three months pass...
I'd never even heard of this magazine, and now they're trying to hide their true selves? Fuuuuck that.
Why is the Financial Times Trying to Hide the Wealth Porn?We know, we know: We live in the era of “eat the rich.” Conspicuous consumption is supposed to turn our collectively enlightened stomachs.
But who does the Financial Times think it is fooling by rebranding How to Spend It? That’s the tasty glossy magazine that comes tucked inside the weekend edition of the pink-paged British broadsheet. It is the most trusted Baedeker of bankers, oligarchs, and what Evelyn Waugh called “the sound old snobbery of pound sterling and strawberry leaves.” After Muammar Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound was stormed by Libyan rebels, one journalist reported finding a “well-thumbed” copy of How to Spend It on the dictator’s coffee table. Last weekend’s issue featured an actual statue of Bacchus once owned by Hubert de Givenchy and currently priced at over €1 million. In terms of opulence, How to Spend It makes the New York Times’ T Magazine and The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ. — and even Luxx, which is put out by the Times of London — seem if not populist then at least relatively approachable. How to Spend It once claimed that one in five of its readers has, or would consider using, a private jet. Maybe consider is the key word here. Part of the fun of the magazine is to imagine yourself having to weigh the pros and cons of private jettery. (And I know exactly where in my apartment I would put that Bacchus.)
So it was perplexing when its editor, Jo Ellison, decided this week to do away with the magazine’s title in an attempt to insert a modicum of modesty into this hard-core wealth porn. “From this weekend, we will publish as HTSI magazine,” she wrote in her editor’s letter. “We will offer new interpretations of the ‘s.’” One such interpretation? “How to save it.” That sounds … responsible. But not very fun. Ellison ticked off a bunch of un-fun things — the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, the housing crisis — as suddenly intruding on her greedy glossy and necessitating the change, concluding, “We just want HTSI to reflect the deeper sensitivities and priorities of a changing world.”
Admittedly “the title gets up many people’s noses,” as Lucia van der Post, one of How to Spend It’s former editors told me of the old name. But the rebrand does seem like hollow virtue signaling. I emailed Ellison to ask why the house organ of the golden calf suddenly lost its sybaritic nerve. “I don’t really know what you mean by virtue signalling in this context,” Ellison wrote back from the Faroe Islands. “There are many luxury brands and labels who will have been profoundly affected by the war in Ukraine. Likewise the pandemic. While we would never change our coverage to focus on any news subject exclusively, I think it would be naive to pretend that world events aren’t happening. I don’t think any magazine can exist in the modern era without acknowledging, reflecting and responding intelligently to the times we live in — even if that simply means reflecting on how consumer tastes have changed. Which they have, as I said, we have broadened our content considerably to become more news reactive and it has only become stronger and more widely read as a result. I know what our role is — and it is mostly to be diverting and aspirational. But a magazine still has to be relevant, no?”
By which I guess she means that Croesus is now into meditation and wants a vegan option. The acclaimed English novelist and FT contributor Henry Porter told me he views the new name as merely “camouflage for consumer porn.” “My sense is that people don’t want to be seen reading How to Spend It at a time when a very large part of the British Public face a winter relying on food banks — there are 1,172 in England alone — or choosing between eating and heating, as the grim new slogan goes,” he said via email. “So, it’s more to do with the sensitivities of the super/very rich rather than virtue signalling. I mean they aren’t going to drop the Bulgari and Versace ads, are they?"
Andrew Neil, Britain’s feared broadcaster and a proprietor of The Spectator, calls Ellison’s maneuver “nonsense” and told me, “The FT has been awash with posh lefties embarrassed by the wealth of their readers for quite some time now.” He’s got a point. In 2020, the FT issued “a new brand campaign,” even wrapping the physical newspaper in a special message touting, “Capitalism. Time for a reset.” (That will distract the next Baader-Meinhof Gang from going on the attack for sure.) Other London media folk tell me How to Spend It’s bling-bling bowdlerization reminds them of the recent identity crisis Tatler suffered. That magazine attempted to de-posh but had to reverse course after realizing its readers really do just want to read about the absurdities of ladies-in-waiting. Chris Rovzar, the editorial director of Bloomberg’s luxury franchise Bloomberg Pursuits, tweeted, “‘How To Spend It’ is one of the all-time great media names. Everyone’s always jealous of it because it says exactly what it is, in a cheeky way. This is so silly and tiresome."
“Hey, we’re no hairshirts,” Ellison assured me by email. “When it comes to the best possible way to spend it, we’re still the holy grail.” So then why change the name? “I just don’t feel especially enthusiastic about going out in to the world with a title (conceived in the yuppie era nineties) that feels a little gauche, and, I think, somewhat dated at this moment following a global health pandemic and one of the most profound cost of living crises in decades.”
It first became a magazine in 1992 (the same year the New York Times launched the “Style” section, seeking fashion adverts), but the title dates to a page in the newspaper itself in 1967, then written by journalist Sheila Black. All week long, the FT would tell London’s financiers how to make their money; come weekends, Black argued, there should be a page to tell them how to spend it. Black’s successor was van der Post, who joined the paper in 1973 and became an authority on luxury in London. (Her father was a spiritual adviser to Prince Charles and godfather to Prince William.) “It was originally a page. Sometimes, in slightly flusher times, it would be two pages,” said van der Post when I rang her up in London. “Gradually, the paper grew from being the parish newspaper of the city of London to a much-admired international newspaper, so the pages grew and the sophistication of the coverage grew.” She eventually spun the “Spend It” pages into its own magazine, partly to satisfy advertisers who wanted their ads to appear on glossy print. (The Times didn’t launch T until 2004; WSJ. came along in 2008.)
Van der Post recalled uproars about the title during previous economic downturns. (The Thatcher years were no picnic.) Once, a distinguished publisher sent her a letter calling the publication’s name a vulgar insult to the times in which they lived. Van der Post published the letter and promised a case of Champagne to anyone who could come up with something better. No one could, and she became “inundated with hundreds of letters of support from readers, who almost at once declared the title honest and refreshing.”
In 1998, she handed the magazine to Gillian de Bono, who would edit it for the next 20 years, transforming it into something far more opulent, until Ellison took over in 2019. De Bono told me she wouldn’t have changed the title “for the reason that, since the 1970s, this question has come up, and every time the decision was made — the title was iconic, the magazine was iconic, and it was sort of a sacred title, a sacred sub-brand of the FT.” The question certainly came up after the financial crash of 2008. Lionel Barber edited the FT from 2005 to 2020, and in his recent memoir, The Powerful and the Damned (it’s a bit like Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries but for the go-go globalist aughts), he wrote about how he had to “summon” de Bono to his office, telling her, “I don’t give a damn what you call it. Just no more Bonus Issue!”
HTSI sounds like something you’d better hope an anti-biotic can clear up. What does de Bono make of it? “I find it quite a cold title, just initials,” she said, adding that it could be confusing to new readers. She said her magazine learned how to adapt without changing its name, adding subjects such as environmentalism and philanthropy to its remit as the years went on. Of course it also put super-cars on the cover and a jet plane it called “a supercar for the skies.” (Parallel parking must be a cinch!)
Not everybody can afford to play with these toys. But somebody can, and changing the name of this magazine is not going to change the inequality or waste of this world one little bit. And really, what’s the harm of How to Spend It if all its readers are in on the joke?
Take a magazine like Town & Country, which is at its most successful when it just accepts that its readers want to know about stuff like Sunny von Bülow’s daughter’s caftan line. Flipping through its sleek new summer issue, in which a $70,000 Todd Reed necklace with emeralds and white diamonds is recommended, one gets the feeling it won’t be doing away with its annual jewelry awards or changing any names soon. And why should it?
“We are not embarrassed that we cover beautiful things; that is our job,” said Stellene Volandes, the editor of Town & Country. A luxury title ought to cover the world of its readers, but as Volandes points out, “We engage wealth as a journalistic subject. Tom Wolfe called it ‘plutography.’ At the T&C offices, we call it our ‘crazy money’ stories. So as much as we have our eyes wide open to where our readers should go on vacation and what they might buy at Cartier, we also have our eyes wide open to the absurdities of wealth and also the responsibilities of wealth. I think that has guided us through difficult times and what remain to be difficult times. The original editor’s letter from 1846 has the mission of the magazine, and the two men who founded it said that their mission was to ‘instruct, refine and amuse,’” said Volandes. “And we take the amuse part really seriously.”
― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, 3 June 2022 20:10 (one year ago) link
four weeks pass...
i’m doing it, only mod can judge me
Solveig Gold Is Proud to Be the Wife of a ‘Canceled’ Princeton Professor
nytimes.com/2022/07/01/style/solveig-gold-joshua-katz-princeton-professor.html
Anemona HartocollisJuly 1, 2022
PRINCETON, N.J. — Solveig Lucia Gold was setting the table in her backyard, next door to the house once occupied by Albert Einstein. Her yard is a sweeping field of emerald green grass leading down to the 18th-century blacksmith’s cottage with stone floors that houses her home study.
Ms. Gold, 27, was preparing for an intimate dinner with some of the few people — “our little cabal,” she said — who publicly admit to being on friendly terms with her and her husband, the recently fired (she prefers “canceled”) former Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz.
Most of the guests were much older than Ms. Gold. This included Dr. Katz, who is 52 and was once her professor. They married last July, four years after she finished Princeton with a summa cum laude degree in classics, and one year after Dr. Katz began his public fight with the campus left.
The couple ran arms wide open into the culture wars, which Ms. Gold says was characteristic of her, but not of him, the low-key professor whom everyone liked, who previously didn’t ruffle feathers at the university where he had worked since 1998. (“I am the alpha,” she wrote in an essay about their relationship.)
“I’m not Lady Macbeth in this story, but I am obviously implicated in some way in getting him involved,” she said.
“She gave me a certain kind of courage for doing this type of thing,” Dr. Katz said. “She was not responsible for my action in doing it.”
The trouble began on July 4, 2020, when a group of Princeton faculty sent a letter to the university’s president, demanding that the university combat institutional racism. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” it declared.
Four days later, Dr. Katz responded with a manifesto, “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor,” in Quillette, which is something of a house organ for the so-called Intellectual Dark Web. He took issue with proposed changes that would “lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate.”
But the part that drew the most notice was his characterization of the Black Justice League — a student group that had called on Princeton to acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson some six years before it finally took his name off its public policy school, in June of 2020 — as “a small local terrorist organization.”
As it happens, when she was a student at Princeton, Ms. Gold had helped found a group called the Princeton Open Campus Coalition for the express purpose of opposing the Black Justice League and its demands.
Outrage ensued over Dr. Katz’s choice of words, which he defended as “metaphorical.” Nearly two years later, this spring, Princeton fired Dr. Katz, who had tenure, saying it was not for his outspokenness, but for new information that had emerged about his conduct during a sexual relationship he’d had with a student some 15 years earlier, an affair he had been suspended over before.
Ms. Gold says she has often been the only one standing between her husband and utter despair, as his career crumbled and colleagues deserted him.
“He has said essentially that if I weren’t there, he probably wouldn’t be here either,” she said. “That’s a lot of pressure on me, being responsible for keeping someone alive. On the other hand, I’m glad to do it.”
A certain amount of prurient interest accompanied the revelation that the Princeton professor who’d lost his job over a relationship with one former student was now married to another. Ms. Gold doesn’t shy away from it. On her Twitter account, her avatar is a photo of herself in a wedding dress, and the background picture is of her with a group of Princeton professors, including her husband.
And when Dr. Katz lost his job, Ms. Gold promptly published an essay about their relationship in Common Sense, the newsletter run by Bari Weiss, a former writer and editor for the opinion department of The New York Times. (“My alma mater is not the school I once loved,” went part of the headline. “But Joshua Katz is exactly the man I knew I married.”)
“He’s young at heart, and I’m an old soul, and it works,” Ms. Gold said later.
While she is not a national player yet, she has long imagined the possibility. When Ms. Gold was named a winner of the Pyne prize, one of Princeton’s highest undergraduate honors for which Dr. Katz (they were not in a relationship at the time) was one of her nominators, the official announcement said she aspired to become a public intellectual. (She had a head start. Ms. Gold and her grandfather Robert W. Jenson, a Lutheran theologian, wrote a book, “Conversations With Poppi About God,” when she was just 8.)
As her guests were about to arrive, Ms. Gold changed from a plain blue summer shift into a more glamorous cinched-waist yellow dress, drawing an approving smile from her husband, who was wearing a pink linen shirt.
She set the long rectangular table in the grass precisely, with a Wedgewood-blue and white tablecloth, cloth napkins tied up in yellow ribbons, place cards inked in a neat cursive hand and melamine dishes in a Provençal design. She was schooled in formal manners from a young age, she said, as an only child to an actress and a soap opera writer. “My mom threw a lot of dinner parties, and I ended up talking to adults,” Ms. Gold said.
Dr. Katz was her professor in two classes, Egyptology and Hesiod, and her freshman adviser, but there was no romance in sight, she said, until the summer of 2017, her graduation year, and then it was a slow burn. Besides, as a Democrat and comfortably paunchy middle-aged man, he wasn’t her type.
“Most of my boyfriends were conservative, they were all pot-smoking Republicans,” she told her dinner guests later that night.
“That’s the worst,” said her husband. (Dr. Katz was married once before, at 28.)
“Solveig” — it’s pronounced SOL-vay — “has always received a lot of favorable male attention,” said her best friend from Princeton, Claire Ashmead, now a medical student at the University of Michigan. “She’s very feminine — I might describe her as ultrafeminine.” At the same time, Ms. Ashmead said, “she never pretended to be dumber than she was.”
The relationship surprised Ms. Ashmead. “What made me come to terms with the fact that Joshua was the partner she had chosen was that I don’t think any of the guys she had dated were her intellectual equal,” Ms. Ashmead said. “They are intellectually so well matched.”
Ms. Gold said she has always been a contrarian.
Her parents sent her to the all-girls Nightingale-Bamford school in Manhattan — the “Gossip Girl” school — where she wrote a column for the school paper called “Au Contraire,” on topics ranging from a defense of Sarah Palin (which she said she would probably not write today) to an endorsement of watching old black-and-white movies. She registered to vote Republican at age 18, mostly to be different on the liberal Upper West Side, she said.
On the night of the dinner, the couple had just returned from a brief decompression trip to Amsterdam and Cambridge, England, where Ms. Gold is completing her Ph.D. in classics. She just submitted her dissertation tracing “the metaphorical language of slavery across the Platonic corpus.” In her introduction, she writes, “the very use of slavery as a metaphor may be hideous to many (although the enduring popularity of Britney Spears’s 2001 hit song, ‘I’m a Slave 4 U,' suggests that the metaphor has survived somewhat unscathed).” She relishes that it’s a “hot button” topic, but fears that “the woke people in classics won’t read it because it’s by me.”
Her dinner guests, on the other hand, position themselves as the resistance to intellectual conformity.
There was Robert P. George, 66, a professor of jurisprudence, in the chair once held by the now ignominious Woodrow Wilson. The New York Times Magazine once called Professor George the country’s “most influential conservative Christian thinker,” for his role in laying the intellectual groundwork for the fights against marriage equality and abortion rights. He founded the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, where Ms. Gold is senior research assistant, and where another dinner guest, Bradford Wilson, 71, is executive director.
Professor George’s family — West Virginia coal miner stock — believed in Jesus, F.D.R., Democrats and the United Mine Workers of America, he said. He arrived in a natty three-piece off-white suit with a bottle of 1997 Meursault.
During the pandemic, Professor George has been presiding over an almost weekly Zoom meeting called “the Friday Group,” where about 30 regulars — mostly professors, but also alumni, including Ms. Gold, and some students — get together to talk about threats to academic freedom and to socialize.
Also in attendance at the dinner: Edgar Choueiri, 60, compact, bearded, lover of Bach, an expert at Princeton in spacecraft propulsion and 3-D audio, with his more reserved wife, Martina Baillie, 43, a land-use lawyer. Frustrated by political labels, Professor Choueiri pronounced himself a libertine. “Martina and I feel that we have been on a human level, part of the support of someone who has been going through hell,” he said. (They bring Ms. Gold and Dr. Katz pastries on bad days.)
And finally there was Abigail Anthony, 22, an ex-ballerina and the current vice president of the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, the organization Ms. Gold helped found.
Ms. Anthony stood up and left before the alcohol was served.
Can a student stay for dinner?
“If it’s not against university rules,” Dr. Katz said.
“But nobody would do it,” Ms. Anthony said.
“The professors are afraid to take students out to coffee or lunches,” Dr. Katz said. “Last I asked, a major part of education was extracurricular activity.” He added, “People are going to jump on me — ‘I know what he means by extracurricular activity.’” Later, he insisted on adding a clarification: “That’s obviously not what I mean.”
She did not anticipate the force of the backlash against her husband, Ms. Gold said, because she had voiced controversial opinions before, and had not been shunned. As an undergraduate, for instance, she wrote an essay criticizing the women’s march for providing a platform only for supporters of abortion rights. She attributes this new feeling of hostility to a culture of lock-step thinking ushered in by Gen Z, the generation right behind hers.
But Ms. Gold has in fact drawn controversy of her own in the academic world. The summer after graduation, she engaged in a very public debate with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an associate professor of classics, a historian of Rome, who has argued that the discipline of classics has contributed to the invention of whiteness and to its domination.
In an essay entitled “The colorblind bard,” published in The New Criterion, Ms. Gold invoked Dr. Padilla, who is Black and a Dominican immigrant, as evidence that “Western Civilization does not belong to white men.” In a fierce public exchange of letters after that, he criticized her for using him as a “signifying monkey,” the way, he wrote, some people will claim a token Black friend. (Dr. Padilla did not return emails and calls for comment.)
“People went after me pretty hard,” Ms. Gold recalled. “Some professors at Princeton — people I had liked and who liked me — were horrified by what I had written. They accused me of being Kellyanne Conway and Laura Ingraham.”
She and Dr. Katz privately joked that the faculty reaction was “quite discriminatory toward blond women,” she said.
In an indication of what a fishbowl academia is, Dr. Padilla and Ms. Gold both asked Dr. Katz to read their dueling letters, and he made suggestions, Ms. Gold says. “Dan-el and I, we were not dating,” Dr. Katz said, with typical mordant humor, the evening of the dinner party.
“You weren’t dating?” Ms. Gold said, archly.
“I thought he was still my friend,” Dr. Katz replied. (Three years after that exchange, Dr. Padilla was one of the organizers of the faculty letter that so riled Dr. Katz.)
At the dinner table, Ms. Gold, wearing a checked kitchen apron over her yellow dress, sat at one end and Dr. Katz at the other. Ms. Gold said a swift prayer (“Come Lord Jesus be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed”) and the chilled pea soup was served.
Dr. Katz previously had a cultural interest in religion, but her faith has rubbed off on him. “I don’t think he ever had taken seriously the idea of actually believing in anything until he started dating me,” she said. Both of them have published in First Things, a conservative religious journal founded by her godfather, Richard Neuhaus.
Dr. Choueiri offered a toast: “When Solveig becomes, I don’t know, the next Nancy Pelosi. …,” he began.
“God, no,” Professor George objected.
“Replaces Nancy Pelosi is what I wanted to say,” Dr. Choueiri said. “Or becomes the next Schumer. I can say: this lady, I hired her to perform at my party with her a cappella group, the Tigerlilies.”
Ms. Gold said she once aspired to be a cross between Professor George and Mary Beard, the iconoclastic Cambridge University popularizer of classics. Now she is less certain that she has a future in the academy, but would like to write about public issues.
They are going to start house-hunting in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Katz is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Somehow one thing led to another and he ended up in the position that I had imagined for myself,” his wife said.
― bule bulak oying (cat), Sunday, 3 July 2022 18:43 (one year ago) link