I like books. I like writing them. I like reading them. I like reviewing them.
That puts me in strange company. Each year, a record number of books get published, something on the order of four or five million books. Most of them get a handful of readers. A lucky few get read by thousands. Continue reading “Jeff Bezos, Pamela Paul, David Graeber and Me (Or, If You Hate SEO, “Book Reviews”)”
The “second-most-reckless driver in the city” racked up 547 camera-issued red light and speeding tickets since 2002 before being exposed by Streetsblog NYC in April.
James Giovansanti raced his 2½ ton pickup truck through the same school zones and traffic lights on Staten Island, at the same times, at least every other day, on his way to and from work. Instead of posting a patrol car at one of these intersections to catch this reckless driver, and give him enough tickets to suspend his license, the NYPD is instead dealing with a PR crisis.
Giovansanti, you see, is a cop and his depraved indifference to pedestrian safety lays bare the crime scandal that the press rarely talks about: that the NYPD have virtually stopped enforcing traffic laws.
Continue reading “NYPD Must Enforce City Traffic Laws (Or Else Bring Back the Agency That Will)”
I’ve started reading fiction again. I’m not entirely sure when I entirely stopped. I never stopped reading (unlike some people), but at some point I convinced myself that I was too busy with research to bother with novels, and that when I wanted to scratch that itch I could invest a long Saturday in watching some epic, corpus callosum-expanding non-linear epic movie, or at least some twisty, buzzy prestige TV mini-series.
Fast forward a few years, and every 2.5 hour “epic” movie could have been a taut 90 minute thriller, every premium streaming TV series could have been a movie (epic or otherwise), and Hollywood’s alliance with dipshit private equity and fascistic Silicon Valley has me boycotting streaming subscriptions in favor of scouring garage sales and used book stores for “new” sources of entertainment. Continue reading “Currently Reading”
My eight-year-old daughter wants to enter a thirty year-old trivia contest-cum-lottery she found in the back of the 100th volume of The Baby-Sitters Club. I’m going to help her, because I’m curious about how long a New York book publisher, or its star author, might maintain a P.O. Box in Jefferson, MO to handle fan mail about a book series about an improbably successful small business enterprise run by a cluster of 11-13-year-olds in a made-up Connecticut suburb. Continue reading “Richman’s ‘Meh’ Idea”
