smith tower construction, from seattle municipal archive

• The 1914-built Smith Tower is up for sale in a foreclosure auction. It comes four years after a condo-conversion scheme for Seattle’s first skyscraper was born, and three years after the scheme died. Let’s hope someone shows up who can bring the classy place back to glory.
• Could it be? Could it be? Could there really be snow in Seattle next week? I hope I hope I hope….
• One of those silly magazine surveys ranked Seattle as America’s fifth “gayest” city. Number one: Salt Lake City!
• Update: When we wrote last week about a scheme to bring the National Hockey League to Seattle, we noted a state legislator with a plan to help fund a new arena. The state rep’s name is Mike Hope (R-Lake Stevens). His plan: Have visiting teams pay a licensing fee to play there. No local taxpayer funds involved.
• David Goldstein again righteously picks apart the Seattle Times editorial board for its near-right-wing hypocrisies.
• The headline says it all: “New York Times Crossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin”.“
• Fun with reactionaries: “Rick Santorum Quotes as New Yorker Cartoons.” (Well, actually as new captions to pre-existing New Yorker cartoons.)
• You don’t have to be a gamer to get valuable schooling in non-linear narrative design from the original Legend of Zelda.

Here’s one way to get a large audience for a literary reading. Invite so many readers that they, and their individual dates and/or entourages, will fill the room by themselves.

That’s what happened at Town Hall last Saturday night with “60 Readers.”

The event’s organizers scheduled it to tie in with the Modern Language Association’s convention in town that week. But the reading was not officially connected with the MLA. This meant the general public could get in.

Town Hall’s 300-capacity lower room was nearly filled for the free event. Readers were limited to three minutes max. The whole thing came in on time, at just under three hours.

The readers picked included both locals and MLA attendees. They ranged from the wild and the experimental down to that squarest of all literary sub-genres ever created, ’70s style nature poetry.

They read in alphabetical order. They opened with Greg Bem, whose “piece” was a listing of all the readers’ names.

As it happened, most of my favorite bits came in hour three:

• Doug Nufer (above) telling a tall tale of a circus freak, who had been the knife thrower “before the accident.”
• Judith Roche repeating a “blessing” she’d given to a new waste treatment plant, praising the cycle of life as the cleaned up biosolids get trucked to the Palouse to fertilize the wheat fields (really!).
• Nico Vassilakis howling raw phonemes.
• Christine Wertheim enacting an orgasmic childbirth(!), then with equal passion mourning the murder victims from Mexico’s drug wars.

iloveyoubluesky.blogspot.com

• How-the-mighty-have-fallen dept.: Last year folks mourned the end of Kodachrome slide film. Now, Eastman Kodak itself may declare bankruptcy. The only thing that could delay that move: a fire sale of Kodak’s patents, its only remaining valuable assets.
• The Wash. State Supreme Court ruled the state Legislature is failing in its constitutionally assigned task to fully fund K-12 education. But the court didn’t prescribe any specific action to remedy this. I’m hoping this means the days of brutal, all-cuts state budgets are finally over.
• Speaking of which, some legislative Democrats have another state income tax proposal going, as part of an overall tax reform package. We’ll see how far this one goes.
• The movie biz had a lousy ’11, but music sales (led by commercial downloads) were up 6.9 percent. Non-major-label releases, however, were stuck at about 12 percent of total sales.
• The folks who created the “phone book art space” Gallery 206 tried to give it away to the Seattle Art Museum. They said no, expectedly.
• Not as gruesome as you might have thought: The guy who tried to drive alone in the HOV-only freeway lanes by having a dressed-up skeleton in the passenger’s seat? It was just a plastic skeleton.
• Yesterday when we said Boeing Wichita’s demise was Seattle’s gain? Nope, not really. Blame the obsession by corporate hotshots with outsourcing everything, even if it costs more in the long run.
• Update: That smashingly good sounding “Electronic Literature” exhibit in town, tying in with the Modern Language Association convention at the Convention Center? If you live here, forget about seeing it. It’s only for ticketed convention goers, despite what its web page says.
• R.I.P. Robert Jenkins, a figure in the Seattle music scene for more than three decades. I knew him in the ’80s, playing guitar for Audio Leter, Officer Down, and the New Art Orchestra, among many other combos. Lori Goldston’s obit says Jenkins…

…had an otherworldly timbral and expressive range with both guitar and voice, ranging from beautifully sweet to guttural monster-from-Hell.

The Modern Language Association, those ol’ guardians of the university English department as the supposed nexus of all thought and creativity in America, are meeting in town this week.

Besides the members-only conferences and seminars on surviving campus budget cuts and why doesn’t America appreciate the greatness of English profs, there are a couple of major peripheral events open to the general public.

On Saturday (1/7/12), Town Hall hosts mini-readings (three minutes max) by “60 Writers,” including “upstart, altertative” scribes. Some are local; some are in town for the conference. It’s free and starts at 7:30.

And Washington State University’s Creative Media and Digital Culture Program is organizing a display of “Electronic Literature.” Its curators describe the exhibit as featuring:

…over 160 works by artists who create literary works involving various forms and combinations of digital media, such as video, animation, sound, virtual environments, and multimedia installations, for desktop computers, mobile devices, and live performance.

The works in the exhibit were all “born digital.” That is, they were designed to be experienced as digital media spectacles, not merely adapted from straight-text products.

The exhibit is open Thurs.-Sat. (1/5-7/12) in the Wash. State Convention Center Room 609. There’s also a free tie-in reading event, 8 p.m. Friday (1/6/12) at Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave. on Capitol Hill.

(UPDATE: Even though the Electronic Literature exhibit’s web page says it’s free, it’s really only open to ticketed MLA convention goers. Locals can attend the Hugo House reading, however.)

It’s only appropriate that all this is happening this year in Seattle, ground zero for the big transition from dead-tree lit product to the brave new digi-future.

Be there or be pulp.

My full time (with overtime some weeks) contract position with Amazon.com is now ended. A gig that was originally set to have lasted 7.5 weeks instead got stretched to 13, so I’m more than grateful.

I was not stationed at the massive new Amazon campus at south Lake Union. Rather, I was in the company’s highly obscure back office in back of the Rainier Valley Lowe’s.

(For local old timers or baseball nerds, my desk was where the left field bleachers had been at the old Sick’s Seattle Stadium, home of the old Rainiers and Pilots.)

I was in an office area previously occupied by Amazon’s accounts payable department, for which we occasionally got phone calls, to which we had no forwarding info.

The building also houses:

• the company’s central mailroom,
• its photo studio (where tall blonde models would occasionally assemble),
• a large conference room (sometimes rented out to the guys from the Pepsi plant across the street),
• office-equipment storage, and
• the workshop where they custom-make the legendary Amazon “door desks.”

I got to eat lunch at the fine fast-food outlets of the Rainier Valley; as well as two local indie treasures, The Original Philly’s and Remo Borracchini’s bakery-deli.

I worked as part of a team that varied between 12 and 32 people; at least two-thirds female. Some were otherwise stay-home moms. Some were recent college grads. Some were middle-age cranks like myself. All were damn smart and able to think their way through sometimes obtuse situations.

•

What we did all this time is a bit harder to explain.

On the Wednesday of our first week at the task, Amazon announced a line of new Kindle e-book machines.

At the same time, it announced a new, exclusive feature in its e-book files, “Xray.”

Reviewers have called Xray “an index on steroids.” It’s a hyperlinked list of a book’s references to people (real and fictional), places, ideas, topics, etc. It gives Amazon something other sellers of the same e-book titles don’t have.

The company’s crack coders created a software algorithm to generate the Xray files. But it had trouble parsing the infinite possibilities of what is and isn’t a person’s name (it regularly believed “Jesus H. Christ” and “Jack Daniel’s” to be characters in a story), and what is and isn’t a relevant phrase (publishers’ addresses don’t really belong in an index).

So every Xray file needed human tweaking.

That’s what we did, on the “Xray Quality Assurance Team.”

We used specially-programmed data tools to delete and add names and phrases in the Xray files. (To explain the process any further would risk violating my non-disclosure agreement.)

Our goal was to have 6,500 titles ready by the time the new Kindle models came out or shortly thereafter. By this past midweek, we’d exceeded 8,000. I worked, in whole or in part, on almost 1,500 of those.

•

Since “books” are a widely diverse lot, each Xray editing job was different.

Some titles (self-help guides or tech instructionals) contained lots of phrases but few to no names. Others (short stories sold as stand-alone products) had names but no significant phrases.

Some had compact casts of characters and limited place names. Others, such as epic historical tomes, contained literal “casts of thousands.”

The absolute toughest e-books to figure out were the umpteen-volume fantasy sagas, such as The Wheel of Time and the Game of Thrones sequels. They’ve got hundreds of made-up people names, plus hundreds of equally made-up names for places, tribes, deities, swords, etc.

But no matter how tricky any particular job was, our goal was accuracy above speed.

We picked the titles to work on from a database of Amazon’s most popular e-books, both “paid” and “free.” The latter include sample chapters of forthcoming books as well as public-domain classics. (I helped edit the Xray for The Idiot, and sure felt like one afterwards.)

•

I’ve long ranted in this space and elsewhere that, despite four decades’ worth of pseudo-intellectual hype about “The Death of The Book,” the written word remains a vital medium, commercially as well as in other aspects.

My thirteen weeks with Xray helped to confirm this belief.

The job also gave me an insight into what’s selling in the e-book sphere.

You’ve got all your regular NY Times and USA Today bestsellers, present and past.

You’ve got your expected genre items:

• Thrillers.
• Whodunits.
• Regency romances.
• Sword n’ sorcery.
• Space operas.
• Twilight knockoffs.
• Bridge to Terabithia knockoffs. (In the knockoffs, the fantasy worlds the kids travel to are real.)
• Inspirational lessons.
• Celebrity tell-alls.
• Cookbooks and diet guides.
• Political sermons of all stripes. (Yes, my fellow lefties, right-wingnuts do read books. They read wingnut books.)
• And, oh yeah, “serious literature,” or whatever that’s called these days.

•

And there’s one genre that I, and the rest of the Xray Quality team, were surprised to find so prevalent among the top selling e-books.

Sometimes, it’s euphemistically billed as “erotic romance.”

What is is, is women’s smut.

You might already know that your regular formula romance novels, the Harlequins and the Silhouettes and such, include explicit sex scenes these days. (Only “Christian” romances don’t.)

But lately—and specifically in the e-book realm, where no one else can see what you’re reading—stories primarily or totally about sex, written for and by women (or at least under women’s pseudonyms), have become a major cottage industry.

I’d say they made up a good 5 percent of the database of Kindle bestsellers, at least.

They range in length from full size novels to short-short stories.

Some are self-published. Others come under the logos of established romance imprints, or their subsidiary lines. Still others are issued by professional, e-book-only companies. The latter have authors’ guidelines as strictly detailed as those of print romance publishers.

And formulaic they are.

For one thing, the traditional romance happy ending is a must. No matter how wild the sexual adventures, the heroines have to end up in committed relationships by the end.

The prose styling is also strictly regulated. No Anias Nin poetic flourishes; just simple declarative sentences and an established vocabulary of descriptions. Breasts are never fondled or groped but always “cupped.”

The plots are equally formulaic.

Several of them star mousy, modern-day women who travel back in time and into the arms of shirtless Scottish Highlanders.

In other formula plots, the male lust objects are equally studly—young corporate tycoons, Navy SEALs, cowboys, police detectives, firefighters, zombie hunters.

Or they’re vampires. Or shape-shifters of assorted types. There are werewolves, were-leopards, were-foxes, were-rats, and were-ravens.

And, quite often, the heroine has simultaneous sex with two, three, or four men. Sometimes these men are brothers. Other times they have sex with one another as well as with the heroine. But they always end up in permanent polyandrous households.

The self-published smut stories often have more traditionally “smutty” formulae. Amazon won’t deal in sex stories involving underage characters or blood relatives (except for the aforementioned groups of brothers sharing the same woman). But there are plenty of just-over-18 tarts seducing stepdads and stepbrothers.

E-books don’t really have covers, only promotional images on their respective Web pages. For many low-budget e-book-only smut titles, these images are amateurishly Photoshopped from licensed stock photos, or from unlicensed “found” online pictures. The effect is, of course, extra cheesy goodness!

An anonymous member of our team (not me, I swear) collected some of these images, along with blurbs and excerpts from the cheesiest of these smut stories, and put them on a blog called Wet & Wilde.

This, my friends, is what massive technological investments by companies here and overseas have led up to.

And even if most of it doesn’t arouse me, I’m glad it’s out there.

This weekend, three major figures from world affairs left us.

• Christopher Hitchens was an erudite and outspoken essayist/commentator on world affairs, peace/war, justice, and religion and all he felt was wrong with it (which was just about everything). But, like several of his ’60s radical-intellectual forebearers, he became seduced by the siren song of right-wing righteousness; specifically, the Bushies’ meme that there was one big “Islamofascist” conspiracy to overthrow Western society, and that the war in Iraq was a valiant counter-crusade rather than an imperial power-grab. But then, his chain-smoking and chain-drinking already proved there were limits to his wisdom.
• Vaclav Havel was one radical-intellectual who never changed his ways, even when it was might inconvenient not to do so. The herein-linked BBC obit lauds him as having brought “free markets” to what was still Czechoslovakia, following the collapse of the Soviet empire. But that wasn’t even among Havel’s chief priorities. He was foremost a thinker and writer. He began by writing satirical plays, which were promptly banned once Soviet forces crushed the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Arrested several times, he never gave up striving for freedom, democracy, and independent culture. When the Slovaks split off into their own nation, Havel oversaw an amicable civic divorce. May we all remember his life’s motto: “Truth and love will prevail over lies and hatred.”
• Kim Jong-Il, with his tinhorn self aggrandizement and his obsession for military ultra-precision in all public spectacles, was regularly depicted as a living joke—at least among those who didn’t have to live under North Korea’s abject poverty and repression. The best hope for the failed state he left behind is that his heirs sell it to the south, in exchange for a cushy Kim family compound in some equatorial land.

I’m still on the highly time-consuming contract job I’ve been at for a while. This Monday starts week 11 of what was to have been a 7.5-week gig. But it looks like it’s finally on the closing stretch. I’ll have a full report when it’s done.

Meanwhile, I’ve continued to collect wacky n’ weird links fer y’all. They include the following:

• KPLU revisits out that ol’ regional quandary, do Nor’westerners have an accent or not? And if there is a Northwest accent, how should it be defined?
• Umberto Eco sez, “People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.” I’d trust what he says. I like Eco. Even if he’s no longer playing with the Bunnymen.
• Barry Ritholtz insists it wasn’t the poor people getting mortgages that caused the housing bust, no matter what the right-wing-media blowhards now bluster. It was a collapse of private corporate policies that were doomed to fail in the long term; policies instituted here and globally.
• Naomi Wolf claimed online last week that the crackdowns on Occupy encampments in cities around the nation had help and coordination from the Feds. This accusation turns out to be an unsubstantiated rumor. The brutality of those individual crackdowns, though, is all too sadly real.
• William M. Chase at The American Scholar says there was a golden age for college English departments in this country. It lasted for less than 30 years, about as long as the golden age of radio. It’s been over for almost 40 years, with no reincarnation in sight. Chase claims only one thing could bring back student and administration interest in lit studies. That’s if appreciation of great literature is hyped as a worthy pursuit in and of itself; not as a route to a cushy faculty career, nor as a mere sidebar to ethnic/gender studies.
• Meanwhile, the NY Times ponders whether a college degree, as a purely careerist strategy, is worth the cost anymore.
• Katie Roiphe finds lessons in how to live from a man who decided not to live any longer, the maximalist author David Foster Wallace (he’s also one of my own all-time faves).
• Turns out folks other metro areas have had the same idea that Seattle’s viaduct-replacement-tunnel opponents had—the idea that cities need fewer freeways, not more.

Horror author and Seattle music-scene legend Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is out of the hospital and back home, tired but apparently on the mend.

a teenage pugmire as 'count pugsley'

Before he gained national cult fame as “the world’s greatest living Lovecraftian writer,” Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire already had several other claims to fame.

He’d played the costumed mad scientist “Count Pugsly” at the Jones Fantastic Museum in Seattle Center.

He’d published Punk Lust, a literate and intimately personal zine chronicling his life as a queer Mormon, doing restaurant work to support his obsessions with punk rock, horror fiction, and Barbra Streisand.

He’d been a constant figure on the local music scene, sometimes appearing at events in goth-white face paint with ruby red lipstick.

Finally, in recent years Pugmire’s horror fiction has risen in stature, from a few short stories in scattered anthologies to full-length, limited edition books.

He hasn’t been very visible lately. He was stuck at home, taking care of a dying mother.

Now he’s the patient. He’s reportedly now in a Seattle hospital, dealing with a worsening heart condition.

Several days ago he wrote a blog post announcing his retirement from writing. In it, he described his condition as follows:

I have been extremely ill for over a month, and it doesn’t seem like I’m gonna get better any time soon.  Tonight has been one of the worst nights.  I think my ailments are a combination of heart disease and lingering bronchitis.  One of my ailments is coranary arterial spasms, which happens usually when I recline in bed and try to sleep–they jerk my body and produce a little yelp, making sleep impossible so that I am a zombie moft of ye time.

I know no more about Pugmire’s condition at this time. Will Hart, at the horror blog CthuluWho1, is keeping track.

Before Thomas Frank became a renowned author of geekily-researched anti-conservative sermon books, he co-ran a tart, biting, yet beautifully designed journal of essays called The Baffler.

It was based in Chicago for most of its existence. Its original focus was the intersecting worlds of corporate culture (including corporate “counterculture”), entertainment, and marketing. (It’s where Steve Albini’s 1994 screed against the music industry’s treatment of bands, “Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked,” first appeared.) As Frank’s concerns steered toward the political, so did The Baffler‘s.

Its one consistent aspect was its irregular schedule. Though it was sometimes advertised as a “quarterly,” only 18 issues appeared from 1988 to 2009.

This will now change.

The title was bought in May by essayist/historian John Summers. Last week, Summers announced he’s attained backing from the MIT Press. MIT and Summers promise to put out three Bafflers a year for the next five years.

This is good news, because we need its uncompromising voice more than ever.

(Told you I wouldn’t necessarily be providing these headlines every day.)

• Wednesday was drum n’ bass dance nite at Occupy Seattle!
• Gavin Polone is a film/TV producer in L.A. who believes film and TV should mostly be made in L.A., not spread out across North America. Still, he makes a lucid point when he alleges state and provincial tax breaks for film producers (like the ones Wash. state just got rid of) benefit only the producers, not the states and provinces.
• The real woman behind the book and TV movie Sibyl didn’t really have multiple personalities. But (and this is buried in the linked story) she really did have serious psychological/emotional issues, and believed she could only get the attention and help she desperately needed by exaggerating her condition.
• Ex-Seattleite Emma Harris pleads for her fellow environmentalists to care about more places besides “pristine wilderness”—which she says doesn’t even exist.
• Could the recently concluded CityArts Fest grow into the big regional music festival various entities have tried to launch from time to time but without really catching on?
• Now it can be told: Steve Jobs called Fox News a “destructive force in our society” to Rupert Murdoch’s face, while he was negotiating to get Murdoch-owned entertainment content for iTunes.
• Does the boss of BankAmeriCrap really believe all he has is an “image problem“? If so, he’s even more out of touch with reality than the average big-bank CEO. If not, he’s just another cynical spinmeister.
• Even Forbes scorns the Oakland, CA police’s violent over-reaction to peaceful Occupy protesters.
• Danny Westneat notices something we’ve known all along—Tim Eyman hates transit. So do right-wingers in general. They want people stuck in traffic, as captive audiences for the talk-radio goons.

gadgetsin.com

As power in the book biz moves increasingly from Manhattan to here, the Manhattan news media treat it as a crisis, or at least as a matter of controversy.

Hence, the Sunday NY Times op-ed package posing the musical question, “Will Amazon Kill Off Book Publishers?”

What rot.

Worse, it’s predictable rot.

I’ve ranted on and on here, since years before the e-book became a marketable commodity, about the traditional book industry’s stodginess, parochialism, and criminal inefficiency.

I’ve also ranted about the particular cultural conservatism (bordering on the reactionary) that’s long held sway within the big-L Literary subculture. (That scene is not the same thing as the book industry, even though it thinks it ought to be).

Current example: Dennis Johnson (a respected publisher of, and advocate for, big-L Literary product), claiming in the NYT debate-in-print that

…publishing isn’t, right now, and hasn’t been, for 500 years, about developing [sales] algorithms. It’s been about art-making and culture-making and speaking truth to power.

The corner of publishing Johnson occupies might be about art n’ culture making.

But the whole of publishing is, and always has been, about the bottom line.

And in societies such as this one where there’s no royal family or state church to prop up (and censor) publishing, that bottom line means sales.

And, I will argue, that’s mostly been a good thing.

Not in spite of the ephemeral commercial dross that’s been the bulk of most commercial publishers’ product, but because of it.

The romances. The mysteries. The space operas. The treacle-y 19th century “ladies’ stories.” The pulp adventures. The lurid ’60s paperbacks. The advice and how-to guides. The travelogues. The comics. The fads. The tracts (spiritual, political, dietary). The bodice-rippers. The porn. The celebrity memoirs. And, yeah, today’s teen vampires and werewolves. They’re all where the passions of their particular times and places are preserved.

But Johnson wants to know how big-L Literary work will fare in the brave new e-world.

I say it will thrive as never before.

For the e-book business model is not, as Johnson fears, a recipe for monopoly.

It’s about less consolidation, not more.

There are three major e-book sales sites, and hundreds of minor ones.

Anybody can sell just about anything in e-book form on their own, or via one of these sites.

And they are.

Cottage industries are springing up to provide editing and design services for e-book self publishers.

And new small presses are forming to more fully curate “quality” ebooks, and to more effectively promote them.

Big-L Literature was, at best, a prestige sideline for the old-line major publishers. Smaller specialty presses, like Johnson’s, had to play by the big presses’ business rules (including devastating return policies with bookstores); rules that made Johnson’s kind of books hellishly difficult to put out at even a break-even level.

That good, and sometimes great, books of highbrow or artistic fiction came out of that business model, and came out regularly, is a testament to the perseverance of impresarios such as Johnson, and to authors’ willingness to work for the equivalent of less than minimum wage.

The e-book business model doesn’t guarantee success.

But it gives specialty works, and their makers, a fighting chance.

• Jezebel and Gawker each snark away at the absurdist extremes of commercial “sexy” Halloween garb.
• The Olympian has some cogent reasons (as opposed to the TV ads’ scare-tactic reasons) why Washington state’s liquor business shouldn’t be turned over to Costco.
• Jerry Large is the first local mainstream reporter to note the connection between Occupy _______ and the Vancouver mag Adbusters.
• Buried within a statement of support for Occupy Seattle, city councilmember Nick Licata floats the idea of a municipal income tax.
• There’s a whole site of writers expressing support for Occupy ______. One of its best entries, as you might expect, is from Lemony Snicket.
• Matt Honan claims to speak on behalf of millions of grownup children of prior recessions when he proclaims, “Generation X is sick of your bullshit.”
• Is Target really better than Walmart? Allegedly, not when it comes to working conditions.
• Microsoft’s opened a retail outlet in U Village, right across a parking lot from the Apple Store.

satirical ad by leah l. burton, godsownparty.com

• To CNN, it’s apparently news that conservative preachers denounce gay marriage and birth control, but can’t get themselves to preach against greed.
• Filmmakers are getting ideas from the oddest sources these days. A feature’s being shot in Seattle, based on a classified ad. (A joke classified ad, to be more precise.)
• A bigger North Cascades National Park: why not?
• Highway 520 construction crews have taken down the trees that let wealthy Eastside households imagine they were in “the country,” not next to the freeway they were actually next to.
• Whatever happened to Seattle’s neighborhood activists?
• Seattle, now with one-third more transit users per capita than Portland.
• Local scifi author Neal Stephenson asks whatever happened to America’s (and Seattle’s) hope for the future. His answer: an obsession with “certainty” at the expense of daring.
• In the online music world, Seattle-based Rhapsody has bought the subscription rosters and other assets of Napster. In other news, Napster still existed as of last week.
• It’s official. The Kress Building on Third Avenue will hold a J.C. Penney store. But they’d better let the Kress IGA supermarket stay on the lower level.
• Our ol’ pal Ronald Holden sings the praises of a better industrial food thickener.
• The head of the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization predicts print newspapers will disappear in the U.S. by 2017. In other lands, they could last as long as 2040. Believe it or don’t.
• One mainstream media outlet has finally found a way to cover Occupy Wall Street—as “New York’s newest tourist attraction.”
• The Koch Brothers are secretive, wealthy backers of all sorts of anti-democracy and anti-middle class projects on the federal and state levels. Now we learn they’ve made part of their fortune through illegal, secret chemical sales to Iran. Whooda thunkit?
• And, though I’ve not been following this at all, there apparently was a verdict in a legal appeal out in Europe somewhere.