New Yorker magazine alert thread

Joe Don Baker also more successful than any of them.

lol

Was he in Reality Bites?

Reality, Texas

xpost yes he was her dad in the movie

Certain of his friends “spend all week doing due diligence, and other businessy things”; others “are, literally, starving artists in Oakland.”

I’ve known Casnocha since, literally, his infancy: we grew up a few blocks away from each other, in San Francisco’s Cole Valley, and our families were friendly through a babysitting co-op. (That such a co-op existed perfectly distills the area’s mood and demographics in those years.)

“It’s like, Dude, you do! You do!” He twanged the guitar’s open strings. “Literally, there’s a room dedicated to miking these bad boys.” He twanged again.

“I had friends who were raising rounds for their companies. They were all awesome—like, literally, I could totally see these guys being millionaires soon. Some of them already are!”

“What we’re seeing now is literally a shift in the way that people do business—a shift from hierarchical architectures to networked architectures.”

barf

“Hardware? No, now you just put it on Amazon or Rackspace. Software? It’s all open-source. Distribution? It’s the App Store, it’s Facebook. Customer service? It’s Twitter—just respond to your best customers on Twitter and get satisfaction. Sales and marketing? It’s Google AdWords, AdSense.

This braiding of tech-business growth with life-style values and aesthetics—and, from there, the world of art—creeps many people out.

http://i.imgur.com/angTNvK.jpg

we have our Lyft and our Sidecar and our UberX and our InstantCab and our Flywheel

He twanged again.

Hwin asked the driver whether she had an auxiliary feed into her stereo. She did. He gave her his phone, and an electronic ballad started throbbing from the car’s front speakers.

“Who’s this?” the driver asked.

“My band, unreleased,” Hwin said. “Turn it up!”

The driver nodded appreciatively, and Hwin started singing along with his vocals. The windows were open, and the wind was in my face. We looped around Octavia and continued up Franklin, to the center of the life of a collective kid who, for reasons I still didn’t understand, seemed to have mastered everything about the new Bay Area and how it worked.

http://i.imgur.com/NoJWHpG.gif

ready the launch codes

If I hoped to understand the first thing about American culture in this decade, I realized, I’d need to figure out exactly what was going on in San Francisco.

http://i.imgur.com/KfBjaUT.jpg

I asked him what he thought the next dip would look like, and he frowned. The coast was socked in, and the Ritz golf course seemed kind of scraggly. “Well, first we need a boom,” he said. I thought about people like Johnny Hwin and Tyler Willis and Naval Ravikant and wondered whether he was looking in the right places.

i have no idea who nathan heller is but this is the worst shit ive read in the new yorker maybe ever

and i read lena dunham writing about owning a dog

i dont understand what that means at all out of context

its the writer talking to an old money guy and getting worried that the old money guy doesn't know about all the cool new startup guys.

its like the new yorkers music writing

I think we've found the next dip, Lots of them, if you get my drift.

we have our Lyft and our Sidecar and our UberX and our InstantCab and our Flywheel
― marcos, Tuesday, October 8, 2013 1:01 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Now I’ve sold most of my cars.."

What’s going to happen to these serial entrepreneurs when they’re forty-five and have two kids—especially if they don’t have a hit company? This seemed a window onto the Bay Area’s future, so I asked a lot of people. No one knew. The consensus was that people like this go to work for Google.

"Now I’ve sold most of my cars.."

looooooooooooool i totally didn't even catch that

Chairish, a marketplace for high-end furniture.

That’s when his experiment in pushing culture forward really began.

Forget about it, Jake, it's the Mission.

I think the barfiest thing to me was that at no point did the author ever pull back and note that these SF start-up-millionaire-nuevoVC-creative-class whatever people are totally out of touch with the lives of the 99.99999999% and that makes me not respect them very much.

Them meaning both the subjects and the writer.

Dylannn parodies come to life.

Related article in the current Vanity Fair:
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/10/pacific-heights-real-estate

Trevor Traina, San Francisco’s undisputed social king, has enticed many of the Silicon Valley elite to his ultra-exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood, showering them with advice about what to wear, how to entertain, and whom to know. But the concept of noblesse oblige may be harder to teach. Evgenia Peretz learns why the arrival of such high-tech moguls as Apple’s Jonathan Ive and Zynga’s Mark Pincus has put some Old Guard noses out of joint.

“It’s like Knots Landing,” says Traina, with little irony. He moved to his first home on the Gold Coast—a 5,500-square-foot Wurster house—in 2000, after selling his tech company Compare.net to Microsoft for $100 million. When he decided to get married (to Swanson-food-and-wine heiress Alexis Swanson) and start a family, he deemed the house too small (“O.K. for one kid, but not multiple kids”) and moved across the street to his current house. A 1905 Georgian, it would fit not only a growing family but also his 300-piece photography collection, which includes works by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston. The house is an unabashed paean to extravagant beauty. In one corner is a pair of taxidermy peacocks from Paris—a gift from his stepmother, novelist Danielle Steel. In another, an ornate console table that belonged to movie director Franco Zeffirelli and took center stage at Traina’s dramatic marriage proposal to Alexis in the handbag section of New York’s Bergdorf Goodman. Then there’s his art-book reading room, for which he had a wild notion. “I said to [our decorator] Ann (Getty), ‘Could you do a wall of hand-sewn peacock feather?’ And she said, ‘Absolutely, no problem.’ She had her people hand-sew it.” He has infused his love for over-the-top exquisiteness into his latest Internet venture, a company called IfOnly, which raises money for charity by enlisting the world’s foremost talents to offer “life-enriching experiences” such as cooking with Thomas Keller or getting the world’s “top mixologist” to invent a cocktail for your friend for $250. “We all have too many cashmere sweaters,” he says, explaining the inspiration behind it. “What people want today are experiences and memories… A lot of friends aspire to have incredible experiences, and so I thought, What if we could really delight people by connecting them in the most incredible ways with their heroes and do good in the process? … It’s sort of what I already do.”

I think the barfiest thing to me was that at no point did the author ever pull back and note that these SF start-up-millionaire-nuevoVC-creative-class whatever people are totally out of touch with the lives of the 99.99999999% and that makes me not respect them very much.

― quincie, Tuesday, October 8, 2013 1:35 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not focused on as much as it should be but he does talk about it briefly when discussing the guy who founded his own private bus service, talking about how taking the solution out of the hands of the government makes it less likely that "normal people" will benefit.

this thread has an appetite for the nyer introducing sardonic winking smilies & maybe in the digital edition deploying rolleyes.gif just to make it super clear though. i guess the guy is allowing an optimistic reading of where we're at & the attitudes that are guiding these people but in concert with how goofy everyone looks i think it's okay to let the reader draw their own conclusions? there doesn't have to be some slash & burn denouement, it puts forward a pretty explicit argument that this stuff kinda stratifies society somewhat

yeah, the article makes these people seem gross and out-of-touch and terrible, it is not doing any of them any favors unless you already think people like this are cool

n/a, true but wtf with the repeated references to "old Chinese lady," jesus H.

Telling parents back east "Here's what your kids are up to."

yeah, the article makes these people seem gross and out-of-touch and terrible, it is not doing any of them any favors unless you already think people like this are cool
--Lamp

Don't think this is what Nathan Heller thinks at all.

otm, the whole thing is written with this wide-eyed reverence that's just as terrible and out-of-touch as the article's subjects.

totally different from the bustle.com piece

Rewinding a couple of weeks, I loved Josh Eells' Vegas EDM piece. Nice deadpan black comedy. Love the details like the girl falling off the stage and the man employed to clear a path for the promoter. And the main players seem somewhat aware that this is an absurd and depressing bubble even as they rake in the $$$.

the Heller piece felt like it should be in the Atlantic with a title like "How the new San Fran techno-aristocracy is changing the way we think and making our lives better and saving the world"

this is sub req, how is it?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/14/131014fa_fact_seabrook

first sentence is not good

the whole thing is written with this wide-eyed reverence that's just as terrible and out-of-touch as the article's subjects

well heller obv thinks people like this are cool but the piece is still presented in such a way that it undermines that i guess, or at least doesn't obscure how lame the people hes writing about are? maybe thats just completely unintentional idk

Rewinding a couple of weeks, I loved Josh Eells' Vegas EDM piece. Nice deadpan black comedy. Love the details like the girl falling off the stage and the man employed to clear a path for the promoter. And the main players seem somewhat aware that this is an absurd and depressing bubble even as they rake in the $$$.

― Deafening silence (DL), Wednesday, October 9, 2013 8:46 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the killer quote being the one where someone tells afrojack that track intros are usually timed by bars not seconds and hes like whats a bar

hah yes i respect that so deeply

iirc he says 'whats bars?' lmao

i mean it could be a translation thing as english isnt his first language i think, but still

Lamp I think if you are pre-disposed to think subjects are douches there is no article about them where you won't find plenty of evidence to affirm that belief. I don't think that is evidence that the article is critical of them.

Reflecting on that SF article, I have to continuously remind myself that these douches are, like, 25 years old. Were we not all douches at 25? I certainly was.

It is easy for me to forget their true ages when their resumes already have three/four different "started a company, sold it" entries. Starting a company and selling it used to take a lot longer, which is part of the articles point.

Still, barf.

goole i bet you will love the vegas/afrojack piece-- can YSI a pdf if you want me to

yeah totally! plz do :)