New York City is simultaneously inconceivably tall and deceptively flat.
Going around the city on a random Tuesday, I slide through the crowd, everyone sort of loosely bound by threads of buried conversations and passing through each other like the ether. But once in a while I catch a glimpse of just how high the social stratosphere of New York goes — it disappears into the clouds.
I was passing through Fifth Avenue for an errand last weekend, and a secluded hotel lobby caught my eye. I popped in to check if they had a cafe or bar I could take a breather in, but of course, amenities were members-only. Membership starts at $200,000, as I later found on Google. I thanked the staff and stepped out. Back on the ground.
It's not so much the existence of lifestyle at every imaginable height of commodity and luxury that I find so individuating about the city, but the juxtaposition. The $3 beers next to the $3,000-a-night hotel. The food cart parked in front of the Tiffany vault.
That urban terrain of status and glitz dotting the skyline flattens out, though, in the motion blur of the nights and weekends rushing by. Hopping from a game night here to a dinner there to a birthday partly uptown somewhere, and then a midnight train back. The clouds are backdrop to the busy now.
I hate to say it but the GPT-4 memes are so much better than the GPT-4 announcement itself.
NewJeans really is single-handedly raising the bar for the entire kpop entertainment industry.
We are beginning to enter the alchemy stage of our relationship with intelligence. Soon, we will have chemistry.