These neighbors spent $2 million to block a McMansion. Will their bet pay off?

This week we bring you the Hate Read, Not In My Back Yard edition. The fun--or destruction of the social fabric, your pick--usually begins when rich people have too much money on their hands. But the NIMBYist is a special rich person: the rich person who has money, time, and a grudge. Usually, your average neighborhood activist will try to kill the noxious, morally destabilizing effects on property value of clean energy projects (such as wind farms), housing for war veterans, cellphone towers, funeral homes, and the like.  But, as the Washington Post reports, some particularly intrepid NIMBYists have taken up the fight to stop the spread of the gauche taste of other rich people, a noble, time-honored endeavor indeed.

The trouble began when a family decided to sell their home on a tree-lined street in the Washington, DC suburb of Bethesda, MD (median household income $117,723 and average 4-bedroom home price of $806,817 in 2010). Concerned that their street would turn into the McMansion version of a Renoir painting, three brave neighbors "pooled $2 million to buy, modernize and resell the old home":

“I knew the only way we were going to look out the window and have a home we want to look at is if we did something about it,” said Diane Rosenberg, who owns a real estate law firm and is one of the three sellers. “Looking at what we did with this house versus what you’d get with a McMansion, our quality is unsurpassable. If you’re showy, and you want people to say, ‘Look at this humongous house,’ that’s not what you’re going to get.”

Indeed, the house is a paltry 5,360 square feet with 6 bedrooms and 4.5 baths (that's enough for four people with full-blown diarrhea and one just mildly constipated) with an estimated monthly mortgage payment of $8,062 (assuming $435,000 downpayment on $2,175,000). For comparison, McMansions are any houses over 3,000 square feet. So the only apparent difference from McMansions is whether the house includes towel warmers, a desk with a USB phone charger, and wine coolers, as the would-be developer, Carole Sherman, builds into her houses. Still it didn't come cheap:

Rosenberg estimates that they spent at least $600,000 to double the size of the 2,200-square-foot home and update it with white wooden kitchen cabinets, an oversize Viking gas range, a stone fireplace and an adjacent living room big enough to host Super Bowl or office cocktail parties.

Super Bowl and office cocktail parties? And yet, somehow, for the three neighbors, an interior designer, a real estate lawyer, and a senior Department of Justice (haute-WASP and daughter of a past chairman of the Trilateral Commission), avoiding the specter of tackiness was uppermost in their minds:

Creer, whose kitchen designs have been featured in glossy home magazines, worried that a huge new house on a street filled with older, smaller homes would look tacky and, worse, would necessitate cutting down trees. 

We at the Hate Read would like to subject Mr. Creer to a lie detector test to see how much he really cares about the trees, seeing as a law was already passed in the county to require builders to plant new trees after Occupy Bethesda protested tree cuttings. Still, their gamble hasn't paid off. The house has apparently sat on the market for more than two months and suffered a reduction in price:

The now-renovated home at 7812 Oldchester Road in the Bradley Woods neighborhood of Bethesda has been on the market since late August, its price having dropped from nearly $2.4 million to $2.175 million. 

The developer they blocked from tearing down the house isn’t surprised. 

“I think they’ve learned their lesson. The home’s not selling,” said Carole Sherman, owner of Bethesda Too. “We’re building what people want.”

What is it that people want? Well, Ms. Sherman's unspeakable monstrosities, the kind the DC Urban Moms blog mocks as "garage Mahals." One gets the feeling the three Bethesda musketeers don't go for bathtub Madonnas, Christmas lights, or dining at TGIF much. But, as the original owner put it, they sure like "dignity":

“There was a lady down the street, and she met me when I was visiting and said she was getting sick to her stomach about it,” she remembered. “I just reassured her that there was no way I was selling to anyone who’s going to kill the dignity of Oldchester Road.”

So what's really at stake here, we wonder? The horror of looking out the window at people with less "dignity" than it is due to Oldchester Road? Or is it something else? Well, it appears Mr. Creer, not content with glossy magazines, harbors a sort of Harrison Ford-as-cop fantasia:

Creer thinks Harrison Ford would approve, too. In the movie “Random Hearts,” Ford played a D.C. police officer who lived in one of Oldchester Road’s homes across the street from the 1940s Cape Colonial. The filmmakers, Creer said, wanted a charming neighborhood. 

“They would have never picked it if there were a bunch of McMansions on the street,” Creer said. “Even if there was one.”

If he only knew Ford lives in a 14,000 square foot house and was paid as much as 100 times more than his costars in Star Wars. But maybe Ford can call up his friend George Lucas to help him buy up 7812 Oldchester Road and build some "dignity" (cough, affordable housing, cough) into its 16,000 lot? Nothing like when the rich troll the rich.

Occupy Bethesda has united to preserve tastefulness

Daisy Prince on Her Greenwich Village Apartment

The reaction to the protests at the University of Missouri, Yale, and other colleges have not escaped the eagle-like attention of the Weekly Hate Read. That class of pundits that exists like a crusty eczema on the face of society screamed bloody murder at the idea that students who navigate a cruel and unequal world might benefit from "safe spaces." The santorum spewing forth from the pusillanimous cry-baby contingent, drawn largely from that stratum of aggrieved and persecuted white, middle-class suburban journalism-school has-beens, has only sharpened our focus on the safe spaces of the Birkin bag set.

And thus this week our Grey Lady's Real Estate section delivers (and how) in the euphemistically titled column "What I Love," otherwise known as, "What I Bought with Blood Money and Cannot Sell Until It Appreciates Enough to Trade Up for an Appropriately Sized Estate in the Hamptons." This week gives us an inside peek into the life of one Daisy Prince, hapless yet upwardly mobile bobo:

When Daisy Prince and her husband, Hugh Chisholm, returned to New York in 2009 after eight years in London, they moved to Greenwich Village, where she had wanted to live since she was a college student in the 1990s. “I attended Barnard, and you spend most of your time trying to go downtown to a club or hear music,” she said. “And then when we moved downtown, I was like, wait a minute, I missed the memo — when did everyone move to Brooklyn?” 

Alas Barnard's curriculum, despite producing radical leaders and renowned scholars, must lack a program in subway ridership, since Ms. Prince spent most of her time there trying to get downtown. Thankfully, she landed in a marriage with the financier nephew of a baron best known for a passable biography of Siegfried Sassoon, leading her both to a tenuous claim to nobility and an apartment in Greenwich Village, thus obviating the need for transportation. Tragically for her, the center of cool had moved:

But Brooklyn would have been inconvenient for Ms. Prince, 40, who attends uptown cocktail parties and galas two or three nights a week in her role as the editor of Avenue magazine, which published its 40th anniversary issue this month. Started as a free magazine that was left in the lobbies of high-end buildings on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Avenue provides a safe space for the One Percent.

Of course, cocktail parties and galas two or three nights a week near the Met would have made a forty minute subway ride to, say, Brooklyn Heights terribly inconvenient. But what more could be expected from a magazine that provides a "safe space for the One Percent"? Our quick survey of Avenue Magazine unearthed lines such as, "What can be more tiresome than planning a vacation?" (The next sentence: "It's time to go wild: get your private jet and fly to more than 200 countries of your choice.") Apparently this was not the article Ms. Prince was referring to when she touted Avenue's sense of noblesse oblige:

“We write about the positive things they’ve done,” said Ms. Prince, who has been the editor since 2012. “We are not a scandal sheet. To be in Avenue means you have done something significant, usually philanthropically. These are the leaders of this community, and by making them look good, we encourage people to follow in their footsteps.”

One such philanthropic act, supposedly, is the opening of the flagship store of "The Laundress" in Soho, an "eco-friendly brand of specialty detergents and home cleaning products." The Laundress founders Gwen Whiting and Lindsey Boyd are evidently leading the community in price point, charging $20 for a 32 oz. bottle of detergent (a "specialty product"?).

Who else leads this community? Well, one building alone, 740 Park Avenue, boasts several such well-known philanthropists noted for their works (good or bad, who are we to judge?) who've created their own followings. David Koch, of Koch brothers fame, lives there in a 18-room duplex he purchased for $17 million. (Here are some "Koch facts" courtesy of the office of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.) Another such leader is Stephen Schwarzman, responsible for donations to the New York Public Library and Yale University in the tens and hundreds of millions, and also for piquant comparisons between tax increases and Hitler's invasion of Poland.

Yet we digress. None of this should detract from the article's focus on Ms. Prince, both a human Wunderkrammer of laughably outdated notions and an accomplished humble braggart. She also also happens to be eminently quotable.

• On the living room of the four-bedroom Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Washington Square Park: 

“It’s the part of the apartment we’ve put the most work into,” Ms. Prince said. “It was completely empty when we moved in.”

• On the library: 

“We haven’t changed it at all,” she said. “I even bought the sofas from the previous owners. I’m very practical that way.”

•  On the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which her husband's great-grandfather edited:

“The 11th edition has a lot of fans [presumably dead?]; it’s considered the best edition [presumably because India was still part of the UK?],” Ms. Prince said. “I like that the shelf groans with knowledge.”

• On family silver:

“I thought we should have some family silver.”

• On cooking:

“I like to have a glass of wine and chat with my friends in the kitchen, and sometimes I forget to turn on the oven.”

Yet, in her world, she is a bit of a rebel, which provides the rest of us with an idea of just how jolting the pitchforks will be when they arrive on Madison and Park Avenues: "Reflecting on her decision to live downtown, Ms. Prince acknowledged that it would have been considered unconventional for the editor of Avenue at one time." This shift owes itself to the fast-paced hyper-gentrification of lower Manhattan, no longer a scary ghetto of the merely rich:

“The lines are blurring,” she said, citing the “super-fancy” condominiums being built on the site of St. Vincent’s Hospital by the Rudins, one of the “power families” in Avenue’s October issue.

But even Ms. Prince has a soft spot for the New York that was before, however devoid her love for working class lunch spots is of even an iota of class awareness and economic analysis:

“Now there are places selling crepes and Japanese ice cream,” she said. “But I miss Gray’s Papaya.”

One gets the sense that Ms. Prince, however, is mostly glad she must no longer calculate how long it takes to burn off the hot juices of a dollar hot dog at SoulCycle, if we generously assume that what she misses is actually eating at a Gray's Papaya and not just consuming its rough-hewn kitschy atmospherics. But at heart, there is more than a hint of fakeness in her nostalgia, much like in her family silver, for a block or two from her perch she can find a Papaya Dog on 6th Avenue. But something tells us she won't venture that far.

Waiting to accumulate assets is the worst

Meet the Instamom, a Stage Mother for Social Media

The Weekly Hate Read must humbly apologize to its readers for a lapse two weeks ago resulting in our being scooped. In spite of a gamely take-down by Gothamist, we deprived our readers of what would have been a highly tasty hate read (think alpine Swiss quinoa and ostrich prosciutto with a side of school segregation and woe-is-me $1 million suburban mortgages). But to err is human, to hate divine: so we return to the task we must not refuse. This week brings us the grave matter of Instagram-fuled upper-class child abuse.

Enter a parade of children named Princeton, London, Grey, rendered in filters termed Slumber, Crema, Ludwig by parents who are spurred by a mix of dandified notions of breeding and commodification:

Regardless of how their time and money is being handled, the amateur child models of Instagram are already more famous on the Internet than most of your co-workers. There’s 4-year-old London Scout, with 105,000 followers; 2-year-old Millie-Belle Diamond, with 143,000; 4-year-old Michelle (154,000); Gavin (200,000); and the Mini Style Hacker (260,000). Then there’s the prince of Instagram: Alonso Mateo,with more than 600,000 followers. He recently attended the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week.

This may just be the diametrical opposite of Weird Twitter no one was asking for, except a rarefied sort of pedophile, one supposes:

Sometimes adults are drawn to the feed: people who post comments on their own Instagram pages like “Can I be her?” or “She’s become my style inspo” or “I love the hair!!!!”

Translation: "I am a a little bit of a pedophile"

Unlike Weird Twitter, a quick survey of the Instagram accounts revealed nary a reference to bowel movements or flatulence befitting of the two-to-five year old demographic. Yet the bucks at stake can be big with deals negotiated with Gwyneth Paltrow's company (which has spawned its own hate read cottage industry):

And marketers are also taking an interest. Athena Rotolo, who owns the Mini Life website, said she was pleased with the transactions she has struck with Ms. Cannon. “She requests certain items that fit in for the style of the shoot and then I send them off to her,” Ms. Rotolo said. “So instead of me having to hire someone and pay all those fees, it’s a mutual relationship.” 

The biggest star in this pageant of child image pimping is London Scout (journalist Hayley Krischer notes these are her first and middle names) who graced New York Fashion week in "a pink and navy faux fur coat, waving to a crowd of photographers":

“It was like she had her own little paparazzi,” said her mother, Sai De Silva, who runs the feed. London Scout is living #scoutstyle and schooling followers on how to #gettheLondonlook. And because London’s mother, 34 and a self-described social-media strategist, is as photogenic as her daughter, there are also the hashtags #mommydaughtermoments and #ScoutMomstyle.

#Vomit is all we can say. At least Ms. Krischer, chronicler of the "edgy tales from parenthood," is attuned to both the violations of childhood and labor law that might ensure. Enter the admittedly cute Princeton Cannon-Roberts and his mother, Keira Cannon, a pastry chef, perhaps the least offensive of the parent-child business partnerships covered:

But Princeton is not a teenager. He is 5 years old. A happy-seeming little boy, he played with his scooter, balanced on the curb, twirled in endless circles but only had so much tolerance for the professional photographer whom Ms. Cannon, 38 and a pastry chef, had hired to populate his Instagram feed, Prince and the Baker, which has more than 5,600 followers.

When the photographer attempted to coax him to pose for one more shot with the Brooklyn Bridge behind him, he gave her a polite, “No thanks.” It didn’t help that children were riding past him on scooters of their own, or bicycles.

Princeton might do well to avoid applying to his eponym in twelve years to avoid the appearance of redundancy on his resumé. But, as always, indulgences can sometimes be forgiven: Ms. Cannon is not only a pastry chef, but a military veteran who grew up in the South Bronx. His father, a graphic designer, also voiced reasonable-sounding concerns and a desire to limit overexposure.

But we spare no wrath or fecal discharge upon Angelica Calad, a Paltrow wannabe  whose son, at the ripe old age of two, already has garnered 112,000 followers (trigger warning: Ms. Calad dresses her infant children in culturally insensitive outfits):

“Taylen has become a brand,” said her mother, Angelica Calad, 33 and the owner and designer of POMP Kids, an online clothing business in Davie, Fla. Ms. Calad’s Instagram feed, Taylen’s Mom, is a devoted chronicle of Taylen and Aleia, Ms. Calad’s infant daughter, in high-fashion outfits. In one photo, Taylen wears a retro Esther Williams-inspired dusty rose bodysuit with ribbon shoulder straps, glitter-adorned bottoms and a bow tie. In another, Aleia wears peach merino overalls and a white-feathered chieftain headdress. 

If your head is not spinning, go read some bell hooks, Derrick Bell, or do whatever you need to do to deal with what just happened above. If you want to take action, just call Florida's Department of Children and Families' Abuse Hotline. For our part, we merely ask, what is a peach merino overall? Also, what is an Aleia? Why is Aleia in a "chieftain" headdress? As if all of this were not enough, Ms. Calad has partnered with what we can only imagine is a sort of anti-social, nihilistic terrorist organization whose acronym happens to also be KKK:

In the course of one weekend, Ms. Calad booked back-to-back shoots for Taylen and Aleia. She said she is also in talks to develop a network television show for Taylen and is branching out into home décor. But the real get is that Taylen is headlining the holiday campaign for Kardashian Kids Kollection, a relationship that began, Ms. Calad said, when she was approached by a publicist for the Kardashian line through Instagram.

Several child psychologists consulted in the article expressed concerns about developing these children "pro-social values" and preventing "higher-than-usual social anxiety" or the children starting "crave [attention]...in unhealthy ways." For their part, the parents are more focused on "online predators" with apparent lack of awareness of the potential irony that they are the online predators:

Regardless of the potential psychological effects, the mothers interviewed for this article said they feared online predators. “You never know who’s behind a profile,” said Mia St. Clair, 29, a professional photographer in Spokane, Wash. Her son Grey, 3, is at the epicenter of Grey’s Little Closet. They have over 28,000 followers.

Ms. St Clair's husband, also quoted in the article, is the "director of media and communications at Calvary Spoke, a church." (Apparently "media and communications" is the new word for proselytizing?) Well, they better start praying hard for little Grey's forgiveness.

Pageants are so passé

Presented Without Commentary Vol. 1

We thank our hateful readers for continued support of the Hate Read. Your own hate reads and recommendations have both moved us and overwhelmed our capacity to digest hate-worthy articles. There's only so much bile to go around. Instead of our full edition, we will occasionally present a series of recommended articles so you can Choose Your Own Hate Read™. Please enjoy!

1. Julie Satow. For Foreign Buyers, Family Homes Over Trophy Towers, N.Y Times (Nov. 13, 2015).

Choice quote:

He recently purchased a four-bedroom condominium at the Astor, at 235 West 75th Street on the Upper West Side. He will move there with his family once his green card is approved. “New York is a very natural fit for us,” he said. “It is very affluent, very cosmopolitan and very multicultural, which is what we are looking for.”

The Upper West Side provides an unlimited supply of adult diapers

2. Joyce Cohen. The East Village Scene for Two Theater Students, N.Y. Times (Nov. 12, 2015)

The set-up: two 20-year old NYU musical theater students looking for a $3000 two-bedroom in the West Village. Deal breakers: walk-ups, dark bedrooms, no washer/dryer.

These two are working on a revival of Rent where the rent is paid by their parents

3. David Brooks, My $120,000 Vacation, N.Y. Times (Nov. 13, 2015)

The bottom line: David Brooks goes on a 24-day, round-the-world trip on a Four Seasons luxury jet to decide too much money can be a bad thing.

Taking a nap with the shrouds of authentic Buddhist monks from Bhutan

4. Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite, 50 Pantry Essentials for the Modern Gourmet, Grub Street (Nov. 8, 2015)

Hate Read Gold medal: $15 a quart broth.

Like, how do people live on food stamps?

 

Thievery Corporation’s Eric Hilton Builds an Empire in D.C.

At the Weekly Hate Read, we appreciate a good dose of irony (or is hypocrisy?). Just as long as we're not overcharged for it. Sadly, for our readers in the nation's capital, it does seem that the prices for its liquid form are ticking up. How can it be? Well, as our favorite section in the New York Times reports, one half of the aptly-named DJ collective Thievery Corporation has set up a cartel of unbearably pretentious bars and restaurants in historically African-American neighborhood of Shaw that trade heavily on the clichés and smarm that are the coin of DC's burgeoning yuppie set.

Four of those establishments — the Brixton (a British-style pub), Satellite Room (an “L.A. style dive diner bar”), American Ice Company (rustic Americana) and El Rey (a taqueria) — are within a three-block radius of Montserrat house. Two were abandoned properties, one was a warehouse, the last a vacant lot. 

“I like going to an area that will be hot,” Mr. Hilton said. “I’m just baffled no one saw those abandoned buildings and open land surrounding the 9:30 club,” he added, referring to Washington’s venerable music hall down the block.

Of course, no one "saw" those buildings. Hilton bravely ignored the people around him. (The most recent "abandoned" building under attack is  434-unit public housing complex Barry Farm.) Hailing from Rockville, MD (household income $98,712), he had learned the trade of repackaging "culture" for the kind of jet set Muzak as a DJ:

[...] Mr. Hilton met Rob Garza, and the two began Thievery, an influential electronica act that melded jazzy electronic grooves with bossa nova, hip-hop, Indian rock, reggae and other international beats. Their sound defined a new genre of ambient electronic music, a kind of global soundtrack for the pre-iPod, late-’90s mélange of boutique hotels, cosmopolitan cocktails and colored mood lighting. 

“They have managed to stay successful in electronic music, which can be very fickle,” says Michaelangelo Matos, author of “The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America.” “They haven’t been tied to one sound, they can be a little fungible.”

No doubt Hilton realized that real estate is a "little fungible" as well and the immovable property equivalent of dubstep is just as bankable. No wonder his establishments became Obama administration favorites, blasé after another drone strike:

In 2007 Mr. Hilton opened Marvin, a Belgian-style diner at the intersection of 14th and U Streets in a space that was once a Subway franchise. The area, known in the early- to mid-20th century as Black Broadway for its theaters and restaurants, had just begun to rebound from the riots of the 1960s. Marvin became a favorite of young White House staff members from the first Obama administration. 

“He gave cred to an area that wasn’t going to get cred unless a local came in and understood it, and understood what would work there,” said Kate Glassman Bennett, a White House correspondent for the Independent Journal and a native Washingtonian. “I don’t think any of the stuff around 14th and U would have happened without him.”

Rather than name the restaurant Guantánamo in tribute to his benefactors, he availed himself of Marvin Gaye's memory, while also ignoring the continued existence of African-American people in the neighborhood. As one critic put it, "All are based on some facet of black history, some memory of blackness that feels artificially done and palatable." But let us not be too hard on Mr. Hilton. He did not single-handedly transform Shaw from 25% white in 2000 to 48% in 2010. Plus, he totally gets it, brother:

“I completely appreciate that perspective,” Mr. Hilton said. “When we named the restaurant Marvin, it was to remind people that Marvin Gaye was from D.C.” One bar was called Blackbyrd, for the 1970s-era jazz-funk group led by Donald Byrd, a musician and professor at Howard. (Its name and décor have since changed twice.)

Wikipedia apparently wasn't doing its job of reminding people of Gaye's birthplace. (Just joking, it was.) This is all the more rich since Thievery Corporation took the kind of pan-progressive "it's the system, man" stances endemic to creative "types," especially during the Bush era, penning tracks such as as "Revolution Solution":

The paradox of poverty
Has left us dismayed
Sliding democracy
Washing away

The toil of the many goes
To the fortunate few
The revolution solution
Oh, I've come to join you

If your eyes did not just roll a complete 720 degrees à la Tony Hawk, we can't help you. So much for the Eric Hilton of that era. Now he opens restaurants you can only go with a reservation, though he assures us the great thing is that there's all the types of people still:

“My favorite bar is the Gibson,” he said, referring to a quiet, unmarked speakeasy that he opened two doors over from Marvin in 2008. It is known for its reservation-only policy and Prohibition-era cocktails. 

“There is no really one type of person there,” he said. “You don’t really notice if people are hip or cool or professional exec types or fixed-gear bicycle types. Everyone seems to fit in.”

You could be hip or cool, profession or ride a fixed-gear bike! Amazing. But we're guessing if you tear up the streets of DC with a 21-speed bike, Chipotle might be more your speed.

Eric Hilton understands it if you think he's profiting from the lifeblood of minority communities

A $365 Foam Roller? It Exists

Well, we gotta give it to the New York Times style section writers: they take Ecclesiastes 1:14 literally and strive after flatulence  the wind. This week it's a handmade, $365 foam rolling pin with bubbles called the "RolPal." Strap yourselves in with some luxury bondage apparel, dear readers, it will be literally a bumpy ride.

As Donald Fowler, buyer at a Dallas home goods emporium where you can purchase a $5,400 cabinet with painted with the figure of a masked Elizabethan woman that "whispers 'regality,'" explained, you don't want to bring home a "cheap, utilitarian prop[] like the foam roller -- the often grimy-looking logs used to massage tight muscles and connective tissue." In Monsieur Fowler's words:

“Those big black wormy things,” Mr. Fowler said with obvious distaste, “are not something you’d want lying around your living room.”

Thankfully, the RolPal has come to fill, with its "well-designed, upbeat, almost 1960s mod" appearance, that gaping luxury fitness hole in your life, however you want to think of that hole. We chose not to and let rich person protégé and Times amanuensis Courtney Rubin do it for us:

Amazon offers more than 1,000 kinds of foam rollers for self-massage in various colors and densities, from swimming-pool-noodle gentle to digging-in-an-elbow painful. Most cost less than $30. But exclusive gyms, hotels and 1-percenters are snapping up the RolPal, which can be made just six at a time over two to three days in Sunset Park. The pop star Shakira has one with her name laser-etched into it. At E, Equinox’s $26,000-per-year club at Columbus Circle, which is entered by a retina scan, there are seven on the floor for its 50 members.  

Clearly it's a bigger hole in some parts than others, particularly if you use a retina scanner to enter your gym. Does it scan for brains? Is the criterion to enter whether or not you've lost all sense of reality? That seems to be about the measure of who would own a RolPol, to judge by Anna Kaiser, fitness impresario and star of the lobotomy-aid DVD "Happy Hour":

 This week, Anna Kaiser, whose $475-per-month dance-cardio classes have cheeky names like “Sweat Dream” and “4Play,” will begin using the rollers in a class in her new NoMad studio called “Sexy Mofo Fascia Release.” (The fascia are the connective tissues that surround and separate muscles.) Ms. Kaiser said she thinks the showy props will hook clients. “It’s like: ‘Wow, this looks so cool. What is this?’ ” she said. “It pulls you in.”

And not only fitness entertainers and celebrities have adopted the RolPol as their latest psychological consolation in life. "Former" executives in the tech word have embraced it as well in increasingly feverish tones:

Dae Mellencamp, a former president of Vimeo, said she tried all manner of foam roller, from the softer blues and greens to the harder, denser black, on up to one with a metal bar, hoping for relief. Then she found RolPal. 

“There’s just nothing like it, and nothing goes as deep,” said Ms. Mellencamp, who is training for a mud run. “It’s like an addiction.”

Whatever the stresses the RolPal's early adopters operate under, it takes a true savant of the pain of the rich to imagine a $365 piece of foam over a rolling pin. Ms. Martin masterfully zeroes into the inner concentric rings of insanity emanating from Park Slope and the demented but perhaps brilliant mind of one Dièry Prudent:

Visit RolPal’s president, Dièry Prudent, and it’s easy to understand the roller’s genesis. Mr. Prudent, a personal trainer who lives in a featured-in-interiors-magazines 1870s brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is the sort of exacting guy who bristles if you refer to the roller as a tool. “Tools are for carpenters,” he said. “This is an instrument.”

When a reporter arrived for a demonstration breathless, late and sweaty, Mr. Prudent, 53, handed over a glass of water and gestured toward a platter of Paleo-diet-friendly snacks: strips of bresaola, the meat as intricately folded as origami, so uniformly spaced it looked as if a ruler had been involved. “Relax,” he said. “This is supposed to be an experience.”

 If you were wondering if there were a semantic basis for Mr. Prudent's distinction between a tool and an instrument, you might look here as we did. If you want to get a good look at a tool, Park Slope might not be a bad place to start. We digress. As is said, behind every person with an extravagant and bizarre contraption...we forget the saying. But Mr. Prudent knows a thing or two about high-strung personalities from his wife:

His wife, Mariza Scotch, an accessories designer and the chief creative director at Skagen, a Danish lifestyle brand, was unimpressed. Ms. Scotch can’t stand “visual dissonance,” he said, so he worried he’d have to rescue it from the trash or the recycling bin, like some of his other projects.

Little wonder, their kitchen was featured in New York magazine and described as "indestructible."  The family's kitchen lacks a conventional refrigerator because as Ms. Scotch reasonably put it, "I don’t want to hear the zooming and groaning of a motor.” The rows inside this house sound like they would put George and Marta from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to shame. But you gotta give ti to Ms. Scotch, she knows a good thing when she sees it:

He decided to sell the RolPal for $189, but business was slow. His wife, steeped as she was in luxury branding, knew the reason. “Your price point is too low,” she told him. 

“No one is going to take you seriously unless you charge more money.”
And so the price nearly doubled, to $365 — “a dollar a day for a year,” Mr. Prudent likes to say, though the RolPal should not need to be replaced in a year, he noted. If it does, fans are likely to pay up for another.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we are instituting a $365 a year subscription to the Weekly Hate Read. Maybe then you will start taking it seriously.

The pain of the rich can't be soothed cheaply, can it?

Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: 'It’s really isolating to have lots of money'

The Weekly Hate Read has been on a short hiatus enjoying analog life and its various travails. Sorry, even haters have to do the dishes sometimes. But we've been lured back from a mini-sabbatical (the latest craze in corporate academia, didn't you hear?) by a especially choice tip from comrades over at Kitchen Flânerie (making that circumflex accent took the wind out of us). This week its The Guardian that delves deeply into the inner lives of the 1% by speaking to a therapist with the professional scruples of a Wall Street banker.

Enter Clay Cockrell (née Cockroach?) banker-turned-therapist. He walks and talks through Central Park or Battery Park "as a confidant and counsellor to some of the [sic] New York's wealthiest." Why walk in Central Park? Well, we suspect that the rich like to survey their real estate around the park and institutions that bear their names. But take it from "Jim," who wrote a testimonial for Mr. Cockrell's website: 

I was in therapy when I was in grad school. I hated it. The small office, the bad art, the fake plants – the therapist sitting there and saying: "uh hm, tell me more". What was the point? So when I needed to address some things in my life, I was determined not to repeat my mistakes and went looking for the best and most unusual therapy practice in New York. I found it. So THIS is what people talk about when they say how much they love therapy and won't miss it for anything. Thank you!

Mr. Cockrell's website is a veritable Wunnderkammer of the rich's neuroses, self-regard, and bad faith. But back to the horse's mouth in The Guardian: 

“I shifted toward it naturally,” he said of his becoming an expert in wealth therapy. “We are trained to have empathy, no judgment and so many of the uber wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – they feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.”

Yes, he might be revealing his client's problems and exposing them in a major online newspaper, but isn't that just the fault of other mental health professionals, who simply don't understand? It can be hard to hear that you're not paying your fair share of taxes or that your company's buying up formerly affordable housing. Take it from another psychologist to the Gulfstream set:

“The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality, but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative. It’s an -ism,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. “I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through, but ... it really is making value judgment about a particular group of people as a whole.”

[...]

“You can come up with lot of words and sayings about inheritors, not one of them is positive: spoiled brat, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, trust fund babies, all these things,” she said, adding that it’s “easy to scapegoat the rich”.

Occupy Wall Street was a "-ism"? What "-ism" was it? Socialism? Communism? No, apparently OWS unleashed a wave of prejudice against the wealthy akin to racism. We could go on about that unhappy comparison, but we will say that Dr. Traeger-Muney need not worry about too many "ultra-wealthy" individuals of color in her practice as only four people of color, or less than one 1% (how's that for elite status?), figure among the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Thankfully, Dr. Traeger-Muney did her part for the cause by getting her PhD at a for-profit institution and hiring no therapists of color in her practice.

But what particularly creates mental unease among the rich out are protests from those teeming with prejudice. In October 2014, workers protested outside of "Walmart heiress Alice Walton's $26m, 6,346 sq ft New York condo." Though the 26 arrests in the protest far outnumbered the arrests for police officers accused of shooting unarmed Black men, "[t]hese types of protests can be very stressful for the rich."

The rise in wealth in the last three decades has also meant the wealthy feel like they have fewer friends. Here's Mr. Cockrell:

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the income gap has expanded and the situation “has gotten worse for the wealthy”, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money. 

“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you! Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult,” said Cockrell. “As the gap has widened, they [the rich] have become more and more isolated.”

Honestly, who would want a midlevel executive Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, or Enron hanging around in the guesthouse? Do you even like me or is it just my exquisite crudités? The wealthy have chosen instead, sometimes, to keep their wealth in the closet. Here's "Dr." Traeger-Muney:

“People say: ‘Oh, poor you.’ There is not a lot of sympathy there,” she said. “[Wealth] is still one of our last taboos. Often, I use an analogy with my clients that coming out to people about their wealth is similar to coming out of the closet as gay. There’s a feeling of being exposed and dealing with judgment.”

We were  unable to find data on how the wealthy experience rejection from family and friends, harassment from coworkers (or employees?) and colleagues, violence from strangers and acquaintances, and discrimination in employment and housing at record numbers. But we believe you, Dr. Traeger-Muney, we believe you. Still, we offer a hot tip to all the millionaires and billionaires ashamed of their wealth, who think they can't shed it like Blackness and being gay: you can actually give the money away.

You can also have your spine surgically removed to gain wealthy friends

Why This New $18 Plate of Bread Might Just Be Worth It

Everyone should have an art. That is to say, something they care about enough to dedicate hours to, distract one's mind from the inevitability of death, the pain and suffering that is the stuff of life, and New York Times trend pieces. But no one, and we repeat "no one," should play any role (or shall we say roll?) in putting to market an $18 plate of bread.

But that is what the twee-masters at Bruno Pizza in the East Village did. $18 bread. But what else would you expect from two clowns who named their fancy pizza joint for Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600 for his curiosity about the world? (See what they did there? Wood-fired oven...burned at the stake. Cute!) Just as you would carefully work on a bread starter, read slowly so your anger does not boil too-too fast:

This bread itself, which will hit the menu on October 1 as a composed $18 dish with fermented Caputo Brothers mozzarella, buttermilk and "ambrosia" honey complex (a mixture of the honey propolis, pollen, and royal jelly), has been in the works since before the restaurant's opening earlier this summer. It's the brainchild of chef de partie Phil Marokus, who previously had no bread-making experience. "After I left my previous job, I had two and a half months before Bruno started up, and I was just super bored," he says. "I'd done a lot of research online and read Tartine Bakery's books to learn about how naturally risen bread works, but this has been a real headache! Why is the bread doing this, and not this? What do I have to fix to make that happen?"

Did your anger rise like the dough for the majestic $18 plate of bread? Take a thirty-second breather and read on from aspiring society page subject Sierra Tishgart (who sounds like she could be an exotic appetizer of baby lentils and Komodo dragon tongue):

The dark, seedy bread is rich and satisfying on its own, but Bruno's chefs also serve it with a bone-marrow-and-herb-infused compound butter. They also add pine oil, nasturtium flowers, and Jacobsen salt (and that's before plating it with the cheese). It's a nice accompaniment to vegetable-forward dishes like the fairy-tale-eggplant appetizer with black-cashew paste and blistered shishito peppers (and the pizza with smoked ham, Pawlet cheese, and peaches, for good measure). 

"When we started, none of us had any pizza experience," Marokus says. "But making the pizza dough helped me with the bread: I can see how adding more or less water or flour makes an impact. We've all worked together to figure it out."

Can you hear the mellifluous notes of self-satisfaction? They worked together for a year, folks, to design a plate of a few pieces of bread that would cost, after tax and tip, $20. Like NASA engineers or Supreme Court litigators devising legal strategy, they got together to figure it out. Someone had to, right? And we thought a $20 burger was still the ne plus ultra of the excesses of the New York food scene. We delight in being proven wrong but we're gonna stick with this one for now.

Cheaper than your co-pay

Harvard Students ‘Devastated’ About Yogurtland Closing

We pride ourselves on being equal opportunity trollers at the Weekly Hate Read, pursuant to the strictest EEOC regulations. Thus we have no qualms including an article from that august institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose acceptance rate hovers around only 5.9%. The 5.9% are very sad that a self-service frozen yogurt store has closed.

Up and coming cub reporter Sharon Yang, who has previously covered on a talk by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a prestigious awarded given to noted economist Roland G. Fryer Jr., shifted her focus to the Harvard Square self-service yogurt beat, a perennial favorite in sleepy New England:

A small but passionate and vocal group of longtime student-patrons who frequented Yogurtland while it was in business described themselves as heartbroken over the closure.

Ms. Yang elicited some choice quotes on the closure, not least from the daughter of deranged law professor (or is professor of deranged law?) Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

"I was actually devastated. I was genuinely devastated. Yogurtland for me as a freshman, was a place of solace,” said Lulu S. Chua-Rubenfeld ’18.

Somebody call student health services! Though Ms. Chua-Rubenfeld claims here to have survived just fine standing in 20-degree weather at the age of three for having disobeyed her mother, we think this obsession with yogurt betrays a hint of PTSD. (By the way, what's the statute of limitations on child abuse?) Another student provided a more dispassionate assessment of Yogurtland's superiority:

“Pinkberry is not self-serve, you've got all these complications of lines, you don't get immediate access to the yogurt, it's hard to sample,” Jon D. Young '16 said. “The same issues plague the Berryline, the J.P. Licks, and what have you.”

Not to be outdone, however, Mr. Young added:

Young is a platinum level member of the rewards program, a distinction he earned after consuming more than 240 ounces of frozen yogurt over the course of his frequent visits to the store. 

“Yogurtland was the holy place for me,” Young said. “My temple, if you will.”

Pulitzer prize-winning material, my friends.

The nightlife in Cambridge, Massachusetts

At Hawaii Resort, Yoga by Day, Party by Night

We are hypocrites at the Weekly Hate Read. We denounce the parochialism of the Real Estate section while greedily indulging our need to deride it. That is why today we venture forth into its companion section, which the New York Times insists on calling “Travel.” We prefer the appellation, “Summer Homes and Places I Go Only First-Class.” We prayed for a piece that let us move beyond Williamsburg and the Upper East side, finally receiving a 2,000-word article detailing the Lollapalooza or Burning Man analogue for yoga devotees, set in beautiful, postcolonial Hawaii. Hallelujah.

Written by the Times' hard-hitting "primary Olympics writer" Lynn Zinser, the article grapples with the phenomenon that is Wanderlust, a three to four day festival combining various forms of yoga (what?) with all-night raves. It has now spread, like a rare tropical disease, to fifteen cities. We were unable to obtain a demographic census of the event, but we have our suspicions:

“When we first came up with the idea of a festival, people said, ‘No one is going to want to do yoga all day and party all night,’ except we knew that’s exactly what they would do,” said Sean Hoess, who founded Wanderlust with Jeff Krasno and Mr. Krasno’s wife, Schuyler Grant. “We would go to these yoga retreats, and that’s exactly what they were already doing.”

Exhibit 1: when there is a “Schuyler” involved, you are no longer dealing with garden variety WASP, but true Philadelphia Main Line or Greenwich, Connecticut WASP. (The same goes for Piper.) As such, Wanderlust joins other businesses in the now-familiar vein of daycare facility for putatively able-bodied wealthy adults. It is best in these situations to run for the hills or, as one would do at Wanderlust, up the coconut tree:

The tightrope walker fit in swimmingly with the impromptu human pyramids or the people hand-walking on stilts, the laughing circles of people bruising their hips in hula hoop yoga or splashing into the water trying to do Warrior 1 on a stand-up paddleboard. There is yoga with dancing, D.J.s spinning tunes to the downward dogs. There are the fabric hammocks hanging from trees for something called aerial yoga. At regular intervals, you could find someone shinnying up a 30-foot coconut tree. Just because it was there.

The business acumen of Krasno (who has been "incredibly" inspired by Williamsburg), Hoess, and Grant consisted of putting together this goofiness just as goofiness became the latest fad in papering over structural violence, while “Just be cool, man” became the most eloquent defense of its apologists:

“Our timing was just really, really good,” Ms. Grant said. “Just as the music industry was starting to nose-dive, the wellness industry was starting to catch its wings. There is such a broad interest in wellness, and there are so many different ways and different depths of how to practice that. It is starting to approach its mass appeal moment.”

Never fear, however, we are in the hands of the New York Times—an eminent and critical news source. Even the yoga-practicing journalist, engaging in a bit of participant-observation, smells something fishy here:

“Wellness,” as it turns out, can be a rather fungible idea, stretched to include eating poke bowls and kale salads by day and enjoying inebriating substances while the music pulsates late into the night. The wellness part of that being that, well, people were enjoying themselves.

Whatever concerns Ms. Zinser has are dispelled once she finds out that the trio of yogapreneurs made sure that those unable to attend the $440 entrance fee for the four-day festival and the $269/night Hawaii hotel (before fees and taxes) could enjoy a taste of this "community" for one day close to home. For those without PTO (paid time off for those not in the know), Wanderlust offers a one-day cocktail of yoga, road race, and Molly-fueled gyration to Prodigy, just in time for work on Monday:

Last year Wanderlust 108 made its debut: a one-day “mindfulness triathlon” combining a 5k run, a yoga class and a guided meditation. After two successful editions of that last year, it will reach 15 cities in 2015. That includes one in Brooklyn — Wanderlust’s headquarters — on Sept. 13 and one in Washington on Sept. 20.

“Those are just a taste of Wanderlust,” Ms. Grant said. “Some people can’t afford to do a three- or four-day festival. These are more of a community event. It’s a happening.”

If that doesn't sound like a recipe for a fatal combination of schizophrenia (run, yoga, DJ?) and class resentment writ large, we frankly don't know what is. Ms. Zinser, however, leaves reassured that there is a place for first-generation, good ol' yuppie Orientalist wisdom in this new-fangled space:

Ms. Phelan told the class that Yin is her favorite yoga because it involves the willingness to look within.

“All the answers are there,” she said. “The past is just a memory, and the future just a thought. There is only now.”

In that minute, everything seemed to make sense: the circuslike atmosphere, the party-till-dawn vibe, the stretch-and-be-seen scene, the idea that people traveled thousands of miles, or just a few dozen, to discover the one thing that is true everywhere. It is always now.

Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon: eat your heart out. The future is worse and weirder than you ever imagined.

Medicare will be defunded while you practice aerial yoga

Getting Workaholics to Stop and Recharge

They say you reap what you sow, but here at the Hate Read, we just reap and reap and reap. We leave the sowing to New York's one-percenters who busily sow the soil around us with bad taste, astonishing levels of self-regard, and obliviousness to others' pain and suffering. And apropos of pain and suffering, this week brings another chapter in the high-level collusion between so-called "doctors" (i.e., dermatologists) and model-actresses and financiers to ease their pain.

First, we have seen the work of aspiring journalist Paul Sullivan before on snagging high-end restaurant reservations, so it is good to see we're in the hands of someone who cares about the interior spaces of his subjects. To wit, he begins with short profiles of different real estate/medical potentates' self-care routines. First, Anthony Hitt, a "luxury property company" executive:

Anthony Hitt, chief executive of Engel & Völkers North America, a luxury property company, spends at least one week each quarter at his home in Maui, Hawaii. At this point, three years into the top job, he said he talks to his top lieutenants only 15 minutes a day when he’s there. The rest of the time he reads, practices yoga, rides his bicycle or otherwise tries to disconnect from the responsibilities of his job 

“My vacations are so low-key,” he said. “I try not to think, ‘What about this or what is the solution to that?’”

We salute Mr. Hitt for not thinking too hard--we're afraid of what would happen if he did. While the Times helpfully links to "yoga" in the above and a litany of stories on downward dog poses, it fails to link to Mr. Hitt's personal blog, whose last entry, dated December 31, 2014, listed his resolutions for 2015, including the all-important: "I will NOT forget that this real estate market will pass - and so will the next good or bad one." Good advice for us all. From your lips to Goldman Sachs' ears.

Next, Mr. Sullivan profiles Dr. Judith Hellman who bravely sticks to the surface of things:

Judith Hellman, a dermatologist in private practice and an associate clinical professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, has a mix of strategies to disconnect from the demands of her patients. Trained as a classical pianist, Dr. Hellman likes to play jazz on the piano in her apartment. She swims (in the shade, of course). She writes poetry, though she has no illusions about its quality.

And she takes off at least four weeks a year — next month it is scuba diving in Israel — and asks her patients to contact her only if it’s a true emergency.

What would be a true emergency for Dr. Hellman or her patients? This is a tough nut to crack as we're clearly in the hands of a narcissist writ large and as she'll have you know on her website, the mother of a musical prodigy. But finally, Mr. Sullivan hits us with the real story. People are overworked! Who knew?

People in the United States are taking less time off than at any point in the last 40 years, according to data cited this year in The New York Times. Responses to one online questionnaire indicated that a majority of Americans do not use all of their paid vacation.

It's hard to Hate Read the fact that Americans have the least paid vacation in the world. It's okay, the Times won't lead us astray yet, or it will lead us astray. Not sure exactly what the point is now. Back to previously overworked Mr. Hitt:

Mr. Hitt said that when he first became chief executive, he used to get up at 4 a.m. while on vacation to call people in Germany and New York, logging in hours before anyone else in Maui was awake. Now, he said, he has a great team and is comfortable relaxing. 

“It’s something that’s taken me a long time to get to,” said Mr. Hitt, just back from Maui. “I’m someone who likes to be in charge.”

Poor baby. He was made to work! From Maui! Now he's only in charge 48 weeks a year. Must be rough. But the beauty of Mr. Sullivan's articles is that he captures human frailty, not just human frivolity. In fact, frivolity and frailty are really two sides of the same coin, n'est pa?

Mr. Hitt said he was hesitant to admit it but his business runs fine when he’s not there. “There is no negative cost associated with me being gone, which is not what most C.E.O.s want to say,” he said, adding: “When I come back I have that 30,000-, 50,000-foot view that goes away in the few months between those visits.”

The gigantic phallus of Mr. Hitt's ego stands unassailed and we can all breathe a sigh of relieve. However, the real coup de grace is Mr. Sullivan's discovery of cryotherapy (apparently *not* weeping therapy) and Anastasia Garvey, runner up to Miss UK 2012 and, we project, a future Real Housewife. 

While Anastasia Garvey, an actress and model, doesn’t have office pressure, she says she is constantly on edge wondering if she’ll get a certain job. She has developed a regimen of ways to disconnect: meditation, acupuncture, cupping therapy, monthly trips to a reservation-only spa and most recently cryotherapy — as in spending some time being blasted by air cooled to minus 260 degrees. 

It only lasts three minutes, plus time to warm up again on a stationary bike, but it costs $90 a session, she said. She goes three times a week.

“The first time I did it I couldn’t remember my name,” she said. “You’re in a freezer. You’re so cold you can’t think of anything.”

We imagine this is a skill that comes in handy in her trade--forgetting her own name, that is. And while cryotherapy will set you and Ms. Garvey back $14,000 a year, now that SoulCycle is going public, spending $5,000 on a thrice-weekly regimen a year on a company whose stock any chicken plucker can soon buy, is hardly exclusive anymore. Pity the rich, but pity us more.

This is someone who can't remember her name

Uniting a Mysterious Ring With Its Rightful Owner

We offer the Hate Read's first trigger warning today. The author of today's atrocity, aspiring socialite Patricia Morrisroe, published a "book" titled 9 1/2 Narrow: My Life in Shoes. So you know we're in the hands of a materialist philosopher of sorts. The book was blurbed by Irene Beckerman, author of Love, Loss, and What I Wore, so you know we're in for a head-thumper.

Romance ain't what it used to be. Just read the weekly human rights violation that is the Modern Love column. If you hadn't guessed, this monument to bourgeois matchmaking can be found in the country's paper of record, The New York Times. Cue the tiny doomsaying, violin-playing orchestra in my head.

The saga begins on Ms. Morrisroe's 25th anniversary when she receives a $2,350 diamond ring in the mail from Neiman Marcus, which begins a series of reveries on jewelry and subplots that could only have been hatched in the mind of a crack-addled Real Housewife:  

Shaped like an oval shield with a sapphire in the center, the ring was so gigantic it extended beyond the knuckle of my index finger. It was a “statement ring,” and here’s what it said: My husband, after 25 years of marriage, still didn’t get my taste in jewelry. 

Decades earlier, there was the chunky Art Deco engagement ring that became a nonengagement ring when we postponed the wedding. Though we had been engaged for only 15 minutes, it was long enough for me to decide that while I still loved my former fiancé, I definitely didn’t love the ring.

The horror. Who could this terrible man be? One feels a bit of sympathy for Mr. Morrisroe  until realizing that if he's held it together for 25 years, he can't be made of much. Thankfully, their 10th anniversary ring tells all:

For our 10th anniversary, my husband presented me with a delicate Burmese ruby to make up for the Art Deco disaster. I was moved but conflicted: “pigeon blood” rubies derive their name from the color of the first two drops of blood dribbling from a butchered pigeon’s nose.

I have no great fondness for pigeons, but I didn’t want their symbolic blood on my finger. Luckily, the United States government gave me the perfect out. “Myanmar is violating human rights, and the U.S. has banned Burmese rubies,” I told my husband.

“I bought the ring before the ban,” he said. 

“Other people don’t know that. Besides, I feel bad for the pigeons.” 

“That’s the last time I ever get you a ring,” he said.

No doubt the Burmese military junta could count on this couple for a good hard-on. We would provide you a .GIF to show you what a Burmese military junta hard-on looks like but the free wifi at McDonald's is too slow to do .GIF quality control. And we regret to inform Ms. Morrisroe that "pigeon's blood" rubies have no blood in them. But alas, the $2,350 "bargain" ring was not meant for her, so she suspected a "secret admirer." Wrong--it was a Stefan from Studio City, California. She bravely trucked out to the remote tundra outpost of White Plains, New York to return it:

Neiman Marcus doesn’t have a branch in Manhattan, so I brought the ring to the Neiman-owned Bergdorf Goodman. The woman at client services suggested taking it to Neiman Marcus in White Plains.

Two days later, my husband announced that he had made a reservation at one of our favorite restaurants.

“You know what I’d really like to do?” I said. “Go to White Plains.”

“Are you crazy? That’s 40 miles away.”

“I know, but I’ve got to get rid of the diamond shield ring.”

“I was hoping we could have a nice romantic dinner,” he said.

“We can — in White Plains.”

Leaving Manhattan! Can you imagine? Do you even know where White Plains is? Isn't that where poor people go for colonoscopies? Meanwhile, Mr. Morrisroe had learned his lesson and bought his beloved a bracelet instead. The beautiful, or atrocious, thing about this Modern Love is the cast of characters we are privy to and to which the New York Times subjects its readers:

As it turned out, he hadn’t. His gift was a beautiful bangle bracelet that immediately fell off my wrist. To be fair, I’m very small-boned, but now it would have to be returned for resizing to the jeweler’s workshop in Jaipur, India. Still, I was so happy he hadn’t given me the shield ring that I didn’t care.

[A few weeks and paragraphs later]

Back home, I spotted a familiar box on the coffee table. Inside was my bangle bracelet. The jeweler had been able to resize it in her New York workshop. Now I realized why my husband had made dinner reservations. He had wanted to make it a special night.

The bracelet was beautiful. It was also very small, but after I used soap and ignored the pain in my thumb joint, I was able to get it on.

Can you just picture the jeweler with the workshops in New York and Jaipur resizing the bracelet to fit poor Ms. Morrisroe's bird-like wrists? We may be in for another one of the Times' famous labor investigation. Here the abuse would just be interacting with Ms. Morrisroe and the people in her orbit. On her book, an Amazon reviewer optimistically opines that it "Will Make You Laugh, Cry and Think." She's definitely right about the crying. 

The main building of the White Plains gulag

Along With Babies, Hairstylists Are Arriving in Hospitals

Apologies for the hiatus, Hateful Readers. We temporarily relocated to the West Coast where we were caught in a miasma of sunshine, ice cream, and brunch. Life on the Lifestyle Coast, as we like to call it, is like a being in a coma: while a relaxing break from the indignities of capitalism (that is, if you're not paying rent), it's not exactly up to you when you leave. When you finally do wake up, you're greeted by a nurse in white dreads, a hospital bill, and some sign the world has changed for the worse--climbing gyms for toddlers or something.

But we digress. This past week brought plenty of red meat in our CSA of Hate Reads. The latest journalistic atrocity the Times has aided and abetted is a feature on new mothers who contract with hairdressers to do their hair sometime between cutting the umbilical cord and placing the placenta in a doggy bag to drop into an omelet during brunch in Park Slope:

“I think someone realized, ‘Why should I not look good for that great picture that I’m going to show everybody, the first picture of my child?’ ” said Joel Warren, an owner of the Warren-Tricomi salons. 

Finally this public health--erm, hair--crisis is being addressed. And by no less than our favorite demographic: lawyers who live in the financial district.

When Donna Yip, a lawyer who lives in the financial district, went into labor with her second child in June, she had more than just her husband and medical team in her room at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. 

Jackson Simmonds from the Julien Farel Restore Salon & Spa was also there, with a curling iron, hair dryer and boar bristle hairbrushes in his Longchamp tote. They were his tools to style Ms. Yip’s hair immediately after delivery.

And here we were thinking that boar bristle brushes were passé. But never underestimate the rich: as Fitzgerald said, "The rich are not like you and me; they're cray." Ms. Yip a lawyer to Oak Hill Advisors, a firm "specializing in below investment grade credit markets" (that's investment-speak for "stealing candy from babies") would never leave pictures in the delivery room to chance, nor would the brave Upper East Side nurses who serve our corporate overlords:

“We have a lot of patients who have had a long labor, and they are like, ‘O.K., I want cool pictures of me and my baby,’ ” said Lisa Schavrien, the obstetric nurse navigator at Lenox Hill Hospital, who keeps in her mobile phone a list of hairstylists from nearby salons for the five to 10 new mothers for whom she helps arrange in-room appointments each month.

But let us not hate on Ms. Schavrien, who is probably under pressure from from millionaire hospital CEO Michael Dowling to bring in the bacon. Everyone wants to know, healthcare reporter Rachel Felder, what does it cost to have a hairdresser waiting for you after you burst out a ball of blood and slime? Is it a pre-existing condition? Will insurance cover it?

A hospital-room booking with a stylist from an upscale salon can be expensive: An out-of-salon call by Mr. Lospalluto costs $700; the charge for a similar booking from Julien Farel’s salon is $500. Stylebookings.com appointments start at $180 before tax and tip. Prices for Glamsquad’s services begin at $50.

Some us were probably worried about the outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease in the South Bronx, a potentially fatal bacterial pneumonia, but yes, please bring on the cool pictures. Patti Wilson, a director at the august journalistic instituted called OK! Magazine (because nothing denotes gravitas like an exclamation point and the word "magazine" to warn readers there may be words inside), put it succinctly:

“This is a moment where it’s one of those milestones. I’ll feel better if it’s blown out, and in pictures it will look better.”

If the New York Times style page stands for anything, it's for the proposition that everything looks better blown out. Perhaps the paper's motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print," should be upgraded to the aspirational "How to Look Fabulous All the Time" or the more prosaic "Stuff About Brazilian Blowouts." We'd at least be forewarned.

Would you like to accentuate your placenta?