The Last Taboo

The Village Voice examines the last great New York taboo topic — Trustafarians:

Sex with strangers. Drug abuse. Mental illness. Among educated twentysomethings reared in the therapy culture, every personal scandal is fair game at the dinner table. Except for one: coming from money.

“Please don’t tell anyone about my trust fund, I really don’t want that information being passed around,” one young New Yorker e-mailed me. “Oh, so I’m the bad guy?” another heir asked warily.

It may sound strange that in the most affluent society in the world, in the richest city in the world, Richie Riches would be ashamed of their inherited fortunes. After all, President Bush repealed the estate tax just for them, the luckiest 2 percent of the population!

But America still sees itself as an egalitarian society, and wealth is still a loaded issue. Those who bear the dreaded “trustafarian” tag say they have problems with guilt, embarrassment, and most importantly, figuring out what to do with their lives.

All of which sets up the devastating conclusion: getting a job helps one “get direction” in life. Say it ain’t so!

The Times’ Prole Rat Threat

Slate’s Jack Shafer commits to print (or pixel, as the case may be) what we’ve long assumed to be true about New York journalists in a piece from last week about the Times’ recent Class Matters series:

Journalists are notoriously sensitive to matters of class and status, especially a New York journalist with a $125,000 salary that might make him an object of envy to a reporter living in Lansing, Mich., but that stigmatizes him as a knuckle-dragging proletarian on his home turf. Rising housing prices, high taxes, pressures to enroll children in private schools and dress fashionably, et al., contribute to a permanent state of status anxiety in many New York-based Times and Journal reporters and editors. Financial journalists in New York have their noses rubbed into their relative pauperhood on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis by the lawyers, hedge-fund traders, business executives, and investment bankers they report on. If they’re blue about class in America, you can’t blame them.

Specifically, I’ve often wondered who exactly the audience is for some Times stories — the real obnoxious ones, the ones that by all rights the 92.5 percent of the rest of us (journalists included!) shouldn’t really understand. And sometimes you get to thinking that 92.5 percent of us (journalists included!) are just millions of court jesters sitting around this big castle with that funny Indian name — those rivers are the moat!

NB: Credit where due.

Venti Wobblies

Employees at a Midtown Starbucks are attempting to unionize. Management sends in the Pinkerton agents. New York Magazine has the story — “A Union Revolution is Brewing”:

It sounds very Brave New World, but [Barista Daniel] Gross prefers an Old South analogy. “We’re talking about wage slavery here,” he says, slamming his hand on the table in a non-multinational East Village café so hard that a water glass jumps. “We are very aware of the implications of that term. We wouldn’t use it if we didn’t think there were inherent similarities to plantation slavery.”

Unlike an antebellum cotton farm, however, Starbucks does offer comprehensive health-care benefits to two thirds of its workforce, those clocking twenty hours or more a week. And Fortune magazine just rated it the second-best large employer in the nation.

Gross scoffs. “Their dirty little secret is the repetitive strain injuries,” he says. “Starbucks is not some old-world European coffeehouse. We face an extraordinary demand every day, while an epidemic of understaffing requires us to work at lightning speed.” There’s the bending and stooping, the risk of steam burns, the carpal tunnel syndrome from pulling hundreds of espressos. By the time Gross pauses for breath, Starbucks, which prides itself on being a comforting “Third Place”—welcoming customers into a sphere that is neither work nor home—sounds more like a Dickensian workshop.

Reaganomics Takes Manhattan

New York Magazine’s Daniel Gross wants us to believe that there is a trickle-down effect of “ridiculous wealth”, and sommeliers all over the city should be counting their lucky stars.

Point taken — rich bastards spend absurd amounts of money propping up an absurd service economy, but I’m skeptical. Doesn’t the housing market — one in which a frightening number of New Yorkers spend more than 50 percent of their income on — quickly become unaffordable as average housing prices rise? To be sure, it’s part of their “to be sure” paragraph:

Before we get too carried away in enumerating all the great gifts New Yorkers humbly receive from the very rich, let’s admit some limits. The ever-climbing cost of living hits us all. It’s not just the price of apartments; everything from sneakers to a jug of milk costs more here and prices are rising fast. The Consumer Price Index in New York City has been growing at a 30 percent greater clip than the national rate. For the vast majority of people, inflation cuts directly into their standard of living.

As for real estate, if this boom does turn into bubble, the really rich will be bummed, but they’ll disappear for a week to St. Barts and return good as new. People with mortgages they can barely swing—like those three-year, fixed-rate, interest-only “deals”—could be wiped out.

But it’s inescapable. Of course rich people make our lives better — they fix Central Park, they contribute to MoMA, they subsidize two operas (take that, L.A.!). So on behalf of the squeezed middle class all over the city, thank you for helping us eke out a living.

Manhattan Preschool Admissions More Competitive Than Harvard

The Post notes that the the preschool admissions process is more competitive than Harvard’s admissions process, with 15 applicants for each spot compared to Harvard’s 11:

Manhattan toddlers have a harder time winning acceptance to private preschools than students have trying to get into Harvard.

An average of 15 applicants vied for every spot in about 200 preschools in Manhattan, said consultant Amanda Uhry, founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors.

Harvard had 11 students competing for each of its approximately 2,030 slots.

Thousands of New York parents received notice last week that their children had been rejected or put on a waiting list for preschool.

“It is a very punitive process,” said Roxandra Antoniadis, admissions director at St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s, on the Upper West Side.

“Think of how educated New York City parents are, how sophisticated, how accomplished their children are,” she said. “When they don’t get in, it is horrible for them.”

. . .

Brick Church School, on the Upper East Side, had over 300 applicants for 53 spots, director Lydia Spinelli said. Next year, its annual tuition will range from $12,000 for half a day to $15,400 for 4- and 5-year-olds.

Uhry, the consultant, advises her clients to try 12 to 14 schools. Parents then may have to wait in lines for applications, take tours, write essays, have their toddlers tested and observed at play or even interviewed, and secure letters of recommendation from friends and family members.