The Prologue

I once had a British finance professor who hammered the phrase “red dollar, blue dollar” into our heads. This stemmed from a little stunt on the first day of class. He ambled in, greeted us with that English pattern of speech full of ums and ers and well nows, and produced one of those star-spangled USPS Priority Mail envelopes. He then knocked two dollar bills out of the envelope onto the table in front of him. One was dyed blue, the other red. He then thundered, “red dollar, blue dollar!”

He turned to a guy in the first row and continued, “which’ll ya have?”

“Wha… what?” came the reply.

“Say I’m giving you a dollar. Do you want the red one or the blue one?”

“Oh, red I guess.”

“No!” He then turned to another student: “Do you want red or blue?”

“Blue?”

“No!” He tried a third: “Do you want red or blue?”

“Um, I don’t know… I don’t really care,” she replied.

“Correct! Why do you care if the dollar is red or blue. They’re both worth $1.”

“So do I get one?” the student pressed.

“Oh, no,” he replied, “these are my dollars.”

I’d spent the little episode realizing that our professor snatched Priority Mail envelopes from the post office instead of just buying his own manilla ones (or, rather, asking the department secretary for them). So, I hadn’t paid as much attention as I ought to have. But, it was a very good lesson!

The key idea is that if you’re investing your money, what do you care if you earn a dollar from a stock or from a bond or from the family business? Preferring red dollars to blue ones is irrational. And, it’s downright stupid to take one red dollar in place of two blue ones.1 This is very important to keep in mind when you consider how firms behave.2 If a company expects to earn less on a project than they would from just keeping their money in the bank, why would they bother with making something?

Now, what if we apply this spiel about red and blue dollars to housing? Specifically, I want to explain why most new housing is “luxury housing”.

The Game

We’ll look at New York City specifically and apply a very narrow frame: we’ll think only in terms of the minimum return in rent that would be required for a developer to be willing to build an apartment building.

Now, suppose you hate real estate developers and think that their greed is responsible for high rent. I’ll grant you that they may very well be unpleasant people; kindly salt of the earth folk don’t usually merit the headline “Who Didn’t Want Him Dead?” when their smoldering corpses are discovered in dumpsters. Nevertheless, that does not mean greedy developers cause high rents.

The wager is this: I will demonstrate that, so long as developers are not very very stupid, new housing won’t be affordable to the typical family. New housing does push overall housing prices down (more on that later, after our game) but the new houses themselves only pencil out if they target the relatively well-heeled. Notice that “not very very stupid” is a much weaker condition than “rapacious capitalist pig dog”.

The stakes are: If I win / convince you, you’ll talk about something more interesting than landlords at dinner parties for at least two months. If I lose, I’ll do nothing… after all, my writing is worth what you pay for it.

The Rules

I’ll assume a developer will only begin a project if he or she can expect to earn a 5% real yearly return on the total cost. This is a rule of thumb for returns on an asset, going back as far as Jane Austen novels.3 For our purposes, it’s a laughably low assumption (so no complaining later). The long run real return on an S&P 500 index fund (probably a much safer investment than attempting to build in NYC) is 6.5%. Moreover, I’m ignoring property taxes and operating costs; a more realistic figure with those included would be 10-17%.

I’m going to ignore the first-floor commercial rents on these buildings. Those wouldn’t come close to compensating for the low 5% assumption above, so you still may not complain.

I’ll also ignore the fact that, because NYC permits so little new housing, the market clearing rental price might be well above the absolute minimum rent that will make developers willing to build at all. This is another major concession on my part, so no crying allowed.

The overall effect of these rules is to 1) massively tilt the playing field in your favor, and 2) demonstrate that it’s just quite expensive to build new housing. It’s impossible to cover your costs if you accept a pittance in rent.

The Analysis

We’ll proceed with a few examples of apartment buildings in progress.4 None of these are mega-projects, high profile, or anything special, which is the whole point.

Let’s begin with this project in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The cost $1B and it will include 1,000 units. The average unit size is 850 sq ft,5 compared to a median new U.S. house size of over 2,000 sq ft.

Now, red dollar, blue dollar. Developers will not be willing to undertake this project if they can’t make at least a 5% return; they could just stick $1B in an S&P 500 index fund instead and earn 6.5%. This means we need to get $50,000,000 in rent each year, or $50,000 per apartment, or $4,167 per apartment per month. That $4,167 rent is affordable for a household with a $150,000 annual income.6

The (approximate) median household income in NYC is $77,000; the 80^th percentile is $180,000. Under the most charitable of assumptions, these apartments cannot be broadly affordable. We don’t need to assume developers are greedy to get this result, only that they’re not morons. And, if we were using realistic assumptions, double the required rent.

The development includes rent stabilized units, but that doesn’t change the fact that 1,000 apartments are costing $1B to build. If the rent stabilized units’ rents are capped, the developer will need to be able to charge a higher rate for the other ones. Remember, if he doesn’t get an average rent of $4,167 per unit, he’s an idiot.

Here’s another example, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan this time: 89 apartments at an average size of 1,500 sq ft. Large by NYC standards but hardly extravagant as the U.S. goes (in fact, about 700 sq ft below the median). Costs are roughly $165MM, meaning that, to make 5%, the average annual rent per unit needs to come in at about $92,500, or $7,708 per unit per month. This is affordable for the lucky household earning well north of $250K each year.

Now, there are occasionally cheaper projects. This one comes in at $200MM7 for 465 units at an 800 sq ft average. For a 5% return, this would require $21,500 per year per unit, or about $1,800 per month, which would be just affordable for the median NYC household.

So, overall, if we make a bunch of generous (wildly unrealistic) assumptions, we can occasionally find a project that could pencil out to be affordable for a median household. That still leaves 50% of households out of luck. Also, for all of these examples, remember that we ignored property taxes (very high in NYC), ignored operating costs, ignored depreciation, and assumed that developers would be happy making slightly less than they could expect to if they just put their money in the stock market – i.e., assumed they’d be happy taking on more risk to earn less money. So again, if you’d like to be somewhat more realistic, double the rent figures.

The Moral

New housing is expensive (partly8) because it is expensive to build, not because real estate developers are price gouging. Some of this is for good reasons (fire resistance say); some is for silly ones (look up ULURP, I double dog dare you). We could do something about the silly reasons, but it will probably never be cheap to put up nice new buildings in the middle of New York. It’s just always going to be the case that a shiny new apartment will cost more than one that’s 20 years old, not all that different than the case of any other good. We don’t expect new cars to cost less than used ones.

The point here isn’t to argue that billionaire NYC developers are unfairly maligned. It’s to note that “developers are sometimes bad and greedy” isn’t a helpful way to think about housing development in general; new houses would be expensive even if their builders were angels (red dollar, blue dollar). And if developers would like better PR, I’d suggest they find hobbies other than murder,9 and refrain from hiring prostitutes to seduce and film their brothers-in-law.10

The (Important) Epilogue: New Housing Still Lowers Overall Rents

If new housing is targeted toward the affluent, how does it lower rents for the middle class and poor? Well, the high-level answer is supply and demand: if you increase the number of housing units available, all else equal, rent prices will fall (that’s the econ 101 answer). Exactly how does that work? If you’d like some dry reading, look up the economic literature on vacancy chains. Otherwise, take my explanation: If an affluent family moves into a new apartment, they vacate a nice but older apartment. Another family moves into the vacated old apartment. And so on. It’s a bit like how when hermit crabs find a new empty shell, they line up from largest to smallest, then adorably race to new shells all at once. Each hermit crab ends up in a somewhat nicer house. We’re not so different from the crabs.

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This piece was originally picked up as a freelance article for a NYC publication. However, when they saw the draft they decided it would be too “hard to find the bandwidth to edit this into usable shape.” Truly a ringing endorsement of my writing ability. Regrettably, there isn’t a single joke in the article; it’s an entirely earnest essay about trains. For that, I do apologize.

Suppose you need to get from upper Manhattan to visit a friend in Fort Greene Brooklyn. You board a southbound local C train at 155^th street, intending to take it to Lafayette Avenue, 25 stops away. The trip should take 45 minutes. However, there are four different crossover points, or junctions, on the trip where other trains could delay you.1 You’re on the C, but the A/E and B/D trains move in front of you. These routes are all interlined, meaning they share track and a delay on one line can propagate to the others. But, why so many junctions? Could all of that be simplified?

De-interlining would entail adjusting subway routes so that they each share a minimum amount of track with each other. Such a change would eliminate merges, reducing the potential for delays on one line to spread to others. The 1 and the 2/3 are examples of de-interlined routes: The 1 train runs alongside the 2/3 but does not travel on the same track. In theory, this would allow for more frequent and reliable service. However, it would only come at the cost of revamping subway routes that New Yorkers have gotten used to over generations.

How did we get the current routes?

The A/C/E and the B/D are descendants of the publicly operated IND system. Peter Derrick, a transit historian and author, writes that it was “designed to compete with, rather than complement” the existing privately operated IRT2 and BMT3 transit system. Work was completed in stages, with the first being the Eighth Avenue trunk: Construction started in 1925 and by 1933 the Bronx and Manhattan sections were complete, operating as far south as Jay Street in Brooklyn. The next piece was the 53^rd Street crosstown section (used today by the E and the B/D/M). This opened in 1933, operating from Roosevelt Avenue in Queens until it joined the Eight Avenue trunk at 50^th Street. The Sixth Avenue trunk (today’s B/D/F/M) was next, with local service starting in 1936. However, the engineering for this last section was complex as the local tubes were wrapped around PATH tunnels while the express tracks had to be positioned below. As a result, the express tracks were not complete for decades.

The new system’s design was marvelous. All intersections are grade-separated or flying junctions, allowing trains to merge onto different lines without moving in front of other tracks (akin to merging from the leftmost lane on a highway to the rightmost but without ever crossing in front of the middle ones). This is why you notice trains moving up and down to get around each other when you travel between the 50^th Street Station and 59^th Street Columbus Circle. This was a major improvement over IRT system planning, where some crossings required, for instance, downtown traffic to stop before an uptown train could switch tracks. These are termed grade or conflicting junctions. An example is the 96^th street station where the 2/3 splits from the 1. Until 1959, lines merged at that station; but the switch could not accommodate enough trains, snarling service so much that de-interlining was the only solution (this is why, today, the 1 does not share any track with the 2/3). The well-designed junctions on the IND are the reason that interlining is even an option. As new segments began operating, trains could merge into the existing ones with ease.

To some extent, today’s routes simply reflect the order in which the system was built. Eric Goldwyn, a professor at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, noted that there definitely is some “path dependence”, meaning the routes are what they are partly because there’s a natural resistance to changing a line once it opens. I also spoke with Joseph Raskin, author of a book on the history of New York City’s tumultuous subway construction and unrealized plans. During a wide-ranging conversation where he demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of every track, station, and rail yard in the system, he mentioned that many of today’s routes were designed to replicate long-gone elevated lines dating to the 1800s.

In other respects, routing reflects current service objectives. Goldwyn said that a “one-seat ride is a priority” for the MTA. He added that interlining can be useful for routes with high ridership in a central area and less demand near the ends. For instance, it makes sense for the 4/5 to be interlined in Manhattan (where ridership is high along the Lexington Avenue line, service must be frequent to avoid overcrowding) but to branch near the ends of the routes (where the risk of overcrowding is lower).

A Potential Simplification

Assuming a willingness to reconsider today’s routes, some degree of de-interlining is appealing because a simpler system is less prone to delay (and delays that do occur can be isolated). In turn, less volatile service allows for tighter schedules, which means service could be made more frequent. What’s more, in many cases, it would not require any new construction. In our IND example, the flying junctions allow for new routing without new track.

Reconsider our trip down the Eighth Avenue line on the C. If the A/C both ran express through Manhattan south of 145^th Street and the B/D both ran local from 59^th Street to 145^th Street, no trains would ever need to cross onto each other’s track. Some riders would have to make more transfers4 but average trip times ought to fall because there would be fewer delays. Further, the simpler routes should allow the MTA to schedule more trains. One might have to transfer, but faster and higher frequency service would more than make up for that, or so the argument goes.

The morass of shared track – where the A merges with the D, which merges with the B, which merges with the C, which merges with the A and the E – would be reduced to a system where the A/C use the same track (likewise for the B/D) but no trains ever have to merge into each other’s path. It would, for example, be impossible for a delay on the A line to ripple into the E line. Today, that does happen because the A can delay the C, which can delay the E. Moreover, the A/C sharing track (and the B/D) would not add any complexity because these lines already share track elsewhere in the system.

The Tricky Details

For our example, the Eighth Avenue infrastructure could already accommodate de-interlining. However, there are other constraints in the system. Both Goldwyn and Raskin suggested that rail yard space might impede the MTA’s ability to run more trains per hour. Raskin mentioned that the last newly constructed rail yard was the Pitkin Yard in 1948, “I think” (he was right, although another one was converted for subway use in 1956). Goldwyn noted storage space is such a constraint that, on a practical level, it’s very difficult to even shut the system down (during a shut-down, empty trains still have to run because there isn’t enough room to park them all). This storage inflexibility means that trainsets may need to be matched to specific yards in a way that makes it difficult to increase service frequency.

Still other impediments come down to differences over what the MTA’s objectives should be. Goldwyn said there’s a tendency to focus on the biggest constraints. De-interlining some routes might be easy, but not attract attention because of more pressing, but harder to solve, issues (like the Nostrand interlocking that snarls 2/3/4/5 trains in Brooklyn). On interlining, his “impression is that there’s some disagreement between the younger generation and the old-timers,” with younger employees more open to de-interlining. He characterized the agency as averse to asking passengers to make transfers. For his part, he mentioned that a one-seat ride can be nice when one it lines up with where you’re going, but says “transfers are invariably part of a good transit system that offers anywhere-to-anywhere connectivity.” The type of transfer is important though: a cross-platform A to B switch at 59^th Street is pretty painless, while a 2 to A transfer at Times Square is tedious since you have to take stairs, then more stairs, a corridor, a ramp, another corridor, followed by more stairs.

It’s also possible that the biggest stumbling block is inertia. Reasonable changes don’t always get traction. After all, it took a significant deterioration in service before the MTA checked to make sure it was using the correct speed limits as part of Andy Byford’s Save Safe Seconds campaign.

I asked for the MTA’s perspective on interlining, but their Media Relations department declined to comment or answer questions. An attempt to reach the Operations Planning department went unanswered as of this writing. A FOIL request for information turned up only one document, a project background summary from Byford’s Fast Forward initiative in 2018. It outlines a plan to study bottlenecks throughout the system to see if route changes could improve service (the Eighth Avenue example used here is mentioned specifically). The MTA is aware that putting multiple routes on the same track limits capacity and causes delays: “The act of throwing switches … to allow multiple routes to share tracks can itself reduce capacity…” and “any deviation from scheduled service can cause delays at key merge points, adversely affecting operational reliability.” The summary also notes that the agency’s highest concern about simplifying routes is “community pushback”. The project plan lists a 2019 completion date, but, as it was the only document provided, it’s not clear if it was ever carried out.

Yet…

There does seem to be some movement toward de-interlining at the MTA though. They recently announced that the F and the M will be switching places during rush hour to reduce merges on the Queens Boulevard interlockings. In a corresponding press release, the agency cited improved service reliability as the goal. Service will revert to the current pattern for evenings, nights, and weekends (“confusing” according to Raskin, who was unsure why they didn’t just make the change full time), so it’s a tentative step. Still, it is de-interlining in action. As another move in this direction, the agency’s new capital plan allocates money to revamp the Nostrand Interlocking (a notorious bottleneck); however, the resulting reconfiguration is planned to include route changes to reduce merges.

If these small changes reduce delays as much as hoped, perhaps we’ll see larger scale route adjustments. The knock-on effects could be substantial: fewer delays, the potential for more service, and the denser development more service would allow. Not a bad result for an operational change.

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You can read about the other things Amtrak is bad at here.

The first US transcontinental railroad took six years and cost in the ballpark of $4 billion.1

Amtrak’s new Acela trains have taken nine years – three of which were delays – and $3.25 billion. And they’ve only finished five of them, out of 28.2 And they suck!

They’re so bad that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with doors.

On a recent trip, I thought I was only going to be delayed because Amtrak cannot figure out how to maintain its catenary wires3 properly. However, once the wires were addressed, we simply sat their watching other trains leave. It seems that no one knew how to close the doors. Closing the doors is such a finicky thing that the trainset had to be restarted several times. So, I sat in the dark for a while as the locomotive rebooted. We did this for an hour. Apparently, it’s a common problem.

While admiring the wide open doors, notice that ramps built into the trains are a nice touch. They’re meant to extend to the platform when the train is in a station, which should facilitate things such as wheelchairs. Of course, Amtrak seems to have given up on getting them to work; they’ve been unused my last few trips. Wheelchairs can jump a 9-inch gap though, right? I’m sure that’s a thing.

Once you get moving, the trains are supposed to be faster and more modern. The posted top speed is only slightly higher than the old Acela sets, but the new ones have a tilting technology that allows them to move more quickly on the northeast’s curly-whirly old tracks. Except, the tilt technology is not engaged, and there’s no word on when Amtrak will turn it on. I, for one, am skeptical it will ever be used.

At least the train interiors are uncomfortable and inconvenient. The chairs are hard as bricks.4 What’s more, after a few months in service, the recline feature is broken on every other chair. Since they don’t feature a recline feature so much as a seat that shifts forward, being stuck in the low position means you’re forced to sit slumped over like a burlap sack full of potatoes.

Glowing reviews of the new kit mention how nice the bathrooms are, with automatic doors, faucets, etc. This is a ridiculous sentiment because Amtrak cannot maintain anything. The automatic bathrooms doors are – in a running theme here – often broken. In the best of cases, they open at about 1/5 the speed of a normal hand-operated mechanical door. The sensors for the faucets and hand dryers are finicky. And, since the dryer is right next to the faucet which is right next to the soap, it’s a crapshoot as to which will turn on. Also, the dryers themselves are nearly useless. Dyson dryers have been on the market for something like 15 years; these models gently blow cool air on you, meaning you’ll inevitably just have to dry your hands on your clothes. Actually, maybe just hope you don’t need a bathroom, because the door problems mean they’re frequently out of service anyway.

There are also a bunch of random features that Amtrak just doesn’t use. For instance, there are screens near the seats that I’ve only ever seen display “no mission,” which is pretty spot on really. However, these are not off-the-shelf equipment. We refuse to import trains from places like France or Japan where factories for making them already exist. So, instead, these were custom designed and built in a brand-new factory in the Buffalo, NY. Presumably, Amtrak designed, requested, and paid for things they had no intention to use.

All of this is a bit academic though, because odds are your train will be cancelled. My last two Acela trips have turned into Northeast Regional trips (on Amtrak’s 60+ year old clunky creaking coaches). Amtrak didn’t even refund the ticket for one of the cancellations; I had to dispute the transaction with my bank (after waiting on hold with Amtrak customer service for over an hour).

Moreover, the railroad’s excuses for the shoddy Acela service are laughable. A few particular examples: It was cold outside three days prior. Never bothered to upgrade the train maintenance facilities. Maintaining permanently coupled trains is so hard.5

Reviews of the new Acela trains are missing the point when they focus on how pretty the new equipment looks. Amtrak spent billions on these, missed deadlines by a country mile, never learned to operate the things properly before putting them in service, and doesn’t even seem to think this should count as a failure. The whole mess would be funny if I weren’t constantly sitting motionless on a railroad in New Jersey.

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The world isn’t ready for jackhammers. There was a buzz of excitement initially: For the first time, we could break rocks into smaller rocks at breakneck pace. “Think of how productive this will make us!” people said. “Think of what we’ll build!” That quickly gave way to despair though: One only has to think a moment before the problems are apparent.

What will happen to the hordes of burly pickax wielding men who currently break boulders into gravel? What will this mass of humanity with no skills, dreams, or aspirations do when they can’t be occupied by swinging a hammer until collapsing dead with exhaustion one day? For, we certainly won’t need as many of them. The productivity gains from jackhammering cannot possibly be used to allow more construction; no, we’ll only need exactly the same amount of stuff we have right now. Then what? One man will do the work of so many. My fellow jackhammer developers have bets on when we’ll see the first quarry with only one employee.

Workers are angry too. Unions have responded by calling for bans on jackhammers. They say the contraptions will never be able to break apart rocks with the artisanal skill of 300 exhausted guys with medieval implements. But consumers are too stupid to notice the difference between expert-crafted chain gang rocks and the crass, corporate, jackhammered alternative. So, they can’t be given the choice. These protests may delay jackhammers, but the effort is ultimately doomed.

There’s also an existential problem. For the first time in history, we’re no longer the best creatures on the planet at breaking apart rocks. Now our jackhammers are. What if they notice how inferior we are? What if they revolt? The squishy human body is no match for the combined weight of 300 of them; we’ll be crushed underneath.

It’s only going to get worse. We’ve seen so much advancement with excavation technology. It won’t end with pneumatic hammers. Imagine if we invent dynamite? What do you think that will do? That labor demand will magically rise since it will be feasible to carve tunnels into mountains for some kind of “transcontinental railroad”? Don’t be such a child. If you believe that, I suppose you also think we’ll learn how to split atoms and use it for something other than breaking rocks apart, maybe as a clean energy source… or some other such nonsense.

Nope, the only appropriate response is worry and existential dread. And a smug sense of superiority over all the silly rubes going about their lives as though we’re not all doomed. They’ll see! They’ll all see!!!

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A Wedding

(A wedding reception, just after the ceremony, but just before martinis were available.)

ME (aside): Stupid tailor! Apparently, “leave plenty of room in the arms” meant, “turn my dinner jacket into a damn tourniquet!”

(Australian enters, creeping up behind me.)

AUSTRALIAN (doing a silly accent): Ah, so you’re the economist then.

ME: I like to think I’ll be most remembered for my contributions as a painter, literary critic, and carnival juggler, but yes, I am an economist. Now tell me, who let an Australian in here?

FRIEND: Meet -----. She’s -----’s girlfriend.

ME (lying through teeth): Oh, so nice to finally meet. I’ve heard so much about you!

Australian: You don’t believe in Marx I assume? Don’t you think he was onto something?”

Me: So no standard greetings then?

Australian: …

ME: I mean, we believe he existed, we believe he wrote a book, and we believe he had a very impressive beard, even by 19^th century standards. But we just don’t believe he was the son of God. It’s just… well a lot of people died each of the first 37 times we tried Marxism.

AUSTRALIAN: You know true communism has never been tried!

ME: Right, I think I’ve heard that one, but the bar is opening so we’ll have to put a pin in this. Let me know how many corpses it takes to finally get it right.

AUSTRALIAN Is that supposed to be a joke?

ME: A damn good one! And I’m sure they’ll let you keep that $5,000 bracelet you’ve got on.

A Holiday Party

(the middle of a parlor game where we’re guessing names)

FRIEND/TEAMMATE: Just wanted to impress Jodie Foster!

ME: No idea… Honestly though, who doesn’t want to impress Jodie Foster?

FRIEND: Come on!

ME: I don’t know!

REFEREE: Time!

FRIEND: Hinckley! It was Hinckley you idiot!

ME: So, we’ve lost this round then I take it?

FRIEND: Yes…

ME (slight slurring): Great, time for more eggnog then.1 You know, it’s some sort of cosmic unfairness that you can’t eat the cinnamon stick after you finish the drink.

FRIEND: Huh…

FRIEND-OF-FRIEND LAWYER 1 (ongoing conversation, but now audible as people shift about the room): …it’s just capitalism. Incomes haven’t grown since the 60s…

FOF LAWYER 2: Like how are you ever supposed to afford a house?

ME (butting in, but very politely of course): You know that’s just not true, right?

FOF LAWYER 1: What?

ME: Incomes are up by a lot. GDP per capita in the US is something like $80K. If “capitalism” is keeping the little man down, it’s doing a remarkably poor job at it.

FOF LAWYERS 1 & 2 (in unison, like a Greek chorus): Yeah, but everything has gone to the rich. Middle class incomes haven’t grown.

ME (sobering up at the chance to be an obnoxious statistics scold): That’s a common misconception. Income has increased across the distribution. Median real incomes are up something like a third since the 80s.

FOF LAWYER 1 (daring to doubt me): How do you know?

ME: I mean, I am an economist. At least I think I am. The large-ish piece of paper the university gave me is in Latin, so I can’t be sure.

FOF LAWYER 2: Uh huh…

ME: You can look it up. Here…

(phones all appear)

Here’s a graph of median household income from FRED.

(I produce a beautiful graph, line going up to prove I’m right, yet no groveling apologies are forthcoming.)

FOF LAWYER 1: Well, here’s one that shows you’re wrong. This says it’s from FRED too.

ME: That’s a screenshot on Reddit. Look at the damn URL on the page I’m showing you; it’s the Federal Reserve. Real incomes have gone up a lot. This isn’t a controversy where we get to have different opinions!

HOST: What are you going on about now?

ME: I’m explaining how the typical American is rich by any global or historical standard. So we have a lot to be grateful for. It’s a perfectly wholesome sentiment in this season of Thanksgiving, God damn it!

HOST: Stop it.

ME: Fine.

FOF LAWYER 1: Okay, maybe incomes have gone up. But people are angry.

ME: I just made you rich. What, I have to do all the work? You need me to make you happy too?

A Dinner

(Eight people sitting around a table for dinner on a South Shore barrier island. Everyone is cold and wet since it’s pouring rain outside and the only way to get there is by boat. Between the attendees, at least 19 different conversations are in progress simultaneously.)

J-----: This is the last season for this restaurant.

M-----: They were so cute at tea.

DIFFERENT M-----: I don’t know if I like this jacket.

SCOTTISH GUY (facing away, doing a silly accent): [inaudible] gorgeous Australian [inaudible].

J-----: You know he’s an economist?

ME: It’s very sad that seems to be the most interesting thing about me.

THE SCOT (offhand): Oh, I’m a communist.

ME: Wait, what did you say?

THE SCOT: Oh, I said, “I have a date to [unprintable] this gorgeous Australian guy later. So, I have to go after dinner.”

W-----: Oh, wow… so much detail

ME: No, I meant about the… wait, [unprintable]? Um…

W-----: Sounds like a lot.

THE SCOT: Yep.

ME: Mazel tov? Anyway, I meant the communist thing.

THE SCOT: Yep, communist. I think the means of production [should be expropriated].2

DIFFERENT M-----: THE SCOT, will you be in the city next month?

THE SCOT: I don’t know, have to get back to London at some point. I’m being fitted for a £3,500 overcoat.

W-----: Um…

ME: I’m sorry, 3,500?

THE SCOT: Yes, and?

ME: Communist?

THE SCOT: Well, I’m rich in the meantime. And this coat is worth all £3,500.

W----- (deadpan): That’s too heavy for a coat.

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As first published in Slate.

Desperate to focus on anything other than competently running a railroad, Amtrak made news this fall by arresting a couple hundred men for “public lewdness” in Penn Station, the implication being that they were cruising the bathrooms there for sex. This caused a minor uproar. New York Representative Jerry Nadler sent a letter demanding Amtrak, “cease … targeting members of the LGBTQ community … on the basis of their perceived sexual orientation.” In The Cut last week, David Mack (also a Slate contributor) talked to a cruiser who referred to the Penn Station men’s room as the “de facto third space” for some “old queens.” According to the same article, one can get famous on Tik Tok nowadays for cruising or at least pretending to (yay?). Out Magazine characterized the episode as the return of the “dark days” of police entrapment efforts against gay men. They go on to speak with a law professor who, “underlined that this is an attack on the entire LGBTQ+ community”.

For the uninitiated, cruising, in a broad sense, refers to seeking out anonymous sex. In a narrower sense, which is the focus here, it refers to seeking out sex in public or semi-public spaces. This can be conflated with indecent exposure in the public imagination, but it’s not the same. With cruising, the goal is not so much to be seen as to have sex in a public setting (bathroom, wooded park, rest stop) without anyone else knowing. It is intended to be an activity where all parties consent. Undoubtedly, it’s a part of gay history, if for no other reason than because pervasive discrimination didn’t leave many other options. Often, one could not have sex in a private place because your neighbors or the hotel clerk could figure out what you were up to, and what you were up to was illegal.

However, it’s no longer the 1960s. Is cruising really still the integral part of gay culture so many seem to think it is? I’m not so sure! Must we describe it as a sacred rite of gay (and bi, there are literally dozens of us!) men everywhere? If we don’t have anonymous sex in public, we’re not risking crop failures, and our deities won’t be wrathful—just disappointed I suppose.

For the most part, we aren’t forced to choose between cruising or celibacy these days. Sex and relationships are available to gays in all the traditional ways and a good many non-traditional ones. As non-app-based examples of the latter, gay bathhouses still very much exist. Raves and circuit parties (i.e., gay raves) are quite similar, except one often features a roped off section where people can go for anonymous sex (oddly enough though, both tend to have some hippie-looking lady selling cutesy crochet work at a table in a corner). And so on. With the freedom to engage in same-sex relationships openly and with various opportunities for facilitated public-ish sex, it’s worth asking, is cruising really that vital? Moreover, when it’s a choice, a kink people actively seek out, is it maybe just a little bit disrespectful to other users of public spaces? Imagine the poor, hapless guy having things go so wrong that he has to use a stall in those filthy Penn Station bathrooms for its intended purpose. Isn’t having a threesome one stall over just sadistically making his day that much worse?

To be clear and slightly more serious, my point is not that cruising should get you thrown in jail, or burned in hell for all eternity, or whatever. Rather, it’s just a little bit rude, like littering. I might be the only bi man in New York who actually uses Central Park’s woods for birding. Stepping on a used condom or accidentally locking eyes with a guy in the bushes mid-fellatio hasn’t scarred me for life. However, it can take the fun out of linking up with my first love, an ovenbird. I don’t think to myself, “oh, that’s disgusting!” But “eh, that’s kind of inconsiderate” fits. I asked some warblers for their thoughts, but they declined to comment on the record due to fear of reprisals.

So then, were the Penn Station arrests useful? Is it an effective use of resources to conduct an elaborate sting operation wherein Amtrak makes (or is it lets?) a policeman pretend to masturbate at a urinal? All for collars so ridiculous judges have refused to even hear the cases? I think not. Even if the “save gay culture” blowback over the sting is over the top, the operation itself seems like silly overkill. It would have to be easier and cheaper to have one uniformed cop (not a whole undercover task force) stand near the door of the bathroom as a deterrent. Moreover, at the end of the day, this sort of thing is mostly just consenting adults getting to second base while hiding. Tickets would be more appropriate than making a criminal case out of it. Maybe a PSA poster series: no taking up two seats, no loud music without headphones, pets must be in carriers, and please, no putting your unmentionables through holes in restroom divider panels. Have a pleasant day.

Importantly, if you’re deterring the activity and erring toward tickets instead of arrests, you’re enforcing the rules but making allowances for people who do still wear 1960s-esque shackles: Though homosexuality is broadly accepted here, it’s not universal. For various reasons some men may still feel they have few other options, and publicly shaming them over it seems cruel, which is worse than rudeness for those keeping track. You’d also avoid deporting people over something so trivial. (Despite some portrayals, Amtrak didn’t necessarily set out to deport people. But given how much they depend on federal funding, it’s unlikely they have the luxury of ignoring ICE detainers in the current climate.)

Overall, whether you agree with me or not about cruising being a little inconsiderate, it should be a matter of manners and civil penalties, not criminality. I have friends who’ve done this sort of thing (albeit usually in locker rooms, not train stations) and I certainly don’t think any of them deserve to be arrested. In fact, they’re saints for tolerating some nitwit who spends his time writing 1,000-word columns about manners. Most of the ridiculousness of this episode stems from the ham-fisted overenforcement. But, criticizing the police action by framing cruising as a central part of gay identity is a bit overwrought as well. Cruising is not something we have to do to feel fulfilled as queer people, and it’s sort of rude to do it in very public spaces (even if no one sees). So now that you know I’m a bit of a killjoy, stay away from me in the Ramble unless you’re five inches tall and can fly.

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It’s not especially easy to get a research job with the federal government. If you’re an economist, you spend six years in a PhD program proving fixed point theorems and getting pilloried on Rate My Professor.1 Then you put in something like 1,000 applications all at once in a centralized job market. You hope that some of those turn into offers someplace not a three-day ride by ox cart from the nearest train station. Then you might find yourself working for the government or a university. In my case it was the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which I was quite excited about. I got to do research, and I got to work with a nice group of colleagues genuinely invested in and curious about our work.

I was hired into a research group created by Mr. Trump’s first director on the theory that, to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it would be good to have a few economists around who understood housing and mortgage markets. We pitched and conducted research we thought would be of use to the agency. When edicts came down (say, “answer this” or “put together a project with that group”), we followed them. I’m sure we all had our political opinions (have you ever met an economist who didn’t?) but I think we all took pride in our jobs. We were nonpartisan as far as work went. It was almost neurotic how careful everyone was to avoid violating the Hatch Act, ironic given reporting on the Trump administration’s complete disregard for it.

During our team meeting immediately following Mr. Trump’s election, my supervisor focused on how best to anticipate what the incoming administration might want from us. We were told to wrap up any papers relating to climate change (flooding, say, is of interest for anyone studying mortgage risk) and to think about projects pertaining to housing supply and potential Fannie/Freddie privatization. In short, we went through the sort of boring change of priorities you might have with any new boss. And we worked with that in mind until the end of the Biden administration.

In the days following the inauguration, I suddenly became a censor. Old research papers dating back years were pulled down from the agency’s website for revision. It became clear that whoever was ordering the changes was just doing a keyword search. We were given a list of words to expunge. I quipped to a colleague that one thing zealots all have in common is that they get very upset with normal people who use “sex” (the allowed word) and “gender” (the forbidden one) interchangeably.2 “Race” was also off limits. It’s often used as a control variable in papers that have nothing to do with race. We had to replace it with, “demographics.” “Bias” was a tricky one to go without. It’s a technical term in statistics (a biased estimator is one that’s off predictably) without a direct synonym. I felt like Ampleforth in 1984. One could say an estimator is “off base,” but it’s a bit like describing a tachometer as, “that gauge in the dashboard that swings around when the car goes vroom”. Once all the no-no words were removed, papers could be reposted. The whole process was doubly annoying because no one would put anything in writing. So, instead of just getting an email explaining what we were meant to censor, the deputy director called someone, who called someone, who called us to play some game of telephone. Then, if we interpreted vague instructions correctly, they’d leave us alone. If not, they’d tell us that there were still bad words in our work, but we’d have to guess which ones and try again.

My agency was, nominally, independent but it seemed they were going above and beyond in trying to obey the flurry of executive orders. Telework was completely revoked. It wasn’t entirely clear whether this violated agreements with the union, but my union isn’t very good at its job, so that didn’t matter. Probationary workers were to be fired but my group actually didn’t lose ours since economists had been classified as “mission critical”. At some point people got mad that USAID, in between subversive activities like giving grain to starving children, had purchased a Politico subscription. This triggered orders for us to cancel any subscriptions to Politico, the New York Times, and Bloomberg News. Amid all this, I found it annoying that OPM emails very pointedly came outside of business hours (like 2:00 am on a Saturday) as something of a dig at anyone who had a life outside the office.

Our union, the NTEU, held a meeting about all of this in February where they made very clear they had no idea what they were doing. A flummoxed lady kept repeating, “we’re doing everything we can” like a mantra. When someone inquired as to specifics, she responded, “you can keep asking but the answer will not change: we’re doing everything we can.” Everything they can do apparently entailed complaining they weren’t given notice about policy changes and sending emails ending with “in solidarity”. (Also, post-firing, they continue to ask me for more money.)

I suppose I started worrying when the DOGE people began tearing through the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) since we shared a building. [edit: We did not and I was wrong about it for three years. For some reason I was so sure I saw their seal hanging in the building.3] For our part, research papers were pulled down again. Any mention of the CFPB had to be stricken (they managed some datasets so were only ever mentioned as a citation). It was a bit like versions of a photo of Stalin with progressively fewer buddies by his side. One Friday our data server went down for a while. We’d gotten our very own DOGE commissar, reportedly one Michael Mirski4 but I never saw who it was personally.

The rumors were that our DOGE wunderkind started giving orders to the acting director and that he threw a tantrum to the White House anytime he was refused permission to something. But, who knows what was going on? There were no official announcements, and speculation from people paranoid about losing their careers isn’t always the best source of information. I do know that they started cutting contracts pretty aggressively. The rubric was to take something (say access to a dataset) then ask management, “would your agency fall apart without this?” Of course, the answer is “no” for any individual item, so they started slashing everything. That you could apply the same logic to any particular load bearing column in a building but not all of them simultaneously didn’t seem to matter. There was talk of ripping out the coffee machines and microwaves (it was never explained how paying a janitor to throw out an already purchased coffee machine would save money). To boot, cutting staff and contracts at my agency doesn’t even save any money. It’s not funded by congressional appropriations so they could’ve locked us all inside and burned the building down and the government wouldn’t have saved a dime.

My group did our best to keep our heads down and be productive. We figured that, were we to be targeted in a reduction-in-force (RIF), we had until mid-April, then a 30-day notice period. Moreover, our nominee for director, Bill Pulte, was something of an unknown entity. We hoped that, if confirmed, he might dial back some of the DOGE stuff. He seemed relatively normal in his senate testimony. Of course, he also loved meme stocks and claimed to be the “inventor of Twitter philanthropy” so I wouldn’t say I was totally at ease.

Once Mr. Pulte was confirmed, staff expected he might drop by the office the next day, but no one saw him. He did a photo op about working through the weekend with a laptop and a stack of bar graphs I’m sure weren’t printed up solely for the photo. I expected an all-hands meeting or at least an announcement wherein our new boss introduced himself. Yet nothing was forthcoming. He did, however, immediately start firing people at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before appointing himself chair of both companies, despite that being illegal as far as I can tell.5 He might’ve considered Lord Governor of L’Enfant Plaza while at it. In fact, at some point, he did start calling himself “director of US federal housing” (perhaps “FHFA director” is too much of a lateral move from “inheriting a homebuilding company and being active on Twitter”).6

The next Tuesday a division called the Office of Public Interest Examinations was placed on administrative leave as a precursor to getting cut in the agency’s upcoming RIF. I wasn’t surprised since they did have DEI-sounding themes in their remit. But it felt cruel. The members there weren’t necessarily idealogues and didn’t even necessarily choose the assignment. The division was created by the previous director. It could have been dissolved while transferring the staff.

Wednesday was our turn. So much for “mission critical”. An invite for “Urgent Meeting” popped up on all our calendars with a couple minutes’ notice. We all shuffled into a canteen, knowing what was about to happen. Our deputy director, ostensibly there to can us, was too choked up to speak. She was either very sad about it or it was a convincing act. She’d either dug our graves to save her own position or was just unable to convince the DOGE guy to keep us around. Or something in between. Rumors ran the gamut, and, dear reader, if you’re expecting me to describe suddenly getting clear information or official answers to anything, you’re in for some disappointment.

Some lady from HR started announcing that we were all being placed on administrative leave, with no further information to be given. Also that we shouldn’t talk to anyone about it. It almost certainly meant we were on the RIF lists, which had theretofore been secret. We were to be allowed five minutes to pack up our offices. Meanwhile, this little exercise was periodically interrupted by people dropping by the refrigerator for a snack. In a building with dozens of conference spaces and an auditorium, our HR team had not bothered to reserve a room. Nor did any of them think it might make sense to stand by the side door to prevent people from wandering in unintentionally. I asked one of the HR people about the legality of putting us on admin leave indefinitely; she responded to the effect of, “well, you’re welcome to hire a lawyer and sue if you don’t like it,” which was fun to hear from the team who’d given us hours long sermons on ethics when we were hired. We were escorted outside. All without so much as an email from the new director.

We languished on administrative leave for a while before they reached out to tell us we were being fired. They gave us a choice between being in the RIF or signing Elon Musk’s stupid “fork” agreement. Our ever useful union called a meeting to inform us about the choice, scheduled for just after the deadline for making a decision. I had another job offer at that point, so I accepted it and signed the agreement. In a way I suppose I’m lucky; getting purged in some silly stunt puts me in the company of literal rocket scientists, FBI agents, people delivering antibiotics to tubercular children… and I guess Big Bird. I should be proud to be included.

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* The car salesman is also a bad father, a reported drug addict, a weirdo, someone who says things like “I am the alpha in this relationship” while looking like a pudgy Keebler elf on chemotherapy, and an all around goober.

Something about working in bureaucracies stupefies people. It doesn’t matter how important the organization is. You could work at NASA – which, among other missions, is trying to figure out where we/everything came from – and you will inevitably be yelled at for not using the requisite number of staples in some anachronistic process of printing, stapling, un-stapling, then faxing a form. Perhaps this tedium explains why people see their basic language skills deteriorate at the office. There’s an awareness that one should appear professional, but not the wherewithal to know how that should be done. Taking anodyne words, pretending they’re suddenly vulgar, then replacing them with incomprehensible but more anodyne terms feels like an easy win. In this way “trash can” becomes “waste receptacle”, “desk” becomes “cubicle” becomes “workstation”, “performance reviews” become “one-on-ones”, “those little bastards calling me ugly in my teaching evaluations” become “students”, and so on.

This tendency takes on different flavors depending on the organization.

Government agencies are deeply and unrequitedly in love with initialisms. You contribute to FERS for your retirement, which is comprised of a pension1 and the TSP. Life insurance is provided by FEGLI; healthcare by FEHB. Pay is determined by the GS, or maybe by the WE or EL if you’re in an agency congress has decided should offer competitive salaries. One doesn’t just fire the guy sleeping under his desk; he’s first put on a PIP. Unless, of course, you want to fire competent people for the theatrics of it; in that case you perform a RIF action. The people making the laws are probably the worst offenders here. Every act needs a too-clever-by-half acronym. New York outdid itself in this regard with the FLACO (“Feathered Lives Also Count”) Act.2

Anything related to transportation is going to be a serial offender. Transit requires you to make periodic announcements to the public, and it’s just an irresistible opportunity for jargon. Airlines decided the perfectly good “disembark” (or “get off”) was passé so now it’s “de-plane”. You know, the same way one “de-velocipedes” when getting off a bicycle. Amtrak, never to be outdone, picked up on this and now we have “de-train”. The MTA, having just introduced subway cars with intelligible pre-recorded announcements, decided to re-record everything using voice actors with New York accents. This was a terrible idea for the same reason that the London Tube announcements don’t sound like Groundskeeper Willie: tourists, people who don’t speak English well, etc. are supposed to be able to understand them. It’s difficult to make out “the elevator is at the rear of the platform” when both “elevator” and “rear” are mispronounced. They also threw in some grammatical errors for funsies: “The MTA police is located at this station.”3 Ferries, oddly enough, usually don’t make announcements in my experience (this is good so, I guess, airlines should be more like boats). Captains of non-ferry boats won’t shut up. They’ll want to say things like “port” and “starboard” but they have to take ten minutes explaining that means “left” and “right” because “we use some special language out here on the bay.”4

Your typical corporation does its damnedest to make mincemeat of standard English. Each one is so focused on efficiency that a localized form of Newspeak is a business necessity. “Let’s discuss the pros and cons” is criminally verbose and must be replaced: “Do a SWOT analysis!” Technology firms are maybe the worst offenders. They seem to despise parts of speech, as in their current campaign to make “compute” a noun. For a while, branding departments thought it would look much cooler if companies were named like ticker symbols, so we took a hacksaw to vowels. I suppose that’s how you get a jeans company named DSTLD. And marketing departments love nothing more than a good pun, as in instructions for installing a bidet end up titled, “Let’s put this sh*t together” [sic]. Sometimes banks aren’t all that bad in this respect. Financial terms are often straightforward, as in “compound interest” is exactly what it sounds like. When it comes to branding though, they’re insufferable. You too could eat cereal at the Platinum Tier Gold Bonus Triple A Executive credit card airport lounge.

HR departments are their own world, more like each other than they are their particular companies. There is always some new personality test vocabulary you’re being asked to “acquaint yourself with before we go over everyone’s results.” I’ve had to take so many HR team-bonding-exercise-mandated personality tests that they all run together (to say nothing of the times in my non-working life when I’ve been told, “I took a personality test for you and I know what’s wrong with you now”). Apparently I’m “conscientious-dominant”, which is an oxymoron. HR trainings are the only place in real life – real life not counting an op-ed about how college students are so much worse than we were when we were overconfident bastards at that age – where I can count on someone using acronyms like “BIPOC” or “AAPI”, instead of, say, “Asian”, in person. They’ll also be sure to go through all eight syllables of LGBTQIA+ instead of just saying “gay” or “queer”. We’re already aware of which sort of queer person we are and don’t need a comprehensive list to see if we qualify, right before the topic turns to W-9s and annual leave policies.5 Moreover, in the first place, I’m not sure if it’s all that polite in conversation to describe someone’s race or sexuality as though it’s an initialism being read from the DSM-5.

Nonprofits are like HR departments without the rest of the company attached. Unless they’re conservative non-profits, in which case their employees must say “liberty” and “free markets” 13 times a minute or they’ll turn to stone (so it’s ironic they’re keen on neither liberty nor free markets).

Unions love a good shibboleth as part of their Gilded Age “the time for the glorious people’s revolution is nigh” cosplay. If they ever sent an email without closing it “in solidarity” it would be a miracle. The term “management” gets bandied about to mean “anyone not lucky enough to be represented”. I was once called “management” while being yelled at by a teamster for daring to move my own chair, never mind that I was 22, one small step removed from intern, and didn’t even have healthcare benefits.

The points so far describe crimes specific to certain categories of organizations. But there are often more similarities than particular quirks when bureaucracies set to bashing normal speech over the head with a shovel before burying it in a cornfield. Some phrasing seems to find a life across a diverse set of institutions. I dare to provide a, by no means comprehensive, list of examples. When on company time, people of all backgrounds incorrectly use…

“performant” for “functioning”; “talent acquisition” for “hiring”; “talent development” for “training”; “level set” for “summarize”; “scrum” for “meeting” (unless I’m mistaken and everyone is just really into rugby); “circle back” and “table that for now” for “drop it”; “unconscious bias” for “bias”; “team members / associates / amazonians” for “employees”; “agent / specialist / representative” for “clerk”; “at the current moment” for “now”; “at the present moment” for “now”; “imagineer” for “engineer who makes rides”; “onboarding” for “training”; “bandwidth” for “time” or “attention”; “toil reduction” for “ease”; “take ownership of” for “take responsibility for”; “operationalize” for “set up”; “productionalize” for “set up”; “knowledge transfer” for “conversation”; “compute” (noun) for “computing power” or “computers”; “learnings” for “lessons”; “action items” for “tasks”; “core competencies” for “skills”; “deck” for “slides”; “deep dive” for “look into”; “whitepaper” for “memo”; “flush out” for “flesh out”;6 “benchmark” (verb) for “test”; “customer service” for “rabbit hole”; “team-building” for “drinks”; “leverage” for “use”; “last and final” for “last” or “final”; “keep me honest” for “double check”; “I appreciate you” for “thanks”; “empathy” for “sympathy”; “empathy” for “manners”; “empathy” for “politeness”; “empathy” for “favor”; “empathy” for “understanding”;7 “lived experience” for “experience”; “generational wealth” for “wealth”; “retirement goals” for “money”; “journey” for “experience”.

This stilted vocabulary sounds close enough to the intended meaning that you’re not totally confused, but you can never get more than a tenuous connection to the topic at hand. You’re lost in the work of a painter with no eye for light. You can make out the object at hand, but no fine details make sense: objects glow despite being in shadow and the sun seems to be in five places at once.8 You can’t help feeling like you should be somewhere else.

Most worrisome, an essay about proper English usage might mean your author is entering his “old man yells at cloud” phase.

The ending here probably owes a bit to Twain.

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New Yorkers tend to be silly, frivolous, or at least irreverent. It’s difficult to understand the city without realizing that, and it helps one understand why we seem to despise any mayor who isn’t a cartoon character. We do care about competence, but only as a second order issue. Canvasing for mayor goes something like,

“I’d like to talk to you about ─── for Mayor. Do you have a few moments to hear about his program?”

“Ah! Ah! Ah! You with your program! Now you hold on just a minute. Tell me first, does he throw pies at people? Does steam come out of his ears when he eats hot sauce? Does he ever find himself sleepwalking off the Flatiron Building but only falls when he wakes up and looks down?”

“Well, yes, of course. In fact, just this morning he and a duck took turns chasing each other back and forth with a mallet around the Central Park Reservoir.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say so? Come in, come in, my husband will make coffee. Now tell us all about his plan for a phonics-based reading curriculum.”

A good mayor needs to be cheerful and wacky, yet still good at dealing with city departments to make sure the trash gets picked up and buildings don’t burn down. The requisite personality is going to be horribly unsuited to any other political office (look up the outcome for all the men on this list who eventually ran for president).

I’ve put together a helpful guide to our fair city’s leaders. I start with La Guardia because he’s the most cartoon-like of them all. The man was a crazy, frenetic, God-damned delight and I wish we had another one. He was also probably the first mayor anyone expected1 to do anything right, instead of just being born the pliant nephew of some political boss.

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Fiorello La Guardia

Fiorello (“Little Flower”) La Guardia was a boisterous man who seemed like he might pop out of the woodwork at any moment. He became a major in the air force during WWI, a time when it was a miracle for anyone to survive military aviation. An unrepentant wet, during his time as a congressman, he once mixed up an illegal beer concoction2 in his House office for a reporter; New York prohibition authorities commented to the effect of, “he’d better not try that here,” so he caught a train and did the same thing in his Harlem district, asking a passing patrolman to arrest him.

As mayor, he was ahead of his time, overseeing a staggering build out of public infrastructure as well and the attendant increase in public spending. He secured large amounts of New Deal projects and was one of the first politicians to become adept at spending public money (a new skill as the world changed during the Great Depression). He made some progressive moves on civil rights, more than can be said for many of his contemporaries. He also loved nothing more than hearing himself speak and ribbon cuttings:

“La Guardia’s predilection for pageantry, preferably with himself at its center was obvious to anyone who noticed the yards of gold braid with which the Major outfitted his policeman bodyguard or his penchant for holding full-dress military-type inspections of anything that conceivably be inspected – police or firemen with motorized equipment, snow plows, new garbage trucks, old garbage trucks – and for preening and strutting as he marched in front of them, literally swelling out his barrel chest as he bounced by at the salute.” – The Power Broker, chapter 23

Unsurprisingly, he desperately wanted to be a general in WWII. Just for the uniform one imagines. Working for the man was a nightmare: he routinely made his staff cry and would berate commissioners seemingly at random.3 At least he was entertaining.

William O’Dwyer

Notable for being so corrupt he had to get the President to save him by sending him out of the country as an ambassador. Put politely, “he proved to be quite comfortable in the role of glad-handing frontman for a network of corruption that gave the crime bosses and their political partners a stranglehold over the city’s economic life.” Somehow he had a squeaky clean reputation at the time despite a massive police corruption scandal.

Vincent Impellitteri

The Droopy Dog of mayors, Impellitteri was “shy” and people would pass him on the street not realizing that he’d ever been mayor. His nickname was “Impy”. He deferred quite a lot to Robert Moses (himself a cartoon villain4), but did show some gumption in standing up to party bosses and firing corrupt hold-overs from his corrupt-as-all-hell predecessor’s administration.

Robert Wagner

Sadly, this one was calm, level-headed, and not much of a character, making him a big exception to the rule. By all accounts, he rooted out corruption, hastened the decline of machine politics in the city when he broke with Tammany Hall, and handled the changing post-WWII makeup of the city about as well as could have been expected. If he was at all cartoon-like, he was more of a straight man sort of character. He quit the New York Athletic Club because they wouldn’t allow Jewish or Black people as members, which is a mark in his favor (though ever being part of a gym that costs thousands of dollars and requires a sponsor’s recommendation, seconds by two other members, and a background check makes me question his judgement). In one cartoon (villain) turn though, he implemented a mean spirited crackdown on gays/gay bars after working himself into a tizzy over the city being too queer for the 1964 World’s Fair.5 Maybe it was the drag? But, that’s the most cartoon-like activity ever… maybe he was a toon but maybe it was Judge Doom?!

John Lindsay

The man was a disaster. I’m assuming he was elected three times because he was young and pretty (the Kennedy, JFK very much included, recipe for gaining power despite cocking up everything you do). At one point on his watch, “mounds of garbage caught fire and strong winds blew the filth through the streets”. The city had riots (in the “Hard Hat Riot” a bunch of, I assume drunk, construction workers beat the bejesus out of anti-war protesters while the police stood around watching), corruption went on a tear, and just about every city worker went on strike. We went from putting garbage in containers (Oscar-the-Grouch style cans specifically) to just dumping it all over the street in plastic bags. He was what happens when you elect Daffy Duck mayor.6

Abraham Beame

This man was a cartoon in the Mr. Magoo just so out of his element he didn’t have an element sense. I feel sorry for him because it wasn’t his fault. His big flaw was wanting to be mayor at all at that particular moment. The city had no money, nearly went bankrupt, and there was pretty much nothing he could do except run hither and yon with his hat in hand begging for money. Poor guy.

Ed Koch

Koch was funny on sight. He had that high pitched yet still gravely New York accent that made him seem even kookier than he was. He’d walk around with a megaphone asking, “How’m I doin’?” He was entirely a creature of the city. In fact, it’s comical how bad he was at campaigning anywhere else when he ran for governor. Despite needing suburban votes to beat Cuomo The Elder, he couldn’t help himself from saying,

“Have you ever lived in the suburbs? I haven’t, but I’ve talked to people who have, and it’s sterile, it’s wasting your life. And people do not wish to waste their lives after they’ve seen New York.” [He’s not wrong.]

His mayoralty is complicated. The wheels fell off the city during his third term. But he also faced a pretty much never ending series of setbacks (New York in the 1980s was rough, so it’s to his credit that he absolutely adored the city even then). Dinkins eventually beat him fair and square, so it was petty when Koch turned around and endorsed Giuliani.

They renamed the Queensboro Bridge after him and he was as giddy as a kid over it.7 He kept pointing at it going, “That’s my bridge!”

He was gay, and in the closet his entire life because he (almost certainly correctly) believed coming out would wreck his political career. Near the end, he rued his loneliness. I don’t have a joke for that; it’s sad.

David Dinkins

David Dinkins seems to have been smart, deeply ethical, competent, and had a normal personality. He inherited a city in shambles and paved the way for its revitalization. He was decidedly not a cartoon. It is for this reason that I think New Yorkers hated him and he lost reelection to a bona fide lunatic (well, also racist8 incompetent cops played a role). Yes, he increased police headcount and expanded after school programs, which helped the city finally get crime under control. Yes, he also took ungodly amounts of flak for simultaneously starting to get the police themselves under control. But, was he ridiculous, scandal-plagued, or just plain odd? No, and our fine city deserves a clown. So, in his place, we chose one alright…

Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani is a man who only makes sense to a cartoon. Before he was mayor, he – surprisingly enough, laudably – went after the mafia as a prosecutor. They even wanted to kill him. When campaigning against Dinkins, he may have helped incite a police riot. As mayor, he got a lot of credit as public order / anti-crime policies initiated under Dinkins began to bear fruit. He wanted to privatize all the city’s public schools because he is an idiot.

After his time as mayor, he ran for president on the “I was mayor during 9-11” ballot line. After that, he did his best to enable a fat orange narcissist who, in turn, is currently doing his best to wreck the federal government. Also, his face melted at one point.

Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg, a.k.a. “El Bloombito”, was about as cartoonish as one can get. The El Bloombito satire comes from him cluelessly trying to read Spanish in press conferences, without any understanding of pronunciation. He was an out-of-touch rich man in many ways, always taking his plane somewhere to play golf. Although he definitely came off as awkward and unfriendly, he gave the impression that there was nothing in life he’d rather be than mayor of New York City. He seemed to like us in whatever way he’s capable of liking people.

Education is a big part of his mayoral legacy; he successfully lobbied for mayoral control of schools9 and ushered in charter schools. Graduation rates rose to the highest level since records began. He was also responsible for quality of life initiatives ranging from banning indoor smoking to more bike lanes. He was stubborn to the point of inflexibility, refusing to admit he was wrong about stop-and-frisk. He received remarkably little blowback for getting the city council to rubber stamp an exception for his third term run. In response someone started putting up “No Third Terms Vote for Burns” posters around the city. Like a big chunk of this list, he had a brief and disastrous campaign for president after his mayoralty.

Bill de Blasio

Universal pre-Kindergarten was a good idea. Beyond that, he couldn’t stop stumbling into PR messes. He managed to make himself look bad (or silly, which is worse) for his gym routine. He was constantly fighting with the governor. Now, the governor was an asshole, but it’s a very stupid position for a mayor to get in because, power dynamics in NY State being what they are, the governor can keep the mayor on a very short leash if he or she so chooses. Constantly dithering, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to increase police accountability or whether he wanted them to like him; so he got neither. New Yorkers were constantly treated to too much information about his marriage, and still about his dating life. It also seemed like he never really liked us; he was always off in Iowa, in a delusional attempt to be president. At Staten Island’s Groundhog Day ceremony, he killed the groundhog.

Eric Adams

Adams could’ve been one of the greatest on this list. He combines being an absolute clown (of the “what nonsensical blather will come out of his mouth next?” variety) with a surprising competence in many areas: he has actually tried to do something effective about the housing crisis,10 he moved to have the city put its trash in bins,11 and he decided it would be a good idea if we cared about whether children could read.

Unfortunately, he’s also brazenly and transparently corrupt. The inane thing is that he sells himself so cheaply. He took kickbacks in the form of discounted airfare (also, he seems to like Turkish Air first class so much he’d fly from NYC to Chicago by way of Istanbul). People in his administration just give out small amounts of cash in paper bags potato chip bags. He landed on a (very) competent police commissioner entirely by accident, as the procession of corrupt clods he installed in the job kept having to resign. Before becoming mayor, it seems he may have lied about actually living in the city.

Next?

This autumn, we’re either to be treated to Zohran Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo. Neither of them seem like they’d be good mayors,12 but they’re both excellent muppets. So, in a way, we can’t lose. Which character will I be adding to this list come November? You decide!

Zohran Mamdani

Gracie Mansion13 will soon host Zohran Mamdani and I, for one, look forward to waiting in a five block long line to exchange ration coupons for cabbages at his city-run Glorious Workers Food Co-op / Grocery Emporium… or rather that will probably just fizzle. He doesn’t actually have the power to make busses free. And, he can’t really freeze the rent.14 So, he seems set to say many cartoonish things (yay!!!), but might actually be pretty competent. The bus lanes he’s been promising sound nice, he seems to appreciate the need for more housing construction, and he’s pledged to keep on the first competent police commissioner we’ve had in years. Except he shouldn’t bring back the school boards. That’s a no good, very bad, awful, horrible idea.15

I’m a little sad because either Cuomo or idiot-in-beret would’ve made for somewhat better cartoon characters, but I suppose electing the candidate who isn’t a horse’s ass is a good sign for US politics.

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I’ve never felt so happy to be alive as when I landed in Jakarta. This had mostly to do with the fact I’d recovered from E. coli about 12 hours before the flight and was just jazzed to no longer feel like gnomes were siphoning off my blood in my sleep. When I go back someday, I’ll be happy when I land because Indonesia is a wonderful place where I was treated with more genuine kindness than probably anywhere else. What follows, however, is not an account of that; what follows is an account of the idiosyncrasies one random visitor found weird, funny, or otherwise notable.

When you arrive in Indonesia, the first thing you notice is smoke. Apparently, lighting things on fire is a national pastime. The forests are on fire to clear land, the cleared land is on fire to fertilize the fields, and trash is on fire everywhere (presumably to get rid of the trash and not for fun). For good measure, everyone is smoking. It’s not like with wildfires where you just can’t breathe; rather, it’s like being near a campfire at all times, downright pleasant if you don’t dwell on what it might be doing to you.

Once you toughen up your lungs and explore a bit, you may be struck by how warm everyone is. By many accounts, Indonesia is a friendly country but it’s not the superficial niceness you get from a barista or a Midwesterner. It seemed more like a genuine regard for visitors: People’s faces would light up when they asked how I liked it there and I responded, “I love it.” I was clearly not from around the area, so managers at restaurants would check with my party to see if I was enjoying the food. It was very sweet. Also, of course I was enjoying it because the cuisine (more like 100 different cuisines really) is amazing.1 We wandered into the middle of a pretty animated protest in Jakarta (with the frenzy of mopeds, crossing the street is more of something you do on a dare). As people saw us trying to get through with luggage, to a man they smiled, stopped what they were doing, and politely made space for us, resuming chanting only after we’d gotten through.

The language has the term “rubber time,” which I assumed would mean things tended to be late.2 As experienced, it’s more that things expand to fill the available space. A friend of a friend takes you to lunch, learns that you don’t have plans after, and so she rearranges her day to show you around all afternoon. The downside to this is a certain aimlessness in group settings. Everyone wants a nap but is too polite to break off company, so you end up wandering around a mall for two hours.

There’s also the term bule,3 which, roughly translated, means foreign white guy.4 As one, I came away from the trip really not sure what celebrities are always complaining about. People wanted photos of me, with me, of me with their babies. There’s a selfie of me with a janitor in the new high speed rail station bathroom. It’s awesome! It’s like being the mayor but with no pesky responsibilities. There was but a slight pang of jealousy when a group of schoolchildren, after some debate, opted for a photo with a 7’ tall middle aged Australian man instead of me.

I’m struck by descriptions of Tokyo where people remark on how quiet the city is. Indonesian cities are decidedly not like that. The busyness is exciting, but there’s noise. Noise, noise, noise. Sometimes it’s a characteristic you get used to, even nostalgic about. The constant hum of moped engines for instance; a sort of background music. Other times, you wonder how anyone could put up with such a racket without going insane. The train station in Yogyakarta is a case in point: there’s the train traffic, train arrival/departure announcements so consistent it’s not clear where one ends and another begins, the moped engines, the car horns, music over the PA system, and… and, inhumanely, there’s the tinny 1990s era synthed up version of the Westminster Quarters clock tones. Only, the chime of the hour never arrives. I think they’re used to announce when a train is entering or exiting the station. But, they’re so long that they just run together for each train. They never end! So, over the din of everything else, you hear:

Bong, bong, bong, bong

Bong, bong, bong, bong

Bong, bong, bong, bong

Bong, bong, bong, bong

[this is where the clock is supposed to chime, but it never happens]

Bong, bong, bong, bong

Bong, bong, bong, bong

Bong, bong, bong, bong

Bong, bong, bong, bong

[still no chime]

Bong, bong, bong, bong

[…forever…]

Exiting the station I remarked, “it’s a cacophony in there”.

And the response was, “oh, really? I hadn’t noticed”.

Speaking of Yogyakarta, the city has two of the most impressive pieces of architecture I’ve ever seen. And, I’d have never known about either if someone hadn’t remarked on a whim, “he should go see Borobudur”. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world and is impressive in its enormity at a distance and in its detail up close. The Prambanan is a large Hindu temple, only partially restored. It’s more whimsical than monumental, and the grounds make for a nice walk at dusk. There are periodic evening Javanese ballet shows at the Prambanan, and I happened to catch a performance of the Ramayana. It was a bit like a community theater5 in that the actors seemed like they had day jobs and the production was modest; it was nothing like community theater in that all the performers were talented, the style of dance was very cool, and everyone seemed to be having fun. It would be worth planning a trip around the performance schedule.

I stayed in one of the nicer hotels6 in Yogyakarta and, when I went to turn the tap on, it dawned on me that a competent plumber would be worth his weight in gold. I didn’t encounter a working faucet the entire trip, not in hotels, nor restaurants, nor private homes, nor even the airport. Now, they weren’t broken in the sense that they sprayed water everywhere, leaked, or otherwise had an emergency issue. But they’re not anchored to the sink. Every time you touch one, the handle and faucet give and shake, like a turtle’s neck jutting in and out of the wall. It’s as though plumbing schools stop after explaining how to connect a spigot to pipes but before explaining how to keep it from dancing around.

Overall, if I must devote a sentence or two to things more important than faucet shakiness or train station announcements, Indonesia is, in the best of ways, not quite like anywhere else. It’s the sort of place you could spend a week and then miss for the rest of your life. Go if you get the chance. And try durian while you’re there.

Oh, also, if at any point you awake to a loud roar with sweaty palms and a visceral fear that a jungle cat is about to lunge at your throat from the darkness, don’t worry. That is the cry of an 8-12’’ long insect eating gecko.

“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.” — Ray Bradbury

It was all very civilized to my young mind: a specific day, standardized tools, a procedure. I’d just come from Tennessee, where you simply dug a pit and burned things whenever you damn well pleased. Sometimes you didn’t even bother with the pit. Some people didn’t even bother with that far of a walk from their houses, though then they occasionally ended up without houses.

In Pennsylvania things were orderly. You burned on Saturdays, and in a regulation burn barrel, of the sort hobos warmed themselves around in the 1970s. By noon a great grey pall of smoke hung overhead.

In town, the barrels lined alleys where people’s lawns ended. Carting services would come ‘round to carry away the ash or replace the barrel once your current one burned out and holes started appearing at the bottom. On the edge of town (or a five-minute drive away), barrels sat where lawns turned to brush and woods. You got rid of ash by dumping it down the hillside, to be carried into creeks or neighbors’ basements by the next rain. A barrel was to be used for long past its service life. When it finally had to be replaced, you simply turned the old one on its side and kicked it out of the way.

Your best friend was your burn stick. Townsfolk used old rusty iron rods, which never needed replacing, although you did have to be wary of burns. By the woods, you’d find a nice stick and that would last a few weeks before crumbling. You needed the stick to mix up all the material in your barrel. Woe unto the townie who let his boxes and junk mail get too compacted in his barrel. He could be out there trying to restart a smoldering fire for hours.

Though it wasn’t a problem in town, in the hinterlands (again, a five-minute drive away) maintaining access to your barrel in the summer was paramount. Weeds and briars and saplings grew up as quickly as you cut them down. You had to constantly be hacking at vegetation, else you could end up cut off. If you were lucky, you got a dull swing blade for the task; if unlucky, you got an old shovel with a loose socket, which you’d use until the blade went flying. Weed eaters were sometimes employed but were about as useful as trying to cut down a tree with a butterknife. A machete was the correct tool, but it would’ve been an irresponsible implement to hand your 11-year-old before sending him into the woods unsupervised to light rubbish on fire.

There was only a modicum of reasoning behind what was burned. Paper of course, never glass, usually not plastic, unless someone really wanted to. It was usually determined by an adult yelling at you: “Don’t you put that in the trash! That’s burn.” The town had municipal trash collection as well as recycling so burning things wasn’t, strictly speaking, “necessary”.

Eventually I left. I met people from places near and far, from places big and small, from places with fluoride in the water (we had to go up to the teacher’s desk every morning in elementary school to get a chalky grape-ish tablet that kept our teeth from rotting out of our skulls). But none of them had ever heard of burn day. “What?!” they’d say, or “where the hell are you from?”, or “no… that’s not something everyone grew up with”. The tradition continued unabated however, into the 2010s. It continues today among those flame bug pensioners brave enough to snub their noses at the fire department, local ordinances, and common sense.

I like opera because melodrama is fun, and a full orchestra is fun, and a guy who looks like a portly longshoreman singing with the voice of an angel is funny. Basically, you go to the opera because you were the sort of kid who thought it was awesome when Bugs Bunny tormented Elmer to the tune of the Barber of Seville overture. Or you go because you’re a snob. I think the Met had the latter idea in mind when they put on Moby Dick this year.

In theory, if you’re going to write a new English language opera, Moby Dick should be perfect source material. It’s a dramatic but streamlined story (you can ignore all the chapters about how to skin a whale or about how people in the 1800s classified whales as fish) and you can pick whichever of the book’s 500+ themes you’d like to focus on. What’s more, you have free reign to write whatever lyrics1 you’d like since reading – much less singing – Melville is the literary equivalent of swallowing a brick sideways. Lines like, “In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again.” don’t exactly roll off the tongue. In this context, shoe-horning in as many direct quotes as possible was a bold choice. Thankfully, they were set to a largely discordant score, slightly less annoying than a 10-hour long Hare Krishna chant;2 otherwise, the audience may have enjoyed themselves. The closest the performance came to anything resembling a “song” was a “tough, rare, and bloody” routine wherein they did a whole number about the (not thematically super important) chapter where Stubb eats a whale steak. I think this was meant to be catchy:

“Tough, rare and bloody!

Whale steak!!

[dissonance]

Whale steak!”

But if the lyrics were bad, the score was just awful. The audience keeps waiting for a forceful (they’re harpooning whales after all) piece of actual music but it never arrives. Something like Flight of the Valkyries would’ve been great for the final chase, but just cribbing the Jaws score would have been a huge improvement. My ticket, for not a particularly great seat, was $249, and video games have better scores… I’m ever so slightly miffed at that. It’s like they hired a foley artist rather than a composer.

Meanwhile, the plot choices are bizarre. The production starts with the Pequod already at sea, which scotches any chance including the book’s foreshadowing of a doomed voyage or any of Queequeg’s interesting scenes. Ishmael is referred to as “Greenhorn” the whole time, up until he’s rescued at the end. When asked his name by the relief ship’s captain, he responds “Call me Ishmael!” as a groan rises from the audience. Pip is given a major role. On the one hand, I understand that the character (being a cabin boy) is about the only way to integrate a female voice into the show. On the other, Pip goes mad, so spending half the run time with a character running around the stage freaking out is annoying. They acted out the chapter where Pip is lost at sea by suspending the actress on a wire and having her flail around in midair – it felt like some combination of Will Ferrel in Zoolander and Mike Myers in Austin Powers. Paradoxically, despite an ad nauseum focus on Pip, they edited out any of the book’s better themes surrounding him. For instance, at one point, Pip goes overboard (he did that a lot) and Stubb admonishes him, saying a whale would sell for 30 times what he would. Melville was criticizing slavery there, in a way that would have been obvious to readers when the book was published. It’s a brief point in the book, so I wouldn’t say you’d have to include it in an opera; but in an opera that focuses relentlessly on Pip, it’s an odd omission.

Overall, it’s just bad. The biggest failing is the music. Mozart’s operas aren’t great but at least listening to them can be pleasant. But, a dull plot set to music that goes out of its way not to be melodic is obnoxious. It’s very disappointing because I would like to keep opera from becoming a dead art. It’s good that the Met wants to put on new productions, but it’s silly that they think seem to think that the costumes and the sets are what matter, that the plot and the composition can be phoned in. Opera is not supposed to be an acquired taste! You’re not supposed to need context to appreciate it. That’s why cartoons do opera episodes.3 You’re not supposed to try for, “well the music sucks, and the acting was grating, but boy does it make me cultured.”

Some other thoughts

While it’s not a new work, the Met did put on Stories of Hoffman last fall. It felt very modern because Offenbach was ahead of his time. It even has an act speaking to fear of automation. Most importantly, it has good music, it’s trippy, and it’s fun. Why can’t this be the Met’s guide for newer productions? If nothing else, do more Offenbach. Orpheus in the Underworld would be great, given that it pokes fun at the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and that an Orpheus based musical was just a smash hit.4 (Moreover, it’s funny, and who doesn’t like can-can music?)

I also went to Anthony and Cleopatra this season, another new production. If anything, it was worse. Listening to direct Shakespeare quotes being sung at you takes one right back to being a child as some middle-aged lector shout-sings Psalms to the pews on Sunday mornings. I don’t think I can do a full review because I walked out at intermission (and I wasn’t the only one). I just fundamentally don’t understand why the Met thinks that the music in any opera written after 1930 should be dissonant and bad.

If time spent doing something is at all correlated with skill, then I am one of the best Amtrak passengers now living. In my thirty-[redacted] years, I must have taken at least 1,000 of their trains.

You might be tempted to think that implies I’m a fan of the company, but no. They go out of their way to make that impossible. I take the train because it has some natural advantages. Relative to flying, it’s cheaper, less susceptible to weather / random delays, the stations are in more convenient locations than airports, and I can show up five minutes before departure time. Relative to driving… well I’d rather spend time in Attica than doing 15 mph on I-95, plus reading a book and napping are both counterindicated with operating a vehicle. Amtrak, however, go out of their way to negate these, in ways large and small.

Now, I am sympathetic to some of the railroad’s excuses. Their infrastructure is old, and the fact that the US spends something like $20 million a yard to do environmental review for track is not entirely their fault. The issue is that they tend to hide behind these things. It’s true, for instance, that they’re stuck with stupid station layouts in some cities; but, this is used as a red herring for when they make silly operations decisions about how to operate in the old stations (and if Moynihan is any guide, they make silly operations decisions in brand new stations too).

In the way of keeping this diatribe reasoned critique somewhat organized, let’s go item by item.

The Stations

An Amtrak station is often a microcosm for the railroad’s overall problems, encapsulating poor choices during construction and ongoing operations. They are sometimes stuck with station layouts from decisions a century ago (although Moynihan is brand new and an example of a terrible design) but the day-to-day cock-ups are just baffling.

By far, the most consistently stupid thing about station operations is boarding the trains. Amtrak even had an inspector general report in 2016 with 45 pages of “here’s why you suck at loading your trains,” which they must’ve chucked in a shredder. I don’t even know why it took 45 pages when it should have just been two items: 1) Trains are not airplanes so you don’t have to board them with one line through one door. 2) Find someone in the company who has taken a train in Europe and ask him how those degenerate French people board trains. The correct way to board a train is to let people wait on the platform, not in a holding pen in the station. When the train arrives, the people on the train get off, then the passengers on the platform board immediately. You can do that because a train is not an airplane! This is how foreign railroads manage it. This is how American subways work, and, I’m pretty sure, subways are trains. This is even how the little shuttle trains at airports work.

Now, I take the train between consistently between New York and Washington, DC, so I’m going to focus on specific issues I encounter at a few stations. From what I can tell though, many of these have analogues in other places (as in when I’ve occasionally taken the train to Boston).

New York Penn Station … Moynihan Station … Penn Station Moynihan Train Hall… Oooooh, a hall like where concerts are played!

This station is just the worst. Partly that’s because they destroyed the old one and built a terrible replacement on its corpse in the 60s. But a big part of why it’s bad is Amtrak today. Amtrak owns and operates the station, and platforms are shared with the LIRR, and NJ Transit. Despite the fact that all the trains use the same platforms, Amtrak seems obsessed with divvying up space in the station rather than making everyone play nice. There’s one door if you’re trying to get to an Amtrak train, a different door if it’s an LIRR train, and yet another door if it’s an NJ Transit train. The sensible thing would be to let any passenger use any door to the platform and speed up the painfully slow boarding process because, dare I repeat, trains are not airplanes and don’t need separate gates.

This problem is most obvious in the Moynihan portion of the station. On the top level, there is the Amtrak concourse with a single one-person-wide escalator down to the platform. One level below, there is a subterranean LIRR concourse, from which you may walk down a staircase onto the same platforms. There should be staircases from the Amtrak level to the LIRR one. That way, passengers could choose to walk directly down two flights of stairs instead of waiting in a stupidly long line to take the escalator. You can technically do this if you walk out of your way around the concourse, but it's not encouraged so only people who take the train a lot know about it. Oh also, Amtrak has another boarding hall in the Penn Station portion of Penn Station (i.e., the east side) where they play the same stupid two levels but all the stairs go to the same platforms game with NJ Transit. The idea behind spending billions to give them Moynihan was that they would give up this separate waiting room to simplify operations for the other railroads, but then they just didn’t.

Back in Moynihan, where the staircases should be, they built a waiting room. This is pretty (in fact Moynihan ispretty) and architectural critics liked it. But, it’s slotted between the station and the tracks so it’s just an obstacle. It’s also small and the only place with seating in the station. They have people sit around at the front of the waiting room to stop you if you don’t have an Amtrak ticket, because… I dunno, they’d rather you go to hell than Long Island. I think the seating decisions were to keep homeless people out on the theory that it’s easier to make some guy in an Amtrak vest check 10,000 tickets a day than say, “you can’t bring a shopping cart in here, sir… also how on earth did you come across a shopping cart in Manhattan?” three times a day. The net effect is that you have dozens of passengers sitting on the floor. Philadelphia’s station gets to have benches.

Upstairs there’s a lounge for anyone dumb enough to buy a first class Acela ticket. That it exists demonstrates Amtrak really doesn’t understand that it’s not an airline. You don’t buy a ticket for the fastest train available so you can show up to the station an hour early.

The arrival/departure boards are the best example of how Amtrak is indifferent to making Penn Station more efficient. There are giant screens in Moynihan, where you might expect to see platform numbers for incoming trains. Instead, they seem reserved for advertising, but that they haven’t sold ads yet. So it’s just empty, displaying some dreck like, “Moynihan Station in case you forgot where you were” or whatever. The status boards are all off to the sides, or around a corner, and way too small to read at a distance. Moreover, the train status information isn’t integrated. It would have to be simple to put Amtrak, the LIRR, and NJ Transit on the same board, so you didn’t have to wander around from wall to wall to find your particular railroad, but no.

Finally, the boarding issue is particularly stupid in NYC. The official line for why everyone has to wait above the platform, let the train come into the station, then go single file down to the platform is that Penn Station is old and the platforms are narrow. This is also why Amtrak insists on something like ten-minute dwell times in Penn Station.

Why ten?

Well has to be more than the two used in Germany with wider platforms, and ten is more than two.

Why not five then?

um…

Okay, so what’s the solution?

Give us $17 billion to expand the tracks at Penn Station. We’ll be digging up three city blocks in midtown for (probably) eons to do it. Your kids will be pensioners before it’s done, muahahaha!

That’s the only possible solution? What about through-running whereby more trains pass through Penn Station instead of originating and terminating there? That should make it so they don’t have to sit in the station so long, which will allow you to expand capacity without excavating a giant pit in the middle of Manhattan.

No! You, with your solutions. Give us $17 billion.

Hmm… probably not going to happen. Also $17 billion for new platforms?! You know the French are building an entire 140 mile high speed line for a little less than $10 billion?

Why don’t you just move to France then?

They don’t like me there either.

The “narrow platforms at Penn Station” line is also annoying because they throw it around constantly to explain why service sucks. But then, if platform space is worth a chest full of gold doubloons a square inch, why do they add as much clutter as possible? Why does each platform have a passenger elevator and a freight elevator instead of just one elevator? Why is the freight elevator in the middle of the platform and framed in with something like three feet of cinder blocks? Why is the east side escalator framed in with cinderblocks so it can be narrow but also take up a lot of space? Why is there some foldable ramp (labeled Acela but I’ve never seen it used) in the middle of the platform? Couldn’t that be stored elsewhere and brought down in the freight elevator when you need it? Why are there wayfinding signs bolted to the floors instead of hanging from the ceiling? Why are there garbage cans on the platforms? Can’t the giant fire extinguishers be bolted to the backs of the staircases instead of in the middle of the only free platform space?

Philadelphia Penn Station

Surprisingly, given its location in Pennsylvania, this station is actually quite functional. There is ample space and seating. The platforms are huge so, in theory, you could just let people amble down to them at their leisure once the tracks are announced for an incoming train. In practice, they still line everyone up to go down single file. I guess the employees just get bored and like having people wrapped around a station like that snake game on an old Nokia phone. At least they do this before the train comes in, so trains move through the station quickly. They also have benches so you can have a seat when (not if) your train is delayed. If Amtrak doesn’t want to improve by looking at a good railroad and copying it, they could at least do better by copying Philly. This station used to have one of those clickety-clack arrival/departure boards (properly a “split flap” board; I looked it up). This was lovely and you could actually read it. So of course they got rid of it and replaced it with a digital one. The new one is an improvement on those at other stations but the resolution kind of sucks (plus white text on light blue backgrounds isn’t the most readable) so it manages to be worse that the sign it replaced.

Newark Delaware

This isn’t a major station so I don’t expect it to be really nice. But, it’s notable because you have to walk across the outer train tracks to board the train, which just… seriously? The experience of hitching a train like an Okie fleeing the dustbowl in a boxcar.

Washington DC Union Station

They want $9 billion to renovate this one. For that princely sum we’d get wider platforms, longer platforms, and a bunch of aesthetic upgrades, parking, and other things that have nothing to do with trains. For that absurd amount of money they should be able to turn it into a through station, but that’s not even in the cards. Also, the platforms are already plenty wide if they would just abstain from driving a half dozen airport golf cart things down them every time a train arrives and people are trying to get out.

The current version of the station is ugly, but the layout is terrible more because of how it’s operated than how it’s built. As built, it’s easy to arrive then walk straight from your train to the subway. As operated, they put some stupid metal gate between the platforms so you have to go out of your way to enter the station, go around the rope lines they have up, then walk to the subway. It’s doubly annoying that the gate blocks off the easternmost tracks, which are where they have the Acela arrive, the exact train you take if you care about speed. For departures, they still have some aversion to letting people wait on the platform, so they build little holding pens out of tensabarriers. These take up gobs of space, which makes walking around the station feel claustrophobic even though you could fit a herd of elephants in the corridor. Of course there are additional obstacles about the terminal. The dumbest of these are ol’ timely looking arches that look like you’re supposed to walk through them on your way to the train. They look like some ticky-tacky detail from a carnival attraction with a name like “1890s land”. In fact, they are actually old; they were doorframes from the original station that they inexplicably left in place in the name of historic preservation. So that section of the station is hideous but it has old doorless doorframes preserved as sculptures. Good job everyone!

Another detail that affects boarding is that they have gates and tracks. So instructions are in the form of, “board through gate H, track 18”. It doesn’t matter though what gate you use. The tracks are the same. So there’s no difference between gate H track 18 and gate F track 18. I guess it’s more for keeping people corralled in the station, which isn’t necessary. They should just let you mill around until the train is announced then go to the platform.

A final detail: it’s idiotic that the second busiest Amtrak station in the country still has some platforms that are too low for the trains. If you ever take a Northeast Regional train, odds are you’ll arrive at one of these at some point. Instead of walking out onto a raised platform, you have to go down the carriage stairs onto ground level. This takes forever because 1) people pack comically large suitcases and 2) the conductors don’t open all the doors! I don’t know why they won’t open the doors aside from the fact no one at Amtrak values your time even a little. I’m sympathetic that this could be a difficult detail to fix. It probably is tricky to build new raised platforms in an active station. But, it ought to be something they have a better plan for than “give us $9 billion and 20 years and we’ll do it”.

The Trains

The company operates several types of kit. I’ve experience primarily with the Acela, the Northeast Regional, and long-distance trains passing through the Northeast Regional corridor. I have also taken routes such as Boston to Portland ME, Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and Chicago to Cleveland; doing this is usually a mistake. Presumably the west coast has Amtrak too. I don’t know about it.

The Acela

Amtrak calls these high speed, which isn’t true. However, they are the best level of service available. They will take you from DC to NYC in three hours. It used to be 2 hours 50 minutes but inexplicably got slower at some point. An actual high speed train would take you from DC to Boston in not much longer. The trains themselves are much better than the regional trains because they debuted this century (barely) rather than in the 1970s. They look like high speed trains from other countries but are vastly heavier because they are engineered to withstand a collision with a freight train. This is necessary because, despite the northeast regional corridor being the only place in the US that’s almost entirely passenger trains (and mostly owned by Amtrak), no one even has a plan to separate passenger and freight operations on the route.

The experience on Acela is better because the trains are somewhat faster and less decrepit inside, Amtrak seems to prioritize them so they aren’t delayed as often, and they have assigned seating. The assigned seats are such an improvement it’s mind boggling Amtrak doesn’t do this for other trains. People can travel and sit together without lining up to board 30 minutes early, and new passengers don’t have to perambulate around a crowded train searching for an empty seat.

It's supposed to be an express service so I do not understand why they stop at the Baltimore airport and in Metropark NJ (a station in an unincorporated community with a population of 20,000). I’m assuming that (very slow) track improvements decreased the travel time on the route and Amtrak responded with, “gee willikers, no one’s gonna wanna get to where they’re going faster. We gotta do something. Let’s pretend Metropark is a big place.” Before the pandemic, they tested out an express train from DC to NYC with no other stops. This actually did save like 20+ minutes and was nice, so of course they killed it off.

I mentioned the rolling stock is newer. This is true, but it isn’t new. It’s way past the service life. You’ll notice that the locomotives have dents and cracks in some of the fiberglass pieces, the power outlets sometimes don’t work, and the chairs will recline suddenly without prompting on occasion. They started building replacements1 in 2017. These are sitting on a siding outside the Philadelphia station to taunt you as you go by. We’re constantly told they’ll be soon entering service. The line now is “spring 2025”. I see migrating birds and flowers blooming in Central Park, but I’m not holding my breath.

The ticket prices for the Acela are sometimes reasonable (something like $130 to go from NYC to DC) and sometimes absurd ($320 for the same route). It makes no sense to charge over $300 one way since a passenger could get a cheaper round trip flight. So they’re either leaving money on the table by not selling seats, or they should be adding capacity. Instead, they’ve cut the number of Acela runs because they can’t get the new trainsets into service. Moreover, each train includes a first class car, which should be replaced with a regular car to increase overall seating. The first class tickets are routinely over $500; I imagine these seats are only filled by people using upgrade coupons since you’d have to be out of your mind to pay that much. Oh, and first class entitles you to some coffee and a meal on par with the worst coach class airplane lunch you’ve ever had. There’s also a dining car, which should be replaced with another passenger car as well (the food is horrendous anyway, unless you think nothing says “traveling in style” like a microwaved sausage biscuit in a plastic wrapper).

The Northeast Regional

These will get you between DC and NYC in something like 3 hours 30 minutes, except for some that are nearly 4 hours because they make a station stop every 30 yards.2 The trainsets are Amfleet I cars, which date to the 1970s, though they’re based on a design from the 60s. The company that built them went bankrupt some time ago. They’re just horrible. At some point they gave up on replacing them in a reasonable amount of time and had the chairs reupholstered from cloth to (I’m assuming fake) leather. This made them less comfortable. They’re typically freezing in the summer when the passengers are in light clothing and roasting in in the winter when the passengers are in sweaters (also the temperature controls are allegedly on the outside of the cars so there’s no turning down the heat when it’s 15° outside but 90° in the car).

The coaches are rickety as all hell. You hear constant rattling as they lumber along. The power outlets at the seats often (like a quarter of the time) don’t work. The windows are small because way back in the 60s they wanted them to look like airplanes… of course. The doors between cars close automatically, which I guess is nice while the train is in motion; it’s annoying though when you’re in line to get off the train in a station and the door keeps trying to cut you in half.

In my anecdotal experience, these are much more subject to delays than the Acela (though the Acela can and does get delayed). I usually expect a regional NYC to DC train to be at least 10 minutes late. No one even comments on these sorts of short-ish delays; I don’t even know if Amtrak counts them. Once I had a flight to Maine cancelled due to rain. I ran to Penn Station to catch a train leaving in 15 minutes, except once I got there it was delayed and delayed until it was something like an hour and a half behind. I figured I’d miss my transfer in Boston, but lo, that train was also so delayed that I actually had to wait for it too. Status updates for a delayed train are pretty useless as well. I’ve been in a station waiting for a delayed train after the scheduled departure time while the Amtrak app lists it as on schedule.

The simplest, cheapest, and quickest way to vastly improve the experience would be to implement assigned seating. Boarding takes forever while people look for seats. Families make a mad dash trying to find chairs together. On crowded trains, when people board at a small station, they have to walk around searching for an open chair (it’s also all but impossible to tell if a chair is open or if the occupant went to the café or something; a lot of conductors don’t even use the paper slips anymore). It would also be a simple way to crack down on fare evasion. This would also be a much better way to assign people to the correct car when they’re getting out at a station where only a few doors can open.

The replacements for these horrendous trains, dubbed the Airo, are due in 2026. If you believe they will actually arrive that year I have a cryptocurrency to sell you. We’ll be lucky if they make this decade. The locomotives will be dual mode diesel-electric because we’ve basically just given up on electrifying track at a reasonable cost. These will be better than changing out the engine on trains arriving into DC from the north (electrified) and continuing south (not electrified), but most of the northeast regional is on the electrified DC to Boston track. So, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to build a bunch of custom, heavy, expensive dual-mode locomotives because of the most marginal routes (seems it would make more sense to use cheap/reliable/lighter/easier-to-maintain/already existing engines for the majority of trains going between DC and Boston, then purchase a few of the custom finicky ones for trains going to the Adirondacks or wherever).

Others

The cars for other routes are Amfleet Something or Other (I don’t feel like looking it up). They’re worse than the regional ones. I mostly end up taking these by accident, as in I book a ticket from NYC to DC and it happens to be on some stupid train going from the North Pole to Miami in 3 months and 5 days. With the northeast corridor track as crowded as it is, these should not exist. If you’re crazy enough to take a train from Massachusetts to Florida instead of flying, you should have to transfer in DC.

The boarding procedures for these are so absurd that someone should be forced into retirement over it. Penn Station is at capacity we’re told. I don’t see how it helps to have people queue in single file, go down to the platform, have a conductor shout, “where ya going?” then direct you to a car where you line up single file again while a different conductor assigns you to a seat using a notepad. The process ties up a platform for an absurd amount of time (also it’s just annoying being marshaled around like a 3^rd grader on a field trip).

I once took a train from Chicago to Cleveland since it happened to perfectly line up with when I planned to sleep… in theory anyway, in practice it was delayed. This sort of route should also not exist. It’s maddening to pay stupidly high fares on a functional, if frustrating, line (Acela from DC to NYC say) then see the money basically shoveled into a pit to maintain service like this. The trains run over freight right of way, so they are constantly delayed due to freight traffic.3 The tracks also aren’t built for speed so there’s almost no route in the middle of the country where it isn’t better (and cheaper) to fly. Running a better northeast corridor should be the main priority; once that’s done, focus on connections (maybe eventually a Philadelphia to Pittsburg train wouldn’t suck). It’s just foolish to waste money and effort on areas with low potential ridership; Amtrak needs to prioritize. When they put forward strategic plans with routes extending into Wyoming, they just seem delusional.

I guess the Downeaster is kind of an exception in some ways but an example of an inability to prioritize in others. It travels between Boston and Portland Maine in a kind of reasonable amount of time. But, it’s still a missed opportunity since it comes and goes from a separate Boston station than other Amtrak trains. The logic of an add on to the trunk of the regional corridor is that you add several routes (e.g., connecting Norfolk VA to DC gives you Norfolk to DC travelers but also Norfolk to Baltimore travelers). This doesn’t work for the Downeaster. To go from Portland to Providence RI, you’d have to take the Downeaster to Boston North Station, then the subway to a different station, then a different Amtrak train to Providence. And, best I can tell, the schedules aren’t synced up, so you’d have to wait in between.

Operations

In some ways, Amtrak is saddled with operational headaches not of their own making: old tracks, NIMBYs, and idiotic proceduralism required for building anything. In others, they just can’t stop stepping on rakes. A lot of their operational screw-ups probably relate to both of these things.

First up, the delays and cancellation at this railroad are just not acceptable. Trains get delayed when it’s hot; they get delayed when it’s cold; they get delayed when it rains; they get delayed when it snows. Sometimes they get delayed when a drawbridge is stuck open. My favorite was a delay “due to the late release of equipment from the train yard”, which is basically, “we didn’t do our homework and we’re not sorry.” Earlier this year, they tried the “extremely cold temperatures” excuse for a 15° day. That is cold, admittedly. But, is pretty normal for NYC (well, less so with climate change but still not extreme). Train schedules are more reliable than airplanes (and much easier to just take a later one than with a cancelled flight) but it’s an advantage Amtrak seems to be trying to squander. The attitude is more “Well, what’re you gonna do? Delays happen.” than “Oh, that’s awful, how do we improve this? (without assuming we can have two decades and $20 billion)”

It would also help if they could get their conductors and station staff more organized (this is a management failure). I’ve already mentioned a bunch of ridiculous boarding practices. But, boarding an Amtrak train always seems ridiculous in a different way. There’s no consistency. In Philadelphia, sometimes they let you wait on the platform, sometimes they snake a line around the terminal. In DC, sometimes they open the gate and want you to board early; other times it’s another giant single-file line that extends so far through the station no one can figure out what train it’s for. In NY Penn Station they’ll start calling out to get you to line up before putting the track announcement on the status board. Why? Why is it a secret for a little while?! Ticket agents also never have any useful information. When they have a cascade of delays and you’re trying to rebook, no one can give any answer to “which train is leaving first?” or “which train will get me there soonest?”

As far as customer service goes, mostly it’s fine. For the most part I have sympathy for conductors having to deal with idiot (or out-and-out rude) passengers. But, there does seem to be a fair amount of latitude for how crazy you can be as a conductor. One guy on morning Acela trains used to go around yelling at people for crossing their legs. He once got really annoyed and started huffing, “you can’t cross your legs on Delta, why should you be able to here?!” In fact, you can because a train is not an airplane. A fair number of the conductors got really frustrated when Acela moved to assigned seating (they were wrong; the passengers who couldn’t match up the number on their tickets with the one on the seat were morons). Also, when someone boards the train with a ticket for a different train or a different day, why can’t the conductors change the reservation for them? I’ve observed this multiple times. Conductors who try to be helpful have to call the same customer support number the rest of us do. Why is there no mechanism for them to issue a revised ticket themselves? Or at least why don’t they get their own support line?

I don’t entirely understand how Amtrak ticket pricing works. It’s usually much cheaper if you buy in advance. I think the prices just go up as you get closer to the departure date, especially for Acela. Maybe there’s some reason for it or maybe they’re just blindly doing what airlines do again. It seems that it fritters away a potential competitive advantage: It should be easy to hop on a regional train with minimal planning, so you don’t need to set up your weekend trip five months ahead of time. Sometimes I’ve used points (which I accumulate because I take so many trains) to get an Acela ticket that’s priced at $300+ because it’s convenient. Then when I’m on the train it’s half empty, which, again, just seems like they’re leaving money on the table by not selling seats.

I also get the impression people at the company don’t give much thought to planning for when things go wrong. I was once on a regional train someone jumped in front of. That was sad and I feel really bad for whoever it was, full stop.4 I just felt an abrupt deceleration and smelled brake dust. Then, we sat there for three hours. The only announcement was about a “police investigation”. I only learned what it was because SEPTA listed a reason for delays online. As a railroad, you’re supposed to have a plan for tragedies like that ahead of time. You don’t just leave a disabled train in the middle of the track for three hours on the busiest stretch of railroad in the country. Another time, the same thing happened outside of DC. I was on a different Acela train at the time, which just stopped in Maryland with no word on when or if it would move. The conductors were basically like, “good luck”. I had to take a cab. The point here is not that I was inconvenienced. The point is that Amtrak didn’t seem to have more than an ad hoc plan for getting the trains running again and hadn’t even bothered to write up a standard announcement for such events. I imagine you want to handle such situations with a measure of respect and decorum; a lack of preparedness communicates the opposite.

Infrastructure

Amtrak isn’t entirely responsible for the fact we spend way too much on substandard infrastructure, and they’re not necessarily the worst. The MTA’s favorite pastime is lighting money on fire after all. However, they certainly do a lot of silly things. It gives the impression that they have this idea that there are an overwhelming number of projects and all of them need money. So they just throw as much money as they can at whatever they can. This leads to a lot of substandard results.

They spend way too much to modernize catenary wires. The catenaries for the northeast corridor are very old and do need replacing. I’ll just note that their own inspector general found gross mismanagement here, which seems like a management problem to me.

For other projects it seems like they just don’t think ahead. The stuck open drawbridge I alluded to earlier is actually a swingbridge that’s being replaced. I’ve seen them building the new one as I go by. However, another long term goal is to get four tracks instead of two between NY Penn Station and Newark NJ. I don’t understand why they’re only building a two track bridge; they’re undertaking this huge project without increasing capacity while they’re at it. The idea is to get more funding later for the additional tracks, but later you’ll have to do more environmental review, have work crews set up again only to repeat the same tasks, etc. Essentially, they give up any economies of scale they may have been able to achieve and make the overall project cost as much as possible.

A series of bridges in Connecticut are being replaced for astronomical sums that it seems no one can explain.

… for a few examples.

I don’t know what the solution is here, maybe better in-house engineering expertise. But, they don’t even seem to recognize they have a problem. They should care about this more. They should explain why these projects cost so much and why they make the decisions they do. If it’s not their fault, at least explaining it would let policy makers address the real problems. As it is, it just comes off as indifference.

I’m going to stop now. I’m tired.

P.S., I forgot to even mention the website and app. Why can’t these at least work well? Both are slow (the most recent version of the app takes forever to load a ticket, exactly what you want when a conductor is hovering over you). The website should immediately prioritize bookings on the northeast corridor (since we account for most of their customers) instead of all the banner ads for the California Zephyr or whatever. And why, when you book tickets for multiple people, does Amtrak only issue one ticket instead of one for each person? In trains without assigned seating this is doubly annoying because parties get split up and the conductor has to try and figure out who’s sitting where and which person has a groups’ ticket.

Wherein I really overuse the word “bread”

The French are not a particularly practical people. That is not an insult. Practical people don’t invent the Citroën DS, much less replace it with the SM. Neither do practical people retrofit metro lines to use Dr. Seuss-esque rubber-treaded trains solely because they’re fond of a particular tire company, a tire company that moonlights as the world’s premier restaurant critic. So, it’s ironic that France is the best place in the world for bread for a very practical reason. They’re not the best because they have the best bread – the US has the best – but because they have really good bread you don’t have to jump through hoops to get.

In Paris, you’re never more than a few blocks from a bakery. If the closest one is middling, you go to the next, adding two minutes to your travel time. Also, the hours are reasonable such that you can get a decent loaf anytime between, say, 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. give or take. Oh! And a baguette will run you $2.

In the US, the closest option is usually a grocery store. There, you may buy sliced bread in plastic bags. Typically, you should remove the bread from the bag before eating it, but the taste will be the same either way. Or, the grocery store will have an in-house bakery where the bread looks pretty but is tasteless, and dry, and never expires.

Alternatively, you may opt for a bakery, but you’ll regret it if you don’t do some research. Take Levain of yuppie chocolate chip cookie fame. It looks the part, reads “bakery” on the door, and has good looking bread. If you give them ten American dollars for said bread, you’ll find it has the taste and texture of plasterboard. Then there are places like Balthazar or Daily Provisions, which once had good bread, expanded after people liked the good bread, and now sell bread-shaped fiberglass insulation. Even worse are places like Modern Bread and Bagel that look like bakeries, have “foodstuffs” that really look the part, but then bury the lede by not having “we don’t use wheat flour because we’re paranoid about gluten, the most necessary component of bread” written on the front door. You’ll learn that a rice flour roll just disintegrates in your mouth and will catch fire before it toasts.

Other times you find amazing bread, such as at Claude, then learn that they do not sell it. You get a slice or two with your meal and that’s it. It’s as if the only way to get peanuts were to take a flight to LA.

Yet, if you wade through a sea of pretenders, you’ll eventually be rewarded. You’ll land on really good places like Sullivan St. Bakery, top notch ones like Fabrique, and home runs like Alf1 and Seylou. Now, these will be some of the best bread you’ll find anywhere but 1) you’ve had to search far and wide for them meaning a sourdough entails a subway transfer and 2) they’re often the most obnoxious places in the world. They’re shuttered random days of the week, close stupidly early as though they can’t fathom anyone wanting bread after 8 a.m., often run out of bread before closing time anyway but never learn to make more, generally are a magnet for stupid customers in the, “what does the apricot tart taste like?” vein, and never seem to mind when people bring their filthy dogs into a commercial kitchen. Oh, and the bread is $15.

But, it is really good. That and the alternatives suck. So you’ll put up with all of it and beg them to take your money.

Anyway… sunk costs, I’m meant to be writing about sunk costs. Once upon a time, I found myself waiting at Seylou in DC. I was third or fourth in line so figured I’d be there an hour as the customers at the register inquired as to the provenance of the flour. But since I didn’t really care about who the farmer was, or whether he still played fiddle on weekends, or how he never missed an alimony payment, or how he was recovering from his (presumably unrelated) bout of secondary syphilis, I debated whether or not to get a pastry. Now the bread at this place is some of the best in the world but the pastries are hit or miss. They had canelés2 though, so I decided to go for it. Some indeterminant amount of time later, had you been at the Baptist church across the street that plays sermons on a loudspeaker as a form of torture, you’d’ve seen a man exit a bakery, take one bite from a pretentious dessert, then immediately chuck the rest of it in the nearest trash can. The canelé was a colossal ash-tasting miss. Continuing to eat it would have been a perfect example of the sunk cost fallacy. This brings us to an important distinction:

A sunk cost is not the same thing as the sunk cost fallacy.

“Sunk” does not mean “bad”. A sunk cost is merely any price you’ve paid (in money, time, effort, etc.) that is unrecoverable. For instance, time spent building friendships is sunk; you can’t get younger; but, it isn’t wasted.3 Money spent purchasing a house is not sunk; you can resell the house. Money spent adding giant Corinthian columns to the house is sunk since, if anything, you’ve destroyed part of the house’s value, unless you live on Staten Island, in which case it's a sound investment and will net you a large premium when you sell.

The sunk cost fallacy has to do with sunk costs, but it’s not the same thing. Roughly, the sunk cost fallacy is letting the fact that you’ve already invested sunk costs into something influence your behavior going forward. Had I kept eating the canelé, I would have been succumbing to the fallacy. I didn’t like it. It’s a pastry so eating it is actively bad for your health. I wasn’t particularly hungry. Taking a second bite of it would have made me worse off; the fact that I had already paid for it is immaterial. What if it had been a bad tasting apple? Well, then it gets interesting. It’s still a sunk cost and tastes bad, but, since it’s still an apple, it’s good for your health. It you eat the apple despite the taste because it’s good for you, you’re not falling prey to the fallacy; if you don’t give a damn about your health and eat it solely because you spent money on it, you are.

You know those cretins that wait in 15 hour lines for a phone or concert tickets? They’ll always say things at the outset like, “five hours is my limit.” Five hours later, it’s, “well, I waited this long, might as well do 10 more hours.” But when the justification for “might as well” is that they’re having fun with their friends in the line, it’s a festive atmosphere, what have you, then they’re making forward looking decisions. Maybe they wouldn’t have come in the first place if they knew it would go 15 hours, but they’re deciding to stay put because it’s fun.4 They’re behaving perfectly rationally here.

Most people understand this, but they, wrongly, assume that economists do not. We are socially inept in general but not wrong here. If you can get one to make eye contact long enough for a conversation, any economist will tell you that plenty of sunk costs are worth it and there are often reasons to finish things you regret starting. Only, sometimes, when there’s nothing in it for you or anyone else, you shouldn’t finish things just because you started them. The world would be a happier place if more people left the occasional restaurant meal half eaten, walked out of a concert or two at intermission, or threw Catcher in the Rye in a waste basket after two chapters. If you’ve read this far though, you’ve learned nothing.

If you don’t care for anecdotes, skip the prologue.

Prologue

Before Microsoft made Teams (a product that never works) to knock off Zoom (a functional product), there was Cisco Webex (a product not even expected to work). Webex was (is?) a video conferencing app with video so faulty that no one even bothered to use it and audio so poor that everyone gave up on it. We had to sign into the meeting, then call in with our desk phones. It was more a phone call with screen sharing than anything.

Enter the Nortel M3904 desk phone, a fine and unpretentious device. It was a hunk of plastic with grey buttons for dialing and pastel-colored buttons for decoration. There was a screen that mostly displayed a jumbled mass of rectangles as if it had been smashed, though occasionally it showed a caller’s name. Plug it into the wall and the voice of some asshole sales rep named Steven would come out. Just don’t ever dare to plug it into said wall yourself or some joyless Teamster will come around to read you the riot act.1

But progress stops for no man and, eventually, the Nortels needed replacing. Switching them out for Cisco-branded VOIP sets would save the company untold amounts of money, except, sadly, not enough to avoid the annual Christmastime layoffs. In the event, the Cisco phones sent voice data over the internet but otherwise simply replicated the Nortels’ functionality, with two differences. First, you could dial the phones from your computer… via an app that just displayed a picture of the physical phone and allowed you dial by clicking the numbers instead of pressing them on the actual phone two feet away (desk phone, the video game). Second, they included a nicer full color LCD screen; it still served no purpose and – with emphasis – it was not a touch screen.

Some time passed after the upgrade and I found myself in a conference room. I don’t remember what we were supposed to be discussing. The company had recently realized that social media is a thing and were hoping to get a piece of that pie by throwing a Flash2 website, a small team of Belarusian developers, and $11 at the effort. Maybe it was that. Anyway, our vice president3 was batting away the not-a-touchscreen trying to connect our conference room with a developer on a cell phone and a group of other (presumably) sad people across town in a similar room. Despite the initial failure of the plan to press the words on the screen, he kept at it. “Maybe if I just paw at it one more time it’ll work like my i-Phone,” he apparently thought. I must confess I spaced out a while at this point. I don’t know how long, a couple minutes, a week, eons. Playing in my mind was a David Attenborough special I once watched: a chimpanzee tries to master using a hammer and anvil technique for cracking open a nut. He places the nut in a poor location on the anvil rock, thwack! It just rolls off. He puts it right back in the same place, whacks it again, and so forth… I come to as our valiant executive manages to lose both calls.

And so, I came to realize I was disaffected and decided to do something else. I could’ve made that “something else” something useful, could’ve learned a skill (my first cousin once removed was pretty good at carpentry, why not that?), or taken up guitar, or what have you. But I opted for grad school. Worse still, it suited me.

What Sucks about an Economics PhD

Let’s get the unpleasantries out of the way first. As much as the average person thinks that the life of an economist is just a montage of riches, adulation, sex with models, and deference from anyone who’s never memorized the proof of the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem, the reality is that grad school is a five or six year4 process with some real downsides.

The first year is a slog. You will spend most of your time memorizing theorems and solving problem sets. Sometimes you’ll spend hours on a derivation, not succeed, then the professor will say something like, “yeah I didn’t work it out, didn’t know if it was solvable but thought I’d have you guys try it.” You’ll work seven days a week most of the year. At the end of it, you’ll know a lot of math, which is cool. You’ll forget most of it immediately after passing your comprehensive exams. Still, it’s important during this period to take some time to unwind. Pick a leisure activity you like and make it a routine. For me it was soccer, but the important thing is to pick something you find relaxing, whether that’s a sport, books that aren’t textbooks, abusing horse tranquilizers, or walking aimlessly around a grass field in a video game to just see the pretty graphics (yes, I know a real person who blew off steam that way). Some of your classmates will object to that. They’ll feel guilty anytime they aren’t working. The only thing they’ll have to talk about is how much they work. Their hair will go grey, and they’ll lose friends. Decades later, those ones will be awarded tenure at a teaching college somewhere on the Great Plains for their sacrifice.

Aside from the whole “getting thrown in the deep end” first year, the other major drawback is the opportunity cost. In the course of preparing for and doing a PhD, you give up a lot of your youth. This is true in the sense that I was decidedly prettier when I started. But, more importantly, it’s true in the sense that you’ll likely forfeit time with loved ones, travel less than you otherwise would, have some nice weekends lost while you’re holed up debugging a DSGE model, etc.

Finally, by the end of a PhD, you’ll have had, from kindergarten, something like 23 years of schooling, more if you did an MA or took post-bac classes in preparation for grad school. It’s impossible to do this without becoming a little institutionalized. You’ll be an odd person and there’s no avoiding it. So, if being normal or high functioning individual is important to you, this is the wrong career choice.

The Nice Parts of an Economics PhD

It’s not an easy process, but neither is it that hard if your heart is in it. Maybe we cater to the popular assumption of a PhD being an ordeal by torture because we like the prestige associated with completing a difficult somewhat respectable task. Or maybe, the field just attracts a lot of depressive personalities so everything gets presented in a negative light.

Anyway, the reality is that, after the first year, a university is paying you to do research on whatever you’d like. It’s a pretty good deal. You have a lot of autonomy. Sure, you do have to teach, but this is a nice diversion that gets you out from behind a desk occasionally. Not to mention it’s good practice since a lot of us could stand to see our speaking skills improve. It’s also rewarding when some of the undergrads impress you; granted, others will behave like a junkie in withdrawal if you give them a B, but really this does you no harm.

You also get a pretty good work balance in many ways (again, after the first year). Much of what you do will be self-directed and you’ll set your own schedule. That noted, if you’re the type of person who can’t stand having a pile of tasks or can’t relax over a weekend knowing that you screwed up transforming some data series and it will need fixing, then you’re going to have a stroke. There will always be work you could be doing; you’re never done; you just have to live with that. One caveat here is that the overall experience can vary by university. If a department has a reputation for being cutthroat, you should weigh that heavily. Try not to be miserable for half a decade then deal with the emotional damage by hectoring seminar speakers the rest of your life.5

The career you get out of the degree can be very rewarding if you’d like it to be. You’ll get to study important social questions and you’ll be numerate so there’s a better chance you’ll have useful findings. At the very least, you’ll know how to tell whether a number is zero or not, which should give you a leg up on other social sciences and, frankly, things like medical researchers.

Oh, and it might be the only PhD with money in it. Now, you definitely shouldn’t do this for the money. There are much more direct ways to get rich. But, I guess I’ll just push back on the conventional wisdom that all researchers are like starving artists. If you count the years you’re in grad school and only making a stipend, PhDs in general probably earn less than they otherwise would have. I’m not so sure that’s true for economists though. Government work (yours truly) and academia entail a lot of non-monetary benefits (that you should still value). Or go the consulting or technology routes if you want to make all your friends roll their eyes when you complain about how much servants cost.

Finally, it gets short shrift, but writing is a big part of the job. I put this in the “nice parts” section because I like writing and it’s my essay so I can organize it as I like. A lot of people treat writing their papers as secondary to the analysis, as though it’s divorced from the research itself. You shouldn’t do that. You get to be a writer! It’s fun and it’s worth practicing to improve. This will make your work all the more accessible. Sure, none of us are Hemmingway, but we get to be survived by more than just our emails and text messages.

Other Notable Stuff

The world, dear reader, comes in shades of grey. There are some idiosyncrasies to this lifestyle I wouldn’t classify as good or bad, but they nonetheless exist.

They call me Doctor! Tibbs!

First and silliest, the whole doctor title thing. It’s nice occasionally, like being surprised when a stewardess refers to you as Dr. So-and-so. You think, “how could she tell?” for half a second before remembering that she has a passenger manifest and is good at her job. By hour five of the flight you’re thinking, “why does the airline make this person address me with some special title like I’m a fake knight? Please just use my first name.” It also invariably leads to mix-ups such as when said flight attendant tries to make conversation:

“Do you work in a hospital here in Singapore?”

“No, no, not that kind of doctor.”

“What kind?”

“The real kind”

“huh?”

“I’m a PhD, not a medical doctor.”

“Oh, so you’re a professor.”

“Well no…”

So your past self, who was thinking “oh why yes, I am a doctor. I want to feel special” when he entered “Dr.” on the form while buying the stupid ticket, has made present you look like an idiot. Really, we’d all be better off if everyone used Ms./Mr. in all non-professional settings, and that includes physicians, who really get holier-than-thou with the whole “I’m a real doctor” thing. Moreover, when it comes to PhDs (especially the social science sort), it is decidedly true that the more a person insists on being called “Dr.”, the more pointless his or her time in grad school was. “Excuse me, it’s Dr.” is roughly equivalent to “I spent five years skirting the line between paraphrasing and plagiarism while writing about something of no relevance, practical or otherwise.”

The Job Market

Like good capitalists, we’ve put together a centrally managed job market for early career economists. I found this useful because every economics job under the sun is posted in one place, the deadlines are similar across the board, and you have a much better chance of having your CV read than by randomly applying to things online, which is like shoveling résumés into a furnace. The downside to this whole system is that applying to jobs basically becomes your job (so better have that dissertation mostly done). It’s a lot of paperwork. And, it’s impossible to write a diversity statement without feeling like you’re a complete tool.

Social Science and Your Social Life

Don’t talk about your research at parties, ever! You think it’s cool. I might find it interesting. The Broadway actor you’re chatting up could give a damn and will be looking to get away from you faster than you can say, “marginal utility”. Good work in economics is interesting and important, but it is not sexy. Accept this.

That noted, when people find out you’re an economist, they’ll have a clutch of stupid questions at the ready as they try and trick you into talking about work. British people (and Australians, who are basically British Texans) especially love to ask you what you think about communism, which is a bit like asking a cardiologist if she’s ever tried voodoo in her practice. Anyway, don’t worry, I’ve prepared responses to some of the more common questions below. The goal is to shut down the line of inquiry and steer the conversation back to more interesting topics, such as everyone’s favorite Muppets.

“What do you think of the Fed’s interest rate change?”

• You think: “I don’t know, they probably just pulled it out of a modified Taylor Rule. It’s not rocket science.”

• You say: “You could argue it’s a sensible choice.”

“Where should I invest my money?”

• You think: “S&P index fund”. But, if you say that, the questioner will be really upset that you don’t have some secret portfolio that nets 20% yearly returns. He’ll start to think you’re hoarding all the good crypto tips6 for yourself. The conversation will never end.

• You say: “Under your mattress”

“What’s going on with the economy?” [Usually asked when everything is approximately normal]

• You think: “Could you ask anything more broad you nitwit? Why not, ‘What’s up with fish?’”

• You say: “Now now, I can’t go giving away our secrets.”

“Isn’t socialism a better system?”

• You think: “How has this type of person convinced themselves that I’m basically a laissez faire adding machine with feet? I guess you get the straight up honest answer…”

• You say: “Well actually, today’s modern economies are all mixed systems with both capitalist and socialist elements. There really isn’t a country that’s 100% capitalist or 100% socialist. You may be thinking of European-style democratic socialism, but even if that’s the point of reference, the US has a relatively progressive tax and transfer system and social safety net. In many ways a market-based system and government intervention are complimentary; the former offers efficiency gains (i.e., makes everyone richer) while the latter can provide a safety net and address market failures. Viewing these as conflicting concepts is more of an early 20th century thing.” [The questioner expected you to get really worked up about this one. Disappointed, his or her eyes will start to glaze over.]

“Isn’t communism a better system”

• You think: “Except for the several million dead people every time a place tried it.”

• You say: “Oh, you’re English?”

Anything Else?

I don’t think so. I’ve been writing this a while, so I trust it’s comprehensive.

Now, I may be willing to go to Buffalo for this sort of thing, but, on principle, I’m entirely unwilling to pay $900/night to stay there. This meant that, against my nature, I’d have to plan ahead. Enter Russell J. Salvatore. The sum total thought I put into the rooming arrangement was, “oh this delightful weirdo allows you to book 18 months ahead of time for a not exorbitant price. Sold!” As the event drew closer, I actually bothered to look the place up: bit of a 1980s guido vibe in the décor… okay. Some of the rooms have hot tubs in the (carpeted) floor next to the beds?!... hmm. Well whatever. All of the nerds assembling for the eclipse have bid up the price of a Day’s Inn to $1500; I’m locked in.

Soon enough, I found myself on final approach to Buffalo with the lady across from me explaining to her silly grandson that, “no, there were never any Buffalo here. I’m not sure why it’s named that.” [Point of fact: there were scads of bison there, hence the name; they killed every last one; the Lorax was furious] Merely 40 minutes later, from behind the wheel of a rented Honda, I beheld Salvatore’s Grand Hotel / Russell’s Steaks, Chops, and More.

Out front, the first thing you come upon is Salvatore’s Patriots and Heroes Park. It’s more of a plaster statue garden really but why split hairs? Evidently, there are two – and only two – ways to be a patriot and/or hero. Option 1: Be in some way connected to WWII. Option 2: Die in a NYC to Buffalo commuter plane wreck. Do either of these things and you too can be commemorated in front of a roadside hotel by an upstate airport.  Past the park is the hotel-cum-steakhouse, which is just the sort of large beige box that could be any suburban building, but with some pointless ornamentation thrown in.

Approaching the institution from the parking lot, the first thing one sees is a large television by the door playing Sal’s greatest hits (i.e., his local TV commercials). With the sound off, these are quite trippy: In one vignette, he enters an exam room dressed as a doctor, chats with a young man in a hospital gown, then turns him into a broiled chicken with a human head. The moral is that you should go to the steak restaurant.

Once inside, I let Rini check us in as I went to stare at the fish in the saltwater aquarium. There are several reasons for this: like a magpie, I’m drawn to shiny things; I couldn’t bear to look at the bright red carpeting and gold fixtures a second longer; it’s possible I have an undiagnosed (really would prefer it stay that way) autism spectrum disorder; the fish were the only pretty thing I’d seen since the view from takeoff at JFK; the check-in process was interminable because the staff were about as elderly as the factory workers in Mouse Hunt (incidentally, if you have a mental image of how quickly a 75 year old maid would push a hotel cleaning cart, I assure you it’s slower in reality).

On the way to the elevator, it seemed as though the hotel were a shrine. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Russell was dead and this was done to memorialize him. There are pictures of gazebos named after him, news clippings about how he bought TVs for a hospital, and plaques of all sizes. Amongst this are bits of Russell J. Salvatore thought (much like Xi Jinping Thought) scattered about, frequently, “they’d be in jail for the discipline they gave us” in reference to his parents.2 Still, he is — or at least was at the time — very much alive. We’d find him at breakfast walking around, dressed like an extra in a Scorsese film, yelling at his staff.

In the elevator, guests are treated to his life story, from which I have selected a few choice quotes. First, he casually mentions that his family doesn’t speak to him (though that’s probably their fault) and kind of implies that he sold his first business to his son then opened a competing one down the road (yes, there are actually multiple Salvatore’s).

Success has cost him. It’s led to feuds with his family and loneliness. He separated from his wife and barely speaks to his three children, eight grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren. In 2007 after he sold his business to his son, he was miserable…

Next, we’re informed that things used to be cheaper.

…A square pizza with anchovies cost 50 cents.

Finally…

Even now that he’s got millions and is 86, [this blurb was a few years old] Russell works full-time. He takes an afternoon nap. He’s always impeccably dressed; he owns 200 hand-tailored shirts with his name embroidered on the cuffs…

Our room was fine, clean, and in keeping with the 1980s in Staten Island theme. But I’m sorry to report that it was not one of the rooms with a hot tub in the floor. So, tripping and nearly drowning while getting out of bed in the middle of the night is something I’ve yet to experience. In place of the Gideons’ bible, one finds Well Done. The final course served to a Great Life lived. The Life and Times of Russell J. Salvatore. Of course the title is a steak pun. I read an uncomfortable amount of that book. “When [Russell] was in school, all the girls wore jewelry. These days the boys do.”

Out the window, an equally beige and boxy chain hotel beckoned. The next day, clouds blocked the view of the eclipse.

Objectives & Justification

1. Summary

   In this study we intend to secretly sabotage two one-person sailing vessels forcing them to wreck on opposite ends of an island. The first individual will wash ashore and find he has access to a huge supply of coconuts but no mussels. The second will find herself in an area rich in mussels but poor in coconuts. Throughout the rest of this document, we will refer to our subjects as "Bob" and "Amy" as placeholder names (actual subjects are currently being selected from a random pool of likely cryptocurrency “investors”). We plan to track the development of what we expect will be a a mussel and coconut based economy.

2. Study Hypothesis

   Trade will ensue… most likely... hopefully... otherwise Amy will get scurvy.

3. Study Purpose

   Is “amusement” an appropriate answer here?

4. Primary Scientific Justification

   Oh, now economics is a “science”?

5. How Will Research Findings Be Used?

   The betterment of econ 101 textbook practice questions everywhere

Details

Describe the Experiment Step by Step

• Set up “Truman Show” style camera apparatus on small island.

• Attack two (2) sailboats with ball-pein hammers by cover of night. Attach remote control apparatus to rudders.

• Pilfer physics department grant money to pay camera operators. Save money by not recovering subjects from island once experiment is over (this will also save on litigation costs).

Risk/Benefits/Consent

1. Describe Consent Procedures

   N/A

2. Risks

   Death / never seeing families again /  degenerating into madness once they find the conch shell we intend to plant

3. Benefits

   Health and dental coverage will be provided, should participants ever again encounter a doctor or dentist.

Beginning my Substack with a review of an opera should be an appropriate way of indicating the level of pretentiousness you should expect from me overall.

If, like me, your idea of a nice evening out is to sit through a few hours of warbling, ham-fisted acting, and melodrama, a performance of Carmen is hard to ruin. The music is great, the setting is fun (bull fighting!), and it’s a tragedy where the characters all sort of have it coming.

Perhaps seeing this as a challenge, Carrie Cracknell’s production at the Met manages to make this opera cringe-inducing, terrible, and, worse yet, boring. The central characters in Carmen are a gypsy, a gendarme, and a matador. The US has neither a significant Roma population, nor an internal military, nor bullfights. But, that doesn’t seem to stop Cracknell from staging the thing in Texas (or, presumably Texas anyway since it’s desolate and some of the characters are wearing Texas state flag outfits). In what I assume is an effort to make some statement (though I’m unsure what) about immigration, policing, and the military, Bizet’s cigarette factory has become what looks like a bullet factory, or warehouse, or Pepsi bottling plant surrounded by razor wire. The gendarmes are now… I dunno, guys with guns forcing migrants to work in said bullet factory.  Never mind that jobs in a modern munitions plant would qualify as highly skilled labor and, for all the flaws in the US immigration system, that’s not what happens to migrants.

Skipping ahead a bit, Carmen is seducing Don José at a gas station (because that’s where Texans hang out, right?). Eventually, she climbs on top of a 1960s era gas pump and starts gyrating. At this point, did no one think to ask the director whether she’d ever seen actual humans flirt before? Or if she’d even been to Texas before setting her production there?

Mercifully, this scene eventually ends and we move to a legitimately cool staging in a semi-truck on the road. Just ignore the fact that this has no relation to the source material. The momentary “oh that’s kinda cool” feeling is quickly lost when Escamillo enters using a 2000s era Jaguar XK convertible as a chariot. Not to be a wet blanket but it’s inadvisable to ride in a convertible like Washington Crossing the Delaware on a highway. In his current iteration, Escamillo is a rodeo star/clown, which makes perfect sense since the lyrics are all about fighting a bull to death.

At some point, Micaëla (the opera’s requisite pointless character, even in a good production) comes to reason with Don José. The semi-truck is overturned and on fire. Was that on purpose or did they wreck? Alas, we’ll never know. The fact that they’re unloading it now suggests a wreck. The fact that it had been stuffed to the rafters with something like 347 gypsies but there are no injuries suggests that they just forgot to take their things out before setting the engine on fire for warmth.

By the time the final act came around, I realized I was thinking, “thank God, it’s almost over.” First though, we’re treated to a scene of, I’m guessing, what an English person imagines a rodeo and its fans look like (admittedly, maybe sort of accurate… but careful throwing stones since I’ve seen how chavs behave on their holidays in Amsterdam). As I’m regretting how much I spent on the tickets, in a final grasp as being edgy, the standard murder by gun is replaced with a brutal bludgeoning.

Why do all of this to your audience? There’s nothing wrong with art exploring contemporary America’s contradictions/hypocrisies/etc.In fact, it’s a crowded field. But, that’s not what Carmen is; the Spanish setting is pretty integral to the story so it doesn’t just port over to the US (a much better update was Richard Eyre’s staging in fascist era Spain, which did manage to be eerie, profound, and, importantly, still a good opera). It’s a bit like saying, “I want to do a modern version of Jane Eyre that really explores a middle-aged man’s psyche.” In case I’m not selling the sarcasm, please don’t take that as a suggestion.