According to the Port Authority:

Fishs Eddy, a well-known housewares store at Broadway and 19th Street, is “unfairly reaping a benefit from an association with the Port Authority and the attacks” of Sept. 11. How? By selling two lines of goods — “212 New York Skyline” and “Bridge and Tunnel” — that are adorned with fanciful, cartoonish depictions of the twin towers, the new 1 World Trade Center and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, labeled with their names, all of which the agency claims as its own assets.

The Port Authority, the steward of the very idea of 9/11, and all that surrounds and permeates it, is correct in disrupting the production of obnoxious tourist bait like New York City-themed housewares, but it is clearly thinking too small in its prosecution of the sanctity of the skyline of New York City and the policing of who is allowed to derive profit from it.

Has the Port Authority considered the vast scale of the wealth of imagery of the new World Trade Center and 9/11 memorial that is captured and posted to social networks every day? For free? With the sophisticated image recognition algorithms developed for products like Google Image Search, YouTube’s automated copyright enforcement, and Facebook’s facial recognition products, it would be trivial for Instagram or Facebook to detect iconic images of the World Trade Center and allow the Port Authority to extract the proper tithings owed to it and the families of 9/11 victims (who would, of course, be exempt from paying). Every photo posted of the World Trade Center to Instagram or Facebook or Twitter is fundamentally for the social profit of the individual posting it, and like all profits, it comes at the expense of others.

Who Will Disrupt the Public Good?

“Haystack provides a solution to a key market failure in popular parking areas: meter prices are too cheap, which results in excess demand.”

A few other market failures, which have resulted in excess demand:

1. Space for your blanket at the park on a cool summer evening.
2. Seats on the bus during rush hour
3. Public housing. So cheap!
4. Walking space on the sidewalk, especially in those busy shopping neighborhoods
5. Snow removal
6. Clean water

This undercharging is ruining my overall User Experience. And frankly, Haystack’s lack of a parking space derivatives function makes me think they’re not serious about extracting capital from parking spaces. And no private traffic police, to enforce the contracts and prevent outsiders from stealing paid places? There is money to be made. Where are my apps?

★★★ The day arrived so gray that being rained on seemed inevitable. No sooner had that resignation set in, though, than the sun came, for just long enough to be encouraging. Stepping out into humidity was like walking into a wall, but when the breeze came, it was cool. From the Midtown luxury terrace outside the birthday party, the sky had settled into a noncommittal and featureless gray. The two-year-old never even tried to venture outdoors into it. By the afternoon, sun returned, and the clouds took on individual shapes, though a brothy haze lingered for a while in the spaces between them. It was hot on the avenue in the reconstituted sunlight. Cars draped with keffiyehs and protest photos were separated from one another by a stoplight and surrounded by apolitical traffic. The two-year-old rode on shoulders, bound for the playground, brandishing the blue balloon scimitar he’d acquired from the party clown. The humidity had ebbed; the space between clouds had been clarified. Light rebounded off the white-brick condo tower and sparkled in tears, once the blue blade had been stepped on and popped.

by Brendan O’Connor

Earlier this month, the Barclays Center was filled with children and animatronic dinosaurs. Both of them made a lot of noise. “Walking With Dinosaurs” was an approximately two-hour long show, hosted by a man with an Australian accent in a leather duster who claimed to be a paleontologist. His name was Huxley, and he invited us to join him on a journey through time, “to see how far dusting off a few old bones can take us.”

There were no bones, but the kids in the audience didn’t care. “That dinosaur is pretty big,” observed the young man next to me. “Are they gonna fight?” he asked his dad. They did. The animatronics shuffled forwards and backwards, towards each other and away again, loud roars playing over the speaker system. The dinosaurs looked very obviously fake, but also very obviously expensive; the risk of damaging them far outweighed the desire to pretend to spill blood to sate the cries of bloodthirsty five-year-olds — a reluctance which, in its way, reflects what anyone who’s watched a nature documentary knows: that predators in the wild will rarely risk injuring themselves. That’s why they prey upon the weak and the old, though whether this nuance was apparent to the rest of the audience was not clear.

The show started with eggs hatching somewhere on the megacontinent known as Pangea. (There was sort of a funny use of the past tense to describe Pangea: “This continent was known as Pangea,” as if there was anyone around at the time to call it that.) That was the only place to start, of course, because it was the beginning of the story, and in the beginning, and there is nothing, and indeed there was nothing in this particular corner of Pangea, no plants, no dinosaurs, no other animals, just the eggs, until one of them, shortly after it hatched, was stolen and eaten by a scavenger. It is a harsh world, “Walking With Dinosaurs” tells its audience. The first to hatch is only the first in line to be eaten.

The mother dinosaur arrived, eventually, to fend off another marauder. Her eggs hatched, and the audience ooh’d and aah’d as baby remote-controlled dinosaurs squirmed around the stage, squeaking. This went on for a little bit longer than it needed to — like every segment — before we transitioned to the Jurassic period, which Huxley describes to us as “a wonderful time for dinosaurs.” In the Jurassic period, we met the brontosaurus and allosaurus, who also fought (“fought”) and whose fight (“fight”) took the form of a mother dinosaur successfully defending her child from a predator. It would be too gruesome, maybe, to expect children to applaud while watching predators feast on the flesh of a mother and child, still living; the velociraptors — a pack of two males led by a dominant female — were the only carnivores who got to eat anything during the show, tearing imaginary pieces out of the corpse of an indeterminate dinosaur we didn’t get to see them kill.

In the Cretaceous period, we met the Tyrannosaurus rex. It was big, and loud, and the maternal dynamic was flipped: Her offspring, investigating two large, armored herbivores, found itself trapped in a corner, facing down horns on one side and a clubbed tail on the other. Not a moment too soon, the curtains pull back and the big rex emerged with a roar to chase off the lumbering, leaf-eating bullies. It then cantered around the arena, eyeballing the children in the audience and roaring about its dominance.

Like any reasonable five year old, I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up, and my favorite dinosaur was Tyrannosaurus rex. There were periods of time, certainly, when I might have pretended to favor other dinosaurs, especially around the time of the discovery of the big, clever Utahraptor. Those were lies, mostly: my first and truest love was always Tyrannosaurus rex.

Dinosaurs are nothing if not mysterious, or at least mystifying — gargantuan, practically alien creatures that are said to have existed some incomprehensible amount of time before human beings were around, so there’s something deeply satisfying about the memorization and categorization and organization that goes into being a fake paleontologist. My obsession with dinosaurs was eventually replaced by obsessions with airplanes and then birds — equally mysterious, and equally categorizable, in their own way. “What kind of bird is that, Brendan?” I might be asked, half-mockingly, half-seriously. “Black vulture,” I’d say. “You can tell it’s not a Turkey vulture because of which part of its wings are translucent.”

I received the Catholic sacrament of confirmation around the peak of my enthusiasm for bird-watching, though I’d stopped considering myself Catholic a little while before. I was raised Catholic, and I believed in God, in the way that kids do, which is to say I believed that if I didn’t go to church, or committed some other egregious sin like telling Tyler Kalian to go to hell when he cheated in flag football during gym class or coveted my neighbor’s sunglasses, then something bad would happen unless I went to confession, and then, having gone to confession, felt further guilt in recognizing the fact that whatever confession I’d made couldn’t have been that genuine because I still felt like Tyler was a jerk for having cheated, and I still wanted those sunglasses. (They were Oakleys: grey steel frames, orange lenses.)

By the time I was confirmed, I’d discovered that not only that were there other religions, but that there were people who thought that institutional religion wasn’t even really worth one’s time at all. I read the Transcendentalists and argued with my father; I told him I believed in God, maybe, but that I was anti-ecclesiastical, and moreover, that I couldn’t square with the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. They were big words and I took smug pleasure from the thought that maybe he didn’t even know what they meant, because I was in seventh grade and was therefore insufferable.

Ironically enough, it was in college that I re-discovered Christian literature, full of miracles and meaning, if not Christianity. Poets like Milton and the (maybe, secretly, Catholic?) Donne and Herbert brought me into contact with questions of God, and faith, and solipsism, and the necessity of recognizing and remembering that there are people in the world besides myself more readily than any mass, or any catechism class, I’d ever been to.

So when a priest refused to let me participate in the baptism of my cousin Emma this weekend because I’m not a practicing Catholic, I was knocked back in time to seventh grade, grinding my teeth and yammering away wordlessly, soundlessly in my mind about the Church’s bureaucracy and hypocrisy — that didn’t they see that this is what necessitated the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament in the first place, the overemphasis on empty rites and rituals, the hollowing out of meaning and on and on in a simultaneously self-pitying and self-aggrandizing spiral that spit me out into the parking lot outside the church, cursing.

“Your parents raised you Catholic,” the priest said. “They want you to be Catholic.” (My mother rarely went to church, and doesn’t take Communion when she does, for weddings and things, and my dad converted to Episcopalianism a little over a year ago.) “Let me know if you start doing what you ought to be doing, and I will consider naming you Emma’s godfather,” the priest concluded. What I ought to be doing, of course, is going to mass — and probably also giving money to the church.

“As far as we are concerned,” my aunt told me, “you are still the godfather.” I had found myself bragging, a little bit, before the weekend, to friends about the fact that my aunt and uncle had asked me to be their daughter’s godfather, my zeal for the position coming in no small part from the fact that it’s the closest thing I’ll ever be to an uncle, but probably also because I miss participating in that kind of institutionalized meaning-making: a man in robes waves his hands around, muttering, and afterwards you are something that you were not before. Children aren’t more readily religious because they’re stupid, or naive, but because they’re still able to take things on faith — that is to say, to trust that the meaning of things is what it is and that that meaning is true. When you’re a kid, if you know a thing’s name you know the thing. This is the power that God gave Adam in the Garden: “Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” What power, to point to a thing and to say: this is what you are. Some years later, we met this idea again — twisted, dessicated, petrified yet recognizable, in Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden: “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth,” says the judge. “The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.”

And yet, surely there is a way to put things in their place without being a total fascist about it. I moved into a new apartment a couple months ago, and for the first time I have a desk. I’m trying to keep it clean, or at least neat, and not just on top of the desk but in the drawer as well. My desk faces a window and hanging on the wall to my left is a corkboard, covered in notecards organized into columns: Ideas; Pitched; Assigned; Reporting; Writing; Filed; Revision. Notecards move through these columns at various speeds. Some get stuck. Others spend hardly any time up there at all. When I’m feeling panicky — about work or life or dating or anything at all, which can so easily become everything at once — I lean back in my chair and just look at the corkboard.

“Life on earth will never again be this grand,” Huxley announced, at the end of the Jurassic, to his audience of mostly children. “But it will get a lot scarier.”

Brendan O’Connor is a reporter in New York.

Photo via

“’This is one of those wonderful high-water marks in The Atlantic’s 157 year history,’ Atlantic Media chairman David Bradley said in a press release. ‘Our founders (Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow …) would welcome Fareed [Zakaria] enthusiastically — and then worry about raising their own game.’”

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, college student Michael Rosen tells us more about what it’s like to have your bike stolen and then have to confront someone stronger than you later on in order to get it back.

Not fun: getting your bike stolen. Also not very fun: seeing your stolen bike w/ a group of homeless people and asking for it back

— Michael Rosen (@michaelrosen3) July 19, 2014

Michael, so what happened here?

Really, this whole ordeal is Richard Linklater’s fault. That sounds like a non sequitur, but I promise it’s not. For the Daily Cal (UC Berkeley’s student newspaper), I was assigned to review Linklater’s most recent movie, Boyhood, and as a kind of perk/thank you for writing the review, the arts editor allowed me to interview Linklater as part of a press junket-y thing. It’s important to understand that Richard Linklater is not just any movie director to me: Me and my buddies watched Dazed and Confused every weekend for at least a year. Waking Life and the Before series are movies near to my heart. And I really loved Boyhood. So I was pretty stoked to meet this guy whose movies I’ve worshipped since puberty.

I was also a bit nervous. I’ve interviewed dozens and dozens of people, but without fail I clench up into a throbbing ball of anxiety before each and every one. The prospect of interviewing Richard fucking Linklater upped my built-in pre-interview anxiety a couple standard deviations. So as I rolled up to the restaurant adjacent to the Berkeley Public Library, I evidently forgot to lock my bike to the bike rack. Which I never do! I am religious about locking my bike, especially since I just bought it a few months ago.

You can probably guess what happened next. I interviewed Linklater for ten minutes (it went well!), and then went back to the bike rack. It’s a pretty surreal feeling to realize your bike is just, like, gone. It’s like going through a lightning round of the five stages of grief: I transitioned from confusion (where the fuck did I park it?) to denial (nah, this can’t happen to me) in a span of minutes. Meanwhile, I’m pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, thinking I parked on this street sign or that street sign, looking like a crazy person. At a certain point, I accepted that my bike was gone.

Frustrated and angry, I called the police, which I knew was futile, but, whatever. “Do you ever find stolen bikes?” I asked the officer. “Honestly, no,” she said. “If you’re lucky, someone will be selling it at the Berkeley Flea Market down at the Ashby BART station.”

And so the next morning, hungover, I made the forty-five-minute trek down to the Ashby BART station, which sits right on the Berkeley/Oakland border, and walked through the flea market, swiveling my head left and right to look at each of the tents. Hundreds of vendors hawked CDs and omelettes and herbal soap, but the only shop selling anything remotely related to bikes was selling used bike tires. No luck.

I had told myself I’d go back and check the bike rack where I thought I’d parked it just one more time to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating or something. But I was very tired and wanted to enjoy my weekend, so I eventually just decided to head back to my apartment. On the way home, for some reason, I turned around and headed back to the Berkeley Public Library, my denial roaring back.

The Downtown Berkeley BART station sits about a block away from the library, and there’s usually a sizable conglomeration of homeless people near its multiple entrances. I was walking past the Shattuck and Allston entrance on the right side of the street when I saw a bike sitting upside down near one of these groups. That’s weird, I thought, who sits a bike upside down? So I looked closer, and noticed the U-Lock attached to the frame of the bike. Huh, that’s where I put my U-Lock, I thought. And I looked even closer, and it was a light blue specialized Sirrus model. Holy shit, I thought, that’s my fucking bike.

So did a confrontation ensue? How heated did things get, and what was the end result?

Well, first I needed to decide between fight (confront this group of seven or eight homeless people, most of fairly imposing size) or flight (call the police). As someone of slight build, words are my favored mode of defusing conflict, but I figured out pretty quickly that it was going to be tough to talk my way out of this one. On the other hand, calling the police was risky — what if the people with my bike just up and fled? And I really wanted my bike back; it’s easily the favorite thing I own. A combination of rage and desperation conflated to give me the courage to approach the group.

Me (not very confidently): “Uh, how did you get this bike?”
Alleged Bike Owner: “Bought it, bruh.”
Me: “That’s my bike, man.”
(silence)
Me: “That’s my bike, bro, and I have a police report filed for it.”

Things got pretty heated in a hurry. Maybe I’m just a coward, but I was ninety percent sure I was about to get my ass kicked. Luckily, downtown Berkeley in the middle of the day is pretty crowded, and a few people started to glance over, but they sure as hell weren’t about to come over and help me out. I desperately glanced over at a lady sitting maybe twenty or so feet away, but she quickly diverted her gaze. Alleged Bike Proprietor and his buddy — both at least six feet and two hundred pounds — stepped pretty closely into my personal area. Both screamed various threatening ad libs: “Better back the fuck up, bruh!” “This is our fuckin’ bike!” etc.

Thankfully, one of the homeless people — an older lady, my guardian angel — stood up to defend me. “Give him his bike,” she said. This started a bit of an internal war of words — Alleged Bike Proprietor and his friend turned their attention away from me and aimed their profanity-laced rants at the woman.

Guardian Angel: “Just give him the bike back.”
Alleged Bike Owner: “I paid $200 for this shit.”
Et cetera.

During this brief respite from paralyzing fear, I remembered my bike keys were in my pocket. “Hey, I can prove this is my bike: Look, I can open the lock,” I said.

I grabbed my bike and turned it right side up. The Alleged Bike Proprietor muttered something like “You better hope you can open the lock.” Meanwhile, his hands were on the bike. Honestly, I thought he was about to just bolt as soon as I took the U-Lock off the frame, but I figured this was my only shot, so I proceeded anyway. My hands were shaking like crazy. I shoved the key into the lock, but it’s kind of a fussy lock, and my shakiness and the lock’s fussiness prevented me from opening it the first time. I yanked the key out and tried to just run off with the bike, but that maneuver elicited some tempers to flare up pretty quickly. “Open the lock, man, and you can have the bike,” Alleged Bike Owner said.

He put his hands back on the seat, and I worked to open the frame in the front. This time, it opened up. “You’re a lucky man,” he muttered, and I figured that was license to ride off with it. Somehow, I emerged unscathed.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I mean, there’s the obvious one. I’ve been ultra careful locking my bike since I got it back. I’ll lock it, walk into work or class or whatever, get paranoid, and then walk BACK to the bike rack, just to make sure the lock’s actually on the bike. That level of paranoia probably won’t be sustainable long term, but I’ll probably make more of an effort to just bring my bike inside when I can.

I suppose I gained some confidence in confronting situations with a degree of physical risk. Off the top of my head, I can’t really think of any practical day-to-day application to this lesson, except maybe at pickup basketball or something. Next time that one dude keeps cherry picking, I’ll probably talk a little shit.

Just one more thing.

If I ever have to interview Richard Linklater again, I think I’ll probably just walk.

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

Here is a little preview of a full album coming in September, which Karen O describes as a soundtrack to her “ʟᴏᴠᴇ ᴄʀᴜsᴀᴅᴇ.”

What is it, exactly, that’s so unsettling about this trailer? I am exhilarated by it, but I can’t tell exactly why. Is it that the last film George Miller directed was Happy Feet? Is it that the most beautiful scene in the trailer, with the silent powder explosions over the desert, sort of evokes The Color Run™?

The trailer gives us an aesthetic and a few set pieces, and that’s it. If you haven’t seen the original film, the trailer tells you about as much as you already know: Something something wasteland, cars, chaos. Which isn’t unusual — most trailers, particularly for action movies, don’t tell stories so much as they leave impressions. But the impression here is unusual.

It’s orange and warm and the action sequences hold together from shot to shot. The camera doesn’t shake at all! Every single human is beautiful. It’s “almost a continuous chase,” according to its director, which sounds stressful. The only staggeringly large objects are natural, and things fall apart when they collide with one another. There are plenty of percussive sounds but no Inception horn or Michael Bay decaying slo-mo groans. Is the problem that it’s… too orderly? Has Transformers just dulled all our senses and blown all our nerves?

Filtering Technology Advanced

Whisper’s advanced technology to reduce the amount “meanness” floating around on its service, otherwise known as “libel,” has a high cost:

The company, based in this city’s Venice neighborhood, says it has built filters to reduce celebrity gossip and everyday name-calling. “We have a huge layer of technology that detects proper names and puts those posts in a different queue for evaluation by 130 full-time human moderators,” Mr. Heyward said. “At least in the short term, these policies have been growth inhibitors for us.”

What a terrible thing this at least passing interest in making people less savage hath wrought: an inhibition of growth, a startup’s only sacred doctrine.

“We know that happiness and social connection can have positive benefits on health. Now research suggests that having a sense of purpose or direction in life may also be beneficial.”