Build Me An Ethics Robot

Technologists are always portrayed as future-oriented, on the cutting edge of the major questions of the age. But if we examine this ubiquitous representation of the "innovative" and "disruptive" world of technology, this characterization couldn't be much further from the truth. These fields are on the cutting edge of making money and selling you something, but not much else.

Notice how the power of technological innovation is always described not in terms of potency but of potential. It's always the future of technology that will revolutionize the world. But just how revolutionized have we been?

Sure, the landscape looks a lot different today than it did 100 years ago. We've seen changes and innovations commensurate with what one might expect of 100 years' worth of human existence. But is it truly "revolutionary" to have quicker and more efficient ways of encountering the same old human problems? Even something as breathtakingly consequential as the domestication of electricity, something that today none of us could imagine our lives without, has solved only minor problems in the grander scheme of human development: has electricity decreased poverty or helped enable it? Has it eliminated warfare and sectarian difference, or has it helped us develop new tools with which to battle out our differences?

I recognize that I'm pushing it here; I'm not a luddite, and I'm not anti-electricity. I'm not anti-technology or anti-innovation. What I am is skeptical of the grandest claims of technofuturism: the idea that it's technologists who are on the cutting edge of solving the world's major problems.

This grand claim of technofuturism suffers from a major fallacy: the idea that facts can do things.

In my circle of educated liberals, I'm continually perplexed by how perplexed others are that data and facts can't change people's minds. Every so often we'll see a scientist writing with self-righteous indignation about how despite overwhelming scientific evidence of man-made climate change, all these ideological morons (that's what they mean, though they don't write it this honestly) still won't get on board. The same goes for articles making the same claim about religion: if only these Bible-thumping mouth-breathers could wake up to the facts, they'd abandon their stupid religion. Almost laughably (if it weren't so sad), the same people making these complaints double down on their faith in the transformative power of facts, citing more research on why people aren't moved by fact. Their next il/logical step is to try to find ways to better understand why people don't respond as readily to facts, in hope of one day being able to move the earth and transform human kind simply by saying 'this is the case' (which sounds strikingly similar to 'this is the word of god'). The reporting of such research on why people don't respond to facts as scientists wish they would is presented as itself a scientific discovery, as opposed to a small piece of sound reasoning. Everywhere self-righteous people who are also intelligent fail to understand why facts themselves are incapable of changing people's minds.

I don't think it's a revolutionary insight to understand why this is obviously the case. Knowing that climate change is man-made doesn't answer the very important questions of what values underlie a decision to do something about it versus not, and what policies we should implement to recognize such value conflicts. Likewise, if someone has chosen to have faith in something unknowable as a way of structuring their life, there's not a single scientific determination or technological development that is or ever will be that will change that person's mind on fact alone. The only way anyone could delude themselves into thinking the contrary would be if they believed, as a person of faith, so strongly in the ultimate transformative power of facts and technology that they've beome blind to the obvious.

These fundamental questions of faith, values, ethics, governance, and coexistence are old problems that facts and technology can assist in solving, but can never solve alone. They're problems that have not been "revolutionized" by any technological development, but certainly disrupted and complicated by technological developments. And the people on the cutting edge of these kinds of questions simply aren't scientists and technologists.

If it were the techno-optimists and factmongers on the cutting edge of these problems, they'd be working on something other than, primarily, ways to make money on consumer goods, or ways to blow shit up or protect us against getting our shit blown up. They'd be building me something I've always wanted: my ethics robot.

See, once these cutting-edge geniuses trained their efforts on one of the world's most fundamental problems, they could build me a robot that always knows the right thing to do, simultaneously in any context (universal) but also in every specific context (historical). By bringing my ethics robot to Washington, I could begin using the robot to solve all the world's problems. Do we intervene in Syria, ethics robot? Should abortion be legal, ethics robot? Should we spend more money on penis pill R&D or on food technologies for the food-insecure, ethics robot? What should we do about climate change, ethics robot? Is religion good, ethics robot? Am I a good person, ethics robot?

I mean, if these ultra-visionary technogeniuses can make me an app that tracks my sleep rhythms by listening to my breathing and wakes me up at the right time, or a tv that knows what I want to watch, or telescope that shows me galaxies lightyears away, surely they can solve once and for all time the simple question of what's the right thing to do?

No? Oh well then.

Is it Racist for White People to Like Black Music, Wear NWA T-Shirts?

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon has written a piece on the retail chain, Forever 21, marketing NWA, Notorious B.I.G. and 'straight outta Compton' t-shirts to its predominately white consumer base. Her basic claim is that marketing such materials to suburban white people is a form of cultural expropriation, like when the 'Harlem Shake' meme went viral, depicting groups of mostly white college kids dressed like clowns, flailing around and air-humping in ways that bear no resemblance to the Harlem shake dance. For Williams, marketing NWA t-shirts to white people amounts to what Lindy West calls 'hipster racism':

And doesn’t it bother you even a little that these big chain stores selling all those Biggie and Tupac and Cypress Hill and ODB and Tribe Called Quest and not even employing non-white models? Doesn’t that make your penchant for irony seem petty and insulting? Because it is. And if you don’t know, now you know.

I have two major issues with Williams' position: 1) she's painting cultural expropriation with a brush so wide that it deflates the term; 2) she's unwittingly tethering the 'ghetto' image to, what, any race but Caucasian? Putting aside what it suggests that Williams drops into her article the most cringeworthy and ironically used ghettoisms (like 'yo' and 'street cred') intermixed with mean-girl-isms like 'fug' (this is the linguistic equivalent of Forever 21's marketing campaign), her argument only reinforces a backward divide between popular culture that white people are allowed to consume and popular culture reserved for everyone else.

First of all, a white person wearing an NWA t-shirt is not an instance of cultural expropriation. I can see why knowingly marketing this stuff to a white suburban consumer audience grates--I'm outraged by all kinds of marketing tactics too--but we're not talking about cherrypicking, distorting, and ethnicizing a minority culture here (the way that, for example, the 'Harlem Shake' meme, or the hawking of 'Native American' headdresses along the interstate, do). We're talking about jumping on the bandwagon that has been the hip-hop mega-industry for decades now--a bandwagon that got rolling when urban artists tried desperately to break out of predominantly local, black clubs, parties, radio stations, tv stations, and into 'mainstream' American discourse so they could get their stories heard. There was a time when the Grammy Awards didn't televise the hip-hop awards section of the show--just cut it right out of the national programming. These artists have been fighting for a long time to bring hip-hop from the margins to the center of the musical universe, and in many ways (not all certainly) they've accomplished this, quite impressively.

It might occur to Williams that Notorious B.I.G., NWA, and Lil' Wayne actually have broad fan-bases and lots of completely un-ironic white fans, in the same way that many people in London follow the New York Yankees despite having never set foot in New York beyond Time Square, or kids wear Ramones shirts despite having never been authentically part of the punk rock scene that came of age before these kids were born. Williams' move is to essentialize the 'authentic hip-hop experience,' disturbingly along racial lines; yet I wonder if Williams is as offended by the examples of inauthenticity I gave above, or by Urban Outfitters' marketing of the California bear t-shirt to lots and lots of people who aren't from California? Would she have a problem with me teaching Jay-Z's memoir, Decoded, to my predominantly white college students, or must this artifact of the ghetto only be taught and marketed to those with enough 'street cred' (g-cards?)? The double standard people like Williams apply when it comes to rap--the only genre for which we demand some kind of authentic, essentialized tie, while we're happy to excuse a white audience at a performance of Dreamgirls, or a white audience at a Basquiat gallery--suggests to me a more troubling attitude about race and art in those who embrace it than in the targets of its criticism.

Should marketing be a more ethical, culturally sensitive, and culturally responsive practice overall? Yes (though I'm not holding my breath). Should chains like Forever 21 veer clear of the Abercrombie and Fitch model model and include a greater diversity of models in their marketing, giving a greater diversity of customers the chance to imagine themselves in the clothes? Yes, absolutely. But why, pray tell, must hip-hop apparel in particular appear on black models? We already know that authenticity can't be a viable test for what's an acceptable screen-printed t-shirt to wear (we're not talking about Benetton-style marketing of dashikis to white girls, though perhaps we should be): widespread acceptance of Londoner Yanks fans, millennial Ramones fans, preppy Metallica fans, etc. all disprove the authenticity standard for what t-shirts we can wear without being taken to task for being poseurs (or worse). So all that's left to justify Williams' argument is the essentializing of the 'ghetto' experience along racial lines. The ghetto experience (the one we're talking about here) could be considered a black experience historically; but why should this be essentialized in a way that only reinforces ghettoization (in the literal sense: to isolate or segregate a group to a confined space or cultural field)?

In other words, I put the question back to Williams: what does it mean to single out black bodies for the burden of representing 'ghetto' rap culture?

Cultural expropriation is a tricky phenomenon, and not all instances of 'crossover' are also instances of appropriation. There's political potential in dwelling on the margins; but as Williams seems to forget, keeping that potential on the margins is the very definition of marginalization.

Stop the 'Generation Why' Blaming

You've probably come across this thing making the social media rounds, describing how people of 'generation y/why,' the millennial generation, are unhappy: because we were told from a young age that we're special, unique snowflakes, and we can be anything we want to be, and then we stumbled into the harsh, cruel world and found a massive disparity between the fairytale we've been fed by our baby boomer parents and the cold, unyielding truth: shit is a struggle.

This is an old, tired argument that's been around for a while before some clever person made stick figure cartoons and colored graphs about it, turning it into an internet phenomenon (apparently this is all it takes to transform a mundane, establishment idea into an internet phenomenon, but that's for another article).

I'm here to tell you today why this argument is bullshit. But before I do, I'll show you my hand. I'm an early gen-y/millennial who is sympathetic to the struggles of my generation. But I'm also a professor who teaches students who are of the same generation, just the latter half of the range that those who study gen-y typically use. So you can say that my defense of gen-y is just another instance of typical gen-y entitlement; but then you should keep in mind that, unlike most of you, I have to put up with this generation's shit all the time--the young ones, and especially the rich ones, who maybe need an extension on the assignment this week because the NGO they founded in Mali during the summer after they graduated from high school is having a really important board meeting.

Further, I'm not a sociologist or demographer of any kind, and I'm skeptical from the outset of the value of making claims about generational characteristics. What I am more accustomed to studying, though, is the way cultural and historical circumstances shape the way we perceive what's going on in the world. In light of this I have a few things to say about this grand theory of the coddled gen-y yuppie.

The first is that just about anything that's said about the 'gen-y yuppie' can also be said of yuppie subculture more generally, leading me to believe that feeling entitled, feeling empty, and chasing never ending dreams as a consequence of these is more a facet of yuppie subculture and other cultures of privilege than a generational particular. Young, privileged, educated professionals of any generation are in a striving phase of life. When the country used to fight global wars in which not just the poorest and most disenfranchised people were part of the war effort, but everyone went to war in a way, there were obviously fewer yuppies; the would-be yuppies of 'the greatest generation' were at war. Why don't yuppies go to war today? It would be easy to throw this question on the bonfire of vanity we project onto gen-y yuppies: we're too entitled and precious to fight in a war. But there's something else we're forgetting: war today isn't something we do as a last resort to a problem; war today is an industry. We don't fight wars we believe in; we assign people who have few other options to fight wars that special business and political interests want to fight. The point here is that, whereas in times past young people could find fulfillment in military or civil rights causes larger than themselves, young people of gen-y have had to look outside of military engagement to find our defining generational causes. This is partly why among gen-y people, issues like gay marriage, the environment, and international development are popular causes; and this is why the privileged, educated, cause-oriented gen-y person is probably a yuppie rather than a soldier: the jobs that allegedly transform the world these days are all yuppie jobs.

Of course, this isn't necessarily a good thing. Because these yuppie jobs are also part of a dramatic historical change in the way people are employed, and what employers expect of their employees. Which brings me to my second point: everything is corporatized.

A gen-y person grew up in a world in which the concepts of civil society, civic responsibility, public education, privacy, and family cohesion are mostly things of the past. Everything is corporatized, from education and non-profit work to media and politics. Gen-y lives in a world in which even currencies (Bitcoin, Amazon dollars, etc.) are privatized. Employers pay investigative firms to stalk employees on social media; employers administer drug tests for employees with no criminal record or evidence of illegal drug use; employers give employees smartphones, and pay the bills, so that they can call on employees for work at any time, and expect a prompt response; employers have created the unpaid internship while simultaneously requiring the prestige of a college degree for employment. Think about this for a second. Employers today say you need a college degree for a job, but reject the idea that a college degree prepares you for one; so you must work unpaid labor to get 'experience.' Meanwhile, amid this deliberate shift to reallocate prestige in opportunities for unpaid labor rather than opportunities for education and intellectual, civic, and humanistic development, wages have remained stagnant for decades while cost of living and GDP have risen, putting gen-y people and in many cases our parents in the position of having to maintain our standards of living through debt rather than real earnings. This is not just a gen-y thing. The entire US economy runs on debt, not on real production of value, goods, and services. Further, as economies became increasingly globalized, corporatized, and debt-driven all at the same time, while socioeconomic inequality hit record highs by multiples, the prospect of job security, let alone career security, began to diminish. This is the case not just for millennials, but for anyone of any generation seeking employment today.

So where does gen-y fit into all this. It's a lot simpler than the grand psychoanalytic theory of inflated self worth. Gen-y is simply the most vulnerable generation in a time of political, economic, and environmental failure. The people running these failure ships into the giant iceberg of fucked are not gen-y people. The people expecting their young employees to be peachy about all this, to tolerate low wages despite high qualifications, are not gen-y people. The people complaining about gen-y people are people with lots of experience--most of it experience fucking something up royally--who can't answer the demands of a generation who simply want better for the world, not just themselves. One acquires such an idealistic outlook when raised during a time in which prosperity and hope turns to shit, all before your eyes in the years in which you're barely old enough to drive a car, let alone do something about the fall of Rome. And you know what? For a generation that supposedly has had everything handed to it, why aren't we talking about everything this generation has had handed to it? Dysfunctional politics, crushing debt, deregulation and game-fixing for the greatest rent-seekers in the world, perpetual warfare feeding a gluttonous military-industrial complex, the abandonment of public education, the rotting scraps of what was a civil society, utter abandonment of both personal responsibility for elites and the public obligation to care for those less fortunate, personal data mining and the mass violation of basic privacy rights, off-shore accounts and off-shore torture cells in which due process doesn't apply, and countless other fundamental failures. These are the things we've been handed. This is not the first time things have gone to shit just in time for a generation to come of age; which is why gen-y is not unique in its demands for a better world, and why prior generations are not unique in calling younger generations a bunch of entitled pansies. There's simply no reason to reify some notion of the particular specialness of gen-y as a generation of the particularly special.

Lest you read this as a complaint, let me remind you that it's a defense. But it's only a defense. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes for the ability of my generation to turn things around. This brings me to my closing point: when systemic dysfunction reaches a certain degree of entrenchment, it's like a cancer in metastasis. Good people can fight the good fight (and we're definitely not all good), but it won't help much. To fix these problems we need a transgenerational effort. We need even more idealistic gen-y millennials to reject the worst of yuppie and corporate cultures along with whatever prefab notions of 'happiness' that allegedly come with (puts on gruff voice) building a stable career, buying a home, etc. There's no rational reason why gen-y should settle for the hand it's been dealt, as though we haven't inherited a world on fire.

PMB Responds to the Goldman Sachs Guide to Manhood

You might have seen this Goldman Sachs 'unofficial' guide to being a man. PMB responds point by point below:

GS: Stop talking about where you went to college.
PMB: Stop talking about what it means to be a man.

GS: Always carry cash. Keep some in your front pocket.
PMB: I stopped carrying cash after the second time I was mugged at gunpoint.

GS: Rebel from business casual. Burn your khakis and wear a suit or jeans.
PMB: Under no circumstances should a suit and jeans be conflated as like solutions to a sartorial problem. If you're going somewhere and you can't decide whether to wear a suit or jeans, you're missing something.

GS: It's OK to trade the possibility of your 80s and 90s for more guaranteed fun in your 20s and 30s.
PMB: Is it OK to trade 50% of the hours of every day of your life in your 20s and 30s for a cubicle at an investment bank?

GS: The best public restrooms are in hotels: The St. Regis in New York, Clairidge's in London, The Fullerton in Singapore, to name a few.
PMB: Privatize public restrooms!

GS: Never stay out after midnight three nights in a row...unless something really good comes up on the third night.
PMB: Night 1: call girls and blow. Night 2: call girls and blow. Night 3: call girls and blow...again? Oh AND karaoke? You don't say! Fuck it, I'm down, bro.

GS: You will regret your tattoos.
PMB: I would too if my tattoos were all quotes from Ayn Rand and Bret Easton Ellis.

GS: Never date an ex of your friend.
PMB: Because at Goldman Sachs, we're all about loyalty.

GS: Join Twitter; become your own curator of information.
PMB: @BrockMan69 where we drinking tonight PUSSY #infocuration

GS: If riding the bus doesn't incentivize you to improve your station in life, nothing will.
PMB: It was all a dream / I used to read GQ Magazine / Seersucker on the bus don't stay clean / Mark Rothko on my wall / every Saturday Bellini brunch next to a shopping mall...

GS: Time is too short to do your own laundry.
PMB: Time is too short to brush your own teeth.

GS: When the bartender asks, you should already know what you want to drink.
PMB: Your bartenders should already know what you want to drink without you having to ask. C.f. 'be a regular at more than one bar.'

GS: If you perspire, wear a damn undershirt.
PMB: If you don't perspire, see a doctor.

GS: You don't have to like baseball, but you should understand the concept of what a pitcher's ERA means. Approach life similarly.
PMB: ERA = Earned Runs / Innings Pitched * 9; lower ERAs reflect greater pitching performance. So if I'm getting your drift, we should pay the pitchers with the highest ERAs massive end-of-year bonuses for failing at their jobs?

GS: When people don't invite you to a party, you really shouldn't go. And sometimes even when you are invited, you shouldn't go.
PMB: And sometimes when you really have to go you shouldn't go at a party. Find the nearest hotel.

GS: People are tired of you being the funny, drunk guy.
PMB: People are tired of you being the guy who squeezes really hard during a handshake to assert yourself.

GS: When in doubt, always kiss the girl.
PMB: "Her eyes say no, but they mean yes."

GS: Tip more than you should.
PMB: Feel entitled to assert your superiority over service staff by reminding them that you can spare the money.

GS: You probably use your cell phone too often and at the wrong moments.
PMB: You DEFINITELY use your cell phone too often and at the wrong moments.

GS: Buy expensive sunglasses. Superficial? Yes, but so are the women judging you. And it tells these women you appreciate nice things and are responsible enough not to lose them.
PMB: Try signaling responsibility in more substantive ways than the sunglasses you wear, and maybe you won't be surrounded by such superficial women all the time.

GS: If you want a nice umbrella, bring a shitty one to church.
PMB: I have a PhD from Oxford and I have no idea what that means.

GS: Do 50 push-ups, sit-ups, and dips before you shower each morning.
PMB: And don't forget to wear the tank top of the gym you belong to while you're out walking your dog, bro.

GS: Eat brunch with friends at least every other weekend. Leave Rusty and Junior at home.
PMB: Are Rusty and Junior children or pets? And are they self-sufficient left at home?

GS: Be a regular at more than one bar.
PMB: But not after midnight more than three nights in a row...unless something really good comes up.

GS: Act like you'e been there before. It doesn't matter if it's in the end zone at the Super Bowl or on a private plane.
PMB: Or in an IRS auditor's interrogation cubicle.

GS: A glass of wine or two with lunch will not ruin you day.
PMB: But when you fuck up royally on a credit default swap because the combination of those lunch wines and the Ambien you took at 4am last night clouded your judgment, you'll ruin someone else's day for sure.

GS: It's better if old men cut your hair. Ask for Sunny at the Mandarin Oriental Barbershop in Hong Kong. He can share his experiences of the Japanese occupation, or just give you a copy of Playboy.
PMB: Yeah, I've been to Hong Kong; never left the Mandarin Oriental, but I'm sure you believe I'm a real world traveler from this yarn.

GS: Learn how to fly-fish.
PMB: Learn how to clean and cook a fish.

GS: No selfies. Aspire to experience photo-worthy moments in the company of beautiful women.
PMB: In other words, never update your aspirations from those of your adolescence.

GS: Own a handcrafted shotgun. It's a beautiful thing.
PMB: Place it next to your leatherbound book collection atop a shelf of rich mahogany, behind where you keep the fine single-malt scotch that you ignorantly drink with ice, proximate to the other cliches in your abode.

GS: There's always another level. Just be content knowing that you are still better off than most who have ever lived.
PMB: Be content, or be 'incentivized' to reach that next level after bus pass?

GS: You can get away with a lot more if you're the one buying the drinks.
PMB: As if you're the one buying the women, I'm sure you know.

GS: Ask for a salad instead of fries.
PMB: A sedentary lifestyle requires sacrifices.

GS: Don't split a check.
PMB: Why?

GS: Pretty women who are unaccompanied want you to talk to them.
PMB: Not the ugly ones though, right? Ugly women are allowed to have their own desires without you projecting yours onto them?

GS: Cobblers will save your shoes. So will shoe trees.
PMB: Do you tip a cobbler?

GS: When a bartender buys you a round, tip double.
PMB: Accept no acts of generosity without using money to leverage feelings of superiority and diminish the acts of others.

GS: The cliche is that having money is about not wasting time. But in reality, money is about facilitating spontaneity.
PMB: If you can't facilitate spontaneity without money, that the truth is that money only enables your lack of imagination.

GS: Be spontaneous.
PMB: Spend money.

GS: Find a Times New Roman in the streets and a Wingdings in the sheets. She exists.
PMB: A man of true refinement seeks a Garamond, and understands what this means.

GS: Piercings are liabilities in fights.
PMB: Investment bankers are liabilities in trying to have a night out where fights are avoided.

GS: Do not use an electric razor.
PMB: Time is too short to shave yourself.

GS: Desserts are for women. Order one and pretend you don't mind that she's eating yours.
PMB: And remember: salads are for men.

GS: Buy a tuxedo before you are thirty. Stay that size.
PMB: While you're at it, learn how to tie your own bow tie. All these fancy pre-tied men can't even operate the tools of their own vanity.

GS: One girlfriend at a time is probably enough.
PMB: Yeah, probably.

GS: #StopItWithTheHashtags
PMB: Hashtags are so un-curatorial.

GS: Your ties should be rolled and placed in a sectioned tie drawer.
PMB: Time is too short to curate your ties.

GS: Throw parties. But have someone else clean up the next day.
PMB: If ever there were a metaphor for investment banking, this is it.

GS: You may only request one song from the DJ.
PMB: What if it's R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" in multiple parts? Is that like a loophole, like carried interest?

GS: Measure yourself only against your previous self.
PMB: Invest in all-natural male enhancement.

GS: Take more pictures. With a camera.
PMB: But no selfies. And only in the company of beautiful women, in photo-worthy moments.

GS: Place-dropping is worse than name-dropping.
PMB: So please disregard what I said previously about hotels in Hong Kong, New York, London, and Singapore (if my accounting is correct; but we know you don't care much about correct accounting).

GS: When you admire the work of artists or writers, tell them. And spend money to acquire their work.
PMB: No wonder every single done-up Hoboken apartment has the same shitty artwork on the walls, and Business Insider's list of 35 books to read at least once in a lifetime is a high school English syllabus.

GS: Your clothes do not match. They go together.
PMB: They go together to the Korean guy who does your laundry and has infinite time.

GS: Yes, of course you have to buy her dinner.
PMB: She's not sleeping with you otherwise.

GS: Staying angry is a waste of energy.
PMB: So is holding the debts of people with no money.

GS: Revenge can be a good way of getting over anger.
PMB: See above, then reflect.

GS: If she expects the person you are 20% of the time, 100% of the time, then she doesn't want you.
PMB: If Jane is driving down the highway at 50 miles per hour on the way to Jeff's house, and Jeff lives 10 miles away from Jane, how long will it take Jane to get to Jeff's house?

GS: Always bring a bottle of something to the party.
PMB: Human blood.

GS: Avoid that 'last' whiskey. You've probably had enough.
PMB: We know because there's vomit on your suit. I'm stating to come around to this not doing your own lanudry thing...

GS: Don't use the world 'closure' or ever expect it in real life. There may still be a mortally wounded Russian mobster roaming the woods of south Jersey, but we'll never know.
PMB: But isn't 'closure' part of 'foreclosure'? See this is going to be problematic.

GS: If you are wittier than you are handsome, avoid loud clubs.
PMB: Always avoid loud clubs.

GS: Drink outdoors. And during the day. And sometimes by yourself.
PMB: Drink in a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox...in the dark, in the rain...

GS: Date women outside our social set. You'll be surprised.
PMB: So will their friends when you walk into the Raven sporting a tie clip and throwing your credit card down at a cash bar.

GS: If it's got velvet ropes and lines, walk away unless you know someone.
PMB: Unless they're lines of cocaine.

GS: You cannot have a love affair with whiskey because whiskey will never love you back.
PMB: At lest whiskey will fuck you.

GS: Feigning unpretentiousness is worse than being pretentious. Cut it out with the vintage Polo and that '83 Wagoneer in Nantucket.
PMB: Cut it out with Nantucket.

GS: The New Yorker is not high-brow. Neither is The Economist.
PMB: You're not high-brow unless you've read periodicals from before 1800.

GS: If you believe in evolution, you should know something about how it works.
PMB: Like for starters, evolution is not a 'belief.'

GS: No one cares if you are offended, so stop it.
PMB: "I'm entitled not to feel guilty for offending you."

GS: Never take an ex back. She tried to do better and is settling with you.
PMB: It may be that being settled for is your best option.

GS: Eating out alone can be magnificent. Find a place where you can sit at the bar.
PMB: Because your ego is too fragile to be seen alone at a table.

GS: Read more. It allows you to borrow someone else's brain, and will make you more interesting at a dinner party--provided that you don't initiate conversation with 'so, who are you reading.'
PMB: Don't be afraid to show off your sensitive side.

GS: Ignore the boos. They usually come from the cheap seats.
PMB: Validate all actions arising from your will, regardless of the consequences they inflict on others, by creating an axiom that says poor people aren't worth listening to.

GS: Hookers aren't cool, and remember, the free ones are a lot more expensive.
PMB: Did you catch the subtle dig at women who court rich men who court women who court rich men?

GS: Don't ever say 'it is what it is.'
PMB: Say 'it is what it isn't,' and maybe they'll actually buy a share of that junk.

GS: Start a wine collection for your kids when they are born. Add a few cases every year without telling them. It'll make a phenomenal gift in twenty years.
PMB: In twenty years your kid will be so spoiled and entitled that they'll wonder why you only got them a 200-case, 20-year-old collection when Michaela's mom got her 500 cases of wine and car for her super sweet 16.

GS: Don't gamble if loosing $100 is going to piss you off.
PMB: *$100 of your own money, that is. Only gamble with other people's money.

GS: Remember, 'rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.'
PMB: It's easier to be guided by the rules rather than constrained by them if you're the one making them up as you go along.