Michael Kantor

City at Night

But not from this weekend when it was cold and rainy.

Taste and Quality

It's not "junk food," it's quality food.

The term "junk food" is really just a way that rich people can look down on poor people but feel morally justified about it.

Man dies running Baltimore Marathon

Yesterday, a 23-year-old man died while running the Baltimore Marathon.

A few days ago, I discovered a blog post listing the top 10 reasons NOT to run marathons, and the blogger seems to know a lot about medical science. He cites published articles from medical journals in support of the contention that marathons are bad for your health.

Why do people participate in this unhealthy sport?

First fall colors

This is the first weekend I've noticed any fall colors in the trees in Manhattan.

Don't let your kids attend community college

Out in certain parts of the internet, some people have been spouting “wisdom” that parents should save money by having their kids start out at a cheap community college. That turns out to be very bad advice:

Bright, well-prepared community college students are 36 percent less likely to make it through to a bachelor's than similarly qualified students who start their degrees at four-year schools. Bowen realizes that message is likely to rile politicians and students who are hoping to use community colleges to save money in this economy but notes that his findings confirm those of others: "It is pretty hard to argue with the data . . . . If you want a bachelor's and you can start out at a good four-year institution, that is what you should do."

Why do community college students fall by the educational wayside so often? Other research has shown the influence of motivated and challenging peers, who are not always present in community college classrooms. Many community college students also have complained over the years about the failure of their schools to direct them to classes that will count as transfer credits. In addition, Bowen says many students are probably put off by complicated transfer processes.

So if you care about your kids’ futures, make sure they start out at a real four-year college. Don't be a cheapskate.

Also, if your kid goes to the best four-year school he can get into, his chance of graduating will increase:

Thousands of bright, qualified students apply only to lower-ranked schools where their grades and tests scores are above those of the average student. But the new study finds that those who attend such "safety" schools are far more likely to drop out than those who get into "reach" schools. "It is counterintuitive," Bowen says. "You might think that if Sally goes to a school where she is top dog, she will have a much easier time graduating. But that's not true. She has a better chance of graduating if she goes to school with other people as talented she is."

These findings are obviously related. If your kid hangs out with a lot of slackers (which will happen if he attends a lousy school), their slacker ways sometimes rub off.

How can the NY Times make more money?

Traditional revenue from advertising and sales of the print edition are falling, and the New York Times can’t figure out how to monetize its website. Giving stuff away for free is a business model which only works if the stuff costs very little to produce. The New York Times, however, seems to be quite an expensive operation. According to its 2008 annual report, the New York Times had an annual operating cost of $2.8 billion. That’s a lot of money!

The New York Times previously had the idea that people would be willing to pay $50 per year to read its op-ed pages. This didn’t work because the internet is full of high quality opinion articles which you can read for free.

I have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal’s website. It’s worth the money because the Journal has a lot of high quality articles which you can’t read anywhere else, and it’s still less expensive than paying for a print subscription.

Unfortunately for the New York Times, its content isn’t quite as unique. If the NY Times closed off its national and international news to non-subscribers, you could read the same stories at the Washington Post or CNN. Some would see unique value in the way the NY Times presents these stories, but the majority of internet readers, accustomed to reading the news for free, will turn to other websites.

An example of the type of content only available at the NY Times is the article currently atop the most-emailed list, 101 Simple Salads for the Season. Is this content worth paying for? Maybe if you’re the type of person who serves salads to a lot of guests and want to impress people with your knowledge of the latest trends in salads. I think I could live without it.

If the NY Times simply said, from now on, you can’t read our website unless you pay us, a certain percentage of readers would definitely pay. I would probably pay, but the majority of readers won’t. The New York times fears that the loss of readership would ultimately harm its reputation as the premier source of news, and is probably also hesitant about making predictions regarding what percentage of its internet readers, accustomed to reading the news for free, will pull out their credit cards.

One plan that’s guaranteed not to make a whole lot of money is the one described at Gawker in which the news remains free but subscribers are given access to special new content. Would I pay $50 per year to view “videos of [] reporters telling the story behind the story”? I don’t think so, who has time for that? I also don’t need a New York Times tote bag. The NY Times might make one or two million dollars a year from this plan, but it’s not going to save the company.

Maybe the only way to make the NY Times really profitable is to cut costs. Does it really require $2.8 billion to run the NY Times? The cynical view of corporate spending is that expenses always rise to the level of revenue available. Why can’t the Times produce a product nearly as good for a lot less money?

Why marathons?

I don’t understand marathons. They’re not healthy. The issue isn’t that exercise isn’t healthy, but rather that running 26 miles isn’t healthy.

From a recent New York Times article about why people don’t finish marathons:

Tim Gerspacher, a 40-year-old New Yorker with two marathons under his belt, could see the finish line for the New York City Marathon last November and was elated.

“It was the best race I had ever run in my life,” he said.

Then he collapsed.

Gerspacher tried to collect himself and attempt a few more steps but passed out. He woke up minutes later in a medical tent.

. . .

A day after ending up in the medical tent, he was hospitalized with severe kidney failure. Gerspacher said doctors told him that if he had delayed going to the hospital for another day, he probably would have died.

After reading the article, the question I wanted answered was not why people don’t finish marathons, but why do they start them in the first place?

Doing some more Googling on the subject, I came across an Ascribe Newswire article:

Dr. Arthur Siegel, director of Internal Medicine at McLean, and his collaborators analyzed the blood of marathoners less than 24 hours after finishing a race and found abnormally high levels of inflammatory and clotting factors of the kind that are known to set the stage for heart attack.

"My concern is for people who exercise thinking 'more is better,' and that marathon running will provide ultimate protection against heart disease," Siegel said. "In fact, it can set off a cascade of events that may transiently increase the risk for acute cardiac events."

So we see that marathons can cause kidney failure, and instead of making the heart healthier, as people think exercise does, they actually cause damage to the heart.

Marathon deaths are, unfortunately, all too common. At last year’s New York City marathon, two runners died. Earlier this year, a 46-year-old man died from a heart attack after completing the Rome marathon.

Besides being unhealthy, running 26 miles seems more like a punishment than something I would want to do for fun. Yet so many people love marathons. It seems as if half the people who live in Manhattan are training to run a marathon.

I’m sure a lot of people who find this blog post are in the category of people who run, or aspire to run, marathons. So the question I ask you is, why?

Remembering Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, died yesterday. Frank McCourt was also my high school English teacher at Stuyvesant High School during my senior year.

What was Mr. McCourt (as I knew him back then) like as a teacher? The answer is tremendously entertaining. In all of my years of education, there is no class I ever looked forward to as much as Mr. McCourt’s Creative Writing class. Mr. McCourt was brilliantly funny, with a dry and sarcastic wit which reminds one of Bob Newhart, but with an Irish brogue. Mr. McCourt had a talent for saying things that were on the edge of being either serious or a joke, and you couldn’t tell which.

I wish I could recall more of the specifics, but high school was a long time ago and, sadly, there are only a few things I still remember from his class. Some of his other students say he told a lot of stories about his miserable Irish childhood, but all I have are some vague recollections of him mentioning how hard his life was when he was a kid, and these brief anecdotes evoked nervous laughter because we couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. I figured they were gross exaggerations until I read Angela’s Ashes years later and discovered how truly miserable his childhood really was.

I do remember one class where he read from the Book of Genesis and made sarcastic comments. “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” he read from the Bible, and then he commented, “back then, God would just walk around.” Perhaps it doesn’t sound funny in writing, but he had a talent for saying things like this in a such a way that they were hilarious when you heard them.

It was the first time anyone had ever read the Bible to me; who knew there were actually some interesting stories in there? Mr. McCourt was dismayed that so few of his students had read the Bible. He said the Bible is an extremely important influence on Western literature, and to understand what the literature is about you have to know what’s in the Bible. Several years later, remembering Mr. McCourt’s advice, I finally bought my own copy of the Bible, and one day I still plan on reading it from cover to cover.

In retrospect, mocking the Bible was probably not prudent behavior for a public school teacher. I could imagine a teacher getting fired for doing that.

Mr. McCourt was certainly a great performer, but did I learn anything in his class? That’s a tough question. In his Creative Writing class, I wrote a rather mediocre play, but I was only seventeen, so the production of a great work of literature was probably beyond my capabilities. In his Senior English class the next semester, he made us read The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary. I was in my Lord of the Rings phase at the time, so I just didn’t get Cary. Once again, I’m going to plead the ignorance of being only seventeen years old. I’ve put The Horse’s Mouth on my short list of books to read; hopefully I will be able to appreciate as an adult what I didn’t get as a high school kid.

Whether or not I learned much English, I am grateful that I was able to have such a brilliant and memorable man for a teacher, and I offer my heartfelt condolences to his family.

Happy birthday, dad

My father with his grandsons (my nephews) at his 70th birthday party. Harrison, the one on the left, wasn’t very happy about having to pose for the photo.