I'm crouched awkwardly on the floor of Xiyin Tang's Columbia dorm room, peering up at her laptop as she shows me her first blog entries, a 13-year-old Xiyin's musings on Good Charlotte and the perfidy of her friends. A Warhol Marilyn print gazes over our shoulders. "I always find myself more motivated to write things," Xiyin, now 19, explains, "when I know that somebody, somewhere, might be reading it."
Ah, the onslaught of emails from dudes forwarding the Em&Lo article to their girlfriends with the subject line "See, honey?" has finally ceased. Thanks, Judy! Also, we like this headline even a little bit better than "Even Bitches Have Feelings."
Some publications have stringent, tightly policed guidelines about not assigning reporters to cover stories that they have a personal connection to. Other publications have, uh, the opposite policy. Seriously, do you remember the last time you read a New York mag feature whose author didn't at some point step forward and announce, "Disclosure: I once shared a yoga mat with Madonna in 1995" or some such nonsense? We certaintly don't. But the disclosure moment in Vanessa Grigoriadis's long Sympathy for Judith Regan profile today has to be our all-time favorite:
Well, this is the best news we've heard from WWD since . . . well, since the item before it, about how Jessica Joffe was picked to star in new Uniqlo ads because they're all about "interesting, creative people not changed by the media." Annnyway, they also report that New York Magazine's cherished Look Book feature is soon going to be transmuted into a collectible coffee-table book that we can all own! But what will differentiate the Look Book Book from, you know, the Look Book?
Well, we seem to have hit a nerve earlier when we called out New York film critic David Edelstein's takesies-backsies regarding his The Departed review, prompting him to admit that the review was "wussy." See, Mom, our job isn't totally pointless! David had time to mull this over, of course, because his correspondent, producer Lynda Obst, took her sweet time in replying to his (9:28) email. She is on the West Coast, but we mean, this is LIVEBLOGGING, people! Pick up the pace, Picante!
Every year, New York Magazine film critic David Edelstein and producer Lynda Obst correspond via email on the day the Oscar nominations are announced, and their ramblings are posted on the mag's website (this year, they're hosted by the Daily Intel). Yes, you heard right: email. We hear David had been really edging towards IM this year, but there was a last-minute glitch involving animated emoticons. Anyway, in the spirit of immediacy, we thought we'd liveblog our thoughts as we read David and Lynda's e-pistles.
In his introduction to this week's "Inner Peace" package for New York, Editorial Director Hugo Lindgren notes that he "asked 100 friends, acquaintances, and random people whose e-mail addresses I happened to have, "What do you do to achieve inner peace?" Lindgren, whose own route to inner peace comes from ocean-depopulating levels of sushi consumption, doesn't tell the whole story, though: Many of the responses he received and printed in his intro came from actual NYM staffers. Thanks to a friend on the inside, we've matched the quotes to the contributors from whence they came. All is revealed after the jump.
In case you were harbored any suspicions that Park Slope parents weren't completely neurotic and obsessive, New York magazine is here to prove you completely and utterly wrong. Park Slope parents, as it turns out, are in fact the most neurotic and obsessive parents in the world! At least, that's what we've gleaned from this article , which details the lengths to which parents will go to protect their wee'uns from, like, the air:
Sure, you could read Rob Patronite and Robin Raisfeld's 3,460 word article about the travails of Momofuku and Momofuku Ss m Bar owner David Chang in this week's New York ("the plight of the Asian Burrito" indeed! We find it too small, generally). Or you could read our tipster's rather pithier account:
Ariel Levy's New York mag profile of the three rich white kids who are single-handedly keeping "downtown" alive got a lot of people roiled up this week — not least its elusive, controversial main subject, Dash "the Pollock of Peen-juice" Snow. On the Irak blog, Levy was called out as a "wacked reporter." Then, as so often happens, things got much harsher in the comments, and Levy was raked across the coals in the standard retarded playground-bully ways. Seriously, if you've ever kind of suspected in the back of your mind that some hipster dudes were thisclose to being skinhead thugs, but found skateboarding just in time, your suspicions will be confirmed by the scattershot misogyny and antisemitism on display here. So edgy.
On the pages in between the ads for $2 million studios in misshapen new downtown luxury condos in this week's New York Magazine, there are a couple of articles about how a few rich dudes in their twenties are taking drugs, sleeping in the same bed, making "art," and, you know, helping "downtown" retain its gritty cred. We're convinced! We especially liked the bit about how 25 year old art-richie scion Dash Snow (vaguely related to Uma Thurman, brother dates MK Olsen) goes about crafting his work:
Norman Mailer has been an ancient crotchety windbag for like sixty years now, so it's gotten to the point where you really just have to admire his stamina — not to mention his flair for crafting quasi-Shakespearean, quasi-acid casualty insults. We mentioned earlier that New York Magazine had done a brilliant job of cataloguing his enemies — in anticipation of his new book, for which Michiko Kakutani is apparently already sharpening her samurai sword, they've also listed some of the barbs (literal and figurative) he's hurled at them over the years. To William Styron: "I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit." On biographer P.D. Manso: ""P. D. Manso is looking for gold in the desert of his arid inner life, where lies and distortion are the only cactus juice to keep him going." We know you're great at talking smack, so we're going to open up the floodgates and see if anyone wants to try their hand at crafting a Mailerian (whatever) insult. Leave 'em in the comments, or send them to us the way you usually do. Your target can be us, Mailer, Marisha "hedge fund trophy wife hot" Pessl, or whoever. We can't wait to to read a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.
We were sick of Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman the from the moment we first heard of their illicit yoga love story in New York Magazine — (remember? "'[New agey blah blah],' Saidman says, sitting entwined with Yee on the floor of the shingled house they now share," etc, etc.) But we all must have done something really bad in a past life to deserve their Vows column this weekend. We mean, seriously:
We were ever so intrigued by New York's take on the ol' 'increasing popularity of anal sex' trend piece ("[27-year-old 'Jim'] agrees that it seems to be on the rise among his friends but wonders whether it's 'really a cultural shift or just something we ease into semi-contemporaneously as we age, like marriage or buying real estate or listening to jazz rap.'"). Our butts were hungry for more after we finished reading it, so we were excited to see Kurt Andersen picking up the theme in his Imperial City column, entitled "How The Middle Class is Getting Screwed." Then we clicked, and were disappointed.
Anal Sex is Increasingly Popular in the Hetero World [NYMag]
Yesterday we sifted through some of the many Best of Lists and impartially selected a few of our favorites. Today, we have a few more lists to throw at you, so that you can sound wittier and more learned than you actually are if you go to the kind of New Year's party where anyone can hear you talk over the music (loser!). They're after the jump.
We remember reading this New York article about The Outsourced Parent a while back and being impressed by the creativity of its central conceit — a subtle jab at the way many New York-area businesspeople let other people perform more and more of the basic tasks involved in childrearing, dressed up as a service piece. Surely, though, we thought, no one actually does delegate every single responsibility involved in having a family to an outsider.
This week New York brought us a ton of the relevant-to-our-lives news that we've come to expect from them, but perhaps the most pertinent item of all was the interview with Giorgio Armani's niece Roberta, who will be hosting the Young Artists' Ball at the Guggenheim (you've already decided who you'll be wearing, right?) This lady handles VIP relations for her uncle's business, which means she get to interact with TomKat and stuff. She's also, let's be honest, the oldest 36 year old we've ever seen. So we were surprised, a little, when we came to this part of the interview:
