parlaying status into reality+
Your options for seeing the world: work for ice, or deal with airline lounges
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Some NYT Cooking drama related to Cookie Week (last week): First, there was debate on whether Claire Saffitz’s mortadella cookies (which look great but sound, ingredients-wise, major ew, I will be so for real) should have credited inspiration to the food writer KC Hysmith, who made mortadella cookies a few years ago, or whether sausage-inspired cookies are just a thing.
But also, if you’re the type of eagle-eyed NYT Cooking diehard who’s noticed the absence of Sohla El-Waylly from the program, well, she aired a good deal of it out on her Substack! Tl;dr, NYT Cooking sounds like quite a screamy workplace.
A brilliant way in on the perpetually stomach-roiling ICE story from “Yanis Varoufuckice” (great pseudonym), who attended a Department of Homeland Security job fair and reported on the whole grim affair for N+1. The wildest part is learning not about the ICE applicants’ militaristic or xenophobic leanings, but about their apparent desire to…see the world?
The prospect of travel excited this applicant and many others. In fact over and over the DHS agents at the fair emphasized how it was the best part of their job.
A longtime ICE agent said he had accompanied undocumented immigrants on deportation flights to more than fifty countries and stayed in numerous three- and four-star hotels. A White House rooftop sniper said that she’d had “amazing experiences in foreign countries” and that the camaraderie of her sniper team reminded her of her college volleyball team … The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust.
I guess the original colonists were just trying to see the sights, too, if you think about it…
This New Yorker piece by Zach Helfand on the proliferation and escalation of airport lounges is worth shame-sending to folks in your life who obsess over this kind of thing, but it’s also quite a funny read. (“Buntut received a fraud conviction and was sent to jail, a place definitionally very similar to a lounge, but emotionally very different;” “The thing about lounging is that it’s impossible to lounge without worrying that someone, somewhere, is lounging better.”)
I was surprised Helfand didn’t get too into the elitism aspect (which is more so the subject of John Seabrook’s recent piece on the luxeification of sports stadiums), focusing more so on the ludicrousness of designated waiting spaces in modern life and the truth of the airline business—“it’s only a minor stretch to think of Delta or United as lounge companies that also fly planes.”
Helfand and Seabrook’s pieces work really well read in tandem though; there’s a part in the latter where the lead architect of LA’s SoFi stadium talks about how the stadium “experience” hierarchies are literally built in (and ties it to the airline caste system as well):
At SoFi, a menu of premium experiences, each with its own price point, insures that on “every step along an individual’s journey through life they have an opportunity to create an experience that aligns with their place in the world,” he went on. “As they get their first promotion, there’s a spot in the stadium for them to celebrate. When they become a partner in a law firm, there’s a place for them, and as they become C.E.O.s there’s a place, too.” (If your journey leads only as far as the parking lot, you can tailgate.) Airlines and credit-card companies pioneered these élite-status hierarchies; stadiums have rendered them in concrete and steel.
Both pieces made me think about how the appeal of status/wealth used to be all about the ease of separating oneself from riffraff-coded inconveniences in life, which is what generally made quality of life better, whereas in an increasingly experience/authenticity-maxxing culture, there’s a tension now between that protective insularity vs. the pursuit of heightened sensations of reality. Reality+. Seabrook writes about attending a Beyonce concert from the perch of a Google Cloud suite, where no one nearby danced and he mostly still looked at the talent from a giant screen, the way you kind of would if you just watched a livestream from home. Fancy, yes, but is it…fun? Interesting to think about how status and fun can be at odds. But it’s nothing that a little more status can’t fix…
Had a good, if sobering, laugh at Kate Lindsay’s railing against the discourse re: the release of Nano Banana Pro, the latest Google Gemini Image model that people are using in ways “not remotely fantastical or even creative,” as Lindsay points out. “In fact, many of them are using it to depict a variation on a single picture: An image of themselves sitting at a restaurant, holding a glass of wine.” It’s very Hate Reads-worthy:
We have the entire scope of the human experience available to us. We’re not even confined by reality. The only limit for these tools is our imagination, but it turns out our imaginations have a short leash. Our fantasies begin and end with taking ourselves out to dinner.
How revealing of our creative capacities—or perhaps, of our actual desires:
IRL Rec: Rusty was in town last weekend, so I took him to Fish Market at the bottom of Manhattan for what I promised was the best fried rice on earth, seeing as he is a fan of the genre. His review: “I would say it was exceptional fried rice, especially for a random dive bar in the Seaport. My favorite fried rice place is a little better but not much.”
Well OKAY, fine. The Infatuation actually quibbles with the rice specifically, warning that it’s “crispier than you think it will be, so prepare for potentially too-much crunch in every bite.” As if that’s a bad thing? As if one can have too much good in their life? Reality+ is all around us, people. Go try it and vindicate me.
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