As I put my shirt back on, it was explained that there used to be more women, “born women,” in our escort service. A lot of clients will want one, and we’ll run out early. Try to “up-sell” them. I assumed this meant to a transsexual, but the Commander said you can send a boy to a client who wants a girl. “You can?” He shrugged. “Once in a while. I tell ‘em, ‘Hey, a blowjob’s a blowjob.’” “Does that work?” “It has worked.” More…
Ovechkin is the oddest player going. On highlight reels he is always scoring acrobatic goals—goals while flinging himself through the air, goals from his knees, goals from his back—but in actual games what you see is that he’s out of control. Ovechkin is graceless. His great rival, Sidney Crosby, when he skates, looks like he’s barely touching the ice. Ovechkin looks like he’s trying to dig a hole in it. More…
Norman Foster’s preliminary plans for the library have not yet been made public. According to a former staff member who has seen them, Foster’s design may well call for the demolition of not just the stacks but of much of the marble facade that stands on the Bryant Park side of the main library. In the facade’s place, we will likely see some kind of ambitious new glass entrance. More…
The New York Public Library has announced a plan to remake its landmark building on 42nd Street. As Joshua Steiner, vice chairman of the board of trustees, put it in 2008, the renovation in many way represents the “further democratization” of the library. By contrast, a staff member with whom I spoke called the plan “the destruction of the research library.” More…
If you have 300 people against three or four police officers—well, what happened in Chicago was that one group of police officers shot and killed three black Communists involved in this movement. And then fifty thousand people marched through the city in a memorial parade—and after that it became incredibly difficult to evict anybody in Chicago. More…
When you are wealthy and successful, you have a choice. You can believe your success stems from luck and privilege, or you can believe it stems from hard work. Very few people like to view their success as a matter of luck. And so, perhaps understandably, most people on Wall Street believe they have earned their jobs, and the money that follows. More…
We have this curious system whereby the US has this gigantic empire, which we can’t call an empire, the places that we occupy are sending us money, which we can’t call tribute so we call it a loan. And we’re supposed to think this is just a problem with the balance of trade. It has nothing to do with the fact that we have this gigantic army sitting on top of them. More…
For email, using Riseup.net is good news. The solutions they offer are integrated with Tor as much as possible. They’re badass. Whereas Google inspects your traffic as a method of monetization. I’d rather give Riseup fifty dollars a month for the equivalent service of Gmail, knowing their commitment to privacy. And also knowing that they would tell the cops to go fuck themselves. There’s a lot of value in that. More…
Snakes, trees, devils, and also dams, vineyards, and Martin Bryant, a young man with hair like a Dogtown skater who murdered thirty-five people one day with an AR-15 machine gun. Of all these topics of conversation and others, the one that kept appearing in the most unexpected places was the Museum of Old and New Art, founded last year by a native Tasmanian. More…
Each candidate was required to respond; those who were quick to react were immediately chastised, by those who were slower to the bit, for using tragedy for political purposes. This brings the sum total of politicians who will stand to benefit from the incident, whether by responding to it or affecting to defer their response, to every one of them. More…
We thought we had signed an armistice with reality. Then it all started over. In Santiago, a group of art students go round and round the Moneda. They plan to keep this up for 1,800 hours, symbolic of the $1,800 million they think need to be injected into higher education. The street is taken over by Lady Gaga imitators, open-air nudity, and three thousand passionate kisses in front of the cathedral. More…
The champions of baseball’s offseason were the Miami (née Florida) Marlins, who not only got a hip alliterative name and fresh uniforms, but also moved into space-age Marlins Park this week. To complete the makeover, they made a host of pricey upgrades, adding the twin loose cannons of Chicago, manager Ozzie Guillen and pitcher Carlos Zambrano. More…
The Cycle Messenger World Championships are usually quite a lo-fi affair. In 2010 the race took place in Panajachel, a tiny town in the Guatemalan highlands, and resembled something from Mad Max. Guatemalans are allowed to carry guns as long as they’re kept on display, and a few messengers in Panajachel sported pistols alongside the radios and mobile phones they carried bandoleer style across their chests. More…
