Follow-up/clarification on NYC post

A reader responded to yesterday’s post about NYC Manhattan with a 1,300+ word rebuttal to pretty much everything I said.

I’m really glad he (I assume it’s a he; there I go making assumptions again) called me out. Seriously. NYC deserves to be defended from what were undoubtedly gross generalizations. And I’m glad to get such an in-depth perspective from someone who lives there.

He is damn right that this was a very narrow experience. (For the record, I was originally planning to take up residence there for a couple of months this summer, but for various reasons, it didn’t work out.) There is no way that a five day trip – maybe not even a five year trip – could accurately paint such broad strokes about such a complicated city. I refer to a line from an older post: “if one thing is certain, it is that there is no getting to the bottom of New York.”

I hope it’s clear that what I wrote in yesterday’s post were a tourist’s (and fanboy’s) impressions of Manhattan after a very short trip, not in any way an accurate portrayal of the city as experienced by long-term residents. In some ways, though, I think a tourist’s impressions are more interesting than anything a long-term resident has to say about the city. That’s because it’s like a child being surprised by and questioning everything he sees, even if he is wrong about how it works or what it usually does.

I am tempted to respond to some of his more specific claims about budget and general design of the trip, but what’s the use. It’s true that it was a narrow experience, and that, I think, is his main point.

I also want to make clear that I am not [intentionally] disparaging NYC/Manhattan. When you read/hear so much about the city but never experience it, it should come as no surprise that most of your initial impressions are disappointments. But on the whole I still think it’s an amazing place, and I’d gladly live and/or spend more time there.

New York frickin’ City

I had never been so enamored with a place as I was with NYC, but not until last week did I get to experience it. My friend Pavs and I took the Megabus up there for five nights and did just about every touristy point of interest on the map, plus much more. Here were my impressions. (Warning: this is way more info than you want, but too bad, I was on a roll.)

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Rarely do they glance.

I have heard much talk about NYC being an oppressively lonely place. I could see how a person could be quite lonely in NYC, but I didn’t see much of what looked like loneliness in the field – most people we encountered were either with someone or phoning or texting. I didn’t see a lot of people that looked like they were dying to be noticed. I think NYC is better described as a disinterested place. It was creepy and bizarre how rarely any of the hundreds of people we passed each day would shoot us even a quick glance. I’m not asking for prolonged eye contact, but I’d at least like to be occasionally visually acknowledged. It’s not even like being in an elevator where at least the awkwardness of not looking at each other is present. To New Yorkers, other pedestrians seem to be merely moving, peripheral obstacles.

Even the dogs were disinterested. They’d walk inches away from me without showing the slightest inclination to direct a quick sniff toward my smelly legs. It’s the first I’ve felt tempted to yell, “WHY AREN’T YOU SMELLING ME?!”

It was an incredible relief to meet a woman and her german shepherd in a mostly empty Central Park one night because they both gave us a sniff and a tail wag, one only metaphorically. Maybe I’m just narcissistic, but I think having your existence acknowledged by someone whom you are not paying is a pretty important part of life, up there with food and sleep.

Homeless people that don’t beg.

Related to the last point, we were within coin-flipping distance of probably more than a hundred homeless people during the trip, and only a few – literally 3 or 4 – asked us for money or even held up a sign. Like most New Yorkers, it’s rare that they even glance at you.

City that never sleeps, my ass.

Try walking the NYC streets Sunday night at 3am. Less sleepy than Durham-Raleigh streets to be sure, but hardly deserving of being called “awake.” When you have 70,000 residents per square mile, I expected to see a whole contingent of people and businesses that operate throughout the night, just by mere necessity. But other than bars and McDonalds, it’s hard to find any businesses open after midnight. The parks shut down, the public chairs in Times Square are stacked up or put on top of tables, and the homeless people sleep on benches or church steps. There is very little going on at night.

Walking speed.

“New York minute” seems inaccurate. People in New York don’t move that fast. Near the end of the trip, when we had logged nearly 100,000 steps and our lower backs, legs, and butt cheeks were in moderate to severe pain, we were slogging, and yet I estimate that we were still passing people at a two-to-one ratio.

Bigger than I realized, but not intimidatingly big.

Here is a rough sketch of our path on the first day from the bus to the hotel:

That’s a long walk, my friends, especially if you're carrying luggage. That particular path took us three or four hours. In total, we took nearly 40,000 steps that day, and took over 20,000 steps every day we were there. (For perspective, I average 4,400 steps per day.) There is a lot of ground to be covered in Manhattan, but not so much that I felt like the other side of the island was out of reach. It felt large yet consciousable.

Unaccommodation.

Can a cracker get a drinking fountain? Or how about a bench or a public restroom? Even a private restroom? A free Internet connection that does not come in 15 minute increments and have a waiting list? These things are surprisingly hard to come by. I’d hate to live in New York if I had bladder issues. Correction: New Yorkers would hate it if I lived in New York if I had bladder issues. (Related: A friend mentioned that there was a large turd on her subway train the same day I wrote a post praising the subways for their “homey” smells.)

The smells.

Trash bags are piled up about every other block every day of the week, many of them rancid. We did lots of momentary breath-holding. But even when there was no trash to be found and no rancid smells to be expected, you would still sometimes get hit with a random pungent odor, maybe creeping from the sewers. Pretty unpleasant. The subways, though, were not terribly smelly—just warm and ugly.

The sounds noise.

I don’t know how people are able to speak casually into a cell phone in New York. But they do it. Except in the residential areas and in the parks, you are swimming in noise, often to the point that it makes conversation with the person next to you difficult.

It was fascinating listening to the city’s hum from the top of the Empire State Building at 1:30am. [This at best crudely captures it, but here’s a clip.]

Style.

I had this vision of NYC as being this rare place in the Universe where you could not look out of place if you tried, but wow did I feel very Midwestern walking through West Village in a t-shirt, baggy shorts, and athletic shoes. I might have expected to see Manhattanites looking glitzy sporting Gucci logos and what not, but that wasn’t at all the case. There were hardly any logos to be found; that’s out of style, apparently. These people dress well. Not runway-style, but clothes-that-fit-and-look-good-on-them-style. Only good, though, not interesting. They look like professionals and party-goers, not artists and designers.

Mmm, diversity.

When I first got off the bus near Penn Station, I could not stop smiling. The activity, the sounds, the colors – it was like a sensory orgasm. Flower shops and pizza parlors, fake jewelry and porn, young and old, gay and straight, hipster and nerdy, thin and plump, poor and rich, white, black, mocha and latino, all rolled into one concrete pastry. It was delicious. But either the effect wore off or we wandered into boroughs that had less diversity to offer because after the first ten minutes the feeling was lost for good.

Prices.

Yes, it’s expensive, but not prohibitively so. If you’re not careful, you could easily have living expenses exceed $5,000 per month, but with some sleuthing, I estimate that a person could live reasonably in Manhattan for $1,500 a month. There are apartments to be had for under $1,000 a month. There are 1,000 calorie meals to be had for under $5 (see Chinatown). Subways will take you pretty much anywhere for $2.25. And grocery stores are probably no more expensive in NYC than the rest of the U.S.

Pretzel croissants.

That’s right: pretzel croissants. They exist, apparently, and I was determined to put one in my belly, especially after reading that Thomas Gresham called them “one of the most delicious things in existence.” But alas, it wasn’t to be. There were three or four separate missions, countless natives interrogated, but ultimately zero pretzel croissants captured. I left the city humbled and ashamed.

Where’s the creativity?

True, there are pretzel croissants (we’ve heard), but I expected NYC to be a place where trial and error are always and everywhere on display. With the density of “creatives” that live in the city, I thought these little shops could hardly afford not to try new things. This was probably what disappointed me the most. Pizza, bagels, corner delis, halal carts – it’s really all the same. As a business owner, you keep doing what’s profitable and/or what’s been OKed by the city ‘crats. Sadness. (Side note: I thought they'd at least be up on technology, but unlike Miami I saw none of the small businesses using Square.)

Lack of cookyness.

There was an old, shirtless gentleman in khaki shorts playing tennis with himself against an Arc de Triomphe-like monument in Washington Park, but that was about it as far as cookyness sightings. I was expecting to see weirdos on nearly every city block. Instead, stylish people predominate.

Chinatown.

This was the most pleasant surprise for us. It is a bit grittier than the rest of downtown, and that is a compliment. Here is Morgan Friedman, founder of Overheard in New York among many other things (and reader of this blog!), writing in a random thought journal about a city's need for grittiness:

Raw areas have 99-cent shops, liquor stores, thrift shops, adult bookstores, pawn shops, psychic readers, corner bars and strip clubs, tattoo parlors, check-cashing and money transfer shops, Off the Track Betting, men on the street selling food (tacos, in LA), local bars on block after block (often unmarked), and everything is cheap. This is the sort of environment that creates the vibrancy that is the hallmark of a true city: the unpretentious, middle-class but almost sleazy atmosphere of all sorts of stores and lifestyles and desires clashing and co-existing on top of one another. This is what the fabled Manhattan was supposed to be like back in the day of "if you can make it here you can make it anywhere" and "the city that never sleeps"; this rawness survives in pockets far uptown, in the Lower East Side, and in the outer boroughs -- and it is the defining characteristic of every Latino city. I was shocked - in a very positive way - to discover that Los Angeles is not fine-tuned so as to have removed every extra mole on its face, like the models and movies and magazines and pictures that come from it have done; New York is the one that threw the adult stores out of its center, not Los Angeles.

Chinatown was definitely the most active part of the city. The park was crawling with activity, even at 2pm on a weekday. We sat and creepily watched a couple of hotties dressed in their snug-fitting designer jeans kick ass on the handball court. ...Could have watched that for days.

Maybe what sold us the most on Chinatown was a phenomenal little (and by little I mean tiny) place called Prosperity Dumplings, where we filled our bellies with unbelievably tasty fried dumplings and sesame pancackes for about $3.50 / person.

Unpredictable subways.

The subways are not, it seems, like Durham-Raleigh’s I-40, where you know exactly when to avoid them. At least I wasn’t able to figure out the subway traffic patterns from our five day sample. You’d think that we’d be safe riding downtown at 11am on a weekday, or uptown at 3pm, but sometimes it would be no-choice-but-to-grope packed, other times not.

Celebrity sightings.

I saw (but did not stop) Charlie Todd and Matt Haughey (here's a 2 minute video of his trip) – celebrities in geekdom, at least.

(Speaking of geekdom, I have been spending an embarrassing amount of time on the site “You Are Listening to New York” wherein a live feed of the NYPD dispatcher is set to a background of ambient music. Somehow they go together beautifully. [By the way, the crime rate in NYC, I learned, has gone down dramatically [75%!] since the 80’s or 90’s. There are theories, but it’s hard to believe any of them could explain an almost unfathomable 75% drop.])

Declining awesomeness?

I’ve heard comments from various people saying, to paraphrase, that NYC has been declining in awesomeness. I pretty much dismissed it as typical nostalgic chatter, but then I saw these stats. NYC seems to be experiencing a not insignificant exodus. (P.S. – W00t Raleigh.)

It’s easy to not notice stuff.

There were more than a few times during the trip where Pavs and I compared notes and had a “how did I not notice that?!” reaction. For example, I made what I thought was a good observation that there were no public swimming pools in NYC, until Pavs pointed out that we passed two along our walk.

I certainly felt like the lesser of the two observers, but Pavs missed some stuff, too, like when we passed a girl with albinism. I think it’s probably generally true that we fail to notice a lot of what is going on around us at any given time, but New York gave us the opportunity to really see how much we were missing (or else hallucinating).

Mental poverty.

I felt a kind of mental poverty being away from my nerd coffee of Google Reader and books. I was exposed to so many people and so much behavior, but being back on Google Reader for 2 hours, I felt I learned more and was inspired more than I was during the entirety of the people-watching adventure.

Things in NYC I liked / would do again / would recommend doing:

Prosperity Dumplings (Chinatown)
Sal and Carmines pizza (Upper West Side)
Shake Shack (various)
High Line Park (Chelsea)
Absolute Bagels (Upper West Side)
Madison Square Park, while the giant head lasts (Flatiron)
Central Park late at night
Empire State Building late at night
Walk the Brooklyn Bridge
People (tourist) watching in the Guggenheim lobby

Here is a handy map of these and other recommendations from people I trust.

As for transportation, neither of us had a good or even mostly OK experience with Megabus, but we’d do it again just because it was so cheap: $26 round trip (but prices vary widely).

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Postscript

Was NYC everything I hoped and imagined it would be? Of course not. But I’m glad I went. I’m glad I dragged Pavs along, I’m glad we got to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams (I loved it; Pavs: meh), I was thrilled to be able to take a ride in Gene’s taxi, I’m glad I got to see my high school sweetheart, and I’m glad Chinatown exists.

Also, I’m glad to be home.

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Postscript 2

That hiatus I mentioned? It's back on.

"We exist as one organic miracle linked to others"

And that, says E.O. Wilson in a 2002 article originally appearing in Scientific American called "The Bottleneck", is the essence of environmentalism.

Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.

Humanity did not descend as angelic beings into the world. Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home. To its special conditions we are intimately adapted in every one of the bodily fibers and biochemical transactions that give us life.

Environmentalism has become like spiritual experience in that it is nearly impossible to talk about either without drowning in clichés, which is why I consider these two of the better paragraphs I have read on the subject.

The whole article is worth a read, especially if you studied economics and/or put faith in free-market principles. It inches too close to Malthusianism for my comfort, but is the best response to the economic worldview I’ve read.

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Somewhat related:

I was excited to find an article in ScienceDaily titled “Evolution of the Evolutionarily Minded”, but it was mostly uninspiring. However, I’ve been thinking about this one statement quite a bit:

The field of evolutionary psychology had been dominated by a set of widely held [and wrong] assumptions — e.g., that human behavior is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments, that human cognition is task-specific, and that there is a universal human nature.

"Something is wrong with the entire argument of 'obviousness'"

Duncan Watts in response to the criticism that findings from the social sciences are "obvious":

Lazarsfeld was writing about "The American Soldier", a recently published study of over 600,000 servicemen, conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the second world war. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings that he claimed were representative of the report. Take number two: "Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds."

"Aha," says Lazarsfeld's imagined reader, "that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I already knew?" Why indeed.

But Lazarsfeld then reveals the truth: all six of the "findings" were in fact the exact opposite of what the study found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place, they could just as easily have reconciled them with other things they already thought they knew: "City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing, etiquette, and so on. That's obvious!" But this is exactly the point Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious then, as he put it, "something is wrong with the entire argument of 'obviousness'".

You should read the whole article, but in case you're feeling lazy, here's the conclusion:

Because of the way we learn from experiences - even ones that are never repeated - the failings of common sense reasoning are rarely apparent to us. Rather, they manifest simply as "things we didn't know at the time" but which seem obvious in hindsight.

The paradox of common sense, then, is that even as it helps us make sense of the world, it can actively undermine our ability to understand it.

Blog on hiatus through July

Sorry for the deluge today. Posting will be light or non-existent for the rest of the month.

50 “tools not rules” for better writing

Llyod Morgan points to a list of 50 “tools not rules” for better writing.

Here are some I like:

10. Cut big, then small. Prune the big limbs, then shake out the dead leaves.
13. Play with words, even in serious stories. Choose words the average writer avoids but the average reader understands.
17. Riff on the creative language of others. Make word lists, free-associate, be surprised by language.
21. Know when to back off and when to show off. When the topic is most serious, understate; when least serious, exaggerate.
25. Learn the difference between reports and stories. Use one to render information, the other to render experience.
43. Read for both form and content. Examine the machinery beneath the text.
46. Take interest in all crafts that support your work. To do your best, help others do their best.

On the whole, though, I found it a bit too blueprinty for my taste – the best part of writing for me is being surprised by where I end up. But the idea of a list of writing “tools not rules,” that I can get behind.

Here are some I would add:

-- Don’t write what you know. Write what you love. Write what you can’t stop thinking about.
-- Don’t hesitate to take a sidebar. The most interesting writing often happens tangential to the main point.
-- Focus on interestingness, not coherence.
-- Write about ideas, not opinions.
-- Except for very rare occasions, don’t use words you have to look up in the thesaurus.
-- Save the intro paragraph for last. I don’t often know what I’m writing about until I’m finished.

Okay so that ended up being more rule-y than tool-y. So sue me.

Here are some others from or inspired by Omaha’s Oracle:

Tell stories. Reading a Berkshire annual report is like sitting across a booth in a diner with a great conversationalist possessed of both intelligence and insatiable curiosity.
Use vivid language.
Talk about people. It’s one thing to say, as almost everyone does, that business is about people. It’s another thing entirely to portray those people fully fleshed and full of foibles.
Be generous with humour. Every Berkshire annual brims with jokes (including some groaners), drollery, and wit.
Get to the point. “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful,” Buffett writes. That’s an entire business philosophy in twelve words.
Let your enthusiasm show.
Write with a specific person in mind. (For his annual reports, he pretends that he’s talking to his sisters.)

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A recent, unrelated gem from Buffett about how to end the deficit in 5 minutes:

You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.

The absurdity of our $600 billion “pain” industry

I see Jonah Lehrer’s latest WSJ column as a punch-in-the-gut reminder that medical practice is still in the Dark Ages:

Consider a study by scientists at Wake Forest University. After only a few days of meditation training—teaching people to better focus their attention, concentrating less on the discomfort and more on a soothing stimulus—subjects reported a 57% reduction in the “unpleasantness” of their pain. Such improvements are roughly equivalent to the benefits of morphine. […]

The larger lesson is that, for far too long, we’ve been treating pain as a purely physical problem, a sensation rooted in the breakdown of the flesh. As a result, we’ve invested in costly and often ineffective surgeries, such as spinal fusion, that attempt to fix the mechanical failure.

But this approach oversimplifies an extremely complex condition. It’s now clear that pain is best understood as a mental state concerning the body, an objective sensation terribly twisted by the brain. And that’s why these psychological interventions sometimes work better than scalpels: They help us to untwist our thoughts.

“You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.”

After reading Mark Larson's review, I am going to have to check out Jay-Z’s book.

The most important thing Seth Roberts knows about research

Better to do than to think:

It is better to do an experiment than to think about doing an experiment, in the sense that you will learn more from an hour spent doing (e.g., doing an experiment) than from an hour thinking about what to do. Because 99% of what goes on in university classrooms and homework assignments is much closer to thinking than doing, and because professors often say they teach “thinking” (“I teach my students how to think”) but never say they teach “doing”, you can see this goes against prevailing norms.

The three elements of successful cities

In 1995, Kanter argued that successful cities can be identified by three elements:

good thinkers (concepts)
good makers (competence)
good traders (connections)

The interplay of these three elements, Kanter argued, means that good cities are not planned but managed.

From Wikipedia. (via)

What I wish I knew when I was 18, er 26

A reader named Aatash set up a site called When I was 18 that asks cool people (like me) to answer the question, "What's the one thing you wish you knew when you were 18 years old?" My response is below.

(Go ahead, Aatash, put me right between Gretchen Rubin and Guy Kawasaki.)

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The Money Value of Time

My biggest regret from when I was 18 was treating time as preciously as a leftover bologna sandwich.

That’s not advice, just an observation.

I don’t want to pollute Aatash’s impressive collection of wisdom with a tired cliché about our most precious resource and blah blah.

It’s true, of course. Truer than I realized at 18. But probably less true than I currently think.

Time matters. Then again, if you must announce that something “Matters,” it probably doesn’t.

I keep a spreadsheet by my bed that reminds me that I’m getting old. And I have a blog that notifies me when I am a certain special number of days away from a milestone age. The idea is that if I am not aware of the fleetingness of time, and in some vague sense the imminence of death, then I am at risk of floating through life with such a passivity that calling it “life” may be a misnomer.

This temporal awareness has significant advantages. I plan. I reflect. I pay attention. I reflect on paying attention. I try new things. I plan on trying new things. This is what I take to mean living.

The cruel thing is that any advantage in one respect is likely to show up as a deficiency in another.

To be grotesquely simplistic, it seems that those who most highly value time take one of two forms:

1. Sure, pass me another beer, I’ll be dead soon.

2. No, I won’t chit chat with you, I’ll be dead soon.

Just as the drunk drinks pleasure, the businessman contributes contribution. The first type we offer treatment, and the second type we praise for their go-getter-ness. Neither is inherently good nor bad – useless concepts if there ever were any – but it ought to be clear that neither is without deficiencies.

If I could look into the future, I think I would tell my 26 year old self that finding value in life is not the same as finding value in time.

Evolution of the Alphabet

From a U of Maryland professor's page on The Evolution of Alphabets. (via)

My favorite line from the page is this:

The authors cannot comment on the religious or mystical nature of alphabets and letters.

I'd like to see those emails.

Otterpants

Google quietly launched a new site called prizes.org where people compete to win modest amounts of cash. Currently, the top contest is "Best poem about otters" for a $100 prize. As of this writing, there have been 151 entries, including the one below. I won't say who wrote it.

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OTTERPANTS

Leroy the otter decided to treat himself to a new pair of trousers after his solid Q4.
He had grown tired of the plainness of the khakis he wore day after day.
He needed something far less vanilla to express his uniqueness as an otter and to remind his clients that he is consistently at or near the top 25% of the sales leaderboard in the tri-states area.

The vendor of choice was a no-brainer: The Pantsionado was the finest pants artisan known to otter.
He took his craft seriously, and it showed. Some say too seriously.
The Pantsionado was not known as the type of otter you would leave your pups with, but he makes great pants, so no one complained about his weasliness.

The first handful that Leroy tried on were hit or miss. Mostly miss. They were beautifully crafted and all, but just too… plain.
Frustrated and bordering on desperate, The Pantsionado huffed and disappeared into the back room, eventually reappearing with a pair of shiny, almost translucent, brown pants.

Leroy was stunned at their magnificence.
He had never sported a pair of trousers that left him feeling so dry and so warm.
It coated his bubbly rump, insulating his chubby lower body from the dressing room elements.
The pants felt so… smooth, so… semi-aquatic.
And that shine! They glistened as if freshly sheathed from a newborn whelp.
They had a peculiar smell, too. A semi-sweet, almost fleshy odor.
The fabric reminded Leroy of the soft, insulated underfur that coated his own pup.

“What’s the secret? What material is this?,” Leroy asked.

It was then that the romp showed up.

"I’ve not come across a more apt metaphor for life."

So says James Geary, the guy who wrote the book on metaphors, about this one from Samuel Butler:

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Geary posted more aphorisms from Butler here.

Philosophy: The most inhuman of disciplines

With the possible exception of the higher reaches of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, one can scarcely imagine anything more inhuman than philosophy. Its worship of logic in all its cold, crystalline purity; its determination to stride the bleak and icy mountaintops of theory and abstraction: to be a philosopher is to be existentially deracinated. Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.

— Mark Rowlands in The Philosopher and the Wolf