bicoastal December 31st, 2006
The NYT has an article today on Google’s new offices in Chelsea. As often happens, it’s a deep, and potentially political, commentary on American society, but the editors put it in the Styles section. (The most egregious example of this practice was a 2001 article on NYCers in Union Square protesting military action, just days after 9/11. I think then the strategy was to blunt criticism that the NYT was unpatriotic just for covering the protests. Here I’m not sure why it’s in Styles).
My memory is that back when major news outlets were covering the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, they focused on how Google’s beach volleyball court, Segways gourmet food, and free massages encouraged the playful creativity that may make Google the market leader in so many domains. This is a behavioral-economics-ish take on the Google workplace.
But transplant the same infrastructure to NYC and the Times sees it as a clever way to keep employees at work longer:
The strategy of keeping employees happy and committed to spending endless hours on campus seems to be working. Richard Burdon, 37, an engineer who joined Google two years ago, has been staying past midnight to prepare for the introduction of a project. (Google’s Manhattan engineers have been responsible for developing Google Maps and are working on some 100 other projects.)
“Google is about as interesting as starting your own startup because you can really follow your own ideas,†said Mr. Burdon, who previously worked for Goldman Sachs, Sony and I.B.M. The only time he could remember leaving the office during the workday was to buy a friend a birthday present.
The Times seems to totally miss the other benefits — creativity, social cooperation, and . . . happiness. It is as if they are looking at the office with neoclassical blinders.
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bicoastal December 24th, 2006
Men and women with a baseline level of stamina and emotional hardiness may choose between at least two models of dating. The “playa playa” (PP) dates more than one person at a time, rarely staying with any one for very long. The “serial monogamist” (SM) pursues an opposite tact, rarely if ever dating more than one person at a time, and often staying with one for substantial periods.
At first glance the PP seems more west coast. The PP appears more playful, living life by the seat of his pants, gleefully skipping from one experience to the next. The SM seems more cautious, closed, and perhaps more careful.
In fact, the PP is pursuing a far less risky and distinctly more east coast strategy. Like a hedge fund manager who seeds money far and wide, pulling funds in and out with abandon, the PP is deathly afraid of investing too much in one place. Hedge funds look overexposed, but they work because they are in fact minimizing risk. This is an extreme cautiousness.
The SM is like a venture capitalist of relationships, investing in fewer startups, considering each investment more carefully, and using her experience to nurture the investments over a significant period of time. She hopes that at least one of these will yield high gains, but there is a substantial risk that many will fail before one succeeds. Venture capitalists limit risk too, of course, but less so than hedge fund managers.
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bicoastal December 18th, 2006
bicoastal December 17th, 2006
David Zaring and Bill Henderson are writing an article on how legal associate satisfaction correlates with geographical location, and they’ve posted the table below on their generally excellent Empirical Legal Studies blog.
They conclude, “The most striking feature of this table is that, in ALL categories, working conditions appear to be better in the smaller corporate law markets.”
bicoastal December 12th, 2006
Bicoastalcurious has readers from all over the western hemisphere, but I’m especially proud that we now have one reader from Lima, Peru!
bicoastal December 9th, 2006
Annie Hall has held the title for a long time. Of the course the dialog in STF isn’t as good, and the characters aren’t as deep, but the movie is visually stunning and the plot speaks to me much more now than Annie Hall does, even though both are about west and east coast.
I’m starting to realize just how universal this east-west trope is, but I’m still wondering whether there is something about our time and place that makes it even more central. The director, Marc Forster, says as much in the movie’s promo clips, but doesn’t say why.
I’m sure I’ll see the movie several times, so if you haven’t seen it yet we may see it together.
(Does anyone know the source of the text above Ana Pascal’s cafe, in the pic above? I googled it and found nothing — so it may not exist at all.)
bicoastal December 5th, 2006
This afternoon this article hit #1 in the NYTimes most e-mailed list.
In the last few decades, in typical Southern California fashion, the Chinese have claimed a freeway. It is the portion of I-10 known as the San Bernardino Freeway. This road runs through the San Gabriel Valley, straight east from downtown, all the way to Jacksonville, Fla. (to the west, it runs only 10 miles, to Santa Monica). And for its first 50 miles or so, from Los Angeles to San Bernardino, it is a modern-day Chinatown, a string of multiethnic communities that all have a large, dynamic Chinese population. There is strong evidence of this in the chains of Chinese supermarkets, the likes of which exist nowhere else in the country. (In these stores, announcements are made first in Mandarin, then in Korean, then Vietnamese; then Spanish, and last English. Really.)
bicoastal December 4th, 2006
This is from a foundational work in the sociology of medicine, written just over three decades ago:
‘[A]s a sociologist I am more interested in the evidence that responses to pain are predictable on the basis of group membership and that the social meanings ascribed to pain are shared by members of groups.
In a now classic study, Zborowski and his staff interviewed eighty-seven male patients, most of whom suffered from such neurological ailments as herniated discs and spinal lesions, and most of whom were of Italian, Jewish, and “Old American†backgrounds. Assuming that, since their disorders were all similar, the actual physical pain suffered by the patients would vary within fairly narrow limits, the problem of investigation thus became the determination of variations in response to pain. The hospital staff itself seemed to feel there were ethnic differences in such response. The staff believed that Jews and Italians were similar in being more sensitive to pain, and more prone to “exaggerate†the experience pain than were “Old Americans†and people of north European origins. The investigators explored such differences.
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bicoastal December 4th, 2006
Two years ago a learned professor with a distinguished beard described one of my policy proposals as “delicious.” It was one of the highlights of my year, not only because the compliment meant so much coming from him, but because it was such a juicy expression. The kind of thing that only a non-native English speaker might invent.
My brain and heart have been particularly attuned to deliciousness in the last few weeks, and as I thought about them at compline last night (itself a delicious experience) I thought I’d introduce a regular feature to Bicoastal that highlights the delicious.
Mmmmmmm, delicious:
* “Delicious” is a west coast word, but making lists is an east coast activity.
