Tag Archive for 'the new york times'

Intern Murdered In Mexico

Published on September 17, 2010 in Interns. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, an even scarier place to be an intern than Conde Nast? The New York times reports:

A 21-year-old photography intern for a newspaper in Ciudad Juárez was shot and killed, and another intern was wounded in an attack Thursday at a shopping mall parking lot, their employer said. The shooting comes a week after the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report documenting the deaths or disappearance of more than 30 journalists since Mexico began a crackdown on traffickers that have left more than 28,000 people dead. Eight journalists have been killed this year, the group said. The pair of interns, from El Diario de Juárez, were attacked in their car by gunmen firing several rounds, leaving Luís Carlos Santiago dead. His unidentified companion was being treated at a hospital.

Our thoughts are with the intern’s loved ones.

lloyd’s night on the town

Published on September 14, 2009 in Fictional Assistants. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This weekend, the New York Times did its weekly “A Night Out With…” feature about Rex Lee, best known as Lloyd the long-suffering assistant on Entourage. The Times followed Lee and several friends as they went to the hugely popular restaurant Koi in Los Angeles. Some choice selections:

Seated at the head of a table decorated with an orchid and a bottle of low-sodium soy sauce, Mr. Lee played host to six friends, most of whom he worked with when he was an assistant to a commercial casting director. After dinner, everyone would walk to Mr. Lee’s nearby condominium to watch the latest prerecorded episode of “Project Runway.”

After four years of playing Lloyd on “Entourage,” the frazzled, gay Chinese-American assistant who suffers the homophobic and racist insults spit out by his manic boss, Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), you might think Mr. Lee would be tired of melodrama. But that’s exactly what draws him to “Project Runway.”

What a cutie. Team Lloyd!

korean pop stars have to fetch snacks, too

Published on September 9, 2009 in Horror Stories and Interns. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Fashion is a notoriously competitive field to break into – that’s why people are still willing to work for crazy bosses like Kelly Cutrone and Anna Wintour. However, it may be so competitive that even famous and/or rich people have to do grunt work. First, Tallulah Willis toiled away as an intern guest of the editors at Harper’s Bazaar instead of simply being handed a job or a column. Now, the New York Times reports that even famous Korean pop stars still have to start at the bottom:

Let us take the example of Sang A Im-Propp, who was a pop star in Korea before she decided, while on a business trip to New York, that she wanted to be in fashion. This was nearly a decade ago, and Ms. Im-Propp’s command of English was tenuous, but she enrolled at Parsons and in short order found herself an internship with Victoria Bartlett, a noted stylist and designer whom she admired and hoped would introduce her to the glamorous world of design. Instead, Ms. Im-Propp found it difficult to understand Ms. Bartlett’s heavy British accent, and at first she thought she had misunderstood just what Ms. Bartlett was asking her to do. Get cupcakes?

Not just any cupcakes, but the glossy butter-cream confections from the Cupcake Cafe, which is a four-block crosstown walk from Ms. Bartlett’s studio through the dodgy garment district, and it was freezing outside.

“It made me cry a lot,” Ms. Im-Propp said. “Vicky is an amazing artist, but she can be difficult.”

Could it be that fashion is actually becoming a great equalizer? I’d be a lot less demoralized about having to fetch coffee if the other lackey fetching coffee was a pop star. I’m just saying.

author finds success, assistant

Published on June 15, 2009 in Manifestos. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

As a writer myself, I am a sucker for a good “writer works for long time in obscurity and finally hits the big time” story a la J.K. Rowling. The newest addition to this class is Charlaine Harris, who wrote the “Sookie Stackhouse” series of books that were turned into HBO’s red-hot vampire series True Blood (which stars the lovely Anna Paquin as Sookie). In time for the second season premiere, the New York Times has a profile of Harris. In the obligatory “how she’s changed now that she’s famous!” section of the profile, the Times lists some of Harris’ new status symbols, which include a personal assistant (Harris’ longtime best friend).

While I get the Times’ point, which is that becoming famous and successful and busy often means that a person needs to hire an assistant to make sure all the work gets done, I don’t like the implication that an assistant is just another fancy object like a car or a hot tub. Statements like these lead to faceless assistant entourages (where they don’t have jobs other than standing around and making the celebrity feel/look important) or assistants working for people who don’t bother to remember their names and discard them as quickly as a day-old newspaper. It’s the same problem when glossy magazines write “trend” pieces about celebrity babies, treating the kids like accessories or pets with cute outfits rather than people.

So can we please stop listing an assistant as an outward sign of wealth and status? It’d go a long way toward helping change the way assistants are viewed in our culture – we’re people, not props.

meet the ROTUS

Published on May 18, 2009 in Assistants in the News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Thanks to The West Wing, I know that all the cute acronyms for government types that end in -OTUS (for example, POTUS = President of the United States, SCOTUS = Supreme Court of the United States). However, there’s one new addition to the list: ROTUS. The R stands for Receptionist. I’ve been a receptionist for a super busy company before, but I doubt it’s anything on par with what it must be like to be the gatekeeper to the most powerful person in the free world.

Darienne M. Page, who is profiled today in the New York Times, is 27 years old and has met some of the biggest celebrities in the world (Tiger Woods, Owen Wilson, and, of course, Barack Obama). An alumna of the University of Illinois, Page served in the US army for several years and was sent to Iraq. She worked as a paralegal and took depositions at Abu Ghraib prison. In her current job, she earns $36,000 a year. As for her duties, well… ROTUSes, they’re just like us!

A task that requires particular diplomacy is overseeing the presidential boxes at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. A few days a week, she goes to pick up tickets and checks to be sure that the V.I.P. seats in all three theaters are in order and that the minibar is stocked with small bottles of Korbel champagne, white boxes of M&Ms with the presidential seal on them and a few cans of Bud Light.

First of all, I love Bud Light. And how do I get my hands on one of those boxes of M&Ms?

Secondly, Darienne Page sounds awesome, and I would love to hang out with her. Maybe the next time I’m in DC…

in defense of sick days

Published on May 12, 2009 in Survival Guide. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – if you are sick, you should not come to work. In addition to the fact that one sick employee often causes office plague, no one ever does their best work when their head is stuffed up and their eyes are runny. Plus, as the charming Swine Flu hysteria is now reminding everyone, you never know when your coworker is going to infect you with something way worse than just a cold. Now, the New York Times is siding with me: a physician named Anne Marie Valinoti has written an editorial about how dangerous it is for our physical and mental health when we go to work sick.

If the swine flu epidemic ever swings into full gear, I will be prepared for the onslaught of ill patients. I will educate them about the appropriate use of antibiotics. I will provide symptomatic relief when I can. And I will let them know it’s O.K. to be sick. It’s O.K. to stay home from work, pull up the covers and drink gallons of hot tea all day. Maybe for an entire week.

And believe me: if you show up to work sick these days, you are not going to earn anyone’s admiration.

If it takes a weird flu strain to make people realize the importance of taking sick days, well, at least something positive came out of this whole fiasco.

japan pays workers to leave country

Published on April 24, 2009 in Assistants in the News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Imagine if your company hired you from another country just to do a job. You ended up staying in the country for a long time, marrying, having kids, buying a home, and then one day the country fell on hard financial times and told you to get out.

That’s exactly what happened to many workers from countries like Brazil and Peru who emigrated to Japan to take blue-collar jobs that Japanese workers couldn’t fill. As industry boomed, more and more foreigners got jobs in Japan. But now that the global economy is on a downswing, Japan is offering these workers a deal – they’ll pay for them to go back to their home countries, if they promise never to come back and seek a job in Japan ever again. For people who have spent much of their lives living and working in Japan, often because of a lack of opportunities in their native country, it’s a heartbreaking decision.

The New York Times has a more in-depth article about what’s going on in Japan.

broke? laid off? have a twizzler!

Published on March 24, 2009 in Junk Drawer. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Once again proving that my own unemployment is rich fodder for other people, the New York Times reports what the contents of my trash can could already tell you – when the going gets tough, the tough get sweet tooths.

In a rare case of someone doing well during this economy, stores like New York’s Dylan’s Candy Bar and Economy Candy are reporting upticks in sales as adults indulge their candy habits. Those who have been recently laid off or are earning less money are finding that candy is a quick – and cheap – high. In particular, they’ve been buying candy that they loved as kids, from Violet Gum to Mary Janes to Tootsie Rolls. [My own drug of choice is strawberry or cherry sour punch straws, and at my old job they were my favorite form of cubicle speed.] Just last week, I had an entire conversation with a friend about how awesome Bubble Tape was and how confounding it is that no one’s bringing it back. Maybe articles like this one will convince people that Bubble Tape is seriously due for a comeback. Til then, I’m just reading it and getting hungrier.

where have all the sidekicks gone?

Published on March 18, 2009 in Celebrity Assistant Soapbox. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Johnny Carson had Ed McMahon. The Lone Ranger had Tonto. Ryan Seacrest used to have Brian Dunkleman. But, according to the New York Times, the era of the sidekick is all but over. They note that popular late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, and Craig Ferguson all go without sidekicks (although, it should be noted that Stewart’s rotating cast of commentators, from Kristin Schaal to John Oliver, are hilarious, and he lets them bask in the spotlight). Plus, even though not that many people watch her show, Chelsea Handler’s sidekick is her ubiquitous assistant, Chuy “Little Nugget” Bravo. Here’s how the article defines a sidekick:

A real sidekick is something between a friend and a servant — a fervant. Sancho Panza is the exemplar, a paid employee who behaves as if he would gladly serve free, but another is James Boswell, so humbly devoted to his friend Dr. Johnson that he took on the role of amanuensis.

And what might have ushered out the era of the right-hand man? The Times blames an interesting person… Dick Cheney.

Continue reading ‘where have all the sidekicks gone?’

what role do looks play at work?

Published on July 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The Evil Empire, the company where Ashley and I used to work, had a certain unusual hiring practice. While it wasn’t a rule, they tended to interview a group of people for an open entry-level position and then hire whoever was the thinnest. The person was usually qualified and had all the right credentials, but consciously or subconsciously the folks in charge of hiring seemed to prefer hiring skinny chicks. The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog (based on the popular book of the same name) delve into the topic of “beauty quorums,” where unspoken advantages go to people who are considered more attractive. But how did they put their theory into practice? By asking some people to rate their own looks and then talk about their careers.

As awful as this sounds, I don’t think the people should have been allowed to rate their own attractiveness. While it was pretty heartwarming to see some positive body image on display, a “beauty quorum” is decided by the looker and not the person being looked upon. As a result, the results of this particular survey seem a little off-kilter, even though the topic they’re discussing is incredibly relevant.