My husband has forbidden me from writing any more posts titled New York Shitty. He’s as tired of all that whining as many of you are. But the NYT has come to my rescue. The Times recently asked readers for a reverse bucket list of all the things they’ve experienced in the Big Apple that they never want to experience again. It turns out I’m not alone:
“Disinfecting a phone that’s fallen into a sewer grate puddle,” Francesca Fiore wrote on Twitter. A reader named Ronnie K suggested in a comment on our City Room blog, “Finding a few black specks on your pillow case and a couple of bites on your arms.” Jennifer Fragale offered on Twitter: “Having to move furniture down from a 4th Fl walk up, around the block, and up a 5th Fl walk up.”
Navigating the streets of the city, by whatever mode of transportation, was a particularly rich source of discomfort.
Do you drive? Try “Being stuck in August rush hour traffic behind a garbage truck leaking hot garbage juice, a.k.a. ‘Satan’s Sangria,’ ” Jerome Goubeaux suggested in the comments. You could take a cab instead, or try to. Howard Freeman’s lament almost demands the mournful strum of an acoustic guitar: “Hailing a cab in the rain at 4:30pm, with a broken $5 umbrella.”
Satan’s Sangria. Genius.
Today, there were more questions than answers. Did Israel share what it found by bugging John Kerry’s phone with Russia? (And why on earth was Kerry talking on a non-encrypted phone anyway?) Is a Third Intifada brewing on the West Bank? How much should we spend on the health and longevity of our pets? Did Edward Snowden tip off al Qaeda about US encryption? Was Montaigne an atheist?
You want an answer? Try the Mental Health Break. That‘s the answer.
The most popular post of the day was “Why Sam Harris Won’t Criticize Israel“. On a program note, Sam and I are going to have a conversation about this subject this week. We’ll post an audio and a transcript soon thereafter. So stay tuned. The second most popular post was “We Tortured. It Was Wrong. Never Mind.”
Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 23 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. One quickly jumped aboard:
I just thought you should know that it was precisely because of John Oliver’s scathing
indictment of the native advertising model, and in particular the insane comments by NYT’s Meredith Levien, that by 8:35 pm last night, I cancelled my Times subscription and went looking for an NA-free source of content. Sadly, most search engine results are links to articles about how media outlets are starting NA groups or campaigns. But it took me all of 30 seconds to find your site, which I subscribed to immediately. Thank you for your principled services and your voice in the public discourse, both on TV and in the ether.
If you long-time subscribers want to help spread the word, gift subscriptions are available here. From a Dishhead last week:
I am sitting at the airport in Orlando with my daughter, who is entering 11th grade, on the way to visit my mother in Alexandria, Va. I am reading the Dish on my phone and she is reading your coverage of Gaza over my shoulder. I love her, but enough is enough. I just bought her her own subscription.
See you in the morning.
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