Foer days late to the most important story of all time

So here's something I'd wanted to write about for a Jewish publication, but was very much beaten to the punch, which... I'd sort of figured would happen, because, I mean, this story. It's now yesterday's news, but the personal Weblog is yesterday's genre.

What follows, to be clear, is not the article that might have been. Rather, it's the free-from-constraints WWPD version. This is the very definition of my beat, in a way that no other story past or present possibly could be.

Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer. By now we all know this much: He got the byline, she the pantsless fashion spread in that T Magazine story from over the weekend. It was kind of like that Margot Robbie profile, except, I think, much worse. With the Robbie one, I'd thought it was a bit silly that the standard feminist complaint was that this woman famous primarily for being gorgeous wasn't being asked more intellectual or substantive questions. After all, isn't a better feminist complaint why the women in magazines being asked questions, period, tend to be ones about whom the salient (known) facts are such things as "26," "blonde," "sufficiently good at acting," and "looks good in a bathing suit"? Meanwhile... yes, Portman is beautiful (ahem, understatement), but the reason she's being profiled is because she directed a highbrow foreign film. (Clarification UPDATE: the *profile* is a pretentious/flirtatious musing on Jewish identity and alternate side of the street parking regulations that has been aggregated and parodied all over the place at this point.) But we're still in the world of male-gaze female pantslessness.

The Foer-Portman article, though, presented itself as more sophisticated. This is even alluded to in the profile, which isn't a profile but a back-and-forth email exchange (but intended for publication) between two colleague-type friends (and more on that in a moment). At one point Foer writes (and note that this needs to be specified in a piece given only his byline, ahem): "[...] we weren’t going to be in the same place for long enough to allow for a traditional profile — me observing you at the farmer’s market, etc., which would have felt ridiculous, anyway [...]" Ridiculous why? Because they already knew each other, or because standard-issue celebrity profiling is for peasants?

And then there's the gossip angle, which is too fascinating, and which sheds light on a reason, other than logistics, why the profile may have had to be via email, rather than at the café where the starlet orders and picks at the proverbial cheeseburger (but not real one, in this case, because of the famous vegetarianism of the parties in question).

Anyway. I read Foer's recent short story in the New Yorker. And it was... fine. But it was also a predictable return to that thing in Jewish literature where "Jew" equals a Jewish man; where penises and that ever-fascinating-to-men question about them (cut or uncut?) is the metaphor; and where female characters couldn't possibly play into any of the psychodrama. Not to be all, Philip Roth did it and did it better and so did Arnon Grunberg so why bother, but... Roth and Grunberg did it better, and even if I weren't a Jewish woman myself, I'd be ready for stories about Jewishness that weren't entirely about the concerns of - to use an of-the-moment but in this case entirely needed specification - cisgender men.

Portman, meanwhile, is the subject of longtime fascination here at WWPD. If you're a petite, dark-haired, pale-skinned Jewish woman who's read at least one book not assigned in school, and who has at any point in her life given off that vibe that says, 'Please, men of a certain type, write me pretentious emails' (a vibe that is, let it be known, entirely consistent with "RBF" in day-to-day interactions), you are that type. (There are plenty of us; allow me to shed all intellectual credibility and note that we're what Patti Stanger refers to as "spinners.") But as much as I am that type, I'm also not that. I'm not about to be hired to be the face of a perfume, or to pose in a thousand-dollar sweater and little else. Which is a way of saying that yes it annoys me, as a feminist, that she's pantsless and not given a byline, and yes it gets to me that Jewish literature is to this day such a (kosher-) sausage-fest. But there's also the whole thing of how Natalie Portman is Natalie Portman and I am not.

WWPD, ahead of the curve

The great dream of wandering around Williamsburg was finally realized. It only happened because I picked the only plausible day to go within a span of X weeks and made a haircut appointment for that day, namely today. But this non-spontaneity meant going a) when it was leggings-under-jeans-level freezing out, and b) while still recovering from some variant of the seasonal ailment seemingly affecting everyone lately. I'd recommend going in a more robust state, and in better weather, but still! So much excitement!

What you, oh jaded New Yorkers, see as a so-last-season condo-filled mall, I - someone whose usual options are actual malls - see as the epicenter of cool. What, the epicenter shifted, and is now in Bushwick? (I suppose it had while I was still living in the city.) Somewhere cooler than Bushwick? Perhaps so, if you want the best parties or galleries. But Google Maps-level planning suggested that for a day of urban leisure, for glamor before 11am, the L to Bedford (but straying off Bedford itself) would do.

First there was a flat white, this special Australian cappuccino-type thing with denser foam, from a suitably New Williamsburg establishment, Toby's Estate.

Then there was a haircut at Commune Salon and Gift, whose website seems to be down. It's in any case a super-chic Japanese hair salon, where I got a super-chic Japanese haircut.

Then it was time for lunch. My initial thought had been that of course I'd get the hamburger from Diner, but with Samurai Mama, a much-recommended Japanese "tavern," right next door, that became the obvious answer. I got the yakko (cold, custard-like tofu) with seaweed tsukudani, a condiment (?) I'd never had before, but that was delicious and can now go onto the list of Japanese dishes to try to recreate at home. Then I had the vegetable gyoza, which come in the small frying pan they were (presumably) cooked in, with some kind of batter connecting all the dumplings into one pancake. This came with an amazing dipping sauce, as well as a spicy chutney (?). Fabulous, and I can already say, impossible to recreate at home. I mean, the gyoza I could manage, but who knows what the webbing between them was made out of. It was too early in the day for tavern beverages (a novelty - NJ's very BYOB, not that I can even bring any B, what with the driving needed to get anywhere), but I hope to be back and try some of those - and basically all the other dishes - as well. No idea if my Princeton friends will read this, but if you do, let it be known you will be dragged there the moment it's not this cold out.

Then came some more Williamsburg wandering around, being generally freezing and blah, navigating icy streets, noting that the beard trend (so very absent in my part of NJ) lives on. I tried on nail polish at the Woodley and Bunny "Apothecary," but didn't buy any. (The royal blue Uslu Airlines was tempting, but then I remembered I have that color from the Rite Aid in the shopping center.) I noted that the some of the shoes in a "curated" store off Bedford were a brand with a store on the main street in Princeton. As always happens, I start to see the area again through jaded-New-Yorker eyes, and start wondering if maybe I should have just gone to Zabars and been done with it. Except no - that whole bit on Grand Street was probably worth the trip.

Southwest Williamsburg

-Williamsburg - sorry, North Williamsburg - is being ruined by visitors from New Jersey. Guilty as charged. For some of us car-possessing interlopers from what I will now start calling Southwest Williamsburg, it's just cheaper and easier to get there than to lower Manhattan.

-Thank you, Gawker, for bringing this story to our attention. A Canadian professor insists on teaching only "serious" literature, which by his definition must come from straight, white, middle-aged men. And he hasn't, it seems, been misquoted (although, condensed and edited...), nor, more surprisingly, is he some creation of the left. It's actually more interesting than the gaffe-ness of it all may first seem. If nothing else, he more or less confirms what everyone suspects, namely that the reason for diversity among professors is precisely that people do gravitate towards writers/stories they identify with for boring demographic reasons. And thus that there isn't something objectively superior about the literary production of this one demographic category.

-It is my hope/prediction that "Into The Gloss" will have a Lena Dunham "Top Shelf" in the near future. (They've profiled the fashion designer who's her boyfriend's sister. We're getting there.) Until then, a slideshow of an unknown actress named Gwyneth somethingorother. Who now smokes one cigarette a day, or whoever wrote that post didn't do proper fact-checking on this most important matter.

Fiction is better, Part III

Kate Fridkis describes a situation at the crux of all kinds of hot-button issues: she's an upper-middle-class writer, a woman who lives in Brooklyn ("Girls" yoga organic parenting CSAs beards flannel coffee artisanal! Brooklyn!), and she married at 24 and got pregnant intentionally at 26. In other words, she dared violate the laws of the window of opportunity by not waiting until her set entered into full-on panic about marriage-and-kids, and did things according to a timeline that worked for her. Is hers a story about the latest updates from Turkey? No. But she has an interesting perspective, conveys it well, and doesn't pretend to be talking about a larger pool of people than she is. She writes about herself without dragging anyone else down in the process. A personal-essay triumph!

The commenters, though, did not see it this way. It's a veritable festival of YPIS getting hurled at the author. Fridkis, the commenters believe, thinks she's all that because she did this utterly normal thing: married and had a kid. (Did they not notice how the piece was about how this utterly normal thing has become, in her world, outrageous?) She is, the commenters will helpfully point out, privileged, and needs to get out of her bubble. Meanwhile, the point of the essay was very much self-awareness about said bubble, but why should that stop anyone?

Some commenters - and there are over a thousand comments, not all of which (shocking, I realize) I have read or will read - are really miffed that Fridkis didn't get into her husband's stance on all this. When it's like, maybe she's prepared to share about herself, but not other people? Still others fault the author for caring what her friends think. When it's like, we all care what our friends think. Less as we get older, sure, but it's far easier to claim indifference to this than to achieve it, and at any rate, it's kind of a good thing to have people you're close to, whose opinions you respect.

And then there's the contingent annoyed at the New York-centrism of all of this. When... just change the ages of marriage and first pregnancy, and the same hoopla would happen in a different milieu. There's quite often going to be an age that's not really too young to settle down, but it's younger than what your friends are doing, and it's therefore scandalous. That's the window-of-opportunity problem, and the reaction to the piece I wrote about it suggests it's not only an issue in New York. But yes, New York, so tragically overrepresented. I mean, I was slightly bitter - where I live now, there don't appear to be any wine-fueled non-fiction writing circles, waa! - but the broader point holds even for those of us who need to drive to run errands.

The reaction, then, points us back to the whole fiction-is-better issue. The only reason readers reacted as they did was the dynamic created by the author being a real person. The story gets classified as a news article in readers' brains, and readers understandably compare it, at least implicitly, to hard-news, breaking news, things of that nature. Which, alas, even the best-written personal essay about being 26 and having a baby with one's spouse is never going to be. This is not the first time such a thing has happened, to say the least. One commenter calls it a "narcissistic humble brag," which... no. There is a real problem, but it's not a Real Problem. Fiction allows for presentation of real problems that aren't Real Problems, whereas the personal essay, it seems, does not.

Anyway: to be clear, I don't think fiction is better than non-fiction. I think fiction is better at doing certain things than non-fiction is - better at telling a certain kind of human-nature story. I think we've started looking to non-fiction for the things we should be getting from fiction, while at the same time criticizing certain non-fiction for dealing with exactly the small-scale, relatively-petty concerns that we do find interesting, thus why we were reading the thing in the first place.

Stage

Of all unpaid internships, the ones that tend to jump out in their ridiculousness are those that involve traditional youth labor, but without pay. Unpaid internships in trendy mall-store retail and, apparently, at New Brooklyn pizzerias (with $10 individual-pie-the-size-of-a-normal-slice Manhattan food-cart outposts)... and NYMag has a piece defending this. On account of, there's a French name for working for free at a restaurant - "stage," note the italics. It's a thing that predates Bushwick hotspot Roberta's foray into not paying farm workers, because Roberta's is farm-to-fork, you see. Food's just so much more ethical that way!

On the one hand, one might say, at least in such cases, this doesn't involve kids from poorer families being excluded from high-prestige, high-mobility professions. If more rich kids enter such lucrative fields as chain-store salesperson or pizza-place urban farmer, that might leave some slots at the top for kids whose parents are non-glorified retail or food-service workers. And in principle, these are fields that don't require college, and so whichever apprenticeship period might be in lieu of tuition.

On the other, it seems especially off when jobs that normally go to people looking above all for a paycheck - not some long-range career benefit, the forging of connections - switch to unpaid. And realistically, these positions are not going to be taken in the place of college, but in addition to it. Who else but those in, bound for, or graduated from college is even thinking about "internships"? And it's not as if all such labor is going this route. These positions seem mostly restricted to organizations with a certain highbrow allure - Anthropologie, not Old Navy, and Roberta's, not the local utilitarian slice joint. The extreme of this, I suppose, would be internships at restaurants in France that you have to pay to do, and the job requires constantly demonstrating how grateful you are for the opportunity. (Some kind of immersion tourism for those who want to be sneered at by French restaurant workers more than tourists normally are?) But still, Anthropologie isn't Chanel, and Roberta's isn't Per Se. It's clear enough that lines are getting blurred, and that employers are learning the lesson that one doesn't even need to pretend that one pays one's workers.

Friday's assortment

-We've established that Rejected White College Applicant is entitled, just as we caught a similarly barrel-dwelling fish when we confirmed that Princeton Mom is simultaneously sexist and elitist. But if there's any message to take from this high school student's cringe-inducing essay, it's absolutely not that young people are entitled if they don't take (often unpaid) internships.

-The famous writer who's lost it and his particular brand of losing it is Gucci. Sad, really. That GQ essay now joins Zola's Ladies Paradise as the document to read if you find yourself with a shopping urge, however slight, you'd rather not have. I had, as you all remember, lost even the vague interest I'd ever had in Lululemon yoga pants once the scandal broke. I ended up with some much cheaper running tights, and none of the deer I pass on my jogging route (the ticks, the ticks!) have remarked on the material. But I did have my eye on a bottle of $8 pale-blue nail polish. Now? No.

-The New Brooklyn involves houses with space for the wife to "get dressed and go to work in the morning without waking [the husband] with the sound of clomping Louboutins."

-What was that you said? You want something about something I didn't read or listen to? Something from... life? Not as much material at the moment. My husband and I had a fun dinner party last weekend, and lately I'm taking a break from Chapter 7 to work on the Conclusion, which means having to reread Sartre on The Jews... which is almost identical to Zola on The Jews, which seems relevant. 

Your to-read list for the day

-Flavia's post on some not-useful new-pope commentary.

-Stephen Metcalf on the brand that is Brooklyn.

-Robert Huber on race in Philadelphia, and responses from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Conor Friedersdorf.

-Lisa Miller's NYMag story on feminist housewives.

-Dina Kraft on how women's desire to be thin is greater than whatever it is that divides Jew and Muslim. Although I don't think that's what one was supposed to take away from the piece.

"Cursed with a plague"

At the risk of revealing that in the year 2013, I have finally discovered the internet, this will be a post about Yelp. 

Yelp reviews as a genre have a lot to admire, but my favorite have to be the ones where someone wanted something very specific, and headed straight for an establishment that plainly does not have the thing in question. The best example of this phenomenon, alas from life, not Yelp, might be when, at a thoroughly decorated Thai restaurant in Heidelberg, Germany, some people came in asking if the place sold schnitzel. Confusing it, seemingly, with a nearby beer-centric restaurant.

Not all cluelessness counts. It needs to be a case where it's obvious a place is/has one thing, and yet the customer demand should somehow trump all, to the point of actually transforming an establishment. And ideally the mistaken individual(s) will be locals - it needs to be entitlement at best, obliviousness at worst, and not culture shock. (It's not hilarious if someone just in from a country that doesn't have the chain - if such places still exist - assumes Starbucks serves hamburgers, or, along the same lines, if someone from a place where the only coffee bars are Starbucks orders a "grande" at a different one while on vacation.) Nor can it be culture clash (class-inflected) within a community - someone used to fast food expecting fries at an upscale restaurant whose emphasis is foams. It needs to be abundantly clear that the mistake was the customer's, and that the customer does not see this.

My all-time favorite on Yelp comes a filtered (which is often key) one-star review of Masa, one of those restaurants in Midtown-broadly-speaking that notoriously cost some freakish amount, but even if you hadn't known this, even if Masa is one of those thousand-dollar meals served in a shabby setting (never been, but I kind of doubt it), menus tend to be helpful in that regard: "My girlfriend was starving and we saw it was a sushi place but didn't look at the prices before we were seated." As someone who has, on occasion, and only in the presence of loved ones, gotten cranky when hungry, I can't even begin to imagine. What completes the story is that the couple then go on to eat dinner at Masa, evidently the most expensive restaurant in all of New York City. As much as it's never advisable, from a Cheapness Studies sense, to go for any sushi when "starving," this individuals somehow set out for a couple of California rolls and ended up, what, a thousand dollars lighter?

Another, not filtered, of a Williamsburg coffee shop I've peeked into and am now desperate to actually try:

I didn't think it was possible to find a more pretentious, smugly elitist coffee shop than Blue Bottle, which is 3 blocks away. Yet somehow in Williamsburg we are cursed with a plague of affectation, and it descends upon Toby's Estate with vengeance equal to that with which it claimed its brother on Wythe. 

First off, I like the idea that one is "cursed with a plague," and that plague is independent coffee shops. Let it be known that I would welcome such a plague. Note the "we" - this is someone who lives in Williamsburg. It continues:

I came here for a quick cup of coffee after missing the ferry, hoping for a quick pick-me-up before waking back to the pier. I disclosed my desire for speed to the lady at the counter and she assured me they could deliver.

It can't just be that I worked in a coffee shop that I find the idea of someone asking a counterperson at a coffee shop to make their drink quickly some mix of rude and hilarious. There were X people ahead of you in line, and their drinks need to be made first. What makes your time more valuable than theirs? (Where's the Bitter Barista when you need him?) 

Lo and behold, the hip coffee shop in Williamsburg proved not to be a coffee cart, a Dunkin Donuts, or a vending machine:

Five minutes later I was still waiting at the counter while a bearded betattooed hipster traded stories absentmindedly with another hipster about (I kid you not) their most sublime "coffee experiences." Telling this man, who clearly possessed no concept of time, that I was in a hurry was like talking to Mr. Bean in "Love Actually." I pleaded with him that I would take whatever had dropped through my miserable individual filter [...]

Ah! The pour-over method. Always a good thing to check for if you're expecting a quick cup of regular coffee. Pour-over, for the uninitiated, means it would be quicker and cheaper to get an espresso, maybe even an espresso-and-foam concoction. But this individual, who a) lives in Williamsburg, and b) has done so long enough to have encountered Blue Bottle is initiated. This is the very definition of what not to order if you're in a hurry.

And it goes on - dude (or dudette - although various clues suggest this individual is male) misses his second consecutive ferry. But the coffee itself was not bad after all.

Manhattan: because I'd never make it as a farmer

-New Brooklyn continues to represent aspirational farming by non-ethnic white people. On that front, we have Swedish Brooklyn obsession, and the expansion of already-suburban New Brooklyn to actual suburbs. (Brooklyn, in case you were concerned, has yet to reach Princeton. Although we are getting a farm-to-table restaurant, and already have a cheerily Park Slope-ish coffee shop.)

-Yesterday, in the tragically non-hip borough of Manhattan, a really long-standing wanty was achieved: galaxy-print leggings. These, I believe, so $20, and the price had thus far been the obstacle. The price I paid, however, was that these leggings were being sold in a store on lower Broadway that I'd have never entered had I not seen them in the window. A store for tween girls and/or club kids, the overlap's substantial. The overlap with what I wear, not so substantial, and limited, I suspect, to these particular leggings. In any case, there were several dressing rooms, each of which contained a clown-car's worth of the popular girls at that age, accompanied by a really enthusiastic mom of one or more of them, who kept bringing her daughter/all the girls more stuff to try on, seemingly unsolicited. It appeared they'd come into the city for this, and had unofficially rented the store for a coming-of-age celebration of some kind. I couldn't decide if the problem was that they were taking forever or if it was that I was shopping at a store whose shopping bag bears the slogan, "Girls Only." But the leggings themselves (to be worn as tights, thank-you-very-much) are spectacular.

-Soba-ya continues to be the center of the universe. Not only because for $14, you can get a "mini" lunch special that's a sashimi bowl, a bowl of handmade-soba-noodle soup (neither "mini"), and various extras (or, for less $, a more sensible amount of food), and it will be all of it amazing, two of the best lunches you've ever eaten, and for the price of a hamburger in Princeton, but also because there, eating alone at the counter with book-and-phone, as I sometimes would to treat myself after an especially long week, was a punk legend/literary sensation.

What my great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized as Brooklyn

Despite living in oddly-rural suburban NJ, and having had to dodge a live turkey while driving a couple days ago, I feel very connected to Brooklyns Old and New. Both of my parents grew up in the borough. I moved there for several years, right after college (cliché! sorry!), and I'm distantly related to a certain pair of artisanal-chocolate entrepreneurs who've won over, among others, at least two national editions of Vogue. (See also Slide 7 here).

One thing I've long noticed, but have trouble putting my finger on, is the way that Brooklyn-the-idea has become a kind of New York for people who otherwise hate New York. Who'd find it all too crass and competitive, or too diverse, too busy, too life just moves so fast. Young white people, but not ethnic whites from the region. White people from "Real America," not necessarily "Red America," but not suburbs of the city.

"Brooklyn" as an aesthetic has come to mean heritage-chic, or Americana-chic, this rustic, no-artificial-fibers, nothing-your-great-grandmother-wouldn't-have-recognized-as-food mentality. (Manhattan even has a Brooklyn-themed bar.) Nineteenth-century-ish vests and facial hair. Homesteader, pioneer low-maintenance-ness. Kale, rutabaga, and turnips. There's also Europhilia, and an influx of Western European tourists and expats, making Brooklyn (parts of it) almost an extension of that hipper, quieter, northern part of the Marais.

I am, as the expression goes, not hating, just saying. As I've said repeatedly, I'm a big fan of hipster cuisine. I miss the Greenmarkets, the coffee shops with chipper-yet-judgmental baristas. If I ever get over my pathological fear of spending more than $30 on jeans, I'm totally buying these. It's amusing to me, as someone who grew up in Manhattan, thinking of Brooklyn as vaguely dangerous and not remotely glamorous (although, by late high school, Brooklyn and my impression of it had changed), that it's now such a thing. But I'm part of the "thing," or was, back in the days when I'd get a martini at Soda on Vanderbilt.

What I find unsettling, I suppose, is the veneer of authenticity. It's all about being really authentically American, or maybe British or French (via). It's the embrace (aesthetically) of these identities through which Brooklyn's own earlier residents (non-whites, ethnic whites) were traditionally excluded. It's nostalgia not even for preppy or the era of quotas and Jim Crow, but something earlier still, a simpler time when these questions weren't even being asked. Now it's all about under-spiced food with self-farmed ingredients.

Meanwhile I certainly don't think those who participate in heritage-chic are themselves more likely than anyone else to be racist, or are participating with sinister motivations. "Hipster racism" may well be out there, but I'm not sure that's what this is. I don't know what it means that Brooklyn is the home of heritage-chic, but I must learn. Which is exactly why I'm having trouble putting my finger on my argument here; also why you, the WWPD audience, are getting this post before I've even tried to pitch this idea anywhere.

Someone was right on the Internet

Chris Schonberger, Nick Schonberger, and Foster Kamer wrote this endlessly compelling if somewhat NY-centric list of "20 Things Everyone Thinks About the Food World (But Nobody Will Say)." It's so much more spot-on that something like that seems like it could be, without being gratuitously contrarian. It's refreshingly not yet another revelation that your food was prepared in less sanitary conditions than you might have hoped - thank goodness, because we know, and choose not to think about it. (Even when, as happened yesterday, one's preferred Philadelphia Vietnamese restaurant serves up a spoon with a startlingly fresh noodle already on it, and plates that look clean on top but are coated with grease on the bottom.)

My take on the list, item by item...

Largely endorse:

#1: "Refusing to spend money on non-Western restaurants is racist." Meaning, "Why is it that people are willing to spend $20 on a bowl of pasta with sauce that they might actually be able to replicate pretty faithfully at home, yet they balk at the notion of a white-table cloth Thai restaurant, or a tacos that cost more than $3 each?" An excellent point, although some counterarguments spring to mind. As commenters point out, Japanese food isn't 'white-people' cuisine (see: Masa).* Also relevant: once you take any cuisine past a certain fanciness threshold, it starts to taste generically upscale, probably something to do with cream sauces. This can work for French or Italian, but any cuisine known for intense flavors is going to suffer. So it's not necessarily that customers wouldn't pay more for higher-quality Thai or Mexican food - it could be that past experience has shown that as the price goes up, the taste gets worse. But yeah, caveats aside, point taken.

#3: Yes, there is a conspiracy to make us think Scandinavian food is something to be consumed on a regular basis outside Scandinavia. Which also gets #16 - "Not every country's cuisine is worth celebrating" - out of the way. Exception: gravlax. And to be clear, I say this as someone whose own ancestral culinary heritage is, what, a kosher version of Polish cooking? Also not a cuisine anyone who didn't grow up with it is going to want to eat terribly often.

#5: Someone in the comments protested that this should be "undocumented" not "illegal," which, fair enough, but semantics aside, yup.

#6: A fine critique of the food movement: "Locavorism has become the newest outlet for yuppie guilt, providing a feeling of living ethically and supporting a cause, but too often the onslaught of kale and artisanal pickles blinds us from looking at the deeper problems affecting America’s food system."

#7: Get rid of tipping, pay restaurant workers properly, no argument there.

#10: "All wine mostly tastes the same." Afraid so. See the Freakonomics podcast about this.

#12: "Foie gras is not worth fighting for (or against.)" Wow, could not have put that more elegantly. Probably because I'd have felt compelled to equivocate about how these things aren't zero-sum, but that really, there are more pressing food-industry issues relating to humans, but even if your main concern is animal welfare (and someone's should be), a food eaten on rare occasions and only by the very rich is an odd place to start. And yeah, anyone fighting for the right to use foie gras, eh. Side note: a friend from college, Joe Hanson, took on this issue a while back, from the comedic perspective.

#20: "Brooklyn's hyped food scene will turn the borough into Manhahattan [sic], part deux." Typo aside, a flawless sentence. Because it really is food that seems to drive the new Brooklyn.

Semi-endorse:

#11: "Most sushi restaurants in America stay in business by serving mislabeled fish and ridiculous rolls that have never actually existed in Japan." While this may be true, mislabeled fish is a problem, but inauthenticity is not. As the authors themselves should see, considering #18: "Tex-Mex is often better than authentic Mexican." Different audiences have different preferences, and sometimes preexisting cuisines fuse to create a superior product. Why would U.S.-ness ruin Japanese food but not Mexican? 

#13: "The food world is the only place where Asians get respect as celebrities in America." What about fashion (Vera Wang, Alexander Wang, Philip Lim...)?

#8: Yes, nostalgia bolstered by heritage-chic does lead to some terrible food. Also some wonderful food, and yes, Doughnut Plant vanilla-bean doughnuts and cinnamon buns, hamburgers from Diner in Williamsburg...

Sounds plausible, but I have no idea:

#2: re: NYT restaurant reviews, #9 re: Anthony Bourdain, #14 re: molecular gastronomy, #15 re: anonymous critics, and #17 re: sexual harassment in kitchens.

Beg to differ:

Re: #4, New York bagels are just fine, and moving elsewhere even within the same region, it becomes immediately obvious how tough it is to get a good bagel. Not all bagels in New York are good, some are rolls shaped like bagels, but that's not even the issue when people claim a problem with New York bagels. No, it's this whole thing about how bagels these days are too doughy, and it sounds sophisticated and adult to prefer the version that sounds old-timey and less like toddler-food. But this is, at least from my born-in-1983 perspective, an overhyped concern. As long as you go to a place that's an actual bagel shop, you will get an actual bagel. Some of the best (Ess, Absolute) are doughy and excellent. Murray's is maybe too dry, and Bagel Bob's, well, you have provided more $2 grad-school lunches than you know. The Montreal bagels are good, but when outside Montreal, a novelty item.**

Re: # 19, I already have a post addressing why I don't think it's the same when fancy food-professionals celebrate grease as when people who actually influence what people who don't merely pick at a meal at high-end establishment consume.

*I was once wasting time on the internet and on the Yelp (?) page for Masa, a restaurant I've never been to and probably will never go to on account of it's the most expensive food establishment ever. And there was this one review from someone who said something along the lines of, 'My girlfriend and I were near Columbus Circle and really hungry, so we went to grab a bite at this nearby Japanese place,' and you see where this is going.

**Philadelphia has Montreal-style bagels, which I, as someone who has also had the original, and who's of partial Montreal-Jewish heritage, let it be known, for authenticity's sake, can confirm are close enough. New York apparently has some as well, now that Mile End has decided to stop importing bagels from Canada. How was that consistent with the locavore, new-Brooklyn ethos?

The greener grass across the pond

American women - well, some, maybe not Ann Romney - want to be French. French women, at least the demographic equivalent of the American women who want to be French (cosmopolitan, vaguely hipster or fashion-ish) want to be American. Some of this is gender-neutral (food trucks, say), but some is not.

First up, there's personal-style blog Le Blog de Betty, whose protagonist is on a tour of the Southwest that involves wearing a bedazzled bustier in a run-down part of Texas; sporting a feathered headdress as if PC had never been invented, because she's always found the look "somptueux"; and, alas, picking one day to pair an American-flag t-shirt with a just adorable handgun necklace, 'cause you know, when in Rome.

This is all of it offensive in a way that will be familiar to readers of high-fashion mags, where they periodically send a white model to some impoverished brown-or-black-person country, to be artfully photographed with smiling but suffering children surrounding them, or with adult locals around them posed as background objects. But the difference here is that it comes from a place of genuine admiration. It's the French fantasy of Americana, not quite as patronizing, I suspect, as it seems. I mean, slightly - could it be Fashion to have a spread of an American girl in Paris, dressing "French"?

Then there's Paris concept store Colette trying to peddle something called "Brooklyn Beauty." This is the rare happening that will provoke chuckles in equal measure from those familiar with Old Brooklyn and New - neither working-class immigrants nor Birkenstock'd Co-op-goers nor stringy-haired trustafarians are known for having covetable skin-care routines. It's not offensive, just seemingly lost in translation, like t-shirts that say odd things in English, tattoos that convey the wrong thing in Chinese. What would Frenchwomen, who have that parapharmacie at their fingertips, want with Brooklyn? What gives?

The point - how was this not obvious? - is that Brooklyn suggests artisanal, and artisanal is the hot new thing in beauty. Heritage-chic isn't really a thing in France, and the English real deal isn't quite as much fun as the paraben-free New-Brooklyn Mom variety.

The time Junior peed himself in a tent UPDATED, AND ONCE MORE, AND ONCE MORE STILL

Noooo!!!! Slate is asking parents to send in letters their kids have sent them from sleepaway camp.

The trend in overshare parenting writing will only end when the children begin posting their parents' private business on blogs and social media. I feel as though a commenter somewhere may have made a similar suggestion, but whatever the case, it's the only way.

UPDATE

I was just sent (comment if you wish to take the credit that's rightfully yours) this horrifying - most yet? - example of the genre. NYT commenter DJS, whoever you are, good on you for pointing out that it's not OK, and certainly not brave, to out one's child as mentally ill. To relate, to the NYT audience, the details of the most private things your child has ever confessed to you, as well as further information that emerged during a therapy session. Let me repeat, but this time with more conviction: how is this legal?

SECOND UPDATE

The commenters, many at least, are catching on! They're pointing out: 1) that a child this young (9?) is too young to consent to this story being told, 2) that there are major ethical problems with disclosing another person's medical diagnosis, 3) that this child is completely identifiable (more so than usual, even, b/c the author shares a last name with her daughter; Google immediately reveals precisely who this girl is, where she goes to school), 4) that there are so many reasons it would be terrible later in life - middle school, adulthood - to have even innocuous details about your childhood, let alone not-so-innocuous ones, revealed to all, and 5) that while the story of parenting and mental illness is an important one, the story of this particular little girl isn't her mother's - or anyone else's, for that matter - to tell.

THIRD UPDATE

You can count on me for a YPIS angle, and here it is: I suspect that part of why there isn't more of a movement to stop parents from writing tell-alls about their kids in national publications is that we-the-readers assume that anyone whose parents are writing for the Times, the Atlantic, whatever, anyone whose parents are not merely journalists but paid to muse on their own lives, is growing up in a well-off, well-educated, privileged household. Which is probably a safe assumption. As YPIS holds, socioeconomic privilege means any problems you do have - and that would include 'my mother wrote a tell-all about my toilet training' - are first-world problems, rich-kid problems, non-problems. Why should we feel bad about the children of Berkeley or brownstone Brooklyn, when (goes YPIS mythology) all kids brought up places other than those two are being raised by neglectful parents who don't give a damn?

Thus the commenter who writes, "I'm glad your daughter is getting the treatment that she needs [...]. I feel worse for all of the children who must be out there with conditions like this without caring parents or access to a plush Park Avenue specialist." Yes, commenter, you've proven yourself a plugged-in, clue-having, class-differences-sensitive, perhaps liberal-arts-educated individual. And well done on correctly identifying that this upper-middle-class family is upper-middle-class, and on pointing out that this is not universal. (I'm only half-sarcastic on this last bit - Styles-ish writing does often address a "we" who take the F train to doctors on Park Ave.)

Meanwhile, I'm not entirely sure a kid with OCD is so privileged to have a parent whose "caring" involves spilling the details of private conversations and therapy sessions to the entire world. Is it better than ignorance or indifference? Inconclusive - untreated mental illness isn't so hot, but parental over-involvement/screwy involvement has been known to make matters worse. What I'd say with confidence is that a psychiatric evaluation in Peoria that isn't offered to a limitless audience sounds a whole lot better than one on the Upper East Side that is.

Brooklyn Berkeley Alice Waters Recession Parenting Grow-Your-Own NOW WITH LINK, PROGRESS!

The NYT has hit yet another jackpot. A divorced mother in Brooklyn, but from Berkeley originally, decides that the correct response to being a freelance writer in an age of this not being a viable source of income isn't to demand child support while looking for some dull yet reliable office-job route to earning an income, or even signing on as the token older barista at the local coffeehouse. No, it's making everything she and the kids eat from scratch. And she was onto something! Now she has a book out about this, and, as we see, an article in the Times.

First, the petty-but-pertinent: I don't know where Susan Gregory Thomas was doing her grocery shopping, but an Eli's health loaf for $10? Fancy cereal for $14 a box? I know my New York schlepping, and this is just bizarre. The only possible explanation is hyperbole to make the point about how aloof she once was. That bread is totally $5 or maybe some places $6 a loaf, which is still expensive enough to feel embarrassed about buying it, even if it holds up remarkably well (years, quite possibly) in the freezer. And non-store-brand cereal at Whole Foods in NY is, what, $4-something? Again, not cheap, but the $14 variety had better include some cruelty-free foie gras.

Now, the practical: even shopping only at whichever store was nearest (even, yes, Whole Foods), she could have bought a bunch of rice and dry pasta, supplemented that with a mix of cheap and less-cheap ingredients, tossed in some peanut butter, and problem solved.

Or not, because the problem, if I understand correctly, was: how to eat at Al Di La, but at home and without much money for groceries. In other words, how to be at the cutting edge of yuppie cuisine, without the yuppie income. How to deal with a massive (David Brooks, apologies) status-income disequilibrium.

And I sympathize, to a point. I'm trying to eat like someone with access to NY levels of food variety, if not any spectacular income, while out in the woods of NJ with limited access to groceries, period. It takes up some but not all of my time. Cookbook/memoir contracts welcome. I even have a title and everything.

But this is like the part of Vérité I'm at in my current reread - this nice bourgeois family is flat broke but really concerned with making sure their clothing is clean because otherwise OMG the neighbors might find out, which would be a problem on account of the neighbors are already ticked off because this family's on the wrong side of the novel's version of the Dreyfus Affair. I mean, can't someone who's lost their money kind of turn this off? Does there really need to be homemade ricotta?

OK, probably not - once you've accepted certain items as definitive of "food," it can be tough to all of a sudden eat like someone with utterly different life experiences from yours. It probably would have been more difficult for the author to have hauled her family to the nearest McDonalds than it was for her to start raising her own chickens.

What's off, then, is that the intended takeaway here is that see, it is possible to eat like a fine, upstanding yuppie, even without the cash. Take that, people who claim to be too poor to eat Chez Panisse-style every night! When it is possible to do so, assuming you have all the time and Brooklyn garden space in the world, and when you're the class you are and would not find it acceptable to eat otherwise. So all the commenters explaining how this article doesn't speak to the single mother who lives in the projects and works two jobs are right, but not for the right reason. The issue isn't so much the author's time and space, or even cultural knowledge - knowing what all these ingredients are and so forth. Rather, it's that she was as hooked on Food Movement-approved meals as others are on Burger King and the like.

Meanwhile, the message ought to be that devoting all one's time and energy to eating as though one had lots of money is, while possible, not heroic and actually kind of a waste of resources. But there's the complicating factor of, she got a book published about her experiences.

Of Brooklyns old, new, and international

Ah, Brooklyn. The borough whose newish residents can't help but sneer at the even newer arrivals. Ha! one will say, I moved here back in 2005, when Williamsburg was only a little bit extremely popular and unaffordable.

The bizarre misconception underlying this painful rant about a NYT "36 Hours" travel feature on the borough is that the Times is some kind of coherent entity, whose readers and journalists are all cut from the same cloth, all inhabiting the same stodgy patch of the Upper East or West Side. When in all likelihood the writers for the paper who are under 40 - and many over as well - live in Brooklyn. But, when writing what is, after all, a travel feature, they assume that the person they're writing for isn't a prissy Manhattanite daring to dip his pinky toe into the L train, but rather a visitor who lives outside NY if not the US entirely, and who doesn't want to waste what limited time he has in the city on what one not especially NY-specific subculture - hipsters, if we're still calling them that - thinks is most important.

There's enough to do in NYC that it's not a given any tourist would visit Brooklyn at all; someone looking to see a side of the city not represented in Manhattan would do well to consider, for example, Queens, rather than spending 45 minutes on the train for what are essentially extensions of the Lower East and Upper West Sides. These are writers who know Brooklyn just fine, who no doubt have their own favorite spots, but who are describing it for a broad and middle-aged audience - broader and more middle-aged still in the case of a travel story. It's not that they're getting it wrong, but that to describe what would appeal to a particular sort of 23-year-old would be an odd choice, even if, granted, New Brooklyn caters largely to a particular sort of 23-year-old.

The response is incoherent in the way that defenses of Brooklyn can often get. On the one hand, we're meant to Celebrate Diversity, or, more accurately, to celebrate a kind of socializing among other college-educated white people that reveals courage in the face of having perhaps walked through two streets of a black neighborhood to get to the bar: "Is the New York Times trying to tell us that only bars full of upper-middle class people are safe? If that’s what you think, go to Connecticut or something. They have nice quiet white bread bars there, too." On the other, god forbid anyone imagine Brooklyn to be so uncivilized a place as not to have all the frou-frou amenities of Manhattan: "[C]ontrary to the Times' gentle suggestions to the contrary, there are tons of cabs on Court Street, especially in the dinner hours. It’s still a major street, even though it’s in Brooklyn." Which is it? Is Brooklyn so hardcore that those who can't take it must be exiled to New Canaan? Or are those who dare doubt that Brooklyn is, in fact, as nice a lily-white suburb as the best of 'em the problem?

Meanwhile, there were some valid complaints to be made about the "36 Hours," most notably the fact that much of New Brooklyn is inaccessible to much of the rest of New Brooklyn, such that anywhere in the Park Slope realm and anything any realtor has ever called "Williamsburg" are in fact far more difficult to get back and forth from than is either destination from Manhattan. Contrary to contrary to contrary to, even gentrified areas of Brooklyn are low on cabs, so even those willing to pay for what on the map looks like it should be a short trip may well end up on that delightful combination of Q, L, and whatever else if they decided to do all of New Brooklyn in one go.

One could also point out that the "36 Hours" feature is a guide not to Brooklyn, but to New Brooklyn, and as such ignores, with the exception of Sunset Park, the neighborhoods where Stumptown coffee does not already flow from a spout in every kitchen. This, if anything, would be the authenticity critique. The rant's author "imagine[s] that certain parts of the article could be a little obnoxious to Brooklyn natives," the cites as an example of this that the article had the gall to suggest... the wrong New Brooklyn rock clubs. Huh?

I suppose, though, that my objection here is less to the response as a Defense of Brooklyn, than its place in the ever-growing canon of travel advice not exactly aimed at hipsters, but that conflates 'where the hipsters are' with 'where one finds local color.' The old-as-time popularity of telling people how to find 'off the beaten path' restaurants, of how to (as is written, preposterously, on the side of tourist vans near Battery Park City) "Come a tourist, leave a local," has morphed into a kind of parallel tourist industry, in which there's an assumption that everyone's looking for pretty much the same thing around the world, namely the equivalent of Williamsburg or Wicker Park of whichever locale they may find themselves in. This is the real-life travel equivalent to the street-style blogs depicting identically-quirkily dressed 20-and-30-somethings, whose locales one can only discern from their ethnicity. (Naturally platinum blond and in the '70s-inspired uniform-of-the-moment? Helsinki. Dark hair and a rockin' post-army bod in the same outfit? Tel Aviv.)

It's precisely this approach that sends tourists in Paris - Paris! - to the Canal St. Martin area, which is good and well but... the 6th and 7th Arrondissements! The Seine! One doesn't go to Paris for hipsters who happen to speak French and own a bit more striped stuff. One goes for the beautiful everything, for the 60-ish women who look like a young Catherine Deneuve, for the bichons frises with their own chairs in a café. As I thought in 2004 and continue to think in 2011, it's all about the poodles-and-pearls. Or if you're interested in a particular immigrant community and how it and Paris have mixed - the Queenses of Paris - that's also something Paris-specific worth checking out. But hipsters? The globalization that leads to that international subculture of like-minded sorts certainly facilitates friendships and relationships across borders, but if you're going somewhere different on account of it's different, why go that route?

WWPD and the revolution

No, it does not surprise me that Park Slope coffee shop patrons are more concerned with getting good coffee in self-righteous packaging than with getting said coffee from a staff treated decently.* I remember quite well how crappily the workers were treated at the Park Slope coffee shop where I worked (not Gorilla) way back when. Our shifts were basically full days without breaks (or with breaks not long enough to get down the falafel from next door that was the food option for those many hours), and ended when they ended, which could mean having to walk home after 1am, having of course not received any tips from that last hour or so because no one comes by for a cappuccino when the place is closed and the machine's getting cleaned out. We were allowed to drink all the regular coffee we wanted (all the better to keep us upright), but not to try the desserts. (We could, if we wanted, purchase them at a discount.) We were nevertheless expected to be able to describe said desserts in a convincing and mouthwatering-inducing way. At any rate, not so great, but nothing newsworthy as worker-oppression goes.

What was remarkable was the smug obliviousness of the customers. Like the woman who came in, asked which products were organic, deemed the response unsatisfactory, and stormed out. The entire concept of the place was geared towards reassuring those who really care about the world, who want a spiritual connection with the soy plant that contributed to their vanilla chai lattes, that even their smallest indulgences are in sync with their values.

*See especially the preference for the small local blah-blah-blah over Starbucks. I fully agree that aesthetically and coffee-taste-wise, many of the much-hyped independent coffee places are superior. But I thought it was common knowledge that if your concern is, say, that the baristas have health insurance, Starbucks is a safer bet. And that products like coffee and chocolate might be more or less fairly produced, but are not "local" if you're consuming them in New York.