Felix Salmon

Gearbox has returned!

It was launched as a vehicle for Mickey Kaus to blog about cars in 2001. He

managed one entry that year, followed by another one at the end of 2002. 2003

was the golden year for Gearbox: Mickey managed a full nine posts! He then fell

back to two in 2004, and three in 2005.

Today, Gearbox gets a new byline: that of Paul Boutin, who has decided to write

about Zipcar. It’s unclear whether this fills the Gearbox quota for the

year, or whether more posts are forthcoming.

And in any case you’ll learn much more about Zipcar from reading the Gothamist

comments thread than you will by reading Boutin’s article. Boutin is in

full-on boosterish mode, and seems to have carefully excised all possible criticisms

of Zipcar bar one: "My only beef with the service is they need to wash

the cars more often."

I’m a Zipcar member myself, and have recommended them to others, and they do

seem reasonably good at learning from criticism. Last year, for instance, they

implemented a policy limiting people to booking Zipcars for no more than five

weekends at a time, in an attempt to cut down on "zipsquatting". But

it’s often still very difficult to find cars at weekends; there are still no

Zipcars within a one-mile radius of where I live in downtown Manhattan; and

the much-vaunted XM Radios rarely seem to work.

But much more serious than all those problems is the insurance situation. I

sent Zipcar an email asking them for clarification about three weeks ago, and

have yet to receive a reply. The FAQ

seems pretty cut and dried:

Unlike rental car companies, we don’t make you pay more for basic insurance

coverage. Insurance is just part of your Zipcar membership. Nice, huh?

There’s a deductible of $500, but they say that even that might be covered

if you book with a credit card:

Zipcar recommends that all members try to use a credit card, like an Amex

or MasterCard Gold, that may provide a deductible waiver. It could save you

some cash. So get out the glasses and check your credit card’s fine print.

But of course Zipcar has fine

print of its own, which is not very easy at all to find. My emphasis added:

10.1.1 Any person authorized to operate a vehicle under these Rules is covered

by an automobile liability insurance policy to state minimum levels

as well as comprehensive and collision coverage…

10.2.1 You are responsible for the full value of any damages caused

to Zipcar’s property or the property of all third parties which are neither

covered by insurance nor by manufacturer’s guarantee while you are

responsible for the vehicle as described in section 6.5 of these Rules.

What does this mean in English? It means that if something happens to your

Zipcar, chances are that Zipcar’s insurance policy will cover it. That’s what

"comprehensive and collision coverage" means – it means damage

to your car, not to anybody else’s.

But of course if you get into any kind of accident in which another car is

involved, there’s likely to be some kind of damage to the other car as well,

and possibly to the occupants of that car as well. And in that case, Zipcar’s

liability insurance only goes to state minimum levels. After that, you’re liable

for everything.

What are state minimum levels? I believe that in New York, they are $25,000

per person for bodily injury and $10,000 for property, while in New Jersey they’re

$15,000 per person for bodily injury and just $5,000 for property.

Now I often take a Zipcar to New Jersey – if I’m going on an Ikea run,

for instance, my closest store is in Elizabeth. And there are lots of very expensive

cars in New Jersey. So what happens if I get into an accident with a Mercedes

in the Ikea parking lot, and the damage to the Mercedes comes to $15,000? The

damage to the Zipcar will be picked up by Zipcar’s insurance, after I’ve paid

a $500 deductible. But Zipcar’s insurance only covers $5,000 of the damage to

the Mercedes: the rest, $10,000, comes out of my pocket. So I’d be liable, in

total, for $10,500.

And if there was any kind of serious accident, causing bodily harm, then my

liability could be much, much greater. If an occupant of the Mercedes had to

go to hospital, and ended up with say $200,000 in medical bills, I would be

liable for $185,000 of that.

I’m pretty sure all this is true – that most people driving Zipcars think

they’re covered when in fact they might end up with very large uncovered liabilities.

But it’s not easy to get an answer out of Zipcar: maybe they’ll leave a comment

on this blog. And the Zipcar website is far from useful when trying to get answers

to questions such as these.

In any case, it’s certainly true that Zipcar does not offer an option of extra

liability insurance, probably because if they did offer it then the users would

be shocked to realise that they’d been going without it all along. According

to the insurance information institute, non-owner liability policies cost

about $300 per year: is this something that Zipcar members should be buying?

And if it is, shouldn’t Zipcar be tipping them off to the fact?

In an attempt to stay young ‘n’ trendy, Phillips de Pury has launched a new

auction series called Saturday

@ Phillips. The idea is that it’s an entry-level auction, for people who

don’t have hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars to spend on high-end

art and design. Instead, the work is generally in the $1,000 to $5,000 range,

and the target audience definitely includes people who have never bought work

at auction before.

The next Saturday @ Phillips auction is on September 16, and it includes a

couple of gorgeous Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs (a movie

theatre and a seascape)

estimated at $700–$900 and $1,000–$2,000 respectively. I’ve long

been a fan of Sugimoto, so of course when I saw those I briefly pondered whether

I should even perhaps bid on them myself.

Certainly someone who knows what they’re doing might be able to pick up something

of a bargain at the auction. My favourite jeweler, Jill

Platner, has four pieces in the auction (1,2,3,4),

and it’s pretty easy to phone up or visit her

store and find out what they retail for. If you buy a $5,600 necklace for

the mid-estimate price of $4,000, for instance, you know you’ve got a pretty

good deal.

The Sugimotos, on the other hand, are a little trickier. For one thing, there’s

clearly a big difference in value between the photolithograph of the movie theatre

and the silver-gelatin print of the seascape: the movie theatre is from a smaller

edition than the seascape, and it’s a much larger print, but is still the cheaper

of the two. Most people who buy at auction are educated sophisticates, who know

what they’re buying, know what they think it’s worth, and bid accordingly. But

the new crowd at Phillips might well not really fit into that category: how

many of them even know what a photolithograph really is? (I certainly

don’t.) What’s more, Phillips is presumably trying to attract the kind of people

who are scared off by the opacity

and malpractice endemic in the art world, which means that they are much

less likely to be able to work out what the "going rate" is for such

Sugimotos, or which other, similar, Sugimotos might be on the market at the

moment.

In any auction, the size of the winner’s

curse is highly correlated with the degree to which the bidders have incomplete

information about the value of the item they’re bidding on. In other words,

the more bidders there are, and the less they know, the more that the winning

bidder is likely to overpay. Saturday @ Phillips is an auction series which

seems designed to maximise the number of bidders and at the same time attract

bidders who know relatively little about what they’re bidding on, compared to

most of Phillips’s clients. A recipe for crazy bidding.

If you are confident in your own valuations, then, Saturday @ Phillips might

be a good opportunity to pick up the kind of art and design which is often overlooked

by the auction houses. But you have to be prepared to drop out of the bidding

with no regrets, since there’s a very good chance that a lot of the work for

sale will go for overinflated sums.

Not only does New York have a Puppet

Lending Library, but it’s in the Grand Arch at Prospect Park! Yes,

as in inside the arch. It’s open Saturdays from noon to 4pm, and occasionally

there are even performances in the crossover at the top! (Via the Coolest

New York Blogger By Far)

So there’s tons of news about Apple’s

battery recall, which involves Apple replacing either 1.1 million or 1.8

million Sony batteries. Obviously the source for all this news is Apple itself.

But there’s nothing on the apple homepage,

nothing on the news page, nothing

on the press release page – nothing

at all anywhere, as far as I can see, explaining exactly which batteries are

affected or what owners of Apple laptops should do. One would think that Apple

could coordinate things so that the details of the recall would be up on the

website as soon as the press release went out – or, at the very least,

would be able to put the press release up on the website.

In fact, how did all the news organisations get this information?

Was it by email?

UPDATE: It seems the news came

from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. There also may or may not

be a recall page at http://support.apple.com/batteryprogram,

but I just get an error message when I try to go there.

UPDATE 2: Guess what? My PowerBook battery has been recalled!

I get a brand-new battery (value: $130)!

UPDATE 3: I found the link on apple.com! You click on the

"support" page, and it’s buried in the right-hand column. Thing is,

if you try to click on it, it doesn’t work… that page is down. So I phoned

the number on the CPSC page, and the friendly Apple person told me that:

• No, he couldn’t organise a new battery for me, since that’s done through

  the webpage, and the webpage is down.

• No, I can’t just take my battery in to the Apple Store and get a new one

  there: it has to be done through the mail.

• I should just try that webpage again "in a couple of hours" and

  hope it’s up at that time.

In other words, chaos. Not the kind of user experience one expects from Apple.

In any case, after the jump, a screenshot of where that link is buried.

UPDATE 4: The webpage

is up! But when I input my battery’s serial number, I’m told that this "serial

number didn’t validate". Back to the phone… at which point, after almost

an hour on hold, I’m told that this is a known issue and that they (on the phone)

can get around it. My new battery is on its way! But the whole process was much,

much harder than it should have been.

Continue reading →

Just as my cable-modem bill increased to $42 per month, my cable-modem service

started getting horrible. Connection is very spotty: internet access seems to

come and go on a minute-by-minute basis, and is sometimes very fast and sometimes

incredibly slow. I’ve now started getting weird error pages from Earthlink,

too, like this

one when I try to reach an Amazon page.

So, is there an alternative? Earthlink is nothing more than a rebranded Time

Warner Cable, so there’s no point in switching to Roadrunner. And I don’t have

a landline (I use Vonage), so DSL doesn’t really seem to be an option. Or, is

there a known issue with cable-modem access in NYC which is likely to be resolved

at some point?

So after having to cancel

my trip at the last minute in March, I’ve now rebooked, and am all set for a

trip

all the way down to the Antarctic Peninsula in November. Can’t wait! I’m looking

to spending some time with my sister on

a slightly smaller boat afterwards, too.

I can go now because I have all the necessary papers – along with a wonderful

work authorization card. So, if anybody has any work for me between now and

mid-November, let me know: it doesn’t even need to be journalistic!

Jenufa tickets are on

sale now. Buy them. (I’m going Wednesday February 14 if you’d care to join:

tickets are cheaper Mon-Thu.)

One of the more minor differences between English English and American English

is the way that investment banks are referred to. The English have a weird habit

of pluralising everything: Goldman Sachs becomes Goldmans, Lehman Brothers is

Lehmans, NM Rothschild & Sons is Rothschilds. The habit is so ingrained

that the investment bank named after England’s Schroder family was actually

called Schroders before it was sold to Citigroup.

In any case, the pluralisation is something that all English financial journalists

eventually learn to lose when they move to New York, because "Goldmans"

just sounds weird to American ears. Which is why it’s weird to find

this in the New York Times today, from an American no less:

Rohatyn Associates, which had been loosely affiliated with Rothchilds, the

British investment bank, worked on several prominent mergers like SBC’s

acquisition of Cingular and later AT&T.

Or is Andrew Ross Sorkin, now an A-list blogger,

simply bringing a little bit of bloggish informality into the Grey Lady?

Two art-world doyennes, Diane

Shamash and Annely

Juda, died last Sunday. I don’t want to read too much into the coincidence,

especially considering that although they died on the same day, they were born

41 years apart from each other. Diane died at 51: when Annely was that age,

her best years were very much ahead of her and Annely Juda Fine Art wasn’t even

founded. It’s a sobering reminder of how much Diane could have accomplished

given more time.

Still, there are definite similarities between the two: both were physically

small and temperamentally uncompromising, with a tendency towards perfectionism.

Both, too, were intensely loyal to their artists: the art, always, came first,

for both of them, and they had a rare ability to bend the art world to their

will when they wanted something.

I never met Annely, although I spent many wonderful hours in her pristine Dering

Street gallery, lost in her beautifully-curated shows of usually underrated

abstract masters. I remember one constructivism show particularly well –

there was a Malevich I returned to Saturday after Saturday on my weekly trips

into town from Dulwich.

Diane I knew better, often meeting her in some kind of food-related context:

she loved food almost as much as she loved art. Diane saw great chefs

as artists in their own right, and was particularly interesting when she explored

the intersection between fine art and food, as in the work of Christian Philipp

Müller.

The biggest difference between Annely and Diane might be in the fate of their

legacies. Annely Juda Fine Art

is in the excellent hands of David Juda; Minetta

Brook, on the other hand, has lost not only its founder but its very soul,

and although I dearly hope that it will be able to continue, I fear that might

not be possible.

Minetta Brook was a serious-minded public art organisation which refused ever

to condescend to the public it served. Diane would find artists as serious-minded

as she was, and would help them realise their vision with unquestioning faith

that there would always be an audience for good art, no matter how superficially

inaccessible it might be.

As part of a project called Watershed, Minetta Brook once rented out a storefront

in Beacon, NY, where it exhibited a long silent black-and-white film of the

Hudson River by Matthew Buckingham called Muhheakantuck. Christian

Philipp Müller’s piece in the same project consisted of a long steel trough

in Annandale-on-Hudson planted with Hudson River flora. Neither was easily accessible

in any sense of the word.

The audience for these pieces came largely from the art world: Minetta Brook

was never scared to create "public art" which in practice was seen

and appreciated by a very small audience. For Diane, public art was not a popularity

contest. She always served her artists first, even when their projects might

not receive much in the way of public acclaim.

If she refused to submit to the tyrannny of the popular, Diane also refused

to be told what was art and what was not. Food could be art, as could be barbecue

grills (designed by Pae White and installed in Bear Mountain State Park) or

park benches (by Constance De Jong and installed at Hessian Lake). The most

ambitious of all the Watershed projects was George Trakas’s Beacon Landing:

something that many art-world types would automatically consider architecture,

or design, or in any case Not Art.

Diane, however, had the utmost faith in and respect for her artists and their

art, and treated all of these projects with the same white-gloved respect that

she would give to the films of Dan Graham or the sculptures of Lothar Baumgarten.

New York without Diane Shamash is certainly a poorer place, but it will be

poorer still if it loses Minetta Brook as well. Public art is often thought

of in terms of hits: big projects in Rockefeller Center or along Park Avenue

or installed in subway stations. Diane had her own hits, too, foremost among

them the realization of Robert Smithson’s Floating Island from little

more than a single sketched drawing. Predictably, that project takes up a large

part of the NYT obituary.

But it’s the smaller, quieter pieces which for me are her true legacy. If you

went down to Pier 26 on the West Side Highway

at any time before last November you might have seen an upside-down canoe-like

structure on a couple of stilts. In fact the whole pier was an artwork by George

Trakas called Curach and Bollard, one which wasn’t often admired as

art, but one which very many people enjoyed very much all the same. That was

part of its beauty, and part of what made it such a classic Minetta Brook piece.

Every so often someone would stop, and consider, and move on, and the world

would be just a little bit better.

I just got the Met

Opera‘s 2006-7 season guide. Excerpted without further comment:

the marvelous tenor Macello Giordani

exceptional baritone Dwayne Croft

the greatest Rossini tenor of our time, Juan Diego Flores

the great Strauss interpreter Deborah Voigt

the celebrated lyric soprano Lisa Milne

legendary tenor Ben Heppner

the commanding Violeta Urmana

tenor sensations Rolando Villazón and Marcello Giordani

the majestically-voiced Maria Guleghina and Dolora Zajick

the dynamic Salvatore Licitra

the sensational Renée Fleming

charismatic Dmitri Hvorostovsky

the dynamic Ramón Vargas

the young Russian star Ildar Abdrazakov

popular countertenor David Daniels

English mezzo-soprano Alice Coote

the radiant Dorothea Röschmann

the glorious Karita Mattila

the remarkable Anja Silja

the great tenor Johan Botha

international sensation Anna Netrebko

baritone greats Carlos Alvarez and Juan Pons

young tenor stars Piotr Beczala and Joseph Calleja

acclaimed baritone Thomas Hampson

the magnificent Angela Gheorghiu

the great Italian bass Ferrucio Furlanetto

I wouldn’t live in the Sculpture for Living if you paid me. (Well, of course

I would if you paid me, but I doubt that’s likely to happen any time

soon.) I rarely agree with Michael Blowhard on matters architectural, but he’s

absolutely right when he criticises

"the way it detaches itself so completely from its surroundings".

But boy do a couple of the features of the $12

million penthouse sound cool. First, there’s a "mini ‘morning kitchen’

just outside the master bedroom" for an espresso machine – I don’t

know why, but the idea of not even having to go into the kitchen to get one’s

morning jolt really tickles me. And then there’s "the windowed walk-in

closets (the better to choose your wardrobe while you’re looking at

the weather)". Dude. A windowed walk-in closet – and, given the design

of the building, a floor-to-ceiling window at that. That’s pretty cool, even

by New York standards.

"I was being ironic" really is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

If you do a stupid or offensive thing, you can almost always claim that you

were being ironic. Once in a while, you might even be right, in that you might

have had ironic intent. But that doesn’t stop what you did being stupid or offensive.

And, of course, anybody can claim after the fact that they were being ironic

(or, better, "subtly ironic", whatever that means) even if they had

no ironic intent whatsoever.

Gawker knows all this better than anyone. Indeed its weekly "Blue States

Lose" feature is little more than an extended excoriation of hipsters who

think they’re being ironic but are really just being tragic.

I’m

like most people, I think, in that I have different uses for irony at different

times. When I say I love Thomas Kinkade, the appreciation there is definitely

in the realm of the ironic; when I say I love Britney Spears, I actually mean

it. (Hit Me Baby One More Time and Toxic are two of the greatest pop songs of

all time.) For me, however, irony really comes into its own when it’s a bit

more sophisticated and a bit less clear-cut. For instance, I have a neon sign

on my wall at home: there it is, at right. I was the person who came up with

the idea for it, and even I (perhaps especially I) am far from clear

on how ironic it is. In fact, that uncertainty is a large part of the reason

why I like the sign so much. (If you don’t "get" the sign, don’t worry,

nobody gets it. Try asking Choire.)

But back to Gawker, and its various alumni. Former Gawker editor Jesse Oxfeld

is quoted

in New York magazine as saying that the skeevy

Gawker Stalker feature belies Gawker’s "Ur-New Yorkerness". In response,

former Gawker editor Choire Sicha quotes

former Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers responding with this:

The point of Gawker stalker *was* not being impressed by the celebrities.

The irony was subtle, but I’m fairly certain it was obvious. (That Jesse interpreted

it that way may be indicative of why he wasn’t a good fit for Gawker.)

Oh, and in response to Spiers’s response to Oxfeld (are you tired of this yet?)

former Gawker "mascot" Andrew Krucoff says

that Spiers is talking bullshit.

I’m with Oxfeld and Krucoff on this one, even after a very interesting and

wide-ranging IM conversation with Spiers, who bases her analysis of Gawker Stalker

much more on the history of its inception than on how it is actually perceived.

The main reason that I’m with Krucoff against Spiers is that I hate the irony

defense. (Spiers does too, sometimes: she was quite famous, for a while, for

hating on "ironic" trucker caps at every available opportunity.) And

in any case, insofar as "subtle irony" means anything it means non-obvious

irony, and therefore obvious subtle irony is something of a contradiction in

terms.

That said, however, the New York article does actually say what I think Spiers

was trying to say, or at least what I think Spiers was driving at with her "subtle

irony" quote:

Even Gawker Stalker is presented partly tongue-in-cheek, a guilty pleasure

that’s heavy on the guilt, its meticulous missives a halfhearted joke

about how silly it is to obsess over the whereabouts of Ryan Adams.

The problem is how halfhearted the joke is, and how old the joke is. When Gawker

Stalker was launched, says Spiers (and she takes full credit for the idea, saying

that Nick Denton was on holiday at the time, and refuting any assumption that

it was a feature forced on her by a gossip-hungry overlord), "the celebrity

mags weren’t nearly as nasty as they are now. Gawker Stalker was exactly the

opposite of standard celeb coverage at the time, which was fawning and worshipful."

Of course, that no longer applies, since features along the lines of "stars:

they’re just like us" appear in every tabloid in the supermarket. Gawker

Stalker is no longer the opposite of standard celeb coverage; it’s merely an

extension of it. Which means that whatever irony or separation from the celebuverse

was there originally has long since disappeared.

Spiers concedes that Star magazine and its ilk are now doing something very

similar to Gawker Stalker, but says that what they’re doing is "coming

from a different place" than Gawker Stalker. That, it seems, makes all

the difference: "we’re talking about intent, not effect," she says.

Oxfeld should know that the intent behind Gawker Stalker was in some

way ironic, and therefore he shouldn’t have been offended by it.

This is not particularly convincing, especially when Spiers also concedes that

Eurotrash, when she was working

at celebrity tabloids, "invented several features that were at least according

to her, ironic". She also concedes that most Star readers, at

least on the coasts, are reading the magazine ironically – or at least

kid themselves that they are. In other words, there might be a little bit of

ironic intent behind Gawker Stalker, but there might be a little bit of ironic

intent behind Star, as well. And there might be a little bit of ironic

intent in Gawker Stalker’s readership, but there’s a lot of ironic

intent in Star‘s readership, certainly in New York. And Spiers certainly

stops short of defending Star on the grounds of irony.

It’s worth noting that Gawker no longer feels the need to resort to the irony

defense: their note

today says in as many words that they’re practicing gutter journalism.

You can either hunt with the pack or sympathize with the prey, but you can’t

do both. Once that dick comes out of your mouth and you’re handed the money,

you’re a whore; it doesn’t matter how many pages you spend contemplating the

symbolism of sucking cock for cash. We, at least, know who we are – and we

welcome Adam Moss and Co. down here to the gutter.

Spiers might not like the fact that her invention, Gawker Stalker, has now

become Gawker’s proud flag of whoredom. But Gawker is right and Spiers is wrong:

there’s nothing noble or justifiable about Gawker Stalker, certainly not in

its present incarnation. Gawker’s not trying to justify it; she shouldn’t, either.

I got an "exclusive limited time offer for Preferred Professionals"

in the mail yesterday: a 1-year subscription to the Wall Street Journal, including

online access, for just $99. Seemed like a pretty good deal, so I compared it

to the standard

subscription rate, which is, um, exactly the same. Indeed, if you don’t

want online access, you can get the Journal for a year (call it 313 issues)

for just $79. Or roughly 25 cents per issue, including the delivery fee. Which

is what the New York Post charges at the height of its circulation war with

the New York Daily News.

Claire Hoffman’s LA

Times article on Joe Francis reveals the Girls Gone Wild entrepeneur

to be a raging id. This is unlikely to come as a great surprise to anybody who

knows much about who he is and what it is that he sells. It also, however, reveals

a lot about the morals of US journalists.

The article is certainly less than flattering to Francis, who could certainly

be arrested for the things he did to the LA Times reporter alone. (Indeed, one

police officer advises her in the article to press charges against him.) At

the same time, however, Hoffman herself is more than a little bit exploitative

– of exactly the same girls who have already been exploited by Francis.

In the article, Hoffman talks both to Francis and to the girls who get naked

for his videos in return for little more than a free t-shirt. Why do they do

it? 21-year-old Jillian Vangeertry talks about her "15 minutes of fame".

Kaitlyn Bultema is more explicit about her motives:

"Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy,

but if I get filmed everyone could see me," Bultema says. "If you

do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model."

I ask her why she wants to get noticed. "You want people to say, ‘Hey,

I saw you.’ Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will

get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody’s house and said, ‘Give me

this,’ I could have it."

We read this, and we are saddened by the delusions and naïveté

of these girls. No one is likely to become an actress or a model through appearing

on a Girls Gone Wild video. If people do see you in the video, they’re likely

to label you as a slut long before they will give you "anything you want".

Later on in life, when you’re working at your job, your subordinates or your

superiors might find video footage of you and a couple of other girls having

sex on camera. This will not be good for your career. And yet given the enormous

potential downside and the nonexistent potential upside, girls still flock in

their thousands to be feature in GGW videos.

Hoffman then tells the harrowing story of Jannel Szyszka, described as "a

petite 18-year-old". Acccording to her acccount, she was plied with alcohol

before she got naked for the GGW video cameras, masturbated with a dildo, and

told the cameraman that she was a virgin. Then Francis himself takes over.

Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and

told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman

to come back, saying, "She’s not a virgin anymore."

At the end of the night, Szyszka has three pairs of underwear, and at best

unpleasant memories of something which might well have been rape. Six weeks

later, however, things go from bad to worse: she agrees to talk, on the record,

to Claire Hoffman. Until that point, her downside to appearing in a GGW video

was confined to what might happen if someone she knew saw the video –

something which might well never occur.

Now, from here on in, anybody googling her (she has a pretty unique name) will

see first and foremost that she was the girl seduced / taken advantage of /

raped by Joe Francis. It’s something which will follow her for the rest of her

life, long after her episode of Girls Gone Wild has stopped being watched

by anyone.

Hoffman didn’t need to use Szyszka’s real name, and certainly didn’t need to

use her surname, but doing so gives her (Hoffman) added brownie points at the

LA Times. After all, getting people on the record is always preferable to granting

them anonymity.

We don’t know how Hoffman ended up talking to Szyszka. We know that Szyszka

first "came out" about her experience to her family a month after

the events took place, and that she seems to have first spoken to Hoffman between

that point and the point a couple of weeks later when Hoffman confronted Francis

about what happened. Who approached whom is unknown. But even if Szyszka approached

Hoffman, I think that a responsible journalist would have taken it upon herself

to shield this vulnerable young woman from this kind of posterity.

As it is, Szyszka ends up as not only a notch on Francis’s belt, but a notch

on Hoffman’s as well. Yet Hoffman comes out with nothing but accolades for her

story. She exposed Joe Francis as an exploiter of young and innocent girls;

has it occurred to her that she could be described the same way?

It was hilarious, while it lasted, but now, for unknown reasons, it’s

gone. In memoriam, a post from July 30 which I happen to have cached, after

the jump.

Continue reading →

I’m flying quite a lot this year, so I used the (not particularly user-friendly)

CarbonNetural

flight calculator to give me some idea of my total emissions. Most people

fly less than this in a year, I’m sure, but then again I can think of very many

people who fly a lot more. In any case, here are my flights for the year, which

collectively account for more carbon emissions than the rest of my life combined:

These numbers are inprecise, of course: there’s no generally-accepted way for

calculating the carbon emissions one is responsible for when taking an airplane.

What kind of airplane do you base the model on? What percentage occupancy do

you assume? How much cargo do you model? What do you use for the CO2 equivalent

of other greenhouse gases emitted? And, most crucially, what multiplier do you

use for the extra harm caused by emissions at 35,000 feet?

In any case, the cost to offset 9.7 tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the

Climate Care

calculator, is £72.75, which is $137.75 at today’s exchange rate.

A significant sum, but certainly an affordable one, so I’m happy to offset my

flight-related emissions for the year with one donation.

But the weird thing, to me, is that all of the websites I can find about carbon

offsets seem to be based in the UK or Canada.

People there – at least the environmentally-responsible ones – are

very likely to know about offsetting their emissions. In the US, however, when

I bring up the subject, I’m generally greeted with blank stares. Some high-profile

Americans offset, of course: this

article cites Al Gore and Dave Matthews. But the concept is still not generally

known about in this country.

What I would love to see would be the ability for flyers to offset their carbon

emissions when they buy their plane tickets, rather than having to proactively

go to some other website entirely. It shouldn’t be too hard for a progressive

airline like Virgin or JetBlue to add a little button on their ticket-sales

page, saying "offset your carbon emissions from this flight for an extra

$22" or whatever – many more people would do that, I’m sure, than

currently go to places like Climage Care. Of course, all donations would be

tax-deductible.

At the very least, if the airlines won’t do it, might not one of the big travel

booking sites give it a go? I’d probably switch from Orbitz to Travelocity,

say, if it had those kind of environmental credentials.

Coming soon to a film festival near you (we hope): Ayamye,

a wonderful, heart-warming documentary by my friends Tricia Todd and Eric Matthies,

about the Village Bicycle Project. If

you want to watch it, let me know, and I’ll see if I can’t get a DVD to you

somehow.

There’s nothing particularly complicated about the film: Todd and Matthies

follow a shipment of bicycles from Boston to Ghana, where they change peoples’

lives. The Village Bicycle Project is clearly run by dedicated professionals

who know what they’re doing and do it very well, and if you’re in a charitable

state of mind there are many worse places to send

your money. Check out the website for more details, or, of course, the film.

The film is structured well. It starts with the bicycles being sent over to

Accra; then we learn the stories of four individuals who will shortly be getting

bikes. They get their bikes, the filmmakers leave, and then they return a year

later to see how the lives of the individuals, and the other people in their

villages, have changed. The difference a bike can make in rural Ghana is amazing,

and you finish the film desperately wanting to send thousands more bikes to

the country.

I was mildly annoyed by some slightly irrelevant IMF bashing at the beginning

from some of the Westerners involved in the project: I suspect that they haven’t

actually met the IMF and World Bank officials who work very hard on poverty

reduction in the country and whom they criticise in a superficial and knee-jerk

manner. But their anti-globalization rhetoric thankfully doesn’t correspond

to wide-eyed idealism in the field. They’ve made a conscious decision, for instance,

to sell all their bikes, rather than giving them away. This means that Ghana’s

poorest don’t have access to the bikes, but it’s also a very smart decision.

If the bikes were given away, they’d probably end up with the relatively rich

and powerful anyway, either because those people could maneuver themselves to

the front of the queue, or because they would simply buy the bikes from whomever

they were given to. Selling the bikes means that the recipients, many of whom

take out loans to buy them, put their bikes to the best possible use. After

all, all of us have a tendency to value things we’ve paid a lot for over things

we’ve received for free.

And because the Village Bicycle Project doesn’t give bikes away, it can do

something more important – give bike tools away. It’s educating

bike mechanics in every village it’s giving bikes away, extending the lifespan

of the machines and giving villagers an important and valuable skill.

I have two questions about Ayamye which I hope the filmmakers will answer in

the comments. The first is substantive: how many villagers did you follow for

this film? Was it just the four you ended up using in the film, or were there

more who ended up on the editing room floor? And are the experiences of those

four Ghanaians really representative of the experiences of most of the VBP bicycle

recipients? We all know that aid and charity projects in Africa are horribly

frustrating and demoralizing at times: it hardly seems feasible that this one

has so much visible success and so little visible failure.

Secondly, a tiny quibble: is there any way you can change "formally"

in the subtitles to "formerly"? I fear your transcriber wasn’t perfect…

We all know about the cult of the opening weekend: film producers will do almost

anything to maximise their opening weekend gross. In the case of the the new

Oliver Stone film, World Trade

Center, that includes standard tactics like opening very wide – on

over 2,000 screens nationwide. But they’ve added an interesting twist: according

to a press

release today (PDF), WTC

charities will receive 10 percent of all “World Trade Center”

ticket sales in every theater across the United States for the film’s

opening five days, from Wednesday, August 9, 2006 through Sunday, August 13,

2006.

Got that? If you want any of your $10.25 to go to a WTC-related charity, then

you’d better go during the opening weekend. After that, the price of the ticket

just goes back to the filmmakers as usual.

I think it’s great that some of the proceeds from World Trade Center ticket

sales is going to WTC charities, of course. I just find the way they’re doing

it to be a little too cynical for my taste.

Stephen Dubner, co-author of the global bestseller Freakonomics

and resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is

not happy with his lot. Turns out he’s part of that small minority of Manhattanites

who owns a car, and he feels that not enough is being done to make his car-owning

life easier. What would he like to change? He would like to be able to buy a

parking spot. He would like some form of residents’ parking on the UWS so that

he can park there for free while other people can’t, increasing his chances

of finding a spot. And he would like to be able to park in front of fire hydrants.

Weirdly, I feel no pity for Dubner’s sorry state whatsoever. For one thing,

the commenters on his site have done a very good job explaining why people shouldn’t

park in front of fire hydrants. Says Dubner, with his habitual overconfidence

that anything he thinks must, therefore, be true: "The firemen only need

to hook the hose up to the hydrant, and a car parked by the hydrant certainly

doesn’t interfere with that." I think that "certainly"

maybe doesn’t mean what Dubner seems to think it means, as this

photo clearly demonstrates. Fire hoses need to go straight into the hydrant,

and if a car is parked in front of the hydrant, that basically means they have

to go straight through the car.

As for buying parking spaces, Dubner hilariously says that he has "long

wondered why some entrepreneur hasn’t turned a NYC parking garage into

a co-op". Yes, that’s right, a co-op. Because of course we couldn’t

have just anybody buying a parking space: they would have to go through the

co-op board first. Can’t have some crappy old Ford truck next to my Porsche

Cayenne.

In any case, Dubner seems to have utterly missed the entire business model

behind parking garages, which is that they quietly sit there, making a relatively

modest amount of money with very little in the way of hassle or expense or property

taxes, until such time as the owner decides to cash out to a property developer.

So clearly you can’t sell individual spaces in perpetuity, because then you

would lose your exit strategy and your opportunity to make an enormous profit

on the land.

Then, of course, there’s free on-the-street parking, a system which abuses

– abuses! – honest taxpaying millionaires like Mr Dubner:

NYC residents like me get abused by the current free-parking-on-the-street

system. Why should someone who, say, lives in New Jersey and works on the

Upper West Side get to park for free on my street when I pay local taxes and

he doesn’t?

Is it maybe because public parking is for the, um, public, and not

just for people who can afford to live on the Upper West Side? In any case,

Manhattan’s car owners get an incredible deal already. Every time they park

their car on the street for free, they get exclusive use of roughly 160 square

feet of prime Manhattan real estate for nothing. They can store all manner of

stuff in their car(s) – storage space which would cost many thousands

of dollars if you had to pay for it. And they get very easy access to transportation

anywhere in the city, while the rest of us have to schlep to the subway or wait

for a bus or try to find a taxi.

Think of a European city like Utrecht

or Munich. There are many

fewer cars parked on the street than you see in Manhattan, and instead the roads

have wide and well-maintained bike paths. Now imagine all the space given over

to free car parking in Manhattan used instead for bike paths and bike parking,

remembering that you can easily have parking

for a dozen bikes in one parking space.

Who would benefit from such a plan? Most New Yorkers, since biking around the

city would stop being a very dangerous proposition and start being by far the

easiest, fastest, and most efficient way of getting from A to B. Who would lose

out? The relative handful of residents who also own cars. The cost-benefit analysis

is clearly positive, but don’t expect a "freakonomist" like Dubner

to buy it (or, it would seem,

New York City Transport Commissioner Iris Weinshall). After all, look at the

pain Dubner’s in already!

This is just a wonderful,

wonderful story (via

the excellent StreetsBlog). It turns

out there’s a cycling union in Holland (where else), which actually does really

useful things instead of just screaming and shouting a lot. In this case, they

put a wiki together to create a cycle

route planner for the Utrecht area, including thousands of bicycle lanes

which didn’t appear on the GPS route-planning devices used by cars.

The volunteers needed to be much more precise than commercial digital map

makers for car navigation devices, jotting down details such as road surface,

scenery and if a road is well lit.

"Detail is what cyclists need and what makes this so valuable. You need

to be able to choose a safe route at night, and a racing cyclist wants a hard

bike lane and no dirt roads," said 34-year-old Erik Jonkman, one of 70

volunteers.

Because it’s a wiki, errors get corrected quickly and easily. And of course

it should scale very easily as well, at least within Holland. The whole thing

sounds great.

The story also reminded me of something I’ve never understood about New York,

a city where most people travel by subway. If you look at any street map of

London, all the tube stations are very clearly marked. But if you look at any

street map of New York, except for the subway map itself, which isn’t much of

a street map, there are never any subway stations on it. So if you’re looking

at a certain address, you have to have the whole subway system essentially memorized

– or else have a copy of the subway map to hand – in order to work

out how to get there.

This is particularly, and annoyingly, true of online maps from the likes of

Mapquest or Google. Many stores and venues in New York helpfully link their

addresses to an online map page which shows where they are in the city –

but you can never see, from that map, where the nearest subway stations are.

Indeed, I’m not even sure that there is any online resource where you

can just type in an address and get back a list of the nearest subway stations.

Even Hopstop, which presumably could offer

the service very easily, doesn’t.