Another New York Magazine writer joins Substack!
+ a new photo booth on Orchard St., and media circle jerks!
Good morning everyone. I went to a wedding over the weekend in Buffalo and had about seven Aperol Spritzes and four Heinekens on Saturday and today I feel incredible and so grateful for people in my life with love-filled relationships and great taste in wedding desserts (key lime pie).
I went for a walk with my best friend yesterday and we said that we should be out dancing more this summer, which lately leads to these conversations about what our current form of partying is (everyone’s done with edibles, everyone is looking for better stimulants), and independence, and what a good night out feels like. She told me that last weekend she went dancing with friends but they got kicked out after minutes because someone lit a joint in the club.
I re-read one of
’s essays about shame and partying from 2020 and it’s so weird to look back at how we wrote about summer in the wake of COVID. We took the medium of “party” so seriously when we didn’t have it anymore. Escapism was a colloquial term we were all casually debating.“A good party requires a sense of urgency, heightened by secrecy, and during recent years, it’s been hard to keep anything a secret. Even if parties are illegal or exclusive, they are surveilled by their own guests. Guests whose lives are mostly online develop competitive natures, and soon every exciting event can’t not be broadcast to their followers... The party hosts are living on unemployment, without a lot of options, but then again, there is potential for that urgency and escapism we always hear about to return.”
Turning 30 is relieving because most of my friends including myself have blown their lives up already, which was exciting and often painful to be a part of, but the other side is a total relief because everyone knows how to handle their shit with a bit more grace. Last week I wrote about the benefits of changing your life, and I saw these comments so I thought maybe today in the comment section we can talk about that — changing your life or blowing it up, however you put it. Good day to be a paid reader.
NEWS:
Earlier this month I said it was going to be a clubby, druggy summer. So far, accurate. The greatest newspaper of our time, The New York Times, published a 4300-word guide to partying this morning and I think that’s the cherry on top of what we can assume to be the hottest July in history. Ivy Getty suggested Irish exits, Bravo’s Patricia Altschul said you should help the drunk person call a car, Plum Sykes said don’t be afraid of political discussions, and Kyle Hotchkiss Carone said it’s weird to Instagram someone else’s home (I AGREE). This is fun, maybe The Times is going to finally kick back and have a drink this summer.
One sweet potato at Happier Grocery is $6.
Your Instagram feed is going to have a lot more film on it this summer. This morning, a couple is opening a film photobooth on Orchard Street, just a few steps away from Wildair. It will be open from 10am to 10pm daily, and it’s $8.
It sounds like it was a universally terrible weekend for anyone who was flying. Which is why it comes as no surprise that ridership for Amtrak is up 20% on the year, hitting a record last month and on track to break its annual ridership record of 32mm. Brightline, the US’s only private passenger railroad, is cutting into Amtrak’s market dominance: it reported a nearly 50% jump in ridership in April for its Florida passenger system and doubled its revenue YoY. I called in my (single, employed, suit-wearing) anonymous transit friend to comment on this. If anyone wants his number, you know where to find me.
“So I think car-haters and/or train dweebs should welcome the resurgence of Brightline and applaud its success because it’s indicative that there’s latent DEMAND for these services. If Congress were smart, and if we really wanted to “run the government like a business” (we don’t, but I’ll save that for October), we’d be investing at an even faster clip in Amtrak.
A thank you to the author for calling to their readers’ attention the evils of precision scheduled railroading (PSR). The closest parallel I can draw is imagine if you lived on Manhattan and needed movers. Instead of 3 college hunks and an appropriately-sized van, the moving company sends you an 18-wheeler and a morbidly obese 50-year-old. He’d take all day to load the truck himself, would probably break some of your shit doing so, and would then have to tiptoe a giant truck through the narrow, gridlocked , half-closed (it’s Saturday) streets. Then, instead of paying this one employee well, or hiring him more coworkers so he could take a single day off, or putting air conditioning in his truck, the moving company gave all of the money you paid to The Shareholders™ and didn’t pay its DOT tax.
I’m going to not get into the intricacies of how states like New York tax railroads’ land and the incentives for bad service it creates. Because it’s interesting only to me.
But if you’ve ever been late on an Amtrak, it was almost certainly:
an equipment problem because much of the rolling stock is still older than my parents
a freight train fucking about in front of you.”