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The First Post-Woke Designer Suzy Weiss

Published

11 months ago

February 17, 2024

Models wave at Elena Velez’s fashion salon on the Upper East Side this past Sunday. (Courtesy of Maya Spangler)

It’s easy to think that everyone in their twenties is lost in their screens and beholden to a predictable set of politics. But today we bring you two stories of twentysomethings pushing the envelope in their respective fields.

Up first, meet Elena Velez, the bold young designer—and mother of two—pissing off the New York fashion establishment. “I am a reflection of their own professional demise,” Velez, 29, tells Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold. “There is a henhouse of fashion editors who gate-keep and are still living their Sex and the City ‘best life,’ who moved to New York to pursue their dream of being a snob.”

Come for her biting critique of today’s fashion crowd; stay for Velez’s soft steampunk-meets-Southern belle wares:

If you’re a tech nerd who decides to drop out of school to pursue software engineering full-time, chances are you’ve discovered a way to solve some futuristic problem: turning carbon emissions into rocket fuel, or figuring out how to deliver pet food to your door in under twenty minutes. Luke Farritor, a 22-year-old coder, found his niche in translating 2,000-year-old scrolls.

The Herculaneum Papyri scrolls were recovered from a villa belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law in the eighteenth century, but the delicate pages couldn’t be touched without turning to ash. Fast-forward to 2023, and Farritor and his teammates were able to read the text using AI. They’re only 5 percent through one of the scrolls, but this small breakthrough could unlock a whole library of classical texts that, Farritor predicts, “will completely upend our understanding of the ancient world.”

Read Julia Steinberg’s interview with the whiz, and find out the message he uncovered from the ash:

And now to the different, but no less important, work of finding love. First off, if you missed me (Suzy) discussing on Honestly what it’s like to date while being canceled—how could you?—you can do so here.

On Valentine’s Day we played Cupid, inviting anyone looking for open-minded, heterodox-leaning love to contact us—and The Free Press inbox was inundated with responses. Today, we are featuring three single readers who make their pitch. If you think they might be a match, drop them a line via the email provided. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

We will continue to feature more reader messages to help them find love. And if you want to submit your own lonely heart, find out more here.

Happy courting!

Bonnie Sherman, 72, San Diego, California

I am Bonnie Sherman, a subscriber in the South Bay area of San Diego. I was married for 44 years to my high school sweetheart and have been widowed for too long. Though I can’t believe it, I am 72, but I still work and travel a great deal.

Given how much I travel, I would only consider meeting someone who also has global entry. I grew up in suburban Chicago and lived there for the first 37 years of my life. I was fixed up with my husband by a close relative, and that was it, history! As a couple since the ages of 15 and he 18, we grew up growing together, with the same family values and respect. He had a very dry wit, and we laughed our way through much of our lives. Basically, I have not been on a date since 1967!

bonnie.sherman@gmail.com

Preston McKee, 22, Fort Worth, Texas

Hello world, my name is Preston McKee. I am 22 years old, and I’ve decided it’s time to be desperate. I’ve tried the dating apps, I’ve gone to a bar (all the ladies are taken by overprotective guys in boots, cowboy hats, and hulking belt buckles), I asked out a friend and an acquaintance at church. I know at 22 y’all will say I have plenty of time left, which is true. But now my younger brother has a girlfriend and that struck a nerve.

After all that melodrama, here’s a little about me:

I live in Fort Worth, Texas.

I love the outdoors and playing sports.

I’m a sucker for verbal abuse; the more you roast me, the better.

My love language is touch and quality time. I will give you free massages.

I’m a Christian guy looking for a lady around my age (+ or − three years) who loves Jesus and is reasonably active.

preston.mckee01@gmail.com

Claire Ashmead-Meers, 29, Ann Arbor, Michigan

My name is Claire Ashmead-Meers, I am 29, and while my hometown is Cleveland, Ohio, I am based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I attend medical school. I have a dog and a busy life and find it difficult to meet people outside of medicine. I hope you can help!

I’d love to meet a guy who values reading and discussions, takes care of his health, does not look down on religion (whether or not he believes), and is kind and trustworthy. I am drawn to men who are straightforward, nonjudgmental, and very competent in some area, though what that area is doesn’t matter so much: it could be music or surgery, so long as they value excellence and have goals. I am quite playful, so a partner would need to match that. I don’t have many qualifications physically because I have been attracted to all sorts of people before. People who are very, very handsome scare me.

Something I’ve changed my mind about: each Sunday I meet with a few friends over Zoom to discuss philosophy. Most recently we read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation Now. That plus a few other experiences have convinced me that I should try to be vegetarian. Now, I am not even close to being 50 percent vegetarian at this time, in part because whenever my mom visits, she brings me every cut of meat known to man (apparently turkey, skirt steak, roast chicken, and duck “do not count”), but also because I love cooking and so many fabulous dishes involve The Murdered. But my diet now involves more tofu and vegetables with tasty sauces, and I think that’s the right thing to do, given how we treat animals.

My politics are “Be Open-Minded and Wear Comfortable Shoes.”

c.c.ashmead@gmail.com

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

4 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

7 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

—

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/