“He reads a lot of sort of opinion writers online, including a lot of people he thinks are smart, including [Vox’s] Ezra Klein, [The Dish blogger] Andrew Sullivan and [New York’s] Jonathan Chait.”

by Ben Dolnick

I
Not like I wasn’t training good before, but now I’m doing something different. Now when me and Doc see the Statue of Liberty, it’s like, “Yep, fourth time I passed you today, see you in a hour, I’ll be the dude in the pink sweatsuit.” Because Bald Bull? He’s fierce. Straight-up fierce. I mean, when I was eighteen, nineteen years old I didn’t have to count when he did that spinny shit, it was just like his eyes start rolling, boom. First round. Then I’d be up all night at the hotel, different girls in the club, in my room, and still be up the next day with Doc six, seven in the morning, still drunk sometimes, didn’t matter.

Can’t do that no more. Body won’t let me. I’ve had my eye closed up, had my whole body turn gray on me. I’m like one of those…what’s that car? With like the little dude up top? See, that’s another thing — can’t remember shit either. But these, man? These? They can still fucking wreck you. I’m playing, I’m not gonna hit you. If I did, though? Man, you’d think it was a star punch. You’d still swear I was twenty-one years old. Probably even worse, actually, because I know how to do it now, know how to put my body behind it. Not just brawling no more.

It’s gonna be me and Bull, man, and he comes at me? He comes at me like the way he do, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk? Just, bam. One little uppercut, like bam. And that’s it. Harder they come, know what I’m sayin’?

II
I got dropped, man. Second round, he starts doing that conga line shit with his hands, you know? Like this? And one of ’em catches me in the eye, right up here. Nah, it’s good now, they stitched me up and shit, but it just messed with the count I was doing. I was about to just pull back and fuckin’… Back to work though, you know? This is almost like my favorite part, ’cause he knows now. Knows I can get him. Next time he won’t catch me in the eye. Next time he’ll be on his back.

III
Most people you talk to don’t take this dude serious. It’s like, Glass? That’s his fuckin’ name? But you know what? You get smart as a fighter, you learn something, you learn something from everybody. Glass Joe? Dude taught me how to fall. You don’t see me do the whole ziggy zaggy shit, but watch when I hit the ground. The way my shoulder goes first, like that? Straight Glass.

IV
King Bullshit. It’s like get pants that fit, you know? How many years we been doing this, and he’s still… I just got no patience for people like that. People say shit like, “Oh, he’s slow, he’s retarded, whatever.” But you know what? I get in the ring with you, I’m not trying to see your nuts. I’m just not.

Yeah, I dropped him, though. Second round he goes all kind of…see-through and shit, you know? So I just pull back and pow. Feel that. Yeah, alright? I see Soda Pop last night out running and I’m like, “Pops, Pops, I’m gunning for you,” and he’s just like, “Ha ha ha, OK, Mac, we’ll see,” because he don’t know — he don’t know ’bout all the new shit me and Doc are doing.

V
Me and Glass again, man. People say all kinds of shit, but he’s a warrior, you know? Twenty-nine fights he’s lost. Dude’s parents have money, dude’s dad keeps being like “Joe, get out the ring, come do my shit with me,” and he’s just like, “I’m a fighter. That’s what I am.” And dude’s right, I don’t care if it’s twenty-nine fights or fifty-nine fights or a hundred-nine fights, that’s just how a fighter’s got to do. When they carry me out, when you see all the blue and red lights and shit? Then OK, you done your time. But ’til then? Shit, I don’t know. I’m not counting. Used to be like I’d get home, fill out my little card and shit, this many rounds, this many minutes, all that. Probably got like whole boxes of ’em. Now it’s just like, how many fights you been in? This one. Just this one I got to do today. You hear me?

VI
Truth is, I don’t feel too good. Just these past couple of days, been wobbly. I’m not a teenager no more. Used to be, I’d be up all night at the hotel, different girls… Sorry, can’t remember shit. ‘Specially when I’m tired, Doc can be like, “Yo Mac, how many rounds you drop Sandman in that time?” And I just go, I got no fuckin’ clue. It’s all just kind of…wavy, you know? I’ll be better, though, I’ll be better.

VII
Was talking to Piston last night — you met him? Smart dude, like fuckin’ smartest dude I know. Everybody thinks he’s Japanese ’cause he plays Japanese but dude’s from like Iraq or India or some shit. Speaks English better than me. And usually I don’t get too caught up in his trippy shit but right now, ’cause I been sick or whatever? He was makin’ sense. What? Oh it’s just like… like talkin’ ‘bout think what happens after you get laid out real bad. Like real real bad, the way when Piston just nails you with that like duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, or Bull gets all up on you. What happens after that? Where do you go between that and waking up in the ring with Glass? That kinda shit.

VIII
Nah, I’m better, man, all better. Feelin’ good. Got Bald Bull II this afternoon. You met him? Nah, I think he’s just like his cousin or some shit. Bad dude. I used to see him up in the club with all these like girls all up on his lap and shit, powder all on the table. But I’m just gonna go in, fight my fight, you know? His thing, man, he gets you with the little bunny hop and shit? I’m just tuning it out. That’s what me and Doc do like every day now, just tune it out and go to work.

IX
See that’s the thing with Glass, because no one takes him serious. People see his name, see like the little rooster shit with his hair. Dude’s smart, though, dude’s a soldier. Dude’s dad is always asking him come work for him and shit and he just won’t do it, ’cause fighting’s what he do, that’s who he is. I’ll lay him out this afternoon, no doubt, but that’s ’cause I’m a soldier too. Just going to work.

X
This thing Piston was telling me last night — you know that dude? He ain’t even Japanese. Fuckin’ smartest motherfucker I know. I’ll tell you then I gotta fucking go home and go to sleep ’cause I got Flamenco in the morning. He said, you think all there is is getting laid out, then fighting Glass and me and Bull, over and over and over? He said it ain’t like that. He said, you lay out Mike, you get out of the whole thing. Just like balloons dropping and shit and then you’re out. And I’m like, out how? And he just says, “Out.” But I’m like, how am I suppose to lay out Mike? And he’s just like watch his blinking, watch his blinking. So I been trying to, been watching people’s eyes, you probably thought I was trying to kiss you or some shit. But it makes me a little nervous too, you know? Like out where? Out of what? I left Piston a message but he didn’t get me back. I’m a soldier, I go to work every day, but still, something about how he said it, I almost couldn’t sleep last night. You know what I’m sayin’?

Ben Dolnick’s latest book, At the Bottom of Everything, is now in paperback. He remembers less about entire years of his childhood than about certain Nintendo games.

New York Endless, “A Consultant’s Agreement”

Sunny, approachable computer music that will remind you of a lot of things — this track took me straight to Bugskull, while the next two songs on the EP pointed in different directions entirely. The full stream is here.

But consider the experience of Chris Dannen, a 29-year-old ­webtrepreneur who was served with an eviction notice after a year of hosting Airbnb guests in his Greenpoint apartment. When he dropped off his final rent check, he noticed the management company was converting it into a hotel: The “loft suite” apartments are currently listed on Airbnb for $199. Dannen was, and still is, a believer in Airbnb’s cause. “I’m of the millennial view that it’s a nice way to meet people and make friends.” But he was disappointed in Airbnb’s reaction to his situation. “In retrospect, I would say, they knew this was going to happen to people, and they didn’t do anything to help me.”

A gentle reminder from Jessica Pressler’s massive piece on Airbnb in New York City: If you could make a lot of money renting out your apartment on a nightly basis, your landlord could probably make even more.

“We’ve also gotten a steady stream of feedback from non-members (including Google) that our design makes the site look dated and neglected, and the information on the site may be untrustworthy as a result,” says Metafilter’s Matt Haughey, who yesterday announced the site’s first new template in over a decade. Machines make unpleasant neighbors.

★★★★★

The three-year-old had to be argued out of shorts and into a pair of corduroys to face the morning chill. It was sneezingly bright; two passersby pressed their index fingers across their upper lips. Bicycle bells, chromed fenders, and handlebars glittered, crowded together, along Lafayette. The chill lost its sharpness, but the light remained keen. On the walk up the fire escape, the accompanying shadow walked up the side of the next building. Bright window reflections stood on the eastern and northern faces of buildings — low and high, downtown and uptown, afternoon gold darkening to late red.

Kiesza Feat. Joey Bada$$, “Bad Thing”

Are You a Tech Company?

In 2014, there are but a few questions to ask yourself in order to determine if you are a technology company or “startup.”

• Do you have a website which is primarily used to sell your product(s)?

• Do you sincerely believe that your company, which mostly aspires to sell a commodity product to middle-class and upper-middle-class consumers using mildly novel marketing techniques, is going to change the world?

• Has a mysterious man offered you tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars?

Well then! I have good news for you.

The shaving industry, long dominated by giants like Gillette and Schick, now includes a wave of well-financed start-ups. Dollar Shave Club, which just raised a $50 million round of venture capital, offers inexpensive replacement razor blades. Harry’s offers a similar product, but with stylish handles as well. Bevel products cater to African-American men, who are often pained by razor burn, according to the company. … Other start-ups offering less expensive consumer products include Casper, which sells mail-order mattresses to consumers online for as little as $500, nearly a tenth of the cost of high-end bed sets. And Warby Parker, the successful online eyeglasses retailer, offers a range of trendy eyewear for far less than the cost of many frames.

These companies do not manufacture technology products; produce complicated logistics platforms that could be used to transform entire cities after acquiring a quarter of a billion dollars in venture capital; or even apps. They make razors, mattresses, and eyeglasses, and sell them for lower prices than their competitors, through a website. For this, Dollar Shave Club has been given fifty million dollars; Harry’s one hundred million dollars; Warby Parker more than a hundred and fifteen million dollars; and Casper around fifteen million dollars.

So, if you answered “yes” to first two questions, but not the third, please locate the nearest venture capitalist in your phonebook — he has a check just for you.

P.S. Why is Mike Isaac writing about shaving companies? He has literally never shaved.

by Awl Sponsors

Columbia professor and New Yorker contributor Samuel G. Freedman writing on the biker threat is a healthy exercise in empathy. For example: If you got hit by a bike — pretty hard — could you imagine formulating and remaining sympathetic to this series of arguments?

There are the racers who careen along the park’s six-mile loop, treating it as their private velodrome. There are the tourists who blithely pedal the wrong way, or in the wrong lane, or both simultaneously, despite the clear markings on the roadway. There are the everyday bikers who ignore traffic signals, stop signs, and crosswalks. In the rare instances when I’ve seen a cop around, he or she has done nothing about any of it. Every time I have run these past few years, I have had the anxious sense of watching a game of Russian roulette in which the chamber with the bullet would eventually slip into place and a biker would maim or kill a pedestrian.

Russian roulette kills someone approximately one in six times a turn is played. It also kills the player. Which I guess actually works here, because bikers are vastly more likely to be smeared into the pavement by a car than they are to cause the death of a pedestrian. Not that bikers haven’t killed people; Freedman describes two.

These tragedies lay bare two realities of what we might call bike culture in New York City. First, many bicyclists routinely ignore all traffic laws, signs, and signals. Second, the city has made inadequate efforts in recent years to enforce those laws, and thus to protect the rest of us.

Follow the law in a car in New York City and you’re pretty well guarded against death. Or don’t! You’re still safer than anyone else on the road. Follow the law on a bike, however, and you’re not necessarily safe at all: you will find your “bike lanes” full of cars, both stopped and moving; you’ll notice quickly that people don’t notice you; you’ll realize that the cars around you either don’t know you’re there or, if they do, actively resent your presence, not because they’re afraid of you but because they’re annoyed that they might accidentally kill you. It is within this context that the biker is mindful of the law, the enforcement of which, regarding cars’ interactions with bikes, suggests that it doesn’t really matter; it is within this context, then, that the biker appears to flout it, or actually does. It is within this context that the biker is an asshole.

To put it statistically, New York City’s Department of Transportation recorded three hundred and nine crashes between bicyclists and pedestrians in 2013, an increase of more than twenty-five per cent from the two hundred and forty-three such collisions in 2012.

To put it statistically, there were three hundred and nine crashes between bicyclists and pedestrians in 2013, the same year that 286 people were killed by cars. A few blocks west of the park where Freeman no longer feels safe from bikers is a remarkably fatal stretch of West End Avenue near 95th, where, this year, two pedestrians were stuck and killed by four-wheel conveyances over the course of one hour. A week later, a few blocks away, another death.

Part of the current problem, I think, derives from bicyclists’ sense of themselves as victims.

Part of the current problem, I think, derives from bicyclists’ actual victimization, which produces a sense of victimhood.

If you feel aggrieved, if you have been injured, if you mourn at the ghost-bike shrines of bikers who have been killed by cars, then you may have a difficult time realizing that you can simultaneously be the aggressor.

The constant threat of death might cloud your awareness of all things that are not your death, that is possibly true.

And there is another element, I suspect, to bicyclists’ self-righteousness and the de Blasio administration’s inadequate response. To ride under your own power on two wheels is to be admirably green, to be on the sustainable side of the angels.

It is, and it is, as well as promoting the convenience and health of the entire city and all who live in it.

Four wheels fuelled by hydrocarbons are easier to see as a potential danger needing to be controlled. But there is no mandate of heaven for putting passersby at mortal risk. And there is no public-policy logic to giving a free pass on public safety to someone who is not polluting the air.

Here is an objective that doesn’t align with what I imagine “public-policy logic” means: Obsessing over the equal enforcement of safety laws, the violation of which produces, for one party, drastically less severe personal results and drastically more severe external results.

One of the social compacts of living in a large city is sharing public space in a mindful way. That is why we listen to our music on headphones instead of boom boxes. It is why we stand on line for our morning coffee and bagel. It is why we give up our seat on the subway to the pregnant lady and apologize right away if we step on somebody’s shoe entering the elevator. Civility can be a fragile membrane, instantly replaced by confrontation or violence or death, even on a brightly lit afternoon, even in the park.

The social compact: That is why we listen to our music on headphones instead of boom boxes. It is why we stand on line for our morning coffee and bagel. It is why we give up our seat on the subway to the pregnant lady and apologize right away if we step on somebody’s shoe entering the elevator. It is why we ride bikes or subways or buses or our own feet instead of clumsy three-ton air conditioners, in this crowded and small place.