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?

'Tinder for elites' app The League had an exclusive party in Montauk with helicopter rides and celebrities — here's what went down

While we try to keep the faith and follow our beloved New York Times real estate section here at the Hate Read, sometimes there are cultural artifacts and political events noted in other publications that demand our attention. The launch of The League, a digital abacus for summing net worths and also a dating app for white people who work in finance, granted exclusive access to Business Insider to their Montauk party. We give you the Hamptons chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Grand Wizards of Manhattan eschew hoods and mingle on Long Island

The Millennial Commune

Are you a baby boomer? Did you expose your unborn child to Rod Stewart's "Forever Young"?  If so, you may have done your child irreparable harm, as this New York Times real estate story painfully reveals. Apparently, one of the consequences of inoculating the 1988 Muzak hit in utero results in your child's inability to find one's own friends to live with, a willingness to pay above-market rates to be "curated" into a social group,  and a desire to combine networking opportunities with "spiritual growth." Cue the gag:

Prospective residents answer probing questions like “What are your passions?” and “Tell us your story (Excite us!).” If accepted, tenants live in what the company’s promotional materials describe as a “highly curated community of like-minded individuals.” In other words, they rent a room in an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but with opportunities for social and spiritual growth, like dinner parties and meditation sessions.

Who are these successful and hip "like-minded" individuals whom you must "excite" with your "passions" and who pay from $1,600 to $4,000 for one room (ONE FUCKING ROOM)? Well, at The Loft, it's apparently a guy who looks like Drew Carey and worked for AIG, married to a "certified life coach specializing in money and personal finance":

The Loft is currently home to six single people in their 20s, although one is moving out in September. Getting accepted into the Loft is an informal but challenging process. Prospective tenants are subjected to several lengthy interviews with Mr. Gerstley and the residents, who collectively agree on their next housemate. Usually, the process involves a fair amount of alcohol and a visit to a favored Loft haunt, Fresh Salt, a Beekman Street bar.

“We look for friendly people who aren’t super weird,” said Akshay Nagula, 24, a software engineer who moved into the Loft last October.

Challenging process? Yes, we do imagine it's challenging to spend an afternoon with these poor souls. Nonetheless, it's the underlying economics of the whole thing that leads to facepalm concussions in those of us who simply long for a place close to a subway stop and with rent control:

Another company, Stage 3 Properties, is constructing a new co-living building with 180 units to house 400 people, to be completed around 2017. Stage 3 describes its mission as “passionately disrupting the housing industry by reimagining its process, product and price points and curating an all-inclusive cosmopolitan living experience designed for today’s creative class.” However, its leases will be conventional, 12 months long.

Oy va voy, I think my bowel movements are being "passionately disrupted." At Pure Loft, I hope you get a colon cleanse with your $4,000-a-month package (which includes "massage, yoga, fresh fruits and vegetables, personal coaching and wellness counseling"). But there are loftier goals in this "creative class": the sufferers of this yuppified Peter Pan syndrome are BUILDING A BRAND: 

“I wanted to live in a place where I could invite people over and we could build something that is bigger than the sum of its parts,” said Gillian Morris, a founder of Gramercy House and the travel app Hitlist, as she prepared her signature drink for the party, a mix of rosemary, grapefruit juice, soda and gin.

Ms. Morris, 29, a Harvard graduate, rented the apartment in January with two other entrepreneurs to create a household that could double as a place to build a brand. The apartment, two floors connected by a staircase with a handsome curving banister, was listed for $12,500 a month when the three rented it.

The residents (who now number four) host brunches, dinners and a meditation class, all with the intent of enlarging their social sphere.

“We’re willing to give up living alone for a few years because we define privacy differently,” said Melissa Kwan, 32, a founder of the real estate app Spacio and of Gramercy House, who hopes that the connections she makes there will help her find investors in her fledgling company. “I think as an entrepreneur, it’s not only motivating, but necessary for you to constantly surround yourself with these kinds of people.”

Of course, you wouldn't pay $4,000 each for a place without a "handsome curving bannister" (on which one could summarily impale oneself, of course, though that is an idle fantasy). At least Ms. Kwan is trenchantly honest: landing an investor isn't just about good PowerPoint animations, it requires 24/7 hardcore sucking up and, given gender inequality and sexism, God knows what else. Unfair as it may all be, we should be thankful that others are shouldering the burden of living "with these kinds of people."

But never fear, since you can always count on some Gen X freelance writer lurking in some rent control apartment, probably sporting white dreads, to call bullshit and extol the forgotten Brooklyn of the early 2000s, that golden era book-ended between Giuliani's mayoralty and 9/11 where such pleasures, such as taxidermy and rock-climbing, non-ironically proliferated:

Some critics argue that month-to-month rental agreements do not amount to a housing collective, even if residents attend social events. “To me, it seems like a bastardization of the idea,” said Oriana Leckert, the author of “Brooklyn Spaces: 50 Hubs of Culture and Creativity” (Monacelli Press, 2015).

Sigh. Time to move to Topeka.

Namaste, Hate Readers