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In Which I Forget All The Reasons I Hate Midtown Manhattan

I generally try to avoid midtown Manhattan as much as possible, but on Wednesday I had a couple of reasons to be there, and ended up having one of those classic New York excursions that reminded me of why I spent most of my life all the way through college dying to move here. I'd come in to tape an interview with NPR's Day to Day program; their studios are over on 42nd and 2nd Ave, and so when I was done I strolled along 42nd Street over to the resplendent Bryant Park, which was a brilliant spectacle of verdant grass, daffodils, and free wi-fi. One of the great small-scale urban parks in the world, I think, and a complete wasteland only a decade or so ago. Then I realized that my agent's office was just around the corner, so I popped over there to talk about a new book proposal that we're in the middle of selling. (More about that in a future post, I promise.) And then it was down to the Oyster Bar below Grand Central, where I had lunch with a good friend who also writes for a living (though much more successfully than I do.) Grand Central, too, has been transformed since I first moved to the city in 1990, and like Bryant Park (and unlike Times Square) they've managed to make it a bustling public space filled with shops and restaurants without turning it into a mall and losing the charm and quirkiness of the original. The Oyster Bar had been slightly redesigned since I had last been there, but it had exactly the same 40s New York feel that I've always loved about it.

One of the great things about walking around Grand Central is when you finally leave, you pass by all these people who are clearly setting foot on a New York City sidewalk for the first time in their lives, and the expression of excitement and awe in their faces is always incredibly moving to see. This time I passed a trio of twenty-something visitors, who were staring in wonder at the generally nondescript though relatively tall Lincoln Building across the street. (The only reason I even know its name is that I had a girlfriend who used to paralegal there during my college days.) I was tempted to nudge them, and direct their gaze to the left, towards the gleaming spire of the Chrysler Building. Or at least wait around until they stumbled across it themselves, just to see the expressions on their faces.

And then, walking back to the subway, I passed Martha Stewart strolling along the sidewalk alone, cell phone pressed to her ear. A classic New York moment: one of the most famous people in the country, walking down a busy street, and no one is paying the slightest attention to her.

Toy Story

Any budding entrepreneurs out there waiting to create the next toy empire? I have the plan for you.

As some of you know, I am the father of two little boys: a two-and-a-half-year-old, and a ten-month-old. Over the past few months, we've been plagued by the younger boy, Rowan, going through the exact same phase that his older brother did at a comparable point: he is obsessed with grownup objects that look vaguely like they might be some kind of toy but emphatically are not. Cell phones, landline phones, remote controls, electric fans, PDAs humidifiers, lamps, anything at all with an electric cord attached to it. The more dangerous, the better. If we had a suitcase nuke hanging around in our living room, I'm sure he'd be in to that as well.

Now, if you've ever spent any time in a modern toy store, you know that the shelves are amply stocked with kiddie versions of most of these things: baby's first cell phone, little plastic lanterns, oversized remote control-like gadgets, day-glo keyboards. We have purchased most of these items, and they sit around our parlor floor and the boys' room like dejected orphans. Rowan has no interest in them whatsoever. I know that this is all about our prohibition: he wants to chew on the humidifier cord because 1) cords are delicious (duh!), but just as importantly because 2) we scream and race across the room every time he goes for it. But the problem here is that he's clearly picked up a general pattern here, one that defines the category of toy objects itself: the shiny, colorful, plasticky things are the things that mom and dad want me to play with, while all the black and beige things with cords are The Forbidden.

So here's my proposal: a line of toddler toys that are totally indistinguishable from Actual Consumer Electronics, save one key attribute: they are incapable of killing or maiming little children. Where appropriate, they sport fake electric cords, perhaps even with fake sockets you can suction-cup to the wall. There are no fluorescent dinosaurs on them, no Disney characters. Everything looks from a few feet away like it's right out of the Sharper Image catalog.

I think there's a quick million to be made here. Any takers?

Verizon And The Turing Test

So maybe I'm a little out of touch with the latest developments in customer service, but I just got off a pretty amazing phone call with Verizon. We'd been out of town on vacation the past ten days, and when we got back to Brooklyn, the phone lines were overrun with static. So I call up Verizon on the cell phone today, and after punching in my home phone number, I get connected to a technician. She asks me again for the number, and then asks what the problem is. I explain that it's a noisy line, and she asks if it's affecting all the lines, and all calls. I say yes to both. As she runs a line test on her end, we discuss a number of home diagnostic tests that I can do to figure out where the problem originates, which I ultimately decline to do. When her line test fails to detect the problem, she offers to send a repairman out to the house, and we agree on a date and time.

All in all, it's a five minute call, and entirely pleasant, conversational, and effective. The only thing odd about it was the fact that was talking to a computer the entire time. You could tell from listening that I was talking to a machine, of course, though the conversation was perfectly fluid, with no strange pauses or requests for me to say something again. But I suspect if you read a transcript of the exchange you'd have no way of telling that there weren't two humans on the line. I kept waiting for her to finish her introductory routine and drop me off with an actual flesh-and-blood person, but the drop-off never arrived.

I'm not sure whether I should feel happy or creeped out by this call, but there it is.

Verizon And The Turing Test

So maybe I'm a little out of touch with the latest developments in customer service, but I just got off a pretty amazing phone call with Verizon. We'd been out of town on vacation the past ten days, and when we got back to Brooklyn, the phone lines were overrun with static. So I call up Verizon on the cell phone today, and after punching in my home phone number, I get connected to a technician. She asks me again for the number, and then asks what the problem is. I explain that it's a noisy line, and she asks if it's affecting all the lines, and all calls. I say yes to both. As she runs a line test on her end, we discuss a number of home diagnostic tests that I can do to figure out where the problem originates, which I ultimately decline to do. When her line test fails to detect the problem, she offers to send a repairman out to the house, and we agree on a date and time.

All in all, it's a five minute call, and entirely pleasant, conversational, and effective. The only thing odd about it was the fact that was talking to a computer the entire time. You could tell from listening that I was talking to a machine, of course, though the conversation was perfectly fluid, with no strange pauses or requests for me to say something again. But I suspect if you read a transcript of the exchange you'd have no way of telling that there weren't two humans on the line. I kept waiting for her to finish her introductory routine and drop me off with an actual flesh-and-blood person, but the drop-off never arrived.

I'm not sure whether I should feel happy or creeped out by this call, but there it is.

The Swingers Club

Normally when I post here to point you to a new article of mine, I like to say a few things about the subject matter of the piece, or a little back story about how I came to write it. But for once, I'd like to concentrate on the art direction of an essay, not the actual words themselves. If you happen to have a copy of the latest Wired (the one with Peter Jackson on the cover) turn to page 118 and prepare to have a good laugh at my expense. I'd written a fun piece for them about how accurate golf simulations have become -- basically you can improve your real-world golf game by playing virtual golf on your Xbox. As the piece was working its way through copy-edit, I got a call from their art department saying that they wanted to do a photo shoot for the piece with me as the lead subject. My brain was immediately filled with glamour shots of me wearing my best noted-cultural-critic look of intense rumination, glamour shots of me mulling the blurred line between the real and the virtual. All of my essays should have photos of me accompanying them, I thought. How appropriate that Wired -- with its legendary ahead-of-the-curve design sensibility -- should be the first to realize this.

And then I showed up for the photo shoot, and was greeted by a pair of yellow pants, a green jacket, an argyle sweater, and a hat that hasn't been worn without irony anywhere in the civilized world for nearly thirty years. You can get a sense of the picture from this smaller image here, but I assure you the full-size version alone is worth the cover price of Wired. My friend Rael described it best: I look like a demented leprechaun.