“A film review on Friday about ‘Jobs,’ a biography of Steve Jobs that the review said has ‘all the sex appeal of a PowerPoint presentation,’ referred imprecisely to PowerPoint.”

If you’re a person who does things there are things to do, including Adelle Waldman and co. at McNally Jackson, Cris Beam at The Strand, Mark Epstein at BookCourt — and “E.T.” in Bryant Park and documentaries with James Baldwin at BAM. Also The Brooklyn Comedy Festival starts today if that’s your bag.

Do you hate it when your friends, co-workers and office enemies become successful? Then be careful where you work. What outfits like PostBourgie have done — it is now too late to stop the Grape Drink Mafia! — is gather together a super-smart (or sometimes just super-aggressive) group of people that will go on to success and perhaps even dominance in media. (You could say something similar about n+1, but they’re all basically unemployed novelists, and there weren’t that many of them anyway. What about The New Inquiry? Well, only time will tell. Check back in later 2013.)

Over the last twenty years, a handful of scenes emerged that seem to have fed people into dominant roles in journalism. (That most of these scenes were all or nearly all white explains quite a bit about some things too.) But it’s true: you can’t just play “where are they now” with any old masthead and get satisfaction; many mastheads are full of folks that have moved on to other fields or are otherwise unfindable.

Cases could be made for lots of recent eras at other publications. (The Advocate, circa… 2000? The New Republic in 2007? Was there a golden age of Details???) But here’s six examples of moments that might not have seemed magical at the time but certainly look it in retrospect. Bonus: none of them are Spy.

As with any list, omissions, unpleasant memories and time compression are purely the fault of the passage of time. Suck it up.

Lingua Franca, 1990–2001

Where are they now?

• A.O. Scott, New York Times film critic
• Hillary Frey, editorial director of NBC News Digital
• Daniel Zalewski, New Yorker
• Warren St. John, formerly New York Times
• Emily Eakin, New York Review of Books, New York Times
• Judith Shulevitz, The New Republic
• Margaret Talbot, New Yorker
• Larissa McFarquhar, New Yorker
• Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker
• Alex Star, FSG
• Lev Grossman, novelist, Time book critic
• Laura Secor, New Yorker
• Masha Gessen

Vibe, mid-90s

Where are they now?

• Danyel Smith, two-time Vibe editor and editor of Billboard
• Joe Angio, editor of Time Out, documentary filmmaker
• Carter Harris, writer, “Friday Night Lights”
• Kathy Dobie, contributor to Harper’s, GQ
• Sacha Jenkins
• Greg Tate
• Dave Bry
• Minya Oh, Hot 97
• Mimi Valdés, editor of Vibe, Latina, then head of BET.com
• Josh Tyrangiel, editor of Bloomberg Businessweek

Spin circa 2003–2005

Where are they now?

• Sia Michel, editor, Arts & Leisure, New York Times
• Will Hermes, Rolling Stone and NPR
• Dave Itzkoff, New York Times
• Alex Pappademas, Grantland
• Chuck Klosterman, Grantland
• Thomas Beller
• Marc Spitz, Vanity Fair
• Melissa Maerz, TV critic, Entertainment Weekly
• Zev Borow
• Mark Schone has since won Emmy, duPont, Peabody, and Murrow awards

Suck/Feed

Where are they now?

• Heather Havrilesky
• Ana Marie Cox, Wonkette, now The Guardian
• Owen Thomas, editor, ReadWriteWeb
• Nick Gillespie, Reason
• Chris Lehmann, The Baffler and BookForum
• Josh Ozersky, Time
• Jake Tapper, ABC
• Greg Knauss
• Mark Dery
• Tim Cavanaugh, Reason
• Elaine Blair, NY Review of Books
• Feed Contributing Editors list: Keith Gessen, Sam Lipsyte, Clay Shirky

Inside Dot Com

Where are they now?

• David Carr, New York Times
• PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit
• Erik Wemple, Washington Post
• Simon Dumenco, Ad Age
• Michael Cieply, New York Times
• Seth Mnookin, MIT
• Greg Lindsay, in some airport somewhere
• Lorne Manly, New York Times
• Craig Marks, editor of Blender, Billboard
• Sara Nelson, editorial director, Amazon.com

Weird Philadelphia Scene, circa 2003–2005

While there were a few publications attached to this group, including Philadelphia Weekly, Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia magazine, this strange scene spanned publications and later assaulted New York City somewhat simultaneously (and not subtly). This is the most confounding of all these scenes; by around 2007, they had all depart d Philadelphia.

Where are they now?

• Doree Shafrir, executive editor, BuzzFeed
• Jessica Pressler, New York
• AJ Daulerio, editorial director, Spin and Vibe
• Moe Tkacik
• Stephen Rodrick, New York Times Magazine
• Gabe Boylan, BBCAmerica.com
• Sasha Issenberg
• Bethlehem Shoals, The Classical
• Christine Smallwood, New Yorker and Harper’s contributor
• Mattathias Schwartz, New Yorker and Harper’s contributor
• Dan P. Lee, New York
• Mark Lotto, GQ
• Benjamin Wallace, New York
• Michael Schaffer, editorial director of The New Republic, former Washington City Paper editor

★★★★★ The toddler and the clear blue sky each made the case for getting outside at once — onto the third-floor play deck, up to the fourth floor deck for grownups, and then down and out the front to watch cement trucks pouring concrete into the boom pump. Little white clouds arrived, a tasteful assortment. The tourists were on the hoof, unharried by temperature: a couple with a thumb-splayed guidebook decelerated in mid-block and mid-sidewalk; a herd filled an entire corner. So what? Frustration evaporated quickly in the atmosphere. Beer was on ice on the office roof; up above was a just-gibbous moon, with a small plane and a big jet passing near it, and pink-gray clouds and white cirrus, everything at its own altitude or distance. The ugly gray apartment buildings caught amber light. The Empire State Building was shimmering. A contrail stretched fat and vivid white. A thin pink cotton-candy haze appeared over the moon, then turned to silver streaks as the sky darkened. The moon made its way out of the east and well into the west, and the people stayed where they were.

Kim Deal is one of those rare people who is so effortlessly cool, and so acknowledged for her effortless cool, that she is somehow underrated when people assess her levels of cool and the effort expended to maintain them, just by virtue of the fact that her coolness is already processed and assimilated. She’s like a chick Dave Grohl, to put it in the kind of terms a Bryan Goldberg would understand. Anyway, here’s her new one. Sedate, but cool. [Via]

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Instrumental

There, reading against the traffic, a car
crash between chapters.

Alphabet via street
signs. C is for Con
Ed.

Kids music
meant an actual kid, singing to herself

past
all the silent billboards.

*

Then those days — when you were starting out,
as they say — you were sulfur

frozen at Odeon

when strapped to the masthead,
every remark,
aside, sharpened.

The table by the mirror reserved
for all the baby lionesses.

And now. You are living the app.
A pop-up. La Vida App!

Too many words, not enough ears.

*

An instrument of life, of instrumental life,
In those days — raised by the book, zine,
velveteen couch. African

violet. Your face in the spider
plants. World of Our Fathers,
Serpico edition.

Hairy men bearing
Bronx-Yonkers vowels.

Famous daughters’ names hidden,
like classical music in restaurants.

Children under oak tables.
Everyone under nine is “Outta sight!”

*

All stars, all
likes. All nothing.

And you know, it’s so much like every culture

business in which you are really nothing,
with some handler/mother/father guiding you along

toward ?option percent foreign.
You are something waiting to be nothing or vice

versa. As value
is circulation.
The Twitter
Dead Souls told me.

*

Ann says: In Minnesota it was
peer therapy on the phone, over coffee,
or on plush ottomans.

You’d talk for an hour then
the peer for her hour.

Unlike a real friendship, so to speak,
each person had to listen

their allotted time.

*

Now, the ads talk to us all
in cars. Bus stops move with

product. Streaming, advertorial, posted, scraped
mined. Reading is fracking.

Friends are what we handle.
BabywithiPad!.jpg

Too many words,
not enough ears.

Alissa Quart is author of the non-fiction Republic of Outsiders, out this month, and contributes regularly to many publications including The New York Times. Her poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books and elsewhere.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“Marissa Mayer’s ascent up the corporate ladder and to the top of the tech world are enough to make her the mentor every working woman wants. But her uncanny ability to perfectly answer that age-old fashion question: What is work-appropriate? is equally worth emulating. During her early days at Google, she stood out not only as a star coder, but in her polished Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta separates, as a style setter in Silicon Valley. Her look became her trademark, setting her apart from the sea of hoodies and flip-flops that are so prevalent in West Coast tech world boardrooms. So, while this CEO of the moment is trending, we decided to take a page from her playbook, with our Monday through Friday guide highlighting what to wear to work. Add these looks to your iCal now.”

Stories like this usually happen to let us know that it is time to draw the curtain down on summer, so I’d recommend that you make the most out of your remaining weekends: Fall is clearly coming up fast.

“Here’s a new strategy in the ongoing war between coffeeshops and laptop squatters, courtesy San Francisco’s Coffee Bar: reserved ‘express tables’ for non-computer users.”