Draft Four: A place for your better self

A letter from New York City.

A few nights ago, I saw a journalist friend here in New York City. He moved from the UK about a year ago and is finally feeling settled in – his apartment is furnished, he made some new friends, and he figured out his work schedule (three times a week in the office because the company has a gym).

He sometimes thinks about the life he built in London, the comfort, the ease, the network of colleagues and friends. “London might be a better place to live”, he told me. “But I like who I am in New York more.”

I can’t get this idea out of my head. There is nowhere in this world where I feel more invisible than in New York. Unseen, small, humbled by the reality that millions of people around me are going through their daily lives, unaware of mine. And this is also why always feel I am the cusp of everything every time I come here: possibility, chance, serendipity.

A panorama from the top floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I first came to New York in 2005. I was 24 and fresh out of a master’s program in journalism at Mizzou. My girlfriend at the time landed an internship at Time magazine, and I followed, hoping one of the applications I sent would turn into something. My pile of job and internship rejections was in the dozens: not experienced enough for some, overqualified for others.

Without a job, the only place I could afford was a sublet in the Polish area of Greenpoint, in Brooklyn. Staying with my girlfriend was not an option because she was more than an hour across town, in a dorm room with a bunk-bed (and other people). My room in Greenpoint was about the size of a larger bathroom, with only three walls; the fourth was a curtain. My roommates were twin sisters adopted from South Korea by Americans. The air conditioning barely worked. My eating habits were atrocious (there is a limit to the $5 falafels you can eat).

Still, none of this mattered. I remember being on the bus one day to the internship I finally got at the dying United Press International office in the United Nations building. There were so many people on the streets, everyone rushing to become or rushing to escape. Nobody cares what I do, I thought to myself. And I felt I could do anything. Or at least anything within my limits. It was scary and exhilarating to feel this much freedom.

Do you remember the last time you felt everything was possible?

*

I told my friend I understood what he meant when he said he liked his New York self more. Maybe because we are not in our regular context, in the places, spaces and communities that have shaped us, we can envision or channel other selves.

It’s not a makeover with a plan; more like a changing room where you just try something out.

This is why I’m on the road for the next month*, I realized. Since I landed Wednesday, I’ve had deep and fulfilling conversations about many things: working from home (my local journalist friends love it), picking a house, separating, the future of longform storytelling, product management, poetry, leadership, the decline of working hard as a value, reactionary politics, misogyny, illustration, magazine making, creative problem solving, design thinking, alienation, inequality.

I remembered I do my best thinking when in conversations with others. It’s only then that I can orient myself in the world and find my way into a “yes, and…” stance.

*

“Yes, and…” is holding multiple apparently competing truths in your mind at the same time. Yes, there is a rising global far/alt right movement with shades of fascism. And there are strands of essentialism on the left, too. Yes, the way many of us look at work is broken. And there are some (me, included) for whom work remains a force that gives us meaning. Yes, New York can be a reservoir of endless possibly. And it can be a well of sorrow.

The news of the week in the city was a murder on one of the subway lines. Jordan Neely, a homeless man who used to do Michael Jackson impersonations on the subway, got on a train earlier this week and was harassing passengers in what was probably a mental health breakdown. A former marine took him down and restrained him in a chokehold. Neely’s oxygen flow was cut off. He lost consciousness, and later died.

Many here are negotiating what this means; there are protests out there as I write this. The man was perceived as aggressive. The marine killed him. What should the punishment be? Are the other passengers responsible? A local reporter spoke to some of them, including two who didn’t intervene, one of whom was disappointed at himself, and the others.

"You get on the train, you don't say nothing to nobody, you look at your phone. I don't think the people were happy that the guy died, but they were definitely not on the homeless man's side. They were still sitting in their seats. They just witnessed someone getting choked to death and they're not getting off the train. Everybody was contemplating, ‘How are we getting to work?’".

*

That’s the thing with crowds in cities with so many unseen, but not only – we become bystanders. Sometimes out of fear or confusion. Sometimes out of self-absorption. Not entirely guilty, but certainly not innocent. Somehow, collectively, New Yorkers have failed that man on that train. At some point in his life, the idea that he could be whoever he wished, became outlandish. It is still so for many. (Writes NY Mag: “To be Black, destitute, homeless, and mentally ill in our city is to be one of those outsiders, existing in a kind of internal exile from society’s circle of care and concern.”)

To be able to choose who you can become is a privilege.

A memorial to Jordan Neely outside the subway stop where he was pronounced dead.

Eventually, way back in 2005, after two months of possibility, I made a choice: I took a job in Washington, DC, as a project manager for a newsroom training program. It paid well, and I could afford to rent a studio with all four walls. (Little did I know back then than just a couple of years later I’d be back in the Bucharest studio I was convinced I’d never return to.)

Here’s the thing about the future: it doesn’t exist. It’s possible, it’s probable, and there are preferred versions of it. I’m among the ones who believe it’s also slightly plannable, and I’m aware of hubris of this. Over the years I came to understand the following: being an anxious person means I need to plan. But I don’t plan because I believe that if I do, it’ll all work out. I plan because if I have a projection of what might be, I can also adjust easier when it turns out different. (And it often does.)

*

There were many people in New York planning for the future in the early 00s, especially in media. Digital publishing was growing, and technology was democratizing access to who could make stuff. In journalism that meant, as some have said back then: here comes everybody.

In 2005, I also believed in this. It’s New York where I started to blog – it was the new cool thing to do, to challenge the media status quo. The power balance was shifting. There were powerful institutions, but there was also a new class (think the proto version of today’s YouTube or Tik Tok creators).

This is the story told in Traffic, a book that just came out chronicling the rise of Gawker (and other blogs in that network), and BuzzFeed. There are many imperfect things in the book – one of which is the degree to which Ben Smith, the book’s author and former editor of BuzzFeed News, keeps himself largely out of the story – but it’s still a riveting account of how a New York scene of young writers and misfits both proved the promise of the internet, and unlocked some its worst instincts.

Those who have been in journalism for the past decade or so know this story. A bunch of digitally native companies – most of them American – became the thing to emulate. They racked up millions of pageviews, changed the way we measure and talk about website visits and embraced the platforms – Facebook in particular – as forces for good they would partner with to get information to the masses.

Enough with traditional editors and gatekeepers deciding what people should consume. People will tell us what they liked because we could see where the traffic was. And hopefully we will then sell their eyeballs to advertisers, and platforms.

These outlets told a story of rebels redefining media. And they did, to some degree. But not in the way they planned. From a recent story about that time:

“It was a contrarian but intuitive enough view. Today, from an internet where social platforms systematically demote links to outside websites, and where content recommendations are made by machines instead of by friends, it sounds naïve. (…)

From the vantage point of 2023, the history described in Traffic sounds less like a story of entrepreneurial experimentation than an account of a recurring industry delusion. But it’s a delusion worth studying today as it threatens to manifest again. The tech industry will not ever save the media. It will sooner eat it alive.”

*

I realized there were parts of this story that made me angry. I lived it from afar, both interested in the ideas (such as the delusional “publish a slideshow of cat photos, and then keep people there for a hard-hitting investigation”), and worried about the conclusions that were later preached at conferences around the world (“forget the frontpage”, “go all in on social!” etc.).

Even in Romania, if you still roll your eyes at click-bait headlines, it’s because of this era. If you still dodge display ads on news sites like a mosquito attack, it’s because of this era. If you get turned down by potential sponsors and agencies demanding “reach” (instead of quality), it’s because of this era. So, yes. A bunch of people in New York made it possible to look at traffic in a different way. And they also screwed many of us who, halfway around the world, still answer to corporate publishers that crave what was never sustainable (because it was inflated by platforms that never really cared about journalism): traffic.

*

The Brooklyn neighborhood I lived in for that summer in 2005 has changed. It’s packed with fancy restaurants, bars, and reconverted lofts, probably many thousands of dollars in rent per month. A friend told me, there is no “media scene” anymore, because who could afford to live here to be part of one?

But people still move to New York, still like this version of themselves better than others. For a few days, so did I.

---

Side dishes:

1. This poem by Tara Skurtu, an American poet who recently moved to New York after almost eight years in Romania. About parts of that separation, she writes:

you don’t have
an alcohol problem

you have a
childhood problem

you piss
in your hands I came

to your country
for you I left

you in your country
on the boulevard

of your ancestors

2. This recent list of New York’s best 100 restaurants. Because you never know when you’ll need it.

3. This audio conversation on love and relationships with philosopher Agnes Callard, who I’ve mentioned in a previous letter. Here, she talks about romance and the possibility of it having an expiration date: “There are these kind of transformative moments that can’t last. And romance just gives us a big, strong version of that. That sudden experience of everything being possible, it doesn’t last. But I don’t think that’s the same thing as saying it’s not sustainable.”

4. Our love affairs with places also often have an expiration date. As Tara Skurtu told me over lunch about deciding to not return to Boston: “The present you hold in your head is the past”. Here is one of my favorite break up with New York essays ever, by Meghan Daum: “I suppose that part of the city’s magical beastliness is the fact that you can show up with the best of intentions, do what’s considered to be all the right things, achieve some measure of success, and still find yourself trapped in a financial emergency.”

* I’ll be in Chicago next week, then Vancouver, and Seattle. If you happen to be there or know people I should meet up with, let me know.