by Drew Nelles

A year ago, what might be the modest future of bricks-and-mortar bookselling arrived in Ridgewood, Queens, the neighborhood northeast of Bushwick that has been impolitely dubbed “Quooklyn.” Topos, at the corner of Woodward and Putnam Avenues, is sunny and small, with blond-wood shelves, plants in the window, a bas-relief tin ceiling, and a pointedly thoughtful selection of used books. There is no cash register; sales are logged by hand. Topos is also a café, and, although the coffee and pastries are better a few blocks away, at the Milk & Pull on Seneca, the coffee and pastries are incidental. People seem to just like hanging out among all the books.

On a recent Sunday, the morning after Winter Storm Jonas glazed the city with two feet of snow, Cosmo Björkenheim, who wore round glasses and a green plaid shirt, opened the store for business. He started Topos, along with a few partners, as an unofficial offshoot of Williamsburg’s Book Thug Nation, where he still works once a week. In previous eras, the Ridgewood storefront hosted a bodega, a thrift store, and a furniture-upholstering studio, but it had been vacant for five years when the bookshop moved in. In Greek, topos means “place”; in literary criticism, the word also refers to a traditional motif or convention — an abbreviation of tópos koinós, or “common place.”

“We bandied about at least fifty or sixty Greek words before we landed on topos,” Björkenheim said, standing behind the copper coffee bar. “Aletheia was one — truth. Another was from Greek myth, from the Odyssey, which I really liked. I’m going to write it for you, because it’s hard to pronounce.” On a note card, he spelled out, in careful block letters, AEAEA. “That’s the island where Odysseus and his men land, where Circe lives, and where his men are turned into pigs. It was on the way to Ithaca, like this place, in a certain sense. If you’re going north.”

“If you’re going to Ithaca, it’s on the way to Ithaca,” an artist named Kyla Chevrier, who took an Americano with milk, said.

Topos is a snug place to spend the day drinking coffee and talking to strangers. Offering coffee and books at the same place is not a novel idea, but it is one way for booksellers to pay the bills, even if nobody likes to read anymore. There is the corporate version — Barnes & Noble outlets usually include a Starbucks, which is a natural pairing, a sort of Oprah’s Book Club made flesh — but there are lots of other, better examples. In New York, there is Housing Works, Molasses, Bluestockings, the Loft, McNally Jackson, and more.

Bookstores, of course, are having a rather hard time right now. One of Topos’s other founders, Benjamin Friedman, helped start the shop after fleeing St. Mark’s, the East Village landmark, which is tens of thousands of dollars in debt to its landlord, and has been perennially on the verge of closure. Other shops have shuttered, or fled Manhattan in search of cheaper rents. But this has not necessarily been the case for used bookstores, many of which are thriving. “Strangely enough, it’s the big chain bookstores that are more of an anachronism,” Björkenheim said. “Even Strand is having to do a lot more of what Barnes & Noble was desperately doing for the last ten years. I don’t even know what they’re selling now — more tchotchkes and t-shirts and tote bags. Which is something a used bookstore doesn’t necessarily have to resort to.” The whole industry was probably heading in this direction, he added: “smaller used bookstores, rather than enormous megastores.”

Even as New York lay low after the storm, Topos was busy. Customers lingered and bought books: The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff, Hollow Land by Eyal Weizman, Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories. Donald Byrd’s Byrd in Hand played over the stereo. “My favorite thing is the smell of used books,” a customer, Jeff Freer, said as he waited for his coffee. “It’s the smell of, ‘We have something here.’ The smell of, ‘It’s not going to disappear.’ The digital can be gone in an instant. But smell has to come from time.”

“On my computer there’s a smell, but it’s not that kind of smell,” Bogdan Szabo, a friend of Freer’s, said. “It’s a different kind of smell. A smell that most people wouldn’t want to smell.”

“You can’t smell the internet,” Freer said. “You can’t smell a website.”

“You can smell what The Rock is cooking,” Szabo said.

A man sat at the bar, ordered a cappuccino, and began to work on a screenplay. There is no Wi-Fi at the store, but people still bring their laptops. In some ways, Topos is a very contemporary literary endeavor, in that it cultivates an aura of bookishness without requiring anyone to actually buy books. The fact that it sells coffee represents the same kind of product diversification to which Strand and Barnes & Noble, to say nothing of Amazon, have turned; it is possible that most people prefer being associated with books to reading them. Topos is applying for a beer-and-wine license, another revenue stream that doesn’t rely on a widespread cultural appetite for literature.

People at Topos also wring their hands over something else: the creeping Bushwickification of Ridgewood — traditionally a working-class area populated by European and Latin American immigrants — and the store’s role in it. The owners want it to be a neighborhood hub, and the more prominently displayed titles — Anarchy in Action, The Fact of Blackness, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie — make clear where their loyalties lie. A Polish book club and the local community association use Topos for meetings; the store banks with Ridgewood Savings; many hangers-on are involved with Woodbine, a radical-left organizing space a few blocks away. Still, a bookstore-café in an “up-and-coming” neighborhood tends to attract a certain clientele. “Shortly after we opened, some real-estate broker dude came in here, y’know, suit and tie,” Steve Macfarlane, an employee and eight-year Ridgewood veteran, recalled. “The first thing he said was, ‘Oh, nice to see my kind of people in the neighborhood for a change.’” Macfarlane grimaced. “Who the fuck says that? It’s terrifying.”

There were many more book sales that day: The Carnal Prayer Mat, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. As night fell, Friedman and another cofounder, Anny Oberlink, arrived. Friedman, a cheerful, loquacious man who worked in new bookselling for many years, talked about why used bookstores are still a viable venture. “The not very glamorous economic answer is that it’s a lot easier to make money selling used books,” he said. “On the whole, the problem with new books is that there’s a list price set by the publisher and a discount price that’s also set by the publisher. So, as a new bookseller, you have no control over what the book sells for or what you pay for it. With used books, if you’re smart, you find ways to get them cheap, and you decide what you price them at. As a general rule, on any book, a used bookseller is probably making twice as much profit as a new bookseller. And that’s the difference between making it and not making it, because the profit margins on new books are razor-thin. At a used bookstore, no one is getting rich, but you can make enough to stay alive.”

A photo posted by Topos Bookstore Cafe (@toposbookstore) on Jan 24, 2016 at 5:53pm PST

Around six o’clock, the employees began to prepare for the store’s one-year anniversary party. Kira Josefsson, a Swedish writer and translator who works Sundays, strung streamers between the lights and put up dollar-store decorations: crepe-paper pineapples, flowerpots, strawberries. The employees moved the tables and chairs aside, and laid out big trays full of cheese, figs, baklava, rugelach. The music changed to disco. Partygoers began to file in, until the windows were fogged and the room became claustrophobically full. Oberlink told a story about the time a squirrel got into the store and hid behind the Murakami section.

As the evening wound down, Björkenheim tapped his glass with a spoon. “I wanted to make this more of a celebration of this world we’re building here, rather than just Topos the bookstore, Topos the café,” he said. “It’s our first anniversary, but it’s also the anniversary of something more that happens within these confines. I think that’s what we’re truly celebrating — not just this institution, this cold, impersonal institution that is Topos.” Everyone laughed knowingly, and Björkenheim trailed off. “Anyway, thanks for coming,” he said. “Please finish the cheese.”

Photo by Topos Books

It’s so close, the weekend. You can see it just out over the horizon. You can’t touch it yet, but soon. Soon! You didn’t think you’d get there but here you are, mere hours away. Just put your head down and do what you have to do and it will all be yours. I have faith in you. I know you can do it. Also, just like the last one we featured from them, this song is super pretty. Maybe it will give you that little push that helps you to the finish line. Enjoy. [Via]

★★ What looked like mist out the window was fine, drizzly snow, which lost all distinction from rain as soon as it hit the pavement. It accumulated only on the fake leather of a broken desk chair lying with the trash. Before long it gave up and went away, and some tentative sun came out, a white disc at the edge of a clot of thicker gray. By midafternoon everything had gone back to full lumpy gray. The wait for the third grade to let out was deeply chilly without quite being frigid; the four-year-old was grouchy but not grouchy enough about it to agree to take shelter in the lobby. The clouds broke again late, in time to spread painterly effects across the west, as if in conclusion of some more congenial day.

by Brendan O’Connor

Last week, in his State of the City address, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to build something called the Brooklyn-Queens Connector — a sixteen-mile, $2.5-billion streetcar line along the East River that would connect Astoria, Queens, with Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The BQX, as it would theoretically be known, has the potential “to change the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers,” the mayor said, and “to generate over $25 billion of economic impact for our city.”

The idea that the people of the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront (and especially those in Red Hook) deserve a streetcar or light rail line has been knocked around for decades, but no one has ever been able to convene sufficient political and financial capital to move the project forward. Recently, however, a variety of community groups, technocrats, and real estate developers assembled a non-profit called the Friends of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector, which last summer commissioned HR&A Advisors, a real estate consulting firm, to conduct a feasibility study.

Such a proposal might seem frivolous, given that all five of Brooklyn’s busiest bus routes — the B46 (Utica), B41 (Flatbush), B35 (Church), B44 (Nostrand), and B6 (a mess) — are located far from the waterfront, and that weekday ridership on the bus routes closer to the river pales in comparison. (Not to mention that any route that would allow for both transfers to the subway and access to the waterfront would be absurdly circuitous.) Also, the project, which would cost at least $2.5 billion, wouldn’t be completed until (at the earliest!) 2024. All five of the aforementioned bus routes pass through New York City’s 45th District, which comprises Flatbush, East Flatbush, Flatlands, and a bit of Midwood and Canarsie, but Councilman Jumaane Williams said he was only peripherally aware of the BQX proposal. “I think it’s a creative idea, but I’m not sure what their transportation needs are over there,” he told me. “We have some real needs here, and I hope that we can also get some of that creative thinking.”

Proponents of the plan argue that the streetcar would connect people in high-growth residential neighborhoods like Astoria with high-growth commercial areas like the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Sunset Park’s Industry City. Theoretically, it would also encourage further development in areas where, right now, public transportation is less accessible, like Greenpoint. That, in turn, will generate enough tax revenue to retroactively cover the cost of having built the line in the first place — the 7 train extension is cited as a precedent for this kind of “value capture” success. “This doesn’t actually cost the city any money to do,” Alex Garvin, an urban planner, real estate developer, and former deputy commissioner of housing and city planning commissioner who has long advocated for a Brooklyn-Queens streetcar, told me. “There are plenty of places that need more transit, but the money isn’t there. We need two more tunnels under the East River. We need to extend the Second Avenue subway line to the Bronx. But the money isn’t there to pay for those things.”

De Blasio spokesman Wiley Norvell said that the administration, which is apparently conducting its own analyses, had intended to discuss its preliminary findings at an event last Friday that was postponed when high winds knocked over a crane in TriBeCa. Norvell also emphasized that, while the administration appreciates the Friends’ streetcar advocacy, the city has its own interests and motivations in exploring this idea. (It is worth noting that a large part of what makes building a streetcar system an appealing solution to transit issues for the administration is that it would not involve the state-run MTA, and therefore also would not involve Governor Andrew Cuomo.) The BQX “aligns with our own public policy priorities in meeting the future needs of the city,” Norvell said.

The city claims that more than forty thousand people living in thirteen nearby NYCHA developments would benefit from the proposed route. This may be so, but the proposal also implicitly ties the possibility of building any infrastructure that would help low-income New Yorkers to being simultaneously useful to rich people; the idea wasn’t considered viable until the people with money, who stand to make a great deal more, decided it would be worth pursuing. As recently as 2011, the city’s Department of Transportation decided it was not feasible to build a shorter streetcar line connecting Red Hook more readily to transit hubs in Downtown Brooklyn and DUMBO. It is perhaps worth considering, then, who the BQX’s newest supporters actually are.

Earlier this month, the New York Daily News reported that it had “obtained” the study conducted by the Friends of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector, whose members include Doug Steiner, of Steiner Studios, a production company based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, the venture capital firm; and Helena Durst, of the Durst real estate dynasty. According to the New York Times, the group also includes Jed Walentas of Two Trees Management. Neither paper makes their sourcing for this information explicit, and public information about the nonprofit is lacking. Charles Gergel, a partner in Manhattan law firm Cullen & Dykman’s banking department, is listed as an officer on corporate filings submitted to the New York Secretary of State last February. It registered last fall with the IRS as a public charity, but has not yet filed a tax return. Two different non-profit trackers list Andrew Steininger, senior vice president and chief of staff at the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, as a point of contact for the organization. (The nonprofit’s offices are listed at the same address as the chamber’s.) Neither Gergel nor Steininger returned interview requests.

Last summer, an “advisory committee” organized by Two Trees Management’s director of special projects, David Lombino, was reported to have commissioned a streetcar study from HR&A Advisors. “It’s a cool idea,” Lombino said. “We’re a supporter. Could be transformative for Brooklyn and Queens someday. We’ll see.” Cathy Rought, a spokesperson for Two Trees and vice president at communications and strategy super-firm BerlinRosen, reiterated many of the same talking points put forward in the Times’ and the Daily News’ stories covering the streetcar proposal. She also deflected questions about the degree of Lombino’s involvement, emphasizing that responsibility for the proposal is shared amongst all the people and organizations represented on the nonprofit’s steering committee:

• Michele de la Uz, Fifth Avenue Committee
• Helena Durst, New York Water Taxi/Durst Organization
• Jill Eisenhard, Red Hook Initiative
• William Floyd, Google
• Jukay Hsu, Coalition for Queens
• Andrew Kimball, Industry City
• Liz Lusskin, Long Island City Partnership
• Ramon Peguero, Los Sures
• Tucker Reed, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership
• Carlo Scissura, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce
• Alexandria Sica, DUMBO Improvement District
• Doug Steiner, Steiner Studios
• Jed Walentas, Two Trees
• Paul Steely White, Transportation Alternatives
• Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
• Tom Wright, Regional Plan Association

Rought told me that Friends was going to make their study available around noon on Wednesday this week, but that has come and gone, and there is still no study.

As it happens, city planning commissioner Carl Weisbrod used to be a partner at HR&A. (He left to join the de Blasio administration.) NYCHA chair Shola Olatoye and First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris are also both former HR&A employees. “You say, ‘Are we plugged in?’” the consulting firm’s chairman, John Alschuler, told Politico New York. “I mean, ‘plugged in’ implies that we’re just familiar. Yeah, we’re familiar.” Alschuler is registered as a lobbyist, but he denied being a lobbyist in the sense that most people think. “I only advocate to the government when I have done the work that has produced a factual, financial or substantive conclusion that I’m explaining to a government official.”

BerlinRosen represents both Two Trees Management and Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector. It has close ties to the de Blasio administration as well — actually, they helped him get elected, and they also represent “Campaign for One New York,” a non-profit organization run by political operatives affiliated with the mayor’s administration. After reaching a deal with the city to redevelop Williamsburg’s Domino Sugar Factory (past which the BQX would surely snake!), Two Trees contributed $100,000 to the nonprofit. (Incidentally, de Blasio once lamented, in testimony before the New York State Office of the Attorney General, that “shadowy nonprofit organizations” increasingly impose “not only a threat to our democracy but also to the integrity of our nonprofit sector.”)

Two Trees’ interest in the Brooklyn waterfront extends beyond Williamsburg, however. In his own words, the firm’s founder, David Walentas, is “solely responsible” for creating the DUMBO we know and love today. From a 2014 New York magazine profile of the family:

Unlike Soho and Tribeca, where the classic city progression from decaying industrial buildings to artists’ lofts to condos for the superrich happened more or less organically, creating many fortunes along the way, Dumbo was the vision of one man. It was a planned community in the heart of Brooklyn, bohemia by the numbers. A self-described dictator, David organized everything, providing free rent to galleries, restaurants, and chic shops like Jacques Torres. And he defended his little enclave fiercely. “If you were with me, we were friends. And if you were against me, you were my enemy,” David tells me.

His son Jed, who apprenticed under Donald Trump, is now a principal at the firm, and was responsible for brokering the Domino deal. In Williamsburg, Two Trees also developed the Wythe Hotel, and it owns thirteen residential and commercial buildings in DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights, all of which would benefit from the BQX’s existence. While, at first blush, one might find it surprising that local, community-oriented activist groups like Red Hook Initiative and Los Sures would ally themselves with ambient technocrats from Google and Union Square Ventures and ravenous developers like the Walentas and Durst families, there is also no denying practical realities: Red Hook desperately needs better transit options, and misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

As Friends only incorporated as a nonprofit last year, there is not yet a record of its finances; however, such a record does exist for some of its constituent members: In 2014, according to tax filings, the Red Hook Initiative received just under $1.8 million in grants and donations, and its net assets were just over $2 million. (Most of its money went towards programs for local high schoolers.) In 2013, Los Sures, or the Southside United Housing Development Corporation, took in $343,607 in grants and contributions, and its net assets were $5.3 million. (Los Sures preserves and develops low-income housing in South Williamsburg.) Union Square Ventures, meanwhile, manages $1 billion across six funds; Two Trees Management’s portfolio is worth some $4 billion; and Google’s market capitalization is $475 billion.

Why the tech industry would be interested in developing a waterfront streetcar is clear even in the city’s own press release: “The route ties in several ‘innovation clusters’ in which the city has made significant economic development investments, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Brooklyn Army Terminal, and the Cornell/Technion campus on Roosevelt Island via a ferry connection.” Or, as the New York Times’ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in 2014, “One can imagine another Silicon Alley spanning Cornell, Astoria, Williamsburg and Sunset Park.”

Kimmelman also wrote: “Buses are a more obvious solution. Improved bus service is an easier sell, faster to get up and running, and cheaper up front. A bus would be … fine. But where’s the romance? A streetcar is a tangible, lasting commitment to urban change. It invites investment and becomes its own attraction.” His language echoes that of the DOT’s 2011 Red Hook study, which also considered the effect of streetcars in Philadelphia, Portland, and Seattle. “Portland’s streetcar shifted the attractiveness of sites adjacent or near its tracks from moderate to high,” the DOT found. “Streetcars provide a historic, romantic appeal and have transformed blighted districts into vibrant areas.”

What remains unclear, however, is why the people of Flatbush are less deserving of romance than those of “Silicon Alley.” (“Urban change,” for that matter, is an awfully ahistorical way to describe the vexed relationship between development and displacement.) Advocates speculate that tax revenue generated by new construction in Astoria stimulated by the streetcar line will pay for the whole project, but that probably sounds more like a threat to the people currently living in Astoria than a reassurance, and it hardly makes any difference to the people living in Flatbush who need better transportation options now, not a decade or more later.

Still, the administration holds that the BQX would be good for everyone. “You hear the argument that if you increase transportation service, you’re going to increase gentrification. But poor access to public transportation is clearly not a shield to gentrification in New York City, and it’s clearly not a shield to rising rents,” Norvell said. “We have to be serious about equity.”

Once, long ago, but not that long ago, like the late nineties, in cities around the country, there was a startup that delivered groceries to people’s houses within thirty minutes — as fast as a Domino’s pizza, wow, amazing. It was such a great idea that this company was valued at almost five billion dollars after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in an IPO. But it turned out that building the infrastructure to run this service cost far more money than the company could make from charging people a reasonable fee to delivery the groceries they were too busy to retrieve, because they were doing things like going to restaurants or trying to beat out scalper bots to get Beyonce tickets. And so this startup, called Webvan, went bankrupt in what is generally considered one of the most violent incidents in the orgy of death that was the first dot-com implosion.

Roughly ten years, or two internets and one successful FreshDirect later, delivering groceries seemed like a great idea again, great enough to be its own company and not a side business like AmazonFresh, great enough to once again attempt to spread to every city in America, great enough to sweep aside the problems that killed it last time, great enough to merit hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. But this time, it would be different, because instead of building warehouses and hiring employees, the idea would be built on the shelves of existing grocery stores and the backs of a servile labor force left rattled and underemployed by the Great Recession, unlike the people whose groceries an army of independent contractors would be retrieving and delivering:

Sequoia’s Moritz: Instacart is not Webvan 2.0

“Instacart is a crowdsourced model for the home delivery of groceries, and it offers a way to escape the enormous capital infrastructure burden that was so tricky and complicated about Webvan. Weebvan was a company that, in computer parlance, was trying to design the underlying computer architecture, the operating system and a whole bunch of apps on top of it. Think of Instacart in a similar manner to a company like Uber where you have a lot of independent contractors who, instead of driving cars, will attend to your grocery shopping needs.”

With Webvan’s Implosion as Cautionary Tale, Instacart Slowly Begins to Expand, Starting With Chicago

So, as Instacart contemplated when and where to expand first, CEO Apoorva Mehta said he called on Moritz for advice. “One of the main reasons that Webvan failed was that it expanded too quickly,” Mehta said in an interview yesterday. “Mike really encouraged us to get a lot of the important things right in San Francisco before considering expanding into a new city.” …

But Instacart is different from those competitors, as well as Webvan, in many ways. Instacart does not carry any inventory, while the others do, or did. Instead, Instacart hires a network of shoppers who pick up and deliver the goods once an order has been placed. As a result, it does not need to open new warehouses when it moves into new cities, nor worry about how much demand there is for a given product.

Where Webvan Failed And How Home Delivery 2.0 Could Succeed

Instacart and Postmates have studied the history of home delivery. They are avoiding mistake Nos. 1 and 2 that Webvan made. Now only two questions remain. How profitable will their models be? And how quickly will they expand nationally. Stated otherwise, will they avoid mistake No. 3? Time will tell.

How does Instacart differ from infamous internet bubble giant Webvan?

Instacart has a far different approach, taking advantage of existing grocery stores by dispatching couriers to Whole Foods or Safeway and delivering goods within an hour. The drivers are independent contractors, meaning Instacart doesn’t have to provide them with salaries or costly benefits.

Rebuilding History’s Biggest Dot-Com Bust

Many investors are betting on Instacart Inc., a San Francisco company that calls to mind Webvan if only for its soaring sales and surging valuation. … Webvan grew at a faster clip, generating $178.5 million in sales in 2000, its second year in operation. Shortly after its IPO in November 1999, it was valued at $8 billion.

Still, much is different about these two companies. And in that way, Instacart stands as a metaphor for how the online business has evolved over the course of a generation, driven by the rise of the smartphone. In particular, Instacart, like many online businesses today, vigorously pushes out costs and risks to others.

So, roughly two years later, how different has it been this time? Well, let’s ask a partner at Greylock Partners, a leading venture capital firm*:

Taking the wrong lesson from Uber

Which brings me back to the “on demand economy”. The challenge I see with so many of these services is that most often, 1) they are new costs, and 2) they don’t fundamentally recast cost structures like Uber did — instead, many of them are an arbitrage on the cost of wealthy people’s time vs the less wealthy.

Would I like something that’s more convenient? Sure. But how much will I pay for it? The very wealthy might pay $20 for a surge delivery fee, but there aren’t a lot of those people. And how do unit economics shake out when you need to pay delivery people enough money to attract them, but not too much that only the top 1% can afford the service?

Hmm. Well, what has the New York Times found?

Good Eggs, an organic grocery delivery service, laid off more than 100 employees and shuttered its offices outside its San Francisco headquarters in August. Instacart, the grocery delivery service, recently laid off 12 recruiters, which the company said was “part of an overall plan to slow down hiring” after a growth spree last year. And DoorDash has been turned down by some venture capitalists as it has tried to raise new financing, according to three people familiar with the company’s plans.

The problems are rooted in the high operating costs of the start-ups, which typically act as middlemen between consumers and restaurants or grocery stores. The companies not only have to pay for large fleets of drivers, they also have big groups of employees who receive customer orders from the apps and who then manually make calls to the restaurants to order food. At the same time, to attract customers, many of the start-ups offer introductory prices and discounts, often making delivery free for first-time users.

As DoorDash’s experience with drivers shows, the start-ups’ costs don’t necessarily decline over time. For some drivers, who are paid a fee per delivery, it can be difficult to make enough deliveries in an hour to make it financially worthwhile for them. And when drivers move on, the companies must spend again to recruit replacements.

Well, maybe next time — with an even more broken labor force willing to accept even less from its employers, or drones, or as just another button in the Uber app — it will be different. It’s a great idea, after all. 🙃

*This post was updated to add the bit from Greylock Partners’ Sarah Tavel (via)

Giph by non4prophet

All this is is fun, and really, what more could you ask for? Nothing, that’s what. Enjoy.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Imagining Marriage: 1

The bellies of right whales, each krill
its jacket of mineral: one meal. The empties
on Tilghman Street: what they will make
in their next heat is maybe a whale’s glass cage,
is maybe the largest bulb in Reno, is certainly
a grey rash of nickels. Hello, goodly transmutation. Hello,
my onus, my many. Two can be many. One can be,
too. At any siren I still hail Mary, the pastor’s way
of saying thywomb like thyroid, fast and ill-accounted,
though now I am praying to the box of noise,
the string of women mimicked in its hosing peal — 
the low one with her black nosegay,
the central matron strong as steel-cut oats,
the soprano, hem on fire, parched red,
smoke-gingered — all these are you
says the ambulance, when not saying
the more important Move. And yet to reduce,

to make a vichyssoise of the large Babylonian heart — 
a feat, and all that ends in –feat. Oh thick roux,
dumb as Napoleon in the goat-hills of his mind
weaving one scratchy blanket for two or three
hundred million backs. We are apart, apart.
Yet how good and still the bed can feel
as you tug at my hair, a thousand brown filaments
a single greased bobbin. How unreal,
to grab so much together. Today in a space movie
a man in orbit tapes long strips of paper
to his airshaft out of dying
to hear the Russian grass. To you
it is all a sick dalliance with ghosts.
Me, I want those streamers, am ready to glue them
all over the house, drowning out even our shared dog,
our real trees, so that always it can be said
our listening is to splits and shards, is in pieces.

Laura Kolbe studies medicine in Virginia. Her poetry, criticism, and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and The Cincinnati Review.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Leah Falk

Before I got married this past October, my father called and asked if he could read a poem at my wedding. I knew it from the wedding album on my parents’ bookshelf: Typed on a word processor in a California courthouse sometime around 1980, it was part of the stock ceremony the justice of the peace brought with him to marry my parents in my grandmother’s backyard. The reading, having been part of one ceremony, now struck my father as some material for a family tradition — something all our own, against the backdrop of a Jewish ceremony and some typical American reception conventions.

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other.

Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other.

Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other.

Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before you.

May beauty surround you both in the journey ahead and through all the years.

May happiness be your companion and your days together be good and long upon the earth.

The poem in my parents’ album was titled “Navajo Prayer,” and, losing a lot in translation, I’d told my friends that my parents, a Bronx Jew and a lapsed California Protestant, had been married by a Navajo priest. But the first page of search results when I looked it up for my wedding revealed that it wasn’t ours at all. My father had unwittingly bought into an honored, and lucrative, American tradition: The embrace of the “traditionalesque.”

According to Rebecca Mead, the New Yorker writer who made one of the first deep incisions into what we now know as the “wedding-industrial complex” with her 2007 book One Perfect Day, the traditionalesque describes any tradition invented or refurbished more for the purpose of creating a market than for carrying on a culture. Trapped in that net, which could also be labeled “fakelore”: the diamond engagement ring (which, by now, we all know emerged from the hands of a De Beers copywriter), the “unity candle,” and other sundry neutrals of the contemporary white wedding.

It’s easy to write off the rituals crafted for the modern wedding industry as just so much Portlandia, but the more troubling items in the trousseau of the traditionalesque are the ones with roots, albeit obscured ones. Mead’s book revealed that America’s wedding industry knew the “Navajo Prayer” better by the name “Apache Wedding Blessing.” Its origins were not Native American, as suggested by a number of anthologies and “officiant services” websites, but the imagination of Elliot Arnold, author of the 1947 ethnographic novel Blood Brothers, which later became the 1950 film Broken Arrow. Arnold’s novel and the film follow army captain and Pony Express rider Tom Jeffords as he ventures into Apache territory during a time of attacks on the infant U.S. mail service. He befriends Apache leader Cochise, and their friendship helps establish a fragile treaty between the U.S. government and the western tribes. In Arnold’s imagination, Jeffords marries an Apache woman named Morning Star, and the fictional ceremony includes the first draft of the blessing:

Now for you there is no rain
For one is shelter to the other.
Now for you there is no sun
for one is shelter to the other.
Now for you nothing is hard or bad,
For the hardness and badness is taken by one for the other.

In the introduction to Blood Brothers, Arnold admits that this was a romantic move on his part, and a rare break in his allegiance to Apache ethnology. He writes: “There is no record of [Jeffords and an Apache girl] ever marrying, but… knowing the basically simple process of an Apache wedding, I have taken a writer’s liberty and imagined that such a wedding took place.”

Putting aside the decades-later discussion about why white men feel like they can inhabit the heads of just about anyone, Arnold’s imagined Apache wedding would go on to provide the liturgical material for thousands of other, non-Apache weddings. It appears in an alarming number of wedding planning resources, presented with the authoritative tone and use of the ahistorical past tense people use when they believe there is no one around to correct them. “Here is the blessing Apaches used in wedding ceremonies,” writes TheKnot.com. A Cheshire County, N.H. travel website lists two different versions of it under the title, “An Ancient First Nations Blessing.” A Houston wedding officiant includes it in a sample ceremony, after an optional Unity Candle ceremony, a ring ceremony, and the standard “do you take” text. Americans have embraced Arnold’s invented bit of culture as inoffensive but profound: just the right mixture for a “spiritual, but not religious” wedding.

Why has Arnold’s poem lived on and mutated when there is so much other, less appropriative poetry to go around? The sad story might be the poem’s ability to “pass” as Native American. For much of American history, native culture has appealed to non-natives, precisely because they have believed it was dead or dying, but also somehow simpler or more authentic than their own culture. Arnold, for all the ethnographic information he draws on in the rest of Blood Brother, seems to know this subliminally: His poem is designed to give the impression of foreign naivete, of simple ritual. What’s remarkable about this particular invented text is how far from the original it has metastasized, transposing it from fakelore to true folklore: it’s succeeded in masquerading as an authorless text for long enough that individual authors feel permitted to put their own touches on it. Of course, the Internet only speeds up such folk processing. I counted at least seven versions of “Apache Wedding Blessing” besides Arnold’s — it seems that every wedding officiant who’s used it has modified it to make it seem either more ancient and traditional or more palatable to the modern couple.

In this way, Arnold’s flight of fancy is not unlike some of the folk songs and stories that America and other nations hold up as symbolic of their primordial identities. Many, far from being source-less “oral literature,” have distinct authors who were stripped of authorship. Others, like the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, were recorded by their collectors in such a way to become aligned with a preconceived notion of national identity. Folklorists like Richard Dorson, author of Folklore and Fakelore, have spared no ink condemning the “fake” material that people persist in believing communicates the essence of their nations — America’s brawn and independence personified by Paul Bunyan, for example. And indeed, despite Arnold’s apparent devotion to Apache ethnography, his deviation from that scholarship started a twentieth-century tradition that relied on the invisibility of living Apache culture.

Alan Dundes, in an article on the influences of nationalism on fakelore, argues that rather than vilifying the commercial or nationalist inventions that pass themselves off as folk culture, folklorists should examine them the way they do all folklore: By recording, tracing sources and trying to determine the patterns of transmission. In his inimitable way, Arlo Guthrie embodies this approach on a live recording of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” (which has its own wild folk history) which he precedes with a story about a Denmark arena just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, full of Europeans who knew all the words to the Elvis song. It’s a story about the export of American culture, or a story about people around the world grabbing onto meaning. “Years ago, folks would argue themselves to death over what a folk song was,” Arlo says, as he finishes folding his story irrevocably into the song. Suddenly, it’s hard to think of Elvis without thinking of Berlin; the song, on its way around the world, gathers a little more gravity, means a little more, even more than it intended.

“Gravitational waves provide a completely new way at looking at the Universe. The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionise astronomy. This discovery is the first detection of a black hole binary system and the first observation of black holes merging. Apart from testing (Albert Einstein’s theory of) General Relativity, we could hope to see black holes through the history of the Universe. We may even see relics of the very early Universe during the Big Bang at some of the most extreme energies possible.”
 — Stephen Hawking reacts to Science’s first observation of gravitational waves, a possible game-changer in our comprehension of the vast expanse all around us. Still, that doesn’t really get you a date for Valentine’s Day or anything, does it?