Peak to Peak

There’s a lot of research behind the idea that we measure how well we’re doing in life not by absolute measures, but by relative ones.

Most people would (perhaps obviously) choose to earn $75,000 over $50,000, all else being equal.

Yet change that choice to be between earning $50,000 while your friends and colleagues earn $40,000, or earning $75,000 while your friends and family earn $100,000, and the popular option flips. Most people choose to earn less overall, rather than to earn more overall while still earning less than those around them.

Evolutionarily, we’re wired to look for our standing within a group. We determine how we’re doing by checking how well we compare.

And that, I think, is the danger of Twitter.

Most people’s average days are, well, pretty average. Yet within any given day, at least one relatively interesting thing is likely to happen. That’s the part people tweet about:

“I’m at [fill in the blank interesting place]!”

“Just ran into [fill in the blank important person]!”

“OMG! I love [trendy thing]!”

Basically, you get the highlight reel of all your acquaintances’ lives, 140 characters at a time. All of whom, extrapolating from there, seem to spend their entire lives attending parties, being fabulous, and generally living very well.

But, like in reality TV, the trick is in the editing. You live the entirety of your life (the highs, middles, and lows), and only read about their lives’ peaks.

So, rather than let Twitter depress you with comparison-driven angst, consider a thought experiment I personally enjoy: Tweets that your friends should publish if they were trying to reflect the full balance of their lives, but probably never will:

“Still working on [busywork related to current mind-numbing project]!”

“Eating a tub of Haagen Dazs alone on the couch while watching TV again!”

“Holy crap, I just had really explosive diarrhea, and boy did it burn!”

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November 18, 2010

Sushi 2010

Six years back, I wrote a run-down of NYC sushi that inexplicably made the rounds of New York blogs, food blogs, etc., and for years floated atop Google’s results for ‘new york sushi’ and ‘sushi nyc’.

By now, that post is far out of date, but more than a handful of friends and colleagues still ask where to find excellent sushi.

So, to help them and you out, allow me to share the complete list:

1. Sushi Yasuda

That’s it. Seriously. I admit to a bit of paternal pride, having pronounced Sushi Yasuda as the future king of New York a few weeks after it first opened eight years ago. But, really, by now, everything else is varying degrees of crap.

I’m not sure what accounts for the decline, exactly. Perhaps fewer diners in a poor economy yields less fish turnover, and therefore older fish. Perhaps restaurants are just scrimping on quality to save. Or, perhaps, as my father (whose foundation focuses on island healthcare) contends, the problem is at the supply, rather than demand, end of the chain: small island countries have been hit particularly hard by the economic downtown, leading to fewer people working fishing boats, less frequent flights to ship fish back to the mainland, etc.

Whatever the reason, despite the reputation, despite the price point, by now, most of the city’s high-end sushi just isn’t that good. Sushi Yasuda’s is.

And, of course, there’s the great story behind the place:

Chef Yasuda was a young hot-shot chef in Japan in the ’80’s, inventing a style of eel preparation that spread nationally in the same way as Nobu’s miso black cod has here in the US. (As an aside, there is no such thing as black cod – it’s really just sable. Nobu took a cheap and widely available cut of fish, covered it with an equally cheap glaze, then re-branded it to sound exotic, and has been rolling in the dollars ever since).

Anyway, Yasuda comes to New York, and takes a job at Hatsuhana, the priciest, most venerable sushi stop at that time. Quickly, he rises up to star status.

And then, one day, like many days before, somebody comes in and orders a spicy tuna roll.

This time, however, Yasuda refuses. He can’t take it. Never again, he says, will he serve spicy mayo sauce.

He and the owners fight it out. The Hatsuhana side contends that, while spicy mayo is indeed a completely inauthentic way to destroy excellent fish, we Americans are too stupid, too unsophisticated to appreciate the real deal.

Yasuda, instead, argues that we’ve simply never been given the chance.

Hence Sushi Yasuda. Exceedingly good, exceedingly traditional sushi.

Try it out. Or better yet, don’t. Because, honestly, after you do, you’re going to have a hell of a time appreciating the sushi that’s served these days anywhere else.

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November 17, 2010

When in Rome

I grew up in Silicon Valley, at the very beginning of the personal computer revolution and its attendant startup boom. So perhaps it was inevitable that I’d start some tech companies, or spend my life in various entrepreneurial pursuits.

But I grew up in Silicon Valley also largely by chance. My parents, born and bred New Yorkers, headed out West only after my father matched post-med-school at Stanford’s residency program. Just as easily, he could have ended up at a hospital here in New York, or in Boston, or down in DC. And I always wonder, had I been born in any of those places, might I have been more likely to follow a different path?

Would a childhood in DC have pulled me into politics? Would Boston have kept me in the world of medicine? Here in New York, would I have leaned towards banking and the public markets?

My best guess: definitely.

As Malcom Gladwell points out in his (admittedly less than stellar) Outliers, it’s all too easy to overlook the power of place. Which is something I’ve been thinking about of late, as Jess and I still, slowly, mull over where we’d like to live, in both the short and long term.

In theory, with technology of all kinds flattening distances, physical location should matter less and less. But, in practice, that hardly seems to be the case. In just the past few days, I’ve met a dozen or so people at events around the city, all of whom intersect in some interesting way with my work at Cyan, or Jess’ work in the fashion world, or with CrossFit NYC, or with something else somehow relevant to our life. And, indeed, those serendipitous meetings, the building of new weak ties, is exactly what you lose in absenting yourself from a physical community.

The problem is, those communities are also quite specific. So far as I can see, the only place where substantial pockets of fashion, film, and finance people intersect is right here in New York City. So, toy as we might with fantasies of complete escape, Portland, Maine becomes practical only if I’m ready to switch careers to lobstering.

Still, there’s an upside to this line of thought. After a decade of life in Manhattan, and as a relative newlywed, it’s all too easy to lapse into eating lunch in the office, into spending the evening at home with Jess on the couch. So it’s good to be occasionally reminded that the only way we can justify the crazy rents, small footprints, and booming street noise of our New York offices and apartment is to get out of them, and to meet the slew of smart, interesting people all around this city.

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November 2, 2010

Mobile Chicken Sex

All chicks, male and female baby chickens, look more or less precisely the same. Yet the females grow into hens – able to lay eggs – while the males grow into roosters – no eggs, just lots of noise.

The brutal reality, then, is that breeders want to kill the roosters as young as possible, before wasting months of feed, space, and care on those unwanted birds.

Hence the chicken sexer: a professional able to divine the chicks’ genders at just a day old.

Apparently, however, chicken sexers can’t, by and large, explain how they know the gender. Instead, new chicken sexers learn their craft sitting at the side of an experienced sexer, watching the pro sort male and female, male and female, for months at a clip, until they, too, can reliably spot male or female themselves.

By now, after six years of owning CrossFit NYC, after having watched literally thousands of people learn perfect form on movements like the squat, pullup, and deadlift, I’ve begun to feel a bit like a chicken sexer of human movement.

I see someone come in the door of the gym, and even before they start working out, I can already tell that they have low back pain or shoulder pain, that they have tight hip flexors or calves, that they’re unable to squat to full depth or lock a weight out overhead.

And, of course, I notice it outside the gym, too. The difference is, if I tell one of our members at CrossFit NYC that they might want to stretch their external hip rotators, they’re usually grateful for the insight. Whereas, if I inadvertently blurt out as much to someone in my apartment building’s elevator, I get looks that put me on par with Silence of the Lambs‘ Buffalo Bill.

Still, I can’t help it. The vast majority of rotator cuff tears, blown ACLs, replaced hips – the movement injuries of modern life – could be easily avoided, with just a little time and attention spent on fixing imbalances and dysfuction before they spiral all the way to breakdown.

If any of you want to dork out, I’m happy to recommend a dozen great books on the topic. But, for most people, I now have a far simpler, faster recommendation:

The Mobility Workout of the Day.

The site’s about two months old, started when Kelly Starrett, a doctor of physical therapy in San Francisco (as well as an owner of San Francisco Crossfit, a national champion whitewater rafter and kayaker, and a generally smart and excellent guy) started shooting short videos of himself with his new iPhone.

The premise is simple: prescribing ten minutes or less of guided, high-impact stretching each day.

Whether you’re an athlete looking to maximize performance, or just a desk jockey looking to make it through the work day without your back freezing up, the Mobility WOD is a great place to start.

Besides, it’s only ten minutes. Certainly, not permanently jacking yourself up should be worth that kind of investment, no?

If you’re feeling saucy, I’d recommend starting from the beginning, with the first post, as you’ll learn a huge amount from each one, though you can also safely jump in at pretty much any point.

Stretch it out! Or don’t. But then don’t complain to me when everything hurts.

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October 21, 2010

Burbs

For the past four years we’ve been living together, Jess and I have been in the apartment she rightly calls my former bachelor pad. So we’ve been looking, for a while, for a next place to live.

As of now, we don’t have kids. But, in the next few years, we’re likely to pop out a first. Which adds a whole new level of complication to the search. Ideally, we’d find a two bedroom. But if we’re looking to buy, rather than rent, here in Manhattan, nice two bedroom / two baths easily creep up to the $2m mark. Which is, obviously, ridiculous. And while Brooklyn is cheaper, it isn’t hugely so.

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of schools – New York being a place where parents unblinkingly spend $30k a year to send their child to pre-school, though only after having pulled strings and competed for slots in the “right” ones.

In the rest of the country, this is the prime argument for the suburbs. And, indeed, 25 years ago, someone with kids in Manhattan (aside from multi-generationally wealthy New York families who send their kids as legacies to Chapin) would have already moved out. Staying in the city meant having essentially failed; the nice house in the suburbs was the overt goal.

Amongst my peers, however, the equation has flipped. We apparently all want to stay. Moving to the suburbs is, it seems, an admission of defeat, a sign you couldn’t make it in the city.

Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work in this new world order. While more and more of us want in rather than out, the number of two and three bedroom apartments, and the number of slots in good schools, has remained largely the same.

But the suburbs of New York are equally problematic. Most, for example, are a surprisingly long commute away. Unlike other US metros, that are now populating their first wave of suburbs, New York is working on it’s second or third. It could be argued that New York, in fact, largely invented the suburb, with families initially moving on up to outer Queens and Brooklyn, upper Bronx, or Staten Island.

By now, however, Sunnyside or Yonkers have long since reached their peak, and starkly declined. So the real estate that would elsewhere hold prime post-city living has instead become no-mans-land, thirty minutes of commute to be passed through. (Though perhaps this isn’t entirely new, but simply enlarged, since Fitzgerald trained past the ‘valley of ashes’, en route to the ‘East Egg’ of Great Neck eighty years back.)

As a result, even New York hedge fund partners pay good money to commute to lower Connecticut, as much as an hour and a half each way.

And with most of those suburbs, there’s the issue of what you find when you get there. I grew up in Palo Alto, CA; Jess in Newton, MA. While both are ostensibly suburbs, they’re more accurately small cities that just happen to be near larger cities (San Francisco and Boston, respectively). Whereas many suburbs of New York are really suburbs. The two restaurants they have close at 9:00. On the plus side, they don’t have a Starbucks; and, on the downside, they don’t have a Starbucks.

All of which leaves Jess and me without much of a clue what to do next. We’re busy looking, weighing the advantages of a grocery store down the block against not finding somebody else’s underwear somehow mixed in with your laundry after a trip to the building’s ill-maintained laundry facility.
Fortunately, as demand and property taxes are working against us no matter what we choose, at least we’ll find a way to pay more than it’s worth for a solution that’s less optimal than it would be anywhere else. God bless New York.

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October 17, 2010

Four

A bit more than four years back, I got a message on Friendster (a Facebook predecessor that was both cooler and far less cool, all at once) from a girl named Jess. The message was long and rambling and said that she didn’t really write this sort of email (as cliche as she knew that sounded), but that I kept showing up on her home page as part of the ‘singles near you’ feature, and that she had Googled me up and found my website, etc., etc.

Ah, I thought. A crazy girl.

So I deleted the message.

Then, a few hours later, I got another message. This Jess girl had shared the first message with her younger sister who had said that you absolutely couldn’t just send that kind of thing to someone you hadn’t met, because they would think you were totally insane. So, to prove she wasn’t nuts, she then proceeded to essentially do a deep reading of her own first email, explaining jokes, etc., in a message even longer than the first.

Due to apparent technological ineptitude, she sent this second message three times.

By now, I was intrigued.

So, after much back and forth, exactly four years ago today, we met for drinks at Russian Samovar.

I was smitten. After that date, I was the one sending long messages (or, as previously discussed, faxes). And, long story short, Jessica Gold Newman is now sitting next to me as I write this on laptop on a flight back from Portland, Maine, where we celebrated our four year date-iversary, with huge amounts of foodie eats (a win for me), equally large amounts of terrifying vintage stuff and antiques (a win for her), and some time at the beach getting our first sun of the season (a win for both of us, though somewhat reduced for me, as she tans and I [after a solid twelve months locked indoors] hop straight to medium-well done]).

To which I say, god bless the internets. All my love to Jess, and looking forward to another four and four and forty and forty.

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June 20, 2010

Innovation Overshoot

Among the laundry list of other features Steve Jobs demonstrated this morning on the brand new 4G iPhone was a secondary, front-facing video camera, allowing users to video-chat with each other.

Amazing! Straight out of the Jetsons!

Or, honestly, not so amazing. At least not to me. While I appreciated the wow factor intellectually, Jobs’ demo didn’t leave me much viscerally impressed. After all, Jess and I already video chat whenever one of us in on the road, using Google Video on our respective MacBooks.

This afternoon, however, I was truly bowled over. I sent a two-page fax. And, as happens each time I use one of those machines, seeing paper going in one end of a fax machine in my office and knowing that a copy was coming out the other end of a fax machine somewhere hundreds of miles away completely boggled my mind.

Obviously, as compared to even plain-text email, the fax machine and its simple transmission protocol is roughly akin to cave painting. Which, perhaps, is why it so impresses me. I can just barely comprehend the engineering involved in faxing, the difficulty of somehow turning my paper into a series of screeches that another machine can translate back to scribbles on a page.

Whereas by the time I think about email – or certainly video conferencing – my mind can’t even begin to grasp the complexity.

As Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indestinguishable from magic. Which, perhaps, is the problem.

Growing up, I loved magic – learning tricks, watching magicians on TV. But magicians like David Copperfield, whose tricks (I recall seeing him walk through the Great Wall of China) were completely inscrutable, never really stuck with me.

My heart, instead, belonged to Penn & Teller. The plucky pair would gleefully give away the secret to their tricks, then re-perform them. And, the second time through, I’d be doubly impressed, marvelling at the skill and dexterity I suddenly realized that pulling off the tricks required.

So, perhaps, to really appreciate that 4G video chatting, I’d simply need to spend some time puzzling through the technology involved. Apple engineers, if you want to send along a crash course, feel free. And if you really want to wow me, you can send it via fax.

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June 7, 2010

McGyver’s Kitchen

These days, in the professional cooking world, sous vide [for those who don’t speak French, it’s said ‘soo veed’] is all the rage. The term literally means ‘under vacuum’, and was developed in the mid-70’s, though it’s only come broadly into vogue within the past couple of years.

The idea itself is simple: vacuum pack food (say, a steak), then place the food into a contant-temperature water bath. After a sufficient period of submersion, the food cooks to the same temperature as the water.

Which, in a professional kitchen, is excellent. You can’t overcook a steak if it’s sous vide – after one hour or five, if the water is 128 degrees, the steak will similarly still be 128 degrees, a perfect medium-rare. You can sous vide an entire evening’s worth of steaks in advance, then pull them out, unseal them, and quickly sear a nice brown finish onto either side in less than two minutes apiece.

But beyond convenience, sous vide won converts through sheer deliciousness. After even an hour or two marinating in their own, vacuum-sealed juices, each of those aforementioned steaks would be far more juicy and tender than after any other mode of cooking. And the same applies to poultry, pork, seafood, vegetables, even eggs – at exactly 146 degrees, an egg is perfectly poached every time.

The downside: most home kitchens don’t come equipped with the requisite constant-temperature water-circulation baths, which are giant and hugely expensive.

Late last year, the very smart physician and nutrition author Dr. Michael Eades, fed up by that problem, brankrolled the development of a smaller, cheaper unit for home chefs – the Sous Vide Supreme. But, even then, “small” and “cheap” are relative. We barely have room for food on our NYC apartment’s kitchen countertops, much less for yet another appliance. And at $500, I was pretty sure I couldn’t justify it to Jess, who could surely line up several dozen smarter ways to spend that money.

So, the Sous Vide Supreme moved to my ‘someday’ wishlist. But my sous vide curiosity still stood.

Enter the beer cooler.

Somewhere in my web trawling, I stumbled across an article on Serious Eats about a ghetto-fabulous sous vide substitution: put the food into Ziploc bags with the air squeezed out, as a substitution for vacuum packing; and then pour water heated on the stove-top into a cheap beer cooler as a substitution for the water bath. At least for foods that can sous vide quickly – in less than an hour or two – a beer cooler can keep the temperature steady for long enough to do the trick.

Obviously, I was intrigued. But also fairly skeptical. I picked up a small cooler from Duane Reade for $14.99, or roughly 97% off the cost of the Sous Vide Supreme. Surely, I thought, something – everything – must be lost in that kind of translation.

Still, as we were on the way home from the Barnes Foundation yesterday (a separate blog post coming, but, in short, an inexpressibly amazing place to visit), we stopped at a Costco in New Jersey to restock some essentials in bulk, and I picked up two nice looking flank steaks. I rationalized that both together were still cheaper than one would have been back in the city, and that I’d have the second on standby if my sous vide attempt destroyed the first.

At home, I placed one of the steaks in a Ziploc gallon freezer bag, then tossed in a liberal amount of salt, some pepper, three or four garlic cloves, and a sprig of thyme. Then I sealed the bag, doing my best to squeeze out the air, before laying it at the bottom of the cooler.

On the stovetop, I boiled water, checking the temperature every few minutes. 110 degrees. 115. 120. I stepped away to slice some vegetables, then came back to find the water had overshot to 150 degrees. So I turned off the heat. A few minutes later, it was 148. So I dropped in some ice cubes, lowering the temperature to about 140. As Jess likes her steak on the medium side of medium rare, and as I figured I’d lose some heat while pouring across, I hefted up the pot, and dumped the water on top of the steak, then quickly sealed the cooler closed.

After which, I did the laundry. We live a life of nonstop glamour.

Two hours later, I popped the cooler, to find the temperature had slid down to about 130. Close enough.

When I pulled out the bag, however, my heart sank. It had leaked.

Or so I thought. The liquid, I quickly realized, was the jus from the slowly cooked steak. I poured the liquid into a small bowl, then pulled out the steak itself, before slicing off a small chunk. Beautifully cooked.

I heated some oil in a saute pan until smoking, patted the steak dry with a paper towel, then laid it down in the pan for about a minute on each side, until it turned a nice golden brown.

I put the steak aside to rest, deglazed the pan with a splash of wine, then poured in the jus from the bag and a little chicken stock, reducing to a pan sauce. And then Jess and I sat down to eat.

Somehow, in that stupid $15 dollar cooler, with nearly no work on my part, the chewy flank steak had transformed into something literally as tender as filet mignon, but flank’s robust flavor.

Even the pan sauce was delicious.

So, in short, I’m sold. And I’m pushing the Sous Vide Supreme a bit higher on the wishlist. But, in the meantime, cooler it is. Just as Homer Simpson observed, “ah, beer; the cause of and the solution to all of life’s problems.”

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May 24, 2010

Max iPad

Back in my tech days, I used to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And it was there, in 1999, as I was walking past the smaller booths towards the back of the show, that I came across a little Canadian company called Research in Motion. The RIM booth wasn’t pulling many people in, but for some reason I stopped to check out their product. It was called a Blackberry.

The pager looked just like the Motorola two-ways that were all the rage at the time, but this one didn’t send pages – instead, it sent and received email. Crazy!

I looked at the thing. I played with it a little bit. Then, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I plunked down a credit card, and bought one right there.

In those days, I was still a student, and I knew better than to show something that dorky to college friends. But I was also running a company, and I made it down to New York City two or three times a week for meetings. The people I was meeting were largely in the finance world. And I’d show them the Blackberry.

Invariably, their reaction was the same: “I’d never carry something like that. Not in a million years.”

A few years later, when the iPod came out, I convinced my parents to buy me one as a birthday gift. At that point, people told me similar things: it would never catch on; they would never buy one; shouldn’t I have asked for a Nomad instead?

And now, as I eagerly await the 3G-enabled version of the iPad dropping later this month, I keep hearing the same complaints. That people aren’t buying one. That I shouldn’t bother. That it doesn’t do anything, does too much, is too big, too small. That, in short, it’s an overpriced and essentially pointless toy.

But the thing is, they’re all wrong. I don’t know why I think so. I’ve barely even had the chance to play around with an iPad directly. But I’m sure. The iPad is the future. And I’m looking forward, in five years, when the next big thing hits, to gloating about this one, too.

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April 11, 2010

Chicken Soup

[I am a story repeater. Mainly because I have terrible, terrible memory for what I’ve said, when, and to whom. But also because some stories are too good to give up.

So, though I briefly blogged it in the past, though I recounted it on the first episode of my and Sarah Brown’s podcast, when Chicken Soup for the Twenty-Something Soul contacted me for a submission, I had no choice but to retell my infamous beans-throwing date.]

Shortly after I moved to New York City, I met a girl at an art gallery. She worked for the gallery, I was there for the opening of a friend’s show, and we hit it off making jokes about the snottier-looking patrons.

I asked her out on a first date. To play things safe, I pushed for early evening drinks. That way, if the date went badly, I could keep it short; if it went well, I could *still* keep it short, end on a high note, and leave her wanting more.

Fortunately, the first date – at a Gatbsy-esque bar in Midtown – went off without a hitch. So it was with high hopes that I headed to our second date, dinner at a trendy Mexican restaurant on the Upper East Side.

That date, too, started strong. Until the waiter didn’t bring us our basket of chips quickly enough.

“This is ridiculous,” the girl exclaimed. Ridiculous? We were talking about *chips*. No big deal.

But to her, apparently, it *was* a big deal. So, after two or three more chip-less minutes, she got up, found the waiter, and yelled. Then, for good measure, and at ever-escalating volume, she found the manager and yelled at him, too.

By this point, it was immensely clear that my date had absolutely zero relationship potential. I had somehow found the highest maintenance girl in all of New York City. But I vividly remember thinking, “I’m out of college, I’m an adult now; I should at least be civil, and make it through the rest of the evening.”

I thought, perhaps, that a round of margaritas might help calm things down.

I was wrong.

By now, of course, the waiter hated us. My date had yelled in his face, had gotten him in trouble with the manager. So, not surprisingly, he was a bit rude. To which, in response, my date was even ruder. Over the course of appetizers and a few more drinks, the situation continued to devolve.

The waiter delivered our main courses with a snide comment. My date said something in reply. Back and forth they went, until something he said crossed her final line.

My date picked up her plate of beans. And threw them at the waiter.

She was seated on my left, the waiter stood to my right. So the beans flew, as if in slow motion, right in front of my face.

I remember wondering, beans mid-air, what might happen on impact. Would the waiter punch her? Punch me? Throw something back, leaving me smack in the middle of a giant food fight?

With a splat, the beans hit, and the world caught up to speed. The waiter, however, didn’t. He stood there in shock, a mass of pintos slowly dripping down the front of his shirt.

My date stood up.

“Well, I never!” she declared. And she walked out.

This was a small restaurant – maybe twenty tables. By this point, every single patron was staring at me.

“Get out!” the manager bellowed. “And never come back.”

Mortified, I backed my way slowly across the floor, apologizing profusely – to the waiter, to the manager, to anyone still willing to make eye contact.

I opened the front door, stepped outside, and found the girl standing there, fuming.

“Well,” she said, “where are we going next?”

At which point, I turned, and started running down Lexington Avenue as fast as I could. And I still remember thinking, finally looking back over my shoulder a few blocks later, “well, at least she doesn’t have my phone number.”

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July 9, 2007