“Nevertheless, the female thrill seekers are as bewildering in their own way as the sleazy would-be mayor of New York is in his. Why is he called a pervert while Sydney Leathers’s statement that their Internet contact progressed to phone sex twice a week — ‘a fantasy thing for both of us,’ she told one tabloid TV show — is greeted with neutral, if not exactly respectful, attention? Some fantasy. Cinderella, where are you now that we need you? […] Virtual sex is to sex as virtual food is to food: you can’t taste, touch or smell it, and you don’t have to do any preparation or work. Sex with strangers online amounts to a diminution, close to an absolute negation, of the context that gives human interaction genuine content. Erotic play without context becomes just a form of one-on-one pornography.”

This New York Times op-ed by Susan Jacoby is such a piece of terrible, double-standarding, offensive trash! “Internet sex with strangers” “expresses” “a loneliness and low opinion of oneself”! Anyway, yeah, how dare you sluts do what you want to do, how shameful.

Stupid photo via Shutterstock.

“A recipe on July 17 for Paella of the Sea misstated the amount of rice required. It is four cups, not four pounds.”

All the things you can do tonight! They include: Mike Doughty, Beth Orton, M. Ward, a night with Harper’s Magazine, some book parties and readings, and, of course, the final closing party at Maxwell’s over in Hoboken. Goodbye Maxwell’s!

★★★★ The sky was a promising clear blue; sunlight chrome-plated the trees and the bulge of a belly in its leather or synthetic maternity dress. The sun cooked things a little where it got though the shade on 3rd Street, and got hotter still in the open on Houston. A mourning dove lay dead at the top of the fire escape at the office, with a little spot of blood on the mat under its beak thickening in the sun. By afternoon, the air had dried out and the sun had nothing to hold onto. Now the breezes bridged the patches of shade, making for easy walking. Teens with iPhones swarmed a locked store, trying to see a pop star shopping privately inside. The new asphalt at Columbus and Broadway was soft and scented. Late light flashed off the usually invisible joints between floors on the next apartment building, and lit up sails on the Hudson.

Your Body Is Waking You In The Middle Of The Night To Tell You Something’s Wrong, And Also You Might As Well Go To The Bathroom Now That You’re Up

Do you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night for no reason? Maybe you’re dying! Here’s a bunch of shit to worry about.

“As for the new Walter Mitty movie, I fear we can expect all the melodrama and the slapstick that we saw in the old one, though I should have loved to see Ben Stiller in a faithful version of this story, which would make a very lovely movie. Stiller can be both Everyman and also a strangely elegant and romantic figure (a rare combination, and one essential to the character of Mitty). I admit, it pained me to hear about the shark attack. But it bears remembering that this story has withstood three quarters of a century of invasive re-workings without any real harm coming to its beguiling hero, whose wayward charm has become the indestructible stuff of legend…”

“A runaway greenhouse Armageddon in which the oceans boil dry could theoretically happen on Earth, researchers claim.”

“I recently saw a boy in a supermarket parking lot in Winston-Salem, N.C., with a T-shirt that read, ‘What would Cher do?’”

by Brendan O’Connor

Until last week, I worked at a food truck downtown. We sold grilled cheese and milkshakes. One of the unusual things about this particular food service job was that the owner used customer comments and pictures on social media — especially Twitter and Instagram — to monitor his workers. Grilled cheese: gamified.

And it was explicitly framed as a game for workers. Members of whichever ‘crew’ got the most positive feedback on social media each month would win a $25 iTunes gift card.

But compliments are hard to track online. Even if a customer thinks she is paying a compliment online, she might not be. Like if you enjoyed your sandwich enough to Instagram it, but the color of the grilled bread wasn’t exactly right, we’d hear about it.

Anyway. The other rainy Monday morning, business was slow when a group of about a dozen customers sprinted up. This was at our second location, a stall the company opened in South Street Seaport to support the area while Hurricane Sandy repairs were happening. This group placed a huge order: three of this sandwich, four of another, three of the one that takes forever on the grill, two of the one that takes forever to assemble. Five or six milkshakes. The order came to just under $170.

I was making sandwiches, another worker took the order and a third made the milkshakes and watched the grills. A line grew while we worked, and we had to tell other customers that their lunch orders would take longer than usual. They paid; I asked my co-worker who was dealing with the money how much of a tip they’d left. They had left actually no tip at all. (They had paid with a card so we checked the cash tips to see if there’d been a bump. There hadn’t.)

I asked some of the group as they were picking up their orders if they had intended to not tip. They hemmed and hawed and walked away.

Well. I could have not said anything. I could have made it a subtweet. I probably should have made it a subtweet. But I didn’t, because of some misguided notions about having “the courage of your convictions,” or whatever.

Shout out to the good people of Glass, Lewis & Co. for placing a $170 order and not leaving a tip. @glasslewis

— Brendan O’Connor (@OConnorB_) July 22, 2013

Two days later, I got a text from the owner asking if I was free to talk on the phone at some point. We spoke later that afternoon.

He told me that he’d gotten a call from the company, Glass, Lewis & Co. The company provides shareholder advisory services. Apparently, those employees were mortified that their lunch truck had tip-shamed them — the home office in San Francisco even got involved.

And it was unfortunate but he was going to have to let me go. The company has a way of doing things and he thought I’d understood that. I had embarrassed him and the company and that was that.

The food truck apologized to the customers on Twitter, and Glass, Lewis accepted that apology.

@milktrucknyc We appreciate it, and look forward to doing business with you again!

— Glass Lewis & Co. (@GlassLewis) July 24, 2013

Obviously I knew it was a possibility that I’d get fired. I guess I had hoped that the owner would have my back if they complained, but that was a miscalculation. And the stakes weren’t too high, or I wouldn’t have done it: I’d been thinking about quitting and focussing on freelancing, so I had a luxury of speaking, and then tweeting, my mind.

What did I get out of this? Hmm. A “story,” maybe. A lesson about employers — at least in the food service industry — and what they think of workers advocating for themselves.

To be fair, maybe I’m not the best employee for a gamified grilled cheese truck. About a month earlier, I’d come into work on a Saturday and was told I’d need to work late the next day. (Our schedules are established on a weekly basis, so this was very late notice.) I believed this gave me some degree of leverage. So I started bargaining. If they needed me to stay late on Sunday with only 24 hours notice, surely it was only fair that they let me go early that night?

They weren’t too happy about this and my bargaining failed — they just found someone else to work late on Sunday. I suppose this is why ‘collective bargaining’ is a thing.

The justice or injustice of tipping is a question again under hot debate; the incivility of failing to leave a tip on an order of that size, in the current arrangement of things, is not. There is a reason so many restaurants impose a mandatory tip on parties of a certain size.

And also: If social media is going to be used in one way to monitor worker productivity, why can it not also be used to advocate for a more civil exchange between worker and consumer? And why wouldn’t a food service entity, while it’s judging employees on social media, also judge its customers? The business practice of running a restaurant is to cultivate great customers and spurn bad ones.

At least I wasn’t asked to delete the tweet. And I wasn’t asked to apologize. Not that I would have done either of those things. I was just canned. A part-time food-truck worker with 300 Twitter followers managed to shame some Wall Street firm into getting him fired. What a world.

A restaurant that sells “hamburgers” finally opened in New York City yesterday, and a man rushed over to sample the exotic cuisine. This is his story.