Lot 1: Let Them Eat Cake

Courtesy of Julien’s Auctions

Auction houses occasionally serve up pieces of famous people’s old wedding cakes for reasons unfathomable to all but a few. This stale morsel was given as a souvenir at the multi-million-dollar wedding of our esteemed president Donald J. Trump and his third wife, Melania Knauss, in 2005. The actual cake—seven tiers of Grand Marnier-soaked sponge cake decorated with 3,000 white icing roses that reportedly cost $50,000—was inedible due to the amount of wire needed to undergird it (how’s that for a metaphor?).

To take the Palm Beach affair beyond grossly excessive (because, duh), a batch of mini chocolate truffle cakes was sent home with guests as wedding favors. No Jordan almonds or personalized matchboxes here. This un-nibbled example from an anonymous source—no A-lister wants to admit they attended the ceremony—heads to auction in Los Angeles on November 17, estimated at $1,000+.

This is the story of a blue most common, and most beloved. A blue that Thoreau thought needed to be Americanized, like Freedom fries. It’s the color of waves and stamps and too many paintings to count. It’s an accidental pigment, a happenstance color, and an antidote for heavy metal poisoning. Meet my sweetheart, Prussian blue.

I’m so sorry you can’t see her properly, because she is beautiful. Unfortunately, like many high-chroma (i.e., high-intensity) pigments, Prussian blue can’t be accurately displayed on a computer. Screens emit too much light to properly showcase the texture and depth of Prussian blue, a hue that is both a color and a material. Darker than cobalt and moodier even than indigo (and with enough green that it sometimes reads as a dark teal), Prussian blue is often called the first modern pigment. (A quick note: pigments and dyes are not the same. According to Color Studies by Edith Anderson Feisner, a pigment is a “powder that are in a binder such as acrylic or oil which covers and adheres to a surface. Dyes are pigments that are dissolved and absorbed in a fluid.”) The microcrystalline blue powder has been around since 1705. Its invention was, like penicillin and saccharin, the product of happenstance.

The story goes like this: in the early years of the eighteenth century, alchemist and avid dissector Johann Conrad Dippel (who is rumored to have been the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) was sharing a lab in Berlin with Swiss pigment maker Johann Jacob Diesbach. One day, Diesbach was working on a batch of cochineal (a brilliant red dye made from crushed insects) when he used a tainted instrument from Dippel’s table to mix his crimson brew. Dippel had been working to invent a recipe for immortality, but instead he created Dippel’s oil, an awful-smelling mixture made of crushed animal bones (sometimes also called “bone oil” or “animal oil” or “bone sauce”) that would eventually be used as a chemical weapon during World War II. When Diesbach grabbed Dippel’s oil-coated instrument and plunged it into his vat of red dye, he had no clue he was about to create an entirely new (and highly profitable) color.

I woke up with “Monster Mash” in my head and I bet that’s the best thing that’s gonna happen to me all day. For you, though, here’s music. Enjoy.

★★★★★ A contrail arched smoothly across the cloud-whitened sky and fractured to bits in a wall of mirrored windows. The freeze had lifted; a vest and hoodie were enough for errands. Something small with falcon-y wingbeats flew to the top of an antenna, then took off again just as the binoculars found it. The forecast had said the clouds would thicken but instead they went away, leaving full blue sky and light that was glass-clear nearby and blurry as quartz in the distance. The off-white railings on the playground climber thrummed in place. The sun was already low when the children arrived at the aircraft carrier for the birthday party. The grownups clutched coffee cups in their hands despite the late hour. Reflected sky gleamed on the glossy flight deck of the Lego replica ship, and a glow spread through its side belowdecks. Out the window, the blinding shine spread on the water all the way to New Jersey. The actual flight deck was like a mountain range underfoot, the rays raking over its ridges and throwing their backs into shadow. The canopy of an aged Dassault filled with scattered sun.

Image: Basheer Tome via Flickr

“Man, this Thanksgiving is going to be brutal for family political talk. What can I do?” —Ronnie Red State

Thanksgiving is great because of food. Thanksgiving is lousy because of relatives. Although they are generally all well-meaning and nice people, relatives are the friends you can’t even tell to shut up during dinner. You have to swim for your life across waves of terrible opinions that will touch, no doubt, upon Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, Ray Moore, and, if you’re lucky, Louis C.K. At some point it will be socially acceptable to always wear headphones. At family dinners, in church, after death. Always. We won’t even need actual headphones, they will install speakers inside everyone’s head for better fidelity. How much better would the world be if we never had to talk and instead had Queen songs as the background for everything in your life. You are the champion, my friends.

If we’ve learned anything from the current political climate, the best policy is to always answer the questions you want to answer rather than the ones you’re asked. “Jimmy, don’t you think the media is being unfair to our President?” “Uncle Louie, I’d rather talk about the fact that the United States is the only country not committed to the Paris Climate Accord. Even fake countries from shows like “24” are committed to the Paris Accord.” If people do bring up politics, you have to shut it down hard and ugly, so someone’s mom will step in and say “Not at the Thanksgiving table, please!”

In late October, as I wrote columns and tweeted about this wave of stories, I discovered that a male colleague had been hired here at New York despite documented claims of sexual harassment in a prior job. I’m angry not just because New York saw fit to bring him on. It’s also the impossibility of the situation now: Should the guy (who doesn’t supervise anyone) be let go, even though no one at New York has complained about him? Mostly I’m mad that he was chosen, at all, over at least two talented women who also were in the running.

Indeed, what do you do when you know about someone’s bad behavior that predates his position at your place of employment? Serial harassers are an unusual breed of off-the-books offenders—even if, say, this person were fired for sexual misconduct in the workplace with a direct report, what’s to keep someone else from hiring them for contract work? (Should there be anything to keep them from doing so?) Does keeping them specifically away from management positions do anything except keep the misbehavior off your premises? Who’s to say they won’t just become a freelance harasser rather than a workplace one? But what if he writes really great articles and makes interesting intellectual arguments? Does it matter that he hits his wife if he’s a gadget reviewer? I seriously doubt that Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct is only relevant because he tells so many jokes about masturbation and sex. So why do we have such a hard time accepting that someone’s conduct outside the workplace might be relevant inside it?

It’s a curious thing, the idea of redemption, or What Comes Next, because it entails a certain amount of moralizing on the part of the employer. Do nothing, and you could be part of the problem, especially if someone warned you. Do something—fire someone or terminate their contract—and well, I don’t know, can they sue for some kind of prejudice or discrimination? At least we have rules for how we treat felons and convicted criminals when it comes to workplace rights, or loss thereof. What if you learn through the grapevine that a man sexually harassed his employees at his previous place of work but was never disciplined for it? What if he swears he’s changed, what if he’s sober now? What if women come forward and tell you stories of what he did to them two decades ago? Does any of it count, and if so, how much? What is the statute of limitations on sexual harassment, a subcriminal act? I don’t know, but I think we’re well on our way to finding out.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★★ The daytime moon was slightly brighter than the translucent bits of cloud, cracked with blue, nearby. The air was still humid to wash and hang up the jeans, and too mild for that to seem like an urgent problem. The office had crossed over from too cold to too hot. Once again the clouds got thicker and the day began fading even faster than it would have. Someone had an umbrella out in the midafternoon light and somehow there was a drizzle blowing, incomprehensible and invisible—a sensation on the skin that seemed imaginary till careful inspection turned up fine droplets on the parked cars.

Image: Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff via Flickr

JARED is quietly melting down at his desk. He is unable to sign onto his work computer. Instead of trying to remember and then inputting his correct password, he presumes he has been fired. He looks around and sees that everyone else is working, even KELLYANNE CONWAY who typically just talks about how busy she is without ever doing much of anything. GARY COHN is listing taxes to cut like they’re items to pick up from the grocery store to make a cake not one rich person is allergic to. GENERAL KELLY is reinforcing the patriarchy but not present. IVANKA is sprawled out on her reclining couch. The one leg is a little charred from the time STEVE BANNON and REBEKAH MERCER tried lighting it on fire. Moving it into the West Wing was IVANKA’s way of reclaiming her power. It’s worked. She is with her LAWYERS, avoiding liability and criminality.

KELLYANNE CONWAY [into her phone]: That toast Steve Bannon smells? He’s not just having a stroke this time. It’s a civil war.

[JARED cleans dust from his keyboard to disguise the fact that he can’t log onto his computer. When his keyboard is spotless, he notices the Chinese takeout fortune he long ago affixed to his monitor, “Wherever you go, there you are,” is furled. He reapplies Scotch tape. He presses the edges three times, but it won’t unfurl. JARED decides he doesn’t want to be where he is anyhow, and peels off the paper. It’s the most decisive action he’s taken since redacted.]

KELLYANNE CONWAY [into her phone]: I don’t know what side I’m on either but that’s not the point. The point is, you’re going to need reinforcements. You can’t win white women without—[KELLYANNE CONWAY pretends she wasn’t hung up on. She walks over to the office white board and crosses off BERNIE SANDERS from her list of “Contingency Plans.” She opens her music, searches for and plays Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” and lights a cigarette. JARED coughs reflexively. She slinks over and reaches for the Nilla Wafer wrapper in JARED’s waste basket.]