“Our guy at sanitation is actually Sartre, because many people notice black bags of trash. They notice piles of trash. They rarely, if ever, notice the absence of piles of trash.”
Odd Lots · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
Joe Weisenthal had been musing that trash collection might feel like Sisyphus pushing his boulder. New York sanitation official Joshua Goodman answers that the work only gets noticed when it fails.
Transcript
Well, it is true that most New Yorkers think of cleanliness as the natural state, right? It's not wow, you did it. Are you sure about
that? That's the goal,
right? The idea is that a street is supposed to be clean. And, you know, you mentioned Camus. Our guy at sanitation is actually Sartre because many people notice black bags of trash. They notice piles of trash. They rarely, if ever, notice the absence of piles of trash. And so there is a philosophical element to this, but obviously, I know we're going to spend a lot more time on this. We could just talk about Camus
and Sartre the whole time.
What it really came down to was about four or five years ago, we had spent decades of people coming to New York from Barcelona, from Buenos Aires, from Paris, from London, even from Chicago and LA, and saying, why do you live like this? And for many decades, our answer had basically been like…
Before we get into all the ins and outs of the trash revolution, which I love as a designation, how did black bags of garbage become a thing in New York in the first place? Because I remember this was one of the big culture shocks when I first moved to New York for college, and then I dropped out.…
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