Well this is something special, a holiday treat for the end of 2024: a group of archivists (including Chris Person) has uploaded an HBO magic special by Ricky Jay that has been largely unavailable since it aired in 1996.
This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people. This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist online.
Before getting into preservation generally, it’s worth considering how we got here. Why is so much media lost or badly preserved? A recurring reason is that the people in charge are sometimes, but not always, asleep at the wheel. Media is forgotten or stored improperly, and humidity and heat have destroyed more of our history than we will ever know. Sometimes companies handle the material sloppily (I’ve blogged about the use of AI before, but there are countless examples in audio too).
Having shared all that, I feel like the quality of this YouTube video of the special is not perceptibly worse than the one uploaded to archive.org? What am I missing?
The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right — what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
Let’s talk about education for a minute,” said Matthew Civello, CEO of Scanscraps, at a recent roundtable talk at the Conference of Climate and Compost at Baruch College in New York City. “I’ll just take a show of hands. How many people here today are familiar with alternate-side-of-the-street parking?” Civello’s question was met with laughter and a near-unanimous show of hands in the audience. “It’s probably the most successful program the city has ever rolled out,” he continued. “And how many of us own a car?” More than half of the hands went down. “Even if you don’t own a car, you know about alternate-side-of-the-street parking. … [So, for composting,] education is great, but there has to be a motivational stimulus to make people want to participate. You need to incentivize people with rewards, and also with enforcement, and it has to be on an individual level. It’s a behavioral exercise. First and foremost, it has to become part of our city’s DNA.”
Civello is illustrating the paradox of NYC’s new boroughwide “mandatory” curbside collection of organic waste: How can you compel more than 8 million residents to separate food scraps and other compost from their garbage? How can you regulate the wide-scale collection of different kinds of waste? And how can you even make a smidgen of difference in the composition of some 14 million tons of garbage that NYC annually feeds to landfills?
Points of capture: a kitchen windowsill compost bin; a city-issued brown bin in a garden; an app-driven “smart bin”; a compost bin set out for collection with recyclables. Photos by the author.
Structure and Consistency
“Changing behavior requires structure and consistency,” said Baruch conference organizer Samantha MacBride, a sociologist and professor at the college’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, in her keynote address. “Once you get behavior going, if you don’t have the physical structure for it to mean something, and the consistency of information being provided, the behavior’s going to peter out.”
A former director of research and operations at the New York Department of Sanitation (NYDS), MacBride cited statistics from earlier pilot programs (2013 to 2023) for curbside organics collection in parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx that showed a continuous decline in participation. “The prior efforts were rolled out district-by-district,” she said. “The current program is now rolling out to entire boroughs, and the trends are all showing declining capture rates—and the capture rates were never high to begin with. The capture rates of the new districts are even lower.”
Statistics of decline: at left, an NYC Open Data chart shows declining capture rates in the Queens curbside compost pilot from 2015–23; at right, a diagram depicts the sliver of organics diverted. Images: biocycle.net.
In recent years, NYC has managed to “divert” about 20% of its recyclables from landfills. But with collection rates of just under 5% for organic waste—in a pilot, no less—New York is a long way from, say, the 80% total diversion rate boasted by San Francisco. MacBride called the New York program “inefficient,” with a lot of trucks bringing in very little material. “You’re paying a lot of money for labor, fuel, with nothing to show for it,” she said. “Municipal programs like that cannot survive.”
MacBride said that the Queens pilot’s low capture rates stem from a lack of education about the curbside organics program; frustration with the city’s on-again-off-again approach; problems with missed collections; and, especially, the structural challenges of separating trash in large buildings. “You can have people wanting to participate all you want in their own kitchens,” she said. “If they don’t have it properly set up in their building, it won’t matter.”
Composting legacy: NYC gardening groups began backyard composting in the 1970s and have spearheaded efforts to collect organic waste from residents. Photos: Dan Brownsword/Getty Images, gardeningknowhow.com (left); the New York League of Conservative Voters, greenpointers.com (right).
Access and Incentive
Back in the early aughts, when my family started composting in our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, we dutifully set up a bin in the kitchen and periodically took the contents to our neighborhood garden, which had a public compost bin. At some point that became too much for the garden to manage, and they quietly removed it. We started taking our compost to nearby farmers markets, until they stopped collecting during the pandemic.
In 2023, the New York City Council passed the five-part Zero Waste Act, designed to expand curbside organics collection, set “zero waste” targets by the year 2030, provide yearly progress reports, set up at least three food-scrap drop-off sites in each district, and provide a recycling center in each district. (This follows suit from successful programs in other cities, such as San Francisco and Seattle, whose organic-waste-disposal ban garnered headlines and diversion rates of around 60%.)
To its credit, the Adams administration answered the NYC legislation with its citywide curbside composting program, led by NYDS Commissioner Jessica Tisch (who recently moved on to become police commissioner). The city has touted the benefits of separating compost and food scraps—from the diversion of organic waste from landfills, where it generates greenhouse gasses, to the reduction of rats on the streets—while offering organics bins to buildings in all five boroughs and installing more than 400 app-driven “smart bins” throughout the five boroughs (more on those below).
And yet, it’s not clear what’s going to happen with the curbside program. “All buildings are now supposed to have access to the brown bins,” says Clare Miflin, architect and executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design. “And as we all know, from the pilot programs in Queens and Brooklyn, even though it’s mandatory, many buildings don’t maintain these bins for their residents.”
NYC’s “mandatory” program is based on the participation of buildings. And its enforcement will fall—not unlike the enforcement of recycling collection—on those buildings, in the form of fines for noncompliance, due to take effect next year. According to an NYDS educational video, the “warning period” for all five boroughs will extend until the spring of 2025. “That’s when you really need to look at participation,” Miflin noted wryly, “because lots of people don’t do anything until they start enforcing it, right?”
Urban challenge: How waste is stored in New York City (left) vs. how waste is stored in Paris. “In other cities you have these bins in public spaces,” says Clare Miflin of the Center for Zero Waste Design, “and it’s the residents who come down and use them.” Photos: Clare Miflin, Marwan Hamouche, vitalcitynyc.org.
Cultural Mosaic
From a waste-disposal standpoint, Gotham was unusual from the get-go. “Most other U.S. cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, have alleyways where garbage can go to await pickup; the men who designed Manhattan’s grid in 1811 didn’t give us such spaces,” Miflin writes in the essay “Vital City.” “Continuous street facades—with few loading docks or parking garages—create a lively, walkable city, but they make it hard to hide the trash.” Another unique challenge is NYC’s polyglot population. “New York is tough because it’s such a variety of density,” Miflin says. “What works here is different—actually, it’s better to take from Europe, where cities don’t have garages or alleyways.”
Then there’s New York’s decades-long infatuation with big black garbage bags, where most trash currently resides on streets until pickup. Many reports trace this practice to a 1968 sanitation-workers strike, which plunged the city into a garbage crisis, yet led to widespread use of plastic bags in place of Oscar the Grouch–style metal cans. But the trash bags, a ubiquitous part of the cityscape, generate their own problems: they create litter, smell, and block sidewalks; they’re susceptible to vermin, require a lot of cleanup, and, according to Miflin, are socially inequitable: “It’s why richer parts of the city are clean and parts of the city that don’t have the staff to clean up are dirty, because we have a system that requires a lot of labor to do it properly.”
Miflin’s firm has been advocating for “containerization” of NYC’s garbage for years; in 2017, it published Zero Waste Design Guidelines, with strategies ranging from shared, permanent public containers for lower-density neighborhoods to big four-wheel bins that can be stored in large multifamily buildings and rolled out for collection. “The larger buildings have waste rooms,” Miflin said. “Many of them have trash chutes. They can just store the stuff inside and wheel it out to a temporary place on the street. Whereas the smaller buildings don’t have trash chutes and don’t have as much staff. It makes sense that their residents take stuff straight to the street and put it in permanent containers.”
In 2023, the DSNY published its “Future of Trash” report, pointing to containerization models from other cities including Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. “In that report, the DSNY suggested they would have all four waste types in the street,” Miflin said, referring to organics, glass and plastic, mixed paper, and trash. “Then they realized it would eliminate too much parking, so they said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it for trash.’ In places where they’re trying shared containerization—such as Morningside Heights—I’ve talked to residents who say, ‘Oh, I can just take the trash straight outside, but I have to go to the cellar to get rid of my recycling and organics?’ It disincentivizes people to separate garbage if it’s easy to throw away trash and more difficult to throw away recycling and food scraps. It perpetuates this trash-centric system.”
Means and ends: Most of the organic waste collected at a “smart-bin” or in a curbside brown bin ends up anaerobically digested at sites such as the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Photos: Save Our Compost NYC.
Where Does it Go?
The “smart bins” for compost started appearing on Upper West Side streets in 2023, to the bafflement of many of my family and friends, until it became clear that downloading the NYCCompost app provided access to unlock the bins any time day or night. Voila! The bin on our nearest corner became our go-to place to deposit food-scraps—unless the app said it’s “full,” which happens fairly frequently, leading to a search for another bin or a wait until another day to get rid of compost.
We also were pleased when our co-op building (with 40-plus units) acquired a brown bin for organics from the city in October. However, that bin was used for just a few short weeks before it disappeared from our garbage area. One night, when asked where it went, one of our building workers replied that it was “taking up too much room,” then added, paradoxically, that it “didn’t hold much stuff.” So we reverted to the nearby “smart bin” for dropping off compost.
“The smart bins are a great idea,” said MacBride. “They’re part of the solution because they’re convenient, and they absolutely do bring in cleaner organics than curbside collections. Unfortunately, right now, the smart bins are being mixed with school organics on collection truck routes, and school organics are highly contaminated. The material that’s coming into the smart bins is being wasted in terms of being good clean organics that could be composted locally.”
Both MacBride and Miflin pointed out that collecting organic waste on a citywide scale inherently involves contamination—which means it’s less “pure” and reusable. About 80% of the organic material collected by the NYDS goes to sewage-treatment plants, where it’s anaerobically treated. “Those are the big silver digestion eggs you see at Newtown Creek, where it’s made into this kind of slurry,” Miflin said. “That’s way better than having it all go to the landfill, hundreds of miles away. But it’s not true composting.”
Miflin said there’s no substitute for the kind of compost that NYC community groups have been collecting for decades. “With these grassroots groups, they check it when people drop it off. People don’t put in plastic bags, so it’s very good quality compost. They then apply it for street trees, or they bring it to school gardens or community gardens. That compost is used in the city to make soils healthier.”
For nearly 30 years, traditional food-scrap dropoff sites—run by groups including GrowNYC, Earth Matter, and Big Reuse—have fed area compost facilities for use in local green spaces. Photos: westsiderag.com; Earth Matter/biocycle.net.
Grassroots Groups Struggle
In NYC’s never-ending budget battles, collection of compost and organic waste has often been treated like a bastard stepchild. In 2020, neighborhood composting groups, as well as curbside composting pilot programs, were defunded by the de Blasio administration during the pandemic. “It wasn’t purely because of Covid,” MacBride said. “It was already going on the chopping block.”
After a public outcry from New Yorkers, a segment of the neighborhood composting funds were restored for the 2021 fiscal year, only to face new budget cuts from the Adams administration early this year. Another public outcry ensued, leading to another partial refunding announcement by the City Council. Meanwhile, Grow NYC, which has spearheaded many of the composting efforts at neighborhood farmers markets and community gardens, gets a much smaller part of the fiscal pie. “Most likely, all those dropoffs you saw in farmers markets are not going to come back,” Miflin said. Indeed, Grow NYC has permanently closed a long list of compost dropoff sites, directing residents to the curbside composting page of nyc.gov for alternatives.
“This administration made it clear, with their initial cuts, that they didn’t value the contribution of community composters—which is, in my opinion, morally wrong,” MacBride said. “You have people who have voluntarily taken it upon themselves to do something that is nothing but positive for the city—they’ve proved that they can do it for close to 30 years. And they’re still fighting being displaced from plots of land where they operate and for relatively small amounts of funding. Still viewed as extraneous to the issue of sustainability in waste.” She advocates a broad-based, cooperative approach that includes staffed community drop-off sites allowing micro-haulers—small bike- or e-vehicle-based neighborhood-level collections—to work alongside DSNY, picking up organics as a service to buildings.
Building Education
While individual behavior is key, the success rate for the curbside compost program will hinge on the participation of buildings, where education and outreach should be intensified. “The labor—the work that’s going to make or break this program—is with the porters,” MacBride said. “These are some of the lowest-paid, lowest status folks who will be asked to do a lot of extra work without necessarily extra pay or resources. The porters and their supers and the building managers should have much more direct attention from DSNY.”
Such efforts are ultimately intertwined with enforcement of the program. “When we start enforcing, we’ll need to go in and check on arrangements,” MacBride said. All of this will require major groundwork at the building level: How’s the recycling, garbage and organics room set up? What kind of bags line the receptacles? Does the porter have to carry an organics bin upstairs? Where’s the set-out area? Are there signs on every floor in the building telling people where to take their organics? Has educational material been handed out? Has each tenant received a kitchen container for use in their home? “These steps are hugely labor-intensive,” she said. “They involve an agency working with people who do the labor in the building. This is not being carried out—on anywhere near enough of a scale that I believe New York City needs.”
One thing I have zero fucking patience for this is the idea that Trump has won and we are just going to sit back and watch it happen. NO!!!!! If we don’t fight on every front, then we deserve to lose. And the idea of people being “tired.” Huh? What have you done? Doomscroll? I mean, c’mon, we have a whole set of history of change to build on here that shows how people can turn the worst moments into something that might not be victories but at least are less bad situations. The battle for American democracy is far from over, unless you just don’t give a shit about it.
While the Patel pick only adds to the sense of gloom that Trump’s authoritarian fantasies may come to fruition, it’s important to remember that autocrats want you to believe they are more powerful than they already are. Trump has been president-elect for less than a month and we’ve seen instances in which his ambitions have been checked. His first attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz, had to withdraw because of sexual misconduct allegations (which he denies). The MAGA favorite for Senate majority leader, Rick Scott, lost a secret ballot to John Thune, a lawmaker more in the mold of Mitch McConnell (who, likely not seeking reelection, could be a thorn in Trump’s side). Scott, it should be noted, didn’t even make it to the second round; he got 13 votes, less than not only Thune (23) but John Cornyn (15).
Trump has historically bullied Republicans into doing what he wants, but in a 53-47 senate, he can only afford to lose three senators in trying to get his cabinet picks confirmed (given that JD Vance would be the tie-breaker in a 50-50 vote.) Some who could be swayed against Trump include Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. I’d also keep my eye on the independent-minded(ish) doctor Bill Cassidy and Mitt Romney’s successor John Curtis. While it’s fair to be skeptical whether some of the aforementioned senators will buck Trump and the Republican Party line—see Collins and Murkowski’s role in the fall of Roe—it’s no time to cynically write off the Senate as a check on executive power.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s second rule of fighting autocracy is to “defend institutions,” which, he writes, “help us to preserve decency.” Snyder adds, “They need our help as well. Do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. So choose an institution you care about and take its side.” These Republican senators have the constitutional power of “advice and consent,” a responsibility we should hold them to—especially if Trump tries to opt for recess appointments to get unconfirmable nominees into positions of great power.
If we are cynical, if we assume the worst from everyone, then we have surrendered in advance. I think it’s important to remember that even Trump responds to pushback. Trump is very reactive, seen, at times, as taking ideas from the last person he’s talked to. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman last month told her colleague, Ezra Klein, “He doesn’t especially like the work of governing, didn’t when he was in the White House. But he likes power, and he likes being praised, and politics combines both of those things.” There are ways to get Trump to do things; incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles seems to have figured it out. Trump isn’t a mystery, if anything he is very straightforward and transactional.
If pro-democracy voters expect senators to do nothing, they are effectively giving those lawmakers permission to do just that. We should expect our elected officials to protect norms and institutions; that also goes for members of the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority. If people care about democracy and the direction of the country, they should call on senators to do their jobs and subject Trump’s picks, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and Patel, to legitimate scrutiny.
Do I think democracy makes it through another Trump administration? Only if democracy supporters stand up for norms and institutions, and resist falling down the path of cynicism and hopelessness. It only takes one person to do the right thing.
I suppose in this case it takes four people. I should say as well I am curious as to what Mitch McConnell is going to do here. He loathes Trump personally and while he is the most cynical human living today, he might be out for some revenge, or at least to knock down a couple of the most ridiculous picks and keep the Senate as an independent body. Of course I wouldn’t bet money on that, but what I am saying is that the battle is not over. Yes, the Senate sucks. Yes, the Senate is going to be worse now than before. Yes, tons of horrible judges will be confirmed. But even given that, we still have room to at least try to claim a part of it as ours and pressure senators to do the right thing. Some of them might at least occasionally do it too! In any case, giving up is for losers.
Come on sheeple, if this hero can copy/paste a reputable news source and tag 500 words of dumbassery at the top from his Mexican vacation spot or awful jazz show you should be able to get out on the streets and derail the fash
For the love of god, quit calling your newsletter “my Substack”. “You can talk about your work as *your work*. It’s your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing. But it sure as hell isn’t ‘your Substack.’”
When I started Travis McGee & Me in 2008, I never figured it would be getting regular readers 16 years later. But folks keep coming here for McGee and JDM info. And my little book of the same title keeps selling a dozen or two copies every month.
But as I face the medical fight of my life, I realize it would be unfair of me to simply vanish without saying thanks to all you readers. If I make it through, I’ll be back to tell the tale. In the meantime, if you’re the praying type, please say a prayer for ol’ D. R.
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