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What Would You Do?

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What Would You Do?

What WOULD you do? What would YOU do? WHAT would you DO?

Rusty Foster
Jul 26, 2022
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What Would You Do?

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Death has come for the Choco Taco, and what hope is there for the rest of us? Alexis Ohanian tweeted an offer to “buy the rights” to the quasi-Mexican-themed frozen novelty from its corporate parent/murderer Klondike, because if you own the brand you can just mint a Choco Taco NFT, then you still have the same asset. Nothing has changed. Anyway according to Christina Morales at The New York Times, the whole ice cream truck business is also melting down, with price increases hitting fuel, parts, ice cream, even sprinkles.

Parks, pools and residential streets used to be prime territory for the ice cream man. But now, more often than not, a soft-serve truck’s jingle plays to a crowd of no one as prices for some cones with add-ons like swirly ice cream and chocolate sauce reach $8 on some trucks.

A soft-serve truck’s jingle plays to a crowd of no one, the ice cream man has ransomed his dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. No one came forward. No one waved a dollar at him. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon him; it was obscene.

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Twitter avatar for @joekjoek
Joe Kwaczala @joekjoek
(spills a milkshake all over a new pair of pants) so has anyone else noticed this thing where cups are being really aggressive lately??
11:24 PM ∙ Jul 25, 2022
367Likes24Retweets

Meta employees are melting down because Zuck suddenly wants to flip the switch from “extra days off for everyone” to “all days off for some (because fired), extra work for everyone else” as the company starts to panic about committing itself to spending the next decade building an imaginary place that no one wants while it watches TikTok devour its users and revenue. It’s a well-known business fact that when the CEO is at the all-hands saying “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” everything is just great. Haha Kylie who? And anyone who rented a cheap apartment in New York during the pandemic is melting down when they see their 60%+ rent hike, reports Ronda Kaysen.

The displacement of so many New Yorkers at once is having a ripple effect in neighborhoods around the city, pushing the rental market to the outer limits of affordability.

Old black & white “Outer Limits” TV show title screen that reads “THE OUTER LIMITS of affordability” next to a view of… the moon I guess? A planet? I don’t know, some sort of planet with “$4,100/mo” plastered across it.
Image by Tabs Senior Managing Editor for Graphics and fanfic coordinator Alison Headley

Surely, you’re thinking, no one left a rent-controlled apartment in Queens for a Lower East Side two bedroom at a ludicrous pandemic-deflated $1700 a month? Of course not, sweetie. No one would do that. Don’t read that last tab, though, it’s not for you. But have Emily and Keith found a new place to Raise Raffi™ yet? Officially:

Twitter avatar for @EmilyGould
Emily Gould @EmilyGould
subscribe to @NYMag https://t.co/sA0MYkhglC
Twitter avatar for @DeepOmega
Christian Brown @DeepOmega
hey @EmilyGould did you ever find an apartment
6:05 PM ∙ Jul 22, 2022
39Likes2Retweets

But perhaps unofficially….

Twitter avatar for @EmilyGould
Emily Gould @EmilyGould
sorry to tease but soon …
Image
2:07 PM ∙ Jul 26, 2022

Bless This Mess: New Yorker staff leapt to the defense of their unfairly dismissed and maligned colleague, ex-archivist Erin Overbey… Ah, no I’m sorry, checking my notes again it appears they did exactly the opposite of that. Lachlan Cartwright rounded up the basics in The Daily Beast, and former co-workers were not exactly effusive. The social media silence got quite loud indeed before it was broken by Laurel Maury, who had a tale to tell about Overbey as a co-worker:

Three tweets by Laurel Maury (@LaurelDreaming), which read: “As someone who used to work in the library with Erin, I believe this firing is long overdue. Erin used to freak out because she thought the managing editor put cameras in the ceiling to watch her. (Circa 2002-4.),” “She accused me of bugging her phone and installing surveillance software on her computer--again, early 2000s when this wasn't easy to do. I was simply another librarian. She bullied me, was horrid to me. Spread rumors about me that were untrue,” and “Like that I was dating a certain cartoonist. (I was engaged to a man in another country.) She used to have me check the ceiling panels for cameras. It was creepy. She engaged in name-calling. Once she followed me out of the building, cursing.”

Maury summarized the whole kerfuffle as follows:

Twitter avatar for @LaurelDreaming
Laurel Maury @LaurelDreaming
@thedailybeast I worked with Erin O at the magazine for six years. She's right about the magazine--when I was there it was a white trust-funder's haven. But the magazine is right about her. She's unprofessional. She lies about colleagues. She's a bully. I saw this behavior two decades ago.
2:41 AM ∙ Jul 26, 2022

But if you read The New Yorker for the articles (😉) don’t miss Casey Cep on the true story behind 1970s teensploitation hit “Go Ask Alice.”

As a few ex-Mormons have pointed out, Sparks was not the first Mormon to publish a text ostensibly based on an original source that the rest of the world did not get to see.

And on New Yorker Dot Com (“The Deuce”) Kyle Chayka wrote about “algorithmic anxiety,” the cargo-cult mixture of fear and reverence people have developed for the online black boxes that seem to determine what we buy, what news we see, possibly who we are? If you like this post, Kyle has a book coming out that you’re gonna love. And “the good Atlantic” Kaitlyn Tiffany explored what the Facebook news feed becomes when it’s no news and all feed: “Have a nice day! Have a nice day! Have a nice day!”

Twitter avatar for @waterbringer
Amy @waterbringer
@Snazithus
Image
11:25 PM ∙ Jul 23, 2022
3,782Likes969Retweets

“What are you gonna do, stab me?” —quote from man stabbed. James Parker: “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol … have DEFIED THE SEAT OF DESTINY…” Samantha Bee canceled. Coinbase probed [Tentacles undulating moistly].

Peter Falk talking to Kermit the Frog in a screenshot from The Great Muppet Caper, with the classic caption: “(Confused Frog noises)”
[Eldritch ribbiting]

Today’s Song: Wet Leg covering The Chats “Smoko”

~ what are you gonna do, tab me? ~

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Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Act II (approximately). Times being what they are.

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This is gonna get the whole newsletter spam-filtered today isn’t it.

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