New Yorker magazine alert thread

"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 :)

idk anything abt afrojack but i find it almost impossible to believe that anyone working with music software even as a clueless amateur doesn't know what 'bars' are. that's how the visual mapping of everything is delimited. calling them 'measures' is more classical/euro, maybe?

oh whoops you linked to the dr luke thing then i started talking abt the vegas/ afrojack thing.

send me whatever man, i'm not choosy

sent via ilxmail

cool man. can't d/l at work but i'll check that soon.

Deadpan profiles of douchebags seems to be the New Yorker's new speciality.

Hasn't John Seabrook already written that piece btw?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_seabrook

also

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_seabrook

yeah seabrook has apparently made a specialty out of writing about the machinery of pop music, amusingly he apparently is a) a huge eagles fan b) doesnt really like pop music

i loved the ester dean piece, like even tho he was condescending i found her creative process totally charming and inspiring

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/10/new-private-club-in-san-francisco.html

LOL now this lady on the other hand really does not like these douchebags:

"The seagull population in San Francisco has risen, from twenty-four birds in 1980 to more than fifty-three thousand in 2013. The gulls threaten endangered native species, interfere with landings and takeoffs at local airports, and even upset Giants fans by eating their snacks and defecating on them during games. They are opportunistic scavengers who adapt easily and can unhinge their jaws to consume what looks like more than their fair share; they may have started out as a small group of not-so-charming birds, but now they’re running the show."

clubs that select their own members are, by definition, not diverse

This is incorrect?

Gottwald's cell phone rang.

"Hey, man," he said. It was Katy Perry's manager, Bradford Cobb. "What's up? Talk to me."

The NY law firm article was bonkers in a vicarious John Grisham kinda way

Henry Wallace article showed him bonkers in a hilarious way.

I started the law firm article...it's like a Louis Auchincloss story.

https://twitter.com/davepell/status/388722039705460736/photo/1

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BWUEoq2CUAAQWr1.png

This is great: Michael Shannon gets rejected by the NYer

I love articles about collapsing law firms, looking for a novel version.

Is Edward Snowden coming back to fix http://healthcare.gov ? @BorowitzReport http://nyr.kr/1daZQ1c

fp borowitz is the worst