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

right? i am pretty sure the right answer to "I got mugged" is a shot of bourbon and a doughnut, not "good luck eating out for the rest of your life"

no icecream wd be a bummer

maybe they stole her gluten, sugar and carbs tho

right? i am pretty sure the right answer to "I got mugged" is a shot of bourbon and a doughnut, not "good luck eating out for the rest of your life"

Exactly!

shame, she has some interesting links on twitter occasionally, none that I've seen about gluten-free

Meg Geldart, a circus acrobat in Portland, Ore.
Meg Geldart, a circus acrobat in Portland, Ore.
Meg Geldart, a circus acrobat in Portland, Ore.
Meg Geldart, a circus acrobat in Portland, Ore.
Meg Geldart, a circus acrobat in Portland, Ore.
Meg Geldart, a circus acrobat in Portland, Ore.
Meg Geldart, a circus acrobat in Portland, Ore.

^^^

Ms. Yayanos first dropped gluten, sugar and carbs on a friend's advice after being mugged at gunpoint, a trauma that left her fending off panic attacks and depression.

The best part of this is the unintentional time compression; the way it's worded, it makes it seem like Yayanos staggered to her friend's house sobbing "I've been mugged!" and her friend was all "STOP EATING CARBS IMMEDIATELY oh and maybe we should call the cops"

I'm reading it that dropping gluten, sugar, and carbs was the trauma that led to panic attacks and depression. I know it would for me.

haha that too

Re the busy-ness article, I don't disagree with anything in it really but I get IA at

"Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this."

OH YOU POOR BABY. PEOPLE WANTED YOU TO PARTICIPATE IN TEH WORLD, HOWEVER WILL YOU SURVIVE THIS HORROR. As opposed to all those days when you blew off work to do something nicer than work and no one penalized you for it, I guess?

i think not opening your email would be a more realistic response then fleeing town. but what do i know.

tbf a lot of people have a set workload they have to get done and the email problems are on top of that! I think it's more an issue of jobs assuming you get done with a set of tasks and never have to return to them, whereas a lot of jobs involve maintenance and support.

maybe don't work in publishing if you don't like answering emails?

"asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve"--I might be kind of a Puritan about industriousness but like is this guy somehow incapable of...life?

Things I do not want to do = almost everything I have to do to live that doesn't involve reading, drinking, or making out. Problems I have to solve = everything in life, including how to maximize opportunities to read, drink, and make out.

laurel on the money!

this is making the rounds
http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/travel/single-in-chicago.html?pagewanted=all

On a different evening at Roof, this time well past midnight, two go-go dancers twirled like woozy tops, flanking a D.J. who was blasting Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up.” It was more lively than the night I arrived, which suits the space: it’s too sprawling for tête-à-têtes. Still, I later wondered aloud to a man I met why a lounge with fire pits, a 12-foot-wide HDTV monitor, and million-dollar views felt it also needed to throw in a couple of dancers in panties.

“Are you visiting from New York?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It’s the Midwest,” he said. “Welcome.”

manages to be even more condescending than you might expect a NYT article about chicago to be

a coffee shop where people work on laptops! a guy held the door open for her and was nice!

did not know the midwest was know for going big

theres so much for me to discover out there *writes times travel diary*

"Boy, Chicago sure seems different than the two years I've spent in New York after moving from Cleveland"

It's also pretty funny that they devoted like half of the slideshow to Milennium Park. It was on national TV when Obama accepted the presidency, it's not some hidden treasure. Maybe next they should travel to San Francisco and tell us about the Golden Gate Bridge.

haa this bar she visited multiple times is on the roof of the hotel shes staying in

I shivered. This time, it wasn’t because I was chilly. It was because the Windy City blew me away.

*writing*

do they just let anyone write these dravel diaries because ive seen a lot of bad ones

Luckily, exploring Chicago on your own is not like wandering around Turks & Caicos..

what a relief

its just like some randos personal travel blog level writing idgi

It looks like she's written quite a lot for the Times actually

i guess people tend to get uninteresting when they have to talk abt their own uninteresting experiences

Whenever I read stories about tourists' visits to Chicago, I always get a little nervous -- fearful, I guess, that their very particular experiences will skew their impressions of the city. This article mostly struck me as pointless rather than misguided, though.

(I've actually been to one of the bars in the Wit -- a coworker once dragged me to watch her boyfriend play background music -- but not to the one on the roof.)

Gazing out at Marina City’s towers, rising like two corncobs (as the locals call them)

GTFO

I know! that sentence!

The wit roof top bar isn't too bad. But there are about 500 more interesting places to go.

Like Navy Pier.

Is this being talked about in the Chicago threads at all? I feel like that would be entertaining.

the stupid thing about bad travel writing is that you'd assume tons of great writers would be like YES PLZ COMP MY TRAVEL & PAY ME TO WRITE ABOUT IT & yet so many travel writing is just completely terrible

my favorite part tho was this:

This is the second in a series of articles about traveling alone.

is "traveling alone" a special genre of travel writing? can't all travel writing just be applied to whatever your situation is?

and the feeling you get from the piece is 'weird! chicago is not like new york!' which surely can't be what people want from travel writing

I assumed most travel writing was 'travelling alone'

She actually comes off as so PROVINCIAL, like those people who say "OMG, the McDonalds in Arizona had quesadillas! It was so weird!"

I assumed most travel writing was 'travelling alone'

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, July 6, 2012 10:47 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

well travel writers travel alone, but i guess the implication is that they write about things that are to be done for people that are travelling in a group? but that really doesn't matter at all. almost anything you would or could do while travelling in a group you could or would do while travelling alone. if the NYT travel editor thinks that's novel, that person is not very good at his or her job.

Wasn't there some article where a young Sulzberger traveled around the midwest and wrote about it or something? Perhaps even in this thread?

is it true abt the mcquesadilla

I linked to this thread on the Chicago thread so we're talking about it here.

i don't think i have ever looked at a chicago thread. seems like it would be rude to.

Well hey, *y'all* Chicagoans are welcome here on our thread. I hope it's not too intimidating and different, this is a BIG city, not like Chicago!

lol at thinking nytimes is ny-specific

joeks

I don't think that at all, my parents always subscribed and we lived in DC

I game their system for the weekday shit and occasionally subscribe to Sunday edition