The Awl

Today's Groupon: Helping People with HIV for Half Off

Choire Sicha — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:40:08 +0000

Today's New York City Groupon offering is a 50% discount at Housing Works' nonprofit thrift stores, which raise money to assist people living with HIV. For $20, you can receive $40 worth of things! Oh, just FYI: "A pair of designer shoes that sells for $40 in one of our stores provides ten days worth of hot meals for a homeless HIV+ mother and her child." Enjoy your discount. :(

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UK Prime Minister Cancels Tuscan Holiday :(

Choire Sicha — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:40:07 +0000

One thing you don't want to do probably is go a-thieving in a total surveillance society. The Metropolitan Police have set up a Flickr account with pretty pictures of a few people who have apparently gone robbing in North London at some point before or after these images were captured. It's the modern version of the "WANTED" poster, but en masse. Of course, some people have taken to Tumblr to do this vigilante style. In less dramatic imagery of the day, people have apparently taken to the streets with brooms to tidy up. Awww! And more to be found here.

In other, totally unrelated news from London, the headlines at the Guardian this morning include "Senior London officer says authorities will consider using rubber bullets to quell rioting" and "Lloyds bank axing 1,300 more jobs." (As a result of the takeover of Lloyds by HBOS, announced in 2009, nearly 45,000 jobs have been eliminated.) Combined, the two entities have received more than £40 billion from the government since the recession.

Oh, one more: "The Prime Minister flew back into the UK from Tuscany where he was on holiday to take personal charge of efforts to quell the rioting."

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Top Three Fun Facts About America Tossing People Overboard from '07 to '09

Choire Sicha — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:40:27 +0000

The IRS did an analysis of the 2009 tax year, and some interesting and not surprising things happened!

• More than 3% of households that had job income in 2007 had none in 2009.

• America's average household income fell 13.7% from 2007 to 2009.

• Two million fewer people filed tax returns from 2007 to 2009.

Goodbye! America doesn't need you.

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"My family is eating stir-fried dandelions out of yards to keep from starving."

Choire Sicha — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:00:17 +0000

What are we to do about the disgusting plan to keep America's unemployment high? Since we're not marching on Washington, the right and the left aren't unifying on this issue on which we both agree and basically no one in the business world cares in the slightest, all we can do is create a few jobs ourselves and also keep putting out there what's really happening, which Yahoo!'s The Lookout is doing admirably. They've created a Tumblr where people tell their stories—lots of people. They got thousands of letters when they asked people to tell them what's really going on. You could just start here at the imposing wall of stories, or maybe you'd like to start with this one and page back.

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Gaddafi Sachs: When Bad Things Happen to Bad People

Choire Sicha — Tue, 31 May 2011 09:00:50 +0000

It's the feel-good story of the morning: Goldman Sachs took $1.3 billion of Libya's money in 2008 and promptly turned it into no money at all, according to the WSJ: "The $1.3 billion of option investments were hit especially hard. The underlying securities plunged in value and all of the trades lost money, according to an internal Goldman memo reviewed by the Journal. The memo said the investments were worth just $25.1 million as of February 2010—a decline of 98%." That is particularly delightful. And then, the panicked firm offered the foul government a number of chances to make their money back, but nothing ever came of it. On the plus side, they have so much money that they wouldn't really notice the $1.3 billion disappearing into garbage investments—and meanwhile, many of the people mismanaging the money jumped ship for even-more profitable pastures when they saw the writing on the recession wall. Now much of Libya's money, which is essentially stolen from its citizens, is frozen, and Army leaders are defecting while NATO bombs and baloney "truce" talks occur.

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Rich Man Buys Expensive House

Choire Sicha — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:20:11 +0000

Jack Meyer, who managed Harvard's endowment until 2005, at which point some people tried to run it into the ground, with a little help from pals from Goldman Sachs, while Meyer went off to run a hedge fund, just spent $15 million on a house in Dutchess County, so all's well that ends well.

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On Being Laid Off from Harper's

Choire Sicha — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:10:53 +0000

"Life at a publication such as Harper’s is far from easy. The pay is bad, chances for advancement are almost nonexistent (during my tenure at the magazine, only two people on the editorial staff received a promotion due to merit rather than attrition; I was one them), and with each day, the sense that the magazine and the nation’s readers hold less and less in common only seems to increase."
—Theodore Ross on having just been laid off from Harper's after six years.

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The Education Bubble

Choire Sicha — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 13:50:34 +0000

I have not always been a Peter Thiel fan—the PayPal founder and Facebook investor's politics and ideas are complicated and sometimes they stem from what I would consider psychological projections (see: affirmative action, although even in that case I totally agree with his embracing a larger concept of "diversity"!)—but honestly, I am on board with about 75% of this extended interview with him in the National Review. One idea in particular is extremely valuable, and we will all be talking about this a lot in the next decade: that America has group-hallucinated itself into an education bubble.

Thiel:

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it.... [W]hen people make a mistake in taking on an education loan, they’re legally much more difficult to get out of than housing loans. With housing, typically they’re non-recourse—you can just walk out of the house. With education, they’re recourse, and they typically survive bankruptcy. If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.... I estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the colleges in the U.S. are not generating a positive return on investment.

And:

The Great Recession of 2008 to the present is helping to bring the education bubble to a head. When parents have invested enormous amounts of money in their kids’ education, to find their kids coming back to live with them — well, that was not what they bargained for. So the crazy bubble in education is at a point where it is very close to unraveling.

That's notable that he said "the present," actually! I hate the conception that the recession "ended" in June, 2009, because we only define "recession" through very specific economic indicators.

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Understanding the Difference Between Being Unemployed and Being Unemployable

Luke Mazur — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:20:52 +0000

The worst kind of job interview is over the phone. Who calls whom? Is my phone working? What if a creditor calls at the same moment the interviewer tries? Will the call be bounced? Will the recruiter leave a message? If they don’t call right away, how long should I wait until I call them? Do I even understand how my phone works? Do I even understand how interviews work? Should I shave?

In-person interviews, at least, have rules. Brush your teeth. Don't swear. But phone interviews? Once, a recruiter called me five minutes before the time we had set the interview. This really rattled me: I hadn’t gone to the bathroom yet, or re-filled my water, so I’d have to do both while talking to her.

But when I answered, she just asked if she could push back the interview until tomorrow. That I was great with, because interviews make me nervous, and why do today what you’re getting permission to do tomorrow? I still haven’t been offered the job. Maybe she just keeps re-scheduling the day she is supposed to call back?

There are still many opportunities with in-person interviews to make it clear you're unemployable. In law school, a whole bunch of law firms visit school and set up shop in a hotel. The interviews take place in the actual hotel rooms. Career Services advised us not to make jokes about the beds in the room. We used to joke that we were cheap tricks for the law firms to use, but then none of them hired me and this joke didn’t land right anymore. I think others continued to make the joke, and if law firms are visiting the hotel this year, probably more students are thinking of the same joke for the very first time. It’s fairly low hanging fruit.

I worked for the Census earlier this year. They didn’t interview, but they still called. Applicants who scored high enough on the test got called to work. They’d ask if you were available before they offered you the job, but that was the only question they asked. And even that seemed redundant, because if you took the Census test, you probably needed a job. Carl Paladino can complain about government inefficiency all he wants, but the query was functional.

This summer I got a phone call from my area code. I vaguely recognized the number, but it wasn’t in my phone book, so I knew it wasn’t family, or a pizzeria, or a friend, or even someone who used to be a friend. I answered though, because maybe it was someone offering me a job, or more likely I thought, interviewing me for one. It ended up being the local director of the Census, calling to yell at me. A few weeks earlier, I had tweeted that people should message me if they were interested in [redacted] Census [redacted]. I added that I wouldn’t ask twice whether they were Latina.

I told the Director that I was joking. I was! But I still deleted the tweet. I texted my lawyer friends to ask if I was in trouble, and they didn’t know, but they assured me that he was probably just scaring me into deleting the tweet. I told them that I remembered we weren’t supposed to [redacted] Census [redacted], and they reminded me that I didn’t [redacted] anything. I only kind of joked about [redacted].

Even still, that the Director found the tweet at all worried me. Was I going to prison over this? What other tweets did he read? What other things did I tweet? I signed up to work the Census, to be a member of the largest corps of civilian workers assembled since World War II, because I needed some extra money. Not to commit a crime. I didn’t even work that many hours. I mostly just ran errands for some of the managers. I was a team player.

This all occurred at the same time that Gary Shteyngart’s new novel Super Sad True Love Story hit, and though I didn’t read the book, I recall whining existentially about that book's premise to my friend, also a lawyer: if the government takes away satire, what will I have? If an employer doesn’t like my tweets, I continued, I don’t want to work for them anyhow.

Except.

I wondered: was cracking wise via Twitter doing me in with potential employers too? If my Census boss was looking at my Twitter, wouldn't they all be doing the same? And if so, was it the cracking wise itself? Or was it that the cracking wasn’t all that wise?

My friend had a diagnosis: “You’re being stupid."

And that’s true. All this worrying and self-reflection and joking and messing about online cost me, at the very least, one day of applying to jobs. And that's only the cost I know about. What's more, I was wasting time, and worse, I was tweeting about wasting time. And then I was asking too many questions about those tweets. Which is to say, when it comes to job interviews, focus on the job. Let them worry about the interview.

Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case Gillette; advertisers do not produce the content.

Luke Mazur is a resident of Buffalo, N.Y.—and a beer-related social networking entrepreneur!

Photo by Ted Murphy from Flickr.

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40 Million People Lived Off Unemployment? Everyone Start Hoarding!

Choire Sicha — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:12:57 +0000

"The White House made the case on Thursday that cutting off unemployment benefits would actually result in hundreds of thousands of more unemployed Americans." Ooh, hundreds of thousands? That's all you've got to scare Republicans into extending unemployment? Nice try! I mean, only 40 million people benefitted from unemployment since December 2007. (That's 14 million recipients, plus their households.) Besides, last week 436,000 applied for unemployment. Which is actually not far off from the two-year low! So what's a few hundred thousand more unemployed people?

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