even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

I went to Rutgers-New Brunswick (a state U), and Rutgers is like 35 mins drive or a pretty quick train ride from princeton, so there used to be some traffic between the two. We'd go down to princeton to hit up the Princeton Record Exchange and their nicer bookstores, and I guess kids would sometimes also come to New Brunswick from Princeton for a change of scene. I remember one day I was sitting in a New Brunswick coffee shop with my gf, and this guy started chatting with us. He was from Princeton but didn't have the Princeton air about him, seemed more like a middle class kid that could have been at Rutgers. I don't remember why or how the conversation got to this, but he launched into a long and slightly surreal spiel about "the game" and about how everyone at Princeton was playing "the game," whch was basically what he called the race for status. There were different levels in "the game," and he meticulously laid them out - what career outcomes were the top, what were just below that, etc. What about being a high school english teacher (what I thought I wanted to be at the time) I asked him. Oh no, that's not even part of the game. You're out of the game if you do that. You don't even exist. I guess I was a naive kid but I had somehow reached the age of 20 or so and never really thought about life that way, or at least never realized that there was a whole class of people who unreflectingly and unironically lived their lives according to that code. I assumed nearly everyone in the entire world would find that laughable even if they quietly sought status, but this guy set me straight.

I guess I was a naive kid but I had somehow reached the age of 20 or so and never really thought about life that way, or at least never realized that there was a whole class of people who unreflectingly and unironically lived their lives according to that code. I assumed nearly everyone in the entire world would find that laughable even if they quietly sought status, but this guy set me straight.

I grew up in a relatively well-off suburban NJ town and that shit was going on when I was in high school. I didn't apply to any colleges at all, and the looks I got not just from my friends' parents but from other kids were amazing.

i taught at columbia for a year, met maybe 50 students, and the top five were all either from overseas or on the (terrible) football team. those guys were great.

i once had a student ask me for "life hacks"

I went to an expensive school for smart kids but it was probably because I was an affable brown kid who'd written an award-winning (and yes unproduced) play, and charmed the admissions committee while high as a kite

fwiw I felt the same way about the way a lot of princeton kids dress, like "WTF, you wear brand new, pressed department store clothing and use a calfskin knapsack? Why the fuck would anyone dress like that?"

i'm sure the 'game' was happening at my university, but i was unambitious and oblivious

it absolutely was *not* happening at my high school, lol

Like "who buys the non-suit clothing at Brooks Brothers? Oh, these kids."

FWIW that's probably not true anymore, I think there was a cultural shift a decade or so after I left college.

i always thought it was wild that you could get an athletic scholarship to an ivy, but not an academic one. i guess i still think it's wild! (disclaimer: i went to an ivy, had a great time, would v much not recommend anyone in 2020 going this route unless they could figure out how not to pay for it. oh shit am i going to be a lacrosse dad??)

I never understood the Game.

That probably explains why I'm a well-respected experimental poet who has made more than 30k a year only twice since I turned 18.

I went to a yupwardly-mobile high school where the central anxiety of most juniors and seniors was getting into a good school, for which the euphemism was "the school of your choice." As if it were your choice and not your parents'.

Personally, I was somewhat immune to that pressure. Partly because I was a complete slacker with terrible grades, and partly because my parents were exhausted and did not give a shit. But I saw what the pressure was doing to my friends, and I am still sad for them. Sad for what they missed out on, and sad for what the anxiety did to them.

I hasten to note that this is all *relative*. It was still culturally assumed that I would go to *some* sort of college, get a degree, and work in some sort of salaried white-collar office job.

No other future was even considered for people of my class (for which, read: race and socioeconomic status).

Given the class-based, race-based, and relative nature of these perceptions, I am pretty sure that large swaths of people would regard my attitude toward college as just as bizarre as the NYT quid-ag view.

"Horrors! You have to settle for Loyola?!" Seems ridic to me, but I need to acknowledge how much privilege resides in even going to college at all. And then I have a sad, because I cannot fix it in any way.

as a child and as an adult, i always found that shit both hysterical and poisonous.

Yes it is toxic

oh for sure, and I also came from a family background where it wasn't really an option to *not* go to college, it just wasn't that sort of pressure cooker environment and I guess I also went to school with a lot of kids who would be the first one in their families to go if they went.

this shit is one of the million reasons I moved my family out of the USA. it'll wreck your soul.

The article now has a correction as long as the article itself.

Yeah just came here to post that. Sorry for passing it on! Great artwork though!

that correction is amazing btw and well worth the read!

"We have corrected a detail about a thigh injury, originally described as a deep gash but more accurately described as a skin rupture that bled through a fencing uniform." - I don't think I've ever read the phrase "skin rupture"? That's not clarifying at all, it kind of makes it more horrifying.

Ohhhhhhhh Ruth Shalit.

obviously there are serious issues involved about who gets second chances, or first ones, but you must admit it’s very funny that this one lady is like “i simply refuse to do actual journalism”

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) October 31, 2020

amazing

a real piece of work: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/273495/goodbye-to-all-that

Ruth Shalit is the sister of conservative writer and author Wendy Shalit. She married internet executive Robertson Barrett in September 2004, becoming the stepdaughter-in-law of Edward Klein. Barrett was the Vice President of Media Strategy and Operations at Yahoo! before becoming the president of Hearst's digital division in 2016.

Where will she fail upward to next?

Edward Klein aka the current Walter Scott of Walter Scott’s Personality Parade.

lmao on CNN tom friedman just said "maybe the best thing for the country would be for Biden to win and Republicans to keep the Senate by one vote" because then the two parties would have to come together

— jesse tripathi (@jessetripathi) November 3, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/realestate/shelter-island-renovations.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

aww...poor dude didn't think 1700 sq ft was enough space to raise a kid with his partner....

Lol, our three story house is only slightly larger than that, and we could easily fit in two kids if we wanted, which we don't. Ridiculous.

uhh...

what the fuck https://t.co/RZJaH5zsjE

— Nora Princiotti (@NoraPrinciotti) November 5, 2020

His 20-year old wife probably got him hooked

The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This

They moved to exotic locales to work through the pandemic in style. But now tax trouble, breakups and Covid guilt are setting in.

David Malka, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles, had heard from friends who were living their best work-abroad lives. In June, he created a plan: He and his girlfriend would work from Amsterdam, with a quick stop at a discounted resort in Mexico along the way.

The first snag happened almost immediately. In Cabo San Lucas, Mr. Malka and his girlfriend realized that the European Union wasn’t about to reopen its borders to American travelers, as they had hoped. Returning to the United States wasn’t an option: Mr. Malka’s girlfriend was from the United Kingdom, and her visa wouldn’t allow it.

The two decided to stay in Mexico a bit longer. At first it was glamorous, Mr. Malka said. Working by laptop — he manages a portfolio of vacation rental properties — they had the resort to themselves. But by the second week, their situation began to feel like “Groundhog Day.” The city and the beach were closed, so the couple never left the resort. Meanwhile, the travel shutdown was hammering his business.

Eventually, the couple took a 28-hour, two-layover trip to Amsterdam, where Mr. Malka was indeed turned away at customs. They retreated to London, where they promptly broke up.

He has been there since. “Cold, raining, depressing,” he said. “Those are the first three adjectives that come to mind.”

quiddities and agonies of fucking morons

I feel like the reason these people can do their jobs from Grand Teton or whatever is that none of their jobs are actual jobs

"Brandtrepreneur and commemorative Bitcoin facilitator Bret Misko thought at first it would be easy to telecommute from Nunavut"

you realize you’re implicitly insulting everyone else who’s been wfh since march

The city and the beach were closed, so the couple never left the resort.

Wow, I wonder what that must have been like, to be stuck at home for a while

you realize you’re implicitly insulting everyone else who’s been wfh since march

I've been wfh since march

but I'm not at a resort, I'm working from... home

Brandtrepreneur.

Brandtrepreneur?

Brandtrepreneur!?!?!

I just made that up it's not in the article

I didn't read the article but the headline seems like it belongs here:

"Welcome to Brooklyn, Where the People Are as Unique as Their Brownstones"

i hate these people, they are why we can't fucking recover
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/style/where-the-party-never-sleeps.html

"Welcome to Brooklyn, Where the People Are as Unique as Their Brownstones"

― o. nate, Wednesday, November 11, 2020 5:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Is that irony? A lot of brownstones look similar to one another.

Oh god, this sounds awful, but at least the reviewer didn't like it.

COBBLE HILL
By Cecily von Ziegesar

Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the best-selling Gossip Girl series, has returned, and this time she has shifted her perspective from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. “Cobble Hill” features four married couples weaving in and out of one another’s lives and pulling “Xennial” high jinks and horseplay. There’s a former rock star and his purposefully bed-bound wife; there’s a quirky school nurse and her awkward, aspiring musician husband. There’s an eccentric designer and her bottom-energy inventor husband. And there’s a magazine editor and her husband, a famous writer and recent English expat struggling with his next novel. The novelist, Roy Clarke, thinks of his previous works as “chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking.” This reads like a wink from von Ziegesar herself, and as a fan of breaking the fourth wall, I hope it is.

A lot is happening in Cobble Hill (infidelity, multiple fires, theft, frequent drug use) and yet the novel sustains a calm, plotless schema. These four Brooklyn families operate under the pretense that while nothing is great, it’s good enough for now. For a novel based in a high-income neighborhood full of brownstones, there is a refreshing lack of pretension in the prose. Von Ziegesar easily dips into the psyches of adults, teenagers and children, often on the same page, and she lets us into the interlocking structure of the story quite quickly. There’s much to be thankful for in a novel that doesn’t waste a reader’s time.

Von Ziegesar winks at the audience again by presenting Cobble Hill as a sanctuary for the liberal elite. She good-naturedly pokes fun at her characters, but she does so with a next-level amount of kook, which becomes more distracting than it needs to be. There is a famous musician named Stuart Little, from a once popular band called the Blind Mice. There is a shy teenage girl who is named — wait for it — Shy. There is a hot school nurse named Peaches who secures a drug dealer named Dr. Mellow after making just one phone call. And there is a beautiful woman named Mandy who is pretending to have multiple sclerosis. Why? Because “she liked it,” and “it felt like she was doing something earned and deserved.” Possibly even more batty than a woman faking M.S. for the full length of a novel is the nonresponse it receives when the truth comes out. Peaches the nurse finds the act “sort of badass,” and like most of the bad behavior in the novel, Mandy’s phony illness is, in the end, “not such a big deal.”

At times, the novel is the fun fall romp that it was intended to be. But the self-consciously idiosyncratic characters in an intensely geographically accurate portrayal of Brooklyn also present an odd “for us, by us” veneer; it often reads like a joke you had to be there for. Much of the appeal of this novel relies upon its references to gentrified Brooklyn. The magic comes in the form of a jolt of recognition; that feeling when a character in a novel shares your birthday, or when you see your neighbor’s face on the local news. To say this novel is niche would be an understatement, to call it wacky would be apropos — but much like the neighborhood it’s named for, “Cobble Hill” may delight readers of a certain age and income bracket.

Oh god, this sounds awful, but at least the reviewer didn't like it.

COBBLE HILL
By Cecily von Ziegesar

Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the best-selling Gossip Girl series, has returned, and this time she has shifted her perspective from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. “Cobble Hill” features four married couples weaving in and out of one another’s lives and pulling “Xennial” high jinks and horseplay. There’s a former rock star and his purposefully bed-bound wife; there’s a quirky school nurse and her awkward, aspiring musician husband. There’s an eccentric designer and her bottom-energy inventor husband. And there’s a magazine editor and her husband, a famous writer and recent English expat struggling with his next novel. The novelist, Roy Clarke, thinks of his previous works as “chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking.” This reads like a wink from von Ziegesar herself, and as a fan of breaking the fourth wall, I hope it is.

A lot is happening in Cobble Hill (infidelity, multiple fires, theft, frequent drug use) and yet the novel sustains a calm, plotless schema. These four Brooklyn families operate under the pretense that while nothing is great, it’s good enough for now. For a novel based in a high-income neighborhood full of brownstones, there is a refreshing lack of pretension in the prose. Von Ziegesar easily dips into the psyches of adults, teenagers and children, often on the same page, and she lets us into the interlocking structure of the story quite quickly. There’s much to be thankful for in a novel that doesn’t waste a reader’s time.

Von Ziegesar winks at the audience again by presenting Cobble Hill as a sanctuary for the liberal elite. She good-naturedly pokes fun at her characters, but she does so with a next-level amount of kook, which becomes more distracting than it needs to be. There is a famous musician named Stuart Little, from a once popular band called the Blind Mice. There is a shy teenage girl who is named — wait for it — Shy. There is a hot school nurse named Peaches who secures a drug dealer named Dr. Mellow after making just one phone call. And there is a beautiful woman named Mandy who is pretending to have multiple sclerosis. Why? Because “she liked it,” and “it felt like she was doing something earned and deserved.” Possibly even more batty than a woman faking M.S. for the full length of a novel is the nonresponse it receives when the truth comes out. Peaches the nurse finds the act “sort of badass,” and like most of the bad behavior in the novel, Mandy’s phony illness is, in the end, “not such a big deal.”

At times, the novel is the fun fall romp that it was intended to be. But the self-consciously idiosyncratic characters in an intensely geographically accurate portrayal of Brooklyn also present an odd “for us, by us” veneer; it often reads like a joke you had to be there for. Much of the appeal of this novel relies upon its references to gentrified Brooklyn. The magic comes in the form of a jolt of recognition; that feeling when a character in a novel shares your birthday, or when you see your neighbor’s face on the local news. To say this novel is niche would be an understatement, to call it wacky would be apropos — but much like the neighborhood it’s named for, “Cobble Hill” may delight readers of a certain age and income bracket.

What does it mean to be purposefully bed-bound, is that a sex thing

Presumably it's somehow related to "bottom-energy"

Correction: Nov. 11, 2020
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a cocktail served at Gitano Garden of Love. It is Jungle Fever, not Jungle Punch.

glad that got cleared that up