Author: jbenton

When I was working in Toledo, the city (or more accurately, the newspaper) was obsessed with brain drain, the idea that the city’s bright young people were fleeing as quickly as they could. (To which most outside observers would say: well, duh.)
I wrote a few stories about this fairly intuitive phenomenon while at the paper, and it was always amusing to see how the city fathers tried to react to it. (It usually involved tax breaks to industries that promised minimum wage jobs, or paying for a new sports facility to watch thuggish minor-league hockey.)
This story, however, nails the origins of the problem better than anything else I’ve seen. It’s an examination of the importance of a “creative class” of (primarily) young artists, writers, and professionals to a city. It goes so far as to claim that the number of gays and rock bands in a city are a better predictor of economic growth than the usual economic development crap cities lay out.
“Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads ‘non-standard people welcome here.’ The creative class people I study use the word ‘diversity’ a lot, but not to press any political hot buttons. Diversity is simply something they value in all its manifestations. This is spoken of so often, and so matter-of-factly, that I take it to be a fundamental marker of creative class values. Creative-minded people enjoy a mix of influences. They want to hear different kinds of music and try different kinds of food. They want to meet and socialize with people unlike themselves, trade views and spar over issues.”
The folks who run places like Toledo would do well to read this piece and focus on smaller-scale improvements, rather than shoveling millions to hucksters promising big-box success.
(The final irony of one of those brain drain stories I wrote: it won a prize as Story of the Year from the Toledo Press Club. But when it came time for the awards ceremony, both of the story’s co-authors — Sam Roe and myself, both youngish educated folks — had already skipped town, he to the Trib, me to the DMN.)

Alas, crabwalk.com doesn’t have enough readers in Newark.

Great lines from an okay Wilco review:
“It puts me in mind of an anecdote from Jimmy McDonough’s new Neil Young bio. Young put Graham Nash in a rowboat, rowed the two of them to the middle of his lake, and played the Harvest album for him for the first time. Young’s house was wired up as the left speaker, and his entire barn as the right speaker. When somebody on shore asked Young how he liked the sound, he hollered, ‘MORE BARN!'”
I think I’m going to go around yelling “more barn!” for the rest of the evening.

If you live in Newark, New Jersey, I have two messages for you. First, I’m very sorry. Second, go to the polls today and vote for my old college teaching assistant, Cory Booker, who’s running for mayor at the tender age of 33.
Cory was my TA for a polisci class I took in college. I don’t pretend to know about Newark politics, but even in the ego-ridden environment of my alma mater, it was clear that Cory was a couple steps ahead of everybody else. (All-American football player and class president at Stanford, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Yale law graduate.) As one might expect in a city dominated by paleolithic machine politics, things have gotten a little messy, with Booker’s incumbent opponent even saying he gets funding from the KKK. (Both Booker and the incumbent are black, but Booker is evidently not quite black enough for the mayor’s tastes.) Go Cory!

Here’s my story on history teachers from today’s paper.

In case any Texan was wondering, this Texas Monthly article outlines the case of its headline quite nicely: Dallas Is Better Than Houston. (You need to be a Texas Monthly subscriber to read it, but really, shouldn’t you be anyway?) I spent chunks of my teenage summers in Houston, and I’ll take Dallas every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Some of the best lines (from the author, the late A.C. Greene):
– “Dallas has three seasons: summer, winter, and two weeks of fall, but Houston has only two: the beginning of summer, and the end. Houston humidity doesn’t just wilt your shirt, it eats away your courage. Smog is constant and ubiquitous, but Houston’s proud of it. It holds to the conceit that pollution is a sign of progress.”
– “The whole damn thing is too big, too spread out. Nobody quite knows for sure where he is in Houston. Even the taxi drivers are confused. Your chances are no better than three-in-five that coming from Houston Intercontinental Airport (second largest airport in Texas, the largest being DFW, need I note?) you’ll draw one who can deposit you where you want to go without having to stop and ask for help along the way. In some cities this sort of thing happens because the cab driver is too new. In Houston it happens because some part of town’s too new.”
– “I’m from Dallas,” you say, anywhere in the world, and for the next few minutes you don’t have to worry about making conversation. Everyone has an opinion about Dallas. But try saying you’re from Houston, and after the words “petroleum” and “rich” have been said a few times, the dialogue lapses.”
And a few choice quotes about the city:
– “Houston is an example of what can happen when architecture catches a venereal disease.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
– “After you’ve listened to the talk you begin to feel that the creation of the world, the arrangement of the solar system, and all subsequent events, including the discovery of America, were provisions of an all-wise Providence, arranged with a direct view to the advancement of the commercial interests of Houston.” — A. E. Sweet and J. A. Knox, 1882
– “I like you, Houston . . . you don’t put your slums in one unsightly place. You spread them all over the city.” — Architect O’Neil Ford

I’ll be on TXCN all night tonight talking about my story on the failings of U.S. history teachers. (It’ll be on tomorrow’s front page. Also, test your own knowledge of recent history with this dallasnews.com quiz that’ll run with my story.)

Anybody else think this is fairly shoddy journalism? It’s a classic reporter error to mistake a small movement in a counterintuitive niche into a full-blown trend.
The link to the story reads: HIV cases increasingly older and straighter. But the story doesn’t include anything at all about HIV becoming more of a heterosexual problem. (Michael Fumento, despite occasionally being something of a nutcase and having an alarming love for animated GIFs, has written often and persuasively about the media’s attempts to make AIDS seem more heterosexual than it is. On one hand, it’s a laudable attempt to bring attention to a serious problem; on the other, though, it’s something of an insult to the gays whose deaths are apparently not enough of a tragedy to get people interested.)
The thrust of the story is about an alleged boom in AIDS infections among the elderly. There’s only one fact in the story to back this up: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the proportion of Americans over 50 with AIDS has risen steadily from 10 percent in the early 1990s to 13.4 percent in 1999, the most recent figures available.”
First off, the phrasing’s wrong: it should be the proportion of Americans with AIDS who are over 50, not the other way around. (It’s not as if 13.4 percent of old people have AIDS; it’s that 13.4 percent of people with AIDS are old.)
Second, the story omits an extraordinarily obvious point. Think about it: there are two ways to be an old person with AIDS. First, you could contract HIV at an old age. Or second, you could be contract HIV at a younger age and just live longer.
In the 1980s, before AZT, before protease inhibitors, AIDS wasn’t something you lived with for decades. Once symptoms developed, you generally died in short order. Now, of course, people can live a decade or more with proper medication. So let’s say you were a 42-year-old gay man in 1990, and you contracted HIV. Thanks to protease cocktails, you’re now a thriving 54-year-old man with HIV. Sure, you’d be part of that 3.4 percent increase in older AIDS patients, but it’s got nothing to do with older people getting infected more often, the thesis of the story.
The only anecdote given in the story is of Jane Fowler, a 67-year-old with HIV. But the story points out she contracted HIV from a man she was dating 17 years ago! How can an infection in 1985 be part of a rising infection trend today? The fact she’s lived longer is, however, sign that it’s people living longer that’s behind any numerical rise.
Even the big official quote in the story — “It is an area we want to be concerned about,” said Robert Janssen, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. “Potentially there is a risk of there being increases in new infections in older people” — is not convincing. (Any reporter will tell you that’s exactly the kind of fuzzy quote you get if you call someone up and say: “Hi, I’m doing a story about this growing problem. Isn’t it a growing problem?”)
Maybe the basis of the story is accurate, and more old people are being infected. But the reporter hasn’t done anything to prove it here.

For the three of you interested, the Josh Update since Thursday: Spent Thursday night with Laura out at the DMA, getting a sneak peak at the new Thomas Struth retrospective and listening to those wacky boys in the Observer-approved Chomsky. (That would be the Dallas Observer, not the New York Observer.)
Then Friday morning, it was off to Cecil, Wisconsin, for the mumble-mumble birthday of Kelly. (On the legendary Cheese Factory Road no less!) It was good to see some of the old Toledo crew and to revel in the smell of cow manure on Kelly’s family’s dairy farm. Plus, beer’s cheaper there than in Dallas. The only real drawback was the thick blanket of cigarette smoke in every Wisconsin home and bar, which left me unable to breathe for big chunks of the weekend. But hey, breathing’s optional, right?
Larry King-style dot-dot-dots: Oliver North was in line behind me at DFW, followed by a crowd of middle-aged Rush-listening middle managers who apparently believe selling arms to Iranian militants to fund the overthrow of a legitimate government is downright patriotic!… I was accused of being an industrial spy in a cheese-novelty shop… Kelly’s family owns a cow named Satan…

My college officemate Gabriel Snyder is moving, from the New York Observer to Us Weekly. So I guess I’ve read the last of his writing for a while. It’s disappointing, since he interviewed me for an Observer media column a couple weeks ago, and I suppose it’ll never see print now.