The Twilight of the Indoor Mall

★ Mist lurked above the buildings and then withdrew, leaving dimness and dampness below. What the chill had lost in intensity it made up in its ability to penetrate. The water returned as a drizzle, verging on scattered rain, and then as full rain. The rain diminished; the cold increased. The newest excesses of Lower Manhattan were neatly chopped off where they reached above the older skyline, into the once-more-lowering gray. By the commute, the rain was entirely gone, and clouds moved surprisingly fast across the low gibbous moon.

Not long ago, a friend told me he’d been fired from a West Coast marketing internship for not having a “hunger for marketing.” I asked him what that could possibly mean, which turned into a far longer story about post-graduate floundering, awful-seeming marketing software, and the perils (or subtle benefits) of showing one’s utter lack of enthusiasm in the workplace.

I asked if he would share the story in an interview and he agreed, provided that I let him remain anonymous. Here is the story of the guy who got fired for failing to have, or express, a “hunger for marketing.”

Tell me about your marketing internship. What was the internship?

I was looking for jobs after college and I had these aspirations that whatever job I took, I was just looking for a way to pay for rent, a 9-to-5 that I was tangentially interested in. I was like, honestly, I’m going to be doing comedy stuff after work, why does it really matter what I’m doing during the day?

Before this, you had moved to the Bay Area without a job.

Yes, but the day I got there I had my final interview for this job I ended up getting.

So you already had the interview set up.

Yeah, I had a phone interview, and I think one of the reasons I felt comfortable buying the ticket was because I felt this was going to come through. And it did. So that came through, and basically I knew nothing about marketing and I had a friend who was a liberal arts major, like myself, at the same university, who was working there. She was like, “Don’t worry, I don’t know anything about marketing either; I was an American Studies major, you’ll learn. That’s the point of the internship.” I was like, OK. My parents definitely put a good amount of pressure on me to be self-supporting and be working and to not bum around. They didn’t really encourage me to do the whole food-service, post-liberal arts college thing. They didn’t see the point of me becoming a waiter, like a lot of my friends did after college. I might as well explore a career path and decide it’s not for me, or explore a career path that I know I want and do that in whatever way presents itself.

A spec script for an Outbreak sequel, set in India, by the New York Times:

A growing chorus of researchers say the evidence is now overwhelming that a significant share of the bacteria present in India — in its water, sewage, animals, soil and even its mothers — are immune to nearly all antibiotics.

“India’s dreadful sanitation, uncontrolled use of antibiotics and overcrowding coupled with a complete lack of monitoring the problem has created a tsunami of antibiotic resistance that is reaching just about every country in the world,” said Dr. Timothy R. Walsh, a professor of microbiology at Cardiff University.

Health officials have warned for decades that overuse of antibiotics — miracle drugs that changed the course of human health in the 20th century — would eventually lead bacteria to evolve in a way that made the drugs useless. In September, the Obama administration announced measures to tackle this problem, which officials termed a threat to national security. Indeed, researchers have already found “superbugs” carrying a genetic code first identified in India — NDM1 (or New Delhi metallo-beta lactamase 1) — around the world, including in France, Japan, Oman and the United States.

Clutch your antibiotics tightly, but do not take them.

Author’s Note: The following are excerpts from a diary that I found in the pocket of a black trench coat at a thrift store in Oslo, Norway. I have translated the diary from the original Norwegian (Bokmål). For the sake of the diarist’s privacy, I shall not provide his name. I shall, however, note that the diary contains a few visible food stains, and that here and there the diarist has illustrated the foods responsible for these stains. Also I shall note that the diary smells repulsive. It smells like my dad’s socks.

November 2,

The hollowness has returned. Ulrikke has left me. Grier’s visiting his girlfriend whom I’m sure is not real in Brussels, so now I have the apartment to myself. Today the sun set at 4 and it won’t rise until 8 in the morning. I feel like a submarine at the abysmal bottom of the sea. When I try to talk to people, I send out unanswered bleeps and bloops. I texted Ulrikke today, “im sorry.” No reply. If a submarine texts his ex at the bottom of the sea and she doesn’t reply, is he any less alone? For dinner I made a stir-fry: diced onions, mushrooms, red pepper, ginger, dark soy sauce and various ‘ethnic’ spices. I added medium ground beef and cooked it slowly, tenderly, sensuously, sizzling in butter. I cooked the beef knowing that beef makes me gassy. Anything to fill this hollowness.

November 6,

Lay in bed all day, curtains closed and caressed by the darkness, stuck in thought loops about Ulrikke, sweet Ulrikke, the one who got away. Recalled two lines from a poem by H.D: Like a bird out of our hand / Like a light out of our heart…

My boss called around noon to ask why I wasn’t at work and I told her I was bedridden with a migraine. I said, “The pain is intolerable,” which was true. Grier keeps a jar of distilled water in the fridge because according to his bullshit Ayurvedic diet, tap water contains either too many or too few negative ions. After my boss called I decided to add to the jar some tap water. Let’s see if he dies from tap water. For dinner I made chili with red beans because red beans make me shit and I yearn for a shit so satisfying it feels like Satan himself has left my body. Tomorrow: buy floss, cigarillos, chewable stool softeners (cherry), gum.

Ways to Keep Self-Portraiting


I assembled a me from them, I assembled a you.
We know all the lines. I’ve drawn the negative space around each one.

I can’t draw myself because I can’t fit on the paper.

Someone said I look like Kiefer Sutherland and all of the Midwestern plains. Nobody can decide where the Midwest ends.

But what is the line for you are not alone, not at all said like we’ve said it before?

Like when we’re just saying anything instead of just saying anything.

I am an artist who has drawn every inch of herself except for what she looks like.

One day we will not know Kiefer Sutherland! My portraits will just evoke chipmunk cheeks. You say only chipmunk cheeks will remain. As chipmunk cheeks!

I have made nothing but what’s identifiable.

I made a mold of myself and cast several me’s. In soap, in disco balls, in a chessboard set. I poured in the entire state of Iowa, which you point out is clearly Midwestern.

I meet myself in cheese, and just want crackers.

              Are you sure you want to eat that?

I have taken that line. I have collected all the tones—

              Nice haircut. I mean, nice try.
              That’s something different. I’ve seen it before.
              You look like I used to, like when I was staying indoors.
              It was a tremendous time! Those pants should go nowhere.

How would you make a sculpture out of Tell me something I don’t know?

The line you say as saying something still unsaid—

What kind of portrait would look like that?

I’d like to make a self-portrait you’d prefer.
A breaking bust,

something you can keep pushing off the pedestal display?

Self portrait as It once had a striking resemblance! It once had a striking resemblance! It once had a striking resemblance!

Is Amazon good enough for your baby’s ass?

Called Amazon Elements, the diapers and baby wipes will only be available to customers who belong to the Amazon Prime membership program, adding another item to the growing list of membership perks. By working directly with a manufacturer, Amazon will be able to price the brand aggressively, with a 40-count package of diapers starting at $7.99. That works out to about 19 cents a diaper, compared to competitor prices that mostly range from 24 cents to 34 cents.

This will sound strange to people who don’t live as nodes in Amazon’s worldwide logistics experiment, but a little less strange to Prime members who do: Amazon already makes, or at least brands, a wide and strange assortment of things. Diapers are just one of its first attempts to move from things into the lucrative market for stuff.

Amazon’s feints at physical retail are focused on Kindles, tablets and phones: These are the tier-one Amazon products, in terms of visibility. They’re thing things Amazon makes to compete with Apple and Google. They get their own advertising campaigns, they’re purported to be in some way “innovative,” etc.

Tier two is made of products that are adjacent to the tier-one products. They’re electronics, or electronics accessories, that don’t really get much advertising, unless you count how easily they’re discovered when shopping Amazon for other stuff. These are the best-known of the “Amazon Basics” products. They’re HDMI cables and adapters. They’re cheap things, things that only have to function, usually in a single way, to be satisfactory; they’re also, perhaps not coincidentally, things that physical electronics stores, which Amazon would like to destroy, tend to mark up.

At some point, every comic serious about their career makes the move to either New York or Los Angeles. Some are lucky enough to grow up in one of the two cities, but the majority of comics migrate there. Their stories are generally pretty similar: drive across the country, rent a brutal apartment in a terrible neighborhood, and start from scratch. It’s an enormous sacrifice, but it’s part of the process. For Canadian comics, however, the situation is more complicated. When your friends from the great white north decide that this is how they want to earn their living, they can’t just saunter across the border into New York to tell jokes.

Canadian comics have an entirely different and painfully frustrating set of legal hoops to navigate. For starters, they have to plan this out well in advance because before they can even book a ticket, comics need to pitch themselves to an immigration official. Preparing the documentation itself can take around 6 months. That official will then decide whether the comic is deserving of the title ‘extraordinary person.’ The fee for that ego boosting privilege ranges anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000. My parents’ escape from the Soviet Union in the mid ’80s was way less expensive and time-consuming. So, is Canada so bad that people are willing to plot for half a year and spend $25,000 to leave? Well, sort of.

★ Scraps of color hung in the morning sky, then were replaced with a well art-directed assortment of grays. The wind was seething. Rain fell, lightly enough to be tolerable. Little droplets floated against the black paint of the fire escape. Carrying an umbrella had seemed wise; one should always be prepared. But this was nothing an umbrella could help with. Cold drizzle fell in the evening. A woman in a short fur jacket, holding a gold clutch purse, gave up on her Metrocard and crept under the turnstile.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to live in Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” video, at least for a couple of days. Pure white horses, vintage cars, gorgeous dresses, hot men … knives. Tears. Goats. It’s a glorious, overindulgent dream/nightmare vision. I love it unreservedly.

But at what cost does Swiftie’s vision of true love and then true hate come? I needed to find out, so I took to the Internet. I priced out as many of Swift’s 21 glorious outfits and accessories as I could (hat tip to tayswiftstyle.com for the hook up on the couture). For other, brand-non-specific items, I just went online window shopping. Here is my unsurprising conclusion: If you’re looking to recreate Swift’s whirlwind romance, you’re going to need deep pockets.

Haven’t seen it? Watch it right now. I’ll wait. Okay, you’re back? Let’s do this.

Vintage AC Cobra: $175,000, at auction
Your Lover rolls up to your crib in this sweet, rare ride. But don’t get too attached—you’re going to destroy it later, to the absolute horror and shot of vintage car collectors. (Occurs at 0:06)

Renting the Oheka castle Olmstead Suite for one month: $32,850 at $1,095 per day
No better locale than Long Island’s Oheka Castle for your relationship to flourish and then spectacularly crash and burn. I say reserve it for a month—that’s about the time it takes for an epic romantic rise and fall, right? Ballrooms, libraries, gardens are open for toodling around. TripAdvisor says the sea bass is terrific. (0:07)

Altazurra for Target lace eye mask: $54
Sold out at Target, tragically. (0:07)

One Scottish fold kitten: $1,000
Looking up designer cat prices made me instantly sad, so allow me to break from my position as Video Calculator and tell you to adopt from your local shelter. I promise any kitten will be adorable. (0:09)