The Downsized Employee The Downsized Employee woke up the first business day after the downsizing somewhat disappointed to be angry at no one. The Downsized Employee stayed in bed a full fourteen minutes longer than she really wanted to while considering the emotional fuel that might sustain a final task. On Sunday the Downsized Employee had woken up angry at the middle manager whose idea of a heads-up was not replying to two email requests she'd sent a couple weeks earlier asking for a key fob to the office. On Saturday the Downsized Employee had risen at 7 a.m. with a hangover and an uncharacteristic cache of fury directed at her ex-boyfriend, who had been a shithead, but really, had he ever once humored any of her long-repressed desires for stability or security, no, and that brings us to the underlying slight. The Downsized Employee could summon no rage toward the boss who canned her, because her boss had never given her any reason to believe he would treat her anything other than as a disposable commodity. MORE »

The Downsized Employee The Downsized Employee woke up the first business day after the downsizing somewhat disappointed to be angry at no one. The Downsized Employee stayed in bed a full fourteen minutes longer than she really wanted to while considering the emotional fuel that might sustain a final task. On Sunday the Downsized Employee had woken up angry at the middle manager whose idea of a heads-up was not replying to two email requests she'd sent a couple weeks earlier asking for a key fob to the office. On Saturday the Downsized Employee had risen at 7 a.m. with a hangover and an uncharacteristic cache of fury directed at her ex-boyfriend, who had been a shithead, but really, had he ever once humored any of her long-repressed desires for stability or security, no, and that brings us to the underlying slight. The Downsized Employee could summon no rage toward the boss who canned her, because her boss had never given her any reason to believe he would treat her anything other than as a disposable commodity. MORE »

What California Can Teach Us About The Crisis California has always fostered a kind of insane optimism that strikes outsiders as absurd and delusional and actually kind of sick. My favorite symbol of this, when I lived there, was Rent A Wheel, where you could "rent to own" chrome rims for your tires, your job is your credit etc. etc., for an eminently reasonable $200 a month. This was not the sort of business model I could see thriving back East, but there was something weirdly charming about that, and the charm was contagious, and probably enabled some regrettable apparel purchases. Well, today the rest of the country officially caught the contagion; because the nation's financial institutions are suddenly too spooked to lend money to anyone but Hank Paulson, the state of California can't borrow money, and Governor Schwarzenegger is hitting up Hank Paulson to the tune of seven billion dollars. California, much like its citizenry, has one of the worst credit ratings in the nation. It's the double-edged sword of that sunny optimism, which badly needs to be redirected and channeled toward the national interest and perhaps other pursuits like surfing. MORE »

Market Crisis So Not Averted (!!!) Today this guy I know ruminated about why white bloggers employ so many goddarn exclamation points. I didn't really read it because I have ADD and assume everyone else does too so when I do actually bother employing punctuation at all it is usually for the purpose of impressing upon everyone the total urgency of whatever it was I just wrote and what better way to achieve that than an exclamation point!? (Or four!!!!!!) But hey wait, I actually know where I picked up this silly habit — another white blogger! Back from before they called them blogs, tho. There was this ZOMG-tacular writer Andy Serwer who wrote a daily stock market column on the Fortune website called "Street Life." It made no sense!!!! Except to me. (The synthetic constant proportion portfolio insurance of online commentary!) So you can blame that guy for everything, including the credit crisis! Anyway it's in Andy's honor (he still writes a blog, but it's no longer crazy because he is on teevee now) that I wrote the evening's Panic Roundup in the Steez De Serwer. (Shall I call it "Manic Panic"?) MORE »

Which "Big Stars" Were Grossed Out By Their Portraits In New York? I sort of loved how most of the actors Dan Winters photographed for New York's "New York Actor" photo essay looked basically like hell. This is not freaking Santa Monica. If someone invented indulgences for all the sins we commit against our skin we'd be the Avignon Papacy. But enough wishful thinking: Liz Smith reports today "some big name stars" were "not amused" by the harsh realism of his portraiture, which Smith credits to his past shooting spreads for Texas Monthly, "where they like things rough and tough." (This assertion appears to have no basis in fact, but it was fun checking out his portfolio.) So: who's the vain aging diva/o who told Liz she wasn't the only one who was put off by Mr. Winters' verisimilitude schtick? Let's examine the evidence: MORE »

Which "Big Stars" Were Grossed Out By Their Portraits In New York? I sort of loved how most of the actors Dan Winters photographed for New York's "New York Actor" photo essay looked basically like hell. This is not freaking Santa Monica. If someone invented indulgences for all the sins we commit against our skin we'd be the Avignon Papacy. But enough wishful thinking: Liz Smith reports today "some big name stars" were "not amused" by the harsh realism of his portraiture, which Smith credits to his past shooting spreads for Texas Monthly, "where they like things rough and tough." (This assertion appears to have no basis in fact, but it was fun checking out his portfolio.) So: who's the vain aging diva/o who told Liz she wasn't the only one who was put off by Mr. Winters' verisimilitude schtick? Let's examine the evidence: MORE »

Did John McCain And P.J. O'Rourke Share A Love Triangle With This Lady? This is Amy Lumet, the California socialite daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet (and granddaughter of chanteuse Lena Horne!) As you might have noted, she is voluptuous! Three years ago she told the Village Voice she wanted to be in Playboy; she apparently used to model. We bring her up today because of some highly unsubstantiated internet rumors that she had an affair with John McCain during the Gulf War while she was married to cancer-stricken conservative pundit P.J. O'Rourke and O'Rourke was on assignment in the Middle East, where John McCain's wife was coincidentally consuming some of the aircraft carriers worth of Percocet she took to cope with the pain of her loveless marriage. We might wait for more evidence as to the veracity of such a rumor if the mere existence of Amy Lumet were not so fascinating in itself. MORE »

Did John McCain And P.J. O'Rourke Share A Love Triangle With This Lady? This is Amy Lumet, the California socialite daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet (and granddaughter of chanteuse Lena Horne!) As you might have noted, she is voluptuous! Three years ago she told the Village Voice she wanted to be in Playboy; she apparently used to model. We bring her up today because of some highly unsubstantiated internet rumors that she had an affair with John McCain during the Gulf War while she was married to cancer-stricken conservative pundit P.J. O'Rourke and O'Rourke was on assignment in the Middle East, where John McCain's wife was coincidentally consuming some of the aircraft carriers worth of Percocet she took to cope with the pain of her loveless marriage. We might wait for more evidence as to the veracity of such a rumor if the mere existence of Amy Lumet were not so fascinating in itself. MORE »

So What Changed Since Last Time Congress Voted On The Bailout? In a matter of minutes (or anyway, units of time) the Senate is expected to vote on a bailout package. Much like the bailout package that just got voted down the other day and sent all your stocks back in time to September 11. So what's changed since then? We've been sorta paying attention. Here's a comprehensive roundup! MORE »

To All The Sad Young White Media Interns Working For Free… There's blind item is causing a mild shitstorm on Fashionista today about a "publishing house" that has been "quietly paying interns — but only if they're of a 'minority.'" Commenters immediately called out Hearst, which, what do you know, we called them up and it turns out that like myriad other media organizations recruits local minority interns* through a separate internship program with special terms and specifications, one of them happens to be a salary of $12 an hour. Now there is something to get enraged about. Not. Who planted this fucking item? Don't tell me, I don't want to know. This is for you. MORE »

To All The Sad Young White Media Interns Working For Free… There's blind item is causing a mild shitstorm on Fashionista today about a "publishing house" that has been "quietly paying interns — but only if they're of a 'minority.'" Commenters immediately called out Hearst, which, what do you know, we called them up and it turns out that like myriad other media organizations recruits local minority interns* through a separate internship program with special terms and specifications, one of them happens to be a salary of $12 an hour. Now there is something to get enraged about. Not. Who planted this fucking item? Don't tell me, I don't want to know. This is for you. MORE »

Reading Gawker In Moscow Is The New Reading Lolita In Tehran "Dear Moe, Thank you for defending my good looks on the internet. I am going to press that post to my heart as the Moscow air and water slowly turn me into a walking cadaver. Yours, -k" MORE »

Is VP Debate Moderator Gwen Ifill In The Tank For Obama? PBS anchor Gwen Ifill has been a pundit for decades, but she shrewdly avoided controversy until the 2004 presidential campaign, when she moderated the vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. Remember that? At first you maybe thought, "How nice, that America has found a black woman it deems sufficiently sedated to moderate a big debate!" But then she slipped. Edwards brought up Cheney's old company Halliburton's multibillion profiteering in the Iraq, and Dick Cheney told her he would need more than the allotted 30 seconds to respond, and Ifill told him, "That's all you've got" to audience laughter, and that exposed her deep boiling black rage. Well, somehow the Attention Deficit Democracy allowed this bitter partisan to come back to moderate another VP debate. And big surprise: it turns out she is completely in the tank for Obama. MORE »

Lindsay Lohan Makes Being Gay So Much More Than Just OK! Beloved child actress Lindsay Lohan's shocking "I'm Gay!" cover has hit newsstands! And it is truly shocking. The word "gay" is nowhere to be found?! It's all "Love" and "Wedding Plans" and "In Other Old News, Oy That Is A Remarkable Rack." But everyone knows the correct way to reveal one's gayness on a magazine cover is to make arrangements with a distinguished Time Inc. publication to run a cover story that somberly declares: "Hey! Hi! I am ready to air my deep painful lifelong secret with the world in a supportive setting! If just one kid in Nebraska with an elaborate Christian Siriano fantasy and a dream can read my painful painful story and feel a little more 'normal' as a result then it will all have been worth it! Because this is really painful for me, telling the world what they already knew about me! Even though being gay is nothing to be ashamed of; it is just like having Lyme disease or something!" Not Lindsay. When Lindsay Lohan turns out to be gay, it is like …aspirational! And that adorbs snapshot of her and girlfriend Sam Ronson in those Come On Feel The Lemonheads shirts: whose inner college lesbian without the college isn't tingling experimentally over that image? It is like Jamie Lynn and her enviable teen pregnancy, but without the weight gain. MORE »

That's It, Neocons! Big Government Will Pay Off Those Big Loans On Your Big Cars, But No More Big "Ideas" "Not once did we consider asking Washington to bail out the Sun," proclaimed the conservative New York newspaper in a deathbed editorial this morning that cited the importance of adhering to its highminded free-market "principles." But it turns out that they did almost precisely that kind of! See, some of the Sun's capitalist backers had a bunch of money invested in the private equity firm Cerberus, which controls the auto financing firms Chrysler Financial and GMAC. (And also, owns Chrysler itself, which was also a bad idea.) Auto financing firms are sitting on truckloads of car loans gone bad in no small part because people can't get home equity loans to pay them off like they used to, which is (a major reason) why the whole auto industry has gone to shit. So…guess which struggling private equity firm was about to get some major R-O-L-A-I-D-S from that big communist bailout bill all those ideological comrades of the Sun just voted down? MORE »

Eliot Spitzer Doesn't Want To Talk 2 U It is so funny, the way people pick up their kids' text message habits and apply them to email. [NYT] MORE »

Meet The New N+1 T-Shirt Models! The highbrow low-pay publishing community has long suffered from a startling male-female attractiveness imbalance exemplified by the case of that American Apparel modeling Paris Review intern. I mean, if Jessica Roy was ever right about anything, it is that.* But for its work righting the prettiness gap perhaps we owe a debt of "gratitude" to the most important literary journal of our time, N+1, whose founding editors Keith Gessen and Benjamin Kunkel are not only decidedly conventionally attractive but extra reviled on the basis of that fact. And as the Observer noticed today, N+1 is now employing male contributor Wesley Yang (and his wavy hair I will refrain from calling a "mane") in the new capacity of T-shirt pitchman. Yang, you might recall if you are one of N+1's numerous readers, originally ascended to literary microfame in a piece in the last issue about how he related to Virginia Tech school shooter Seung Hui-Cho for feeling fundamentally "unlovable." MORE »