WE ARE YOUR FEK

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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]

High-Minded: Ryan Adams

The phenomenon of Ryan Adams is difficult to explain. He’s a high school dropout whose first solo album is called Heartbreaker, as inspired by a photo of Mariah Carey wearing a shirt that read, yes, “Heartbreaker.” It’s generally viewed as the most important alt-country record ever made and handily one of the best rock releases of the last few decades. It also featured Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch on backup vocals, and was credited by Elton John for his artistic rejuvenation. (John later sang backup on Adams’ sophomore record.) And it’s an album that famously opens with an argument about Morrissey and a dumb joke about a mouthful of cookies.

More over here, at Gossamer.

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.

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

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

The Life-Changing Magic of a Jump Rope →

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.]

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

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

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.

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.