At some point in my early 20s, I suddenly realized that I was dumber than shit, and so I started making myself read a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have bothered with before, trying to absorb it.  The Atlantic was one of the first of these things that I actually enjoyed.  I began working through it with an effort, but I quickly developed a true appreciation for its long-form political journalism, which was extremely well-written and involving, even for someone with very little context.  So, I’ll always have a soft spot for The Atlantic, and I’ll put up with a lot of bullshit from it, because in the end, despite its frequent misses, when it’s good, it’s great.

Apparently, the magazine is on track to turn a profit this year:

The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money.

Getting there took a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue.

“We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” said Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company, who arrived at the magazine’s offices in the Watergate complex in 2007 with a mission to stanch the red ink. “In essence, we brainstormed the question, ‘What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?’ ”

They’ve basically embraced the internet and free digital content, as opposed to fighting it, and it seems to be paying off. 

My only issue with their web presence is that you can’t get an RSS feed of just the monthly issue.  I refuse to read anything that won’t show up in my RSS, because I can’t be bothered to remember when things publish, so I haven’t looked at The Atlantic in years, unless something else in my feed has linked to it and reminded me of its existence.  You can get feeds for other, more frequently updated web-only content from them, but not of the actual monthly issues.  I don’t know why.  They’ll send you a weekly or monthly email with a list of links to the magazine contents, but I’m never going to read something out of an email.  My feed is where I read stuff, and if I want to read a longer article, I’ll star it or keep it unread and come back to it, but I don’t come back to old emails looking for stuff to read.  So, until The Atlantic makes that extremely simple fix, I’m not reading it, because I’m a Millennial and I’m entitled and lazy.

Related Articles

• The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web (nytimes.com)

I’m sort of peripherally aware of the controversy surrounding this Four Loko caffeinated alcohol drink.  They’re banning it in NY, I think (as they did with Sparks before it)?  Here’s the thing, though – it’s just alcohol and caffeine, yeah?  I mean, probably not the best idea, but people are acting like it’s a mixture of ketamine and acid.  I keep hearing that children are dying and people are throwing themselves off balconies and what not.  Personally, I’m so caffeine tolerant/low energy that I can fall sound asleep standing up directly after consuming a venti red eye, but even normal people sometimes have a bottle of wine and a double espresso with dinner, yeah?  Or a few Red Bull and vodkas?  There’s nothing in this combination that makes people go starkers, so I don’t understand what the big commotion is all about. 

People have a tendency to make up reactions to substances; like how everyone – everyone!  – thinks they get a “sugar high” when there is absolutely no such thing at all.  So between that and the fact that I don’t really react strongly to a lot of substances, I tend to simply dismiss it anytime anyone’s going on about some craaaaazy food or beverage that makes you nuts.  For example, this whole meth thing:  I mean, guys, is it really the meth that’s to blame, or is it just that deep down, you secretly want to develop a terrible psychosis while all your teeth rot away?

Last night, I visited the new Trader Joe’s in Chelsea, and it is sweet. The aisles are so big! The ceiling is so high! The space is so ample and bright! I am a long-time fan of Trader Joe’s, and I have been braving the throngs at the 14th Street location for a while now, even though it sucks there. Here’s a tip should you be so inclined to shop there: go at 9:45pm. The employees at Trader Joe’s work up to a certain hour past close anyway, so they don’t rush you to get out. You can shop freely at fifteen to close, and it’s nowhere near as crowded as it is every other time of day. Anyway, it’s not the lines that are a problem at TJ’s. Even though the lines wrap around the store, they move pretty quickly. What really sucks about the Union Square TJs is that you can’t get to any of the merchandise without shoving through the ever-present line, and this is not a problem at the Chelsea location.

Fortune has a long, interesting article about TJ’s, but it’s funny that they spend the first couple pages talking about why the stores are so popular without focusing on the main reason people go to TJ’s: low cost. They kind of cover this later, but they open with selection, and the friendly, small-town vibe. That’s great and all, but TJ’s is so popular in its demographic (students and young, urban, single broke people) because it puts paid to the whole “cheap, healthy or fast: pick two” conundrum. At TJ’s, you can get healthy, fully- or semi-prepared foods for low cost, which makes it the perfect store, even if you have to wait in line.

Also, TJ’s doesn’t have coupons or discount cards – the price is the price. Which, side-note, the whole discount card thing blows my mind, in that every single American consumer despises the discount (club) card system — nobody wants to give a store all their marketing information in exchange for sale prices, and then carry around a card all the time — but even though the entire spending population hates it, somehow every single store has adopted this system. I mean, what the hell? Why doesn’t the consumer have a vote here? It’s like we’re all serving the stores we shop at, rather than the other way around. I wish there were some way to coordinate everyone in the country to just refuse to use those damn cards, so the chains would all have to give up on that stupid system.

Ahem. Anyway, Trader Joe’s!

The friendliness of the employees wouldn’t be enough to get me to shop there if the prices weren’t low, but it is a nice benefit. I’m shy and don’t generally like to have to interact too much with the employees where I shop, but even I feel that it is more pleasant to shop at TJ’s then anywhere else. Turns out, the shocking reason why the employees are helpful and approachable is that they are really, really well-paid!

Store managers, “captains” in Trader Joe’s parlance — the nautical titles are a holdover from Coulombe (newly promoted captains are commanders; assistant store managers are first mates) — can make in the low six figures, and full-time crew members can start in the $40,000 to $60,000 range. But on top of the pay, Trader Joe’s annually contributes 15.4% of employees’ gross income to tax-deferred retirement accounts.

Apparently, the way to motivate employees to act as if they care whether they keep their job or not is to pay them decently. Who’d have thought?

When I first moved to NYC, I applied for a job at TJ’s, and I had to take this “simple” math test that included long division (I can’t even add or subtract, so I used my phone when no one was looking). So, presumably the employees at TJ’s must be fairly decent at the maths, even if they are occasionally so stoned, you have to count up your Clif Bars for them at the register (it’s charming, really). Also, the employees do all the jobs in rotation – they don’t have stockers and cashiers, and early-morning truck unloaders; rather, everyone does everything, which seems to work pretty well.

Anyway, it’s an interesting article. I didn’t know the company was so secretive, or that the owners also own Aldi. Also, the article cites studies showing that people enjoy a shopping experience more if there is a smaller selection, which doesn’t surprise me at all. And then there’s this:

Make no mistake: A typical family couldn’t do all its shopping at the store. There’s no baby food, toothpicks, or other necessities.

Really? Toothpicks – that’s what you’re going with there? Reporter Beth Kowitt must have recently quit smoking.

Now personally, I’ve never seen a woman who looks like this, whether in real life or on the catwalks, but apparently, they are legion.

In reality, my figure looks more like this:

Luckily for the industry, small groups of executives at most of the large firms have spent the last decade studying cardholders from almost every angle, and collection agencies have developed more sophisticated dunning techniques. They have sought to draw psychological and behavioral lessons from the enormous amounts of data the credit-card companies collect every day. They’ve run thousands of tests and crunched the numbers on millions of accounts. One result of all that labor is the conversation between Santana — a former bouncer whose higher education consists solely of corporate-sponsored classes like “the Psychology of Collections” — and the man from Massachusetts. When Santana contacted the man last month, he was armed with detailed information about his life and trained in which psychological approaches were most likely to succeed.

(via Lone Gunman)

See also this post:

One model is that the credit card companies are lying to you – they think of you less as an individual to have a dynamic risk factor dynamically assigned to you, and instead as part of a portfolio to have a specific rate of return extracted from. So they have statisticians and psychologists not to create a credit risk, but instead to figure out who is likely to pay what when, and use that to keep their returns very high. Quants to study how much they can squeeze from someone – not too much, but not too little. So it is less about the awesome part of markets, the price information and the convergence and feedback, and something more feudal.

(via Yglesias)

He goes on to do all the maths, but I went blank at all the numbers.

Frankly, as the type of person who always pays my bills the very same day I get them in the mail, I’m quite sure I’d always pay my balance off each month if I had a credit card (I never have had one), so I’m probably not a desireable customer for credit card companies. They don’t realize that about me, though: almost every single day last year, I received a credit card offer in the mail, from my bank, Washington Mutual. I actually called them to tell them to stop it, and the woman straight up told me that I would continue to receive them until I signed up for a card and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Little did she know! Since the collapse of the general economy and WaMu’s absorption by Chase, I have yet to receive one single offer. Which is all well and good till I want to buy a house. But then, it’s looking highly unlikely any of us will be buying houses in the future, so whatevs.

Now. Much has been blogged about this horrible incident already, and I doubt even the most heavily retail-seduced among us heard this news without cringing.

But my main reaction was: how could self-aware people display so much unabashed enthusiasm for anything? I went to high school during the 90s, and if there is one value that the experience of being an adolescent during that unenthused decade instilled in me, it is the importance of being too cool. When something tempting comes along, you are not supposed to snatch at it like an eager toddler. You sit back, smirk ironically . . . and then, after a decent enough time has passed that everyone understands that you could take it or leave it, you casually shrug and take it, peering at it the whole time as if it both amuses and perplexes you.

This is the way in which I approach every desirable thing, from jobs to friends to food to new clothes to men. But even leaving aside the studied indifference of my generation, nonchalance is the only appropriate and polite attitude for people living in a land of plenty. If you are sitting at a table, and the person at the head of the table brings out a cake, you do not climb frantically over the people in between you and the cake, screaming and gnashing your teeth, and bury your face in it. You only behave that way if you are starving to death, or two years old. Otherwise, you sit politely, and pass each slice down as it’s cut, until everyone has one, and then you calmly proceed to eat your slice.

Black Friday is an example of one situation in which everyone thinks it’s a good idea to bury their face in the cake. And for this country, that’s especially disgusting behavior, because essentially, most people at the table already have five entire untouched cakes sitting right in front of them.

There’s a general assumption in America that anything worth having (wealth, fame, good parts, book deals, seats on the subway, marriage proposals, property, cheap piles of shit from Wal-Mart) can only be attained by wrestling it away from somebody else. We talk about ‘wanting it (or her or him) enough to fight for it,’ as if that illustrates strength of character. What a desperate, scrabbling way to live! Just because competition is healthy for markets and other living things does not mean that everything need be competed over. Economists of every school agree, the world is not a pie. Really, it seems to me to be more of an endless conveyer belt (even in a recession, at least as far as Wal-Mart goods are concerned).

Gains not ill-gotten can still be sinful, but for a country that brays so loudly about its Christianity, we’ve entirely erased the word ‘greed’ from our vocabulary.

–

Also, Bitch Ph.D. has this to say about how tramplings actually happen:

You know how hard it is to work your way backwards through a crowd. Now imagine a crowd that’s *urgently* trying to push forward-it would be impossible. And, given that the crowd was apparently strong enough, en masse, to push down a door and trample a man, then (presumably) any individual-or even several individuals-who tried to push back-to keep the doors from being pushed open, or to keep the man from being trampled-is also going to be overwhelmed and pushed forward. . . .The real problem isn’t the people in the crowd. It’s the policy of creating such crowds, especially in situations without infrastructure and trained security people to manage the crowds properly. . . . The problem is the corporations who deliberately create an unnecessary sense of urgency and scarcity in order to drum up sales.

Well, sure.  Living in NYC, everyone shoves and pushes everyone.  At the grocery store yesterday, an older lady bodily shoved me out of the way of a bread bin (and proceeded to fish around in the bread with her bare hands), and a short time later, a girl shoved in front of me to get on the train, because I paused for half a second to let a guy exit (she shoved him aside, as well).  I can’t imagine shoving anyone to get to merchandise or onto a train, but man, if you get into my personal space for no reason, you’re going to catch an elbow.  And while I can’t imagine pushing and shoving my way into any crowded store, concert, club, parade, tree-lighting ceremony, free food giveaway, etc., I can often be found shoving my way out of them.  I have troubles with crowds, and I try (as best I can in a city like this) to keep to mostly clear spaces.  But here, sometimes you’ll be somewhere that’s totally empty, and randomly somehow before you know it, you find yourself surrounded on all sides by a thick crowd.  At which times, I panic.  I can’t help it.  My heart leaps into my throat and starts pounding, and I feel like I can’t breathe, and I will do absolutely anything – kick, claw, shove, trample – to get out of such a situation.  Which may be why I just can’t get my mind around the desire people have to crush into hot spots, to seek out places where they know there will be pushing, sweltering, thronging crowds of humanity pressing on all sides of them.

Of course, I suppose I’ve done just that by moving to New York.

They spent the early part of the evening wrapping presents for the morning, each in his own room with his gifts for the others…

Again, this sentence is referring to two grown women and a teenage boy.  How much less confusing and disorienting would be:  ‘…each in their own room with their gifts for the others….’

While reading this story, I enjoyed a Naked juice drink.  Naked juice claims to use a pound of fruit per bottle, and on the side of the label, it lists the fruits included.  This particular bottle lists:  3/4 peach, 1/2 mangosteen, lots of yummy white grapes, 2 3/4 apples & a hint of lemon.  Of course, by “lots of yummy white grapes,” what “they” mean is “this juice is about 98% concentrated grape juice.”  A quick glance at the ingredients list confirms this.  Which is fine – I knew I was drinking juice from concentrate, and this is noted on the front of the label.  But what’s so annoying about the “lots of yummy white grapes” language is how condescending it is.  It’s like the Naked juice people know that the Achilles heel of their all-natural, whole-fruits juice packaging is that there’s concentrated juice in there, but rather than just not emphasize that part of it, they highlight it with a bunch of silly, misleading language.  It’s like when I waited tables, and everything fried was described as “crispy,” which only led to a ton of people getting pissed when fried food came out, and sending it back, making more work for everyone and costing the restaurant money.  People avoid ordering fried foods because they don’t freaking want fried food, so trying to fool them by changing the word is just a ridiculously pointless strategy that is doomed to fail.

Along the same lines, postcards for shows are a giant waste of money and a thoroughly ineffective marketing tool.  Nobody ever, ever, ever goes to a show they weren’t already planning on going to (because they have a friend involved with it) because of a damn postcard.  Best-case scenario here is that one or even two lonely old people in from out of town might possibly, conceivably go to some show just because they saw a postcard for it, but even if you get three such audience members (which is an improbably high estimate), their admission is not enough to recoup whatever you spent on the postcards.  I hate being handed postcards more than fliers, because I actually have to take the postcards and act interested, and then I have to carry them around until it’s ok to throw them away.  Even if I actually plan on going to the show, I’m going to look in my email inbox (where undoubtedly there are at least fourteen different messages about whatever show it is) to remind myself of the time and place, not paw through my various handbags looking for some torn-up flier I was handed at a party three weeks earlier.

In marketing, it’s like…somebody starts doing something, and everybody just does it forever, whether it’s worth a damn or not.  These measures are not effective, and they are annoying, and they result in a huge build-up of worthless clutter in my purse.  Everybody, just stop it.

Another thing nobody agrees with me about – and I know with the economy in the shitter this is hugely optomistic of me – but can we just be done with change already?  It’s heavy and it’s dirty and it gets everywhere and it makes whatever else is in your purse smell like coins, and I amass pounds of it, and then when I try to actually use it up by counting out exact change when I buy something, it massively pisses off the cashier and everybody behind me.  The only thing you can really do with it is give it to homeless people, but then you have to juggle your bag and root around in it and shake it back in forth, all in a moving subway car, while you totter back and forth, and the homeless person politely waits and also totters back and forth, and everybody in the car stares at you and then you look like a real stingy asshole for not just giving the homeless person a dollar, especially after they stood there while you rooted through your purse for five minutes, and anyway, everybody (including the homeless person) knows you’re just trying to offload your obnoxious coins.  I hate small change, and I can see no good reason for it, and with the way prices are these days, why can’t things just be rounded up or down to the next stupid dollar?  At the very least, get rid of everything but quarters.

So, and but this is pretty funny.  It explains how to shut up a music geek at a party.  I used to kind of do this (make up a fake band) on occasion when some snobby guy at a party asked me what bands I like, but now I just never go to parties where I’m likely to run into any guys like that.  Or maybe it’s just that everyone suddenly realized it’s rude to grill strangers about their musical taste.

I seem to recall reading Shape several years ago, and it was 95% about actual exercise, and the models were all ripped. Not anymore.  Now, it’s 95% hideously overpriced clothes, and interviews with lying celebrities (“I mostly care about being happy and healthy, and my kids!”), and advice on how not to eat, or do anything much but spend insane amounts on worthless crap.  And only 40 pages in (or 3 pages in, if you don’t count advertisements), there is an interview with Kaley Cuoco.  Apparently, she is an actor on a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory.  I’d never heard of her or the show.  She’s 22-years-old, and this is what she has to say:

I go to [spinning] class three times a week, without fail.  I always get there early so I can sit in the front of the studio, and I’m ready to go as soon as the instructor comes in.*

And:

…right now I can’t get enough of the 6-inch vegetarian whole-wheat sandwich from Subway.  I pick one up after my Spin class . . . It’s my default meal; I know exactly how many calories are in it – 260 – and I never have to think about what to order.*

And worst of all:

Diet cola is my absolute favorite drink in the world; I used to drink four cans a day.  But to help me cut down, I’ve turned it into a treat.  Now, instead of having dessert, I’ll have a can of diet soda.  Putting a limit on how often I can drink it has helped me appreciate it more.*

Oh my God, Kaley!  I want to kill myself!  You are the saddest girl in the whole world!

Seriously, I myself am far more ascetic in most respects than your average person could bear to be, and I often find my own self depressing in some ways.  But even I want to kidnap this girl and make her go on some insane sky-diving, Fleet-Week-cruising, cocaine-snorting adventure in irresponsible hedonism.  What’s the point of being rich and famous if your best idea of an awesome time is go to spin class and then eat a Subway sandwich and drink a can of Diet Coke?

Jeez.

–
These quotes taken from Shape’s October 2008 issue (Vol. 28, No. 2); I don’t really know what the procedure is for footnoting in a blog post.  Please don’t sue me, Shape.  Oh, and also – your magazine blows.

First of all, let me just say I finally found a beer I can drink in good conscience. I’m less thrilled to say that it’s Fosters, as Fosters isn’t that good or widely available, and generally comes in giant oilcans that I’d rather not admit I can drink by carrying around with me. But regardless, I’m tickled pink with them for this, and happy that at long last, here’s a beer company that doesn’t feel it can afford to alienate half the population.  (Although, none of the above is really true, as Fosters advertising is just as offensive to women as all the other beer ads.)

Also, the Olympics have been going on; they’ve provided all manner of things for everybody to get pissed off about, and feminists are not left out:

First of all, are the uniforms too sexy? I don’t know, actually. While I do understand the point here, and while it’s certainly not okay for female athletes to be treated like objects. . . on the other hand, the skimpiness of women’s Olympic uniforms doesn’t really make me angry. Athletes are walking representations of what bodies can look like and what bodies can do, and you know, of course people are going to ogle them. What really upsets me is when men like (or are encouraged to like) ogling undernourished, undeveloped, weak, hairless, diminished women – listless, helpless waifs who closely resemble (or are) prepubescent girls, and whose “sexiness” lies entirely in their powerlessness. Frankly, I think the ogling of Olympian bodies is a huge step in the right direction. If only all young girls could think the best way to be sexy is to look like you can fling your date across a parking lot.

Finally, All Them are upset about this, which, yes, it’s bad, but it’s not like it’s an outrage particular to China. In the U.S., ability completely takes a backseat to attractiveness across the entertainment industry. Okay, so China was more blatant about it, choosing a pretty girl to lip-sync to a less-attractive girl’s singing. But in the U.S., we would have just had the pretty girl sing with her own crappy voice – the less-attractive good singer wouldn’t have gotten the job in any event.  What isn’t a beauty pageant, really?  America has absolutely no tolerance for the uglies – even off-camera civilians here are expected to look like movie stars.

In other (non-Olympics related) news, the UK courts decided that women who were raped while drunk deserve less compensation than those who were raped in all sobriety. Of course, there was a huge public outcry and the decision was reversed. I can’t comment on this any better than these two posts do (one and two), so everyone should just read them.

On a lighter note, how did I not know Hedy Lamarr was so cool? Apparently, she co-invented a torpedo-guiding device. She also said this:

“Any girl can be glamorous,” she said. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Holla!