Linda Holmes

I don’t write a ton of sex in books, but I once saw a woman describe my first book (which she hated for this reason) as not even containing a “real kiss.” Which, I’m sorry, is not true. That is not true!

People just … have theories. I’ll say that.

As soon as I saw the endorsement of basically “anything is okay if it’s funny,” I thought about a famous story that I think Hodgman used to tell about someone exhaustedly saying (to somebody else, “Oh, I get it. You’re *wacky*.”

I wonder how this went over with the rest of the band.

Ah, yeah. I am not much help there.

I don’t do much with music, but a lot of my good friends do!

Let me know if you’re going to visit, maybe Sus and I could meet you.

I have AB- blood and a teacher once told me I should try to donate. My veins were also too slow, and I failed.

I’ve had a bad couple of days for getting out over my skis a bit, I think because I’m so mad all the time. I’m sorry about that. I’m gonna hop off here for a bit.

Cities, then, are pushed toward a race to the bottom —not one driven by ideology, but by mobility. As high earners leave the tax base without leaving the economy, cities face pressure to lower taxes without lowering obligations. The burden of funding schools, transit, parks and public safety shifts to those who remain. Established cities and rising stars alike are caught in this trap. Cities cannot simply chase mobile residents by cutting taxes. That is a losing game. National governments are unlikely to solve this problem, and in any case it plays out at a global scale. Cities will have to respond on their own by rethinking what they tax. If income and wealth can move, cities must focus on what cannot: land and property, consumption and entertainment, visitors and tourism, commuters and employment, companies that operate locally and anchor institutions that are rooted in place.

What it’s more about is that when mobility allows rich people to (I am paraphrasing) sponge off a city’s advantages without living in it and paying taxes, the city can end up in a pinch. I’m still not sure I love it, but it’s not about whether a city can be itself without billionaires.

Can confirm that the piece is way more thoughtful than the headline. Appreciate the gift link!

(Clarifying.) I can’t tell you how much of a revelation it was when a tax professor told us sports tickets were so expensive in part because so many of them were written off. (I believe they have tightened this up and business entertainment is more limited deduction-wise than when I was in school.)

You cannot ever give someone enough if they think it is reasonable for them to have billions of dollars. Nothing you give them will secure anything.

If this is how you do it, It’s like paying a blackmailer. They’ll just come back for more.

The state or the city builds the stadium, pays for it, uses it to coddle *additional* rich people whose attendance is subsidized by business deductions. The billionaire benefits.

And a few years later, the exact same threats start again.

This will also happen with regular billionaires.

It’s an extension of what happens with sports teams. If you accept that (1) nothing can be done to prevent them from being moved and (2) they cannot be allowed to move, they essentially announce, “You will give me whatever I want. (For now. I will want more later.)”

If you accept this—that if billionaires leave, there is no city—you definitionally make yourself an oligarchy. Why shouldn’t they demand to pay no taxes of any kind? Be exempt from criminal laws? Why pay minimum wage?

If you define specific people as the sine qua non of your society, they own you.

Obviously I’m not going to pay to read this, so I’m not going to say the piece has no value, but the framing and selling of it is downright rank.

I don’t know, dudes, what is every city without billionaires, which is many many cities in the country and the world?

I’m not saying you can’t debate the economic impacts, but framing this as if the presence of billionaires drives *the identity of a city* is, frankly, extremely goofy.

I have heard this!

The years-long bit where Jamelle does all hedgehog movies (including one NON-SONIC hedgehog movie) is really a favorite of mine. I am weirdly psyched to hear this tomorrow.

Yes, agreed.

It’s really good though! It’s not terribly complicated, so you can make a lot easily (as a firehouse would need), and to a lot of people, I think it would have a kind of familiarity. One of my friends suggested it might be good with tater tots, and I immediately thought … yes, exactly.

Firehouse Chili Gumbo (Published 2017)

This recipe is the darndest thing. I’m not sure I’d call it chili *or* gumbo, but it’s extremely comforting. With the ketchup and steak sauce and stuff, it tastes like lovingly made cafeteria food—like the thing you would happily anticipate seeing on the menu once every three weeks.

Demi Moore “I strenuously object” vibes.

Right—people do like it! But when I was growing up, its cultural positioning in my world was definitely “food no one wants to eat.” Not true! But pervasive, and that makes it seem extremely funny.

I mean if Tom Wambsgans had been made the Secretary of HHS, he absolutely would have solved worries about beef prices by saying that everyone should eat liver, and then he would have complained that he got bad advice.

It’s not funny that the new advice in surviving high food costs is “stop complaining and eat this liver here,” but if it were hypothetically happening instead of actually happening, it would be VERY funny.

So possibly the Columbia student yesterday was released on a writ of … Mamdamus.

Okay sorry had to get it out of my head, apologies

Yes. In person I *jumped back*. (He was also, I must say, extremely extremely nice and friendly, the kind of person who really tries to help a panel interview go well.)

YouTube video by Collider Interviews Slow Horses: Christopher Chung Says It’s Rare for a Show to Stay This Good After 5 Seasons #nycc

He is VERY convincing as a very different dude from the one he actually is. youtube.com/shorts/tXKq7...

Oh that line is the BEST.

I moderated a SH event at NYCC and the funniest thing about it was how utterly smooth and impossibly charming (and gorgeous) Christopher Chung (who plays Roddy) actually is. In person, I was like, “He would make a good James Bond.”

Maybe? Or the result of some boss’s very very weird non-brain non-storm?