The Most Worthless Thing on the Internet: Sexed-up Trend Piece Edition

Let’s say you’re a writer for a respected (well, pretty much) New York City publication. It’s your job to write things about New York, which is great, because everyone knows what people do in New York is important, especially if they are “creatives,” especially if they have money, and especially if they live in Manhattan. They are on the cutting edge of culture! What is that edge cutting? Why? What drugs are the young people doing? What music are they listening to? What cuisines are they consuming? These questions must be answered and it is your job to do it.

One way to do it is you could just get loaded with a bunch of trust fund babies, look around the room, and write about whatever you see.

That seems to be what Nate Freeman of the New York Observer did in what will no doubt will go down in infamy as another entry in that already-infamous genre, “The NYC Trend Piece.” Trend pieces, for the blissfully uninitiated, are articles that describe something that a supposedly broad group of people (usually rich people) are doing, but do so without any numbers at all. “Trends” are always described using anecdotal evidence, partly because statistics for trends are hard to come by, and partly because trend pieces are often bullshit that gin-soaked writers make up in the face of deadlines and demanding editors.

Here’s what, in journo-speak, we call the “nut graph” of Freeman's piece:

Young New Yorkers no longer care about having sex. It’s not the endgame, nor even the animating force of social interaction. Men and women still get dressed up, but not for the purpose of taking off their clothes in another’s company. What used to signify desire or the desire to be desired now boils down to narcissism. How will I look on Patrick McMullan tomorrow? Or just on Facebook? The Observer spent a few weeks at parties and gatherings fraught with abstinence but slack of any sexual tension, and we heard a repeated sentiment, often delivered with uncharacteristic fervor: “We are a self-obsessed generation.”

We might ask, for starters, what the hell? Since when does “spending a few weeks at parties” count as reporting? (Since we died and went to reporter heaven, I guess.) And how do you know they were “slack of any sexual tension”? No one was making out in front of you, or getting erections, or quietly taking off their panties in the bathroom? And what is “Patrick McMullan”? I’m a 24-year-old working in the media, and I have no idea what that is. Oh, Google reveals it’s a party photography company. Well, maybe people don’t try to dry-hump that much at the kind of fancy party with professional photographers that the Observer apparently went to. To put it succinctly: you guys are going to the wrong parties, apparently.

Elsewhere, the writer recalls a coke-fueled party that lasted until dawn, full of “day laborers in film, public relations, media, fashion”—get it? “Day laborers?” Because ironically, these people do not do hard labor and get paid a lot!—that disappointingly did live up to the writer’s expectation that “one should choose a member of the opposite sex and set off for his or her apartment, to sleep together.” Damn, I guess Nate Freeman really wanted these hot 20-somethings to bang. Maybe they were tired after a long night of cocaine.

The thesis that young New Yorkers like me don’t care about sex because online social networks, er, make social interactions awkward later (or something?) is backed up by a few quotes from people who are experts because they, themselves, are in their 20s and in New York. Those quoted seem to be having a tough time with their sex lives, and I can empathize to a degree: If you and your potential mates work long hours, it’s tough to schedule a night of fucking in. And maybe it’s awkward for some people to have sex with people who later appear in your Facebook feed—but c’mon, that’s a fucking stupid obstacle to stand in the way of a good orgasm.

Then, as is usual in the trend article genre, there are some people who are bucking the trend. Is this bucking the trend it’s own trend, or just a sub-trend of the original trend? Whatever--in this case, Freeman talks to a couple teenaged actors from Skins and concludes, “younger [more sexual] kids are poised to take their places.” Is that creepy to say? Maybe! Anyway, the kids who aren’t old enough to drink are totally DTF, and amusingly, they have no idea what the Observer is talking about, responding to questions about how undersexed New York with “I haven’t actually, um, heard that?”

Well, I haven’t heard that either. Maybe there’s not as much anonymous sex in this city as there used to be because, y’know, AIDS, but I’ve been to plenty of parties with sexual tension to go around. A few Manhattan people are too coked out and workaholic and obsessed with internet status to fuck each other senseless? They just have their priorities out of whack, and I don’t believe many of these people exist because I’ve never, ever met them. If people want to have sex but aren’t, it usually means no one will let them.

To fight anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence, I posted Freeman’s story to my Facebook wall and someone said, “Man, whatever. I do blow and fuck like every night.” Does that count as a trend?

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Why Complaining About How There's no Good Men Sucks

Hey, did you think that the well of “20-somethings-represent-a-whole-new-paradigm-for-adulthood-and-the-way-we-live” newspaper articles was empty after that long sorta-expose the New York Times did last year? Well, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t think so—they just published this long piece by Kay Hymowitz that at this moment has 47,000 Facebook likes and 1,100 comments. Hymowitz talks about all the stuff the Times article talks about (young people are undergoing extended periods of adolescence and not getting married, buying a house, and/or starting a career right after college, etc.) but adds her own little twist—in an endearing combination of feminism and reactionary traditionalism, she complains that this “pre-adulthood” is hurting women, because all the men are too immature to be long-term relationship material. Or as she puts it:

Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.

Still, for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up."

The immature, Apatow-movie-watching, maladroit geek in me wants to snark back with something like, “Where have all the good men gone, Kay? Away from you as fast as fucking possible, that’s for sure!” Then I’d high-five my grubby slacker buddy and we’d go right back to playing Left 4 Dead, snacking on salty, chemically-flavored chips, and periodically taking bong hits.

But you know what? I’m a fucking adult, so let’s actually talk about Hymowitz’s ideas. Perhaps because it’s is adapted from her book, the article is sort of confusing: after telling us about the dangerously low supply of good men in America, she backs away and discusses the formation of “pre-adulthood” in a gender-neutral way. It takes longer to get a good, stable job in today’s market—you have to go to college, and probably bounce around a few jobs before you have something you can properly call a “career.” People’s age at the time of their first marriage has been rising steadily since the 70s. And the media—oh, those bastards!—are encouraging our young men to remain barely-sentient towers of meat who giggle at fart jokes. Hymowitz blames the lack of good dating options for heterosexual women on Maxim, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Spike TV, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Steve Carell, and Seth Rogen.


As much as I like the idea of a bunch of frat-humor outlets teaming up with Hollywood and advertisers to keep men dumb and single so they have disposable income to spend on body spray and fancy booze and video games, I think it’s probably more likely that being a grubby guffawing boor makes you read Maxim and watch Adam Sandler movies than the other way around.

To deal with the other pieces of Hymowitz’s narrative: people aren’t getting married as much as they were in the 50s and 60s, and that’s probably a good thing. Women couldn’t earn as much as men, so it made sense for them to land a fella and become housewives as soon as possible. Now that women can have careers, they do have careers and don’t get married so young. Another explanation for the marriage age rising, courtesy of Matt Yglesias: “Maybe this number just bounces around over time and it’s always been the case that some people are sometimes frustrated with some members of the opposite sex.”

Anecdotally, I would say that there are plenty of 20-somethings who follow the guidelines given to them by the trend pieces. But an upper class of shiftless layabouts who aren’t employed at anything in particular is nothing new. Remember the dandies or whatever in England, or wherever the dandies were? (They were probably invented by trend article writers too.) Remember Baudelaire, a prominent proto-pre-adult?

Hymowitz probably wouldn’t consider Baudelaire marriage material, what with the syphilis and the drug addiction and all. But he doesn’t match the description of the archetypal pre-adult man that she uses in her concluding paragraph: “Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does.”

Nor does that description match anyone I’ve ever met, except for maybe my dorm neighbor my freshman year, who would literally lie in bed eating candy and playing video games. Even the men I know who have moved back home with their parents, or are unemployed for long periods of time, or are chronically single, aren’t the kind of shiftless hedonists of the sort that Hymowitz is convinced are replacing the “good men,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style.

I’m not a woman, or an old person, but weren’t good men always hard to find? Wasn’t that the whole point of the saying, “A good man is hard to find”? Now that women can become successful for themselves and don’t need to latch onto a man—anything with a penis and a paycheck—for the sake of long-term security, they can take their time and pick out a man to share a life and a house and chromosomes with. Picking out a romantic partner can be pretty complicated, especially when you have high standards, and especially when you have to find someone who will love you back. That’s tricky! Maybe you’ll like someone and they won’t like you, or someone will like you and you’ll be in a relationship, or you’ll really like each other but one of you has to move across the country—both of you being hard-charging professional types—and thus, leaves the other behind. Love is complicated, as pop music has taught me. It’s complicated and hard, and you don’t have to invent bullshit pop-sociological reasons for why the guys who are around you are losers.

Where Have all the Good Men Gone? [WSJ]

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Why Fashion Week Sucks: An Event Diary

There’s a girl dressed in all black checking names off a list when you walk in. If your name is on the list you get to go to the second floor in a tiny elevator. You can ask, but you are not allowed to go up the stairs. A woman in a fur coat tells the girl she’s with something called Fitz, with a z, and spells it out. Other girls dressed in black hurry out of the door and onto the dark street on some kind of important errand.

Upstairs, the elevator opens into a small, softly lit room. People are gradually filling it up, waiting for something to happen and getting complimentary vodka drinks mixed by two more girls in black. They carefully combine ice, juice, tonic, and a certain brand of vodka on a table at one end of the room, while a movie in black and white is projected onto the curtains behind them. All of the people working at this event are wearing all black and all are conventionally pretty young women. Many of the women and men spilling from the tiny elevator in bunches are conventionally pretty; some have foreign accents. There’s an animal skull on the wall. It’s impossible to tell what movie is playing because it’s on mute and the folds of the curtain distort the image.

The people are not watching the movie. They are mostly talking about the places they have been, the people they know who aren’t here. Introductions are made over the generic thumping dance music floating in from somewhere. “I actually tweeted you,” a man with long blond hair says to an older woman with impeccably painted red nails. Conversational clusters form. If you aren’t part of a cluster, you stand against the wall with your drink and look around at the other clusterless people. Or you get out your phone and stare at its blue glow—many people are doing that. “I’ve been to a few parties here,” a stylish young man tells his cluster of other stylish young men. “There were all these guys coming out of the bathroom together.”

Everyone in the increasingly crowded room is stylish. It’s unclear who is waiting in line to get another drink and who is trapped by the crush of people. A nervous-looking guy in a zebra-striped shirt keeps going back to the vodka table. Whatever is supposed to happen hasn’t started happening yet. The black-clad vodka girls use a new cup for every drink until they run out of cups. “Who does your color?” says someone waiting for a drink to someone else.

The elevator doors open, deposit more people, and close. This keeps happening. A woman makes a distressed noise and starts hitting the closing door like a prisoner pleading with her jailer. “Her boyfriend,” someone says knowingly. Finally the doors open and she stumbles in. Someone asks about if there’s a bathroom here or what and no one knows.

A signal has been made; knowledge of the next stage of this event passes through the crowd. A door opens and people press towards it in an orderly but eager fashion, like children queuing for a mall Santa. There are complimentary cans of ice tea on a table near the door but no one takes them. The generic dance music gets louder as the people surge into the next room. This is where the event will take place.

The center of the new room is occupied by a narrow raised platform covered in brown construction paper. There are chairs to either side labeled with numbers and letters, and if you have a seat assignment you sit down, elbow-to-elbow with the other seated people. Is a chair a sign of status? The others stand, crowding each other all the way back to the wall. A pretty girl in black is sitting at a podium doing something on a computer; maybe she’s controlling the music. Everyone is getting out cameras and cell phones with cameras in them. A video camera on a tripod is set at the foot of the platform.

More pretty girls in black come and take the construction paper away, and the narrow black platform shines like a freshly polished shoe. People type words into their phones, bring up menus, communicate over social networking platforms.. A man walks across the platform, leaving footprints of dust. The crowd grumbles at him—“He just did that?”—and the people nearest the platform wipe off the footprints with napkins and sleeves.

A hidden door slides open at the head of the platform and smoke or fog from an unseen machine comes billowing out. The music gets louder, more urgent, and everyone sits forward in their chairs, preparing their cameras. Without an introduction, a man strides down the platform wearing a full-length coat that looks like it’s made out of furry intestines. Gasps are heard. He stops for a split second at the foot of the platform then turns and walks away. Another man takes his place immediately, wearing a waist-length version of the same coat, then he goes back into the foggy opening.

Men are walking down the platform one by one, in a very organized way. Some of them wear makeup, one has a black mask on. They all look very similar; if they weren’t all dressed differently you might think they were the same man. Everyone takes photos of the men all the time, but they don’t stop to pose. They look like they want to get this over with as fast as possible. One wears a jacket with feathers, another has no shirt, another wears a shirt that exposes his stomach. “Look at the footwear!” someone says.

It is over faster than you would think. At the end all the men come out at once in a single-file line, walking up and down the platform as a group to the crowd’s applause. It’s like they’re proving that they all are different men, like they are displaying the end result of a complicated magic trick. A man in all black, like a stagehand, appears out of the fog and there is more applause. No one makes a speech or explains anything. There is nothing to explain, or it’s like that quote about jazz, if you have to ask you’ll never know. Everyone here knows.

The rush to get out the door begins. Some people push through the crowd searching for the vodka table, wondering if it’s still open for business. Others are talking about other places to go, upcoming events, past events this has reminded them of. The phones come out again. The elevator doors open and close, taking people downstairs now instead of up. Outside the street is lit up with headlights and neon. Some guys are standing at a closed loading dock smoking weed. Plastic bags are carried over the sidewalk by the wind. Women pull the collars of their fur coats up, their high heels clacking on the pavement.

(Image ripped off from Oakazine) Read more!

Why the "9/11 Mosque" Controversy Sucks

I have a confession to make: I don’t really get this whole “9/11 Mosque” controversy. That is, I know what it’s about—some Muslims want to build a cultural center a few blocks away from the big hole where the World Trade Center used to be—and I know that people and news organizations don’t have a whole lot to do during August and things can get a little silly (last August was when we had the whole Town Hall Meeting kerfuffle). But I don’t understand why we need opinion polls to tell us that 70 percent of the country is against the building of a mosque (a cultural center, actually) in a middle of a block that includes restaurants, apartment buildings, and a strip club across the street.

This New Yorker opinion piece sums up the situation nicely. People who don’t live in New York, people who will never walk by the proposed mosque, people who have made their careers badmouthing the “elites” who live and work in New York City—these people don’t think the mosque should be built. But they shouldn’t be involved in this process. What Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich or Howard Dean says about the Park 51 project shouldn’t matter to anyone. Conservatives are constantly bitching about “states’ rights”; well, what about a city’s rights? The neighborhood Community Board—the smallest, most local form of government in New York City—endorsed the project 28 to one. And while New Yorkers oppose it, Manhattanites (you know, the people who actually breathed in the dust and ash from the fallen World Trade Center nine years ago) are in favor of it. So why won’t these goddam out-of-towners just keep their mouths shut?

The arguments against the mosque that aren’t just obvious anti-Muslim sentiments are tidily articulated in this blog post. The author equates 9/11 to genocide and makes no distinction between American Muslims and Middle Eastern Muslims, and describes the mosque’s location as, “within enough distance to pass the mosque coming from one direction and turn your head to see the WTC within a minute.”

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing this blogger isn’t a New Yorker. If he was, he’d know you can’t see the WTC, because there’s nothing to see. It’s not a memorial, it’s just a giant construction site. In a few years, it’ll be a giant office building (housing Conde Nast, among others) in a neighborhood full of giant office buildings. Conservatives and other out-of-towners who oppose Park 51 seem to think that the big hole in the ground is the only distinguishable feature in that part of Manhattan; in actuality, the former WTC doesn’t stand out very much. I used to visit some guys who lived near the big hole to watch sports and get high, and believe it or not, I don’t think I thought about 9/11 once when I was walking past the hole.

America is still getting over the World Trade Center attacks, but Manhattan has moved on, because that’s what Manhattan does. Nothing leaves much of a mark, every scar is built over and built over again. Maybe that’s heartless, maybe it’s a good way to move on, but that’s what happens. I don’t know if the critics in other parts of the country understand how little 9/11 has defined Manhattan and how easily life flows around that big hole. They’re looking to preserve the “sanctity” of a “memorial site” that exists only within their heads.

Another thing I’m not sure the Park 51 critics get is that there are a lot of Muslims in New York. That sounds stupid, but in most parts of the country, Muslims are a rare sight. They’re extremely foreign to most Americans, and possibly a little scary. Even on the subway, where you’re likely to see some weird stuff, it’s a little startling to see a woman in a full-on burqa. But you’ll see those women if you live here, and you might walk by the mosque near my house and hear that Islamic chanting that they do. I’m just guessing, but I imagine that people who have never met (or even seen) a Muslim find the prospect of building a mosque “in the shadow of the 9/11 site”—wait, what shadow?—pretty objectionable, because to them, mosque=Muslim=enemy. New York isn’t exactly Mecca or Tehran (remember that controversy over the Muslim school?), but it isn’t Wasilla, Alaska either. There are enough mosques in town that one more shouldn’t upset anyone—especially when the building in question is already used for Islamic prayer!

I’m still wrapping my head around how one would be offended by the presence of this cultural center, which might explain why I can’t understand the grievances of the out-of-towner opposition. Are tourists going to walk past the mosque and be upset because they’re on their way to the 9/11 memorial/New York Doll strip club and the ambience was disturbed? Are the prayers of Muslims going to prevent the 9/11 victims’ souls from going to heaven? Is merely knowing that a Muslim building is near a big hole hundreds of miles away from you upsetting? Or do the opponents agree with Gingrich, who believes the cultural center is part of an “Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization." If that last one is true, I really, really don’t understand.
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Why Las Vegas Sucks

The New Yorker, that great publication that serves to chronicle the lifestyles of the extraordinarily rich for the benefit of the upper middle class, just did a profile of some guy who provides fancy Las Vegas restaurants with delicacies like truffles and cinnamon and (presumably) human skin. Here’s one interesting passage about the world of high food in Vegas that starts with a quote from chef Paul Bartolotta:

“Las Vegas is a pilot project to see if man can live on the moon,” he says. “There’s nothing local—our water comes from somewhere else, our electricity comes from somewhere else.” Fishermen have sent him texts in the middle of the night from their boats in the Adriatic, with pictures of themselves holding fresh-caught specimens and messages like “Want this fish?” On one such occasion, the fish was an eighteen-pound ombrina; when it arrived at the restaurant, forty-eight hours later, Bartolotta walked it onto the floor and offered it to a party of thirty golfers as the main course in a tasting menu they had ordered. He took it back to the kitchen, sprinkled some salt and pepper on it, tied up the tail so it would fit in the oven, and within ninety minutes the golfers were eating it. Their bill came to nearly five thousand dollars, before wine.

To recap: modern technology allows people across the world to communicate to one another instantaneously, and transport pretty much any object from any place to any other place in less time than it takes to watch all of the episodes of The Wire back-to-back, and we use this technology to provide a bunch of wealthy, drunken golfers with fresh fish.

I don’t want to turn this into a rant against the rich or global capitalism—although I suspect this already qualifies as such—but it’s worth noting that no matter how fantastical our abilities become, our ideas for how to use our powers remain bizarre. Why do we have this giant luxurious mecca of sin in the desert anyway? Living on the moon would be a gigantic waste of resources, which is why we never tried to do it. Las Vegas seems like a waste of resources too. Can’t we move all of those casinos somewhere a little easier to transport food and water to? Read more!

Why the Census Sucks

I wrote a blog entry for Vice yesterday about working for the Census in the same area of Brooklyn where two managers notoriously falsified over 4,000 people’s personal information in order to meet their deadline, and I thought I’d add a few points that I couldn’t fit in that limited space:

1. Obviously, if you’re going to have a representative democracy that awards seats in Congress based on population, you need to count the people who live in your democracy. Equally obviously, this is impossible. The US could probably count all the voters in the country more or less accurately, but the Census tries to count everyone from newborn infants to illegal immigrants in 50 states and thousands of large towns and cities. Thanks to pockets of people who want to hide from the government for various reasons, urban areas are probably always going to be undercounted, and that’s far from the only problem. People could lie on their Census forms without anyone catching them, Census Enumerators and low-level managers can lie as long as they’re smart about it, an office clerk could hit the wrong key and misenter some data…it’s simply impossibly improbable that there the number the Census comes out with is right. The only reason the Census exists is so the government can claim that it made a good faith effort to count everyone. The managers who falsified data aren’t in trouble because they screwed up the count; they’re in trouble because they undermine the fictitious notion of an “accurate” Census.

2. But just because the Census is doomed doesn’t mean it can’t do a better job than it does. For starters, they could set up a website where you can send your information to the government electronically—in fact, it’s ridiculous that they didn’t do it this time around. They could mail everyone the standard Census form along with a user ID and password to log into a secure site where they could fill out the form without having to go to a mailbox, and there’s no way the response rate wouldn’t rise. (Can you imagine the anti-government, gun-toting types’ reaction to a website where the government asked you personal information?)

3. Another thing the Census needs to fix is the system they use to train Enumerators. When I trained in Brooklyn, I received exactly the same materials and instructions as Enumerators in Cowtip, Montana, which is insane. Enumerators in cities have to deal with a much different set of problems than the people in smaller towns—for instance, we had to try to get into buildings where the buzzers were broken or no one would let us in. I personally had to continually correct the forms I was given because the listed number of units in a building had no relation to reality. And the requirement that we visit boarded-up or burned out units three times before asking the winos sitting on their stoops if the building was vacant was ignored by everyone because it made no sense to begin with. Privatizing the Census makes no sense for a lot of reasons, but a private company wouldn’t make the mistake of treaties large cities and small towns exactly the same.

4. Despite all this, I recommend a Census job to anyone lucky enough to be unemployed in 2020. It pays well, and there’s a joy in working an insignificant job in a large, poorly managed organization. Or as the late Harvey Pekar once said, “I gotta good gig, man. It’s steady an’ I can fuck off a lot. I’d recommend that every young man look inta th’ possibility of getting a flunky government job.”

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Why White People in My Neighborhood Suck

My intention was to never divulge any kind of personal information on this blog, but for this topic I need to mention some personal details: I'm white, I don't have very much money in the bank, and I live in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Bed Stuy, for those of you who don't know, is a historically black, historically fairly poor and crime-ridden neighborhood. Do the Right Thing was filmed here, and so was Dave Chapelle's Block Party. Mos Def and Talib Kweli grew up around here, as did the Notorious B.I.G., who may have rapped in the basement of my building back when it doubled as a kind of makeshift club (Biggie also reportedly sold crack a few blocks away). There's a mural of Ol' Dirty Bastard's driver's license on a wall outside a liquor store near my building, and there's other murals scattered through the neighborhood that memorialize lesser-known folks who died early thanks to guns and drugs.

I'm not trying to brag about how “hood” my 'hood is—and it certainly has gotten safer in the past few years—but there's some areas of Bed Stuy that are, undeniably, pretty rough. There are a few corners where crack merchants hang out, a bunch of project towers, and countless fried chicken franchises, liquor stores, and bodegas where you can buy beer without an ID any time of the day or night. Bed Stuy's also home to a huge amount of diversity. Within the radius of a few blocks you can find Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Africans (I mean African Africans, not “African Americans”), American-born blacks, Orthodox Jews, robe-wearing Muslims, Christians who attend hole-in-the-wall storefront churches with names like “The Congregation of the Journeyers of the Holy Spirit,” and even a few white folks, like me.

Well, more than “a few” white folks these days. From my window, I'm watching the fascinating, stop-motion process known as “gentrification.” I guess I'm a part of that process too, even though I didn't ask to be. White people looking for cheap rents—mostly ex-students and the like--have started to trickle in to Bed Stuy, mostly around the edges, and as if it's all part of some master plan the organic food stores and fancy coffee shops have come in with them. You can see sociological trends happen in real time, which is exciting and depressing at the same time. In the past year, a new coffee and wine bar opened up three blocks away, a brunch-serving “gastropub” appeared just down the road, and the building next to mine was transformed from a vacant house into a classy condominium, that people (white people) actually bought. There are other condos in Bed Stuy now too, even some in fancy new glass buildings that look like they've been transplanted from SoHo.

This is part of the urban life cycle, right? The poor, struggling students and artists move to a neighborhood—usually a neighborhood that has a lot of ethnic minorities and poor people in it—because they like cheap rent. Then some businesses that cater to those artists and students open, like new bars and restaurants, and then more white people who like bars and restaurants and feel that the slight scent of urban decay adds “authenticity” or whatever move in, and then rents go up and buildings get renovated or torn down and rebuilt and some people probably protest or whatever but it doesn't make a difference, and before you know it there's a Whole Foods in the Bowery. And the poor people, including the next generation of poor students and artists, find somewhere else to live.

I'm guilty of being part of this, because I enjoy some of the services gentrification provides, like good coffee places that have wi-fi, bars that have fancy beers that taste like fruit and chocolate on tap, and attractive young white women walking around during the summer months. But what I don't like about gentrification—and why I wish all of the white people would just stop pouring into Bed Stuy, can be contained in this anecdote:

I'm getting on the G subway line to go to work, and I need a new Metrocard. So I wait in line behind a few people waiting to use the machine, which, as is so often the case at the Bedford-Nostrand stop, isn't working—this time, it's not taking credit cards. The young, earnest-looking white woman (she looked like an sophomore at NYU) who was dutifully feeding her card to the machine, eventually figured this out and turned to the young woman behind her and asked if there was an ATM nearby. Of course, this being Bed Stuy, every corner bodega has an ATM in it, and there's a bodega on nearly every corner. After being told to go to the bodega right next to the station, the young white woman paused and said, “Yeah, but uh, is it legit?”

I'll stop here to note an important, often overlooked facet of gentrification: the first wave of poor white people who move in (including me) don't want the neighborhood to change, even though their arrival is the first step in a process that will change the neighborhood beyond recognition. I like living in Bed Stuy and not so I can impress people with my “realness.”

First of all, I like the cheap rent. I like buying cheap beer at (sometimes non-legit) bodegas that are open late and always friendly. I like the little kids hanging out on their stoops at one in the morning, and I like the teenagers who roll blunts on the steps of my building after buying weed from my neighbor. I like saying hello to the friendly homeless guys who might be crackheads, and I like walking down Franklin Avenue when the elderly, welfare-dependent drunks are sitting in the sun and hollering at each other across the street. On Sundays, I like looking out my window and watching the old ladies in insane hats navigate the church steps with their canes and walkers. I even like walking past the derelict hulks of vacant brownstones, or at least I prefer those to the newer, glass-and-steel structures going up lately. I don't need a Whole Foods, or even a Trader Joes, and I definitely don't need any more “hip” bars designed to cater to gentrifiers. If these things come in and the neighborhood gets “whiter” and my rent goes up, I'll probably move. If my rent goes up too much, I'll be forced to.

So, to the girl who's looking for a “legit” ATM: get the fuck out of Bed Stuy and get your parents to find you a place in Park Slope or Williamsburg or Brooklyn Heights. You probably shop at Fresh Direct rather than supporting the local shops, you're probably scared of your own neighbors, and you'd probably spend your time at the Starbucks that your kind will inevitably bring. I'd rather live next to a drug dealer than you, because at least a drug dealer is a part of the community in a way you clearly don't want to be. People like you give white people in black neighborhoods a bad name. Read more!

A Series of Tubes Sucks Us Down the Drain: Facebook and the Lost Potential of the Internet

Facebook is one of the most useful, most popular websites in existence. It offers, free of charge, a number of services that nearly everyone wants—services that weren't even imaginable 20 years ago. You can let all your friends know what you are doing at any given moment, or you can tell them all a joke, or you can post a link to something and comment on it. You can post pictures of yourself or your cat or other people and share them with all your friends, or the entire internet if you want. You can post links to blogs like this one, or videos, or anything at all that has a URL. You can voice your support of a cause, politician, music group, or abstract idea by hitting the “Like” button or joining a group whose members can share relevant content and have discussions about that cause/artist/idea. You can invite your “friends,” many of whom you don't know very well or actually hate, to parties, political rallies, and flash mobs. You can play a variety of online games, some of which are not even disguised marketing schemes. And you can watch all of the people you share tenuous social connections do all of these things in real time. I'm on Facebook right now, and maybe you are too.

So why do so many people hate it?

Maybe “hate” is too strong a word, but many, many people have voiced criticism of Facebook in the last few months, mainly over the site's privacy polices. Wired ran a disturbing article about the site censoring the content of private messages, as well as a somewhat rambling op-ed railing against Facebook; Gizmodo listed 10 reasons to quit Facebook; Time published a somewhat critical profile of the company; and quitfacebookday.com is exactly what it sounds like. There have been other attacks from more obscure sources as well, like this blog entry, which I read because my friend linked to it on Facebook.

Some of the criticisms are, too my mind, pretty minor. The author of the last post, for instance, describes a case where his friend got his account deleted for posting a picture of his cock, which is clearly against Section 3.7 of the Terms of Use Agreement. The author didn't notice his friend was kicked off and the friend missed out on some parties because he wasn't invited to them on Facebook—this shows that terms of use agreements are not merely randomly selected strings of syllables and that you should have ways of communicating other than Facebook. I'm also not convinced by attempts to portray Facebook as a Big Brother-esque monster who is logging our every keystroke—the site may have access to our personal information, but only because we put our personal information on a website whose stated purpose is to share personal information with others. No one forces you to use Facebook, although the way some bloggers talk, you'd think that was the case.

The meatier concerns over Facebook involve the site's privacy settings, which are complex and change every few months in response to user complaints. The basic problem is simple and practically unfixable under Facebook's current rubric: people want to pick exactly which of their “friends” sees what. If I want to share a status update that says, “Damn, I am really wasted considering it's not even noon,” I don't want my mother to see that. And I don't want my boss to see photos of me partying in a different city the night before I call in sick. But to Facebook, everyone is either a stranger, a “Friend,” or a “Friend of a Friend;” there's no way to differentiate between my family members, my coworkers, my oldest friends who now live in other cities, and the people I don't really know but friend anyway. We want to filter the information we give out on Facebook the way we do in real life, but we can't. Or to quote Marlo of The Wire, “You want it to be one way, but it's the other way.”

The way it is is this: Facebook is one of the first websites to take advantage of the internet's incredible, essentially unlimited capacity as a tool to share information. “Information” being not just academic papers, as in the days of ARPANET, but everything. Text, videos, photos, games, software, music--whatever the fuck you want, you can share and spread among friends, strangers, and people you've had sex with exactly one time, using a service not unlike what Facebook is now. The total, perfect, probably unrealizable form of the internet is communism on servers—everyone being able to access anything, all the time. Information is so plentiful it becomes free. The world's greatest library in history downloadable to every laptop without money changing hands. We could have that right now without any new technologies, except as the case of Facebook shows, we aren't ready.

For starters, users still regard information as private property. In the Time article, the author casually notes, “There's something unsettling about granting the world a front-row seat to all of our interests,” without further analysis. He's not talking about personal details like phone numbers, addresses, and other tidbits that could aid identity thieves, he's talking about a concern people have that people he doesn't know will know what he likes. What forbidden desires does he have that he doesn't want broadcasted? Similarly, Ryan Singel of Wired wants to “support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing,” which he thinks is a problem Facebook should be able to solve. Mr. Singel: if you want to donate money to anti-abortion cause, that is not something you need to tell Facebook. And if you fear that your peers will ostracize you for your political beliefs, maybe you need new peers. And are you really that afraid of your mother? I personally have no problem with giving the world a front-row seat to all of my interests, and I know a number of people who feel the same way. I like the Flaming Lips, sandwiches, and heterosexual intercourse, and I'm not afraid to let everyone know. One interesting question is whether the babies being born right now will have the same hang-ups concerning the sharing of interests that Mr. Singel and the man from Time have. Or will they use social networking sites as naturally as we use toilets?

I don't want to let Facebook itself off the hook though: it's not as if Mark Zuckerman and co. give a shit about my information-sharing utopia. The censoring of private messages between users is disturbing, but it comes from the attitude that they own the data that users choose to share with one another. This is spelled out specifically in Section 2.1 the User Agreement (linked to twice because if you use Facebook, you should read it), which says: “If you upload something, our company owns it just as much as you do.” The way Facebook chooses to use the information they own is to share it with advertisers, which allows them to make unspecifiably large amounts of money without charging its grouchy, constantly complaining users anything. The internet, despite its theoretical potential to become an anarchic hacker's wet dream of information-sharing, is run by for-profit companies like Facebook, and those companies generally make their by selling your personal information to other companies.

(This project offers hope to disgruntled Facebook users. I advise those folks to donate to the cause, but I'm holding my breath until I see a detailed explanation of who is going to be paying for these “seed” servers and how.)

The Time article warns that without more “transparency,” Facebook will become “the web's sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.” That Borg model, of course, is exactly the model that will make Facebook and part-owners Microsoft the most money. Transparency and openness are for hippie programmers who don't conceive of the web as just another money-making machine. And what, really, is wrong with ads that target me based on my stated interests? If we're going to have advertising on the web, I'd rather see ads for things that I might actually use rather than ads for new cars I don't want and can't afford.

Like the Borg, Facebook is constantly adapting and seems impossible to kill. The recent changes to the privacy settings have made them (I think) fairly intuitive and easy to use, and whatever points Facebook's critics have, they haven't been very persuasive (quitfacebook.com has 23,000 committed quitters as of this writing, compared to over 4,000 Facebook users who want Slavoj Zizek to host Saturday Night Live). The truth is, there isn't a single website that does everything that Facebook does, except for maybe the still-imaginary Diaspora project linked to above. Someday, I imagine Facebook will be replaced by a sleeker, hipper replacement just as Friendster and MySpace have been replaced. But if that replacement site is just another for-profit service that regards information as a way to make a buck, and the population at large still imagines information to be the same thing as private property, expect exactly the same thing to happen.
Read more!

Why Taking a Forced Gap Year Sucks

The other day I was emailing a friend of mine now living in Portland, Oregon, and I asked him if he had found any work. That's a pretty normal thing to ask the folks in my age/education demographic bracket these days—my bracket being kids in their early 20s who just graduated from prestigious or semi-prestigious universities who are mostly the children of middle and upper-middle class parents. Our bracket is getting the shit kicked out of it. My friend is living with his girlfriend (another bracket-mate, working as a nanny), on food stamps, and writing essays that he hopes to sell for low amounts of money. After sending out application after application via Craigslist and a brief, unhappy stint as a kickball umpire, my anonymous buddy has found work at a “really terrible smoothie shop inside of a gym.” This is a guy who graduated from my school a semester before I did, and who can presumably do something a lot better than telling gym rats exactly how many grams of protein is in the mango-strawberry blend. And he's not unique.

Some of my friends moved back into their parents' houses right after graduation. Others stuck it out in the city of their choice, but they usually got subsidized like a failing financial institution by their parents. Most, feeling the weight of their debt to their parents, took any opportunity to get a job that would give them an independent income—meaning they umpired kickball, scooped ice cream, applied to work at Home Depot just like they applied to Princeton five years ago, and learned the intricacies of government programs like unemployment, Medicaid, and food stamps. A surprising amount of them now play online poker for a living, which means they are smart, math-inclined, and disciplined enough to sit in front of their computer staring at numbers for hours at a time, yet they can't get a job. A whole lot of us work for the census, which is paying good money while it lasts, but knocking on doors like Tim Meadows isn't what we had in mind when we got those fancy degrees handed to us. Some of the people I know are going back to school already, either to get a more “useful” degree or to simply hide out in academia for a little longer.

But enough anecdotal evidence, which any competent economist or SABR-matician will tell you is a bunch of randomly occurring bullshit: here's a page of numbers. The numbers say that despite the progress the economy is making, 16 percent of 20 to 24 year olds are unemployed. That's better than the 16 to 19 year old age bracket, but the job market is always tough on 17 year olds—by the time you're in your 20s, you really should be able to get a job. So why can't my peer group get it together?

As with everything, there are a multitude of reasons. Number one has nothing to do with the economy: a four-year degree doesn't mean what it used to. College enrollment has been rising for decades, to the point where every middle class child is expected to grow up to attend the most expensive university that will have him. We did our duty and went straight from high school to college (which is basically high school where everyone gets laid), and when we graduated and got our piece of paper, we found out that everyone else our age had the same piece of paper, and that a bachelor's degree isn't the ticket to a white-collar job it once was. Even before money turned itself inside out, kids who were too old to really be called “kids” were moving back in with their parents after finding out that graduating from college doesn't automatically make you an independent adult. (The trend even has it's own Wikipedia entry.)

But in these troubling economic times, when “sub prime mortgage” is a part of everyone's vocabulary even if no one knows what it means, it's even tougher for young people to transition from college to a job to a career to an apartment without roaches to the final stage in life when you have kids and multiple bank accounts and don't stay awake late enough to watch The Daily Show. When my graduating class went into the job market we weren't just competing with each other but also with the swarm of older, more experienced workers who had just gotten laid off, for jobs that were getting scarcer and scarcer. Is it any wonder that so many of us are sitting in the basement bedroom where we used to masturbate three times a day as teens, playing poker for a living or scanning and refreshing Craigslist every five minutes?

I don't want to exaggerate—some of my friends, through a combination of luck, perseverance and talent, are doing very well, thank you for asking. But it's worth noting that the government, who is in the business of bailouts these days, hasn't done my demographic any favors. Extending unemployment benefits didn't help, since few of us recent graduates had worked enough hours to claim unemployment in the first place. Cash for Clunkers wasn't designed for people who didn't have cars. And I've yet to understand how the TARP money is going to trickle down to us. Politicians don't really care about young people—for all the talk about how the “middle class” and “small business” are “the backbone of our economy,” no one has mentioned what body part recent college graduates are supposed to be. (But I have a guess.) A while ago I had a daydream that the government would step in and directly create jobs through a new program based on the Works Progress Administration and smart, motivated young people would line up in droves to be part of it, but I guess that would be Socialism, and Socialism is what got us into this mess in the first place. (Wait, what?)

The irony to be found here is that the aspiring artists among my generation are more prepared for this economic climate than the rest of us. Artists expect to go through a period of destitution in their early-to-mid 20s. Hell, they practically look forward to it when they're teenagers. But now everyone is basically a starving artist, and that has created a new and weird hybrid economic caste—raised on middle-class values, educated like the upper-class, and now living below the poverty line. We buy organic food with our food stamps. We break off late-night discussions of Lacan and craft brewing to ask each other if the coffee shop down the street is hiring. We go to the library to use the computer and nod hello to the homeless guys hanging out there. We get mildly embarrassed when the rent check arrives from our parents, but that's wearing off. Most of us did actually work hard in college, and learned some skills that we thought would be useful, but no one is buying what we want to sell.

This sucks, right here.

I have no idea what the long-term impact of our demographic's mini-depression will be. At best, I suppose, we'll just be late bloomers when it comes to starting careers, buying homes, and raising kids. (Actually, at best we will rise as one and seize the country in the grip of revolution, but that's not happening.) At worst...who knows? Maybe twenty years down the road, ours will have turned out to be a generation of filing clerks and coffee serves who have whole libraries of unused knowledge in their heads. But I hope not. Read more!

Why Employment Sucks

An interesting one-two punch of widely-covered news stories landed on our collective eyeballs last week: first, the jobs report told us that more people have jobs now, or at least less people have no job; then, a bunch of miners died on the job. There's usually a bit of irony sprinkled on top of tragedy (Romeo & Juliet's ending is kind of funny, for instance), and the coal-black joke here is that those miners would still be alive and above ground if they were unemployed.

Not everyone's job is as bad as being a coal miner, but unless you're one of those lucky people who get money for what they love to do—and those people are fucking few and far between—you hate your job. It might not a particularly emotional hatred right now—you might have hated it at first and then settled into a semi-comfortable rut, like one of those once-passionate, now loveless marriages, only in reverse—but if I asked the majority of people on the planet if they hated their jobs, they would probably pause and say, “No, I don't hate it exactly. Parts of it are very enjoyable. I've had jobs that were a lot worse and if I stay here I can become assistant manager/senior fry cook/the guy who gets to hold the gun and order us around.” Let's face it—you hate your job, and if you don't, you probably should.

Some time ago I wrote a post about the problems with unemployment, but the reason you feel bad when you are unemployed is not that you don't have a job, it's that almost everyone else does. In Modern Capitalism, no one can literally force you to work, but if you don't work you don't have money, which means you are a failure. If you don't have a job, your parents, roommates, and the people you panhandle from will tell you to get one. If you don't have a job, society in general will conspire to make you feel like shit. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!” the right-wingers will yell at you, while the left-wingers will try to enroll you in job training programs and reduced-price housing. If you don't have a job for a while, the government will stop sending you checks, advertisers will stop catering to your demographic, and even the bleedingest-hearted liberal will start thinking that maybe some people are lazy and don't deserve to participate in the global economy.

Everyone who tells you to get a job is cynical at best and a raving moron at worst. Jobs are the problem. Jobs rob us of our dignity and the majority of jobs destroy some small part of the planet. For every life-saving surgeon or genuinely good hearted social worker, there's two soldiers willing to fire into a crowd of civilians when ordered, or a pair of cops who just want to bust brown-colored heads. Coal miners only make the news when they die in the mines, but their jobs don't get better when the cameras leave—they're still sweating in the dark caves, prying black rock out of the ground, and contributing to an industry that is slowly filling the sky with smoke. Jobs are the problem, and if you're not part of the problem, you're part of the solution.

If I was a pragmatist, I'd advise everyone to get a job just to put sandwiches on the table and Flaming Lips records in your ears. But pragmatism is horrible and boring. Here's what you should do: if you don't like your job, quit. We probably only get one life, and thanks to “jobs” everyone spends the majority of it doing a series of unenjoyable menial tasks. Fuck that—let's all just quit. If you don't like what you're doing, you should do something else. If you, like the majority of people in the world, can't do something you find enjoyable and rewarding and keep a roof over your head at the same time, there's something wrong with the world's priorities, not your own.

Jobs mean dying in a mine, either all at once, literally, or very slowly, metaphorically. Yet most of us have them, and are glad we do. The alternative of homelessness and abject poverty is even worse. We just need to come up with better alternatives Read more!

Why Umbrellas Suck

We had a wet weekend here in New York City, with gray clouds hovering spitefully overhead for three days and occasionally spitting sheets of rain down at us. If you had to go out in that weather, you walked as quickly as you could, dodging the puddles pooling at the curbs, gritting your teeth against raindrops that seemed to be coming at you sideways, huddling under your umbrella and feeling, perhaps, like the hero of a Horatio Alger novel who has yet to climb the corporate ladder through hard work and ambition and is therefore still stuck selling newspapers in the cold, wet rain.

Then again, maybe you didn't feel so bad because you had an umbrella with you, keeping the rain off of your head like an ingenious portable roof. Did you know that the umbrella has been in use since ancient times in the Middle East? And that they are sometimes called “gamps” in England, after a Charles Dickens character? You should click the “Random Entry” button on Wikipedia more often! Then you would have found out that umbrellas throughout history have been more often used as status symbols or to protect against the sun's heat than they have been used against rain, the way you are doing right now.

If you're unlucky, a wind will pick up suddenly and you'll discover why your use of the umbrella is historically inaccurate. If yours is a sturdy umbrella, one with a sturdy “double-canopy” design and one that has been tested in wind-tunnel conditions—like this one—you'll have to grip it tightly to keep it from flying away, but nothing too terrible will happen as a result of a sudden gust. But if you're like me and aren't inclined to spend 30 dollars on an umbrella, your cheap drugstore-purchased gamp will pull away from you, the canopy will make that nasty fluttering sound, and then the whole contraption will turn inside-out, and the ribs will get bent out of place so the stupid fucking thing (which is what you call it) will never protect anything from getting wet ever again. You can try to get the umbrella to go back to the way it was, but you'll wind up feeling like the person at the black-and-white opening of an infomercial who is demonstrating the problems with a traditional knife or lawnmower. “Is your umbrella giving you problems?” the voiceover asks you. “Did the wind kill your umbrella yet again?”

There are no statistics on how often this umbrella homicide occurs (although there should be), but it happens a lot. Now that the rains had ended, there are dozens of piles of colored canvas and metal rods that were once umbrellas wedged in the gutters. Most of them were poorly manufactured, but some of them are the fancy umbrellas with the double-canopy designs or the endorsement of Rihanna. Umbrellas are the material embodiment of entropy. The clasp that keeps them tightly wrapped up breaks, then it gets harder to open the umbrella, then the metal ribs get bent, and eventually all umbrellas realize their ultimate destiny and become stupid fucking things one windy day or another. And when that destiny is realized and the unlucky umbrella owner is suddenly shelterless, you can bet that it's the sort of miserable day when the umbrella was needed the most.

Umbrellas break when they're needed, they can be cumbersome to open and close, they sometimes refuse to close altogether (an alternate route to stupid fucking thing status), they ensure that you won't have two hands free when it rains, and on a crowded sidewalk with a lot of umbrella-bearers they'll get in one another's way. Yet a great many people seem to think that they're the best way to shield themselves against the rain and I have no idea why this is. Is it an umbrella-industry conspiracy? Is it really good advertising? Is it a holdover from the days when rich society ladies would use umbrellas as a stylish accessory? Is it a Freudian phallic obsession? Or is it that Rihanna song?

Whatever the reason, I'm—as the kids say these days—over it. No more umbrellas for me. Yet I stayed relatively dry this weekend, and not because I sat inside all day eating donut holes. No, I had to go to the store to get those donut holes and my head stayed miraculously dry, thanks to that newfangled invention, the Jacket With a Hood. Read more!

Things That Don't Suck: Elitism

If you listen to conservative talk radio and Fox News 24 hours a day, even while sleeping, like I do, one word you hear a lot is “elite.” And while my dictionary defines this word as “the best part,” they always use this word in a pejorative sense. The elites are always seeking to destroy America, or undermine democracy, or mock the values of normal, heterosexual, apple-pie-ingesting folks. Conservatives commentators never call themselves elite, but not out of modesty (ha!); in the conservative media dictionary, elitism is, like progressivism and socialism, just another synonym for “bad.”

See, elites don't respect God, America, or the Constitution. In fact, they hate those things. Elites want to get rid of these things, build a superhighway connecting the USA to Canada and Mexico,ban religion in the name of science, give the money of average hard-working Americans (average Americans are always hard-working) to minority groups who don't deserve it. Then they will go back to their fancy apartments in their large coastal cities, look at their prestigious degrees and awards (given to them by other elites), and make fun of Southern accents. Or at least that's the conservative view of the “elites,” personified by Laura Ingraham's book Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America.

As it is fashionable to do in literature these days, Ingraham merges fact with fiction, basically inventing a vast conspiracy against American values by people who are “tired of the American voter getting in the way of their agenda.” (It's unclear what their agenda is, but it sounds ominous.) It was published in 2003, so instead of Barack Obama and the health care bill—which was stopped thanks to the Senate, the less democratic chamber of Congress—she beats up on Michael Moore and Bill Clinton*, but the rhetoric is exactly the same: Americans are a God-fearing people who want lower taxes and don't want these big-city, Ivy-League media elites telling them what to do.

Well, that may be true—truer than some of the things said in that book anyway—but by anyone's reckoning, Ingraham is something of an elite herself. She grew up in Connecticut, went to Dartmouth (where she was the first female editor of the school paper), went to law school, even served as a clerk to a Supreme Court Judge, then went on to become a wildly successful media person. She's written three books—the last one was a New York Times number one best seller—and gets paid 20,000 dollars just to make a speech. She even quotes William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! at one point, surely something only an elite would do.

Most of the right-wing “populist” radio and TV hosts are elites, maybe not according to their definition, but according to mine. To me, elites are talented, intelligent, driven people who work extremely hard to get what they want. They're good at what they do, and what they do is often important. Like Ingraham says, elites inhabit politics, media, academia (she calls this “ivory tower”), arts and entertainment, business, and international organizations, because those are the fields you go into if you want to make a difference, which is another characteristic of elites.

Do elites think of themselves as smarter than the general population? Some of them probably do, if only because they are smarter than the general population. Do elites control the media? Of course they do. You have to be elite to rise to prominence in a cut-throat business like that. Do elites tell ordinary people what to believe? Yes, and they have ever since the dawn of time. Do they mostly live in big cities? Well, they have to if they want to succeed at the kind of industries they're usually interested in.

The great thing about America—or at least the idea of America—is that most of our elites came by their status honestly. They aren't a hereditary aristocracy, they didn't buy their way to the top, and anyone can join their ranks as long as they're talented. Our Founding Fathers, who have been practically deified by the right wing, were the uber-elites of their day. Benjamin Franklin was the kind of celebrity politician that conservatives mock Obama for being, and the Constitution was written by extremely intelligent lawyers. America was founded by elites, is ruled by elites, and will be dominated by elites for as long as it exists.

Ingraham loves to slam Bill Clinton in her book, and there are plenty of reasons to slam Clinton from the left as well as the right, but the man started out with a lot less of money than Ingraham, suffered a pretty rough childhood, earned a Rhodes Scholarship, and became Governor of Arkansas at the age of 32 and President just a decade later. America can be a shitty, shitty place, but at least in America, the elites have the opportunity to rise to the top. And if some of them live in big cities and look down their noses at the rural Midwest and South, maybe that's because those are terrible places to live. Don't agree with me? David Byrne does:




*Another sign that the bill was written seven years ago is the sentence, “America has fought to protect Muslims all over the world,” which not even a talk show host would have the chutzpah to say in 2010. Read more!

Why the Winter Olympics Suck

When you are forced to wait four years for something, you have the right to expect it to be pretty fucking awesome. If you couldn't have sex for four years--say you were me in high school--you would be really, really, looking forward to having sex with practically any human being on the planet.

The Winter Olympics happen every four years, but just like my first sexual experiences, they're not as good as you imagined they would be, there's a whole lot of confusing stuff going on, and it isn't very much fun to watch on TV. Also, a lot of it happens on a skating rink.

The weirdest thing about the Winter Olympics is that for such a massively televised, supposedly important sporting event, it's remarkably boring to watch. The skiers go down the same hill over and over, the lugers and skeleton-ers (?) shoot down the same icy chute, the speed skaters aren't fun to watch unless they are all on the ice at the same time...it says something about the Winter Games that the most exciting part is women's figure skating, which hardly anyone cares about during non-Olympic years. And let's not even mention the too-boring-to-mention events like curling, the biathalon, and women's ice hockey.

Having weird, boring things on television isn't a big deal—it happens all the time on public access—but the Olympics aren't just boring TV, they're boring TV that take billions of dollars to produce. For instance, there's the cost of importing snow to Vancouver, which only sounds like an unfunny joke. There's the cost of building all of those massive, useless-unless-you're-hosting-the-Olympics sporting complexes and arenas (remember what a problem this turned out to be for Athens?). Then there's the cost of bribing the IOC spending legitimate money to make the city more attractive to the IOC, and the cost of keeping the Games safe from fishing rods, which all adds up to more than 6 billion dollars, including nearly 1 billion for security alone.

That is a lot of money, and unlike professional sports very little of it goes to the athletes, who if they're lucky become famous and get rich off endorsements and if they're unlucky they get seriously injured or die because their sports are dangerous. And none of it goes to the locals, who resent the whole mess.

But why don't we look on the bright side? Well, unlike the 1936, 1968, and 2008 Olympics, these Games aren't helping to support an authoritarian government or the open massacre of civilians. So, hey, that's awesome. And it's unlikely that there will be any more deaths or any more judging corruption scandals. And no doubt the women's figure skating outfits will be dazzling and make a large number of men ask themselves, “How old is she? Does this make me a pedophile?” Although, on second thought, that last item might not be a positive.

The Winter Olympics defy logic. They obviously just exist to counterbalance the Summer Olympics, which may have started as a good, if somewhat naive, idea but turned into another battlefield for the Cold War, which is now over—and that means that the Winter Olympics are the offshoot of a weird undertaking that doesn't have any purpose any more, except to alert the public that speed skating still exists. And, of course, to sell Coca Cola and McDonald's products, which are extremely delicious.

Some people, of course, hate McDonald's, and these people really don't like the Olympics. They do like Rage Against the Machine, however:

Read more!

Why Unemployment Sucks

Most people have a fairly easy decision to make when they wake up each morning: Should I go to work or stay in bed? You want to stay in bed, even if your job is Delicious Candy Taster or Famous Television Personality, because every job has a number of uncomfortable, often painful downsides—that is why you get money for working. Yet, with herculean efforts, we all get out of bed and stagger into the shower and even put on a giant rat suit, if our job is Mascot, because that is what it means to be a full and functioning member of Society. Also, we have bills and sometimes baby mommas to pay so: we go to work.

Unless, of course, we have no work to go to. Then our decisions upon waking up are more numerous, and more fraught. What time is it? What should I do today? Should I look for work? Should I masturbate? I should really look for work today, shouldn't I? How do I do that? Should I masturbate again? If I don't look for work, what should I do? What's on Hulu? How long can I stay inside my apartment before it becomes weird that I haven't left yet? Can I justify buying more weed, even though I don't have a job? MST3K is on Hulu now? What's my dealer's number?

Without a job, our days are completely free and the daily planner applications on our cellphones are useless. You should be refreshing Craigslist every hour, scanning job sites every day for leads, and roaming the streets with your bundle of resumes tucked under your arm. Maybe you do that for a couple of days, or a week, but if you are out of work much longer it becomes harder to convince yourself to look for work. Here's where the problems start.

You start growing a beard, even if you are a woman. You start riding the bus, not to go anywhere, just to have something to do. You never see the friends you have, because they're always at work or doing things that require money. You wear the same clothes for days, because what difference does it make? You start to believe the universe will provide a path for you. It doesn't. You contemplate joining the Navy or the Marines, or hitchhiking around the country. You tell yourself you need to take charge of your life and stare at the wall for several hours. You walk past a guy who is probably selling crack and think, I wonder what that's like, and mean both selling and smoking crack. You chicken out and go home, wondering how long you can go without paying rent. Your unemployment benefits start running out and you start watching homeless people very closely. How do they get by? Could you do that? Are you attractive enough to be a successful prostitute? Do you have to be attractive to be a prostitute?

People with jobs seem mysterious after too much unemployment. You watch them from your seat on the bus. Where are they going? Do they like having jobs? What's a job like? How did they get one? You follow some of them off the bus until they go into a building. This is getting weird, you think. You walk into a fancy restaurant and order thirty dollars of food for yourself, which you can't afford. You fantasize about having sex with the hostess, then you fantasize about being a hostess at a restaurant like this. Then you would meet new people and you could pay rent again! But all of the restaurant jobs in this town require experience. How does one start a career as a restaurant employee, if no one will hire you without experience?

Jesus, you think, what a horrible society we live in, in which all of our value and connection to society is based around what we do for a living! How can we live this way, with our lives so caught up in our relationship to the perverse and cruel capitalist economy? You read some Communist literature online, but it's pretty dense and you give up. You read that unemployment is 10 percent, does that mean 10 percent of people in this country are having the same problems you are? Jesus. What a fucked-up situation. Fucking banks. Fucking mortgages or whatever. You hope someone will give you health insurance soon, because if you get hit by a car right now, your life is pretty much over. That's a pretty grim thought. You check Craigslist again.

(Image stolen from Unemploymentality.) Read more!

Why Tipping Sucks

Tonight, all over the western world, hundreds of thousands of diners in thousands of restaurants will be faced with the most difficult question of their day: how much should we pay for this meal?

Paying for a meal in a restaurant is far more complicated than a purchasing decision like, say, buying a car. With a car you may have to figure out the “APR financing” or whatnot (I clearly don't drive), but in the end you and the salesman figure out how much money you need to exchange for the car. When the waiter puts the check on your table, on the other hand, you have to figure out how much you should pay by asking yourself a series of quesitons that touch on mathematics, altruism, and the very fabric of our existence as social animals.

Was the service good? Was it unexpectedly good? Was the food satisfactory? If everything was good, how much should we tip? Fifteen percent? Twenty percent? Do you calculate that before or after adding the tax? If the service was not good, how much should we tip? Will we come back to this restaurant? Did my wife see me staring at the waittress's cleavage and if so, will she get mad at me if I tip too much? Was our water refilled enough? If I only want to leave thrity-nine dollars, can I ask for change for two twenties, or will the staff think I'm cheap? Do I care what the staff thinks? Does the waittress wear shirts like that just for tips? If she does, should I reward such behavior?

But why do we go through this process? Having to tip makes people stressed out. Couples have arguments over whether they should have tipped more or less. Waiters and waitresses end up resentful of diners' power over them, and get undertipped often enough that they don't like the tipping system either. Cooks, busboys, and other back-of-house staff sometimes don't get tips distributed to them, or individual waitresses will pocket tips instead of splitting them with the rest of the staff—meaning that a good deal of the time, everyone is unhappy that tipping is a part of our culture.

The easy solution would be to pay wait staffs more and work the increased salaries into the menu prices. That way, paying for a meal would be as simple as paying for sneakers, marijuana, or furniture. The only downside to this is waiters and waitresses wouldn't leave work with a bunch of wrinkled cash in their pockets—then again, since they're probably just going to go out and get drunk with that money, is that really a downside? Maybe our young food workers would be more fiscally responsible if we bumped up their paychecks and didn't give them spare change.

The current byzantine estimation process of service and food quality known as “tipping” is the opposite of a “magic eye” puzzle—the more you look at it, the less sense it makes. Waiters suffer when they give good service and they get stiffed; they don't know how much they're going to get paid for their service in advance, which is a pretty demeaning position. Customers suffer from having to deal with questions over who, how much, and whether to tip. Like war and segregation, tipping is a system that harms everyone who comes into contact with it. Normally I consider it outside of this blog's misison to suggest solutions, but here I feel obliged: please, United States Congressmen, take a break from debating health care to make tipping illegal and force restaurants to pay their workers a fair wage. Compared to the other stuff you're dealing with, it'll be easy. Thanks in advance. Read more!