February 2010
124 posts
“How much money does a writer need? In New York, a young writer can get by on $25,000, give or take $5,000, depending on thriftiness. A slightly older younger writer—a 30-year-old—will need another $10,000 to keep up appearances. But that’s New York. There are parts of this country where a person can live on twelve or thirteen thousand a year—figures so small they can be written out. Of course it depends.”
—From Keith Gessen’s excellent 2008 essay “Money”, which offers a rare, frank look at the income of a young writer in NYC. Props to Emily at thingsiatethatilove for the reminder (via bundlehq) (via tiedupwithstring)
"Man Buried in Haiti Rubble Uses iPhone to Treat Wounds, Survive" →
wired.com
This story is pretty incredible. US filmmaker Dan Wooley was trapped after the earthquake and used an iPhone app - Pocket First Aid and CPR - to treat his wounds until he was rescued 64 hours later. iPhone as survival tool? Maybe we should rethink how much is too much to spend on phone service.
“This is the essential nonsense of it all. Unless the mass of the population has the spending power there is no possibility of wealth in a mechanical civilization. A vast, penniless slave population may be necessary for wealth where there are no mass production machines, but it is preposterous with mass production machines. You find such a real proletariat in China still; it existed in the great cities of the ancient world; but you do not find it in America, which has gone furtherest in the direction of mechanical industry, and there is no grain of reason in supposing it will exist in the future.”
—
H.G. Wells, in his review of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, in 1927
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“success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.”
-johnny cash
” —(via ericwimberly) (via bundlehq) (via tiedupwithstring)
“
At ten that night I go to the break room for my final break, too footsore to walk out to the smoking area, and sit down with my feet up on the bench. My earlier break, the one I’d committed so many crimes to preserve, had been a complete bust, with no other human around but a management-level woman from accounting. I have that late-shift shut-in feeling that there’s no world beyond the doors, no problem greater than the mystery items remaining at the bottom of my cart. There’s only one other person in the break room anyway, a white woman of maye thirty, watching TV, and I don’t have the energy to start a conversation, even with the rich topic of the strike at hand.
And then, by the grace of the God who dictated the Sermon on the Mount to Jesus, who watches over Melissa and sparrows everywhere, the RV picks up on the local news and the news is about the strike. A picketer with a little boy tells the camera, ‘This is for my son. I’m doing this for my son.’ Senator Paul Wellstone is standing there too. He shakes the boy’s hand, and says, ‘You should be proud of your father.’ At this my sole companion jumps up, grinning, and waves a fist in the air at the TV set. I give her the rapid two-index-fingers-pointing-down signal that means ‘Here! Us! We could do that too!’ She bounds over to where I’m sitting — if I were feeling peppier I would have gone over to her — leans into my face, and says ‘Damn right!’ I don’t know whether it’s my feet or the fact that she said ‘damn,’ or what, but I find myself tearing up. She talks well past my legal break time and possibly hers — about her daughter, how she’s sick of working long hours and never getting enough time with her, and what does this lead to anyway, when you can’t make enough to save?
I still think we could have done something, she and I, if I could have afforded to work at Wal-Mart a little longer.
” —Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich (via bundlehq) (via tiedupwithstring)