An attention economy savant, Ms. Allison was perhaps best known as a foil for Gawker, which obsessively, and sneeringly, covered her social life. In exchange, she gained a kind of toxic fame, both hyperlocal and completely global thanks to the internet, which was a harbinger of the culture to come.
That made me wonder if I'd ever written about her, and, searching the archive I see that I did, once, in 2018, in "How you got into a Chanel bag I'll never know." It quotes Allison saying: "I was considered by many to be Carrie Bradshaw 2.0. And I was happy to be given that identity for a while, but it was all a lie." And: "I lived on food bought for me on dates... Different men I dated gave me YSL shoes and status purses... I also subscribed to Carrie’s ethos when it came to men. There was no such thing as a bad date — only a good date or a good brunch story...."
Back to today's NYT article:
Ms. Allison took Mr. Feldman on several pilgrimages — acid tests, really — to make sure he could loosen up. First the pair went to the Indonesian island of Bali,... Mr. Feldman was tense at first.... he began to feel himself pleasantly removed from the rigidly intellectual culture of Cambridge, Mass....
Next, in the fall of 2022, came the final exam: Burning Man....
“To say Noah was having trepidation about Burning Man would be a major understatement,” Ms. Allison said. “He understood it was a requirement. If you’re going to be with me, you have to go to Burning Man. He was vibrating with anxiety.”...
Then, she moved to Cambridge — into his "5,000-square-foot mansard-roofed home" — and enrolled in Harvard's Kennedy School where she hopes to study "environmental justice, gender issues and animal rights."
Cory Booker, a "longtime friend" of Feldman's, declares:
“Noah is a sharp edge that needs to be softened; he is a square that needs to be rounded.... This woman is a gift to him, a guy who has been walking a narrow pathway toward extraordinary success all his life. And she was on the side of the road in this wondrous field, filled with wildflowers, and she got him off the path, to dance.”
That resonates with Feldman's love-at-first sight quote: "I saw Julia dancing, alone, in a sundress on this tiny little triangle of grass in the middle of the airport. It was a beautiful, moving image of somebody who was sourcing joy entirely internally."
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64 comments:
Who says manic pixie dream girl is just a movie trope?
“enrolled Harvard's Kennedy School where she hopes to study "environmental justice, gender issues and animal rights."
What?! Not Law School?
“In retrospect, come to think of it, isn't everything seen in retrospect?”
Oh, wait, that’s Marty Feldman
I have seen this kind of love poetry before. There was a law professor who wrote interestingly about law, politics, and society. Then suddenly she could only blog about puppies, flowers, walks along forest paths, and love. She married, and gradually recovered the ability to write about serious subjects, but still she also writes about sunrises and forest paths, and we can tell she is thinking about flowers and puppies.
We’ll that’s fair - he goes to Burning Man, she goes to the Kennedy School. ;)
The next door neighbors to my parents had sufficient pedigree to warrant one of these NYT stories. She's a junior in PE and he quit his 'job' to raise their special needs boy. They got married in a barn in the Berkshires. They seem like awful people. During lockdown she always ran out and screamed at the lawn guys because 'she was on a call!!!'...
I used to be able jazzed about these stories. I recall one about the too young couple were both a smart kid awkward and but it was clear they were perfect for each other. Now it's difficult to appreciate the witty quips when they are two people throwing their potential away on destructive careers. How about you decide to help humanity?
My goodness, what have I been missing?
I’ll take her seriously when she studies environmental gender and animal justice.
Omitted from the blogpost: The article is full of photos of the lavishly redecorated house. We're told — her words — it "was a sad, beige house for a sad, beige bachelor." She brought in "whimsical pink wallpaper with a pattern of monkeys and leopards; thick velvet drapes; Balinese statuary; antique chandeliers throughout the house; and a formidably deep, blue velvet couch in the living room, intended to encourage a kind of sensuous lazing that is not typically associated with Cambridge."
I'm sure there's some kind of "sensuous lazing... typically associated with Cambridge." But I'll accept the NYT's representation that it is not the whimsical-pink-monkeys-and-leopards kind.
Self-indulgent noodling by the ingrown academic class. They earned the description "hothouse flowers who wilt in the outside world" for good reason.
I pine for Kamala Harris to run this magnificent poetry through her word salad machine.
I give em three years. Versions of Carrie Bradshaw don't fare well as domestics- their partners grow weary of them before they mellow...
These people are certainly awash in money. Ann, does being a law professor really pay that well?
Hope she is really hot as she sounds insufferable
Man, she sounds like a lot.
I'm also definitely not getting the poetry. The people he dated seriously, subsequently? As in, after he dated her? Not only am I not understanding what was going on, I am unmoved.
Is that our host's point? My sarc detector seems to be on the blink.
lions and tigers and bores, oh my.
"The physicist, reclining in an oxblood Eames lounge chair, offered that the hippies had saved physics, to murmurs of assent."
I wonder what he meant.
Ugh, lost me at the mansard roof.
"...Harvard's Kennedy School where she hopes to study "environmental justice, gender issues and animal rights."
What?! Not Law School?
Dave Begley
What makes you think that's not Harvard Law School?
Cambridge is a very progressive community. Of course it’s full of sensuous lazing about. How else do you come up with all the ideas of DEI, CRT, gender affirmation, purging incandescent lightbulbs, gas stoves and the like, etc? Whimsy! Or, maybe weed.
The lives of the 5%. They all really do live in a fantasy world with absolutely nothing in common with real people. No wonder they concoct these heroic environmentalist fantasies. Put up wallpaper and stop global warming. There’s a movie in there somewhere. Candace Bergen meets Ernest Borgnine. I think Texas should drop off about 5000 invaders right in the middle of Harvard Square.
These people really are despicable and have no idea about it. I hope the times does a follow up in about seven years after Borgnine slaughters Bergen in her bed and frames her lover the gardener and then runs off with the nanny.
So, she was one of Cory Booker's beards at one time?
What is this? A famous and powerful woman committing her life to being the female helper of a man? One man forever?
That sounds like a fantasy. Or a Christian Marriage. The Balinese angle may have another plan for them.
She brought in "whimsical pink wallpaper with a pattern of monkeys and leopards; thick velvet drapes; …”
@Althouse, didn’t you just have a post which suggested that Ivana Trump’s use of leopard prints in one room of he townhouse was tacky?
Aspirational goals for the unformed intellectual are vaguely implanted by those who are living a more advanced form of the human condition. Focus on "wunderkind" as the tell indicator. I guess its something to do with all that money and education and stuff. Life as an art form. Thirty nine and single, eh?
Whimsy must be a good thing because it's such a wonderful word, right? Whimsy is hard to achieve from the cab of a long haul semi or an Amazon warehouse, because whimsy requires time, attention, and effort.
I bet these folks love one-day delivery, just like you and me. Let's aspire - all together now!
Kennedy School is a massive cosmic joke, a jaundiced Harry Potter Playschool for elite oafs and slippery scoundrels. Some of the dumbest rich people I met in academia ended up at Kennedy.
Any half-witted sex columnist could make many a killing there.
“I'm sure there's some kind of "sensuous lazing... typically associated with Cambridge." But I'll accept the NYT's representation that it is not the whimsical-pink-monkeys-and-leopards kind.“
Noah Feldman lives in a $6M+ 5,000 sq foot mansion on Sparks Street in Cambridge, which I have driven by hundreds of times without noticing, including this Monday and Tuesday. The house next door always catches my eye. You can Zillow multi-million-dollar mansions in Cambridge and decide if the new decor is all that special for Cambridge. I would say that it is not.
Feldman is also listed at a vacation home on an island in Maine. That explains why the love-at-first sight quote references the Portland airport. He was picking Allison up at the airport, not exactly the chance encounter the poetic prose suggests. Noah was previously married, divorced men aren’t bachelors.
I just googled her after reading through your previous post because I realized she must be kind of old to have her engagement featured in the NYT. Yep, she's 42. He's 53 and has two kids. His ex wife is still at Harvard Law and married to another law professor there.
All of that is definitely more juicy than pink wallpaper. It also makes his 5000 sq. ft. house less bizarre. He wasn't a bachelor, he was a single father.
But she's on some kind of publicity push so redoing the bachelor pad must fit in with that. Rolling Stone just did a piece on her too.
"Mr. Feldman was tense at first.... he began to feel himself pleasantly removed from the rigidly intellectual culture of Cambridge, Mass...." Transcription error. It should read "conformist" instead of "intellectual."
ChatGPT will soon cite them when someone asks, "Why do so many people hate elites?"
I couldn't tell if the article was an elaborate send up of the couple or if the writer was just reporting on two very elaborate people.....Well all couples can learn from their example. The secret to keeping a relationship refreshed and recharged is an occasional trip to Bali. I would further recommend that Prof. Feldman take up Balinese Temple dancing on his next trip. The discipline learned from this study will pay huge dividends in both his upcoming marriage and further efforts to draft a constitution for the Iraqi government.
This is a story that desperately needs some Morlocks in it.
"Kennedy School is a massive cosmic joke, a jaundiced Harry Potter Playschool for elite oafs and slippery scoundrels. Some of the dumbest rich people I met in academia ended up at Kennedy. "
Now, how can you say that, when Pennsylvania's smartest, most erudite, most well-spoken and sartorially-endowed Sentator carries a degree from that hallowed institution?
These two just don't seem very interesting to me, even dressed up to the nines by NYTimes prose.
it was a sad, beige house for a sad, beige bachelor."
I always thought that the perfect apartment decoration scheme for a bachelor was Tyler Durden's apartment in The Fight Club. Bare unpainted walls and the absolute minimal amount of furniture a human could get away with. Everything over that is a compromise to one's need for women, and their power, which is not inconsiderable, since almost no bachelor lives like Tyler Durden. Women mighty mistake it for poverty.
Maybe Professor Higgen's home in My Fair Lady would do, as well. If one has aged to the point of requiring a certain level of comfort.
By the way, I thought that teased forelocks were 'out'.
A lot of people took Ivy league professorships to do good, and did well.
Perhaps if Meade had been gay, he could've landed a Harvard law Prof.
If you've read the legal/political opinons of these Harvard/Yale Law Prof on twitter, you'll have zero respect for them. They really give the game away. Everything is about pushing the Leftwing agenda, and law is simply the vehicle.
If you think 'Them thar smart law perfessers" are to be looked up to for guidance on the Constitution, you're a gullible rube. Its ALL politics. We need to get rid of the Judicial tyranny. Its just rule by leftists.
It seems they have spring fever, and it isn't even spring.
This would have been a lot more interesting if Ms. Carrie Bradshaw 2.0 had oozed poetic about Noah's 5,000-square-foot mansard-roofed dick.
I think that the "hippies" remark refers to the revival of Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," or quantum entanglement, which was revived by non-hippie and Irishman, John Thomas Bell, who came up with a way to test if it existed, the Bell Test, after rejecting the "scientific consensus" that it was a dead end; turns out that it wasn't.
Nathaniel Branden, the late psychologist, and famously an escapee from the romantic tentacles of Ayn Rand, has written that the great engine of romantic relationships is the hunger for visibility - the experience of being seen and understood. I think there is a great deal of truth in this.
So I suppress my sneer reflex and wish Julia and Noah the best in their romantic quest.
To give and receive visibility, self knowledge is essential. I wish the two of them the self knowledge they will need.
""The physicist, reclining in an oxblood Eames lounge chair, offered that the hippies had saved physics, to murmurs of assent." I wonder what he meant."
I can't believe I didn't use that line in the blog post. That's rich! It's near the end, and I overlooked it. Wow. Just hilarious.
I mean, don't you have to think the NYT writer — Joseph Bernstein — was having some literary fun here.
Anyway, to try to understand the line — I'm responding to your "wonder" — let's look at the whole context:
"On a recent, humid August evening, the couple hosted a Shabbat dinner... The guest list featured friends of Ms. Allison’s — among them a professional intimacy coach, an entrepreneur who built a high-tech chair for meditation and a professional relationship coach — as well as two friends of Mr. Feldman’s, a physicist and a sociologist.... Mr. Feldman, wearing a rakishly unbuttoned pink oxford shirt, reclined on the sofa, where the meditation chair entrepreneur draped her legs across his lap... “bringing the squish.”)... Starielle Hope, the intimacy coach, said that at first she had been skeptical about the match. “To me they were so different,” she said. “He is a man who is part of a hierarchical system, and she is a woman who is seeking an unconventional life in balmy climates.” The physicist, reclining in an oxblood Eames lounge chair, offered that the hippies had saved physics, to murmurs of assent. As the evening progressed, he performed sleight of hand."
So... there's a lot about furniture: the meditation chair, the sofa, the Eames chair... not to mention Feldman himself, serving as a sort of ottoman (which calls to mind a scene in "Succession" where Tom Wambsgams uses someone other than Greg as a coffeetable).
The Allison-affiliated guest — Starielle Hope, the intimacy coach — makes a comment about what an odd couple Allison and Feldman are. He's all serious and Allison is something like a hippie.
The physicist — a Feldman-affiliated guest — may be "reclining," but he rises to the occasion and makes zany social sense: "hippies... saved physics." What I hear is a smart serious person's facile demonstration that people like him can be whimsical too. Later, he does a card trick.
I'm in the middle of my project of listening to all of Bob Dylan's studio albums in chronological order, and the strange interactions of this cast of characters feels to me as though it could be another verse in "Desolation Row."
I'm beginning to think this is the most amusing article I have ever seen in The NYT.
These are, quite possibly, the whitest people I've ever read about. Beyond parody!
wild chicken said...
Ugh, lost me at the mansard roof.
Can the possibility for happiness exist beneath a mansard roof? I don't see how.
What do you make of her web page? She is showing us her many self-help books. Shouldn't one be enough?
Can the possibility for happiness exist beneath a mansard roof?
MANsard? In this day and age?
I would think indigenous-people-sard would be more in keeping with the times.
Are there any snapshots of Noah at Burning Man? No naked pictures of course, Noah probably doesnt completely undress even in the shower alone. But I'm sure he let his hair down with an open collar and jeans with a crease. And his tan lawyer loafers to hide the dust.
I agree, 3 years at the most for this couple. 3-4 years after that he will finally tire of the monkeys and replace them with sad beige.
Out of touch…
The Allison from the song has two elles
The Alison from the story has one ele
Story Alison was stolen when Feldman fell
In between planes dancing at the airport
Uh, oh. He forgot about the hot/crazy matrix.
Which we've expanded here to the hot/crazy/writer matrix, dangerous enough, but which perhaps should be the hot/crazy/online celebrity matrix. Gentlemen! Before you go to second base, perform the wallpaper test, and do that Google, or preferably DuckDuckGo, search. Stay away from Burning Man. Bali is OK, on a fling with strict conditions.
"I'm beginning to think this is the most amusing article I have ever seen in The NYT."
Perhaps the most amusing aspect, or very sad depending on your point of view, is that these people exposed themselves this way in the first place.
A happy couple, married and gay.
Gender studies: Does this ass make my boobs look big? Hip-pies, too.
The physics of psychedelic signals and inferential states.
@Sebastian
Uh, oh. He forgot about the hot/crazy matrix.
Yep. This woman is the Cambridge equivalent of a redheaded hairdresser named Tiffany.
Yah Kennedy School is where the freaks go to become pedigreed freaks, so they can start more fires...
The worst Judd is a high profile grad. It's also the place that simultaneously was proud of Liz Warren's faux ethnic heritage and hiding their recognition of it at the same time. That was long ago when such matters could damage the credibility of a place, however...
Early Evelyn Waugh, as in Vile Bodies.
"he began to feel himself pleasantly removed from the rigidly intellectual culture of Cambridge, Mass...."
This is hilarious. A bunch of credentialed know-nothings represent 'rigidly intellectual culture' if they do say so themselves.
William F. Buckley Jr. knew better.
On the plus side for Feldman, she's really cute : )
AZ Bob said...
"What do you make of her web page? She is showing us her many self-help books. Shouldn't one be enough?"
Going purely by the book titles visible in the picture, Sex at Dawn is the only useful one. Although that title made me think it's a corollary to the phrase Pistols at Dawn.
Following up on AZ Bob, here's part of her web page:
"Julia Allison is a mission driven narrative strategist . . . Her mission is to be a force for positive transformation, creating a world of harmony, health and love that honors all beings.
Julia now teaches social justice activists how to craft media strategies that contribute to the public conversation with solutions for these issues, inspiring collective social action through strategic media coverage.
She is particularly passionate about issues like women’s empowerment & reproductive rights, health (particularly mental but also physical and emotional), the environment (climate change), animal welfare, responsible psychedelic legalization and justice advocacy work.
Considering herself a “type A bohemian,” she has an Oura ring, meditates daily with the Samsara app, has practiced yoga for almost two decades and been to Burning Man ten times. Yes, 10!"
Gentlemen! Do that search! Honor the matrix! Don't get burned by hotness!
Sure, you may snicker at the thought of "sensuous lazing" and Cambridge, but I remember the "quantum groupies" that used to hang out at MIT parties hoping for some nuclear fusion ("the Oppenheimer special") and, like Julia, not quite have the density, shape, enrichment, purity, and temperature to initiate the chain reaction to achieve the big bang, then ending up on the rebound at Harvard Law. So, yeah, it's a thing there. I mean, at least for women that think the brain is the main sex organ.
Regarding Mansard Roofs, when they are done in the spirit of their modern originator, Monsieur Mansart, the roofs are fantastic. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansard_roof
However, those things that popped up all over the place in the 60s/70s/80s are pure abominations. A Mansard Roof on a one story building; really? See here for examples from Washington State: https://dahp.wa.gov/historic-preservation/historic-buildings/architectural-style-guide/mansard
Back in the day, you could spend a bit of money for a Pavarotti concert and hear some beatiful singing. Or you could slip a neighborhood kid named Tony Pavarotti a twenty and have him sing for you. In both cases you could say you "Heard Pavarotti Sing". But there is a big difference between the two.
I understood that the Mansard roof was a device to avoid taxation. The top floor was an attic under the definition which was not assessed.
Tom Wolfe Lives!
I understood that the Mansard roof was a device to avoid taxation. The top floor was an attic under the definition which was not assessed.
Yes. This was a result of the French tax system.
Not than anybody cares, but my comment about quantum entanglement doesn't really make the point I wanted to make, which was that the people working in that area of physics were considered dreamers chasing rainbows until one day Bell managed to catch one, making him one of the giants of physics, even though most people have never heard of him, probably because acceptance of his work was so long in coming, due to the aforementioned culture of physics which meant that research into this area was possibly career suicide.
"I mean, at least for women that think the brain is the main sex organ."
There is such a thing as a "sapiosexual," even if the term is a cutesy made up thing, but it's not surprising that most men don't know about them. Sometimes they are pretty hot.
Does she have any tattoos just to make her interesting?
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