This past weekend, I saw The Honey Trap. The play centers on a former British soldier who lost a close friend during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Years later, while participating in an oral history project, he gains access to interview tapes and discovers that one of the interviewees may have been involved in setting his friend up for execution by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He travels to Belfast to confront the woman who had posed as a “honeypot,” and to kill her.
The play dramatizes how memory, trauma, and narrative combine, forcing the audience to witness these components emotionally rather than analytically. The actors also do a great job in their respective roles, though a handful of aspects of the story strained credibility.
But one comment caught my attention: the claim that the IRA used to whitewash graffiti on exterior walls so their snipers could better detect British soldiers on patrol and more successfully shoot them. It sounded plausible.
However, it’s also not true.
Even at a basic logical level, the claim falters. In urban conflicts, soldiers walk past and take cover against doors, windows, vehicles, and walls of many colors, so whitewashing graffiti alone would not meaningfully change visibility.
More importantly, there’s no credible historical evidence that the IRA or other republican groups whitewashed walls for tactical visibility purposes during the Troubles. More specifically, the IRA favored ambushes over sniper attacks. And most graffiti (not to mention murals) appearing in nationalist neighborhoods served a purpose. It marked territory, commemorated the dead, warned outsiders, and communicated political identity. Whitewashing those walls would have been politically counterproductive, not tactically useful.
But what interests me most is that the claim sounds believable. Not just to the playwright, but to audiences, and initially to me.
Why?
The general public (not to mention government officials) has sweeping, unexamined assumptions about graffiti: what it is, who produces it, and what its removal is supposed to accomplish. These beliefs are typically unsupported by empirical evidence, or else persist despite the availability of this research, which is ignored, misunderstood, or simply disbelieved.
More importantly, they believe that graffiti creates disorder, and removing it restores order.
With frequent appeals to the Broken Windows Theory, but little empirical work that supports these claims, the public believes that graffiti abatement reduces crime, improves property values, and increases public safety.
Thus, cities, counties, and businesses spend millions on removal. Money that can be better spent on more important prosocial initiatives.
Moreover, beliefs about abatement are so deeply held that a false tactical claim about whitewashing walls during a guerrilla conflict sounds instantly plausible.
The problem isn’t just that the whitewashing claim is false; it’s about how readily we accept claims about graffiti and abatement without consulting evidence.
We don’t actually know much about what abatement does (e.g., who it benefits, what it costs beyond the direct expenditure, what it erases beyond the markings themselves). We just assume removal is neutral, practical, and good. And until we start asking what we’re actually accomplishing when we insist walls or surfaces stay blank, we’ll keep accepting plausible-sounding stories that confirm what we want to believe.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2026-01-25-at-9.59.22-AM.png9941884Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-01-25 15:37:192026-01-25 15:37:19Whitewashing a Myth about Graffiti Abatement
“I Love Paris” has been performed and recorded by dozens of musicians. Written by Cole Porter in 1953, the song has been interpreted by artists ranging from Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald to Michel Legrand. What’s striking is not just the number of versions, but how differently each musician renders the song.
Running at about four minutes, the lyrics are relatively simple, leaving performers considerable interpretive freedom through tonal variation, pacing, and choices of instrumentation. Most recordings, however, make the same fundamental mistake: they approach Paris through a tourist’s gaze, treating it as an abstraction or postcard rather than a vibrant city full of energy and contradictions. They offer sophistication, instead of feeling, grandeur instead of authenticity.
Esther Phillips’s 1970 live recording (appearing on her album “Confessin’ the Blues”) was the first version I heard, and that initial encounter probably affected my perception. However, unlike other situations where the primacy effect might be at play, I believe that my preference for her approach is rooted in the deliberative musical choices she made. Another important factor to consider is that it is a live performance in front of an audience versus a studio version. Let’s briefly look at other singers’ versions.
Frank Sinatra’s 1960 rendition, for example, is supported by lush string arrangements and appears unnecessarily slow. Each carefully placed pause, each swelling orchestral phrase, reminds you that you’re watching a performer rather than hearing someone express genuine affection.
For Sinatra and others (Bing Crosby, Doris Day, etc.) Paris is treated as an abstraction, a symbol of culture and refinement rather than a lived place. These versions of the song probably belong in a luxury hotel lobby, not in the streets of well-traveled neighborhoods where daily life unfolds.
Ella Fitzgerald’s version has similar challenges. The orchestration is busy. But this time it’s not the string section that is doing the work, but the brass and rhythm ones. In this context, the song’s intimacy vanishes entirely. Similar to the Sinatra version, the listener is forced to admire a performance rather than experiencing emotion.
Even the upbeat versions often miss the mark. For example, Peter Cincotti’s performance captures remarkable energy, but the arrangement features an extended piano instrumental that functions more as a showcase for his jazz virtuosity. As a result, the song becomes a vehicle for displaying musicianship rather than conveying a genuine attachment to Paris and the way it resonates with the performer.
Phillips strips all of this away. Her recording opens with a solitary bass line before she begins singing. This puts her voice front and center. When she sings “I love Paris… in the springtime,” she sets the song up as a playful take and interpretation of the city in the way that Sinatra and others don’t.
All in all, Philips delivers the message as if she’s confiding in something true. The faint sound of audience applause in the background only reinforces that sense of intimacy.
The tempo is moderate but purposeful, and the performance builds organically. Phillips’s distinctive phrasing sounds relaxed and unforced. By the second verse, the tempo, with the addition of the rhythm guitar and drums, subtly increases. The backing band does not overwhelm the vocal, but supports it with a growing sense of momentum. When she reaches “I love Paris in the fall,” there is genuine warmth in her voice, as though she is recalling specific moments rather than performing a standard. The line, “I’ve got to have it every morning,” is a playful, slightly cheeky double entendre. Phillips conveys the city’s romance, sensuality, rhythm, and pleasure. Her performance sounds spontaneous, and this makes the performance feel lived rather than from a distance.
Not only does Phillips’s rendering sound as if she has visited Paris, but like a skilled urban ethnographer, she’s experienced it numerous times. And that visit is not confined to the touristy neighborhoods.
This is why Phillips’s version captures something essential about Paris that other renditions miss. Phillips’s performance, with its intimacy and warmth, its building energy and conversational phrasing, conveys the experience of being in the city rather than admiring it from afar.
Would another version resonate as deeply if I had heard it first? Perhaps. First encounters shape our relationships with music in lasting ways. But when this song surfaces in my mind, especially during moments when I want to imagine being elsewhere, it is Phillips’s version that appears. It’s not simply because it was first, but because it performs a type of emotional labor that the song demands. It makes Paris feel like a place where one could actually live and work, not merely admire from a distance.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2026-01-10-at-11.38.34-PM.png598602Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-01-11 17:36:312026-01-13 18:11:33Whose Version of “I Love Paris” Is the Best?
It’s a special occasion, such as a birthday, graduation, promotion, or anniversary. You decide to celebrate by going out to a fancy restaurant with a close circle of friends, relatives, or loved ones.
In order to choose an appropriate eating establishment, you rely on memory, reputation, and/or the recommendation of someone whose opinion you trust in these matters. Alternatively, or in combination, you consult Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor reviews. You book your reservation through an app. You receive confirmations, reminders, and sometimes even warnings. This strategy attempts to minimize the risk of a poor choice.
That being said, one must keep in mind that restaurants change. A place you loved five years ago may disappoint today; a restaurant you wrote off once may surprise you later. Risk has always been part of the dining experience. But the corporate restaurant (supported to a lesser extent by review platforms) doesn’t eliminate uncertainty; rather, it redistributes it. Now there is less chance of a spectacularly bad experience, and more certainty of an unremarkable experience. Most restaurant goers know this, and yet they return, hoping this time will be different, failing to accept the reality of what these places have become.
What frustrates me is not any single failure like bad food, slow service, or a noisy room, but the way these failures now arrive as a package, predictably and repeatedly.
First, there is time. Despite securing a reservation, you and your party may unexpectedly find yourself waiting for your seat. Once seated, you wait again for water, for menus, and for drinks and food. Courses arrive unevenly, separated by long, awkward gaps that drain the pleasure from the meal. When you want the check, the wait staff somehow seems to disappear into some back-of-house limbo, only to reappear the moment you’ve clearly overstayed your welcome.
Then there is quality control. Plates arrive lukewarm or cold. Portions are so minimal that they feel more conceptual than filling or nourishing. At the same table, one of your party’s food items is hot, another’s barely warm, and another’s chilled. This isn’t a demonstration of creativity; it’s operational sloppiness.
Next comes psychological pressure. Wine glasses are refilled aggressively, not out of hospitality but strategy. Upselling is constant, including another bottle of wine or alcoholic drink, another side dish, or another add-on. You sense the script. You may even know more about the food and wine than the person serving you. This happens because wait staff work under scripts, metrics, and upsell quotas that tie their earnings to their ability to extract more from each table. The interaction feels transactional, not convivial, because it has been designed that way.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every step of the process. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
Finally, there is the sensory assault. The room is loud. Music thumping, voices ricocheting off hard surfaces. Whether this is an intentional strategy to discourage lingering or merely indifference to acoustics hardly matters. The effect is the same. Conversation becomes work. Lingering becomes impossible. The message is clear: eat, pay, leave.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every interaction point. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
And the servers and wait staff? They are not the villains here. Being a waiter is an exhausting, precarious job. They are typically underpaid, overmanaged, and increasingly constrained by the very scripts, metrics, and quotas that make the dining experience feel mechanical. Few people choose it as a calling, and fewer still practice it as a craft. In the corporate model, servers are as trapped as diners, forced to prioritize speed and sales over attentiveness and care.
Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and travel documentarian, once observed that most restaurants are terrible businesses, and he was right. Profit margins are thin, costs are high, and failure is a common occurrence. But that reality has pushed many owners toward a false solution: corporatization. The belief that if you optimize hard enough by tightening portions, rushing tables, and automating warmth. But you can’t.
The restaurants that linger in memory are not the most efficient ones. They are the places where time stretched, where food arrived with intention, where no one rushed you out the door, where hospitality felt human rather than programmed.
I hope that the decidedly corporate restaurant is nearing its end. Not because patrons are nostalgic, but because they are tired. Tired of being hustled. Tired of paying more for less. Tired of experiences engineered to look good online but feel hollow in person.
If the corporate restaurant does fall, it won’t be a dramatic event. It will be gradual. Diners will stop choosing it. And in its place, slowly and unevenly, something better may return: restaurants run not to scale endlessly, but to serve well.
That would be worth celebrating.
Photo Credit: Charlie Chaplin from the movie Modern Times.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2026-01-03-at-10.20.27-AM.png660934Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-01-04 05:23:542026-01-04 13:51:02Why Corporate Restaurants Fail
Whitewashing a Myth about Graffiti Abatement
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThis past weekend, I saw The Honey Trap. The play centers on a former British soldier who lost a close friend during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Years later, while participating in an oral history project, he gains access to interview tapes and discovers that one of the interviewees may have been involved in setting his friend up for execution by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He travels to Belfast to confront the woman who had posed as a “honeypot,” and to kill her.
The play dramatizes how memory, trauma, and narrative combine, forcing the audience to witness these components emotionally rather than analytically. The actors also do a great job in their respective roles, though a handful of aspects of the story strained credibility.
But one comment caught my attention: the claim that the IRA used to whitewash graffiti on exterior walls so their snipers could better detect British soldiers on patrol and more successfully shoot them. It sounded plausible.
However, it’s also not true.
Even at a basic logical level, the claim falters. In urban conflicts, soldiers walk past and take cover against doors, windows, vehicles, and walls of many colors, so whitewashing graffiti alone would not meaningfully change visibility.
More importantly, there’s no credible historical evidence that the IRA or other republican groups whitewashed walls for tactical visibility purposes during the Troubles. More specifically, the IRA favored ambushes over sniper attacks. And most graffiti (not to mention murals) appearing in nationalist neighborhoods served a purpose. It marked territory, commemorated the dead, warned outsiders, and communicated political identity. Whitewashing those walls would have been politically counterproductive, not tactically useful.
But what interests me most is that the claim sounds believable. Not just to the playwright, but to audiences, and initially to me.
Why?
The general public (not to mention government officials) has sweeping, unexamined assumptions about graffiti: what it is, who produces it, and what its removal is supposed to accomplish. These beliefs are typically unsupported by empirical evidence, or else persist despite the availability of this research, which is ignored, misunderstood, or simply disbelieved.
More importantly, they believe that graffiti creates disorder, and removing it restores order.
With frequent appeals to the Broken Windows Theory, but little empirical work that supports these claims, the public believes that graffiti abatement reduces crime, improves property values, and increases public safety.
Thus, cities, counties, and businesses spend millions on removal. Money that can be better spent on more important prosocial initiatives.
Moreover, beliefs about abatement are so deeply held that a false tactical claim about whitewashing walls during a guerrilla conflict sounds instantly plausible.
The problem isn’t just that the whitewashing claim is false; it’s about how readily we accept claims about graffiti and abatement without consulting evidence.
We don’t actually know much about what abatement does (e.g., who it benefits, what it costs beyond the direct expenditure, what it erases beyond the markings themselves). We just assume removal is neutral, practical, and good. And until we start asking what we’re actually accomplishing when we insist walls or surfaces stay blank, we’ll keep accepting plausible-sounding stories that confirm what we want to believe.
Whose Version of “I Love Paris” Is the Best?
/by Jeffrey Ian Ross“I Love Paris” has been performed and recorded by dozens of musicians. Written by Cole Porter in 1953, the song has been interpreted by artists ranging from Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald to Michel Legrand. What’s striking is not just the number of versions, but how differently each musician renders the song.
Running at about four minutes, the lyrics are relatively simple, leaving performers considerable interpretive freedom through tonal variation, pacing, and choices of instrumentation. Most recordings, however, make the same fundamental mistake: they approach Paris through a tourist’s gaze, treating it as an abstraction or postcard rather than a vibrant city full of energy and contradictions. They offer sophistication, instead of feeling, grandeur instead of authenticity.
Esther Phillips’s 1970 live recording (appearing on her album “Confessin’ the Blues”) was the first version I heard, and that initial encounter probably affected my perception. However, unlike other situations where the primacy effect might be at play, I believe that my preference for her approach is rooted in the deliberative musical choices she made. Another important factor to consider is that it is a live performance in front of an audience versus a studio version. Let’s briefly look at other singers’ versions.
Frank Sinatra’s 1960 rendition, for example, is supported by lush string arrangements and appears unnecessarily slow. Each carefully placed pause, each swelling orchestral phrase, reminds you that you’re watching a performer rather than hearing someone express genuine affection.
For Sinatra and others (Bing Crosby, Doris Day, etc.) Paris is treated as an abstraction, a symbol of culture and refinement rather than a lived place. These versions of the song probably belong in a luxury hotel lobby, not in the streets of well-traveled neighborhoods where daily life unfolds.
Ella Fitzgerald’s version has similar challenges. The orchestration is busy. But this time it’s not the string section that is doing the work, but the brass and rhythm ones. In this context, the song’s intimacy vanishes entirely. Similar to the Sinatra version, the listener is forced to admire a performance rather than experiencing emotion.
Even the upbeat versions often miss the mark. For example, Peter Cincotti’s performance captures remarkable energy, but the arrangement features an extended piano instrumental that functions more as a showcase for his jazz virtuosity. As a result, the song becomes a vehicle for displaying musicianship rather than conveying a genuine attachment to Paris and the way it resonates with the performer.
Phillips strips all of this away. Her recording opens with a solitary bass line before she begins singing. This puts her voice front and center. When she sings “I love Paris… in the springtime,” she sets the song up as a playful take and interpretation of the city in the way that Sinatra and others don’t.
All in all, Philips delivers the message as if she’s confiding in something true. The faint sound of audience applause in the background only reinforces that sense of intimacy.
The tempo is moderate but purposeful, and the performance builds organically. Phillips’s distinctive phrasing sounds relaxed and unforced. By the second verse, the tempo, with the addition of the rhythm guitar and drums, subtly increases. The backing band does not overwhelm the vocal, but supports it with a growing sense of momentum. When she reaches “I love Paris in the fall,” there is genuine warmth in her voice, as though she is recalling specific moments rather than performing a standard. The line, “I’ve got to have it every morning,” is a playful, slightly cheeky double entendre. Phillips conveys the city’s romance, sensuality, rhythm, and pleasure. Her performance sounds spontaneous, and this makes the performance feel lived rather than from a distance.
Not only does Phillips’s rendering sound as if she has visited Paris, but like a skilled urban ethnographer, she’s experienced it numerous times. And that visit is not confined to the touristy neighborhoods.
This is why Phillips’s version captures something essential about Paris that other renditions miss. Phillips’s performance, with its intimacy and warmth, its building energy and conversational phrasing, conveys the experience of being in the city rather than admiring it from afar.
Would another version resonate as deeply if I had heard it first? Perhaps. First encounters shape our relationships with music in lasting ways. But when this song surfaces in my mind, especially during moments when I want to imagine being elsewhere, it is Phillips’s version that appears. It’s not simply because it was first, but because it performs a type of emotional labor that the song demands. It makes Paris feel like a place where one could actually live and work, not merely admire from a distance.
Why Corporate Restaurants Fail
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIt’s a special occasion, such as a birthday, graduation, promotion, or anniversary. You decide to celebrate by going out to a fancy restaurant with a close circle of friends, relatives, or loved ones.
In order to choose an appropriate eating establishment, you rely on memory, reputation, and/or the recommendation of someone whose opinion you trust in these matters. Alternatively, or in combination, you consult Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor reviews. You book your reservation through an app. You receive confirmations, reminders, and sometimes even warnings. This strategy attempts to minimize the risk of a poor choice.
That being said, one must keep in mind that restaurants change. A place you loved five years ago may disappoint today; a restaurant you wrote off once may surprise you later. Risk has always been part of the dining experience. But the corporate restaurant (supported to a lesser extent by review platforms) doesn’t eliminate uncertainty; rather, it redistributes it. Now there is less chance of a spectacularly bad experience, and more certainty of an unremarkable experience. Most restaurant goers know this, and yet they return, hoping this time will be different, failing to accept the reality of what these places have become.
What frustrates me is not any single failure like bad food, slow service, or a noisy room, but the way these failures now arrive as a package, predictably and repeatedly.
First, there is time. Despite securing a reservation, you and your party may unexpectedly find yourself waiting for your seat. Once seated, you wait again for water, for menus, and for drinks and food. Courses arrive unevenly, separated by long, awkward gaps that drain the pleasure from the meal. When you want the check, the wait staff somehow seems to disappear into some back-of-house limbo, only to reappear the moment you’ve clearly overstayed your welcome.
Then there is quality control. Plates arrive lukewarm or cold. Portions are so minimal that they feel more conceptual than filling or nourishing. At the same table, one of your party’s food items is hot, another’s barely warm, and another’s chilled. This isn’t a demonstration of creativity; it’s operational sloppiness.
Next comes psychological pressure. Wine glasses are refilled aggressively, not out of hospitality but strategy. Upselling is constant, including another bottle of wine or alcoholic drink, another side dish, or another add-on. You sense the script. You may even know more about the food and wine than the person serving you. This happens because wait staff work under scripts, metrics, and upsell quotas that tie their earnings to their ability to extract more from each table. The interaction feels transactional, not convivial, because it has been designed that way.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every step of the process. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
Finally, there is the sensory assault. The room is loud. Music thumping, voices ricocheting off hard surfaces. Whether this is an intentional strategy to discourage lingering or merely indifference to acoustics hardly matters. The effect is the same. Conversation becomes work. Lingering becomes impossible. The message is clear: eat, pay, leave.
None of this happens by accident.
This is the logic of the corporate restaurant: maximize table turnover, standardize experience, extract value at every interaction point. Hospitality becomes a revenue-optimization problem. The diner is no longer a guest but a unit of throughput.
And the servers and wait staff? They are not the villains here. Being a waiter is an exhausting, precarious job. They are typically underpaid, overmanaged, and increasingly constrained by the very scripts, metrics, and quotas that make the dining experience feel mechanical. Few people choose it as a calling, and fewer still practice it as a craft. In the corporate model, servers are as trapped as diners, forced to prioritize speed and sales over attentiveness and care.
Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and travel documentarian, once observed that most restaurants are terrible businesses, and he was right. Profit margins are thin, costs are high, and failure is a common occurrence. But that reality has pushed many owners toward a false solution: corporatization. The belief that if you optimize hard enough by tightening portions, rushing tables, and automating warmth. But you can’t.
The restaurants that linger in memory are not the most efficient ones. They are the places where time stretched, where food arrived with intention, where no one rushed you out the door, where hospitality felt human rather than programmed.
I hope that the decidedly corporate restaurant is nearing its end. Not because patrons are nostalgic, but because they are tired. Tired of being hustled. Tired of paying more for less. Tired of experiences engineered to look good online but feel hollow in person.
If the corporate restaurant does fall, it won’t be a dramatic event. It will be gradual. Diners will stop choosing it. And in its place, slowly and unevenly, something better may return: restaurants run not to scale endlessly, but to serve well.
That would be worth celebrating.
Photo Credit: Charlie Chaplin from the movie Modern Times.