The Structure of Gratitude

The New York Times is a paper world-renowned for the flatulence of its op-ed page. Yes, the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page might represent the opinions of a low-calorie, fat-free Hitler or Mussolini. But the Times takes the cake for providing a soapbox for the fanboys of inanity, from Frank Bruni's Olympic-level genuflection at the alter of corporations to Maureen Dowd's incoherent babbling about Uber and France. And at the heart of darkness of this enterprise is David Brooks: the sphincter from which it all emanates, the turd that follows the shart, the miasma of ass smells on the subway. I once heard him introduced as a "public intellectual" on NPR and almost sharted myself.

The David Brooks schedule is fairly predictable. As the reigning conservative on the page, every third column he freaks out about people of color or poor people gaining power, another third is dedicated to L'brals and their zany ways, and then the last third he reserves for Big Ideas and "Culture." Words like "structure" in the title give this away.

This last category is when the true sphincter-nuggets spew forth from the diarrhea canon on the porch of his $3.95 million mansion in D.C. And befitting a man of means, this week he writes about "gratitude," something one would imagine he would feel as a horrifying leech-man on the face of the Sulzberger empire. Yet our little Mr. Brooks struggles with even such a amorphous, capacious concept:

I’m sometimes happier at a budget motel, where my expectations are lower, and where a functioning iron is a bonus and the waffle maker in the breakfast area is a treat.

Not only does Mr. Brooks feel gratitude when he sees a waffle iron he gets to operate on his own, it makes him so giddy he is compelled to write this pair of smarmy-saccharine Lifetime-movie sentences:

Gratitude happens when some kindness exceeds expectations, when it is undeserved. Gratitude is a sort of laughter of the heart that comes about after some surprising kindness.

Take a minute to recover from that. (Reading that would make any ordinary human want to cover her eyes in her own ripped-out intestines.) But what could Mr. Brooks be getting at with such an odious sentence? Is he trying to tell us he isn't so bad? After all, who could begrudge a grown man who, when he sees a waffle make, thinks "What a treat! Making my own waffle, it amuses me so!" Don't be fooled, hateful readers.

The first clue is that what Mr. Brooks calls "gratitude," the rest of us call "surprise." Waffle iron? Neat. Gratitude? Ehh. First, it confirms he cannot feel gratitude. Don't kid yourselves that he has ever felt normal human emotions. Secondly, and more importantly, lurking behind the mealy-mouthed prose of a madman is a point. Not just a point, but a capital-L Lesson, a veritable North Star of Condescension that Mr. Brooks is kind enough to point out to us in the Sky of Platitudes to guide us through the maze of our small lives:

We live in a capitalist meritocracy. This meritocracy encourages people to be self-sufficient — masters of their own fate. But people with dispositional gratitude are hyperaware of their continual dependence on others. They treasure the way they have been fashioned by parents, friends and ancestors who were in some ways their superiors. They’re glad the ideal of individual autonomy is an illusion because if they were relying on themselves they’d be much worse off.

The basic logic of the capitalist meritocracy is that you get what you pay for, that you earn what you deserve. But people with dispositional gratitude are continually struck by the fact that they are given far more than they pay for — and are much richer than they deserve. 

Aaaahhhhh, we see! This was all a set-up! Mr. Brooks has managed to thread two of his favorite topics into one: 1. "You Yokels Should Expect Less of Life and Accept Your Lot because That is The Way Things Are" and 2. "Capitalism Works for Me (So Why Hasn't It Worked for You?)." You see, those with "dispositional gratitude," i.e. Those Who Know Their Place, are able to read Emotions and weave Relationships with Other Humans, their currency is their gut sense for survival. But what the fuck is he really talking about? Well, let's see.

But people with grateful dispositions are attuned to the gift economy where people are motivated by sympathy as well as self-interest. In the gift economy intention matters. We’re grateful to people who tried to do us favors even when those favors didn’t work out. In the gift economy imaginative empathy matters. We’re grateful because some people showed they care about us more than we thought they did. We’re grateful when others took an imaginative leap and put themselves in our mind, even with no benefit to themselves.

The point seems to be that "people with grateful dispositions" are virtuous, pre-capitalist mental dwarves who can see beyond the market economy. This can only mean some kind of some amalgam of elementary school librarians, "good" people of color, churchgoers in small towns, and someone who said "Hello" to him once on the street. They know to expect less than what the market  promises.

For Mr. Brooks, it is amusing to see How the Less Fortunate Get On and teach us about our pre-capitalist and pre-individualist selves. Sure, it's great being David Brooks because he earns what he deserves, but grateful people get even more. Magic! The grateful remind us of how we were before Harvard-Yale games, TiVo, and Greek yogurt. And most importantly, it provides a chance for Mr. Brooks to quote some soppy-stern chinless wonder he read at the University of Chicago:

Gratitude is the ability to see and appreciate this other almost magical economy. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

One can almost feel the sadness he feels at not being able to connect with other human beings. But is is impossible to care when one is having so much fun seeing if Mr. Brooks can be intellectually honest or half-conscious for the duration one 800-word column. And the reward is already knowing he can't.

David Brooks: once stayed at a motel

Do you see the family resemblance?

How to Snag a Reservation at That Oh-So-Popular Restaurant

It's pay day here at the blog this week. The reason is that nothing registers on the ol' Hate-O-Meter quite as high as the dining woes of the rich, especially of aspiring socialites and actresses  and plastic surgeons (who post before and after pictures of rhinoplasties but not their regurgitated three-Michelin-star food). The Your Money section (emphasis added) helpfully chronicles how the rich spend our money on the most frivolous things. It's trickle-up economics at its best.

Like the Bard said, "It's hard for a pimp out here." When can one show off that latest round of Botox treatments at a prime location on the Upper East Side? Well, it really depends if you're merely rich. Shockingly, not every snobby restaurant caters to those who've only acquired massive wealth. These are the very trials and tribulations of one Cassandra Seidenfeld, she of the multiple websites, which tells you we're clearly not dealing with just any self-promoter here. If anyone could get into Polo Bar, it would be someone with an equestrian section on her personal website, right? WRONG!!!

Not content simply to describe the supply-and-demand dynamic of five-star restaurants in New York on any given night, i.e., 50 tables, 10,000 assholes, aspiring journalist Paul Sullivan delves into the emotional complexity of the merely rich's outsider status. Mr. Sullivan paints a nuanced portrait of Ms. Seidenfeld's psyche, plumbing the dark waters of how being refused a reservation has made her feel:

“I’d call and they’d say ‘We have a waiting list that lasts months,’ ” Ms. Seidenfeld said. “No one in New York wants to wait months. I had friends who were posting that they were in the restaurant, which made me ballistic.”

Ba-llis-tic. The last time I felt ballistic was when George W. Bush was reelected president TJ's stopped carrying the caramelized onion pizza. But different strokes, different folks, y'know? Still, you never know where a helping hand will come from and Ms. Seidenfeld appears humbled, if we may be so bold as to use that word here, by where she found it:

She mentioned her frustration to her personal shopper at Ralph Lauren on Fifth Avenue, around the corner from the restaurant, and he offered to call on her behalf. A day later, she was dining there with a friend. 

“I was shocked by the power of my personal shopper,” she said.

It is a great joy when you learn that the proletarian still have something to offer their masters, other than their very souls, even if it is only to gain access to the place where the even bigger masters rub shoulders. Still, in life, timing is everything. And this is no less true for dinner reservations that are harder to get than Swiss citizenship:

For starters, adjust your expectations. Everyone wants to have lunch at 12.30 p.m. and dinner on a Saturday at 8 p.m. Chances are the other diners calling are just as affluent, willing to spend and unknown as you. 

But even hip restaurants need to pay the bills, and that means early and late seatings for the non-A-list crowd. Michael Ridard, partner at Bâoli, a fashionable Miami Beach restaurant, said someone who wanted to eat at his restaurant should aim for 7 p.m. and forget trying to get a 9:30 p.m. reservation, when the restaurant will be filled with A-listers and a D.J. spinning music.

Horrid as it might seem the merely rich might just have to be content to eat before 7 p.m. What is this, Boca Raton? Not only that, but restaurants are capitalizing on their seating arrangements and leaving the best spots for those who can afford upholstery of human skin or something:

While [Jason Apfelbaum] said the average affluent person had no chance of getting one of the 14 seats at the center of the restaurant, which will feature a Tokyo-style cabaret, there are 58 additional seats in the main room and 53 more in a lounge (in other words, the less cool area).

It is perhaps no wonder then that in Ms. Seidenfeld's interminable and quotable LinkedIn profile she writes at the very top of her professional summary, "Goal = an OSCAR." This is without any apparent irony--one of these basic concepts in ars dramatic that seem to bedevil poor Ms. Seidenfeld during her training at the William Esper Studio.

Not all hope is lost, though. There are still those generous and reliable souls who listen when money talks:

Abraham Merchant, president and chief executive of Merchants Hospitality, said he typically held a private room at his restaurant Philippe in Manhattan for celebrity clients but would open it up to diners who commit to ordering an expensive wine or spending well on the meal. 

“Sometimes, people will order a bottle of Château Lafite ahead of time — you’ll get the room then,” he said. “If they’re going to spend $10,000, we’ll give them the room.”

And we still have friends in this town, thank God. Dr. Weintraub uses his famous patients to get him reservations when they stay at the Pierre Hotel: 

“They often have access that a civilian, even a plastic surgeon, might not have,” Dr. Weintraub said.

And here I was thinking that getting into Chipotle at noon was the worst of my headaches.

A merely rich person wonders when she'll get her next $1,000 dinner

Country Living for the Creative Couple

Sometimes we like some good old-fashioned fun at the Weekly Hate Read. And the Real Estate section exists, as the late Triumph the Insult Comic Dog used to say, "...for me to poop on." It is a a master class in...CLASS. Class outta the ass, as Papa Karl Marx used to say.

But let me level with you. Mostly I chose this article because one of these two beauties--the canines in the picture--is named Brooklyn. We have a policy at this blog of leaning into any story when anything is named "Brooklyn," whether it's a baby, a dog, a particular chapter of your life you're wistful for, a mole on the underside of your thigh you've tattooed over with the shape of Brooklyn, or that tubal ligation procedure you got done last summer that guaranteed you the spoils of singledom into your late 70s. Brooklyn.

At any rate. Enter Dana Brandwein Oates and Daniel Oates stage right, the co-owners of dbo Home, purveyors of $97 plates who moved to Connecticut after living in the West Village and Mr. Oates maintaining a studio in Williamsburg. But the wages of ceramics are not paid by ceramics alone, as we learn. Ms. Oates traded in her career as a music executive for the "rural business" of pottery:

Ms. Oates, 53, had not imagined herself running a rural business. For years, she lived in the West Village and worked at Elektra Records, where she served as vice president of marketing and artistic development, promoting the likes of AC/DC, Björk and Metallica. “It was an office where if you left at 6, people would look at you and say, ‘Half day?’ ” she recalled.

No wonder no one has bought a Metallica record since 1999 with all those half-days. But how metal is working past 6:00pm? It would drive you to sell $97 plates from the countryside to this estate:

[T]he couple quickly fell in love with the bucolic landscape, and with a cowshed-turned-house on three acres with a big red barn. The house was a fixer-upper, but they were impressed with its size (around 4,000 square feet) and the living room’s conversation pit with its “1970s vibe,” said Mr. Oates, who did much of the renovation himself.

While Ms. Brandwein Oates set up the artisanal plate empire, Mr. Oates busied himself renovating "much of" the 4,000 square foot cowshed himself, probably digging up ancient layers of cow poo. Well, maybe he didn't do it all of it himself, but telling immigrant workers where to put up the wainscoting and iron filigree should count as doing the renovation yourself, shouldn't it?

Now the two collaborate on pieces for West Elm, the Ikea for Episcopalians or some shit. If you were worried that these $97 (EACH!) porcelain beauties couldn't be "throw[n]" in the dishwasher after you're done with another night of eating Kraft Easy Mac by yourself and watching Full House, rest assured:

The plates are stronger than they look,” she said. “I literally throw them in the dishwasher. But clearly, I can make more if they break.”

[...] 

This spring, Ms. Oates donated 100 or so to the Greenwich Village pop-up restaurant wastED, where the chef, Dan Barber, cooked with ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown out. “My plates didn’t get wasted either,” she said.

The generosity all around is baffling. Back in March the buffoons of wastED convinced some idealistic, green-washed bougies to pay $15 a plate for tapas of discarded food. Served on Ms. Brandwein Oates' plates! But the rural life, it isn't all giving:

It’s a life that many would consider idyllic: leaving the city for a more tranquil existence in the country. But what it is like in reality?

“You work all the time,” Ms. Oates said. “But we get to be with each other.”

Right-o. The difficulty of retiring to the country in your 40s and caring for two dogs. Fortunately, the Oateses have found much to give their life meaning, namely:

In the living room, there are paintings Mr. Oates made of the couple’s dogs, and the mudroom has prints of English, Irish and Gordon setters that Ms. Oates collected. “We had setters growing up,” she explained, as they led a visitor outside and into Mr. Oates’s studio in the barn.

Toward the back were two wooden boats he had made and a third under construction. The largest was a 19-foot faering, a traditional Norwegian boat with four oars and a sail. “We’ve taken it out a few times on the lake, and it’s quite a sight,” Ms. Oates said. “Danny sewed the sail this winter while we binge-watched Netflix.”

Paintings of their dogs! Building three wooden boats! Binge watching Netflix and sewing sails! The busyness of it all is quite exasperating, exasperating! It's a wonder either of these two gems get any sleep at all. Thank God these two get to be with each other. 

Our instructors for Class Resentment 101

The Name Atticus Acquires an Unwelcome Association

Nominations for Hate Reads are streaming in so frequently from faithful (or hateful?) readers I'll have to rename this the Bi-Weekly Hate Read. But the truth is, I hate read every day and every hour from the comfort of the porcelain throne. Let's hope this peak oil situation lasts awhile longer. But I digress. Thank you, Rebbeca Hufstader, for this gem:

Going all Buzzfeed on us, the New York Times took on the latest shocker to bedevil white liberals: the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird is a racist...so your child is named after a racist! A RACIST!

In “Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch was the beloved, honorable father figure, a namesake freighted with values and meaning. In the new book, “Go Set a Watchman,” which was released on Tuesday, Atticus is a racist.

Can you hear the thud down the well of unpopular names? So goes "Atticus" into the trough with favorite baby boy names of yore: Adolf, Brutus, Judas, Onan, Orval, and Track, along with a number of common misspellings of more popular names, such as "Henrey."  I guess George Wallace apologized, so George is a-okay. Still, what do you do if your kid's already tainted with the other scarlet "A"?

“When we first heard about the book, my wife said, ‘Oh no, I hope Atticus didn’t turn bad or something,’ ” said Christopher Campbell, the father of 3-year-old Atticus Campbell, who was born shortly after his parents moved to the Atlanta area from New York City. “We actually had that discussion. It was almost a joke.”

[...]

But there are those who worry that the book will prompt an unfortunate questioning of their children in the future: Which Atticus were you named for?

"It was almost a joke." But not really right? The smart money says white liberal do-gooders will do what they do best: keep up appearances.

Ever a litigious society, we should expect a veritable avalanche to the courthouse of NPR-listening, kale-chomping, middle-brow whites falling over each other to change little Atticuses into Calebs and Ashers. Because what we do best, as white people, is erase the racist legacy of virtually every institution of this country, down to naming conventions. Am I right or am-i-rite?

Hope springs eternal, however, for there is a courageous man among us who understands the complexity he represents:

Atticus Gannaway of Manhattan, a 37-year-old who started going by Atticus in college (his parents named him Ryan), said that while he was not thrilled by this new development, he found comfort in the idea that “Watchman” might be part of a deeper conversation about race and history in America.

“If my own name has to be tainted in some ways for that to happen, it’s something I can live with,” Mr. Gannaway said.

He can live being "tainted." As if a guy named "Atticus Gannaway" who changed his name from Ryan in college wasn't tainted enough. What the fuck, dude? And at the risk spilling more ink on white people's feelings about not just race, but being thought of as racist, here's the real money shot of the article:

When Mr. Campbell and his wife met eight years ago, they bonded over the fact that they both wanted to one day name a child Atticus; it was the first thing they realized they had in common.

 Need I say more?

Focus your eyes on the center of the picture and you will start to notice little Atticus is a Grand Wizard in the Klan

Brooklyn Expats Come Home

This week's New York Times Hate Read brings us the afflicted and wandering souls of those yuppies not quite rich enough to afford a helicopter or a five-story townhouse who later regret decamping to less prosperous shores. Forced to move to New Jersey for that illusive chance at an upper-middle-class life, they struggle to adapt to the relative dearth of carefully curated offerings for the consumption that is so crucial for self-styling their egos:

Before life in New Jersey, the couple did a gut renovation on a home in Park Slope South, which they purchased in 2008 for just under $1 million. But Mr. Hogan’s job made for a difficult commute. “My husband works in health care and it’s all out in New Jersey,” Ms. Hogan said. “He was leaving at 6 a.m. to beat the traffic. He was supposed to be able to get home early, but that never happened. We were spending $1,000 a month in tolls and we never saw him.”

[...]

Finding ingredients for recipes out of “Jerusalem: A Cookbook” is a challenge in the suburbs, she said. “It’s not like I can run over to Sahadi’s or D’Vine Taste,” she said, referring to her favorite shops, where she stocks up on spices such as sumac and za’atar. “In New Jersey, I find myself going to 8,000 different stores to replicate the experience of going to Sahadi’s.”

Spice is the variety of life, isn't it after all? Some people leave good jobs, great communities, or passionate relationships behind for new opportunities. Others turn a new leaf and start again. And others leave Brooklyn for...New Jersey. You wouldn't understand the horror. Leaving Brooklyn for New Jersey is like becoming a displaced person in a refugee camp in Kosovo or South Sudan, losing all you knew and being unable to ever go back. Truly, your kids grow up without moorings or a sense of place:

“It kind of kills me that they won’t have that inherent knowledge of the city like I do,” Ms. Hogan said. “For instance, they won’t know without looking at a subway map how to get from Brooklyn to TriBeCa. I don’t know why that makes me sad. I guess it just feels like street cred or something.”

It kills poor Ms. Hogan. The rich truly are unlike you and me: they have to make hard choices sometimes. Can you imagine the choice between street cred and a spacious house and streets to play on? A veritable real estate Sophie's choice to cap this Weekly Hate Read:

“I had to acknowledge that I love her more than New York City,” Mr. Kim said. The couple’s daughter, Ruby Kim, now 13, was initially against the move. “She was 7 years old at the time, and her wails were as sorrowful as I’d ever heard,” he said.

A family in matching Ray Bans enjoys the benefits of structural racism and financial capitalism

Working Mothers Who Make It All Work

This week we have both another guest editor, the wonderful Sarah Brafman, and another publication, the lacking Wall Street Journal, here waxing poetic on having it all. Let's just cut right to Sarah after the break.

---

Women with big jobs earn enough to buy balance. . .Women in my study spent an average of 10 hours a week on housework and errands; the typical employed American mother spends about 19...at the top, women ordered what they could online, hired cleaning services and had household help to cook family meals. . .Her cleaning service handled heavy housework, allowing her to take guitar lessons on the weekend.

You want to talk about how "six figures" affect women, Wall Street Journal? Here are six figures that you should really be talking about. Until then, I really don't want to hear from you about a privileged fraction of the population whose ease and "balance" rests on a reliance on others who don't have the luxury of such stability:

• The minimum wage reached its peak level in 1968. Since then, Congress has raised the minimum wage only five times, and its value has dramatically eroded: at $7.25 per hour, the minimum wage is worth 24 percent less today than it was in 1968. A woman working full time at minimum wage earns just $14,500 annually, more than $4,500 below the poverty line for a mother with two children.
• The federal minimum cash wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour, unchanged since 1991. Tipped workers—two-thirds of whom are women—experience poverty at nearly double the rate of the workforce as a whole.
• Women are nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers[1] and two-thirds of tipped workers.
• Women of color are 23 percent of minimum wage workers,[3] compared to 16 percent of all workers.
• The Economic Policy Institute estimates that if the minimum wage were increased to $12.00 per hour by 2020, more than 35.0 million workers would get a raise—including nearly 6.7 million workers earning between $12.00 and $13.00 per hour... nearly 19.6 million (55.9 percent) are women.
• If the federal minimum wage and tipped minimum wage were to rise to $12.00 an hour, annual earnings for a full-time minimum wage worker would increase by $9,500.

Dry cleaning is just another cost women face when they have babies without being able to remove their suits

Building Attention Span

David Brooks is trolling me by writing about attention spans. He's deviously tried to get me to read his column for more than five seconds, knowing I will try to prove I can do it to spite him. Well, he's done it. Here's my review: TL; DR.

Look into my eyes

Jennifer Beck and Brian Goldblatt: He Can Stand the Heat in the Kitchen

This week's hate read, one of the extended meet-cute wedding announcements we've come to love, contains this gem of an opening salvo: "Jennifer Beck is someone who enjoys perfect outcomes, and she will do whatever it takes to make them happen." (Exhibit A.) Guess she's probably upset about the impending Grexit. Or maybe that's a perfect outcome seeing as how a pied-à-terre in Athens will cost the equivalent of Papaya Dog with fries? I digress. More importantly, we have the honor at the Weekly Hate Read of our first guest post from Raina Lipsitz covering Jennifer and Brian's just-so, precious invitation to hate:

Today's wedding announcement opens with the bride describing herself as "a bit controlling." Reader: she wasn't kidding! The fact that she wrote an insane multi-part document about the type of ring she wanted years before she was even engaged, plus her #‎humblebrag about always dating lawyers & hedge fund managers, were already grounds for license denial, but the real kicker is the correction the Times was forced to issue: "A previous version of this article and a caption in the accompanying slideshow misstated the number of items [the bride] collected to decorate the wedding. She collected more than 250 bottles and glass jars, not 100 bottles. The previous version also misstated the location of the bar in which the couple met. It was in Manhattan, not Brooklyn." Manhattan can have you, sweetie! #‎Denied

- Raina Lipsitz

Did you hear about the New York Times' correction?