Amandaburnham

The bands of lake effect snow that have buried Western New York are not done—another couple of feet will fall tomorrow, meaning parts of the region will be covered in up to eight feet of snow. There's a football game scheduled for Orchard Park on Sunday, and the Bills are going to do everything in their power to make it happen.

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This guy Snyder is so brazen, it's remarkable. In response to the growing sentiment that his franchise's name is an embarrassing and hateful relic, Dan Snyder is starting a foundation "to provide meaningful and measurable resources that provide genuine opportunities for Tribal communities." He's calling it the Original Americans Foundation. Dan Snyder's foundation to distract you from the racist slur on his letterhead is OAF.

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14 years ago, author and science historian George Dyson got a chance to meet with Bill Nye. Dyson's then-9-year-old daughter, Lauren Dyson, had some sound sartorial advice to offer her dad. (And a drawing of a horse, for good measure.)

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So you are Chris Christie. Your once-bright career is falling apart before your eyes, all because you closed a bridge in a fit of unexplainable pique, thanks to the fact that you are an inveterate bully. Oh, and you also may have blocked Hurricane Sandy aid to one of your own cities, but c’mon! That’s totally understandable because you wanted a little real estate quid pro quo and this fucking lady mayor would just not play ball. Can’t really be faulted for that, now can you? And now the woman has gone whinging to the U.S. Attorney’s office? Keeee-rist. Don’t people know how shit gets done in Christie-land, where you are a petty little king?

Anyway, your beautiful life is crashing and burning. You need a lifeline. Someone to lift you up, pull you out of the muck when everyone else is abandoning you. Who do you get instead? Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney defended Chris Christie this weekend, saying his 2016 ambitions wouldn’t be hurt by the scandals.

Romney told the New Jersey governor “he must be frightening a lot of people because they’re giving it a lot of attention,” the former Republican nominee for president in 2012 told The Washington Post over the weekend.

Yes, Mittens. The only reason the media ever writes about anything is based in sheer terror. Pantywaist journalists don’t actually love breaking news or juicy scandals. They just need to write about things they are scared of because — well, we haven’t really worked that part of this theory out.

So you’ve got the guy that passed you over for 2012, thanks to some bullshit thing about a defamation lawsuit in your past, and then went and lost his presidential race with a whimper, not a bang, getting up in front of God and everyone explaining how he supports you? Who asked for this shit?

Worse still, while you’ve got the most boring man in politics, the man who is a semi-human charisma vortex, “helping” you, one of Mittens’s one-time minions is going around talking smack about you.

“The guy, as a person, is horrific,” Brian Ballard, a top lobbyist and Romney’s former finance chair for his president bid, told the Miami Herald this weekend ahead of Christie’s fundraising event in Florida.

“Charlie Crist got a lot of grief for what was called a hug of Obama. But what Christie did to Obama isn’t suitable to say in a family newspaper,” Ballard told the Herald. “I firmly believe he helped swing that election in Obama’s favor just to help himself. I busted my ass for two years raising money and supporting Romney and this guy Christie just wiped his hands of us when we were no longer useful to him.”

This is probably true, because you, Chris Christie, would probably throw momma from the train if it meant the furtherance of your outsized ambitions, but also, too, it was sensible not to keep supporting Mittens during the world’s most tiresome death spiral that was the end of his campaign. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and right now, a man’s gotta figure out a way to shut Mitt up so that he doesn’t do any more damage to your floundering career. Is there a bridge that could be shut to prevent Mitt from going anywhere? Maybe just build a moat. Rich people dig moats, right? Perfect. Now let’s find a crooked contractor that will do this on the cheap and get this done ASAP.

[MSNBC]

This is Brian Williams. He is the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News and noted fan of NASCAR. The Pew Research Center recently found that only 27 percent of Americans know who he is. Compare our familiarity with Williams, anchor of the highest-rated nightly news program today, to our ability to identify Dan Rather in his heyday:

What's more, many people had the audacity to guess that Brian Williams was someone other than Brian Williams. Three percent said he was Tom Brokaw, and two percent said he was Joe Biden.

In a 1985 survey, Dan Rather was much better recognized. Pew research analyst Rob Suls says this is because of the overall decline in nightly news viewership:

Is that good or bad? Can anyone really know Brian Williams?

It’s sometimes hard to stay positive about development in New York when Frank Lloyd Wright buildings can disappear in the blink of an eye and everything seems to be turning into condos. However, it’s not all bad news, and 2013 had plenty of optimistic progress in architecture and urban design.

Expansion of the Queens Museum

After breaking ground in April of 2011 on a $68 million expansion project designed by Grimshaw Architects, the Queens Museum opened its newly redesigned self this November with about twice as much space. Now the museum in Flushing Meadows has 105,000 square feet and a bold new entrance on Grand Central Parkway that leaves its former diminutive side entrance in its shadow. It all has the potential to make the museum an even greater art presence for the surrounding community, and command more attention from the rest of the city.

Green Roofs on the Rise

This concrete city can use every scrap of grass it can get, so it’s encouraging to see so many new developments draped in green. The Bushwick Inlet Park opened its second phase in Williamsburg with a new structure designed by Kiss + Cathcart housing community spaces and park offices, all below a sloping green roof dashed with walkways. It joins the similarly minded new Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center that opened in May 2012 with a rolling green roof over its glassy building.

New Ways to Ride: Citi Bikes and Green Taxis

Two initiatives made it easier to get around the city. Citi Bikes debuted in May with 330 stations, and as New York Magazine cited in their annual “Reasons to Love New York,” 95,197 have reportedly signed up for the bike sharing service. The “Boro Taxis” also arrived with 1,000 released to the streets as of November and another 6,000 licenses planned to be made available next June. The apple green taxis aren’t supposed to pick up fares in Manhattan anywhere below 110th on the west side and then 96th on the east, and are intended to increase outer borough taxi service, great news for anyone who has been caught in a deluge while visiting an outer borough art opening or stayed out too late at some weird art rave in Bushwick.

The Waterfronts Are Getting Greener

The first phase of Brooklyn Bridge Park opened in 2010, but the 85 acre park that winds over 1.3 miles of the Brooklyn shoreline is still expanding. This March the Squibb Park and Bridge increased access to the former industrial area and construction started this fall on the old Tobacco Warehouse which has been a brick skeleton (and Smorgasburg home this summer) and will be transformed into a new home for St. Ann’s Warehouse. More adaptive reuse plans are underway for the Empire Stores nearby. Meanwhile, up in Hunter’s Point in Queens, a formerly abandoned industrial area opened this August as  Hunter’s Point South. The park reclaims the former wetlands in a 10 acre park with an alluring oval design and stunning skyline views to gaze at while wandering.

The Return of Olmsted & Vaux in Prospect Park

While new parks were opening, others were returning to their roots. Prospect Park is finally unveiling its Lakeside project. The $74 million, 26-acre project includes the restoration of an Olmsted and Vaux-designed vista that was wrecked by Wollman Rink, and adding a new ice skating rink opening this December 20 designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, keeping both the recreation and bringing back some of the stately 19th century beauty of the Brooklyn park.

Beaches Recover in Style

Following Hurricane Sandy, 2013 was a year of major rebuilding for the NYC waterfront. The beaches were particularly beat up, but have gracefully returned with new storm resistant modular beach pavilions designed by Garrison Architects, and a new optimistic graphic identity designed by Paula Scher. The VW Dome 2 also took up residency as part of the MoMA PS1 EXPO 1: New York, with the geodesic dome at the Rockaways serving as a community center for a community that was reassembling after the storm.

A 19th-Century Building Is Saved by Transportation

The 1889 Corbin Building at Broadway and John Street in Lower Manhattan once seemed doomed, but in a rare case of development protecting history it’s been restored instead. This is thanks to the Fulton Street Transit Center, the MTA’s ambitious $1.3 billion new center that stretches below, and the once derelict 19th century building will now be an entrance to the center when it opens next year.

Folk Art Museum Saved, for Now

After major outcry from architects and the public, MoMA’s plan to tear down the Folk Art Museum designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien were halted. Now Diller Scofidio + Renfro are taking over, although its fate still remains in limbo, but at least the barely-used fortress-like museum is getting another chance.

TWA Flight Center Finally Gets a Purpose

After many attempts of trying to bring it back to life, the 1962 Eero Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Center is getting a new life with  Balazs Properties turning it into a Standard hotel. Sure, it’s not ideal — the dream would be to leave the mid-century beauty as it is, but at least this keeps it from the fate of its neighbor the Pan Am Worldport that was demolished this year.

David Zwirner Adds an Elegant Chelsea Space

The new David Zwirner space on 20th Street (via David Zwirner)

David Zwirner opened a new five-story exhibition space at 537 West 20th Street in Chelsea this February, giving a refined take on new white-walls space with 30,000 square feet. And if no commercial gallery space will do it for you no matter how fine the facade, it’s also the first of them to get LEED certification.

Two of the Best Buildings Became Centenarians

And finally, while all this development gives encouragement for the always-transforming city, it’s great to see two of its icons age with dignity. Both the “Cathedral of Commerce” Woolworth Building that opened on April 24, 1913 and Grand Central Terminal celebrated their 100th years.

Some of the world's most polluted cities happen to be the most bike-infested – look around China, for instance. But one team of inventors has come up with a way to pit the cyclists against the smog: with a high-tech bicycle that removes bad stuff from the atmosphere as you ride it.

The Air-Purifier Bike is a yet-road-tested electric vehicle from Lightfog, a design-consulting firm based in Bangkok. Lightfog's company background doesn't drift much into cycle design: among other strange products the firm has created a bear trap-shaped dog bowl and the toothsome-sounding Soy Jelly. But the pollution-fighting bike has attracted enough positive attention to win a "concept" award at Singapore's 2014 Red Dot design contest, which provides this description of how the green machine is supposed to work:

Air-Purifier Bike incorporates an air filter that screens dust and pollutants from the air, a photosynthesis system (including a water tank) that produces oxygen, an electric motor, and a battery. While it is being ridden, air passes through the filter at the front of the bike, where it is cleaned before being released toward cyclist. The bike frame houses the photosynthesis system. When the bike is parked, the air purifying functions can continue under battery power.

The prototype comes off looking a bit like a sweet riding vacuum that never got built at Dyson. Among its pluses: a stream of fresh air blowing in your face when you're gunning down the haziest of roads, a slight scrubbing of the general atmosphere if you get a couple thousand or hundreds of thousands of people using them. And the urgency behind the cycle design is certainly on target, what with research arriving every week about how air pollution is killing us all.

Flaws are clear and present, too, the biggest being this two-wheeled air-cleanser doesn't exist. If it did, one might wonder how much it would cost laden with all its environmental systems. Would you have to buy pricey replacement filters, like with a car or a Brita? And presuming that the photosynthesis-generating frame is full of water, maybe like those algae-filled street lights, the added weight burden would be significant (although definitely worth it if a thief tried to cut through the frame, and was blasted in the face with greenish muck).

Still, for a "concept" the Air-Purifier Bike makes a winning journey around the track. Here are some more views of it:

Images from Red Dot. H/t to ETA

Monday night, Australian police had to rescue a tourist after she accidentally walked off a pier because she was too busy checking Facebook on her phone.

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After reading this, and a seven-year-old Bengals fan's letter to the injured Kevin Huber, I'm starting to think nobody appreciates sports quite like a small child.

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That's it. After four hilarious, exciting, sloppy, just downright fun snowbound games, I don't want to hear a single person complaining about the possibility of bad weather at the Super Bowl. Football isn't just designed to be a cold-weather sport; it's so much better that way.

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People often question why some pronounce the word "ask" as "ax." We axed several linguists, and it turns out that "ax" has long been an accepted form of the word, used by English speakers for more than a thousand years.

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Shannon Gibney is a professor of English and African diaspora studies at Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC). When that’s your job, there are a lot of opportunities to talk about racism, imperialism, capitalism, and history. There are also a lot of opportunities to anger students who would rather not learn about racism, imperialism, capitalism, and history. I presume MCTC knows that; they have an African diaspora studies program. Back in January 2009, white students made charges of discrimination after Gibney suggested to them that fashioning a noose in the newsroom of the campus newspaper—as an editor had done the previous fall—might alienate students of color. More recently, when Gibney led a discussion on structural racism in her mass communication class, three white students filed a discrimination complaint because it made them feel uncomfortable. This time, MCTC reprimanded Gibney under their anti-discrimination policy.

Declaring a war on warrior culture in the wake of the Miami Dolphins bullying scandal.

More light has been shed on the nature of Miami Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito's harassment of his teammate, Jonathan Martin, and it's just as ugly as you expected.

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Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Morrissey’s Autobiography, which Penguin published in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe last Thursday, is that it exists at all. It has been rumored roughly forever. As recently as September, the Atlantic put together a convincing case that its imminent publication was a hoax. In fact, the British pop icon’s memoir was merely delayed, reportedly over his insistence on a Penguin Classics designation—a black-border badge of literary immortality assigned, in this exceptional case, before the book’s actual birth, which is rather a royalist attitude for someone who once made a great record called The Queen Is Dead. What links other Penguin Classics authors is death and veneration; Morrissey has always longed for both, first as lead singer of the Smiths—the greatest band to emerge from the extraordinary British postpunk renaissance of the 1980s—and then in his resilient solo career. If the reports are true that he held Penguin to ransom over the Classics imprimatur and won, then Autobiography is an act of hubris at once appalling, hilarious, and diabolically brilliant, much like the writer himself.

What are the United States' best regional foodstuffs? Its worst? These are the questions that bedevil the mind of man—but no longer! For here, we have ranked them. Rigorously scientific (not), ardently researched (nope), and scrupulously fair (not even a little bit): this is the Great American Menu!

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High-cost cities tend to have higher median incomes, which leads to the simple heuristic that, sure, it's costlier to live in San Francisco than in Akron, but the people who pay bills there make enough money that they can afford it.

In reality, yes, the median household income in metropolitan San Francisco is higher than it is in Akron (by about $30,000). But that smaller income will buy you much, much more in Ohio. To be more specific, if you make the median income in Akron – a good proxy for a spot in the local middle class – 86 percent of the homes on the market there this month are likely within your budget.

If you're middle-class in San Francisco, on the other hand, that figure is just 14 percent. Your money will buy you no more than 1,000 square feet on average. That property likely isn't located where you'd like to live. And the options available to you on the market are even fewer than they were just a year ago, according to data crunched by Trulia. To frame this another way, the median income in metro San Francisco is about 60 percent higher than it is in Akron. But the median for-sale housing price per square foot today is about 700 percent higher.

The gulf between those two numbers means that the most expensive U.S. cities aren't just unaffordable for the average American middle-class family; they're unaffordable to the relatively well-off middle class by local standards, too.

To use an even more extreme example, the median income in metropolitan New York is about $56,000 (including families in the surrounding suburbs). If someone making that much money wanted to buy a home on the market this October in Manhattan, the most expensive home they could afford would cost about $274,000. A mere 2.5 percent of for-sale housing that's available in Manhattan now costs that little. Oh – and those properties are averaging 500 square feet.

Trulia ran these numbers based on the assumption that a family shouldn't spend more than 31 percent of its pre-tax income on housing (and that it must pay local property taxes and insurance). This data also assumes that a family makes a 20 percent down payment on a home – a daunting feat even on a six-figure income in somewhere like Los Angeles or New York.

By those calculations, these 10 metros are the least affordable, using Census data on median incomes (note that the data refers to metros, not cities):

Data courtesy of Trulia

In San Francisco, a household making $78,840 a year can top out buying a home worth about $409,000. 24 percent of the homes for sale in the area were below that threshold last October. Now it's just 14 percent. In fact, in every one of those 10 metros, a smaller share of homes are considered affordable now to the middle class than last year.

The same trend is true even in those metros where the vast majority of housing is accessible on a local median income:

Data courtesy of Trulia

Affordability is effectively declining as home prices are rising (and at a much faster rate than median incomes). Within the most expensive metros, the most affordable housing is also located in the areas that require some of the longest commutes. In metro New York, for instance, the Bronx and Nassau County are home to the bulk of the most affordable housing in the region.

Or, there's always a move to Akron. Here is the full data from the 100 metros that Trulia examined:

 

Color Wheel is a series in which we identify a trending color in art for the week and post a daily image that illustrates its popularity. In honor of PandaCam, we’re continuing our black and white series. Readers are invited to send us images of profiled colors and we’ll post the best ones we receive.

By the strictest rules of Color Wheel, which continues to focus on black and white this week, Joshua Abelow’s painting “Blog Blog” at James Fuentes shouldn’t make the cut. It’s more black and grey than it is black and white, and we know we’re dealing with black and white. But fuck it. This is a self-portrait stickman with an erection who walks through the words “blog blog”. We like dicks, we like blogging, and we appreciate Abelow’s desire to rule the blogosphere. And based on Abelow’s cult-like following, we’d guess that’s a project that’s going pretty well.

As Conan O’Brien celebrates 20 years in the talk show business, he’s been having some friends and old pals on Conan to talk about the early days of Late Night. Yesterday, O’Brien welcomed original Late Night writer Louis CK, who dished on the insecurity he felt while writing, and talked about a joke he convinced O’Brien to tell that absolutely bombed. While it might seem pretty funny now, 1993 was a long, long time ago—as evidenced by the photo of the original writers that O’Brien showed during the interview.

The whole thing’s below, and it’s well worth watching. CK is, as always, hilarious, and it’s nice to see two old pals just hang out and shoot the shit.

 

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Cersei and Tyrion Lannister graced the lands of House Henson this week, making separate appearances on Sesame Street. Alas, they weren't in character — by which I mean they weren't completely drunk — and they didn't teach kids to count by paying their debts, either.

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In diametrical opposition to the pizza-for-titties initiative at Drew's Pizzeria, one small-town pizza joint in New Hampshire is offering its young customers the chance to earn free slices with school work and good grades.

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More details about a new collection of the Beatles' BBC sessions have emerged with the The New York Times reporting that On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2 will be released on November 11th and will include 63 tracks on two discs Due out on Capitol Records the collection will fill...

A federal judge ruled this week that the allegedly corrupt, cousin-dating, cocaine-smuggling, big-spending playboy son of the ruler of Equatorial Guinea may not have his Michael Jackson "Bad Tour" glove back from the US government just yet.

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It's not enough that Detroit's suffering an economic collapse. Now, one neighborhood has to deal with a "supersize cat."

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Amanda,

Not only did you finally finish IJ, but today is totally your birthday! Happy birthday, yo!  What does this say about us, living the Keswickian lifestyle with our two copies of IJ?  What are we becoming?  And even though we don’t agree on the qualities of IJ, at least we both agree to never read Pale King.

God save the Mayor!

love,

Adam

P.S. Was it Laura or Shannon who borrowed “Consider The Lobster?”

It couldn’t be true, could it? Nicole Flatow summarizes Holder’s announcement:

Holder will order all federal prosecutors to avert drug charges that carry mandatory minimum sentences for low-level offenders, by omitting the quantity of drugs when charges are filed, according to excerpts of the speech obtained by the New York Times. The measure, which would avert harsh sentences that start at five or ten years in prison regardless of an individual’s role in a drug offense and cannot be reduced by judges, is one of several Holder may announce today at an address to the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

Ambers sees this as only a first step:

Of a million things President Obama could use his second term in office to fix, he has maybe 10 slots — 10 real chances to advance the debate about a topic, even to advance policy, even while Washington is at its sclerotic worst. Drug law reform has always been on the president’s to-do list. This I know from a series of conversations with some of his senior policy advisers during the first term.

Matt Welch thinks that “this has the makings of a key moment in beginning to undo the disastrous war on drugs”:

An important test going forward will be public opinion in the next couple of days, particularly from quarters that have historically been “tough on crime.” My prediction, and fervent hope, is that there won’t be much opposition at all. Then the real work of drug-war reform—including, hopefully, an announcement from Holder that the administration will no longer be raiding state-legal marijuana operations—can begin.

Dana Liebelson expects the reforms to save taxpayers money:

Based on how Republicans have reacted to sentencing reform efforts in the past; it shouldn’t take long for conservative lawmakers to start spreading the word that the sky is falling. But as we reported last week, sentence reductions have already been retroactively applied to crack cocaine offenders—and  the US Sentencing Commission has found the program to be a success. At least 7,300 prisoners sentenced under mandatory minimums have had their sentences reduced by an average of 29 months, saving taxpayers an estimated $530 million. Given that the Associated Press found that US federal prisons are 40 percent over capacity, advocates say reform can’t come soon enough.

But Joyner is uncomfortable with the way these reforms are being implemented:

Holder and I are in fundamental agreement on what our policy should be. If anything, I’d like to go further, decriminalizing whole categories of behavior and shifting into a treatment and education rather than criminal justice approach. But it should be accomplished by the president taking his case to the public and getting the law changed, not an imperial executive deciding it doesn’t have to enforce the law.

“Imperial” is not an adjective I’d attach to an administration refusing to keep nonviolent drug-offenders in jail for ever. But, yes, this would be better done legislatively. But if that means it will not get done at all because of the opposition’s unprecedented obstruction of a re-elected president, a president will consult his legal, executive branch options. Prosecutorial discretion is an exercize of legitimate power, not a new power-grab.

It's July 1, the effective halfway point of the season, so it's time to take notice of what could be the American League's closest and most historic race. Miguel Cabrera has his batting eye on the first ever back-to-back Triple Crowns in baseball history. In his way is Chris Davis, himself right on the pace of a mark formerly held by one Roger Maris.

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