Link Banana

Like most commenters on the series, I feel like these pictures of well-maintained rooftop decks straddle the like between creepy and healthy voyeurism.

(via kottke)

Pat Nelson’s Sunday op-ed about street sweeping (and alternate-side parking) mostly reminded me or the only Calvin Trillin book I’ve read. But it also made an interesting point about the questionable efficacy of sweeping at all:

Consider Park Slope, Brooklyn, where sweeping has been suspended for the past three months so that thousands of signs could be replaced to reflect a shorter street cleaning window of 90 minutes, down from three hours (itself progress).

Despite the foul and filthy outcome predicted by many, Park Slope does not look or smell like an urban wasteland. The drains have not overflowed; Union Street and Seventh Avenue are not buried under garbage. Nonetheless, the alternate side parking rules are scheduled to go back into effect tomorrow.

I finally read Phil Zabriskie’s New York article about suicide tourism. It essentially comes down to this simple/interesting/tragic fact:

Recently, however, researchers stumbled on a striking fact about suicides in New York: A surprising number of people who kill themselves in the city come here from out of town, and many appear to come expressly to take their own lives. In a report published last fall called “Suicide Tourism in Manhattan, New York City, 1990–2004,” researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College found that of the 7,634 people who committed suicide in New York City between 1990 and 2004, 407 of them, or 5.3 percent, were nonresidents. More strikingly, nonresidents accounted for 274, or 10.8 percent, of the 2,272 suicides in Manhattan during that time.

The Economist compares the cost of living in cities around the world. I was rather surprised that neither London nor New York came out on top. As proof of my ignorance they say Norway’s Oslo has topped the list since 2005.

Also, this map of American cities and their singles sex ratio has been floating around. It appears to have originated on The Daily Dish. It appears to be related to Richard Florida’s recent Who’s Your City?

I was just going to ignore this one, but the Daily Intelligencer wrote a headline too spot-on to ignore:

David Paterson Had an Affair! But It’s Okay Because His Wife Loves Him. And We Do Too!

PS: As I noted in an edit, it’s worth noting that David Paterson is actually not the first legally blind governor in the country’s history. Bob Cowley Riley was Arkansas’s governor for eleven days in 1975.

Last week’s New York magazine had an interesting story examining what it would take to reduce New York’s murder rate — currently lower than it’s ever been — all the way to zero.

There is ultimately no such thing as an irreducible level of violence in the city—violent crime can always go lower. It’s a matter of deciding what costs we’re willing to incur, how much Big Brother we’re willing to let into our lives, how much faith we put in science to curb the excesses of human behavior. Trying nothing new would be the easiest way forward. Surprisingly, that’s a strategy worth deeper consideration.

An amazing — and somewhat old — video of throwing a paper airplane out of a high window of a New York building. Truly breathtaking, makes me wish I could fly.