Jonathan Taylor writes:
One holiday season of the high 1990s, I drove over from New Orleans to rendezvous with some friends at the Beau Rivage casino in Biloxi, Mississippi. I had to head back late the same night to catch a plane the next morning. But after an evening on the casino floor, back in my friends’ room I realized I had dropped my keys—somewhere. By the time I called Lost & Found, they had already been turned in, which I still consider inexplicable, and you would too, if you’ve been in a casino and seen what the carpet patterns are like. (Not quite as good, though, as the guy in London who returned the wallet I jet-laggedly left in a phone booth—a guy whose job was to put up those cards and stickers for prostitutes that used to plaster London phone boxes.)
Anyway, Lauren Collins has a nice Talk piece on a gallery show of photographs of casino carpeting by Polish-born, Swedish -raised Chris Maluszynski at 25CPW “this week” (gallery site seems to have no info on the show). It reminded me that there was another nice short piece on the topic in The Believer a few years ago, “Rolling Out the Carpet for Homo Ludens” by Alexander Provan (the print issue had a nice insert of sample patterns).
Provan wrote:

….hotels and casinos are increasingly looking to trade gimmickry for packaged elegance, starting with the carpets. Oddly, many of the new floor-coverings feature forms and figures that would look familiar to the so-called non-objective filmmakers, animators and painters emergent in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson and the Whitney Brothers–call it visual Muzak. On a recent trip to Las Vegas I saw densely packed geometries, monochromatic patterns, abstract figures in various stages of metamorphosis. The new carpets at Harrah’s appropriate the quivering striations of Georgia O’Keefe’s “Music–Pink and Blue II” and wash all tension away with buckets of brown and orange. At the Mirage, russet amoeba cartoons exchange organic matter over a tan backdrop. At Carson City’s Nugget Hotel, Paul Klee’s “Variations (Progressive Motif)” is amplified beyond the bounds of good taste and supersaturated in canyon hues….

Mark Pilarski, a longtime Vegas insider and consultant, agrees that the abstract geometric patterns are used “to break up the space,” in accordance with the Friedman Standards. But he also contends that, for those in the business, “The main reason is that your eyes are focused to look up at the machines. You just can’t keep looking at that busy pattern when you’re walking.” A solid pattern, he adds, “would look like a football field. I’ve seen this once–the casino looks like the runway of an airport, like infinity. But the guests don’t want that, they don’t want it to be infinity out there.”

“Friedman” is Bill Friedman, author of Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition.

Jonathan Taylor writes:
In 1966, a five-part [correction: four-part, as correctly stated in today’s subsequent Back Issues post] Annals of Legislation piece by Richard Harris in The New Yorker chronicled “the long, legislative, and anti-legislative activity which preceded the achievement of ‘medical care…a basic human right’ certainly in a country whose people had not only been ‘ill fed, ill housed’ but also ill,” in the words of the Kirkus review of the book version of the series, A Sacred Trust.
Kirkus continues:

The fight went on for more than three decades from the time when the A.M.A., a monolithic obstruction in the body politic, determined to keep “public health in private hands,” spent fifty million dollars opposing what ultimately would result in Medicare. This traces the whole unhealthy history of A.M.A. political power ploys, first in the hands of that demagogic blowfish, Dr. Fishbein, then in those of a p.r. organization, down through all the administrations and bills, submitted and defeated, on Capitol Hill.

Jonathan Taylor writes:

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism posts her article on Wall Street culture, “Indefensible Men,” from the December 2009 issue of the revived Baffler, whose slowness or reluctance to post many of its articles have helped it make so much less of a splash than it would have, given contributors including Matt Taibbi, Naomi Klein, Lydia Millett and Michael Lind. (Yves Smith link via Matthew Yglesias, who notes in particular the handsome Niebuhr epigraph.)
I received, nth-hand, an e-mail sent out by a Moe Tkacik desperate to distribute her article at a time when it hadn’t seemed to materialize in either paper or pixels (it has in the latter, at least). As for Christine Smallwood’s “What Does the Internet Look Like?”, we’ll just have to keep looking at the rest of it.
In 1995, the original Baffler threw a party at the Knitting Factory in New York that was covered in a Talk piece, which is written in that style of deadpan that mocks weakly with a sort of faux-naif air, so annoying to me, and, I think, less commonly deployed than it used to be: “About three hundred people showed up, mostly striving writers and publishing types. Dress was exceedingly casual.” (It followed an item about Nutella—”pronounced ‘noo-tella.'”)
The Baffler also made a cameo in a 2008 Jeffrey Eugenides story, “Great Experiment“:

For sixteen years now, Chicago had given Kendall the benefit of the doubt. It had welcomed him when he arrived with his “song cycle” of poems composed at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It had been impressed with his medley of high-I.Q. jobs the first years out: proofreader for The Baffler; Latin instructor at the Latin School.

Did or does The Baffler even have paid proofreaders?

Jonathan Taylor writes:
I’d call him the Wolcott of Williamsburg, but even better to note that anyone writing, on or off the Internet, would do well to aspire to be the Edroso of their environs. Roy Edroso of Alicublog and the Village Voice—profiler of Emdashes, tormentor of conservative bloggers who can’t keep up—announces the imminent shift of his operations to Texas, into the arms of a “girlfriend.” I’ll just pretend it’s Jerry Hall, in light of the way Edroso has lived the life of New York:

More to the point, New York has been my home. It hasn’t always been an easy place to live, but if I was ever bored it was my own fault. Here I’ve been chased by cops in the Tompkins Square riot, and heard Allen Ginsburg [Yeah, yeah, Ginsburg, schminzberg] read poetry there some days after (“Look, I’m wearing a tie — am I a yuppie?”); fretted with my Williamsburg neighbors as the ruins of the Twin Towers smoked on the horizon; walked over the Williamsburg Bridge during a blackout; spilled a giant thug’s beer in a basement after-hours, apologetically bought him a new one, and been rewarded with fat lines of coke; read poetry at St. Mark’s Church; played CBGB so many times I forgot it was a shrine; been advised by Jimmy Breslin on how to talk to cops, handed a flyer by Jean-Michel Basquiat, advised on my music career by Lieber and Stoller, given a tour of Terry Teachout’s art collection, yelled at by Hilly Kristal and several members of the NYPD. And at the Voice I held a desk next to Tom Robbins. Everywhere I met remarkable people, because this is one of the places they like to be, and saw and did remarkable things, because here they happen all the time.

Of course, New York is the most provincial city of all. So often it “dulls the mind and blunts the instrument” (PDF, and worth it) by convincing that it doesn’t. Like those fat lines, it gives a foolproof high by making you want only one thing—it. Edroso doesn’t say exactly where he’s going—giving pursuers a lot of ground to cover—but I’ll say the advantage of being anyplace that’s not “the capital of everywhere” is that the smart people, by definition, have to be interested in the wider world. They should be in the capital, too, yet so many aren’t—and, in truth, aren’t exactly too searching about the capital either.
But Edroso is right about the remarkable people and things, of course, because he is one. And you can tell he has made the most of his New York days, because he’s so cold-eyed about the city, he easily laps its suburban would-be ill-wishers.

A: _Jonathan Taylor writes:_
I was pained by Patricia Marx’s “shopping column on Brooklyn”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2010/03/what-to-buy-in-brooklyn.html in the March 8 issue, but she was correct to highlight the thrilling “tours of the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel”:http://brooklynrail.net/proj_aatunnel.html (also the subject of a 1982 “Talk piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1982/11/01/1982_11_01_033_TNY_CARDS_000333539 by Bill McKibben).
But that didn’t prepare me for these pictures from a tour of “Cincinnati’s never-completed subway”:http://queencitydiscovery.blogspot.com/2009/03/cincinnati-subway.html (via “Lawyers, Guns & Money”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2010/03/queen-city-subway.html)—they’re a must see.

Jonathan Taylor writes:

• Via the neatly searchable archive of the Harper’s Index, they are:
  

  (Jan. 1993) Percentage of New Yorker articles since Tina Brown became editor whose first sentence includes a person’s name: 70
  (July 1996) Chances that a cartoon in The New Yorker‘s Women’s Issue was drawn by a man: 5 in 6

• In the Times Book Review, Craig Seligman shares some (self-) revealing recollections of St. Clair McKelway, on the occasion of a new collection of McKelway’s New Yorker reporting.
• At the Edge of the American West, a historian’s reflection on Paul Krugman’s comments about studying economics versus studying history in the recent New Yorker Profile of him—with some spirited exchanges in the comments. Coincidentally, “Undercover Economist” Tim Harford’s latest column in the Financial Times illustrates the persistence of long-ago history in contemporary outcomes.
• Continuing on the history tangent, I was delighted to see Adam Cohen’s Times Editorial Observer appreciation of the BBC Radio 4 program (and podcast) “In Our Time,” in which Melvyn Bragg harries his academic guests into distilling great topics in civilization into their pithiest essence. (Will Self also wrote about “In Our Time” recently in the London Review of Books.) WNYC’s Laura Walker wrote a letter to the Times defending U.S. radio against the suggestion that it doesn’t host such erudite discussions. But Walker’s counterexamples are telling: All the topics are basically contemporary; none represents the undiluted interest in the past that “In Our Time” exhibits.
• I reviewed Country Driving, by Emdashes fave Peter Hessler, at Bookforum.com.