Results tagged “phoebemaltz”

What are interns? I've been an intern, but never an unpaid one, although I could imagine circumstances that would make taking such a position seem reasonable. The justification for an internship being unpaid is that the position is an educational experience for the intern; the transfer of goods is from the organization to the intern. While both a paid internship and a traditional job also serve as learning experiences for the employee, an unpaid internship ought to differ from these other situations in that the help provided by the intern to the organization is negligible. Which is what makes this ad so odd. How could an unpaid intern be "needed ASAP"? Here's a clue: "Duties include filing, setting up new filing system, creating and editing org charts, updating 401Ks and other files, assist Human Resources Director in all duties, etc." In other words, a job, a rather dull-sounding one at that, but with the special quality of not paying anything at all. 

This is just wrong.

No spitting, radio playing, smoking, or littering is permitted on public transportation. Coffee and cameras come in and out of legality. But one subway crime remains, thankfully, entirely legal: reading over the shoulder of the person sitting next to you.

While finding a movie "beautiful" is not the same thing as finding it "hot," it can't be denied that it helps if the leads are of the sex one prefers, and if the setting is something more inspirational than, say, the Chambers Street subway station. Straight men (or anyone, for that matter) seeking to ban "Brokeback Mountain" may be accused of homophobia; the men who roll their eyes when their girlfriends or wives suggest the film are perfectly justified, their reputation as tolerant individuals intact. Am I heterophobic to prefer "Yossi and Jagger" to "Yossi and some really hot Israeli actress"? Perhaps, but you can't help what you like.

A nice anecdote, we thought, and one we could definitly relate to. And then we promptly forgot about it and went on with the rest of our lives. But then on the subway we opened up our copy of the Post (don't give us that look you, we read the Times on the way home) only to have a Hasid with a photoshopped hot-red mohawk staring out at us. Needless to say we were instantly reminded of Ms. Maltz's previously mentioned moment. Sadly the Post's photo didn't make it onto the internets, but the accompanying story did. And as the subject of the story, a new book called Unchosen : The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels by Hella Winston, is in fact the point of this post that's kind of ok by us. Basically Winston spent some months exploring the underbelly of the Orthodox Jewish experience as research for her CUNY doctoral thesis. She talked to people who have left the faith, remained in, or have foudn ways to sit somewhere in the middle (think secret televsions, hidden heels and slicked back sidelocks). As we regularly, for no particular reason, find ourselves fascinated with exceptions to orthodoxy, we totally want to read this book now.

Perhaps the Co-op believes it makes up for the injustice of not providing jobs to those who need them in other ways, such as by providing only the fairest of fair-trade products. Yet the problem remains of just why so many well-meaning, progressive New Yorkers feel the need to cut themselves off from the truly urban experience of going to the local deli or supermarket and interacting with whichever fellow shoppers and store workers happen to come their way, choosing instead not just to buy organic but to buy organic in an ideologically homogeneous environment.