“Arctic Winter Draws Rare Birds to City, Experts Say”

“The Wealth Matters column on Saturday, about a series of complex trusts that can be used to shelter assets from taxes, misidentified one of the trusts being discussed. The trust for the charitably minded that is similar to a grantor-retrained annuity trust, or Grat, is called a Crat, or charitable remainder annuity trust — not a Clat, which stands for charitable lead annuity trust and functions differently.”

The critic Jerry Saltz this week basically called him a pig, to which Simchowitz responded, on Facebook of course:

You are a disfigured meat grinder of over inflated, self deluded, petty and insular insults, whose limitations are those of many, whose minds have closed to their once great imagination for hope of a brighter and better future. You are the cynic, but ultimately you are less than that.

Good times!

Flipping is the backbone of the art market now; dealers just have less ability to freeze out collectors who flip now. At the most recent Armory show here in New York, there was a spectacular tiny Louise Bourgeois painted print. (Really tiny! Like, four by six inches?) They wanted $55,000 for it. The last time it traded hands was just a year or two ago, though, and then its price was something like $35,000. And yet it’s still a great place to park some money for a little while. The market for Bourgeois will always be good: she was a legend, with a long and sturdy career, well-supported by dealers and collectors and institutions. She isn’t a 27-year-old with paintings being snapped up by the armful and dumped at auction. The road of the art world is piled high with bodies of young artists who had a fast boom and a bust. That’s to be expected. But if the new collectors want to treat painters like startups, they’ll get the same kinds of return on their investment as they do with startups. The vast majority of artists will fail and evaporate all their invested value. A small percentage will soldier on, for a while, but only as long as the market will have them.

by Michael Bertin

ABCCBSFoxNBCFox with AnimationCBS without Five-0

It’s part of the reason CBS paid $10.8 billion for 14 years worth of broadcast rights to the NCAA tournament.

Yes, having the rights to a really popular sporting events allows networks to sell ad time at a premium during said event, but it also gives them the opportunity to pimp their own programming. “Hey, now that we have several million people watching Tennessee play Michigan, why not tell them about that new comedy we’re airing?” It doesn’t take a particular genius to figure that out, but all of the networks do it and they’ve all become pretty shameless about it.

It has led to painfully forced moments in corporate self-promotion, like Calista Flockhart casually taking in a World Series game or Christian Slater dropping by the Monday Night Football booth to fail at pretending he knows something about the NFL. While “America’s Most-Watched Network” has avoided any such cringey moments during March Madness, CBS has been pretty relentless — the tournament is 63 games spread out over the better part of a month — so much so that even if you’re not fully paying attention you start to notice things. Or thing.

Specifically: the lower-thirds and in-game bumpers for the shows CBS was promoting featured an awful lot of white people. “The Mentalist,” Simon Baker: white. “Two Broke Girls,” Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs: white and white. “The Good Wife,” Julianna Margulies: white. (Jewish!) The Masters? Tiger Woods is out, and golf is so white that the ball and even the African player is white. The entire cast of “How I Met Your Mother”: white, white, white, white and white. (Fun basketball tie-in: they all met when they were first cast as the Kentucky starting five in Glory Road.)

In all of the promos CBS ran, the only non-whites I recall seeing were LL Cool J (“NCIS Los Angeles”) and Lucy Liu (“Elementary”). It got me to thinking, “Man, is CBS really that white?”

Yes. Yes, it is. By percentage, it’s the whitest network on television.

It’s not a runaway — but about 83% of CBS’ scripted primetime programming is white (which is to say, the cast members are white). The U.S. Census projections for 2015 puts the non-Hispanic white population at 61.8% for 2015. That means that all four networks — CBS (82.9%), Fox (80.8%), ABC (77.1%), and NBC (72.7%) — are actually whiter than America itself, so it’s not like any of the other networks can shame CBS with their racial progressiveness.

There are a myriad of caveats for those percentages, with two standing out. First, while I certainly aimed for accuracy, primetime network schedules are fluid. Methodologically speaking, I took the current lineups (using this and this), then went through each of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC show-by-show, and cast-by-cast, and noted the ethnicity of each cast member. But shows get cancelled. Shows go on hiatus. Shows just finish. “How I Met Your Mother” aired its final episode this week (although it looks like its slot will be filled by a show every bit as white: “Friends With Better Lives”). So just figuring out which shows to include in the current schedule, especially at this time of year with summer on the horizon, is not as as binary as it might seem.

Second, and often even less clear cut, is trying to determine a person’s ethnic identity. Consider Megalyn Echikunwoke, of ABC’s “Mind Games.” She has a German/Scots-Irish American mother (presumably, that means her mom was an American with one German and one Scottish/Irish parent) and a Nigerian-Igbo father. She was raised on a Navajo reservation. What is she?

Well, she’s whatever she wants to call herself, but for these purposes, by our weird historical American logic, she’s black. I generally erred on the side of giving “benefit” to the networks. Anyone with a vaguely Spanish-sounding surname and skin that wasn’t somewhere near ‘pasty’ on the alabaster spectrum I counted as Latino (short-handed as “Latin” above, for lack of a better term for a very diverse group of people). Being the arbiter of ethnicity is difficult — and not really fun — in many cases. Impossible in others. What’s the ethnicity of a cartoon character? The Griffins look white. The Simpsons look yellow.1

Point being, there is a bit of a moving target aspect to the numbers. And if you give the task of calculating the percentages to a handful of people, you are likely to get back snowflakes, which is to say no two will be alike, but they will all be exceedingly white.

It’s not just the total amount of white that’s surprising — it’s how it dominates shows from top to bottom, particularly at the top. There are very few non-whites in leading roles on any of the four major networks: Mindy Kaling (“The Mindy Project”), the aforementioned Liu and LL Cool J, and not much else. (Is Omar Epps supposed to be the primary star of “Resurrection”?)

And there are almost no shows that have predominantly non-white casts. In fact there is exactly one: “Community.” Its cast has four non-whites (Yvette Nicole Brown, Danny Pudi, Danny LOL DONALD Glover, and Ken Jeong), to just three whites (Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, and Alison Brie). That’s only because Chevy Chase got run out for season five. CBS’ “Hawaii Five-O” does make it to parity with three Asians and a black guy (and a Samoan at large!) to go with its four white regular cast members.

But it’s almost a primetime TV law that people of color occupy one or two supporting roles in ensemble casts that are mostly white. There is no equivalent of “Sanford and Son,” “The Jeffersons” or “Good Times” currently on network TV (incidentally, the latter two of those were both originally aired on CBS).

It’s mildly surprising that Fox is such a close challenger to CBS’ ivory crown. In the network’s infancy it was progressive in not only casting African Americans but also doing entire shows that were predominantly black. “In Living Color” had every Wayans ever, David Alan Grier, Jamie Foxx, Tommy Davidson and T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh. “Living Single” cast Kim Coles, Queen Latifah, Kim Fields, and Erika Alexander. Fox even gave Sinbad his own show. Instead of putting a token minority on an otherwise white show, Fox was casting shows that were almost entirely devoid of white people. Curiously though, the development of new such show casts trailed off about the time Fox won the rights to the NFL in 1993 (although they did run “The Bernie Mac” show from 2001 to 2006).

Today there are so many cable outlets with narrowly defined programming, that viewers, no matter their ethnic makeup, shouldn’t lack for anything they want to watch. And CBS is a business. If they’ve figured out that appealing to an old, white demographic — that’s just an inference working back from what they are currently programming — is their path to staying America’s Most White Watched Network even that problematic? It’s probably something their shareholders appreciate — or they do as long as there are Baby Boomers. That mightn’t be sustainable long term, but CBS’ market cap has just about doubled over the past 24 months.

Moreover, does anybody watch an NBA game and get upset that, of the 10 players on the floor at any given time, maybe eight or more of them are not white? Demanding that the racial makeup of a professional basketball game mirror that of America would probably just lead to basketball games that not many people without Aryan Nation passports would want to watch.

Much like the NBA — the hypothetically racially-balanced one or the real one — scripted network programming is entertainment. The idea is that if a show is not good, people won’t watch it and it will get replaced with something better. (At least, eventually.) You could make a defensible argument that the slate of network shows is simply what the market has left us with. If CBS could make money with a reboot of “The Jeffersons,” they would do it (uh, and if this goes into development tomorrow, someone better cut me a large check).

That does leave out one key distinction between sports and TV networks though. The NBA is not a public good. The airwaves are. And you can still put up an antenna and get network TV for free and even get it in HD. In exchange for the privilege of using hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our airwaves without paying for said privilege, networks are supposed to serve the educational and informational needs of the people — or at least pretend to every now and then. And a monochromatic primetime scattered over four networks might not really be serving the cultural interests of America.

In the summer of 1999, Kweisi Mfume, the then-President of the NAACP, threatened a boycott of the major networks when not a single new show in their fall line-ups featured a person of color in a leading role. After some self-serving self-flagellation, Hollywood made some small changes and recast a few shows. Most gains won in that battle are long gone, the work of Shonda Rhimes notwithstanding. And it’s entirely possible that, collectively, the networks have regressed from where they were 15 years ago.

Maybe CBS can find small consolation in its coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament itself. The studio show for its $10.8 billion investment in unpaid college kids features Greg Gumbel, Clark Kellogg, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley. All four are African Americans. So, in five-minute increments, spread out over three weekends, CBS honcho Les Moonves is fighting the power that is himself. Even if only just a little.

1 Note: I originally punted on cartoons and just left them out of the calculations. But, you’ll notice in the drop down menu there is an item for “Fox with Animation.” If you assume that the yellow Simpsons are actually white, and then put the entire line-up of Fox’s Sunday cartoons into the mix, then Fox actually overtakes CBS as the whitest network on TV. But, the numbers are very sensitive. As noted, CBS has at least four people of color in one show, “Hawaii Five-O.” If you remove that from CBS’ line up (also in the drop down menu), it would again take over the top spot. That show is on TV, though. So that’s not to arbitrarily humiliate CBS even more, but to show how much that one show affects CBS’ numbers.

Michael Bertin is a writer rarely in New York.

★★★★ First thing, out the window, white flakes were falling on a sharp diagonal. Again, again, and still: snow. One spasm — one last spasm? — of horribleness. Then blue skies blew in, first with decorative white clouds and then pristine, innocent, as free of malice as a child is, when the child is not being malicious. The office roof deck was closed, but it was good enough to go out on the fire escape, coatless. On Lafayette Street, the late light caught choking, gritty clouds of dust raised by traffic on the torn-up roadway.

“The selectiveness of Gladwell’s science doesn’t nullify the plausibility of his argument.”

This is great and I have nothing to add, if you haven’t clicked play already you have been wasting your time. [Via]

I am presuming here that everything you know about William Henry Harrison is that he caught pneumonia after giving a long-ass Inauguration address and died a month later, but it turns out that is probably not true: “In those days the nation’s capital had no sewer system. Until 1850, some sewage simply flowed onto public grounds a short distance from the White House, where it stagnated and formed a marsh; the White House water supply was just seven blocks downstream of a depository for ‘night soil’ hauled there each day at government expense. That field of human excrement would have been a breeding ground for two deadly bacteria, Salmonella typhi and S. paratyphi, the causes of typhoid and paratyphoid fever — also known as enteric fever, for their devastating effect on the gastrointestinal system. Two other antebellum presidents, James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor, developed severe gastroenteritis while living in the White House.”

“House hunters should brace themselves for sticker shock — Manhattan real estate prices have hit a jaw dropping average of $1,363 per square foot, according to a Douglas Elliman report released Tuesday. With buyers competing for slim pickings in the first quarter of the year, sellers had the upper hand, pushing prices upward and often forcing speedy sales. The average sales price of Manhattan apartments spiked more than 30 percent over the past year to $1.774 million, the report said.”
 — If you need a laugh this afternoon try to remember that one time you thought about what things would be like when you finally owned an apartment in town rather than renting and then brace yourself for a long series of mordant chuckles at your own expense, because at this point you’ll be lucky if you’re able to afford the storage space somewhere that you sneak into at night to sleep in.

The toilet man was obsessed with numbers. Like the number of days he had left to live. Ten-thousand five-hundred was about how many days he said he had left, if he lived to be eighty. Thirteen years ago, the Toilet Man said, he turned forty and asked himself, how long is one lifetime? Then he checked the national statistic: eighty. So, forty more years; fourteen thousand, six-hundred days more days, give or take. “And then you die,” said the Toilet Man. He lingered over the last world, stretched it. “Dyyyyyyyeee,” it sounded like.

Back then, before he was the Toilet Man, he was Jack Sim, a rich Singaporean, running 16 businesses, having a midlife crises, searching for meaning and finding none. “What’s the purpose of having more money?” he thought. “I mean it’s crazy! When you have no money, you need to sell your time for money, and when you have money, you sell your time for money. It’s a losing business.” And it was confusing. “Time is the only currency of life” is what he concluded, and so endeavored to do something different with his.

It wasn’t toilets. Not at first. First he tried volunteering with the SOS, which was a listening service for distress phonecalls. A suicide hotline, more or less. He trained for nine months before he took his first call and then, not long after, realized it was a miserably lonely job. People didn’t call. And then when people did, he couldn’t help them all at once. So he tried something else. He helped conserve old buildings, which meant spending a lot of money on renovation and he thought, “Hey, this is a very expensive hobby!” so he dropped that, too. Soon after, still searching, Jack Sim read something Singapore’s prime minister at the time, Goh Chok Tong, had said. It involved toilets. “We should measure our graciousness against the cleanliness of our public toilets,” is what Goh Chok Tong said. And Jack Sim thought to himself, “Hey, that’s the one! Nobody’s going to handle this one. That’s going to be my job!” and he started the Restroom Association of Singapore to clean up the public toilets. People loved it. He then realized there were 15 toilet associations around the world, in cities in Britain and Germany and Japan and some other places, too, but no world headquarters. So he started the World Toilet Organization, a kind of play on the World Trade Organization, and that is how Jack Sim became the Toilet Man. People call him Mr. Toilet, too.

The Toilet Man just got back home from India. He spends a lot of time there now, because India needs a lot of toilets. He is good at raising money for toilets, and motivating people to clean toilets, but his biggest thing, the thing the Toilet Man likes doing most of all, is to get people talking about shit. “I’m a bit of a naughty boy,” the Toilet Man said, and then explained that this was because he was the youngest child in the family. Toilets, said the Toilet Man, need a common language, we need to talk about our shit as much as we talk about food, and anyway what happens to food afterward? It ends up in the toilet! The next step is to make the toilet very sexy, create a fashion trend, where Bollywood stars talk about toilets. In Germany they are very good at talking about their shit. In India, it’s a taboo.

Just then someone, a tall skinny man, approached quietly and softly said, “Jack, so you have a fan. She is very shy. She’s standing over there,” and he pointed to a woman across the wide hall, over by a table, who looked away when we all turned toward her. “She wants to get a signature,” the quiet man said, and then passed the Toilet Man a magazine and a pen.

“What is this?” the Toilet Man said.

“It’s a magazine. You’re in it,” the quiet man said.

“Oh! OK! Soooooo…” the Toilet Man flipped through the magazine until he found a page with his picture on it, and underneath, the headline “Man of Missions.” He laughed and signed the magazine and handed it back to the quiet man, who took it over to the shy woman across the wide hall.

“Did you see, they didn’t print the world ‘shit’?” the Toilet Man said. “It’s ugly, people don’t like to talk about it. It’s scary. When I grew up, we had the British bucket system, which was terrifying, all the colors and smells of other people’s shit. That is some of my first memories. And it’s scary. When we moved from a hut into a flat, the first flush made us feel wealthy. Today, what we are doing now, we conduct a survey of people going to the toilet before and after, and you will find that most people, ninety-nine percent of the people, are happier after. Maybe one percent had a bad time. So the toilet is actually a room, a happiness room, for almost everyone. It’s a joy! It’s a luxury! Let’s celebrate the toilet. Let’s talk about it like that. Oh the subject is so embarrassing otherwise, the only way to break the ice is to make fun.”

“And the customer! No one thinks of the people, if they are poor, as customers. In Germany, Japan, they are good at talking about shit, and they have very good toilets, very advanced toilets in Japan. But we can’t take that to India. You have to customize, obviously, and think about the terrain, yes, the hydrology, yes, the affordability of the people, yes. But most important, the thing we forget, is what is sociologically acceptable. It’s the customer. Are they wipers or washers, squatters or sitters? You have to be very, very sensitive to the customers. If they don’t like the toilet, they will turn it into a store room, rich or poor. You have to make them want the toilet,” said the Toilet Man, standing up. “I have to go, now,” he said. “I have to go give a talk about toilets, of course.”

Ryan Bradley is a writer and editor in New York.