John Krakauer’s Missoula has been out for almost ten days now, and damning reviews keep pouring in from people who haven’t read it. Defense attorney David Paoli’s guest editorial in the Missoulian, “Krakauer’s ‘Missoula’ misses the point,” ran the day before the book was released. Two days later, the same paper quoted a woman who flipped through Krakauer’s book at Hastings and found it “biased.” For a book that has received wall-to-wall coverage in the local press, remarkably few people seem to have actually read Missoula. Beware the truth on which everyone agrees but nobody knows firsthand. I read Missoula, and I found it remarkably even-handed, although it got distastefully zealous in its condemnation of Kirsten Pabst at the end. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, wherein I gently remind the good people of western Montana to read a fucking book. Come for the literary smugness and stay for my review of Hop Along’s Painted Shut, which is delightful. The album, I mean, not the review. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

 

 

Don’t freak out, but the US Department of the Interior is considering raising its royalty rates for coal leases on federal land. I know—you’ll have to tell the kids you won’t be going to Disneyland this year, unless you get some kind of last-minute reprieve. Fortunately, a host of Montana politicians—including Steve Daines, Ryan Zinke, the Yellowstone County Commission and various chambers of commerce—have stuck up for the mom-and-pop strip mining operation by writing a letter to the Interior urging them to extend their public comment period before raising rates. You think I made a plural error when I said multiple people wrote a letter, but I didn’t. The commissioners and the chambers sent the same form letter written by Cloud Peak Energy, a large coal company out of Wyoming. Daines and Zinke borrowed a lot of language from the letter, but at least they rephrased it. The important thing is that our elected representatives are serving as mouthpieces for an enormous energy corporation. You can read all about it in this week’s column in the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

 

I have removed the Donate button until I can figure out how to get rid of the link to hard gay boys. It appears we have been hacked. While I try to fix it, please send me hundreds of thousands of dollars by conventional mail.

A new high-rise building at Riverside Drive and West 62nd Street, excoriated for having one door for condominium owners and a separate entrance for residents of affordable housing, has attracted 88,000 applicants for its 55 low-priced units. Available to households whose income is between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, the affordable apartments rent at $1,082 for a two-bedroom and $833 for a studio. That’s a pretty sweet deal, even if you don’t get access to the gym, the pool, the private theater or the bowling alley, and even if you have to enter and exit the building through a designated “poor door.” You also don’t get to live at 50 Riverside Drive, with the quality. Instead, you live at 470 West 62nd Street—a distinction that will seem meaningless only to those who have not lived or worked on the Upper West Side.

Continue reading