Vladimir Cole / Vlad Cole / VC

Picked up the pace a bit in May, but still only 10 books down versus a goal of 21 (one per week is the target pace).

I finished:

#7: The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg. An easy, fun read with lots of quirky insight into the characters that made tuna the delicacy that it is today. I enjoyed this and recommend it to anyone with an interest in how supply chain innovations can create whole industries. Reading this has bumped tk back to the top of my reading list.

#8: The Numerati by Stephen Baker. Read this on the flight from NYC to Heathrow Airport and still had two hours to spare. It’s a quick, enjoyable survey of the potential for data mining and how companies that master it might create incredible new advances in human welfare (and of course corporate profits). Enjoyed the chapter on how medicinal use of body monitors could result in drastic healthcare improvements. Not one of my favorite books — found it a bit too “Newsweek” in style. That is, it seemed dumbed down for a business audience, just missing the mark for business writing that I like (The Economist does a better job hitting the right balance between catering to a business audience and being faithful to complicated subjects).

#9: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller. Spent shifted my whole outlook on consumerism and why it’s such an integral part of modern society. Loved it. Maybe the top book of 2009 (from my list) so far. Huge insights for consumer marketers guaranteed.

#10: Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres. Enjoyed this one more than The Numerati which covers many of the same topics. Super Crunchers does a better job with impactful anecdotes and he author is an actual practitioner of quantitative analysis. Examples in this book are more powerful and appicable to everyday business. This is a book I’ll be tempted to keep on my shelf rather than sell off.

Next up:

• Loyalty Myths by Keiningham et al.
• Web Analytics by Avinash Kaushik
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austin, Seth Grahame-Smith
• Competing on Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
• Billion Dollar Lessons by Paul Carrol and Chunka Mui

Just read, in quick succession a few more books. It felt good to knock out #6 in a single day. And yet I’m still 20+ books behind my goal pace of one per week, though.

#4: There’s No Elevator to the Top: A Leading Headhunter Shares the Advancement Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Executives  Occasional flashes of useful career navigation advice, but disorganized, rambling, and annoyingly preachy for the most part. I wouldn’t re-read it, but I don’t regret reading it for the few things I picked up.

#5: Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine Hustler editorial big cheese’s  hilariously ribald account of a truly bizarre organization. Left it on a plane after I was done reading. Wonder who picked it up? I learned quite a bit about Larry Flynt Publishing, about Hustler editorial structure — stuff I care a lot about given my journalism background — and learned some neat smut factoids.

#6: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex The best of the three — mostly because the writer was more talented and the material better researched. The book took me on a roller-coaster ride of emotional lows (horror at how recently medical professionals were performing the equivalent of sexual lobotomies and how backwards society is on this topic) and highs (many genuine laugh-out-loud moments at the absurdity of it all). Also genuinely illuminating and instructive on the topic of research done well and done poorly. Loved this one, but not for the squeamish.

Nearest the top in my daunting stack of unfinished books:

• Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years
• Competing on Analytics
• The Numerati
• Super Crunchers
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (no joke)
• The House of Mondavi

The subject lines of two emails in my junk mail folder right now remind me of one of my favorite books, Jude the Obscure:

1. “Tap her hole and drill her.”
2. “Specialize in X-Ray technology. Train to be a Radiologist.”

 In a critical moment early on in the book, Jude is walking along a public road and thinking about his progress towards his goal of becoming a great scholar, pondering the great authors he’ll read –Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca, Antoninus — when he’s hit in the ear with a chopped-off pig penis thrown at him by low-class girls who are washing pig offal in a stream and who call him “Hoity-toity.” One of these girls (the thrower of the pig parts) becomes his wife and completely derails his dreams of scholarship.

These two spam emails pretty much sum up Jude’s losing battle between pursuit of animal gratificatin and pursuit of high-minded scholarship. It’s fun (and maybe a bit sad) to note that not a lot has changed since Hardy published Jude the Obscure back in 1896. I’m wondering whether some cultural critic a hundred years from now will take a serious look at spam mail over time and come to the same conclusion.

Signed up for a 14-day free trial of Zune Pass but won’t renew. Here’s why:

• Tried to buy an album (730 MS Points) — half of the 10 songs downloaded and the rest refused to download. I had to spend half an hour on the phone to resolve the issue. The album still isn’t purchasable and they advised me to avoid trying again, calling the album “bugged.” To their credit, phone support was top notch and also surprisingly nice. But ecommerce needs to work Amazon flawlessly for me to want to continue to engage in it. Also, it’s annoying to use MS Points instead of standard dollars. I know why they’re used (having worked at Microsoft), but I feel that Microsoft has way underinvested in improving the MS Points architecture, infrastructure, reliability and consumer-facing features. It’s old and increasingly a weak point for products that use it.  

• The catalog is infested with DRM’ed music. I should be able to change a preference so that no DRM content is ever shown to me. I won’t buy it and don’t want to be shown it. Of the “millions” of songs in the catalog, it felt like half were DRM.

• The Zune recommendation engine is broken. Pandora does it well. Zune doesn’t. I just clicked on Zune’s “songs for you” and they recommended Justin Timberlake. Are you frigging kidding me? I’ve played 2,673 songs through on Zune at this point and you push JT on me? Are you trying to make me retch on my keyboard? The software should have a *very* good idea of my tastes. Pandora nails this. If only Pandora’s Music Genome technology were part of Zune! So, in order to find good new music, I had to run Pandora for the recommendations, then I had to punch in Pandora’s recommendations to see if Zune had the music (it often didn’t, or when it did, it was often crippled with DRM).

• Unavailable content. I couldn’t find ANY content from (just to name a few) Man Plus, Truckasaurus. I also couldn’t find some very important content from Ratatat. Of Ratatat’s available content, much was available only through a whole album purchase. This is not a great consumer experience, but I realize it’s a business and licensing issue. The music industry makes it far easier for me to pirate. Here I am, a paying consumer, looking to buy music that I like and it’s EASIER for me to find it outside of a legit content service like Zune.

• Favorites list is crippled. This one I blame the Zune team for. In my first couple of days with the Zune pass, I’m blithely listening to music and tagging certain content as “favorite” thinking I’ll be able to go back to these favorites at any time (as I might a “favorite” within a browser). I even imagined that I’d be able to assemble a playlist out of my favorites. Instead, the “favorites” is just 8 songs long. This was probably done so that server-side storage per account was kept reasonably low (a cost savings) and maybe even because licensing restrictions made long favorites lists problematic. But this is broken. Avid music listeners certainly have more than 8 favorite songs — we might have dozens or hundreds, depending on the mood that we’re in.

I could go on, but these are the most egregious issues that prevented me from renewing my Zunepass subscription. It’s too bad. I want to see something like this succeed.

This is a great business lesson *and* a great restaurant story all wrapped into one post.

First, I’m not usually the type to want to take a beef public. I believe that one should praise in public, criticize in private. However, Wild Ginger (a relatively expensive restaurant located in downtown Seattle) makes it impossible to send anything more than a few words at a time to them. Their “contact us” form rejects submission of comments that are too long and (even worse) gives the user no indication of why the form failed to submit.

So, because Wild Ginger’s comment form is broken, I must make the comment in public and LINK to it in their comment form. Isn’t that brilliant? I bet that that’s exactly the side-effect they didn’t have in mind when they told their web designer to limit comments to 150 characters (or whatever the limit is).

Here’s the text of the complaint I tried to submit:

I was having lunch with business associates at Wild Ginger (downtown Seattle) today and noticed that the crab cakes that we ordered as appetizers smelled strongly of ammonia. At first, I misidentified the source of the odor as the dipping sauce that came with the crab cakes (because the sauce did indeed smell of ammonia), so the server took away one of the two dipping sauces at our table and returned 20 minutes later to inform me that they had determined that the sauce wasn’t spoiled. By the time the server returned, I had rediagnosed the source of the odor as coming from the crab cakes themselves. I pointed this out to the server, and he took away one of the three crab cakes on the table (not the two remaining dishes of crab cakes, mind you, which would have been the appropriate response, even if the customer was just imagining the whole issue).

The server returned 5 to 10 minutes later to say that the crab cakes were indeed “off” and that he’d be removing the crab cakes from our bill. I expected Wild Ginger to make a better response than “We’ll take those off your bill.” Wild Ginger was serving spoiled crab! The restaurant should have assured me that they’d be taking the rotten crab cakes OFF THE MENU.

Subsequent to the meal, I did some research online and learned that ammonia in crab is a common symptom of spoiled crab meat. There is ample documentation of this issue online, but here are a couple of particularly enlightening links:

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/346785
http://www.ari1.com/id41.htm

Serving spoiled crab is not something I would have expected of Wild Ginger. I have been to the restaurant at this point a dozen times since I came to Seattle in 2006 and have always considered it a safe place for a business lunch. Now that I’ve been served spoiled seafood at Wild Ginger, and now that I’ve experienced an underwhelming response to the issue, I am questioning whether it is safe to order *anything* from the menu. Perhaps refrigeration standards are not up to par. Perhaps other hygiene issues exist. I know I may be overreacting because one bad experience in a dozen doesn’t necessarily mak a restaurant bad (especially after so many positive experiences), but I was particularly concerned that the waiter didn’t react more appropriately to the issue. At the very least, the waiter should have removed all of the spoiled food from the table immediately. He took away one single crab cake, not the whole lot. Second, I would have expected escalation to a shift manager who could apologize for the issue. Finally, I’d also expect not to see the crab continue to be served on other diners’ tables.

PS: Please fix your web comment form.

I am still on some press lists … and am usually pretty well behaved about obeying embargos, but this one I’m going to break because (a) it’s from my former employer and (b) it’s awesome news and I want to be the first to out it!

The Economist to Launch London Theme Park

Media brand branches into experiential space

London, UK–  As part of a strategy designed to broaden the revenue base, leverage content over new platforms and promote The Economist brand to a young and dynamic audience, The Economist Group is delighted to announce the development of a public-entertainment facility that combines the magic of a theme park with the excitement of macroeconomics.

After six months of negotiations with the British government, The Economist Group can confirm that Econoland will be built on a former industrial estate in East London, close to the beating heart of the City and thus to a large potential market of financial-sector employees.

Thanks to issues relating to its previous use, the site has been acquired at an advantageous price. Most of the toxic wastes have been cleared and levels of carcinogens appear to have returned to normal. High unemployment in the area will only increase the facility’s attractions, as former City workers seek to recapture some of the excitement they enjoyed in their professional life. Heavy investment in security and a landscaped moat and electric fence will neutralise any potential threat from the growing anarchist presence.

Among the thrilling experiences Econoland will offer are:

The currency high-roller: Float like a butterfly with the euro and drop like a stone with the pound!

Chamber of horrors: Tremble at the wailing of distressed debt!

Fiscal fantasyland: Watch the economy shrivel before your very eyes as you struggle to stop growth falling!

Bankrupt Britain: Pit your wits against the government as you try to sink sterling and bring the country to its knees!

The severe contest: Try your strength against a bear market!

Econoland will appeal to the kid in everyone, although children themselves will not be admitted. The park will open on April 1st.

More information, including exclusive images of the park, are available at Economist.com by clicking here.

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Tomorrow’s my last day at Microsoft. I never thought I’d be leaving Microsoft after just two years here (many people know what a huge advocate of the company I’ve been). It took a special opportunity to tear me away from all of the great people and awesome Xbox and PC games projects that I’ve had an opportunity to work on as a member of the interactive entertainment business development team.

After a week off, I’ll be joining NCsoft West (developer & publisher of massively multiplayer online games including Aion, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Lineage)  in their new HQ located in downtown Seattle (4th and Pike — less than a mile from my home at 11th and Pike!). I’ll be leading a team responsible for research and analytics — together we’ll be generating actionable market, consumer, and competitive insights.

NCsoft’s got years of experience developing, publishing and operating next-generation online games and is very well positioned to leverage* its assets to compete effectively in the service-oriented future that’s rapidly becoming a reality within the games business. Very exciting! I’m also thrilled to be working on MMOs as a genre. The thousands of hours I spent playing Everquest (2000-2003) led to the epiphany that resulted in my pursuit of a career in games. I’m doing what I love … and getting paid for it. It’s not quite “playing games for a living” (as friends outside the industry are wont to refer to it), but it’s still somewhat unbelievable!

For locals: I’ll be at Smith Bar (Capitol Hill, Seattle) tomorrow from 7pm until late.

* Whoa! I can use words like “leverage” in writing again! Crush! Kill! Compete! Yay. I’ve regained some vocabulary. (’softie joke)

Finished Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us last week. Inspirational, but fluffy. Reminded me a lot of Tom Peters’ writing style. My takeaway: don’t be scared to take a leap; passionately lead and the rest will follow. Four stars (not five — it’s ultimately just business erotica).

This article in the WSJ that spoke to me. Summary quotes:

“The deepening recession is exacting punishment for a psychological vice that masquerades as virtue for many working people: the unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status. This tendency can induce outright panic as more and more people fear loss of employment.”

“Like a drug, professional success can induce a feeling of ecstasy that quickly feels essential. Recapturing that feeling can require greater and greater feats, a phenomenon that — more than simple greed — explains the drive for ever-larger bonuses and conquests.”

Pretty good summary of typical careerist neuroticism. Not so sure that it’s a vice to be stamped out, though.

I’d love to average about a book a week this year, but so far, with January drawing to a close, I’ve only finished two. I had better pick up the pace if I’m going to stay on track…

1. i-mode Strategy (2/5): waste of time. I picked up some neat anecdotes and a better understanding of i-mode’s inception, but I’d have learned more just reviewing the Wikipedia entry. McKinsey consultants are portrayed quite unfavorably here, but I found myself more frustrated at the author’s lack of business acumen and found her frustration with the consultants naive.
2. On the Road (4/5): It took all sorts of willpower to stay mentally engaged and to actively visualize the scenes in this manic roadie romp, but the effort really paid off. I’m still experiencing flashbacks, days after finishing it.

(Please pardon my experimentation with an Amazon Associates account I set up years ago but never used, until now.)

While a student in Wharton’s MBA program, I simultaneously served as EIC for the AOL-owned Joystiq properties, the largest video game blog network on the web. This was basically a full-time job on top of my MBA curriculum. For the most part, it was difficult to balance the two roles, but sometimes it lead to insights that wouldn’t have occurred had I not been deeply steeped in new journalism and MBA studies.

One idea that I built out for a class (including business model and all that MBA jazz) was the idea of going head-to-head against the likes of the Financial Times, WSJ, and NYT with an online-only business news publication. The company would not be saddled with expensive print and distribution operations, and would also allow its writers to live wherever they liked, so long as they were near one of the world’s major airport hubs and population centers.

The reason for this unorthodox structure was to keep fixed overhead costs very, very low so that (a) all salaries could be covered through even mediocre advertising, special publishing and syndication revenues; (b) the extra margins (to the extent that any existed) could be focused on talent acquisition, talent retention and brand building. Unshackled by the dead weight of physical operations, the business would be agile, fast, and ultimately deadly for the lumbering giants — even the Grey Lady.

Alas, I never went any further with the idea, but every new report on the collapse has me kicking myself for not building this out and trying to make it happen. It’s too late now. The timing would have been perfect two or three years ago. The physical news media are already reaching advanced stages of collapse which has some of them earnestly working to reinvent themselves (the LA Times, for instance, announced that digital revenues now cover newsroom payroll!). The survivors will be much, much stronger and will have their pick of talent.

It’s fun to watch from the sidelines, but I wonder how long I’ll have to wait to feel this sure about an opportunity to found a startup so clearly in my domain of expertise and passion. The collapse and rebirth of multi-billion dollar, multi-century industries doesn’t happen often (thankfully). I hope I’ve got the guts to pursue the next one.

It’s sometimes nice to spend a whole afternoon with Creativity Magazine and follow all the links and suggestions. Here’s the best of what I found in the December issue of the magazine.

• There can be only one (NBA): Neat splitscreen application. Supposedly won tons of awards. I’m not sure it’s *that* good.
• Wario Land: Shake It: Best video game advert of the year. Amazing work. Too bad the game’s metacritic score hovers in the high 70s.
• White Gold - Do You Love My Hair? (Milk): The whole concept (of which this is just one video) was really well done.
• Fate: Leave Nothing (Nike): Nike’s commercials are so inspirational. They make me want to get out there and exercise. Or at least buy some shoes. If I buy shoes, I’ll automatically be healthier, right?
• The Great Schlep: Best political ad of the election season. Sarah’s so cute.
• Moodstream (Getty): Awesome interactive tool that allows users to dial a mood for inspiration, ultimately selling more Getty images. Getty should sell moodstream as a service for digital photo frames and LCD television sets. Slick. Helps Getty transform from purveyor of images to creative partner.
• CNN Shirt: get wacky CNN headlines in t-shirt form. I wonder if the reporters get a cut of revenues from successful headlines? Unlikely. Also, nothing against CNN, but the British tabloids would sell way more shirts. I hope they’re copying this.
• Aviator (JC Penney): I love it when little girls dream big. Great ad. Really sad when you consider what happens when dreams meet biological reality.
• Slide (Old Spice): Ridiculous.
• Lumberjack (HSBC): Hrmm. I’m not sure if I like being manipulated like this. The ending is too neat and clean, and therefore too crassly commercial.
• Burst (Schweppes): I’d love to get ahold of a camera that can do this. So gorgeous.
• Slots (Monster): Monster doesn’t disappoint.
• Horse Head (Audi): Funny gag.
• Perfect Mom (Lucchetti): He was about to ask for something else besides a nose, I think. This one’s good too.
• I’m a PC (Microsoft): This response to Apple’s nasty Mac vs. PC campaign walked a delicate line between response and repositioning. It was well done. Apple’s new Mac vs. PC ads now look mean-spirited and cheap.
• Last Day Trailer (Gears of War): I love the song and the editing, but for some reason Devotchka’s “How it ends” doesn’t twang my heartstrings like Jules’s “Mad World” that accompanied the original Gears of War trailer.
• Art blogger takes a tour of Faile artists studios: wow. I’d love (but can’t afford) to buy some of that massive art they’re making. Beautiful.
• Music video: Sweet Lies (Booka Shade): makes me miss NYC.
• Bring on the Trumpets! (National Confectionary): You know it’s good when users create music videos remixing your advert (great one here).
• Absolut Machines (Absolut): Musically creative robots!
• XXX Party (Diesel): Seriously funny.
• Take It to the Next Level (Nike): Goosebumps. Guy Ritchie directed it.
• I Love the World (Discovery): Optimism is a nice emotion.
• Pinata Man (Skittles): So much wonderful emotion and humor.
• Damn Tasty (New York Pizza): “fuck” is an underused word in advertising.
• MTV Backchannel: the website game is very, very cool.

I’m certain: the most incredible thing ever published on the subject of coffee addiction is right here.

Here’s how I make my coffee.

Every Saturday morning, in a very large glass french press, I cold-brew heaps and heaps of high-quality coffee. On Sunday evening, after about 36 hours, I push the filter down on the cold grounds and bottle the elixir in empty wine bottles which then go into the fridge.

To prepare: I pour a serving of this iced coffee into a cup, microwave it, then put in a teaspoonfull of condensed, sweetened milk. I stir and stir, then drink it down pretty fast, since I’m paranoid about letting coffee sit on my teeth too long.

Since everyone’s asking, here’s the verdict on the places we visited:

• Rose & Joe’s Italian Bakery @ 22-40 31st St., Astoria, NY (Yelp)
  • Verdict: tremendously tasty bakery pizza. This is like the “reference spec” for Pizza Hut when it was still made out of just one kitchen by a single entrepreneur.
• Rosario’s Deli @ 2255 31st St., Astoria, NY (Yelp)
  • Verdict: The sauce is just a touch too sweet, but Rosario makes a very fine crust and fresh mozz. The overall effect makes this a top 5 by-the-slice establishment.
• Sac’s Pizza Place @ 25-41 Broadway, Astoria, NY (Yelp) 
  • Verdict: Nicely balanced tomatoes, but we were their first customers of the day the day after thanksgiving — meaning that the coal-fired oven was not hot enough yet. Our pie came out of the gas oven, disappointing us. I intend to give this one another shot.
• Di Fara Pizzeria @ 1420 Avenue J at E 15th St., Brooklyn, NY (Yelp)
  • Verdict: Everyone’s favorite. Unfortunately, the middle-tier of the three-tier oven kept burning one side of the pies. Dom needs to fix this. Char is good, but burning a significant portion of the hump is wrong and Dom should know better. Still, the pizza is just wonderful.
• Joe’s @ 7 Carmine St., New York, NY 10014 (Yelp)
  • Verdict: Also a top 5 by-the-slice establishment. Very solid exemplar of the true NYC slice.
• Arturo’s @ 106 W Houston St., New York, NY 10012 (Yelp)
  • Verdict: Surly, unfriendly waiter. Chintzy Italian decor. Overly brittle crust with too much dry hump. Unremarkable pie. Did not live up to my hopes that this coal-fired pizza might become my go-to coal-fired pizza place in NYC.
• Grandaisy Bakery (formerly Sullivan St. Bakery) @ 73 Sullivan St., New York, NY (Yelp)
  • Verdict: Still my favorite pizza in all of NYC; truly unique Rome-style bakery pizza but with upscale bread and fantastically fresh ingredients. Will always be on my itinerary when I’m in NYC.
• L’Asso @ 192 Mott St., New York, NY (between Kenmare St & Spring St) (Yelp)
  • Verdict: Crust on the pies we had was fatally flawed. Like thick paper, the crust got wet and basically disintegrated moments outof the oven. Too cracker-like at the hump, too limp in the center. Good decor and service, though. This pizza is better than average, but not a top-10 establishment.

 My top pizza list is therefore largely unchanged by this tour:

1. Pepe’s (New Haven)

2. Grandaisy Bakery (NYC) 

3. Di Fara’s (Brooklyn)

4. Joe’s (NYC)

5. Lombardi’s (NYC) — (but only off-hours, when the tourons are not mobbing it)

6. Una Pizza Napoletana (NYC)

7. Franny’s (Brooklyn)

8. Patsy’s (NYC)

9. Rose & Joe’s (Astoria)

10. Grimaldi’s (Brooklyn)

On my next visit, I’m going to have to visit Artichoke, Denino’s (Staten Island — UGH) and all the New Haven establishments again.

As of update 6, my pizza tour itinerary is near final. This post will be edited and updated with any changes.

ASTORIA

• [DONE] Rose & Joe’s Italian Bakery @ 22-40 31st St., Astoria, NY (Yelp)
  • Transit: N/W to Ditmars Blvd station
  • Why: something magical in the taste of these slices. I don’t know what it is. I used to live a few blocks from here and try to never miss a return visit.
  • When: 10:30am 
• [DONE] Rosario’s Deli @ 2255 31st St., Astoria, NY (Yelp)
  • Transit: Will walk across the street from Rose & Joe’s /  Walk from previous stop
  • Why: it’s a very nice slice made with very tasty tomatoes and fresh mozz. I often grabbed a slice from Rosario and a slice from Rose & Joe’s on my way to/from work.
  • When: 10:45am
• [DONE] Sac’s Pizza Place @ 25-41 Broadway, Astoria, NY (Yelp) 
  • Transit: N/W to Broadway station, head west on Broadway. I plan to walk here from Rosario’s Deli /  Walk from previous stop
  • Why it’s on the list: underrated, supposedly. One of the few coal-fired places in NYC.
  • When: 11:30am

BROOKLYN

• [DONE] Di Fara Pizzeria @ 1420 Avenue J at E 15th St., Brooklyn, NY (Yelp)
  • Transit: A very long subway ride from Astoria.  
  • Why: Domenico de Marco is a true maestro of mozz. I must have pizza touched by his hands once again (he’s not getting any younger). Plus, I skipped it last year and still feel guilty about that. I will be bringing a bottle of Vueve to enjoy with the pizza.
  • When: 1:00pm-ish (not sure how long it’ll take us to get there from Astoria)

MANHATTAN

• [DONE] Joe’s @ 7 Carmine St., New York, NY 10014 (Yelp)
  • Transit: A/C/E/B/D/F/V to West 4th Street
  • Why: best by-the-slice place in all of NYC
  • When: 3:45pm ish
• [ELIMINATED] No. 28 @ 28 Carmine Street, New York, NY 10014 (Yelp)
  • Transit: A/C/E/B/D/F/V to West 4th Street /  Walk from previous stop
  • Why: Lots of good stuff said about it… we’ll see
  • When: 3:00pm ish
• [DONE] Arturo’s @ 106 W Houston St., New York, NY 10012 (Yelp)
  • Transit: Spring St-6th Ave (C, E) /  Walk from previous stop
  • Why: Rare coal fired pizza. This could be my new Lombardi’s, since Lombardi’s has just mismanaged their pizza trust for too long.
  • When: 4pm ish
• [DONE] Grandaisy Bakery (formerly Sullivan St. Bakery) @ 73 Sullivan St., New York, NY (Yelp)
  • Transit: Walk from previous stop
  • Why: still my favorite pizza in all of NYC; truly unique Rome-style bakery pizza but with upscale bread and fantastically fresh ingredients
  • When: 5pm ish
• [DONE] L’Asso @ 192 Mott St., New York, NY (between Kenmare St & Spring St) (Yelp)
  • Transit: Walk from previous stop
  • Why: Rishi Kundi made a timely recommendation. Plus, it’s got a great reputation with the pizzarati. I’ve never tried it.
  • When: 6pm ish
• [SKIPPED -- TOO FULL!] Artichoke Basille’s Pizza & Brewery @ 328 E 14th Street (between 1st Ave & 2nd Ave) (Yelp)
  • Transit: L train to 1st Ave. / Walk from previous stop
  • Why: Haven’t been, but it seems like everyone’s been raving about it.
  • When: 7pm sharp
• [DONE] Wined Up Wine Bar @ 913 Broadway 2F, New York, NY 10010 (Yelp)
  • Transit: Walk from previous stop 
  • Why: Fiona’s coordinating this part of the evening — unwind from the pizza tour at Wined Up. I’ve never tried it, but Fiona’s a vinophile, so I trust her opinion.
  • When: 8.30pm onwards…

NOT MAKING THE CUT

• Grimaldi’s: Has officially become a tourist-oriented purveyor of formally edible pizzas. They used to be great, but they’ve lost the love and are too inconsistent. 
• Lombardi’s: Has officially become a tourist-oriented purveyor of formally edible pizzas. Far too inconsistent. Dungeon basement seating next to restroom, rushed (and raw) pies during rush hours. The Philadelphia Phailure (a true blight on the Lombardi’s name).
• Luzzo: went last year. Immemorable.
• Nick’s: Have been a bunch. Not particularly awesome.
• Una Pizza Napoletana: Have been a bunch. Just too much hype.
• Patsy’s in Harlem: too inconvenient for this particular itinerary; not thrilled about traveling this distance for what often turns out to be an inconsistent pie
• Franny’s (Brooklyn): just not convenient for the itinerary.
• Lucali’s: Just couldn’t fit it into the itinerary.

Thanks to Slice NY in particular for the wonderful research resource. Thanks also to everyone who chimed in with recommendations.

Will Wright (game designer) on car care. I love it. I may emulate him (if I ever manage to obtain an M3):

“He drives: A BMW M3. It’s a two-door sedan. It’s astoundingly fast for how boring it looks, which is what I like about it. I always get ablack car and never wash it. It becomes bland looking, like urban camouflage.” (source: NYT)

Well doncha know the liberal gotcha media are at it again, unfairly smearing Sarah Palin’s decision to parade around in a mere $150,000-worth of designer threads. Listen, you lame liberals, Sarah Palin DESERVES to look good. Here, for the benefit of my conservative readership, are a few STUPID LIBERALS who get it all wrong, courtesy of DNC mouthpiece NY Magazine:  

• Marc Ambinder says that “Democrats are going to have a lot more fun with this than is prudent, but the heat for this story will come from Republicans who cannot understand how their party would do something this stupid … during the collapse of the financial system and the probable beginning of a recession.” The wardrobe price tag is “without precedent,” and one can tell by the campaign’s “weakly defensive response” that they’re “deeply embarrassed.” [Atlantic]

• Steve Benen thinks the “political implications are more than a little humiliating” considering “all the McCain campaign messages a story like this steps on — ‘elitist,’ ’small-town values,’ ‘big spender,’ ‘relating to “real” America,’ etc.” [Political Animal/Washington Monthly]

• Christopher Orr concurs that many “Joe the Plumbers, Tito the Builders, Phil the Bricklayers, etc. … may be less than thrilled to hear that the RNC has apparently spent $150,000 clothing and accessorizing La Palin.” Though on the bright side, “John McCain’s $520 Ferragamos now sound like the shoes of a pauper.” [Plank/New Republic]

• Matthew Yglesias says John Edwards’s $400 haircut, over which there was such a huge kerfuffle, looks “like a rounding error compared to Palin’s September hair and makeup expenses.” It’s also surprising that this type of expenditure is legal, though apparently it is. [Think Progress]

• Chuck Todd and friends believe the story “could further add to the perception that Palin isn’t a serious candidate.” And Andrea Mitchell wonders whether Palin is “permitted to accept these kinds of gifts under Alaska ethics laws.” [First Read/MSNBC]

• Jake Tapper wonders whether Palin realizes that even if she donates the clothes to charity, as her campaign claims, she still has to pay taxes on “those fancy new duds just as if someone had written her a check for $150,000.” [Political Punch/ABC News]

• Amanda Carpenter understands that “Palin needs to look good and probably didn’t have a closet full of prime time suits in stock before she got picked,” but thinks this is “extravagant.” She also wonders how much Hillary Clinton spent in comparison. [Town Hall]

• Ezra Klein writes that being a governor, Palin presumably had clothing that “was appropriate for giving political speeches and attending campaign meetings.” Even assuming she needed some new things, “$150,000 of other people’s money” is too much. [American Prospect]

• Michael Tomasky calls the expenditures “both ghastly and hilarious,” and says it’s “way beyond my comprehension” how a woman “running for public office and giving speeches about how she’s just a regular Joe/Joan who understands what regular families go through” can accept “$3,500 jackets.” The tangible effect is that this will “demoralize Republicans.” [Guardian UK]

• Sam Stein writes that the timing is awful: As the “Republican ticket is trying to highlight its connection to the working class,” it’s revealed that Palin “received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years.” [HuffPo]

• Alex Koppelman says “the optics of this aren’t great for the McCain campaign or for Palin, especially given the country’s economic woes and the work the campaign has done to portray Palin and her family as salt-of-the-earth middle-class types.” [War Room/Salon]

• Emily Bazelon contends that, “In a sense, this is unfair,” because any wealthy candidate would already have the nice clothes that Palin needed to buy. Plus, “Isn’t her image a legitimate campaign expense?” However, “the price tag is just much [too] high, too many teacher and nurse and firefighter salaries,” and it also “points out exactly how much Palin is trading on her sexuality, her winks, her look.” [XX Factor/Slate]

Loving this:

“According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”

Which is why Mr. Janzen has become interested in the small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.”

I love it and am hopeful that this “movement” can gain steam (more often than not, newspapers invent trends where there are none, but I think this one taps deep into the zeitgeist).

Short update: After a weekend spent frantically driving between Ikea, Nob Hill, Costco, and various other purveyors of nesting goods, we are now officially a two-city family. I’m in Seattle working for Microsoft, while Fiona’s an hour-and-a-half to the south (as the plane flies) working for Bain as a consultant. Looking forward to reconnecting with all my friends in San Francisco on my trips down there. These lyrics ring particularly true for me, now:

I left my heart in San Francisco
High on a hill, it calls to me.
To be where little cable cars
Climb halfway to the stars!
The morning fog may chill the air
I don’t care!
My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea …

-v

The WSJ covers, as many other papers did this week, the converging trends of higher gas prices, demographic shifts, increased interest in sustainable living, and increased value placed on the richness of urban living. In a nutshell:

“Baby boomers and millennials are the country’s two biggest generations, with some 82 million and 78 million people born during their respective eras. Both flocks are leaving their nests and finding that higher-density urban housing fits their lifestyles.”

It’s my hope that these shifts continue and accellerate.

Didn’t know this: “In terms of the broader neighborhood, this corner [12th and Pike] of Capitol Hill is the only area in the northwest United States that achieves residential densities approaching east coast cities” (source).

Hey, cool, that’s where I live! No wonder I’m nailin’ the 98 walkscore. Unfortunately, though, the quote lacks meat because it doesn’t tell exactly how dense nor which east coast city we supposedly compare favorably to. Washington DC wouldn’t be a very favorable comparison. That place is pure sprawl.

Zipskinny says my hood’s density is 12,266. Unfortunately it can’t narrow it down any further. 98122 covers a very large swath of land, some of it very low density.

Bernard Tschumi says: “I live in Paris and New York, the great cities of the 19th and 20th century, respectively. But the 21st century will have a number of great cities. You’ll choose between cities of great population density and those that are like series of islands in the forest.” 

The Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma-Redmond area is like this. Where else?

I never thought I’d read an endorsement of anticonsumerism in the WSJ, but the Journal’s Andrea Coombs writes, “It’s time to shake off the “consumer” mantle that politicians and economists are so happy to drape around our shoulders. Resist their calls for consumers to save the economy, and resist the advertisements enveloping us in the idea that we need more and more things.”

Nice!

Here are the better tips from the article:

• spend less time feeling poor (avoid magazines and other media that feature advertisements selling junk you don’t need) [presumably, one shouldn’t stop reading the WSJ, even though reading about hedge fund managers pulling down $1B per year and being exposed to three ads touting products for the affluent might also contribute to that feeling of being poor]
• stop viewing consumerism as a reward for good behavior
• assess the eROI of your purchases (eROI = emotional return on investment) and shift spending to achieve higher eROI
• spend less on “extravagances” (mentioned: cable TV, eating out)
• exchange for-cost activities with low- or no-cost activities (host a movie night for friends instead of going out)

I’ve been vexed by an Outlook 2007 bug that prevents me from deleting certain RSS feeds. It’s a completely annoying bug with an incorrect error message, but thanks to good citizen Grayson Peddie, I found this fix. I couldn’t find another way to thank him  (the forums where he’s active require registration to see his “profile”), so here’s my thanks in public, on the world wide interweb. On the off chance he ever searches for himself, I want to tell him this: Grayson: you saved me a ton of vexation. Thank you! Thank you!

Friends here in Seattle know that I’ve been offloading tons of crap that I’ve managed to saddle myself with over the years. I’ve been ditching games, movies, t-shirts, electronics, shoes, watches, phones, a bicycle, books — pretty much everything that will sell or that the local Value Village (thrift store) will take.

But I’ve not gone all the way. I like having a couch to sit and work on. I like having a table to eat at. I’ll probably always have these objects, though I might eventually succeed in combining the two (using the couch as dinner seating).

One Australian man has gone all the way. He’s selling all of his worldly posessions on eBay to gain closure on a failed marriage and a broader midlife crisis. Some might think he’s gone nuts and is a failure. I think he’s discovered a lot earlier than most that happiness isn’t encapsulated in the physical goods we acquire. Good luck, Ian!

From Zenhabits.net, a great blog I’ve just started reading, comes this excellent paragraph:

“There is little in a Zen monk’s life that isn’t necessary. He doesn’t have a closet full of shoes, or the latest in trendy clothes. He doesn’t have a refrigerator and cabinets full of junk food. He doesn’t have the latest gadgets, cars, televisions, or iPod. He has basic clothing, basic shelter, basic utensils, basic tools, and the most basic food (they eat simple, vegetarian meals consisting usually of rice, miso soup, vegetables, and pickled vegetables). Now, I’m not saying you should live exactly like a Zen monk — I certainly don’t. But it does serve as a reminder that there is much in our lives that aren’t necessary, and it can be useful to give some thought about what we really need, and whether it is important to have all the stuff we have that’s not necessary.”

Blog unclutterer pokes fun at a different “unitasker” (device that just does just one thing) every Wednesday. They are poking fun at the objects, but they’re far too kind, writing, “It’s totally fine if you choose to own a Unitasker. There aren’t any Unclutterer Police coming to take it away from you or judge you over it. We’re just talking about stuff, things, objects — not people or their choices.”

I don’t think it’s fine. Sure, every one of us is entitled to live life as wastefully as we like. We can squander our income on ephemera, clutter our home, and make ourselves miserable. But it’s everyone else’s right to point, and if they like, judge.

And so I think it *is* worth making fun of the people who own or buy unitask objects. They’re cluttering by owning these objects, and they’re hurting their financial picture. Their unchecked consumerism is also hurting the environment, and that hurts all of us.

A point I make over and over here is that every single object I own needs to be thought of in terms of “total cost of ownership” or TCO. Putting aside the total cost to the environment to design, manufacture, distribute, and get the object into your home, TCO is the cost to actually own the object. 

1. Cost to acquire the thing in the first place (including the opportunity cost of how that money could have been put to better use — say, by paying down high-interest debt)
2. Cost to maintain (running it through the dishwasher, dusting it, oiling it, repairing it, replacing it, whatever)
3. Cost to store the thing
4. Cost to dispose of it (eventually)

It’s this third item that people rarely think about. Take a pickle picker-upper. How many items like it clutter a drawer? How many drawers do you have in your kitchen now? How many would you need with a decluttered lifestyle? (Yes, storage for tiny objects is a step function, but acquisition of crap like this is a lifestyle choice — you never own just one “unitasker.”) Even the smallest object requires storage space, and every square inch of storage space can be costed out like so:

1. cost for the storage (cabinetry, fancy closet hardware, whatever)
2. cost for the property in which your storage sits

Whether you rent or own, you can determine a cost per square foot. If your monthly housing costs are $3000 for 1000 square feet, then that’s $3 per SF per month for the duration of your stay in that space. Is an object that takes up a square foot really worth $3 x 12 ($48) per year, just to store? If you didn’t own it (and all of the other junk that you’ve accumulated) would you be able to step down to 800 square feet for an annual savings of $7,200?

Do this calculation with every new potential acquisition and with all current objects. Is that CD collection worth not just what you paid for it and the cost to store it? Only 31 standard CDs fit within a square foot. A CD collection of 200 discs costs $232 per year to store at a monthly housing cost of $3,000. Is it worth it?

Pickle picker upper (and the folks who buy them) be damned.

PS: Need to retreive a pickle from a jar? Just use a friggin’ fork.

Apartment Therapy’s full of it. On their “re-nest” blog — which claims to cover “the intersection of the ‘green’ movement and the ‘home decor’ movement”  – author “Stephanie” shills a plug-in air freshener. This is unintentional parody.

How does buying a plug-in, plasticy air freshener device accomplish any green goal? Sure, shit stinks. But buying a product that was manufactured in a developing nation and shipped around the world is the very definition of consumerism run amok. Heaven forfend that Americans have to wait for the air to clear before the next one of us steps up to flush 1.6 to 5 gallons of previously fresh water along with pulped remains of trees that were felled just so that we could wipe our asses in comfort. We’re lucky to have indoor plumbing and fresh water, and some of us are buying $10 gewgaws made of plastic and perfume.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Apartment Therapy reader “SFGail” was more polite in her diss of the post, writing, “Ok, I’m going to go out a little on a limb here. I really wish, that as the environmental part of AT, re-nest would focus more on sustainable building/home design, and less on frou frou products like this that aren’t really part of the solution to the environmental problem we all face.”

Straighten up, AT. Your writers have been turned into marketers of the sort of junk that’s clogging landfills, polluting waters, and making a mess of the world.

Packing light can be so freeing. Nothing beats walking onto (and off of) a plane without having to bother with the hassle of checked luggage. If we were to pack our homes as carefully as we pack our luggage, would this affect how we choose to consume? Apartment Therapy’s Laure thinks so, and in doing so makes up for some of her fellow writers’ incessant pushing of consumer ephemera.  They need more like her over there.

The post reminded me of a coworker at Scholastic who had a set uniform (all black, all the time) and who believed that he should be able to pack up and move in a day on his own. For a long time everything he owned could fit into a duffel bag. This precluded acquisition of a TV set and other consumer basics. Pretty zen, but far too hardcore for most Americans, self included (for now).

If it’s true that “He who would travel happily must travel light,” is it also true that he who would live happily must live light (i.e., acquire fewer things)?

Apartment Therapy, an endless source of inspiration for “stupid product” posts, is shilling a decorative magnifier and letter opener set. Awful, worthless product.

1. When was the last time you used a hand-held magnifying glass? Fishermen who tie their own flies and decorative seamstresses aside (they’ll use desk-mounted lenses anyway), most of us will opt for standard eyeglasses when we need assistance seeing things more clearly. The last time I used a magnifying glass was probably 25 years ago. I burned ants with it.
2. Letter openers. Seriously. A specialized knife just to rip paper? Seriously? You’re not ripping an entire phone book in half with your bare hands. You’re opening a friggin’ letter. It’s not that difficult. It’s certainly not worth cluttering your home and destroying the environment.

Try these remedies instead: unsubscribe from mailing lists that send you letters that need to be opened; opt for electronic versions of mail where possible; use a butter knife on the rare envelope that you want to save (decorative invites, for instance) … and last, but certainly not least, open your goddamned letters with your friggin’ fingers, the best, most useful tools you’ll ever own.

Stupid, stupid product. Is it really worth the environmental damage and a portion of your mortgage / rent to own this?

Finally, what kind of “Therapy” is Apartment Therapy proposing here? How does it help any of us declutter and make better use of our space to own a couple of decorative, largely worthless objects?

Apartment Therapy is shilling “candle plates” — little glass plates that sit underneath candles and vases. While they do indeed look good, products like this are pure clutter that add no utility. The manufacturing, packaging, distribution, storage and maintenance of these products is also costly and bad for the environment. It’s a product that creates net negative utility for the world.

But Apartment Therapy’s Matt believes that they do serve a purpose. He writes, “Any water I might have missed while filling the vase gathers where the vase and the coaster meet.”

Buying a new piece of consumer kruft just because you’re too lazy to take a towel to the bottom of a flower vase? That’s why our environment is in trouble.

In addition to my update to the prior post, this one’s also typed while in traffic. I’m stopped. Still stopped. Still stopped. It’s raining… ooh some movement … ooh … moved 15 feet! Stopped again. Stopped some more. Now crawling and crawling some more. Moved 30 feet! Oh my goodness! Stopped again. It’s raining. The fellow in front of me has his blinker on but the lane to his right hasn’t budged enough for him to get over. How I wish it would… because then I could move forward! Still stopped. Still stopped. Still stopped behind this dude with his blinker on. Movement! Holy movement! I moved a good 10 car lengths just now. Oh my gosh! My exit is a mere quarter mile away! But it’s not really my exit. It’s just an exit from this particular stretch of bad traffic to another, altogether different, altogether the same stretch of bad traffic! Still stopped. Crept forward a foot. Still stopped. Still stopped. I realize now that I should have stored “still stopped” in the copy-paste buffer. Still stopped. The sun is shining cruelly down upon us even as the rain continues to patter the parking lot of cars on the 520. Crawling forward. Crawling some more. Stopped now again. The radio (c89.5) plays: “I can’t help it, can’t help myself. I can’t help it, got no self control, there’s nothing else to do.” Well, truer words never sung. I can’t do a damned thing right now, and this little mindless distraction is keeping me sane. More movement. More movement. Close enough now to my exit that I should consider shutting down. If I were to die behind the wheel right now, my car would creep forward at just the right speed. My death might not be discovered for MILES. That would probably creep the cop out that pulled me over. Would my surviving relatives have to pay the ticket? Or would the Redmond police forgive? Likely they’d add another infraction for driving while incapacitated. Ahh, we are creeping forward at an ever unslower pace. Movement is strong. I shall save and post now. LIVE FROM REDMOND!

• 25 minutes: commute time via the 545 bus from Seattle’s Capitol Hill to the Overlake Transit Center in Redmond (a distance of about 17 miles — this should be the longest part of the commute)
• 22 minutes: commute time via Microsoft Shuttle service from Overlake transit center to Millennium D, a few miles away (if you’re not local, you wouldn’t know that this is a maddening crawl through stoplights and bland corporate office parks, but now you do know that)
• Reason: Redmond’s pro-sprawl policy that limits building height (and Microsoft’s tacit support of Redmond’s pro-sprawl policies through its decision to locate and remain in Redmond); if this were Manhattan, the commute from corporate lobby to my office desk would be mostly vertical and would involve only a few idle moments in an elevator
• Further aggravation: I spend 1 to 3 hours per day just puttering around Redmond (going from meeting to meeting in disparate, far-flung buildings). If I were working in a reasonably dense urban environment, I’d instead spend 5 to 10 minutes taking the elevator from floor to floor. It’s demoralizing to feel that you’ve arrived “at work” only to spend an extra 1 to 3 hours getting where you need to go.
• Result: one pissed off employee, many thousands of wasted man-hours commuting around the Microsoft Redmond campus, many dollars wasted on gasoline, vehicles, and shuttle services designed to move people around in this wasteland of sprawl.
• Suggested fix: move more people to Bellevue and Seattle, where zoning laws allow office space to be stacked.

Disclaimer: my experience is not representative of the overall Microsoft experience. It just so happens that my immediate team is currently (and temporarily) spread across three buildings that are a handful of stoplight-infested, SUV-choked miles away from each other. It also happens that Redmond is a very, very poorly planned city and that a good portion of my coworkers are lucky enough to work outside of it.

Update from the thick of rush hour traffic (yes, it’s so slow that I can type on a laptop while driving — safely): it should be noted that I love my job, love the products I work on, and really am excited to get to work every single day. That’s why it’s so damned frustrating to suffer this particular commute. I’m seriously considering getting a sleeper sofa for the office just so that I can avoid the commute a few days a week.

Happy Spring, everyone!

Annie Leonard caught wind of a horrendously wasteful product: NXT shower gel and does a great job explaining why the packaging for this product is an environemental travesty. In short, every single bottle of the shower gel includes an LED light, 2 to 3 triple-A batteries and “a mini-computer” in the packaging. As Annie notes, “Batteries have such toxic components that many cities ban their disposal in the regular garbage and require them to be dropped at a household hazardous waste facility. We’re supposed to be designing toxics out of our production systems!”

Right on.

But I wish she had questioned the need for shower gel in general. As I wrote in a comment on the Story of Stuff blog: Is shower gel really even necessary? To make it, manufacturers take a compact product like soap, add water, and THEN ship it around the world. It makes no sense to ship water since it’s plentiful in a shower environment. Why is shower gel even a category that deserves consumer support? A good bar of soap does a fine job of lathering a loofah or a sponge. Shower gel itself is a wasteful product category that shouldn’t even exist.

I regularly run into folks here in Seattle and Redmond who believe that they’re living in some sort of God-touched environmentally friendly wonderland, who believe that because they drop their polystyrene into a recycle bin they’re saintly, who — in short — live in a reality distortion field.

The Puget Sound region is an environmental disaster. Cars are ubiquitous, mindless consumption a way of life, and (worst of all) people aren’t cognizant that the disaster is of their own making.

Well, I don’t have the time to bang out a full rant on this topic, but not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. For now, I’m going to link to David Owen’s excellent article, “NYC is the Greenest City in America.” Please read it.

I don’t claim to be the first to apply the word “diet” to the home, but I do think I’m one of a small population of folks who’re obsessively attempting to trim the fat that accumulates in all of our lives over time. That’s why it cheers me to see the inveterate consumerist gluttons over at Apartment Therapy start to feature more posts about object dieting, like this one.

Apartment Therapy’s Laure cites one of the basic tenets (”This means when one thing comes in, at least one must go out”) but the practical advice ends there. Hey Laure, how about avoiding Target in the first place?

Well, it’s a glimmer of hope. Apartment Therapy will of course continue to feature “beautiful” displays of clutter.

This is fantastic. It’d be really nice to be able to fit everything I own into such a tiny cube.

Dear Editors,  

As I read the March 2008 issue of your magazine, I was struck by the inconsistency between Donna Warner’s anti-clutter screed (bravo) and the remainder of the magazine. On the one hand, Donna lauds closet-cleaning as a “discipline with mind-clearing, potentially life-altering results” and speaks of the potential to lighten her “soul and [her] brain” through the discipline of clutter reduction. Meanwhile, in the very same editorial she talks about renting a storage cube, makes the pro-clutter assumption that closets are a way of life, and (of course) edits a magazine that features the following clutter-kruft:

• Pages of SUV advertising (the better to haul clutter home!)
• Advertising for storage solutions (buying closet solutions simply increases the density of objects one can store without  

Clutter-reduction (and green living) isn’t just an effort to clean out your closet now and then. It must involve re-examination of the entire ecosystem of clutter-inducing products. SUVs, external storage cubes, closet solutions, and magazines that thrive on helping marketers push consumption are contributors to the problem of overconsumption, not solutions to it.  

(Sent to metletters@hfmus.com and published here because they’re never going to publish it.)

 A longer list of Metropolitan Home’s hypocrisy, just for the web:

• Page 27: around a Saarinen dining table, four black chairs, with legs. Saarinen designed the table specifically to “clear up the slum of legs in the U.S. home” and here it is being surrounded by 16 legs (where just four would have done). Granted, this is just aesthetic clutter, and not the sort to get riled up about. A chair is a single object whether it’s got one leg or four.

• Page 28: a throw blanket draped over an ottoman. Consumption pervades these magazines. Nobody needs throw blankets on ottomans. Savvy object dieters would simply use a blanket that can be used on more than just an ottoman.

• Page 30: “Why settle for an ordinary can opener when you can have the graphic toucan?” I’ll tell you why: (1) it’s already been manufactured and transported to my kitchen. (2) The can opener I’ve got right now works. I’m supposed to throw out what I’ve got and replace it with something that may or may not work as well (but certainly no better)? That’s the sort of needless consumption Metropolitan Home pushes.

• Page 32: Acrylic house numbers, at $100 each. Because my house doesn’t already have a number? Doubtful. Purchasing these numbers will create scrap for no extra functional benefit.

• Page 36: Metropolitan Home notes that “it takes about 22 gallons of oil to make one truck tire.” Great! So why encourage readers to replace their can openers? Doesn’t a truck have to literally burn rubber and oil in order to transport that new can opener to reader doors? How many can openers were sold as a result of this product placement? How many gallons of oil were burned transporting these newfangled can openers to reader doors? Metropolitan Home harms the environment, even though they pretend to care about how much oil goes into making a truck tire.

• Page 50: A recipe for risotto. Ok, fine. Risotto is tasty. But Metropolitan Home says, “Making Risotto can be intimidating, but you can make it fast — and foolproof — if you use a pressure cooker.” Oh… now I get it. I’ve got to buy a pressure cooker (new object alert!) just to make a dish that even the least educated of Italian women have been making just fine in normal pots for centuries. Of course Metropolitan Home doesn’t miss a beat on the product placement, writing, “I recommend models from WMF, Kuh-Rikon and Fissler.” Risotto does not require special equipment. This is product sales literature masquerading as recipe.

• Page 81: “This issue of Met Home is full of tips on how to achieve a sense of spatial abundance.” My tip: stop reading magazines that push SUVs, pressure cookers, special can openers, throw blankets, and other redundant, low-utility garbage.

• Page 85: One of these so-called “small spaces” that is proferred as evidence of space mastery is full of bric-a-brac with absolutely no utility. Ther’es a porcelain dog, some sort of decorative cat-o-nine-tails, a fluffy, impractical rug, Chihuly glass (I do love the chandalier) and tons of gauzy drapes. This isn’t minimalist or utilitarian. It’s posh, expensive, and difficult to maintain.

• Page 117: A brilliant eating surface with storage-under-glass… Very nice. The organization of the objects stored underneath is artful, the surface can makes a great dining table, and of course the objects themselves each have utility. However, many of the items are the sort of single-use kitchen implements that I despise. A garlic press, nutmeg grater, hurb chopper and lemon zester are shown. Worthless.

• Page 144 (back page) takes the cake: “Sometimes, just one isn’t enough: these designing objects come in perfectly fitted multiples.” Good job. Why buy just one entirely useless* object when you can buy several at once?

 * Does art have utility? Yes. But art that has other function is better than art alone. Saarinen’s tables, for instance, are both beautiful to look at and eat at.

Of course it must be noted that I’m a hypocrite too. I did purchase the magazine, thereby generating a sale that will be factored into future demand forecasts. My behavior (in aggregate) is why tires and oil is burned transporting magazines like this to store shelves. I should have at least waited and purchased the rag used.

Here’s a great example of the sort of worthless object that American consumers have been trained to purchase. As donuts are to a food diet, this crap is to an object diet.