US News tells us what to do if we love our job (but hate our boss)—or if we hate both! It's fairly oldfangled: "Write a journal about it... Rereading the entries at a later, less emotional time helped her gain perspective." Whatever, that's for teen girls. The cutting thing to do would be to keep an anonymous blog about your boss on the Internet (once you're OK with eventually being fired for it.)
Don't feel too bad about the economy, members of the creative underclass: the superrich are still doing okay. While ordinary people like you fret over your outstanding subprime loans and plug the leaks in your rickety little rowboat with used chewing gum, the superrich are doing well enough to ensure that the Superyacht (an actual term!) industry is growing strongly. There are nearly 20% more requests this year for yachts longer than 130 feet. How many feet does one need? But god bless our economic superiors for providing the liquidity to fuel this crazy global economy. And don't be jealous; there's a benefit here for commoners, too:
Here in America, Barack Obama spends most of his time insisting he is a non-terrorist, American-born Christian who doesn't hate white people, and who impregnated his wife only after they got married. Sad. But in Europe the Democratic presidential candidate is actually producing uhhh, what's it called — CHANGE. And HOPE. French newspaper Le Monde credited Obama with "stirring up high hopes" among French blacks, while the Times said Obama "hastened... a new black consciousness there." And today fashion writer Cathy Horyn reveals that Obama helped inspire a forthcoming issue of Italian Vogue with all-black models, including Naomi Campbell, pictured at left in a shot from the issue. The idea, executed by photographer Steven Meisel, was to highlight inequality in the fashion industry:
Like all single guys on the subway, men in the publishing industry like to devise, or at least imagine they've devised, strategies for attracting cute women, and for maybe even making these lady strangers do the hard, traditionally-male work of striking up a conversation. Unlike other men, publishing types have access to advance galleys of hot books, and they hope this will give them an edge with New York's many literary babes. The Observer's bookish young Leon Neyfakh made an ernest — eager, even — attempt to prove this hypothesis true, in a story with the hopefully-worded subhead, "Carrying Bolano's 2666 Is Like Driving an Open-Top Porsche." And he found plenty of literary men to agree with that thesis. But the women? Different story.
We're hearing something fairly horrifying — that Rolling Stone senior editor Austin Scaggs is starting a "Perez Hilton-esque" music blog for the magazine next month. It's not clear how, exactly, this new creation would ape Hilton's crude celebrity gossip site, but the initiative is said to be an outgrowth of Scaggs' own infrequent Smoking Section music news blog. Jann Wenner has approved the project, but the magazine mogul hasn't provided any budget, so "Scaggs is hiring six unpaid interns to staff the whole thing—and they have to work 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday" said our tipster. NB to desperate young intern candidates: Just launch your own music news site. You won't get to say you write for Rolling Stone, but you'll have no trouble reaching Perez Hilton quality levels, and at least you'll retain ownership in exchange for all your free labor.
The Radar magazine contributor is something of a man about town, but even we were surprised to see him show up at our office, delivering the aforementioned magic berries that Hamilton ordered, like a common coke dealer. So we asked him what was up! Does the pay at Radar suck? "Nah... beats freelancing," he says. We got the rundown on his berry-selling ring:
Several voice actors from the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV have come forward to politely point out that, while Rockstar Games has sold $600 million worth of copies in three months, they have only individually made tens of thousands of dollars. For example, Michael Hollick, the voice of leading GTA criminal Nico Bellic, made about $100,000 over the course of 15 months worth of work, at about $1,050 per day, with no residuals.
Scientists offered high-sugar, high-fat, banana-flavored pellets to female rhesus monkeys, and found that high-status monkeys were not impressed. But the low-status monkeys scarfed them around the clock because, researchers believe, they somehow mitigated the stress of being harassed all day by the top-tier monkeys. It's possible the treats enhanced the reward pathways in the brain, in a manner similar to cocaine. Reports the Times, "the experiment intrigues scientists studying human junk-food binges, which are hard to understand because there are so many confounding factors." Of course, in humans, the benefits of bingeing are offset by crippling guilt. Which is why a follow-up study is planned at the Condé Nast cafeteria. HEY-OH! [Times]
N+1 founder and sad young literary man Keith Gessen sat down for a Big Think interview last week. He touched on everything from "Dating as a Historical Phenomenon" to "Is political writing political activism?" But the only bit I was curious enough to watch was his response to the question, "Why does Gawker hate you?" According to Gessen, it's because Gawker types once read a lot of books, then we gave up on the value system of books, but we're wrong and we will lose! I don't know, man; I just think it's annoying how much you talk about Harvard. The full clip of this latest volley in New York's most frivolous cultural clash, below:
What are "co-housing enthusiasts," asks the Brooklyn Paper? They're "a group of Brooklynites who want to buy a nice building near Prospect Park and share common areas with like-minded friendly people." They are sad living alone in tiny apartments and want friends! A co-housed building is a cross between a "commune and a condo." One place starts at around $600,000 a unit. There are communal meals, but no free love. (Sure, that's what they say now; we'll check back in six months.) [Brooklyn Paper]
Born in unglamorous Scranton, PA, author Lauren Weisberger started out as the abused assistant of a big bad media mogul, raging at the rigid class and social hierarchy of life at Vogue. (A creative-underclass victim, like our core readers!) She survived. She wrote a book! The Devil Wears Prada became a best-seller and a movie. ("I've gotten some feedback from people saying that their bosses have—directly after reading the book—started asking what their majors were in college, where they live, etc.") Take that, Anna Wintour. She became so successful that she's no longer One of Us: rich. Married well. Wedding in Anguilla. Working on third novel! (Click to see a mean-boss Devil Wears Prada clip.) P.S.: Now we hate you.
Just as we always suspected (we always suspect!), the nation's neurotics are concentrated on the East Coast. Richard Florida, Rise of the Creative Class author, and a team of psychologists compiled "hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys" and found that "personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster," he writes in the Boston Globe. They cluster, in fact, exactly to our preconceived regional stereotypes! After the jump, see where the other sorts of people live—the ones who are "agreeable," "open to experience," "extroverted," and "conscientious." You know, the people who think they're better than us, or whatever.
Writers so fancy themselves as cultural guerrillas, sneaking in subtle messages of protest against the media-entertainment complex or any other form of totalitarianism. They really would have been happier penning samizdats in the former Soviet Union; and many authors did indeed mourn the passing of a régime so brutal-and mockable. Successful TV writer Chuck Lorre has little to fear from Les Moonves and his other bosses at CBS, but the millionaire writer has embedded subversive short texts in the vanity cards at the end of shows such as Two and a Half Men. In one recent message, the 55-year-old Mr. Lorre wrote: "I received a phone call from a mid-level CBS exec who began the conversation by saying he wanted to give me a head's up. Having been in this business a while I knew 'head's up' is code for 'we've decided to s- you.'"
This morning we ran a picture of a woman in Houston whose ironic protest sign said "Make English America's Offical [sic] Language." A helpful tipster then sent a link to the picture above, taken in Harlingen Texas just a few days ago by the Valley Morning Star. These protesters are from the opposite end of the political spectrum, decrying a police sting against prostitutes and subsequent publication of booking photos. But they still fucked up their sign spelling. And they really should have caught the mistake, because they took the time to use stencils and everything! So poor English knows no political bounds. Are Texans just unable to spell? I don't remember things being so bad when I was growing up in Houston, but I was a mere grade schooler, and that was prior to the election of one Gov. George W. Bush. [Valley Morning Star]
What do you do when you need to find some good stars for your upcoming porn film, but are too cheap to put a free ad on Craigslist? Hang a flier on a pole in Bushwick, of course. And to maximize responses, just leave space at the bottom for everyone interested in starring in your low-budget fuckfest to write in their name, "Length, Girth," and email or Myspace address. Don't worry, your friends will respect you in the morning. It's a perfect opportunity for you indie rock kids in "Bushdick" to earn some extra cash between jobs. Click through for a bigger picture, and to read the enticing pitch:
Apparently, there was an absinthe party at the Bowery Hotel last night, attended by some Gawker staffers. (Thanks for the freaking invite!) They report that they each drank a shitload of absinthe and were totally retarded, yet not drunk! Slurring words and strange thoughts were reported (our videographer Blakeley thought it perfectly logical to want to steal a car), yet: "I could still walk in a straight line," even after having "8 to 10 drinks in a 2 hour period." Their memory and ability to remember words was totally shot. Yet, no hangover occurred. They didn't feel high, exactly, yet were thinking and acting strangely. The following party pics of the event, from RandomNightOut (plus an informative History Channel vid) are not hallucinations.
We throw ourselves at your mercy. Paying taxes is a terrible bother for freelancers, which means us, your Gawker staff. A reader asked us to be servicey and offer our tips. BUT WE HAVE NONE. The only tax tip I ever got was "file quarterly," which I didn't do. But some of you commenters are like economic geniuses and stuff, right? Right? Then help a blogger out. Tell us what to do, and how to do it.
Nature magazine polled their readers on their use of "cognition-enhancing drugs," such as Adderall, that great booster of the chattering classes. Oh, let's just call them by their street names: Speed, people. Uppers. Bennies. Blues. Results of the poll? Readers are for them! Twenty percent have taken neuroenhancers like Ritalin, Adderall, or Provogil, seeing them as a perfectly acceptable way to focus and "stimulate concentration or memory." More proof that the modern world has shot our attention spans to hell.
