and it's amazing.
Christie's has pulled out all the stops and created a Judd exhibition of which any museum in the world would be proud. Judd's gallery work has never looked as impressive, and I have to say that Christie's official estimates are ridiculously low.
The plywood boxes, especially, shine in the temporary space at Rockefeller Center: for the first time I felt I understood what Judd was getting at. The curators of Dia:Beacon should certainly come here to take a look at how Judd should be exhibited.
This exhibition is so good, in fact, that Tyler is right: these works absolutely belongs in a museum, ideally together. Some artists are never as great as they look in retrospective: their work is best when seen in conjunction with many other pieces by the same artist. Warhol is a prime example. Other artists, by contrast, seem monotonous in retrospective, and the whole oeuvre is dragged down by repetition. I must admit I felt that way at MoMA's Pollock show. Judd, it turns out, is like Warhol, not Pollock: if you see these works together, you'll realise what a great artist he really is.
Go see this exhibition: it's the show of the year, and it's free. And, distressingly, these works will never be seen together again. Really, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Don't let it pass you by.
Posted by Felix at 22:23 EST | Comments (2)
FT.com
Does the FT have a web strategy? I just spent a bit of time clicking around ft.com, and there seemed to be big problems with the subscription firewall. If I clicked on a story with a blue "s" for subscription-only next to it, one of two things would happen: either I'd be served the entire story no problem, despite the fact that I don't have a subscription, or else I'd get a multiple-redirect error and essentially exit the FT site entirely.
Much the same thing happens when I search for stories on Google News: if it links to an FT story and says "subscription required", there's roughly a 50-50 chance that's true. Sometimes you get a message saying you need to be a subscriber, but often you don't and can read the whole story anyway. I used to think that Google News just put the words "subscription required" next to all FT stories, even the ones you don't need a subscription for, but now it seems that even the stories which are meant to be behind the subscription firewall are often, in fact, freely available – at least for some unknown amount of time.
The site can't even seem to decide which stories have the little "s" logo and which don't. The current lead Lex story, on Compass Group, for instance, doesn't have an "s" on the home page, but does have an "s" on the Lex page.
The home page looks dreadful, too. Whose idea was that horrible scrolling ticker?
Philosophically, I think ft.com finds itelf torn between two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, it's the website of the newspaper – a newspaper which justifiably prides itself on its editing prowess. The FT is thin: it gives busy businessmen the news they need without stretching it out over 24 column inches. Unlike newspapers in the US, there's no feeling at the FT that if a story's important it has to be covered at length. Subscribers to the newspaper, then, value it for its concision and its ability to pinpoint the most important stories of the day. Oversimplifying, one might say that the Wall Street Journal reports everything; the FT tells you what matters.
Yet ft.com clearly also wants to be a one-stop shop for financial information. Subscribe to us, it says, and we'll tell you everything you need to know. Do the editors excise the less important stuff? It's unclear. Certainly there's more original material at ft.com than there is in the newspaper. Is that because the FT thinks that at ft.com more is more, even if at the newspaper less is more?
The FT also seems to have stepped up its attempts to restrict access to its content, even as it sends very mixed signals on that front from its own home page. Tim Harford reports today that he will no longer be posting his FT column on his website:
Alas for free-riders, the Financial Times has asked me not to publish my entire columns here. The paper does, after all, have to raise the money to pay me somehow - and sadly, I don't make the rules.
The statement raises more questions than it answers, not least how Harford's reprinting his own column deprives the FT of revenue. Are there really people who will pay for an ft.com subscription just to read the Undercover Economist? And even if there were, Harford himself notes that the column is usually freely available online for at least a couple of days – and that half of the columns pop up for free forever at Slate. Besides, clearly Harford does make the rules to some extent, since he's been able to reprint the column until now, as well as syndicate it to Slate. It's all very peculiar, but it sounds as though the FT still doesn't get the web. If people read and like Harford's FT column on his website, that's good for the FT brand, just as Michael Gordon's new book is good for the New York Times brand.
One of the reasons why there are so few financial blogs is that there are very few free sources of financial information online. Think what would happen if the FT gave up on online subscriptions and put all of its stories online for free and forever like the BBC and the Guardian. It would immediately become a bloggers' darling, its traffic would go through the roof, and it quite possibly would spawn dozens of websites around the world linking predominantly to it. FT stories would start rising up the Google rankings to where they belonged, and the site would become the first place to go for anybody looking for any kind of global financial information.
Would circulation of the print newspaper fall? There's only one way to find out. But even if it did, that might be no bad thing, especially considering the cost of printing and distributing it in the US. I'm sure the FT loses vast amounts of money in the US – much more than it makes in ft.com subscription revenue. Why not stop trying to pick your readers' pockets, and start giving them something for nothing instead? If ft.com was as well designed as the new nytimes.com, it could become the home page of choice for businessmen from China to the Czech Republic. Given that the FT is failing to make much of an impact in the US, maybe it should concentrate its efforts on the rest of the world instead – keeping the more internationally-minded US readers while doing so.
Even if it doesn't go free, however, the FT needs to work out a web strategy which doesn't confuse people. If people don't know whether they're going to be able to read stuff on your site or not, it doesn't really matter if it's freely available: they're simply not going to come. At the New York Times, there's a very simple rule. Stories are free for the first week, then they move behind a subscriber firewall. (OK, there's a blogger exception, too, but let's not get into that.) The FT should come up with something similarly simple. Then people might actually read the stuff available to them.
Posted by Felix at 1:39 EST | Comments (2)
Concatenated quotes
Updike reviews Fernanda Eberstadt's Little Money Street in the New Yorker this week. Here he is talking about Gypsy girls:
Her value, as a virgin, is ascertained not by the young groom on the wedding night but, according to archaic folk custom, by the probing finger of a tribal crone: Eberstadt’s partially renegade Gypsy friend Linda explains, “For Gypsies, it’s a nasty old woman who is paid to penetrate the girl, like a gynecologist but with dirty hands, in front of all the husband’s family. It’s terrifying, it’s inhuman.” Landric sums up: “People talk about preserving Gypsy culture. But what am I as an educator supposed to do when the comportment of my students is frankly pathological?” Eberstadt, liberal enough to doubt liberal pieties, complains that “if these pedagogues were nineteenth-century missionaries to a cannibal island, they could not be more convinced that the belief system they wished to impose upon the Gypsy savages—in this case, egalitarian secularism—was as unequivocal a good as clean water.” Yet she comes down, finally, on the side of clean water, asserting that the French authorities are “using their utmost powers of imagination and sympathy to devise ways of freeing a community that was clearly stuck and unhappy.”
What struck me about this passage was not only Updike's striking language ("the probing finger of a tribal crone") – it was also the way that he strung quotations from three different people together in one paragraph.
Now there's no rule against quoting more than one person per paragraph, unless you're doing dialogue or conversation. But for some reason, at the back of my head, I always thought there was. I suppose that when I was learning English, I might have misunderstood my teacher's comments about dialogue, or maybe my teacher was the one with the misunderstanding. Either way, I'm glad I now went to the effort of looking my imaginary rule up, and coming to the conclusion it doesn't exist.
That said, I would be happy to break the rule if it did exist. If something's OK by John Updike and the editors of the New Yorker, it's OK by me.
Posted by Felix at 19:19 EST | Comments (0)
Aids update
Two things struck me about this story.
Firstly, it's well known now that HIV+ individuals can lead long and healthy lives. What I was less aware of is the fact that the same is true of people with Aids. The woman in the story had Aids as long ago as 1991, and is still going strong. Good for her!
But how come she's going strong? Here's a datapoint for you: her health insurance premiums are now $29,000 per year. Yowzers!
The central dilemma of healthcare is that as technology improves, ever more diseases can be treated and/or cured – at ever greater cost. What happens when those costs become unmanageable? Obviously, people will end up not getting the best available care. But does this mean that the USA and Europe will go the way of Africa – being theoretically able to treat Aids, but in practice unable to afford to do so?
Posted by Felix at 18:53 EST | Comments (1)
Journalistic innumeracy, part 872
Rents in Leipzig are cheaper than rents in Manhattan! This astonishing news is brought to you by the New York Times. But they still manage to get it wrong:
What Mr. Amrhein is paying, per month per square foot, in Leipzig: about 40 cents
What a similar gallery would cost, per month per square foot, in Chelsea: $75
Er, no. Chelsea rents might be high, but they're not $75 per square foot per month. Actually, they're $75 per square foot per year. The number they should have used is $6.25: one twelfth of $75. Alternatively, they could have given rent per square foot per year in Leipzig, which is $4.80.
The Times knows this, of course. There's even a box in the print article (not online) which gives accurate monthly rents for a 3,800 square-foot space: $23,750 in Chelsea, $1,470 in Leipzig. But no one seems to have stopped to think whether the ratio of those two numbers was the same as the ratio between $75 and $0.40. There's arts journalists for you.
Posted by Felix at 10:50 EST | Comments (1)
Finding wine
Why isn't there a free wine database on the web somewhere? It could start in the US, but very easily expand worldwide.
The problem is that wine is the ultimate long-tail business – I would say that more wine sales exist in the long tail than in virtually any other business. Wine shops specialise in finding small wines from underappreciated areas, and their customers are generally more than willing to buy wines they've never heard of before, if they come with an enthusiastic recommendation from the sales assistant.
But the total number of wines, of course, is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of wines that any given retailer can even taste, let alone stock. So if you're looking for a specific bottle, the chances are that your local wine shop doesn't have it – and nor does the one down the street from your local wine shop, or the one down the street from that one, either. And wine stores aren't like bookstores, happy to order something for you which they don't have in stock.
One of the problems I have with wine journalism in the US is that when someone reviews a wine, it's often all but impossible to actually find it. In the UK, with its chain stores and supermarkets, the problem is much smaller. But in New York, there's actually a law banning any retailer from operating more than one liquor outlet in the entire state. So if Whole Foods has a wine store in Columbus Circle, for instance, it can't have one on Houston Street. What this means in practice is that everybody in New York, including wine journalists, buys their wine from a different retailer, and the chances of my local retailer stocking the same wine as the journalist's local retailer are pretty slim.
Let's say a wine gets a good review, then, and I want to buy a bottle – or, more likely, I drink a great bottle of wine at a restaurant, and decide to buy a couple of bottles for my personal cellar. How do I go about doing this? I could look up the website of the winemaker, but even if it exists that's going to be of precious little use to me. I could try phoning up all the wine stores in my neighborhood and asking if they stock it, but that could turn out to be an exercise in frustration. There are many wines which are only sold by one or two retailers in all of Manhattan.
Individual wine stores generally don't have the resources to put their entire inventory online. Some do, with varying degrees of success; the biggest, Sherry-Lehmann, has a very annoying system where individual wines don't have permalinks, so you can't send anybody a link to a wine you've found. In any case, it would be borderline impossible to set up a system aggregating the information from individual stores' websites, since they're all run on very different systems.
But there is another way. While there are thousands of wine stores and vastly more different wines, there are only a handful of importers and distributors, through whom all wine travels. These people (a) know exactly which stores their wine is going to, and (b) have every incentive to make it as easy as possible for people to find those stores.
The problem with wine.com, for instance, is that it wants to be a retailer, as opposed to just a source of information. That means that it gets caught up in all manner of red tape concerning inter-state commerce, drinking-age laws, and the like. And it has no incentive to give out information about wine it either doesn't stock or can't ship to your state.
What I would love to see instead is just a simple searchable website where distributors can list their wines. When you find a wine you're interested in, you can click on it and find out whether any retailers near you stock it. Then you can phone up that store, make sure they have it in stock, ask the price, and decide whether you want to buy it. It's not as simple as Amazon, say, where you can just click on a book you want and have it sent to you and billed to your credit card. But it would be a great step forward from the (lack of any) system that exists at present.
Posted by Felix at 15:22 EST | Comments (13)
Changing hotel sheets
I'm a big fan of Mark Hurst and his This Is Broken website. But today's entry, to me, speaks much more about the ridiculous level of American self-entitlement than it does about bad design. Hurst stayed at the Marriot Monterey, a big hotel in a part of California which is both environmentally fragile and evironmentally aware. Hurst's complaint?
At the Marriott Monterey...
... the only way I can finagle new sheets every day, in this $200+/night hotel, is to
(a) read the card and
(b) remember to put the card on my pillow every morning.
Otherwise they reserve the right to give me the same sheets each day.
(If they're saving water as a result, shouldn't they give me a price break?)
The language about the price of the room (which seems utterly normal for this kind of hotel in this kind of location to me), along with the language about wanting a "price break" for the water they're saving, makes it clear that Mark thinks this is a cost issue: that the main incentive here is to save money. The idea that saving water and electricity might be a good thing anyway doesn't seem to have crossed his mind.
I don't know Mark very well, but I've met him a couple of times, and he certainly doesn't strike me as the kind of person who changes his sheets every day at home. (Does anybody do that? Donald Trump, maybe?) In fact, I daresay that if I told him that I changed my sheets every day, he'd think me very wasteful, and/or obsessive-compulsive to a point nearing outright mental illness. So why does he seem to think that any halfways-decent hotel should change his sheets automatically?
Obviously, if sheets are dirty, they should be cleaned. If a guest requests new sheets, he should get them. And new guests get new sheets, always. But I see no reason for a hotel guest to expect a level of wastefulness and environmental unfriendliness which would be outright shocking to most Europeans.
Let's just think of everything that Mark is expecting on a daily basis as a default setting here. The bed to be stripped, and all sheets (used once) to be scrumpled up into the laundry. Then the sheets from hundreds of hotel rooms to be washed – a massive operation, involving vast amounts of water, electricity, and nasty bleach. Then all those sheets to be dried, and folded, and stored, and then made into new beds. Never mind the cost of the water, how much labour does Mark think all this involves? How much does he think a reasonable wage is? Why does he feel that he is entitled to all this? Because he's paying $200 a night for a room in a full-service hotel in one of the most expensive parts of the world?
Different places have different levels of environmental consciousness. Britain is somewhere between Germany and California; California is somewhere between Britain and New York. If Mark goes to a hotel in Germany, he won't find the hotel apologising for not changing his sheets every day, because the hotel doesn't think that's anything to apologise for. They won't change his sheets unless they're dirty, and he won't notice or care. And that's not broken: that's as it should be. And Mark needs to get over himself.
Posted by Felix at 0:08 EST | Comments (6)
Bill Buford is hot
Bill Buford is about to become a household name. His new book, Heat, is a guaranteed bestseller: it'll be on airplanes and beaches around the world this summer. It's funny, accessible, and as addictive as Mario Batali's lardo.
The book grew out of a wonderful profile that Buford wrote on Batali for the New Yorker, wherein Buford got himself a job as a kitchen slave at Babbo to see how restaurants really work. What neither Buford nor Batali expected was that Buford would like the work so much that he'd quit his job as fiction editor of the New Yorker and go back to work at Babbo for another year. And Babbo wasn't enough: Buford also went to Italy, to learn both pasta and butchery at the hands of the masters in the home of Batali's cuisine. By the time the book finishes, a sequel, set in France, would seem to be in the works.
Comparisons will be made to Kitchen Confidential, of course (which also started as a piece in the New Yorker), but this book is much funnier, and actually more practical as well. While it doesn't have formal recipes, you definitely finish it wanting to head to the kitchen to make some of the dishes Buford talks about. Meanwhile, the set-pieces – some featuring Batali and others featuring his former boss (!) Marco Pierre White are priceless. The flavour of the book is encapsulated in a great quote just a few pages in:
"I will never forget him," White said, when I met him in London. "He has fucking big calves, doesn't he? He should donate them to the kitchen when he dies. They'll make great osso buco."
Buford is a great humourist, and much of the humour is directed at himself, but he also is well aware of how much he learned while researching and writing this book. At one point he starts bossing around a bunch of "highly accomplished chefs who (it was perfectly obvious) hadn't come to do the plating, although happily prepared to help out" at a huge benefit dinner in Nashville. Of course, they end up doing the plating. Buford starts screaming at them: "Wrong! This is a mess. Redo!" – and we realise he's become a proper cook in his own right, not just a writer-interloper. Later, after some time at the Tuscan butchery, he brings an entire pig home to his West Village apartment, and cooks the whole thing: "By my reckoning my green-market pig generated four hundred and fifty servings of food and worked out to less than fifty cents a plate."
The one area of the book where Buford is not entirely, brutally honest about himself is when it comes to how he was able to write it in the first place. Here's Buford:
I knew I had to get back to Italy for a length of time, whatever it might be, or else I'd end up regretting that I hadn't gont there for the rest of my life. I was in a state. I'd experienced this kind of haunting the year before when I had quit my job and taken up a spot on the line in the Babbo kitchen. Now, feeling it again, I found myself trying to persuade my wife, Jessica, that what she really wanted to do was quit her job as well (she was a highly paid Manhattan magazine editor) and accompany me to an Italian hill town where we would know nobody and where I'd work really long hours for no money.
But of course this is all in the book. The book he was writing when he took up his spot on the line in the Babbo kitchen; the book for which his agent, Andrew Wylie, undoubtedly got him a hefty advance. Never mind Buford quitting his job and working for no money; never mind his wife quitting her job too. There was money – quite a lot of money, I would guess – from Buford's reported three-book deal with Knopf, and there will undoubtedly be more when Heat starts selling like, well, hot cakes, and the royalties start pouring in.
And, of course, it's not like the New Yorker isn't paying Buford anything any more. He's back this week, in fact, with a six-page article on Long Island oysters under the heading "Notes of a Gastronome". One assume there will be further notes to come, and that Buford is essentially joining Trillin on the New Yorker food beat. I can't wait for more: already I tried some of the Widow's Hole oysters that Buford writes about in the piece at the Grand Central Terminal Oyster Bar this afternoon. He's right: they're amazing, some of the best oysters I've ever had, and they're cheaper than the inferior Oregon Kumamotos to boot.
At least they're easy to find. After reading the original Batali profile, I walked into Di Paolo's in Little Italy and asked if they had any lardo. (I'd had it in France by the name veritable du lard, and had been looking for it in NYC until reading the piece.) The guy behind the counter looked at me, looked at the big guy behind me, smiled, and addressed him, not me: "Bill, this guy's asking for lardo". Bill Buford (for it was he) told me that I had to go to Batali's restaurants for that.
Posted by Felix at 14:36 EST | Comments (0)
Public radio
At six o'clock on a freezing Chimayó morning last week, I dragged myself out of bed and onto a porch, where a friendly B&B proprietor had left me a cordless phone. The reason was that a radio program, Democracy Now, wanted me on as a guest to talk about the New York Times and Sudan. Seeing as how it was insanely early, insanely cold, and I hadn't had any coffee, I think I acquitted myself reasonably well.
Gratifyingly, a couple of my readers seem to have heard me on the radio, so I must have reached a halfways-decent audience. Later on in the week, I ended up listening to Marfa Public Radio while driving through the desert: there was nothing else to listen to, so it's not hard to see where an audience can come from.
Democracy Now has a clear left-wing bias: indeed, NPR is cited in Jack Shafer's piece on media bias as pretty much the archetypal left-wing media entity. (BTW, is there any demand for a Report Report Report on the media bias study?)
But the report I heard about the French employment demonstrations, on a Public Radio program called The World, was anything but left-wing:
GERRY HADDEN: Eleanor, if we compare this to the United States, no one would even begin to expect such job protection that the French are asking for. Can you explain what's going on?
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: A lot of it is ignorance. A lot of these young people, maybe they just want to be out of class. I don't think a lot of them know what's going on. They're scared of globalization. I think that globalization hasn't been sold very well here.
Listen for yourself: the whole tone of the interview has no sympathy whatsoever towards the demonstrators, who are portrayed as ignorant agitators who simply need a bit of education and who would then understand that this law is all for their own good. Really, it wouldn't have been out of place on Fox News. That the new employment law and globalization are essentially interchangeable was never argued: it was simply taken as gospel fact.
Meanwhile, Lance Knobel has found a much more interesting take on the whole affair, from Jean-Pierre Lehmann:
There is no valid case to be made in support of French Prime Minister de Villepin’s first employment contract. I am totally in favour of far more flexible labour conditions and contracts and also of longer working hours, but I am definitely against picking on youth, among the most vulnerable and traumatised segments of French society. What de Villepin is doing is trying to show his machismo by bullying the weak. France is full, full, full of subsidised, molly-coddled, highly protected sectors throughout the labour force. This is what is responsible for the 24% youth unemployment in France and this is what needs to be addressed. The farmers, the huge government sector, the civil servants, who in France more often than not are highly uncivil, the transport “workers”, plumbers, pensioners, these are the people who need to be confronted.
Why, then, was the public radio report so simplistic, and biased against the left? I don't think it's as simple as saying that the left in the USA would be considered the center-right in Europe. After all, there's no shortage of anti-globalization activists in the USA, too, on both sides of the political spectrum.
Rather, I suspect that NPR appeals to what you might call smug urban liberals, the kind of people who congratulate themselves on being worldly enough to understand the positive effects of globalization and even congratulate themselves on knowing enough about the genocide going on in Sudan that they are appalled that the New York Times would take the Sudanese government's money.
If you buy Gentzkow and Shapiro's theory of media, NPR then has every reason to confirm such preconceived notions, unless there's a chance that its listeners will get a more nuanced and accurate view of the situation elsewhere. In the case of the French demonstrations, there was very little chance that other media outlets would run pieces more sympathetic to the protestors, so they were safe going with the conventional wisdom. Those French students: it seems they just can't catch a break.
Posted by Felix at 22:40 EST | Comments (7)
Southwest
Click on the picture for a small gallery of photos from my trip to the Southwest.
Posted by Felix at 20:51 EST | Comments (0)
Vanishing views and sleazy brokers
In January 2005, Curbed noted an apartment for sale on Water Street being sold on the strength of its fabulous views – views which, it seemed, were doomed. Last month, the new owner of the apartment wrote to The Ethicist:
The sellers' fast-talking real-estate broker assuaged our fears that new development might block the spectacular river views. We subsequently learned that development is planned within two years.
The new development is now going up for approval by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The architect is Morris Adjmi, who specialises in the placement of modern buildings in historic districts. But the new owner of the Water Street apartment is predictably not impressed, calling the proposed development a "monolith".
Today, Curbed gave some advice about whether a view might or might not vanish:
You may be saved if your view overlooks a landmark district. Some people think landmark status is sort of like garlic to ward off evil blood-sucking developers. But other people claim to have seen developers blow right through the Landmarks Commission with a few well-placed political contributions and a pretentious architect nattering on about contextual green design.
The Seaport development, it's worth noting, is in a historic district, but there's no doubt that something is going to go up on that lot.
The main thing for a prospective buyer to do is never believe anything the seller's broker says. In this case, the broker was Jon Phillips, a guy who lied and lied and lied, saying, among other things, that a view-blocking development could never be built in the first place because of the crappiness of the landfill. What Phillips did was extremely sleazy, and in fact it was illegal.
Have a look at the Real Estate License Law of New York State. Specifically, have a look at §443:
In dealings with the buyer, a seller’s agent should (a) exercise reasonable skill and care in performance of the agent’s duties; (b) deal honestly, fairly and in good faith; and (c) disclose all facts known to the agent materially affecting the value or desirability of property, except as otherwise provided by law.
Phillips knew that the lot in question had been sold to a developer who was planning a tall building which would destroy the views which were the main selling point of the apartment. That's a fact which certainly materiallly affected the value and desirability of the property; yet far from disclosing it, he made it his business to deny that it could be true. Which meant that he was not dealing honestly, fairly or in good faith.
So maybe the first thing you should do if you're worried about a vanishing view isn't look at Property Shark: it's look at the broker. If it's Jon Phillips of Halstead, run away.
Posted by Felix at 15:30 EST | Comments (3)
Gather.com
I just had a phone conversation with a woman from gather.com, who wants to republish my blog posts, especially the media criticism. Does anybody have any opinions about this site? Is there any advantage to my posts having two permanent locations and two comments streams?
Posted by Felix at 14:27 EST | Comments (3)
Back from Marfa
I'm back. Had the most wonderful holiday in New Mexico and West Texas. If you're thinking about heading out that way, I can highly recommend southern New Mexico, especially the strip of desert from White Sands National Monument, in the west, over to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, in the east. It's much less touristy than, and just as beautiful as, the well-travelled strip between Santa Fe and Taos. The place to stay is the Hurd Ranch in San Patricio. Talk about value: for $140 a night, you get an entire house on acres of land, complete with large sitting room, wood-burning fireplace with lots of wood, kitchen, bedroom, porch, barbecue, amazing views, everything. The scenery is lovely (and makes for a nice walk to the top of the hill, too), and the whole atmosphere is utterly relaxing. There are bigger houses, too, if you want to take a group.
From there we moved on to Marfa. I've always been more of a Carl Andre fan than a Donald Judd fan, but the two big Judd pieces at Marfa are indisputably two of the greatest artworks of the second half of the 20th Century. Photos can't begin to do them justice. The aluminium boxes are the better known, and are absolutely stunning, but leave a lot of time for the concrete boxes as well. Walk slowly among and around them, go from end to end (I think it's about a mile in total), and you'll see just how amazing site-specific art can really be.
As for the controversy surrounding the Judd Foundation, I certainly think the Christies sale gives every impression of being rushed and ill-thought-through. But the two big permanent pieces at Chinati are so much better than any of Judd's gallery pieces that I'm not as upset about it as I was before I went to Marfa. The Judd Foundation needs cash; it does not need a lot of gallery pieces lying around in storage. Yes, more of an effort should certainly have been made to place those pieces in museums rather than auctioning them off to the highest bidder. But I do have some hope that, armed with a $20 million endowment, the Judd Foundation will be able to memorialise and preserve the legacy of this great artist, both in Marfa and New York.
Posted by Felix at 14:20 EST | Comments (7)
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