Paloma Paloma Paloma

Or, what have you been doing all this time?

Greetings from Chinatown, mid-November and 62 degrees. Had hoped to be off to the BK (Brooklyn to most of youse) to go rollerskating with a friend, maybe in Brooklyn Bridge Park, but she ate a bad shrimp or something last night and let’s just say, she’s had an active 12 hours.

Speaking of Brooklyn Bridge Park, the waterfront strip of land just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, it did not exist when I was growing up in Brooklyn Heights, the view from the Promenade (which you have seen in eighty gazillion movies) and onto the waterfront at that time of abandoned warehouses, the Navy Yards mostly having shut down by the 1970s and ‘80s.

It is the case that I was something of a truant teenager, which meant that one day when I was supposed to be in school, Arnie Rodriguez and I were instead wandering around the waterfront, where we saw two or three men standing over something. As Arnie and I approached, we realized the something was a body covered with a tarp. We asked the men, who I guess were plainclothes cops or detectives, what was going on; they said the body had been pulled out of the river. We asked if we could see it, which by all rights should have elicited the response, “Scram, you stupid kids” (and maybe did). But Arnie and I were insistent, and had nothing else to do, and decided to tell the detectives that we were really pretty sure we knew who the dead guy was. The detectives gave us an, oh please look but eventually pulled back the tarp. Let's just say the guy’s face had sort of... softened, the features no longer where they’d once been; I recall an eye having slid to the side. “This your guy?” one detective might have asked, or maybe I am making that up. I do recall the men’s grim satisfaction in making two snot-nosed teenagers nearly hurl.

Steady readers of this blog (Ed: You know they call them newsletters now, right?) will recall my threatening, more than once, to launch a website called Paloma Media. Well, we launched it. And I thought, for the hell of it, I’d tell you how it came to be.

In January 2019, I was visiting NYC from Portland and attending one of Bari Weiss’s media meet-ups at the Comedy Cellar. There were maybe fifty of us there, most of whom I did not know. I was sitting at the end of one table with someone named John McWhorter when Bari stood and mentioned that three people in attendance - McWhorter, Jesse Singal and me — were currently in the barrel as far as social media was concerned. This didn’t draw too much concern - the get togethers were for drinking and hanging out, not lamenting - and indeed I was not overmuch concerned. Later that night, Bari, Matt Welch and I stood at the bar and said something along the lines of, the walls are really, hahaha, closing in, right? Maybe we will, hahaha, need to push back at some point…

Five weeks later my world was cratering. I was back in Portland, trying to write my way out of the peril my work had put my family in. The day an Opinion piece the LA Times had asked me to write ran, I got an email from Matt, saying, “I want to start something new, and I want to do it with you.” What that something was was not stated, and I think part of why Matt emailed was because he knew I was drowning and wanted to save me. (He will never admit this.) Whatever the reasons and whatever the possibilities, I held onto it like a life preserver.

And then it was fall 2019. I was living in New York and, while Matt had a full-time job at Reason and was co-hosting The Fifth Column podcast, then starting its crazy upward trajectory, I was in many ways starting fresh. And how about this new thing? Maybe we could name it? Get an EIN? Talk to some people about coming aboard? We did these things, and then it was COVID, and we all honeycombed away, for how long we did not know.

But the world did not stop, not at all. In my East Chinatown neighborhood, and as I would write for the New York Post, “the streets around me were in full, if somewhat different, bloom. The cantina on Division Street had turned into a grocery. A previously empty storefront on Hester started doing a booming business in electric bikes.” Meanwhile, over in journalism land, whatever resentments of long- or short-standing that had not been allowed to fully fruit in-office, gained strength and velocity with employees working from home. People considered superstars at their publications jumped from or were pushed off the motherships: Katie Herzog left The Stranger, Bari Weiss, the Times, Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine. Where would they go? What would they do? Everything felt accelerated, you had to parse the new climate in real time and in full view, and I will say here only that summer 2020 meant many conversations about who would ally with whom, which platforms had legs and which were bunk, which tech bros were dangling the possibility of $30 million today.

Meanwhile, George Floyd had been killed and the country was exploding, no place more so than Portland. That story had me writing through the end of 2020, when the half-apartment conjoining mine became available, and we decided, because why not, to turn it into a recording studio.

Paloma Media @palomamedia

Welcome to the @palomamedia recording studio! Thanks to @wethefifth fans for all the (Melania!) swag, the hooch and the love. Come inside for a special guest appearance!

Doing this basically cost a little more than nothing and has proved a tremendously fun locus through which dozens of people have recorded and hung out, and which tbh looks pretty hot right now.

So that could be it, right? Paloma achieved!

Or not. Maybe one still wants to conjure a website, something like…

As for more pie, it’ll be on daily offer at Paloma Media, as opposed to this one little weekly slice. And so I am packing up the KitchenAid and porting over. I will be absolutely so happy if you follow me, plus you will be getting about one hundred times more content for your buck. And as for those bucks: we are putting nothing behind paywalls, don’t like ‘em/don’t need ‘em. But we are offering extras when you Patreon on up or otherwise choose to support. We are giving you many ways!

I thank you so, so much for coming along with me thus far. More pie ahead xx