Category: Uncategorized

…personal newsletters are on the rise, and for good reason: Like podcasts, they foster a minimally mediated sense of intimacy with the writer/aggregator; like Twitter, they offer a peek into a person’s idiosyncratic tastes as a reader; and, like a favorite blog, the selections of the day’s readings arrive with annotations—quippy one-liners that explain why a story bears mentioning. There’s something precious and intimate and pure about the form, which is why so many recipients remain steadfast in their support for the personal newsletter.

John and Ed were approaching Black Rock desert on the way to Burning Man when the email arrived from a friend. “Thanks for letting us stay in your apartment this weekend!”

John looked at his husband in confusion. There must be some mistake – they had left their San Francisco apartment with their professional housesitter.

“No, it’s definitely your house – your car, your wedding photos, your cats,” said his friend. “We found it on Airbnb.”

In what is just the latest symptom of San Francisco’s overheated property market, John and Ed discovered that their housesitter had rented out their apartment while they were away, charging $2,000 for five days.

In addition to heavy promotion and marketing for the first issues, Marvel is rolling out the red carpet for the second installments of these highly anticipated titles. Along with added publicity, web advertising and web skins – each new All-New, All-Different Marvel first issue will conclude with a full page advertisement for issue #2. Prompting fans who’ve just finished these exciting first issues to come back for round two! If you thought issue #1 was packed with high-octane action and can’t-miss moments, just wait till you read issue #2!

Many newer outlets offer fifty cents per word or more—sites like The Verge might pay a dollar per word—as do established publications, including New York‘s blog network and The Guardian. “You can expect that two hundred and fifty dollars is an ultimate baseline for anything that you do,” Kyle Chayka, a New York-based freelancer, told me. “No one is paying less than that. My own perception is that fifty cents per word is a fair going rate for an experienced freelance writer who’s writing something primarily for the web that’s been reported.” But still: Figure twelve hundred or fifteen hundred words per piece, and you’re talking closer to twenty cents per word. “That’s depressing math when you’re doing your budget,” Erik Malinowski, a freelancer writer, said.

The number counted as living rough in the city in 2015 is 6,686, up 3% on the last count in 2013.

At the same time, the median house price in San Francisco has risen 103% since 2012 to $1.35m in July 2015, affordable for only the top 10% of households in the city, according to the latest figures from the California Association of Realtors.

And household income for the 95th percentile is the highest in the US at $423,000, although the city’s income inequality is the second worst after Atlanta, says a Brookings Institution report.