How workers get trapped by “bondage fees”

Two-sided markets always lead to enshittification.

I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books this weekend!

On Sat (Apr 23) at noon, I’m on a panel called “Covering Silicon Valley” with Winddance Twine, moderated by Wendy Lee from the LA Times.

On Sun (Apr 24) at 11AM, I’m signing for California Book Club at booth 111. At 12:30, I’m doing a panel called “The Accidental Detective” with Alex Segura, Margot Douaihy and SJ Rozan

Growing up in Toronto, I naturally held NYC in awe. As the joke goes, it takes two Torontonians to change a lightbulb: one to change it, and one to go to New York and make sure lightbulbs are still cool. When I went to New York, I had a great place to stay: my cousin Maxine’s rent-controlled apartment in a midtown doorman building off 23d and Lex.

Max was impossibly glamorous: a perfectly coiffed office manager at Colgate-Palmolive who earned an anthropology degree at CUNY, volunteered at the Brooklyn Zoo, and knew every trick for getting cheap tickets for museums, galleries and shows, and had an encyclopedic, up-to-the-minute knowledge of all the culture New York had to offer. Staying with cousin Max was fantastic and I went to New York as often as I could.