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

I find Giridharadas's public persona irritating about 85% of the time but this is exactly the context in which I'm into it.

Yikes. Won’t hurt sales, tho.

maybe giridharadas should review thomas friedman's columns

yeah i posted it because it felt like one section of the paper reviewing another

That's a good review, but I remember liking Guns Germs and Steel a lot at the time and thinking it seemed like a pretty sound theory -- are there any good critiques of it worth reading?

I recently signed up for the NYtimes cooking / recipe box feature. The comment section is awesomely A&Q, and I can't tell which comments are trolling and which ones are sincere. Here are some reader responses from a salad dressing recipe posted by Samin Nosrat. I like to imagine the voices of the people who wrote them:

"EssieDee1 day ago / The best green salad in the world? I had a better one in St. Remy De Provence in 2012 . . ."
"David o.5 days ago / Did a very Canadian thing. Instead of honey, added maple syrup. Added a nice touch, it did."
"Dora1 week ago / To claim that most Italian extra virgin oil is adulterated while Greece, Lebanon and Spain’s is pure is simply untrue and irresponsible as it damages the reputation of so many honest small Italian oil producers. The entire industry is plagued with abuse and buyer beware from whatever provenance. I have to laugh at the Lebanon reference from personal knowledge."

Metropolitan Diary: Turn It Down

Dear Diary:
In fall 1999, I was single and I decided to have a party where single men and women could meet. The caveat was that everyone I invited had to bring an equally unattached friend, presumably someone they were not romantically interested in.
The party was a great success, and at around 10 p.m. the doorbell rang. I opened the door to two men dressed in dark clothes. I introduced myself as the hostess.
“Come on in, gentlemen,” I said. “The party is just getting started.”
The older of the two stepped forward.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “We’re from the 20th Precinct, and we had a noise complaint from one of your neighbors.”
I started to offer to turn the music down while apologizing for any inconvenience when the younger of the two officers stepped into the apartment. To my surprise, he took my hand and started dancing with me.
We danced until the song ended. The officer leaned toward me.
“I’m getting off at 11,” he said, before asking whether he could come back after his shift ended.
“Of course,” I said. The officers left.
Around 11:30, the younger officer returned. He ended up being one of the last guests to leave.
— Melaney Mashburn

wake up, melaney!!!

Another real estate one, starring two Vice staffers
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/30/realestate/30hunt-conti.html
Guess which one they chose.

most expensive of course. Damn, $3800 a month, and vice pay is notoriously low (although maybe exec editor is an exception). DINKs.

wau i would live in Clinton Hill over Bed-Stuy in a heartbeat

i assume these are 1BRs? lmaaaaaao

it's all broken

rare that I have a chance to feel better about my rent tbf

xxxp they had a wedding announcement in the times, one of them has a trust at least?

It says they were looking for a 2BR. The Clinton Hill one had an extremely fucked up layout so I don't blame them for not taking it -- the one bathroom was literally outside the unit and you had to walk through someone else's place to get to your own due to some kind of shared staircase. Can't really blame them for not wanting that. As much an indictment of how insane NYC real estate is as Q&A of the ruling class. But at the same time, (1) fuck your need to live in a "classic brownstone" and (2) just fucking move to queens.

ah i see now. 2BR is much more realistic for that money.

I don't care how small the apartment was, giving up getting to walk to work is weird but they are young I guess.

At least they have that really nice mirror.

btw

https://i.imgur.com/9tBqqoh.jpg

hahahahahaha oh. my god

Headline writer misspelled "lágrimas"

we thought being complete idiots was a good idea but we were wrong

I could barely plan things to do in Argentina with my parents when I was like 20

That writer is also the editor in chief at Goop.

is that shocking?!?!

My life perspective changed a lot when it hit me that jobs like "editor in chief of goop," which ordinary folks sadly strive for and usually don't get, are actually just created for the dumber kids of rich people.*

*nb I don't actually know what goop is.

presumably the smart kids of smart rich people are allowed to join in doing whatever the parents did

i am sure you have looked it up by now, but goop is G Paltrow's mockable but profitable lifestyle brand.

I think Pergament is where you go in Catholic theology to live in eternal agonies if your sins are all quiddities

Blake Lively's store-brand Goop was better
https://jezebel.com/what-real-dudes-think-of-the-mens-section-on-blake-live-1616380572

Blake's barely lasted a year i think.

What Middle-Class Families Want Politicians to Know

nothing that egregious in here except that all these families make at least $100,000 a year

deeply sadly 100k for a family _is_ middle class for nyc i imagine

this one tho

The Battle of Grace Church: What happened when Brooklyn’s oldest nursery school decided to become less old-fashioned? A riot among the one percent.

The world was a simmering, seething cauldron, one that was only going to get hotter and harder to survive in. If this felt true in general, it felt especially true to the residents of Brooklyn Heights, whose small universe had recently gotten a lot more crowded. The glass towers that sprung up along the waterfront had filled up with families, yet the number of schools remained the same. In the past, parents could pay their way into Grace Church, which traditionally served as a feed to St. Ann’s and Packer Collegiate, one of the two private schools traditionally favored by Brooklynites with $40,000-plus a year to spend on setting their children on The Correct Path. Now this privilege, like all others, seemed in jeopardy.

yeah, that one was a laff riot it's true

deeply sadly 100k for a family _is_ middle class for nyc i imagine

Yeah but one of those familes is +200K in Wyomissing PA.

you need that 200k to get by in (checks notes) Laveen Arizona i guess
i gotta move

I usually feel like 'families' make 50k or 110k and there is barely an in between. It's messed up.

1. exhibit one: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/technology/brex-start-up.html
2. exhibit two:

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fdoughroller-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F10%2FBrex-logo-e1540841268699.jpg&f=1
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.wallpapersafari.com%2F34%2F11%2FQG6FKy.gif&f=1

3. exhibit three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X

Kara Swisher's tech columns have moved beyond ridiculous into some sublime pure land of drivel. pic.twitter.com/5Q5hGOim0U

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) August 6, 2019

(screenshots from the same column)

hadn't really noticed her before so i clicked on another random article and got this word salad:

[Don’t get me wrong, I love to scoot, and I do it often, including a whole bunch of times here in Paris. Zoom, I went to meet someone for lunch in a bistro near the Bastille. Zip, that was me going under the Arc de Triomphe. Zut alors, me again sailing along the Seine on a Bird.

wasn't there some recipe column that did the exact same thing in the NYT a while back?

The pileup of adjectives in the first sentence of that tweet remind me of trying to pad out a book report in the 5th grade

pareene on the aristocracy's paper

Take a surgeon, making $400,000. That is, more or less, the intended reader of the Times, which consigns a mere family practitioner making $200,000 to the “middle class.” Indeed, the Times itself helpfully clarified its own upward-skewing vision of social class in a delightfully unselfaware Opinion section piece about “the middle class in America” made up almost entirely of subjects with six-figure household incomes. When readers criticized the paper’s apparent redefinition of “middle” and “class,” the Times braintrust explained the editorial process that led to the creation of that piece: They simply tasked reporters to ask Times readers who self-identified as middle class; not surprisingly, these open-ended inquiries yielded a handful of objectively wealthy people who simply don’t feel that rich.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154726/heres-better-reason-unsubscribe-new-york-times

the jonathan weisman stuff is really quite something

Yeah, he's an idiot who tweets racist shit again and again and when a black woman pointed it out he mailed her, her assistant, and her publisher to demand an apology. How the fuck is that not a firing reason?

lol

NYT says it is demoting Jonathan Weisman -- he will be an editor in DC, but no longer overseeing Congressional correspondents, and no longer active on social media. Weisman has been contrite. Story to follow.

— marc tracy (@marcatracy) August 13, 2019

This article was interesting and made a decent argument.

Here's a Better Reason to Unsubscribe From The New York Times
It's not the "newspaper of record." It's a rag for the East Coast rich.

You shouldn’t unsubscribe from The New York Times over a bad headline. Or even over a bad pattern of editorial decisions dating back years demonstrating an institutional worldview poisoned by false equivalence, blinkered elitism, and fealty to power. Don’t unsubscribe to punish them, or as economic leverage to force them to Do Better. You should instead unsubscribe from the Times because the Paper of Record doesn’t need your money. Or, at least, the Times needs it much less than someone else probably does.

The Times itself reported on Wednesday that The New York Times Company earned an operating profit of $37.9 million in the second quarter of this year—down from last year but still pretty healthy—thanks in large part to the paper’s combined print and digital subscriber base of 4.7 million readers.

If you are among that 4.7 million, you have been won over with some canny marketing. The Times’ decision to heavily invest in attracting subscriptions from a national (even international) audience has been a savvy and largely successful one, but almost by definition these world-conquering ambitions can only succeed at the expense of other, smaller outlets. There is not an unlimited international appetite for newspaper subscriptions. And that expansion has required the paper to market itself as various things it is not: chiefly as a true national newspaper, meant to be read by every literate American, or as a voice of the Resistance. But it has never been either of those things, nor has it ever sought to be. The Times has a specific niche in the media environment, and it is quite good at being the thing it actually wants to be.

The Times is a paper for the East Coast rich. If that doesn’t describe you, the paper is not making editorial decisions with you in mind.

“Times readers in the New York metropolitan area are upscale, affluent, Jewish, liberal and identify with New York’s culture, its museums and its art,” a former Times circulation editor said in a 2013 interview. The company’s media kit—the PR materials designed to convince brands to purchase ads in the paper or on their website—tells a similar story: “The NYT Weekday ranks #1 with Opinion Leaders, reaching 57% of this elite group.” It reports a median household income of $191,000 for readers of the paper and $96,000 for the website.

I am an urban professional, living in New York, making a good living, and The New York Times is barely even for me. Take a surgeon, making $400,000. That is, more or less, the intended reader of the Times, which consigns a mere family practitioner making $200,000 to the “middle class.” Indeed, the Times itself helpfully clarified its own upward-skewing vision of social class in a delightfully unselfaware Opinion section piece about “the middle class in America” made up almost entirely of subjects with six-figure household incomes. When readers criticized the paper’s apparent redefinition of “middle” and “class,” the Times braintrust explained the editorial process that led to the creation of that piece: They simply tasked reporters to ask Times readers who self-identified as middle class; not surprisingly, these open-ended inquiries yielded a handful of objectively wealthy people who simply don’t feel that rich.