This week’s themes: New York, drinking and drinking in New York.
That has something to do with smart governance but more to do with the gritty culture of the city, its work ethic, its inspiring sense of its own grandeur, its shared knowledge of the personal struggle that goes into a day. A Fuld (Lehman Brothers former chief executive), who never took the subway, never sat in Bryant Park with a sandwich, knew nothing of what makes the city tick.
-Roger Cohen, “A Nation Hard to Short,” NYT 7/26
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look at this fucking guy
The hipsters that will be the “dead end of Western Civilization” are the ones who add nothing new or original and simply recycle and reduce old trends into a meaningless meme. It’s for that reason that when Williamsburg’s hipster playland is in crisis, there aren’t many who are concerned.
-Dan Fletcher, “A Brief History of Hipsters,” Time, which apparently is now in the business of publishing stories that sound like they were written in 1998. This story is dumb, inane, trite blog-bait. The sentence is only great in the sense of spectacular tragedy, much like flames that explode from a car wreck.
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In their scope, both the Internet and New York are profoundly humbling: young people accustomed to feeling special about their gifts are inevitably jarred, upon arrival, to discover just how many others are trying to do precisely the same, with equal or greater success. (For a vivid demonstration of this online, try to invent a play on words, and then Google it. You’ll be convinced that there is, in fact, “nothing new in the cloud” — a joke that a British I.B.M. employee beat me to last November.)
-Bill Wasik, “Bright Lights, Big Internet,” NYT 7/29, about the parity between moving to New York and trying to make a name for yourself online
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“OBAMA: I could pick up the phone right now, get the plane, we could go to Italy for pizza.”
-John Kenney, “Shouts and Murmurs: A Beer With Obama,” The New Yorker, 7/27
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Fox Headline: U.S. Brewers Upset over White House Beer Selection. I guess there’s no end to the controversy over this brewhaha.
-Howie Kurtz, Twitter, 10 a.m. 7/30
Inverted Soapbox 