Category: Recommended

After reading through the Le Soir case, she wrote a blog post issuing a warning to US newspaper editors: “In America I hear lots of people scoff and say, ‘The First Amendment will never let that happen here.’ After five years of researching this topic, I have to say I’m not quite as optimistic that the American media are as protected as they may think.” She added: “If nothing else, we need to stay on top of the facts and consider how both the EU’s existing law might be more broadly interpreted—and how a U.S. version might unfold. It can’t hurt to be ready.”

t.r.: And I got sick that morning, and so I told my wife, Heather, “Just go. Take the kids.” They had a car come for them, and drove them to Madison Square Garden. And she showed up and they said, “Well, if the person from ‘S.N.L.’ ’s not here . . . then you’re not allowed to come in.” They turned my wife away. My kids had to leave, and they’re crying. And then the car was gone, too, so they had to hail a cab to get back home. They turned away my crying kids.

To have sex with an automobile, if this film is to be trusted, all you need is a clean driving license and a dirty mind. Alexia takes plum position inside the vehicle, bang in the middle, and holds on tight to a couple of scarlet seat belts, for better purchase. Not to be outdone, the Caddy bounces up and down of its own free will and lurches from side to side. I haven’t seen a car enjoying itself so much since “Herbie Goes Bananas” (1980).

It took a tweet, though, to ignite what Suarez calls “the Miami movement.” On December 4, Delian Asparouhov, a venture capitalist in San Francisco, posted, “ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to Miami,” and Suarez, lying in bed at home in Coconut Grove, replied, “How can I help?” Those four words got more than 2.7 million impressions. Ever since, Suarez has been on a mission to rebrand Miami — long a place to spend money, rather than earn it — as a haven for founders who feel underappreciated in more calcified urban climes. He bought (with money from a venture capitalist) billboards in San Francisco featuring his Twitter handle and an invitation to “DM me.” As he put it, “I saw the tsunami coming, got out my surfboard, and started paddling.”

The benefits of staying off social media are insanely generous. Not only your time is salvaged, but also your attention – which is far more precious.

Out of 10 longlist nominees for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, all 10 are college graduates. On average, the nominees attended universities with rejection rates above 80 percent (i.e., highly competitive). Five went to Ivy League schools or competitive equivalents, and winners tended to double up. Charles Yu, who won the 2020 award, attended Berkeley as an undergraduate and then went to Columbia for his JD. Susan Choi, who won in 2019, graduated from Yale and Cornell. Sigrid Nunez won in 2018; she’s a graduate of both Barnard and Columbia.

“I was, I think, a little overawed by the jump from a rather anonymous school to a big prestigious campus in the big city and decided I was in,” he told me. It was the peak of the financial crisis; the only other immediate option was to stick around his college town and wait for his girlfriend to graduate. He ended up taking out over $60,000 in student loans to cover his year in the program. More than a decade later, his payments still haven’t dented the principal.

The San Francisco surveillance videos that have gone most viral are those that emphasize brazenness and impunity. In June, a reporter at the local ABC affiliate posted on Twitter a cell-phone video taken at a Walgreens in Hayes Valley. A man on a bicycle stands in the middle of an aisle, calmly loading cosmetics into a black garbage bag. He begins with the top shelf, and works his way down to the bottom one, until his bag is full. A few feet away is a Walgreens security guard, who makes no effort to stop the cyclist, choosing instead to film him with his phone. Eventually, the cyclist mounts his bike and rides out, ducking to avoid a half-hearted lunge from the guard. The video crystallizes the subversive, Banksy-ish quality of the San Francisco theft wave. It also supplied a political context—in her post, the reporter, Lyanne Melendez, tagged Boudin.

As part of her revenge plot, Mariam creates a fake Facebook account and messages Ruqayya, pretending to be a male admirer. The two of them message back and forth for days, before the boy asks Ruqayya to send him a photograph of herself with her hair uncovered. She receives the request while at a school event, and goes into a bathroom stall to take the picture, but eventually demurs. “Sorry I can’t,” she writes, worried about revealing herself to a stranger. He replies, “I admire you even more for saying no to what feels wrong,” which flatters her into sending him the photograph after all.