WE ARE YOUR FEK

WE ARE YOUR FEK. You'll never be alone again. Well, come on: [fosterkamer] at [gmail] dot com.

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The Best Albums of 2019 (So Far)

An anthropomorphized $40 gift certificate to Free People. Your friend who will vote for Warren because she’s 1/29th Cherokee. The sound of someone desperate to tell you about the astrological sign of her miserable bitch of a roommate who leaves dirty dishes in the sink. A human cactus succulent. Your friend who just untagged all the photos from last year’s 'Chella trip of herself rolling balls in a knee-hem caftan, cowboy boots, rose-tinted heart-shaped sunglasses, and an Indian headdress (Etsy, $175). The sound of a Wing application acceptance letter being opened. Madewell in the streets, J. Crew in the sheets. The soundtrack to your favorite Travel Influencer/Surf Yoga Instructor’s Raya profile.  Your friend who genuinely loves her job in experiential marketing. The official soundtrack of destination bachelorette parties in Sedona. $100 rose quartz crystals you purchased at a yoga retreat in Nicaragua that you upsold your friends on after. Has been caught lying about reading The Cut on multiple occasions. Insists otherwise. Stevie Nicks cosplay. The reason your apartment building reeks of palo santo. The sound of finally pulling the trigger on that AWAY suitcase purchase. TFW u consider urself the “light spirit” in ur “coven” Your one friend who you know is definitely for sure a secret anti-vaxxer. The aural equivalent of Shailene Woodley making her own toothpaste. Voted for Hillary twice but would definitely be down with Donald Trump stopping all Capricorns at the border. Putting them in cages, too.

An advertising campaign for The Shop. The sound of feeling obligated to go to ComplexCon and hating yourself for it. The sound of getting incredibly hyped up to buy cereal at Kith. What Gritty secretly prefers to Meek Mill’s recent output.  Came highly recommended to you by your therapist with the Supreme brick on their bookshelf next to the latest edition of the DSM, who won’t stop asking if you’ve listened to it yet. 4:44 but with approximately 99.3% less net worth. ”And now, a very special episode of Hanging with Mr. Cooper.” Burlington Coat Factory stickup music.

When indie rock shipping stops being polite, and starts getting real. TFW you trade in your Wing membership for a Lisbon vacay with that Australian guy you met on Hinge last month. The aural equivalent of your friend who hasn’t been able to shut the fuck up about how great Cursive and The Good Life are for the last decade, now attempting to add you as a contact on WhatsApp, years after you stopped talking to him. What you got instead of a new Ryan Adams album.

The official soundtrack of a weekend spent looking at real estate in Beacon. The official soundtrack of realizing you can’t afford any of the real estate in Beacon. The official soundtrack of subsequently renovating your rental in Lefferts Gardens. Red Hook in the streets, Ditmas in the sheets. The sound of your increasingly unlikely domestic fantasy involving his and her sinks. An anthropomorphized BAM membership. Q: What is the sound of one sweaty hand clapping back at decades-long critiques that The National is sad straight white man music? A: This. What you opt for after concluding you’re too old for the Better Oblivion Community Center album to make you horny. The sound of coming to terms with the fact that he is never, ever, ever getting back with his gym membership. TFW both you and your “DH” are too lazy to have an open relationship.

Your friend who prefers Maxwell to D’Angelo. Your friend who pretends to listen to Maxwell. Your white friend who keeps trying to pull off a high-top fade. Your black friend who wants to summarily execute your white friend trying to pull off a high-top fade. Will bring up Mo’ Better Blues at every possible opportunity.

Moscot in the streets, Warby in the sheets. TFW u and ur boyfriend share the same Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Your friend who wants to buy acid exclusively “by the half-hit.” An anthropomorphized Online Ceramics shirt. The sound of a subscription to Jacobin piling up. Žižek in the streets, Biden in the sheets. The sound of mildly objecting to Israeli hummus at the Park Slope Co-Op and buying it anyway. The sound of a human Eustace Tilley Supreme Hoody coming to terms with his own mortality. The guy you could lock down for life by memorizing all the words to Purple Haze and pretending to love Knight of Cups. The overwhelming existential despair felt when you, a pair of Warby Parkers, want nothing more than to be Moscots. An anthropomorphized manterruption. Your friend who won’t stop asking for help with the Saturday Times crossword just to demonstrate that they’re attempting it. “Free copy with every Great Jones dutch oven purchase.” The sound of being unable to decide what to order at Russ & Daughters. Copped a vintage Ron Artest jersey, still can’t tell you what a Metta World Peace is. While browsing the Nepenthes Tumblr: “Babe, I can pull this off, right?” Your boyfriend who describes his kink as “you know: pinky stuff.”

What you listen to when you think about how much you hate your therapist. Your wife whose most erotic fantasy involves cuckolding you, watching her bang Bari Weiss.  The sound of that ghost who haunts The Wing (Silverlake). The sound of secretly hating your best friend, Maggie Rogers. The sound of fantasizing about leaving your National-listening husband after you beat him with the tire iron in the trunk of your ‘14 Subaru Impreza, and also, absconding with your shared child as you do it. Actually reads The Cut. All of it. Actually reads Jacobin. All of it. Actually fuckit you’ll leave the kid with him.

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The second issue of Gossamer is on its way, so no better time than to shill to you, and tell you to go pick up the phenomenal first issue of the mag, in which I was given, yes, 6,000 words and change to tell a story I worked on for two years, that started with a magazine assignment to investigate the reinvigorated New Age movement’s tourism arm—specifically, its ground zero, Sedona, Arizona. Without spoiling too much: This was the second drum I’ve had beaten over my head this week, and the wisdom keepers are just one of the many Higher Entities astrally telephoned on my behalf in the last three days. It’s added up. Because right now, I don’t feel guided by the sacred directions as much as I feel the fibers of my psyche ripping apart. This wasn’t even my first trip to Sedona—just my first as an adult. I knew, generally, what I’d signed up for. But like anybody getting high on anything, I knew only to the extent that I’d watched other people dive in. And the difference between watching someone use and doing it yourself is the difference between looking at a pool, and getting your feet wet. And I’d jumped in with ankle weights. 

Get it here.

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Every sports narrative you’ve ever been truly in love with somehow always comes back to you. And this one, of the Golden Knights, starts for me with an all too familiar thing for those of us who ever lived anywhere else. We’ve all laughed about it. 

When you tell people you’re from Las Vegas — as in, was born there, grew up there — you’ll get, without fail, the same kinds of reactions:

- Did you grow up in a casino? (No, dumbass.) 

- How far did you live from The Strip? (Like most people, 10-15 minutes, give or take.) 

- Do you know how to gamble? (Sure, but moreover, I know not to.) 

But mostly: 

- What was that like?

On The Golden Knights, and Growing Up in Vegas [SB Nation]

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On Vegas, and Tragedy

I don't know where to put this, so I'm putting it here:

The last few hours have been surreal—like being on a heavy, dissociative drug in the harsh light of day, where everything is noise, but there aren't really any sounds emerging from it so much as a constant, low-frequency hum of confusion, pain, sadness, anger, etc. And even that feels far off and distant. The messages from politicians and celebrities and Facebook/Twitter randos of prayers for Vegas, while well-intentioned, feel hollow. So do the calls for more gun control. So does the politicization of whether or not to use the word "terrorist." It's not that these aren't valid ideas or conversations with having, it's just that they're not really registering as meaningful right now. They register as ways for people to make someone else's tragedy part of their own narrative, or for the narrative of a tragedy to register as a part of someone's individual story. Maybe this is just how people cope, now—or maybe people are just assholes. Probably both.

All I know is that, as someone from there, who spent 18 years there, who goes there twice a year to see family, who still likes taking a drive down the Strip when he does—from the Mandalay, two turns from my parents' house, the same glittery, light-smothered effect that it always had, and still does—who still has friends there, who feels like it's this massive and usually inescapable part of his identity, for better or worse, I can only think of three things:

1. This isn't my tragedy, and it's probably not yours. At this point, nearly everyone I know from home has checked in, and they're okay—shaken up, and sad, but they're alive, today. Unlike the people who aren't, or who are in the hospital, fighting for their lives. At this point, anything that isn't a consideration of or for those people feels, at best, self-serving, but most commonly, deeply insensitive. To that end, if you're in Las Vegas, or visiting there for any reason over the next few months, go donate blood. They need it. There's nothing anyone can do for the people who died, now—but for the scores of people who were wounded, there's absolutely something you can do, that's incredibly practical, and meaningful. You can say whatever you want, post whatever hot meme you've got in the hopper, do whatever the hell it is you're gonna do, just do it after you donate blood and, sure, then you can make this part of your narrative, or put your narrative into it. Just donate blood. 

2. Las Vegas hasn't, historically, been a united city by anything other than the fact that [A] you live in Las Vegas, [B] you ultimately always work for the casinos, no matter where you work, or what you do, or [C] you were around when UNLV won the national championship in 1990 and once ran into Larry Johnson at Caesar's, too. All kidding aside, it's just not a town a lot of people from there are always taking pride in. Like most of America, more than ever, it's divided among race and class lines. Most of the ostensibly noble attempts to bring pride to Las Vegans have either come at the expense of Las Vegans or been initiated by cultural carpetbaggers (examples: the owners of the Raiders, the Golden Knights, the XFL's Las Vegas Outlaws, Zappos, The Believer), and the crassness of these enterprises have always held them back from being a truly unifying boon (or, in the case of the XFL, which people in Vegas totally loved, tragically didn't pan out). But a few weeks ago, I was at a drinks thing here, in New York, and that night, in that room, eventually met two people who also grew up in Las Vegas, born and raised. We were those loud, obnoxious people at the party, screaming about the schools we went to and the people we knew in common and the places we hit when we went back home. While I wouldn't call it pride, there's a weird kinship among people from Vegas who end up in other places, and it kind of boils down to: Oh, god, can you believe we actually grew up there? And that's kind of like what living there is like, too: Oh, god, can you believe we actually live here? Las Vegas, no matter how relegated to the suburbs your life is, never stops reminding you of where you are. All Las Vegans might not have pride, but most of them—or most of the ones I know—share that same feeling of kinship. 

3. And many of them, like me, wish they had more pride in their town, and wish everyone else did, too. And here's their chance, to be proud, of themselves, and of that kinship, and to let this draw them together instead of (as this news event becomes more and more a narrative driven by projections on it rather than the people involved in it) letting it pull them apart. And right now, they can do that by donating blood. In a few weeks, it might be something else. But I hope they do it. And I think they want to. Like I said, just because it's not a town we've historically let unite us, and a town we've taken a great deal of pride in, doesn't mean‌ people haven't wanted to.

Anyway, I'm thinking of the injured, and after that, those people, today. This really is mostly their story to write, and at most, yours and mine to be sad for, proud of, deferential to. Here's hoping they make a sound—it's the only one I'm listening for.

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I went and watched Bill Murray bartend and reported on it for the Times. Like this:

One man asked him if he knew how to make a Bellini.

“I know people who do,” Mr. Murray said.

He refused another man’s order until, at Mr. Murray’s request, the guest removed his hat.

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Obligatory Gawker Eulogy Post, Pt. 2 — The –30–

All that’s a long way of saying: My ten months at Gawker were and are one of the most formative moments of my life. I’d be so, so much…

I held out as long as I could. Part 1—the sentimental, self-indulged context to the above—is right here.

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The Life-Changing Magic of a Jump Rope

But getting the right one is crucial.

Wrote for The Cut on why I bought a jump-rope, and how it’s been going since then. From the cutting room floor, though, one critical piece of reasoning behind buying a jumprope didn’t make it in the story:

[Also, I saw Creed a few months before that, and thought: Yes. That. That looks fucking cool. Also, if Donnie Darko can answer trivia questions on Ellen while doing side-outs and double-unders, I figured, hell, I might have a shot at it. This is probably most people's line of reasoning.]

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15 Bucket-List Pastas in America to Try Before You Die - Spicy Rigatoni at Carbone

Fresh or dry, served at roadside diners or fine-dining temples, pasta's versatility and mass appeal merit a deep dive.

In which I rant on the psychotropic qualities of Carbone’s funky orange madness.

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Somehow I got lucky enough over the course of my life in New York to be able to kvell in public about what small businesses mean to me alongside the likes of David Chang, Daniel Boulud, Jeff and Eric, Rem, the guys from Public School, Bernie Telsey, Carol Lim, and a bunch of other far more impressive people. It’s like Professor X’s Home for Great New Yorkers, except Phil Chang is Professor X, and I somehow snuck in the back door. The first of my business with it is here, but seriously, please check the entire thing out, it’s really quite wonderful, and apologies in advance to New Jersey.

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On the Shaun King Mess, and the Editor in the Age of Churn

So, finally, the story so many of us were waiting on is here: Shaun King’s editor at the New York Daily News, Jotham Sederstrom, taking to Medium to accept the blame, and explain his role in what happened when King was accused—incorrectly—of plagiarizing some of his stories.

The “us” I’m talking about aren’t some group of media elites, or Salinger-backpocketing right-wing conspiracy theorists assuming King to be setting up his white editor (or the diametrically-opposed-but-ultimately-same-corny-shit from the left, who were frothing for a story about a white editor being caught maliciously and intentionally introducing errors into King’s copy). Both groups, who rushed to suss out their own version of the story (including those who rushed to embrace the basic narrative of King being a plagiarist), are equally despicable and terrifying. 

The “us” are people who have worked with Jotham, who were stunned, who otherwise know him to be a diligent, level-headed, morally-centered human and have personally watched him work under pressure with grace. 

The story Jotham tells is simple: He got sloppy, he made a mistake. A formatting error in the NYDN’s CMS stripped indented quotes from their original text. It was moved to the web. CMS text-importing tools have always been imperfect at best, and totally cumbersome the rest of the time, so none of that comes as a surprise. 

What did? That Jotham didn’t catch the strips. And I’ve still got questions about why Five Thirty Eight wasn’t mentioned in the copy leading up to the blockquotes, as is more or less the standard for introducing text from somewhere else. 

But I also know—having had my own stories basically ripped and rewritten for the tabloid dailies, sans attribution—that the daily tabloids’ historical hyper-competitiveness has bred an institutional distaste and stigma against using copy from (or sourcing) other publications’ information. This also happens at some of the larger newspapers, too, over the reporting of substantial stories. 

To be fair, this history and institutional angling definitely doesn’t get Jotham out of the doghouse. Here’s how he explained what happened:

In those two cases where no citation or hyperlink appeared in the column, I believe I likely cut attribution from the top of Shaun’s quoted text with the intention of pasting them back inside the block — only to get distracted with another of the many responsibilities I juggled as an editor.

The error speaks for itself. But let’s be clear: When we talk about knowing of Jotham’s grace under pressure, this...

On any given day I was tasked with editing not only Shaun’s column but roughly 20 other news stories from five reporters, all of whom filed early and often. 

...isn’t pressure. That’s a setup for failure. Nobody I know, in the almost decade I’ve been working in media, edits that much on a daily basis. And when you work on an omnibus desk like those at the dailies, and your job is to move copy from the original format to the CMS, while also rewriting for copy, house style, clarity, and fact-checking (if one even can fact-check at that point), that strikes me as less of a fuckup and more of an eventual inevitability. 

Again, that’s not to say the mistake wasn’t Jotham’s, or that he didn’t have the opportunity to speak up at his workload. 

But that objection answers itself, no? It’s the American job market in 2016: A bunch of statistically, objectively overworked people who fear losing their jobs if they point out the systemic incapabilities of their positions, and if they do, they’re told there’s someone else to do it better, faster, or more commonly, to embrace some Orwellian, quasi-Marxist bullshit about being part of a more “mindful” workforce.

And, yes, “systemic” being the operative term, there: Consider the teachers, firefighters, air traffic controllers, construction workers — people who figuratively and literally hold people’s futures in their hands every day.

And, yes: I fully understand how “it’s the system, maaaaan” is the most cliche cop-out trope ever when discussing a worker at fault. But the system (maaaan) is also why certain unions offer literal protections for their workers—limits on on-worksite time, precautions taken to prevent fuckups like this from even happening to begin with. I’ve never been fully sold on the need for unions in media when so many other workforces so obviously need those protections more (but don’t have anyone to sell their story quite so well), but the kind of workload Jotham faced makes a hell of a case for the protections from self-immolation that they offer other workers, which, in this case, obviously could’ve been useful.

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“Your Best American Girl” - Mitski

Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me...

I knew I loved "Your Best American Girl" the first time I heard it for the same reasons everyone else did. It’s a song that merits playback exclusively at barely-tolerable levels of loudness. Like so many staggeringly great things, it sounds immediately recognizable, like we somehow had it forever and it's been just out of reach until now, because the memories of a life without this song seem untenably weird. 

We love it because it's the sound of so many legacies at once—not just PJ Harvey, Mazzy Star, and Veruca Salt, but Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, hell: Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Courtney Love, and especially Blue Album-era Rivers Cuomo, whose hands are being channeled (but whose neck is being throttled). And it's the sound of someone new, someone who genuinely lacks the intent of authenticity and therefore achieves it effortlessly, the sound of someone inheriting all those aforementioned legacies with only a cool shrug and a cogent understanding of what doing so truly means: Nothing.

And jesus fuck, do you remember the first time you consciously registered the bass and drums in there? It probably took a few listens, because Mitski's guitar line is so pronounced, so overwhelmingly spotlight-stealing, so thunderously and cathartically loud that it's hard to imagine there isn't a lone, broken volume knob somewhere that fell victim to its needs (no doubt encased in a milk-crate's wasteland of broken strings and amp plugs like it), to say nothing of her voice, the song's other main actor, one casting rote pop annunciation into an alien light (like, say, how that video casts its non-Mitski leads).

Just like this song rages from placidity to destructiveness, so goes a lyric sheet about absolutely nothing and absolutely everything. It's a lullaby about spooning and sad love. It's also a scathingly angry screed about the widening gap between two humans, about the corrosive nature of faith in other people and mis-managed expectations, about how we love in quantities, about the luck of being born one way (or not), about shame, and pride, and the secrets we keep to ourselves. And it’s about the way we hate ourselves, or learn to love ourselves, and how we cope with that relationship and inflict its damage on other people, too.

[And as for that video, take it at face value: For one thing, the best part about it are the too-few and brief moments of seeing Mitski Miyawaki shred, but for another, it does the lyrics a disservice by hammering home a lazy and overblown reading of them, tethering it to rote and de rigueur conversations about race and gender and (ironically) the creepiness of populism. Needless to say, it lacks for subtlety.]

I've spent the last six months going through at least two of the kinds of years we were warned about when we were younger. It involves the feeling of time swinging wildly between the quiet, droning background hum of something speeding away past you, where growing measures bleed into one another; and then, the utterly immutable roar of mortality, the earth-shaking boom of every passing moment ahead of you. It’s the strange paralysis of knowing you’re taking your own time for granted, especially when people you love don’t have that time anymore. And lately, those sounds have been both more insidiously quiet and more staggeringly, painfully, headsplittingly loud than they've ever been. I know it's a moment, and I know I'll be better than fine after it’s over, and that there may be others like it, but I also know that no matter what you do, moments like these don’t go away without you letting them play out, first. You can try to fight them off, but sometimes, you just have to let them run their course.

Anyway, like I said: The first time I heard "Your Best American Girl," I loved it for the same reasons everyone else did. But now I love it because I'm realizing how perfectly it captures the angst of inescapable distress, it's loudest and most quiet ways. One of my favorite parts of the song are those metronome-like blips you hear shuffled away at its opening, and then again, trying to make an incursion into the sound of the song's closing, this clearly suffocated digital noise that desperately wants to intrude on the comparably analog sound of guitar feedback, but can't. Again: Sometimes, the only sound you can hear is the one you need to hear, no matter the volume, of something running its course.

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Going Out is the Old ‘New’ Staying In is the Old Going Out

Is Staying In The New Going Out? - T Magazine, April 12, 2016

'I’d rather chill in and relax': why millennials don't go clubbing - The Guardian, March 24, 2016

The Death of the Party - New York Times, September 16, 2015

Not going out: Why Millennials are no longer going to night clubs - The Independent, August 10, 2015

What Really Killed NYC Nightlife - Medium, November 2013

What Killed the Nightlife? - Village Voice, March 2013

It goes on. That took all of, like, five seconds to find. If I wanted to hit the Wayback Machine and various Steve Lewis/BlackBook items and Paper Magazine dispatches bemoaning how downtown is dead and people don’t go out anymore, I’m sure we could make it at least to the mid-90s without any kind of significant interruption. It comes in different forms, too. Remember the whole Games In Bars Are Ruining Bars thing? And there was that other Carter-era (Windolf-penned) Observer story about Game Boys destroying the art of conversationalism.

This kind of thing stretches out for a long, long time. All of which is to say: While I love and can recognize Molly Young’s ideas in this story, and its comically hyperbolic and troll-primed headline aside, people have been writing this piece for-ev-er. Nightlife’s always dead to someone, usually, the people most desperate for someone else to go out with. Everybody wants to get you high, right? The bars are still packed. The restaurants are, too. Nightlife is always dead and alive and well and youth’s always wasted on the young.

If you’re getting upset at a story like that, it’s because you recognize yourself in it. I can’t stress this enough: It’s built for you to project upon. This has become one of the pro forma ways with which you are expected to make an argument in media, right now: Lacking substantive evidence but armed with a comically flammable premise built around the most pedestrian of neurosis (read: FOMO), if you can theorize something a handful of people can project their own insecurities on, let alone quietly nod their heads in solemn recognition of, you’re probably right, or at least should be published. It’s the Harrowing Personal Essay scaled down and turned outward. It’s how any theory at any given moment in 2016 is “confirmed” (it’s also a defining feature of the current election cycle, one where empirical evidence is somehow anathema to success). Where you look for affirmation, you’re gonna find it, now, as fast as ever (see above).

But as far as theory trend goes, this one’s a classic in heavy rotation. One writer isn’t going out anymore! Somewhere, for someone, the party is over, the well’s run dry, and a hobby is being taken up (maybe, even, a relationship) to fill out the time they once spent recovering from last night’s shitshow. But I can’t stress this enough—and I can’t believe this even merits wordage, but—contrary to what this go-to’s core premise so earnestly asserts, or to the way people are freaking out about it (so easily baited by their own insecurities of being fuddy duddies as they are), the party is always still raging somewhere, and a bunch of people you no longer know or recognize are still going out and having a great time. Having a byline doesn’t void that truth, and while we’re here, it maybe shouldn’t exempt us from issuing grand statements without at least being curious about them, either.

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Filed Under: ‘Unfortunate Moments in Closeted Powderhounds and Ski Bums’

Old story, told again: Defecting British double-agent for the KGB gets away with “the deaths of hundreds” because his MI-6 handler lost any sense of priority or bearings at the thought of “freshies.” This reminds me of at least two syllabi packets I was given as a freshman taking 1010s and 2010s at the University of Utah, which read—in all-caps, bolded, italicized, and underlined, in the middle of the first page—”A POWDER DAY IS NOT AN EXCUSE TO MISS THIS CLASS.”

Kim Philby, Lecturing in East Berlin in ’81, Bragged of How Easy It Was to Fool MI6 [NYT]

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On Vice and Mollification

So, it’s funny: People seem to like to talk about media these days in a way they were never really interested in doing so before. And, like: Normal people, who don’t work in media, but who are now just totally inundated by it in ways they’ve never been before. So when you’re outside of New York and the subject invariably turns to VICE, and what You, Person Who Works In Media In New York, thinks, my pocket response is usually something like: They got big, fast, to nobody’s surprise; it wasn’t hard to see it coming, I like a lot of the stuff they do, I don’t like other stuff, just judge a media company a piece at a time, and so on. 

But I was recently asked to explain what “problem” I could possibly have with What VICE Is Doing For Young People and News, and this is an exhausting conversation to have half-drunk at a wedding, but this time, I took the bait, because I could start with pointing to Paul Farhi’s Washington Post filing from the day before on how Vice’s Company Brass dispassionately and regularly shuts down news stories that run against The Company's financial interests. 

[Here, I should note, for my friends at VICE: I've got no doubt most of you who work in editorial there have any of this coming as news to any of you, and—I should add—I also have no doubt most of you recognize and hate the reality of this. Some of you don't really care, because that stuff generally doesn't affect the work you do, which you've never had come under question. That's fine, too. Overall, again, I think plenty of people there do or at least aspire to do good work unimpeded by untoward interests.]

My issue is with Shane's stance on this matter, and the people more than willing to trot out (or write off) his argument that advertisers aren't really telling VICE what to do, or, as he put it in 2014:

“Does North Face tell us where to go?” he said. “Do they pick our hosts? Do they fucking pick the story? No.”

Well, of course not. But also, that's a canny and bullshit piece of misdirection. 

For one thing, look no further than that canceled mortgage crisis story preceding a show sponsored by Bank of America:

This [Vice] employee described an extensive reporting project undertaken by Vice journalists about Bank of America’s mortgage-lending practices. When a senior editor found out the project had been underway for nearly three months, he expressed alarm to those involved. The investigation was soon aborted. Some weeks later, Vice News announced the creation of a personal finance show, “The Business of Life,” aimed at its millennial audience. The sponsor was Bank of America.

Now, did that show trot out talking points that plainly run parallel to Bank of America's interests? Is the show about how terrible financial regulation is? Is the show itself evil? Of course not.

But: There's a vacuum created when you write off the value of a report demonstrating the various ways in which large banks (like: Bank of America) continue to take advantage of their customers! A way for Bank of America to align themselves with a "cool" brand with the word “News” in its name is not, to be gentle, the best thing to fill that vacuum. 

And that's how the show is bad, and runs counter to the aims of an actual news organization, and speaks to a key understanding of the canniness that's a brilliant offensive in capitalism: Mollification. Not the spreading of disinformation, or propaganda, but filling the void of valuable understandings with information that isn't substantive or whole. The “zone” is more vast than ever, and there’s an argument to be made that it’s easier to flood (or wash away true grit of actual reporting) more than it’s ever been before.

And an organization that aspires to be in the business of news, and trusted by young people with the business of news, doesn't habitually compromise on the larger truths of the world. And these truths may seem insignificant or plainly obvious, as in, not worth fussing over—at they very least, they'll be written off by VICE brass as collateral details, things that need to go by the wayside in service of a greater mission, telling a more important story, getting inside ISIS, or the KKK, to see what they're "really" about. More from Farhi:

In one shot, for example, a bystander wears a T-shirt featuring the Nike logo; in another, a self-identified Klansman wears a cap with a Budweiser logo and drinks a Bud Lite. The appearance of the logos set off a brief flurry among the documentary’s producers, who scrambled to obscure them from viewers after the documentary had already been posted. The series was briefly taken down and the logos of the two companies — both of which have been Vice sponsors — were digitally blurred, as was the logo on a Coke can. The series then reappeared, with the images altered. News and documentary filmmakers traditionally do not remove corporate logos that appear incidentally in footage. Doing so changes the facts of a scene or image, said Tom Bettag, the former longtime executive producer of ABC’s “Nightline.”

That’s one way to put it. Another is: What kind of story is being told about the Ku Klux Klan by vaporizing the visual evidence of their similarities to everyone else, and that similarity being—what else—the fact that they spent money on Nike? To separate the Ku Klux Klan from this fact is to dismiss the nuances of reality, and nuance is the enemy of the sensationalist, of hucksterism—nuance is the grey, pedestrian shit that life's largely made of, and it makes for an unsexy story. In the Klan's case, that's most definitely the banality of evil, and the realization that this vast, billion-dollar commercial entity is what bonds the Ku Klux Klan and everyone looking at these all-too-human monsters, these unapologetic, diminutive racists. 

It goes without saying, but: Of course Nike doesn't want anyone to see that. It's not in their interest to let anybody highlight or dignify that fact, let alone condemn it. And it's in VICE's best interest to not have that conversation to begin with, to not instill even a moment of doubt in a media buyer's mind that there aren't gonna be any problems when push comes to shove with a client.

Let's put it another way: Nearly all of the heads of the Republican party can speak plainly about the terribleness of abiding the KKK as voters but VICE won’t show them wearing Nike.

Anyway, the next time Shane tries to tell anyone that the mission of VICE isn't under compromise because of advertisers, he might be right sometimes, but that mission only involves a portion of the truth, the parts that don't hurt the multinational conglomerates underwriting them, and anything but the whole truth is, well, exactly that. And, when I’ve got one, that’s my problem with VICE: They’ve done better than anyone else at convincing people who don’t work in media, people in Hollywood, people across America making their choices about what media brands to trust—they’ve been convincing those people that they’re somehow immune to or above doing this kind of thing, when, well, they’re not. 

[fek]

These people also act as if they’ve got a Flake Out Of Social Engagements Free Pass we are ethically obliged to acquiesce to whenever a conflict arises, like we all don’t know that shit’s selective—you bailed on plans you had for three months not because the sight of a merlot will make you crumble, but because you’re on episode six of Making a Murder and Brendan Dassey’s about to get fucked by his lawyer again. 

Why Dry January Is the Worst, First We Feast, January 2016

[fek]

A Quick Note on 2015

It was a weird year. I don’t remember being so frightened by the world over the course of a calendar year as I was this one. I’m not so afraid to admit that. 

Anyway, here’s what was great:

1. My girlfriend and I moved in together.  2. Jim Windolf, a genuinely wonderful human, gave me the best writing gig I’ve ever had. 3. I started my current editing gig at Mental Floss, working on a mag I truly love. 4. The places I went for the first time: Oslo, the Norweigian mountains, Copenhagen, Nashville. 5. The places I went back to: Asheville, Philly, Salt Lake City, Vegas, Miami. 6. I went skiing with friends for the first time since college. It was incredible. 7. I went wakeboarding for the first time since high school. It was incredibly painful, actually. 8. My friends who got married, my friends who moved on to bigger and better, my friends who are still around, my friends who survived the crazy life shit—they’re really the best. 9. I finally won our goddamn fantasy football league. Sorry, Mohney. 10. Krucoff let me on his podcast. Sorry, Boss. 11. Noma. 12. Star Wars. 13. Didn’t have a seizure this year. 14. Really pissed off the MTA. 

Anyway, it’s a pithy-sounding list because pithy is my only mode of response to so many things that, in aggregate, are so incredibly overwhelming. Again: There’s a lot of bad shit that happened, in the worldly sense (ISIS, Ebola, Carr died) and in the most intimate—a lot of time I spent in my own head, thinking about the wrong things, committing energy to the wrong causes. I didn’t write enough—I scared myself out of it or tricked myself out of it or made excuses for myself, none of which are even remotely decent reasons for not doing, you know: The do.  But rather than tell you what I’m going to do with 2016, I’ll leave you with this: It’s a tidbit from a front-of-book feature I wrote for Mental Floss’s December issue on New Year Resolutions. It’s not a story I was particularly passionate about writing, or which enthralled me when I was writing it. But it was work—hard work, interesting work, work mostly dedicated to making this small thing perfectly, or as perfect as I could get it. And it was a thing that mostly went unremarked (and unnoticed, to a large degree: you won’t find it online!) though maybe it’s gonna help someone along the way. I’m not sure—whatever, really, it doesn’t matter. It was just good work. And I’m out of 2015 alive, and my loved ones did too, and I’ve done some good work. 

Anyway, the tidbit is from a brilliant psychology study, and again, if you pick up the December issue of Mental Floss, you’ll see it in there, but it boils down to: Don’t tell anyone your New Year’s Resolution. By verbalizing it, you send yourself on a cognitive offramp, and start to internalize the idea that you’re already well on your way to working on it, thus decreasing the chances that you’re actually going to stick to it. So: Start 2016 off with a little secret; it’ll be the first new thing you own this year, and if all goes well, it’ll be the best, too. Here’s to all that. -f.

[fek]

All the Hard Ways: On the Las Vegas Review-Journal

The earliest memory I’ve got of anybody ever being proud of me has to do, directly, with the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I’m four years-old, sitting at our kitchen table, housing some sugary breakfast cereal I’d snuck in the shopping cart and then begged for at checkout. Dad, in his suit and tie, was—as he did every morning—drinking his black coffee, and reading the Review-Journal. He’d go through the paper, section by section, every morning. All I can remember aside from the cereal, the coffee, and the weekday warrior suit was that, this particular morning, my Dad was already done with the front page, and was onto either the Nevada or the Business section. And I picked up the front page to imitate him—the way kids love to imitate the most adult things adults do—and started reading the headlines outloud, from the paper. 

At first, Dad just thought I was jabbering some four year-old nonsense. And then he started to hear that this sounded not just familiar, but familiar in the sense that it’s something adults would read. He pulled at the giant broadsheet hiding my jabbering four year-old face, folded it over, pointed to a headline, and without further instruction, I read it out loud. 

“Holy shit, Bonnie, come here, did you know Foster can—”

“Don’t curse.”

“Mom Dad said holy shi—”

“Don’t you dare say it.”

“Bonnie, look.” 

And he pointed to a headline, and I read the front page of the Review Journal out loud to both of my parents. My Dad knew I could read. I guess, suddenly, I did, too.

- -

Not a lot of people are from Las Vegas. But if you are, and you’re of a certain age, you can remember a time when the town was so much smaller, figuratively and literally—in 1990, around the first time I read the RJ (how locals refer to it), its population was a little less than a third of what it is now, if that. And everyone, it seemed, had a subscription to the RJ, and the same morning routine (or something like it) as my Dad. 

Back then, Vegas was a town with a robust, growing middle class. The local press and its contents deeply mattered, to everyone, in the same way the old western boomtown presses once did, because for over two straight decades, that’s what it was: a boomtown. In fact, when Vegas was literally an old western boomtown, the RJ was there: The paper has been published, in one form or another, since 1909. 

As it quickly became the fastest growing city in America, its presses mattered more. And it was a decent media market, too—the Las Vegas Sun presented an alternative to the RJ, owned and operated by its founding publisher and editor, local character Hank Greenspun, until he died in 1989. That’s when the Sun entered into a 50-year joint operating agreement with the RJ as an afternoon paper, ensuring its legacy wouldn’t be completely screwed, with totally independent staffs. But what was its legacy?

The Sun was basically a propaganda arm of Greenspun, a local real-estate developer turning media magnate with ties to Republican and Zionist politics. Sound familiar? This is a guy who was pardoned by JFK after being convicted for supplying guns to the earliest iterations of the IDF (thus violating the Neutrality Acts). He was even netted up in some weird Watergate stuff. He wasn’t all bad, though—he once went toe-to-to with Joseph McCarthy (and ran a story essentially implying, with a comic absence of evidence, that McCarthy was a self-loathing closeted gay man). And like everyone in Vegas of a certain age, he had ties to the mob (in his early years, he was a flack for Bugsy as the mobster opened the Flamingo, essentially kickstarting the Las Vegas Strip) and Howard Hughes, too. But Greenspun was one of a long lost cast of true Vegas characters who took pride and ownership of the city’s fortunes—he even regularly published a front-page column on the Sun called Where I Stand, which was an endearingly batty read until Greenspun died regarding, well, where he stood. Either way, the paper was, if nothing, utterly transparent. 

It came as a surprise but not a shock when, in 2010, the Sun was awarded its first and only Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reporting, on a series of construction deaths in Las Vegas. It also came as a surprise but not a shock when, immediately after, the journalist who wrote the series, Alexandra Berzon, left for greener pastures. She likely knew what has long been in the cards for Vegas journalists: While a fertile ground for stories, the media market there hasn’t exactly been a fertile place for journalists. Mismanagement and economic hardship had forced the fairly disconnected, stumbling media market to trim everything and anything. Four alt-weeklies were whittled down to one. The Sun stopped independent distribution and had become a supplement inside the RJ. And after a certain point—starting around early 2009—when the fastest growing city in America crashed hard, and became the most unemployed, the most foreclosed-upon, and the most bankrupt city in America, nobody needed to get the paper, because they already knew what was inside of it. That middle class Vegas grew up with basically evaporated overnight, and for the first time in Vegas’ history, for most people, reading the RJ wasn’t even a matter of wanting to so much as being able to afford the ability to do so.

- -

That isn’t to say that—despite moments like the dumb, blogger-suing, comic mole-hunt boondoggle RJ parent company Stephens Media once precipitated—the RJ and the Sun have only suffered, or that they haven’t been complicit in their own suffering. Both papers have broken great stories, hilarious stories, important stories. The RJ’s told the story of Las Vegas through its proud Las Vegans, whether its the paper’s own shoe-leather columnist John L. Smith, the Vegas analog to Tom Robbins or Wayne Barrett, a guy who has been seemingly sued and possibly bankrupted by every casino magnate in town for his reporting. Or the comedy that is local gossip-cum-pirate Norm Clarke (truly a human who could only exist in the Vegas media). The Sun has told the stories of those construction deaths, of the city’s economic depression and slow-burning recovery, of the unemployment, of our insane and unhinged local politicos (like the time former mob lawyer-turned-mayor Oscar Goodman told a classroom of fourth-graders that, if marooned on a desert island, he’d take with him a showgirl and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin). And both papers have slipped, whether its been famously softpaw reporting of stories like the racist campaign of U.S. Senate would-be Sharron Angle (whose xenophobic views, no doubt, many Las Vegans shared), or the RJ’s comically bad attempts at clickbait over the last few years. They’re too embarrassing to link to.

But the bigger picture, the one that the media seems to be regularly missing when covering the recent scandalousness of the Review-Journal, is not that an unapologetic, egregiously wealthy Republican Zionist owns the media game in town right now, and that he has designs on influencing elections—that, Vegas has had before. And it actually went somewhat okay. It’s not even the new twist, which is that—unlike Greenspun—this new owner seems to have designs on shadowy ownership and duplicitous intent, though they are covering that story well (as are the journalists at the paper itself). 

It’s that Las Vegas is a town in recovery, possibly forever, and that a media outlet owned by not a Republican, and not a Zionist, but a casino magnate is nothing but bad news. Remember, the 2008 crash hit Vegas harder than anyone in America, because the city’s boosters of growth promised more jobs, more money, more potential for the American Dream than ever before, when it already was that fast-growing boomtown. Money and people poured in. Home loans were distributed en masse. Remember? This was only seven years ago. The euphoria was delusional, and then, it became an anvil of reality, crashing down, hard, into Earth, smashing people’s lives and a city into pieces. As it turned out, the jobs were fake. So was the money for the homes. So were the homes. Enter joblessness, homelessness, a city hit by a figurative bomb that now looks, in places, as though it’s still rebuilding from the detonation of a literal one.

- -

That boosterism is scary. And Sheldon Adelson stands to benefit enormously from a paper that can whitewash whatever news that could forestall the growth economic boosterism seeks to inflate long after the 2016 election is through. Sheldon Adelson stands to benefit from a paper that can whitewash the relationships between employers and employees, the company of our Company Town and its many workers (and make no mistake, everyone in Vegas, in some way or another, works for The Company). Sheldon Adelson stands to benefit from ignoring unfair and/or unsafe labor practices, economic conditions, the basic realities of Las Vegas, knowledge of which is at least helpful, on some level, to give the people of Las Vegas a sense of choice, of awareness of choice—a reason to be mad and wary and skeptical before those powers behind those reasons have inflicted significant damage upon them. 

The legacy of Adelson owning the RJ is already scary, and it has so much less to do with the upcoming election than any of the horse-race reporters would have you believe. Don’t worry about Sheldon Adelson trying to win the votes of Las Vegans. They’re not all idiots, and they can’t all be swayed to vote a certain way by a paper most of them don’t read, anyway. 

If history is any indication, it’s more that which they don’t know, in Las Vegas, that can in fact hurt them. And Adelson has already demonstrated how little he wants Las Vegans to know, beginning with his own involvement with the RJ. Who knows where it goes from here? 

I care about the Journal because I care about Las Vegas, and I care about Las Vegas because my family is still there, my friends are still there, and part of me is (and will always be) there. I’ve already daydreamed of waking up one morning to find that an entrepreneur committed to transparency and great reporting has staked out Vegas as a fertile ground for good local journalism, now more than ever, and made it their mission to give Las Vegans a democracy of choice by knowledge and by news (and also, to enjoy the hell out of reporting on Adelson’s newsroom follies). I can tell you more about that dream, for so many more words, but I’d rather give the last one here to storied Vegas newsman John L. Smith, who deserves a better owner, let alone station, but is committed to decent journalism no less:

Where's the firewall between ownership and the newsroom? Given Adelson's reputation as a micromanager, it had better be made of asbestos. The purchase of the Review-Journal signals a tectonic shift in the political landscape of Las Vegas and Nevada and has the potential to reverberate all the way to the White House. Sheldon Adelson can buy the newspaper. It's his right. For a man of his means, that's the easy part. And the family deserves the chance to make good on its stated intentions. But Adelson can't purchase the credibility of an independent press. That has to be earned every day on the street by reporters, columnists and editors who must be able to throw elbows without fear or favor — even at the new boss.