“I like to think of the organization as a friend factory,” said Amy Short. “Our mission is to eradicate loneliness." The end of loneliness comes in the form of the Notwork Network Society, which runs a kickball league four nights a week on the Lower East Side, mostly attended by twenty- and thirty-somethings new to New York City.
The trouble with eradicating loneliness is that when it involves lights and generators and 40+ adults running around a school yard at night, the neighbors start to complain.
And so, last Thursday, Short showed up to answer to Community Board 3, in her role as president of the for-profit [...]
So The Onion apologized today for one of their many, many Oscars jokes last night. Which one? The one that was nooooottttt good or okay. Nooo, the other one.
Quentin Tarantino has been heavily criticized for his frequent use of the word "nigger" during tonight's red carpet interviews #Oscars2013
Tonight is the second night of the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program spring show, with thesis projects and schemes and fun things. It's sheer chaos, and you can stop by tonight from 4 to 8 p.m. if you want to see some good old fashioned wackiness.
A few of the student projects really stood out for me as art objects or as great thinking or excellent applied programming or as just plain fun. There were probably a lot of great things that I didn't "get" or didn't appreciate or just missed, so human error applies here.
• Google Booth is a small constructed room. There's a slot on the [...]
It may feel like "Girls" has been on the air for months already, but the series actually doesn’t premiere on HBO until April 15th. Its creator, writer and star is Lena Dunham, about whom, if you’re reading this, you probably already have an opinion—although it's difficult to come up with an opinion or observation about Dunham that she has not already anticipated, heard or joked about herself. Her 2010 feature, Tiny Furniture, released when she was 23, was just added to the Criterion Collection. Now there's "Girls," a comedy about four 20-something women puzzling out adulthood in the city, executive produced by Judd Apatow. Dunham and I met recently [...]
You've got to really open your heart to the long hard run of cruddy movies that stretches from January to May. If you succeed in opening it far enough, you'll decide that Project X, the pre-frat frat movie about three high school losers throwing an "epic" (shudder) party, is nearly awesome—as a movie-going experience, at least. You know: low expectations. Oh and this is actually the entire plot so I am kind of spoiling it for you: a kid's parents go out of town and he throws a really big party. Still, if you see it in the right frame of mind, with the right audience (a packed theater of [...]
The comments on this Dealbook piece about how Wall Street has reconstituted the notion of employment as bottom-line cyclical churn are 100% mean, as you'd expect. ("I can't help but wonder if any of these laid-off wunderkinds ever ask themselves whether they contributed to the current economic situation," for example. And: "My God these people are pathetic. Even when they're laid off and collecting unemployment, they still sound like insufferable snobs.") But the sheer numbers involved in the way financial firms chew up and spit out young people are pretty bad. These are the very kids who were the children of the subjects of New York magazine parenting [...]
Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because he's just not that into anything, really, except himself."
Hi Polly,
I met this funny, quiet, artistic, and all-around wonderful man shortly after I had escaped from an abusive relationship. We hit it off and started out a casual (albeit, exclusive) thing. I saw from the beginning that he was a bit of a flirt, in a self-deprecating, sarcastic kind of way that made women go "Oh youuuuu!" but hey, that's what drew ME to him in the first place, so what the hell.
Fast forward 2.5 years. We've moved in together, [...]
Jessica Grose: We're here to talk about hate-blogs. In my novel, Sad Desk Salad (shameless self promotion alert), the heroine and her coworkers at a women's website called Chick Habit are plagued by a hate-blogger who reblogs their posts and puts up incriminating, embarrassing personal information about them.
For those who aren't familiar with the phenomenon, hate-blogs are an actual thing. I based the hate-blog in my book (Breaking the Chick Habit, or BTCH) on the hate-blogs I had read up till then: The ones about Jezebel, the Pioneer Woman, and Julia Allison.
I asked you to join me in this chat because you’ve covered [...]
Police said a 14-year-old stole a car on Sunday then led officers on a chase that ended in a crash on a Parkway East ramp…. "My son was wrong for taking that vehicle but someone jumped out of their car and a 14-year-old seen the opportunity to take the car. He didn't break the car to steal it. They left the keys in the car. I think as an adult we [...]
"I'm a 23-year old undergraduate at a small liberal arts college. In my view, there's nothing inherently wrong with having a very close relationship with your parents. Calling your parents five or six times a day–why not, especially if you consider them your friends? Just because the Boomers (and the Gen X-ers, to a certain extent) had bad relationships with their parents doesn't mean we need to repeat that experience." —This comment, in response to Terry Castle's essay on what it's like to teach the current crop of parent-attached young people, is pretty amazing! It's gonna be a long couple decades.
"I Just Want My Pants Back" premiered last month on MTV. It's about four attractive post-grads living in Williamsburg, dropping pop-culture references to the tunes of its hipster-friendly soundtrack. RJ and Jon, our two in-house young-altbro would-be music writers living in Williamsburg, greeted the show with guarded optimism—even some excitement. But as the show has progressed—tonight is episode 10 of the 12-episode first season—they may have become just the latest generation to discover the heart of sadness in the world of MTV.
JON: So "Pants" was kind of a bummer, right? Five episodes in (approximately, er, three weeks ago) and Jay and Tina’s Brooklyn-based adventures in hip young [...]
I don’t know why I’m never quoted in trend-pieces about What the Millennials Are Doing. I’m 23. I live in Brooklyn. I’m a perpetually underemployed graduate of a highly ranked East Coast university. I live with a female roommate who owns a lot of ramekins. And I decided to become a sperm donor to make ends meet In This Economy.
Manual labor jobs are on the decline, you know. Based on how winded I got trying to move a box of books into a new apartment a few months back, I probably couldn’t survive in a manual-labor-based economy, but like anybody with a steady flow of testosterone, I still like [...]
"The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday. While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation." —You know, nowadays, it's the old man, he's got all the money.
As part of its "Intoxication Nation" series, "a crazy land where Charlie Sheen is the mayor and Courtney Love is the sheriff" (according to actress Kristen Johnston, who's a recovered alcoholic) ABC's "20/20" warned viewers it would show them "what the kids are doing."
This, according to the conventions of television, could not be good. The only question really, was the degree of plausible depravity. Vodka-soaked tampons? Check. Eyeball shots? Check. Gobbling booze-infused Gummi Bears because they want to live in crazy land all the time? Check. Once upon a time, Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" demanded the world entertain us; now, according to "20/20," this generation of kids [...]
If you are working on Fridays in summer, you are a tool. That is the truth. But if you ARE working on Fridays in summer, and wondering how to change your life, well, we have the answer for you. Perhaps you spotted Flint Beamon, extolling the virtues of "not really working on Fridays" in the Styles section troll-a-thon today. It went like this: "Scanning the [Thompson Hotel] scene closely was Flint Beamon, 36, a director of events and lifestyle brands for a public relations company [N.B.: That firm is called PR Consulting] that gives its employees Fridays off in summer. He was there to network. 'People here are usually [...]
First off, know that I want to help you. I do. I enjoy being a mentor. This is largely because I’m so inspired by, and thankful for, my past and present mentors. I credit most of my career (in publishing) to the five or six people who took the time and patience, and surely the occasional offense, to bother teaching me their business. Yet in our I want-I click world of ordering things up—no doubt made more frenetic by job crises across the board—the art of finding, courting and keeping a professional mentor has been lost.
I see this almost daily in the Mad Lib assistance-on-demand emails I receive. [...]
A week ago one of my eleventh-grade students approached me after class. “It will be starting again,” he began. “This time the target will be against the military government. The first set of demonstrations will be this Friday, but they will continue until a second wave of the uprising will begin. This time it will demand the resignation of the SCAF"—the Supreme Council of Armed Forces. "It will be bloody and you should not go to the demonstrations. Maybe once all of the people come out, then you can come. For now there is widespread fear of Israeli spies and you will not be safe in these places for the [...]
