Penny Wiseacre

There's something about this paragraph ...

[Bill] Simmons grew so big that ESPN was willing to fund an entirely separate site -- Grantland -- as a way to make him happy and keep him tied to their larger brand.  His quasi-departure from the company that had "made" him presaged other moves like it. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg broke from the Wall Street Journal to start Re/code, a tech site. David Pogue, a popular tech columnist at the New York Times, left to start a larger brand of his own under the Yahoo umbrella. Ezra Klein, a star policy writer here at WaPo, left to run a broader site for Vox Media. And Nate Silver, who made his name as an election modeler for the Times, jumped to ESPN -- drawn by the model Simmons had created with Grantland.

-- "What Bill Simmons' Suspension Tells Us About the Changing World of Journalism," WaPo, Sept 25, 14

I realize the takeaway here is supposed to be that "Individual Content Creators Who Just Say Things Are Now Bigger Than The Institutions That Launched Them," but here is my takeaway ...

That's a whole lotta dudes who turn into brands.

And the one woman, Kara Swisher, is mentioned in conjunction with her co-founder dude.

It's worth digging in to: Are there "star" reporters capable of launching their own brands who happen to also be women? More TK.

Would you all like to be lab rats?

I don't talk much about my day job on my personal blog for many reasons, some of which may actually demonstrate mature good judgment.

But one of the ongoing tasks I have is to assess email as an effective form of editorial content. I spend a lot of time thinking about email newsletters -- what makes the good ones good, why they work in this age of social media and texting, how to make them work better, how much effort it takes to produce something of value to the readers.

It's one thing to think big thoughts on the job. I'm also doing some private experimenting so I can bring real-world experience to bear on anything I say on the job.

My new experiment: I've launched a semi-daily newsletter of my own through Tiny Letter. It's called So What, Who Cares, and you can subscribe here.

So What, Who Cares is published every Monday-Thursday night. I point out three to five things that you might like to know, explaining why they matter (So what?) and who they affect (Who cares?). It's a news digest with context -- and the odd bit of pop culture gushing when I read or see something worth my time.

Because I am commiting to my professional experiment for a few months, long-form blogging here will be infrequent at best. But I hope to see you all via Twitter, or via subscription to So What, Who Cares. (You can read the archive here.)

And if you all have ideas on how to continue conversations based on what I'm covering in So What, Who Cares ... I'm all ears. Facebook? Twitter? Open posts here? Tell me.

Liberals do THIS and conservatives do THAT

Here are recent developments that all go together ...

1. Conservatives want big houses & liberals want walkable communities. A recent poll showed that, when given a choice between "The houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools,  stores and restaurants are within walking distance" vs. "The houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away," 77% of consistently-liberal people chose the former while 75% of consistently-conservative people chose the latter.

2. Liberals eat here, conservatives eat there. The methodology: Researchers went into the chains and asked people for their political leanings. And now, they say, the presence of a specific chain can tell you whether a suburb is shifting toward a more liberal bent.

(How to tell your exeurb is becoming infested with liberals? Ethnic food. Or its nonunion equivalent, i.e. P.F. Chang or Chipotle. I question labeling Chipotle as a liberal brand, since I keep running across "lifestyle bloggers" who skew rightward and gush about that place only slightly less than they do about pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks. But I suppose some folks have the ability to embrace the lifestyle cachet of fresh, local food or decent wages while completely ignoring the larger policy issues that make these things possible or not.)

3. Why the Democrats are focused on inequality: Liberal metros face the worst of it. The increasing economic divide between labor and white-collar knowledge workers is more prevalent in left-leaning cities. I look forward to seeing how this is reconciled with studies that show how the best cities in the U.S. for income mobility -- San Francisco, Seattle & Washington, D.C. -- are also among the most left-leaning in the U.S.

4. "'Ideological silos' are now common on the right and, to a lesser extent, on the left." A little more than six out of every ten consistently conservative people (63%) enjoy a homogeneity of opinion and values among their friends, while nearly five in ten consistently liberal people (49%) have a similarly homogenous bubble. (Also of note: conservative people seem to really loathe their liberal counterparts at a much higher percentage than vice-versa. I wonder why?)

... and none of this is really surprising if you've read Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. He identifies the cultural gulfs that exist between different regions of the country, so once you've accepted the idea that your conception of this country is going to be different from someone raised in a completely different region, the notion that folks in walkable neighborhoods are going to have different values from the folks sitting in 3000-square-foot houses 90 minutes away isn't really that hard to swallow, is it?

I have to admit that this self-selection for homogeneity makes me nervous. I've been nervous about it for nearly ten years, ever since I read "The Urban Archipelago." 

And here is my own admission of bubble residence: If there is an equal and opposite manifesto urging readers to abandon the cities and all who live there, to turn their backs on the "blue" states and their works? I can't recall what it is.

New York's Hottest Nightclub Is ...

A friend of mine linked to this piece by James St. James today, "Dear Michael Alig ...," which can be read in two ways:

1. As a critique of how swiftly consumer technology can alter social mores and change the definition of everyday tasks.

2. As a wink-and-a-nod parody to the superficiality of club- and "celebrity" culture and what the people involed in it presumably care about.

When I read it, what it reminded me most of was Josh Kilmer-Purcell's book, I Am Not Myself These Days, which details the year of his life in which he divided his time between working as a drag performer named Aqua and being helplessly in love with an escort-cum-crack-addict. At the end of the book, Kilmer-Purcell concludes:

While most of the things we are told may be true, it is not until we have tested them, taunted them, flaunted them, that we truly know they are right. Or wrong. Or true. Or false. Or somewhere in-the-fucking-between. And I think I know now a little better which is which. And I also know I’ll never quit testing this world. I’ll never rely on common knowledge. Or common denominators. Or even common sense, for that matter. To do so would be too, well, common.

So. I’ll keep dancing in my costumes. Day and night. And I won’t sleep as much as I should. And I will drink more than I should. And maybe, as I’m twirling and glittering, playing a retarded game of hide and seek in the middle of an open field, maybe, just maybe, whatever happens next will be bigger, and I will forget that which seems so huge to me right now.

This heedless rush away from your feelings and toward the bliss of the next big thing -- which will, when spoken aloud, be utterly tiny -- is what I think St. James was reaching for as he wrote "to" the man who killed their friend.

But there's also an echo of a sadder cultural complaint in the link. Because the party kids were folded into the same commodification of outsiderdom that Thomas Frank has been writing about since the club kids first hit daytime television. The end result?

Stefon.

The ostensible joke in each sketch is that a witless club kid works for a city tourism bureau and makes terribly inappropriate suggestions, but I think the larger joke is that you can actually buy the counterculture that you want. You can have the comfort of existing within the consumerist mindset of American culture while believing that you're somehow too special for it.

(Buying your way into an alternacutlure is a logical extension of celebrity as "the sum of their consumption patterns," to quote Anne Helen Peterson's analysis in the Believer. When the bar for getting attention is so low, we can all buy our way to notoriety for a second.)

The St. James piece ends with a chilling line about krokodil, a drug that's currently enjoying its moment as the panic object of straight culture. I love it. It's an elegant twist of the hairpin, a tiny vicious stab reminding the new guard that consumerist conventions may have moved forward but some truths about cultural commodification seemingly spring eternal.

The recipes for all the lives I'm never going to lead

One of my daughter's closest friends is severely allergic to eggs, milk and nuts. Another one is allergic to milk and eggs. The kids' preschool is nut-free at this point, and the teachers have done a wonderful job of teaching the children not to share food at school. "We could make our friends very sick," Trix will intone gravely, italics audible. "So we don't do it!"

Still, one of the fundamental joys of childhood is being able to bring in treats on your birthday, and another one is being able to share your snacks. So I asked the moms whose kids do have these allergies: "Do you have any recipes you like, or cookbooks to recommend?"

The surprising answer: Once you ignore any recipe that has nuts in it, a vegan cookbook is a handy resource.

What hot television Vikings taught me about American inequality

One of the side effects of my nightly Lenten selah is that my television viewing has dwindled substantially. This isn't a bad thing, per se, because television viewing was beginning to feel oppressively mandatory. David Carr addressed this feeling a few weeks ago, concluding:

Television’s golden age is also a gilded cage, an always-on ecosystem of immense riches that leaves me feeling less like the master of my own universe, and more as if I am surrounded.

So taking my deliberate pause for reflection every night has not only helped me reacquaint myself with the dimly-recollected acts of stringing thoughts and words together for the sheer, profitless joy of it, it's also helped me slither through the bars of that gilded cage.

But I'm not wholly free of television. I always make the time for a handful of shows: Phil and I have wonderfully uneventful fortysomething Friday nights eating charcuterie and heckling the would-be moguls on Shark Tank; we watch Archer and Bob's Burgers within 24 hours of their broadcast; we're slowly working through this season of Justified. (Michael Rapaport is best in very small doses.)

And on my own, I watch Vikings. That show is far better than it has any right to be, which is something I also said about one of Michael Hirst's previous historic soaps, The Tudors. Both shows have much in common: Exquisite costuming that instantly creates a sense of a fundamentally different time and place; pacing that balances moments of tremendous emotional import with crazy, loud, alien-feeling violence; an approach to history that is fast and loose. They also invite the viewer to think on what an incredible thing civilization-building is, and how the modern mind as we live in it is really the culmination of a long chain of unpopular ideas bravely wielded by men and women.

Also, the actors and actresses are incredibly dishy. I can't emphasize this enough. (At left: I am a-twitter.)

Anyway, I really like Vikings, because it is a lot of fun to watch a show where the central premise is "When you are a man ahead of your time, you don't wait for people to catch up" and a supporting argument is "We will feature many, many, many well-muscled shirtless men with fantastic hair that suggests levels of virility that have not been seen since the Black Plague."

In the most recent episode, "Eye For An Eye," there is a scene where what passes for the Saxon intelligensia is meeting with King Ecbert to solve a recent civic problem, that problem being that holy shit, Vikings are really good at this raping and pillaging thing. Ecbert says coolly that he plans to negotiate with these guys, and he'll be doing that by exchanging high-status hostages. His submission? His son. (Who performs "history's" first documented spit-take on hearing this news, apparently for the first time.) Some fat bishop who will likely be speared by a Viking in the next few episodes protests that this tactic won't work because Vikings don't have anyone valuable to them, on account of them being terrifying subhuman savages.

Ecbert, proving that he is a man ahead of his time, calmly replies, "We are Christians, but not so long ago, we were also pagans. And, when we were pagans, do you think we cared nothing for our families? Our children?"

I watched Vikings this evening, and then I read an article on the disconnect between ministering to the poor in America and understanding the people to whom you're ministering. The author says:

From the outside, poverty is a lack of money that results from past choices and failure to plan. From inside, poverty is the diligent effort to love family and live securely, maybe even comfortably, with very little.

It strikes me that very often, people in this country who are poor are all lumped together as "The Poor," as if they are a monolithic bloc, a giant organism that's here to suck an actual individual dry of her resources, then turn its voracious maw toward the next innocent citizen.

It is easy to dehumanize "the poor." It is harder to think of them as people who love their children just as fiercely as the parent who's turned her life into a calendar grid of carpools and sports practices and homework help.

When I passed on the article to the nice pastor who's running my social justice study group, I asked, "I think this acknowledgment that poor people love as fiercely, as purely, as those who are comfortable leads to a question I am not sure how to answer: Why do we fear acknowledging the humanity of the poor?"

For me, I think, the answer is the flip side of the insight that Vikings character had: If we have to acknowledge our similarities, then we have to face the possibility that we are just as vulnerable, and we have to face a really frightening question: What are we afraid of losing, and why?

I don't know the answer. I think I may watch some TV and avoid the scary questions for tonight.

I swear, I intended to make fun of Windham Hill & it got away from me

I thought this life of thoughtful liberalism was my birthright, too. Before I understood that my generation was to be born in interesting times.
-- Maureen McHugh

I love the above line for how tidily it skewers a certain strain of liberalism as a lifestyle in America. It comes from the short story "Useless Things," which sketches out a world where smart, educated and creative young people are scrabbling to get by while their parents enjoy a lot of professional success and material comfort.  The story may have felt like a dystopic future when it was written, but in a United States where our youngest crop of working adults is staring down a 12-13% unemployment rate (compared to a general unemployment rate of 6.7%), it hits more like a blog post from the year 2016.

The law of supply and demand will work in favor of the chicken!

I heard the most boggling thing on NPR the other day, that there's a shortage of organic eggs and poultry in this country because there's not enough organic feed to keep the chickens in the manner to which they ought to become accustomed -- and that there's a shortage of feed because most U.S. farmers have figured it's just not worth their time and money to go organic.

So. Chicken and eggs, going to be a shortage. Well, not the regular chicken and eggs, but the chicken that is better traveled than I am and processed by people I don't talk to when I buy the bird. We buy organic -- at a price that's about five times that of the Foster Farms stuff -- and every time I pick damp pinfeathers off a chicken before roasting it, I mutter about how the feathers are probably there to make consumers feel as if the chicken was hand-plucked by wifty hippies who are themselves free-range and allowed to forage for sorrel instead of being penned up and forced to scrabble for quinoa in a trough.

(What is it about organic food and its non-food accessories? Every time I buy organic spinach at a farmers' market, it comes with its own rock garden; I'm the only person out there drinking green smoothies that have their own terroir.)

I'd be cool with the chicken and egg thing if I weren't already keeping one nervous eye on the many, many kinds of produce we like to eat, all of which have been severely affected by the drought California's living through. And another nervous eye on beef prices, which have climbed to record highs and show no sign of falling. We don't even buy beef any more, mostly because we're at an age where we legitimately fear our doctor slapping us if we cop to bingeing at Don & Charlie's, but I fret about the prices because that means people who can't afford beef will look elsewhere, and the law of supply and demand will work in favor of the chicken.

("The law of supply and demand will work in favor of the chicken!" Doesn't that sound like something an insane person would scream atop their hay-bale throne in a barn? This is how you can tell Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type is in regular rotation at our house -- I have no problem imagining barnyard revolutions that are less metaphors for Soviet history and more like sit-ins at Greendale Community College.)So we're being squeezed on the meat that we're eating less of, we're being squeezed on the vegetables upon which we rely to fill up half our plate at every meal. And now, thanks to the shenanigans currently underway in Sevastopol and surrounding areas, the world's number four corn producer is not to be relied upon. Grain futures have skyrocketed -- good if you're a grain trader, bad if you're a grain eater on a budget.It's hard not to feel a little compressed by external circumstances with so many different sources of food becoming pricier, especially when writers are referring to this as a lost decade for economic growth and wage stagnation drags at us all, especially in a world where we're all eating the same staple crops. I think what I'll do is go back to thinking about the lunacy of someone waving around a hoe as their sceptre of state and investing the lowly pullet with the power of pushing economics on the rest of us.

Come on Eileen (Fisher): Generation X at middle age

The Gap has recently rolled out its springtime collection -- skinny, ankle-zip pants, patterned shoes, oversized oxfords and pale, shaker-knit sweaters. I really liked everything I saw, and I didn't quite realize why until a Facebook friend of mine pointed out that she had been wearing these clothes in 1986. The pieces fell into place: I remember being very happy in spring 1986, and the idea of buying all the things I'd never have been able to swing on 1986's babysitting wages thrills my inner 14-year-old.

The subsequent Facebook discussion had me thinking about the potency of brands. In 1986, I had papered my bedroom wall with posters of  New York City and Lufthansa travel ads, and I'd look at those pictures of far-off places and at United Colors of Benetton ads, and deep in my reptilian retail brain, I'd think, "Benetton is for people who are citizens of the world!"

(This probably explains why I fell hard for the Body Shop in 1993, when Anita Roddick was constantly explaining how she used passionfruit cleansing gel in the types of places where Anthony Bourdain's forced to eat pig anus.)

Brands can be totemic. Brands can also force uncomfortable confrontations between our internal conceptions of who we are versus the external perceptions. Case in point: Eileen Fisher.

A year's worth of reading about a year's worth of life changes

I have become increasingly jaded about "A Year Spent Doing [Fill in Stunt Here]"-type ventures and memoirs, mostly because a year really isn't a huge time commitment and most of the time, what's being given up is not that significant a sacrifice. (A Year Without Ice Cream: One Woman's Brave Story Of Leaving Several Gallons of Lemon Custard In The Freezer.)

Still, there's something to be said for making the effort to live mindfully and deliberately, and to understand how one ended up constructing the delicate and idiosyncratic web of circumstances, people and things that we've drawn around ourselves and called our lives. If you're looking for a way to shake up your life this year, I've found 52 "A Year Spent Doing [Fill in Stunt Here]" works for you to use as inspiration. And if your idea for this year is to spend this year reading "A Year Spent Doing [Fill in Stunt Here]" works ... feel free to mention me somewhere in the author's notes.