real talk

How Are You Spending Thanksgiving, And What Will You Spend?

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Adam Freelander: I’m driving to Providence, which should cost about $50 in gas I think. My contribution to Thanksgiving this year is some awesome bread from Brown Paper Bag Baking (paperbagbaking.com) which ran me $13 for three loaves. So $63 give or take.

Adam Frucci: My Thanksgiving plans involve taking the subway 3 stops to my parents apartment, feasting, and then returning home that night. I am responsible for an appetizer, which I am still figuring out, but that’ll be my only expense. So $25, maybe? (Nice life, Frucci. Real nice life.) Haha SORRY. But not really. I put my time in spending 4 days at my parents place and traveling for 8 hours each way. Last year was the first year I didnt have to travel for Thanksgiving and it is THE BEST.

by Mike Dang and Logan Sachon 1:00 pm

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Blair Thornburgh: I’m getting a haircut. I forgot Thursday was Thanksgiving and no one reminded me because Canada. I really want to make dinner, too, but my French-Canadian sublet oven doesn’t work so I’m limited to stovetop cooking, WHICH would be fine except I could only get an appointment with a (cheapie) student stylist at 5:30 which throws a metaphorical wrench into my plans of watching turkey legs simmer all day. But I’ll probably try to make it work, so, $35 + tip for the haircut and around $30 for the food.

Edith Zimmerman: I’m going to extended family’s in DC annndddd spending kind of a lot of money on trains and hotel. Not that my family is mean, I just would prefer hotel.  READ MORE

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Our Classless Society

Poor Kids

by Mike Dang 12:15 pm

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Watch Poor Kids on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

I’m not trying to bring the mood down right before Thanksgiving, but Frontline has an excellent documentary we should all watch about poverty in America through the eyes of poor children living in cities like New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix and San Francisco. The children are aware of the circumstances they are in. Sera, an 11-year-old who lives with her sister and mother in San Francisco, has been in and out of shelters before securing subsidized housing in the Tenderloin district. “I think it’s kind of scary that we don’t have much of a choice if we lose this place,” she says. “This is not the Great American Dream.”

Filmmaker Jezza Neumann made the documentary after seeing the huge response he saw when he made a documentary about poor children living in the U.K. 12 years ago. In a Q+A, Neumann discusses how difficult it is to remain neutral while making the documentary:

During the filming you try to stay as distant as possible, while remaining connected. It’s really difficult because, of course, as a human being, you don’t want to witness what you’re witnessing. You’d love to change things for the kids, but you know in your heart of hearts you can’t. If I changed things for Kaylie and I bought her all the food, can I buy the food again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? If I buy her a bunch of clothes, should I buy them for Tyler? And should I therefore go and buy them for the kid next door, who also doesn’t have any? Where does it stop?

So many questions we don’t yet have the answer for.

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Family Matters

Guess Who’s Coming to Thanksgiving Dinner (It’s Charlie)

spacer “God damn it, Charlie, go upstairs and take a shower!” were my Dad’s first words to his half-brother when he arrived at our home on Thanksgiving Day, 2004. That might sound a little brusque, but years of unpleasant visits had us braced for the worst; Thanksgiving was “pre-ruined,” as my dad said, simply by having invited him. We hoped, of course, that that year would somehow be different, but his entrance did not bode well.

by William Foster 11:22 am

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Charlie usually showed up bearing some semblance of normalcy, carrying himself with basic decorum at least for a short while, but that day he was unraveled out of the gate. With a 360-degree neck beard, long-unlaundered Dickies, and a flagrant disregard for hygiene, he looked and smelled like he’d come straight to our house from the tail end of a long-haul trucking run, although we knew he’d been home for at least a week since his last trip.

“You stink, you look like you haven’t shaved in a month, you…” my dad went on. Charlie was 35 then. My dad, at 55, hadn’t grown up with him, and had always served more as a disciplinarian than a peer. Charlie offered no explanation for his filthy state. He didn’t express any shame or even try to fake it, and actually seemed annoyed that we weren’t letting it slide. My dad motioned upwards and insisted, “Come on, Charlie.” Charlie wordlessly handed my mom the huge plastic-wrapped turkey that he had cradled in his arms, and with a sigh of resignation lumbered upstairs to the bathroom.  READ MORE

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Hurricane Sandy

Depending on Government in an Emergency No Fun, Turns Out

by Logan Sachon 10:58 am

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You know what sounds EXTREMELY NOT FUN? Being at the mercy of the NYC emergency shelter system! Being moved from schools to armories to hotels in the middle of the night! Maybe or maybe not getting food assistance! This NYT article about the mess ends with an 11-year-old girl asking her father, who lost his home for his family of seven and his business to support them in the storm, “Daddy, don’t you hate your life?”

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Holidays

Grandma Helen at Thanksgiving

Words mean things. I say what I mean. Let me repeat: You don’t need to bring anything means you don’t need to bring anything. And if I did tell you to bring something, bring it in the quantity I said. Really. This doesn’t have to be difficult.

by Mike Dang 10:00 am

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If you’re unfamiliar with Margaret and Helen, they’re two charming old ladies who keep a blog together (although there is a question about whether or not they’re real). Helen has a really amazing Thanksgiving letter she posted for her family on the blog. “Salad at Thanksgiving is a waste of space.” Agreed!

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Estimations

Wednesday Estimate

by Mike Dang 9:05 am

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spacer We’ll be taking Thursday and Friday off this week for the American Thanksgiving holiday (Canadians, I realize that you celebrated your Thanksgiving last month), so I’m posting the estimate today for our four-day weekends.

I plan on doing zero shopping over the weekend (see this, see also: Buy Nothing Day, and John Herrman’s post at Buzzfeed), but there will be no judgement if you are planning on deal-hunting over the weekend (and if you are, you should definitely check out this post by The Wirecutter on gadget deals). I do plan on heading out to the Rockaways again to volunteer (it’s the season of giving, after all). I’m setting my budget at $150.

What are your estimates?

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It Was Here And Then It Was Gone

The Universe Gave Me a Smartphone, And Then the Universe Took It Away

spacer LAST WEEK

Logan Sachon: Mallory. You have you been without a phone for a month and a half. How did that work?

by Mallory Ortberg and Logan Sachon November 20th, 2012

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Mallory Ortberg: Oh, man. Weirdly. At first I was pretty disappointed (mostly in myself) and was going to replace it right away, but then time just kept happening.
In the interim, Facebook chat and Gchat have helped me keep in touch with enough people pretty ok—if nothing else I can ping someone to let them know I’m leaving the house and on my way or what have you.

LS: “Time just kept happening.”

MO: I mean the first week or two I had friends offer to give me older smartphones, and I was like, oh great, I’ll just do that. This was my first smartphone, by the way—since every phone I’ve ever had has ended up lost or in a washing machine I never wanted to spend very much on one. Anyhow, then it turned out these phones weren’t compatible with my plan, or something; I kind of stopped listening once I heard “this won’t work because.” And I saw on my [PHONE COMPANY REDACTED] website that if I waited til 11/14 (TODAY) I could get a discounted upgrade. So I decided to wait.  READ MORE

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The Cost of Things

People I Have Paid to Hurt Me

by Logan Sachon November 20th, 2012

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spacer 1. Spinning instructors

2. Crossfit instructors

3. The many women I have gone to for eyebrow threading.

4. The woman who gave me an anti-acne facial. “You will feel so good,” she said. And there were a few nice minutes in there with some creams and steam. But mostly it was EXTRACTIONS, during which she pressed down hard on a sharp tool and dragged it across my face to clean out my pores. Found myself resorting to lamaze breathing exercises learned from watching birth scenes on sitcoms. “Cannot endure torture” just another reason I’ll never be a spy.   READ MORE

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The Awl

Assets & Liabilities: Understanding The Rolling Jubilee Project

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by Maria Bustillos November 20th, 2012

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Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, recently launched a project called the Rolling Jubilee, which has raised over $350K as I write; the money will be used to buy, and then forgive, around $7 million worth of distressed medical debt. That’s what a “jubilee” meant, in Old Testament times: a period for cancelling debts, and for the manumission of slaves, that came around every five decades: “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family” (Leviticus 25:10, and someone might mention it to Benjamin Netanyahu.)

The highlight of the Rolling Jubilee so far was a telethon, the “People’s Bailout,” which featured speeches and performances by a passel of alt-notables including Janeane Garofalo, Lizz Winstead, Hari Kondabolu, David Rees, John Cameron Mitchell, Lee Ranaldo, Guy Picciotto, the TV on the Radio guys Kyp and Tunde, several performers and representatives from local Christian churches and a group of nuns, Sisters of St. Joseph, the latter of whom were received with the utmost bewilderment. But the star attraction was undoubtedly the famously reclusive Jeff Mangum of the Neutral Milk Hotel, who is married to Strike Debt organizer and documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor (Žižek!).

This somewhat punishing four-hour event was livestreamed on the 15th, and I watched it in a very noisy bar in Oakland. READ MORE

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Rich People

The Billionaires of India

spacer “Until roughly the year 2000, becoming a billionaire was something that everybody saw as a good thing in India. They saw it as a coming of age,” he explains, as we sit in his home in a fancy neighbourhood of New Delhi. “Now being wealthy has been given a bad name.”

The generation that rose in the period immediately after India’s reforms in the early 1990s amassed fortunes in areas such as information technology and outsourcing, he contends. However, recent times have seen a more troubling economic trend. “In the last decade, almost all of the billionaires created in India have been created because of the proximity to politics,” he says. “They have been created in specific areas where government policy determines whether you make a billion or you don’t, which includes land, real estate, infrastructure, and natural resources.”

by Mike Dang November 20th, 2012

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The Financial Times examined some of India’s newest richest people (men), and found that as India’s economy rapidly grew in the last decade, the wealth found a way to corrupt people (surprise!). Not everyone is so bad: The country has its own version of Warren Buffet in the guise of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, a financier who made a bundle spotting undervalued companies, and who recently promised to donate at least a quarter of his fortune to charity. Interestingly enough, the two words you’ll find missing from the piece are the words “poverty” and “poor.” The only time the word “slums” appears is in the context of where India’s richest man has decided to build his mansion—the $500 million home is located in a city where half of the residents live in slums.

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