patrickinglis.com

View high resolution

Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 2011

Bike-Sharing in NYC

Story here. Now, if only we can get the NYPD to properly regulate the bike lanes. Presumably, bike shares are for people without bikes, or for people who ride bikes irregularly, and who wants to bike in the city when there’s no space to do so, or if the space allocated for them is taken up by parked cars, vans, and trucks—many of which are owned and operated by the NYPD itself? For all Janette Sadik-Khan’s good efforts, and there have been many, this is the one area she has yet to make headway on. Without regulating bike lanes, I’m afraid, this whole bike share exercise will be a bust. Or perhaps now that bike sharing is here, we’ll see an improvement? Here’s hoping. 

Mumbaikars’ Spirit: Apathy?

From a New Yorker blog post by Naresh Fernandes:

It suddenly became clear this morning that the sentiment many had identified as the Mumbai spirit was probably epic apathy all along. And, really, who could blame the residents of this city of just over twelve million for being too exhausted to think about anything other than their gruelling daily routines? Behind the sparkling Bollywood façade it projects to the world, Mumbai is a city riven with gargantuan problems. It’s more slum dog than millionaire. More than sixty per cent of the residents of India’s financial capital live in shanties, with twenty thousand people packed into each square kilometre. The pollution is often throat-searing; the water supply and road systems are overstretched. The trains, which carry about 6.9 million commuters every work day, are designed to transport seventeen hundred passengers each, but in peak hour bone-crunchingly pack in forty-five hundred travellers. Life in Mumbai is a daily battle that leaves little energy for luxuries, such as joining campaigns to pressure the administration to provide the basic amenities that residents of most cities take for granted.

Frightening to think of the implications of this dynamic for a city like Mumbai and other mega cities across India and really the entire developing world. So many people, so few engaged, and yet for very good reasons, it seems, not least poverty and inequality. But let’s be clear: the apathy among elected officials is by far the biggest worry of all.

Klosterman on The Wire

In making a case for Breaking Bad as the best show of the past decade, Chuck Klosterman offers fans of The Wire a reality check: 

There’s never been a more obstinate fan base than that of The Wire; it’s a secular cult that refuses to accept any argument that doesn’t classify The Wire as the greatest artistic endeavor in television history. It’s almost as if these people secretly believe this show actually happened, and that criticizing the storyline is like mocking an episode of Frontline. This was not a documentary about Baltimore: Wallace is not alive and playing high school football in Texas, Stringer Bell was not reincarnated as a Pennsylvania paper salesman, and you are not qualified to lecture on inner-city education because you own Season 4 on DVD. The citizens on that show were nonexistent composites, and the events you watched did not occur. As a society, we must learn to accept this.

As for the show itself, he writes:

In The Wire, everyone is simultaneously good and bad. The cops are fighting crime, but they’re all specifically or abstractly corrupt; the drug dealers are violent criminals, but they’re less hypocritical and hold themselves to a higher ethical standard. There were sporadic exceptions to this rule, but those minor exceptions only served to accentuate its overall relativist take on human nature: Nobody is totally positive and nobody is totally negative, and our inherently flawed assessment of those qualities hinges on where we come from and what we want to believe. And this, of course, is closer to how life actually is (which is why The Wire felt so realistic). It’s a more sophisticated way to depict the world. However — from a fictional, narrative perspective — it ends up making the message a little less meaningful. If nothing is totally false, everything is partially true; depending on the perspective and the circumstance, no action is unacceptable. The conditions matter more than the participants. As we drift further and further from its 2008 finale, it increasingly feels like the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political than philosophical. Which is not exactly a criticism, because that’s an accomplishment, too … it’s just that it turns the plot of The Wire into a delivery mechanism for David Simon’s polemic worldview (which makes its value dependent on how much the audience is predisposed to agree with him).

I wouldn’t disagree, but I do wish there were more like Simon who had the guts to write and produce television that depicted such a “polemic worldview.” The show Breaking Bad, which I haven’t seen, seems on the face of it less political (or even philosophical) than just plain entertaining—in other words, nothing that quite breaks with the status quo.

Arundhati Roy talks about her new book on India, Broken Republic. Her brave essay on rebels in the northeast of the country previously appeared in Outlook. To be sure, I don’t always agree with her perspective on things—to say, as she does, for example, that India’s poor are no better off in the present reform era than before ignores not only facts on the ground but also the experiences of the people she purports to speak on behalf of. That being said, her writing on India stands as a necessary counterweight to pro-globalization evangelists in the mainstream English press.

Oops!

Has it really been three months and two days since I last posted here? My, it does seem so. Now recommitting myself for the umpteenth time to keeping this space updated. You’ve been warned.

Reforming the reformers

Paul Tough gets tough (pun intended; cute, no?) on education reformers. The best lines come near the end:

The reformers’ policy goals are, in most cases, quite worthy. Yes, contracts should be renegotiated so that the best teachers are given incentives to teach in the poorest schools, and yes, school systems should extend the school day and school year for low-income students, as many successful charter schools have done. But these changes are not nearly sufficient. As Paul Reville, the Massachusetts secretary of education, wrote recently in Education Week, traditional reform strategies “will not, on average, enable us to overcome the barriers to student learning posed by the conditions of poverty.” Reformers also need to take concrete steps to address the whole range of factors that hold poor students back. That doesn’t mean sitting around hoping for utopian social change. It means supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom: working intensively with the most disadvantaged families to improve home environments for young children; providing high-quality early-childhood education to children from the neediest families; and, once school begins, providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support.

All that’s left to do is wait another ten or so years for someone else to say the same thing. It’s the reform way, after all.

View high resolution

Stack of Yellow Pages dropped on the steps outside my building’s front door. A little twentieth century, no?

Sean Parker: Poser, “douchebarge,” take your pick

A few choice quotes from a recently published Financial Times interview with Napster founder and ex-president of Facebook Sean Parker:

Since he disputes his portrayal in the film, I ask him about what drives him and how he defines his job. “Solving specific problems is what drives me. I am not interested in having a career. I never have been,” he says. “This in no way resembles a career. I think a career is something your father brings home in a briefcase every night, looking kind of tired.”

It is an arresting image and I ask him if he is thinking of his own father, who was until recently chief scientist of the US National Ocean Service. “Yes, I think that’s accurate,” he says soberly. “He wanted to be entrepreneurial but he had a family and he didn’t feel able to take the risk of putting everything aside. He actually told me, ‘If you are going to take risks, take them early before you have a family.’ ”

And this: 

We skip pudding. I have coffee while he takes an English breakfast tea and discusses the meteoric change in his fortunes. “You have got to be willing to be poor [as an entrepreneur],” he says. “There was a time when I was living out of a single suitcase. I had a rule that I wouldn’t stay on one person’s couch for more than two weeks because I didn’t want to become a bother.”

So is a billion dollars cool? He ponders the question carefully. “No, it’s not,” he says. “It’s not cool. I think being a wealthy member of the establishment is the antithesis of cool. Being a countercultural revolutionary is cool. So to the extent that you’ve made a billion dollars, you’ve probably become uncool.” He laughs at his retort to Aaron Sorkin.

Sean Parker, a countercultural revolutionary? I think not. A “douchebarge,” as one of my friends calls him? Closer to the mark. But then, the ease at which something of the sort rolls off his tongue—and many other rich tongues these days—is indeed something to ponder, especially in light of protesters charging for freedom in the Mideast, as well as what’s going on at home with rallying teachers and other public sector employees in Wisconsin and around the country. Without a doubt, these are the real revolutionaries, lest we—or Parker—forget.

"Religion is not a rational enterprise. Its metaphysical claims cannot be proven; either one believes them or one does not. When reflecting on the problems of religion and democracy, the main issue is how to stop irrational passions from turning violent. Spinoza, not a religious man, believed that religion was fine, but only under certain strict conditions. Faith should make people behave lovingly and peacefully, should never get mixed up in rational inquiry, and should always be controlled by rulers of the secular stare. I’m not sure I agree with the last point, but the first two are unimpeachable."

— Ian Buruma, Taming the Gods (2010)