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

(Full disclosure: I live in a building on East 74th Street, where I grew up playing ball with the doormen and today often find myself in long chats with them about politics and family. And while the doormen of my childhood sat and listened to the ball game in shirt sleeves, staff members today keep jackets on and stand behind a little wooden lectern.)

Also, great headline

hahaxp

there's a good article or five to be written about doormen but that ain't it

One need not look further than the lobby of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., to see that the iPhone and applications that run on it are centerpieces of the company’s mobile strategy.

Fascinating! Tell me more!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/technology/06apps.html?em

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/12/04/ST2009120402037.html?sid=ST2009120402037

Hey now, we have another thread for that!

quiddities and agonies of the ruling class, DC edition - a rolling washington post thread

oh ha didn't kno

o man the post is just like *smh*

the only reason i can think of for this not being on this thread yet is that nobody could bring themselves to read it. (i made it onto the second page, just barely...)

lol i thought about posting that but was like, can i in good conscience post an article i can't even read through myself :)

i'm embarrassed i even read that much of it.

i mean i know i have defended the new york times on this thread but SOMETIMES THEY MAKE IT HARD.

(that is not a reference to any sexual details that may or may not be in that article, and if there are sexual details in that article, i don't want to know.)

I couldn't even be bothered to start it. Summarize it in the most nauseating way possible.

i can summarize the first page:

hi me and my husband are smart, attractive people (did i mention he's on a fitness program to give himself the body of a Marine?) with interesting backgrounds who got married because we were madly in love and now we have two lovely children and a house we renovated ourselves with money from a book advance and we're both successful writers so what with being fabulously happy and successful and all i thought i should write a memoir about trying to make our already-really-swell marriage EVEN MORE FANTASTIC by REALLY THINKING about what kind of relationship we really want to have and being really honest and open with each other. and now i'm going to spend 4,000 words telling you the candid details. (if you like it, you can buy my book!)

top of page 10

The following weekend: jealousy again (or was it an attempt to fuel our eroticism with tension?). I said yes a bit too forcefully when Dan asked if I’d noticed a well-muscled young man at the pool. Dan was allowing for my sexual free agency, granting me my full humanity. We lived, raised children, worked and slept together. Now we needed to gouge out a gap to bridge, an erotic synapse to cross. It was exhausting. “That guy did the epitome of bad-values hypertrophy training” — vanity weight lifting, in Dan’s estimation, just to get buff. “You’re like a guy admitting he likes fake boobs. And he had chicken legs. Did you notice that, too?”

her husband is a surfer who is the child of hippies. he cooks so much delicious food they haven't even saved for their retirement!!! can you believe that? he really loves to cook, he's like a chef

and later

Still, night after night, I’d slide into bed next to Dan. He often slept in a white T-shirt and white boxer briefs, a white-cased pillow wrapped over his head to block out my reading light, his toppled stacks of cookbooks and workout manuals strewn on the floor.

But as I watched Dan sleep — his beef-heart recipe earmarked, his power lift planned — I felt more committed than ever. I also felt our project could begin in earnest: we could demand of ourselves, and each other, the courage and patience to grow.

white
white
white

lol

"our project"??

I scrolled very quickly through it and caught something about "top 10 orgiastic tao sex maneuvers"

wowwwwwwwwwww

New York Times I love you but you're bringing me down

sorry but i see the photo and all i can think is dude can maybe power lift a bagel if he's feeling up to it

I was wondering when someone would post the link this.

I'm going to get a bit challopsy here, because I actually read that entire article, and in spite of wanting to punch both people in the face at multiple moments, I liked parts of it. I mean still, yeah, it definitely was made for this thread.

i can believe there are some actual relationship insights here and there in it. or i'd hope so. i'm just not going to read the whole thing to find them.

yeah, I too started to read it and then after about a page was just like, oh barf, gimme a fuggin break with your fake ass yuppie narcissism "problemz"-which-are-really-new-modes-of-self-love

God knows I don't begrudge anyone happiness, which is why I blame the reporters, not the subjects: as usual with the NYT, the story's framed as if it was about beehives on the moon or some shit.

Um, it's a memoir.

And? It's still published in the NYT mag as a main story, complete with photos and headlines. Framing matters.

The things she says "drive her crazy" about her husband are all actually braggin.

xpost yeah but you said you blame the reporters, not the subjects. The reporter is one of the subjects.

I guess as a married dude I enjoyed some of the "What is it we're actually supposed to be looking for (if anything) in a marriage" stuff. I also found it interesting to read between the lines to the narcissism and distance in their relationship.

from reading this thread only, im hoping it goes totally tiger woods on them

one thing is i'm just very tired of this whole stunt-memoir thing: i'll do or try to do XYZ thing to change or improve my life, and write a book or a big magazine feature about it. and in a case like this, you're bringing other people into it too. she writes at the beginning how her husband is kind of resistant to the whole thing, and i mean, no kidding. "honey, i want us to work on our relationship, and by the way i'm going to write about everything you do or say."

his n hers lamps :\

lol modern marrieds

(and then if doing the stunt-memoir puts a strain on your relationship, you can do like julie powell and write a second memoir about the stress caused by the first memoir. it's a perpetual bullshit machine.)

yeah julie powell needs to go away

I need to write a stunt memoir about being stressed out by trying to come up with my own stunt memoir.

RFI: is Julie Powell worse than Elizabeth Gilbert?

o man my sister on her blog said she was lookin forward to reading that article cause she knows the guy - and her post has got a bunch of comments from ladies being all omg it was so great - smh

this is the couple where the husband wrote (and published) an epic "sexual bildungsroman" about all his past lovers right

yeah here's the Publishers Weekly summary of the husband's book:

Duane tracks the emotional meanderings of Berkeley grad student Cassius Harper in this meticulous study of the ambivalence and romantic bewilderment of privileged American 20-somethings...his occasionally claustrophobic first-person narration offers a second-by-second account of his affair with this "most exquisitely sexual and vulnerable girl-woman."

i declare a new rule, if your husband writes a book containing the phrase "exquisitely sexual and vulnerable girl-woman" you're allowed to go all sorts of Julie Powell on his ass.

argh. i want to know less about both of these people.

despite many reservations and twitches, made it through the article on good faith. The last two years have seen so much writing on modern divorce as a generation of 35-45ers discover it all over again for themselves, and so much of it is gung-ho marriage-is-an-inherently-fucked-institution / I-got-divorced-and-YOU-SHOULD-TOO that I was actually willing to suspend all snarkiness for the sake of a hilariously overamped article suggesting that even a ludicrously picture-perfect marriage takes work

so in the middle of what seems to me like a tidal wave of female bloggers who are loudly & proudly giving up on marriage, I had time for this article, even if I thought the couple were pretty shamelessly ridiculous. almost woke up mothra's divorce thread the post about it but figured that'd be a lonely thing to do

i loved how it turned out their marriage was never even the silver mylar balloon, it was "hiding" in the basement

how could you MARRY someone who wrote the phrase "exquisitely sexual and vulnerable girl-woman"?

that article made me against gay marriage, and also straight marriage, and against humanity