Something I was told in law school by a professor in an entertainment law class has stuck with me for 25 years. He said that being a good lawyer is not about knowing all the answers, it’s about knowing the right questions to ask. You can pay people by the hour to look up the answers, but if one side knows the right…

The right of first authorship plays a big role in this process, with the slick lawyers piling up billable hours telling the harried municipal staff “Why don’t we draw up the agreement, it’s standard language that other cities have used in similar situations, we’ll tweak it and fill in the blanks, and then you can…

Because typically you have staff lawyers from the City Attorney’s office negotiating with very expensive, very experienced big-firm lawyers who work for the owner. That’s a mismatch, and you can add to it the fact that the mayor/city council/whoever is calling up the lawyers every week wanting to be sure they don’t do…

Linking to Kinder Eggs and John Hodgman in a story about the Tampa Bay Rays was a genius move to get me to read a story about the Tampa Bay Rays.

Or the Madlib theory when they [verb] a bunch of [plural noun] all [preposition] a [place.]

Something that got swept under the radar in English-speaking media is a report done by CSL for the Montreal investors’ group which measured the relative size of the Montreal market versus other alternatives. It was a glowing review of the City’s potential.

hard to decide whether the uchicago econ department or the kennedy school has been more detrimental to american public life in the last century

I don’t have any insight into the Indy example, but I think the general argument isn’t “who is literally actually paying for it” but instead “what better uses of this tax fund could there be (like schools, parks, infrastructure) instead of handing it to billionaires.”

Indianapolis is a joke with this. Crime is terrible in several areas, the public schools are horrendous, infrastructure is in awful condition, and they spend hundreds of millions chasing some hope of the “economic development” that these teams supposedly bring. Lucas Oil stadium has brought absolutely no development,…

...spending a year as an undistinguished deputy mayor in New York before resigning after an arrest for shoving his wife into a kitchen cabinet, and then returning to Harvard...

David S. Cohen is my second-favorite David Cohen, trailing (by an admittedly large margin) only David X. Cohen.

The above image, of the scene outside an alleged Worcester Red Sox game, is the best evidence yet that architectural rendering designers have some sort of Wacky People Clip Art package that they pull out when in need to populate their creations. In this one image alone, we have Kids In Oversized T-Shirts Putting On…

When I saw the link to this article, I knew I would be disappointed if there was no picture of the moat.

This made me laugh wayyyyy more than I expected, great job Neil!!

Rarely do I get to flex my expertise in public, but this kind of stuff is literally the bulk of my work.

Fantastic review.

Look, the MLS gets a lot of crap, but even I don’t believe they use distorted half-sized nets.

This is the Texans Stadium, with grass instead of a parking lot.

These are all uniformly and insanely ugly but not unique to stadiums - you see this sort of stuff done for any public facing project, be it condo, mall, or whatever.

No mention of the Florida Marlins’ vaportecture that showed a competent baseball team on the field?