by Noah Berlatsky

David Simon’s The Wire, which is set to soon be re-broadcast in high definition, continues to be hailed, in some corners, as the greatest television show of all time. In an effort to elevate it to the level of high art, many critics (including Simon himself) have reached for comparisons with other, less lumpen forms, from Greek tragedy to Dickens — anything, in short, that isn’t a television show. But Linda Williams, a professor of film studies and rhetoric at Berkeley, in her new book, On The Wire, thinks that the show’s greatest accomplishment is its use of melodrama. I talked to Williams last month about melodrama and realism, and how they shape people’s view of the show.

You argue in your book that The Wire is a melodrama, and that, contrary to popular opinion, melodrama is a form that is tied to, or makes use of, realism.

I liked Isaac Butler’s essay on the “realism canard” quite a bit. As he says, many people believe that something is great because it’s true or because it’s accurate. My point of departure for thinking about The Wire in a different way was precisely when Julius Wilson and some other sociologists published something in Critical Inquiry arguing, I thought kind of solipsistically, that the Wire was great because it was accurate according to their sociology. Yes, that is one of the great things about The Wire. But if we stop there, we fall into what Butler calls the realism canard, which is to say that the best fictional works are those that are the most factual, and that’s certainly not the case.

What does that have to do with melodrama?

I tried to define melodrama as that which is very good at absorbing new forms of realism in order to try to make claims for justice and for arguing on the part of those whose voices have not been heard. Melodrama is a machine for the production of new kinds of apparent truth. I know that many people, if they hear me say that The Wire is melodrama, will say, “Oh no! It’s great! It’s good! It’s true! It can’t be melodrama!” It’s easy to recognize melodrama in old melodrama. It’s harder to recognize it in the new, because it always seems so true.

So I wonder what you think of Pam Newton’s argument that one of the ways that The Wire is not true to life is that it downplays police corruption?

Truth is always from some subjective point of view. If you read David Simon’s Homicide, which is one of the two books of non-fiction which feeds into the lore and the data of The Wire — Simon just loves those cops. He was like a twenty-four-year-old reporter who got to follow the cops around and go drinking with them, and I think that there are ways in which he is blind to things that were wrong with the police. But he knows a lot about the cops and their ways, and he knows a lot about the drug dealers and their ways. Because he did a year long study of both that was ethnography. And then he loves them — more than he loves the politicians, for example.

You referred to David Simon’s methods as ethnography, and I was thinking about Christina Sharpe’s piece in The New Inquiry, where she talks about Alice Goffman’s On the Run and the ethical issues raised by urban ethnography. Sharpe suggests for example that studying black people and policing black people are often part of a single continuum of control. Is The Wire a way of rationalizing and controlling and consuming the lives of certain black communities, in the interest of letting white people say, “I understand them now”?

I understand that criticism. And I certainly understand the criticism of the anthropologist, the journalist, the ethnographer, who goes to the foreign culture and tries to understand it, and then gets praised for their own marvelous understanding of that which would be beyond the pale if we didn’t have that mediating white voice to present things. That’s precisely what I think is less good about David Simon’s journalism, and great about The Wire: The journalism is full of this kind of white interpretive voice that really does see an us and a them. The thing I quote from his early journalism, where he says, “The ants are here. The picnic is us,” in that piece called “The Metal Men,” there it is: The ants are the people he’s studying, the drug addicts, and “the picnic is us” — our houses in Baltimore, we propertied middle-class white people.

I think you’re suggesting that there are ways in which The Wire has not totally divested itself of that voice, and you may be right. But it’s done it better precisely because we lose David Simon’s voice, and we get Bubbles, Colvin, everybody else. I would say that The Wire is more exempt from that criticism than most other works of the imagination that try to get into a culture of the other. There is a criticism of melodrama there that is well-founded, though; melodrama is what we’re stuck with here.

We’re stuck with melodrama because that’s what The Wire is doing?

No. We’re stuck with melodrama because it’s what the culture does. It is our lingua franca of popular entertaining culture. These are the stories that we tell ourselves, in the broadest sense. Melodrama is limited; all it can do is point out these discrepancies in justice. There is a little democratic impasse that is inherent to melodrama. And yes, you can get ironic in melodrama — there are ways to handle it, but it is a limit. We want to identify and identify with the people to whom injustice is done. The only problem with that is that can end up being the white people in Birth of a Nation. Melodrama does not have a progressive ideology necessarily.

In Birth of a Nation you identify with the Klan as the victims of injustice?

Yes, it’s the former slaveowners who are oppressed by the former slaves. So that’s the limit of melodrama. But I think it’s important to identify the works that move us, and that grab us so well, as melodrama, and then study the way it operates. Rather than to always say, it’s not melodrama, it’s real, it’s true. Or, Simon’s way of doing it, which is to say it’s tragedy.

So would you identify ethnography as a kind of melodrama?

That’s a good question. I think in many cases it is. Why do you become an ethnographer? It’s because you want to understand disappearing cultures. I know that’s a simplification. But you want to go travel to the Amazon and learn the language of the people who are disappearing because their culture cannot operate in this world. That kind of salvage ethnography is a kind of melodrama — “I’m going to do something to save them” — and that saving comes through a kind of understanding of the meaning and the logic of that culture.

I know you feel The Wire was fairly successful in its treatment of race. I wondered what you thought about Orange Is The New Black, and whether it is as successful in your opinion?

I do gather that Orange Is the New Black is the hot new thing for many of the same reasons that The Wire was valued. It is of course interesting that it begins, and builds around, this white character — the person who would be like the voice of David Simon in his journalism. Its feat is to be able to take her away some of the time and to let everything else run on its own, at which point you do have a story about a very diverse collection of people, representing an underclass that does not normally get represented. I think it’s obviously a melodrama, and a pretty good one, although broader, more caricatured, than The Wire ever was.

Finally, I wanted to ask you about the controversy with David Simon. You wrote a piece for the Huffington Post where you said he’d been fired from the Baltimore Sun, and then had to correct after Simon explained that he had not been fired. Could you explain what happened there? How did you make that mistake?

I said that in the blog; I never said it in the book, because in the book I had carefully gone over it. It’s my fault in the sense that I didn’t take blogs very seriously; I’d never written one. I was invited to by the Huffington Post to write about Dickens and The Wire. I hope this doesn’t insult you, but I thought, “Who reads blogs?” So I just sloppily used an old draft, and kind of simplified my thinking. I did think that he had been fired at one point, but then I did more research, and I realized that he wasn’t fired. He quit. And he didn’t just quit; he took a buyout. Nobody ever impugned his value as a reporter, though the editors did disagree with his way of reporting, I insist.

I’m frankly debating whether I should blog back, about this. Just to say, you know, I’m not some academic out to impugn his reputation. I’m trying to understand the evolution of this great thing called The Wire. But maybe I shouldn’t. Blogging doesn’t seem to be my medium.

Noah Berlatsky edits the online comics and culture website the Hooded Utilitarian, and his book on the original Wonder Woman comics will be out in early 2015.

by Eric Lach

How To Make Boots From Your Garage is not a shoe store; you can’t walk in off the street and buy a pair of boots. But you can learn how to build a pair. The shop’s proprietor, Olivier Rabbath, wants to teach you. “The fact is, it is possible to make up to a hundred pair of boots a month, in a space no bigger than a two-car garage,” Rabbath writes on his website, an aesthetic throwback to the days of Geocities.

The workshop occupies the first floor of a three-story brick building on a bare stretch of Hoyt Street, in Brooklyn. When I walked in on a recent afternoon, Rabbath, a lithe and agreeably profane French ex-pat in his fifties, was feeding his toddler, Gaia. A young woman worked quietly at one of the tables in the back. Raw materials — pieces of shoes, synthetic severed feet, which shoemakers call “lasts” — were strewn around the large room, interspersed with papers, tools, desk lamps, table fans, and a few pieces of heavy machinery. In one corner, above and around a small coffee table and couch, several dozen of Rabbath’s creations — boots, high heels, shoes, sandals — were on display, hanging upside down from the ceiling like bats. Some were extremely elaborate, like a gigantic, embroidered tan leather boot that looked like it rose up to the wearer’s waist.

Rabbath, who lives above the shop, offered me a beer and quickly began to explain the philosophy that underpins How To Make Boots From Your Garage. “It’s shoes, what part do you have to understand?” he said. “You need it! Boom. I make you a good shoemaker. Your productions — forget the talent — last fifteen years. You fuck all the companies. Because you’re doing good shoes. That’s it. It’s called a skill.”

Rabbath came to shoemaking indirectly. As a young man, he had been interested in political cartooning and painting, and made money by selling t-shirts — “funny ones” — to tourists in Paris. The business was so successful he opened a clothing store, called Illusion. After opening a second location, he began making shoes to compliment the clothes. His original attempts were so poor that “people were almost falling in the store,” he told me. Over time, he learned from his failures. “You cannot come back in leather,” Rabbath told me. “You have no right of error. Even stitching — same. You have one try, only. Which is ok. What is important is having a firm hand, and, mostly, no hesitation. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Rabbath first came to the U.S. for a trade show in the late eighties, and as the decade came to a close, he decided to relocate to America in order to focus on shoes. He thought that his prospects would be better here than they were in France, and moved to Miami in 1989, where he opened what he called “my little factory.” There, he spent a decade “producing three hundred pairs a month,” he said. “So I have over thirty thousand pairs in my hands. Thirty thousand pairs. Sixty thousand shoes. And believe me, you know, you remember that.”

Eventually, Rabbath burned out; he almost “died of work,” he told me. He abandoned Miami, moved to New York, and spent several years tending bar, bouncing from apartment to apartment. While the Bush years soured Rabbath on U.S. politics, and he briefly considered moving to Australia, he credits President Obama with inspiring him to return to the shoe business. “When we got our president today, I wanted to believe,” Rabbath said. “So I invest all my money — I had almost a hundred thousand dollars — to do a school.”

How To Make Boots From Your Garage has been in business for nearly five years. In that time, Rabbath has instructed more than three hundred students. Rabbath’s website features photographs of dozens of his students proudly holding their creations. He currently offers classes ranging from a nearly four-thousand-dollar curriculum spread across forty hours that teaches people who want to “be in the business” of crafting shoes, to a basic course on creating a “dream slipper,” for seventy-nine dollars. In addition to giving classes, and renting workspace to former students, Rabbath also creates custom-order shoes, what he called “prototypes,” which can run five thousand dollars. One client, a fashion designer, asked Rabbath to make a pair of shoes where the right looked like the left and the left looked like the right. He showed me that pair, still in progress. They looked how they sounded, with the toes of each shoe pointing out in the opposite direction. Are they comfortable? Rabbath assured me that they were.

A few days after our first meeting, I returned to Rabbath’s shop to watch him work on a pair of special-order sandals he was making. The client was an old Italian woman who had one leg that was several inches shorter than the other. Rabbath made plaster casts of the woman’s feet and cut construction paper into a number of sloping, angular shapes. I watched as he took a pen and traced the shapes onto the backs of small sheets, or hides, of treated leather. Rabbath was using both black and white leather (it takes roughly two-and-a-half square feet of leather to make a pair of shoes), which would be stitched together to make the sandals. He reached for a box-cutter, then, leaning over the work bench, his hair falling over his face, cut into the leather with smooth, strong movements. The long fingers of his off hand followed closely behind the razor as it went along. He mumbled little thoughts to himself, and let out an occasional small sigh. When he was done cutting out the pieces of leather, he took them over to a “skiving” machine to pare down their edges.

After Rabbath had finished up, a man came in through the shop’s front door. He was interested in buying a pair of boots. Rabbath grew animated, and handed the man some pamphlets. He told the man that, instead, he could show him how to make his own boots. The man nodded. He’d think about it, he said, as he walked out the door.

Eric Lach is a writer who wears shoes.

Still from, of course

Mikael Seifu, “Tuff Ruff”

Via The Fader, a gorgeous track from Ethiopian producer Mikael Seifu, who names both Burial and “traditional Ethiopian folk” as influences. You can play it low in the background, or you can turn it up and hear it unfold.

This weekend, millions of internet users scrambled at once to see photos of naked celebrities. These photos had been accessed and published without their subjects’ consent. Media outlets, whose institutional assessments concluded that publishing copies of these photos would be the wrong choice, but accustomed to the realities of the internet circa 2014, had to find ways to address this issue. Mostly, at first, there was a lot of writing around the photos, which coyly provided enough information for people to contextualize and then eventually find them. Then there was real reporting about where the images came from, about the people who acquired them, about technology and about the victims. The story was quickly advanced.

But a phenomenon like this generates an enormous surplus of attention, much more than news can meet. In such a situation the internet’s craving for sex and humiliation is effectively infinite. This throws the Content industry into a frantic generative mode, initiating a full-spectrum stress test on par with a natural disaster or a war. This weekend was a consumption bonanza, a historic seller’s market for Content. This was no time for mere reports and analysis, no, that would never be enough. It was Take Time.

Take Time, the internet’s evolutionary defense against attention surplus, can be large or small, quick or long. A simple form of Take Time is the post-gaffe rush, which usually looks something like this, and occurs over a period of a few hours:

Hacked? EPA Office of Water tweets about Kardashian App

EPA tweet about Kim Kardashian confuses and entertains the Internet

Kim Kardashian App Takes Over Environmental Protection Agency’s Twitter

EPA Office of Water Is Caught Playing Kim Kardashian Mobile Game

‘That Happened’: The Head-Scratching Tweet From an Official EPA Account That Had Some People ‘Howling’ With Laughter

Kim Kardashian App Takes Over Government Agency’s Twitter Account

There were dozens more of these stories, all about a single tweet, from virtually every outlet that publishes news. And they served their purpose admirably: They left no attention on the table. They represent the “we should have something on this” news impulse stripped to its barest form, left unspoken and carried out as a matter of course. Endless minimalist Takes, obviously duplicative from the producer’s side but not necessarily from the other, all drawing energy from a single glowing unit of information.

A: If we acknowledge the Object, people will acknowledge us.

B: But the Object… it just… is….

A: You must harness it. You must find a way to turn your gaze… into… a Take…

The dimensions of Celebrity Nude Take Time stretched conventional Take models to the limit (but did not contradict them). The readings were off the charts. The levels were going crazy. This weekend, through a sleepy holiday, the Takes began to materialize. It was as if the Takes had been snatched directly from writers’ brains at the moment of conception by some unauthorized agent, and then posted, raw, onto the internet (this agent, however, seemed to target men). People who didn’t previously know they were Take generators, much less Celebrity Nude Take generators, found themselves typing, asserting, publishing, delivering fresh Takes in newsy glossolalia.

B, dazed: Did I… is that Take.. mine?

A: Yes…. yes. It is beautiful.

Take creators might have caught themselves saying things like “that, my friends, is why you never take nude photos of yourself,” or “just a reminder that, actually, sex is natural.” There were Takes on privacy and gender and consent and free speech issued with and without conviction. Everyone with an outlet — or, really, everyone, since the great democratization of Take distribution tools coaxed previously private Takes out from bars and dining rooms and into the harsh sunlight — found themselves under the spell of that horrible force that newspaper columnists feel every week, the one that eventually ruins every last one: the dreadful pull of a guaranteed audience.

A flood came, a wide river of nudes cut through the desert, and bustling cities of Takes rose along its banks. Where there was once nothing, there was now something.

Some Takes were good Takes, some were bad Takes. One common method for generating Takes is, and was, to push two existing Takes together and see if they stick. Some Takes were probably convincing and even vital, but in the fog of Take Time it became impossible to tell. Most takes, regardless of character, were rewarded as confused clicks, aimed at, and fueled by the existence of, nearby nonconsensual pornography, took the shape of any new volume they were given.

Clicks gathered in orderly lines to be gunned down or imprisoned by rolling Takes, mounted Takes, airborne Takes. They died confused and aroused, guilty and disgusted. There were conventional Takes, banned Takes, nuclear Takes. By Tuesday, few could even remember what they were scrolling for.

A Take Time of this magnitude spares only the silent and disengaged. Any new Take issued during the diminished but ongoing Celebrity Nude Take Time, including this Take, may still be construed and dismissed as a Celebrity Nude Take.

When Celebrity Nude Take Time is finally over, the best Takes will be excavated and christened Ideas. Ideas are Takes that can be referred to in the future without embarrassment, or which could be presented to their subjects without shame.

The rest will never be spoken of again.

★★★ Mist gathered on the windshield of the car and trickled up it in the darkness. The wipers swept it clear and it accumulated again. Orion and Sirius were up in the sky. Off to the left, down low, the sky was beginning to lighten. It grew brighter on one side of the air terminal, ever-lighter blue streaked with lilac. The lilac turned bright pink, then pale pink. Beyond the parking garage, swirls of orange and purple were forming. Out the water-streaked window of the shabby old regional jet, white edges started to show. The plane taxied past what looked like the previous night’s unused plane, then cleared the end of the building, and the sun itself came into view. It had an unpleasant brown tint to it. The engines pushed; the condensation streamed away; the plane rose. Pines receded in a blurry haze. The raw pink earth of a nascent subdivision passed below. Now the sky around was striated in Greek-restaurant blues and whites. Far away to the east were near-vertical cumulus formations, towers or sugarloaf mountains. The sun was clean white and warm against the cold unchecked blasts from the broken overhead air conditioner valve. A pebbly layer of clouds slid under the plane, and then a lumpy thick one, a landscape of unreal hills, cliffs, a river delta. And past that, in the far middle distance: a whole metropolis, a Manhattan of blocky phantom buildings crowded together, stretching on and on. It lasted till the plane banked and descended through blank gray, then on through layers on layers of clouds, a napoleon of light and shadow, till there was a glimpse of solid prosaic cul-de-sac landscape below. Then there were city roofs, rectangles shining within rectangles, and waters speckled with sailboats, and then as the silhouette of the plane crossed an apartment tower, the distant hazy outline of the actual Manhattan. From the ground, the only sign of the extravagances overhead was one ragged ivory mass, under mundane-looking cirrus. The deep freeze of the M60 bus opened out onto a hot stench of garbage. The morning streets were quiet. A white pigeon, flecked with a few spots of black, strolled on the bricks outside the apartment building. By midday more clouds had gathered. The two-year-old was a little disheveled in his swing on the playground. In the Gray’s Papaya it was stifling enough to raise a sweat. The clouds kept moving through the afternoon, piling up, turning lovely purples and golds by dinnertime, as the seven-year-old spotted rocket ships and passengers in their shapes. Out in the dusk, an airplane flying medium-high over Amsterdam Avenue clipped the bottom of one low cloud and for a moment its shape grew indistinct, while its lights solidified into a yellow fan. A moon just shy of the first quarter stood above the ballet theater as Eugene Onegin played on the screen on the opera house, to an audience completely filling the plaza. Body odor wafted from the seats. The seven-year-old stood to the side and ate gelato and listened to the music; the two-year-old ate gelato and looked at the screen and pointed out when an airplane passed.

by Samantha Maldonado

Colony 1209 is a luxury apartment complex located at 1209 Dekalb Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Located one block from a public library and a smattering of ninety-nine-cent shops, the five-story property’s geometric, shiny blue and gray façade, which makes it look like a fortress built by a first-grader in Minecraft, sticks out in a largely residential neighborhood packed with brick or vinyl-sided two- and three-family buildings. Through the windows, you can peer into the ultra-modern lobby, which is furnished with items like a plastic bubble chair hanging from the ceiling. It seems like a colony on the moon, but the idea behind it is less space jam than manifest destiny.

According to the website of aptsandlofts.com, the brokerage firm renting units at Colony 1209, only fourteen units remain available in Colony 1209. The rest are occupied by renters settling what the luxury building’s website calls “Brooklyn’s new frontier.” That “new frontier” is “bohemian Bushwick, a vibrant industrial setting reimagined through artful eyes.” The area — where there are just as many empty lots overgrown with weeds and buildings with boarded-up windows as there are tree-lined streets, Puerto Rican flags, and yards with colorful lawn ornaments — might unnerve some potential settlers if Colony 1209’s website didn’t reassure them, “we already surveyed the territory for you.” Once settlers arrive, they’ll “find a group of like-minded settlers, mixing the customs of their original homeland with those of one of NYC’s most historic neighborhoods to create art, community, and a new lifestyle.”

When I contacted Quinn, the “lifestyle public relations agency with global impact” behind the building’s marketing, to ask what kind of statement the branding was trying to make, the spokesperson declined to comment. But it’s clear that Colony 1209 celebrates America’s colonial past in order to enact a similar kind of displacement in the present: A colony-themed residential complex in a historically working-class neighborhood promises potential tenants that they’ll enjoy what they will inevitably “discover” in the neighborhood. The rhetoric of pioneering implies that Bushwick is a blank-slate territory, full of possibilities; thinking of the urban space as an empty frontier authorizes recent arrivals to reshape it to match their own particular vision of “authenticity.” The process of discovering the authentic, then, is not so much a process of seeking what exists in the neighborhood, but of tailoring the environment to their own preferences, like conquistadors.

In fact, the potential tenants’ “bohemian sensibilities,” disguised as shabby-chic authenticity, is what Colony 1209 sells to potential tenants. David Maundrell III, the founder of aptsandlofts.com, spoke to the New York Times in August 2013 about his plans to promote the development without offending the target audience’s style:

“I have to be authentic with this,” said Mr. Maundrell, who has employed a photographer living in Bushwick to capture the essence of the neighborhood in pictures to be used in advertising. The building’s home page will include the Twitter feed of Bushwick Daily, an in-the-know blog. “They don’t like corporate,” he said of his prospective tenants. “You can’t fool around.”

The website promises that “once you discover the burgeoning art scene, cutting-edge eateries, historic mansions, yoga studios, and parks, you’ll feel like a Bushwick native in no time.” These commodities and attractions, however, are not necessarily native to Bushwick. Sociologist Sharon Zukin of CUNY writes in her book, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, that “the tropes of ‘grit’ and ‘authenticity’ often lead gentrifiers to feel as though they are participating in the actual (re)production of the city, when in fact they are almost exclusively participating in modes of consumption that didn’t exist before an area gentrified.” Even if you buy into Colony 1209’s promise of being a Bushwhack pioneer, you’d be a little late; the territory is now far from virgin. The earliest gentrifiers were mostly white, somewhat affluent artists who flocked to Bushwick, a place where predominantly low-income Latino families made their homes, back in the nineties for the cheap rent and proximity to the subway. They homesteaded Bushwick and opened yoga studios and coffee shops years ago.

Gentrification is less a form of violence inflicted by individuals than a force generated by greater economic and political tides; the ruthless housing market in New York has made it particularly powerful in Bushwick. From July 2013 to July 2014, rents in Bushwick saw an average increase of 11.3 percent (the second-steepest hike in Brooklyn after Crown Heights, where it went up 17.5 percent on average). Even as these soaring rates drive out existing families, sections of Bushwick remain relatively cheap compared to other parts of Brooklyn: An artist paying nearly three thousand dollars per month for a Williamsburg studio can pack up and move to a studio in Bushwick for “only” two thousand dollars a month. So, while the pioneers of yore wore britches and bonnets, Colony’s 1209’s pioneers are most likely “entry-level Millennial workers with some disposable income,” like Mike, a twenty-two-year-old transplant who works in finance. He told Bushwick Daily’s Katarina Hybenova that he loved the building, which features amenities like a movie theater, arcade, and fitness center.

To colonize a place means to overtake it, to pillage its resources, to dehumanize its people, and to attempt to erase its past; Colony 1209’s revisionist history belittles this legacy of violence. A hierarchy of importance is established in such a situation: The people who already live in the neighborhood, matter less than newcomers from whom developers profit — or matter only in the sense that they add “diversity” and “local culture” to the area. And even if Colony 1209 is an exercise in self-aware irony, it’s at the expense of those who have been living in Bushwick for decades, and of those who can’t afford to live there. Irony here functions, at best, as just another exclusionary inside joke for the young and privileged.

Samantha Maldonado lives in Philadelphia, not Brooklyn.

Photos via Colony 1209 website

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, developer and editor Nozlee Samadzadeh tells us more about being assaulted by some jerk while exiting the subway station.

Just now a man grabbed me from behind by the strap of my totebag because, apparently, I exited the subway car before him.

— Nozlee S-H (@nzle) August 27, 2014

Nozlee! So what happened here?

I have a lovely subway commute — I really do. I take the L just a few stops and then transfer to a couple more stops on the NQR, which conveniently has staircase access directly from the L platform. Even on a bad day this never takes longer than 25 minutes!

Last Wednesday was normal: I got on in a specific subway car to most efficiently make my transfer and pulled out my magazine. The car was pretty empty but filled up at Bedford Ave, where the last person to enter was a white guy in his forties obviously ready to go on vacation — Guayabera shirt, salmon-colored shorts, overstuffed carry-on luggage. He was standing directly next to me in front of the car doors; I briefly imagined the $$ waterfront high-rise where he lived and the suits he probably normally wore when riding the L into Manhattan, then went back to what I was reading.

We pulled into Union Square and, ugh, it was one of those bad days: The NQR staircase was crowded up and down with other passengers. I was running a little late and needed to dash out, but as the doors opened Guayabera guy was taking up the entire doorway getting a hold of his luggage. I wiggled past him — I’m not going to say it was nice to maneuver past someone, but it certainly wasn’t a violent or sudden action — and walked toward the staircase.

I was trying to find a way up the stairs, which were crowded with people rushing in both directions, so it wasn’t until I was halfway up the first flight that I realized the yelling I heard was directed at me. “Don’t push past me, you bitch! Who the fuck do you think you are?”

Then, two steps from the staircase landing, I was yanked backwards: From lower on the staircase Guayabera guy had grabbed me by the straps of my totebag, his other hand grasping that overstuffed luggage, and was yelling at me for getting out of the subway car before him. I can’t stress enough that this was a crowded staircase at peak commute hours, but at that moment it was like all the faces faded away and everything stopped.

What happened next scared me almost more than the fact that a man who was physically stronger than me was trying to drag me down a staircase. (This is stupid, but what it reminded me of most was when Harry Potter’s wand fires a spell at Voldemort of its own accord in the beginning of Deathly Hallows.) Totally out of my own control, I turned, opened my mouth, and shouted in a scary, low, screamy roar, “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME. DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME.”

After that I flailed my arm out impotently toward the man’s face to, I don’t know, try to hit him. (You know how in a nightmare, you try to move but you can’t defend yourself? It felt exactly like that.) I wish I had registered the looks on the faces of the people around me, but the next thing I remember is being let go.

I ran up the stairs as the man continued to yell after me (“I’ll teach you to be late to work! Who do you think you are pushing me?”) and didn’t stop until I was at the middle of the NQR platform, where blessedly, a train arrived immediately. I wrote that tweet while hyperventilating and trembling in my seat; it seemed really important that I tell people about it immediately to cement the details in place.

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Let’s redefine “people” to be “that asshole in his linen shirt,” because most people are incredibly nice: So many friends tweeted back their support. I ran into a coworker while walking to my office, and when I burst into tears she gave me a hug and bought me a drink at the coffee shop, where the owner gave me a free brownie. One friend sent a bunch of goofy texts about men and their big ol’ penises that made me laugh; another friend with a law degree sent a long email explaining how Guayabera guy had likely committed a class B misdemeanor. Over lunch I went to yoga and cried during savasana, about which the instructor was very nice.

So what the fuck is wrong with that asshole in his linen shirt? I have no idea! As scary as it was to be grabbed by him, I truly don’t think that he intended to physically harm me once he got a hold of me. That said, it is in a sense equally horrifying that his reaction to being “slighted” was to find and scold the “perpetrator.” Imagine that! Imagine being so unable to let go of being “wronged” that you must “correct” the world. Life must be so exhausting for Guayabera guy and his brethren! AND I DON’T CARE.

Lesson learned (if any)?

A lesson I did NOT learn:
 — Be careful so as not to antagonize men.

A lesson I actually did learn:
 — Male rage is a deep well of repressed emotion.

A lesson I hope that dude learns:
 — Don’t touch people! Especially women!

In all seriousness, I’m glad that I now know my reaction to a situation like this is to ROAR instead of apologize or freeze. I feel really lucky that I came away from this experience with nothing worse than a sore throat from screaming at him. And I hope that sharing this story is helpful for someone out there — public altercations are scary and just because “nothing bad happened” in the end doesn’t mean your feelings of fear and anger and mistrust aren’t justified!

Just one more thing.

Um, exit the subway efficiently when carrying large items so you don’t hold up everyone around you?

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

Thumbnail photo by Stefan Georgi

Autumn will start off with a series of false beginnings and vague feelings of dislocation as summer lingers longer than everyone expects, even though summer here always easily extends into the end of September and sometimes beyond. When the days draw down and the sun starts to set earlier and earlier you will increasingly develop an overwhelming sense of opportunities missed and chances wasted as each event you had hoped to attend or goal you had your sights set on achieving becomes yet another adventure you opted out of under the empty promise that there was something better going on, and this endless buffet of poor choices will eventually lead to a fatigue so heavy that you will soon stop making choices at all, relying on the default option of doing nothing and hating yourself for it. Suddenly it will be winter, and all around you will fade into darkness and depression and bitter, pitiless wind. You will realize just how empty everything is. The grave beckons. The grave beckons. The grave beckons. Look for a Saints-Broncos Super Bowl.

[Photo via]

“Supposedly born on August 31, 1887–the year Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee–she has attributed her long life to eating well, snacking on chocolate, sleeping for days on end and never getting married, according to her family.”

Hmm:

This is an incredibly exciting time for all of us in media. The Washington Post is a crown jewel, exemplifying the finest in editorial quality and journalistic values. I am honored to follow four generations of Graham family leadership and thrilled with the opportunity to work with Jeff and the incredibly talented team at The Post.

Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of the Washington Post and Graham bloodline human, has “stepped down” from her role to make way for Fred Ryan, the founding President and CEO of Politico and former Reagan chief of staff. A year ago, after Jeff Bezos purchased the paper, Weymouth told readers: “Mr. Bezos has asked that I remain as Publisher and CEO of The Post. I am honored to continue in that role. Our mission does not change.” Today, Bezos made a subtle frame adjustment: “I am so grateful to Katharine for agreeing to stay on as Publisher this past year.”

“Crown jewel,” says Fred Ryan, whose partners in the Politico project were mostly former Washington Post employees (who are surely enjoying some complicated feelings this morning). Crown jewel. As in… a ceremonial item taken from its case on special occasions? A beautiful object symbolizing an excess of wealth and power? An American crown jewel? A Jeff Bezos crown jewel?