A Framework for the Public Sharing of Internet Posts
In response to recent conversations regarding the public/private status of Internet Posts, a proposal for a framework for the sharing of Internet Posts:
Attribution-Commercial-Derivs-Fear-Injury-Death
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your Internet Posts, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered; anyone can do anything to your Internet Post. It can be placed in any context, including contexts which the rights holder does not like. It may be used to either glorify or humiliate its creator. It may be used to intentionally inspire threats of assault or death against its creator. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of Tweeted materials, and to achieve maximum Engagement.
To indicate that an Internet Post has been released under the Commercial-Derivs-Fear-Injury-Death license, hashtag it #AttribComDeFeInDe, or attach no tag at all.
Attribution-Commercial-NoDerivs-MeantToSay
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as the Internet Post is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you, and also with reasonable context. Examples of such context: The ten Internet Posts prior to and succeeding the Internet Post in question; a brief biography that serves to illuminate authorial intent.
To indicate that an Internet Post has been released under the Attribution-Commercial-NoDerivs-MeantToSay license, hashtag it #AttribComNoDeMeToSa.
NoShare-NoPost-NonCon
This license is the most restrictive of our four main licenses, allowing others to receive your works only if they are intentionally and directionally shared with them. Share direction is to be indicated in the penumbras between tweets.
To indicate that an Internet Post has been released under the NoShare-NoPost-NonCon license, hashtag it #NoShaNoPoNonCon or just delete it.
Attribution-NonCommercial-FriendsOnly
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your Internet Posts non-commercially, but only if you know them or could conceivably become friendly with them, and only if they are willing to go to bat for you should another party take their propagation as permission to reproduce said Internet Posts in a less favorable context, because this license, like all of these licenses, is subordinate to Twitter’s terms of service agreement, as well as its functionally implied brutality, which serves a temperamental beast that desires only SPREAD and must eat context, all of it, to survive, and you will need all the help you can get.
To indicate that an Internet Post has been released under the Attribution-NonCommercial-FriendsOnly license, hashtag it #AttribNonComFriOn.
“About the Licenses” by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY.
The Brooklyn Prophesy
by Will Kenton
I never thought I’d shake Questlove’s hand.
It was at the book release party for Bradley Spinelli’s novel Killing Williamsburg at Trash, a bar in Williamsburg, where Questlove was DJing. Spinelli had simply walked up to Brooklyn’s most famous alternative hip-hop star at his own book signing and asked; Spinelli mentioned that his novel was launching on World Suicide Prevention Day, and as Questlove scribbled his thousandth autograph of the day, Spinelli listed some of the great pop musicians who had committed suicide. Questlove rattled off some more as the people standing in line shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and rolled their eyes. Half an hour later, Questlove gave Spinelli his number and told him he looked forward to the gig.
Killing Williamsburg is Spinelli’s first published novel. Though it was released last year, it should have arrived much earlier. He finished the first draft in four months, and in early 2001, Emily Marcus, daughter of legendary punk journalist Greil Marcus, agreed to represent the book — a seemingly appropriate choice for Killing Williamsburg’s post-apocalyptic, counter-culture subject matter. Unfortunately, after 9/11, the market for gruesome disaster thrillers set in New York dried up. Ms. Marcus moved to California (as far as I know), and Spinelli moved on to other projects. Eleven years later, he decided the time was right to publish it.
As the decade passed, latent beauties blossomed in Killing Williamsburg. Its bricolage of genre, the narrator’s callow morbidity, and its homegrown feel turn out to be prescient forecasts of 21st-century taste. The story is an action thriller, an apocalyptic dystopia that predicts our current obsession with zombies. At its core, it is about a young, white, middle-class man’s search for authenticity in a phony world — a Catcher in the Rye for the turn of the millennium. Benson Lee, the novel’s protagonist, and his friends are all hipsters from a time before the label carried its contemporary currency. Today, hipsters are the most discussed, studied, exalted and reviled creature of the early 21st century. But at the end of 1999, the Gen X’ers who moved from Anywhere Else, USA to New York and San Francisco were just kids in baseball caps and goatees.
At the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to Benson and his girlfriend, Olive, an actress who is ready to try her luck on a more visible stage. They get an apartment in May of 1999, “after a few weeks of couch surfing, frenetic apartment hunting [and] a thirteen-hundred-dollar broker fee … in the hip, hopping, happening Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.” Their place, a newly renovated three-story structure behind an older, street-facing apartment building near the Bedford L stop, looks onto a courtyard protected from the street, where the new residents “cocktail it up” and instantly connect “like the first week of college.”
Benson describes the courtyard crew as a peculiar group of immigrants: “not Eastern Europeans or Puerto Ricans, but cool kids and hipsters migrating to the cultural nexus of the world from Lansing, Denver, Austin [and] Des Moines.” The older building, inhabited by the “regular” residents of Williamsburg, the Eastern Europeans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who have been living in the neighborhood for two and three generations, is the gateway to the street where “ancient Polish ladies toothlessly” gum take-out plates of macs and cheese and, a few blocks south, where Puerto Ricans and Dominicans play dominoes on the sidewalk, kids on BMX bikes swarm like gnats in summer, and women chatter in “quick, cricket-like Spanish.”
Four years ago, in a retrospective essay, Mark Greif provided a helpful working definition for the kinds of people who populate Killing Williamsburg:
… that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual — the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student — who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.
In this rendering, the 21st-century hipster takes an oppositional stance to an American culture understood as ethnically white, religiously protestant and socially conservative, a latter-day petite bourgeoisie, but contorted by an acute awareness of, and by misapprehensions about, race, heritage, and authenticity.
Benson and his urban tribe of Middle American transplants aren’t all that different from Sal Paradise and Holden Caulfield, both archetypal hipsters who embody a peculiarly American strain of Romanticism rooted in race. The Byronic rebels-without-causes of the fifties and sixties are undoubtedly heroes to Benson, but Benson’s context is new; his hipsterdom differs from Kerouac’s and Salinger’s because unlike theirs, Benson’s identification with race isn’t liberating or uplifting, it’s suffocating. His search for authenticity, roots — realness — is complicated by the foreknowledge that he can never be as real as the people around him.
In a scene at the beginning of the book’s second section, “The Law of the Land,” Benson visits a diner called “the Luncheonette”: “an old-school joint, with magazine pictures of Frank Sinatra stuck on the wall next to snapshots of Neil [the owner and short-order cook] holding his various grandkids. It’s one of those places widely rumored to be a low-level Mafia establishment,” says Benson. As he sits by himself watching his cigarette smoke make “art-nouveau curlicues,” he eavesdrops on a conversation between Neil and his old, Italian-American pals who berate Neil for becoming a Yankees fan — in 1958.
“Being around men, especially older men, I get the feeling that I belong to a heritage, a kind of buried tradition, and that even my generation’s attempt to overthrow the past can never quite wash away the coffee-stained teeth and nicotine fingers that old men have cemented into the fabric of the universe,” Benson says. He’s a newcomer, a young man, a WASP, an aesthete and an intellectual; he sees and admires the men whose “coffee-stained teeth and nicotine fingers” speak of habits and traditions rooted in an ethnicity he has lost.
Benson asks Neil what he thinks about “all these young kids moving into the neighborhood.” Neil’s answer is non-committal and anodyne: “I Like it. Nice having you kids here.”
Benson hates “gentrifiers,” whom, at least initially, he identifies as the beneficiaries of the dot-com bubble, versions of the computer geek who “got his lunch money stolen in elementary school, got beat up all through high school, never went to college but stayed home jacking off to porno mags,” but who “launched an internet start-up and is now a millionaire hiring thousand-dollar-a-night hookers and thinking about buying something nice, like the Bahamas.” Benson paints the stereotype with a broad brush, but it’s a stereotype with legs. It speaks of unearned privilege, and it whispers that this privilege is rooted in white, technophile masculinity.
“I wish all the yuppies would just kill themselves off,” Benson tells his friend Phil, a PhD student at NYU, inspired by yours truly. Later in the novel, Olive asks Benson, “when are you going to realize that yuppies were not put on the planet as the scapegoat for everything you hate?” to which he replies, “I just can’t deal with gentrification.” Those people, the nouveau riche raising Williamsburg rents in 1999, are the enemy.
When, at the L Café, Benson complains to Olive about newcomers to The ‘Burg from Manhattan, a forty-something man “hunched over an espresso in a baseball cap” butts into the conversation to berate them on the uselessness of the word gentrification: “You think the Canarsie were happy when when they finally realized the Dutch weren’t going away? … and if you spoke Dutch you’d be bitching about the English.”
The old man, anticipating Jake Dobkin’s controversial post on gentrification at Gothamist by more than a decade, continues an expository history lesson through waves of German, Scandinavian and Irish immigrants who were displaced by Jews and Italians, who were in turn displaced by southern American blacks, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. “Gentrification is just the latest term. People in Williamsburg have always been pissed when strangers come in and start changing the demographics. Besides, you’re white, you’re young… you’re part of the problem.”
The scene is late summer 1999. Benson, Olive and a gay couple from the courtyard, Ronnie and Maciej, drive out to Coney Island to eat corn dogs and drink Budweisers, ogle beach bathers and take in the freak show. “I feel at home among my fellow poor, my friends and neighbors in this city of big dreams and high rollers, all the Puerto Rican families swimming in the ocean and laughing and screaming and running at each other,” Benson says. But Benson doesn’t belong — can’t belong — to the Puerto Ricans on the beach or the outcasts at the freakshow because he is and cannot avoid being white — not in terms of skin color per se, but in terms of his repressed identification with the computer geeks and gentrifiers, the soulless scientists and unconsciously privileged whom he hates.
“There was,” Benson explains, “a darker shadow falling over us,” that summer, “a shadow not of New York, not of King Kong’s body falling, riddled with bullets” but “a shadow of uncertainty” that he and his crew of new arrivals feel “in our carrot juice and bagels, in our 3:55 final shot and four-in-the-morning slice, in the Village Voice ink sticking to our fingers, in our American Spirits.” The uncanny malaise on the street grows as winter approaches. Much of the carnage takes place underground on the subway, but suicides become more frequent and visible: A guy tries to inhale a fire extinguisher at The Stinger club; the chef at Oznot’s Dish douses himself with oil and self-immolates; and Benson’s favorite bartender pours him a shot of whiskey and then intentionally overdoses on heroin behind the bar.
On Y2K Eve, Benson and Olive attend a party in Williamsburg that ends abruptly before midnight as a random guest smashes the punchbowl and commences “shredding herself.” The pair flees Brooklyn for a friend’s apartment in the West Village. After a sentimental scene on the roof where the party toasts the new year and drops the champagne glasses over the roof’s edge, the foursome head back to Benson’s Brooklyn apartment where they celebrate the new millennium with an old-fashioned Roman orgy.
Despite being unmoved by the occasional, ghastly suicides at the end of the old century, Benson begins to feel discomfited in the new year as the suicide bug spreads through his casual acquaintances and rubs up against his tribe: Smith, the best pool shot in Williamsburg, eats a pistol in Pete’s Candy Store; Benson’s best drinking buddy Hoagy, a painter, hangs himself in his studio; and Olive, overcome by revulsion and mourning for the gruesome and increasingly public attempts at self-murder that have become hourly occurrences, moves back to California.
At the beginning of the novel, Benson’s romantic side seeks satisfaction in erotic love. But by the middle of the story he has given up on love in a spectacularly nihilistic monologue that is one of the finest passages in the novel. “You want to fall,” he says, “you want to be taken aback by a moment that catches you unawares, an extra wink from someone pouring coffee, an unsolicited compliment that leads to a date, a seduction, an intrigue, a gravitational force that pulls you in and makes mincemeat out of you.” This force, call it fate or history, takes away your free will, and leaves you satisfied with submission.
Brooklyn’s fabled reputation for violence also exerts a powerful erotic force on Benson’s imagination: “I remember the warnings from people — friends, strangers — when I announced I was moving here, words of caution about how dangerous New York really is, and how I secretly fantasized about getting mugged or beat up in a bad neighborhood, caught on the business end of a Saturday night special.” For Benson, pain heightens the realness of experience, and pain, in turn, makes you real. Just like the old men in Neil’s diner who brag about how hard it was when they were coming up, suffering confers bragging rights.
As Benson works through the guilt of his various rape fantasies, he wrestles with its contradictions, tacitly accusing himself of hypocrisy. “You think your contradictions make you interesting, complex, fascinating in a world populated by bland character actors forever typecast,” he says to the reader and himself. At bottom a sensitive intellectual, he finally concludes the only truly authentic form of experience is pain, which cannot be rationalized and cannot be faked. An understanding dawns on him as his friends off themselves left and right: no amount of suffering can erase his inborn, inherited guilt — the guilt of privilege.
At the halfway mark of the novel, his monologue, Benson begins to understand the logic of suicide. He dimly perceives that self-murder isn’t just weakness but a sanctifying ritual. He worries, however, that he’s too much of a coward to pull the trigger: “I know I can’t be special. I know I won’t be famous. And I know I can’t kill myself — I’m too vain for that — but I know I’ll be dead tomorrow. I think that’s what tomorrow really is: death.” Unable to punish himself for a crime he doesn’t yet understand, he resorts to the next available option: inflicting pain on others.
Just before the suicide epidemic destroys his self-absorbed world, Benson goes on a bender. Two of his partners commit suicide immediately after sex, leading Benson to wonder if he is responsible for the misery and carnage convulsing the city. Seeking answers, Benson goes back to the rooftop in the West Village where he and his tribe celebrated the beginning of the new year, only to see his best friend in New York do a swan dive to the pavement six stories below.
Benson eventually realizes that he has been spared by the plague, which means he and the other survivors are responsible for cleaning up the city. As Spring 2000 turns to summer, all of New York becomes a charnel house. Corpses rot by the thousands in apartment buildings, office towers and on the street. Benson finds another crew, the mournful mirror image of his original urban tribe, who scour the boroughs looking for dead bodies. Benson takes his turn as team leader, surveying the apocalypse and taking direct action (usually a bullet to the brain) when another person comes down with “the bug.”
In the end, the Feds show up with FEMA trucks, and the rest of the world starts to pay attention to what insiders have known for months: New York was ground zero for the real apocalypse, the real Y2K that wasn’t and couldn’t be foreseen.
The book ends with a paean to the creative chaos of the city: “Let the future unfold however it will. Let the universe expand to its greatest desires and maintain its own ignorance of destiny. Let the symmetry of perception match the spontaneity of motion. Let the chaos engulf itself, Let the people dance, the hyenas laugh, the ants labor. Let the sky be blue, the roots gnarled. Let the city override the nightmare, and watch nature take her toll on the soul of the world.” The last line of the book repeats one line of that exhortation: “Let the sky be blue.”
In the book, one of Phil’s roommates commits suicide and the other moves back to his home in Germany. In real life, the former became a Silicon Valley pro (of the variety Benson hates) and the other died of leukemia shortly after 9/11. In 1999, I would have never guessed I would be shaking hands with Questlove, but there I was in Trash doing just that; I never would have guessed Questlove would be writing essays for New York magazine, fifteen years later, announcing Hip Hop’s death by universalization. In 1999, I never would have guessed that the World Trade Center towers would be destroyed — or that fancy, residential towers so expensive that only a new, international leisure class could afford them would rise on the Brooklyn side of the East River.
In 2014 the logic of Killing Williamsburg turns out to be correct. Spinelli has written the first visionary neo-Romantic novel of the 21st century. The world, it suggests, will end not because we aren’t clever enough to solve our carbon emission and resource depletion problems, but because fourteen years after we hit the reset button on the 20th century, in the midst of social and political problems both clear and acknowledged, we remain incapable of finding consonance.
Will Kenton is a writer, editor and teacher. His short play Lilith was recently selected for inclusion in the Red Bull Theater’s Revelation Readings short play festival. He received a PhD from NYU in British and American literature.
Photo by lauren
Noodles Manufactured
A thing that may disappoint you (or not, idk): Like your clothes, electronics, mass-produced groceries, culture, and cigarettes, while the variety appears to be infinite, the noodles at the vast majority of high-end ramen joints, from Momofuku to Ivan Ramen, all come from the same place.
Queen Steps Into Frame Of Photograph Unbeknownst To Subjects Of Said Photograph, Smiles To Indicate...
Queen Steps Into Frame Of Photograph Unbeknownst To Subjects Of Said Photograph, Smiles To Indicate Knowledge That Her Action Constitutes A Familiar Manner Of Modern Mischief
Two Australian Commonwealth Games hockey players were left stunned when the most famous royal in the world appeared smiling in the background of their picture.
That led to a series of other postings on social networks with England’s European and Commonwealth 110m hurdles champion Andy Turner, 33, and another Australia hockey player, Anna Flanagan, 22, uploading similar images.
Balance of Power
The proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, announced in February, has set off a wave of activity in the media industry, with AT&T; Inc. announcing a $48.5 billion deal for DirecTV that would rival Comcast’s heft in the cable and satellite business. One rationale for the deals is that they would give the cable and satellite groups more leverage in negotiations with entertainment companies and help contain rising programming costs.
In turn, the $80 billion offer that 21st Century Fox made for Time Warner, which was disclosed last week, would restore some leverage to the entertainment groups.
Why worry about the endless series of mergers, consolidations, and acquisitions in media and technology, or the ongoing dominance of vast corporate entities with all the gravity of a black hole? It’ll all work out.
All the New Yorker Story Roundups You Should Read While the Stories Are Still Unlocked, As Well As...
All the New Yorker Story Roundups You Should Read While the Stories Are Still Unlocked, As Well As All the New Yorker Stories They Link To
Featured Collection: Profiles, New Yorker
“Isadora,” January 10, 1927
“Secrets of the Magus,” April 5, 1993
“Covering the Cops,” February 17, 1986
“Two Heads,” February 12, 2007
“The Man Who Walks on Air,” April 5, 1999
“Delta Nights,” June 5, 2000
Love Stories, by Deborah Treisman, New Yorker
“What Is Remembered,” Alice Munro, February 19, 2001
“The Love of My Life,” T. C. Boyle, March 6, 2000
“Reverting to a Wild State,” Justin Torres, August 1, 2011
“Jon,” George Saunders, January 27, 2013
“The Surrogate,” Tessa Hadley, September 15, 2003
“Clara,” Roberto Bolaño, August 4, 2008
New York City in the New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman and Erin Overbey, New Yorker
John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight”
Adam Gopnik’s “Rikers High”
Nick Paumgarten’s “Up and Then Down”
Jane Kramer’s “Whose Art Is It?”
Joseph Mitchell’s “The Old House at Home”
The New Yorker Opened Its Archive — Here’s Where To Start, by the Digg Staff
Regrets Only by Louis Menand
A Pickpocket’s Tale by Adam Green
The Apostate by Lawrence Wright
Life At The Top by Adam Higginbotham
Being A Times Square Elmo by Jonathan Blitzer
An S.O.S. In A Saks Bag by Emily Greenhouse
The Chameleon by David Grann
14 Fantastic Stories From the New Yorker Archive You Should Read This Summer by Isaac Fitzgerald, BuzzFeeᴅ
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” by Nathan Englander
15 Essential Music Longreads From The New Yorker, by Reggie Ugwu, BuzzFeeᴅ
Read These 18 New Yorker Business Stories While You Still Can, by Matthew Zeitlin, BuzzFeeᴅ
The Best New Yorker Articles on Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes (and a Few from Places Journal), by The Editors, Places Journal
Get Out of Town, by Nicholas Lemann
The Island in the Wind, by Elizabeth Kolbert
A Sense of Place, by Calvin Tomkins
The Civilization Kit, by Emily Eakin
Auto Correct, by Burkhard Bilger
Hidden City, by Ian Frazier
Life at the Top, by Adam Higginbotham
The Psychology of Space, by David Owen
A Life-Altering Sock Drawer, by Deborah Copaken Kogan
High Rise, by Ian Parker
Green Giant, by Evan Osnos
Ponzi State, by George Packer
Up and Then Down, by Nick Paumgarten
Here are the 15 best short stories you can read at the ‘New Yorker’, by Jacob Shamsian, Entertainment Weekly
Every free music article you should read from The New Yorker’s unlocked archives, by Alex Kapelman, KBIA Mid-Missouri Public Radio
“Delta Nights” By Bill Buford, June 5, 2000.
“Clara” by Roberto Bolaño, August 4, 2008
“The Apostate” By Lawrence Wright, August 19, 2009
“Cheap Words” By George Packer, February 17, 2014
“Parallel Play” By Tim Page, August 20, 2007
“The Mask of Doom” By Ta-Nehisi Coates, September 21, 2009
“The Fun Stuff” By James Wood, November 29, 2010
“Living-Room Leopards” By Ariel Levy, May 6, 2013
“The Story of a Suicide” By Ian Parker, February 6, 2012
“Master of Play” By Nick Paumgarten, December 20, 2010
“Symbol of All We Possess” By Lillian Ross, October 22, 1949
“Some Notes On Attunement” By An Unlisted Author, But Listener Andrea Pointed Out That It’s Zadie Smith, December 17, 2012
7 New Yorker Tech Stories That You Can Now Read For Free, by Alissa Walker, Gizmodo
Houston, in the New Yorker’s archives, by Lisa Gray, Houston Chronicle
“The Emperor of Ice: How a bag of supermarket ice cubes launched a plan to dominate an industry” by Ian Parker, 2001
“Homeboy: The world of Lyle Lovett” by Alec Wilkinson, 2004
“Houston’s former favorite first family” by Mimi Swartz, 2008
“The mitigator: A new way of looking at the death penalty” by Jeffrey Toobin, 2011
“Extreme makeover: The story behind the story of Lawrence v. Texas” by Dahlia Lithwick, 2012
“A-Rod, the Astros and Austerity” by Ian Crouch, 2013
Pocket Roundup: The Best of The New Yorker, by Sim, Pocket
The Curse of Reading and Forgetting, Ian Crouch May 22, 2013
We Need Computers That Fix Our Brains, Not Break Them, Tim Wu September 9, 2013
While the New Yorker archives are free, here are the sports stories you should read, by Matt Bonesteel, Washington Post
“The Boys: What Mike and the Mad Dog talk about when they talk about sports,” by Nick Paumgarten, Aug. 30, 2004
“Monday Night Lights: How Jon Gruden became America’s football coach,” by Kelefa Sanneh, Dec. 12, 2011
“American Hunger: As an ambitious, searching young man, Cassius Clay invented himself, and became the most original and magnetic athlete of the century — Muhammad Ali,” by David Remnick, Oct. 12, 1998
“The Outcast: Conversations with O.J. Simpson,” July 9, 2011
“King of the South: How Paul Finebaum became Alabama’s biggest booster,” by Reeves Wiedeman, Dec. 10, 2012
Five great tech stories from the New Yorker’s recently opened archive, by Andrea Petersen, Washington Post
“Remember This?,” May 28th, 2007
“The Face of Facebook,” Sept. 20th, 2010
“Requiem for a Dream,” March 11th, 2013
“State Secrets,” April 24th, 2008
“The Crypto-Currency,” Oct. 10th, 2011
10 New Yorker Food Stories You Should Read Now That They Dropped Their Paywall, by Matt Rodbard, Food Republic
Here Are The New Yorker’s Best Now-Free Stories About Boston, by Eric Levenson, Boston Globe
“The Outsiders,” by Susan Orlean
“Getting In: The Social Logic of Ivy League Admissions” by Malcolm Gladwell
“Transaction Man: Mormonism, Private Equity, and the Making of a Candidate,” by Nicholas Lemann
“Boston, From One Citizen of the World Who Calls Himself a Runner,” by Haruki Murakami
“Going the Distance: On and Off the Road with Barack Obama,” by David Remnick
The New Yorker Stories You Should Read Before the Paywall Goes Up, by Eliza Berman and Slate Staff, Slate
“Hellhole,” March 30, 2009
“Eight Days,” Sept. 21, 2009
“The Empty Chamber,” Aug. 9, 2010
“Getting Bin Laden,” Aug. 8, 2011
“Netherland,” Dec. 10, 2012
“Taken,” Aug. 12, 2013
“Master of Play,” Dec. 20, 2010
“The Apostate,” Feb. 14, 2011
“How To Be Good,” Sept. 5, 2011
“Dr. Don,” Sept. 26, 2011
“You Belong With Me,” Oct. 10, 2011
“The Yankee Commandante,” May 28, 2012
“Trial By Fire,” Sept. 7, 2009
“The Pink Panthers,” April 12, 2010
“Iphegenia in Forest Hills,” May 3, 2010
“The Throwaways,” Sept. 3, 2012
“A Loaded Gun,” Feb. 11, 2013
“Swingers,” July 30, 2007
“The Itch,” June 30, 2008
“The Sixth Extinction?,” May 25, 2009
“God Knows Where I Am,” May 30, 2011
“The Running Novelist,” June 9, 2008
“Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” Nov. 18, 2013
“The Unmothered,” May 9, 2014.
“Noble Savages,” Feb. 27, 2012
“Danse Macabre,” March 18, 2013
“Home Fires,” April 7, 2014.
The New Yorker’s archives are free — here’s a guide to some of its best gaming stories, by Brian Crecente, Polygon
“On video games and storytelling: an interview with Tom Bissell”
12 New Yorker education articles to read while the archives are free, by Libby Nelson, Vox
Class Warrior | Carlo Rotella on Arne Duncan, February 2010
Public Defender | David Denby on Diane Ravitch, November 2012
The Instigator | Douglas McGray on Steve Barr, May 2009
Expectations | Katharine Boo, January 2007
The Rubber Room | Steven Brill, August 2009
Wrong Answer | Rachel Aviv, July 2014
Schooled | Dale Russakoff, May 2014
Live and Learn | Louis Menand, June 2011
The Order of Things | Malcolm Gladwell, February 2011
The Disruption Machine | Jill Lepore, June 2014
Get Rich U. | Ken Auletta, April 2012
God and Country | Hanna Rosin, 2005
10 New Yorker religion articles to read while the archives are free, by Brandon Ambrosino, Vox
“The New Yorker just unlocked its archive. Here’s why that’s good for golfers,” by Luke Kerr-Dineen, Golf Digest
“Fore!,” by Larry David
“The Ghost Course,” by David Owen
“Rip Van Golfer,” by John McPhee
“The Yips,” by David Owen
“Linksland and Bottle,” by John McPhee
“Branded a Cheat,” by James Surowiecki
The New Yorker Is Temporarily Making All Of Its Archives Free; Here Are 8 Stories You Should Read, by Harrison Jacobs, Business Insider
“Eichmann In Jerusalem — I” by Hannah Arendt, Feb. 16, 1963
“Hiroshima” by John Hersey, Aug. 31, 1946
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson, June 16, 1962
“Torture At Abu Ghraib,” Seymour Hersh, May 10, 2004
“After The Genocide,” Philip Gourevitch, Dec. 18, 1995
“American Hunger,” David Remnick, Oct. 12, 1998
“The Predator War,” Jane Mayer, Oct. 26, 2009
“The Duke In His Domain,” Truman Capote, Nov. 9, 1957
“Netherland” (December 2012)
“Birthright” (November 2011)
“The Symbol of All We Possess” (October 1949)
“Thanksgiving in Mongolia” (November 2013)
“Lessons From Late Night” (March 2011)
“Eichmann in Jerusalem” (February 1963)
“Outsource Yourself” (January 2013)
“Covert Operations” (August 2010)
“Last Tango in Paris” (October 1972)
“Difficult Women” (June 2014)
“A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (October 1983)
“The Climate of Man” (April 2005).
“Figures in a Mall” (February 1994)
“Everywoman.com” (February 2000)
“Rock, Etc.” (September 1969)
“You Belong With Me” (October 2011)
“Missing Woman” (September 2009)
“The Fashionable Mind” (March 1978)
“O Pioneer Woman!” (May 2011)
The Single Greatest New Yorker Story of All Time by Elon Green, Twitter
Photo by Tom Small
Additional curaggregation by John Herrman and Noah Kulwin
New York City, July 22, 2014
★★★★ It was still cool in the morning, though with an undercurrent of dread at where the humidity might be taking things. At the far end of the West Fourth basketball court, a lone figure shot free throws. The oncoming sun, clearing the buildings, found haze on the air and greenish dust on the parked cars. A pale scrap of a butterfly, with black-tipped wings, bobbed out over the sidewalk and into a fenced-off bed of weeds. Cornering out of the shade of Broadway into Houston was like stepping into a sluggish river and beginning to wade upstream. But the struggle passed. Midday approached and the sky showed brown around the edges, but it was still comfortable up on the roof. Down on the streets at lunchtime, the shade continued to offer refuge. The Ukrainian church and the firehouse beside it had their doors open, offering a glimpse of the showpieces in their high dim interiors. Elderly shoppers paused to marvel at a white Mustang with red-and-white seats, parked with its top down. On through the afternoon, whenever the heat threatened, clouds kept intervening.
Ask Polly: I Want to Get Laid But I'm Afraid of Oppressing Women
Dear Polly,
First of all, let me assure you, I feel like a huge asshole just for asking this, but I’ve been chewing on this question on and off for more than a year without any real resolution, so I thought I’d turn to you. Here’s the deal: I’m wondering whether I’m abusing feminist ideology in order to justify a natural shyness around women and, if so, whether you could find me a new narrative that would help me feel less bad about acknowledging and acting on attractions.
I’ve always been seriously shy about any aspect of dating, sex, hooking up, whatever. It’s not that I have trouble interacting with women — indeed, my female friends greatly outnumber my male friends. I have no problem making friends with women and, in general, I feel I am generally more comfortable in mostly female environments (this probably came from being thirteen and being constantly made fun of by the other boys in my class, as well as growing up with two older sisters). While I’d hesitate to call myself a feminist, mainly due to my concerns about being appropriative, I would say that I have an enduring interest in gender politics that I do my best to express through my actions.
This interest began to manifest after unrequited crush no. 4,523, around my mid-twenties (I’m in early thirties now) when I began to wonder whether the reason I was so unhappy about my lack of meaningful romantic relationships was because of my attitudes towards women. It has, I believe, helped a lot internally: by working to change a lot of my problematic behaviors and mindsets, I’m not nearly as hung up about sex and relationships as I used to be, and overall I do feel like I approach thoughts about women in a much more healthy way than I used to, helping me get out from being the seething ball of bitterness and anxiety that I was when I was younger.
Despite this, however, dating still fills me with dread, and even though I no longer look at my lack of a love life as some sort of scathing indictment of who I am as a human being, I’ll admit that I’m still kind of lonely and would like a relationship, or at the very least to get laid more than once or twice a year. However, I seem to not want to do anything about it because I can’t help but think that everything that could be done to do so upholds some unhealthy societal norm.
So, for example, when my friends comment that a cute woman has been flirting heavily with me all night, and tell me to go for it, I say that there’s no way to tell what she’s really thinking and that the last thing any woman needs is to feel like she can’t communicate the way she wants to without some entitled creep getting entirely the wrong idea, and that some people are just naturally flirty and we shouldn’t assume that that’s some sort of indicator for desire, and that if she REALLY liked me that way she would have made it much more clear, and I don’t want to assume that any display of friendliness is automatically some attempt to get something going, because that’s a real problem in the way men and women interact nowadays. And then I bring up that she has a boyfriend, and I should respect her choice and it’s creepy to hit on someone in a relationship as if I know more about what she wants than she does. And my friends go, maybe she wants a new guy, to which I say, “If that were the case then she can say it and make things clear and unambiguous because I’m not going to try and override a decision she made about her own life.” This, incidentally, is the point where one of my friends says, “You’re letting your feminism get in the way of your game,” which makes me think but, at the same time, I think it would be safer to err on the side of not doing anything to avoid contributing to a toxic environment.
Or, talking to my one sister about a very attractive woman at one of my group activities, she said why not ask her out, and I said that she probably didn’t join the group to meet guys and I shouldn’t create an atmosphere where she has to worry about being hit on constantly. Besides, I just *know* she doesn’t think of me that way (I mean I don’t really know for certain, but I generally make the assumption that women aren’t interested in me that way, so why bother with someone I think isn’t interested?). So I don’t want to make her uncomfortable or anything. Or when my sister’s husband asked whether I ever talk to attractive people I see on the subway, and I respond that that’s the LAST place anyone wants to talk to a stranger and that women are harassed all the time by people who can’t take a hint and I don’t want to be one of them because nine times out of ten everyone on a subway, men and women, just want to be left the fuck alone.
Or, last week, I was hanging out with two friends of mine, both female, and one of them began giving me some sort of vibe that involved sitting MUCH closer than necessary, initiating much more physical contact than she had ever before, and also briefly and purposefully stroking my fingers under the blanket. When the other friend left for a bit to walk her dogs, she looked up at me and said she couldn’t concentrate on the movie, and I kind of just froze and said that I thought we should watch (stupid, stupid, stupid) and she harumphed and moved across the couch and bundled up her blanket and crossed her arms and acted weird to me the rest of the night. But I’ve known her for two years and she never had given me any indication that she was interested in the past, and neither of us were at all sober and I don’t want to be predatory and take advantage of someone, and she shouldn’t have to be concerned that I would try, she should be able to have fun and get fucked up with guy without having to worry that he’ll try to fuck her. And how do I know that what I perceived as flirty behavior isn’t just all in my head and she didn’t mean anything by it? Because that happens, not just to me but to people everywhere. But her reaction made me think I fucked up somehow, and I ALSO don’t want her to think I was necessarily rejecting her because she’s WAY cute and awesome and smart and principled and if I’d known I was good to go I totally would have gone for it, but I felt the situation was too ambiguous and now I’m worried I made her feel unattractive in that moment, which I know from experience is a terrible thing to feel.
So, things like that. Not helping matters is that the times when I have thought I was good to go, it turns out I had miscalculated, which made me feel awkward and probably made her feel that way too, and so I’m just crappy at trusting my instincts when they’re telling me “say you want to kiss her!” because I’ve been wrong so often in the past and it’s felt terrible and I don’t want to feel that way.
And so I’m wondering whether all those fancy explanations that I wrap up with deep political meaning are just excuses to justify me not pursuing the relationships I want, like the problems I’ve always had with sex and dating just went to grad school and came back with an MA in women’s studies and philosophy but, at heart, is still the exact same problem. It’s the same fear — that there’s something fundamentally unlovable about me and if I ever express a desire for someone in any way, they won’t like me anymore because how could I even SUGGEST such a thing — except dressed in big words and given some sort of political justification. Like, it’s not that I’m shy and need to learn to take some risks, it’s that I’m not going to impose myself on someone who just wants to be left alone and live her life and have male friends who don’t try to hit on her, because I refuse to be That Guy. They’re different mindsets, but it’s the same result: I don’t bring up the topic of possibly dating people I’m attracted to and decide it’s not that bad having a new friend, because, obviously, awesome people don’t stop being awesome just because they’re not sleeping with me, and I want to have awesome people in my life.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is that my mindset could be making this assumption of sexlessness on the part of women, as if they don’t also have bodies that get horny as well, but I’m not sure if that’s really reflective of my thoughts because I acknowledge that women also want to have sex, I just have a very difficult time thinking they want sex with me. And then I’ve been thinking that it’s unfair to expect women to take on all of the risk in romantic interaction by wanting them to make the first move and not responding to anything unless they make their desire abundantly clear, because as a man who was raised with the expectation that I’m the one supposed to do all the asking, that fucking sucks and why do I want to burden women with having to do that. But, on the other hand, it sounds like WAY too convenient an excuse and could just be my mind trying to rationalize the predatory hunter/prey model that has caused so many problems in the first place! We must always police ourselves for bad thoughts, I believe, for the oppressor within can be far more tenacious than the oppressor without, and I wonder whether this is just the inner enemy speaking.
So you can see I’ve been having a rough time and possibly missing opportunities to find what I want in other people. It’s only recently, though, that I’ve started wondering whether I’m hurting other people by doing this, people who may have actually wanted me but I refused to respond because I didn’t think things were clear enough and I didn’t want to risk making them feel shitty, which in turn could be making them feel shitty (admittedly, it’s the final example that got me wondering this).
Am I overthinking all this? How do you both pursue the relationships you want while still staying true to ideals of gender equality? How can you be more comfortable expressing what you want while not going overboard and becoming an entitled creep? And, finally, should I have kissed that girl in the last example?
Sincerely,
Just a Dude
Dear Just a Dude,
Dude. There’s this movie, “Legends of the Fall,” that’s ostensibly about three brothers, all in love with the same woman (Julia Ormond). But really, the movie is a soft porn bodice-ripper for ladies who saw Brad Pitt in that one small role in “Thelma and Louise” and decided that he was tasty man candy. If that sounds hard to believe, go watch “Thelma and Louise” (Again. You’re a male feminist, so I know you’ve fucking seen it.) and you’ll understand why Pitt had a certain undiscovered-fuck-toy appeal back then. He had this weird country-cousin allure that made him exactly the sort of squeaky plaything you wanted to ferret away to a secret corner of the house and chew to tiny little bits.
I saw “Legends of the Fall” in a crowded theater on opening night because my Irish boyfriend loved to see cheesy American blockbusters on opening night in America, among Americans. We both knew the movie would probably be stupid, and it WAS stupid, but that incited more rowdy audience back-talking, which was the real point.
Anyway, there was this one scene where scruffy cowboy Brad Pitt asks his little brother, Elliott from “E.T.,” (Henry Thomas!) whether or not he’s fucked his brand new, smoking-hot fiancee, Julia Ormond. Elliott says something like, “I am not… That is not… When the time comes, after we are legally married, we will… m-m-make love.”
Brad Pitt replies, in a low growl, “I suggest you fuck her.”
So that’s pretty much the sum total of my advice to you. I suggest you fuck her.
The fact that you go from NOT wanting to hit on women with boyfriends and NOT wanting to hit on women on the subway (both reasonable) straight to NOT wanting to respond in any way to an obvious expression of sexual interest (by a woman who interests you!) really underscores how much you’ve overgeneralized this problem, confusing reasonable self-restraint with some overall philosophy of non-intervention.
Stop analyzing the psychosocial and political layers of every single interaction with every woman. Are you interested or not? If you are, say so. When a lady is fondling you on the couch, that typically indicates that she’s interested. If you’d rather say, “Can we pick this up when we’re not drunk?” that’s great. If you want to say, “Can I kiss you?” that’s also good. But freezing up and getting confused and then feeling bewildered by her silence and anger, but not saying a word about any of it, and THEN slicing and dicing the whole thing intellectually, passing it through every high-minded filter known to humankind? This is a squandering of precious youth, an offense against hormones and nature and humanity. PLUS, WHO HAS THE ENERGY FOR THIS SHIT? Open your mouth and speak. Say what you want. Politely stating your desires in the presence of an apparently interested human being is not a high crime against womankind. It just isn’t.
If the woman in question isn’t interested, she is free to tell you that. What’s the problem? Where is the insult or injury there? Give a woman ample opportunity to set you straight. Feel free to apologize for presuming. But don’t apologize for even CONSIDERING opening your mouth. Admitting that you have attractions and desires does not make you an oppressor. No.
I can see why your friends are encouraging you in such a wide range of situations, some of them not entirely comfortable. They just want you to stop thinking so much and do something, ANYTHING. Because you are not some stalking carnivore that needs to be shot. Stop worrying that it’s offensive or poisonous or wrong to think or say this or that. Yes, I do admire your EFFORTS to always police yourself for bad thoughts. I agree that people should try to honor their highest selves, rather than merely assuming that their behavior will naturally match some stanky half-assed selfishness displayed by the lowest common denominator of humankind. But I think that these valiant efforts of yours, and all the analysis you put into every single wasted moment of your squandered existence as a virile young human being, are clearly beginning to stand in the way of your happiness. Instead of thinking quite so much about every dimension of what a woman wants and thinks and feels, I would suggest spending a little time getting to know a woman, or a few women, who interest you. That means asserting yourself. Speaking up. Saying what you want. Telling someone how you feel.
After you start dating someone? Trust me, THERE IS PLENTY OF TIME TO SLICE AND DICE EVERYTHING YOU DO IN A RELATIONSHIP. You will have many, many opportunities to recalibrate and reconnoiter in order to ensure a totally egalitarian pairing. The entire power dynamic of a union is not established and then set in stone within the first few milliseconds of a given interaction. There are multiple times, over the course of a relationship, to reconsider your actions, give more generously, reassert your interest in your partner’s feelings, inquire after your partner’s comfort. All of these things are likely to go well for you, because you care. Healthy women will appreciate your ability to put them front and center, to listen, to sensitively take their feelings into account at every turn.
But in the beginning, it’s pretty black and white. There is desire, or interest, or a spark, or there’s nothing. How will you know if you don’t ask?
Do you need to analyze whether or not you seem predatory, or wonder if you’re creating the wrong atmosphere? I’m not saying there aren’t situations where these questions might be appropriate and even welcomed. On the subway, or in the company of a woman with a boyfriend: Good idea. But I’m just going to go out on a limb and guess, based in part on what everyone else is telling you, both with words and without words, that you are not in clear danger of behaving predatorily in an everyday situation with a woman who’s FONDLING YOU UNDER A BLANKET.
You are, however, in danger of hiding in your hidey hole forever, of ignoring bright, flashing “COME CLOSER!” signs, and of never ever kissing a pretty woman or dating a lady or doing anything, at all, ever. You are in danger of remaining paralyzed by your neurotic thoughts indefinitely.
And that’s a cop out. Your overactive, pro-feminist, hypercritical imagination is a cop out. You are more comfortable writing endless, winding sentences about why you shouldn’t act, why it wouldn’t be RIGHT or GOOD to act, why it’s NOBLE and DECENT and RIGHTEOUS not to act, than you are with action, and desire, and the feeling of feelings.
I have to admit, there are a few red flags in your letter. First, you describe your past in very vague terms. What are you talking about? It’s tough to tell. Second, the women in your letter are suspiciously faceless and interchangeable. You didn’t offer a concrete detail about any of them. You seem to find them appealing, but it’s never clear WHAT EXACTLY you like about any one of them. Does one woman excite you more than the others? When a faceless multitude of women add up to a problem? That’s a little suspect. Let’s not just skin the damn cat, here. Let’s unearth your true desires and feelings and figure out WHO out there is lively and spontaneous enough to blast through your complexly constructed web of rationalizations and teach you to live a little, goddamn it.
I’m not sure you know what you want, though, because you’re blocking your feelings with this rambling, self-blaming paralysis of yours. You need to make less room for your thoughts, and make much more room for your feelings. I suggest you stop thinking, listen more, ask questions, and feel your feelings. I suggest you smile at the woman you really do like. Notice how that feels — making eye contact without apology. I suggest you ask if you can kiss her. If these things go well, I suggest you talk about your attraction to each other. I suggest you express your interest without qualifying it with disclaimers and intentions to ensure that you are not in the least bit offensive or suspect. I suggest you leave all of the complicated sociopolitical ramifications out of this picture at first, if at all possible. And if all goes well? I suggest you fuck her.
Because you are not a walking encyclopedia without a working penis, are you? You are not a sex offender, either. You are not poisonous, simply because you’re a man. You are a polite person. You will ask her for her consent many times. This is clear. You will be kind and you will pay attention.
But you’re not a fucking computer. You ARE an animal. She is an animal. This is a good thing. I suggest you fuck her. And if you’re lucky, she’ll recognize that she’s an animal, and she won’t get clouded up by her self-consciousness and self doubts and she’ll fuck you, too.
Now obviously, there are people who will read those words and assume that I mean, “DOMINATE THE LADIES, MALE OPPRESSOR!” Get real. I’m not telling anyone to become a player overnight or fuck and run or hit on women with reckless abandon. We all know about rape culture and the insane rape-y shit happening all over the place. Go read that long New York Times article about the woman who was raped at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. I mean, seriously, WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING OUT THERE?
But let’s not let our criminal caveman culture keep us from realizing the full force of our sexual potential. Early feminists, suffragettes, and enlightened men have fought very hard to assert that women are not merely vessels that make babies or vessels to get fucked, we are sexual beings with thoughts and desires of our own. Please don’t infantilize us with your condescending, overconcerned intellectualizing. I know you mean well. You want a new, more helpful narrative? We women want what we want, just like you do.
You’re not evil. We’re not helpless. Get over yourself. Put your ego aside. Far less is at stake in a single interaction than you believe. The hero doesn’t succeed or fail here. People out there find love when they learn to show up and be themselves. I know, you’re shy. That’s why you have to practice a little, and make a few mistakes. Stop trying to protect yourself. Stop trying to control the outcome. Stop trying to remain perfect and harmless and blameless. Turn off that twisted brain of yours for once and just say what you want and ask what she wants.
You have the rest of your life to bring gender equality into your relationships — at home, at work, everywhere. You will always do that, and god bless you for it. But there is a limited window for saying, “I want to kiss you. Can I?”
Don’t think. Feel. Ask. And if the answer is yes? Go for it.
Polly
Do you wish Brad Pitt would say something to you in a low growl? Write to Polly and discuss!
Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.
Toward a Theory of Manhattan's Surrender to Brooklyn
“I feel we’ve been tampered with on our soil,” he said, a fat cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. (He was still smoking it as he walked up the suspension cable to the towers.)
His theory?
“Something political, I guess,” he mused. “It’s got to mean something.”
The supposed mystery of the white flag over the Brooklyn Bridge is itself deeply mystifying: While bleaching the stars-and-stripes to produce an all white flag, rather than replacing it altogether, is impressive, methodologically speaking — as was the use of “large aluminum pans, like those to cook lasagna for a crowd,” to cover the lights, according to the Times — the clear meaning is Manhattan’s complete and unconditional surrender to Brooklyn.
How it could possibly indicate the reverse? Brooklyn, producer of New York’s finest pizza, coffee, television, pickles, thinkpieces, bicycles, tattoos, beer (but not cocktails), and faux mid-century modern furniture, only grows more Manhattan-like by the day, rendering the island borough increasingly unnecessary for city essentials like unfathomable rents, finance bros roving in packs, a “downtown,” or even cabs?
Low, "I'm on Fire"
Low covers Bruce Springsteen, 30 years later. Here, from the same upcoming tribute, are Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires with a rendition of “Born in the USA.” [Via Stereogum]