As'ad AbuKhalil

Poor young men in the inner cities get beaten regularly by police but when rich white kids get bothered by police, it is a major news story in the New York Times. The New York Times is very protective of rich white kids at Yale University.
NY Times

Not all white, but mostly. Click on the photo: the earnest indignant expressions.

Brad DeLong

Henry Farrell Continues His War on Rubber Tomatoes...
I, by contrast, say that you have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.

Interesting to watch the divisions in the "reality based" community open up along the lines I noted years ago.

Reuters

A bill that homeowners advocates warn will make it more difficult to challenge improper foreclosure attempts by big mortgage processors is awaiting President Barack Obama's signature after it quietly zoomed through the Senate last week.
The bill, passed without public debate in a way that even surprised its main sponsor, Republican Representative Robert Aderholt, requires courts to accept as valid document notarizations made out of state, making it harder to challenge the authenticity of foreclosure and other legal documents.
The timing raised eyebrows, coming during a rising furor over improper affidavits and other filings in foreclosure actions by large mortgage processors such as GMAC, JPMorgan and Bank of America.
Questions about improper notarizations have figured prominently in challenges to the validity of these court documents, and led to widespread halts of foreclosure proceedings.
The legislation could protect bank and mortgage processors from liability for false or improperly prepared documents.

The White House said it is reviewing the legislation.

NY Times

The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted 12 to 2 this morning to approve a package of fare increases for its subways, buses and commuter railroads, the third time in three years that New Yorkers face a stiff rise in the cost of getting around.
...On Dec. 30, when the increases take effect, a 30-day unlimited card will cost $104, up from $89, a 17 percent increase, while an unlimited weekly pass will cost $29, up from $27. Single rides will rise 25 cents to $2.50.

DSquared ["That's a bingo"]

(actually, the more I think about this, the more I take a view on the extreme epistemological and methodological left wing; I don’t think that “lack of ambiguity” is necessarily a desirable characteristic in something that’s meant to measure an inherently ambiguous and contested property. Similarly, the ease of comparison of Gini coefficients between different periods and countries is not a good thing, and so is scale independence. Scale matters in economics).

A friend of mine refers to Frank Gehry's architecture as the end of craft. I don't agree, but we do live in an age of engineering, and of an art and culture of engineering as physical and intellectual "design". Without saying anything one way or the other about his abilities as a cook, the interest in Ferran Adrià has as much to do with the new model of engineering as with food. A couple of years ago flipping channels I watched Jacques Pepin for a few minutes talking to an old friend, reminiscing about their student years and what he said was the dying "craft" of cooking. While he was talking he demonstrated seven or more ways of slicing a potato, his friend smiling at the memory. Some of the techniques were very complex and Pepin's hands moved fast, with the skill of a tradesman not a designer.