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

you realize you’re implicitly insulting everyone else who’s been wfh since march

The city and the beach were closed, so the couple never left the resort.

Wow, I wonder what that must have been like, to be stuck at home for a while

you realize you’re implicitly insulting everyone else who’s been wfh since march

I've been wfh since march

but I'm not at a resort, I'm working from... home

Brandtrepreneur.

Brandtrepreneur?

Brandtrepreneur!?!?!

I just made that up it's not in the article

I didn't read the article but the headline seems like it belongs here:

"Welcome to Brooklyn, Where the People Are as Unique as Their Brownstones"

i hate these people, they are why we can't fucking recover
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/style/where-the-party-never-sleeps.html

"Welcome to Brooklyn, Where the People Are as Unique as Their Brownstones"

― o. nate, Wednesday, November 11, 2020 5:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Is that irony? A lot of brownstones look similar to one another.

Oh god, this sounds awful, but at least the reviewer didn't like it.

COBBLE HILL
By Cecily von Ziegesar

Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the best-selling Gossip Girl series, has returned, and this time she has shifted her perspective from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. “Cobble Hill” features four married couples weaving in and out of one another’s lives and pulling “Xennial” high jinks and horseplay. There’s a former rock star and his purposefully bed-bound wife; there’s a quirky school nurse and her awkward, aspiring musician husband. There’s an eccentric designer and her bottom-energy inventor husband. And there’s a magazine editor and her husband, a famous writer and recent English expat struggling with his next novel. The novelist, Roy Clarke, thinks of his previous works as “chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking.” This reads like a wink from von Ziegesar herself, and as a fan of breaking the fourth wall, I hope it is.

A lot is happening in Cobble Hill (infidelity, multiple fires, theft, frequent drug use) and yet the novel sustains a calm, plotless schema. These four Brooklyn families operate under the pretense that while nothing is great, it’s good enough for now. For a novel based in a high-income neighborhood full of brownstones, there is a refreshing lack of pretension in the prose. Von Ziegesar easily dips into the psyches of adults, teenagers and children, often on the same page, and she lets us into the interlocking structure of the story quite quickly. There’s much to be thankful for in a novel that doesn’t waste a reader’s time.

Von Ziegesar winks at the audience again by presenting Cobble Hill as a sanctuary for the liberal elite. She good-naturedly pokes fun at her characters, but she does so with a next-level amount of kook, which becomes more distracting than it needs to be. There is a famous musician named Stuart Little, from a once popular band called the Blind Mice. There is a shy teenage girl who is named — wait for it — Shy. There is a hot school nurse named Peaches who secures a drug dealer named Dr. Mellow after making just one phone call. And there is a beautiful woman named Mandy who is pretending to have multiple sclerosis. Why? Because “she liked it,” and “it felt like she was doing something earned and deserved.” Possibly even more batty than a woman faking M.S. for the full length of a novel is the nonresponse it receives when the truth comes out. Peaches the nurse finds the act “sort of badass,” and like most of the bad behavior in the novel, Mandy’s phony illness is, in the end, “not such a big deal.”

At times, the novel is the fun fall romp that it was intended to be. But the self-consciously idiosyncratic characters in an intensely geographically accurate portrayal of Brooklyn also present an odd “for us, by us” veneer; it often reads like a joke you had to be there for. Much of the appeal of this novel relies upon its references to gentrified Brooklyn. The magic comes in the form of a jolt of recognition; that feeling when a character in a novel shares your birthday, or when you see your neighbor’s face on the local news. To say this novel is niche would be an understatement, to call it wacky would be apropos — but much like the neighborhood it’s named for, “Cobble Hill” may delight readers of a certain age and income bracket.

Oh god, this sounds awful, but at least the reviewer didn't like it.

COBBLE HILL
By Cecily von Ziegesar

Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the best-selling Gossip Girl series, has returned, and this time she has shifted her perspective from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. “Cobble Hill” features four married couples weaving in and out of one another’s lives and pulling “Xennial” high jinks and horseplay. There’s a former rock star and his purposefully bed-bound wife; there’s a quirky school nurse and her awkward, aspiring musician husband. There’s an eccentric designer and her bottom-energy inventor husband. And there’s a magazine editor and her husband, a famous writer and recent English expat struggling with his next novel. The novelist, Roy Clarke, thinks of his previous works as “chatty and witty and not about anything, really, just people from deranged families, talking.” This reads like a wink from von Ziegesar herself, and as a fan of breaking the fourth wall, I hope it is.

A lot is happening in Cobble Hill (infidelity, multiple fires, theft, frequent drug use) and yet the novel sustains a calm, plotless schema. These four Brooklyn families operate under the pretense that while nothing is great, it’s good enough for now. For a novel based in a high-income neighborhood full of brownstones, there is a refreshing lack of pretension in the prose. Von Ziegesar easily dips into the psyches of adults, teenagers and children, often on the same page, and she lets us into the interlocking structure of the story quite quickly. There’s much to be thankful for in a novel that doesn’t waste a reader’s time.

Von Ziegesar winks at the audience again by presenting Cobble Hill as a sanctuary for the liberal elite. She good-naturedly pokes fun at her characters, but she does so with a next-level amount of kook, which becomes more distracting than it needs to be. There is a famous musician named Stuart Little, from a once popular band called the Blind Mice. There is a shy teenage girl who is named — wait for it — Shy. There is a hot school nurse named Peaches who secures a drug dealer named Dr. Mellow after making just one phone call. And there is a beautiful woman named Mandy who is pretending to have multiple sclerosis. Why? Because “she liked it,” and “it felt like she was doing something earned and deserved.” Possibly even more batty than a woman faking M.S. for the full length of a novel is the nonresponse it receives when the truth comes out. Peaches the nurse finds the act “sort of badass,” and like most of the bad behavior in the novel, Mandy’s phony illness is, in the end, “not such a big deal.”

At times, the novel is the fun fall romp that it was intended to be. But the self-consciously idiosyncratic characters in an intensely geographically accurate portrayal of Brooklyn also present an odd “for us, by us” veneer; it often reads like a joke you had to be there for. Much of the appeal of this novel relies upon its references to gentrified Brooklyn. The magic comes in the form of a jolt of recognition; that feeling when a character in a novel shares your birthday, or when you see your neighbor’s face on the local news. To say this novel is niche would be an understatement, to call it wacky would be apropos — but much like the neighborhood it’s named for, “Cobble Hill” may delight readers of a certain age and income bracket.

What does it mean to be purposefully bed-bound, is that a sex thing

Presumably it's somehow related to "bottom-energy"

Correction: Nov. 11, 2020
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a cocktail served at Gitano Garden of Love. It is Jungle Fever, not Jungle Punch.

glad that got cleared that up

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/realestate/homeownership.html

Ms. Elliott, 36, and her husband, Spencer Elliott, recently moved from a rental apartment in a doorman building in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park to a three-bedroom house they bought for $465,000 in New Jersey’s Lake Hopatcong community. The couple spent a few thousand dollars replacing a broken refrigerator and furnace oil pump, and updating their fireplace and chimney for the season. A smart video doorbell, which cost $300, was also purchased, to help them adjust to no longer having a doorman to greet visitors or accept packages.

Tag yourself, I'm the amount of shade in "unanticipated but seasonal home maintenance."

subtract the pandemic part and you could run that story any year

the first things i did when we moved into our house was disable the ring doorbell's internet connection and camera

“ I got to the barn and first had to say hi to Tenny because she’s my princess unicorn, so she needs treats and kisses. Then I got to ride a Polly Pocket-size pony named Snickers. I had my lesson with my amazing trainer Vanessa”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/arts/television/zosia-mamet-flight-attendant.html

Kill me now

I stopped at Michaels because I needed a wreath hanger for our door.

the great leveler

h/t MatthewK

https://www.qantas.com/travelinsider/en/lifestyle/business/a-day-in-the-life-routine-professor-joel-pearson-unsw.html

poor zahana

I have black coffee – no sugar

ah i see

most importantly, playing with children benefits me

while at the same time being fun - it's win-win

this guy identifies himself as a "public intellectual" on his uni website

YALL COULDA WENT TO COSTA RICA BUT YA DUMBASS SAID Q!? 🤦🏾‍♀️ #WheelOfFortune

— Queen Mother Asantewa (@Tunacheckers) February 21, 2020

lol, wrong thread

That guy is a scientist the way Gwyneth Paltrow is a scientist.

The Brain.fm app has a good selection you can stream through your laptop; you just need headphones

such good advice

You can have his morning nicotinawhatever and resveratrol for only $4.20/day

https://www.bulksupplements.com/products/nicotinamide-mononucleotide-nmn?variant=32133357699183

headphones have been shown to increase music enjoyment, which produces MGN5, a sub-chemical component of i am a total dillweed

I know this guy is a type and there are surely no shortage of reference points out there for him but reading that really reminded me of the High Maintenance webisode Qasim (would link but I see the web series was moved behind HBO's paywall when they picked it up)

on assholes (specifically james bennet, mostly when he was at the atlantic): https://jenzerb.medium.com/i-left-my-career-in-prestige-media-because-of-the-shitty-men-in-charge-and-they-are-still-in-4963374ec6b8

wow.

jesus

not ny times related but mnuchin's wife's vanity project

Conservatives are getting better at displaying realistic human emotion and it’s making the left nervous https://t.co/bFFxpvR9ER

— Scout Tafoya (@Honors_Zombie) January 29, 2021

https://assets.fishersci.com/TFS-Assets/CCG/product-images/VN00020610-DCAP.JPG-650.jpg

oh my god, is that a lowkey remake of Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise?!?!?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-rise-432-park.html

last name Abramovich, primary residence is London, oil and gas fortune...

HMMM

there are a lot of oh hell no moments in that one but getting stuck in an elevator 1200 ft in the air is top of the list

for me it would be to feel the sway of the building during one of these recent insane windy storms while I stared out the window at clouds and rain. luxury!

so i just saw the NYT include the name of Mike Daisey's new monologue "What the Fuck Just Happened" in the internet edition which made me wonder how many times they've printed the word "Fuck" in the paper where it's not an excerpt and it's more often than you might think:
https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&query=fuck&sort=newest
including this humdinger of a typo
http://i.imgur.com/CHRq26k.png

"Mike Daisey's new monologue" a real world No Way SNA

That looks like a OCR error, not a typo. It was correct in the original paper.

xp

i meant a transcription typo

no fuchs left to give

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/sunday-review/covid-friendship.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage&fbclid=IwAR1D85wWVHzd5qnkob3z0hBYhFhHBNqMl8CCseOTiLISpK4ULc6Ao2TUYNk

features:
- managerialization (if that's a word) of friendship
- employing academic experts to explain normal human shit that everyone understands
- a san franciscan who joined a friendship "pod"
- excessive PMC navel-gazing

i'm not sure i have the emotional bandwidth rn

By Kate Murphy
Ms. Murphy has written several articles about various aspects of life during the pandemic, including why Zoom is terrible, why you should stop using toilet paper and why we’re all socially awkward now. She is the author of “You’re Not Listening.”
No shit