Is it true Thanksgiving was invented by the editor of Harper’s Bazaar?
Right idea, wrong magazine. Thanksgiving as we know it today — at least on the scale we know it — is largely the creation of Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first women’s magazines. Mrs. Hale spent 36 years browbeating public officials high and low before finally getting Thanksgiving declared a national holiday in 1863.
{ Tim Geoghegan | Right now on the Amazon page for the pepper spray used by Lt. John Pike… }
related { Pepper spray and cocaine, a little known lethal combination }
bonus [thanks Tobias]:
Two men have been arrested for installing “skimmers” on 11 separate Chase ATMs near Union Square in January. They stole $300K altogether. Maybe some was yours!
related { Using a credit card induces euphoria, new research shows. }
The drop in street crime in New York City after 1990 is not only the largest decline ever documented in a major city but also a major test of the conventional wisdom that has dominated crime policy in the United States for a generation. (…)
Part of New York’s good fortune was the tailwind of a national crime decline during the 1990s, but the New York decline was twice as large and almost twice as long as the national drop. Why was that? What can we learn from this experience to help other cities?
{ NY Post | Continue reading | More: How New York Became Safe | City Journal }
We have the rise of the two-earner household and so previously if you just had the head of household working, and the head of household lost his job, it was less of an issue to move. Now if you have both members of the couple working and one of them loses their job, it’s very problematic to try to locate and try to find a better opportunity for both people. That’s one of the things that’s sort of been supporting large cities. If you look at what the data says–there’s been kind of a lot of work on this in the past two decades–it suggests, especially in recent decades, density has become quite important for improving productivity. (…) When a particular industry has a lot of participants in one geographical location, the whole industry gets better. It’s not just that there’s more competition, although that’s part of it, but that there’s a lot of cross-pollination of ideas between the participants, new spin-offs get started; so many aspects of that process take place in Silicon Valley, one of the examples you use, Boston, and other places like that; or in New York, the finance sector–some of them not so healthy–but a lot of innovations taking place that are harder to take place in geographically disparate locations. (…)
Places like New York, Boston, Washington, the Bay area–these are places that have been incredibly economically successful over the last ten years, and I think a lot of that is due to the way a lot of new technology has supported the high levels of human capital that they have. Made those places more productive. What’s striking is that this economic success, growth in wages, employment, to some extent, has not translated into a lot of population growth. In fact, quite the opposite. There has been some population growth there but most of that is due to natural increase or immigration. (…)
There’s been some interesting research on this lately which is that essentially there was no surplus labor in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. Pretty low unemployment rate, like 2-3%. That was great for the workers who could afford to be there. Salaries were skyrocketing. But it was very difficult to attract new people. You wonder why, if salaries are going up so much, why wouldn’t people just be flooding into this market and taking advantage of that; and that’s because housing prices were growing even faster than compensation. So even as the tech industry was booming, people were leaving Silicon Valley. I think what’s interesting about that is that it put a chill on entrepreneurship; made it very lucrative to stay at a place that was established, to keep piling up stock options. It was much better to be a salaried worker than to be self-employed, so the rate of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley at this point was much lower than the national average. You have a place that’s producing some of the best ideas; it’s a center for innovation; and it’s important that we start new businesses in the center of innovation–that’s what the research tells us. And yet it was very unattractive to start a new business at that point because the labor market was so tight, thanks to the tightness of the housing market.
Where are the cool kids: Williamsburg or the East Village?
We’re in Bushwick, actually, and we’re really sick of being overrun by yuppies and undergraduates. A new coffee shop called Cup just opened across the street from my apartment and a 16 oz. cup of drip is $2.75. It’s obscene. (…)
Sartre or Camus?
No, thanks.
By the 1980s, the onset of puberty, if not actual menstruation, had gone into free fall–a change so sudden and pronounced that something more than normal evolution must have been at work. In a landmark 1997 study of 17,000 [US] girls, more than 10% of white girls and an astonishing 37.8% of black girls were showing early breast development by age 8. (…)
Later studies, one in 1998 and another in 2010, included Hispanics and produced similar results. On average, 2 out of every 10 white girls, 3 out of 10 Latinas and 4 out of 10 black girls are showing breast development by age 8.
Obesity, a well-established puberty accelerant, is high on the list of suspects.
photo { Mustafah Abdulaziz }
He is one of New York’s busiest casting directors, yet very few know of his work. (…)
For some 15 years, Mr. Weston has been providing the New York Police Department with “fillers” — the five decoys who accompany the suspect in police lineups.
Detectives often find fillers on their own, combing homeless shelters and street corners for willing participants. In a pinch, police officers can shed their uniforms and fill in. But in the Bronx, detectives often pay Mr. Weston $10 to find fillers for them.
A short man with a pencil-thin beard, Mr. Weston seems a rather unlikely candidate for having a working relationship with the Police Department, even an informal one. He is frequently profane, talks of beating up anyone who crosses him, and spends quite a bit of his money on coconut-flavored liquor.
But Mr. Weston points out that he has never failed to produce lineups when asked, no matter what time of night. “I never say no to money,” he said.
Across the nation, police lineups are under a fresh round of legal scrutiny, as recent studies have suggested that mistaken identifications in lineups are a leading cause of wrongful convictions, and that witnesses can be steered toward selecting the suspect arrested by the police.
But for all the attention that lineups attract in legal circles, Mr. Weston’s role in finding lineup fillers is largely unknown. Few defense lawyers and prosecutors, though they spar over the admissibility of lineups in court, have heard of him.
Using within-state variation in employment and unemployment, we find that recreational exercise tends to increase as employment decreases. In addition, we also find that individuals substitute into television watching, sleeping, childcare, and housework. However, this increase in exercise as well as other activities does not compensate for the decrease in work-related exertion due to job-loss. Thus total physical exertion, which prior studies have not analyzed, declines.
A survey conducted in 2006 by political scientist Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University showed that only 14 percent of American adults consider evolution “definitely true” while roughly a third believe it to be “absolutely false.” Out of a sampler of 34 countries, only Turkey was less accepting of Darwin’s theories, while in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, and France, better than 80 percent of the adults questioned sided with Darwin. Perhaps more disquieting is the fact that 20 years ago about seven percent of U.S. adults were uncertain about evolution; that number has since tripled.
The uniquely American aspect to this resurgence of religious fundamentalism is reiterated by a chart showing the relationship of wealth to religious belief republished in the June 2, 2010 opinion section of by the New York Times (“Why Is America Religious?”), which demonstrates that “the wealthier a country is, the less important religion is to that country. The one exception: The United States.”
On a peninsula southeast of Beijing, developer Vincent Lee wants to copy New York City—literally.
Two years into its ten-year construction plan, Yujiapu is still a field of cranes, fenced along the perimeter and hazy behind the smog. The only thing that resembles New York City is a diorama in the lobby of Binhai New Area CBD Office, where bureaucrats like Vincent Lee of the Business Bureau, are working to deliver on their ambitious promise of making this 3.86 sq km area the “largest single financial center on the world.”
oil on board { Richard Estes, Staten Island Ferry Arriving Manhattan, 2011 }
Annie Platoff, a librarian at UC Santa Barbara, is on a mission to find out what happened to the American flags that astronauts planted on the moon during the six lunar landings.
Platoff’s research pinpointed four of them, including the one from Apollo 17, the final lunar mission. At the very least, the nylon national symbols are “tattered” and have “darkened” over the years. She speculates that the other two, planted during Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, fell victim to the ignition gases emitted from the lunar module during blast-off.
artwork { Jasper Johns, Green Flag, 1956 | Graphite pencil, crayon and collage on paper }
The practice of naming storms (tropical cyclones) began years ago in order to help in the quick identification of storms in warning messages because names are presumed to be far easier to remember than numbers and technical terms. (…)
In the beginning, storms were named arbitrarily. An Atlantic storm that ripped off the mast of a boat named Antje became known as Antje’s hurricane. Then the mid-1900’s saw the start of the practice of using feminine names for storms.
In the pursuit of a more organized and efficient naming system, meteorologists later decided to identify storms using names from a list arranged alpabetically. Thus, a storm with a name which begins with A, like Anne, would be the first storm to occur in the year.Before the end of the 1900’s, forecasters started using male names for those forming in the Southern Hemisphere. (…)
Since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms have been named from lists originated by the National Hurricane Center. (…) Six lists are used in rotation. Thus, the 2008 list will be used again in 2014.
related { This isn’t the first time we’ve met Hurricane Irene | As the storm’s outer bands reached New York on Saturday night, two kayakers capsized and had to be rescued off Staten Island }
{ The most valuable coin in the world sits in the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in lower Manhattan. It’s Exhibit 18E, secured in a bulletproof glass case with an alarm system and an armed guard nearby. The 1933 Double Eagle, considered one of the rarest and most beautiful coins in America, has a face value of $20—and a market value of $7.6 million. | How did a Philadelphia family get hold of $40 million in gold coins, and why has the Secret Service been chasing them for 70 years? | Businessweek | full story }
{ In May 2010, a tattered and brittle map was discovered in storage at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Experts identified it as a rare item, a Bernard Ratzer “Plan of the City of New York” map in its 1770 state. Until then, only three copies were thought to exist. After a painstaking restoration to remove layers of shellac and grime and repair dozens of breaks, the map is now behind plexiglass and ready to be displayed to the public. | NY Times | full story }
Here is the great irony: S&P (and the rest of the ratings agencies) helped contribute in no small way to the overall economic crisis. The toadies rated junk securitized mortgage backed paper AAA because they were paid to do so by banks.
They are utterly corrupt, and should have received the corporate death penalty (ala Arthur Anderson).
related { Standard & Poor’s removed the United States government from its list of risk-free borrowers for the first time since it was granted an AAA rating in 1917. | Standard & Poor’s (S&P) is a United States–based financial-services company, headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies. | S&P’s credit ratings }
photo { Scott Eells }
While the Frenchman credited with inventing dry cleaning started with turpentine, perc has been used since the 1930s to clean clothes, and about 80% of cleaners still rely on it. Like turpentine—and benzene, kerosene and gasoline, which were also tried in the early years—perc is good at dissolving oil-based stains. It is pumped into a supersized washing machine to flush dirt from the clothes.
Stubborn stains from difficult-to-remove substances, such as ink, wine and mustard, are attacked by hand with chemicals that target particular substances. Bruce Barish, owner of New York City’s Ernest Winzer Cleaners, cites balsamic vinaigrette as “very hard to get out.” It’s a mix of both water-based and oily stains with a dark dye that is hard to remove—especially since most customers accidentally rub it in.
The quality and service vary, in part because most dry cleaners are independently owned. There are 24,124 dry-cleaning and non-coin-operated laundry establishments in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.
In a 2009 study that examined 50 randomly selected dry cleaners, New York-based Floyd Advisory LLC found that women paid an average of 73% more than men for laundered shirts. Dry cleaners surveyed say women’s shirts don’t fit in their industrial presses as well as men’s and must be ironed by hand.
Last year, market-research firm Mintel International found that 75% of women who had gone clothes-shopping in the past 12 months said they avoided buying clothes that required dry cleaning.
