Much like you need to be “above 5’9” and under 6 feet” to be considered a model, you need to know what words will be used and how in each specific frame of reference. But VIP never moves too fast, or assumes you come into the pages knowing exactly what a high-end club looks, sounds, or feels like. The book never punishes you for being outside, looking in: in fact, it is presented from the liminal space between inside and outside the scene. As both erstwhile model and active sociologist, the author is in the field, participating without disrupting; an important facet of why the book works as well as it does. As reader, you never feel left outside the velvet ropes so the author can flex their intellectual fortitude.
Read MoreThis is Why didn’t teach me about trolling as an act unto itself. It gave me a reason to think about trolling as a reactive impulse to a society that sells its own cruelty back to itself. That’s a real cognitive framework to make trolling comprehensible as a part of culture, rather than as the aberration that people pretend it to be.
Read MoreCatch & Kill is too Eustace Tilley to be a trash spectacle, too sombre because it respects and internalizes serious subject matter, too close, too soon, too decent. It’s the opera Pagliacci when you’re searching for the “But, doctor, I am Pagliacci” joke format.
Read MoreI am not exaggerating when I say I would consider myself successful as a writer if I turn a garbage-nothing clichéd phrase like “due diligence” into idiosyncratic flow with half the zest as a cool quarter of the sentences in this book.
Read More“The problem with foreign oligarchs isn’t that they’re foreign, but that they’re oligarchs”
Read More“The problem with foreign oligarchs isn’t that they’re foreign, but that they’re oligarchs”
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