Neil deMause

Wow, it’s been ages since I last posted here. Most of that remains (as I hinted before) due to the vagaries of the dead-tree publication production cycle: Right now I have at least four articles in the can that should be popping up into public view over the next month. Add in that my Baseball Prospectus column is on hiatus thanks to a lack of funding, and it’s made for a bit of a dry spell around these parts.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to tide yourself over with my short review of Nationals Park in Washington (at Field of Schemes), only three years after it opened. Okay, dead trees aren’t the only thing causing lag around here…

For those of you who’ve been reading my biweekly (and before that weekly) columns in Metro New York for the last two years: I just got word that the Voices op-ed section will be discontinued at the end of this month, and with it my regular column.

I still hope to reappear in Metro down the road — the plan is that it will still run op-eds somewhere, though the format hasn’t been worked out yet. In any case, since this past Monday’s column turns out to have been my last under the old regime, thanks to everyone who’s been reading me, and watch this space or my Twitter feed for future developments.

For those of you in the Twitterverse, I’ve started posting links to all my new articles to Twitter as they appear. You can follow me @neildemause.

For those of you who wouldn’t touch Twitter with a ten-foot pole, there’s still the tried-and-true RSS feed.

Yes, it’s happened: As threatened previously, I’ve changed this page to a blog-style format. This enables me to do a few things:

• Post continuous updates here, rather than the every-month(-or-so) schedule I was on before.
• Add an RSS feed for links to my articles, for those of you who care to be notified when I’ve written something new. (And if you want an RSS feed for all entries on this page, I have that too.)
• Post about side topics that I think might be of interest, like when the heck is the new B-52s record coming out?

This is still a work in progress, so expect more tweaks to the design and features here as I perfect my WordPress wrangling skills. And drop me a line if you have comments or requests for things you’d like to have added.

Most of last month for me was spent on one story, but oh, what a story. As I detailed at length in the April 11 Village Voice, most of Coney Island’s historical amusement district is at risk of being shut down and left vacant for years, as the result of a game of chicken between New York City and a developer who wants his land rezoned to allow condos on the boardwalk. Astroland is already slated to close after 45 years this fall, and if developer Joe Sitt goes through with his threats to wait for a friendlier mayoral administration, as I wrote, “Coney Island’s already diminished amusement district could spend years as a torn-up wasteland, leaving only the Cyclone, Dino’s Wonder Wheel Park, Sideshows by the Seashore, and Nathan’s standing amid a vast empty plain.”

In the weeks after my article ran (and a Save Coney Island protest that preceded it), Sitt began sounding conciliatory notes, allowing some store owners he had evicted to move back in – and, as I reported for the Voice’s Runnin’ Scared blog, even showing up at the reopening party of one of them and chowing down on sausages and beer. A local arcade owner, meanwhile, posted a mock tombstone presenting Sitt as a dictator signing the area’s “death warrant.” All of which can only be described as very Coney Island.

My one other piece of newsprint on the month was an op-ed in everybody’s favorite free paper (if you know what’s good for you), Metro New York, on some more appropriate ways of celebrating Jackie Robinson Day than having scores of players wear his uniform number. I’m sure Bud Selig has it taped to his computer monitor for future reference.

I have a bunch of other stuff in the works for coming weeks, including my debut as a judge for World Hunger Year’s Harry Chapin Media Awards (I think I’m allowed to reveal that, anyway). Watch this space for further developments, and see you next month at the free Television show in Central Park.

Okay, looks like that New Year’s resolution didn’t go all that well. I may switch to a more continuous-blog format for this page shortly; in the meantime, here’s a two-month recap of my doings and whereabouts:

I usually start things off with the articles I’ve written, but then, it’s not every month that I testify before Congress. On March 29, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy (chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich) had me in to testify on a panel discussing public funding of sports stadiums. The hearing lasted three and a half hours, and also included community activists, sports economists, and an IRS official who looked creepily like Bud Selig – you can see it all via C-SPAN’s website, or read our written testimony on the subcommittee’s site.

Back in the written world, I’ve been focusing on stadiums a fair bit as well, it being both legislative season and the start of baseball season. For Baseball Prospectus I took a look at the status of the four new stadiums (and one renovated one) approved last year, as well as the new deals the Oakland A’s and Florida Marlins hope to cut this year. (Both subscribers-only, sorry.) I also made my long-awaited return to the pages of the Village Voice with a look at the details of the new Yankees and Mets stadiums to see just what New Yorkers are getting for their $720 million in state and city tax money. (Hint: It’s not better views from the cheap seats.)

I also tried my hand of late at the ever-popular pastime of concocting new baseball statistics, introducing MP/MWW to evaluate which teams got the most bang for their payroll spending buck, ROPE to gauge their return on player investment (not very good, as it turns out), and BAD and BADr to find the most wasteful player contracts of all time. Murray Chass, forgive me.

Other of my writings in the last two months include: a look at the cost overruns that are threatening New York City’s #7 subway line extension (for the newspaper City Hall); a report on the city’s individualized medical/psychological care system for welfare recipients that costs $200 million and doesn’t provide individualized care; coverage of the anticlimactic groundbreaking for Brooklyn’s controversial new Atlantic Yards project; and a report on how the city proposed to switch a pair of two-way streets to one-way in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and ended up faced with an angry mob that charged it was all part of a plan to making it easier for fans to speed to the controversial new Atlantic Yards project (last three all for the Voice’s Runnin’ Scared news blog). Also, for the transit news site Streetsblog, reports on Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to create a “sustainable” New York for 2030, and a UCLA professor who thinks “market-rate” parking meters are the solution to midtown traffic and parking woes.

Finally, to top off a busy bimonth (quadrifortnight?), I dropped in on a fascinating lunch talk by several ’60s activists featured in the great oral historian Jeff Kisseloff’s equally great new book, Generation on Fire, and wrote about it for In These Times magazine. If you like the article, read the website; if you like the website, buy the book. Actually, just buy the book anyway – it’s worth it alone for Gloria Richardson and Bob Kellner’s recounting of their time at the front lines of the civil rights movement, which is a sorely needed antidote to revisionist crap like “Mississippi Burning.”

Coming up next: I’ll have a long piece in the April 11 issue of the Village Voice, so check their website starting on the afternoon of the 10th. After that, I have a bunch of irons in the fire, so stay tuned to this site for more news of the world around you and its trip to hell in a handbasket.

Oh, and donate to WFMU! It’s not too late, and it’ll get you into heaven. I promise. I know a guy.

In a perfect world, I’d have spent the whole of January wrapping up the manuscript of the new edition of Field of Schemes. (Note to Rob at U of Nebraska Press, if by some chance you’re reading this: Any day now, really.) Instead, the world stubbornly refused to stay still, which meant I had to take time out from revisiting Boston in the summer of 2000 to focus on current events:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as you may recall, keeps promising he’s about to release details of how he plans to fight poverty. In his State of the City address, he revealed that the city will start aggressively helping eligible residents apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor – though he’s not doing the same for food stamps, which should make even more sense from a fiscal perspective, but perhaps not if he’s concerned about only aiding the “deserving” poor. And speaking of helping people to money, the mayor also snuck into his capital budget, with no public notice, plans to funnel as much as $226 million in added city money to new homes for the Yankees, Mets, and Nets – all “deserving” recipients, no doubt. (Both of these stories appeared on the Village Voice’s Power Plays blog, which has just been redesigned and renamed Runnin’ Scared – bylines are still missing from the stories, you’ll note, but that should be fixed soon. I hope.)

I also have two articles in the January edition of City Hall, a newish newspaper focusing on New York City politics with a seriously unfortunate name for anyone trying to report for it. (“Hello, is this the mayor’s office? I’m calling from City Hall. No, I’m at City Hall. Yes, I know you’re at City Hall, but I’m with – never mind, I’ll call back.”) My topics for this month: How New York’s new governor, Eliot Spitzer, plans on dealing with the numerous megaprojects planned for the metro area, and concerns that he’ll start with the ones where funding is easily available, regardless of what’s best for the state; and another look at Bloomberg’s poverty-fighting plans, such as we know they are.

No baseball writing for this month, aside from a couple of posts on Baseball Prospectus’ Unfiltered blog. I have a bunch of stuff in the hopper for next month, though, which should make for a nice run-up to my debut in the BP annual, and the upcoming revised paperback edition of Baseball Between the Numbers. I’ll also be making a couple of public appearances at BP book events in the NY/NJ area on March 22 and March 24, so mark your calendar if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat.

That’s about all for this month, and I see a Vin Scelsa archive with my name on it. (The Yo La Tengo appearance is especially recommended.) Until next month, try not to do anything to drive walruses into extinction and turn Nebraska into a desert.

August was a month for two major anniversaries: One year since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, and the 10-year mark since President Clinton signed “welfare reform” into law. Thanks to my Extra! article on poverty coverage in the wake of the storm I’ve been on the radio talking about the former a bunch (see links at the bottom of this item); on the latter, stay tuned for future media analysis.

It was also the 58th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s death – who says anniversaries have to be in multiples of ten? – and the Yankees celebrated by walling off a public park and holding an invitation-only stadium groundbreaking while community members protested outside. I celebrated by poring through more city documents, which revealed that not only had the Yankees billed taxpayers for their stadium lobbying costs (as I reported last month), but also for the salaries of several of George Steinbrenner’s relatives, and for the lawyers who drew up the lease that let them do all this in the first place. Plus, the city could have gotten this money back, but tore up the Yanks’ (and Mets’) IOUs as part of new stadium deals, adding an extra $46 million in subsidies to what’s previously been divulged. Happy deathday, Babe!

Elsewhere for the rapidly shrinking Village Voice, I reported on the raucous public hearing over Bruce Ratner’s proposed Atlantic Yards development project for Brooklyn; with hundreds of people still waiting to testify as the clock neared midnight, the state told everyone left out to come to another hearing next month – on primary day. And then there was the “Roots Reggae Family Festival” in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park that preached of revolution but charged $40 a head for an event in a public park – leading to the odd spectacle of a concert where the vast majority of spectators were outside the gates, with a near-empty circle of lawn inside.

Finally, I’m extremely happy to announce that a newly expanded edition of Field of Schemes will be coming out in early 2008, from University of Nebraska Press. Expect both new chapters on recent events (the Yankee Stadium battle absolutely included), and updates on the stories in the original edition. And thanks to everyone who helped make this project a reality – you know who you are.

Until next week, I’m me. Send healthy thoughts (and cash if you like) to Kirk.

LATE ADDITION: Hear my radio appearances discussing post-Katrina poverty coverage on KCSB, WCCO, and the online Guy James Show.

Also, so long as you’re grabbing MP3 files, check out this one on PBS’ “Waging A Living” documentary – it’s with Barbara Ehrenreich, not me, but it’s one of the best discussions of poverty in America you’re likely to hear all year.

I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the odd things about freelance journalism is that you can be drowning in work, and yet the time lag from research to the printed page means there isn’t much to show for it right away. I guess it’s not quite as bad as being a musician – the Mekons have reportedly had a new album all but ready to go for two years now, and that’s not even close to a record – but it’s still frustrating sometimes when it’s time to write these updates. In any event, there should be plenty of fruits to my labor over the next month or two – not to give too much away, but let’s just say you might not want to be nominating Anderson Cooper for a Nobel Peace Prize just yet.

As for last month’s fruits, as promised last month, the Village Voice ran my investigation into the new, even stricter welfare rules and what they’re likely to mean for poor
families in New York. (Hint: It’s not going to be less dysfunctional bureaucracy.) One of the troublesome city programs singled out in my article: WeCARE, an “intensive case management” system that mostly served to force people to truck halfway across the city to meet with an endless stream of doctors and case workers, or else have their benefits cut off – and within days, the city had announced it would switch to decentralized services in clients’ own neighborhoods. Coincidence?

On the sports stadium front, the Yanks and Mets deals are currently on hiatus – possibly for several months – but Minnesota more than picked up the slack, passing a nearly $400 million sales-tax package to fund the bulk of costs for a new Twins stadium. The approval came after more than a decade of legislative debates, and with polls showing Minnesota residents still opposed to the deal by a 2-to-1 margin. Baseball Prospectus subscribers can read my take on why the state legislature caved, while everyone else can see my interview in the Minneapolis City Pages.

Also on my agenda for the month was reading a pair of books I’d been meaning to get to – and which I highly recommend if you or your loved ones intend to live on this planet for more than the next few years. Elizabeth
Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe is a slim, eminently readable travelogue on the devastating, irreversible impacts of global climate change – it’s probably the lightest reading you’ll ever do on the end of the world. (That’s a compliment, by the way, to Kolbert’s New Yorker-honed prose. Incidentally, I worked on a college newspaper with Elizabeth’s brother Dan, and while he didn’t teach me everything I know about journalism, he certainly gave me a good nudge in the right direction. Thanks, Dan!)

For a meatier look at the same topic, check out Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, which includes such unlikely-but-not-unlikely-enough scenarios
as the complete collapse of the Amazon rainforest ecosystem and the halting of the Gulf Stream, bringing Ice Age conditions to Europe. (Flannery is also the author of one of my other favorite books, The Eternal Frontier, a history of North America over the past 65 million years that contains the only description I’ve seen of how to preserve mastodon meat by burying it in a bog.) Flannery goes on a bit at times – feel free to skip the first chapter about the Gaia theory – but it’s still gripping reading, and at least spares you having to watch Al Gore.

Between the two of them, Kolbert and Flannery make clear that radical change is needed in the way we produce and consume energy, and soon, if we have any hope of preventing catastrophe within our lifetimes. It looks like we can have SUVs or polar bears, but not both. And if we don’t choose soon, possibly not either.

And on that cheery note, I’ll see you next month. Happy hurricane season!

Welcome to another bi-monthly update, as once again I managed to be too busy to update this page in April. And all that busy-ness makes for lots of business to catch up on, so let’s get to it:

The last two months marked the denouement of the city approval process for new New York Yankees and Mets stadiums – the latest numbers have the buildings costing a combined $1.5 billion, with the projects receiving about
$800 million in taxpayer subsidies. I spent way too much of my time of late sitting around city council hearing rooms, resulting in a flood of articles for the Village Voice on: elected officials’ headlong rush to approve the projects without waiting for public input or analysis; the need for the National Park Service to sign off on the Yankees stadium, since it would use federally funded parkland; the need for IRS approval of the stadium bonds, which several fiscal experts say might just be illegal; and an up-close look at how sausages are made. And for a change of pace, I penned an op-ed for Metro New York on how the New York deals reflect the growing trend of hiding stadium subsidies where only trained economists can find them.

With the New York stadium drama done for now – no one knows when the NPS and IRS rulings will be handed down – I had time to investigate some other ways in which your elected officials are screwing you over. In a followup to last year’s City Project report on how state authorities are costing New York City billions in property tax revenue comes a new study of how private universities are raking in big bucks through dubious tax breaks – including Cooper Union’s $17-million-a-year windfall from the Chrysler Building, which isn’t anyone’s idea of a seat of learning. (Unless you count learning misinformation about Aztec gods.) I also spent some time digging into the likely impact on New York residents of the new, even-stricter-than-ever federal welfare rules set to go into effect this year – the resulting story is slotted for this week’s Voice, so check the Village Voice site starting May 2 around noon. (Or check the right-hand column here once I’ve updated it.)

Back on the baseball front, I’ve been interviewed a bunch in the last few weeks, by publications ranging from the New York Sun to amNewYork to the Sacramento Business Journal to SI.com to an excellent article in the Augusta Free Press on the failures of sports journalism. I also engaged in one of my periodic Baseball Prospectus chats; and am featured in a podcast
interview on Chicago’s 360thePitch (mp3 here), wherein I discuss why I’m beginning to suspect that I’m not the
kind of fan that baseball wants these days.

Finally, “Baseball Between the Numbers” is out, and is getting lots of good reviews; I see as of right now it’s #764
at Amazon, so order a copy yourself and watch the ranking rise! For a taste of what’s inside, visit ESPN.com, which featured a bunch of excerpts from the book, including a condensed version of HREF="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=betweenthenumbers/salarycap/060405">my
chapter on whether baseball needs a salary cap.

Phew. I need a rest now. With any luck one month will do it this time, but if you don’t see a new update here on June 1, you’ll know why.

THIS MONTH’S OBSESSIVE MUSIC LISTENING: “En Este Momento” by Cordero has been in heavy rotation on my CD player, and not just because my son
keeps insisting that I play “Come On, Dear” (which he instantly misremembered as being titled “Come On, Moose”) for him every five minutes. Jon
Langford‘s “Gold Brick” is a winner as well, though I think I prefer the way he’s been performing the songs on his subsequent tour; fortunately, you can hear them that way as well, thanks to the intrepid live music recording community, and the equally intrepid Archive.org. It’s all kept me so busy, I haven’t even had a chance to listen to my new Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics CD – despite the presence of such classics as “Roundabout” and “Meet the Mets”! I must remedy this forthwith…