Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo Going to school on the Upper East Side. Credit Erin Baiano for The New York Times A few weeks ago, a woman named Wednesday Martin, a hobby anthropologist whose graduate degree is in comparative literature, published an op-ed article in The New York Times outlining some of the observations she makes in her forthcoming…
Gaming communities are mourning the death of prominent transgender game developer Rachel Bryk, who committed suicide on April 23. Bryk, 23, was plagued by chronic pain, which she told friends was a result of rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. She took her own life by jumping from the George Washington Bridge, which connects Manhattan to New Jersey,…
by Tara Culp-Ressler Posted on May 19, 2015 at 12:58 pm Updated: May 20, 2015 at 5:11 pm “Leaked Memo Reveals What ‘Breastaurants’ Actually Think Of Their Customers” Waitresses and a customer at a Texas-area Twin Peaks restaurant CREDIT: Flickr Creative Commons via MarkScottAustinTX Popularly known as “breastaurants,” the franchises that cater to the male gaze…
CREDIT: Shutterstock Every three months, the government takes the temperature of the economy by releasing Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, figures. GDP goes up: the economy is supposedly healthy. GDP goes down: there’s a bug (or an all-out contagion, as during the Great Recession). But GDP — which adds up the value of work being…
We’ve learned so much about the Duggars in the past couple weeks! Of course, we now know, in grisly detail, about how Josh Duggar molested five girls, four of whom were also his co-stars on TLC’s 19 Kids And Counting, i.e., his sisters. We’ve also been learning more and more about the creepy homeschooling cult the…
Over the past week, I found myself at times so stricken by depression that I could barely move, only lie face down as if there were some great force pressing me there, leaden and slowly leaking tears. It was as rough as you might expect on the one hand, but on the other I wasn’t…
Facebook / Mad MenA week ago, The New York Times revealed that some women on the Upper East Side were receiving “wife bonuses.” A wife bonus is just what it sounds like. A wife is given a nice year-end chunk of cash for performing her wifely duties. For instance, “how well she managed the home…
Wednesday Martin’s book “Primates of Park Avenue” has had the effect of “dropping a bomb” on the Upper East Side, leaving some of the wealthy mothers she befriended “furious and afraid.” A source whose child attended the 92Y Nursery School with Martin’s offspring said a guessing game has emerged about which glossy, manicured moms are…
In her 26 years in New York, Wednesday Martin has lived in nearly every neighborhood, from Long Island City to Soho to the West Village. Nothing, she says, prepared her for the Upper East Side. “It’s the most fascinating and alienating and completely separate world I’ve ever encountered,” Martin says. “This is a separate tribe…
In her book “Primates of Park Avenue,” out Tuesday, New York writer Wednesday Martin sensationally reveals the trend for bankers’ wives to receive so-called “wife bonuses” — a percentage of their husband’s company bonus in return for managing the household and supporting him in his career. Here Polly Phillips, 32, who gets a five-figure sum…