First Person,
love & romance
All the sad young psuedo intellectuals. Image via New Yorker.
I was intrigued immediately upon reading the Brokelyn headline, “A free way to date the BK intelligentsia.” Why? I’m single. I started reading n+1 after devouring co-editor Keith Gessen’s novel about All the Sad Young Literary Men and kept reading when I discovered that each issue’s 200 pages were filled with even more sad young literary men’s critical-theory informed ramblings. I was sick of giving my number to boys in bars who seemed smart in person and used all the wrong conjugations of “your” via text. But how good could a free personals site that appeals to shy bookish types actually be? I sent in my post and received an unsurprisingly lengthy e-mail reply seeking a “cunning lit-cougar” a few days later. 
First Person
The way the fashion-industrial complex is frothing over the Missoni Target collabo that drops in stores on Sept. 13, you’d think that Coco Chanel herself had risen from the grave to design a honeymoon line for Kim Kardashian.
From the preview photos, this ambitious collection does look pretty zig-a-zag ha (especially the bike), but then, they all do. Seriously, have you ever seen a Target collaboration that looked as good in real life? The Rodarte stuff looked like goth skating dresses. Anya Hindmarch’s squeaky patent pleather bags didn’t whisper Anya Hindmarch so much as scream Target. And so on.
You’d think that a budget blog would be all over these high-low fashion smashups, but allow me to air a petty grievance: they’re patronizing.
First Person
©iStockphoto.com
I am a stay-at-home girlfriend. When my boyfriend goes off to work, I spend my days cooking, cleaning our two-bedroom Greenpoint apartment and trying to look good for him when he comes home. I never planned on this lifestyle; my corporate job of four years was outsourced in October when we were already living together. What was a matter of convenience before is now a matter of financial survival — while I’ve always been someone who’s really into keeping her boyfriend happy (that’s how I was raised), it’s now my primary occupation after job-seeking. I’m not alone. I was actually the third of my female friends living with her boyfriend to wind up out of work, and all of us, to some degree, adhere to stereotypically Stepfordish rules to keep our relationships afloat and ourselves sane. Here are mine:
First Person
Bed Stuy/ Bushwick
Photo by Stefan Tonio
I never really decided to spend only $8,000 in one year—it just sort of happened. I didn’t even realize the extent of my thrift until tallying up my income on the eve of March 15. When you take the amount of money I brought home (roughly $13,000) and subtract the amount I had thrown to the black void that is private student loans (roughly $5,000), combined with the fact that both my checking and my savings accounts were more or less empty on January 1, it was pretty simple math.
