Rich Mintz  

In “Why Don’t People Move to Opportunity,” Matt Yglesias points out that even for unemployed or underemployed people with limited job skills, the rational thing to do is to market those limited skills in a high-median-wage metro area. So why don’t they? For some, the cost of moving (both in dollar terms, and in terms of social connections left behind, which are expensive to replace in both time and money) is the deciding factor. But for others, it’s simply that “the rent is too damn high,” which is conveniently the title of Yglesias’s upcoming book.

In the general case, Yglesias will presumably argue (and I will agree) that restrictive zoning, parking requirements, and so forth, which have the side effects of artificially limiting the supply of housing in attractive precincts of central cities to much less than the market would prefer, lead to an artificial boost in the cost of living that distorts American settlement patterns, making urban living seem less attractive and popular than it actually is and leading (in a vicious circle) to a further concentration of policy and resources behind conventional suburban development patterns.

In this specific case, Yglesias will presumably argue that under the current state of affairs, the cost of living in high-wage metros is artificially elevated, but the extra money spent doesn’t benefit the polity in those communities — it’s skimmed off by rentiers who have an interest in maintaining policies that are at their foundation antisocial.

Obviously, as someone who was pushed out of California almost 20 years ago in part by Proposition 13, I agree, and I can’t wait for the book.

Cam Booth surfaced this map of the Chicago transit system overlaid on a map of the New York subway, with the lines showing in white. The surprising thing here, as Booth notes, is not the extent of the Chicago system, but the density of New York’s.

My latest TV find is The Supersizers Go… on the Cooking Channel, a three-year-old series in which a British pair (food critic and comedienne) spend a week at a time living the lives of different periods and gorging themselves on the contemporary dishes. It’s a fairly light conceit, and I don’t quite understand what “supersizing” has to do with it (unless you postulate, counterfactually, that in every period other than ours, people ate more than we do). But it’s entertaining, and mildly informative.

This week Giles and Sue went Victorian, and it does seem that people in Victorian days ate a lot more heavily than we do — their experience reminded me of when I moved to Atlanta in 1999, and had to adjust to a lot more fried food and meat and sweet tea than I was used to. My favorite moment was when they were served (by their cook, as a side dish, at an ordinary dinner on an ordinary evening) a plate of calf’s-ear fritters, which looked as though they’d be delicious if they had zucchini inside, but alas they didn’t. The rest of the boiled calf’s head was sitting nearby on a plate, dressed with about a pound of parsley; you can see it here.

It’s not Downton Abbey, but given the choice between this and watching Bobby Flay yelling, or Nadia G wielding her assets, I’d pick this. More on this episode here.

Just wanted to point out an example of an elegant, functional user interface that anyone can understand. Not surprisingly, it’s from Amazon, which runs what is probably the most effective customer-centric technology business in history.

It’s the full-screen menus from Amazon’s streaming video product. Buttons are big, icons are intuitive, legends are added where needed, functionality is limited to the minimum necessary.

Worth adding that I’m watching this program for free, as a benefit of my Amazon Prime membership. (And by “membership” I mean I pay $79 a year for the privilege of buying five times as much from Amazon as I otherwise would, because shipping costs are eliminated as an impediment to clicking the “buy” button.)

Because of travel I was barely on a bike for 4 days, and I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting another day (this is how you know exercise is becoming a normal part of life — when you start getting antsy if you don’t do it). So, I thought, hang the snow, I’m going out today. I figured that everything would be pretty much plowed, and we only got a couple of inches in any case, and it was still above freezing, so why not?

And everything was fine. I went out on the Puma, figuring it would be the most stable on icy ground because it has the widest, nubbiest tires, a heavy frame, and a low center of gravity. But in the end I didn’t encounter any ice. Most of the travel lanes were plowed and sanded and salted, traffic was light, and I had a pretty much normal 5-mile roundtrip, via the Trader Joe’s in Chelsea. There was some slush, but I coasted through it carefully and had no undue problems.

The only problems came when I got home, and realized that both my undercarriage and my … undercarriage were covered in sandy muck, which you’ll see here. And about ten minutes after coming in, about a half-pound lump of semi-frozen sand glumped onto the floor. So my pants are now drying, and I’ll give the bike a washdown later this evening.

Severe Australian hair salon interventionist Tabatha Coffey is back for another season on Bravo, and this year Tabatha Takes Over isn’t just turning around hair salons, she’s taking on a range of retail businesses. And in episode two, she took on the turnaround of a business that meant a lot to me twenty years ago: Club Ripples, the gay club on the shore in Long Beach, California.

In 1993, I probably spent eight or ten Sunday afternoons at Ripples, driving down from LA with my boyfriend and meeting up with my Orange County friends. It was a convenient halfway point between us — in those days, I was living in West Hollywood and working in Costa Mesa, driving 50 miles each way in the carpool lane, passing Long Beach about midway — and it was nice to get out of the gay ghetto I lived in and experience another gay-friendly but not-quite-ghettoized community. And there were new people to look at and talk to, and Long Beach (population “only” 400,000) had a friendlier vibe than LA, and it was sunny and quiet and you could hear the seagulls. For a short time, we even considered buying a house in Belmont Shore, a gay-friendly neighborhood even then and much more affordable than LA, and moving.

Back then, Ripples on a Sunday was packed — it was a local hangout for gay people from Long Beach, a fun day trip from LA, and a magnet for gay people from Orange County. I was never really a bar person, and whenever I went to a gay club I felt like everyone else was prettier and more vivacious than me, not to mention in on something that nobody had bothered to let me in on. But Ripples felt incrementally warmer and more welcoming. People talked to you, and being by the beach made people a little less uptight. From LA it was a schlep, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Now it’s 20 years later, and Ripples has been suffering. It’s obvious from Tabatha’s show that some of its wounds were self-inflicted, and she did what she could to help with that (and through the happily-ever-after lens of a reality show, she appears to have succeeded). But it’s also true that the club scene has changed. One of the Ripples owners said this to Tabatha and she waved it away, but I think it’s true.

Even in 1993, which isn’t that long ago, there were many fewer ways to meet people than there are today. The modern coffeehouse scene was very new (no Starbucks, or almost none). There was no Internet as we know it now; nobody had a cellphone, let alone a smartphone; AOL charged by the minute. If you wanted to have a social experience with other gay people, you pretty much had to go to a bar and stand around until you saw someone you wanted to talk to. And so that’s what we did, even those of us who didn’t really like to drink and didn’t feel comfortable in those surroundings.

“Kids today” still go out and stand around, of course they do. The difference is that they don’t have to in order to be sociable; they have other choices. And so businesses have to be competitive, which is where I think Tabatha is right on. I hope her changes to Ripples stick, because the place meant a lot to me once — and it was open and serving gay people with a smile when I was six years old, which is a long history indeed.

I spent my young adulthood in New England, within reach of the CVS headquarters in Rhode Island, and the company’s consolidation of reach along the Eastern Seaboard has more or less coincided with my own moves up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I lived in Washington as they were taking hold there (when the Peoples Drug in Dupont Circle morphed into a CVS, I lived two blocks away), and I’ve lived in New York as they’ve tried to take market share away from Duane Reade.

Here in the Financial District, where basic services for residents were scant until recently, we cheered when the CVS at the end of my block went 24 hours. And it is nice to know that basic necessities are available at any time of the night.

But Christ, what a terrible experience! The store’s tattered and disorderly, stock of basic items is unreliable (they run out of milk!), the nicest thing I can say about the staff is that they’re not surly. The packaging design on the house brands is cringeworthy — the healthcare products dressed in an ugly barking upper-case sans-serif, the food tricked out in a cursive font I’d call “Long Island Princess.” And on the whole, shopping there doesn’t feel like a bargain, either.

Speaking of which, I was in downtown DC this week, where I had an entirely typical late-night experience at the CVS at 8th and E (see above). I tossed a bottle of CVS brand lime “sparkling water” and a bag of CVS brand roasted almonds into my basket. Big mistake! The almonds were almost inedibly stale (since resuscitated by 15 minutes in a hot oven once I got them home, but that didn’t help me in my hotel room), and the “sparkling water” LIED — it was some sort of swill concocted of water, citric acid, and aspartame.

Twenty years ago, I had a generally positive impression of the company, but now I have to steel myself before I walk into the store. Contrast this with Duane Reade, whose recent store makeover has made their premises feel inviting and current, whose house brand products (if a bit expensive) seem genuinely of premium quality, and whose staff on the whole seem capable of customer service and interested in maintaining the quality of the interaction.

In New York City, just being here and making the rent and staying open is something of a victory, but in the long run it’s not enough. If the two glorious 24-hour Duane Reades in my neighborhood were two blocks away on a snowy night, rather than four and five, respectively, I’d never set foot in my neighborhood CVS again.

Just finished A History Of The World In Six Glasses, Tom Standage’s light historical narrative about six drinks (beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola) and the roles they played in different cultural periods.

On the “broad historical trends” front, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know, but Standage was good with details (for instance, I hadn’t realized the guy who yelled “aux armes!” and set off the French Revolution had a name; and I hadn’t known tea came into prominence so late) and it made a compelling read. The narrative construct felt a little forced, but since I have a sort of industrial history fetish it didn’t really bother me.

Earlier this week, Ryan Adams of McKinsey & Company’s Social Sector Office tweeted this Stanford list of the “top 10 books on the economics of poverty.”

This is a topic I’ve had an interest in for a long time, and I’ve read in and around it from time to time. I’ve got two of Jeffrey Sachs’ books queued up at the moment (one of which is on the Stanford list), and once I get through them I’ll check out some of those others.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the iBooks Author app yet, but if it’s anything like what it seems to be, it’s a big step in the direction of democratized content distribution. And I say that knowing full well that Apple takes a big piece (don’t know how much) of any money you make selling your new creations in the iBookstore.

The first generation of democratized publishing came with Gutenberg. The second generation, though, didn’t come until the 20th century, when technologies like the mimeograph (and, later, the photocopier, and even later, the first-generation Macintosh) achieved wide circulation.

Now we’re in a third generation, when the Internet makes it possible for anyone to disseminate information and opinions electronically — and technologies like iBooks Author, which enable anyone to package up information into a physical or quasi-physical product, may usher in a fourth generation.

It’s important not to underestimate the emotional power of that ability to package the information you’re disseminating. Writers want to publish their books not just because they want to make money, but because they want to be associated with (to give birth to) a discrete, finished object. That impulse is so strong that I think being empowered to package up an iBook is a qualitatively different experience than simply putting up a bunch of web pages, and that would be true even if you could only give away your iBooks for free.