meh/style
Adelle Waldman,
Sarah Rose Etter,
Lydia Kiesling,
Tahmima Anam,
Ellen Pao,
Jenny Zhang,
Carrie Sun,
Claire Stanford,
Gabriela Garcia
[...] Ruby felt bad that the teacher had taken the trouble to find “early literacy” materials for her—but she’d just started at Town Square, was still getting used to the early hours. It wasn’t the right time. Besides, deep down, Ruby suspected she’d never be able to learn, no matter how hard she tried. When she was a girl, she got lead poisoning. A lawyer who’d filed a suit on behalf of the residents of a building Ruby had lived in when she was little said this was likely the reason some things were hard for her.
style-wise, this is frankly unforgivable
Over the years, Milo had gotten so much advice about women. Diego, for example, said not to worry so much, that if you didn’t care too much or try too hard, they’d find you attractive—but what did Diego know about being Milo? Milo had tried every single approach—acting aloof, acting nice, negging, complimenting—and he still had been dumped and cheated on and rejected more times than he cared to count. He had thought Callie was different—almost a reward for his patience, for everything he’d been through. But he had been wrong, again. After a few days’ reprieve, a few days of happiness and hope—he was back in a landscape both familiar and bleak. In his head, he heard, Hello darkness, my old friend. (His dad’s Christian rock band covered that song, except they altered the lyrics to make it about Satan.) Milo knew people thought he was a happy-go-lucky sort of guy because he did comedy, but as he tried to remind them, people had probably thought that about Robin Williams too.
urgh
The first part—about the store looking good—he had followed, but Meredith’s interviews were remarkably good? She had learned from past mistakes? Mentor and role model? Beacon of kindness? What the fuck? Had Ryan gotten confused? It was possible. Ryan’s success in climbing the ranks at Town Square was not generally attributed to any particular quickness or skill, but rather to his having graduated from a more prestigious university than most people in the management training program. (For all its talk of egalitarianism, corporate had a fetish for people with Ivy League degrees, no matter how unexceptional many of them proved to be in practice.)
lol
Katherine was the highest-ranking person at the table. She had a master’s degree in psychology from an even more prestigious university than the one Ryan had attended as an undergrad. A retail trade magazine had recently profiled her, calling her a rising star and bright new talent. She’d made her reputation at Town Square by designing policies that were worker-friendly but cost-neutral, and she spent a great deal of time traveling to stores around the country, talking to managers about the importance of praise in worker retention—how much it means to employees to be complimented, how it’s often as valuable, if not more valuable, than raises when it comes to keeping workers happy. She called her approach the “well-crafted carrot.” The idea was not to puff employees up so much that they up and quit, but to “make store-level workers feel that Town Square is a place where they are seen and valued.” She had also formalized the policy of throwing storewide pizza parties at stores where union organizers were afoot and personally approved the language used in the flyers that were distributed at these parties, in which corporate’s case against unionization was laid out in friendly, upbeat terms, with only the subtlest insinuation that any union agitation would force corporate to curtail some of the generous benefits it currently gave to employees voluntarily. She was active, too, in arguing for the company to be a leader in terms of issues around inclusivity and equal treatment. “Especially for our team members who are people of color or LGBTQ+, or for women who’ve dealt with sexual harassment,” she explained to store managers, “working for a company that operates according to progressive values is its own kind of nonmaterial employee benefit.” Then she’d smile. “Of course, these policies also reflect what we believe is right.”
i mean okay i'll accept this
The men with Upstairs Eddie were making a lot of noise. They looked, Bunny noted with amazement, like seniors just graduated from Stanhope, the boarding school where she and her older brother, John, would return in the fall: gorgeous in the aggregate if not individually, white boys with gently shaggy hair, bronzed, golden-furred legs in khaki shorts and dirty running shoes. They were drinking Heinekens fished from a cooler full of lukewarm water, from where Bunny had earlier fished her own tepid Coke.
why is she amazed? im so bored
[...] Some stares were simply from interested people who could tell immediately that Bunny was not from Azerbaijan. Some were pointed but mostly playful: “Hello, beautiful girl!” Some scared her, boys who followed her until she could walk fast and resolutely to a safe and crowded distance. “Monica Lewinsky! Monica Lewinsky!” one of them had yelled, cracking up. Bunny cursed the slutty intern as she broke into a humiliating jog.
terrible
Her father considered for a moment. “His view is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s been a gold rush for resources, and that a lot of unscrupulous people are making money in very corrupt ways. Which is true.” When the Glenn parents were together, she sometimes heard her father lament the quality of men with whom he was now expected to engage, and the variety of work he was expected to do. Bunny, despite her sense of alienation from her father, knew he was a very smart man. His bookshelf was filled with forbidding books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that Bunny sometimes tried and failed to read.
so lazy
Bunny had heard again and again of the Contract of the Century, without knowing exactly what it was. Something about oil, different companies working together, revitalizing decrepit wells, blah blah blah. It was as impenetrable to Bunny as the warren of pipes and factories that ran through the Black City, the industrial east of Baku where she had been told not to go. [...]
????
After they had finished Lale’s food, they watched several of the Friends episodes from the tape Bunny had been given. Bunny loved Rachel’s and Monica’s outfits—so sleek and put-together. [...]
???
Maryellen spoke again after a few minutes. “Sue found out she had some kind of inner ear thing, vertigo. She had to quit.” She turned down Poirot. “I felt so bad for her; she was devastated. But then she did this travel-booking certificate program they had instead, and she ended up managing a high-end guest house in Bora Bora for years,” said Maryellen. “She married an Australian guy out there. Now she’s retired. Never had any children,” she said, the matter finished. Bunny admired the way that Maryellen and Ted knew so many people with very interesting lives.
how do you admire 'the way that'