Editor of the Fantasy Sports Guides since 2000. Writer of Ask Rotoman since 1996. Designer of Booknoise since 2001. Consumer of music since like forever.
Pictures made from food or packaging are a favorite of mine, resonant not only with the subject but also the medium. And I really like maps. Doesn’t everyone?
A food stylist, Caitlin Levin, a photographer, Henry Hargreaves, and a typographer, Sarit Melmed, have collaborated on a series of maps of the world, each made with local foods.
Unlike this packaging portrait of President Obama, the results are quite attractive, even if the point is somewhat obscure. Surely there is more to say about Africa than plantains. More to say about the US than corn. More to say about the UK than biscuits.
So ignore the rationale. The pictures are nice and good fun. Kristin Hohenadel wrote about these, with lots of examples, at Slate.
The artists explain themselves and show their method in a video.
Travis Rix is a student at the School of Visual Arts, about to graduate.
In his travels he happened upon the idea of including portapotties in his pictures.
The results are uneven, the aesthetic varies in the samples, but the effect is mostly appealing. I’m not sure about the importance of the rationale that the pottie precedes development, though in many cases that’s true.
For me the pictures are a cross between Where’s Waldo and deep thinking. My deepest thought? Before these things were all over the place, where did we “go?”
Cutting tuna in Da Poke Shop.Yelp.com just published a list of the Top 100 restaurants in the US, and the winner is a small take out stand on Hawaii’s big island, which serves piles of raw fish on greens, which if I read it right is called poke.
Now, that’s cool, and the list is an impressive mélange of expensive and much less expensive tastes. For instance, New York’s top restaurant is a vegan food truck called the Cinnamon Snail. Second is the gastronomic playground known as 11 Madison Park. On the whole list I’ve eaten at one restaurant, the Gramercy Tavern, which is one of my favorite restaurants in the city. Well selected, I’d say, but we don’t get out much.
So maybe my lack of familiarity is my fault, but in scanning down the list there are a rather large number from our most populous state, California, which made me wonder if their food is so much superior or if the way Yelp weighted their star ratings (by the number of votes) favored more populous areas.
State By State ranking of the top restaurants in the Yelp 100:
California 48
Hawaii 10
New York 9
Texas 7
Washington 4
Illinois 3
Missouri 3
Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Oregon and Tennessee has two apiece.
I like the list, whenever I get back to Cali maybe it will lead us to some hidden gems, but I have my doubts that the algorithm Yelp used is to be fully trusted.
I’ve been a member of the Park Slope Food Coop since 1999, that’s 15 years this November. Some people hate the coop, some people mock it, but I will tell you that it is an incredible institution, a piece of bedrock that joins disparate communities across NYC because, well, the produce and the prices are incredible.
This comes at a cost. Every member is required to work a shift every four weeks. A shift’s length varies a little depending on the duty, but the standard is two hours and forty five minutes. This can be a problem for those with regular work hours and kids, so I certainly don’t blame anyone for not being a member. But because every member is responsible for a work shift, being a member really brings with it a sense of community. We’re all equally invested in the institution.
That community is large and democratic. There is paid staff, but the coop’s policies are the result of a governance system that allows any member to make proposals and shepherd them to a vote of the members at the monthly general meeting. Despite my enthusiasm for the coop and my admiration for its system of governance, I’d never been to a general meeting before last night.
Some of that had to do with circumstances. There were other community things I tended to that seemed to require me more than the coop did. It was doing just fine without me sitting through a three-hour meeting. And while one of the inducements to attend the meeting is work-slot credit, you get to skip a shift twice a year if you attend two meetings, I really like working my shift.
Plus, the big issues that have come up all seemed to have popular support for my side of things. Yes to grass-raised beef from local farmers. Yes to good beer. No to bottled water. Good riddance to plastic shopping bags. Condemning Israel by banning the seven products imported from there was an overreach. But then, a couple of years ago, the environmental committee proposed banning the plastic bags in the produce and bulk aisles that people put food in, and I wasn’t sure what to think.
It would not be reader friendly to go through the backs and forths, the political wrangling, the discussions and arguments that ensued. Better to watch the excellent local sausage makers put together that fine smoked kielbasa in the meat case, if you want to have fun, but please trust me that a lot of smart people spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do about the coop’s plastic bag use, which is now limited to what are called roll bags, those thin things you put a lot of loose or wet items into.
It’s an issue. The coop uses 2.5 million roll bags a year. But the majority of these bags are used to buy local fruits and vegetables and bulk products that regular grocery stores don’t sell. Is it better to sell more local and bulk products? We all agree yes. Will we sell less if folks have to bring their own bags? It seems like yes is the answer.
The fantastic thing about the general meeting I attended tonight is that ideas were discussed. The environmental committee made their case with a very slick video, and then people talked about the proposal (and the video—not everyone appreciated its slickness).
There were some points that were hard to understand, and some people repeated something that had been said previously, but by letting 40 or so people speak directly to the meeting about the proposal many aspects of it were described, defined and evaluated. People had ideas that either supported the proposal or not. (UPDATE: A writer at Slate and coop member, who hyphenates co-op (no doubt correctly), live blogged the event. Snarkier and sometimes funnier details are there.) Hmm, I realize I didn’t say what it was that the environmental committee was actually proposing.
After all the discussion and negotiation, and while they had started with the idea of a phase out of bag use, what they actually proposed was that the roll bags could remain, but that if you used them it would cost you 20 cents per bag.
That’s what we were voting on.
There was some discussion about whether the plastic roll bags made a greater or lesser environmental impact than the alternatives (primarily washing and reusing heavier plastic bags), but mostly everyone agreed that reducing the use of plastics was a good thing.
What ended up being the biggest point of contention was the 20 cents per bag tax. Some of this was a little silly. How would a checkout person know whether your plastic bag was new or used? Some members worried that such a tax would unfairly impact the poorest members of the coop, while others pointed out that the poor are fully capable of living without plastic bags.
The tax clearly violated the coop’s historical markup of all items sold, which is 21 percent of the wholesale price. Each roll bag costs a fraction of a cent, and one speaker said the markup of 2500 percent would be a cruel tax for some.
Everyone who spoke was in favor of reduced use of plastics, but how do we get there? To cut to the end, we voted against the tax on plastic roll bags. For the time being, until a different proposal passes, we will have plastic roll bags at the coop.
I voted against the proposal because the idea of the tax seemed at odds with the way we do things. And better to decide the real issue here than end up with a half-measure that violates the general operational principles of the coop.
So we’re left with this:
If the plastic roll bags are a problem, as the plastic shopping bags were, we should not provide them. Not providing them would still create problems for the unwrapped fruits, vegetables and bulk items, but that’s a problem that each member would have to solve. Maybe some would move to more packaged foods, which would be too bad, but probably most would reuse their plastic bags as best they could depending on their situation. At least the coop would be acting based on its principles.
Or perhaps those plastic roll bags aren’t a problem. Maybe their benefits outweigh the environmental costs. At least if they’re used prudently, and reused as much as possible (which many people already do).
Neither of those options was up for a vote, and so the proposal failed. The irony is that the tax would have reduced bag usage, everybody’s goal.
We know this because the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which runs New York’s subways and buses and commuter trains began last year to charge riders $1 every time they took a new Metro Card rather than reusing their old one. The goal was to reduce printing costs and litter in stations. What has happened, however, is that millions of cards were reused, over and over, and so fewer odd balances (because you received a percentage bonus on your refills, you might end up with a difficult to use or refund amount less than the cost of a fare) were abandoned on old cards.
So many odd balances were abandoned that revenue from abandoned cards dropped from $95M in 2012 to $52M in 2013. (Don’t worry about the MTA. They expected to save $6M a year in printing costs from printing fewer cards, and that $1 surcharge replaces the abandoned odd balances nicely.)
Money talks. But as last night’s vote showed, it shouldn’t always have the final word.
Reading stories about the bloody riots in Ukraine, it was difficult to know what was really going on. Who was protesting and why? The answers and explanations were often contradictory, once you got past the obvious issues with the government.
This VICE documentary does a pretty good job of showing the diversity of ideology among the participants in the Kiev protests, represented by different groups fighting the current government.
Prime movers are the nationalist Right Sector, right wingers, but there is also a serious progressive element to the protests, as well as a more mainstream group. For now, at least, the different sides are joined by their mutual hatred for the present government and fear of Russian annexation.
The bottom line is that the people of Ukraine are standing up to the government and its special police (the regular police are refusing to act against the protestors) in decisive and dramatic terms, even though they themselves don’t agree about what comes next.
Until mechanical clocks and faster transportation became more common in the early 19th Century, local time based around noon, when the Sun was at its highest point in the sky, was all that mattered. (click map for larger image.)
For reasons Maggiolo explains, local noon varies based on latitude and time of year. Once instantaneous communication connected localities, via telegraph at first, and soon after railway schedules, a standardized time was increasingly important. Maggiolo goes into this in brief but interesting detail.
Looking at the map, I wonder why there is so much dark red near the poles (having the sun come up later makes less difference when winter is nearly all dark and summer is nearly all light) and in China (officially, it turns out, China has only one time zone across its vast expanse).
I’ve almost always lived near the center of time zones, but have noticed that the texture of life changes when the sun comes up earlier or later. Despite our efforts to tame time, its inexorable rhythms shape our experience in often unconscious ways.
Reading the NY Times today, I came across this piece by N. Gregory Mankiw, in which he argues that we are not outraged by the oversized compensation of superstars like Robert Downey Jr. and E.L. James and LeBron James (not related, presumably) because we can see the impact that their singular talents bring to their enterprises, like Iron Man and 50 Shades of Grey.
He then points to the outsized contributions of others, like Steve Jobs, to make the point that superstars exist in fields other than entertainment. Then he cites a survey showing that privately held companies pay their CEOs just as lavishly as publicly held companies, suggesting that the reason CEOs are paid so much is not because of lax board oversight, inadequate regulartion and cronyism, but because CEOs are just that valuable.
FInally, he says, the top one percent pays an effective Federal tax rate of 34 percent of their $400,000+ incomes, while the middle fifth in the income distribution paid just 12 percent, demonstrating thei elite’s greater contribution to society. He likens them to the Avengers, though not out of altruism to they contribute more than their share to advance the public good.
Mankiw’s argument seems to be that because Robert Downey is able to command a huge salary, which seems fair because of the somewhat transparent economics of his relationship with his producers and studio, that other high earners are equally justified earning enormously high salaries. As if a CFO at Yahoo is as hard to replace as LeBron James. And that these high salaries are good for society, since as individuals they collectively pay a higher rate of tax than the rest of us.
This seems to me like a public relations argument. The problem with income inequality is that life and work dynamics are broken. We have more people than there are jobs for them, which forces wages down for those who are easily replaced in whatever job they have. The scandal is that someone can work full time and not be able to afford a basic life, including health care and a nice home and the basic things, like food, without government support like WIC and the earned income tax credit.
While in many cases their employer is booking huge profits, paying scant corporate taxes, and the CEO is taking outsized compensation for engineering the fruits of employee labor away from the employee and to the benefit of stockholders, fund managers and inside executives and their friends.
Talented people deserve to make all the money they can, but it is surely our job as a society to set rules that recognize that the amount of payment a person is able to command is not an absolute measure of their worth. And that our system of laws and taxes doesn’t assist corporate interests make bigger and more concentrating profits while failing to compensate their workers a living wage. In fact, salary/income isn’t anything close to an absolute measure. Our society has set up all sorts of incentives and rewards that accrue to the some and are for the most part unavailable to the rest.
Discussing how this all works and figuring out how to pay to implement the societal support and service we all value (health care, Social Security, police, fire department, food inspections, flight controllers, parks and wild lands, education standards and support, tax collection) is our great challenge today.
Mankiw’s piece seems to be an attempt to foreclose all such talk, and convince us all to applaud the contributions the wealthy make. The point isn’t that this is totally untrue, but in a system that is clearly out of balance, we need to figure out what services we need and value, and then figure out how to fairly derive revenues to pay for them.
That’s the conversation that needs to be pushed forward.
FWIW, back of the envelope:
A self-employed person who makes $450,000 would pay $150,000 Federal tax and about $15,000 in FICA. State and local taxes vary, so let’s ignore them. Net: $285,000. (Holds onto 63 percent)
A self-employed person who makes $51,000, the median US income, would (according to Mankiw) pay about $6,000 in tax and $7,000 in FICA. Net: $38,000. (Holds onto 74 percent)
It gives nothing away to say that Natalie Waite, the young woman at the center of Hangsaman, is tightly wound. The cover of the relatively new Penguin Classics edition of the book features a young woman writing a letter to her Dad, but the letter is spattered with blood.
That illustration reflects the intensity of this story, which starts with Natalie living at home, with her brother and extremely dysfunctional parents. The only problem is that once she escapes them physically, she discovers that they stick with her in her head, and once she pushes them out of her head, she’s surprised and bewitched by the things that take their place.
Everyone knows Shirley Jackson from her powerful story “The Lottery,” but she also wrote the novel that was the basis for the famous movie, The Haunting of Hill House, and the masterful We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a tale of psychological fragility and the corrosive idea that history somehow turns into destiny (and that’s not a good thing).
Hangsaman was written in 1951 and I had never heard of it until I found it on the shelf at the library.
Jackson is a fantastic vivid and nuanced writer, capable of rendering the stream of conscious thoughts of a young woman like Natalie so that they represent her disorientation and naiveté but also give us a sophisticated and nuanced view of her psychological state. Something like being inside and outside the scene at the same time, analyst and analysand simultaneously.
Jackson is interested in the way the psyche interacts with a civilization that is really alien to the desires and prerogatives of the free spirit. In Hangsaman lonely Natalie yearns for connection, but when she finds it she is reminded why she was alone in the first place.
The jacket copy says this story is somewhat based on the tale of a disappeared Bennington student, but the delights and horrors it offers aren’t those of a tawdry paperback true crime story, but rather the exacting expression of a writer who seems to believe that the membrane that separates an individual from the outside world is truly porous, and writes as if it were.
Pictures made from food or packaging are a favorite of mine, resonant not only with the subject but also the medium. And I really like maps. Doesn’t everyone?
