Back Issues

Dead Horse Bay-themed rum punch at a SoHo loft and jobs lost to bots

I have a profile on the new Perfectly Imperfect platform, where I’ve recommended seven things (besides the original five I did for the newsletter). This week especially, we may all be experiencing recommendation overload, but the app is working like an affirmation exercise for me: if I like something, I should be able to defend liking it, publicly, instead of giving in to cynicism amongst all the spon con, ad reads, and affiliate linking. Perhaps the way around compromised tastes isn’t to trash the cash grabs—at least not always—but to suggest something genuine.

Speaking of, I just noticed that Spike are pushing their old copies, including this NYC Issue from 2020, which features an essay I wrote (and later edited to include in my book Artless), called “Apocalypse Chic.” Books I and II of NUTS (which I helped edit)—are sold out on the website but now available here. Does anyone buy back issues? Sometimes I wonder this and then check if the special edition 2016 V magazine that Patrik and I edited with Lady Gaga is still available on their site, and it is, for $250.

Last week, I went to a party celebrating the artist Lena Henke at the beautiful, gothy SoHo loft of Lyndsey Welgos and Ara Anjargolian. As the elevator opened straight into its interior, one of their small children, wearing a suit, greeted me and advised as to where to place my coat. Lyndsey wasn’t far behind, assuring me she hadn’t asked her son to play the butler. (I have no problem with it and later told a friend there who had brought her second baby that she must train her children in the same way if she ever wants to host.)

I was impressed with the spread, by writer/editor Elizabeth Wiet, which included crème brûlée in mini ramekins, a sesame sausage wreath with pomegranate relish, puff pastry vol-au-vent with crème fraîche and caviar, and, like eight more dishes, as well as the manned martini bar and the rum punch bowl, strewn, as a nod to Henke’s “City Lights (Dead Horse Bay),” with tiny glass bottles—as the real Dead Horse Bay is.

I took one with me, and later, while sitting at the bar at the River, gave it to a friend, who set it on a cocktail napkin. A blonde in a shaggy coat named, I think, Francesca, introduced herself as a visitor from LA and complimented our confident drug use. “It’s empty!” I exclaimed, and shook the corked vial. It would be a precarious, overly precious way to carry coke, anyway. “Let me guess, you’re all part of the alt lit writing scene.” My friends and I scowled. I was two martinis and a glass of wine deep, though, and decided to agree, “not no.” We ended up hugging and sharing Substack details. Hi, Francesca (?).

At the party, I met a man who works at Google (don’t try to name your acquaintances who also work there, no one knows each other; it’s basically a mid-sized town) and started in on the predicament of wanting AI to do the tedious parts of work for which an unemotional mind is better suited, while wanting to keep a job at all.

I should be taking notes at these things. He said something about how Google, because it is so massive and peopled, has ethical quandaries to think of, meaning it must hold itself up to certain standards of fair use in order to please its teams, investors, and the public, whereas anyone smaller (everyone else) accounts for varying degrees of this concern. There really are no rules, only barely visible, self-enforced checks and balances.

My publisher, for example, sent out an email to all of us authors asking our opinion about selling our text to AI companies and data brokers as training for generative tools. Their initial reply was no, until they recognized that “MIT Press content is already being used for training purposes while the outstanding legal issues over the use of copyrighted content as training data are being litigated in a multitude of courts.” On the one hand, they could use the money, and on the same hand, maybe aboveboard gathering is better than stealing. Should our work enter the AI lexicon officially, or run the risk of entering it anyway without compensation?

I have now missed the deadline for expressing my opinion about this via survey, but I brought it up to the Google guy and was surprised to hear him say, for the sake of my (unnamed) publisher, he hoped they turned down a deal. In the same conversation, my friend, a magazine’s creative director, mentioned that her parent company Hearst just entered “strategic partnerships” with OpenAI and ChatGPT before about 500 employees were laid off. Does no one want to pay for what we have to offer anymore, we wondered to one another, and then lamented being millennials. Every stage of our generation’s lives is so exaggerated, our entrance into midlife simply must coincide with the gained irrelevance of human thought, right?

And with that I want to thank all my paid subscribers—! Writing *here* about money is weird (more on that later, maybe), but I do so appreciate knowing a value is being placed on my work, as writing itself has seemingly only decreased in that respect during my lifetime. I’ve more to say about this, but it can wait for another time because now I need to pack for a trip.

Thank you <3