Detroit

Fat for Thought

New York's latest public hearing shows yet again that the people who testify at these things are as self-selected a bunch as the famous Reader's Digest poll predicting Landon in a landslide over Roosevelt. What's striking, though, is the conflict between the city's proposal to ban trans fats and its proposal to require chain restaurants to conspicuously post calorie counts. Are people unable to make their own decisions, or do that they just lack the information needed to make them? And how many Big Mac lovers are there who would reconsider, if only they had a calorie count to consult?

More on the evils of obesity here, along with the cartoon below, which New York City Health Commissioner Tom Frieden may have taken a bit too seriously.

Which leads to our modest proposal for Bloomberg to take things to the next level, and start zoning obesity. (hat tip: Planetizen)

Or perhaps he could force the Mets to re-sign Vince Coleman and Bobby Bonilla to protect New Yorkers from the apparent relationship between championship baseball and crime. For the record, while St. Louis reprised its World Series put-down of Detroit to lay claim to the title of America's most violent city, the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn held the number one slot for metropolitan areas.

Monday Quick Hits—Proximity for Better or Worse

—Congrats to the Tigers for the win last night, but the World Series won't help Detroit very much, and the Super Bowl back in February didn't either.

—More coming this week on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's purchase of the Chicago Board of Trade to create the world's biggest exchange.

—Old fashioned physical proximity still matters in Silicon Valley, while Wall Street looks to Pennsylvania to back up, spread out and spread risk. (More at WallStreetWest.org).

—Speaking of spread-out New York, Brookings finds exurbia ascendant north of the city.

—On the left coast, Witold Rybczynski looks at San Francisco and when bad architecture happens to good cities.

—Back East, The Boston Globe is on track for its first unprofitable year ever, and Julia Vitullo-Martin compares Philadelphia to Boston and finds Philly's culture wanting. (Of course Boston being THE university town, with a built-in high tech sector as such, also helps).

—And Harry Siegel in the New York Post on how Governor Pataki and his fellow incumbocrats hollowed out New York's GOP.