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

14 years

I didn't really care for the Havrilesky piece, but some of the reaction to it seems not to have noticed that it's an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir. It's not like she suddenly got exasperated with her husband one day and ran to the New York Times to badmouth him.

coming up on 20 years

I'm sure my wife and I could each write a list of minor annoyances about one another that we overlook because, on balance, it's a good marriage. If plucked out of the context of the larger discussion, that list would look similar.

I wonder if any of us here have been married for 15 years

28 years this past June.

I didn't really care for the Havrilesky piece, but some of the reaction to it seems not to have noticed that it's an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir. It's not like she suddenly got exasperated with her husband one day and ran to the New York Times to badmouth him.

No, but that was the excerpt she chose to publish in the New York Times, removing it from any other context (because a lot of people aren't gonna realize it's an excerpt from a book and most of the people who read it are not gonna read the whole book, since it's a very bad piece of writing that does not do much to promote the larger project).

if i had to choose between the havrilesky piece and the i-love-my-wife defector piece mookie linked i would first of all wonder what pass my life had come to but anyway i think i hate the latter more actually

Tracer OTM with respect to this Lady and the Tiger dilemma we are confronted with here.

idk, i didn't love the parts of the defector piece where he was describing his own marriage - a little too hyperbolic - but on sum i hew closer to that experience than the havrilesky one by a long shot. and i thought his takedown of the havrilesky was otm

married 12 yrs here btw, together for ~17

Married 19 years, one thing that helps preserve a matrimonial union is to avoid reading marriage-themed clickbait.

I read my wife some of the lines from the Havrilesky piece and we both chuckled about it, especially the part about the sneeze/scream that she never hears without saying "Jesus Christ!".

My wife and I were just laughing about that piece, but more for its lack of full self awareness (although a few of the lines were funny), like as though the writer imagined she were just writing "don't you hate how men leave the toilet seat up," while basically calling her husband a disgusting piece of shit that she couldn't stand other than in rare moments where she was able to pretend he was something good.

wb

: )

Just had a heated discussion with Mrs. Redd when I told her I prefer various other approaches to the term and idea of a New Year's Resolution. Wonder if "humorous" Op-Ed should be written about this.

My latest rage-inducer from the times was the article about disgust that started off with a shockingly ableist anecdote about how disgusting people with colostomy bags are, so disgusting that they couldn't be worth dating. The article then went on to talk about how eating food with hands was disgusting...without even mentioning that people eat food with their hands in pretty much every culture on the planet, but particularly in African and Asian cultures.

Just an abysmal paper, I think I'm going to end my sub this year because of that article, to be frank.

It's amazing what a high percentage of The Paper of Record is either middlebrow fluff or just straight up trash. I barely read it anymore.

It seems like they need to fill a quota of content

Yeah that fucking article, I've been in a rage about it since it came out. Just an absolute disgrace.

i've probably said this before but aside from the international news and a few well reported metro stories it's completed its transformation into the New York Observer

They WISH. The New York Observer in its glory days crushes any current newspaper like a grape.

Lol okay yes that’s true, for one thing it’s not nearly spiteful enough. but you know what I mean.. the obsession with real estate, the narrow-band audience profile.. interpellating us all as the over-it nouveau riche

"the narrow-band audience profile"

vs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/business/ben-smith-new-york-times.html

“There are 200 million people who are college educated, who read in English, but who no one is really treating like an audience, but who talk to each other and talk to us,” Ben Smith said. “That’s who we see as our audience.”

the observer really had some great, fun writing too it should be said. yeah maybe not a great comparison actually xpost

I still don't get that Ben Smith quote but if he's really saying "I have hired the best journalists in India and we're going to develop an amazing media property there with worldwide reach" more power to him I guess

‘Nothing Will Be the Same’: A Prison Town Weighs a Future Without a Prison
After a decade of efforts that reduced inmate populations, California is closing prisons. A town whose economy is built on incarceration wants to keep one open.

economy is built on incarceration

It's going to be the new "mines/factories/etc" closing for a lot of rural America, particularly as many places— even conservative areas— reevaluate mass incarceration, or at least strive to make it more streamlined.

For years, rural towns with little to no industrial base, aging populations, and a mostly aged agricultural and extractive economy in California have relied on prisons to survive, even when evidence shows that many of the jobs in new prisons go to people already working in prisons. That is, there is no meaningful employment gain when a new prison is built, though there is a net benefit to other area businesses. There is vast collusion between prison companies, guard unions, the state, and local civics orgs to bring prisons to small, struggling areas, fill those prisons with people from coastal cities, and talk about a revived economy, when really the logic is more akin to hedging one's bets on a monocrop, except the crop is human beings. Eventually, the system will collapse, and the whole reason for the town's existence will be shattered.

Just another reason to be against prisons.

There's a fair amount about the prisons in Susanville in Ruth Gilmore Wilson's 'The Golden Gulag,' which I highly, highly recommend to anyone who wants a radical and truly mind-bending look into the California incarceration complex and its culture.

I will say that I have driven through, and it is really a small, one-street town nestled in the foothills of the northern Sierra. Beautiful and old and sort of charming, despite the honky death cult vibes. There's a brewery that makes a great double IPA up there that hasn't found distribution outside of Northern California, I think about that beer all the time because I used to be able to buy a 24oz bottle of it for $3.50 and feel pretty loaded.

a friend of mine grew up in susanville, both his parents are COs

golden gulag is super wild and insightful, def worth reading

There was a time when small towns in the US competed for prisons, which were seen as non-polluting sources of reliable government-funded jobs. The kind of 'clean' new industry that would help keep shops open on main street.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/01/08/cats-took-vitamix-hostage/

The couple, who married in 2016, are accustomed to seeing their cats jump on boxes and sit on piles of things. The animals usually lose interest after a day or two at most. Not this time.

Treats, decoy boxes and toys have been used, all for naught. The Gerson-Neeveses moved the box to a less-central area of the kitchen, hoping the change in geography would end the stalemate. But a cat remained on the box, on guard at all times. Jessica got up in the middle of the night to try to claim the box. Occupied.

“There is just something about the Vitamix box that just has really held their attention,” Jessica said. “At this point, it’s turned into something so much bigger than us.”

People frequently ask why the couple doesn’t just take the cats off the box. These are clearly dog owners. This is not how cats work.

“We’re far enough into it, I can’t move them now,” said Nikii, 38, a utility billing clerk. “They’re committed, we’re committed. ”

They Had Reasons for Leaving the City. So Why Are Their Friends Mad?
When Covid hit, some New Yorkers abandoned the city for good. They left some angry friends.

these seem to just be stories of people with bad friends?

We lost a couple of friends when we moved. One I really got the sense felt abandoned by us. I don't really blame people for it or consider them bad friends, although it definitely shows they weren't our most loyal friends. I think the whole situation was kind of traumatic for people, suddenly having everything shut down, being cooped up, scared out of your mind, and then on top of that some of your friends just leave. I get why some people wouldn't respond well to that. FWIW both the families we lost as friends had this very hardcore city-for-life mentality. One was raised in Queens and lived across from the apartment they grew up in.

One of them also treated our daughter like shit after we moved though (too long to explain but involved a situation that came up with the kids on messenger), and that was not cool.

ffs

people are weird

Maybe I'm being too forgiving, idk, but it was a strange time. It wasn't like we could be like "Hey everyone, we're leaving next month, having a party to say goodbye."

The number of people I know who have effectively ended their friendships with many people because they had kids during the pandemic is larger than the people I know who moved.

wait who are the friendship enders? the kid-havers or the non-kid havers?

i wonder if we'll get that one sorted

ime new parents are desperate for social contact.. it’s only later that we become lame

it's not that my friends became "lame" it's more than they no longer had the energy to be a friend because they were tapped out from caring for their offspring

it's def not a judgement of coolness or not so much as a lack of resources; ime they only truly come back once the kids are late high school afaict (from experience)

When we first had kids it’s not like I didn’t want to see my old friends, but it just took way more energy and logistics and planning to do anything social other than just roll across the street to the playground (even that required packing a bag). So it was hard to link up with no kid friends who were still more in the zone or just texting me on a whim to come to a bar in an hour. Less that way now.

I'm simply pointing out that in many cases, I see friends who don't have kids but live on the other side of the country more often than I see friends with kids who live across town.

I'm not being judgmental, just merely stating a fact— and also registering how irrationally hurt and pissed off it makes me when my friends have kids, because it often seems like them saying, "yeah, all those relationships we built for years, bye bye now."

Just know that your newly parental friends would most likely love nothing more than to go out for a drink with you. (They could really, really use a drink.) Not trying to solicit sympathy for the breeders, but they miss you too.

I know. They shouldn't have had kids, then.

It seems like a fun idea at the time ...

i like hanging out with my kid more than i like hanging out with most of my friends fwiw

https://i.imgur.com/ynVQciR.jpg

CONSUME

here's the latest

Now here’s the plannn