When I asked him whether he regretted going public—whether he thought he could have accomplished more without the market pressure—he became incensed. "I feel like the only reason you could be asking me that question is because you think I’m stupid or because you’re trying to see if I’m going to lie to you."
—Say what you will about fired Groupon (current share price: 4.53) CEO Andrew Mason—he's a slob, he made terrible choices, his company was pretty close to being a scam for desperate businesses of the recession era—but at least he always makes sure to give a entertainingly terrible interview. I do look forward to [...]
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Over the weekend I went to the Lehigh Valley Mall. It’s just outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and would rank as the most popular (and second-most swanky) of the malls in the region. It’s standard-issue, two-levels, lacking a proper food court (although it does have what they call a “lifestyle center,” which was added in 2007, and which is basically a strip-mall add-on with stores slightly more upscale than the ones inside).
Recently I have become concerned about my own wardrobe. I have been somewhere just north [...]
Does a beekeeper dream about her bees? What does a porn star dream about when she's not at work? How about teachers, lawyers and people with office jobs—are they stuck with the same boring work-dream loops as the rest of us, or do their dreams reveal something unexpected about how they spend their days? To find out, we asked eleven people of various occupations, including, yes, a beekeeper and a porn actress, as well as a farmer, a forensic scientist, a waitress, a screenwriter and a live-tv captioner, to tell us about the very best and worst dreams they've had about their jobs.
Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero.
In the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his preschool teacher wife and two teenage kids—one who recently took off for college with most of his father's drum set in tow—Sullivan explained how a life spent crisscrossing [...]
Things I don’t understand about activism, the short list: • Sleeping in a park if you have an actual bed somewhere to sleep in; • Willingly being in a place where you increase your risk of being arrested/maced; • Being uncomfortable in a crowd when you can just, you know, read coverage on blogs; • How crowds of people with signs change anything, ever.
Amount I’m willing to concede ignorance on matters of activism: • Oh, a lot; • I’d go so far as to say "total."
What I decided to do about it: • Not take an eight-hour bus ride to New York City, that’s what; • Get someone [...]
I discovered Kate Christensen’s work several years ago, when I read The Great Man, and then all the rest of her books, in one weekend. After I praised them on the radio, she emailed me and we became friends, which is great because she's a wonderful, smart, funny, generous person, but it's also weird, because she's one of my favorite living writers, and here she is, flesh and blood, moving through the world like the rest of us.
Her latest novel, The Astral, is about poet and sometime lothario Harry Quirk, 57, whose wife has just destroyed all the sonnets he’s been working on for years [...]
