quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

yeah i think the point is that insurance companies are NOT the "main villain" of runaway insurance costs!

"runaway health care costs" are the "main villain" of "runaway insurance costs"

http://i486.photobucket.com/albums/rr222/Chass3ur/Runaways1976.jpg

Insurance companies sure have a bad reputation.

if we could tie insurance premiums to greenpoint hipsters we might have something

well i just linked 5 recent things i found on two-minute search. point is that the times has written a lot about health care, from a lot of different angles. but if you want indictment of insurance companies, there is that, too.

and i agree about the differences between american and u.k. journalistic style, and yeah i think there are pluses and minuses both ways. i prefer a somewhat more pointed, freewheeling approach myself, which is one reason i'm returning to the ever-dwindling field of alt-weeklies. when i first started writing for an alt-weekly after leaving a daily paper, it was liberating in a lot of ways. but the discipline of the daily just-the-facts writing and reporting was good for me too.

and on the iraq war, there was lots of bad stuff done, with judy miller as the most egregious but not only culprit. (btw her copy always needed such heavy revision that it looked like a sea of edit trace by the time it got anywhere close to publication.) the one thing i do try to point out is that the editorial page (headed at the time by gail collins, fwiw) was always against it, which i think made it the highest-profile anti-war platform in the country.

that's true. and I guess that means we have collins to thank for krugman.

Evan, you bring up my other huge beef with the NYT, which their habit of publishing just about any story they deem as being related to "women's issues" in the style section, regardless of the actual content.

― she is writing about love (Jenny), Saturday, January 23, 2010 1:05 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

wow - there was a pretty interesting article about working wives and its effect on divorce rates, and I was scratching my head as to why it was in the style section, then I remembered this post.

This is not from the Times... but it feels at home here.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.

rong

it's certainly rite for some people I know

and I mean I guess their personalities/upbringings are to blame for most of it, but going to certain 4 year institutions def doesn't help

i remember some discussion of that article when it came out, either on ilx or elsewhere. anyway, i'm sure there's truth to what he's saying, but he's also tarring an awful lot of other people with his own brush. i know ivy league grads who are perfectly comfortable talking to plumbers or waitresses or whatever. but if his central point is that elite institutions help foster elitism, well NO KIDDING.

but i mean, my dad went to stanford and i guarantee you he'd rather talk to a plumber than another standford grad.

enh there are probably like a dozen things wrong with that essay including as tipsy points out lots of ivey grads can talk to plumbers but it kinda feels generally true 2 me like:

Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed.

the school i went to for undergrad wasnt an ivey but its probably comparable and this was and kinda is still a big problem for me and a lot of the things he says abt the interior life of a student at yale rung v true to my xp

I think the article doesn't spend enough time talking about the social background of the kids at these schools...I mean my gf went to Columbia but grew up in a middle class FL suburb. most of her classmates were prep school kids + rich NYers who went to the same high schools - even if they overlap, there is a difference between the academic 'elite' and the social 'elite'.

these people would have trouble talking to plumbers not because they took too many great college classes, but because they honestly think they're better than plumbers (which can be a side-effect of going to some of these schools, but which a lot of these people would have thought regardless.)

i have trouble talking to plumbers because i am mute

I have trouble talking to plumbers because it means I'm about to have to write a big check.

i have trouble talking to plumbers because i am from the future where all of our plumbers are robots

I have trouble talking to plumbers because I am an elitist prick.

Most people who have trouble talking to plumbers really only have trouble talking about plumbing.

Best friend was raised by nonconformists and now finds herself in the middle of an entitled upper middle class life, having to manage relationships with people who are working for her in the home. The reason she has difficulty is because she can't make up her mind to treat them like friends or like employees; when she was at work she did not have problems with how things ran.

http://herobuilders.com/images/1%20Joe%20The%20Plumber%20web%20(1).jpg

won't anyone talk to me?
http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/famecrawler/2008/10/08-15/joe-the-plumber.jpg

we are all plumbers now, in obama's america

It was less Timesy for the whining about Ivy elitism than for his general despicableness. OMG I never realized that there are intelligent people outside of my immediate social class!

at least five of my horrible ivy league doucher classmates now work as builders/firemen/poorly paid guides

fwiw

I smell a style article in that

haha one of the smartest ppl i went to school w/is a shipbuilder now

It was less Timesy for the whining about Ivy elitism than for his general despicableness. OMG I never realized that there are intelligent people outside of my immediate social class!

ugh

I smell a style article in that

― Tracer Hand, Monday, January 25, 2010 2:45 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you are not wrong

that guy was my professor (for a lecture class) and was kind of a personal hero to me and my friends! I think he's largely on our side though, but the criticisms of him are pretty warranted. last I heard he wasn't doing so well - his contract ended and no other schools would hire him, probably because he didn't give in to the pressure to publish and instead tried to use his position as a pulpit to teach and nurture from. iatee otm though; for most of these kids an ivy/first tier college is just another stop on the gravy train express.

the other reason why ivy kids can't talk to normal people is because most of them are borderline aspies who were like that well before they ever went to college!

also I find his final message, that it's okay not to be successful by the traditional metrics of the term, to be very reassuring in a jonathan pryce-at-the-end-of-brazil kind of way

They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks.

ohhhhhhh brother plz

the other reason why ivy kids can't talk to normal people is because most of them are borderline aspies who were like that well before they ever went to college!

i think this has a kernel of truth, in some disciplines more than others. but i also think it has something to do with age. most people get a lot better about it as they get older and just wind up becoming more comfortable with talking to more people in life. it's just kind of a life skill combining "be friendly and courteous" with "pay attention to what's going on around you."

also, i am definitely dropping out of grad school if i ever get to a point where i am dividing the world into "ivy leaguers" and "normal people."

“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

is this where niles crane excitedly flusters and announces that we may just have experienced a breakthrough, a necessary epiphany?

the other reason why ivy kids can't talk to normal people is because most of them are borderline aspies who were like that well before they ever went to college!

hellllo, gabbneb!!!

If they make it illegal to serve egg-white drinks, that would be Hurricane Katrina for us

i feel cheated that the author abandons his faux noir paperback tone somewhere in the third paragraph

Haha. Okay I made it to the end, and I have to say this part seems valid? I mean hell I just had some pretty shit-poor Hollandaise sauce a couple of weeks ago (I should have known better but I was jonesing for Benedict) and no one warned me that it contained raw eggs, and in that case it probably should have come in 22-pt type.

Bartenders are also asking why the city was concerned about bars and not restaurants, where raw-egg staples include hollandaise sauce, mayonnaise, Caesar salad and ice cream. “They use raw eggs in béarnaise sauce and steak tartare,” Ms. Saunders said. “Is it that they think chefs are O.K., but bartenders don’t know what they’re doing?”

Baaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrfffffffffff

(at the comparison, not at drinks made w/ egg whites, which are a-ok with me.)

Eggs aren't raw in a hollandaise, just not cooked very much.

tbf i think most people will realize that steak tartare contains raw egg given that it is served with a big honking raw egg right in the middle of it

that makes me wonder how long it will be before we see an article about ppl willfully depriving themselves of one of their senses

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/nyregion/09bigcity.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html?em

this isn't specifically about the ruling class but...

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Since that is not her style, Ms. Deray said, she has still not had a long-term relationship in college. As a fashion merchandising major, she said, she can only hope the odds improve when she graduates and moves to New York.

Good luck with that!

Sidenote: since when is 55% some kind of overwhelming majority that makes it impossible to ever date someone? It's barely above even, for pete's sake.

I'm glad that Emily Kennard has her priorities in order.

So let's see... per the NYT, lesbians are non-existent and all women go to college for the MRS. Got it.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

haven't read the article, but this stands out for me cuz: recent conversations with a younger friend of mine (who's now crashing at my house due to ~lady troubles~) would anecdotally suggest that casual infidelity is, like, a thing. at least in some social circles? he doesn't condone it (nor is it why he's on my couch), but he's like "yeah, loads of my friends have drunkenly cheated on their SOs but, aside from a few blowouts, most of them are still together"

i'm no prude, and if ppl are into polyamory or w/e that's cool, but i'm genuinely sorta surprised at this? btw the cheating was 50/50, w/r/t the gender of the cheater.

Gay ppl do not exist outside of stories exclusively about gay ppl, get with the program.

xp