One of SNL’s current head writers has moved to the writing staff. As of Saturday night’s episode hosted by Tracy Morgan, writer and Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost has officially moved from co-head writer to the regular writing staff, leaving longtime writers Bryan Tucker and Rob Klein as current head writers. The change was reflected in […]
I've had a range of AirBnB experiences over the past 2 weeks!
Airbnb. Amazing. Airbnb “believes that people can and should feel like they belong anywhere in the world.” Strongly agree. Hundreds of thousands of hosts. Tens of millions of users. 500,000 stays a night. A re-imagination of the notion of property. Incredible.
Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage.
That’s bad. But:
75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses.
That’s good! So why not let Airbnb help them even more. That’s where ReHome comes in.
Startup idea: ReHome will let renters and homeowners spend as little time in their homes as is necessary to keep them. By providing affordable sleep-work-live arrangements in extremely space-optimized towers located at or near public transit termini, ReHomes allow sharing economy rentrepreneurs to lease a bed in a beautifully efficient open-plan space. (The spaces could be inside of used shipping containers or former public housing, or even former disrupted office and residential buildings—ReHousing isn’t about the specific space, right, it’s an IRL API for the opportunities inside of it.)
Right, so your stay will be all-inclusive: A mattress (Casper Lite Coil Spring), collaborative bathrooms, and Wi-Fi in cases where cellular service is not available in this part of town. Since these towers may be outside affordable delivery zones, so ReHome, in partnership with Soylent and Beyond Food (formerly Beyond Meat), will offer consumption plans.
This is just a pitch. First things first, right, so we’ll use existing home-havers to scale ReHome. But this idea has real potential. At scale, ReHome could offer financing to partners in order to lease or purchase properties. These deals would be revolutionary: priced not only in dollars but in time. Right so ReHome could finance your home on a set monthly payment plan. $4000 a month with zero days shared could be reduced to $3000 a month with five days shared. ReHome could take care of the rental—either through future partners Airbnb or a future rental service of our own. ReHome would not own these properties it rents or finances, right. So that would be handled by an unbundled partner company called ReBank.*
ReHome will provide an app to help you determine your best home/ReHome living balance. Whether you need to stay in a ReHome for one day a week to make rent, or six days a week to make your mortgage, ReHome’s on-demand real-time pricing model has an option for you. Not yet broken into the personal shelter market? A ReHome is a great way to incubate your dream of renting a home near a population center, where you can enjoy the fruits of the Logistics and Leisure Revolution, such as solid food, and then renting that home to inspiring influencers from other cities.**
ReHomes are ultimately about community. Right? So you can Network with fellow free-working rentrepreneurs to get an edge over fellow Taskrabbit, Uber and Amazon Flex partners via sharing learnings.***
ReHome would also offer to its partners a rewards program. Helping to clean the ReHome space, or shuttling ReHome parters from their homes to their ReHomes, can earn you extra free nights. Save up enough free nights and you can redeem them for an extra night in your own home, credited as a client night. Right. So.
Anyway. Let me know. I’m searching for investors and a co-founder. I’m more of an ideas guy so I need someone good with computers.
*Not an FDIC bank
**ReHome Partners are not “guests” and their co-sleeping are not spaces “rooms.” Each cubicle area gate is compatible with industry-leading padlocks.
***Formal labor organization is counter to the spirit of ReHome and is not allowed on ReHome-licensed premises
I really like this, in that West-Wing-episode-with-an-upside-down-map kind of way.
Drawing upon the work of colleagues, historian Michael Todd Landis proposes new language for talking about slavery and the Civil War. In addition to favoring "labor camps" over the more romantic "plantations", he suggests retiring the concept of the Union vs the Confederacy.
Specifically, let us drop the word "Union" when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in "Union troops" versus "Confederate troops." Instead of "Union," we should say "United States." By employing "Union" instead of "United States," we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a "sandy foundation" (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.
Bosworth, who plans to compete in Rio 2016 Olympics, is the first professional British track athlete to come out of the closet. He holds the British record over 5,000 and 10,000 meters.
He told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire:
“It’s a scary thing. I’m really lucky. I’ve got a loving partner, a great family behind me, a great setup in Leeds, and everyone is really supportive and really welcoming, but that’s not the same for everybody else in this world today, even in 2015. It’s difficult for people to speak with their friends and family about a lot of different issues, and in sport I don’t think being gay is still a normal thing.”
“Why?” Derbyshire asked.
“That’s a good question. I don’t think I have an answer for that. In most other things now it’s very normal to have a gay colleague who teaches anything, any sort of line of work it’s very common to be open, but in sport it’s not.”
Bosworth tells BBC that British distance runner Mo Farah was very supportive when he told him, but things haven’t always been that way with fellow athletes. He was verbally abused a few years ago, and worse before that:
A group of lads used to gang up on me and the worst episode came when they smashed my head through a window after a run-in. I decided not to tell anyone about it, so my parents or teachers didn’t know. I guess I was more worried about people blaming me than the students but I had the support of my friends to get me through that tough time.
It was a decade ago, so I’d like to think that things have moved on a lot since then, even in schools, and that kids are more tolerant these days.
That experience taught me to ignore lone voices. I know there will always be people who have a problem with my sexuality, but one person’s opinion doesn’t affect me now, as I have support from my parents and partner.
I’m not even sure I can change the opinions of those boys. All I want to do is give a positive message that you can succeed in sport whatever your background. Be it gay, straight, black, white, religious or non-religious – there are no barriers.
You can watch Bosworth’s full video interview HERE.
Donald Trump is heading to SNL next month, but it’s a lot more than just a cameo. According to The Hollywood Reporter, NBC confirmed today that the presidential candidate is slated to host the November 7th episode. It will make his second hosting stint following his appearance in 2004.
This is a very very very funny show and I think it should have universal appeal.
Comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez has just released the first episode of his new comic web series, Boy Toys and it’s as absurd as you might hope.
A half-hour scripted sitcom, Boy Toys follows go-go dancer Ivan (Alvarez) as he deals with a breakup and welcomes an old friend from high school, Frankie (played by series co-creator Brad Wergley), back into his life as his new roommate. Frankie is an all around ‘newbie’–new to LA and new to dating, or rather, sleeping with men. As Frankie, Wergley is the cute and spunky ‘straight man’ to Alvarez’s dry-witted but razor-tongued Ivan. One liners fly by so frequently you’ll have to pause and replay.
The show paints LA and its gay scene in broad strokes (“You’re in LA now, you’ve gotta learn how to lie”) that will doubtless be familiar to its denizens.
Comedian Jimmy Fowlie also shows up as Ivan’s confidante, Jeremy–who has something of a drinking problem.
5 more episodes are slated to be released in the coming weeks. Check back HERE for all the latest episodes! And watch the first episode below:
this is so bizarre, who are these fucking monsters
Chris Pratt joins Billy Eichner in a new episode of Billy on the Street but it appears that most New Yorkers haven’t seen Guardians of the Galaxy, Parks and Rec, or Jurassic World.
And some of them are absolutely thrilled to have met Josh Duhamel.
Magazines, particularly the male-dominated magazines, which include basically all the magazines except the magazines devoted to women, serve their own purposes. They don’t particularly care about writers or their actually very segmented audiences, although at the same time they live in fear of a mythologized audience. Here Is Our Audience: He Lives In TriBeCa And Goes To Equinox And Isn’t Sure Where The Best Sushi In Soho Is Now. That he is actually only eight men and seven of those men don’t read magazines isn’t relevant. The male magazine audience member also lives in a perpetual state of divorce and horniness: he must be, all at once, 43 sex tips and best husband and hot dad and also on the prowl. Abs Man and Dad Bod alike! The Male Magazine itself, having passed on over through its emotional crisis, lives in a sad new bachelor apartment of the mind, in a conference room and on an email chain. The “general interest” (male) magazine editor is always waiting for his boss to come back from Milan and tear up all the work everyone has done in the last week. The magazine male has a reasonable fear of commitment to a way of writing a piece. The magazine male is often punished. In the world of the magazine by committee, no profile or essay can satisfy.
The magazine piece lives in a horrifying multiverse, where every possible version of the piece must be executed and then discarded, at least in part to score points in the office game of alphas versus betas. This is workplace hamstering, to borrow the gross and useful term of the mens’ rights universe. I think when men are involved they call that gerbiling but that sounds too anal for what we’re talking about. Office Hamstering is the demonstration of workiness. An editor must prove that he works many hours. It can be unconvincing that one is important if one is not constantly closing a piece. OH I AM SO BUSY! I am already having had worked, I will have worked, I have been and will be working! SO BUSY.
And then, so truly busy, when the committee stomps on in. Senior editors must hamster as well, and they will do it on your story.
The committee will always peg a writer’s essay to a movie that is about to come out and bomb, which was pretty obvious even a couple months ago.
The committee will always ask you to “run some things by the publicist.”
The committee will always “have some last-minute ideas.”
Sometimes, the committee will save you from making terrible mistakes.
You really can’t complain about editors too much without acknowledging that sometimes they literally save lives.
It’s sad that few printed magazines allow the convictions of their story editors.
But mostly, an assemblage of bonobos are pasting up a magazine together, each thinking about the position he will be in when the editor-in-chief finally retires or is auctioned off.
Magazines have become too petrified to give us what we want. They’re right to be afraid, because we want all of the things. We are terrible! But then, magazines are antisocial media. So every magazine choice becomes agonizing, every edit inching closer to an infinity.
Sometimes, magazine stories become gates instead of windows. This even happens at magazines that employ women! The manufacture of the story creates a distance between us and the subject of the story. You can see why women pop stars prefer to produce and execute their own content, rather than playing with the media to let it be created from them. There, sometimes, a subject becomes obscured, instead of revealed. Maybe that’s on purpose sometimes? Maybe it’s a byproduct of the system, where this one iteration of the story was plucked from the windowsill of all time and space. In any event, this is why T magazine should release the transcript of their Rihanna interview that was used for the profile they have just published. It is her first extensive interview in years. No one needs the media less than Rihanna. And yet, they have two hours of Rihanna talking for a piece that in this universe includes almost as much quotation from the writer’s Uber driver as it does from Rihanna herself. Thank the heavens for all involved, this published iteration of the story remains illuminating, charming, funny, insightful. It is filled with lots of really good ideas. And yet. The public words of Rihanna, which are so few, and so impressive, should belong to us all. Those birds want to fly free. Who is a magazine to keep us from hearing from Rihanna?
Professor McIntyre and his contemporaries believed that overfishing was inherently self-correcting. People might catch too much, but then they would stop fishing, letting the stock recover. They did not reckon on improvements in technology such as a monofilament line, factory trawlers, or fish finders that make it possible to catch so many fish so quickly that it can take decades for a stock to recover (if it ever does). Nor did he or his contemporaries understand food webs and ecological connections; reducing stocks of some species has more of an impact than others.
GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson recounted Wednesday a story about being held at gunpoint, amid backlash over comments he made about the Oregon community college shooting in which he suggested victims of the shooting could have done more to fight back.
"I have had a gun held on me when I was in a Popeye's organization" in Baltimore, the retired neurosurgeon told Karen Hunter on Sirius XM Radio, referring to the fried chicken fast-food chain. "Guy comes in, put the gun in my ribs. And I just said, 'I believe that you want the guy behind the counter,'" Carson.
The presidential hopeful's telling of the encounter is at odds with a controversial answer he gave on Tuesday when asked about how he would respond to a potential gunman by Fox News' "Fox and Friends" host Brian Kilmeade. "Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, 'Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me but he can't get us all,'" Carson had said.
In this case Carson didn't even have to rush the guy—the guy was standing close enough to Carson to stick the gun in his ribs. But for the record: If you're in a classroom full of people and a gunman bursts in with an automatic weapon, rush the guy. But if you're Ben Carson and a gunman sticks a gun in your ribs, offer him someone else to shoot.
Campaign reporters: The guy behind the counter at that Popeye's that day? I bet he would be a great interview.
This is why I employ a strict FIFO accounting policy in my vagina.
I had a Diva Cup stuck inside me for a long fucking time. Let me begin: The day after my birthday, I dragged my hungover ass to the park where I taught an outdoor pre-school class. My state of dehydration had me looking for lemon-lime Gatorade like Tom Hanks was looking for Wilson in Castaway.
I was bleary, but noticed a strange, dull pain in my lower back as my canvas sneakers grazed the freshly cut grass. As I set up for class, I remember the distinct sensation of mysterious wet globules dropping into my cotton Wonder Woman panties. I knew it couldn’t be my period, because I’d just wrapped that up.
Before I had time to think to myself, “What the hell is wrong with me?” I was surrounded by a semi-circle of toddlers and their wholesome Park Slope mothers. It was time for us to sing a song.
“Little bird, little bird, fly to my meadow,” I sang, with equal parts haze and feigned delight. I watched the messy three year old faces smile, teeth askew as I struggled to continue. I felt another emission of warm, gooey liquid. Perplexed, I tried to piece together what had happened to my pussy on my birthday night that could explain this spillage. I tried to distract myself from the unsolvable mystery by fixing my gaze on the permanently-worried looking mothers, who passed the class time reaching into their vegan leather purses for organic baby wipes or trail mix from the neighborhood co-op.
I survived the class period, but the mysterious discharge persisted that week and beyond—like a transforming butterfly, its progressive evolution took many forms. It was a crimson-hued putty in my panties and next a grayish purple, a dull brown. It had the scent of nothing at all and later, that of tuna fish, and then of milk spoiling in the sun, and then of nothing again. The slippage of the sometimes smelly and thick jelly-textured discharge was something I could ignore about 70 percent of the time. Other times, it randomly sputtered forth from my vaginal lips like a toddler learning gross-motor control, causing me to freeze in my tracks in front of the bodega’s cash register corner.
“Just…one…second,” I muttered—probably inaudibly—reaching into my wallet for enough change to buy my favorite flavor of Ben and Jerry’s, smiling a smile that I hoped said, “No sir, my pussy is not oozing with an unidentified primordial swamp goo.” He took my money, made a comment about my floral-printed dress, and then despondently returned his gaze to the screen of his iPhone. Business as usual.
My then-boyfriend, Jake, didn’t seem to be bothered. I told him about the spillage. “What?” I looked at him, hands on my hips. “I mean, like, you haven’t noticed anything?” I asked, gesturing at the v-shape between my legs. “No man. Did you get ice cream?” He pawed at the black plastic bag dangling from my wrist, tanned from a summer spent outside.
“No, I mean like, you didn’t like, feel anything weird when you were inside of me?”
“Um…I don’t know…. No? What flavor did you get?” I opened the carton’s cap. Jake’s face lifted, pleased. “I don’t know dude, maybe it’s a UTI,” he suggested, wrestling with the ice cream’s firm surface. That would explain the back pain. I monologued about the changing textures and colorations of residue in my underpants as we reached our spoons into swirling chocolate and caramel, speckled like an aerial view of a rocky mountain landscape.
Maybe it was a urinary tract infection. I just didn’t feel pain when I peed, which seemed like sort of the main feature of UTIs. But like, I knew and had experienced the full menu of UTI symptoms like the back of my hand. It wasn’t like any other kind of UTI I’d had before. I guess I figured UTIs were like people—each a unique constellation of misery, anguish, and disgust. I racked my brain to see if any of the symptoms corresponded that they like...kind of did...maybe...whatever.
If I knew anything about UTIs, I know that they can’t stay forever if you take care of your shit. I upped my consumption of cranberry juice and apple cider vinegar, holding out for an improvement in my pelvis’ ecological conditions. The pollution smeared across my panties every evening wasn’t improving, but it wasn’t worsening either.
One day, after a particularly bad spat of vaginal drooling while teaching toddlers to build fairy houses, I decided I had to take this to the next level. I went to the Williamsburg Urgent Care, where I waited for forty minutes only to have a bespectacled little man examine me, as I laid half naked. He put his squirrely little face between my legs, eyes fanning open and then narrowing thoughtfully. “Hmmm…hmmmm…” he muttered, gasping occasionally as he stuck an assortment of cold metal devices inside of me. “I don’t know what’s going on. Why don’t you pee in a cup?”
Before I knew it I was out the door with a little white bag of UTI meds. I took them, but it didn’t help. Two weeks later, Jake and I were on the train to the Bronx. We were on our way to the only Planned Parenthood in all of New York City that had an appointment that day. “This was the closest you could find?” Jake heaved as he put his arm around me, and slouched into the plastic seat of the Manhattan-bound L train. “Well, yeah,” I said, probably going off on some tangent about women’s healthcare. “The world is fucked,” he offered in consolation as we surfaced into the sun-soaked station at 149th street.
When we got to Planned Parenthood, Jake tumbled into one of the scratchy canvas chairs in the reception room. There’s something about an hour-long commute in the city that’s pretty exhausting. Particularly when your vagina is leaking. I hurriedly filled out paper work with my right hand, holding his with my left.
When I was summoned into the office, cubicle, whatever, I described my symptoms, reaching into my stained tote bag for the little white baggie the Williamsburg Urgent Care gave me. “A UTI?” The technician asked, her welcoming smile now contorted into a thin narrow line. “It sure doesn’t sound like any UTI I’ve ever had,” she bellowed, tapping her ballpoint pen against a clipboard. She hunkered down her thighs, encased in a viridian hue of nurses’ scrubs. “You know,” she sighed, put her finger to her temple, “Male doctors will do anything to avoid touching your pussy.”
I couldn’t believe she was saying this. “Was it a male doctor?” She asked. I nodded. “UG.” Her hand went to her head. She ran some tests to confirm her suspicions, and then clarified that no, it was not a UTI. “Well…I guess we could try an internal exam?”
For the second time that month, I dragged my nearly naked self to reclining exam chair. Even though this situation was totally yuck, I kind of just wanted to know what strange thing was brewing inside me at this point, be it a disease or a frozen box of bagel bites.
The technician’s gloved hand gently poked around inside me. “Just tell me when it hurts,” she said, locking eyes with me. She poked around for a minute or two before declaring that everything looked pretty healthy, and then instructed me to push, clench, and tighten my vaginal muscles. “Um…I think there’s something like, stuck in there,” the technician said.
“What do you mean?” I asked drearily, gazing at the ceiling tile above me, marred by dirty scotch tape adhesing a breezy photograph of dandelions scattering the Swiss Alps.
“I don’t know,” she said ominously. “I’m getting back-up.”
I laid there in limbo, unsure where to look for comfort. I mean what the hell. “Getting back- up,” does that mean that there’s an alien inside of me? I wasn’t sure. Before I had time to fully indulge my neurosis, a swat team of nurses came through in their lab coats, forming a semicircle around the opening of my legs.
Well, by swat team, I guess I mean like, three people, but still! A woman with a stethoscope hanging from her neck quickly identified herself as the Alpha. She looked at me and gave me a perfunctory smile before pressing firmly down on my abdomen. “Does that hurt?” I winced. “Yep, definitely something inside ‘ya, kiddo.”
The two other nurses, complete strangers who I have also never met before, stand behind the woman with a stethoscope. She reaches her gloved finger into my vagina, scraping and digging. She looks up at me, down at her fingers, and then behind her. The two other women stared at each other like nervous crewmembers in the moment when the Titanic scratched the iceberg. The doctor exhales loudly. “Hand me the tweezers,” she commands. “Not those ones, the long ones,” she barks. “What do you think it is, sweetheart?” she asked in the sweetest voice possible for the deep rasp of a long-time smoker.
“I honestly don’t know.” I said, doing a mental scan of all the foreign objects my crotch had been near in the past month. I mean it couldn’t have been like, an abandoned lego? A Cheez-It? I don’t know, all my nether regions had really been near that month, save for my boyfriend, were the children’s toys scattered across the floor of the busy parents I babysat for.
“Well, we’re about to find out,” she said, reaching the 7-inch tweezers straight up into my vag. I could feel her clamp onto whatever it was. She pulled. My body resisted. I got this image of an octopus clamping its tentacles onto the tweezers, winding their suction-cupped appendages with an indolent stubbornness that apparently my imagination reserves for marine life. No No No No. I could feel my vagina resisting. Will. Not. Let. Go.
With one committed heave my DIVA CUP from my drunken birthday approximately a month and a half ago came flying out of my vaginal canal, spilling a modest amount of the mysterious grayish liquid across the linoleum beneath the exam chair. It smelled like I had been carrying a dead coyote inside of my vagina. As stench permeated the room, the nurses clutched their small noses. The doctor, still holding the absurdly long tweezers, reached with admirable courage for the cloudy little silicone bell. Struggling to clamp onto it, it rolled across the floor leaving a trail of fermented menstrual drool. Finally, she got her grip, and a nurse opened the lid to a cherry-red bin labeled, “TOXIC MATERIALS.”
The doctor released the tweezers, and my Diva Cup whispered past the plastic lining of the garbage bin, eventually coming to a thud. At this moment, the entire room exhaled. “Well, watch what ya put inside ya, kiddo,” the doctor said, eyeing me carefully, turning briskly on the heel of her hospital shoes with her troop of nurses following close behind her.
The 2008-9 survey Trajectoires et origines shows that forty-four percent of the descendants of masculine immigrants of Algerian or Moroccan origin have a spouse who is neither an immigrant nor a descendant of immigrants. The rate rises to 60 percent for those of Tunisian origin, falls to 42 percent for those of Turkish origin, rises back to 65 per cent for those of sub-Saharan African origin (we cannot, in this latter case, distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims). For women, the rates are a little lower, which is to be expected in disintegrating patrilineal cultures, but they remain at a very high level for those of Algerian (41 per cent), Moroccan (34 per cent) and sub-Saharan African (40 per cent) origin…But while exogamy is not yet a major practice, these groups have clearly been welded to French society…We need at this point to emphasize the speed with which populations from sub-Saharan Africa have integrated…
When the Curiosity rover landed on the surface of Mars, it took high-resolution photos all the way down. Luke Fitch took those photos and stitched them together into a first-person HD video of the rover's landing.
Update: I was wondering if someone had done a stabilized version of this video and lo:
I just thought this was wonderful, and seeing Kate call her out on gay marriage was :fire emoji:
I'm neither a Hillary fan nor a Hillary hater. In 2008 I was for Barack or Hillary or both. But like Chris, our resident Hillary fan, I thought Hillary did a great job on SNL this weekend. She was so... human. I loved the gay marriage joke/dig—and, hey, Hillary does a good Donald Trump impression. And she can sing! Who knew? Hillary was so good on SNL that you can't help but wonder why she does this sort of thing so rarely. I'm not talking about how rarely she does skits on comedy shows, but how little access she grants to the media generally. Why not do an hour-long, sit-down interview with Rachel Maddow? Why not go on Fresh Air with Terry Gross? Why not go on Real Time with Bill Maher? Flood the zone. Hillary grants so few interviews that anyone who does get time with her—like Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC—feels obligated to put the screws to her about her freaking email server. More interviews, more interviewers, and Hillary might have time to talk about other shit and show us a side of herself besides Hillary Playing Defense.
Because what she's doing now—making herself extremely scarce—clearly isn't working. It's not shoring up her poll numbers or driving Bernie's down. So why not do something else? Back when Hillary was Secretary of State, back when she was popular, she was a lot more available to the media. So... maybe... go back to what was working and stop with what clearly isn't working?
where are we, collectively, on our obsession with billy
Tina Fey is Billy Eichner’s guest star for the premiere of Billy on the Street this week. He asks the writer-actor-director who can seem to do everything to give an Oscar speech in which she names 20 Latino performers, in a challenge called LaTina Fey.
Enjoy watching Tina Fey buckle under pressure and actually fail at something.
Let’s just be honest with ourselves: of course people gossip about us. Gossip is delicious and rich and sticky and filling, flowing like a low-grade American maple syrup on the otherwise bland waffles of our lives. But here’s the thing: I can’t decide if I care. It’s very cool to say “I don’t care what people say about me,” to be bold and self-assured and content, like a woman in a superhero comic or a tampon commercial, but it’s less cool to secretly (and not-so-secretly, hello Internet) be possessed by the thought. So here’s a fun exercise: what if we got to choose? This month’s One Big Question is what do you want people to say about you after you’ve left the room, because it’s a way for our deepest insecurities to mingle with our private aspirations and come up with something honest and hopeful, and quite possibly, true.
“Crucially, it’s impossible not to have a crush on both members of the couple. He’s red-faced and hairy, but graceful, like an elk in khakis. Eyes narrowed with a reflexive suspicion, she spins her lines like batons, lending even the coarsest remark—“I shouldn’t have called her a cunt; she’s more of a bitch,” say—the bite of a Noël Coward witticism.”
Airbnb. Amazing. Airbnb “believes that people can and should feel like they belong anywhere in the world.” Strongly agree. Hundreds of thousands of hosts. Tens of millions of users. 500,000 stays a night. A re-imagination of the notion of property. Incredible.
Magazines, particularly the male-dominated magazines, which include basically all the magazines except the magazines devoted to women, serve their own purposes. They don’t particularly care about writers or their actually very segmented audiences, although at the same time they live in fear of a mythologized audience. Here Is Our Audience: He Lives In TriBeCa And Goes To Equinox And Isn’t Sure Where The Best Sushi In Soho Is Now. That he is actually only eight men and seven of those men don’t read magazines isn’t relevant. The male magazine audience member also lives in a perpetual state of divorce and horniness: he must be, all at once, 43 sex tips and best husband and hot dad and also on the prowl. Abs Man and Dad Bod alike! The Male Magazine itself, having passed on over through its emotional crisis, lives in a sad new bachelor apartment of the mind, in a conference room and on an email chain. The “general interest” (male) magazine editor is always waiting for his boss to come back from Milan and tear up all the work everyone has done in the last week. The magazine male has a reasonable fear of commitment to a way of writing a piece. The magazine male is often punished. In the world of the magazine by committee, no profile or essay can satisfy.
