Peloton’s little holiday advertising spot surprised the company when, instead of being pleased at the idea of the husband getting his wife a $2245 exercise bike, lots of women interpreted the gesture as a domineering and insulting expression of Sexism.
At least, comedienne Eve Victor’s Twitter response is kind of funny.
Papa Hemingway looks down the barrels of his .577 Westley Richards Double Rifle.
Sporting Classics points out that Turgenev owned a Joseph Lang, Hemingway the above Westley Richards, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dineson) a Rigby.
Russian author Ivan Turgenev, whose efforts to free the serfs produced the Sportsman’s Sketches, bought a Joseph Lang gun. Ernest Hemingway acquired a Westley Richards while Isak Dinesen, famed for her farm in Africa, was gifted a John Rigby.
Turgenev’s clipped sentences and snapshot characterization influenced Ernest Hemingway’s writing sometime after Sylvia Beach encouraged Papa to read Sportsman’s Sketches. Hemingway borrowed the book often from Beach’s Left Bank lending library and appeared to have learned its lessons well.
Wes Enzinna, in Harper’s, describes the bizarre fringe existence of a millennial bourgeois Bohemian trying to find living space in ever-so-rich, ever-so-f*cked-up Bay Area California.
[T]he year of the Ghost Ship fire, I lived in a shack. I’d found the place just as September’s Indian summer was giving way to a wet October. There was no plumbing or running water to wash my hands or brush my teeth before sleep. Electricity came from an extension cord that snaked through a yard of coyote mint and monkey flower and up into a hole I’d drilled in my floorboards. The structure was smaller than a cell at San Quentin—a tiny house or a huge coffin, depending on how you looked at it—four by eight and ten feet tall, so cramped it fit little but a mattress, my suit jackets and ties, a space heater, some novels, and the mason jar I peed in.
The exterior of my hermitage was washed the color of runny egg yolk. Two redwood French doors with plexiglass windows hung cockeyed from creaky hinges at the entrance, and a combination lock provided meager security against intruders. White beadboard capped the roof, its brim shading a front porch set on cinder blocks.
After living on the East Coast for eight years, I’d recently left New York City to take a job at an investigative reporting magazine in San Francisco. If it seems odd that I was a fully employed editor who lived in a thirty-two-square-foot shack, that’s precisely the point: my situation was evidence of how distorted the Bay Area housing market had become, the brutality inflicted upon the poor now trickling up to everyone but the super-rich. The problem was nationwide, although, as Californians tend to do, they’d taken this trend to an extreme. Across the state, a quarter of all apartment dwellers spent half of their incomes on rent. Nearly half of the country’s unsheltered homeless population lived in California, even while the state had the highest concentration of billionaires in the nation. In the Bay Area, including West Oakland, where my shack was located, the crisis was most acute. Tent cities had sprung up along the sidewalks, swarming with capitalism’s refugees. Telegraph, Mission, Market, Grant: every bridge and overpass had become someone’s roof.
Down these same streets, tourists scuttered along on Segways and techies surfed the hills on motorized longboards, transformed by their wealth into children, just as the sidewalk kids in cardboard boxes on Haight or in People’s Park aged overnight into decrepit adults, the former racing toward the future, the latter drifting away from it.
To my mother and girlfriend back East, the “shack situation†was a problem to be solved. “Can we help you find another place?†“Can you just find roommates and live in a house?†But the shack was the solution, not the problem.
As penance for abandoning my girlfriend, I still paid part of our rent in New York, and after covering my portion of our bills, my student loan payment, and car insurance, I had about $1,500 left over each month. That wouldn’t have been so little to live on, except that, according to some estimates, apartments then averaged $3,500 a month in San Francisco, $3,000 in Oakland. That year, 2016, 83,733 low-income San Franciscans would apply for the city’s affordable housing lottery, fighting for 1,025 slots. There were still cheap rooms available in the Bay, to be sure, mostly in ramshackle Victorians or weathered Maybeck bungalows where artists or activists or punks lived collectively and were protected by rent control, but these rooms were in dwindling supply and astonishingly high demand. On Craigslist or by word of mouth, vacancies were often offered exclusively to “Q.T.P.O.C.†(queer and trans people of color) or “B.A.B.R.†(Bay Area born and raised) roommates, a reasonable defensive measure against the ravages of the tech economy, which, block by block, was replacing the weird old counterculture with Stanford M.B.A.s and Google engineers.
For those of us caught in the middle, it meant that to score a bed, you had to have Q.T.P.O.C. friends willing to make an exception for you, or be a member of obscure Facebook groups like (’’’), which served as an underground network for people seeking shared housing. (The page also offered bartered services like massage and childcare and, on at least one occasion, a “free hearse.â€) As in other cities under intense economic pressure, marginalized inhabitants had created an alternate, black-market rental economy: the currency may have been cultural capital, but competition was still fierce.
I spent a few weeks on friends’ couches before an acquaintance posted on Facebook about a room opening in his eight-bedroom house in Oakland for $475, a steal, and I messaged him immediately. Thirty people had already written, he said, and his roommates had also received scores of inquiries, so the odds weren’t good. He stopped answering my emails after that. The same thing happened with a few vacant rooms I tracked down at illegal warehouses, cavernous lofts where residents scrimped on such things as functioning plumbing or reliable electricity in order to have space to paint and make sculptures and host bands all night, places like the Dildo Factory, or Heco’s, or Ghost Ship, whose leaseholder posted a roommate-wanted ad on Craigslist that winter seeking
all shamanic rattlesnake sexy jungle jazz hobo gunslingers looking for a space to house gear, use studio, develop next level Shaolin discipline after driving your taxi cab late at night, build fusion earth home bomb bunker spelunker shelters, and plant herbaceous colonies in the open sun & air.
I didn’t answer the Ghost Ship ad, but I went to a few “auditions†at other lofts. There were so many people vying for the spaces, I rarely got a call back and was never offered a room. I’d squandered whatever cool I once possessed, it turned out, by building a “normie†career as a writer and editor on the East Coast.
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, has been making a point of trying to erect the most beautiful Christmas Tree in Europe in recent years. (link)
November 30, 2019: The traditional lighting of the Christmas tree in Vilnius attracted citizens and guests alike. The capital of Lithuania has received a lot of global attention over the years for its unique and stunning Christmas trees, and this year is no exception. This year, the decorated Christmas tree resembles the 14-15th century Queen figure from the game of chess, which was found by archaeologists in 2007.
Decorations adorn the already traditional 27-meter tall metal construction, which bears some 6,000 branches. The construction is specially designed to create a completely sustainable Christmas tree. All the actual tree branches used in the construction are defiled from the trees by foresters while carrying out the general maintenance of the forest. Therefore not only trees but even branches are not cut just for the spectacle.
The particular figure which served as a model for decorations was found during the archaeological excavations around the Ducal Palace in Vilnius. Dating back to the 14th-15th century, the beautifully ornamented figure was made of spindle tree. Its middle part is carved with geometrical patterns and topped with floral ornaments. According to historians, the game of chess was played by the nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the end of the 14th century.
A traditional Christmas market is set up around the Christmas tree, along with another one located at the Town Hall Square. The markets will stay open from the 30th of November to the 7th of January.
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The tree’s design was inspired by this 14th-15th Chess Queen found by archaeologists in 2007.
Esteban Elizondo is only a senior at Yale, but he’s indignant enough to be an alumn.
Last weekend, 148 students stormed the field at the Harvard-Yale game to protest climate change, causing a 50-minute delay and forcing the players to finish in the dark. The Post editorial board called it “the college-version of a toddler’s meltdown,†and that is exactly right. As a current Yale student, I am constantly stunned by the childish behavior of my peers, who are voting-age adults attending what is supposedly one of the most prestigious colleges in America.
At Yale, there is seemingly a new protest every week. Each protest carries the same juvenile self-righteousness, enabled by a university administration that never dares to challenge its student body.
Yale “first-years†arrive on campus curious and mostly capable, but the university quickly proceeds to bubble-wrap their young minds, eliminating any trace of discomfort from their college experience. Rather than allowing students to learn through adversity, the administration creates a safe space where students are never told “no.†Instead, they’re provided with amenities ranging from therapy puppies to sandboxes — more fitting of a day-care center than a university.
Rather than confront its student body with uncomfortable truths, the university creates an alternate reality, where the only opinion that matters is yours, especially if you’re a leftist. Earlier this month, a group of students painted their faces white and began wailing outside a classroom as part of a protest against professor Emma Sky, whom they lazily branded a “war criminal†because she once served as an advisor to the commanding general of US forces in Iraq and the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
To be clear, professor Sky has dedicated her entire adult life to peace in the Middle East, and her calming influence during the war no doubt saved countless lives. But the students made no legitimate attempts to academically engage with her and claimed this was “interdisciplinary research†on the “ethnography of power.†Incredibly, this antic was part of a student’s senior project that was awarded both funding from a residential college and school credit.
The Harvard-Yale football protest, meanwhile, called for both schools to divest from fossil fuels, as though this could actually solve climate change, when the real answers are far more difficult and complicated. Apparently, America’s most academically successful students believe that conducting juvenile demonstrations is a more effective way to fix problems than proposing actual solutions.
But at Yale, there is little interest in challenging infantile thinking, because doing so would not advance the university’s objective: making sure students stay happy in school and get employed after graduation to satisfy its paying customers (parents). As a result, Yale undergrads spend four years totally detached from the rest of America and graduate without the skills needed to become future leaders who can meet the complex challenges of the 21st century.
In Yale’s defense, the college and other “elite†schools are successful at placing their students in influential positions. And we are now beginning to see the consequences of these graduates entering the real world. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, was stacked with Ivy League-educated staffers, including Robby Mook (Columbia ’02, campaign manager) and Amanda Renteria (Harvard MBA ’03, national political director).
However, acquiring a good job and being good at that job are not the same thing. In the same way that Yale students believe in progressive ideas about climate change and intersectional politics with a religious certainty, Clinton’s campaign arrogantly assumed that voters from Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would never pull the lever for Trump. Had Clinton’s team questioned their beliefs, as the best colleges once taught its students to do, staffers would have made her visit those states rather than taking victory laps in October.
Listening to the latest Democratic presidential candidates — whose ideas were mostly forged in ivory towers — suggests this won’t change anytime soon. Given their academic pedigrees (14 of the original 24 declared candidates attended Ivy League schools), it isn’t surprising how out of touch they are. Promising to eliminate private insurance and advocating for open borders does not endear oneself to the average American.
This sense of immunity from the real world could be heard at last Saturday’s protest, where some students shouted “My father is a lawyer!†to police officers trying to persuade them off the field. These protesters did not sound like people who have faced true hardship or even learned the basics of a proper argument. But then again, why would they? They were taught to avoid all that at Yale.
