even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

Ms. Ginn, left, in her rat-pelt dress, and Ms. LaViola chatting with guests before dinner.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/pixel.gif

damn, for some reason i couldn't get that rat-pelt dress picture to show up. maybe a moderator can add it.

i couldn't even save that picture to my computer. the times is tricky.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/27/arts/design/20120727-RATS-4.html

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/07/26/garden/26TWENTIES_SPAN/26TWENTIES-articleLarge.jpg

she needs to come along for the ride.

Across the table Mr. Hutchings gnawed on a rat bone, pronouncing it delicious. The dinner delivered on its once-in-a-lifetime promise. “I don’t care about it as art,” he said. “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/07/27/arts/27RATS_SPAN/27RATS_SPAN-articleLarge.jpg

For Ms. Ginn skinning and eating rats represents the survivalist instincts she likes to explore in her work. “To have these sorts of skills, it’s very empowering,” she said. “It makes me feel like I have more control over my world.”

Cheryl
Westchester Cty

It reminds me a bit of the Woman Warrior ( Maxine Kingston) description of the narrator's mother as a Great Eater, one who could literally and figuratively eat any dish set before her without the slightest expression of fear or disgust. But in a setting of extreme comfort, and the best condiments and disguises for the purchased rats, it doesn't seem to signify anything. Now, if all the rats had been "wild raised" in NYC and caught by the participants, that would be a better story... Or perhaps if different rats had been trapped in different restaurants, again, we could compare the effects of different restaurant fare on their taste.... Overall, ick.

jg
San Francisco

How is this any different from the sensationalism of TV Shows like Fear Factor. Rats are disgusting and only eaten in the worst of times. They are in fact disease ridden and thoroughly disgusting. Why does this generation insist on destroying paradigms or structures without any sensible or tangible replacements. Did they learn nothing from the Baby Boomers and the "Me" generation? I hate everything about this from it's pettiness to its barbarism to the sensationalistic and cynical nature of it. Rich people eating rats. Rich indeed.

comments get really real:

Sami
Long Beach, CA

This can be seen as the expected result of the gentrification of New York that has been occurring for the past 20 years or so. Rats, formerly associated with urban squalor, became reified as a kind of aesthetic signifier of "authentic" New York-ness by the post-collegiate hordes of mostly white middle class young people who flocked to places like Williamsburg in the late 90s and early 2000s. These people were ravenous for real urban life, and embraced the rat as a component of a lifestyle they sought - even as their (the gentrifiers) increasing presence destroyed that same reality by displacing working class residents and communities that had been associated with the presence of rats during the Reagan era of urban decline. This event combines the role that art plays in the gentrification process with the gentrifiers obsession with "local" food culture in an ironic glorification of their (Pyrrhic) conquest of the "urban."

something about eating rats that really pisses people off.

sorry, link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/arts/design/dinner-at-an-exhibition-rat-prepared-many-ways.html?ref=dining

Sometimes I feel like the cycle of trolling and being trolled has just become a ritual for the Times style sections, like the commenters are just this chorus of people who "come to boo"

I mean that's what we are, basically

ya they know what theyre doin

Sami
Long Beach, CA

This can be seen as the expected result of the gentrification of New York that has been occurring for the past 20 years or so. Rats, formerly associated with urban squalor, became reified as a kind of aesthetic signifier of "authentic" New York-ness by the post-collegiate hordes of mostly white middle class young people who flocked to places like Williamsburg in the late 90s and early 2000s. These people were ravenous for real urban life, and embraced the rat as a component of a lifestyle they sought - even as their (the gentrifiers) increasing presence destroyed that same reality by displacing working class residents and communities that had been associated with the presence of rats during the Reagan era of urban decline. This event combines the role that art plays in the gentrification process with the gentrifiers obsession with "local" food culture in an ironic glorification of their (Pyrrhic) conquest of the "urban."

― scott seward, Friday, 27 July 2012 04:07 (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ rad

I think we can't totally discount the possibility that this artist is trolling us too, like basically going for what that commenter is describing? I mean “I don’t care about it as art,” he said. “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

that sounds like trolling

i don't know, do you think that psychiatrists think their case studies are interesting as human beings, or just... interesting...?

I think we can't totally discount the possibility that this artist is trolling us too, like basically going for what that commenter is describing? I mean “I don’t care about it as art,” he said. “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

― Will Chave (Hurting 2), Friday, 27 July 2012 16:53 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this wasn't the artist, this was one of the guests

this seems totally fine to me tbh

i hope that they get the plague and die.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/automobiles/autoreviews/you-cant-beat-it-with-a-stick.html

Priced from $26,795, this is the ILX that screams “compromise” at the top of its little 2-liter lungs, with standard cloth seats and just 150 breathless horses from a version of the Civic engine.

the ILX seems limited to fans of zing-it-yourself compacts at a relatively high price.

too much time on nyt

http://storify.com/jcstearns/lessons-from-the-fake-new-york-times-wikileaks-op

hey, in the interest of fair play, i read that article about the girl tavi who had the fashion blog and now has the rookie site and she seems cool and her site looks great and smart.

don't want to hate every young person in the new york times. makes me feel bad.

"in the spirit of sassy magazine" is always a good move. plus, john waters loves her and that's good enough for me.

wish more websites looked like the rookie site for real! so easy to read and navigate and pleasant to look at.

http://rookiemag.com/

ya tavi is awesome

yep rookie is great and i wish i was as cool and smart at 28 as tavi is at 15/16

nothing to hate about tavi.

Rookie is great and I wish it was there to read when I was 12+ years old. So much better than so many teen girl mags.

LONG ILX THREADS HATE THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK:

1. Click on the Permalink of the message right after the cutoff.

2. The URL will now contain something like "bookmarkedmessageid=3669956"

3. Change that number to something smaller and you will be jumped back to an earlier point in the thread without loading the whole thing.

― Godzilla vs. Rodan Rodannadanna (The Yellow Kid), Friday, July 27, 2012 12:52 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark

I feel dumb for not having thought of doing this myself!

i tried it on the long orig breaking bad thread & it didnt seem 2 work

Which part didn't work? The only maybe tricky part is that if you don't make that number small enough, you won't get any older messages. And if you make that number too small you'll be at the first messages. Usually lowering it by thousands or ten-thousands is enough.

i have tried it and it worked

What I do with a long thread is open it at my bookmarked spot and then hit permalink on the first post while the rest is loading.

fyi you can also click on the permalink for the last post before the fold and then just click “view previous page"

View Previous Page has only ever worked sporadically for me.

i enjoy that scott is all 'that tavi girl'

View Previous Page has only ever worked sporadically for me.

― Godzilla vs. Rodan Rodannadanna (The Yellow Kid), Friday, August 3, 2012 4:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/nyregion/four-men-sharing-rent-and-friendship-for-18-years.html

men. living together.

i was looking for a thread on like manchildren or something to post this on but i guess this is close enough because lol nytimes not so much these guys are the ruling class

"Shyaporn Theerakulstit, actor and audiobook narrator"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/fashion/montauk-feels-the-effects-of-too-many-hipsters.html

In the meantime, longtime residents are left to harken back to that first crowd that had to endure an invasion of newcomers, the Montauket tribe. As Mr. Devlin’s wife, Eileen, joked on Friday as the restaurant prepared for another busy night, “Now I know how the Indians felt.”

Nope. No you don't.

it notes clearly that she was joking

yah what gives

Another showed a rifle and the words “Defend Montauk.”

printing hipster shirts against hipsters u might be a hipster

also isnt the fedora more of a broish affectation

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/nyregion/four-men-sharing-rent-and-friendship-for-18-years.html

men. living together.

― goole, Saturday, August 4, 2012 1:57 PM

this was hilarious! The comments, though, are mostly horrifying.

quiddities thread has made me insensitive to the real articles, i want all the stupid setup cut so i can get right to the aughs

so by hipster they just mean young money?

http://i.imgur.com/aXnRN.jpg

well

what is rainer up to these days? (POLL CLOSES 31 DEC 2044)

President Biden is yet another one-term Democrat hurt by inflation and struggling to free hostages before leaving office. But Mr. Carter’s enhanced reputation offers hope that he too may be remembered more favorably.

Let's see if Diamond Joe has forty years in the tank to make up for it.

lol

Building houses Buster Keaton style

i kinda wonder if anyone would have thought of jimmy carter at all over the years if it weren't for the houses thing. he did a lot to keep his name out there and also become saintly or whatever. like those rich people do now. bill gates, etc.

once biden is out i don't think anyone will think about him at all until he dies. he's pretty forgettable.

oh, i’ll think of him as a senile racist murderer who deserves the gallows, don’t worry.

tablespierre

honestly anyone who speaks positively about Biden should be shown images of Palestinian fathers shaking their headless children as flames burn the refugee camp they are in.

this doesn't really belong here but this article about the royal mint turning a nation's trash into luxury jewelry belongs somewhere. we really have gone back to old time gold-mining days.

https://www.nytimes.com/card/2025/01/01/business/uk-royal-mint-jewelry

On a recent evening, 10 Cubed in Central Park Tower was glowing. The city lights sparkled below, and the room was lit by a swirly Rubelli fiber-optic ceiling designed to mimic the night sky. A couple finished their meal about 7 p.m. and left the restaurant, which stayed empty the rest of the night.

At 432 Park, residents at one point were required to spend $15,000 a year at the restaurant.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/nyregion/condo-tower-restaurants.html

i read that and now await the wistful sofia coppola movie where retired entrepreneur bill murray is the one lone customer at the super-luxurious private restaurant atop the super-deluxe high rise who starts a wistful friendship with the wistful Senegalese gourmet chef there. bill encourages the chef to ask the sad housekeeper out on a date and makes them both spaghetti with meatballs and he also teaches the chef about baseball and the chef teaches bill how to...feel again. the soundtrack would be heavy on george gershwin and orchestra baobab.

Oh shit that guy had a restaurant down the street from me that I didn't even know about (it closed in 2022). Wish I'd gone!

lol Scott

"Latino immigrants care for some of America’s most lavish beachside mansions. Their disappearance would affect the wealthy, too."

"Some of the wealthy are quietly beginning to make calculations about what it would mean if their undocumented workers were deported. Who would mow the lawn?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/nyregion/east-hampton-immigration-nannies.html

the quietest calculations

The answer to the last question is "child labor."

https://www.thecut.com/article/luxrury-children-party-planners.html

About 20 years ago I worked in a letterpress shop for a few months and one of my first jobs was the, like, 6-piece invitation and RSVP card combo for a bar mitzvah, including a handmade wax seal medallion with a custom impression, except the dad didn't like the 1100 wax seals because they were too blobby (like real wax). So, one at a time, I used an x-acto knife to carve off the blobs and then re-melt each seal over a bunsen burner to make the edges uniform.

They rented the Brooklyn Museum for the event. I think we estimated that the invitations alone were like $20,000.

Never have I seen a headline more apposite for this thread:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/magazine/income-ice-facility-ethics.html

wowww

“Kind of evil”

omfg someone referenced this in the No Way NYT thread and it didn’t even cross my mind that it wasn’t satire. wow jesus

NY Times been normalizing evil for a while now.

I know Vows columns are fish-in-a-barrel, but check out these fish: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/style/sean-mcelwee-rachel-atcheson-wedding.html?unlocked_article_code=1.RE8.xxql.UXc_JiPs9rAN&smid=url-share

When Rachel Kelly Atcheson and Sean Adrian McElwee first met at a West Village coffee shop in June 2022, it was too tense to be a meet-cute. Ms. Atcheson — at the time, the senior assistant to Mayor Eric Adams — was planning to chew out Mr. McElwee, a pollster with whom she shared a mutual friend.

Mr. McElwee was conducting polling on behalf of Protect Our Future super PAC, which was backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto billionaire later convicted of fraud. She was angry about political spending in general, including the more than $11 million that Protect Our Future put toward Carrick Flynn, a long-shot congressional candidate in Oregon.

...They held a celebration at Tamerlaine Sanctuary & Preserve in Montague, N.J. The 202 guests — including plant-based nonprofit employees, hedge fund managers, alternative-protein-focused venture capitalists and political consultants — were invited to participate in “community-building breakout sessions,” as they called them, which included salsa lessons, improv, a storytelling workshop and board games.

The drizzly weather cleared in time for the ceremony portion of what they called “a learning wedding.” After a guided meditation and a pause for Ms. Atcheson’s introductory speech, the couple exchanged their vows. Mr. McElwee promised to “keep building together” and made several references to the bride’s preternatural ability to connect others.

Guests were instructed to fill out a questionnaire before the wedding and were sent a spreadsheet listing the other guests and their LinkedIn profiles.

Plant based, alternative protein

MEAT CUTE

Oh my god I would be so pissed if I showed up to a wedding and was forced into team-building activities with tech bros

thank god i have never known any people like this

(In November 2022, five months after the coffee shop encounter, he was asked to step down amid betting allegations.)

Amazing tidbit to include in a wedding piece.

“I’ve never been to a wedding like this,” said Stanley Wang, a regular at the McElwee-Atcheson poker nights.

This could easily be a McSweeney’s satire piece. cannot believe people like this actually exist

The LinkedIn profile sharing and spreadsheet thing is what sent me over the edge into “these people are actually cartoon demons”

otm, cannot even begin to imagine the addled brain that finds that a "fun" idea

Zohran Mamdani is wrong — of course billionaires should exist
https://www.ft.com/content/d441c292-33d5-4be7-8d98-5fea2b2f3aa0

This latest hit piece on Mamdani is truly incredible, 3 authors to break the news that a South Asian man born in Uganda identified himself as Asian and African American on an application to a college that he didn't get into. The story came from hacked information, provided by a white supremacist who the NYT agreed to keep anonymous.

A white supremacist trying to turn Black voters against him — transparent and disgusting. He's literally an American citizen born in Africa. Africa has a lot of different kinds of people, breaking news. The best part is this:

After Mr. Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, he continued to grapple with the issue of racial identity, successfully cosponsoring legislation requiring that when the state collects demographic data, it include categories for New Yorkers of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

“The inability of these boxes to reflect the breadth of New Yorkers’ lives and their backgrounds is something that has also influenced my legislative work and my advocacy,” he said in the interview.

Like, he actually recognized the limitations of the forms and worked to broaden them!

Jamelle Bouie posted that he removed several posts critical of the story (such as "I think you should tell readers if your source is a Nazi") because they violated the Times social media policy.

Quisling behaviour tbh

bouie is an opinion columnist. he’s literally employed because of his opinions. why on earth would the times want him to be “neutral” on social media

in what way is mamdani not african-american

the times doesn't want bouie to be "neutral" on social media, they just don't want him (or any other staffer) to be overtly critical of the paper and its editorial decisions. they even let him keep up a post in which he was personally critical of one of the writers of that mamdani article (who is a freelancer and not a times staffer).

bouie (evidently) will do as he’s told. he’s not an important player here. I would just love to hear an argument that those designations he chose on his application are inaccurate

hey the times is just asking questions

They’re Rich, They Travel and They Love to Complain
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/style/olivia-ferney-travel-rich-clients-tiktok.html?unlocked_article_code=1.f08.874s.xhWRselbqBOF

(latest aggregation of people to fire into the sun)

this story is not quite quid ag, but it definitely wouldn't be the same without the wealth/class disparity involved. insane, infuriating and sad in equal measure:

The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It?
When her son died in utero, a venture capitalist went to extremes to punish her surrogate.
https://archive.is/SssTh

Fucking hell that Wired story. So many horrific details but “if I cannot give him honor, sue the hell out of these people, and have some sense of justice … how can the investment founders say, ‘Cindy, you’re the best?’” is hard to beat.

Definite crossover with ‘Is the US a dystopia’ thread, not just the grim capitalism elements but with how fucked up the care for women who lose their pregnancies is and also some sinister race stuff for good measure. Awful.

yeah, that story is truly insane

honestly i wish nothing but harm upon Bi

That story is awful and Bi is further evidence that tech ghouls are some of the worst people on the planet.