#magazine paid minimum wage

[forsoobado137]

I've been wondering how nations have money. Do they get paid by their bosses? How much do they make monthly or annually? Is it just what the average person makes in their countries? Do they pay rent and mortgages, or have they already been paid off because they're immortal? How do they afford their luxuries and travel expenses? Are they insured? Are they in a lot of debt? If the government buys all of their things, can they be taken away as punishment?

Or maybe they have other part time jobs? Spain does run a café in the anime. And I think he sells merch for that too. I'm not too sure because wouldn't it be a bad look for the gov if the NP of the United States was making minimum wage at McDonald's?

Maybe they do appearance work to make money. Imagine France or Italy on the front covers of fashion magazines. France probably would make a fuckton as a model. And I'm pretty sure there was one strip where America was in a hair commercial.

[urdreamgirls-dreamgirl]

Nancy Wheeler has always considered herself to be a practical kind of person. She keeps to her schedule, she gets her work done, she makes good decisions for her future. That’s why she can’t believe she’s ended up here, stuck at a minimum wage job at the new Starcourt Mall.

If she’s really honest with herself, Nancy can admit that it was a little bit of wishful thinking and a lot of overconfidence that led her here. She’d applied for a really competitive internship out in Indianapolis for the summer and she’d been so sure she was going to get it. Her application was impeccable and she’d thought the interview had gone so well that she’d quit her after school job at the Hawkins Post that same day. All she’d been allowed to do there was order the office lunches and make coffee on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays anyway, so it wasn’t like it was some kind of great loss to her. She’d practically added a line to the resume that was sitting in her desk drawer just waiting to be turned in to college admissions offices in the fall. 

And then the call hadn’t come. She’d waited two weeks and then finally given in and called the Indianapolis Star to ask about the status of her application. She’d held the phone in a white knuckle grip as the man on the other end had told her that, while she’d certainly been impressive in her interview, they’d decided to go in a different direction. They’d be sure to keep her in mind for any future positions, he’d assured her. She’d said “thank you” and slammed the phone back into its cradle; she knew exactly what men like that meant when they used the words “different direction.”

So now, Nancy Wheeler was trudging out to the new mall all the way across town everyday, wearing a ridiculous sailor costume and slinging ice cream alongside Eddie Munson, Hawkins High’s resident drug dealer and repeat senior. If anyone asked her--not that they ever would--she’d tell them this was far stranger than watching a demogorgon rip its way through the walls of the Byers house. Stranger by a long shot.

~*~

Eddie Munson’s not sure how he got here. He’d had a good thing going with Reefer Rick. Decent weed, a place to crash when he didn’t feel like sleeping at the trailer, and a pretty great gig that paid the bills.

And then Rick had to go and get himself arrested. Without Rick, Eddie’s supply completely dried up and he had no other real connections in this shitty little town. So what was a guy to do? He couldn’t lay around the trailer all day. He had tapes to buy and gigs to get to. It wasn’t like he could go an entire summer without a cash flow. He’d only really had one option: the new shining temple to the great evils of Capitalism.

That’s how he found himself pulling on the most demeaning sailor uniform in existence every morning and taking his place next to Nancy Wheeler, the princess of Hawkins, behind the counter at Scoops Ahoy, preparing for a summer full of obnoxious tweens and their even more obnoxious mothers. It was going to be a long three months.

~*~

“Where’s Nancy?”

Eddie sighs, but doesn't take his eyes off the Rolling Stone he’s flipping through at the counter. Thank god for whoever’d left it at their table earlier this afternoon.

“Would it hurt you to be polite? What happened to ‘hello’? ‘How are you?’ ‘Could you please tell me where my sister is?’” Eddie says, finally looking up from his magazine to see little Wheeler scowling at him. Mike reaches over to slam his palm against the bell on the counter, something he knows drives Eddie absolutely insane.

“Hi, hello, how are you? Would you be so kind as to tell me where my darling sister is?” Mike responds, tone dripping with sarcasm.

Eddie sighs again, then calls out, “Wheeler, your demon spawn are here.”

Nancy comes shoving through the door to the backroom with clean ice cream scoops in one hand and a box of little pink sample spoons in the other. Her scowl matches Mike’s.

“I’m not letting you use our mall access for another free movie. Grow up, Mike,” she says, before Mike or his friends can even say anything.

“Come on, Nance, please?” Mike whines. “Will wants to see Day of the Dead and you know we can't get tickets for it.”

Eddie’s eyes shift from Mike to Will, who’s making the biggest, sweetest angel eyes over at Nancy. Eddie can’t help but snort; these kids are good.

“Ugh, fine! But this is the last time.” Nancy shoves the ice cream scoops into their slots by the coolers and then slides the box of spoons toward Eddie, who ignores them. Eddie watches as Nancy leads the kids into the back room. He’s flipped through a couple of more pages of his magazine before she’s back.

“You just got played, Wheeler,” he tells her as she opens the spoons Eddie had left untouched.

“Will’s... been through a lot. He deserves to see a damn movie.” Nancy doesn’t seem like she wants to elaborate on what she means by that, so Eddie lets it drop.

“How’d you end up here at Scoops anyway? Doesn’t seem like something Nancy Wheeler of all people would be that in to.”

Nancy sighs. “Thought I was gonna get this perfect internship in Indianapolis, but... I didn’t, obviously. My options were limited by the time school ended.” She works on replacing the spoons for a moment, before she says, “What about you? Red, white, and blue don’t really seem like your colors, no offense.”

“None at all taken, Wheeler,” Eddie smirks. “Let’s just say, I’m not that interested in seeing what the inside of a jail cell looks like right now.”

Nancy hums in response but doesn’t ask him to elaborate. Eddie knows his reputation often precedes him. He’s kind of into that, anyway. 

Nancy rounds the counter with a rag to start cleaning sticky puddles of melted ice cream off the tables and Eddie returns to his magazine. They work in silence for the remainder of their shift.

~*~

Two days later, Eddie’s back behind the counter with that same Rolling Stone he keeps stashed under the cash register. He’s read the damn thing front and back so many times, he’s practically got it memorized.

“Hey, is Nance here?”

Eddie doesn’t have to look up to know who’s asking, but he does anyway. His eyes snap up to meet Steve Harrington’s gaze and he can feel his own heart racing a mile a minute. Of course the first time Eddie sees Steve Harrington after graduation, he’s wearing these stupid fucking sailor shorts. He feels his cheeks burning red.

“Uh, she’s on break. You need something?” Nancy usually takes her break in the back room, but today she’d apparently forgotten to bring her lunch, so she's gone out to the food court.

“Oh, uh. Yeah, just two scoops of strawberry, please? In a cone,” Steve glances to his left and Eddie becomes aware of the girl standing at his side for the first time. He vaguely recognizes her from school, thinks maybe she plays the trombone or the trumpet or something dorky like that. “You want anything?” Steve nudges the girl with her elbow.

“Can I get the Banana Boat with chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, please? And extra whipped cream,” the girl says.

“That’s for four people,” Eddie tells her, raising his eyebrows.

The girl just smiles and then Steve says, “You've never seen her eat, man, it’s like a snake unhinging its jaw to swallow a baby whole, seriously.” He pulls out his wallet as he speaks. 

Eddie laughs nervously. “I’ll take your word for it. That all?”

Steve smiles, seemingly pleased that Eddie laughed at his joke. “That’s it, man, thanks.”

Eddie tells him the total, takes his money, and then works on the Banana Boat for Robin. He slides it across the counter to her and watches as her eyes light up at the mountain of whipped cream he’d piled on top. Eddie grabs a cone and scoops out some strawberry. And so what if he makes the scoops just a little bigger than he normally would?

Eddie hands the cone to Steve over the counter, their fingertips brushing.

“Thanks,” Steve says, and his pink tongue darts out to catch a piece of ice cream that’s about to fall from the cone. Eddie’s brain short circuits watching him. “Can you tell Nancy we stopped by?”

“Yeah, no problem.” Eddie hopes his voice doesn’t sound as strangled and strained as he thinks it does.

Steve takes another lick from his cone. Eddie’s eyes track the movement hungrily. “Wow, this is great. We’ll definitely be back. See you around?” Steve smiles at him again and Eddie feels like he can’t breathe. He couldn’t speak even if he wanted to, so he just nods and waves, which makes Steve’s smile grow bigger before he’s turning and guiding the girl out of the store and into the busy mall. Eddie watches them go, eyes fixed out the door long after they’ve disappeared from view.

~*~

Nancy sits at the food court and contemplates her life. She’s seventeen years old, working at an ice cream shop, and sneaking her kid brother into R rated movies. How did it all come to this? 

She knew her job at the Hawkins Post had been a dead end. She was supposed to be a journalism intern, but they’d treated her like their own personal assistant and didn’t even allow her to sit in on pitch meetings or read any drafts before they were sent to print. She’d encouraged Jonathan to take on the photography internship and he’d had more access to the actual news writing than she ever had.

Nancy didn’t consider herself a particularly bitter person, but that had left a terrible taste in her mouth. She knew it wasn’t Jonathan’s fault, that it was a flaw in the system not in how Jonathan saw her, but she couldn’t stomach it when he defended the way she was treated. He was always telling her they were interns and they were just lucky to be there. He didn’t get it.

That’s why she hadn’t felt too bad about breaking things off when she’d quit the Post, so sure that she was destined for bigger and better things out in Indianapolis. Nancy loved Jonathan, she really, really did, and they’d been through so much together. But Jonathan’s ambitions had never really matched her own and she couldn’t ask him to wait around for her all summer, not when she wasn't sure she even wanted to come back. Besides, she was seventeen. No one met the love of their life at seventeen.

“Hey, Nance!” Nancy hears someone call to her from across the food court. Her neck snaps up from where she’s been staring at the congealed yellow substance masquerading as cheese on her fries to see Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley walking toward her. Steve’s got a dripping pink cone in his hand and Robin’s got a half eaten Banana Boat. Nancy sighs. She doesn’t like it when people she knows see her in this stupid fucking outfit.

“Hey, Steve,” she says, trying her bast to smile. “How’s it going?”

“Ah, you know, doing this stupid fucking job my dad got me for the summer,” Steve tells her. Nancy had heard something about Steve getting hired at the Post not long after she’d quit. She hadn’t really been able to believe it, but Mr. Harrington pulling some strings for his son made a lot of sense. “This is Robin, she’s another intern there. I think you guys are the same year?”

“Yeah, I know Robin,” Nancy smiles at the girl next to Steve, who seems too preoccupied with the half melted concoction in her hands to really pay attention to Nancy and Steve’s conversation.

“We were just stopping in to Scoops to see you,” Steve tells her. “Thought you were still at the Post, but then Jonathan said you’d quit? Dustin mentioned you were here now.” 

“Yeah, you know, thought I’d get some real-world experience. Make some money. Develop some people skills.” Nancy doesn’t want to admit that she’d made such a huge mistake, doesn't want anyone to know how sure she’d been, only to be shot down in a single phone call. It’s bad enough that Jonathan and Eddie know just how foolish she’d been and she doesn’t even really care what Eddie thinks of her, which is the whole reason she’d even told him in the first place. 

“Right.” Steve gets that little frown line in between his brows that Nancy had once thought was the cutest thing ever, back in another life. “Well, we have to get back so...”

“Yeah, no, me too. Break’s almost over. Can’t leave Munson alone with all that ice cream for too long.” It’s a lame joke. Nancy can relate.

She gathers her half-eaten fast food and heads for the trash can. She tries her hardest not to look back at Steve and Robin as she walks back toward Scoops.

Inspired by this post.

[formulatrash]

hi hazel! i hope you’re well. i totally understand if you don’t want to answer this since i’m sure you get a lot of Working In Motorsports questions. but basically i read your post about breaking into the industry and how you should never work for free…unfortunately i’m not that smart and do, in fact, Work For Free. i’m at the point now where getting paid would be quite nice actually, so i was wondering what your advice would be on taking the next step? tl;dr experience under my belt but seeking a paid role. where do you think are the best places to look? thank you! <33

hello,

honestly, understandable, it happens to a lot of people. god knows I have done a fair amount of work for free in the past year and I should surely know better.

anyway, where to look depends really on what you're looking for. if it's specifically motorsport journalism work then it's worth reaching out to people at publications* and saying "this is my experience, I appreciate you probably have a full roster at the minute but if you ever need someone to help out, I'm really looking to take the next step. include some links to your work, say what you're really interested in covering and what you can cover in a broader way and if you're available for travel.

be polite and keen and show that you understand the publication you are writing to, reference stories they already have that are the sort of thing you would like to write. if you don't hear back, email them again in a few months, persistence has weirdly paid off for a bunch of people I know; make sure you're bringing new ideas and talking about new things, saying "I know it wasn't last time but just wanted to say I'm still interested."

there are then broader industry publications where you might get commissions or where you can pitch motorsport stories. JournoResources does a newsletter every week which includes freelance pitching opportunities, all of which are paid.

if it's not journalism then start chatting to and getting in touch with people in the area you want to work. if it's social media then follow agency accounts, look out for chances where people are asking for people. speculatively getting in touch with individuals on their personal accounts isn't ccol but look out for the agencies and places like Pace Six Four, which is a huge agency, have a page to submit a speculative application in case you don't fit their roles at the moment but they might have something in future.

don't shoot over the sun by emailing Ferrari to ask if they've got any social jobs going - clearly, if they did, they'd advertise them - but it's worth asking eg: junior teams if they need any extra coverage during what's about to be a very frantic part of the season with every series racing simultaneously in Europe for weeks on end. showing you understand motorsport doesn't begin and end with F1 goes a long way.

LinkedIn is a hole and I have absolute no idea how Gen Z use it with a straight face (you guys, what the hell is this 'weekly update on my goals' business come on, millennials might be cringe but not that way) but it can be useful to follow team PRs and be able to pick up on opportunities. it's also worth following companies you want to work at, to get job alerts - check the parent companies of magazines or agencies and keep an eye out.

overall: good luck. it is incredibly rough out here at the moment and there is little to no work. I don't say that to discourage you, I say that cus if it's a struggle for you it's not because you're useless it's because everyone is struggling.

*By this I mean paying ones. of which there are astoundingly few. Autosport, Motorsport.com, Top Gear, CAR, Motor Sport Magazine and RaceFans are the only ones I can verify/vouch for are paying legal wages that are motorsport-specific in the UK - do not accept ultra-low-paid work, I've heard one publication pays £50 for a weekend of coverage which is about an eighth of minimum wage. £100 per day is still below minimum wage a lot of the time but a semi-depressing benchmark of where things are broadly at, unless you happen to have hit the big bucks (this is what I get paid). do not participate in having your labour abused, anyone doing that is not going to help you in your career.

in Europe, AutoHebdo and AmuS pay but I'm not sure much beyond that, in the US then Jalopnik, The Drive, ESPN, Road & Track, ARSTechnica etc all pay but have relatively few, if any, motorsport commissions because they tend to go to staff writers - if you can come with a unique or grassroots story though, they will pay attention. Motor1 has also just been sold so may start commissioning again soon but there's some flux going on there. I don't know if The Athletic accept motorsport pitches.

[aquagem-art]

In response to that AI post about how art school costs £60,000/year:

(check my twitter for the original post response but I thought it important to share here)

I'm not interested in this persons opinion but for any artists out there who think they need to spend money to gain skill I need you to know I never went to art school, I dropped out of grade 10 art at age 16.

I used to steal my parents national geographic magazines and draw the animals out of them. I used to record my favorite tv shows and pause the screen and draw what I saw. Every technique I've learned, I've learned from other artists for free online or from plain old trial and error.

I started taking dirt cheap commissions for OC Sailor Scouts on Deviant art and that's how I paid for my first second-hand Wacom tablet off of eBay. I worked on a 10 year old second hand computer that my friends animation studio was getting rid of for 10 years before I could afford to replace it. I used a pirated version of CS6 that my brother had gotten me. I started doing small conventions near me and for the first three years I only covered my costs. I raised two children and worked crappy minimum wage jobs to make ends meet while still carving out time for my passion.

How much money you spend does not dictate your skill and how much money you make does not dictate your success. If you use AI, your art will suffer because you will have gained no useable skills. If you profit off AI you are not profiting off your own work and any success you achieve is not lasting or your own.

If you cut other artists down to lift yourself up the community will remember and shun you. If you lift other artists up they will remember and share their success with you. Every achievement I have enjoyed with my art would not exist without the combination of time/effort on my part and support/knowledge from my peers. Money spent or made had very little to do with it.

Put the time in, lean on your friends/family, celebrate your achievements, look back to see how far you've come, find your community, define what success means for you, not what other people (especially non-artists) dictate. Don't compare your journey to other artists, be inspired, not jealous. Take your time. Allow yourself to be bad at things (it's the first step to being kind of good at things!) Discover the joy in creating. I promise your art is worth it. Because no amount of money is ever stopping you from being an artist. And no one will ever be able to make the art that only YOU can make. <3

[themaresnest-dumblr]

'Uh, To Steve Wright … Burn In Hell - FOREVER!' (Hang The DJ! Hang The DJ! Hang The DJ!)

Every Toy Dolls fan in the world has long waited for this day.

We don't forgive, and we don't forget.

Steve Wright was an atypical ultra-prick who believed if you weren't wearing the latest fashions and poodle haircuts you shouldn't be even allowed outside. Toadying to rich 'artists' and rich record labels, whilst using his platform on BBC Radio One (paid for by the general public via taxation) to sneer at every independent act on the block.

Lampooned by Viz Comic in Steve Wright and His Sycophantic Shite, the band The Smiths even tore the f**ker a new one on one of their biggest hits 'Panic!' when he started having a good at them largely because Steve Wright thought Morrissey was gay (a frequent running theme of this odious creep on his radio shows and TV appearences - at least until gay bashing because very 'uncool' upon the death of Freddie Mercury from AIDS).

What seemed to particularly annoy Wright and the rest of the London ivory tower set in the so-called 'affluent eighties' was acts daring to talk about like outside of tinseltown London. The world he wished would just go away - unless it was to clean his house or sell him a burger.

Much of the rest of the country, especially north of the Watford Gap, lived in poverty and squalor - the world bands like the Smiths and the Toy Dolls came from, and each in their own way sang about.

People like the Toy Dolls' 'Dougy Giro', about a young homeless man from Hendon, like so many in the north east at that time (and little has changed).

'You can't guess what life for Dougy is like, he wakes up in the street, No home, no bed, he says he's lucky That he can smile and be happy ...'

Wright's ire towards the Toy Dolls was due to their surprise Christmas 1984 double A-Side hit 'Nellie The Elephant' and especially 'Fisticuffs In Frederick Street' which lampooned Newcastle's Fosters Club - an atypical 'Meat Market' where youngsters on minimum wage wearing clothes they'd gone heavily into credit card debt for drunk overpriced 'designer' beers and cocktails because glossy magazines and celeb culture lied to them this is what they needed to do to become 'successful in life'

(Needless to say it didn't, and most who bought into that crap wound up broke and broken by their thirties).

'Fosters Club was full up to the brim. Everybody risking life and limb and just to go and pose at the disco but posing wasn't easy. and the D.J. he got queasy, blow by blow...'

The sort of lifestyle talentless pricks like Wright on fat BBC contracts cheerfully promoted as 'aspirational'.

Suffice to say, violence outside these clubs became increasingly prevailent from a heady combination of alcohol mixed with dreams vaporising in the cold realities of a nation where selfishness and shallowness had become increasingly prevailant.

Little wonder Morrissey retorted to Wright in 'Panic.'

'Burn down the disco, Hang the blessed DJ! Because the music that they constantly play, It says nothing to me about my life. Hang the blessed DJ! Because the music they constantly play ...

On the Leeds side streets that you slip down, Provincial towns you jog 'round,

"Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ!" '

And now this sevile sycophant, awash in his own self pity, has croaked it on the eve of the Toy Dolls latest world tour - bloody marvellous timing!

Good riddance, you sycophantic shite!

[confessionsfromthesecondrow]

Honey, We Shrunk the Interns.

Growing up, I never dreamed of pursuing a career in fashion. Right up until I left college in 2011, I was fixated on the idea of becoming a barrister. Although fashion was an avid interest of mine – one that I studied intensely, poring over my favourite magazines and keeping up with runway shows each season – it felt a million miles away from the reality of my quiet, suburban life. After all, it's not what you know, but who you know – fashion’s unofficial epitaph that is sadly still relevant over a decade later. 

With no connections via relatives or family friends, I turned to Gaydar, determining that through the gay network I’d find an in. As luck would have it, I came across a young fashion photographer who put me in contact with his stylist flatmate to embark on my first internship. 

I wasn’t paid a single penny, much to the dismay of my parents – who chose more reliable careers in building and finance – but my modest entry into the industry felt akin to the moon landing, at least to me anyway. I met models, hauled suitcases filled with returns on buses all over London, and peered inquisitively at the magic being made on set while steaming clothes in photo studios – marvelling at Prada samples that I recognised from the runway. I even met fashion royalty, in the form of Pam Hogg, who offered me a cup of tea when I turned up rain-soaked at her studio one sodden evening. 

From there, an internship at GQ Style followed, the majority of which I spent sobbing in the bathroom thanks to the (nameless) editor at the time who often humiliated me with pointless menial tasks. In one instance, I was asked to hand deliver a single daffodil to Alasdair McLellan sans address, later loudly berated in the open plan office for the flower’s wilted demise by the time I was provided with the studio’s location. 

My introduction to interning finished with a friendlier stint at Dazed – acquired via the gay network, once again – five years before I’d return in a full circle moment as a fashion editorial assistant. 

Beyond the obvious hands-on experience my months of interning provided me, it quickly proved even more valuable than I realised. After initially being rejected by University of Arts London to study fashion journalism, a follow-up email clarifying the additional internships I’d undertaken quickly secured me an interview and later a prestigious place on the course. 

Throughout my studies at university, we were encouraged to continue gaining industry experience, culminating in a term entirely dedicated to interning during my second year. Interviewing at Wonderland and 10 magazine, I chose the latter, and continued interning there throughout my final year – while simultaneously juggling my final major project, writing my dissertation, and a part-time job – until I ultimately became the publication’s fashion assistant upon graduation. 

Over my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of interns – the good, the bad, and the lazy – the brightest sparks among them going on to become my peers holding jobs at Clash, The Face, GQ, Wallpaper*, Matches, and British Vogue. As was my experience at 10, it was common for brilliant interns to find themselves earning entry-level full-time roles within Dazed and AnOther right up until the pandemic when the company’s internship programme was discontinued. 

At the time, the Guardian reported that 61% of employers cancelled their placements due to the pandemic, with small and medium-sized businesses the most likely (49%) to do so. Yet, as we emerged from the two-year slump, internships were just as scarce, largely due to HMRC cracking down on unpaid internships – serving fashion publications (both the media and arts are serial offenders) with warnings of fines if they failed to pay interns the national minimum wage. 

So, where does that leave today’s budding fashion journalists? 

‘It is impossible, it literally feels like winning the lottery,” Moira Gonazález, an MA Fashion Communication student at Central Saint Martins tells me. ‘My plan was to join a team as an intern and work my way up, but it’s so difficult to start like that – maybe one person out of every 20 will reply and most of the time you don’t learn anything. I’ve ended up assisting so many stylists where I’ve just been in Ubers picking up stuff all around London. So many people still expect you to work full-time for free, which is crazy, but everybody’s willing to do it for fashion.’ 

Despite being required to complete 120 hours in the industry as part of her BA, Moira was the only person on her course who was successful in doing so. ‘The teachers said that if you worked on shoots for uni that it would count towards the hours, so there was no motivation to go out and get the experience,’ she says. ‘The process can also be so long, it took four months to get to the interview stage for an internship at Burberry. How can you survive living in London as a 20-year-old and pay rent if you have to wait for four months to get an answer? It’s impossible unless you’re privileged enough not to worry about money.’

To see for myself, I looked into fashion editorial internships in London to see what was currently available. Unsurprisingly, I failed to find a single placement to apply for and advice offered by the Business of Fashion overlooked the obvious, that no amount of experience or tenacity can help secure an internship if there aren’t any available to begin with. Reaching out to all the editors I knew, the results were marginally better with month-long placements available for university students only at 10 and the Evening Standard. The majority – including Elle, Wallpaper*, GQ, The Face, and Perfect – responded with a resounding no, with Vice allegedly going as far as implementing a company-wide ban on all internships. 

Of the paid internships the government were hoping would become available, only Dazed and British Vogue currently offer them – both six months, full-time, and paid the London Living Wage – though at the time, the vacancies were filled. ‘I remember when British Vogue posted the internship on LinkedIn and after two days they already had 500 applicants,’ Moira says. ‘When I later saw who got the internship, she had worked at two banks previously, studied politics, and was 25 or 26 so had a much bigger CV. How can I even compete?’ 

‘For me, I’ve always found that there was never a clear route into the industry, I didn’t have a degree and my parents aren’t creative – there’s nobody in the creative industry in my immediate family. I wasn’t getting anywhere and couldn’t get my foot in the door,’ says Louis Merrion, Dazed Digital’s inaugural paid editorial intern. ‘I had come to a point where I was looking at unpaid internships, but I’d have to work weekends to be able to afford to commute from Southend. All of sudden you’re working seven days a week and you could come out of the end of it without having gained any experience. It’s easy to see why people get so disillusioned with the system.’ 

Three months into his tenure at Dazed, Louis’ day-to-day involves tasks that you'd expect for aspiring writers: shadowing working journalists, transcribing, researching, pitching and writing their own stories. ‘It feels more like an apprenticeship than an internship because of the learning aspect of it, you’re not expected to come in and know how the industry works straight away,’ he adds.

With several bylines now under his belt, Louis is already using the opportunity to gain additional experience working alongside Dazed’s social and Studio teams, which he hopes will set him in good stead once his internship ends. ‘I couldn’t ask for a better first creative job and the experience I’ve gained is invaluable,’ he says. ‘I now feel like somebody who is actually involved in the creative industry as opposed to being a part-timer; I have the belief that I could have a career in it. It’s not as far-reaching as it seemed six months ago.’ 

It sounds too good to be true and for most it will be – the cost of paying the LLW means that spaces on such internships are currently limited to two golden tickets per year. What do you do if you're not so lucky?

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A post shared by @mentoring.matters

An alternative path into the industry – thanks, in part, to the diversity reckoning fashion faced in 2020 – are mentorships that pair beginners with working creatives for 1-2-1 support over a six-month period. 

Mentoring Matters (founded by Laura Edwards, a design director who has worked with Christopher Kane and Alexander McQueen), Room Mentoring (founded by Elle's editor-in-chief Kenya Hunt), RAISEfashion, and The Junior Network are a handful of these schemes born during the pandemic – generally aimed at aiding Black and brown creatives and those from working-class backgrounds. 

In 2021 through Mentoring Matters, Aswan Magumbe, a BA Fashion Communication student at Central Saint Martins was paired with i-D’s global editorial director Olivia Singer. ‘Mentoring was more personal, so Olivia helped me pinpoint specific things I needed help with like pitching and how to approach PRs. I also got a lot more in-depth feedback about my writing,’ she shares. Yet, even with this, Aswan admits, ‘I’m still very stuck. Mentoring is good because you have somebody to turn to, but I still don’t know how to navigate internships. I really don’t know the route to take.’ 

As a working journalist, I’d be hesitant to take on a role as a mentor for this very reason. While I could impart practical wisdom on how to be a writer, I have no means of offering advice on where to practise those skills. While well-intentioned, these mentorship schemes are guiding marginalised voices into an industry that has been reluctant to give them a seat at the table to begin with. How responsible this is without fully understanding or doing more to remove the roadblocks that sadly still exist remains to be seen.

It’s a complex issue, yet to be properly acknowledged – the disheartening reality is that many editors I spoke to weren’t aware that their publications no longer offered internship opportunities. I urge them to similarly reflect on their own arduous journeys – regardless of whether they grafted as an intern or not – and question leadership on why they aren't putting more time and resources towards supporting the talents of tomorrow. Take a chance on a new writer with no bylines, become an unofficial mentor, answer that email asking for advice – do more!

We’ve talked enough about making opportunities more readily available for those who want to pursue a career in fashion – it’s time to finally do something about it. 

[firespirited]

Long post. Press j to skip.

I AM SICK OF THE STUPID AI DEBATES, does it imagine, is it based on copyrightable material, are my patterns in there?

That's not the point.

I briefly got into website design freelancing (less than 3 months) before burn out.

The main reason was that automation had begun for generating stylesheets in somewhat tasteful palettes, for automatically making html/xml (they really haven't learned to simplify and tidy code though, they just load 50 divs instead of one), for batch colourising design elements to match and savvy designers weren't building graphics from scratch and to spec unless it was their day job.

Custom php and database design died with the free bundled CMS packages that come with your host with massive mostly empty unused values.

No-one has talked about the previous waves of people automated out of work by website design generators, code generators, the fiverr atomisation of what would have been a designers job into 1 logo and a swatch inserted into a CMS by an unpaid intern. Reviews, tutorials, explanations and articles are generated by stealing youtube video captions, scraping fan sites and putting them on a webpage. Digitally processing images got automated with scripts stolen from fan creators who shared. Screencaps went from curated processed images made by a person to machine produced once half a second and uploaded indiscriminately. Media recaps get run into google translate and back which is why they often read as a little odd when you look up the first results.

This was people's work, some of it done out of love, some done for pay. It's all automated and any paid work is immediately copied/co-opted for 20 different half baked articles on sites with more traffic now. Another area of expertise I'd cultivated was deep dive research, poring over scans of magazines and analysing papers, fact checking. I manually checked people's code for errors or simplifications, you can get generators to do that too, even for php. I used to be an english-french translator.

The generators got renamed AI and slightly better at picture making and writing but it's the same concept.

The artists that designed the web templates are obscured, paid a flat fee by the CMS developpers, the CMS coders are obscured, paid for their code often in flat fees by a company that owns all copyright over the code and all the design elements that go with. That would have been me if I hadn't had further health issues, hiding a layer in one of the graphics or a joke in the code that may or may not make it through to the final product. Or I could be a proof reader and fact checker for articles that get barely enough traffic while they run as "multi snippets" in other publications.

The problem isn't that the machines got smarter, it's that they now encroach on a new much larger area of workers. I'd like to ask why the text to speech folks got a flat fee for their work for example: it's mass usage it should be residual based. So many coders and artists and writers got screwed into flat fee gigs instead of jobs that pay a minimum and more if it gets mass use.

The people willing to pay an artist for a rendition of their pet in the artist's style are the same willing to pay for me to rewrite a machine translation to have the same nuances as the original text. The same people who want free are going to push forward so they keep free if a little less special cats and translations. They're the same people who make clocks that last 5 years instead of the ones my great uncle made that outlived him. The same computer chips my aunt assembled in the UK for a basic wage are made with a lot more damaged tossed chips in a factory far away that you live in with suicide nets on the stairs.

There is so much more to 'AI' than the narrow snake oil you are being sold: it is the classic and ancient automation of work by replacing a human with a limited machine. Robot from serf (forced work for a small living)

It's a large scale generator just like ye olde glitter text generators except that threw a few pennies at the coders who made the generator and glitter text only matters when a human with a spark of imagination knows when to deploy it to funny effect. The issue is that artists and writers are being forced to gig already. We have already toppled into precariousness. We are already half way down the slippery slope if you can get paid a flat fee of $300 for something that could make 300k for the company. The generators are the big threat keeping folks afraid and looking at the *wrong* thing.

We need art and companies can afford to pay you for art. Gig work for artists isn't a safe stable living. The fact that they want to make machines to take that pittance isn't the point. There is money, lots of money. It's not being sent to the people who make art. It's not supporting artists to mess around and create something new. It's not a fight between you and a machine, it's a fight to have artists and artisans valued as deserving a living wage not surviving between gigs.

[worldofwardcraft]

How divided are we really?

December 11, 2023

The media keep telling us over and over what a divided nation we are. Proclaims Time Magazine, "There is no advanced industrial democracy in the world more politically divided…than the United States today." NBC News regularly grouses about "America's growing political divide." Then, there's The Wall Street Journal: "America is deeply divided. Our politics is broken, marked by anger, contempt and distrust." But while it may be true that ours is a nation separated in our opinions, the two sides are far from equal.

Take, for instance, the issue of abortion. Voters have consistently said they want to protect access to the procedure. In 2022, majorities rejected anti-abortion measures in Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana and backed abortion rights measures in California, Michigan, and Vermont. Last month, Ohio's citizens even enshrined abortion rights in their state constitution.

According to the Pew Research Center, 58% of US adults favor stricter gun laws. And a Gallup poll from last June tells us that 71% of Americans think same-sex marriage should be legal, which incidentally matches what Gallup recorded in 2022. In 2021, Pew Research found that 62% of those surveyed said they favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 40% who strongly backed the idea.

While only around 4% of companies in the US offer paid maternity leave (covering just 15–18% of workers), 82% of Americans support such a benefit. In fact, approval of paid family and maternity leave is both overwhelming and bipartisan, including more than three in four independents (76%) and seven in ten Republicans (70%)

In a study released by the Century Foundation last month, a full 93% of voters said they believe it's important for working parents of young children to be able to find and afford quality child care programs. In fact, for 63% it was extremely important. The survey found this sentiment echoed by 90% of Republicans, 93% of Independents and 96% of Democrats.

US News & World Report is undoubtedly correct when it says,

Americans’ values and personal opinions are more aligned than they are different from one another, indicating a hidden unity amid what at times can feel like divided discourse.

It's clear that sweeping majorities of Americans favor policies the Republican Party routinely opposes. Says Donald Trump's niece, psychologist Mary Trump, "This country isn't divided. A radical, armed, anti-democratic minority is attempting a hostile takeover." Maybe the media should quit trying to promote election horse races by relentlessly emphasizing our divisions and focus instead on the things most of us agree on.

[mikeo56]

Contrary to the popular narrative, Americans overwhelmingly agree on a startling range of issues. So why is there such a disconnect between what Americans want and what Americans get?  Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen, and co-author of the book “The Corporate Sabotage of America” identifies the culprits and outlines what we, the people, can do about it. Then, Ralph welcomes Ambassador Chas Freeman, who brings his vast diplomatic experience and historical insight to bear on the ongoing collective punishment raining down on the people of Gaza.

Robert Weissman is a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on a wide variety of issues ranging from corporate accountability and government transparency, to trade and globalization, to economic and regulatory policy. ​​For 20 years, he edited the Multinational Monitor magazine, and as the President of Public Citizen, Weissman has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations and the wealthy have over our democracy. He is the author, with Joan Claybrook, of The Corporate Sabotage of America’s Future And What We Can Do About It.

More than three in four people want to have CEOs held accountable for the crimes they commit. Eight in ten think the minimum wage is too low. Four in five support paid family leave, and on and on and on. By way of context, those are not regular numbers when you get polls. In fact, if you ask people, “Does the earth revolve around the sun?” only 80% of Americans agree that the earth revolves around the sun. So, when you get numbers in the 90% or 85%, these are extraordinary levels of national agreement. Robert Weissman

If you step back from the immediate moment, I think the big-picture story is that the bounds of what's considered important—or the policy solutions that are considered acceptable or reasonable—are really constructed by corporations and their lobbyists, and that's the problem we face every day. Robert Weissman

[shop-korea]

ITZY “BET ON ME” M/V @ITZY

DEAR - HARVARD - LAW

LET's - END - DOMESTIC

VIOLENCE - FASTER - IN

USA - WORLDWIDE - TOO

CALLING - THEM

LIBERTY - HOMES

WRITING - CHILDREN's - BOOKS

PEN - NAMES - MANY - LIKE YES

MANY - WRITERS

TITLE - 'A - GIRL - NAMED -

LIBERTY'

ANIMATED - STORY - FOR

CIHLDREN - A - REDHEAD

BASED - ON - 'PIPPI LONGSTOCKING' - USA

THUS - LIBERTY - HOMES

THERE - WILL - B - A - DAY

ALWAYS - FIRED - UNEMPLOYED

WON'T - B - ABLE - 2 - PAY THEIR

PROPERTY - TAXES - SO - THEN

HOMELESS - 'FOR - REALS'

THUS - MOSO - BAMBOO

LIKE - PODS

I - WILL - B - DESIGNING THIS

ALSO - 'LIBERTY - HOMES'

SW 2 ST - AND - SW 3 ST

SW NORTH RIVER DR - WHERE

I - AM - TAXPAYERS - PAY - FOR

SIDEWALKS - AND - THESE YES

HOMELESS - WITH - TENTS - FL

TRIED - 2 - MURDER - HARRASS

HURT - BADGER - 8TH - 'CRUEL

AND - UNUSUAL - PUNISHMENT

INFLICTED' - EVERY - 5 DAYS EA

MONTH - 2 - GET - MORE THAN

MINIMUM - WAGE - OVER - $150

THOUSAND - EACH - HUGE YES

WHITE - TRUCKS - WITH MIAMI

POLICE - EVERY - 7A - 2 - LET

THEM - KNOW - WILL - KILL

THEM - FINALLY - WITH YES

MIAMI - POLICE

HARVARD - LAW

SOS - SOS - SOS

THUS - WHAT - WE'RE - YES

CREATING - AND - WILL HAI

B - INTRODUCED - IN TOKYO

THOUGH - EXTREMELY HIGH

PAID - THEIR - YOUNG - MEN

AND - WOMEN - HAVE HUGE

BILLS - WHEN - FIRED - THEY'VE

KNIFED - THEIR - THROATS - AS

WOMEN - BILLS - CAN'T B PAID

WHY - TOKYO - HOTELS - R - SO

CHEAP - WHERE - I - HOMELESS

NOW - DELIVERED - BY SPECIAL

TRUCK - 2 - FLOORS

HDG - FREE - APP - 2 - APPLY

TONGUES - ONLY

SING - IN - TONGUES

2 FLOORS - MOSO - BAMBOO

WHITE - OUTSIDE - LIKE THE

PREVIOIUS - PHOTO - INSIDE

ALL - FURNITURE - BRAND

NEW - ALL - BAMBOO YES

MADE - SEE - THE - CUTEST

WHITE - SOFA - THIS - TIME

INSIDE - IT - MADE - OF YES

BAMBOO - THEN STRONGER

BUT - MINIATURE - THUS ITS

THIS - 2 - FLOORS - SO - ME

CAN - SEE - MIAMI - RIVER

LOT 17 - WILL - B - ISSUED

CRIMINAL - CHARGES FOR

NEVER - CLEANED - EVER

THEIR - PARKING - LOT AND

LOTS - OF - BROKEN - BEER

GLASSES - TRASH - THROWN

YET - THEY - CONTINUE - AS

PARKING - BY - PHONE

$1.49 - RESIDENTS - 1 HR

$0.70 - FOR - 30 MIN

YOU - GET - WHAT - U - PAID

FOR - THEREFORE - THEY

HAVE - 2 - SURRENDER THEIR

PARKING LOT 17

RED PANDA - FOOD - TRUCKS

24/7 - HOLIDAYS

GIGANTIC - NY - PIZZA

$1.00 - TAX - INCLUDED

0 CAL - SODAS - FRUIT

JUICES - $0.25

REMOVING - FENCES - BUT

SHOWING - MIAMI - RIVER

NO - MORE - PARKING BUT

TABLES - AND - 500 MPH

CAN - B - HANDLED - BY

SPECIAL - UMBRELLAS

CHANGING - FENCE - 2

WELL - ON - SIDEWALK

NEW - SIDEWALK - BY - YES

MACHINES - MOSO BAMBOO

INSTEAD - OF - UGLY - TREES

FLOODING - ABSORBED THEN

ON - NEW - SIDEWALK

LIBERTH - 2 FLOOR - HOMES

MINIATURE - HOUSES - YES

MADE - BY - MOSO BAMBOO

PAINTED - WHITE - AND YES

OTHER - COLORS - DEPENDING

WHAT - SIDEWALK - APP - WILL

TELL - U - DESIGN - CHOICES

EACH - 2 - FLOOR - HAS - YES

A - NAME - MINE - WILL - BE

'LIBERTY'

OTHERS - 'PURSUIT'

'HAPPY' - 'LIFE' - OTHERS

AN - ADDRESS - OBTAINED

BY - HARVARD - LAW - YES

LIKE - RV - DESIGNED - BUT

SOLAR - HOMES - SO - FREE

ELECTRICITY - BUT - WE'RE

RELEASING - WATER MAKER

2 PARTS - HYDROGEN OXYGEN

FOR - SHOWER - KITCHEN AND

TOILETS - AND - WHAT - COMES

OUT - EVAPORATED - SO - WITH

NO - WASTE - MINIATURE - YES

WHITE - SOFA - WHITE - WALLS

NON- BREAKABLE - WINDOWS

WE - SEE - OUT - NO ONE CAN

SEE - INSIDE - EDGE - HAS YES

CLEAR - BUT - SHADED INSIDE

SMALL - NOT - LONG - ADULT

AND - KIDS - SCOOTER - AND

IN - THERE - WHERE - THEY'VE

PLUGGED - 2 - RECHARG NEXT

2 - IT - USPS - MAILBOX - BUT

LOCKABLE - HUGE - INSIDE AS

2 - RECEIVE - MAGAZINES YES

PERFECT - AND - PACKAGES

INSIDE - WILL - SHOW - TRUE

ANIMATED - WHAT's - INSIDE

ONE - CLICK - APP - AND THE

LIKE - PC - WILL - SHOW THE

INSIDE - OF - MAILBOX USPS

SHOWER - BOTTOM - FLOOR

KITCHEN - BOOK CASE - AND

FULL - KITCHEN - OVEN AND

MICROWAVEABLE - SOUND

PROOFED - NON-FLAMMABLE

SPECIAL - SUBSTANCE PUT IN

MOSO - BAMBOO - SO - CAN'T

B - BURNT - BED - ABOVE NICE

SMALL - STAIRS - COMPUTER

ROOM - TOKYO - PROVIDING

WI FI - AND - GADGET - SO WE

HAVE - WI FI - EVERYWHERE

WE - GO - NO - MORE - PLANS

NEEDED - AND - WE - CAN

TRAVEL - WORLDWIDE YES

FREE - WI FI - ALL - OVER

THE - WORLD - ALSO - SO

NO - MORE - EXPENSE

FREE - 2 - FLOOR - YES

MINIATURE - HOUSES

MADE - BY - MOSO BAMBOO

ALL - MINIATURE - BUT - ALL

MADE - BY - MOSO BAMBOO

FULLY - FURNISHED - THIS IS

DELIVERED - BY - SPECIAL

TRUCK - AND - CAN HANDLE

500 MPH - WINDS - BETTER

THAN - TENT - WHERE THEY

KILL - OCCUPANTS - AND FL

STEAL - TENT - AND THINGS

DOOR - OPEN - 2 - THE SIDES

APP - 2 C - IN - FRONT - OF

DOOR - AND - PEOPLE ON

STREETS - HIDDEN CAMERA

THEN - U - CAN - GO - OUT

PREPARED - MORE - THAN

ENOUGH - SPACE - 4 - YES

WALKERS - THERE - DRIUNKS

2 - AND - FR - OF - THE WHARF

WE'RE - BUYING - THAT PLACE

BUYING - BOX VAULT - ALSO 2

RED - PANDA - INN - 2 - YES

CONTROL - SURROUNDINGS

BOOTING - OUT - THE OTHER

PARKING - SPACE - 4 - TRUE

EMPLOYEES - ONLY - YES - 2

THUS - WE - SOLVED - THE

200 MPH - WINDS - COMING

POLICE - LIKE - 2 - GIVE - TO

EMERGENCY - HOUSING

RELIGIOUS - ORGANIZATIONS

ILLEGAL - CAMERAS - 2 - SEE

GIRLS - WITHOUT - BRAS - AS

THEY - SLEEP - VIDEO - TRUE

VOYEARISM - AND - ILLEGAL

SEARCH - 2 - AND - FRO - YOU

MUST - B - THERE - B 4 - 6:30P

OR - HOMELESS - U - CAN'T

STAY - 8A - 4P - WEEKDAYS

U - CAN'T - HAVE - SHOWER

THOSE - TOILETS - 3 MEALS

DAILY - REAL - SMALL - AND

DON'T - ENCOURAGE - SHORTS

SLEEVELESS - RELIGIOUS

WEIRDOS - WHO - DON'T FEED

CATS - DOVES - BIRDS - MORE

WE'RE - CLOSING - MANY - IN

FUTURE - SHOWER - TOILETS

5 MIN - RELIGIOUS - PERVERTS

75 % - OF - INCOME - SSI - THAT

IS - ILLEGAL - MONEY - ORDERS

BLANK - REAL - ILLEGAL STUFF

SO - LIBERTY - MINIATURE

HOUSES - 2 FLOORS - THUS

NO - PROPERTY - TAXES BUT

EACH - HOUSE - HAS - A - YES

FOREVER - PERMIT - THERE

PROVIDED - BY - HARVARD

LAW - SO - WON'T - B - YES

BOTHERED - BY - ANYONE

3 EXITS - L AND R AND THE

FRONT - ALL - SIDEWAYS

HOW - OPENS - ALL FREE

WATER - ELECTRICITY THE

REFRIGERATOR - SOLAR &

WATER - MAKER - THUS NO

BILLS - INCLUDING - BUSINESS

RESIDENTIAL - PROPERTY TAX

SO - FREE - 2 - LIVE - THERE

YES - FOREVER - AND - TRUE

APPROVED - HEIRS - OF THE

PLACE - ALL - SPEAKS - IN

TONGJES - HDG - BANKS

HDG - LIBERTY - HOMES

HOMES - WITH - NAMES

LEGAL - ADDRESS GIVEN

USPS - LOCKED - MAILBOX

THEN WE - HAVE ADDRESS

HDG - WILL - PROVIDE FOR

KIA - TRAINING - 2 - GET - A

FLORIDA - TEXAS - DRIVER's

LICENSE - SO - WE - ALL YES

HAVE - ID - INCLUDES - WE

GIVE - FREE - US PASSPORTS

ALL - REQUIRED - INCLUDING

EYES - REGISTERED - WE GIVE

ALL - ID's - FREE - SSN - VOTER

NATURALIZED - ALL - ID - YES

WE - NOW - WILL - GIVE - FREE

REGISTER - INCLUDING - DEBIT

CREDIT - CARDS - STOLEN - WE

ISSUE - NEW - ONES - AND - WE

WILL - REGISTER - AGAIN - ALL

INFO - 4 - DIRECT - DEPOSITS

INCLUDING - SOCIAL SECURITY

SO - NEW - CHECKING - NEW

CARDS - EASY - PEASY - THUS

HARVARD - LAW - THIS - OUR

PROPOSAL - 2 - END - THESE

MURDERS - TORTURE - TRUE

ABUSE - OF - THE HOMELESS

I'M - HARRASSED - YELLED BY

MR KIM - MOST - LIKELY - HE's

NORTH - KOREAN - AN - OLD

PRUNE - PROSTITUTE - WHO

TOPLESS - 2 - GET - FOOD &

DRINKS - WHAT - A - WEIRDO

THUS - HARVARD - LAW

TOKYO - MALE - SCIENTISTS

CREATING - 2 FLOOR - TRUE

WONDER - 4 - DELI VERY - 2

50 STATES - AND - TOKYO

SEOUL - MAKATI - MANILA

TAX FREE - HONG KONG AS

PODS - DELIVERED - 2 - US

HARVARD - LAW

GIVE - LEGAL - PERMITS

WE - NEED - 2 - TALK YES

OUR - 2 FLOOR - FURNISHED

MINIATURE - HOUSES 4 THE

SIDEWALKS - NEW YORK - 2

WITHSTANDS - 500 MPH

WINDS - WILL - CLEAN THE

SNOW - SURROUNDING AND

ABOVE - AUTO - JESUS - YES

IS - LORD - HARVARD - GIVE

US - NEW - ADDRESS - ALSO

LOCKED - MAILBOX - 4 USPS

'IN - GOD - WE - TRUST' - YES

HARVARD - LAW - LET's TALK

[funkywhodee]

Being Dressed by Your Mum Isn't That Bad

Let me first begin by introducing my mum- Vinita Chitnis, an all-rounded powerhouse with a wiz-brain perfectly aligned to the fashion goals and ideals that are actually the need of the hour today; when words like "sustainability", "upcycling", "revivals" and "thrifting" have been shoved into the woke-abulary of today, me and my quintessentially consumer-conscious (and so typically Indian) family have been practicing this since way before I was a blip-sized dot on an ultrasound monitor. Her side of the family, the Deshmukhs, are a largely creative and logical group- it only makes sense that my mother inherited their razor-sharp wit along with the flowy imagination that shows so clearly in the garments and products she designs. Her mother, Hema, was much the same. She is the original source of spreading the love for homemade crafts among loved ones. One of my earliest memories of my grandmother was of her handing me a box of acrylic paints, 4 brand-new white napkins and saying (and I quote), "Go nuts." The last two generations of women I'm so proud to be related to are the reason why my creative and analytical sides have been equally nurtured, which is why I'm now studying at the National Institute of Fashion Technology. 

Pictured above: my mother at a Bhai Dooj party, November, 2022.

A bouquet gifted to my grandparents on their anniversary, December 2017.

Me modelling the pink wrapping paper I stole from it I turned into flowers (in the spirit of creativity, of course!), December, 2017.

Can you achieve sustainability via home-sewing?

According to Unearth Magazine, sustainable fashion and home-sewing go hand-in-hand, provided that the materials sourced for one's projects are ethical and eco-friendly. But let's get into semantics first: having spent 70 long hours studying Fashion Basics at college, it would be a spot on my label as a NIFTian to simply not know it all. Let's get into some definitions:

Sustainability: According to greendreamer.com, the word sustainable is defined as “capable of being sustained.” Therefore, a sustainable fashion industry is one that must operate in ways that can continue working for years and decades to come. If we promote and scavenge off an industry of such wasteful proportions, then our near future holds no hope for even basic necessities like clean food and fertile soil. The fashion industry overproduces products by about 30-40% each season, contributes roughly 10% of all global carbon emissions and is the world's second worst offender in terms of water and plastic pollution (source: pirg.org). Sustainability is also an umbrella term for fashion that has been ethically and environmentally produced.

Ethical fashion: In a related term, this is also prevalent in the conscious consumerism world, refers to clothing made in ways that value social welfare and worker rights. For vegans, ethical fashion may also refer to the avoidance of pelts, leather, and animal fibers in the clothes. According to Legal Services India (e-journal), out of India's whopping 1.26 billion population, 8 million are employed or in someway related to the garment sector. Even so, their research proved that garment workers of India are not even paid the minimum wage by the employer, and are continuously exposed to dust and noises. They even suffer from asthma, bladder cancer, hearing loss and skin diseases. Thus, having supply chain transparency is a must.

Supply chain: This is a huge facet of ethical production. Simply put, the supply chain refers to a network of individuals and companies who are involved in creating a product and delivering it to the consumer. Links on the chain begin with the producers of the raw materials and end when the van delivers the finished product to the end user (source: Investopedia). Thus, the creation of one single garment is the end product of collaboration between fiber harvesters, to the weavers, to the artisans/designers, the tailors and then the distributors. Ill-treatment of any class here is possible, especially the ones at the beginning of the chain. Thus, supply chain transparency allows for such companies (usually multi-million dollar ones) to prove that they are ethical producers and are not merely profit-oriented.

Indigo Exhibit, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum, Ahmedabad, Gujarat. We came here for a field visit- one of the plaques reading out the history of indigo struck me very deeply: "There isn't a fiber of indigo that has been worn in England that doesn't have the blood of the Indians on it."

The Indigo Crisis was a tragic event in modern history when the British Raj raised the demand for raw indigo textile to be exploited from poor Indian farmers who couldn't even afford their own food crop. It was resolved by the Indigo Mutiny of 1859 in Bengal.

'Nil Darpan', a play written by Dinabandhu Mitra on the same, circa 1859.

Now, back to home-sewing. Having absorbed all these facts, let's review my mother's store of work so far. After 4 very long hours of calculation and deliberation with her, we arrived at a specific number: at least 75% of all my mom's projects make some or even total use of scrap- be it fabric, buttons, zippers, pockets, ribbons and so on. Approximately 8/10 of her fabric stock is sourced from local handlooms, and small vendors and craftsmen, and some of it is derived from left-over (usually synthetic polyester) or thrifted sources. Out of our existing wardrobe of garments, (out of which most of these are gifted by others) 40% of my clothes, 80% of her clothes and 20% of my father's clothes have been stitched or in some way altered by her own hand. The remaining garments are hand-me-downs, presents, or sourced from an RTW producer (but the latter group is very few and far between).

A *very* minute fraction of my mother's collection- note the old spice box used for storing sequins, and empty lotion jars and chocolate tins to store buttons.

Another *very* minute fraction of my mother's collection of scrap fabric.

Covering up the mess with a blanket, made with scrap fabric.

This collection of photographs reminded me of a funny anecdote said by celebrated embroiderer and master-artist, Mr. Asif Shaikh. We were on a field trip to see his 37-piece collection of different Indian embroidery styles called "White on White". He was lovingly handling a Marodi embroidery on silk tapestry when he commented, "The women of the old times thought nothing of wearing 9 yards everyday. And today's generation? Do meter se hi kaam ho jaata hai."

Mr. Asif Shaikh, posing with a Bandhini piece at White on White, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Museum, Ahmedabad. (image credits: @kasturbhailalbhaimuseum on IG)

I found his statement ironic to say the least- today's generation of gross consumerism might not actually wear a lot of fabric in one outfit, but how much net fabric really is there in our closets? Those yesteryears of nine yards were hardly unethical- most working class people didn't own more than 4-5 outfits in total. So what really changed? Where once a garment lasted for years, people think nothing of wearing a piece of clothing 2 or 3 times and then just discarding it. Our closets have grown to hold vast clothing collections and accordingly, the largest producers of garments today all cater to pret-a-porter consumers.

Navratri chaniya. Borders made from pasting old sari borders + gota. Total cost is approximately Rs 100 (for a new reel of gota from a local vendor).

A simpler set of lesser quality- at 6 times the price.

Break for a minute here- I've been throwing around far too many terms to not explain them. For reference, here's the list of words we just discussed:

Consumerism: It is the idea that increasing the consumption of goods and services purchased in the market is always a desirable goal, and that a person's well-being and happiness depend fundamentally on obtaining consumer goods and material possessions (source: Investopedia). We can see greater usage of these ideals today in the form of "retail therapy"- that any ups and downs of life warrant a person to simply go and shop as an escape. Consumerism is an excellent business model in capitalistic economies.

Capitalism: It is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state (source: Wikipedia). Competition is the sole driving factor of different private companies to produce great variety over a short period of time. Their ad campaigns teach people that what they have is less. Buying into the shallow and temporary happiness gleaned from material gain is dangerous at the individual level too. It puts a strain on our minds as well as pockets, but multi-million companies are famous for not caring about the consequences of their actions.

Shein: A global fast fashion giant. These are the web results for last week's winter collection launch.

3. Fast Fashion: Fast fashion is a term used to describe the clothing industry's business model of replicating recent catwalk trends and high-fashion designs, mass-producing them at a low cost, and bringing them to retail stores quickly, while demand is at its highest. Often we see them in retail stores, racks and racks of clothes just to be discarded when a new set of collections come out.

The winterwear collection at Reliance Trends, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This is the men's shirt collection- it is simply one single pattern repeated over and over again in different colors. We visited the store on a field trip, and the only conclusion I came to was that fast fashion really doesn't save room or the time to allow for innovation and creativity.

Moreover, the sheer quantity of clothes present in one single store (even out of sale season) is humungous. On the same field trip, I made the calculation:

There were 78 full hangers on a single rack alone. There were 21 such racks in one quarter of the store. The store had 4 such corners on each floor, plus another storey above. The total math amounts to 13,104 garments (plus a few I must have easily missed).

In contrast to this, our family wears the garments made by my mother for years together, until the fabric itself gives out, usually because handmade items (even if not haute couture) are still tailor-made to fit our silhouettes perfectly, and sewn by a loved one. The biggest advantage of having a self-made designer in the family is that

There's sentimental value in the clothing, so we don't throw it away until we have genuine reason to discard it.

The creator herself is conscious about the sourcing of her fabric and material and choice of designs- if the garments are ill-fitting or if the material isn't skin-friendly then her clothes won't be worn. To her, that's just a waste of time and effort.

Having spent hours familiarizing herself with the project, she knows best about improving on her designs, her fittings and the project's eventual reuse when its utility runs out.

Thus, producing home-sewn clothes incites a producer to make durable, reusable, and bodily diverse garments at a fraction of the cost. So yes, I suppose one can safely conclude that home-sewing, and the small business model subsequently derived from it, might just be the Hail Mary we all need for saving Earth!

Home-sewing seems to now be taking up Gen-Z by storm...

Now all everyone can talk about is "doing embroidery, feeling very zen", spending dates at thrift stores, and revival of vintage wear. Seeing sustainable practices spreading wide is impressive, but the question still remains: how long will saving the planet remain trendy? Well, while it's still in vogue, here are some sustainable small businesses and groups that support these practices:

~ athriftynotion.com is an online store that engages in the buying and selling of sustainable, vintage, and deadstock fabrics. They are based in Kansas, USA.

~@your_ptashka (IG) is a fashion designer who uses donated fabrics to create one-of-a-kind pieces which she sells on her couture site of the same name. She is based in Ukraine.

@erenanaomi (IG) is a lace-maker and historian who is associated with the Antonio Ratti Textile Center. She runs her small business along with educating people on the history and co-existence of laces with styles and trends.

And so, my journey with fashion continues- with consumer-consciousness in one hand, and a stellar fashion designer in the other!

Enclosed are some photos to showcase my mother's previous projects:

Costume design ideas for the 12 years of school events- a compilation of the memorable ones. Top (L-R): July 2015, Wall-E costume donned over checked pajama pants (both made out of scrap cardboard and cotton respectively); August 2016, lead role in Mary Poppins- hat sourced from dyeing an old toy, a thrifted vintage blouse, and skirt + coat sewn from leftover upholstery fabric. Bottom (L-R): December 2019, lead roles in The Sound of Music- satin gown from upcycling an 'unstylish' sari, sundress + coat from cotton silk and handsewn; Halloween costume (Loki) October 2021, thrifted tweed dress with draped green fabric (attached with safety pins) and paired with hand-me-down black pumps and leather belt, with headdress handmade from card paper, gold foil and scrap elastic.

Revamping a pair of bellbottom denim jeans previously belonging to my aunt in '95. Now religiously worn by me in college.

Top: My mother at her Haldi ceremony, December 2002. Bottom: Preserving and having me wear the same outfit for a wedding, February 2015.

Constructing a denim tote bag out of old jeans, August, 2022. Cheeky design by me.

But sometimes she does create wonderful pieces out of totally new fabric too! Dhoop-chhaanv (light-shadow) silk lehenga with brocade border, bought from a local vendor in Jaipur, Rajasthan, and worn Gujarati-style, November, 2016. (pictured on the right)

The people who make use of all her scrap fabric are, in fact, quite diverse. L: June, 2022. R: January, 2019. Mats created out of old curtains and blankets, old and soft polyester blend tshirts (soon to be discarded after years of use).

Dear reader, find yourself a mum like no other. But if you can't, do let this post always remind you that we as a society are always growing, always learning. Let it allow you to encourage more sustainable models. Push more innovators towards the fashion sector- specifically oriented to cater to middle-class consumers with misinformed purchasing habits. Find creators of fashion who will help you translate your personality into your apparel, just like I've found mine.

"My sewing machine and I, that's real friendship for you." ~Mom

[canmom]

because i saw a post about it

Quick calculation, if most speculative fiction magazines at least as of 2015 pay 6-8 cents per word, and accept stories in the range from thousands to tens of thousands (say 5k-20k), the typical pay per story is $300 (for a 5k short story at 6 cents per word) to $1600 (for a 20k novella at 8 cents per word).

Which means to make the US federal minimum wage of $7.25, the short story shouldn’t take more than about 42 hours of work, the novella no more than 221. (This should include all the time spent thinking up ideas editing, sending out submissions, etc.)

To make the $15 semi-living wage currently being demanded by many people in the US, the short story shouldn’t take more than 20 hours of work, the novella no more than 107 hours.

To make the same as, say, working for a (purely hypothetical) California-based, venture capital-funded online education company that pays $32/h to its overseas contractors, the short story should take about 9-10h, the novella about 50h.

So, to make a living off writing for speculative fiction magazines with a 40 hour work week at $15/h, that would suggest writers are selling 8 short stories every month. To pull get minimum wage, they’d need to be selling four. Alternatively, they could sell about three novellas every two months.

That said, 40 hours may be the nominal average working week, but I rarely ever get close. If you can live on fewer hours, you don’t need to sell as many stories. I estimate that I live on about £800/mo (£659 rent in a shared London house, the rest on food/utilities/transport/etc.). Based on that calculation, I could maintain my current lifestyle if I was capable of selling 3.6 stories per month.

We should incidentally multiply the amount of time one can spend on a novella by the probability of it getting accepted. i.e. if half your stories never get printed, you can only afford to spend 10 hours on each.

I don’t know of any author who is able to publish multiple stories per month, but it might be interesting to take authors with published short story bibliographies and run the numbers to see how much it paid them.

My hunch is “not nearly enough to live on” - it does not seem realistic to try to make a living off of writing short sff stories without some kind of day job. This isn’t really surprising. A look at more recent data shows that some publishers will pay >$0.20 per word, but I imagine they’re jammed up with submissions.

I haven’t run the numbers for illustration. At least as far as social media posts go, commission rates are generally set by the seller rather than the buyer - though I imagine there’s higher tiers of pro illustration that I don’t know about for magazines and such. A lot more people seem to be able to make a living on visual art commissions than as short story writers, at least?

Extrapolation to what effect this may have on art under capitalism will have to come at some point in the future.

[oscopelabs]

‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

[serendipitous-magic]

Why Don’t We Read: An Impromptu Essay By Me Because I’m Mad

You know how everyone is always saying “oh, I was such a big reader when I was a kid but I just don’t read books anymore, I don’t know what happened”? And how old people are always griping about “This is called a BOOK, it has no commercials and no loading screens, hardy har har har snorf har”?

What if it’s because we just don’t have time anymore?

Think about it. More and more and more of our time on earth is eaten up at our jobs just trying to survive in an economy where “minimum wage” covers maybe 1/3 of bare minimum expenses. And not only that, but we’re expected to juggle more and more and more things every single day. Long, uninterrupted hours simply... do not exist anymore.

Every day you have to not only commute to work, and then work, and then commute back, plus all the little chores and mundanities that make up every day life, cooking food and then eating food and folding laundry and cleaning and putting gas in the car and don’t forget that dentist appointment and better call Mom and if you have a lawn you have to water it and weed it and you have to figure out if you have enough to pay rent this month and you still have to call FedEx about that missing package and now you have to cook again and now there’s more laundry and so many emails to respond to and it’s been months since you washed your sheets hasn’t it and

BUT THEN

You are expected to do and be and keep up with so many things.

You’re supposed to work out, or jog, or do yoga, and you’re supposed to meditate or do a breathing exercise daily because it’s good for you, and while you’re at it, make sure that your living space looks like a magazine or an Instagram post, you need X minutes of sunshine a day to be healthy and Y minutes of exercise and Z number of steps, and you need to be an environmentalist and make sure you’re doing your part to save the planet, and you need to be constantly self improving, you need to be learning a language on Duolingo and doing projects like crocheting or writing or antiquing, you have to be completely unproblematic and constantly monitor everything you do and say and post because one tiny little thing can have the internet jumping down your throat, you’re supposed to be a nutritionist and a fitness nut and an expert on everything you talk about because society has become so black and white that saying “I don’t know” or “I didn’t know that before” is looked on as unacceptable,  you’re supposed to know what’s in your coffee and where it came from, you’re supposed to be a son a daughter a sibling a parent a student a mentor but also you’re supposed to be an interior designer, a small business owner (if you do any kind of Etsy or commission thing), a revolutionary (you’d better care about every overwhelming, exhausting injustice in the world and you’d better take action against it - see below), a curator (if only of your own blog), a rhetor (you’d better damn well know how to argue or you’re screwed in this society), a teacher (because school districts don’t teach anyone shit), a negotiation expert because it is car salesmen and insurance agencies’ job to fuck you over as hard as they possibly can.

Oh and don’t forget, you’re supposed to simplify your life and live in the moment. That one’s very important.

All of this is most likely while you’re already working anywhere from 20-40+ hours per week.

Keep up with your friends on Facebook, spend time to see what they’ve been up to, spend time posting your own pictures, catch up with your Instagram and Twitter and Tumblr feed, and for fuck’s sake you’d better make sure you’re reblogging all the right things about current social events, and you’d better also be caught up on the news, which all happens and changes so fast now that communication is instantaneous, keep up with all the politics, know every new outrage and be outraged about it, keep up with the politicians, the scientists begging us to listen, the latest news about the celebrity outed as a bigot, the latest shooting, the latest bombing, the latest protest, you’d better keep up with all of that and know what’s happening in the world, every minute of every day, and oh don’t worry about having to seek the news out, it comes to you. Every little ping on your phone is a new piece of news.

And you’d better care about it all. You’d better have enough energy in your body and mind to care about all the politics and all the injustice, and be rightly outraged every single day by the state of the world and every new horror, but you’d better also care about the dying planet and the burning rainforests, the oil spill, the glacial melt, you’d better be outraged about that too and you’d better be able to act on that outrage because those are all so important, and they are, but then you also have to care about insurance companies ruining people’s lives by making it impossible to afford healthcare, and you have to care about how agricultural companies have made cruel and byzantine webs of laws to drive farms out of business and make food, a basic necessity of life, a business, and one that’s designed not to feed and nurture people but to make money. And then while we’re on the topic of money you’d better care that the top 10 richest companies in the world create 70% of the world’s pollution, and you’d better care about how billionaires could fix most of the world’s biggest problems and they simply choose not to, and how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and everyone like them have an amount of money and resources that no single person could ever come close to earning, and how if that wealth was fairly redistributed and recirculated into the economy then maybe minimum wage would actually earn you a living and that’s not even to mention the other systems of brutality and cruelty and injustice in society, the racism, the homophobia, the ableism, the ageism, the sexism, the -ism -ism -ism on for infinity

So you’d better buy and use reusable straws and reusable coffee cups, you’d better cut down on your CO2 emissions, you’d better take shorter showers, you’d better recycle your plastics and spend time at the store thinking about how you can buy things with less plastic wrapping, while you’re also thinking about those big agriculture companies, oh and by the way your eggs? The chickens they came from live in cages, barely being allowed to move for their entire lives, and you’d better be outraged about that too. Where do you think that milk came from? What does that cow look like? How about those peas, were they picked by someone being paid $1 an hour? Every single item on the shelf has some deep horror woven into its backstory. 

You’d better sign every petition you can and you’d better reblog the right things about taking action against injustice and you’d better be vocal about it, you’d better buy your soap and your clothes from small businesses instead of supporting the big evil ones that are much easier to access and much, much cheaper (because somebody suffered, somewhere along the line, to make it that cheap), you’d better remember to save your pasta water to water your plants with instead of wasting it, you’d better make your gifts by hand (if you have the time, which you don’t), and 

And then there’s the beauty industry.

You cannot go a single day without seeing something about “lose weight fast!” or “The Skinny Girl Cookbook!” or “This Weird Thing Burns Belly Fat!”, and everyone you see on screen is twig-thin or muscled, and don’t forget that you’re supposed to take the time to love yourself and practice body positivity too, oh wait no it’s too late, now body neutrality is the right thing to say and think. Every part of your face and body has some malady and you can buy a cure! Spend this much to get rid of acne, spend this much to wax your legs, buy this for wrinkles and that for stretch marks, this cream smooths out your skin to look like an eggshell instead of human flesh, that cream “fixes” those bumps on your arms that apparently aren’t allowed to exist, a basic face of makeup is at least 5 products if not 10, there are countless tutorials on how to make yourself better, because you aren’t okay as you are and you never will be as long as somebody can sell  you something to “fix” yourself. 

Oh, and that’s more time spent, too. Take the time to shave, to moisturize, to do your 3-step skincare routine, to slather all different kinds of goops and goos on various parts of you, take the time to pluck your eyebrows and exfoliate your feet and

Everything wants your attention, every second of every day. Because attention is money. Netflix Hulu Youtube watch this ad look at this ad Twitter Disney+ Twitter again Facebook more ads look at this ad sign up for this subscription package watch this new season of this show, watch this new movie, watch this watch this watch this watch look at this this watch this watch this look at this look at this look at this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this look over here look at this look at this look over here watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this watch this look at this

And then at the end of the day you still have to reserve time for the people in your life that are important to you, and leave time for those long conversations with your sister or time to bond with your kid or time to go on dates with your S.O.

And then you’re supposed to take time for yourself. Self care. Like social media is always saying to do. Take a bath, drink some tea, relax. If you have time.

And all of that. ALL of that. Most likely happens in the small slivers of time before and after your work day, or on the weekend in the small sliver of time before or after you fold that laundry and cook dinner and attend to your personal matters and maybe hang out with a friend if you’re lucky.

And I just described a fairly privileged, not-on-the-brink-of-poverty, not-in-and-out-of-the-hospital, not-constantly-targeted-by-violence-or-oppression life. I just described a cushy life.

Is it any fucking wonder that we all feel shattered? Like our time, even on free days with absolutely nothing scheduled, is made up of tiny pieces? Is it any wonder that it seems like nobody can sit down with a book anymore?

I’m so fucking tired.

[arcticdementor]

Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

…

Life in the “content” industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive. There are staff writers at big-name publications who produce thousands of words every week and who make less than $40,000 a year for their trouble. There are permanent employees of highly prestigious newspapers and magazines who don’t receive health insurance. Venues close all the time. Mourning another huge round of layoffs is a regular bonding experience for people in the industry. Writers have to constantly job hop just to try and grind out an extra $1,500 a year, making their whole lives permanent job interviews where they can’t risk offending their potential bosses and peers. Many of them dream of selling that book to save themselves financially, not seeming to understand that book advances have fallen 40% in 10 years - median figure now $6,080 - and that the odds of actually making back even that meager advance are slim, meaning most authors are making less than minimum wage from their books when you do the math. They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision. They live in fear of being the one to lose out when the next layoffs come and the game of media musical chairs spins up once again. They have to pretend to like ghouls like Ezra Klein and Jonah Peretti and make believe that there’s such a thing as “the Daily Beast reputation for excellence.”

I have always felt bad for them, despite our differences, because of these conditions. And they have a right to be angry. But they don’t have much in the way of self-awareness about where their anger really lies. A newsletter company hosting Bari Weiss is why you can’t pay your student loans? You sure?

They’ll tell you about the terrible conditions in their industry themselves, when they’re feeling honest. So what are they really mad about? That I’m making a really-just-decent guaranteed wage for just one year? Or that this decent wage is the kind of money many of them dream of making despite the fact that, in their minds, they’ve done everything right and played by all the rules? Is their anger really about a half-dozen guys whose writing you have to actively seek out to see? (If you click the button and put in your email address, you’ll get these newsletters. If you don’t, you won’t. So if you’re a media type who hates my writing, consider just… not clicking that button.) Or do they need someplace to put the rage and resentment that grows inside them as they realize, no, it’s not getting better, this is all I get?

It’s true that I have, in a very limited way, achieved the new American dream: getting a little bit of VC cash. I’m sorry. But it’s much much less than one half of what Felix Salmon was making in 2017 and again, it’s only for one year.

You think the writers complaining in that piece I linked to at the top wanted to be here, at this place in their career, after all those years of hustling? You think decades into their media career, the writers who decamped to Substack said to themselves “you know, I’d really like to be in my 40s and having to hope that enough people will pitch in $5 a month so I can pay my mortgage”? No. But the industry didn’t give them what they felt they deserved either. So they displace and project. They can hate Jesse Singal, but Jesse Singal isn’t where this burning anger is coming from. Neither am I. They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions and were surprised to find that they’re drifting into middle age without anything resembling financial security. I feel for them as I feel for all people living economically precarious lives, but getting rid of Substack or any of its writers will not do anything to fix their industry or their jobs. They wanted more and they got less and it hurts. This isn’t what they dreamed. That’s what this is really about.

…

My own deal here is not mysterious. It’s just based on a fact that the blue checks on Twitter have never wanted to accept. I got offered money to write here for the same reason I got offered to write for The New York Times and Harper’s and The Washington Post and The LA Times, the same reason I’ve gotten a half-dozen invitations to pitch since I started here a few weeks ago, the same reason a literary agent sought me out and asked me to write a book, the same reason I sold that book for a decent advance: because I pull traffic. Though I am a social outcast from professional opinion writing, I have a better freelance publishing history than many, many of my critics who are paid-up, obedient members of the media social scene. Why? Because the editors who hired me thought I was a great guy? No. Because I pull traffic. I always have. That’s why you’re reading this on Substack right now.

…

A really important lesson to learn, in life, is this: your enemies are more honest about you than your friends ever will be. I’ve been telling the blue checks for over a decade that their industry was existentially fucked, that the all-advertising model was broken, that Google and Facebook would inevitably hoover up all the profit, that there are too many affluent kids fresh out of college just looking for a foothold in New York who’ll work for next to nothing and in doing so driving down the wages of everyone else, that their mockery of early subscription programs like Times Select was creating a disastrous industry expectation that asking your readers directly for money was embarrassing. Trump is gone and the news business is cratering. Michael Tracey didn’t make that happen. None of this anger will heal what’s wrong. If you get all of the people you don’t like fired from Substack tomorrow, what will change? How will your life improve? Greenwald will spend more time with his hottie husband and his beloved kids and his 6,000 dogs in his beautiful home in Rio. Glenn will be fine. How do we do the real work of getting you job security and a decent wage?

…

But how do things get better in that way? Only through real self-criticism (which Twitter makes impossible) and by asking hard questions. Questions like one that has not been credibly confronted a single time in this entire media meltdown: why are so many people subscribing to Substacks? What is the traditional media not providing that they’re seeking elsewhere? Why have half a million people signed up as paying subscribers of various Substack newsletters, if the establishment media is providing the diversity of viewpoints that is an absolute market requirement in a country with a vast diversity of opinions? You can try to make an adult determination about that question, to better understand what media is missing, or you can read this and write some shitty joke tweet while your industry burns to the ground around you. It’s your call.

Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you - college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and wrong. So maybe try and look at where your problems actually come from. They’re not going away.

Now steel yourselves, media people, take a shot of something strong, look yourself in the eye in the mirror, summon you most honest self, and tell me: am I wrong?