The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:10:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 D.C. is the New New York! http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/d-c-is-the-new-new-york http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/d-c-is-the-new-new-york#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:10:20 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/d-c-is-the-new-new-york OH HAYYYIf you fall into Washington Life magazine, and why wouldn't you, you would know that not only was there recently the Bachelors and Spinsters Ball (which we presume was a feminist take-back of "spinster"? Right?) but there was also a party called The Young and the Guestlist. Which, wow! It's like Sex and the City 3: I Peed Myself Waiting for a Mojito up in D.C. these days! In part probably because the new administration actually now sometimes hires people of color, I think, as well as that peculiar old D.C. standby, the lantern-jawed white man, there's definitely a frisson of fun in our nation's capitol! Too bad they're probably all real estate brokers and far-right policy wonk suck-ups. (Still, that might be better than New York- an improvement over real estate brokers and commodities analysts, am I right?)

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]]> OH HAYYYIf you fall into Washington Life magazine, and why wouldn't you, you would know that not only was there recently the Bachelors and Spinsters Ball (which we presume was a feminist take-back of "spinster"? Right?) but there was also a party called The Young and the Guestlist. Which, wow! It's like Sex and the City 3: I Peed Myself Waiting for a Mojito up in D.C. these days! In part probably because the new administration actually now sometimes hires people of color, I think, as well as that peculiar old D.C. standby, the lantern-jawed white man, there's definitely a frisson of fun in our nation's capitol! Too bad they're probably all real estate brokers and far-right policy wonk suck-ups. (Still, that might be better than New York- an improvement over real estate brokers and commodities analysts, am I right?)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/d-c-is-the-new-new-york/feed 37 The Magna Cum Laude Recession http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/rich-people-things-with-chris-lehmann-the-magna-cum-laude-recession http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/rich-people-things-with-chris-lehmann-the-magna-cum-laude-recession#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:42:47 +0000 Chris Lehmann http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/rich-people-things-with-chris-lehmann-the-magna-cum-laude-recession SHE DOES WINDOWS TOO PROBABLY NOWIt's a funny thing, newspapering. Last Saturday, for example, the Washington Post carried a dour dispatch in its business pages announcing that the DC unemployment rate ticked up another half a percentage point in October. This was "its highest level in 34 years of record keeping," noted reporter V. Dion Haynes. While the 11.9% jobless rate is in line with that of other major cities, there's also a peculiar lag in the employment scene here; even though employers in metro DC have added 10,200 jobs in the more credentialed end of the service industries, such as education and health care, they make a poor match for the District's labor market. Citing the work of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis, Haynes notes that "the District has a higher proportion of undereducated, low-skilled people who have been most vulnerable to job cuts," and so it stands to reason that "many of the new, higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in the city are going to people in the suburbs" of Maryland and Virginia. Eagle-eyed readers of the Post business section might recall a similarly underplayed story from earlier this month, which found that DC's rarely functional government has been stoking this urban skills gap by failing to direct recipients of welfare assistance to programs upgrading job skills and offering counsel on job search strategies-even though such referrals are more or less mandatory under federal law.

But that's all just the unremarkable daily grist of recession coverage in a city long besieged by stubbornly persistent poverty and contending with a long-frayed patchwork of public assistance resources: Poor people staying poor, with future prospects shimmering into mirage-like visions of marginal improvement. And that, in turn, is why you see precious little local reporting in the Post's "Coping with the Recession" package, a months-long series tracking national downward-tending economic trends, which has plainly been sent packing across its many appointed column inches with a decal on its luggage that reads: "Destination Pulitzer." The previous big-picture installment in the series, after all, concerned a recently divorced credit-card executive who is "squeaking by on $300,00 a year."

So the day after the A-11 Saturday news about worsening low-skill joblessness, readers of this Sunday's paper were greeted on its front page by a very different face of the recession's jobless ranks: Melissa Meyer, a 23-year-old magna cum laude graduate of George Washington University who has been living with her parents in Missoula, Mont., as she rethinks her long-term career prospects.

Now, there is no doubt that this is indeed a newsworthy trend: No one matriculates as a business and marketing major, as Meyer did, with the expectation of bunking in her old bedroom back at the family home. That's especially the case at a school like GWU-routinely ranked among the most expensive in the nation-where students have every reason to hope that they will follow in the cushioned, entitled footsteps of celebrated alums like Jackie Onassis.

But what's surpassingly odd about Post reporter Eli Saslow's blowout portrait of Meyer's job travails is that Meyers' downward spiral in the labor market leaves us with much the same moral that the grubbier news bubbling up from the low-wage, low-skill sectors of the economy does: Even high-achieving candidates like Meyer are being groomed for positions that simply aren't there. Not only was she stiffed by a sexy New Economy Seattle firm that had instituted a hiring freeze and (what seems infinitely more ominous) shuttered the employee wine bar; she's also put through the demoralizing, bewildering ordeal of putting in for jobs she has no formal training to qualify for.

In one central vignette, for instance, she attends an orientation session for applicants for three part-time substitute teaching slots in the Missoula public school system. As Saslow notes, Meyer "has never taught before, nor does she particularly enjoy children, but she has been turned down by a restaurant, a bakery and an herbal shop during the past two weeks." Seventy-five people have turned out for the event, and Meyer is clearly the odd one out-six are certified assistant teachers, many others have education degrees, and almost everyone but her at least has a bachelors degree in English, science, or some other field taught in public schools.

All the jobs counselor can suggest for her is to hand out business cards at her high school alma mater, in the hope that "the staff will help out a former valedictorian by requesting her as a substitute."

To her credit, Meyer, who clearly deserved her many academic honors, draws a bracingly noncomformist lesson from such encounters. "Why waste my time continuing to apply for jobs that don't want me?" Better by far, she confides to her boyfriend, a local rafting instructor, to pick up and travel-perhaps to a Nepalese yoga ashram, or a New Zealand vineyard. "I don't want to look back after 30 years in a cubicle and think, 'I should have....'"

That, of course, is an option that can only occur to someone who has something more than the safety net of poorly administered public-sector job training programs to fall back on. For all the psychic pain of graduating into a job-starved economy, after all, it's still far easier to list downward from the commanding heights of credentialed privilege than to burrow upward from the depths of an urban service economy pocked with fearsome skill mismatches that favor outer-ring suburbanites. Odds are that DC's majority-black industrial reserve army, disproportionately concentrated in Southeast DC's Ward 8, where joblessness is now more than 30%, won't be scheduling all that many ashram getaways-and that, it seems, is what it would take for its members to draw the attention of the Post's economic features team.



Chris Lehmann changes a mean roll of toilet paper himself, if you'd like to hire him to do so. (Kidding! HE WOULD NEVER. Probably.)

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]]> SHE DOES WINDOWS TOO PROBABLY NOWIt's a funny thing, newspapering. Last Saturday, for example, the Washington Post carried a dour dispatch in its business pages announcing that the DC unemployment rate ticked up another half a percentage point in October. This was "its highest level in 34 years of record keeping," noted reporter V. Dion Haynes. While the 11.9% jobless rate is in line with that of other major cities, there's also a peculiar lag in the employment scene here; even though employers in metro DC have added 10,200 jobs in the more credentialed end of the service industries, such as education and health care, they make a poor match for the District's labor market. Citing the work of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis, Haynes notes that "the District has a higher proportion of undereducated, low-skilled people who have been most vulnerable to job cuts," and so it stands to reason that "many of the new, higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in the city are going to people in the suburbs" of Maryland and Virginia. Eagle-eyed readers of the Post business section might recall a similarly underplayed story from earlier this month, which found that DC's rarely functional government has been stoking this urban skills gap by failing to direct recipients of welfare assistance to programs upgrading job skills and offering counsel on job search strategies-even though such referrals are more or less mandatory under federal law.

But that's all just the unremarkable daily grist of recession coverage in a city long besieged by stubbornly persistent poverty and contending with a long-frayed patchwork of public assistance resources: Poor people staying poor, with future prospects shimmering into mirage-like visions of marginal improvement. And that, in turn, is why you see precious little local reporting in the Post's "Coping with the Recession" package, a months-long series tracking national downward-tending economic trends, which has plainly been sent packing across its many appointed column inches with a decal on its luggage that reads: "Destination Pulitzer." The previous big-picture installment in the series, after all, concerned a recently divorced credit-card executive who is "squeaking by on $300,00 a year."

So the day after the A-11 Saturday news about worsening low-skill joblessness, readers of this Sunday's paper were greeted on its front page by a very different face of the recession's jobless ranks: Melissa Meyer, a 23-year-old magna cum laude graduate of George Washington University who has been living with her parents in Missoula, Mont., as she rethinks her long-term career prospects.

Now, there is no doubt that this is indeed a newsworthy trend: No one matriculates as a business and marketing major, as Meyer did, with the expectation of bunking in her old bedroom back at the family home. That's especially the case at a school like GWU-routinely ranked among the most expensive in the nation-where students have every reason to hope that they will follow in the cushioned, entitled footsteps of celebrated alums like Jackie Onassis.

But what's surpassingly odd about Post reporter Eli Saslow's blowout portrait of Meyer's job travails is that Meyers' downward spiral in the labor market leaves us with much the same moral that the grubbier news bubbling up from the low-wage, low-skill sectors of the economy does: Even high-achieving candidates like Meyer are being groomed for positions that simply aren't there. Not only was she stiffed by a sexy New Economy Seattle firm that had instituted a hiring freeze and (what seems infinitely more ominous) shuttered the employee wine bar; she's also put through the demoralizing, bewildering ordeal of putting in for jobs she has no formal training to qualify for.

In one central vignette, for instance, she attends an orientation session for applicants for three part-time substitute teaching slots in the Missoula public school system. As Saslow notes, Meyer "has never taught before, nor does she particularly enjoy children, but she has been turned down by a restaurant, a bakery and an herbal shop during the past two weeks." Seventy-five people have turned out for the event, and Meyer is clearly the odd one out-six are certified assistant teachers, many others have education degrees, and almost everyone but her at least has a bachelors degree in English, science, or some other field taught in public schools.

All the jobs counselor can suggest for her is to hand out business cards at her high school alma mater, in the hope that "the staff will help out a former valedictorian by requesting her as a substitute."

To her credit, Meyer, who clearly deserved her many academic honors, draws a bracingly noncomformist lesson from such encounters. "Why waste my time continuing to apply for jobs that don't want me?" Better by far, she confides to her boyfriend, a local rafting instructor, to pick up and travel-perhaps to a Nepalese yoga ashram, or a New Zealand vineyard. "I don't want to look back after 30 years in a cubicle and think, 'I should have....'"

That, of course, is an option that can only occur to someone who has something more than the safety net of poorly administered public-sector job training programs to fall back on. For all the psychic pain of graduating into a job-starved economy, after all, it's still far easier to list downward from the commanding heights of credentialed privilege than to burrow upward from the depths of an urban service economy pocked with fearsome skill mismatches that favor outer-ring suburbanites. Odds are that DC's majority-black industrial reserve army, disproportionately concentrated in Southeast DC's Ward 8, where joblessness is now more than 30%, won't be scheduling all that many ashram getaways-and that, it seems, is what it would take for its members to draw the attention of the Post's economic features team.



Chris Lehmann changes a mean roll of toilet paper himself, if you'd like to hire him to do so. (Kidding! HE WOULD NEVER. Probably.)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/rich-people-things-with-chris-lehmann-the-magna-cum-laude-recession/feed 10 Marvel and NyQuil: Everything is Bad, Go to Sleep http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/marvel-and-nyquil-everything-is-bad-go-to-sleep http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/marvel-and-nyquil-everything-is-bad-go-to-sleep#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:10:03 +0000 Mary HK Choi http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/marvel-and-nyquil-everything-is-bad-go-to-sleep picture-215In the wake of the Summer of Death and the colossally major news that Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion (a number that means "death" in Cantonese and is therefore avoided at all costs-not in enumerations of 4, obvs-in addresses, car license plates, cell phone numbers, etc., and, cue ominous, chongy music) and because Mr. Nasir "Nas" Jones says that sleep is the cousin of death, we must report the (in some circles, equally) important news that the soporific in Nyquil (doxylamine succinate) is found in much higher doses elsewhere. Namely Unisom (25 mg per pill vs. 6.25 mg in a 15 ml dose).

This may not be such the whoopin' end of Nyquil-but it is when you consider it can be purchased generically for about 75 percent of the retail price and that Unisom is misleading because their Quick dissolve tablets and gelcaps DO NOT use the good stuff (seriously, check any drug store, the one that needs re-upping is the original tablet kind).

The wrong kind uses the same ingredient as Benadryl, which is a racket, 'cause any OTC pillhead knows you can't sleep fitfully on the pinks. Also, vis-à-vis my dwindling attention span (side effect of what? Who can say!) we (me and Twitter) would like to now report that despite other reports of fanboys FUHREAKING out about the quality of the Marvel Universe maintaining its present state of awesome post Civil War radicalness that The Runaways (not the band) WOULD make a dynamite ABC Family TV show and we would watch the shit out of it and that, to those of us in the dork community, it kinda doesn't matter who owns what rights to theme park rides, because The Dark Knight (which should be an epic testament to physics and turmoil) at New Jersey's Great Adventure is utter garbage. Somewhere in the DC Universe someone is crying/NEEDS A NAP.

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]]> picture-215In the wake of the Summer of Death and the colossally major news that Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion (a number that means "death" in Cantonese and is therefore avoided at all costs-not in enumerations of 4, obvs-in addresses, car license plates, cell phone numbers, etc., and, cue ominous, chongy music) and because Mr. Nasir "Nas" Jones says that sleep is the cousin of death, we must report the (in some circles, equally) important news that the soporific in Nyquil (doxylamine succinate) is found in much higher doses elsewhere. Namely Unisom (25 mg per pill vs. 6.25 mg in a 15 ml dose).

This may not be such the whoopin' end of Nyquil-but it is when you consider it can be purchased generically for about 75 percent of the retail price and that Unisom is misleading because their Quick dissolve tablets and gelcaps DO NOT use the good stuff (seriously, check any drug store, the one that needs re-upping is the original tablet kind).

The wrong kind uses the same ingredient as Benadryl, which is a racket, 'cause any OTC pillhead knows you can't sleep fitfully on the pinks. Also, vis-à-vis my dwindling attention span (side effect of what? Who can say!) we (me and Twitter) would like to now report that despite other reports of fanboys FUHREAKING out about the quality of the Marvel Universe maintaining its present state of awesome post Civil War radicalness that The Runaways (not the band) WOULD make a dynamite ABC Family TV show and we would watch the shit out of it and that, to those of us in the dork community, it kinda doesn't matter who owns what rights to theme park rides, because The Dark Knight (which should be an epic testament to physics and turmoil) at New Jersey's Great Adventure is utter garbage. Somewhere in the DC Universe someone is crying/NEEDS A NAP.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/marvel-and-nyquil-everything-is-bad-go-to-sleep/feed 20 Understanding The Press Event: Nick Jonas Is Against Diabetes http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/understanding-the-press-event-nick-jonas-is-against-diabetes http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/understanding-the-press-event-nick-jonas-is-against-diabetes#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:24:14 +0000 Colin Sweeney http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/understanding-the-press-event-nick-jonas-is-against-diabetes FANSThe month of August in Washington, D.C., is dominated by uneventful fare with the most noteworthy happenings going down outside of the beltway. Perfect timing, then, for an adorable celebri-teen to show up and maximize media exposure for his pet cause. The photogenic subject in question was Nick Jonas of the pop group the Jonas Brothers. This week, he took to a much smaller stage than he's used to at the National Press Club to promote awareness for Type I Diabetes. There, like out of some cruel joke, a soft, moist chocolate cake was present at each table.

Even more conspicuous, however, were the dozens of fidgeting tween girls with their camera phones competing for lines of sight against professional photographers. At one point the National Press Club President Donna Leinwand had to remind the guests that only "Professional members of the press" are allowed to kneel in front of the podium to take photographs.

All in all, it was a good event for those with Type 1 Diabetes, as Nick's charity received a $100,000 donation from Bayer AG subsidiary, Bayer Health Care.

BAYER'S BOY

One might be suspicious, however, that this may be an act of image polishing on the part of Bayer. Last November, the firm was forced to make a settlement payment to the tune of $97.5 million, after a U.S. Department of Justice investigation for running a kickback scheme with 11 separate diabetes suppliers to convert patients to Bayer products. The payments for patients that Bayer was making were disguised as "advertising" payments, the Justice Dept. said.

Just another wholesome day in the books for Nick Jonas before he flies to Canada to film Camp Rock 2 for that other child-friendly corporate behemoth, Disney.

Photos by The Washington Times' Liz Glover. Colin Sweeney is a writer in Washington, D.C. You can reach him at Colin @ The Awl.

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]]> FANSThe month of August in Washington, D.C., is dominated by uneventful fare with the most noteworthy happenings going down outside of the beltway. Perfect timing, then, for an adorable celebri-teen to show up and maximize media exposure for his pet cause. The photogenic subject in question was Nick Jonas of the pop group the Jonas Brothers. This week, he took to a much smaller stage than he's used to at the National Press Club to promote awareness for Type I Diabetes. There, like out of some cruel joke, a soft, moist chocolate cake was present at each table.

Even more conspicuous, however, were the dozens of fidgeting tween girls with their camera phones competing for lines of sight against professional photographers. At one point the National Press Club President Donna Leinwand had to remind the guests that only "Professional members of the press" are allowed to kneel in front of the podium to take photographs.

All in all, it was a good event for those with Type 1 Diabetes, as Nick's charity received a $100,000 donation from Bayer AG subsidiary, Bayer Health Care.

BAYER'S BOY

One might be suspicious, however, that this may be an act of image polishing on the part of Bayer. Last November, the firm was forced to make a settlement payment to the tune of $97.5 million, after a U.S. Department of Justice investigation for running a kickback scheme with 11 separate diabetes suppliers to convert patients to Bayer products. The payments for patients that Bayer was making were disguised as "advertising" payments, the Justice Dept. said.

Just another wholesome day in the books for Nick Jonas before he flies to Canada to film Camp Rock 2 for that other child-friendly corporate behemoth, Disney.

Photos by The Washington Times' Liz Glover. Colin Sweeney is a writer in Washington, D.C. You can reach him at Colin @ The Awl.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2009/08/understanding-the-press-event-nick-jonas-is-against-diabetes/feed 3 Have A Seat For Us At The WHCD? http://www.theawl.com/2009/05/have-a-seat-for-us-at-the-whcd http://www.theawl.com/2009/05/have-a-seat-for-us-at-the-whcd#comments Thu, 07 May 2009 15:19:54 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2009/05/have-a-seat-for-us-at-the-whcd If anyone has an extra seat at the White House Correspondent's Dinner itself for our D.C. correspondent, let us know! We will give you cupcakes. And editorial consideration. CONFUSING NEWFANGLED EMOTICON GOES HERE.

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]]> If anyone has an extra seat at the White House Correspondent's Dinner itself for our D.C. correspondent, let us know! We will give you cupcakes. And editorial consideration. CONFUSING NEWFANGLED EMOTICON GOES HERE.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2009/05/have-a-seat-for-us-at-the-whcd/feed 4 Marion Barry Has No Idea What He's Voting For, Asks For Do-Over http://www.theawl.com/2009/05/marion-barry-has-no-idea-what-hes-voting-for-asks-for-do-over http://www.theawl.com/2009/05/marion-barry-has-no-idea-what-hes-voting-for-asks-for-do-over#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 11:50:20 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2009/05/marion-barry-has-no-idea-what-hes-voting-for-asks-for-do-over "D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) has now asked that the gay marriage bill be reconsidered. He didn't realize what he was voting on before."

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]]> "D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) has now asked that the gay marriage bill be reconsidered. He didn't realize what he was voting on before."

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