by Awl Sponsors

The new Moto X phone will surprise you with all the things you can do just by talking to it, whether it’s checking the weather, setting your morning alarm, or playing slow jams so you don’t get your touchscreen all smudged up with your oily fingers. Watch the video to see what we mean, then check out youtube.com/Motorola to see how this phone makes all others just seem lazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWtH1btpF2A

“At long last, it’s here: The official video for ‘Reflektor’ by Arcade Fire. In the tradition of ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ and ‘Neon Bible’, it’s an interactive experience. Go to justareflektor.com to experience it. Using your mouse, tablet, or mobile device, you can control the effects used in the video. Essentially, it turns you, the viewer, into the ‘reflektor.’”
Did the Internet shut down for this, or is it not the early oughts any more?

“Many of the jobs that disappeared in the recent recession have indeed vanished forever,” wrote Virginia Postrel in the New York Times. That was February 22, 2004, the same day that “Sex and the City” ended.

Two days earlier, Martha Stewart’s best pal, Mariana Pasternak, sold her out in court. Stewart was sentenced to a little prison time. And then, six long years later, Pasternak wrote a tell-all about their two decades of friendship. There was a glut of delighted press upon publication and then we haven’t heard from her since.

It was just like that with the Goldman Sachs guy’s memoir! I wonder where he’s selling underwear now.

Somewhere between the time Lizzie Grubman ran down those people in the Hamptons in her Mercedes SUV and when she was sentenced to 60 days in jail was when we stopped having crisis sex. If we did. It’s totally okay if you didn’t.

When “Sex and the City” ended, Martha Stewart Omnimedia was down deep in a trough, trading at $15. This past month it has been in the $2 range.

In 2007, Lizzie Grubman settled the last of the civil suits from her Hamptons mowdown. Now she has two children and, according to the tabloids, an ex-husband. She is 42.

They keep floating a trial balloon for a Sex and the City 3 movie, and each time they do, everyone makes the finger-in-throat gesture for “gag me.”

They called a lot of people “girls” for a while. The PR girls, the gallery girls, the fashion girls, the journalist girls, there were a ton of people they called girls and gave TV shows to with “girls” in the name. Then they all became women and got a life. If they were lucky, when they grew up no one fired them if they got pregnant.

There was also that whole year where people talked about Katie Couric all the time. Katie Couric! All the time! (She was on TV.)

People used to be afraid of the Rubensteins but I bet the name doesn’t register to anyone under 40. (They’re publicists.)

They killed the 9 train in 2005 because the rich people who moved to Harlem hated watching trains skip-stop them by. In 2009, they sold naming rights to a subway station for the measly fee of $200,000 a year, so not only is the MTA tacky and sad, it’s also apparently completely shitty at negotiating. Now we have a subway station named after a bank.

Mike Bloomberg’s second term ended when they booted most of the lawyers and bankers from Soho House in their great purge of 2010. They never let Mariah Carey in either. TriBeCa used to mean John-John Kennedy, biking all alone down the West Side Highway, but then it came to mean Mariah. She called her house Club Mimi.

Oscar de la Renta might actually be, and may have been for quite some time now, the unlikely person who runs New York City. The other week he was having a very loud dinner at a tiny Italian restaurant with Michael Bloomberg and Henry Kissinger. I know this because someone creep-shotted it on Facebook. This was shortly after the Clintons threw de la Renta a party at the Clinton Library. He vacations with the Clintons all the time; they play cards. Whenever there is an institution in crisis, he turns up with an armload of cash.

It might be that the only great contribution to society of the Bloomberg era is… Shake Shack.

There used to be something called “Dime Bank.” It was everywhere. Dime Bank got bought up by Washington Mutual. There were two bona fide bank runs on Washington Mutual in 2008, no one remembers, and Washington Mutual was not quite big enough to not fail. Goodbye, Dime Bank!

It sure seems like the cops haven’t raped anybody in months.

Earlier this year, it was announced that William Morris Endeavor bought 49% of the advertising agency Droga5 for $225 million. Two weeks later it was announced that Droga5 was moving to Wall Street from NoHo and tripling their space. Droga5 promised they would create 154 jobs downtown over the next four years. In exchange, they, just like everyone else, received an adorable thank-you basket of money from the city.

No one gets the joke any more when you say “I want to focus on my salad.”

The other great thing about now is that no one talks about Rudy Giuliani ever, that dusty old vampire. He wanted to be Dick Cheney but he just didn’t have the sack.

The babies cropped up here, the babies cropped up there. “Oh did you have a baby? We just had two babies! Oh look, here comes Jeremy and Jeffrey with their eight new babies!”

There are nannies pushing strollers on the boardwalks of Fire Island this summer.

Where will all the babies go to school.

How many micro-lofts will all the babies require.

Christine Quinn spent the whole twelve years growing ever more bright and brassy, like a tiny bomb always on the cusp of exploding. She wants to be the most famous thing in the city, our flagpole sitter, our nuclear option.

They kept changing the cabs, what is the deal, now there’s all these different but equally bad kinds of cabs, it’s terrible, all the back seats are tiny, they don’t make any noise, at least they’re still yellow, I guess.

Beyoncé convinced Solange to move to Brooklyn. I think about this a lot.

Every year the press releases for the Tribeca Film Festival arrive earlier and earlier. This year the first official news blast for the 13th annual edition, which will happen in mid-April of 2014, if we’re all still here, arrived on August 5th. The Bloomberg Era has been a never-ending TriBeCa Film Festival and Armory Art Fair.

The Armory Show used to be called the Gramercy International Art Fair, and it was first held in the Gramercy Hotel in 1994. It was mayhem: mostly second-rate art and second-rate art collectors dodging in and out of rat’s nests, the kind of appropriately brown and slipshod rooms where Edmund Wilson lived with Mary McCarthy.

Then the Gramercy Park Hotel became a hellish hotspot, and the Gramercy Art Fair became The Armory Show, because they moved it for a while to the Armory on Lexington. That’s the Armory where everyone went after 9/11 to try to find missing people. The lines for both those events were around the block.

And I guess there’s this.

All I want to do is go to a movie theater near me and watch Snowpiercer and they won’t let me, that horrible Harvey Weinstein keeps allegedly making it shorter and shorter and not putting it in theaters, ugh.

When Zynga honcho Mark Pincus bought a house in San Francisco, everyone gushed. It sounds okay! According to the Wall Street Journal, “Spanning four levels, the seven-bedroom home has an elevator, six fireplaces and views of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Dutch Colonial Revival house was never previously on the market; it had remained in the Newhall family since it was built in 1907.” Not everyone was so impressed, according to the new Vanity Fair which I am now going to go out and buy. According to Trevor Traina, “San Francisco’s undisputed social king,” “Their house needs a lot of work but also has superb potential, so I’m really excited for them.” #BURN. (BONUS FUN POINT: Danielle Steel is Trevor’s stepmother. Yes.)(via Valleywag)

In case you found this assessment of Norman Rush’s Subtle Bodies to be woefully inadequate — and it was; even woefulness wrote us asking not to be associated with such a sorry review — here are some more comprehensive considerations. For what it’s worth, as someone who expressed a certain amount of ambivalence about the book in that terrible non-review, the characters have stayed with me longer than most usually do, so if that at all influences your purchasing decisions it is a nudge in the “buy” direction.

How many different translations can there be of the same classics of world literature? As the French say, un assload.

Here are two new Pixies songs, “Blue Eyed Hexe” and “Greens And Blues.” The more uncharitable types on the Internet who are always imagining some idyllic past that can never be bettered by the harsh realities of the present have probably already pointed to these tunes as proof that Kim Deal got out at the right time, but I think we need to listen to them a little more before we rush to judgment. Or at least that’s the mood I’m in this morning; by lunch I may be all, “these guys suuuuuuuuuck.” I’m fickle like that. [Via]

Intense Love Fades, Unless You Want To Start Messing Around With Biking Or Dance, Which, Really, Who Does?

“These findings suggest that romantic love is an arousing but stressful experience. These physiological changes are short-lived, perhaps because we become acclimated to our partner with time. Although the ardor may diminish, do not lose faith — research shows that some couples can sustain these honeymoon period feelings throughout their relationship by challenging each other with new activities, such as biking or dance.”

“Next year, there will be a scripted drama called ‘WILL.’ It’s the story of Shakespeare as a Millennial, which is either the best idea on earth or the worst; either way, the concept has a brassy, shoot-the-moon quality and, presumably, a refreshing lack of criminal anti-heroes…. Pivot will air documentaries on youth-oriented topics, along with a nightly live interactive news show called ‘TakePart Live’…. Meghan McCain has already been picked on by the right and the left alike, so it’s tempting to write some sort of contrarian defense of her new show, ‘Raising McCain.’ But, honestly, there’s only so much upspeak one critic can take. ‘This is not your mama’s talk show!’ the intro brags, but it clearly intends to be your aunt’s talk show, if that aunt is Tabitha Soren, of the old MTV series ‘Choose or Lose.’”
 — The olds at the New Yorker warn us about the coming of Pivot TV

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