To be fair, there are a thousand reasons to be based in New York City: it’s great, the talent is great, it’s magical, all that jazz. Don’t like living or working anywhere else. Plus, there’s a Starbucks everywhere for when you have a cruddy office with no conference room. That is A+. Oh but wait, why would you support a non-NYC startup with coffee money? Take that meeting to, say, Gregory’s Coffee. But what has the City done for you lately, besides offering terrific mass transit service and a lack of affordable rent? Mayor Bloombucks has gone on the charm offensive once more about tech startups: “New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has launched ‘We Are Made in NY,’ an initiative which aims to support the local tech scene by providing ‘resources and programs’ that help startups grow, highlighting job openings at tech startups, and helping to introduce ‘novices’ to the growing industry…. This program, which was announced at BuzzFeed’s NY HQ, will tap the city’s existing Made in NY Digital Map, but will take the form of a campaign rather than a set of tools.”

So yeah, this happened at BuzzFeeᴅ, which is a reasonable choice. (One great thing about BuzzFeeᴅ is that it’s created a real ton of jobs in New York City! I am very pro that. Also that is possible because they have about $32 million (really random outside estimate) in investment money in their bank account.) Anyway, so: “Resources and programs” is in quotes; then this program… will “take the form of a campaign.” Oh! It’s right there: This program is a campaign. Basically you can apply for a “Made in NY” certification. Neato. Guess what! We are a small independent job-creating tech business that pays an inordinate and unholy amount of taxes to the City of New York, so we are just going to call ourselves certified as Made In New York already.

But okay so, these “resources, benefits and programs to help startups grow in New York City”: ooh, go on?

• Some industry-specific incubator spaces, and some generalist ones, most of which are not actually that affordable for a non-venture-backed company. (Our current rent would be at least tripled if we took the desks we needed at an incubator. Recently we were contacted by a new incubator, that is raising seed money. Our rent would go up five-fold if we moved in there.)

• There’s NYC Seed, which is a great idea, providing seed money to startups — up to $200K, which is reasonable. Here’s their portfolio. Honestly? It’s so-so, but we’re pro.

• They have a link to the “fully searchable database of procurement notices” for the City. So get ready to start searching that to figure out how to get some City contracts.

• There seems to be a good bit of money in grants for staff training, which is actually very cool, if all outside what most people think of as tech startups. People getting certified for HVAC installation, that kind of thing. (Although past trainings are almost all software training; or, one home health-care agency used their “award to advance 10 home care workers into supervisory and administrative roles.”)

• There seems to a be a pro bono lawyer referral system if you call a case manager somewhere?

• There’s a competition to pay people to move to Lower Manhattan, basically. Just like Goldman Sachs! 🙂

• And there’s support for business run by immigrants, and then minority and women-owned certification systems, which of course pre-date this campaign, which are good things.

And that’s about it. What’s there for a small business, making it and hiring and hustling in New York City? Honestly, not much. We’d be better off near-shoring all our infrastructure and workforce to say, Hungary, or New Jersey and Utah. (Right, just like Goldman Sachs!)

Enough negativity! What would I want?

• Structured pooling of professional resources, like payroll. Small independent businesses use up a lot of their time doing their own bookkeeping and doing their own payroll. Would I happily share a payroll person with a team of other startups? Yesssss.

• Assistance with small-team health insurance. That’s the big nightmare.

• Tax credits for hiring in New York City, or credits for new businesses, or credits for businesses with other criteria that reflect their being part of the City’s ecosystem.

• Assistance with the various kinds of business insurance, including things like life insurance for business partners.

• Man, toss us a reduced Metrocard once in a while!

• Assistance to local banks and credit unions to provide better small business services. Most local businesses end up using large national fee-heavy banks because the online services are better, therefore not supporting NYC’s small financial-services companies.

And now, I am going for a physical with a real actual doctor for the first time in eight years.

“The annual Shed of the Year competition to search for the UK’s most wacky and wonderful sheds is underway.” Are there photos, you ask? Are there photos? Why, gentle reader, there is a whole PHOTOGALLERY.

“Re Mrs Hudson’s Diaries: A view from the landing at 221b (In Brief, February 8): a mistake made in every post-Conan Doyle book, film and TV portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. 221 Baker Street was built as a large family house, but its function was overtaken by social change, and became economically viable only as sets of rooms, let floor by floor. 221b was thus the first-floor lodging of Holmes and Watson, 221a the ground-floor set of rooms, while the housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, lived in the basement. The house remained plain no 221.

NORMAN WHITE
Castello 639, Venice.”
 — This is why the letters section of the Times Literary Supplement

is one of the few things left in this broken, hopeless world that brings me anything even approaching joy. Anyway, none of you should ever make this mistake again! Also, the book looks kind of entertaining, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.

Kristy Marlana Wallace turns 60 today. Here you will find The Cramps performing “Tear It Up” in Amsterdam nearly a quarter of a century ago, but should you be in the mood for something else there are certainly options. Happy birthday, Poison Ivy.

“Granola has traded in the bulky sweater for a little black dress.”

Happy tenth anniversary to Gothamist: independent publishers on the web are a rare thing, and ten years is a long time. They’ll celebrate tonight with an anniversary party. Meanwhile, Narratively, a Kickstarted publication, has its official launch party tonight. In other news: Sheila Heti, Lorrie Moore, Sherman Alexie and Solange do their things. (Events calendar.)

I’m sorry for reporting you to campus security.

This was September 1989, at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. In the Marshall Dormitory at the north end of campus, where I shared a much-too-small space with two roommates, Sean and Jeremy. (Sean is now the communications director for the Republican National Committee — he had to shave his head on live television last fall after losing a bet he’d made that Mitt Romney would be president. Did you know that? Crazy, right?)

You and I didn’t know each other at the time. I didn’t know anybody, really. Classes had just started that week. I had come to recognize most of the other freshman in the dorm, because we’d all had to show up a few days early for orientation. But there were lots of new faces to me.

The first time I saw you, you were walking through the dorm lobby out to the doors to the Harris dining hall. Marshall, you’ll remember, was part of a complex of six dorms situated around the dining hall. “The ‘Plex,” as everyone called it. It was mid-afternoon, and I was sitting in one of the wooden phone booths against the wall there, where I spent an inordinate amount of time the first few weeks of college, on the phone with my girlfriend from high school. She and I had been largely inseparable that summer, having fallen into the kind of lash-ourselves-together-as-the-world-burns-around-us love that only teenagers are capable of falling into, and it felt like I couldn’t take full breaths without her.

You passed by quickly, taking long, purposeful strides in blue jeans cuffed up high atop big Doc Martens combat boots tied tight with red laces. You wore a black jacket with Jamaican red, yellow and green on the back (I think it might have been a Bad Brains patch?) and square-framed glasses around your notably large eyes, propped on your notably small nose. Yours was a distinctive look on that campus, where the fashion tended towards khakis and suede bucks and Patagonia fleece. Also you’re black, and most of the students at Connecticut College were white.

I remember much of this so clearly because, though I had never seen you in person before, I recognized you immediately. I stopped my conversation with my girlfriend. “Hold on a second,” I said, putting the phone down and peeking my head out to watch you leave. Then I stepped out of the booth and over to a cinder-block column with a blue piece of paper taped to it. It was the same picture that was on lots of pieces of blue paper I had seen that day, taped up on walls and glass doors, tacked to bulletin boards, all over the ‘Plex. It was a picture of you.

“Security Alert” it said on top of the page. There had been a report of an intruder in the dorm the day before, and under your picture (which was an uncanny likeness — this was a very talented sketch artist) was a description: black man, over 6-feet tall, glasses, boots, it even mentioned the patch on your coat. It said to alert campus security if we saw you. There was a phone number.

I went back and picked up the phone. “This is crazy,” I told my girlfriend. “But there’s been reports of an intruder in our dorm, and I’m pretty sure the guy just walked past here.”

“What?!”

“It’s crazy.” My heart was beating fast. “There’s this poster of him. I just looked at it. It was definitely him.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I guess I have to get off and go tell someone?”

The dorm R.A. name was a senior named Lauryn, who had a vast suite on the first floor where she liked to burn incense. I didn’t like the idea of going and telling her. I’d been to high school, I knew the rules: it’s not cool to narc. And I was new here, I wasn’t sure about anything. I didn’t want to get involved in a whole hullabaloo. On the other hand, I felt the giddy rush of adrenaline. I had seen a wanted criminal. It was job to defend my dorm. Like a hero. In a movie. I rushed to her room. You were getting away.

Lauryn answered her door with a sigh. But her face got serious when I told her my news and she slipped on her shoes.

“Are you sure it was him?” she said, leading me back down the hall to the lobby.

We ran past the phone booths to the doors to Harris. Lauryn pushed them open and scanned the scene. You were long gone. We went back to the picture taped to the column. “It was definitely him,” I said. “He was dressed exactly the way it says, wearing the same coat and everything.”

Lauryn went back to her room and called security. I went back to mine and didn’t hear anything more about it. No one came to ask me questions. The posters came down a few days later.

It was a week or so before I saw you again. Walking back into the dorm with a couple of other students, laughing loudly. I forget if it was that time or a subsequent time when I was with a few of my fellow freshman. “Isn’t that the guy that was on the pictures about an intruder breaking into the school?” I asked.

“Who?” I think it was my friend Todd who answered.

“The black guy,” I said, feeling as guilty as was appropriate. It was becoming clear what had happened.

“Sanj?” Todd said. You two had met, apparently. “No, he’s totally cool. He lives here, on the first floor.”

You lived a couple doors down from Lauryn. Later in the year, Todd and I would come down and hang out in your room sometimes. You were totally cool. Friendly and weirdo-funny and proudly punk rock without being snobbish.

I never confessed. It would have been awkward, and maybe hurt your feelings. But I always wondered: Did you not see those posters? You walked right past them. Did you see them and not recognize yourself? That seems hard to imagine. But then, it’s also hard to imagine seeing a poster like that and making the realization, hey, that’s me! Our brains are maybe not wired to work that way. It’s hard for me to imagine a lot about what it must have been like for you to attend that school. I guess that’s the thing about race, or other people in general — you can’t ever get inside anyone else’s skin. But sitting in your room with you, thinking back on that day, gave me a bummer sort of insight, or the closest I could come to such from my perspective.

Someone sees a black guy walking down the hallway of a dorm where mostly with white kids live, and makes a horrible assumption. A report is filed, posters are made up and the horribleness, the insult, is repeated — who knows how many times before someone realizes the mistake? I hope it was Lauryn, or someone else who brought it Lauryn’s attention, and then campus security’s. I hope the posters were removed without your ever knowing that they were there.

We never got to know each other very well. But you seemed like the type of guy who might have given the situation a sardonic laugh. You’d been at that school for four years. You’d been in America for twenty. It’s sad to think that you might not have been surprised.

The book Public Apology, a memoir based on the Awl column (but made mostly from new, never-before-published material) comes out March 19th through Grand Central Publishing. (Preorder it here!)

Dave Bry has a lot to apologize for.

★★★ A blast of early light brought the toddler to his feet, speechifying incomprehensibly, unimpeded by the fact of the holiday. An airplane passed overhead, lit sharp and white against the deep blue, a golden-hour phenomenon at high midmorning. The cold clamped down and held on; people kept their heads covered even down inside the subway station; the gutter ice was hard and smooth. The light made a roofdeck garden statue shine like marble. In the true golden hour, the conference rooms overflowed with illumination. Outside, the freeze had slipped loose after all, the gutter ice gone lumpy. A young man wore his hair teased high, denying even the possibility of a hat.

“’Gestures such as hand-holding, kissing and cuddling could be indicators that your partner is mad at you,’ said DePaul University’s Sean Horan, Ph.D., an assistant professor of relational communication. In the study, Horan examined how and why deceptive affectionate behavior occurs. Deceptive affection means that an individual in a romantic relationship chooses to express affection he or she does not actually feel.”

“An advert for a penis enhancement has been banned after a man complained it left him feeling ‘inadequate’.” [Related]