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

As an antisocial weirdo I have never exchanged pleasantries with anyone over the waffle machine.

Joe Nocera is off today.

I exchanged presents with my mom on Christmas once and gave her a waffle machine and it was a pleasant day

david brooks i been to the comfort inn and there aint no haimish there son

This is a generalized phenomenon, which applies to other aspects of life. Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability.

youre like blowing my MIND man!

drink and song and fraternity and waffles is all a man needs

next time in editorials: david brooks tries to befriend a hobo by the underpass, finds the guy's grouchiness an "affirmation of the dignity of the human spirit" then discovers his wallet missing

what a scamp! haha welp back to being not homeless

boudu saved from drowning by david brooks

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/4058/boudu.jpg

haha if ever there was someone who deserved someone like Boudu to come into their lives and make a total mockery of it, it's David Brooks.

that's gotta be the tritest take-away from a trip to africa ever

if you look up the "reporting" Brooks claims to have been doing in Africa you'll find a relatively short article about Richard Leakey which contains not a single quote

haha if ever there was someone who deserved someone like Boudu to come into their lives and make a total mockery of it, it's David Brooks.

REMAKE! (again)

that's gotta be the tritest take-away from a trip to africa ever

― shannon goon (symsymsym), Wednesday, August 31, 2011 2:06 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

in the grand tradition of the autobiography of malcolm x, david brooks takes a trip to africa...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/fashion/recent-college-graduates-wait-for-their-real-careers-to-begin.html

Likewise, Amy Klein, who graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in English literature, couldn’t find a job in publishing. At one point, she had applied for an editorial-assistant job at Gourmet magazine. Less than two weeks later, Condé Nast shut down that 68- year-old magazine. “So much for that job application,” said Ms. Klein, now 26.

One night she bumped into a friend, who asked her to join a punk rock band, Titus Andronicus, as a guitarist. Once, that might have been considered professional suicide. But weighed against a dreary day job, music suddenly held considerable appeal. So last spring, she sublet her room in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and toured the country in an old Chevy minivan.

didn't they do this same article in like 1993?

I thought the article was pretty good

i didnt read the whole thing im just sort of loling at the generation gap/assumptions being made there

1993 and 2011 are 'a little bit different'

unemployed recent college grad asked to tour the country with moderately-successful punk band? ONCE, that would have been unheard of! but in this climate, you never know

I was more amused at my reaction of 'okay reading story, another grad, wait why Titus Andronicus oh it's THAT Amy'

yeah i liked that article

i mean any style section piece that features someone who makes $12/hour and can barely afford food doesnt really belong in this thread imo

yeah, FedEx bought out Kinko's, so you can't say you graduated w/honors in English and are now assistant manager at Kinko's.

a freelance gig writing for Elfster.com, a “secret Santa” Web site.

what the shit

and it kinda sucks, but you can use the copiers at work to make copies of your zine and fliers for your friends' bands shows

i knew s4r4h in that article in college! she is nice.

“I have a college education that I feel like I am wasting by being there,” he added. “I am supposed to do something interesting, something with my brain.” For a while, Mr. Shore ran LongevityDrugstore.com, an online drug retailer that he started, but it went nowhere. To stretch his pay check, he made beans and rice at home and drove slowly to save gas. Eventually he quit, got work as a dock hand and is now thinking of becoming a doctor.

wtf @ driving slowly to save gas

yeah lamp otm

usually these articles are like 'Ryan couldn't even land his dream job at Goldman and has been forced to suffer the indignities of working at a small consulting firm'.

this one is basically normal middle class kids

But when his parents started charging him $500 a month for rent

what assholes!

guys I QUOTED the funny two paragraphs for you

i guess it is funny to pay $125,000 dollars for your undergrad expecting to get a job in publishing, in 2007

thanks max, now i know that Elfster exists.

“I am supposed to do something interesting, something with my brain.”

i have no sympathy for this dude

why? that seems like a reasonable expectation in a lot of ways although i can see reading 'interesting' as a little stronger

idk, it's not that i don't sympathize with the difficulty getting a career off the ground, because i feel like i fall squarely in this 'trend' -- idk, it just seems like there is a difference between feeling frustrated and undervalued at your job, and thinking that the only jobs that you *can* get are somehow beneath you.

"i am destined for important things! i will become a doctor!"

I agree with you entirely. In fact, I kinda feel like working a low-paying menial job after college/grad school is a (shitty) rite of passage.

otm

and i think it's not that he "wants to do something interesting" "with his brain," it's that he expects to be paid handsomely for it

ha, it's pretty easy to do interesting things with one's brain and not get paid for them at all.

Elfster was really the only quiddity part of that article but wow, so quiddy

I mean the whole "I went to a good school, I deserve a good job" is just meritocratic bullshit filtered through the lens of the academy. Correct reading of that passage above: I was sufficiently privileged as a child and thus admitted to a 'top' school that my parents paid for /was be-scholarshipped/attended on a good loan package, and now I should get a good job unlike those schmucks who didn't go to a college/went to a state school or community college/spent time in the military/took time off because I am a Hard Working Kid Who Deserves More even though I have done very little but attend a liberal arts program and maybe work summers serving ice cream on a pier.

dude it was on a pier
you don't know their pain

my personal big boob crisis

Isn't it Louis C.K. who says there's very little in the world worse than a 20- year old complaining about the kind of job 20 year olds take?

dude can't find consulting jobs out of biz school
works in a call center, bails
starts a retail drug site, fails
takes a job as a dockworker, dreams of becoming a doctor

i mean, in another economic climate, this dude might have hopped on a biz career path and sailed away, but as it is, i can't help but feel like this is just a dude whose ambitions do not match his work ethic

his first mistake was going to biz school