A beautiful lush essay and homage to an ubiquitous typeface without a name.
Category: New York
Hundred percent sure that if the same policy would be applied to Berlin most car traffic would evaporate from our streets here immediately. Most traffic in my neighborhood is people without really that much to do who could be doing something other than driving and drug dealers.
As if it wasn’t obvious that the New York Times is a pile of crap, here’s them getting rid of Paul Krugman for views that aren’t Trump positive enough.
Even as the world has caught up with him, Finkelstein remains most comfortable on the margins — ideologically aligned with a left that won’t always have him, platformed by a right that won’t always listen, and insulting them both.
Yet Finkelstein is ambivalent about being pressed back into the cause and sympathetic to younger generations’ relative lack of interest in “old fogies.”“I recognize,”he said, “that it is your moment, it’s not my moment.”
A pretty fair profile of a man who’s a polarizing character.
John Ganz on nationalism and reducing humans to insects.
A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.
Above all, I refuse to become an insect or look on others as insects.
An extremely damning account of the way Vice and also the NYT have treated Naomi Wu with some choice bad behaviour from people like Doctorow in part 2 as well.
I get that she got into it a bit naive like many people do when it comes to esteemed publications like the Times. I’ve been at the backstage of an event once where there were people from the NYT and everybody there is ass kissing them all the time because they want to either 1. be covered positively in the ‘paper of record’ or 2. get a job there since it’s one of the last places paying journalists well. In such an environment, it’s hard not to believe that you are better than others.
Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.
Fuck Manhattan. This (Jackson Heights) is the real New York: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/27/arts/design/jackson-heights-queens-virtual-walk-tour.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
A long piece on The Daily which reveals a lot about its inner workings and the all-consuming scale with which something like that operates.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/michael-barbaro-the-daily-podcast-new-york-times.html
Lekha is a former collaborator who now has this lovely site of her own. Her sense of systems and many skills have always made it a joy to work with her.
“In the new city of the supertalls, man is born free but everywhere is in salad chains. The people are being made skinny to fit the skinniness of the buildings to come.”
“Whether the art that comes out of The Shed will be any good, or just social media-ready kitsch delivered in unnourishing experiential baggies for the ’gram, we don’t yet know.”
Every city worth a damn will be colonized and sterilized.
Turns out large parts of science and popular science are all contaminated by Epstein. Evgeny Morozov reveals his part and extricates himself.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154826/jeffrey-epsteins-intellectual-enabler
An incisive profile on the life of an Instagram influencer.
https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/who-would-tavi-gevinson-be-without-instagram.html
I had kinda forgotten about Soigneur, but then I ran into this amazing set of photos of racing bikes in the city. That new race bike seems to be getting closer and closer.
An incredible treatment of moving to New York that manages to make SF more than a bit lame in comparison.
Americans feel ripped off by the Corres’s bait and switch and it seems now we’re going to seeing a free for all where they will mercilessly rip the site.
It was disappointing to realize — to actually see in the numbers — that while The Correspondent raised $2.6 million in part by stressing diversity and inclusivity, tapping ambassadors like DeRay Mckesson and Baratunde Thurston, the Dutch site is not a model of that diversity.
There is a lot of criticism and hate in the Netherlands as well but it’s not so pronounced because:
- The site has its provenance in the Netherlands.
- It’s a small country and you never know who you’ll need again in the future (“the media in The Netherlands is more tight-knit, insular, and male than it is in the U.S.”).
The USA is not bothered by either of those and that creates a more honest environment because frankly a lot of the criticism is valid.
“They’re really good at the PR thing, and it really feels like gaslighting.”
The Correspondent miscommunicated the goals of their extremely well-funded crowdfunding campaign and now their first employee speaks out on their shady practices. Not to mention that a lot of what the Correspondent writes is unreadable and/or compromised.
Unexpected but more than welcome that The Verge would bring the story of Ramsey Orta, the person who filmed the killing of Eric Garner by NYPD and is now facing prison time and harassment for it.
Never forget: Police are bad.