Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?

Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same.

In a 1963 column about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot.

By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.

That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.

I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)

Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.

More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.

With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?

In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.

In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.

There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.

In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]

Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.

But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.

Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.

At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]

No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.

by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times

[ed. Any place blow-torching sushi should be avoided.]

We Absolutely Do Know That Waymos Are Safer Than Human Drivers

In a recent article in Bloomberg, David Zipper argued that “We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” Big if true! In fact, I’d been under the impression that Waymos are not only safer than humans, the evidence to date suggests that they are staggeringly safer, with somewhere between an 80% to 90% lower risk of serious crashes.

“We don’t know” sounds like a modest claim, but in this case, where it refers to something that we do in fact know about an effect size that is extremely large, it’s a really big claim.

It’s also completely wrong. The article drags its audience into the author’s preferred state of epistemic helplessness by dancing around the data rather than explaining it. And Zipper got many of the numbers wrong; in some cases, I suspect, as a consequence of a math error.

There are things we still don’t know about Waymo crashes. But we know far, far more than Zipper pretends. I want to go through his full argument and make it clear why that’s the case.

***

In many places, Zipper’s piece relied entirely on equivocation between “robotaxis” — that is, any self-driving car — and Waymos. Obviously, not all autonomous vehicle startups are doing a good job. Most of them have nowhere near the mileage on the road to say confidently how well they work.

But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.

Fortunately, there is a lot of data available about Waymo, in particular. If the thing you want to do is to help policymakers make good decisions, you would want to discuss the safety record of Waymos, the specific cars that the policymakers are considering allowing on their roads.

Imagine someone writing “we don’t know if airplanes are safe — some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week.” And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what’s going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare, while general aviation crashes — small personal planes, including ones you can build in your garage — are quite common.

It’s good to know that the plane that you built in your garage is quite dangerous. It would still be extremely irresponsible to present an issue with a one-engine Cessna as an issue with the Boeing 737 and write “we don’t know whether airplanes are safe — the aviation industry insists they are, but my cousin’s plane crashed just three months ago.”

The safety gap between, for example, Cruise and Waymo is not as large as the safety gap between commercial and general aviation, but collapsing them into a single category sows confusion and moves the conversation away from the decision policymakers actually face: Should they allow Waymo in their cities?

Zipper’s first specific argument against the safety of self-driving cars is that while they do make safer decisions than humans in many contexts, “self-driven cars make mistakes that humans would not, such as plowing into floodwater or driving through an active crime scene where police have their guns drawn.” The obvious next question is: Which of these happens more frequently? How does the rate of self-driving cars doing something dangerous a human wouldn’t compare to the rate of doing something safe a human wouldn’t?

This obvious question went unasked because the answer would make the rest of Bloomberg’s piece pointless. As I’ll explain below, Waymo’s self-driving cars put people in harm’s way something like 80% to 90% less often than humans for a wide range of possible ways of measuring “harm’s way.”

by Kelsey Piper, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
[ed. I'd take one any time (if reasonably priced), and expect to see them everywhere soon. See also: I Was Promised Flying Self Driving Cars (Zvi):]

***

A Tesla Model S drove itself from Los Angeles to New York with zero disengagements. Full reverse cannonball run.

Mike P: I don’t mean to say this in a way that discredits what they’ve done, but ngl, this stuff isn’t even surprising to me anymore like ya, makes total sense. I went from Philly to Raleigh NC to Tennessee and back to Philly and the only thing I had to do was re park the car at 2 charging stops when the car parked in the wrong place.

Tesla did the thing

There’s still a difference between full self-driving (FSD) that can take you across the country, and the point when you can sleep while it drives.

A Waymo moving 17mph hits the breaks instantly upon seeing a child step in front of it from a blind spot, hits the child at 6mph and dialed 911. If a human had been driving, the child would likely have been struck at 14mph and be dead.

What did some headlines call this, of course?

TechCrunch: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

Samuel Hammond: A more accurate headline would be “Waymo saves child’s life thanks to superhuman reaction time”

This was another good time to notice that almost all the AI Safety people are strongly in favor of Waymo and self-driving cars.

Rob Miles: Seems worthwhile for people to hear AI Safety people saying: No, self driving cars are not the problem, they have the potential to be much safer than human drivers, and in this instance it seems like a human driver would have done a much worse job than the robot

The Secret History of Wakanda

The history of Wakanda is not, of course, an African history; it’s a history of Europe, and of Europe’s fantasies about Africa.

This hidden kingdom is first attested in Book V, Chapter VIII of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, on the ‘countries on the other side of Africa.’ As Pliny ventures further from the known world of the Mediterranean, and into the depths of Africa, the peoples he describes are drawn with a lighter and lighter brush. He can’t quite say what these people are, but only what they lack. Nightmares live here, in the hot voids of the world: [...]

But then, after this list of fantastic degenerations, we meet something different. Pliny describes a kind of African Utopia:

At the centre of the region of Æthiopia we may find the source of the Nile, guarded by a kingdom called Vicindaria, so called for its many conquests. The Vicindariæ are ruled by their philosophers; and if Pelagon of Rhodes is to be believed their libraries contain all that can be known in the useful crafts. Among their marvels are flying chariots, drawn by certain spinning serpents; fine silks that protect the body like armour; trees bearing glowing fruit with which they light their houses; and great towers made of brass and iron. Their cities are arranged in circles, like those of the Etruscans; at the centre of each stands a library which is also a temple to their God and his son. In all their affairs they are orderly and virtuous; solemn are their laws and just are their judges, and all men live in amity with one another. The Vicindariæ are the ancestors of the the Egyptians and the Numidians, and by some accounts, the fathers of all men. But Pelagon says that they have withdrawn from their troublesome children, have no intercourse with the peoples of the world, and no longer set off on voyages over the oceans or to the Moon; preferring to perfect their knowledge in seclusion, their kingdom can not be found by foreigners.

Where did this idea come from? And how did Pliny appear to describe helicopters, skyscrapers, and the electric lightbulb? Pelagon of Rhodes was a Greek geographer of the second century BC; frustratingly, one of our only surviving sources for his works is Pliny himself. Maybe the story stretches back further; maybe the Greeks had nursed this legend of a distant, magical kingdom for centuries. It’s been suggested that the army of Memmon in Arctinus Milesius’ lost Aethiopis might have some relation to the myth; so too might the Homeric gods’ repeated habit of flying off to visit Ethiopia. We will probably never know.

We do know that in Pliny’s time, Vicindaria was widely believed to be real. Sixteen years before the Natural History was published, the emperor Nero sent a praetorian expedition down the White Nile, to find its source and establish relations between Rome and Vicindaria, for future trade and possible conquest. Seneca, as Nero’s tutor, had commissioned the voyage, and he reports its findings in his Natural Questions:

There we found not towers of bronze or wondrous libraries, but only marshes, the limit of which even the natives did not know, and no one else could hope to know, so completely was the river entangled with vegetable growth, so impassable the waters by foot, or even by boat, since the muddy overgrown marsh would bear only a small boat containing one person.

Nero’s expedition may have reached present-day Uganda: the furthest Roman legions ever travelled into equatorial Africa. Europeans made no further efforts to contact the hidden kingdom of Vicindaria for another thousand years.

This is not to say that the story was forgotten. Pliny’s account was reproduced in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville; among early medieval writers the most significant part of the narrative was the reference to ‘their God and his son.’ Centuries before Christ, these people were Christian. In 687 AD, the heresiarch Caelestius of Aquitaine was burned for insisting that Christ had been born twice, once to the Vicindariae and once to the rest of the world, but that the Vicindariae, being wise, had not killed him. Small communities of Caelestians survived in the Pyrenees for another two hundred years, claiming to follow a purer, African version of Christianity, in which redemption can be achieved without blood. (They rejected the name Caelestians, and preferred to call themselves the ‘Good Whites’ instead.)

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Right and Left

No great American novel has ever emerged from the nation’s capital, Christopher Hitchens once observed. London had Dickens—Paris, Zola and Flaubert. And Washington, D.C.? A city cut out for genre fiction: dutiful historical reconstruction, or else cheap political thrillers, sold at airports with raised gold lettering. Evidently, the town’s bureaucratic processes and brutalist office architecture just cannot deliver an exhilarating prose style. Nor can the self-serious men and women, with their big egos and small ambitions, attract literary sympathies.

If literature is no place to turn, perhaps there exists some great work of art? It was 2025, and I had to escape a May Day protest on the Mall (grown men in FUCK TRUMP wifebeaters, a crimson Handmaid’s Tale girl zapped back from a fascist-lite era). So far 2025 had been no 1963, 1982 or even 2017. CSPAN-watching geriatrics waving cardboard signs on bridges felt at times like the only symbolic act fending off the wacko, dark-web authoritarianism radiating from Pennsylvania Avenue. When May Day turned to more “mayday, mayday!,” rather than going to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to drown myself, I ended up in front of a painting in the American Wing of the nearby National Gallery.

Right and Left (1909) by Winslow Homer might be altogether disqualified from Great Washington Painting. For one, the work is not set on the banks of the Potomac but off the shore of Prouts Neck, Maine. Surely the craggy presidential faces in the Portrait Gallery or Gordon Parks’s solemn American Gothic (1942) would make for more obvious contenders. But the painting’s perfect, suggestive title, paired with the melancholic mood of the hunting scene, relaxed all critical judgment that afternoon, as I reached for something, anything, to explain a strange city in strange times.

Over gray waters, a pair of goldeneye ducks are tossed mid-flight like clown juggling pins. Distant waves carry the sportsman who has just fired on them. As if rendered by a Persian miniaturist, the diminutive scale of the shooter makes clear human motives are entirely incidental to the painting. The real drama, and damage, is in the foreground—the freakish, jack-o’-lantern yellow eye of the bird on the left, the terrible head-first plummet on the right. Both birds’ bodies are a cohesion of awkward, unnatural angles. The animals are alive and dead. The waves crest and fall. There is nothing romantic about the state of suspension: the setting sun, low and feeble, is a single orange stroke Homer has made over the indefinite horizon, like a pencil scratch on a doorframe marking the growth of a child.

In late January of last year, a quiet panic began rippling through the capital when the little figure skaters’ plane went down in the Potomac. This was around the time the government was purging tens of thousands of jobs that do things like keep planes in the sky. Countless entries follow in the region’s diary of a bad year. Authorities abducted a local Maryland man from an IKEA parking lot, to then erroneously deport him to a Salvadoran mega-prison. Gold-chained tech barons snapped up mansions in Massachusetts Avenue Heights as the welcome mat was laid out in the White House. A gunman mowed down embassy sweethearts in the streets; seventy-ton M1 Abrams tanks squeaked through a militarized birthday carnival. The clangor of dissent played out on pots and pans as the National Guard rolled into town. M4 semiautomatic rifles circled two-year-olds’ birthday parties in Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park. Meanwhile, immigration authorities began quietly patrolling the District alongside the police, making more than triple the number of arrests in a month than in the first half of the year. Come fall, the president spent the longest government shutdown in U.S. history gussying up the White House, with such understated measures as razing a wing. The year rounded out with two shot National Guard members and a hydra-headed call for five hundred more on the ground: Christmases lost protecting deserted streets in camo and Santa hats.

In a city being pulverized and remade seemingly daily, where even as recent of history as the Black Lives Matter plaza is jackhammered to oblivion, the sense of dread and unknown can bully one into a state of mental submission, or else frantic, desperate attempts to make sense of the nonsense—“rational delirium,” I underline in a hip novel I can’t finish. One of these disposable origami thoughts comes to me in the museum. It is futile surely as any other attempt to say something intelligent about such deeply stupid times. But there it is: like Homer’s bewildering birds, the targets in Washington have also been two. They have also been twinned. In this city, maybe no one has been thumped harder than undocumented workers from Central and South America, on the one hand, and federal public servants, on the other. Their red-alert existential terror—though quite incomparable in kind—might even be held within a single frame. Both perform types of labor deeply distasteful, or perhaps incomprehensible, to the administration: manual labor and public-serving work.

What I mean to say is, hardworking bricklayers and line cooks are being criminalized as hardened gangsters. Dedicated civil servants, meanwhile, are roasted as do-nothings, forced to correspond with HR black holes and polygraph machines. D.C. flags may have sold out across the city in protest of the paramilitary takeover, but Trump’s nostalgia for tough-on-crime 1970s New York increasingly feels like the sideshow. The real story of this past year, the story that will have the longer historical afterlife, is a quieter one. It is one of draining the intrinsic value from labor yoked to repetitive, inglorious and truly vital tasks: the maintenance of the civic home, on the one hand, and the literal home, on the other. (If you want to call these real, productive forms of labor feminized versus a masculine world of bullshit finance capital or big tech, I, for one, won’t object.)

In this bleak picture of 2025 Washington, both civil servants and undocumented workers were said to be living off ill-gotten gains. Both were targeted at the places of their work. Both, like the pair of mid-flight sea birds, found themselves in kinds of godless existential suspense. And both, I would argue in a more grandiose mood, if I could summon it, were subject to an elitist attack on the American work ethic. A work ethic that arrived in the rugged hills of New England with… the Puritans!

Leaving the museum, I retraced the perimeter of the protest on the National Mall, where it turned out I might have misunderstood the Calvinist commitments of the Handmaid girl whose outdated display had driven me away. Now sitting cross-legged, ringed by the roots of an American elm and the rim of her red dress, eyes closed, bodice pooling around her waist: She was topless? Stamp-sized leaves overlaid her nipples and inked across her chest in lipstick were the words “Non Violent Vibes.” (Two words, not one.)

The Puritans had their maypoles of Merry Mount and were, in reality, a band of certified neurotics (Max Weber’s description was always too somber). But even at this lefty protest, the Protestant work ethic—its seriousness, self-discipline, prudishness—appeared to be in somewhat dramatic retreat.

I supposed. Who the hell knew what was going on anymore. I was pregnant and needed to go home and lie down. [...]

●

Around Washington, the flat, SSRI-pilled Zoomers wear shirts that read like floating signifiers or non sequiturs. A girl brandishes SOLD OUT across her sweatshirt in Capitol Hill. (She sold out? Her shirt is sold out?) MAIN CHARACTER traipses toward the zoo in Northwest. (Surely the pandas are the protagonists?) LET’S GO FOR A WALK crosses Penn Quarter, alone, as if the invitation has gone declined. I haven’t seen a slogan fit for the moment of deep unease in a city in which 20 percent of the workforce is federal, tens of thousands have left or been fired since February, and where the unemployment rate has been leading the nation for months. Why not say what we mean? CANNED, FURLOUGHED or PROBATIONARY. DAMNED. SAVED.

In every other respect, the people of this city speak in a direct manner, so rarely a note of the ironical or bohemian. Washington can feel like inhabiting a LinkedIn hologram: transactional, oppressively chipper, neutered. At the tasteful, wood-paneled bistro, a young woman in athleisure sits alone reading Gung Ho! Increase Productivity, Profits, and Your Own Prosperity over a shrimp salad and pale coffee. (The endearing maître d’ who used to inhale drags of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. behind the counter seems to have evacuated his post.) Steel yourself: the first question out of a new acquaintance’s month really might be “What d’you do?”...

Laments are often operatic, duly so, but from people whose professional life and manner are the definition of restraint. A physician running miraculous clinical trials described to me a Looney Tunes world this past winter: a futile Road Runner-Coyote chase sequence, until the latest cuts made by the DOGE kid stuffed in the utility closet inevitably get reversed. Another fed worker is witnessing his unit transform into a “tabloid operation,” he says, “a craven institution stewarding the demise of the nation.” He continues: “What do you do stuck in a job with career-preservationists in charge who bend 93 different ways a day?”...

An elder nanny sidles up at the library to tell me about more ICE sightings. Arrests of nannies at Turtle Park, now Macomb. “They called the parents to come get the child,” she says of yet another raid I cannot confirm. When I ask her where she is hearing these reports—that I think they really might in fact be false—she just points to her phone, to the WhatsApp-group rumor mills, like it is an investigative report published by the Washington Post. It doesn’t matter that she is a citizen, she says. “They don’t care who you are, what your status is. And they go right to us,” she says, pointing to her skin and pursing her lips. Other nannies in the area are forgoing Venmo or check payments. Cash only. “Soviet practices=best practices in this climate!” a Russian-American mom texts me.

No one can even pretend anymore that Americans will take over all these jobs, particularly in the realm of construction or farming, giving the lie to an “American-made” future. An artist acquaintance has been photographing housing construction sites to imagine what it would look like for the power tools and saws to go silent in an industry where undocumented workers constitute more than 20 percent of the workforce. In a film she is making, she interviews a worker who says in Portuguese: “That guy that makes the hole, that breaks things, gets on the roof, lays down brick—they [Americans] don’t want to do that.” He adds, lightly: “So that is why they have us.” I hear of another young woman’s Bolsonarista father in São Paulo finally turning on the Bolsonaro of the North: “Who will do the work?”

The tariffs on trade suppose we want our goods “American-made,” returning the old glory back to the American working-class and blue-collar jobs. But by treating undocumented laborers in the appalling manner we are, it sends the message, rather loudly, that the work done by these individuals does not confer one ounce of dignity or worth. In fact, it disqualifies one from living even a quiet life on the margins. Who wants to be the understudy to the guy who worked so hard he was rewarded with being disappeared to a country he doesn’t even come from?

Another South American living near Rock Creek Park tells me he woke up recently in the middle of the night to the cry of a rabbit shrieking, pursued by a fox, an owl, some kind of predator. It was the most chilling sound he had ever heard. “I feel like that,” he says, “like a chased animal.”

by Noelle Bodick, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Winslow Homer, Right and Left

Aesthetics As a Housing Barrier?

Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier?

Patrick Collison’s YIMBY credentials are unimpeachable. He is a major backer of California YIMBY, the organization that has passed a stunning array of pro-housing bills in one of the most anti-development states in the nation. So it was interesting to see him claim that the movement has made a big mistake — or even been downright dishonest — by ignoring the aesthetics of apartment buildings:

For reference, here’s Sejong City in Korea, whose residential districts do indeed look rather bland and oppressive:

Some urbanists agreed, calling for regulatory reform that would allow American apartment buildings to look like the famous Haussmann buildings in Paris (depicted at the top of this post). So did some conservatives, which is unsurprising; intellectual conservatism has always called for a return to classical architecture and a rejection of modern styles. In fact, the idea that ugly building styles are a key reason that Americans disapprove of housing construction has been around quite a while, and it even has a name — “QIMBY”, meaning “quality in my back yard”.

Chris Elmendorf protested Patrick’s framing, arguing that YIMBYs have been active in pushing for reforms that would allow more beautiful buildings to be built in America: [...]

YIMBYs have been pushing for single-stair reforms that would allow more "Paris-like" buildings…The municipal design standards & reviews that YIMBY laws allow developers to bypass did not improve designs. Per [Arthur] Stamps's studies (the only relevant empirical evidence of which I'm aware), they made things worse…[T]he problem of housing aesthetics deserves more attention -- and is receiving more attention -- but it's not like YIMBYs broke something that was working.

Elmendorf also pointed out that California YIMBY itself recently came out with a plan to encourage the building of more beautiful multifamily housing. The plan reads like exactly the kind of thing that Patrick might like: [...]

If California wants more European-feeling mid-rise development with courtyards, better daylight, shade, and balconies, it has to keep modernizing the [building] code…Too many building, electrical, and fire rules (in California and across the U.S.) [forbid] the buildings people actually like: bright cross-ventilated homes, true courtyard buildings, and mixed-use ground floors. All these requirements – egress, stairs, corridor, and elevator – often make projects bulkier and require much bigger lots, limiting where we can build new housing…[T]he web of building code regulations denies light, proportion, street connections, courtyards, greenspace – everything that makes buildings feel humane…Passing single-stair reforms and elevator reforms makes smaller mid-rise buildings possible, which fit on smaller lots, can be nestled into existing buildings, add variety to the streetscape, and reduce the pressure for larger, monotonous developments.

So at least one prominent YIMBY organization — the one that Patrick supports — is already answering the call to focus on building aesthetics. Others are likely to follow.

I think that’s a good thing. Eliminating onerous building codes and regulations will kill two birds with one stone, making it easier to build housing even as it also makes it possible to build more of the European-style ornamentation that commentators always call for. And allowing American developers to experiment with ornamentation and alternative styles will help break up the sameness of an urban landscape dominated by endless forests of boxy 5-over-1 buildings.

But that said, I highly doubt that this — or any stylistic change — would move the needle on public acceptance of new apartment buildings.

First of all, I’m skeptical that regular Americans actually like the kinds of building styles that intellectuals often yearn for. If you plunk down old-looking European-style buildings in the middle of Houston or Seattle, people tend to ridicule them as cheesy and inauthentic. The typical insult is “pastiche”, a derogatory term for a style that jumbles and mixes old European styles (even though, as Samuel Hughes points out, mixing and matching older ideas is exactly how classic European building styles were created in the first place).

Many local design standards explicitly discourage old-style buildings. For example, Los Angeles’ planning department, in its design guide for Echo Park, writes: “Do not imitate historic architectural styles; a modern interpretation may be appropriate if architectural features are borrowed and replicated to a simpler form.”

Nor is it just old European-looking buildings that leave many Americans cold. Pietrzak and Mendelberg (2025) find that although people tend to dislike tall buildings, traditional brick facades fail to move the needle on support for housing. Alex Armlovich points out that when New York City came out with new limestone skyscrapers, only three were permitted. And Brooklyn Tower, a recently built art deco style skyscraper in Brooklyn, has drawn tons of criticism for its style.

And Elmendorf cautions that no one has yet managed to find a specific architectural style that Americans like enough to move the needle on their support for new housing: [...]

All this suggests that while some American intellectuals may pine for the cornices and mascarons of Haussmannian Paris, most Americans just think that style — and any old style — looks cheesy when it’s transplanted to an American context. This may be because Americans consciously think of their culture as a young one, more suited to modern styles than traditional ones. Or it may be because America’s artistic culture has always focused on critique and fault-finding. But whatever it is, it suggests that allowing — or even forcing — cities to build ornamented buildings will not garner a wave of popular support for new development.

Conversely, the places that do build a lot of housing tend not to build it in old, ornate European styles. Texas, which is one of the best states when it comes to building new housing, mostly constructs single-family homes with lawns. When it does build apartment buildings, they tend to look like this:

Texas builds them anyway, for much the same reason that the Koreans built Sejong City — they’re cheap and efficient, and the state needs them to support its rapid population growth.1 You do see a little experimentation with slightly more European-style apartments in a few places, but overall it’s just boxy and functional. The fundamental driver of housing abundance in Texas isn’t architectural beauty; it’s a culture and politics that values and seeks out economic growth.

Nor is ornamental architecture necessarily what makes people love a city. Traditionalists may sigh over old European styles, and urbanists may salivate over the superilles of Barcelona, but the city that has captured the hearts of Americans in recent years is Tokyo. Downtown Tokyo is a forest of electric lights, strung up along the sides of stubby concrete mid-rises called zakkyo buildings. There’s nary a fancy cornice to be found; instead, the beauty comes from the bright cheery emblems of commerce:

Tokyo’s residential neighborhoods have even less ornamentation. They often feature flat brown or white or tan facades, hanging power lines, and bare asphalt streets with no setbacks or lawns or even trees:

And yet these are absolutely enchanting places to live. Why? Not because of the architecture, but because of the design of the city itself. The small curving streets make perfect walking paths, undisturbed by zooming traffic. Mixed-use zoning gives the neighborhood a communal, lived-in feel. Plentiful public transit makes it easy and stress-free to get around, while Japan’s peerless public safety makes it fun to hang out on the street or in a park at any hour.

Americans who go to Japan have definitely noticed this:

It’s no coincidence, I think, that Japan is one of the best countries when it comes to building plenty of housing. Yes, most of its apartment buildings look like crap when evaluated in isolation on their pure architectural merits. But the urban system made up by those buildings is a wonderful place to live, and so Japanese people have few qualms about building up that system. And Americans go there and love it.

And if America built a bunch of Haussmann buildings instead of boxy 5-over-1s, it would probably only marginally improve the feel of the country’s cities. [...]

If you want American cities to look and feel so nice that Americans are willing to build housing in them, I think you have to do a lot more than give the buildings fancy facades. You have to do the hard work of putting in train lines, making side streets safe for pedestrians, rezoning for mixed use, and — perhaps most important — policing cities in order to ensure robust public safety.  [prescriptions follow:]

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: Wyatt Simpson on Unsplash/X/Minseong Kim via Wikimedia Commons/ Kevin Doran on Unsplash/ Kentin via Wikimedia Commons/Karan Singh on Unsplash

[ed. I imagine people might feel differently if Japan's commercial ornamentation districts were exported to America and composed mostly of Taco Bell, McDonald's, and other corporate fast food signage. In fact, we already have that, and it sucks.]

Nopack Snowpack

'On a Whole Other Level’ - Rapid snow melt-off in American west stuns scientists.

Snow surveys taking place across the American west this week are offering a grim prognosis, after a historically warm winter and searing March temperatures left the critical snowpack at record-low levels across the region.

Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will probably be too little too late.

“This year is on a whole other level,” said Dr Russ Schumacher, a Colorado State University climatologist, speaking about the intense heat that began rapidly melting the already sparse snowpack in March. “Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning.”

Acting as a water savings account of sorts, snowpacks are essential to water supply. Measurements taken across the west during the week of 1 April are viewed as important indicators of the peak amounts of water that might melt into reservoirs, rivers and streams and across thirsty landscapes through the summer.

During a critical survey in California’s Sierra Nevada on Wednesday, grass and mud could be seen through the thin white patchwork as state officials attempted to measure the meager snowpack.

“Normally we’d be standing right here,” Andy Reising, manager of California department of water resource’s snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit said, gesturing at chin height. The 5ft-tall tool typically thrust deep into the high berms on 1 April poked into the brown earth next to him. “There is actually no measurable snow.”

With zero depth and zero water content, this year’s annual April snow survey conducted at Phillips Station, was the second worst on record, beaten only by 2015 when officials “walked across a dry field”, Reising said.

It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.

California’s Sierra Nevada had just 4.9in of SWE, or 18% of average on Wednesday, according to the state’s department of water resources.

In the Colorado River headwaters, an important basin that supplies more than 40 million people across several states, along with 5.5m acres of agriculture, 30 tribal nations, and parts of Mexico, had just over 4in of SWE on Monday, or 24% of average. That’s less than half what was previously considered the record low.

Schumacher said the incoming storm could slow the early melting but won’t be enough to pull the basins back from the brink. Snow water equivalent measurements going into April were at levels typically seen in May or June, after months of melt-off, according to Schumacher.

The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the south-west and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, was at 8%.

“This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past,” Schumacher said.

‘Nothing short of shocking’

Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on 8 March. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle – a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off.

“March is often a big month for snowstorms,” Schumacher said. “Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth.”

More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was “likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west”, climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week.

“Beyond the conspicuous ‘weirdness’ of it all,” Swain added, “the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west.” [...]

In the Colorado River Basin, the situation could be even more dire. The two largest reservoirs on the Colorado River are Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which together account for about 90% of storage, are 25% and 33% full accordingly, as of 29 March, and there is little to fill them.

Already officials are in the process of relocating a floating marina on Lake Powell in anticipation of the quickly receding water levels, as experts warn the vital reservoir could drop to the lowest levels recorded since it was filled in the 1960s. If they fall far enough, the system would cease to function altogether. So-called “deadpool” – when water isn’t high enough to pass through the dams, generate hydroelectric power, and be distributed downriver – would be catastrophic.

The Colorado River has been overdrawn for more than a century but rising temperatures and lower precipitation are putting more pressure on the system that depended on by cities, farms, industries and wildlife across the west. The extreme conditions have added more urgency and greater tensions to fraught negotiations over who will bear the brunt of badly needed cuts. Seven states that have blown past two key deadlines are still locked in a stalemate over how the river’s essential resources will be managed through a hotter and drier future.

by Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Nasa Worldview

[ed. See also: Western US states fail to negotiate crucial Colorado River deal: ‘Mother nature isn’t going to bail us out’ (Guardian).]

Fuzz: Wildlife Conflict in the Modern Era

Recently, I read Fuzz: When Natures Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. Like all of her books, it is a meandering journey that touches on a common theme. Although the subtitle makes it seem that the theme is nature crime, the theme is more about conflicts between bureaucracy, modernity and nature rather than crime itself. A more accurate but worse title would be Fuzz: The Weird Ways Humans Deal with Nature while Navigating Bureaucracy and the Impossibility of People Wanting to be around Wildlife without Ever Being Inconvenienced. Some examples Roach explores include the Indian government’s attempt to sterilize monkeys, how the city of Aspen deals with bears raiding trash cans, and the many failed attempts at getting rid of birds including the infamous Australian emu war.

Reading Fuzz was often frustrating because most of the problems share the same basic structure regardless of time or place. Humans disturb a local ecosystem through moving there or extracting resources. Animals then wander into human settlements in response to ecosystem change that has worsened their food supply, altered the predator-prey ratio, or made it easier to get caloric rich food. Humans react by engaging in one of two strategies. Strategy one is to kill everything, which is usually ineffective because it does not affect the population levels or results in extinction (at least in the region) which results in further ecosystem change. Strategy two is to feed the wild animals because that seems like the nice thing to do except that feeding them encourages the animals to keep going into the human settlements which makes the animals bolder which leads to more conflict and potentially leads to attacks. Once this has started, the animals become so used to relying on people for food that they cannot be integrated back into the wild. Sometimes people become so frustrated and angry that they go back to the first strategy of kill everything.

These problems can seem intractable. People have a hard time being convinced that killing everything doesn’t work and the people who don’t want to kill the animals have a hard time accepting that their help may makes things worse. They continue to feed the wild animals, resist methods that would discourage the animals (such as locking trashcans), and mainly advocate translocation (moving the animal to a different area) even though translocation rarely works. Whether because of blinding love or hate, people have a hard time handling wild animals wandering into their homes and cities.

Even though reading about these issues was frustrating, Fuzz left me feeling more inspired than dejected. There are examples of humans humanely and successfully addressing human-wildlife conflict and limiting the presence of introduced flora and fauna. They do so through careful study of local ecosystems, which includes the humans who live there and how they feel about wildlife. What was the most inspiring thing in the book was seeing how much the animal rights and environmental movements have changed how the public handles these wildlife issues. Before the 1970s, the kill everything approach was the norm. Now it is not.

Throughout these stories, Roach makes the case that the best way to deal with wildlife conflict is to find better ways to live with animals that isn’t killing them or making them reliant on humans. Sometimes the solution is simple and easy. After multiple chapters of ridiculous attempts to stop birds from eating crops, Roach argues that it’s better to do nothing or to hire a human to scare the birds off. Other times the solution is complicated. In New Zealand, there’s research being done on using genetic engineering to induce infertility among mice and other destructive, introduced species as a way to reduce the population without mass poisoning. The researchers are trying to limit unintended consequences but there will always be risk. The important question is whether the unknown risk of doing something is worth the known risk of doing nothing. I appreciate that there are people out there doing the often thankless work of trying to make humans and wildlife happy. Roach did an excellent job of showing the myriad of ways this plays out and, unlike other books I’ve read, Roach discusses these issues without claiming that now is the first time humans have tried caring about nature and ecological balance.

by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts |  Read more:

Image: Fuzz

[ed. This issue has played out forever in my old hometown of Anchorage, Alaska (as you can imagine), and will probably never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. It's a form of politics. What's the science say, and what are the options? How feasible are mitigative policies, and how much will they cost? Finally arriving at the most relevant question: what kind of city do you want to live in (that would perpetually kill its animal populations and modify its natural environment)?]

A Critical Political Season Could Decide if Alaska Is a Failed ‘Petrostate’

A governor who spent two terms cutting services to preserve Alaskans’ oil-funded annual checks is leaving office. Voters must now decide what comes next for the state’s faltering fiscal model.

Juneau, Alaska, takes pride in providing services that some larger cities would shy away from — child care and housing assistance, arts grants, three libraries, two public pools, an arboretum, a ski area and a pledge that all 250 miles of borough roads will be plowed, if possible, within 48 hours after a snowstorm ends.

But the system that has made that possible — a steady flow of revenue from oil production — is cracking like Arctic ice in spring, not just in Juneau, Alaska’s capital, but across the state. Even with the war in Iran sending oil prices sky high, the oil-dependent model that has financed generous public services while giving Alaskans annual checks from a Permanent Fund can no longer keep both promises.

And a political year that will include a wide-open governor’s race and one of the most watched Senate contests in the country could help decide the future of what has become known in some circles as a “petrostate,” for its public reliance on oil production, on the brink.

“The petrostate hasn’t quite failed yet,” said Joseph Geldhof, a Juneau lawyer, but “it will if something does not change.”

Anything that increases global oil prices is good for Alaska’s finances, and state economists expect that the Iran war will mean a revenue bump of at least $500 million this fiscal year, as well as a similar windfall next year if the fighting continues.

But that money is essentially already accounted for to fill existing budget gaps, and short-term war gains won’t solve either the immediate problem for Alaska residents — rising gas prices hit them hard, too — or the long-term supply-and-demand fundamentals, such as the spread of electric vehicles in Europe and China, the freeing up of supply from Venezuela and the long-term decline in production along Alaska’s North Slope.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican who has spent nearly eight years cutting state government services to protect Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend, is leaving office this year with one of the lowest approval ratings of any governor, according to recent polls. The crowded race to succeed him coincides with Senator Dan Sullivan’s bid for re-election against a formidable Democratic challenger, former Representative Mary Peltola.

Those elections pose a fundamental question for Alaskans: Will voters opt for more financial austerity in the name of preserving their annual payments and almost nonexistent state taxation, or will they accept a more politically fraught reimagining of the state’s fiscal structure?

The governor called it “a philosophical debate over the role of government.”

“If you look at where we are and how expensive things are here, we just don’t have the ability to do the kinds of things you can do in Texas or Iowa,” Mr. Dunleavy said. “It’s not going to be roads everywhere, schools everywhere, services everywhere. Alaska is a different place.” [ed. especially if you give away all your revenue.]

The math no longer works, even for the minimal level of services Mr. Dunleavy describes. Nils Andreassen, executive director of the Alaska Municipal League, estimated that one in 10 local governments are now “semi-functioning, unable to keep the doors open for a full year.” He predicted some will eventually close.

Brett Watson, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, agreed.

“Practically speaking, we are probably at the end of our ability to continue to pay a dividend, provide the same level of state services and not broadly pay taxes,” he said.

Alaska’s financial dilemma started in 1968 with the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. Voters and elected leaders created a sovereign wealth fund, whose principal cannot be touched without a vote of the people. They legislated an annual dividend for nearly every resident and abolished the state income tax.

But as oil production has risen, not only in the Middle East but in new parts of the United States, Russia and elsewhere, prices have become more volatile and Alaska’s revenues have plunged.

The war in Iran and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have offered Alaska politicians reprieves, Mr. Watson said, “but waiting for global disruption isn’t a long-term strategy.”

Alaskan lawmakers now use interest, dividends and investment profits generated by the sovereign wealth fund for government operating costs, and for an annual dividend to residents. That payout peaked at $3,284 in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and oil prices topped $100 a barrel, but it has averaged $1,370 over the last decade.

This year, even before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the governor asked legislators for $3,600 per person, and he proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee a dividend in perpetuity.

But such payments now compete directly with core government work like road maintenance, education and prisons. Mr. Dunleavy has used his line-item veto hundreds of times to cut programs and preserve the annual dividend, which he views as “nonnegotiable” because “the people know what to do with their money better than politicians do.”

As state government shrank, local governments either had to go without many basic services or go it alone. Juneau has chosen the second option, using local money to help keep people in a region reachable only by plane or boat, and where prices reflect that remoteness.

“Go take a look at another town that’s 32,000 people, maybe in the Midwest,” said Laura McDonnell, who owns a store selling Alaska-made crafts and jewelry just steps from where cruise ships dock. “How many performing arts centers and libraries and museums and swimming pools do those communities have?”

Plenty of communities subsidize housing construction, said Neil Steininger, who is a Juneau city and borough assemblyman and a former state budget director, “and we extend that to other things because we believe they’re important for quality of life.”

“I don’t skate, and I don’t swim, and I don’t play hockey, but those things are a big part of why I’m here,” he said. [...]

Many Republican leaders continue to maintain that Alaska is on fundamentally strong fiscal ground: Like a family that is house rich but cash poor, Alaska just needs to make some changes in its financial structure.

“We are as far from a failed petrostate as you can imagine, but we have a revenue problem,” said the co-chairman of the Alaska Senate Finance Committee, Bert Stedman, whose office is decorated with historical photos, maps and MAGA memorabilia.

Mr. Dunleavy said the dividend was created to ensure both that the natural resources fueling Alaska’s economy would belong to its residents and that future legislatures could not spend oil money recklessly.

But lawmakers have not approved his $3,600-an-Alaskan dividend request. Instead, politicians in both major parties hope upcoming elections for governor and Senate will clarify what voters actually want — changes to the dividend, a seasonal sales tax aimed at tourists, an income tax or still more cuts.

“It is going to take a governor willing to put it all on the line,” said Bryce Edgmon, who is the state House speaker and a former Democrat who is now an independent. “Just saying ‘protect the dividend’ is no longer an answer.”

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, the top four candidates will advance from an Aug. 18 primary to the November general election. Most of the prominent Republican candidates, including Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and the conservative activist Bernadette Wilson, echo Mr. Dunleavy’s calls to protect the dividend at almost any cost. Most of the Democrats support a more substantial remaking of the state’s fiscal structure, including by changing the formula for funding public schools and potentially making oil companies pay more in taxes.

In all, 17 people are seeking the governor’s mansion, which sits in the shadow of Mount Juneau and up a hill from the hard decisions facing Juneau’s civic leaders. As they ponder what to cut, they’re also worried that the current financial crisis, like others in the past, will not be enough to push through real structural change.

by By Anna Griffin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson

[ed. Republicans and greedy Alaskans have killed what used to be a unique and vibrant state. I say this fully acknowledging that Republicans were once the most vociferous protectors of what we'd call Alaska's culture and pioneering spirit, but that was a long time ago. When the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) was being debated shortly after oil started flowing - and even before that, when the state received $900 million in lease sale revenue for future Prudhoe Bay development - I thought it was a bad idea, giving free money away to people just for living there. I understood the reasoning - that politicians and special interest groups couldn't be trusted not to blow all the sudden wealth - which, in fact, is what they've done with most of the account's alternate savings accounts and contingency funds (interest on investments, criminal penalties, etc). Everything but the principal, which is constitutionally protected. What's worse was the decision to get rid of state income taxes. Once you do that it's almost impossible to get those taxes resinstated. Human nature. Governor Jay Hammond, who conceived of the PFD program, imagined it being based on longevity and commitment - the longer you lived in Alaska the more you'd receive in payments. But the state supreme court struck that down for being discriminatory and unconsititutional. So, anybody that came up and stayed for just a year qualified. Even the military. You can imagine how that has affected (infected?) the population and mindset of residents and politicians ever since. Red as any red state, Alaska was, and continues to be, one of the most socialist states in the country. It also receives (or used to, anyway) more federal dollars per capita than any other state. So greed and a deep sense of entitlement from these handouts became the new ethic. That's how the current govenor got elected - by promising massive PFDs that would exceed anything ever seen, while cutting govenment spending and other essential services to the bone. Which he has done every year during his tenure. Now they're broke and we'll see how much people still living there care about Alaska's future. Are they willing to make the difficult decisions that will put it on a sustainable course, or continue to push for endless freebies? I have my guesses. As an aside - if you can contribute to Mary Peltola's senate campaign for Senate, please do. She's the real deal, and cares deeply about the future of the state, its history, and its people and is running against another one of Trump's zombies that coasted in on his coattails. You can learn more about her at this link. See also: Thanks for all the fish (ADN), which also includes links to recent stories like this: Anchorage School Board approves ‘severe’ budget with hundreds of staff layoffs and 3 school closures (ST).]

Scary Cool Sad Goodbye 88

“I did not gamble, cared not at all about the Mob and even less about Howard Hughes. But there were other stories and other people, and there were days when I told myself that through the travail of others I might come to grips with myself, that I might, as it were, find absolution through voyeurism. Those were the good old days.”

                                               ~ Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, John Gregory Dunne

LED arrows inside Harry Reid Airport pointed left to the carousels and right to the liquor store: “the nation’s only non-duty free liquor store located in an airport baggage claim,” the advertisements bragged. “Stop by before getting your luggage to stock up on what you need. We know why you came to Las Vegas, and Liquor Library is here to help you.” The dusk settled into darkness as I smoked a cigarette on the second floor of the parking garage, watching the distant lights of the Strip and the rippling glow of the Sphere. The 108 bus idled at the terminal beneath me, its destination flashing: “PARADISE: EXPECT DELAYS.”

“We know why you came to Las Vegas...” Well, that made one of us. I did not care for “nightlife,” gambling gave me the willies, and I’d already gotten married on a cheap whim once before. But I had never been, and my book was through with edits, and it seemed like an opportunity for a hard personal reset plus some quality material, what others called eavesdropping. Whether or not I would “have fun” was basically beside the point. In writing, unlike in Vegas, the more you lose, the more you win.

Searching for secondhand clarity, I’d started a book on the plane. “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas,” begins John Gregory Dunne’s 1974 memoir about his six months in Sin City confronting his recent obsession with death and avoiding his wife and young child. The year is 1969, and Dunne is doing swell on paper: two published books, three-year-old daughter, oceanfront home in Malibu. And yet he exists in a state of panicked dread about his health, his writer’s block, and most of all, his marriage, which is perilously frayed. “I sometimes had the feeling that we went from crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town,” he writes, “every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.” His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays.

After months of languishing, Dunne gives himself an assignment, something to do to take his mind off of himself. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems,” he writes. “There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you, someone to whom you can ladle out understanding as if it were a charitable contribution.” As for where he will pursue “salvation without commitment,” a random billboard on La Brea serves as inspiration — a picture of a roulette wheel and a message “with a Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP.”

And so he does, moving into a sad apartment off the Strip to watch TV and eat junk food and befriend some local characters who help him write an account of America’s most sordid city, which doubles as a portrait of one man’s personal rock-bottom. The people whom I mention are not his friends, exactly; their relationships are predicated by Dunne’s private knowledge that these eccentrics are grist for the mill. He does not much like Jackie Kasey, a painfully unfunny lounge comic who once opened for Elvis, though he still follows him from casino to casino, taking notes. “I tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,” Dunne writes with a guiltiness that I know all too well, though his shame often feels misplaced for a man who’s run off on his family under the pretense of art.

“What’s new with you?” asks his wife, Joan Didion, when he calls.

“Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight,” he says. “She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.”

“It’s research,” she replies, unfazed. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.”

“But I don’t want to fuck her.”

A silence on the other end of the phone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she says after some time.

I checked into my room at the El Cortez, a dingy old casino full of leathery retirees glued to babbling slot machines with Orientalist themes. Far too sober to even briefly consider tossing $40 away at the roulette table, I set off on foot past the drive-through wedding chapel where Britney Spears was married, the 24-hour pawn shop from Pawn Stars, the jailhouse that I recognized from TV’s JAIL. It was too late to turn back by the time it had become clear that the only pedestrians in downtown Las Vegas were tweakers, the homeless, and confused people like myself. I speed-walked down quiet side streets in whose shadows I could sense the occasional moving presence, exhaling when I reached a strip mall where a neon sign above an unmarked door said simply “BAR.”

Open 24 hours a day since the early 1960s, the Huntridge Tavern was a windowless dive bar and package liquor store with video poker screens at almost every barstool and karaoke until 3 a.m. each Tuesday, which it was. Milling through the smoky room were locals of the alternative persuasion: aging punks, Mexican goths, women whose chests heaved from tight pleather corsets. A steampunk fellow in a sleeveless vest and kilt drank directly from a pitcher of amber ale as the karaoke MC gave a lugubrious performance of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. “Nine dollars,” said the bartender as she slid me a High Life and a full rocks glass of tequila. “Wait, no, I overcharged you. It’s just eight.”

Breaking from his keno game, a 50-something metalhead in a Bret Michaels bandana showed off his permanent eyeliner. “Yeah, that was my midlife crisis,” he said with a shrug, downing the last of his Dos Equis. “Four sessions, 90 minutes each. Hurt like a bitch.” On his phone, he scrolled through pictures of his latest ex-girlfriend. “She’s an ex-Playboy chick,” he gloated. “Hey, I like what I like.”

A pair of older men settled in beside me, wealthy-looking Boomers I initially pegged as perverts, misplaced among the grizzled lifers and polyamorous goths. In fact, they were not creeps but friendly regulars — a longtime local journalist and a prominent restaurateur whose second marriage was to a famous female magician who pioneered the illusion known as the “Drill of Death.” “What are you doing here in Vegas?” the men asked me. “The same thing I do back home,” I said. “Drinking in bars.” They liked this answer enough to pay for my next round.

The journalist shared with me a passage that his friend had written about the tavern. “A few drinks in, I’d talk to anyone — stray cats, my friends called them. A plumber. Coke dealer. A wannabe magician. Their jobs fascinated me; their confessions came easy. One was new in town. One’s card tricks failed more than they succeeded. One turned out to be a raging racist; we sent him packing. Characters with character. Every race, color, creed, gender. My mother always said you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Hey girl, you good?” a woman whispered when the men went to the bathroom. “If those guys are bothering you, you can sit with me.” I thanked her for the offer, but she had no need to worry. I did not know how to tell her I was right where I belonged.

by Meaghan Garvey, Scary Cool Sad Goodbye | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Carving Up Big Bend

 

A massive border wall expansion is underway (Washington Post/Archive Today)

TERLINGUA, Texas — The Trump administration is building hundreds of miles of border wall through iconic national parks, public lands and ecologically sensitive wilderness, empowered by provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill that provided $46.5 billion in funding and a 2005 law that waived dozens of environmental rules for border security projects. [...]

The aggressive pace — three new miles of wall a week — has alarmed advocates and national parks staff who say the construction will destroy pristine country, threaten endangered species, and cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites. And it has sparked an unusual degree of bipartisan pushback, with sheriffs, conservative county judges, environmentalists and Texas state lawmakers lobbying Trump officials to change course. [...]

The Department of Homeland Security has issued waivers under the 2005 REAL ID Act, allowing the department to disregard the wall’s impact on plants and animals normally protected by the Endangered Species Act. The project is exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act — a sweeping law that mandates an extensive review of a federal action’s potential impacts and public consultation that can take years...

Sorting through complicated legal and property ownership issues slowed down border wall construction in Texas during the first Trump administration. But the federal government is now skipping meetings with local officials and landowners and awarding contracts to out-of-state firms. Last month, the Army Corps of Engineers sent packets to Texas landowners along the wall’s path containing maps showing the land they planned to take. The proposed construction could include anything from ground sensors and infrared cameras to 30-foot steel bollards affixed with floodlights and gravel roads for Border Patrol vehicles — and often all of the above.

Big Bend National Park has emerged as a political flash point in the new expansion, with many landowners and conservationists describing a border wall as an unnecessary encroachment from big government seizing one of the last vestiges of unspoiled freedom and frontier.

by Arelis R. Hernández, Jake Spring, John Muyskens and Thomas Simonetti, Washington Post | Read more:
Images: YouTube/WaPo

[ed. Of all the national parks in the lower 48 Big Bend is the one I'd most like to visit. Beautiful and rugged, and not overly ruined by tourism (yet) or walls (yet). More great pictures in the article. If you've seen the movie Fandango (with Kevin Costner) you know the area. Then there's Marfa (a small nearby arts community) and Terlingua (ref: Jerry Jeff Walker's Viva Terlingua). And, a night sky that's been documented as the darkest in the country (floodlights will do wonders for that). I guess it's ok to just ignore every law on the books and outright take people's property against their will in this administration.]

Iran's Gulf Gambit

It is perhaps a good day to remember that, despite the facial hair affinities, Iran is not Hamas. Its missiles are not home-made projectiles lobbed without guidance systems from the rubble of a collapsed UNRWA building. When an Iranian drone strikes the airport or the Fairmont in Dubai, it strikes them because someone in Tehran decided it should — a deliberate strategic choice, not an accident of indiscriminate targeting.

There is a clear strategy here. The question is whether it is a sound one.

Tehran’s desperate gambit is as follows: the Gulf economic model — the Emirates’ model above all — is built on the promise of the oasis of stability in a neighborhood of chaos: that capital flows freely, that tourists, businessmen, Russian oligarchs, and expats arrive safely, that the skyline is always glamorous. The GDP of the Gulf states is functionally a confidence index. Strike the airports, the hotels, the commercial districts of Dubai and Doha and Manama, and you strike the foundation on which the entire post-oil diversification project rests. Iran is clearly betting that the Gulf states’ extraordinarily low tolerance for economic volatility will translate into political pressure on Washington to end the operation before it achieves its objectives.

There are good reasons to think this bet could work, and Tehran is not being irrational in making it... The Iranian calculation is that a sustained campaign of economic disruption across the Gulf will collapse American political will before it collapses the Islamic Republic.

But this time Tehran may be miscalculating, and badly.

The difference is scale. Previous Iranian attacks were deniable, limited, and targeted — a drone strike on an Aramco facility here, a proxy attack on Abu Dhabi there — enough to send a message without forcing a strategic pivot towards cost absorption. What happened this weekend is categorically different. Iran launched ballistic missiles at the territory of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan simultaneously, killing civilians in Abu Dhabi, striking hotels in Dubai, hitting airports, and targeting the economic and civilian infrastructure of every GCC capital except Muscat. The distinction between a calibrated signal and an act of war against the entire Gulf system at once is not a matter of interpretation.

And this, likely, changes the political logic entirely from the past episodes. When the threat was occasional and deniable, hedging made sense — keep channels open to Tehran, diversify partnerships, avoid being drawn into an American confrontation that might end inconclusively. When Iranian missiles are landing on your hotels, your airports, and your residential districts in broad daylight, hedging ceases to be a viable strategy and becomes a dangerous capitulation that poses greater risk to your future and stability.

The Gulf states did not choose this war, but Iran’s decision to strike their territory was not, as Tehran claims, merely retaliation against American assets on their soil. It was a deliberate strategy to weaponize Gulf economic fragility against Washington — to make the pain of the operation fall on the states most likely to demand its immediate cessation. The US bases merely provided the pretext, but the hotels, airports, and commercial districts are the actual targets, because those are what the Gulf leaderships cannot afford to see burning on international television. Tehran has just demonstrated, in the most visceral terms possible, that neutrality offers no protection against a regime that treats its neighbors as targets regardless of their diplomatic position.

My assessment is that the Gulf capitals are now far more likely to press Washington to finish the job — harder, faster, and more decisively — than to press for a premature ceasefire. [...]

The logic of the Gulf’s position is now effectively inverted from what Iran anticipated: the risk is no longer that the operation escalates too far but that it stops too soon, leaving a regime that has demonstrated both the willingness and the capability to strike the Gulf’s economic heart still standing and seeking revenge.

But Gulf tolerance, however firm in this moment, is not infinite. The Gulf leaderships are drawing down a finite reservoir of political and economic capital to absorb the costs of Iranian retaliation — and that reservoir has a floor, one that drops faster if Iran escalates from hotels and airports to critical infrastructure — desalination plants, power grids, the systems on which Gulf life physically depends. Every day that Iranian missiles continue to strike Gulf territory without a visible degradation in Tehran’s capacity to launch them is a day closer to the point where the calculus flips back.

Washington and Jerusalem are effectively operating on a clock set not only by their own military timelines but by the Gulf’s diminishing tolerance for this sustained punishment. The operation, thus, must demonstrably cripple Iran’s ability to project force across the Gulf before the political will that is currently underwriting it exhausts itself.

Tehran’s bet was that Gulf volatility intolerance would outweigh Gulf threat perception — a reasonable bet based on the precedent of past provocations that extracted disproportionate political concessions. But past precedent involved pinpricks, not salvos. Iran just showed every Gulf leader, in a single morning, exactly what the Islamic Republic does when it is cornered, and the answer to that demonstration will not likely be accommodation.

by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, The Abrahamic Metacritique |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Maybe, but Iran can continue pounding US military bases and communications sites, along with the occasional "errant" hotel strike, and still tank global oil markets with operations in the Strait of Hormuz. That capability won't go away. Yes? Update: this assessment appears to be spot on. See: Saudi Leader Is Said to Push Trump to Continue Iran War in Recent Calls. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sees a “historic opportunity” to remake the region (NYT).]