Season’s Fleeting

Photo courtesy Laurel Touby & Jon Fine

It’s party season, and pacing yourself is basically impossible. So we’re pushing past the holiday slide, fighting Bartleby impulses, and leaning on photos to track how the stuff of life moved through some of this week’s media holiday parties around the city.

OUT AND ABOUT

Last Friday evening, Mediabistro founder and managing director of Supernode Ventures Laurel Touby and former Inc. acting editor-in-chief Jon Fine hosted a pre-holiday party at their sprawling loft near Union Square. On the way in, guests puzzled over a Starlink box in a corner of the elevator addressed to the hosts’ downstairs neighbor. Among those mingling under the apartment’s eccentric light fixture were New York city editor Christopher Bonanos, TV producer Michael Hirschorn, Observer executive editor Jim Ledbetter, Radio Ambulante co-founder Carolina Guerrero, former vice president of digital growth at Inc. and Fast Company Allison Fass, tech investor Esther Dyson, Life X Ventures co-founder Amol Sarva, and an impressive array of food including Eataly pizza and, later in the party, a giant ham.

On Tuesday, The Fine Print hosted our holiday party at Floyd on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Among the subscribers, sources, and friends that gathered to celebrate with us while pretending to ignore the giant bocce ball court dominating the room were Reuters’ Breakingviews columnist Jennifer Saba, New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman, New York contributor Ross Barkan, former GQ and Medium editor Mark Lotto, Kaleidoscope co-founder Mangesh Hattikudur, Futurism editorial director Foster Kamer, Passionfruit interim publisher James Del, Insider correspondent Julia Black, political consultant Peter Feld, Verge features editor Kevin Nguyen, Embedded co-founders and Atlantic newsletter editors Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci, n+1 and Guardian contributor Aaron Timms, Vanity Fair contributor Tom Kludt, former CNN senior editor for media An Phung, The Independent deputy US editor David Taintor, Brassland music label founder Alec Bemis, Bushwick Daily owner and publisher Alec Meeker, Skip Hop co-founder Michael Diamant, former Thrillist travel editor Sam Eifling, tech investor Jeff Stewart, financial analyst Reza Sayeed, cruise line executive Craig Kanarick, graphic designer Jayna Wallach, and The Fine Print’s own Gabriel Snyder, Andrew Fedorov, and Sophie Krichevsky. If we forgot anyone, we’re sorry — by the end of the night, neither Gabriel nor Andrew could recall closing our tabs, though the barkeep assured us we had.

The Fine Print’s Andrew Fedorov and The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman

On Thursday, Eifling hosted the fourth-annual-ish no-office holiday party at Alphabet City Brewing Co. Among the attendees, who eventually crowded out the Rockstar Games holiday party, which previously filled the room and graciously left behind a cheese and crackers spread, were Phung, Slate correspondent Justin Peters, New York Times senior editor Alexa Mills, former Popsugar executive editor Nancy Einhart, travel industry publicist Nestor Lara Baeza, and Game Theory with Bomani Jones writer Tommy Craggs. The conversations swung from reminiscences of early career finances (renting a couch, spending your last four bucks on a beer, etc.) to common freelancer concerns, like how to get good, cheap health insurance (we’re told you only need to sign up for one credit at FIT to be eligible for their health plan), to more universal media worker concerns, like how to stop working in media or just stop working period. (Conclusions: Don’t start a bakery! Be very, very good at something briefly, for instance, writing exactly one bestseller.) Or, at least, how to get away with getting essentially nothing done for the rest of the year.

UPCOMING

Tonight
➾ 7 p.m. Parapraxis, the new magazine of psychoanalytic writing, will host a launch party for its first issue, along with n+1, which is celebrating its 44th issue, at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. “Dancing nearby to follow,” according to the flyer.

Saturday
➾ 7 p.m. Jewish Currents will host a Hanukkah party at Union Pool in Williamsburg. The band Black Ox Orkestar is set to perform.

Wednesday
➾ 12 p.m. The Silurians Press Club will host a lunch with New York Times climate desk correspondent David Gelles to talk about his recent book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, at The National Arts Club in Gramercy Park.

Have a moment? Let us know!