How long would you survive on a Wi-Fi-free retreat?
Plus: a Feed Me Hamptons party, cookie-stuffing, and more.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Does anyone know anything about this $7,000 whipped cream machine I used last night? It was very fun, and I’m fascinated by the resale prices…
Today’s newsletter includes: I’m throwing a party, a Wi-Fi-free retreat in New York, Westville expands its empire, men can now send the first message on Bumble, EMILY DAWN LONG goes Spielberg-mode, and local news is thriving on and off Substack.
☀️ Are you out east this weekend? I’m throwing a party for Feed Me readers with my friends at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island on Saturday night at 8:30. If you’re around, RSVP here.
FILL YOUR CALENDAR
🍸 Bar Archives, an event series dedicated to bringing local history and archival collections out of the library and into neighborhood bars, is hosting an event tonight at Montero with the Brooklyn Heights bar’s new owners. (August 11 at 6pm)
🍔 Shy’s Burgers at The River! (August 12 and 13)
🌽 Apollo Bagels and Pierce Abernathy collaborated on corn butter tomato bagels. (August 15)
🎬 Director Gregg Araki is introducing Three Bewildered People in the Night, his first feature, at IFC this weekend. (August 15)
🍺 I don’t see any other media companies making their own beer! Morning Brew and Montauk Brewing are releasing The Morning Brew this weekend in Montauk. There will be pizza. (August 15)
⛵ Dream Baby Press is setting sail! (August 26th)
🍰 Cake Zine is hosting a reading series about the taste of memory, summer, and New York City at Little Island. (September 4, 5, and 6)
Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI’s head of ethics, who joined the company less than a year ago, left OpenAI this week. Prior to OpenAI, Bakalar spent over six years at Meta as an ethicist. Earlier this year, she told a group of students at Swarthmore that her path to this career started with an interest in “how the ways that we communicate and the different kinds of tools or mediums through which we communicate make us better or worse people.” Regarding Bakalar’s exit, an OpenAI comms person told the FT, “AI ethics doesn’t live with one owner or team at OpenAI, and ethical considerations are deeply embedded into the model-building process driven by a number of teams across research.” Johannes Heidecke, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, OpenAI’s chief futurist and former head of mission alignment, also left the company in the last few weeks.
Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni pushed for features in the e-commerce startup’s software that took credit for sales the app didn’t drive. The Slack messages in this Bloomberg story are insane, and I will use the term cookie-stuffing as often as possible in the wake of this scandal.
Westville is opening its 12th location. None of which are any longer in the West Ville. (The original flagship was on West 10th, between West 4th and Bleecker, but closed in 2016.) The new location will be in Murray Hill, at the Third Avenue turnoff to enter the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Someone has to do the hard work of keeping turkey burgers on a menu in New York City.
Bumble’s main differentiator in the dating app category – the fact that women have to send the first message – is gone. Bloomberg reported that starting today, men will now have the ability to send the first message. Also: Bumble’s response window is now 72 hours, up from 24 hours, after it said users “reported feeling pressure to reply quickly.” Whitney Wolfe added that women often felt like when they had to send the first message, the app experience resulted in low-effort, empty interactions from men. To any Bumble users reading this: You need to toughen up and lock in. You’re missing out on one of the greatest gamified dating app experiences of our century, which bonded tens of thousands of New York City roommates scrolling on the couch together over the last decade. Shares of Bumble are down 57% from a year ago.
For some of you, a one-week stay with strangers in a house upstate without Wi-Fi sounds like a horror movie script that Blumhouse rejected. For others, it might sound like utopia. The Center for Archaic Networks, founded by August Lamm, is an organization focused on studying and cultivating unmonetized human connection and community structures that predated modern social media. This winter, it’s launching a series of one-week stays at an upstate New York home, in Owego, for those looking to experiment with a low-tech living environment. There will be no Wi-Fi available, and all digital devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets) will be locked safely away for the duration of the stay. Computers will be accessible at a nearby public library. Related to the heaven/hell Rorschach test: on-site amenities include a piano, guitar, and bass.
I reached out to August Lamm, the founder of The Center for Archaic Networks, to learn more about the residency.
ES: This house looks pretty cool. How did you find it?
AL: I was driving back from a concert upstate when I decided to stop for lunch in a small town. The Main Street was lined with beautiful, historic homes, and when I saw a “For Sale” sign in front of one, I stopped in my tracks. While the house was far too big for one person, it was the perfect size for a small residency. It already looked like an academic building, with its white columns and red siding. I got in touch with the realtor and just a few weeks later made an offer. As an unmarried freelance writer, I wasn’t planning on investing in real estate, but when I reviewed my finances I found that my book advance was enough to cover a down payment in a relatively affordable part of upstate. The seller accepted my offer and I got to work developing the residency program.
ES: How are you hoping accepted applicants spend their days in the house?
AL: People seek out low-tech refuges for a variety of reasons, and my hope is that the residency will accommodate all of them. There will be optional activities throughout the day but no expectations of productivity. If residents want to work on specific projects, they’ll have access to a typewriter, an art studio, a piano, and other tools. If they just want to relax, they are welcome to do that. Down the line, I’m planning to host more structured sessions, e.g. writing workshops and music camps, but for now I’ll just let the residents decide how to spend their offline week.
Local-news Substacks may be having a moment. But so, apparently, are local-news newspapers. The Times writes about The Chronicle of Glens Falls, N.Y. and illuminates the broader category of gritty print newsgathering weeklies: “Though nearly 3,500 newspapers have ceased publication since the mid-2000s, about 2,250 publications like The Chronicle — independent, sometimes family-owned weeklies — have been ‘relatively resilient,’ said Zach Metzger, director of the state of local news project at Northwestern University.”
🍿 Emily Dawn Long is taking us to the movies for NYFW this year. She’s been teasing video content made with Meta Glasses over the last few days.
The leaves are almost starting to change. The aisles of Staples are getting more crowded. Vogue’s September issue just dropped. Which means one thing: It’s almost back-to-school season. With the welcoming of this special time of year, we have a strong contender for craziest headline of the season: “Students Skinned a Bear in a Dorm. Cornell Realized It Should Ban That.” It gets boring up there in Ithaca, can you blame the guys? Reports the NYT: After hunting a bear and carving up its carcass on a table in a communal dorm kitchen (the students said they planned to make “black-bear pastrami”), a complaint was made, a police report was filed, and the two young men were cleared of wrongdoing (they both had hunting licenses, the bear was killed legally, and there was no existing rule at school forbidding black-bear pastrami-making.) The new policy is meant “to provide clarity regarding what is or is not appropriate to do in a communal kitchen space,” says a Cornell spokesperson. Meateater founder Steven Rinella, who previously spoke to one of the bear-skinners on his podcast, re-posted the New York Times headline, commenting, “it’s a clear sign that Cornell University needs to be boycotted by all serious Americans who love freedom.”
A Staten Island judge paused the rollout of Mayor Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax in response to a lawsuit. Politico reports that the plaintiffs “took specific issue with the publication of more than 900,000 properties” that could be subject to the tax. “The tax applies only to people who own second homes in New York City worth more than $5 million. But some homeowners say they’ve received notices from the city despite being full-time New Yorkers.” Having seen some of the communication between management companies and co-ops regarding the new tax, I am not surprised there is confusion. Mamdani said Monday that he would “vigorously defend” the rollout of the new tax.