Topeka repeals domestic violence law:

By a vote of 7 to 3, the City Council repealed the local law that makes domestic violence a crime. […]

Though Kansas and its capital city have fared better than much of the country in this struggling economy, they are not immune to fiscal strains. The district attorney’s budget of $3.5 million was cut by 10 percent, which would force about a dozen layoffs. Meanwhile the office is dealing with what Mr. Taylor describes as a “recent uptick in violent crime,” which he attributed to increased gang activity. […]

Under the current arrangement, the district attorney is still responsible for prosecuting misdemeanors in the rest of the county as well as all felony domestic violence cases. Almost half of the misdemeanors that were prosecuted last year — 423 cases — are domestic battery cases, and most of the rest are shoplifting, drugs and assault.

Sam Sifton’s final restaurant review, on “the best restaurant in New York City”:

The appetizer is not food so much as a poem about creaminess, a meditation on brine, a sculpture about the delicious. It is a complete introduction to the restaurant and its pleasures.

But perhaps foie gras is more to your liking? […]

A meal at Per Se can stretch to four to five hours — a long time to sit with anyone, even a client with whom you are trying to close a multimillion-dollar deal. The restaurant more handsomely rewards the companionship of those who love one another as much as they do pleasure and indulgence.

Nor is Per Se a restaurant for those who do not understand that such pleasure comes at a cost. The menu has a set price of $295 a person, excluding wine. Nine or more courses are prepared, along with canapés to start and mignardises to finish. A conversation with a sommelier can easily double the cost of the buy-in. Dinner for two can scratch at $1,000 — or about the same as the median weekly household income in New York State.

By point of context, though, an aisle orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera for Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” runs $330, also excluding wine.

And to some, a simple garden salad is the functional equivalent of an aria — particularly as sung at Per Se, with compressed figs and young red beets, Hakurei turnips (small, plump and white, very cute in aspect), red ribbon sorrel and a coulis of pine nuts. Each flavor is bright, distinct, amazing, but none is so purely intense, as reduced to its essence, as the dense, fragrant craziness of the figs. […]

For such people, Per Se exists.

I’m not saying that Per Se should not exist. Nor am I saying that there aren’t real problems in Kansas that might have made repealing its domestic violence law something of an exigency. But the juxtaposition of these two stories as I read the news this morning just made my stomach roil — and not from hunger.

I think it should go without saying, but I will, that the Topeka story is yet another of the intersection between ‘women’s issues’ and the financial crisis. Not only are women faced with staying in abusive relationships because of poverty, but a city’s poverty is letting their abusers go entirely unpunished.¹