Neil deMause: The Website

From today’s “public schedule” for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

*7:45 AM Has Coffee with Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)

* FYI Only. The Mayor will not address the press.

Someone at the mayor’s press office presumably edited out the rest of it:

** We just thought it was cool.

*** But don’t feel like you have to tell anyone. Unless, you know, you want to.

The wheels of academic presses grind slow but fine, but I’m very pleased to announce that the newly revised and expanded edition of Field of Schemes is scheduled for release by University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books on April 1. (Pre-ordering will begin a few weeks before that, from the publisher’s website. This edition is the culmination of more than a decade of research, with four all-new chapters covering the latest stadium shenanigans in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, plus annotations updating the book’s original chapters to the present day.

In other words, please buy early, and buy often. If nothing else, the added heft will make the book a fine projectile for hurling at your favorite local stadium apologist.

Here’s another story that popped up on Google News, and which caught my eye because I couldn’t make head or tail of the lede:

The ex-wife of a Bolingbrook police sergeant found drowned in her bathtub three years ago was murdered, according to a noted forensic pathologist who autopsied her remains Friday at the request of her family.

Initial attempts at interpretation:

• The police sergeant was a lesbian who drowned three years ago, and now her ex-wife has turned up murdered.
• The police sergeant drowned in his ex-wife’s bathtub three years ago, and now the ex-wife has been murdered.
• The Chicago Tribune copy desk needs a refresher in misplaced antecedents.

Transcribing quotes seems to especially vexing for some journalists. Here’s today’s Boston Globe quoting Mitt Romney:

“The monster is this McCain-Feingold bill and it has to be repealed and it just points how in infective it has been in removing the influence of money and underhanded politics,” Romney said.

Admittedly, it’s hard to understand what Romney means at the best of times, but even without the benefit of having heard the interview in question, I can pretty well guess what he actually said.

(Thanks to Chris Tate for the pointer to this story.)

For the latest Village Voice Education Supplement, I explore the growing phenomenon of parents in some NYC neighborhoods carting their kids en masse to other boroughs for grade school:

Each weekday morning, the commute begins: Carfuls and trainloads of Brooklynites make their way across the river to Manhattan, fighting traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge and jam-packed L trains. The trip can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour; on arriving, they strip off their coats, say goodbye to their mommies and daddies, and settle in for another day of elementary school.

While the Williamsburg shuffle has gotten increased attention of late, thanks to a Crain’s article and an epic discussion thread that followed on the Brownstoner blog, parents sending kids as young as kindergarten age to schools elsewhere in the city is a time-honored tradition in the world of New York parenting. The city doesn’t officially keep track of how many kids attend public schools outside their assigned districts—with or without legal permission—but every parent, it seems, knows someone who’s done it… [read more]

Stagehands at most Broadway theaters are on strike, and here’s how Newsday reported the story today:

The stagehands’ union took its cause to the public yesterday, the second day of a strike that has shut 27 Broadway theaters and cost the city economy an estimated $17 million a day in the busy pre-holiday season.

Wondering where that $17 million figure comes from? According to Newsday’s sister paper, the L.A. Times, it’s an estimate by the League of American Theatres and Producers - in other words, the people the stagehands are striking against. Complaining about the economic impacts of labor uppityness is a time-honored tradition - the city did the same thing during the recent transit strike - but as in that case, it misses two main points.

First off, the $17 million figure is actually the cost to “Broadway” - in other words, the amount of lost ticket sales per day (and, perhaps, the lost spending by theater workers no longer drawing paychecks). The city only collects a small fraction of that in the form of income, payroll, and sales taxes, so the actual effect on city taxpayers is far smaller.

The bigger problem, though, is that it overlooks what economists call the “substitution effect”: People who don’t spend money one place will often spend it somewhere else. And Newsday should have known this, given that on the very same page as the dire warnings about economic ruin, it ran an article by reporter Daniel Massey headlined “Visitors find other things to do” (not online, apparently, or if it is I can’t find it in the mess that is the Newsday website):

A select few got into eight shows that continued to run because they are housed in theaters covered by separate contracts. Most improvised plans - eating, drinking, shopping and visiting the city’s non-theater attractions.

“It’s New York. What’s the problem?” said Lilach Yanai, 37, a computer programmer from Tel Aviv, who had planned to get tickets to a show, but instead said she would tour the New York Public Library and check out Van Gogh’s letters at the Morgan Library & Museum.

The only way the theater strike would have a significant effect on New York’s economy would be if it lasted long enough that tourists started cancelling their vacations here out of fear that they wouldn’t get to see “The Lion King.” Otherwise, what’s bad for Broadway will likely be good for 5th Avenue.

UPDATE (11/15): The city comptroller’s office has downgraded the estimated cost to the city economy to $2 million a day, based solely on the 18% of theatergoers who are making day trips into the city to see shows. (Actual impact on city tax revenues would be an even slimmer fraction of that.) The theater operators now say the $17 million figure is a “worst-case scenario.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s long-awaited rezoning plan for Coney Island was finally released yesterday. But while most news outlets were distracted by the pretty pictures, they largely missed the bigger story - the city’s plan to use a never-before-tried zoning ploy to stick a fork in developer Joe Sitt’s condo dreams:

The reverberations from Mayor Bloomberg’s bombshell announcement that he intended to remap Coney Island’s amusement district as parkland were still echoing Thursday night when neighborhood denizens piled into Our Lady of Solace Church on Mermaid Avenue to hear Coney Island Development Corporation president Lynn Kelly give her board—and the public—the lowdown on the city’s plans.

The upshot, two hours of Powerpoint later: Bloomberg is moving ahead with plans to revamp the amusement district, but Joe Sitt’s condos-by-the-boardwalk plan is off the table—and the city plans on salting the earth to make sure things stay that way… [read more]

In an article in today’s Newsday on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease:

ALS destroys motor neurons and gradually leads to loss of speech and paralyzation.

Coining new words when there are perfectly good old ones is a time-honored tradition - it’s what got us normalcy, after all - but sometimes it’s just plain wrong.

Interestingly, the above is how the phrase appeared in the print edition of Newsday (and its Google cache), but the website has been updated to read:

ALS destroys motor neurons and gradually leads to loss of speech and leaves people paralyzed.

Which is correct and all, but leads one to wonder if Newsday’s post-layoff copy editors have just never heard of the word “paralysis.” Or maybe they’re being paid by the word.