Big moves

It has been a busy month. Some of the big happenings:

I moved from Gramercy to Alphabet City. I am now an East Villager!

My employer since March, True/Slant is doing quite well. We 'beta launched' at the beginning of the month and have had over 500,000 visitors to the site since June 1. Pretty fantastic for a brand new online magazine. My site, The Not-So Private Parts, attracted 10,000 readers. Check it out.

My first magazine piece, on the Justice Scalia privacy invasion, appeared in the June issue of Washingtonian Magazine:

Pick up the issue on newsstands in D.C., or you can be 'new school' and read it online.

Day break

Lately, I've been experimenting with a crazy morning schedule. I'll wake up at 5 a.m., drink coffee and work for an hour and a half, then go running. Then shower and start the normal work day. Amazingly, it's just 9:30 a.m. at that point.

I kind of like it, but it's hard to do after a night like this (notice time stamp). My wild night involved working out, a vegan ice cream excursion, and much surfing of the Internets.

While re-reading today's content on Above The Law, I came across a comment that made me smile. But that made me worried -- should I actually be creeped out by this... or creeped out by the fact that it made me smile?

My co-editor, Elie Mystal, wrote a post about a law firm that wants its associates to be at the office promptly and not to wander in at 10 a.m. or later. Elie opined:

My day starts at 8:30. Kash's day starts at dawn. Lat never sleeps. But aren't young professionals more than capable of starting their day based on the work they have to do?

A very Gen Y observation. The information about ATL editors' sleep schedules led one of our readers to make this comment:

i'll start kash's day at dawn. god she's beautiful.

Which is the comment that made me smile, and then made me wonder whether I'm too dependent on ATL readers for affection...

My day does start at dawn. Sometimes earlier. I was amused to read another humorous piece in last week's New Yorker touching on this: My Quiet Time by Andy Borowitz. Here's the intro of the piece making fun of Disney C.E.O. Robert Iger's definition of quiet time:

Q. What are some things you do to manage your time effectively?
A. I get up at 4:30 every morning. I like the quiet time. It’s a time I can recharge my batteries a bit. I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world. I read papers. I look at e-mail. I surf the Web. I watch a little TV, all at the same time. I call it my quiet time but I’m already multitasking. I love listening to music, so I’ll do that in the morning, too, when I’m exercising and watching the news.
—An interview with Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, in the Times.

Whoever said that the early bird gets the worm could have been talking about me, only I’m a person, not a bird, and I’m not interested in getting worms, more like getting things done. But I do get up early. In fact, the secret to my success could be boiled down to three little words: my quiet time. It begins at 1 A.M., when I get out of bed, check my e-mail, brush my teeth, scan some documents, and floss. Then I’ll surf the Web, maybe order a sectional couch or trade zloty futures. Last week, I bought a Swiss chalet and sold it at a twenty-per-cent profit while I was still in my pajamas. I wanted to high-five someone, but no one else was awake.

It goes on to address multi-tasking. I particularly enjoyed this, since at the time of reading, I was on an elliptical at NYU gym, listening to my music, occasionally glancing up at the news on the wall of TVs, and of course, flipping through the New Yorker.

By 1:03, I’ve had two cups of coffee, I’m down in my basement on the elliptical, and my heart is pounding like a cheetah’s. I know that cheetahs have a fast heart rate because I often watch Animal Planet while I’m on the elliptical, although sometimes I’ll do the picture-in-picture thing so I can watch CNBC Asia while I’m watching the thing about the cheetahs. It isn’t always about cheetahs; it’s about other animals, too, like meerkats. I just said cheetahs as a for instance. I do the elliptical naked. One time when I was on the elliptical, I patched myself into a conference call in Jakarta and accidentally hit the camera thing on my phone, so everyone wound up seeing me in the buff, all flopping around and everything. Another time when I was on the elliptical, I saw an amazing documentary about cheetahs.

While I’m on the elliptical and maybe ordering a hovercraft online, I’ll drain a six-pack of Red Bull.

Read the full piece.

When someone is on the elliptical, reading and laughing out loud, is that kind of cool? Or do you rather think to yourself, "What a weirdo. That girl must be suffering from some serious sleep deprivation"?

Aren't you glad you chose journalism school?

An uplifting graduation speech from Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, for the journalism grads at UC-Berkeley. Apparently, things aren't any better on the West Coast:

You are going to be trying to carve out a career in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. You are furthermore going to be trying to do so within what appears to be a dying industry. You have abundant skills and talents - it's just not clear that anyone wants to pay you for them.

That's what everyone loves to hear while sitting with an unnecessary master's degree in one hand and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans in the other hand. Thanks, Babs!

It ends on a upbeat note. Kind of. We journalists do what we do because we're on a mission. Transcript of the speech provided by the spiritually-fulfilled but monetarily-deprived editors at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads [San Fran Chronicle]

New Yorker gets Buzzed

Noah Baumbach wrote the funniest thing I've seen in print in a long time for The New Yorker. The piece is called Buzzed and is a first-person narrative from a bee on cocaine.

Check it out. It's a MUST READ. I read it aloud to my roommate. I suggest you do the same thing if you can find someone around to listen to you.

Baumbach's name may be familiar to you. He's the screenwriter behind The Squid and The Whale.

Here's the intro, explaining what inspired the piece:

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.

The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.
—The Times.

Oh, my God, get over here . . . hurry . . . come on come on come on. Taste this nectar, taste it, taste it. . . . Slurp. . . . Is that not, is that not the best fucking thing you’ve ever had? Like nectar of the fucking Gods!

Read on.

My baby has found a home

Well, summer plans are set. I'll be splitting my time between Above The Law and True/Slant. I'm very excited about this. And about not having to go to classes.

I feel a juvenile urge to chant "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks." Except I heart my professors at NYU and have already sought them out since the semester ended. I visited Meryl Gordon down at the courthouse -- she's covering the Astor Trial for Vanity Fair. And Ted Conover met up with the small group of students in our Portfolio class last week for dinner at expensive-vegan-fare-West-Village restaurant, Gobo.

Speaking of Portfolio, back in February, I blogged the birth announcement of my blog for the course: The Not-So Private Parts. Well, my little blog baby has grown up and found a new home. It's now living at True/Slant.

Check out my musings on the erosion of privacy in the digital age, and sign up to follow me!

The Not-So Private Parts [True/Slant]

"Summer break" and a Supreme message

Yesterday, I turned in my last piece of the second semester and am now officially on "summer break." So far, it looks like summer break will involve lots of working. In this economy, that's great news for me!

Last week was an exciting one. After having written that story on the Fordham dossier on Justice Antonin Scalia, I called the Supreme Court to see if Justice Scalia might have a comment on the story.

He did!

He sent me a message through the Supreme Court's public information officer. We published it here. David Lat, ATL's formidable founder, is out of the country at the moment so it's not possible to ask him if this is a first for Above The Law (getting an exclusive quote from a Supreme Court Justice).

It's definitely a first for me.

Justice Scalia Responds to Fordham Privacy Invasion! [Above The Law]

Magazine Recession Watch: Portfolio Folds

Another magazine bites the dust. R.I.P. Portfolio. We hardly knew ye. Seriously. The only time I ever read Portfolio was to read David Margolick's work, because his stories are usually interesting and he was one of my professors in the fall (I blogged about an article he wrote on online gossip on Above The Law).

But for the most part, I didn't read Portfolio. So I was one of the many un-readers who contributed to its folding.

Employees found out today from the big guy at Condé Nast, S.I. Newhouse Jr. Word is that Wednesday is the last day for everyone on the magazine. Two days' notice. That sucks.

According to the NYT, the "upscale business publication," "failed to gain traction with advertisers and readers, in part because it was confronted by a historic recession in ad spending in its first few years of existence."

The magazine was just 2 years old.

There's nothing more depressing than watching magazines shutter their doors while one is in the midst of racking up debt to get a pricey degree in magazine writing.

Update: There's an excellent dissection of Portfolio's failure by James Ledbetter at Slate's The Big Money: Could Portfolio Have Survived?. And if you're curious, a little Google search leads me to believe that the Portfolio writer who refused to take his bet was likely Felix Salmon, who recently left Portfolio for Reuters.

Condé Nast Closes Portfolio Magazine [New York Times via Romenesko]
Conde Nast Closing 'Portfolio' [Portfolio.com]