Jonah Burke

When I was a kid, I used to go to my friend Dan Stern’s house every Wednesday after school. We’d play Castlevania, make vinegar and baking soda rockets, attack each other with rakes, concoct oozes from the stuff in his parents’ pantry and watch them burn in the oven, and do all kinds of stupid things. Like Bill Bryson wrote in his memoir Thunderbolt Kid, childhood now seems short, but those were long pre-adolescent afternoons, and we would do anything to fill them.

One oddly clear memory I have of those times is sneaking into Dan’s kitchen to get my hands on a Tiger’s Milk bar. These were little sugary bricks of peanut butter coated in carob and wrapped in foil. So many snacks were hard to get at–Handi-Snacks, Fruit Roll-Ups–but a Tiger’s Milk wrapper would yield satisfyingly. And the texture! That’s what I really remember. Somewhere between a Three Musketeers and a Watchamacallit, a Tiger’s Milk would resist your bite just enough.

When I moved to New York last January, I noticed that amidst the array of energy bars now on display in all delis was my childhood friend. At first I bought them infrequently, as a treat, a little nostalgia pill. But recently, I’ve been buying one almost every day, finishing lunch with it. That is, until yesterday. That’s when I ate my last Tiger’s Milk ever.

Yesterday I turned the wrapper over, lifted the flap, and read the ingredients list. Now, I had read the nutrition facts before, and they stack up all right: it’s not a head of lettuce, but for what is essentially a candy bar, it’s not bad. Moreover, I always assumed Tiger’s Milk was healthy because Dan’s parents used to give us good food from Cornucopia, the little natural foods market in our home town.

Boy, was I wrong. The ingredients read like a Michael Pollan hit list. Top ingredient: high-fructose corn syrup. And farther down were all the hallmarks of processed non-food: partially hydrogenated oil, soy protein isolate, a bunch of chemicals you can barely pronounce. I have a firm policy of not eating not-food, and so, grudgingly, I decided never again to eat a Tiger’s Milk.

I’m sure that my body will thank me, but in all honesty, I’m sad. I feel like I’ve discarded something that made me happy and severed a connection to my childhood. When we’re choosing what to eat, is the food itself all that matters?

The other night, en route to meet a friend in the West Village, I passed a bar called Blind Tiger. Then I strolled past the Slaughtered Lamb. Then, crossing Hudson, we spotted the White Horse Tavern (where Dylan Thomas drank the whiskey that killed him). We got to wondering, “What is up with all these animal bars in a city where you can scarcely find a squirrel?” The following question of utmost importance also crossed my mind: What is the most common animal in NYC bar names?

Last night, I marshaled my extreme programming skills and put my six-figure, Ivy League education to use. I siphoned off Citysearch’s database of New York city bars and sifted through them searching for animal names. The verdict? HORSE is the winner, with 7 bars. BULL places with 6, and, with 5, MONKEY shows.

For those with too much time on their hands, like me, here is the complete list. True alcoholics may protest the omission of Spotted Pig and other haunts. These, according to Citysearch, are not bars but restaurants, and so I omitted them. Maybe next time.

My friend Dan Stern and I like to run the Komen Race for the Cure. Most participants are women running leisurely, having fun, in support of breast cancer research. Not me and Dan. We are testosterone-filled men, running our hardest, trying to destroy each other. All the breast-cancer hullabaloo is a distraction from the task at hand: running the shit out of that 5k course.

We ran our first Komen in Seattle in 2007 (I think). Dan beat me by a good margin, but I was sick, and he had cheated big time by drinking coffee before the race. I challenged him to a rematch, and later that year (I think), he beat me again on the streets of Portland. This race was more competitive. Epic, really. Dan jetted out to a big lead, but I caught him in mile two on the downhill through downtown Portland. Heading into the last mile, we were neck and neck. The lead changed hands again and again, and with a half-mile to go, I tried to pull ahead. But I didn’t have it. Dan overtook me, and his spindly little legs carried his undersized frame to a 30 second victory. After the post-race hug, I challenged Dan to best 3 out of 5. In true Komen-racer spirit, he accepted.

Dan and I are currently planning the 2009 series. To aid us in this task — nay, this duty — I created a Google map of the 2009 Komen races. I even made the place markers that cute little ribbon logo! To other Komen racers out there, competitive or not, enjoy.

p.s. For those interested, I created this map by writing a script, in Ruby, to convert the komen.org HTML to KML, Google’s file format for location data. I used Geokit to resolve place names to geographic coordinates.

p.p.s. The truth is that we do support breast-cancer research. My grandmother is a survivor, and we’ve had other scares in my family. But I’m still wicked manly!

One thing I like about the New Yorker is that it usually presents things in simple terms. Joan Acocella, for example, makes dance accessible to the layperson without dumbing it down (which is especially useful for me because my sister, a dancer, is always impressed when I can say something). And so, when I started reading Outsmarted, John Lanchester’s review of several books on the causes of the financial crisis, I expected, finally, a clear explanation of all those arcane instruments — credit-default swaps, CDOs, etc. — that made the economy go bust.

Alas, I was disappointed. Lanchester succumbs to the same problems that so many financial writers do: vagueness, jargon, imprecision. He uses common words — like “sell” — in ways only understood by finance guys, and he makes logical leaps too large for anyone unfamiliar with the concepts he is trying to illuminate. Consider this passage:

[J.P. Morgan] could sell the risk that a borrower won’t be able to pay back his debt.

I would wager that very few readers really understood this sentence, for two reasons. First, it is not immediately apparent what it means to transfer risk, or even that risk can be transferred at all. Even a reader with an insurance policy — a financial instrument whose express purpose is to transfer risk — probably wouldn’t describe it in those terms. Lanchester could make this passage more accessible by developing the analogy with insurance that he touches on earlier.

Second, and more importantly, it simply does not make sense, using the traditional meaning of the word “sell,” to talk about “selling risk.” Risk is a bad thing, a liability. Nobody’s buying. Finance types think of assets like mathematicians think of numbers: there are positive ones and negative ones. Adding a positive number is like subtracting a negative one; buying an asset is like selling a liability. In this world, selling negative things makes sense: you give someone the negative asset, and you get some negative money, i.e. you pay someone to take something bad off your hands. Confusing? Yes. And yet Lanchester plunges into this lexicon without even a warning.

In the real world, we only buy and sell positive things. Lanchester should write with that in mind, describing transactions in terms of assets instead of liabilities. For example, the passage above could become:

J.P. Morgan could buy insurance against a borrower defaulting on his debt.

In this construction, the flows of money are the same — J.P. Morgan is paying someone to take on a risk — but they are described in terms of positive numbers (buying assets) instead of negative ones (selling liabilities). My version might not smack of Wall Street, but I bet a lot more readers would understand it.

As the article continues and the financial instruments become ever more arcane, Lanchester’s treatment becomes ever more opaque. Take this passage discussing that famous yet peculiarly-named device — no, not the Snuggie — the credit-default swap:

Bill Demchak, a “structured finance” star a J.P. Morgan, took the lead in creating bundles of credit-default swaps — insurance against default — and selling them to investors. The investors would get the streams of revenue, according to the risk-and-reward level they chose; the bank would get insurance against its loans, and fees for setting up the deal.

There are numerous confusing or erroneous bits in this excerpt. First, to the layperson, it is not immediately apparent which party to a swap is the buyer and which is the seller. Even if you understand the flow of payments, Lanchester leaves you wondering, what does it mean to sell one of these things? Lanchester should clarify: the party assuming the risk is the seller; the other party, who makes periodic payments, is the buyer. Not surprisingly, the same convention is used in insurance: you buy an insurance policy just like Goldman Sachs bought credit-default swaps from AIG.

This clarification highlights Lanchester’s second and more grave error. He states that J.P. Morgan sold swaps yet “[got] insurance against its loans.” Clearly, he has confused the parties to the contract. It took me a while to unravel this problem. I’m sure most readers just ignored it and moved on, confused. This is the sort of error that seems innocent on face but in fact erodes the foundation, the consistency of basic concepts, that a novice reader requires.

I think I’ve bashed Lanchester enough, so let me give him a reprieve. A big source of confusion in financial writing isn’t the writers but the concepts themselves. They’re baroque, and they’re poorly named. The credit-default swap is a prime example. Even if you understand typical swap contracts, which involve two people trading (swapping) similar assets — for example, two series of loan repayments — you probably won’t understand a credit-default swap without some investigation. That’s because in normal swaps, the assets exchanged are similar; in a credit-default swap, they’re not: one party makes a series of payments while the other makes a single payment only if an event occurs (default on a loan). This instrument, really, shouldn’t be called a swap any more than me buying a sandwich should. Sure, I’m swapping money for sustenance, but that’s beside the point. Credit-default swaps should be called what they are: insurance!

I’m going to concede that my explanations, like the one above, aren’t as fun to read as the New Yorker with its lyrical style. But function trumps form. I’m still waiting for the financial writer that can achieve both.

In 2007, a new noise code took effect in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg claimed it would provide “peace and quiet.” Unfortunately, the code does nothing of the sort.

Right now, I’m sitting in my friend Megan’s apartment on Washington Park and DeKalb Avenue. Two blocks away, on Adelphi, some people have set up a speaker system in their garden and are blaring music. Here it’s audible and annoying; if you walk over there, it’s absolutely ear-splitting. It’s beyond me why people would want to congregate with the music so loud, and it baffles me — it really does — that they don’t consider the effect of their party on everyone in what must be a five block radius: hundreds if not thousands of people.

In New York, when you have a problem like I have right now — you want to go to bed but the neighbors won’t shut off the bass — you call 311, the catch-all phone number for city complaints. The operator at 311 takes your report and forwards it to the local police precinct, informing you that it will be filed “non-urgently.” The police, as far as I can tell, discard the complaint and go on with whatever seems more important. 311 does give you a confirmation number, but if you call back in, say, 2 hours, to check if anything’s been done, a recording informs you that the status of noise complaints may not be checked within 8 hours of filing. By which time, of course, the noise has stopped — and you’ve lost a night of sleep.

This is not the first time I’ve had a noise problem in New York, and, as they go, this one is very tame. Last fall, my brother and I moved in to an apartment a few blocks from here, on Lafayette and South Portland. When we first saw the place, there was a guy outside playing his radio. We asked the landlord if he was always out there, and she said, “Nah, that’s just Julius. Nice guy, means no harm.” Over the next few months, before I extricated myself from that abominable place (a story for a different post), I probably spent several days in total listening, through my apartment windows, to Julius’ selection of disco and contemporary pop. My brother decided to take a no-holds-barred approach: every time Julius’ sounds wafted into our living room, he filed a complaint with 311. Never did we see any action. Once, we even went so far as to stop an officer on the street and point out that Julius was, clearly, violating the noise ordinance. The officer asked Julius to stop, and he did — but he was back later that day.

The simple problem with the City’s noise code is that it is not enforceable. By the time the report winds its way through 311 and the precinct and finally to the officer’s radio, the noise has stopped and the damage has been done. If the officer does reach the scene, he might suppress the problem for a few hours, or even a few days, but it comes back like cancer.

This last point reveals the real problem, which is a cultural one: Most New Yorkers don’t want it quiet. It’s the city, it’s summer, it’s time to go outside and live it up. For example: In Fort Greene Park today, a guy had set up his D.J. station, complete with speakers right out of a club, and the music was absolutely pounding. Yet I seemed to be the only one bothered. The kids were dancing, the people were grilling and living it up. If people don’t want the law to work, it won’t.

That thought occupied my mind as I jogged through the park: it’s hopeless! I must move. But then it occurred to me that there might be a substantial contingent of people like me: those who want peace and quiet, like the mayor promised, but have grown frustrated with the current ineffective system and have all but given up. (It’s almost impossible, by the way, to ask people to quiet down here. I’ve tried it and been scared for my safety, seriously.)

Thus we need a better system: one that represents the preferences of the quiet majority (or at least the quiet substantial fraction) and that is effective. Here’s what I propose. Instead of delegating noise enforcement to the NYPD, which really should be investigating and preventing serious crime, we need a noise brigade. This group, which would be made up of either low-paid city employees (like traffic enforcement) or volunteers from the community, would traverse neighborhoods and ask violators of the noise code to quiet down. They would be more effective than average citizens because they would have official credentials — a badge, vest, etc; they would be properly equipped to evaluate noise, carrying decibel meters; and they would have a hotline to the local police. If a violator chose to rebuff a noise brigadier, he or she could summon the police immediately. And since the police would know the brigadier had identified a real violation and tried asking nicely, they would respond.

If it meant a quieter city, I’d volunteer an hour a week to patrol the neighborhood. I think other concerned citizens would too. How about it, Mayor Bloomberg?