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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
was not accepted.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Click on the picture for a small gallery of photos from my trip to the Southwest.
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.
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?
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.
Off to points west. Don’t expect any new posts until early April.
My eyebrows went up when I saw this
report from the Minnesota Daily:
Atheists are America’s least trusted group, according to a national
survey conducted by University sociology researchers.
Based on a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households and in-depth interviews
with more than 140 people, researchers found that Americans rate atheists
below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as “sharing
their vision of American society.” Americans are also least willing
to let their children marry atheists.
“It tells us about how Americans view religion,” said Penny Edgell,
an associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher. “Many
Americans seem to believe some kind of religious faith is central to being
a good American and a good person.”
On the one hand: really? I’ve been an "out" atheist in America for
the past nine years; I’ve even married the daughter of Americans, and I’ve never
encountered anything like this. On the other hand, the article quotes the author
of the study, and she doesn’t seem to have any doubts about its conclusions.
Of course, I’m not going to extrapolate from anecdote. And besides, I live
in liberal-secular NYC. So I emailed Penny
Edgell and asked her for the study, which she immediately supplied. (It
will be published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.)
And does the study say what the Minnesota Daily says it says? In a word, yes:
The Minnesota Daily gets an A– for its article. Here’s
the paper’s conclusion:
Atheists are at the top of the list of groups that Americans find problematic
in both public and private life, and the gap between acceptance of atheists
and acceptance of other racial and religious minorities is large and persistent.
The author of the article, Jeannine Aquino, has done a very good job both of
reporting what the study says and of going out and seeing whether and how those
attitudes are reflected in the Minnesota population. The reason she doesn’t
get the highest A and A+ grades is purely because she displays no skepticism
regardig the study, and doesn’t stop to ask whether there might be some flaws
in it.
As in any survey, everything hinges on the exact way in which the questions
are worded. In this survey, the key question was the following:
Now I want to read you a list of different groups of people who live in
this country. For each one, please tell me how much you think people in this
group agree with YOUR vision of American society—almost completely,
mostly, somewhat, or not at all?
The results showed that 39.6% of respondents said "not at all" with
regard to atheists. Second was Muslims, at 26.3%, third came homosexuals, at
22.6%, and fourth was conservative Christians, with 13.5% of people saying that
they did not agree at all with their vision of American society. Fifth was recent
immigrants, at 12.5%. Hispanics, Jews, Asian Americans and African Americans
followed; white Americans came at the bottom of the list with 2.2%.
There was a second question:
People can feel differently about their children marrying people from various
backgrounds. Suppose your son or daughter wanted to marry [a person in given
category]. Would you approve of this choice, disapprove of it, or wouldn’t
it make any difference at all one way or the other?
One might think that the vast majority of people would choose the latter choice
for every category: how can you know if you’d approve or disapprove of a future
son- or daughter-in-law without even meeting them? But in fact the results were
startling: 47.6% of respondents said that they would disapprove if their child
wanted to marry an atheist. Again, Muslims were a distant second, on 33.5%;
homosexuals, of course, weren’t included in this question.
But there are problems with the way the questions were worded.
The first question is based on the assumption that I have a known vision of
American society, and that the groups in question can share that vision on a
scale essentially from 0% to 100%. If a group shared between 75% and 100% of
my vision, I’d choose "almost completely"; if it shared between 50%
and 75% I’d chosse "mostly"; if it shared between 25% and 50% I’d
choose "somewhat"; and if it shared between 0% and 25% I’d choose
"not at all". (Obviously no one was asked to quantify these things,
but that seems to be the general idea behind the way the question was structured.)
My problem is with the word "agree" in the question. When you ask
one person whether they agree with another person or group, they immediately
think in terms of whether they agree or whether they disagree. In other words,
they don’t think on a scale of 0 to 100, they think on a scale of –1 to
+1, where –1 is completely disagree and +1 is completely agree.
If someone disagrees mildly with a different group, what are they going to
say? They might be torn between the "somewhat agree" answer and the
"not at all" answer. But I think many if not most such people will
end up choosing "not at all", because they don’t want to give the
impression that they agree, even if only "somewhat", with a group
of people that they actually disagree with. Someone who feels very strongly
that homosexuality is evil and disordered and who thinks that atheists are sadly
missing out on an important part of life will therefore end up giving the same
response to both categories. And in general a negative opinion which is weakly
held by a large minority will be overstressed by the answers to this question,
while a negative opinion which is strongly held by a smaller minority will be
understressed.
Similarly, a religious person, when asked, is going to feel uncomfortable saying
that "it wouldn’t make any difference at all one way or the other"
if their child married an atheist. So they’ll plump for the "disapprove"
option, even if they’re not a judgmental kind of person at all.
There’s also some conflict in the report’s conclusions. On the one hand, we’re
told that
while rejection of Muslims may have spiked in post-9/11 America, rejection
of atheists was higher… In our survey, concerns about atheists were stronger
than concerns about homosexuals.
On the other hand, we find this:
We believe that in answering our questions about atheists, our survey respondents
were not, on the whole, referring to actual atheists they had encountered,
but were responding to “the atheist” as a boundary-marking cultural
category.
The survey is very unclear about whether Americans are rejecting actual atheists,
or whether they’re simply rejecting "atheists" qua "cultural
category". Homosexuals, we all know, are explicitly and vehemently rejected
on a regular basis around the country, even (especially) by their own families.
Concerns about homosexuals in general manifest themselves in intolerant behaviour
towards individual gay men and women on a daily basis.
If the study is true that concerns about atheists in general are even stronger
than concerns about homosexuals, wouldn’t we expect individual atheists to be
shunned by their co-workers, their communities, even their families? Wouldn’t
we expect "atheist", "heathen" and the like to be common
terms of abuse? But that’s not something one hears. Maybe it happens but isn’t
reported; my feeling, however, is that it’s genuinely rare.
There’s evidence in the survey to support the theory that when people think
about atheists, they’re not thinking of real people. Atheists, remember, are
surely the least self-loathing of all minorities. Being an atheist, unlike being
gay or being a Jew, is entirely a matter of choice. And yet
about 17 percent of the nonreligious say that atheists do not at all share
their vision of America, while about one in ten indicate that they would not
approve of their child marrying an atheist.
The only way to explain this is to understand "atheist" as a somewhat
inchoate marker of alterity rather than as a well-defined grouping of individuals.
Indeed, the study makes this quite explicit:
We assess the degree to which atheists represent a symbolic “other”
against which some Americans define themselves as good people and worthy citizens.
In other words, many Americans understand by "atheist" something
akin to "a person who doesn’t share my vision of American society".
Maybe the word "communist" has similar connotations. Which essentially
turns the survey question into:
Please tell me how much you think people who don’t share your vision of American
society agree with your vision of American society
And it becomes easier to see how even the nonreligious might react in such
a seemingly bizarre manner.
A look at some of the interviews in the study tends to reinforce this belief.
Look at KW, a Republican in her 60s, who told her interviewer:
It’s that same arrogance again. I’m an American, I can do anything
I want, and to heck with the rest of the world. These people aren’t
very religious, you’ll notice that. There’s a real, “I’m
an atheist” attitude among people with major money. If you’re
going all through life, “I’m an atheist, I don’t believe
in anything except the almighty dollar,” this is definitely a destructive
attitude and the rest of the world sees it.
Of course, if "the wealthy" had been added as a category to the survey,
I’m sure they would have come out quite well. But this woman doesn’t like the
wealthy, and so she decides that being wealthy and being an atheist are more
or less interchangeable, since it’s socially acceptable for a Republican to
dislike atheists even as it’s much less socially acceptable for a Republican
to start talking in a nasty fashion about "people with major money".
Another interviewee said that
the prisons aren’t filled with conservative Republican Christians.
The prisons are probably filled with people who don’t have any kind
of a spiritual or religious core.
It’s not worth arguing the substance here: the point is that this person simply
took a group of people he didn’t like – prisoners – and threw them,
willy-nilly, into the "atheist" bucket.
I think, then, that it’s wrong to conclude from the survey that Americans are
particularly harsh on atheists. Everybody defines himself at least in part in
opposition to someone or something else, and "atheist" seems to have
become a catch-all term for whatever that something else might be. Actual individual
atheists, I think, still have little to fear from coming out.
