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Hi everyone, Just a quick note before I run out the door en route to Peru for a week.

Thank you all for a wonderful year. It was an absolute blast and I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to all of the readers of the site for helping some of my projects get off the ground.

Anyway, thanks for everything and I’ll be doing some 2008 wrap-up type stuff when I get back. (Also, I’m not bringing my computer with me, so if you email and I don’t respond that’s why. Oh, and if you’ve emailed me in the last two weeks or so and I haven’t responded, sorry about that too, I’ll be back to my regular emailing ways come January.)

Thanks again, happy new year and best of luck in 2009.

- Noah

PS – Sorry for the brevity here, I’m literally being picked up in 10 minutes.

A really solid (and long) profile of Detroit from the Weekly Standard. A really solid (and long) profile of Detroit from the Weekly Standard . The city’s numbers are astounding: 10k unsolved murders since 1960, no new textbooks for schools in 19 years, 24.9 percent graduation rate, 60k vacant dwellings and, of course, an 0 and 16 football team . It goes beyond the numbers, though, also doing a bit of a profile on journalist Charlie LeDuff who sounds like quite an interesting fellow (I’ve got the Slaughterhouse piece he won a Pullitzer for waiting to be read).00p. A really solid (and long) profile of Detroit from the Weekly Standard . The city’s numbers are astounding: 10k unsolved murders since 1960, no new textbooks for schools in 19 years, 24.9 percent graduation rate, 60k vacant dwellings and, of course, an 0 and 16 football team . It goes beyond the numbers, though, also doing a bit of a profile on journalist Charlie LeDuff who sounds like quite an interesting fellow (I’ve got the Slaughterhouse piece he won a Pullitzer for waiting to be read).1545aynyk.asp?pg=1 . The city’s numbers are astounding: 10k unsolved murders since 1960, no new textbooks for schools in 19 years, 24.9 percent graduation rate, 60k vacant dwellings and, of course, an 0 and 16 football team . It goes beyond the numbers, though, also doing a bit of a profile on journalist Charlie LeDuff who sounds like quite an interesting fellow (I’ve got the Slaughterhouse piece he won a Pullitzer for waiting to be read).

Part of what struck me in reading this was thinking about how much it sounded like the Baltimore depicted in the Wire (of which I’m now on Season 5).

via nickparish.net

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How come no one told me there were seven Muppets with their own YouTube accounts? Sam the Eagle (patrioticeagle), Gonzo (weirdowhatever), Swedish Chef (deumnborkborkbork), Statler and Waldorf (heckleu247), Rizzo (rizzratz), Fozzy (wockawockabear) and Beaker (meepmeepmeepow). I have no idea if the videos are official, though the production seems pretty good.

(Be sure to check out Beaker’s Ode to Joy .)

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One sentence in particular stuck out in this Crooked Timber entry about predictions of the economic crisis : “The big problem for the Cassandras (and we were certainly both correct and disregarded) was that it was easy to see that the bubble could not continue and much harder to foresee how it would end – it’s one thing to say that dark matter must exist and another to work out what it is really like.”

As Virginia Postrel pointed out in the Atlantic recently , there is a human tendency towards bubbles. In the article she talks about a very interesting experiment: “take a bunch of volunteers, usually undergraduates but sometimes businesspeople or graduate students; divide them into experimental groups of roughly a dozen; give each person money and shares to trade with; and pay dividends of 24 cents at the end of each of 15 rounds, each lasting a few minutes.” It’s an “efficient market” where everyone knows the same as everyone else and they all know exactly how much the securities are worth. However, every experiment turns up the same thing: “the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes.” Bubbles, it seems, are a fundamental part of who we are as people.

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Paul Goldberger , architecture critic over at the New Yorker lists his top ten buildings of 2008. Out of curiosity, I collected links to pictures/descriptions of all of them: Herzog and de Meuron’s extraordinary Olympic Stadium , Norman Foster’s Beijing Airport , the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren ( the official CCTV writeup with renderings ), the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, by Renzo Piano , the New Museum, on the Bowery in New York, by SANAA Architecture , Art Gallery of Ontario , the new Cathedral of Christ the Light, in Oakland, by Skidmore partner Craig Hartman , Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building, at Yale (now renamed Paul Rudolph Hall), by Gwathmey Siegel , the Eldridge Street Synagogue, on the Lower East Side, by Walter Sedovic and Olafur Eliasson’s extraordinary New York Waterfalls Project .

I think my personal favorites are the Birds Nest and the new Cathedral of Christ the Light , neither of which I had seen before reading this.

via kottke.org

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An interesting thesis from Momus : “Only a medium which is seen as ‘realistic’ can inspire moral panics—in other words, that moral panics correlate to the perceived power of a medium to represent .” He then proceeds to go through panics in television, video, music and video games, making a pretty good case for his thesis that moral panic doesn’t come along until the medium is a real “threat” for the masses.

I’ll let Momus wrap it up: “Ambitious young media turks take note—don’t waste your time dabbling with Daddy’s toxins. No moral panic, no credibility. Not inappropriate? Not appropriate.”

via tecznotes

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One of my favorite ways of telling that a link or idea is really worthwhile is that I find myself mentioning it fairly frequently after reading it. This has happened with “Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide entry “General Remarks””:http://www.tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/2006/09/general_remarks.php where he goes over the basics of what makes a good ethnic restaurant. It includes simple economic rationales for how to choose the best ethnic dining like, “The best ethnic restaurants are often found in suburban strip malls, where rents are lower and the degree of feasible experimentation is greater. Small and cheap ethnic restaurants are often better than large ones.” It’s worth a read wherever you live (but especially if you’re in DC which is where it’s focused).

(Also on the food and economics tip, Paul Krugman and Stephen Dubner explore why food isn’t so good in the UK.)

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I’ve been watching The Wire (currently halfway through season 3) and the thing that I’ve been thinking about most is how amazing it is that the police department gets the amount of information they do. In this way, the show seems a lot more accurate than the other cop dramas on TV which go around finding clues on their own (I assume at least). Basically, these cops just walk into a bunch of places (stores, phone companies, etc.) and ask for info on people. If any of these spots were to turn them down (which, to my knowledge, they’re fully in their right to do) they’d be shit out of luck.

Now it’s easy to find this valuable on the show where they’re using the information to bust drug dealers and the such, but it’s also quite frightening to imagine it happening to you or I. If we were suspected of something how quickly would the services we trust (phone company, email provider, etc.) turn over all their records. I know there was a hubub about this a few years ago with Yahoo!/Google, but I guess I never thought of it in these terms.

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