We have not been paying attention to the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium (WHICH IS BUILT ON A GRAVEYARD), unlike some people who are crazed about it, but I finally looked at the floorplans, because it opens in February? They’re terrible! First of all, the non-penthouse condos top out at like 700 square feet, and most are like 450 square feet? But really: if you’re going to buy a condo-ized hotel room (which you can only occupy for 120 days a year, max, and, um, no thanks), wouldn’t you want an extra closet instead of 1.5 baths? One of the units has a “secure owner’s closet,” but the rest, not much. Thing is, you know, you’d want to keep some of your New York clothes at your own hotel room, obviously, when you wanted to swoop in high and hot from Bahrain or Burma! Good grief.

Conor Friedersdorf has a thoughtful post up at The Daily Dish about the angry reaction to that awful story of Shellie Ross, the Florida blogger who tweeted the drowning death of her two-year-old son just 34 minutes after it happened.

Friedersdorf writes:

Isn’t this just the latest example of people becoming insanely judgmental about a fellow citizen merely because she conceives of technology differently? It is unimaginable to me that people would react this way if Ms. Ross shouted over the back fence in the middle of the crisis to ask all in earshot to pray, and five hours later, still in shock, mechanically composed a letter to friends lamenting her loss… ‘This woman is a perfect example of where humanity is heading as it becomes more enslaved by technology,’ one commenter said. In fact, the callousness strangers direct via Internet at a grieving mother is a far more dire harbinger of where we’re headed.

That sounds right. And not only about how people conceive of technology, but about how people conceive of death. If there’s one truism about experiencing death, it’s that every person deals with it differently. Some people might collapse in tears. Others might reach for a drink. Maybe some people would cook, or tidy up. Some people might burst out laughing. That’s the thing about shock, about right? You never know. To attack someone for their reaction to such a tragedy, well, that’s not very nice, to say the least. And, as Ross herself put it, “small minded.”

Another blogger, Madison McGraw, tweeted, “Perhaps if Mrs. Ross had spent less time tweeting and more time playing with her son, this would not have happened,” and warned against sending donations without verification in response to Ross’ message. Explaining herself to ABC News, McGraw, a former paramedic and mother of three, said “I thought, ‘Who would tweet that her son just drowned?’ I couldn’t believe it… I’ve seen people react [to death], but they’re screaming their heads off, crying and they don’t know what to do. They’re not on Twitter. I’ve never seen that before and I was just shocked.”

She was shocked. And she immediately tweeted about it. Huh.

Seems pretty clear now. He’s not going to die until everyone else is dead first.

Why do you blurt out the stupid, embarrassing things at holiday parties? Because you’re trying not to blurt out stupid, embarrassing things, says Science. Also, you are probably stressed and drunk.

by Foster Kamer

This year’s ______ holiday party was shocking, groundbreaking. It was-dare it be said-a gamechanging affair. Why? Food. Yes. Food. There was food there. Like, good food. Because whenever you go to a holiday party and get wasted, what do you want? Food! And what always happens? Either A) there’s no food, or, B) the food is passed around on trays and you have to elbow your way through packs of people or position yourself by the kitchen entrance in order to accost the servers who emerge from it to get the little mini-eggrolls and then after that whatever other horrid mini-thing (and what the fuck is a mini-egg roll? Like, really. People need to stop making unnecessary mini-things. Just make the big-sized things smaller) comes out of the kitchen that is greasy and typically not so great, but whatever, it’s free food, you’re gonna eat it because you’re trashed and hungry.

The party was at this two-story wine bar place on Division Street which is down by Canal Street-which an employee, ______, told me that he pronounces as “C-ANAL” street, which was funny-in the fairly smelly part of Chinatown, as opposed to the really smelly part of Chinatown, or just the kinda smelly part of Chinatown where you get pretty good dim sum. There are these surprising places down there like that, and this was one of them.

When you walk in, there were two tables full of the food. Beautiful food! And lots of people and a nice person standing around checking names off of a list, but that was really for semantics, because company owner ______ was sitting at the bar and basically saw everyone come through the door, so if, say, infamous terrible publicist ______ came through the door, he wouldn’t have made it in, because someone would’ve told him to leave or ______ would’ve punched him in the face. But back to the food.

After talking to lots of people I learned that, in the past, the presence of food at ______Holiday Parties were most frequently just more of the same mini-foodstuffs every other holiday party has, if at all. ______, who owns websites and kept various editors and chief honcho ______ from killing each other for a bunch of years, was in shock at the presence of actual food. If I knew there was going to be food, I wouldn’t have eaten before. Can you believe this? We’ve NEVER had food at these things. Why didn’t you put it on the invite? he asked ______, who is in charge of business things and dealing with people. I did, ______ told him. Did you read it? I don’t know if ______read it but I did and I kinda remember there being something about food but it certainly wasn’t any kind of SPOILER ALERT-type notice, you know?

Anyway, the one problem with eating all this great looking food-there was a cheese plate, but also, pumpkin risotto and risotto balls and these (OBLIGATORY) mini-meatballs and actual pieces of steak and breads with pricey-looking olive oil and asparagus with some kind of wonderful eggy thing on it and a green bean and radish salad which was DELISH-was that A) both floors were really crowded and B) there was really nowhere to sit. These were fairly tight, economical quarters. You had to squeeze through people to get anywhere. Now, it wasn’t impossible to get somewhere-certainly, by 10:30, this was much easier to do-but you definitely had to get your squeeze on to get to the bar. And then you had to find a place to put down your smallish-plate and smallish fork and eat. So, that part was kind of torture, but in the end, if you’re shameless and drunk and hungry, you don’t give a fig about tact and just kind of get down on some food. Especially when they bring out dessert, you’re just like, panna cotta? I’m in. And you are, because you’ve had lots of wine.

In fact, that was another funny thing! To get the “dark stuff,” i.e. hard booze, you had to ask the bar for it, but the glasses of wine were put out for easy taking, effectively making the pricey booze harder to reach. Like the well-measured size of the space: economical! Maybe even thrifty.

Nobody, to my knowledge, puked, but there were lots of tall people. ______ was walking around in a suit looking really tall. Do you have any idea how many tall people work there these days? Between ______, ______, ______, ______, and ______, who’s kinda taller than I remember, those guys could probably play a decent game of pickup! Not like Rucker Park-pickup, but you know, like, Equinox Gym pickup, if Equinox had basketball courts. [Both The Awl and ______ have had Equinox advertise with them so I feel okay with using their name and also it’s apt.] Funny that none of the tall people work at ______, which is run by a bunch of short guys who clearly masturbated too much as youths, thus stunting their growth.

Eventually the party thinned out but for the most part conversation was nice and casual and I’m sure lots of people met for the first time. Those ______ ladies are wonderful! Their honcho ______ was probably itching to go home to her RSS feed and ______ is very nice and ______ was dancing with her manfriend or whatever they call guys on ______ these days, and he was nice too. I think I saw ______, and ______ was there. Who else? ______, and her former longtime boyfriend ______-but you know that already-and the lady biz honcho ______ was there putting the fear of God into people like me, but not, because she was nice, too. ______ was drinking the entire time with his ladyfriend who was drinking too, and they both managed to position themselves comfortably the entire time, which was impressive.

The only “down” moment came when I was talking to a freelance design writer who told me he felt like an imposter here in “the face of all this ______ success,” considering I.D. closed this week, and basically, design writing is screwed and over. And he’s correct. To an extent.

I mean, what do you think of when you hear the words ______ Holiday Party? If it was a bunch of people popping bottles of Veuve and showering foamy champers in all directions, maniacally laughing about all the awesome ways they’ve survived all the people in media who’re totally screwed out of jobs-checkbook journalism and posting by the fistful and getting anonymous email-based tips up quickly and videos of ______ not really having sex-while doing blow by the tablespoonful arm-in-arm? Well. It wasn’t that. But you know what it was? Modest and nice. For being in the face of “all this ______ success,” you wouldn’t know is was anything more than any other holiday party, unless you were eating. But you had to make an effort. And if you did, you didn’t go home hungry. It was a pretty nice time.

After the party last night, I had a dream. In my dream, my friends and I all signed up for the I.D.F. While there was definitely the creeping feeling that you could be killed at any moment, for the most part, being in the I.D.F. kinda felt just like being on Jersey Shore.

“There’s a really big snowstorm coming to D.C.tonight. It would be unsafe to ask all the staffers and Hill employees who’d be needed at the Capitol if Congress stays open all hours this weekend, as Harry Reid intends, to drive to and from work — especially since many will have to do so at night, and they won’t be well-rested. So from the point of view of public safety and personal well-being, Ben Nelson can do everyone a favor, announce today he won’t vote for cloture, and let everyone stay home this weekend.”
-The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol makes another salient point in the debate over health care reform.

From today’s Times, page A27.

by Seth Colter Walls

Fun reviews are fun. You know how much fun? Sometimes we start writing them before we see the movie. The other afternoon, I started thinking about an Avatar piece headlined “Avatar Is the Greatest Movie of All Time For People Who Love Wearing Glasses.” Right? I had a whole set piece ready about how, during hour 17 of the movie, I got distracted and started wondering if friction from the Costello-grade thickness of the 3D specs was causing a zit on the patch of skin between my skull and left ear. I thought this was fine to conceive ahead of time, because Avatar is obviously just a mass entertainment, and don’t get it twisted: let’s all have some fun, no?

But then something happened on the way to a poorly written piece of linkbait. I saw the actual movie. (Actually, while sitting next to Mary HK Choi, who will be delivering the authoritative opinion in a few hours.) You know how all of California drops into the ocean in 2012, and no one in the audience feels a thing? Well, in Avatar, some serious destruction happens at one point, and it registers. If you are like me, and thus not particularly attached to the notion of James Cameron as an, um, avatar of feeling, this will surprise you.

How does the movie make this happen? As you may suspect, it is not through dialogue. Perhaps the clunkiest text is a speech from the Sigourney Weaver pro-ecology, pro-natives biologist character about the energy that connects all of nature and the like. Ineffective as exposition and inert as drama, it also turns out to be unnecessary, since the visual approach Cameron uses to introduce us to his cockamamie ecosystem works on the level of, say, a Nature special, during which you stare at the mating rituals of exotic insects and think “yeah, sister: this universe or what!” No backstory necessary.

The problem is that next, Cameron-high off the smack of doing something as ill-advised as trying to make a digital world feel this organic-decides to gin up a creaky wartime morality play. When the English-speaking army starts training its military-industrial-complex hardware on the indigenous native tribe, characters actually say things like, “it’s some kind of shock and awe campaign.” (Er, no, I didn’t take verbatim notes while wearing 3D glasses.) Then someone replies with a reference to “Daisy Cutter” bombs as though we were still maybe hoping to take out Osama bin Laden from the air during the battle of Tora Bora. Unfollow x 1000, James Cameron. Let’s just say the complexities of foreign occupation and military force structure are rendered quite a bit more one-dimensionally than the arcs of your wind-strewn flora.

So, get ready: There is going to be A Conservative Response to this movie, and it is going to be in the key of If Hollywood Hates America So Much, I Guess Let’s Not Pass A Bill On Climate Change. (See, the military types in the movie deride our heroes as “tree-huggers,” and then the audience is supposed to cheer against the military dudes.) If this movie actually had a less politically fatuous point to make, perhaps this discussion would be worth having-but as it is, it’s mostly just a chance for Jonah Goldberg to score some easy points.

Since the Oscar pool for best picture nominations has been doubled to accommodate ten pictures this year, plenty of award statuette speculation has centered on the question of whether crowd-pleasers like Avatar will swoop in to beat up on the quasi-indie, critical-darling fare. But the more interesting question is why it’s been left up to a movie like Avatar to deal with Iraq War II concepts instead of another likely Best Picture nominee. You know: The Hurt Locker, the movie that actually takes place in Iraq circa 2004.

If Hurt Locker winds up winning a lot of prizes this year, it will be because it is, in its bomb-defusing sequences, every bit as kinetically compelling as Avatar. But those awards will also be due, in part, to the film’s unique ability to coat itself in the gloss of gravitas that “Location: Baghdad” title captions afford, without actually doing anything as potentially grimy as engaging with the signs and symbols that are distinct about that military effort, outside of the latest advances in our enemies’ booby-trapping.

Whereas Cameron lifts the argot of “shock and awe” and puts it in a narrative where it manifestly don’t belong, Kathryn Bigelow’s film pointedly avoided deploying any phrases as relevant to its time and place as, oh, pick one: “counter-insurgency,” “war on terror,” or “secure and hold.” This isn’t oversight, of course. It’s an intentional move to distance the film’s main character from our geopolitical baggage. We see an alienated, task-focused man the way he sees himself: divorced from the context or purpose of the fighting going on around him.

And fair enough, as far as that one film is concerned. But several of our most notable “Iraq” films thus far seem to want to have nothing to do with “Iraq, the country we are fighting in.” Brothers, like In the Valley of Elah before it, is mostly concerned with what happens to our boys after they come home. (Yes, I am not including documentaries such as Taxi to the Dark Side, which is an Afghan-Bagram Air Base joint, because 1) they are documentaries and 2) hardly anyone sees them. Ditto David Simon’s HBO miniseries Generation Kill.) It’s probably the case that as long as our in-country Iraq films choose to reflect our reluctance to confront the war-as-fought, the more likely it is that we’ll have this weirdo battle subtext popping up in our putatively bubblegum shoot-’em-ups. Hollywood can blow up the best picture category to include 20 movies if it wants. Eventually someone’s going to have to make a good movie about Iraq warfighting-even if it isn’t fun for anyone to watch.

Seth Colter Walls is a culture reporter at Newsweek. Previously, he wrote about U.S. and Middle East politics for a variety of outlets.

Bloomberg presents an extremely comprehensive case for Harvard’s finances having been run by idiots. (You may know this already, but the details are amazing.) Particularly one idiot, Lawrence Summers, who set things in motion as early as 2004, before his sudden departure in 2006; he is now unfortunately the head of the White House’s National Economic Council. INEXPLICABLE.

More than ten percent of Americans rely on food stamps. Tina Contraeras is one of them: “Unemployed and on disability benefits, Contraeras, 45, has custody of her grandchildren, ages 2 and 3. She has resorted to circling the first of the month on her calendar so that when her grandchildren are hungry, she can count down the days until they can return to the grocery store.

‘I have to make a game out of it for the kids,’ she said.” [Via]