In 2003, a furious reader left this comment on Lockhart Steele’s brief review (“one special place”) of Wylie Dufresne’s new Lower East Side restaurant, wd~50:

Enough with this place.

I’ve lived around the corner from Clinton Street since 1997 and the restaurant-row infusion has done little for me. The only place I’ve *ever* eaten at on the entire block is the Clinton Bakery Company. The rest of those places are for uptowners. It’s always comical to walk by Clinton Fresh Food and see all the WASPs and preppies stuffing their faces in there. How they even find Clinton street on a map is beyond me.

Beyond the fact that I can’t afford to eat at any of these restaurants, since Clinton Fresh Food has opened, the following has occured. My dry cleaner has gone out of business, the original Alias restaurant has gone out of business (best chicken on the block), and a million useless boutiques have opened.

I’m all for trendy neighborhoods, but how about a few useful businesses? A newstand, perhaps? A quality pizza slice place below Houston on our side of Essex?

The hype over this one restaurant is so ridiculous, it’s really nauseating.

Another wrote:

i grew up near clinton street, still live down there, and i cannot have said it better: the sight of the uptown preppies taking cabs to dine out “downtown” where it’s “hip” is hilarious. but, i don’t agree that the restaurants are only for those uptowners — it’s just that fewer of the current locals can (or will) pay 30 bucks for foam on their plates.

Today, Clinton St. Baking Company is in virtually every guide book that bothers to send people east of the WTC site; the line on an unremarkable weekday morning runs down the block, which is why the restaurant is expanding into the space next door. Meanwhile, Dufresne, longtime LES cheerleader and/or forward commander of its early-2000s gentrification, has announced that wd~50, now one of the most famous restaurants in the world, is closing. A developer is planning a “39,000-square-foot apartment complex,” which is at least made of brick, but which will make keeping the restaurant open impossible. “We don’t quite know yet where we’re going,” Dufresne told the Times.

It helps, I’ve decided, to imagine New York residential development as an alien movie. The new towers are certainly Not Of This Earth; their glass facades sulk a little too far back from the street and their roof decks rise just a little too high. Everybody is aware of them but most refuse to acknowledge them directly; there are tenants, instantly, but nobody quite knows who they are (they are friendly but do not talk much). The forces that align to install these bio-prisms are far more powerful than anything around them, like interference from another physical universe. Nothing survives their approach: Not pure retail, not gas stations, not celebrity chefs. What will happen to them, eventually? What will they do? Will they… activate? Will there be a rumble and a launch, after The Condos have collected the data they were installed to gather? Or will something more fearsome come along before they’re finished? It usually does. This movie, of course, is a sequel.

wd~50’s last dinner service will be in November.

Photo by John Penny.

★★ Fog drained the colors from the distance without really obscuring the lines. Gradually it ripened or decayed into routine haze, and for a moment blue showed overhead. Then came gray-green light and soggy, shifting breezelets. The old sneakers had dried crispy from the previous day’s soaking. The subway platform smelled of brakes from prior trains, the air uncirculating. Up on the street, phantom raindrops landed, a few to a block, never amounting to more.

by Anthony Paletta

In late April, the city of Baltimore issued a certificate of demolition for the Morris A. Mechanic Theater, prevailing in a lengthy quest to destroy one of its most unique buildings. With a character somewhere between a stone-age helmet and a concrete cog, the nearly fifty-year-old building’s assertive structure has earned the affection of a small number of enthusiasts who embrace its almost oppressively functional style of architecture — and almost no one else. The theater, designed by the revered and often imperiled architect John Johansen, will be replaced by a condo.

The story of the Mechanic has become overly familiar. Brutalism, a muscular and monumental architectural style known for its unsparing use of cast concrete, has grown old enough since its heyday in the fifties, sixties, and seventies to have aged badly, but not old enough to inspire much sympathy. The austere, domineering artifacts of its philosophies now face widespread enmity; a number of institutions, with varying degrees of exertion, have sought in recent years to replace their Brutalist inheritances with practically anything else.

Of the five at-risk Brutalist buildings I wrote about being under threat two years ago, three of them are now gone, or about to be demolished. It’s been a bad year for Johansen in particular: In addition to the Morris A. Mechanic Theater, the delightful Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City faces imminent destruction, as soon as the proper certificate emerges from the city’s administrative process. The destruction of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago began last fall, after such helpful developments as a Rahm Emanual Chicago Tribune op-ed hailing its replacement as progress. The Third Church of Christ Scientist, a Brutalist church in Washington, D.C., was demolished in March. Five of the buildings in Paul Rudolph’s Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, New York, are due to be razed.

As John Grindrod wrote in the introduction to Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain:

There is an accepted narrative to the way we think about our postwar architectural legacy. That narrative is somewhat akin to the plot of a superhero blockbuster: a team of supervillains — planners, architects, academics — have had their corrupt, megalomaniac way with the country for 30 years. Then, at long last, a band of unlikely heroes — a ragbag of poets, environmentalists, and good, honest citizens — rise up against this architectural Goliath and topple it in the name of Prince Charles.”

This is, unfortunately, exactly how large numbers of critics conceive of Brutalism today. Those who wish to preserve examples of the the style aren’t simply fighting against indifference, they’re combating avowed foes — antagonists who would gladly take a turn at the wrecking ball — who view sympathy for the style as willful contrarianism of the “Bach or Before, Ives or After” variety, not just divorced from reasonable taste but purposefully set at odds with it. They sense that battle lines have remained neatly drawn between (lower-case) modernists and traditionalists, and that modernists are now making a convenient pivot to save their austere wonderlands — everyone becomes a fan of precedent once there’s a Supreme Court decision that they like. As Rod Dreher wrote in at The American Conservative: “It is ironic that Modernists, who based their entire movement on liberation from tradition, are in the position of making traditionalist(ish) arguments for saving their hideous buildings from the wrecking ball.”

The task of Brutalism preservation, like many others, has been to safeguard a dying species of architecture that isn’t coming around again. A Next American City piece speculated hopefully that “Prentice Hospital Could Become Modernism’s Penn Station Moment.” It hasn’t. Curiously though, as Brutalism perishes in the real world, it’s been flourishing in the publishing sphere. Paul Rudolph, a fascinating architect whose work has suffered from a broad spate of demolition, is receiving a handsome tribute in a forthcoming Yale University Press Volume, Timothy Rohan’s The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, while Chris Mottalini’s After You Left/They Took it Apart offered a tribute to Rudolph’s lost homes (a traveling exhibit on one of Rudolph’s lost Florida houses is also afoot). The heroic print-only architecture magazine Clog released a 2013 issue on Brutalism; Grindrod’s Concretopia and Owen Hatherley’sMilitant Modernism and A New Guide to the Ruins of Great Britain have issued forthright defenses of the lasting value and design quality of much Brutalist construction in the UK. Such developments, and the valiant work of local and national preservationists, seem to have secured a few successes: the landmarking of M. Paul Friedberg’s 1975 Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis and Marcel Breuer and Roebrt Gatje’s Broward County Main Library in Fort Lauderdale, as well as the salvation of Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center. Now the focus of a renovation plan, the Orange County center is the subject of an unrelated and bizarre, if intriguing, proposal from prolific New York hotel designer Gene Kaufman to purchase it for some unspecified private use.

As deep as the Brutalism bad vibes run — in a 2012 New York Times Room for Debate piece on brutalism, Anthony Daniels screeched, “Atrocities Should be Eliminated” — profit, not bile, is generally the strongest threat to its longevity. Most developers’ formula for determining whether a building is dispensable or not is grounded in whether they own it and can build something larger on the site. This is a threat to any architecture, of course, but especially so to varieties that the larger public doesn’t instinctively value. If the Real Estate Board of New York could argue with a straight face that not a single structure in Manhattan’s Midtown East — mostly composed of venerable pre-war structures — merited landmarking, then what chance is there for Brutalism in Baltimore?

Fortunately, at times sheer presence has proven a valuable boon for some Brutalist structures. In the case of government and institutional structures, where physical demands for replacement structures typically aren’t radically different, demolition and new construction would routinely prove more expensive than renovation. This was the case with the Orange County Government Center, where the county government was skeptical that wholesale demolition and replacement would actually prove any cheaper than renovation. I wrote recently here about the immense size of American sporting facilities offering little guarantee of their survival; happily there’s no luxury-seating-level incentive to level Kallman and McKinnell’s immense Boston City Hall or Rudolph’s University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

The most substantial misfortune for Brutalist structures, though, is that they’re so frequently associated with urban decay. The United States doesn’t have nearly as substantial a residential stock of Brutalist buildings as in Europe, but what it does have — plenty of government, educational, and institutional structures — almost universally suffer from a lack of maintenance. The imagery of rundown Brutalist structures — like The Mechanic Theater and Mummers, each abandoned for a decade — is even worse in Europe, where they’re often identified with vast legacies of lower-income residential construction from the council estate to the banlieue to whatever dystopia you’d like to find.

It’s worth remembering that the breadth of midcentury modern design didn’t always enjoy its present relative vogue. Some pinnacles never aged — Mies Van Der Rohe and the Eames chair — but much modernism wasn’t given a second thought. As tiresome as it might be to cite Mad Men, and as inchoate as its influence on popular culture might be, it’s proven a useful means to see production design explicitly influenced by Skidmore Owings and Merrill’s nineteen sixties work presented as crisp and new — not as a patchwork renovation torn asunder by new ductwork or electric cables. Google “Mad Men” and architecture and you’ll see a wealth of items pointing to the broader second tier of modernism: Gordon Bunshaft and Wallace Harrison, Emery Roth and Sons, Charles Luckman, William Pereira, and others. It’s doubtful that we’re going to see a hit Brutalist TV series, but simple examples of Brutalist structures brought tastefully to the 21st century could prove a similar aid.

None of this is to deny that there are often real problems with many Brutalist structures. Their upkeep can prove considerably expensive due to design issues; the Orange County Government Center, for instance, has eighty-seven distinct roofs, while the Third Church of Christ Scientist required the costly deployment of considerable scaffolding to change a ceiling lightbulb. In many cases, Brutalist structures had downright terrible notions of how to arrange space and strangled urban life like a vintage seventies street villain. The main entrance of the Mechanic Theater, for instance, faced a mid-block plaza while largely ignoring Baltimore’s adjacent main thoroughfare. In some cases, buildings are arranged in ways that directly frustrate any meaningful efforts to build an engaging pedestrian sphere. That’s a pretty understandable reason for replacing them, though in some situations it’s not actually the case. Boston City Hall’s Plaza, for example, is not an insuperable condition of the building’s existence. Its totalitarian horror hasn’t crushed life in adjacent dense streets directly to the south. Rather, it’s the immense plaza that sucks the life out of the area; if you can fit Cirque du Soleil into your square with plenty of room to spare (as Boston’s been doing lately), it’s too big.

The humanizing touches in Brutalist structures — and in fairness many lacked them — have often been forgotten or removed. Timothy Rohan’s Paul Rudolph volume outlines a number of fanciful touches in Rudolph’s U. Mass Dartmouth volumes:

Carefully chosen, brightly colored textiles and carpeting acted as vibrant, stimulating foils to the omnipresent, gray concrete… [t]hey chose to upholster the common room banquettes in orange and carpet the floor with a pattern of orange, red, and purple stripes. The banded carpet echoed the raised ridges of the concrete block and the striations on the poured-in-place structural beams and balconies.

A similar spirit guided recent renovations of the library, infusing light, color, and openness to the space. Glass additions, which alter the original design, show how considerable variation and revival of existing Brutalist architecture is possible. Robert A. M. Stern charted a similar renovation of Rudolph’s Art and Architecture building at Yale. Another Brutalist theater, the Alley in Houston, is undergoing a substantial renovation, which will alter much of its interior, while leaving the exterior intact. At a Clog panel on Brutalism last year, John Johansen’s son noted that his father’s response to threats to the Mechanic Theater had been to mull over how it might be altered to accommodate contemporary criticisms (regrettably, it’s unclear what solutions Johansen might have envisioned; he died in 2012). Similar revivals have become common in the UK, which, while it boasts arguably many more decrepit examples of the form, also has more viable peaks. The Barbican Estate and its contents have undergone some very sharp renovations; the complex remains desirable. Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower is undergoing a renovation which seems entirely likely to prove successful. Even larger complexes can prove open to transformation: The huge Park Hill Estate, a sort of Jacobs Ladder spread above Sheffield, has sprouted multicolored panels and scrubbed decades of neglect.

A Penn Station moment would be a great boon to Brutalism, but it remains abidingly unclear that there’s any martyr whose passing the world would notice, let alone mourn in large numbers. In the absence of such a moment, the greatest need for Brutalism is likely not buildings that die spectacularly but that simply live effectively.

Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Metropolis, The Daily Beast, Bookforum, and The Millions on urban policy, historic preservation, cinema, literature, and board wargaming.

Photos by Adam Gerard, Kelvin Dickinson, Joseph, jessamyn west, respectively

Correction: This piece originally ascribed Boston City Hall to John Johansen; it was designed by Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell.

“There is a battering ram quality to the contemporary novel, an insistence and repetition that perhaps permits the reader to hang in despite the frequent interruptions to which most ordinary readers leave themselves open.” — Does this piece reference Faulkner? There’s only one way to find out.

Tweetdeck XSS pic.twitter.com/tgT9w0bZ1q

— Andreas Lindh (@addelindh) June 11, 2014

“Log out of Tweetdeck, it’s an emergency,” is what every social media manager is shouting right now, on Twitter. These, unfortunately, are not suicidal declarations of self-realization. There is a bug!

A newly discovered vulnerability in TweetDeck for Chrome is allowing attackers to remotely execute javascript code through an unpatched vulnerability. Users have reported seeing random pop-up windows reading “Yo!”

Random, unsolicited, distracting messages? With no context?? ON TWITTER????? Keep up the good work, bug.

Ask Polly: My Boyfriend Won’t Stop Raging About My Sexual History

Dear Polly,

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I’ve been dating a guy for about four months. We’re madly in love, despite being different in more ways than we are alike. Politics, education, socio-economic status, religion — you name it, we’re on almost opposite ends of the spectrum. However, we’re best friends through and through. A month or so into our relationship, he sat me down and shed a tear telling me how in love and how certain he was that he wanted to marry me. I am right there, too. Then shit started to get weird.

One night at a party, he got so angry about my friend and I laughing about this idiot we knew in high school who would whip out his dick and wave it around at us, that he ended up storming out of the party, walking five miles home, screaming at me about my sexual past (never happened with the dick-whipper-outer by the way), and then sleeping on the couch. In the morning I was like “WTF” and he was like, “I hate that you have a past.” Lots of tears (his), and lots of “processing,” and we were fine.

A week later, it started hurting when he peed. Shit shit shit shit shit. A year and a half ago, I had a horrific genital herpes outbreak. Since then, I’ve been tested in all possible ways, four different times, and doctors continue to say that it’s HSV-1 (the cold sore kind) that sometimes “jumps” for a one-time genital outbreak, never again to resurface. I even went to the doctor for the whole battery of tests a week into this relationship and she was dismissive about it — saying it would probably never come back. I should have said something to him a long time before I did, but as soon as it became apparent what was going on downstairs with him, I came clean. Cue three weeks of (semi-righteous) chaos.

He said that a) I’m dishonest and he can’t trust me because I didn’t disclose my “status” earlier and b) it’s hard to get over my sketchy past when it’s “on his dick.” It’s pretty easy for me to go into periods of self-loathing (though I do work every single day to get better about this — and your column is a huge contributor, BTW). Regardless, I cried and apologized and told him I’ll do anything to gain his trust again.

In the past few weeks, he’s had random outbursts where he’ll assume that I’m cheating on him and that I’m a terrible person who just fucks guys and hands out herpes. What provokes him is either nothing at all, or my getting a random Facebook inbox from some idiot I slept with over a decade ago — which I never so much as acknowledge. But I waver between being understanding and accommodating because I DID hurt him profoundly, and being absolutely appalled. I’ve never cheated, nor will I ever cheat. Not my thing, and, as I told him, one of the awesome things I have to offer in a relationship. (It’s worth noting that in the midst of all of this tumult, we managed to get back on track and skip while holding hands through fields of rainbows and shit.)

So as all of this was going on, I’d sit down with the intention of asking you what the fuck to do. But then I’d hear you saying something like (and obviously in a much more clever and perceptive way) that there are red flags everywhere in this situation and I’d realize I already knew the answer.

The reason I wrote today is because he’s 1,100 miles away, yet we’re at it again. Did I mention that he plays independent professional baseball every summer in some random town (he swears this is his last year), and will be gone for the next 90 days? We’re doing this long-distance thing, and one week in, shit hits the fan. Things were great. I’m at home doing the “Polly Thing” and cultivating the best parts of my life and worshipping at the great temple of ME so that I can be even better on the other end of this separation.

But this morning, out of nowhere, he said, “I have to ask you: have you been talking to XX and XX (past idiot boyfriends) while I’ve been gone?” After assuring him that I’ve blocked them completely out of my life as he requested several times before, I straight up burst into tears. “I’m sitting here thinking about you, sending you little gifts and letters, and listening to your god damn baseball games on the radio EVERY NIGHT, and you’re accusing me of cheating on you?!”

Then it hit my psychology-major brain like a zap from the Milgram machine. Borderline Fucking Personality Disorder. Yes, I know that a psychology undergrad doesn’t mean even close to a shit, but check this out:

1. Borderlines tend to “split” between idealizing someone (“I’m 100% sure I want to marry you”) and thinking they’re a terrible person (“You lied and I got herpes; there’s nothing you wouldn’t lie about”).

2. Borderlines think in black and white. (“You’ve been with more people than me, you’re a ho-bag who can never be trusted.” and then “We’re perfect for each other and we’re going to be together forever.”)

3. Borderlines fly into rages over small things (can you say “dick-waving incident”?)

4. The Borderline credo is “I hate you, don’t leave me.” This morning, in the same breath he was telling me that he could never trust me, he told me how afraid he was that I was going to leave him.

And so on.

I know. Therapy, therapy, therapy (although at $250/month and a $5,000 deductible paired with non-covered mental health services, Obamacare is making that a hard pill to swallow). And I know, RED FLAGS WAVING IN MY FACE, no my face IS a red flag.

But I love him. So now what?

Sincerely,

Red Flag Face

Dear Red Flag Face,

Fuck. We really should’ve covered this material way back at the beginning of class. Right after our opening segment on “Kicking Tepid Men To The Curb, or How To Come On His Hampton Blouse And Move On,” we should’ve studied “Dangerous Dudes Who Look Like The Cure To Tepid Guys But Who Secretly Want To Control You And Turn You Into An Obedient Dream Barbie.”

Because, after years and years of fucking around with tepid dudes, guess what? Your immune system is susceptible to more than genital herpes; it’s susceptible to super-intense non-tepid guys who will look you right in the eyes and say, “YOU ARE EVERYTHING I’VE EVER DREAMED OF.” Typically, they’ll do this within minutes of meeting you. Typically, you won’t notice that this is insane, because you’ve finally landed in the middle of the fairy tale of your little girl fantasies. Typically, it will take months if not years to extract yourself from this situation, because you want love and this looks just like love and you feel love inside and you don’t want to go back to kicking around with lukewarm, flinchy deadbeats again.

And if you have a little self-hatred onboard (Hello, almost every smart person alive!) you are particularly susceptible to this kind of a guy. His abandonment issues seem adorable. You will heal everything! His black-and-white thinking feels like home. Wasn’t your dad a little like that? Didn’t your mom fly into rages over nothing? His love for you in spite of recognizing what a hateful slut you are feels just about right. Don’t you feel the same way about yourself? Haven’t you worked hard to love yourself in spite of the fact that, at your core, you’re just a hateful slut?

When you fall for someone who needs needs needs you, and worries that you’ll leave at any moment — but who also hates you for having existed before you met him, in a different town where you could (and will!) track down your scummy ex-boyfriends? That reflects your still very fragile, incomplete relationship with yourself. You haven’t accepted yourself yet: you’re still afraid, still at war, still unsure of what you’re entitled to. Basically, you’re in danger, because you’re not ready for a mature relationship yet. You sort of long for a codependent “You Are The Everything” love, replete with unhealthy boundaries and spitty outbursts over shit that makes no sense.

But let’s be fair: Even people who are pretty together will fall for this. It’s not all that easy to resist someone who swears YOU ARE THE ONE, cries about it, tells you everything, shows you his soft, vulnerable center. But when he shifts into anger? That’s not just unpleasant, it’s dangerous. And does any of it really make sense? I’m not sure it does. When a boyfriend is angry at you all the time for reasons that don’t make sense? That’s not a relationship that’s going to last.

I get that picking up herpes is not exactly ideal for him. You should’ve said something, clearly. But here you are. You’re at the very start of a relationship with a guy who — I’m not going to diagnose him with a personality disorder from here, but let’s just say he has abandonment issues, is very jealous, is very sensitive about your past (but somehow I doubt you’re his first girlfriend), and is prone to angry outbursts to the point where you already feel like you’re walking on eggshells, and you’re starting to burst into tears after placating him for too long. This doesn’t look good. Not only doesn’t it look good, but it looks a little dangerous. This is the kind of guy who can do a lot of damage to your self esteem, even with the best of intentions. This is a guy who tells you, “It’s hard to get over your sketchy past when it’s on my dick.”

That statement is just wrong. If you weren’t angry at yourself for your so-called sketchy past, you wouldn’t stand for that; it doesn’t take sleeping around like crazy to pick something up, least of all some oral herpes that made the jump or whatever the fuck. And if you broke up with him right now, what would happen? Would you become that slut who gave him herpes? Would that be his story? Think about the kind of guy who says things like that. Is that him? And if that is him, is that really a guy you want to align yourself with? Because if you heard some random dude talking that way, you wouldn’t in a million years dream of dating him.

Let’s not even talk about the fact that men who freak out about slutty pasts usually have some pretty fucked up regressive patriarchal notions floating around in their heads about glorious, unsullied vaginas, untouched by humpy, filthy, foul competitor dogs like themselves. No. Saying, “Your slutty past has fouled up my dick”? That alone is more than a red flag. That’s an invitation to suffering. That’s an invitation that says, “You matter mostly in relation to how good you make me look and feel, and therefore you will be blamed for every single way you fuck with my life, even as I beg you to never, ever leave me.” That’s an invitation from an overgrown, confused, pissed off guy. God bless him. He will grow up at some point, I’m sure he will. Look with clear eyes on who he is now, though, because you’re going to get deeper and deeper into this stuff as you stay, and commit, and move in together. You’re going to get stuck and you already know there’s a problem here.

Can you imagine someone who would be much better for him? A sweet little unsullied girl? Devoted, with no past? Doesn’t that say something? Let him have HER instead. Bless him and let him go find his Dream Girl Without a Past.

Let me tell you a story that once felt like a fairy tale. I had just ended a relationship with a lovable man-child. Sweet, idealistic, all clumsy affection and big bear paws and an Unfrozen Caveman inability to deal with mundane realities of life. On our second night together, his stereo woke us up, blasting “Garbage Man” by G. Love (great song, by the way). “Shit, sorry, it keeps doing that,” he said. Yes, his stereo was waking him up EVERY NIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, and gosh, what could he possibly do to fix it? Keep in mind the stereo was resting on a cardboard box, and we were sleeping on a futon covered in a sleeping bag.

So he was very young and a little immature. A work in progress, that’s all. Not tepid, just not ready yet. But he really made me want A Mature Guy Who Knew Exactly What He Wanted.

So I broke up with him and went to a party one night and ended up talking to a very intense man who looked me right in the eyes and asked me heavy questions about my relationship with my mother. It was exhilarating! He was so sure, the first night we met, that we were destined to be together forever and ever! This was a change! This was romantic! This was How It’s Supposed To Go!

I moved in with him three months later, and it was immediately clear that I’d made a big mistake. He didn’t know how to relax. He acted fascinated by me but didn’t really seem to be listening to anything I said, and his responses to important subjects were always strangely combative or evasive. Even in regular, benign conversations, I always felt like I was being subtly batted around and rerouted and cut off at the pass. He was a nice person, and I loved him. He was also the kind of guy who said things like “Whoa. Are you sure you want to eat that?” when I sliced a slab of cheese off the block. I was not a shrinking violet, either. “Yes, I will ALWAYS eat ALL of the fucking cheese, so simmer down about it,” was my answer. But I was jittery and apologetic around him in other ways. He wanted to be soft and kind, but he had anger issues that he struggled with. He drove like a maniac. He was a magnet for other full-of-rage assholes, in their cars, on the street. One guy chased us through a neighborhood and then blocked our exit, and even then, my boyfriend — fearing for his life — was condescending and combative.

One day, furious that someone had parked in “his” spot — ON THE STREET! — he pulled his car up to the bumper of the other car, so that they were touching. As we walked up to our front porch, I pictured leading two little kids by the hand, across the street, while this guy lost his shit over something incredibly small and stupid. I thought about how that would feel, to always be calming the kids down, reassuring them that daddy just had a really bad temper, that daddy just got unaccountably mad over some stupid tiny things that don’t matter.

It’s nice to be in love. The stakes are really fucking high, though. You can’t align yourself with an emotional terrorist. You can’t. It’s too hard. You might ALMOST be able to pull it off for a few months, from a distance. But once you’re in deeper? You’re living together, you’re thinking about marriage, the wedding is being planned, you’re pregnant, and he’s freaking out over something tiny, and you feel like you can’t back out anymore?

The hothead boyfriend of mine punched me in the eye, hard, when I tried to wake him up to talk to him one night when we were arguing. Nothing like that happened before, and he was immediately apologetic, and nothing like that happened for the next two months it took to break up with him. We went to couples’ therapy and he apologized, over and over and over. But look: His instinct, when I grabbed his shoulder to shake him awake, was to pound a fist into the side of my head, hard enough to give me a black eye. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? I felt sad for him, because I knew a lot of his anger wasn’t a conscious choice, and I didn’t want to abandon him. I thought he would be so lonely without me. Wrong! He got married less than a year later, and divorced a year after that. Then he found another girlfriend. Women will always like him. He works on himself pretty hard, and honestly, he has a big heart. I wish him nothing but happiness. But if I’d stayed with him, he would’ve made me miserable.

He’s a good example for you to hear about, Red Flag Face. Because even though he’s a really lovable person, he didn’t make sense to me. His concerns, his emotions, his rage unsettled me. Nothing added up. I was not the right woman for him; I was only going to piss him off.

I don’t think you’re right for this guy. I think he knows that, too. You both want it to work very badly. Me and the intense guy REALLY wanted to be THE ANSWER for each other. But we weren’t.

You have more growing to do, so you’ll feel stronger and more independent and you’ll naturally be the MOST attracted to men who support your strength and independence. I’m sorry! I know you’re in love. But even if you decide to stay with him, I don’t think this stuff is about to go away. You need to find someone who’s more like you, that’s all, someone who says things that make simple sense to you, who doesn’t freak out about stuff that feels wrong to you, who makes many of the same choices you’ve made — good and bad — and who understands, quickly, when you explain them, because he can relate. A guy who’s more like you would never blink an eye at your so-called slutty past, and he’d never guilt you repeatedly over something you were explicitly instructed by a doctor not to worry about. A guy who’s more like you would still be upset about the STD, but he wouldn’t keep throwing it in your face like it proved something about what an untrustworthy whore you are.

I hate to discourage two people in love. But the stakes are really high. You know something is wrong and you need to trust your feelings and be brave about this. Being in love is really nice. But being in love with someone who makes sense, who is calm and supportive and confident, who accepts exactly who you are right now, who doesn’t want you to change a thing, who doesn’t blame you for being a regular, flawed human being with a rich past and rich future? That feels amazing. It’s a love that includes feeling GREAT about who you are, with all of your little dents and shortcomings, with all of your big thoughts and dreams and insecurities and secret fears.

It’s smart to say no to something that doesn’t feel right, that can’t feel right, no matter how hard you try. You need to show yourself that you won’t sell yourself short and settle for someone who can never accept you, flaws and all. Being strong will be tough, but it will feel good. You might be lonely, but you’ll know from now on you won’t settle for anyone who isn’t good to you.

If you’re apologizing like crazy and it’s still not ok, that tells you a lot. Stop apologizing for yourself. True love doesn’t demand an apology.

Polly

Do you want to swap your giant red flags out for beautiful handcrafted tapestries made from the finest horse hair? 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.

Photo by see like click

A taxonomy of unsightly mutants is now “art”:

Marina Rosso imagined herself as a “conservation geneticist” and created her own map of some four dozen varieties of redheadedness and photographed a specimen that expressed the traits of each combination — a green-eyed, curly-haired, short man of medium build occupies spot No. 39, for example. The result is “The Beautiful Gene,” a catalog of reds published by Fabrica, where people of the MC1R gene gaze directly back at you, almost in indictment, as though they know they’re being regarded like creatures in a zoo or steaks in a supermarket, and know that, given a choice, you would take a pass on their genetic schema for a more conventional sort — a blond, a brunette; brown eyes, tall and dark.

Why preserve that which evolution will surely deem unfit to survive and destroy in a cleansing fire of UV light, once global warming has finished turning the entire planet into one big ball of scorched earth?

Credit to Amazon reviewer Sam_One, who noticed “something weird” going on back in May:

Something weird seems to be going on with Warner Bros. pre-orders. Loads of them are not available anymore, and all of them were removed pretty much at the same time (I had several of them in my “Saved for Later” list. This includes most releases of 300: Rise of an Empire, The Nutty Professor Box Set, The Man who knew too little, Looney Tunes Platinum Collection Vol. 3 etc. etc. All of them Warner releases, some of them pretty big.

Today, the Times confirms that Amazon has stopped accepting pre-orders for Warner movies, including The Lego Movie. (You can still buy Disney’s Frozen, so your children won’t actually die, at least not quite yet.)

What we have now is a race! Sort of: Amazon will keep strong-arming progressively more visible companies (Bonnier, Hachette, Warner); with each fight, more and more people will have to consider the power that Amazon wields, and the industries it can profoundly damage if it so chooses. Will the public turn on Amazon before Amazon crushes or cows all of its most important partners and becomes an actual multi-industry monopoly? Will bad press eventually overshadow consumers’ ability to one-click drunk-order toilet paper and have it arrive the next day?

Ha ha, no, of course not, but you never know: Maybe some politician or regulator with a spouse in the entertainment business will find a new cause this year.

The Uber Diaries

by Will Butler

I’m not supposed to drive or bike anymore, so when I discovered rideshare services like Uber and Lyft, my life became much easier. I usually try to talk to my drivers. Here are a few of their stories.

Abram. Wednesday night.

Just before nine o’clock on Wednesday evening is the most stressful time of the week. Easy to feel un-buoyed. Abram had been smoking in his car. That, or he just hopped into the driver’s seat, mid-cigarette, as soon as he got my call. He was maybe sixty-five, seventy tops. Mostly bald, with thick glasses and shadowy eyes. His English was not great; he spoke with a heavy slavic accent. He inserts your name at the end of almost every sentence, you see. I asked him where he was from. Sacramento.

“Everyone say, it beautiful — very very beautiful picture — on email.” Abram was talking about the picture of a giant cheeseburger that arrived in the inbox of every Uber user in his area this morning. He had been driving with the app for 14 months, and was asked to be one of seven drivers running the burger promotion. He had spent all afternoon delivering burgers instead of people, and thoroughly enjoyed it. He didn’t even like burgers. He’d tried a burger, maybe once or twice. But he liked the connection with people.

I was trying to talk about burgers and he interrupted me. “Will, I’m sorry for my question: Are you blind?” he asked. I started to ramble. I realized I was lecturing. He let me talk for a minute. Then he said, “We all have some problem.”

When Abram wakes up every morning, he holds his breath. On some days his wife recognizes him; on others, she turns over in bed and sees a stranger. She has Alzheimer’s and is schizophrenic. On the mornings that she recognizes him, he stays home and spends the day with her. On the mornings when she opens her eyes and says “who are you?” he gets out of bed as fast as he can. “Shari, I’m going right now,” he says to her, trying to reassure her as he leaves, “don’t worry. Don’t get up.”

00:08:23
$9.27
✭✭✭✭✭

Kevin. Noon Friday.

Getting into the front seat of the Rav4, I found myself in presence of a highly positive white male. He was tall, with little hair. He had a broad and unhampered smile. I didn’t want to stare at him from so close, but I couldn’t help but notice how big his forearms were. Kevin had been a butcher at a fancy hotel in San Francisco for several years before striking out on his own. He was starting a company out of a shared kitchen, and he was excited because he was getting his equipment inspected next week. The business?

“Smoked salmon!”

I looked at him again, and pocketed a lox reference. “The money I make from Lyft, it’s going to the smoker.” And he didn’t want to stop there. Kevin had big dreams of smoked meats. “Kielbasa, Pastrami, all of that.” Once you got Kevin started on smoked meats, he was in the zone. I didn’t tell him a word about myself.

He got the idea from when he had to do business with the Tides Wharf Fish Market, an outpost for fresh fish jutting out on the windswept, craggy cliffs of Bodega Bay. There, he bought salmon from a guy named Tony. Sometimes Tony would do business, sometimes he wouldn’t. That’s when Kevin started thinking about salmon. Before I shut the door he said, “You’re the coolest passenger I’ve ever had!” I asked him what his business was called.

“Bay Beans,” I’m pretty sure he said. When I got home I looked it up.

From Wikipedia: “The species of Canavalia endemic to the Hawaiian Islands were named ʻāwikiwiki by the Native Hawaiians. The name translates to “the very quick one” and comes from the Hawaiian word for “fast” that has also been appropriated into the name “Wikipedia”… The bay bean (Canavalia rosea) is supposedly mildly psychoactive when smoked, and is used in tobacco substitutes.”

✭✭✭✭✭
00:04:00
$5.00

Eddie. Saturday evening.

Eddie grew up in Manila, where if you know your place, you stay safe. Venture too far, not so much. Eddie was happy to live in West Berkeley. He knew that a safe neighborhood was a relative thing. You could tell he missed the beaches, underground rivers and island caves of the Philippines, but city life in Manila could be rough. How would he describe it? “A lot of funerals, man.”

“Did you hear about Uber?” I said vaguely.

“The valuation?” he knew what I was talking about.

“Yeah.”

“Seventeen billion,” he shook his head, pausing to mull it over. “It’s just people, and cell phones, and computers, and the office. Seventeen billion dollars? Crazy. And any time it can like, just disappear.”

Eddie had picked up a friend and me just the day before, but we were on our way to a party and we had mostly ignored him, sitting there in the backseat talking about booze, women and baseball. He had a placid demeanor and a rental just two blocks from my own. He’d moved to the States at the deepest trough of the Great Recession in 2008, gotten a green card in less than a year and was well on his way to citizenship. His wife worked at a big international accounting firm which rakes in more than $25 billion per year in revenue — one of the “Big Four” in worldwide professional services. She had moved to California a couple years before him and, after a vacation together one summer, got pregnant. Now, with two kids, it’s time to buy a home, but they can’t. They’re always getting outbid by the new influx of Bay Area residents who are now, more and more, buying real estate in cash.

“You see ‘House For Sale,’ less than a month, then it gets sold. Cash. Thirty, fifty percent on top of the asking price.”

As a child, Eddie came home from school one day to find the house next door disrupted. It had been stormed by rebels — anti-political and yet politically motivated, as many are in the Philippines — who had come for his neighbor, a vice mayor of the city. “He was killed in his own house, inside the house,” Eddie said. The key suspect was the mayor.

In California, the geographical prohibitions weren’t about politics or violence — they were about money. That’s why Eddie was talking about moving out to one of the East Bay bedroom communities like San Ramon, as long as it was safe. “We always consider the neighborhood, man.”

✭✭✭✭✭
00:11:42
$12.24

Stan. Monday morning.

Within a few minutes Stan was talking about floating. It’s what happens when you go raw for twenty days, he said. Nothing cooked, nothing processed, just plants.

“You feel excellent… Your aura; your whole spiritual makeup changes. You know, kinda like you’re floating. Anybody will tell you that they feel different… You start having these crazy dreams… They’re intensified like crazy.”

“Why is that?” my girlfriend asked. She’s pretty healthy, and skeptical.

“Because your spiritual aura’s cleansed. You’re more connected. Universally you’re more connected.”

Stan has practiced herbalism for more than sixteen years. For a time he was under the mentorship of the famous herbalist Djehuty Ma’at-Ra. Born in South Central Los Angeles as Earnest Cooper Jr., and once known as Jaber Abdul Akbar, Djehuty Ma’at-Ra rose to quasi-celebrity status as a self-taught, Afrocentric health guru. Through family connections, Stan was introduced. Growing up in Vallejo, Stan saw how a culture could succumb to the food industry, to processed garbage marketed at bargain prices to low-income people, and he could relate to Djehuty’s passion for escaping this unhealthy cycle. Hence the herbs, the rejection of many drugs, the raw food cleanses.

“Your life changes, just, in every way. You see life differently. Your whole perspective. You’re calmer. Stuff you may have tripped off of, you don’t trip off of no more. Stuff that may have pissed you off, don’t piss you off no more. Or, I should say, it has a lesser effect.”

Stan recalled when his wife’s father was dying of cancer in the hospital. The staff kept trying to give him soda to drink. Stan was dismayed. In the end, he told me, his father-in-law died from an infection associated with the treatment. Stan knew we needed modern medicine for emergencies, but for convalescent and palliative care, he was disabused.

We’d had another friend whose mother, upon consulting a naturalist doctor for weight loss and breathing problems, was told she was simply ridding her body of toxins and not to worry. It turned out to be lung cancer. Recurrent cancer also took my girlfriend’s mother around the same time. I didn’t think about how restrained she had been in the car until later.

✭✭✭✭✭
00:16:39
$20.87

Geoff. Monday night.

He drove a Lexus. The seats: dark leather. It hummed peacefully, went silent at each stop sign. Geoff said he did two things to make money and stay occupied (Uber, I guess, was a third thing). First he was a day-trader. He woke up early with the market: buy, sell, cash out. He was, second, a web developer. But he wasn’t just spicing up your cousin’s husband’s WordPress theme. He scraped. He “did” SEO. He trawled; he was a fisher-of-content.

His inspiration: In August 2005 a 21-year-old British college student named Alex Tew set out to become a millionaire. All it took was one website, called milliondollarhomepage.com. It was a simple, large web billboard advertisement — 1000×1000 pixels — where he sold square pixelage for one dollar per; the effect was a surprisingly enchanting corporate collage. By January 2006, he had sold 850,000 pixels. News media blitzed. Tew sold the last 1000 pixels at a ten-day eBay auction for $38,100. Success.

Geoff and his roommate at the time bought a Million Dollar Homepage script in hopes of running a similar campaign. They didn’t know how to get eyes on the site, so they started mining content from other sites. The example he gave me was that, today, the words Justin and Bieber were very popular on the internet. So he might purchase a domain like justinbieberdyehishair.com and set up shop. For this, he said, Google pays handsomely. AdWords rewards relevance.

He also has bots swimming the seas of data, racking up keywords. Back in the MySpace days he made bots that automatically friended people en masse, then posted bulletins to push traffic. THE CRAZIEST PIC YOU’LL EVER SEE: IS THIS YOU??, and the like. Now he has squadrons of Twitter bots, and programs that vacuum info from news sites, forums, and other social media. With all this info, he said, he can figure out what people want to click before they even know they will soon click it.

I asked him about his motivations, and he was frank. “My old roommate and I were really bored… We were thinking like, how can we start a business? If we do a restaurant, it’s gonna be like, pretty hard, because we’d have to hire people, we’d have to cook really good food. So like, what would be easier? Let’s just do a website, and see if we can start making money from it.”

…

“Did I go too far?”

I was supposed to be navigating. We were far past my house. I told him and he made a sweeping u-turn in the headlights of another car in the intersection at San Pablo Avenue and Ashby Avenue. I tried to tell him where to turn but was having a hard time being descriptive.

He’d started driving Uber just last week. He’d bought the Lexus but didn’t know what to do with it; he said he barely touched it after moving to a new, more walkable neighborhood in downtown Berkeley. But on Friday, when news hit that investors as massive as Fidelity, BlackRock, and Google had all piled on for another $1.2bn, sending Uber’s valuation skyward, he decided it was time to take a look. “I was like, Uber is worth eighteen billion? What is this all about?” He liked it enough that he joined Lyft, too. He ran both apps simultaneously, taking fares from whichever one buzzed first; whichever one paid better, on any given day.

“It’s actually really fun. It’s like playing a video game. But real life.”

✭✭✭✭
00:06:48
$9.34

Names and identifying details have been changed. Will Butler is a writer living in Berkeley. Photo by Lynn Friedman.

Another day, another Google acquisition. But not all acquisitions are like this one. From Wired’s 2013 profile of the satellite imaging company Skybox:

But over the long term, the company’s real payoff won’t be in the images Skybox sells. Instead, it will derive from the massive trove of unsold images that flow through its system every day — images that, when analyzed by computer vision or by low-paid humans, can be transmogrified into extremely useful, desirable, and valuable data. What kinds of data? One sunny afternoon on the company’s roof, I drank beers with the Skybox employees as they kicked around the following hypotheticals:

— THE NUMBER OF CARS IN THE PARKING LOT OF EVERY WALMART IN AMERICA.

— THE NUMBER OF FUEL TANKERS ON THE ROADS OF THE THREE FASTEST-GROWING ECONOMIC ZONES IN CHINA.

— THE SIZE OF THE SLAG HEAPS OUTSIDE THE LARGEST GOLD MINES IN SOUTHERN AFRICA.

— THE RATE AT WHICH THE WATTAGE ALONG KEY STRETCHES OF THE GANGES RIVER IS GROWING BRIGHTER.

There are approximately ten thousand possible punchlines that could fill this space, but weirdly, not a single joke in sight.