More shocking than the price-slashing of luxury goods, reported by Guy Trebay of The Times, is the resulting shopping frenzy. First of all, don’t these crowds have jobs they need to keep by, like, being chained to their desks? And second, now that the displays at Bergdorf’s resemble nothing more than Canal Street, don’t these people realize that what we call “luxury” is no longer the best that money can buy? As Dana Thomas pointed out in “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” it’s an illusion predicated upon the toil of low-skilled Chinese factory workers and the taste of middle America. Very tacky. In any event, maybe the massive downshift will be the thing to get luxury back to its rarefied roots. Or maybe it will make these brands, and their counterfeiting imitators, just plain rare. And really, wouldn’t it be wonderful to start seeing variety again?

This man is New Yorker staff writer Ian Frazier, and the boners in his prose are positively palpable in a profile of a “hip-hop cop” named Derrick Parker. Naturally I was hoping Frazier would be younger, cuter and fitter — basically, Mr. MILF in chunky glasses — because when someone gets so turned on, you want to be right there with him. And it seems kind of sad when he’s a shlub. On the other hand, of course a shlub would experience wide-eyed wonderment at Parker’s blingy world, and the nubile young women who comprise the natural scenery there. Witness this description, and remember, this is The New Yorker: “Some of the women were so beautiful that a force field around them demateri-
alized the raindrops before they hit. On this raw night, these women were wearing, basically, handkerchiefs.” Whew! Can’t you totally see the office gender divide over this copy? With the men over at shlub-central vicariously blowing their loads under their desks? And the women openly blowing chunks all over the galleys?