Tag / New York

by Edward Champion

The City in History (Modern Library Nonfiction #76)

Lewis Mumford was an amazing observer of urban details whose work is very much worth your time. I just wish the man had been a little less committed to cultural elitism and cheapening the lives of the working stiffs.

(This is the twenty-fourth entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: Battle Cry of Freedom.)

I’ve been a city man all my life. Certainly all of my adult life. At the age of twenty, I escaped from the dour doldrums of suburban Sacramento — the kind of hideous Flintstones-style recurring backdrop that seems to encourage broken dreams, angry tears, and rampant abuse behind model home replica doors — for the bright foggy beauty and the joyful pastels of San Francisco.

That gorgeous place from the not so distant past — with the co-op movie theatres playing weirdass indie flicks you couldn’t find on video or teevee, the cafes pattering with political idealism and the streets rattling with the chatty pugnacious jingle of strange conceptual punks, the crumbling encyclopedic bookstores and the boldly strange dive bars of the Tenderloin, and the wonderful mariachi players serenading Valencia Street taquerias for a quick buck, a Mexicoke, and a smile — was exactly the urban realm I needed at the time. Only real souls committed to an increasingly rarefied inclusiveness like Michelle Tea and William T. Vollmann knew how to capture these meat-and-potatoes freak-friendly details in their novels. What I didn’t know, as San Francisco became an unaffordable playground invaded by elitist and not especially perspicacious techbro affluents, was that this coastal metropolis was no longer a place for weirdos like me. I was outpriced and outmatched, like so many who bolted to Oakland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. It was an all-too-common tale of gentrification and migration, of a city permanently regurgitating its most promising inhabitants and falling victim to an influx of wealth that forever altered its essence. Like any foolish romantic, I fell in love with someone who was absolutely wrong for me and became seduced by the Brooklyn brownstones, the skyscrapers spiring along the rivers, and the giddy pace of a megacity demanding all of its inhabitants to make something of themselves. I’ve been in New York City now for fourteen years — most of my thirties and all of my forties. I hope to continue to live here. But like anything in life, it’s largely the luck of the draw, hoping that the law of averages will work out in your favor. Especially in this age of mass unemployment and pandemic uncertainties and anybody who doesn’t make more than $200,000 a year left in the cold and declared the enemy.

I mention these bona-fides in advance of my thoughts on the great Lewis Mumford to give you a sense of why his amazing book, The City in History, took me much longer to read than I anticipated. The problem with an encyclopedic smartypants like Mumford is that he’ll drop a casual reference that is supremely interesting if you are even remotely curious. One paragraph will send you down an Internet rabbit hole. The next thing you know, you’ve just spent hours of your life trying to find any information on the ancient Greek artisans who hustled their goods in the agora and why slavery was simply accepted as a part of city life for centuries. An email correspondent, learning that I was taking a deep dive into Mumford, urged me to plunge into the four volumes kick-started by Technics and Civilization. And I have to say, given the many months I spent not so much reading The City in History but taking in the many references orbiting its scholarship, I will probably have to wait until perhaps my seventies — should I live that long — for such an enormous undertaking. I could easily see myself as an old bachelor on a beach — filling in crossword puzzles, tendering stories about my misspent youth to any sympathetic ear, respectfully flirting with any lingering divorcé with the decency to not see me as invisible, and carrying along the four Mumford volumes with me (along with whatever will then pass for a tablet to look up all the references) in a satchel.

This is my roundabout way of saying that Lewis Mumford’s The City in History is a wonderfully robust and often grumbly tome from a dude who spent most of his years considering how cities thrive through technological and architectural development. One of the book’s charms is seeing Mumford gradually becoming more pissed off as he gets closer to the modern age. It’s almost as if he resents what the city transformed into in the twentieth century. For example, in a weird aside, Mumford complains about the increased number of windows in residential buildings after the seventeenth century, bemoaning the lack of privacy with a touch of principle rarely remembered by people who grew up with nothing but the Internet’s exhibitionistic cadences. He also has a healthy aversion to the “often disruptive and self-defeating” nature of constant growth. It is, after all, possible for a city or a small town to develop too much. Once cities ditched their walls, there were no longer any physical boundaries to how far any teeming area could spread while arguably become lesser the further it rolled along. (See, for example, the anarchic sprawl of Texas today. Everyone from the likes of the Manhattan Institute’s Michael Hendrix to James Howard Kuntsler has spoken, in varying degrees of horror, about this endless expansion.) On this point, Mumford pushes back against the myth of the medieval town as a place of static boredom. He points to religious edifices somehow transforming these clusters where, for the first time in history, “the majority of the inhabitants of a city were free men.” Even when mercantile centers dried up as trade died, Mumfurod points to the limitless evolution of the countryside. Feudalism subsided for a stabler and more available food supply and new forms of home-spun industry that made many of these smaller villages special. Textile industries flourished in northern Italy and not only resulted in innovations such as the spinning wheel, but some healthy revolutionary pushback against tyrants — such as the weavers rebelling against the ruling elite in 1370-1371. In short, Mumford argues that a reasonably confined city was capable of nearly anything.

But what of the modern metropolis? The cities that called to people like me as a young man? Mumford’s view was that the enormity of a place like Paris or Rome or London or New York City wasn’t merely the result of technological progress. As he argues:

…the metropolitan phase became universal only when the technical means of congestion had become adequate — and their use profitable to those who manufactured or employed them. The modern metropolis is, rather, an outstanding example of a peculiar cultural lag within the realm of technics itself: namely, the continuation by highly advanced technical means of the obsolete forms and ends of a socially retarded civilization.

Well, that doesn’t sound too nice. So the punks who I jammed with in Mission District warrens and the scrappy filmmakers piecing together stories and the bizarre theatre we were putting on while eating ramen and Red Vines were cultural atavists? Gee, thanks, Lewis! Would Mumford apply this same disparaging tone to the CBGB punk crowd and artists who flourished in the East Village and arguably altered the trajectory of popular music? Or, for that matter, the 1990s hip-hop artists who flourished in Bed-Stuy and Compton? This is where Mumford and I part ways. Who are any of us to dictate what constitutes cultural lag? In my experience, obsolete forms tend to square dance with current mediums and that’s usually how the beat rolls on. Small wonder that Jane Jacobs and Mumford would get involved in a philosophical brawl that lasted a good four decades.

It’s frustrating that, for all the right criticism Mumford offers, he can be a bit of a dowdy square. He’s so good at showing us how the office building, as we still know it today, initiated in Florence thanks to Giorgio Vasari. It turns out that this amazing Italian Renaissance man wasn’t just committed to corridors. He designed an interior with an open-floor loggia — those reception areas that can now be found in every damned bureaucratic entity. We now have someone to blame for them! Mumford offers us little details — such as the tendency of early cities to repave streets over the layers of trash that had been thrown over the past twenty years. This resulted in developments such as doorways increasingly becoming lower — often submerged beneath the grade entirely — as history carried on. There are very useful asides in Mumford’s book on the history of multistory buildings. We learn how Roman baths and gymnasiums did make efforts to accommodate the rabble, despite the rampant exploitation of humans. Calvino was only scratching the surface. As long as cities have been around, humans have created new structures and new innovations. For all we know, the Coronavirus pandemic could very well lead to some urban advancement that humankind had hitherto never considered.

Because of all this, I can’t square Mumford’s elitism with the beautiful idealism that he lays down here:

The final mission of the city is to further man’s cautious participation in the cosmic and the historic process. Through its own complex and enduring structure, the city vastly augments man’s ability to interpret these processes and take an active, formative part in them, so that every phase of the drama it stages shall have, to the highest degree possible, the illumination of consciousness, the stamp of purpose, the color of love. That magnification of all the dimensions of life, through emotional communion, rational communication, technological mastery, and, above, all, dramatic representation, has been the supreme office of the city in history. And it remains the chief reason for the city’s continued existence.

Who determines the active and formative development of the city? Do we leave it to anarchy? Do we acknowledge the numerous forces duking it out over who determines the topography? I can certainly get behind Mumford railing against mercantilism. But who establishes the ideal? One of the most underrated volumes contending with such a struggle between social community and the kind of “high-minded” conservative finger-wagging that Mumford too often espouses is Samuel R. Delany’s excellent book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a brilliant portrait of the undeniable “color of love” practiced in the Times Square adult movie theatres through the mid-1990s — until Mayor Giuliani declared war on what he deemed unseemly. In a sidebar, Delany, buttressing Jane Jacobs, observes that the problem here is that this sort of idealism assumes two conditions: (1) that cities are fundamentally repugnant places and that we must therefore hide the poor and the underprivileged and (2) the city is defined by the big and the monumental.

The sheer amount of suffering undergone by the impoverished is something that Mumford, to his credit, does broach — particularly the unsanitary conditions that those in London and New York lived in as these cities expanded. (For more on the working stiffs and those who struggled, especially in New York, I highly recommend Luc Sante’s excellent book Low Life.) But while Mumford is willing to go all in on the question of bigness, he’s a little too detached and diffident on the issue of how the have nots contribute to urban growth, although he does note how “the proletariat had their unpremeditated revenge” on the haves as New York increasingly crammed people like sardines into airless cloisters. And, as such, I found myself pulling out my Jane Jacobs books, rereading passages, and saying, with my best Mortal Kombat announcer voice, “Finish him!”

But maybe I’m being a little too hard on Mumford. The guy wasn’t a fan of architect Leon Battista Alberti’s great rush for suburban development, with this funny aside: “one must ask how much he left for the early twentieth-century architect to invent.” Mumford had it in for Le Corbusier and his tower-centric approach to urban planning (which is perhaps best observed in Chandigarh, India — a place where Le Corbusier was given free reign), but he was also a huge fan of Ebeneezer Howard and his “Garden City” movement, whereby Howard suggested that some combination of city and country represented the best living conditions. Even if you side with Jane Jacobs, as I do, on the whole Garden City question, believing that there can be some real beauty in staggering and urban density, you can’t help but smile at his prickliness:

For the successor of the paleotechnic town has created instruments and conditions potentially far more lethal than those which wiped out so many lives in the town of Donora, Pennsylvania, through a concentration of toxic gases, or that which in December 1952 killed in one week an estimated five thousand extra of London’s inhabitants.

Oh, Mumford! With endearingly bleak observations like this, why couldn’t you be more on the side of the people?

Next Up: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory!

by Edward Champion

The Sociopathic Pundit Class: The Casual Cruelty and Uselessness of Jonathan Chait and Olivia Nuzzi

New York Magazine has scraped the bottom of the barrel to carry on its hoary opinion slinging and attention economy. But two of the disgraceful practitioners, Jonathan Chait and Olivia Nuzzi, are woefully unsuited and too heartless for the task.

The moral turpitude from the monsters who crawl on Vesey Street was very well-known in the five boroughs even before the pandemic. Just before any New York Magazine staffer entered a venue, the bartender would clang a bell and announce to the barflies with a stertorous holler that they could stay at the bar at their own peril. The door would open with an ominous squeak and the bartender would distract the vicious predatorial arriviste with charm and, if necessary, a free drink to avoid an Adam Platt takedown. It wasn’t always easy to appeal to the New York contributor’s narcissism and barracuda-like hello in these first vital minutes. But the bartenders did a decent job, even when their lives sometimes ended that very night.

The bartender’s honorable distractions usually offered you a few minutes to give the New York contributor the slip. You’d flatten bills on the bar, placing them just under the check presenter, and then you’d discreetly walk away, hearing the bloodcurdling sounds of the New York writer planting his vampiric fangs into the bartender (along with the bartender’s helpless screaming). You hoped that the generous tip would be enough to help cover the bartender’s funeral expenses. We New Yorkers do try and look out for each other.

Or, to put it a less inventive way, approximately 85% of the people who work at New York Magazine have the moral instincts of a striped hyena.

This is all common knowledge in media circles. Actual facts.

The striped hyena will often pretend to be dead when attacked and will stop at nothing to attack anyone — even a predator of greater size — in a dispute over food or, in this case, the expression of needless cruelty. Follow any New York contributor who gets pushback for a vile and disproportionately callous tweet and the New York contributor will pretend as if she is dead and not there. Which is precisely what Jonathan Chait and Olivia Nuzzi did in the last few days, of which more anon.

You see, these contributors are secretly savoring your attention in their notifications! They’re converting your likes and favorites to justify why their mediocre thoughts should translate into regular television appearances! They are forwarding all of it onto editor-in-chief David Haskell to prove — in an age of heightened media layoffs that always wound the wrong people — just why they should remain employed after writing such garbage hot takes as “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination” when they’re refusing to disclose their conflicts of interest. (Jonathan Chait’s embarrassingly smug and insufferable article, which seriously suggested that Trump’s Presidency would follow the flagstones established by Arnold Schwarzenegger as California Governor, was rightly named one of “the worst takes of the 2010s” by The Outline.)

New York contributors — specifically, the sophomoric and sociopathic pundits Jonathan Chait and Olivia Nuzzi — represent a repugnant breed of amoral Chuck Tatum types who view real life as a joyless sudoku puzzle to be filled in with superficial findings. Chait actually believes he’s some intellectual, but lacks any ability to discern clear satire or to comprehend common lingo. Nuzzi masquerades as as journalist, believing that a white supremacist’s musical taste represents some unique human insight that will make her name. And the media scarfs this up. When Spin‘s Jeremy Gordon actually followed up with Depeche Mode on the Richard Spencer question, it was a dark day in journalism. But even Gordon was savvy enough to understand that there was something preposterous in running with such a story. It’s a pity he never thought to go to the source of this nonsense, which was Nuzzi, and interrogate why such a nothingburger “bombshell” from a white supremacist resonated as much as it did. But then media people trust media people too much.

Journalism should never be about superficial attention. But when you’re as mediocre as Chait and Nuzzi are (and it’s worth nothing that Nuzzi really wants to be Ann Coulter: so stop calling her a journalist already), when you never have anything fresh to say, it’s often necessary to venture into bestial waters and play the attention economy game.

From Jonathan Chait during the afternoon of August 21, 2020:

From Olivia Nuzzi on August 20, 2020:

Both of these tweets are without wit or humanity. It says a great deal about New York Magazine’s hideous atmosphere and Haskell’s complicit approval of eyeballs by any means necessary that these tweets would be published within days of each other.

I have my issues with Joe Biden. But you would need a heart of stone to not be genuinely moved by the way that Biden reached this stuttering kid and gave him hope. So much hope that the kid went onto support him at the Democratic National Convention. Chait isn’t delivering a “spicy take.” He’s conveniently ignoring responsibility for his vile words, falsely claiming that there was something more “refined” to his tweet. No, there isn’t. And isn’t it funny how pundits never seem to have the time to address criticism?

Political leaders have always taken time out of their schedule to speak one-on-one with their constituents. It’s literally part of the job. And in the case of Biden, it most certainly is “high-leverage use” of his time.

As for Nuzzi, she’s a cocky and callous 27-year-old who sold her soul for a pittance. One would expect someone to turn into a heartless cynic much later in life. But that is not the Clay Felker tradition and Nuzzi is on the Ann Coulter fast track. Nuzzi is, of course, referring to how Biden lost his first wife Nelia and his one-year-old daughter Naomi in a 1972 car accident and how Biden also lost his son Beau in 2005 because of brain cancer. Aside from the complete dismissal of how trauma, or grief, has become one of Biden’s most effective ways of connecting with people, Nuzzi fundamentally does not seem to understand the way trauma works. Much like depression, one can relieve trauma throughout one’s life — sometimes in crushing waves, sometimes in little rivulets. That Biden has used his trauma to relate to everyday people should be the focus here. That he also used trauma to give a crying Meghan McCain solace on a memorable 2017 appearance on The View should also be worthy of attention. This is where the pundit should opine. You take in the obvious developments and offer a unique spin. But, like Chait, Nuzzi has nothing but repugnant superficiality.

Chait and Nuzzi are woefully unsuited to opine about this election. Because, for professional sociopaths like them, empathy never factors into the political picture. Even after hope and empathy were the basis of Obama’s meteoric rise to the White House in 2008. Even though empathy was the very message Biden was offering in his final night speech at the DNC.

Empathy is, in short, the very quality that any pundit should be focused on during the next 74 days. It is the very quality that helped Biden to raise $70 million during DNC week. But if you don’t actually have empathy — as Chait and Nuzzi clearly don’t — then you’re in no position to offer useful context in this presidential election.

Chait and Nuzzi’s disgraceful tweets were roundly ratioed. But they were both too cowardly to respond to the complaints. They couldn’t read the room. And if you can’t read the room, you have no business calling yourself a journalist, a pundit, or a media expert of any kind. Especially when you dance around the truth like a sociopath.

by Edward Champion

The Shameful Lies and Unacceptable Irresponsibility of Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blaso’s failure to curb or acknowledge the NYPD’s brutality and abuse secures his place in history as the most incompetent and irresponsible mayor that New York City has ever known.

Bill de Blasio’s hideous curfew experiment has proven to be a spectacular and dangerous failure — an affront to human rights and basic dignity that is uniquely destructive to the City of New York and that has proven dispiriting for its people. The curfew, which started as an 11 PM cutoff on June 1st before shifting to 8PM during the last three nights, was intended to quell looters who had vandalized and pillaged stores in Midtown, SoHo, the Bronx, and other neighborhoods. Police presence in the streets was doubled. But it has become evident in the last week that the New York Police Department isn’t terribly concerned with curbing vandalism, much less serving and protecting the people in a fair and peaceful manner. This corrupt paramilitary police force, which has demonstrated an almost total incapacity to look inward, is more feverishly committed to abusing peaceful protesters and other innocents who merely happen to be in the neighborhood with wanton violence and indiscriminate abuse of power. It is an obvious truth that both Mayor de Blasio and even Governor Andrew Cuomo, who showed strong leadership in the early days of the pandemic, refuse to acknowledge.

As the Gothamist reported, there have been hundreds of people waiting longer than 24 hours to be arraigned in New York jail cells, with Justice James Burke ruling in favor of the police to keep holding them. In a followup report at The Gothamist, it was further revealed that many of the two thousand arrested during the last week were not even protesters. Here, the detainees — some recovering from profligate douses of pepper spray and other injuries — have been crowded in a cell without masks, soap, water, or medical care. Police, who frequently refused to wear masks, have believed they are immune from the coronavirus. But they also seem to feel that they are immune from being held accountable for their criminal conduct. (On May 31st, New York Attorney General Letitia James invited people on Twitter to share the many abuses for a sweeping investigation>)

These are not merely a series of mistakes. De Blasio’s willful malingering makes Mayor Dinkins’ handling of the Crown Heights affair look like a pardonable misstep. It is now abundantly clear that Bill de Blasio is the most irresponsible Mayor that the City of New York has ever known. His insistence that “the police showed a lot of restraint,” even as he has failed to view or acknowledge the considerable videos of police abuse, represents unquestionable negligence of his duties. His considerable deficiency, taken with Police Commissioner Dermot Shea’s complete failure to curb and discipline his officers for their out-of-control attacks, represent a bungling of command that is not merely incompetent, but that stands firmly against the NYPD’s professed credo to work “in partnership with the community to enforce the law, preserve peace, protect the people, reduce fear, and maintain order.” The NYPD has attacked delivery workers, journalists, doctors, and numerous others who stood peacefully in the streets.

What’s especially insulting is the way that de Blasio (and Cuomo) have been attempting to gaslight the public narrative by claiming that clear factual video of police brutality taken from reliable sources is somehow “opinion” or a “partisan attack.” This is not a matter of being Republican or Democrat. This is about whether a major American city should be terrorized by the authoritarian whims of a clearly abusive police force. With the curfew and his failure to hold the police accountable for their deadly behavior, de Blasio created the conditions in which the NYPD were free to indiscriminately attack anyone. It turns out that the police have been the real looters all along, disregarding the law and order that they profess to stand for in order to attack anybody they see. This is not merely a dereliction of the Mayor’s duties. It’s irresponsibility that should never be accepted from any public official in the City of New York.

The time has come for the Mayor and the Police Commissioner to resign. They have enacted policy that is harming the strength and spirit of New York and that is preventing this city from healing. These two men cannot be trusted to keep the city safe. They cannot be trusted to guide us out of a nightmare. They both must be replaced by real leaders who pay close attention, do not deny the facts, and have a limitless capacity to listen.

by Edward Champion

We Need A Guaranteed Income for All Americans During the Pandemic

The Coronavirus will have a significant financial impact on working-class Americans. We need a guaranteed income to help them.

Nearly every working-class American is one or two paychecks from being out on the streets. And the shuttering of bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues in Los Angeles and New York City — all necessary, but all committed with cruel and thoughtless consideration for the American worker — is going to take a significant and life-altering hit on the vast majority of Americans who aren’t cushioned by savings or a 401k plan that they can cash out to survive during this unprecedented time. According to data, 69% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. And 45% of those Americans have no savings at all. It is unconscionable and morally unacceptable to leave these Americans without a financial safeguard. Yes, evictions are frozen in New York City. But there isn’t a rent freeze. And when the housing courts reopen, the restaurant workers — who are undoubtedly struggling to find last-minute funds to make rent in the next two weeks — will be left vulnerable to greedy landlords who have been looking for an opportunity to evict their tenants, do a retrofit, raise the rent, and make more money.

Moreover, with businesses circling the wagons right now just to survive, anyone unemployed right now is also left in the lurch. The emergency Coronavirus bill now being worked out by Congress allows for sick leave, but leaves about 59 million Americans uncovered. If you work for a business with more than 500 employees — say a restaurant franchise like McDonald’s — or the government, you’re not going to qualify for paid leave. Some companies, such as Target and Walmart, have stated that they would allow for two weeks of sick leave should any employee contract COVID-19. But this still doesn’t account for the likelihood that, as quarantine measures continue and more venues and establishments close down, the employees who work for these places will not have an alternative income.

The only mechanism that would alleviate this unfair burden upon the unemployed, the working poor, and the middle class would be a guaranteed income granted to all Americans during the next two months. This must be accompanied by a rent freeze, a freeze on credit card interest and late fees, and numerous other pieces of financial legislation to rectify a situation that we could not foresee happening.

This isn’t about radicalism. It’s about democratic humanism. It’s about an empathy for all that should never be a partisan issue.

Because this isn’t just about workers meeting their basic needs. For the estimated 30 million Americans who are presently uninsured — and for the working class population using a healthplan with a high deductible — are going to face significant costs just to get checked out for the Coronavirus — such as the teacher hit with a $10,000 emergency room bill who got checked out after she returned from Italy. (The irony is that the teacher merely visited the ER and didn’t get tested.)

It’s one thing for Governor Andrew Cuomo to end the seven day waiting period on unemployment. But these benefits must be issued at an amount that is realistic to survive on. Is it fair for the bartenders and waiters now out of work to have to use their two weeks of paid sick leave to survive what may be two months of quarantine? It is not. It is, in fact, deeply inhumane.

Unless our legislators relish the destruction of working-class lives — and there is good reason to believe that Republicans and Democrats alike simply do not care — we must issue a guaranteed income at the federal level during the next two months that kicks in immediately. Creating such a financial cushion for everyone will alleviate stress and encourage people to self-quarantine. For how many of these workers are now looking for alternative income streams that are likely unsafe for them and unsafe for the population?

by Edward Champion

Dating Script for the New York City Metropolitan Area Single

Valentine’s Day is coming up! And Reluctant Habits has consulted with its team of experts for this useful script on what to expect if you are a single in the New York City metropolitan area!

Install app.

Swipe left. Swipe left. Ooh! Swipe right. Left. Left. Right. Right. Right. Left. Left. Right. Left. Right.

Why am I not getting matches? I’m a catch. Surely.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Come on.

No.

Left.

Well, maybe I can settle.

Right. Right.

Match!

“I am from Bulgaria looking for a husband. Please send me $400 through Paypal.”

Unmatch.

Left. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Ugh.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Match!

Send flirtatious opening line based on hasty yet astute study of profile.

Nothing back.

Left. Right. Right. Right.

Match!

Take more time with flirtatious opening line based on hasty yet astute study of profile so as to stand out from other singles who are using the same opening line for all matches. Don’t be a fuckboi.

Engage in banter with dating prospect for approximately six quick rounds.

Suggest meeting in person. Make the prospect alluring. Pay highly specific compliments on qualities that other prospects won’t notice to stand out and close the deal.

Date scheduled. Exchange numbers.

Engage in modest banter by text off the app.

More swiping to play the field.

Left. Left. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Match!

Engage in more banter. Schedule date with second match to combat feelings of nervousness and insecurity, which must not be present during the date. Engage in modest banter by text off the app.

Take break. Live life.

Engage in modest banter with second prospect to combat nervous feelings as you are on the way to first date.

More swiping.

Left. Left. Right. Right. Right. Left. Right.

Arrive early at bar. Liquid courage.

Date arrives.

Early compliments to take pressure of date. You will almost never receive compliments back. In 65% of the cases, your date will show almost no interest in your life, no matter how interesting it is. So work yourself up in advance to ensure that you are confident and prepared to take the inevitable hit.

Begin questions. Be witty and charismatic to the best of your ability. Don’t talk about yourself too much. Ask questions of her. Show that you are a listener. Interlard with compliments and light and respectful touching to let her know you are interested and to see if she responds. Make offers to help out in bits of your date’s life. I mean, you can be as sincere as you want. You probably won’t be seeing your date again in about a month anyway.

Ignore buzzing from phone in pocket from second dating prospect. You can respond to her later, where you will go through the same damn process again and feel your hopes sink as dependably as it will happen here.

Become ashamed and self-aware that you are probably telling the same stories to your date, only because you know that your date probably isn’t interested in you for the long haul and, like you, at the very least, just wants to get intimate. Shame dissipates once you realize that your date is also telling the same stories and you are both here for the same reasons. You are both “looking for a relationship,” but not really. This is really just a pretext for sex, which you hope will be good.

If the date is not going well, politely thank date and leave with class. Let time pass before sending text reading “It was nice meeting you but I don’t think it was a match. Best of luck.” Sometimes you will think that the date is going well and you will be the one who receives this message. This is because your date also has a second prospect awaiting her and she has concluded that the “new” is better than the “old” and we are all hopelessly ensnared within the paradox of choice, the quest for the ideal that gets in the way of really knowing anybody. But at least we have lots of sex with different people along the way.

If the date is going well, go in for the kiss.

If you are making out with your date, respectfully suggest a nightcap or to show something at your apartment that reflects your interests. Engage in loud and amorous passion that you will probably both forget about in a few weeks. Don’t be selfish. Be sure your date has an orgasm. Always practice consent.

72% of singles in the New York City metropolitan area are “one and done” types. Both men and women. It is possible that you are not, but your date probably is. You may graduate to “friends with benefits,” especially if the sex is good, which will help take the edge off as you date and search in futility for someone who you can “be in a relationship” with. You may at least have someone to hook up with on a regular basis to allay loneliness.

Swipe left. Right. Right. Left. Right.

Match. See previous documentation for procedure.

Go on date with second prospect.

Just before date with second prospect, you will receive a text from first prospect paying you a backhanded compliment and saying that you are not a match. Said text will cause date with second prospect to backfire.

Uninstall app.

Drink heavily.

Commiserate with single friends.

Remind married and coupled friends how lucky they are and communicate just how hard it is to be single.

Try to “meet people organically” — that is, the way we used to meet before the dating apps. Rediscover, much to your horror, that dating apps have created a social construct where strangers aren’t as fond of flirting in person as they used to be. You will come to see that “meeting people organically” is more of a nostalgic idea rather than a widespread practice, as antediluvian as making mix tapes on cassette or using a Walkman in an age in which our phones can play and download damn near everything.

Once you have rebounded from the malaise and despair generated by the experience with your two failed dating prospects and once you have seen that “meeting organically” doesn’t really work anymore, and once some ridiculously optimistic faith in romance has returned, reinstall dating app.

Carry out subroutine again.

Try not to think that you are on a hamster wheel. Even though we all are. Try to sustain some belief that you will find a meaningful relationship. Try not to get angry at friends who, remarking upon your many fine qualities, ask you, “Why are you still single?” Yes, they mean well. But they aren’t aware of the script.

Date someone for two weeks.

Date someone for two days.

Date someone for a month if you’re lucky.

And so forth.

Die alone.