★ Rain first splatted, then pattered, in the dim morning. Fog filled in the woods. Birds chattered and trilled; wings flashed white against the darkness of sunflower hulls. Little round chickadees bounced from cane to cane of the dormant trumpet vine. The boards of the porch were slick with water and damp greenness. By lunchtime the rain had dwindled to drips and some of the fog had lifted, multiplying the wet dark lines of the tree trunks, though the sky was as gray as before. An unseasonable warmth had moved in. From the bridge over the Susquehanna, a sickly pink banded the afternoon sky, above the hills and the false hills of cloud. Fog still hugged the little rivers just inside New Jersey. Long after the rain was over, a wet shine clung to the concrete barriers and the faces of bridges. Manhattan came on in a would-be golden hour the color of ash. At last, at sundown, sudden stripes of clear pink and robin’s-egg mustered in the west. The breeze after dark was dry and pointed, but then deeper in the night came the splatting of rain again, and a slashing sound of wind.

As a resident of New York City, you might be displaying a morbid curiosity over where you are going to able to afford to live after your apartment building is knocked down to make way for a two-thousand-foot skyscraper that contains three-and-a-half condos which cost a hundred million dollars each. This is because you are misperceiving the realities of the New York City condo market, which will be engorged by sixty-five hundred new units this year.

Ms. Kennedy Mack of Corcoran Sunshine says that apartments at the very top make up less than 10 percent of new development in 2015, with about 500 “ultraluxury” units priced at $5,000 a square foot or more expected to come to market. “There is a misperception that the market is swinging drastically toward the high end,” she said. “We’re seeing a relatively steady pricing mix from year to year, which is really supported by robust buyer demand at all levels.”

Don’t worry, there will be a place for you. Consider the “entry level” apartment:

The number of units coming to market at the so-called “entry level,” defined by prices at less than $1,700 a square foot, is also expected to rise. More than 800 units in this category are expected to enter the market in 2015, up from 306 in 2014. One-bedrooms in this segment were selling for an average of $1.19 million in the third quarter of 2014, based on contracts signed.

You’ll be fine.

— Big savvy internet publishers will spend a lot of money posting things directly to social networks that they do not own or control. This will be a success by every immediately important measure: these posts will reach and delight many people; they will assume new forms, most of which will have fresh potential as vessels for advertising. Some of these forms will closely resemble common website posts, which will suddenly feel clumsy and unnecessary. Other types of website posts will not find a comfortable home on social networks. From the networks’ perspectives, this will be fine — these posts never did that well anyway. The publication of non-viral, non-native-social content will begin to be viewed by a new breed of triumphalists as either pathetic or vain. Home pages — now less curated selections of stories than uncomfortably revealing glimpses into the social sausage factory — will be considered by large sites to be something of a liability.

— BuzzFeed (disclosure: where I worked for a couple years) is out front on the native stuff, with a team dedicated to “distributed” content, not to mention an enormous video unit that already publishes solely to YouTube and Facebook (First Look is trying a newsy version of the concept, and Fusion is doing entire shows on Instagram). BuzzFeed is a large and diverse company applying capable people to a new project that may or may not be the future of its business — it has room to experiment. However, with any public evidence of success, it will be emulated by less-savvy and more vulnerable companies, large and small, looking for any escape from a set of converging and downward trending lines. In 2015, notable (choose your definition) publications will declare their intentions to go fully distributed — or some other term that means the same thing — effectively abandoning their websites and becoming content channels within Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Vine or Instagram.

Websites that expect to be able keep doing what they’ve always been doing will undertake this endeavor and fail. Websites that don’t mind changing their goals and identities completely — newer ones without much institutional momentum or history — will undertake this endeavor and succeed. It will resemble the multi-decade struggle to bring magazines to the internet — which, if we’re really honest about it, has been a failure — in that there will be large familiar categories of writing that will not be easily transferable to the new medium. Related: 2015 will be the year that a large magazine company folds a major lifestyle brand into a Pinterest page.

— The personality-driven professional use of Twitter will reveal itself, like all other phases of Twitter, to be a weird and regrettable aberration. For the media, Twitter will settle into its ultimate role on an increasingly television-like internet as its grim and noisy and constant 24-hour news channel. The Twitter gaffe cycle will be compressed and amplified; this year, however, nobody’s heart will be in it.

— Proud spammers and uncanny cynics and weird internet plagiarists and liars will be given a lot of money. Some of them will remain openly terrible; others will back uncomfortably into legitimacy, turning their content operations into “news organizations” and pretending it was the plan all along. They will be welcomed warmly by those few who remain to welcome them.

— It will be declared problematic to call things or people “stupid.” This one’s been coming for a while, and it’s finally time. Unlike empathetic identity-based problematicals, this one will serve only the powerful. Its enforcers will disingenuously adopt the language of social justice.

— GamerGate will return under different names in multiple venues. Its agents will not be GamerGaters or even necessarily know what GamerGate is, but they will behave almost indistinguishably. Publications that defy the wrong internet communities will be held to insincere political standards in full view of their inherently cowardly advertisers and “brand partners,” who, with plenty of easier ways to spend marketing money, will cave. (Related: This will be a great year for the neoreactionary movement!)

— Facebook will release those publishing tools everyone is so worked up about. They won’t seem like much at first. But Facebook video is instructive: It was a feature that nobody used, then it was ice buckets everywhere, and now my page is totally rotten with native Facebook video reshared from accounts I’ve never heard of. These contextless videos of Animals Acting Like People and Easily Stereotyped People Confounding Expectations are so much more viral than anything else in my News Feed. It’s not even close. Links are doomed. Teens hate links!

— The future-of-media types either go quiet or insane as they realize that they spend most of their time defending… ads.

— Old media layoffs will accelerate; coverage of old media layoffs will all but disappear. Magazines — national magazines at large companies! — will vanish in silence.

— The acquisitions are going to be weiiird. Will Yahoo buy CNN? Sure, why the hell not. Would Facebook buy BuzzFeed? Again: WHY NOT? It would solve more problems than it would create. What’s left for a vanity purchase? Wired? Maybe some tweetstorming VC can buy it and destroy it and remake it as this generation’s Industry Standard.

— Some of these acquisitions, especially the small strange ones, will serve as a humbling and traumatic experiences for hundreds of young Content producers, who will first cheer and feel pride before gradually realizing that it was never about them at all; that their companies were always just… companies.

— Imagine the new JOBS. So many new varieties of feed-stockers: Maybe Twitter will hire a bunch of “anchors” to retweet celebrities and politicians and terrorists? Vine news production units? Hundreds of people will be hired to create videos for Facebook that work just as well without sound as with sound. Apple Watch breaking news notification writers! In general, though, barring big macro BAD THING, this means more jobs, which is good (especially if you’re very young). The least interesting and most important internet media prediction for 2015 is that it will be a lot like 2014, but just more.

— There will be a backlash not against podcasts but against the podcasting voice, which is really an extension of Ira Glass voice [30 seconds of post-rock] which is a mutation of NPR voice.

Prediction for 2015: URL-shorteners will fall out of fashion and long, luxurious URLs will become symbols of status and prestige.

— Mark Slutsky (@totallyslutsky) January 5, 2015

— No human, for the entirety of 2015, will be convinced of anything but his own rightness by any “explainer” site. They will become extremely popular, fully stocked with “Perfect Response” and “Reasons Why” posts that are first and foremost affirming to the reader, and secondarily intended to demonstrate the rightness and virtue of the sharer. One high-growth post-type in 2015: “You’re Right, But For Even Better Reasons Than You Think.”

The result of this glut will be a social media discourse nightmare — more engagement than ever, but carried out at a distance, through articles written in slightly more composed and assertive versions of your voice, by people who sound like they know what they’re talking about but might, in fact — sorry, I mean ACTUALLY — not. Mainstream neoliberalism might monopolize explainerism right now, but don’t worry: it’s compatible with any loose and selfish ideology! (Related: An earnest discussion about ideological platform biases, possibly? We spent a lot of time last year worrying about the forms of Content privileged by the new internet, but what about the consequences of the forms? The new internet loves markets. The new internet thinks in markets!)

— The SERIAL EFFECT: So much True Crime.

— A splashy recent hire will leave Fusion (maybe soon!).

— Lmao Vice IPO, jesus. Awl IPO??

— Uhhhhhhhhhh

— sdg;bjasdfkj84asfjfl’

—

The Stoner Pickup Artists

by Emma Whitford

Harrison Schultz and Lorna Shannon are the polyamorous couple behind Sex Ed for Stoners, a free, weekly seminar for the luckless in love, and the lead organizers for Occupy Weed Street, an activist coalition fighting for marijuana legalization in New York City, with weekly BYO-weed meetings, phone calls to Cuomo, and Stealthy Smokeouts. The duo, who are trained pickup artists, insist that pickup is something worth twinkling your fingers about. “When you feel that passion for someone, you should have the skills to go for it, the right way,” Schultz told me.

Last month, I went over to their smoky East Williamsburg apartment to talk polyamory, pickup’s bad rep, and stoner-on-stoner vibes.

Lorna [taking a long hit]: Oh, Star Dog.

Harrison [following suit]: It’s a great strain.

Oh yeah?

H: Marijuana is like wine. It’s nuanced. Like a good sativa might make you more uppity and social, and, you know, a good indica’s nice right before the deed’s about to go down. Or maybe right after it went down, and you need to pass out afterwards. Like, get some couch lock going.

Is that the kind of thing that comes up in a pickup class for stoners?

L: Actually, the thing that we’ve been saying for a while now, is that you really don’t need anything to be good at pickup. You don’t need money, and you don’t need alcohol. Because all you’re doing is going out and striking up conversations with people.

So why does your class have the word stoner right in the title?

L: People don’t know what they fricking want when it comes to their romantic lives. So they go out, they get drunk, they hope something is going to happen, and they go home with a sloppy lay that they can’t even remember the next morning. It’s our belief that marijuana can be a tool for better pickup. Whether it’s for self-reflection, or for actually calming your neuroses before you even go out the door.

H: But New York is the marijuana arrest capital of the world. People are even afraid to mention the fact that they smoke pot in a lot of cases. I’ve looked at data that actually suggests that people who think marijuana should be legalized tend to actually feel more alone in the world.

How are you going to help them?

L: Well, with weed, you’re already a step ahead. When you’re out in a social setting, alcohol sort of boosts the ego, whereas marijuana actually quiets the ego.

And that’s helpful?

L: You’re more your authentic self when you’re high. You’re not as worried about what everyone else is thinking. You’re just talking and enjoying yourself.

H: But pickup’s also about body language. Like when I’m out on the street, I’m looking for a woman who’s looking to get checked out. If we’re both smiling, then it’s almost weird if I don’t approach. And then I start a good conversation. Boom. I don’t just ask questions. You’re a writer? I’ve done some writing too! I throw in a little story. Add some value. And then she asks a question. And then I relate back. Touching should start almost right away. Like with the handshake. I’m Harrison. You linger to see if you get a squeeze back.

How did you guys get into pickup?

H: I’m finishing a PhD in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. So I was learning about sexual fringe cultures, and a friend introduced me to pickup. Then I had a quarter-life crisis, and I was hooked. I started taking lessons.

The concept of pickup has so much baggage. Santa Barbara shooter Eliot Rodgers used misogynist language on the Internet, similar to language used in some online pickup forums. And in November Julien Blanc was denied a UK visa because of his attitude towards women. He called himself a pickup artist. How does this reputation affect your approach?

H: Those people weren’t pickup artists. But we understand that pickup has a really bad rap.

L: When it’s done right, pickup is all about seduction.

And that’s not manipulative?

H: As soon as you start manipulating, it’s not seduction anymore. True seduction is about getting the other person to chase you. It’s never supposed to be the other way around.

L: A friend of ours went on a date with a guy recently, who called himself a pickup artist. We checked out his website, and he had these videos about like, what to do when a woman is ignoring your texts. If you’re using the game properly, you shouldn’t ever be bothering the person who doesn’t text you back.

H: Plus, once you know the rules of true pickup, you can tell when people are trying to manipulate you. It’s social self-defense. The game is pure. It’s just that some of the players are slime balls.

If that’s the case, how do you guys play?

H: If I see a woman I’m attracted to on the street, I’ll just go up to her and start a conversation and see where it goes. It’s a social exercise. Lorna and I aren’t the kind of couple that’s going to lie about wanting to have sex with other people. There are three different kinds of love. You’ve got lust, which is consummated and fulfilled in the moment. It’s temporary. But then you’ve got something that lasts a little bit longer, called limerence. This is that Romeo and Juliet kind of feeling where everything else goes away and you’re really happy, and that always ends in fucking tragedy. It’s a form of insanity. And then there’s this other type of love, this really pure love, which is the idea of partnership. I think everyone needs all three kinds of love.

L: When I met Harrison, I was just coming out of a hetero-normative lifestyle. I’m bisexual, and I’ve always known that. I’ve always been a serial-monogamist with men, and I’ve always cheated on those men with women. So this is the first time I’ve actually had the freedom to express my sexuality to its fullest extent.

Did you get into pickup through Harrison?

L: Absolutely. One morning we were walking down the street looking for a restaurant to have brunch. We had both been checking this girl out. And he asked me, “Do you want me to bust out an approach in front of you?” And I was like, Yeah! So we approached the girl and started talking to her, and Harrison got her number. I got a complete oxytocin rush off of it.

Isn’t pickup traditionally pretty heteronormative? Like, the man approaches the woman?

L: Right. But I wouldn’t be able to advocate for it if I didn’t think it was something that women can also be empowered by.

Are the tactics the same?

L: Lots of people don’t expect women to make the first approach, so you have to be even more confident when you do. I use the same techniques as the guys: Hi. I’m Lorna. I really like your style. Sometimes I go to Barnes and Noble, or an art gallery, just to practice. But lots of women I teach opt for the indirect approach. That means using body language to make yourself more available, more open to being approached. Maybe that first move is just making eye contact.

As a poly couple, do you guys tag-team?

L: Oh yeah. My turn to talk, his turn to talk — we’re good at balancing that without being obvious. He’ll usually go in for the makeout first, and I’ll follow. Once you know that the person you are trying to get with is down with weed, take a toke break. That’s a really good opportunity to get it started. We try to always be prepared.

H: Because stoners are like that. Use it as an excuse to leave wherever you are, get a little closer, and blow a little smoke up each other’s… yeah. You get it.

Material for your next lesson?

H: Let’s put it this way: At the first class, a lot of the people were still mumbling with their hands in front of their mouths. We spent most of the time talking about the importance of good posture. Baby steps.

What’s your ultimate goal with these classes?

L: We want to open up a new angle for pickup. Where you can approach this whether you’re trans, or poly, or looking for a threesome, or looking for a one-night stand.

H: Because when you’re getting laid on a regular basis, you have different chemicals running through your brain. Certain things don’t bother you as much. Everyone deserves that. It’s its own high.

The next Sex Ed for Stoners class will take place on January 6th at 5:00 p.m. at 60 Wall Street.

When Your OkCupid Date to the Museum Shows Up Totally Wasted

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer Colette Shade tells us more about what happens when your OkCupid date arrives at the museum completely drunk.

#Protip for #men on #OkCupid: Don’t show up drunk for your 2 p.m. date at a museum.

— Colette Shade (@MsShade) December 20, 2014

Colette! So what happened here?

I met a guy on OkCupid, and we started chatting and texting. He was cute, and we had overlapping taste in music and politics. He read Jacobin, and he liked Jonathan Richman, Crass, and Stiff Little Fingers. He even made a Cab Calloway reference, and we talked about how one of Cab’s zoot suits is in City Hall here in Baltimore. He asked if I wanted to meet up at the Walters Museum at 2:00 the next day.

He was sitting in the lobby of the museum wearing all black. Something seemed off. He smelled like cigarettes, which is not a problem for me, as I have been an on-again, off-again smoker for the past decade (sorry, mom).

“Are you ____?” I asked.

“Yeah. Are you . . . Colette?”

The way he spoke was unusual. His pronunciation was almost British, even though he grew up in Baltimore. And he was sort of slurring his speech. I assumed he had a speech disorder. As we walked toward the elevator, I noticed that he wasn’t walking in a straight line. I have been described as possessing “an odd gait,” and thought it unfair to pass judgment. Inside the gallery, he behaved in a really inappropriate manner. He was talking loudly and practically touching the artwork. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing at jeweled Lalique brooches and chinoiserie tortoiseshell bowls.

“You know, if you read that plaque, it tells you,” I replied coldly.

As I stared at a Flemish still life, I tried to figure out what the hell was wrong with this guy. Suddenly, the pieces fell into place: He had showed up to the date completely hammered.

“No, it can’t be,” I thought. “That is just too comically bad to actually be real.”

But it was the only explanation for the slurred speech, the odd gait, the inappropriate behavior. And the smell. Beneath the scent of stale tobacco, he definitely reeked of booze. How had I not noticed before? I felt angry and humiliated as he loped into the ceramics wing. Even worse, his affect screamed “artistic high school senior.” Despite graduating approximately twenty years ago, he complained about not fitting in with the lacrosse players because he made art and he was “punk rock,” whatever that means. I left high school in 2006, and I think of my time there as barely a footnote in my life. “One of my major influences as a painter is Monet, not Manet,” he sniffed at one point.

The nadir of the date was probably when he pointed at a baroque chest of drawers and proclaimed, “This is so bourgeois.”

“Well, this is a museum,” I replied, though what I wanted to say was, “It’s a fucking museum! Of course it’s bourgeois!”

I played the whole thing with cold ignorance. I wondered if and when I should tell him that the jig was up, that I knew he was drunk and I was mad. But I never did. I think I stuck around because I had trouble believing that what was happening was real. How could someone show up to an afternoon museum date completely inebriated? But, more than that, I wanted to see what happened. I had never been on a date that was bad enough to turn comical.

So how did things end up with this guy? And will this date impact your willingness to use OkCupid or other online dating sites going forward?

After strolling through two floors of the museum, I told him I had to go. I walked to Penn Station to catch a cab home, which cost over twenty dollars but was completely worth it. I deleted my OkCupid account about thirty minutes after getting home. Fortunately, he has not contacted me since. I think he got the idea.

I find dating in general to be very uncomfortable. I’m not one of those people who likes to “go on dates.” I hate sitting at a wine bar and selling my life story to a stranger. I’m interested in talking about A Confederacy of Dunces and the kyriarchy and the history of calypso music. If there is an attraction, then things will go that way, but in my ideal scenario, there is no pressure. I hate having to decide immediately if I am attracted to a stranger I met on the Internet. Sometimes these feelings develop over time. Despite my apprehension, I probably will set up another OkCupid account. Maybe I’ll do it next weekend.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Some experiences are worth enduring for the story. Also, you can’t smell alcohol through the Internet.

Just one more thing.

On my OkCupid profile, I said that you should message me if you want to eat Ethiopian food and talk about neoliberalism. This still stands. Just don’t show up drunk.

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.

Every year come early November, as the shops start setting up their seasonal displays and the constant cacophony of “Sleigh Ride” and “Silver Bells” are only briefly interrupted by your stepping from store to store, you do a deal in your head that is part goal, part promise: “If I can just make it through December, things will be all right.” And you gird yourself for the onslaught: the chronic anxiety surrounding Thanksgiving, the interminable slew of holiday parties at which the sore muscles in your forced rictus are barely soothed by the overindulgence in alcohol that even for you seems worryingly excessive, the dreaded days of Christmas itself and then the aggravation and inevitable disappointment that New Year’s Eve holds, all of which pales in comparison to the massive physical and psychic hangovers you experience on New Year’s Day as you reflect on the turning of the calendar and how it is now one year closer to your end. But at least you’ve done it. You’ve made it through. And then WHAMMO, that first Monday back smacks you in the face with the hard reality that your mind never lets you remember, probably for reasons of survival, until it’s too late: Making it through December is child’s play; now you’ve got to make it through actual winter. The bills come due, the cold comes in, all the people you shunted aside with promises to get together “after the holidays” are bugging you to meet up and even if you somehow manage to blow them off again it only adds to the heap of guilt that is just another piece of the terrible pile under which you’re buried as you sit sobbing on your couch watching bad TV in the permanent dark that descended months ago but is now so familiar that you just assume that it will never go away, that it will just become another part of the frozen tundra you trudge through to go to a job that is somehow both meaningless and demanding and an insistent reminder that even as slowly as the days go by you are still wasting all of them and when death finally comes you will have nothing to show for your time on this earth save for a picture or two that some of your “friends” liked on Instagram. Yes, that is what you have woken up to this morning. Your future full of dark, cold and sad starts now. But I will try to be optimistic for you and tell you this: They can’t keep it winter forever. No matter how bad it gets, how awful and hopeless and worthless everything seems, I promise you that at some point the sun is going to shine again. The middle of May at the latest. If we make it through let’s meet up for a drink.

by Jonathan Shainin

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the garbage?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is garbage?”

“Now and then,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1970, opening a series of lectures later published as Sincerity and Authenticity, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” Trilling’s subject was the emergence of of “sincerity” as a virtue, beginning in the sixteenth century, and its displacement at the center of our moral imagination, over the course of several hundred years, by the ideal of “authenticity.” Thirty-five years later, that narrative still seems to hold true. But the premise with which Trilling begins — that our collective moral sense evolves at a pace so glacial that its revisions are only visible “now and then” — appears utterly antiquated. The story he tells is essentially about the forming, dissolving, and reforming of consensuses about the value we assign to certain modes of conduct and ways of being, a process that used to unfold over decades, if not centuries; now it splinters and recombines and shatters again a million times a week.

The experience of watching people interact on the internet last year was often depressing beyond measure: occasionally because the events being narrated were awful; more often because the responses to the events were awful; more often still because the responses to the responses were awful; and most of all because if you take a step back from the whole thing, you see yourself sitting alone in front of a computer, willingly submitting day after day to the logic of a machine apparently designed to make you angry and sad and alienated.

The closest thing we had to a consensus about last year is that it was a year of garbage; many bad things happened, as in all years, and the word “garbage” was increasingly deployed to describe both the bad things and the often worse ways they were talked about. (To call it a “Year of Outrage,” as Slate did, seems to admit that it was a year of garbage while haughtily dismissing the ways in which people expressed their displeasure.) Over at the Atlantic dot com, it was argued (in what we once called a “hot take” but no longer really bother to name as such) that the word “garbage” itself had become part of the problem, and therefore “must be abolished”:

Garbage plays with a performative pessimism, and its every re-use occasions a fresh round of competitive despair. It dumps minor irritations and systemic oppressions into one giant Tupperware of antipathy, where they clump together in the warmed-over microwave light of online odium.

The argument here is no worse than any other piece making a futile plea for people to stop using words or phrases that have become tedious to a writer who wishes to express his weariness with, and superiority over, those continuing to say them. But its observation about the real meaning of “garbage” seems accurate: “we need a word to say: I’m seeing this too, and it sucks.”

To call something “garbage” is to make a normative claim for the indisputability of its badness; to say that the thing it names is so awful — and so indifferent to its own awfulness — that no reasonable person could disagree. It is, in fact, a hopeful claim, one that asserts the possibility of consensus at a moment when, for reasons technological and otherwise, any kind of consensus — without which there can be no shared meaning — looks to be impossible.

Any day now, we will be so acclimated to what we once called garbage that we can no longer name it. Our feeble attempts to summon some collective indignation at the indignities of the future will become more and more frustrating, and we will slowly abandon our delusion that the virtual spaces where we once gathered, in more innocent days, to perform our anger and disappointment in the hope that others might affirm them, will make us anything but miserable.

Photo by Ross Belmont

Never Better, a collection of essays from writers we love, is The Awl’s goodbye to 2014.

by Awl Sponsors