Who #brands the brands? Recently, I’ve been talking with someone who’s been working as a professional social media manager for the past seven years, architecting Facebook posts for maximum engagement and transforming corporate Twitter accounts into “personalities” for some pretty huge brands. This person, who wishes to remain anonymous (obvs), agreed to tell me a bit about the small armies of people who quietly mill content for brands, day in and day out, hopefully without incident (except, of course, a huge viral hit).

How many followers have your accounts had?

I have managed social media accounts ranging from ten thousand to twenty-four million. Usually entertainment brands have a higher follower/fan count because it’s a natural behavior for people to proactively share and express what TV shows, movies, and music they like. Also, they are more willing to subscribe for updates like changes in show times, updates on tour dates, or announcements about live events.

Another huge factor in audience sizes are ad buys to acquire new fans and followers. It’s one thing to organically grow an audience from two hundred thousand to over a million, which can take months even if you have a solid brand name. But if you are willing to spend money, you could go from two hundred thousand to a million in a few days, even if you have a crappy brand. What sucks the most about social is that sometimes the teams who are most familiar with the content and audience don’t have much buying power because of organizational divisions.

What goes through your mind composing a tweet? Do many people have to approve it? Does it have to maintain a consistent and specific tone?

Thinking about a post is like drawing a Venn diagram. One side is about what your audience wants to hear, the other side is your brand message, and the trick is figuring out what overlaps before attaching the right call to action (buy this/click here/watch this).

For the past few years, I’ve always created a fake persona for my brand’s feeds, often giving him or her a name that I jokingly use with my fellow social managers. These personas are usually fairly developed — to the point my team and I identify their favorite movies, TV shows, shopping habits, hopes, fears, favorite color and how they use smiley faces with friends. This creepy exercise is necessary, because there’s often multiple people drafting and posting content but we all have to sound the same.

Right now, I’m the approver of our social content but further back in my career there might’ve been up to five people to review content before it went live. There’s usually an ad team, a marketing team, and a content team or agency working on content. Each link that’s shared is carefully monitored for both engagement and revenue purposes. And, even though I am the final approver now, I still have to factor in my brand’s identity and our content is strategically helping our overall brand and business.

But if you’re using social media to try and build your brand reputation instead of product sales, it’s necessary to have a small team. Whenever there seems to be too many cooks in a social media kitchen, I bring up the Obama vs. Romney Twitter campaign, where Obama’s social media team proved that being able to be nimble is sometimes better than being over-prepared.

Do you have a certain number of tweets you have to send in a period of time — maybe the best way to ask this is, “What’s your schedule?”

Creating a social media calendar is like going on a family vacation. You plan everything out but then it all changes while you’re there (that tweet featuring a photo of Hilary Clinton on her phone along with top ten email etiquette tips was great two weeks ago but suddenly is horribly wrong!). That being said, finding the right posting frequency is a bit of a science, especially thanks to Facebook’s temperamental algorithm that encourages more brands to spend money for ad space.

In order to establish the right posting frequency for a brand, I start with my go-to post strategy, which is: three to five tweets per weekday and two tweets per weekend day; three Facebook posts per week, with at least one over the weekend; and daily on Instagram — or five times per week, if it’s not a very consumer-friendly brand.

After a few weeks of this basic post strategy, I’ll begin looking at data and determine the following: What days are seeing the most engagement? What hours are seeing the most engagement? Am I seeing more engagement on Saturday or Sundays? What are the purchasing behaviors of my audience members and how does that align with my engagement? Are there periods where people are posting on my FB page or tweeting at me when we’re not posting content? If so, we should plan on pushing content at that time.

Based on all the findings, I’ll work with my teams on outlining the ideal posting strategy. However, that posting strategy evolves every few months. When you’re with a brand for more than a year, you can start comparing historical data with current data to determine if trends are remaining the same or if they’re changing over time. If they’re changing over time, it’s usually worth looking into why and making sure your posting strategy and content is aligning to those changes.

There are essentially two reasons why your content on social will fail: It sucks, or you’re promoting it when your audience isn’t there.

If something hits (like the dress), do you need to address that somehow?

From a brand perspective, it’s usually best to let individuals create content that goes viral and “trend jack” it in a way that gets people engaged with us.

Do agencies believe that social media is actually working, in terms of sales?

Tracking social media sales is hard. I equate it often to the jingle in ads. An effective jingle gets stuck in your head and when you’re standing in front of a bunch of candy options, you see a product with a memorable jingle, the jingle starts playing in your head, and because that jingle triggers a craving of some sorts, that’s the candy you go with. However, there aren’t real strong ways to track the effectiveness of a jingle. The same can be said with social. While a 1-on-1 interaction with a customer doesn’t create an immediate sale, the chances of that person going and using your product after having a favorable experience on social is high.

And again, this is where some of the struggles in proving the effectiveness of social lies: Often the people who are creating the best content don’t have the same tools to quantify their work. Meanwhile, the people who can quantify the work don’t necessarily know how to create meaningful points of engagement online. At the end of the day, I find it’s easier to teach creative people the metric side of social media than try and teach a quantitative person how to be super engaging.

On something like a national day of mourning, are you instructed to write some kind of nationalistic tweets? Does that go without being said, or is it up to the social media manager?

Typically these decisions are up to a social media manager. While it’s fine to celebrate holidays, jumping on things like 9/11, MLK day, Columbus Day, and other historically charged days is risky and I prefer avoiding them. As a social media manager for a brand, you have to think critically about when people want to hear from you and when they don’t. It’s best to err on the side of silence because it’s more likely someone will call you tone-deaf for posting rather than staying silent.

Knowing what you know, if you were heading a campaign, how would you change how social media is currently being used?

Marketers, content creators, and advertisers alike tend to create campaigns without thinking about how to use the sophisticated technology built around social networks to create unique, branded experiences for customers. Often campaigns are over-simplified to “Like this,” “Customize a photo of you with our image generator,” or “Post with a hashtag to win.” These are all flat campaigns. My favorite social media campaign was a map I created by pulling in people’s Facebook movie interests to map out what movies were the most popular with their friend group. The client was in the movie industry and it gave us an opportunity to remind people who participated in the campaign how the brand optimized their movie-going experience.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

For a number of years I drove everywhere, then I moved to a place where I don’t. I am currently enjoying an extended visit to a place where I am driving again. Some things that seem to have changed in the last five years:

☠ Nobody is looking at the road. The road is the distraction. The cars mostly don’t hit each other but they seem to come close basically all the time. Driving is insane and horrifying and I can’t believe we modernized our country around its demands. A few weeks ago I saw a driver with a phone propped in front of the instrument panel playing some kind of video. This driver was watching TV! Which is possibly not as bad as texting, which 100% of drivers do all the time.

☠ Nobody knows where they are or where they are going, because they are following the directions of either toy robots plungered to their windshields or toy robots gripped in their non-driving hands (there is no such thing as a non-driving hand). The fullness of this dependency isn’t clear until you find yourself on a quiet residential street in Los Angeles, carefully creeping along with four more cars behind you — maybe ONE of which is actually consciously taking a “shortcut” — because this “street” is really more of a “driveway” because I’m sure it doesn’t look that way from space/get parsed that way from the data set. Recently I was following my/the machine’s directions to a ski resort north of New York City. It took us out of the cell service area, down an empty road, to a trailhead on the other side of the mountain. When we turned around we saw a line of cars decorated with skis and full of worried-looking young people coming the other way, heading to the same dead end. Finally, back at the corner of the “main” road, we saw some kids out in front of their house. They were standing behind a sign that said: “$$$ MAPS TO HUNTER MOUNTAIN $$$.” They get it. We don’t.

☠ Nobody knows anything about cars, except Car People and Truck People. But regular Driver People just seem to Google “best car.” The most important “luxury” option seems to be a system through which to connect your phone and your car, which for now allows you to play music and amplify navigation commands but in the future might just be a way to keep your passive passenger placation devices charged and placating.

☠ Nobody can tell you how to get somewhere, including people who drive for a living, because wouldn’t it be such a huge waste of time to learn all that information?? I get the feeling that people have even begun unlearning routes because they assume their machines will take them a better way. They might be right! Or they maybe they’re wrong, and every “ROUTE” command just throws your vehicle and body into a giant overcomplicated Plinko game. In any case full submission to GPS is a strange feeling. Well, sort of: it is not something you always identify as a feeling, because you’re still busy looking at the road to know when to hit the go pedal and the stop pedal, and when to move the wheel left or right (“after the machine asks you to” is the answer but we still like to wait and see, I guess). But that sense that you get, as you passively submit to the voice with the sinister elocution, that everyone around you is also on invisible rails, and that you feel safer that way, and that you might actually feel better if the voices just went ahead and said, all at once, here, let me take the wheel: that’s a little strange.

Image via

“Scientists have succeeded in creating false but happy memories in mice, in the first demonstration of memory manipulation during sleep. In the study, positive feelings about a particular place were artificially written into the animal’s memory, which caused them to seek out that place in search of a reward when they woke up…. The scientists say that the findings could pave the way for new treatments that would allow patients to overcome depression or deeply entrenched painful memories.”

Dates, the fruit of the date palm, are most often associated with, and grown in, the arid deserts of the Middle East. But they also grow in the arid deserts of California, where the growing season ends right around now, which means it is a good time to eat some dates.

There are many good and proper ways to eat dates; they are a versatile food. A bad way to eat dates — a common way, according to food blogs and the shithead gourmet grocery store half a block away at which I purchase more of my food than I’m really comfortable with, is to make them into a greasy, sticky, testicular blob called an “energy ball,” which is theoretically a replacement for a granola bar or energy bar, but is just a blob of dates smashed together with cacao, coconut, flax, and maybe some kind of all-natural alterna-nut-butter. An energy ball is a food which should not exist. It is an insult to the date, which is, very literally, a sacred crop; the Old Testament lists it as one of the Seven Sacred Species that sustained the Jews while they lived in a nice place with a good climate. It is in the BIBLE. Please do not blend it with foul-tasting hippie foods such as raw cacao or goji berries or chia seeds. Treat it with respect. It is a mystical sustaining food, naturally possessing a sugar content and texture unlike anything else on the planet. It is not a plaything for raw foodists or those unfortunate souls in the Church of Paleo.

The date grows in giant clumps on the date palm, and ripen right there on the tree. There are several different cultivars, which all produce dates that feel and taste differently, but farmers can also create different textures and flavors by choosing when to pick the fruit during the natural ripening process. Dates, though they look like they belong in the dried fruit aisle, hobnobbing with the apricots and prunes, are not really in the same category. They dry right on the tree, rather than undergoing the extreme artificial dehydration that befalls the true dried fruits, and so retain quite a bit more moisture — which is why they need to be refrigerated, and have a shelf life shorter than, say, dried apricots. But, they also don’t require any preservatives whatsoever; if the ingredients list on your package of dates says more than “dates,” put them down and walk away.

In this country, we mostly see two kinds of dates: deglet noor, which are firm and pale tan, and medjool, which are larger, wetter, squishier and a deeper, darker brown. The flavor is slightly different; deglet noor is slightly nutty, medjool more intensely sweet, like burnt sugar. Both may have a large-ish pit in the middle, which is tooth-crackingly hard and inedible (deglet noor are often pitted, while medjool hardly ever are). Neither of them, to be honest, are good for snacking; they are both somewhere around eighty percent sugar by weight, which if you ask me is way too sweet to be eaten alone. But that sweetness gives them a unique culinary attribute: They are basically a robustly flavored sugar cube.

Given that dates are sold in all stages of ripeness, there are different things to look for when buying them. If you’ll be using them whole, I prefer deglet noor; they’re not quite as cloyingly sweet, and, being a bit on the dry side, are easier to work with (especially for stuffing). Actually, if you’re planning on chopping them for use in a salad, I prefer deglet noor too. Medjool are ideal if you plan on blending or food processing; they turn into what looks like a dark brown honey.

Dates are hugely important in a few different cuisines, especially Persian, Moroccan, Spanish, Tunisian, Syrian, and, um, Southern Californian. Often they are paired with savory elements, especially nuts and fatty meats like lamb. It can be hard to cook with them in a purely vegetarian dish; they are so powerfully sweet that they need that savory flavor to balance them. That said, I have one recipe in here that ignores balance entirely; it is sweet + sweet + fat, and it is crazy good.

Date Milkshake, or, Dateshake

Shopping list: medjool dates, fancy yuppie-quality vanilla ice cream, milk, cinnamon, salt

This is a traditional recipe from…southern California, where some date farmers invented it as a way to convince Americans that this weird wrinkly dried oblong thing actually has enough sugar in it to kill a station wagon full of diabetics. They typically use deglet noor dates, but I like the darker, stronger medjool for this one. Pit the dates, then chop them — about a cup’s worth. Dump into a blender or, less ideally, a food processor, with a cup of milk (whole milk is best; milkshakes are one of those things where trying to remove fat just leaves you with garbage). Blend until smooth. Add a cup of vanilla ice cream, a sprinkle of cinnamon and a sprinkle of salt. Blend more. That’s it. Drink it.

Pilaf Type Thing With Dates And Other Stuff

Shopping list: basmati rice (or quinoa, or couscous), feta cheese, fresh parsley, lemon, olive oil, deglet noor dates, almonds, za’atar mix (or: dried oregano, thyme, and sesame seeds), radishes

Cook rice (or quinoa, or couscous), and let it cool. Throw it in a big bowl, bigger than you think you need. Chop a handful of almonds into smaller-than-unchopped-almond pieces, and throw those in too. Crumble in a handful of feta cheese, then coarsely chop about the same amount of dates as cheese and throw all that in. Chop radishes into chunks (not slices) and add to the bowl. Add in several big pinches of za’atar. If you can’t find za’atar, use a mixture of dried oregano to dried thyme to toasted sesame seeds in a ratio of 2:2:1 and use more lemon juice. Oh yeah, squeeze in like a whole lemon’s worth of lemon juice, and a few big glugs of olive oil. Mix thoroughly, add salt to taste. If it’s too sour, add more dates, almonds, and/or oil. Too sweet, add more cheese, lemon juice, and/or salt. Top with chopped parsley.

Pan-Roasted Dates With Yogurt

Shopping list: olive oil, full-fat Greek yogurt, dates, walnuts, Maldon sea salt, sumac (or lemon)

This recipe comes to us from Crop Chef Pal Nozlee Samadzadeh, albeit accidentally; I had read and subsumed this recipe awhile ago, thought of it as a fantastic alternative to the tasty but sort of expected bacon-wrapped stuffed dates, and had no idea it originated from her. Luckily Nozlee was nice enough to add a few suggestions to the already published recipe. Any dates will work for this — Nozlee says even the stickiest of medjools are acceptable. Chop walnuts into a couple pieces per walnut half, put them in your little toaster oven tray and toast until golden and fragrant, just a few minutes. Don’t burn them!!!

Get a pan on the stove, add in a good glug of olive oil over medium heat. Halve the dates, take out the pits if they’re there, and throw them in the pan. Cook for a couple minutes on each side and remove. On a plate, spread a whole bunch of yogurt. Full-fat Greek yogurt is the best for this; use Fage, not other, inferior brands. If you want, you can strain the yogurt first using the method outlined here. I call this strained yogurt labneh; Nozlee calls it “mast e seft,” but it’s basically the same thing. Scatter the fried dates over this yogurt, sprinkle them with flaky salt like Maldon, and pour olive oil over the top. Nozlee recommends that you “add more olive oil than is sensible.” Top with the toasted walnuts and a pinch of sumac, if you have it. Sumac is a purple spice that, I swear, is not poisonous; it tastes bizarrely like lemon juice. If you don’t have sumac, squeeze lemon juice over the top. Serve with crusty bread.

Dates are referred to, by marketers and desperate parents alike, as nature’s candy. In my opinion nature offers many different candies; have you ever had, like, a really good peach? You idiot? They are better than candy. But the comparison works because dates are luxurious and unhealthy and pocket-sized, gooey sugary sticky treats that if you are anti-candy you can indulge in while thinking of your diet as all-natural. But they go beyond candy; they are an intense way to add a powerful hit of sweetness to any dish, and are worthy of your purchase. Eat the date.

Photo by Franco Folini

One of the many remarkably modern qualities of that That New Brooklyn Look is that, like many other products of our particularly exuberant moment in late capitalism, it is inherently disposable and temporary:

It took just three years for balconies to crack and concrete to flake from the facade of one Brooklyn condominium. Another building was prone to flooding, because the storm drainage system was never connected to the sewage system. With buildings rising at a pace not seen in years, some fear that shoddy construction could be making a comeback, too.

As developers feverishly break ground on projects to cash in on soaring property values, lawyers, architects and engineers say they are fielding more calls from residents complaining of structural defects in newly built homes. There is growing concern that some developers are repeating the mistakes of the last housing boom and delivering substandard product. As more residents settle into new buildings, the trickle of calls could soon turn into a flood.

When your New Brooklyn apartment collapses, just throw it away — perhaps for a profit, like at 500 Fourth Avenue, where twenty units have sold since the city issued a partial vacate order of the building — and upgrade to a newer one with more storage, a slimmer design, and higher resolution windows.

Photo via StreetEasy

No plans tonight? How does this sound? “Author, columnist, [AWL PAL] and book-besotted memoirist Lizzie Skurnick has gathered together her popular, sharp-witted New York Times columns, collecting and nearly doubling her neologisms for our times in her book That Should Be A Word: A Language Lover’s Guide to Choregasms, Povertunity, Brattling, and 250 Other Much-Needed Terms for the Modern World. She’ll read from the new work, followed by a conversation with culture writer and DAME magazine executive editor Kera Bolonik.” It sounds good, right? It’s Lizzie Skurnick, of course it does. Find out more here!

★★★ Helicopters streaked upriver with rose-stained cumulus behind them in the west. The idea of the thaw was enough to draw one outside, though the truth was that whenever the clouds came on, the damp chill of the fugitive snow made things less than nice. Curtains of spray blew off the scaffolds, the flying grime-water impossible to steer around. There was no need for boots, really, but it was necessary to keep reminding the children to step away from or over the puddles in their sneakers. Water poured through the round drain openings in a manhole; ice ruble lay in chunks by the curb. Caulk curled up out of a sidewalk joint, too ruined for spring to save.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, BuzzFeed News Senior Political Writer McKay Coppins tells us more about what it’s like when your wife is about to have a baby and one of the largest, most sophisticated hospitals in New York is unable to provide the right people to help with delivery.

Good news: My wife is in labor! Bad news: We’ve been at @NYULMC for hours and they can’t find an anesthesiologist to give an epidural.

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) February 18, 2015

McKay! So what happened here?

My wife, Annie, started having contractions in the morning, and since this was our second kid we knew the basic protocol. Annie called her OB/GYN to tell him what was going on, I emailed my editor to tell her I was not coming into work, and then we started timing the contractions on an iPhone app. Going into labor (at least in our experience) is not like it is on TV, where the mom’s water breaks and the dad frantically searches for car keys, and then they race down the highway, weaving in and out of traffic in a desperate bid to make it to the hospital in time. The childbirth process can last days sometimes, so you’re not supposed to go into the hospital until the contractions have reached a certain frequency and duration. In our case, this rule seemed especially important because Annie was delivering at NYU-Langone, and as her doctor told her on the phone, “They are notorious for turning women away.” So, we restlessly paced around our apartment in Bushwick for a while, and then when the contractions started to intensify we drove into Manhattan.

By the time we actually got to the hospital, Annie had been in labor for seven or eight hours and she was very eager to get an epidural. But when we got to the delivery floor, a receptionist informed us that they were “very busy” and instructed us to sit in a waiting room along with a couple other pregnant women writhing in pain. I asked if we could at least hand over our insurance cards and get the check-in process started, but the receptionist said she couldn’t do anything until a doctor became available. She seemed genuinely sorry, and brought Annie some water, which was nice.

We waited and waited, and after forty-five minutes a nurse finally came out and said they could examine Annie, but there were no rooms available, so it would have to take place in the hallway. They examined her on a gurney with strangers passing back and forth, and when they determined she was far enough along for an epidural, we were ushered into a room with other women laying on beds waiting for the procedure. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, then thirty — with Annie going through contractions every hundred and twenty seconds or so, each one more painful than the last. I finally managed to wave down a nurse, who apologetically explained that they couldn’t find an anesthesiologist available to perform the procedure. I was slightly perplexed. We were in a major hospital in New York City! They couldn’t find an anesthesiologist? I asked how long it might take to track one down. The nurse replied that she had no idea.

Over the next few hours we developed a little routine. Annie would labor through a contraction, I would offer some feeble words of reassurance and my hand to squeeze (the latter being more useful than the former), and as soon as it ended, I’d hustle out of the room in search of hospital staff to pester. I only had one or two minutes at a time to work with, though, because Annie wanted me back at her bedside before the next contraction started. During these brief excursions out of the room, I developed an alliance with a man whose wife was laboring in the bed next to Annie. They had actually come into the hospital early that morning and were turned away because she wasn’t sufficiently dilated. They’d returned just after we arrived, and his wife was similarly desperate for an epidural. Together, we spent the minutes in between our wives’ contractions scouring the floor for information, and then returning to compare notes — two hapless husbands locked in a quixotic battle against hospital bureaucracy.

More than anything, I just wanted some kind of timeline: I figured if I could assure Annie that the anesthesiologist would arrive in X minutes, it would make the experience more bearable. But since no one would tell us anything, I resorted to asking increasingly hopeless and ill-informed questions: Was there some sort of lesser painkiller Annie could take while she waited? Would Tylenol do anything to take the edge off? How about some breathing exercises? Was it possible to bring in our own anesthesiologist to perform the procedure? In one moment of particular desperation, I actually started googling, “anesthesiologists in Manhattan” on my phone. But while everyone I talked to seemed sympathetic, nobody could offer any help or guidance, and I inevitably returned to my wife empty-handed.

Eventually, Annie — who is quite tough, and had been enduring all this nonsense with much more poise than her frazzled husband — reached a breaking point. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t get an epidural, it was that she was receiving virtually no attention from medical professionals at all, aside from very quick check-ins from preoccupied and powerless nurses. Annie would have happily attempted to deliver the baby without the epidural — we would later learn that she was fully dilated by now — but we still weren’t even in a delivery room.

That’s when I got the idea to Tweet about it. I had seen people use Twitter before to extract refunds or frequent flyer miles by complaining about poor service and tagging the official accounts of airlines or hotels, or whatever. I wondered if it could possibly work for a hospital. I searched my Twitter app for NYU-Langone and, sure enough, the hospital had an account. I asked Annie if it was OK (we are not usually the types to live-tweet a childbirth) and she said, “Do it.” So I wrote three tweets, and within twenty minutes or so, a resident materialized to bring us into a delivery room. Not long after that, an anesthesiologist showed up to administer the epidural. He was a generally jovial guy, but after he finished the procedure (which took all of ten minutes), I overheard him complaining to the resident, “Why didn’t anybody page me? I just found out about this fifteen minutes ago.”

Wow. So first off: Props for being in such a crazy, stressful situation and still being able to spell “anesthesiologist” correctly in a tweet. I am in awe of that. But, yeah, beyond that, please tell us all that they got their shit together eventually and that everything ended up OK. It did, right?

It did! After Annie got the epidural, she was able to get some much-needed rest. A parade of hospital representatives came in to apologize for what had happened, but we were too relieved and excited about the imminent birth of our son to hold any kind of grudge. (We did, however, use our newfound leverage to make sure the woman in the bed next to Annie got immediate attention.) Nobody ever said that the tweets were what hurried things along, and I didn’t ask. Maybe the timing was just a coincidence. But in any case, it was heartening to see a stream of Internet friends lend their support in a moment of distress by tweeting outraged things at @NYULMC.

And most importantly, our son was born just after midnight: 9 pounds, 11 ounces, and perfectly healthy. He has his dad’s large, unique head-shape (which we hope will fade with age), and his mom’s red hair and steely resolve (which we hope he’ll keep).

Lesson learned (if any)?

So, here’s the thing: Eventually, we were told that the reason there weren’t any anesthesiologists available was because they were dealing with an “emergency” elsewhere in the hospital. We didn’t get many details, but the word “hemorrhaging” was used. Obviously, hearing about a life-or-death health catastrophe like that brings a certain degree of perspective, and all things considered, we’re just grateful that everyone in our little family is healthy. And Annie wants to make sure I mention here that she knows many, many women give birth without epidurals, either because they don’t have access to them or because they want to deliver naturally. “My thing wasn’t a real emergency,” she says.

But! It still seems weird to me that a hospital as big and well-funded as NYU in a city as populous as New York isn’t sufficiently staffed to handle a fluke emergency and a couple of pregnant women who want epidurals at the same time. I don’t know anything about hospital administration, but maybe the lesson is that someone should get on that?

Just one more thing.

Our two-year-old daughter was not overjoyed about having a new baby around. The night we brought him home, she apparently decided it was time to move out, because she kept gathering her things and heading for the door, declaring, “Bye see you tomorrow.” We have so far convinced her to stay through a series of bribes.

Photo by JL Johnson

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column? Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

“To watch the compressed cycles of modern consumer electronics pass through your viewfinder gives a calming order to an industry that depends on the perception that it is perpetually exceptional. This perspective also helps to enforce realism about your relationship with consumer electronics. Whether you choose the luxury option, the commodity option, or something in between, you are buying future garbage.” — Our own John Herrman has been a resident of Shitworld for some time; it turns out to be a pleasant place to live.

For The Awl’s permanent coverage of Today’s Apple Event, see here and here.