Billy Crystal’s apartment in When Harry Met Sally is over the top even by NY movie apartment standards. That’s a billionaire apartment. Billy is clearly money-laundering. As is Hugh Grant in Notting Hill — no way he affords a flat in Notting Hill based on income from a failing travel bookstore.




Everyone inside America’s most flailing destination city has a theory for what’s wrong. Now I have my own.

At a bar downstairs at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, I recently found myself next to a 67-year-old man who had come to town to get a tattoo on his shoulder. The tattoo in question was of Yosemite Falls, in California. As best I could understand it, he was getting branded with the landmark because he was enmeshed in a situationship that wasn’t working out. He and this woman had apparently taken a memorable trip to Yosemite earlier this year, and he hoped that—after he showed her the tattoo—a tarnished spark would be rekindled. I wished him all the luck in the world as he took his leave of me, and for a few minutes, I was alone among the chirping slot machines, nursing a gin and soda and pondering how no place on Earth can make you believe the impossible quite like Las Vegas.

I know more people who hate Las Vegas than love it, and I’ve never been able to construct a convincing argument for why they’re wrong. We are granted only so many vacations in this life, and it might seem ill-considered to spend one of them watching the Blue Man Group in an Egyptian-themed hotel in the Nevadan desert. But here I was, at the Luxor, on a quest to renew my love affair with this city.

A well-reported, well written article.



Let’s Call a Murder a Murder. By John Gruber at Daring Fireball.



Arista’s Ullal: Ethernet is the ’eventual winner’ for AI networking. Ethernet is overtaking InfiniBand in AI data centers as inference and automation reshape infrastructure, says Jayshree Ullal, Arista CEO and chairperson. My latest on Fierce Network.


Video shows ICE agent in Minneapolis fired at driver as vehicle veered past him. The video shows that the ICE agent was next to the vehicle, not in its path. He was in no danger.