Things I Love about Durham. Part I: Weird puppets.

Durham, NC is a strange and wonderful little city. Since moving here three years ago, I've totally fallen in love with the place, not least of all because of the strange folks who live here, work here, and sometime do strange puppet shows out of their garage for, as far as I can tell, no financial benefit whatsoever.

Its things like this that make me love Durham.

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Sidewalks Are For Schlepping, Dining, and Baby SUVs

I moved to Manhattan 850 days ago. Should you eventually follow in my footsteps, permit me to be the first to welcome you to the sidewalk. It's going to be like your second home.

Unless you're one of the happy few for whom a $700-per-month parking garage bill is no problem, moving to Manhattan entails giving up your wheels. Manhattan might be interlaced with roads, but 99.9% of the time you (and everyone else you know) have no use for them. Your life is lived on the sidewalk.

Carless, you quickly learn that although schlep might be a Yiddish word, schlep is above all else a New York-living word. The kind of hoofing you do in Manhattan, where owning a car is perceived in some circles as a Gatsby-esque luxury, is so different than the normal walking burden experienced elsewhere that it really merits a separate word. You do not "carry your stuff around." You schlep.

Schlepping about town, you quickly learn that you can never really buy more than about $40 of groceries — since any more than that results in the kind of backbreaking load that keeps chiropractors in business. You must schlep wisely.

Schlepping, New Yorkers develop relationships with their bags that are barely distinguishable from the relationships that drivers elsewhere have with their autos. Your day is in your bag. Or, if you're my wife, several days are in your bag. And a little bag is in there, too. Kind of like the tiny car that gets pulled behind the motor home.

Now that I push a stroller about the streets rather frequently, I realize that a stroller is not a stroller when you're pushing it around New York.

It's a sidewalk SUV.

Yes, I will jam the net beneath the stroller to the breaking point with items. This is my SUV, and I will buy $80 worth of groceries, even if that means that the frame is visibly sagging and junior appears at risk.

When not schlepping around the sidewalks, New Yorkers are eating upon them. I'd add my two bits on the phenomenon that is New York sidewalk eating, but this Sunday's New York Times is running a wonderful piece that saves me the trouble.

"Curbside, We'll Never Have Paris" is one of those wonderful We're-New-Yorkers-and-We're-All-Nuts pieces that details the differences between the sidewalk cafés of Europe and New York. I highly encourage you to read it. Every word of it is truth, and it further illuminates this strange relationship between New Yorkers and the raised concrete dividing the buildings from the cabs.

If you move here and stay for a little while, mark my words: you'll come to appreciate that sidewalk in ways you never did when you were walking about the provinces. And you'll come to embrace it as part of your lot, however filthy and frantic it might be.

Found On The Internets: YouTube — Gallery for the Unconventional Artist

First up, this guy is the Bob Ross of one-minute spraypainting:

Next, I can't even fathom how much time and effort went into this stop-motion work of art:

(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan for the second link)

What if MLB Had Promotion & Relegation?

I've mentioned before in this blog that the system of promotion & relegation in European league sports is the "awesome Shiva of sports, destroyer and transformer." US sports leagues are worse for not having promotion & relegation; however, even with 24/7 coverage of sports in this country, most sports fans have no idea what promotion & relegation are and how they'd change their favorite sports.

O Dear MLB Fan, if your sport had promotion & relegation like the European soccer leagues, the bottom three teams in the MLB would move down to the AAA league, and the top three teams in AAA would move up to the majors. The end of the season wouldn't merely mark a battle for the wild card spot: It'd be a life-and-death battle to stay in the MLB and we'd all be glued to our televisions.

If the baseball season ended today, and MLB/AAA promotion & relegation operated the same way it does in the English Premier League, the Nashville Sounds (89W/55L, .618) of the Pacific Coast League and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees (84W/59L, .587) of the International League would be promoted to the MLB. Playing a 4-team mini-tournament for the final slot would be Sacramento River Cats (.583), the Toledo Mud Hens (.573), the Durham Bulls (.599), and the Iowa Cubs (.549).

As it currently stands, 6 MLB teams – the Chicago White Sox (.433), the Kansas City Royals (.433), the Pittsburgh Pirates (.427), the Baltimore Orioles (.427), the Florida Marlins (.427), and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (.414) – are seriously at risk of finishing in the bottom 3 slots for the year. Relative to other teams in the league, these teams are horrible. And because we have a system where they're locked into the top flight professional baseball league, they can get away with being horrible.

Under a system without promotion & relegation, the players for these teams will simply go through the motions for the rest of the season, playing their remaining games lackadaisically. The best of these teams, the White Sox and the Royals, are 25.5 games out of playoff contention: What do they care who wins or loses the remaining games?

Under a system with promotion & relegation, these players would be playing like madmen. Presently, sportswriters are shocked when teams that have had a rough season play their best at the end of the season. If we had promotion & relegation, this would be commonplace, as each threatened team battled to stay in the top league.

Owners would be forced to invest in their teams or risk falling out of the league — you wouldn't see them employing a penny-pinching strategy of running a wildly profitable but unsuccessful team (See Bud Selig or (outside of baseball) the Golden State Warriors).

What do we get instead of relegation & promotion? We get a Congressionally-sanctioned monopoly for major league baseball. We get meaningful games at the end of the season only for those teams at the top. We get a farm system where the teams are locked into their divisions and financially dependent on their big-league paymasters. We get less.

7 of the Chicago White Sox's final 14 games this season are against the Kansas City Royals. The team that wins the majority of these games will move up the table. The team that loses the majority will probably end the season in the bottom three teams.

Without promotion & relegation, you don't care about these games and nobody else does, either.

With promotion & relegation, you'd care, the players would care, the owners would care, and you can rest assured that the people of Chicago and Kansas City would care.

Making Mannahatta

Following up on my 1685 map post of 2 weeks ago, the New Yorker has an online slide show with computer-generated images that attempt to depict Manhattan (probably from the Lenape "Mannahatta" (Island of Many Hills)) as it was in 1609.

Although I'm a new and almost certainly a temporary New Yorker, permit me to speak as one for a moment. As a New Yorker, the shape of Manhattan is etched in my mind. If you live in this city, you see it every time you take the subway. You could draw it in the dark.

To see it bare of buildings and concrete and landfill is just haunting.

(Hat tip to Gothamist)

Science does it again!

Every once in a while we stumble across a paper that brings the office to a standstill for a while, a paper the epitomizes what good science is all about.

This week's wonder comes to us from Japan, no stranger to unusual technological achievements.

Yes, we can now continue to eat species long after we've eaten them down from a stable, reproductively viable population size.

Science brings you Inter-species Sperm Transfer.


Awesome.

Ahmadinejad & Academe

At the end of the Columbia Hillel Reform Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur) service, the rabbi urged all the congregants to join the protest Monday against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, whom Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs is hosting for its annual World Leaders Forum.

At the time, I generally agreed that protesting Ahmadinejad was worthwhile. Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, calls for destruction of the State of Israel, and generally holds odious and illiberal beliefs on many subjects. Furthermore, he is in a position of political power to effectuate at least a subset of these despicable beliefs into action.

Ah, but the protest is only partially against Ahmadinejad. Most of the rhetoric seems to be directed against Columbia University for allowing Ahmadinejad to participate in the World Leaders Forum.

The main argument against Columbia's action (or inaction, depending on how you view the events) is that providing Ahmadinejad with a forum at Columbia University either (1) implies academic or Western endorsement of his beliefs, or (2) legitimizes him as a political figure. Andy's post effectively addresses the second prong, so I will address the first.

Despite various disclaimers by Columbia President Lee Bollinger that Ahmadinejad's participation does not amount to a University endorsement of his views, the millions of people who hear of this event will likely fail to make this distinction, and may think more highly of Ahmadinejad or his beliefs than before. Even though the University interlocutors promise to "sharp[ly] challenge[]" Ahmadinejad, the simple granting of a forum to some extent implies that his beliefs are worth challenging.

The critical difference, as I see it, is that Ahmadinejad is not simply a layman who holds such beliefs. In other words, he is not "a Grand Wizard of the KKK who called for African nations to be wiped off the map." He is being invited because he is the leader (more accurately: second in charge) of a large and influential nation. If Ahmadinejad were just a shopkeeper in Tehran, Columbia would really have no business inviting him.

But even in this last case, I think Columbia should still have the right to invite him. This is a question of academic freedom. Specifically, it raises the following question: Are there people whose beliefs or actions are so odious that they should be forbidden from speaking at a university? This is a tough question, but I'm inclined to answer No.

As Mike Dorf has pointed out, refusing to allow some people to speak would imply university endorsement of everyone else who speaks. Since drawing the line once would mean having to draw the line forever, from a pragmatic standpoint it makes sense to adopt a hands-off approach.

At bottom, however, it comes down to how much one values the special position of the university in intellectual discourse. Yes, there is a danger that Ahmadinejad may gain in influence by participating in this event (though unlikely to gain much from the one person who matters: Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran), but academic self-censorship is more dangerous precedent. Most ideas are odious to someone. If universities are closed to ideas that lack a consensus, where can they be subject to rational criticism?

We have the powerful institutions of diplomacy and the military to oppose Ahmadinejad's implementation of his ideas outside the borders of Iran. What do we have to prevent the spread of academic self-censorship outside the borders of Columbia?

Ahmadinejad on Campus

Entering the Columbia campus today was no small feat, as the subway entrance outside the gates ejects you into a security cordon. The Columbia campus, a 6-square-block quad, is sealed off except for the two main gates. After presenting my Columbia ID card, I made my way to the law school, passing through a locked-down campus littered with the indicia of a protest-to-come.

New York civic leaders of all stripes are up in arms at Columbia welcoming Ahmadinejad to campus, some threatening to find economic ways of harming Columbia. Yet New Yorkers have had to do their cosmopolitan duty and entertain ghoulish figures since the dawn of the U.N., and my words to those who oppose his presence at Columbia – not to those who oppose him through their questions and remarks at the event or to his ideas through their protest signs – is the same as Josh Marshall's reaction to the Ground-Zero-visit opposition: Grow Up.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been around for almost 30 years — whether its 2^nd in command is invited to face U.S. students or not doesn't really matter when questions of legitimacy come up. It's not a question of legitimizing a less-than-democratically-elected leader. It's a question of dialoging with a presence on the world stage that won't go away, however much we choose to avoid diplomacy and dialogue.

Lost in the furor over the Ahmadinejad visit are two interpretational lenses that I find instructive.

First, it was almost a year ago that supporters of the Iranian progressive movement were heartened by the vocal opposition that met Ahmadinejad when he spoke to students at Tehran's Amir Kabir University. I was elated that Ahmadinejad met vocal opposition then, and I hope he meets vocal opposition today. If I could engineer society so that he met vocal and informed opposition every day, I would.

(In this sense, Ahmadinejad's interlocutors inside the auditorium serve roughly the same purpose as the protesters outside the auditorium. But for Ahmadinejad coming up to Columbia, how would he ever encounter those strenuously opposed to his message?)

Second, our country needs many things, but it especially needs to reacquaint itself with civil debate, even if it looks like civil debate with monsters. For 7 years, we have suffered under a President who appears afraid to face his opposition. This is a problem. Just as the UK's Prime Minister must face bombardment every week during Prime Minister's Questions, we should demand a society where political views of all stripes engage opposing ideas, even if those opposing ideas sound odious in the extreme.

Banks Over Broadway: My Own Personal Liechtenstein

Prior to recent changes in European banking law that diminished its role as a tax and regulation shelter, I'd been told that you knew when you entered Liechtenstein because bank branches began immediately at the border. (A bit like casinos in Nevada, gun shops in Maryland, and fireworks stands in Missouri.)

The same principle applies in my neighborhood. When you visit me, the immediate, overwhelming presence of banks will indicate that you're getting close. I live in a retail banking Liechtenstein.

Until a few months ago, there was Ann Taylor store at the corner of Broadway & 87^th. Some weeks back, construction workers began toiling away at the site, combining the vacant space with the space next door. Today, as we walked down Broadway, Steph asked a construction worker what was going to occupy this new, enlarged location.

"It's going to be a Bank of America."

Cue Claude Raines. I'm shocked, shocked that another bank is popping up on Broadway.

A recent Congressional report (.pdf link) on limited access to banking for the poorest New Yorkers reported that in 2006 the Upper West Side had one bank for every 7,000 residents. However, the same report also counted 11 banks on the Upper West Side. Today, I count 8 banks in one 8 block stretch of one street on the Upper West Side. (Traditionally, the "Upper West Side" has referred to the 250+ blocks to the immediate west of Central Park.) Somethings tells me that there are far, far more than 11 banks on the Upper West Side as of this writing.

The New York Times has covered the recent bank branch explosion, and is predicting a slow down in branch creation. Thank goodness. I'm bank-overloaded.

(The interactive map below may not work on all browsers. If you don't see My Own Personal Liechtenstein, click here or on the image at the bottom of this post.)


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Suing God: Jurisdictional Purgatory? (Part II)

God has apparently answered the complaint and is – you guessed it – disputing jurisdiction.

The manifestation of the divine legal writ out of the ether brings new meaning to the phrase special appearance.

Earlier: Suing God: Jurisdictional Purgatory?