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