Restaurant quality: a supply side problem

The Chinese food in San Francisco's Chinatown is poor. The Chinese food in Los Angeles' Chinatown is also quite lousy. Yelp isn't necessarily the most accurate of judges, but good luck finding any Chinese restaurant in either Chinatown that can sniff an average review much north of 3 out of 5 stars.

The best Chinese food in both cities is outside the downtown areas. In the Bay Area, you can find much better Chinese food in Millbrae, Daly City, Cupertino, Santa Clara. In Los Angeles, the best Chinese food is East of Los Angeles, in places like San Gabriel, Monterey Park, Rosemead, and Alhambra.  

Having lived in those two cities most recently, I grew accustomed to having to drive a half hour or more from where I lived to seek out decent Chinese food. I knew many others who did the same. 

If great restaurants were located based on demand, you'd expect San Francisco to have really great Chinese food because the Chinese population in San Francisco is huge, and like most other Bay Area populations, they love to eat.

My theory is that the number of great restaurants in an area is a supply side problem. That is, great restaurants end up where the great chefs want to live, and where the best chefs want to live is not in Chinatown in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

First of all, the cost of living in San Francisco proper is exorbitant and getting worse (the Twitter IPO should help, no?). Secondly, the Chinatown area isn't really that desirable an area to live in the minds of many immigrants from Hong Kong, source of many of the world's great Chinese chefs. In the suburbs those immigrants can buy much more space for the money.

Furthermore, the demand for great food is so high that you don't necessarily have to locate somewhere with the population density of a major metropolitan area to sell out every night. A Japanese restaurant like Wakuriya in San Mateo here in the Bay Area is really difficult to get a reservation for. El Bulli was not in a major city, one had to trek out to Roses in Catalonia in Spain. As long as they can get access to the right great ingredients, whether locally or by delivery, great restaurants can locate just about anywhere and sell out.

Magic is storytelling

And storytelling is magic.  At least a certain type of storytelling.

Chris Jones builds on his great article "The Honor System," published in Esquire about a year ago, about a magician who stole a trick from another magician. The trick that was stolen was called Shadows, and the magician it was stolen from was none other than Teller, the quieter of the duo Penn and Teller. If you've never seen Shadows, it's just a beautifully conceived illusion, almost poetically concise.

As I describe it, I’m not doing justice to this trick. It is an amazing trick. The first time I saw it I was trying to figure it out: How did he do that? The second, and third and fourth time I saw it I just started watching it, just letting myself go into the magic; and the theater goes silent, silent, silent when he’s doing this trick. And in the dark you can hear people crying. It’s amazing. You’re just sitting there and you’ll hear a sob back here, and a sob back there. And all Teller’s doing is this magic trick.

As writers, we never get to see our audiences. I imagine that people are reading my stories, and laughing or crying or whatever I want them to be doing. But Teller can hear it, Teller can see his audience and see what he does, and doing that story made me want to be a magician. It just made me want to do something as special as Shadows. So I studied magic. And Teller told me something that I’ve never really forgotten. It’s my favorite quote that I’ve ever gotten from an interview. He said: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

My brother James and I really got into magic one summer years ago. James had the patience to practice until he became quite good. I never really stuck with it. But I have a deep appreciation for the art of performing, that desire for a storyteller's control over his audience.

Magic is often described as a form of storytelling, but Jones contemplates the reverse. What can storytellers learn from magicians? 

So these are the seven principles of magic, and I think they’re the seven principles of storytelling: palm, ditch, steal, load, simulation, misdirection, and switch.

Never mind the seven principles for a moment. We can make this even simpler. We can boil great magic, great storytelling, down to one basic principle. Some people think tricks are just designed to fool people. That’s what a trick is. It is to fool somebody. A great trick is more than that. Shadows is more than that. A trick is a lie — that’s totally true — but a great trick is a beautiful lie. The best tricks stoke a battle between your brain and your heart. You’re watching it, you know it’s not magic, you know in your head that no one is a real magician, but you see something so beautiful that moves you in your chest. For the best magic tricks — there’s a real collision between those two things — where what you see is impossible, you know it’s impossible, but it’s so beautiful you want to believe it’s true. And great magic, great storytelling, has that battle between your head and your heart, but you want your heart to win. That’s when you have a really great story. When someone reading it knows something intellectually, but the spiritual component of it, the emotional component of it overpowers whatever they’re thinking.

The case for hate speech

Jonathan Rauch, a prominent gay rights advocate, on why he hopes the boycott of Ender's Card fails: 

Fortunately, Card’s claim is false. Better still, it is preposterous. Most fair-minded people who read his screeds will see that they are not proper arguments at all, but merely ill-tempered reflexes. When Card puts his stuff out there, he makes us look good by comparison. The more he talks, and the more we talk, the better we sound.

I can think of quite a few reasons why boycotting Ender’s Game is a bad idea. It looks like intimidation, which plays into the right’s “gay bullies” narrative, in which intolerant homosexuals are purportedly driving conservatives from the public square. It would have little or no effect on Card while punishing the many other people who worked on the movie, most of whom, Hollywood being Hollywood, probably are not anti-gay (and many of whom almost certainly are gay). It would undercut the real raison d’être of the gay-rights movement: not to win equality just for gay Americans but to advance the freedom of all Americans to live as who they really are and say what they really think. Even if they are Orson Scott Card.

Above all, the boycott should fizzle, and I expect it will fizzle, because gay people know we owe our progress to freedom of speech and freedom of thought. The best society for minorities is not the society that protects minorities from speech but the one that protects speech from minorities (and from majorities, too). Gay Americans can do the cause of equality more good by rejecting this boycott than by supporting it. I’ll see the movie—if the reviews are good.

I loved the book Ender's Game . It's a sci-fi classic. Orson Scott Card's comments about gay marriage are ignorant and hateful. All of the above?

Who do you want taking the last shot?

TrueHoop looked at the last 5 minutes of 2012 NBA playoff games to try to answer the question: who should take the last shot, your superstar or a random wide open teammate?

And you know what we found? The Archangel, Hero Ball offense isn't the best. Though it may not be as fun, if your star has a passing lane to a wide open shooter, that's almost certainly better.

Through last night's play, “go-to players” are shooting 41.8 percent (71-170), including 25.6 percent (11-43) from 3.

Other players who happen to be open are shooting 54.2 percent (58-107) on field goal attempts, including 36 percent (18-50) from 3.

That is a massive difference. Teams shooting 41.8 percent from the floor almost never beat teams shooting 54.2 percent. It is a strong reflection on the power of competing against no defense. 

You get a sense for why this might be watching NBA players warm up for a game. When they're shooting without anyone on them, NBA players make a shockingly high percentage of their shots.

Another entertaining data point to support this case: this video of Gilbert Arenas's 3-point shooting contest with teammate DeShawn Stevenson in practice in 2007. Both shot 100 3-pointers, Arenas using one hand from college 3-point range, DeShawn using two hands from NBA range. The outcome is entertaining, but just as impressive is the sheer number they make.

Make-up secrets of Marilyn Monroe

I never would have thought I'd watch a nearly 12 minute video on a woman's make-up techniques, but this video of Marilyn Monroe's unbelievably involved regimen was hypnotic.

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