Everything that I see must converge.

Pitch: The New Ethics of Luxury Hotels

I’d like to write a story about how the world’s top luxury hotels are adapting to the Trump Era. When a culture of excess and flashy luxury arguably led to the election of a racist demagogue to the country’s highest office, how can historic prestige properties assuage their guests’ qualms? This story would require expensed travel to the Ritz-Carlton Paris, Grand Hotel Vienna, and Aman Villas Maldives.

Pitch: Review of Criterion Fellini Gold Collection

Hacking down the forest of postwar realist Italian cinema, Fellini’s body of work birthed modern auteur cinema. A new, remastered edition of six films from his ‘high modernist’ period, including the meta-masterpiece 8 1/2, function, I will argue, as an expressionistic autobiography of the late filmmaker. Of course, the question undergirding my critical appraisal of this corpus is what to do with so-called “great men,” especially great white men, when some sick version of a Napoleon Complex has propelled one short-fingered vulgarian to the presidency.

Pitch: A Forgotten Tribe of the Amazon

Deep in the Brazilian jungle, an indigenous group down to its last 200 members has emerged for the first time to the outside world, due to mounting pressures from a multinational oil and gas conglomerate. As an invited member of a risky anthropological mission to catalog their way of life before it’s too late, I learned about their unique counting system (only multiples of three), various tree-based alcohols, and the unique psyches of people who have never heard of Donald Trump in their lives.

Pitch: Kylie Jenner’s Glossy Life

The youngest sister of the famous family who takes their biological features as just light suggestions presents as an impeccably airbrushed facade. But the burgeoning lip gloss mogul may turn out to be the wealthiest member of a family of capitalist savants — which I learned on a week-long joyride through Los Angeles and environs on her fleet of pink sports cars. Highlights include the VIP room of at the concert of her on-and-off rapper boyfriend, a rooftop bar with sold gold stemware, and Kylie’s wellness philosophy, as expressed in our comparison shopping of four different high-end spas. This profile of a young female businesswoman of course functions as a commentary on the highest-profile female businesswoman in America, Ivanka Trump.

Pitch: Airing The French Laundry

What does “gourmet” mean in America in an era when our president dines almost exclusively on well-done steaks and chicken fingers? To find out, I will visit the temple of haute Americana, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry restaurant. This trip will require several visits to the French Laundry and roundtrip transportation to Yountville, California. Could extremely refined food be the ultimate act of subversion against a philistine ruling class? That is what I hope to find out by dining repeatedly at The French Laundry.

Pitch: Tinder & Trump

We’re now in Year 4 A.T., Après Tinder, the location-based mobile dating app that has utterly disrupted how millennials experience sex and love. We are probably in for four years of President Trump. Coincidence? There must be something there, right? Maybe millennials were too busy “swiping” to get out the vote? Or maybe their comfort socializing with strangers is propping up the #resistance? To be frank I’m still working this one out. But imagine the headline possibilities.

Krithika Varagur is a writer and journalist based in Jakarta.

They’re only sending one.

White House officials did not respond to several weeks’ worth of inquiries about the Easter Egg Roll, typically a heavily and enthusiastically promoted affair, and declined to provide basic information such as how many people are expected to attend. It is unclear, for instance, whether Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, will reprise his appearance in a bunny suit for the event, as he did a decade ago when George W. Bush was president and Mr. Spicer was an aide in the Office of the United States Trade Representative…

The Latest Test for the White House? Pulling Off Its Easter Egg Roll

The district is up in arms about the apparent lack of planning surrounding the “most elaborate and most heavily scrutinized public event of the year.” Yes, it is actually a huge fucking deal and requires a lot of planning, coordination, communication with vendors, and transparency about schedules, and general responsibility. Could this concerning lack of clarity from the Trump administration be a metaphor for its competence in all matters bureaucratic? Sure, why the hell not.

But I have a more pressing question:

The Easter Egg Roll has been crowded in past years with cast members from “Sesame Street,” but this year, there will be a lone emissary.

Who should it be? I have a few suggestions. How about Rosita La Monstrua de las Cuevas, the show’s first Latina (and bilingual) muppet?

Or Segi, a black muppet who loves her hair?

Okay, yes, I realize that it’s functionally more reasonable to have one of the “bigger” characters who can suit up in a human-sized costume, but it would be too weird to have a giant bird helping kids look for eggs on a lawn (much weirder than a bunny, right?), and Cookie Monster is too obvious. No, the correct choice in this case would be Mr. Aloysius Snuffleupagus, also known as “Snuffy,” who was for many years and many seasons only visible to Big Bird, and nobody believed him. Until one day in 1985:

In an interview on a Canadian telethon that was hosted by Bob McGrath, Snuffy’s performer, Martin P. Robinson, revealed that Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high-profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.

Yes, that seems like a good lesson for the children. Here’s an exhaustive list of Trump’s imaginary friends:

Here Are All of the Accusations Women Have Made Against Donald Trump

Who remembers how we even handle a nice day?

Some of the things I’ve seen say it’s going to get up to 81 degrees today. 81. Can you imagine? You could forget almost every other horrible thing that’s happening and just live your life as if it were a perfect summer’s day. If you ask me, the government is doing it to distract you from all the outrageous things that are happening right now. But I’m an idiot, don’t ask me. Just enjoy your nice day until the bad things are so insistent on your attention that it is impossible to ignore them. Here’s another one from the great new Arca record. It’s a little dark, so let’s hope it’s the only darkness you deal with until night falls. Enjoy.

★★★★ The birds were yelling in the morning and the sun was on the hyacinths. Cows were out in the field, in various colors and stances. Two motorcycles with two riders apiece turned off the state highway. A crow flapped low across the road, more white than black in the hard sunlight. The slope down to the bay was covered in soft purple flowers and tiny blue ones. Low brown waves plashed under the boardwalk. A mantis the length of a thumbnail clung to a trouser leg. The sun was too strong to risk leaving chocolates in the car. Up above the defensive positions weakly held in the War of 1812, a quad-rotor drone buzzed on the sky. The nature offered for consideration was still bare and mucky. Back at the house, the five-year-old urged his brother to run around with him in the dark, out to the edge of the electric light spilling over the lawn, under the haloed rising near-full moon. Back over the roofline, Orion’s top shoulder shone bright amber.

Why are you still indoors, you big fucking dummy?

Did you go outside yet? No? GO OUTSIDE. When you get back you can listen to this.

There are also a couple good bear pictures here.

In snow-buried Sierra, bears awake to a transformed world

But right now, the priority is getting you outside. You should be outside right now. Be outside. You’re welcome.

The Awlcast, Episode 10: The Couch

Talking about sitting with Anna Hezel.

Anna Hezel (HEE-zull) joins us to talk about her very short love affair with a sofa named Peggy, her customer-service experience with West Elm, and the months-long journey she took to discover that the rapid dissolution of her coveted midcentury modern symbol of adulthood and joint income was not a metaphor for her relationship — it was just a bad couch.

This is the most important piece of journalism from 2017:

Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much?

And other answers to questions you didn’t ask.

“I was thinking about having an affair. What do you think?” — Two-Timing Tom

As I’ve said elsewhere, love is a chemical reaction in the brain that makes us stupid and weak. Love is also an illusion. All feelings are basically capitalist bullshit. People didn’t even know they were happy or sad until advertising let them know they were always unhappy, always striving toward an unreachable goal of happiness. And that goal could only be purchased for the price of a soda or a movie or a new car. The hole in our lives is not located near the chest and it’s not heart-shaped. The holes are at the bottoms of your pockets. And you’ll be paying your whole life, chasing and chasing, just to feel somewhat dissatisfied with everything. Do you think our ancestors considered happiness? Hopefully not. That would make dying in pointless wars or toiling for years in coal mines or cotton fields even that much more tragic.

The desire for sex may propel us forward. It might be a reason to get out of bed every morning and wander around the earth in the hopes of something good happening. Another reason would be tacos. But love will break your heart, ruin your life, leave you with nothing and probably get you killed. And that’s a best case scenario. We all die alone whether we like it or not. Nothing and no one will end up making any difference. And sex is usually a lot more fun when you’re chasing it, imagining it. At least the way I do it. Which may be part of the problem.

That said, the most fun of having an affair is sneaking around. And getting away with it. Those are both pretty fun. Sneaking around makes you a spy in your very own Charles McCarry novel. Maybe you get a burner phone. You are constantly lying to someone and maybe getting good at it. It may only be a matter of time before you’re caught. But it’s the chase, the adrenaline rush. The sugary feeling. Chemicals. That’s what gets us off. Kafka knew this when he wrote ”You are incapable of loving. Only fear excites you.”

The only reason to have an affair is to write a great book about it. Look at poor old Kafka. He fell in love with his Czech translator. Wrote to her daily, passionately. She would not leave her husband, who was a dick. He died, heartbroken and alone, wishing only that his work would be destroyed. She ended up getting divorced and marrying some architect. Fucking architects! I’m not sure how many affairs have contributed to the creation of great novels? Kundera? Duras? Raymond Chandler? How Stella Got Her Groove Back? It’s impossible to say. I don’t personally find Adultery to be all that interesting a plot-point, but they don’t ask me who should win National Book Awards and Booker Prizes.

I’m not sure why people get married anymore. I understand that being in a relationship is an economic necessity in the biggest cities of the USA. But actually being married? I guess if you wanted to make breaking up extra-painful. And therefore people would go to great lengths to avoid it?

But you must understand, dear readers, that monogamy was invented by the devil to torment humans. Which Commandment says don’t sleep around? None of them. God made humans, God gets you. If he didn’t want homosexual sex to feel good, then why does it? Exactly. And indubitably. “Going to Church on Sundays” and “Sleeping Around” are like cheating on crossword puzzles. Bad only because they tell you it’s bad. Jesus’s best friend was a sex worker. He was probably fine with sex outside of marriage. Was Mary Magdalene his girlfriend? Maybe. Jesus probably wasn’t the douchey virgin many American Christians would like to make him into.

All that said, don’t cheat around for long. Just break up. No monogamous relationship can withstand cheating. It’s hurtful. It bums people out. It make you lie. It is a weird drama play to eventually get caught. If you want to bang someone at a convention or something, go ahead. That’s normal. What happens in Omaha no one will ever probably care about. But sustained, romantic relationships while you’re committed to someone else is wrong. And will eventually bum you out. Don’t have sex with the nanny or sleep with your boss. Don’t run away with your brother’s wife. It’s just weird and gross.

You can always just get your significant other a wig. That’s just as good as getting a new significant other. I usually just fall in love with unattainable people and then sleep around every once in a while with whoever will have me. It’s a pretty sweet gig, and hopefully that will sustain me all my days. I don’t think I will end up on my death bed wishing I’d had deeper loving relationships. I’ll most likely worry about missing new episodes of “Twin Peaks” (which will probably suck any way) or wonder how the Red Sox are doing. I definitely won’t be regretting sleeping with the nanny.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

Dayenu, said no one ever.

“Jewish culture is in the mainstream, it’s popular, and that’s something any brand would want to jump on,” says Danya Shults, 31, founder of Arq, a lifestyle company that seeks to sell people of all faiths on a trendy, tech-literate, and, above all, accessible version of Jewish traditions.” —Bloomberg

Dayenu:

If God had made us “the chosen people,” which is a great name, from a branding perspective: It would have been enough

If God had carried out judgment against our former employers in a breach-of-contract suit: It would have been enough

If God had led us out of wage-bondage and into Y Combinator, where a sea of investors parted for us on demo-day: It would have been enough

If God had totally slain our first-born sales numbers, just absolutely killed them: It would have been enough

If God had given us “Wandr,” the app for navigating desert environments for periods of up to forty years: It would have been enough

If God had fed us “Manna,” the new kosher superfood and protein substitute from Heeb’s Herbal Supplements (the makers of “Matzo Muscle Bars” and “Tuchus Toner”): It would have been enough

If God had given us Don’t Worship The Golden Calf: And Other Business Wisdom From The Torah in paperback: It would have been enough

If God had led us to “Mount.Sinai,” a digital lifestyle community for gentiles to sample Jewish culture in a non-threatening, apolitical way: It would have been enough

If God had given us “Shabbat Strategy Sessions,” a Friday-night meet-up and networking event for business Maccabees to share learnings from the battlefield of commerce: It would have been enough

If God had built us “Holy Temple”, a private social-club for Jewish millennial influencers/entrepreneurs located in Gowanus: It would have been enough

Martin Bergman lives in New York and is at work on a novel

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck’s work appears in The New Yorker, in Catapult, and on Instagram.

Things are sure to get worse so enjoy everything right now.

The weekend was terrific, the sun is shining, the next couple of days are going to be super-warm and the highs aren’t going to go below 60 all week: Let’s appreciate how great everything is right now before reality comes along to wreck it. Here’s something fun and summery from BNQT, an “indie supergroup” featuring members of Midlake, Band Of Horses, Franz Ferdinand, Grandaddy and Travis. Enjoy!