Now that I’m 31 and he’s 27, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but still, he’s a child of the ’80s!

—Dimple Chaudhary, the bride in my most recent Vows in the NYTimes. Parts of the story overlap with some of the themes here on Obsolete, I think. They met on a blind date.

…

He said he was 23 — three years her junior. “In New York there’s this idea of prolonged youth,” she said, noting that most men of that age “want to date lots of girls, and I felt I wanted to build something with someone.”

They arranged to meet at a Prospect Heights dive bar of her choosing. He knew it was her when she walked in, partly because “she was gorgeous — a sight to behold,” he said, and partly because he’d looked her up online.

She had yet to type his name into any search box. “Didn’t dawn on me,” Ms. Chaudhary said. “That shows our age difference.”

She experienced something increasingly rare: the thrill of sizing up a good-looking blind date without the shield of a computer screen. “He was nursing a beer and I thought he looked a bit nervous,” she said. “I thought that was sweet, because I was nervous, too.”

(You can read the rest here).

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I’ve written quite a bit here about cassette tape worship. In the last decade, cassettes have gone from viable music formats to objects imbued with nostalgia. We melt them and extract their guts in the name of art; we wax poetic about them in books; we buckle our belts with them and honor them on t-shirts or in the form of jewelry. In this article, the NYT’s Rob Walker marvels at this shift. 

Ten or twenty years ago, decorating clothing or countertops with nods to cassette tapes would’ve seemed totally bizarre-o. However, I don’t think it would’ve been weird to see wallpaper with a gramophone motif or a belt-buckle made to look like an LP. This begs the question: At one point will t-shirts across Williamsburg be emblazoned with artist renderings of iPads? And when will teenagers start wearing mini iPod classic charms on their necks? 

Hmmm…

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RSVP, RIP

Every now and then, one reads something and one thinks, “Sheesh, whoever wrote this is a real asshole.”

As a flawless human being, I am of course usually above thinking such thoughts. The world is full of beauty and kindness. I’ve learned this from observing Amos, my dog. If you look deep enough into anyone’s eyes, you’ll see that brightness. And if you smell their asses, you can tell if they’re in heat.

The reality is that I fear even THINKING that some writers might be assholes, because I worry that, in some kind of karmic way, it’ll come back to me and people will think I’m an asshole. In this age of interconnected blogorrhea, such boomeranging happens a lot. I’m not saying I don’t have occasional assholish qualities. I’m just saying I don’t want to have to read about them on someone else’s site. My ego is too gossamer a thing.  

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While magazine editors still attend to “the mix” — the sequencing of articles, the balance of text and images — online readers consider all that obsolete hocus-pocus. Magazine décor used to make readers feel protected, at ease and thus receptive to advertising — in their well-appointed New Yorker place, say, or their coffeehouse Nation place. But online we build lean-tos from whatever is around, often relying on the artless scaffolding supplied by search engines and browsers.

Virginia Hefferman discusses what magazines are and what they were. The Medium - Articles of Faith - The Existential Crisis of Magazines Online - NYTimes.com

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My friend and general girl-crush Melena Ryzik (aka the NYT’s Urban Eye) did this funny piece on… people who make siren sounds and visit from the moon. All in a day’s work. BUT, did you know: visitors from the moon take direction via typewriter? Yuh-huh!

“Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles.”

Not usually the biggest David Brooks fan, but I can get behind his piece in today’s NYT:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

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