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NYC

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NYC

Article

NYC is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 23, 2024 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “WHAT YOU SHOULD DO — NYC”; “After moving to NYC, I noticed something that bothered me”; “a piece about the drive for nightlife in NYC”. It most often appears alongside Chloe Pingeon, Collected Agenda, Cassidy Grady.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: August 23, 2024
  • Last seen: September 12, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

COLLECTED AGENDA #8
August 23, 2024 · Original source
Dinner at El Xolo, which is the best restaurant I’ve been to in a very long time. I’ve never been to a restaurant like this in New York. I’ve rarely been to a restaurant like this in life. It’s a deeply special meal. Food can probably best be described as “Modern Latin Fusion” - small plates, many of them, with foams, emulsions, mousses etc. We order one of everything on the menu. It’s a small enough menu. The best is a crudo with matcha ponzu, cilantro, fried corn and a watermelon basil vodka drink full of clarified ice. I tell my boyfriend's friend across the table about the jaguarundi I saw, and he tells me that jaguars (a different cat) were the very first bio-hackers.
Inline links: El Xolo
I’m waking up late, walking to a mall, buying cargo pants and taro iced tea, buying ceviche and pork shoulder tacos and diet coke at Fisheria. I was planning on returning to New York tonight, but instead I’m going to the mountains, to Coatepeque Lake, spending the night at Cardedu Hotel. The hotel is weird, very hard to find, very hard to reach by car and full of oddities on arrival like a large ropes course on the edge of the restaurant and a never open popsicle stand. I don’t like it here at first but then in the evening it’s storming and you can see the clouds and rain move over the lake like it’s in slow motion, and everything is very quiet and still and the outline of the strange hotel gets obscured by the storm.
Inline links: Fisheria, Coatepeque Lake, Cardedu Hotel
Collected Agenda with Lydia Sviatoslavsky
November 13, 2024 · Original source
Lydia Sviatoslavsky is a writer and publicist in New York. I first found Lydia last spring, when I began to see the label VERA PR attached to a striking number of new and cool projects - I emailed Lydia and we met at SARA’S and then at Time Again, where she told me more about VERA; “independent, free from bureaucratic oversight, representing the unsung and unconventional”. In under one year, Lydia has cultivated a community of intellectually and creatively rigorous clients. She does not shy away from the wonderful gritty edges of things, and this, coupled with an ability to translate these things and make them accessible to a wider audience, has led to a lot of interesting work.
Inline links: VERA PR
VERA PR has represented clients including Uncensored New York, Chris Zeischegg, and Jack Skelley. Lydia also writes and edits the blog Discipline & Anarchy.
Inline links: Uncensored New York, Chris Zeischegg, Jack Skelley, Discipline & Anarchy
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, author, and Presbyterian minister. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for nearly two decades before resigning in 2005 after the paper attempted to muzzle his critique of America’s invasion of Iraq (Check out his “Requiem for the New York Times” here). He’s written a ton of insightful books, including Empire of Illusion and America: The Farewell Tour (both of which predict Trump’s rise to power).
Inline links: Chris Hedges, here, Empire of Illusion, America: The Farewell Tour
My Glass House
February 25, 2025 · Original source
From 9pm in the Lower East Side (dm @Jackiearielle for location) — Painters Pool returns. A weekly party for painters and friends, Tuesday in New York and Thursday in LA. Gather your painter friends - that's your ticket in.
Inline links: Jackiearielle
From 8pm - 1am at Honey’s — Friend Of The Letter Vivein Lee hosts COSMOPOLITAN: a dance party in support of local nonprofit Make the Road New York. Other hosts include Alexi Alario of Nymphet Alumni, Alyssa Davis, Fiona Duncan, Ani Tatintsyan, and Kit Zauhar. I’ve been meaning to revisit Honey’s since artist Sarah Mehoyas took over ownership, and this seems like the perfect occasion. Music by Goop Girl, Miho Hatori, and more. Snacks by Sakura Smith, the coolest list of hosts, etc etc etc.
Inline links: Honey’s, Vivein Lee, Make the Road New York
From 7pm at Pianos — Uncensored New York presents Absolute Divinity album release party, ft Joslyn Crocco, Smith Taylor, Sacred, and No Boundary. Herbal remedies by Beck Iasillo.
Inline links: Uncensored New York
Your Favorite Grifters Favorite Grifter
February 27, 2025 · Original source
Your weekend New York itinerary is here, updated today with some new additions.
Inline links: here
Sunday, February 23 "Whenever I see a guy in a Yankees cap I assume it's a cop," David said, of the clearly undercover officer observing the turnstiles at the Bleecker St station.” At the bar, I was playing journalist. They were celebrating an AI software that marketed itself as undetectable as AI, good for cheating in school, or in screenwriting, code, whatever you want, and it was clear they thought more people would be at the party, they bought raspberry lemon Svedka, I was fighting these Florida tech guys for proximity to the only small space heater in the room. "Do you have any moral qualms about what you do?," Allison asked one of the founders; and he said "no, we're building a tool. you can use a hammer to build a house or to kill someone." Then Alison said something like yes but you aren't building artificial intelligence you are building explicitly undetectable artificial intelligence with the express purpose of cheating and then the founders started talking about the overton window and you're in or you're out and they called my boyfriend over to tell him that he needs to work specifically and only in web app development if he wants to survive the AGI and ASI apocalypse. David was all ehh about it, humoring them a bit but then like oh excuse me I'm going to get a drink and never came back, and then the founder said to me, I like him he's disagreeable and not effeminate unlike most of these N-Y-C guys man, but he needs to listen to me about being a web developer because of the overton window and AGI and ASI coming fast. Then I said why do you work in this industry if you think AI development will only have bad implications and the founder said because it's an arms race and you don't want to land on the wrong side of the glass wall. I didn't ask but thought of this later - do you really think AI will respect its creator? Or, does working on an anti academic artificial intelligence cheating software save you from apocalyptic doom? Later, the founders were telling everyone that the next step of their plan is a pivot to building a game connected to some NFT about mentally ill women called SSRI-wives. Later, a few people kept telling me you should talk to the Gen-Z kid, there's a Gen Z kid here and this program does all his homework, and I didn't meet this kid until late in the night when the founder called him over and said "do you know what Urbit is," and the kid said yes, and the founder sighed and said "he's very online." And then they brought in some girls from Miami off the street because they needed more heads, and then these girls on the street were talking about being from Miami and so the founders said want some free drinks and they pulled them into the room, and then the girls were talking to me about Dinner At Kikis and Quitting Her Server Job Even Though She Loves All The Friends She Made. Then, David sent me the company's TrustPilot reviews and it was all things like “TOTAL SCAM” and “took $6000 from my bank account” and he said this is clearly a total grift even from my preliminary research. Then, there was dinner at Forgetmenot, and there was never returning to the Strange Grift Party, and I was going to write a story. I was going to tell you about grifts and technology, but then, well, I am not sure if there is too much left to add. And I’m not sure if I like to think about these things, although the doomerism fades when you quickly find that the cartoonishly evil project was just a hologram all along. Monday, February 24 When I was eighteen years old, I lived in a hostel in Prague by myself in the springtime, and I was so lonely. I would walk to the park everyday and I would lie in the april grass and I would close my eyes and imagine that when I opened them, I would be surrounded by company. I would imagine that I would laugh and grab someone's hand and we would twirl down the streets towards the old town that reminded me of a fantasy land, a true fantasy land because everything there was all made up. McDonalds were housed in historic old buildings and I didn’t understand why the others I worked with would go on runs every morning just to drink more beer on their returns. Prague was a hologram to me too. I liked the people I met and I liked that they were never going to grow up. I had no friends there. Eventually, I did, but in April I was always alone. These days, I am never alone. I was so sleepy yesterday and not in a nice way. I would like to avoid these things. I will drink green tea on the terrace this morning. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO After reading Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 novella Carmilla for my Irish Lit class last week, I’ve been feeling big on fairytales and magic. My sister Sylvie is the most magical girl in the world, as well as the most well read. She has offered her list of recommended fairy tales for this letter: Fairy Tales (by Sylvie Pingeon) I try to read a section of Lady Jane Francesca Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland: Music Charms & Superstitions of Ireland with Sketches of the Irish Past every night before I go to bed. It’s a truly magic book that brings fairytales into daily life with spells, remedies, and little bits of fairy advice: “People ought to remember that egg-shells are favorite retreats of the fairies, therefore the judicious eater should always break the shell after use, to prevent the fairy sprite from taking up his lodging therein.” A fairytale self-help book, and I love it. As a child, my favorite book was House Above the Trees by Ethel Cooke Eliot. Everything by Eliot is so special: she writes of wind creatures who look like the wind feels and tree girls who wear skirts made from the leaves of their trees (green in the summer, red in the fall), and the humans who can see these forest people have the clearest eyes around. All her books are like this, but House Above The Trees is my favorite: an eight year old orphan follows a Wind Creature into the forest and is taken in by Tree Mother, who lives in the treetops. A wonderful, fairy adventure ensues. Brothers Grimm is also always great, although Bluebeard gave me nightmares as a child that still sometimes come back. My mom gave me a beautiful copy of Aesop’s Fables for Christmas this year. It’s beautiful but I haven’t read it yet. A lot of second-wave feminists wrote retellings of fairy tales, and I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I found Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to be a truly beautiful read. On the topic of AI Grifts, Gabriel Hollis (of Margin for Thought and Microculture) recommends the following articles on Technology and God and Our End Times. All ideas that fall under near debilitatingly large banners, and all topics which Gabriel explores well. To be honest, I need to dive into these pieces with more intensity before I offer any original thoughts, but I will leave you with the links: Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley by Emma Goldberg, for NYT
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JTRE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03385ed5-b5ac-4cc9-8d10-8542c7ed383e_1600x873.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Yfjy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2217312-7969-4c84-bcb5-e2f349100218_1600x855.png, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 novella, Sylvie, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde’s, House Above the Trees, Aesop’s Fables, Angela Carter’s, Margin for Thought, Microculture, Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley
Perfect Little Life
September 12, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, September 7 Woke up to something amazing happening. More rain outside and also, a message from Emma. How are you? Emma asks. Like no time has passed at all, though of course, years have. There are other things to think about first. Octopus and shrimp salad and some cicen cheese at Tashkent Market. Interrogate one’s own sincerity. I am certain that Emma lives a very full and rich life now. I am not sure where in the world she is. I will know this soon. The first time I met Emma, her mom drove her to my house as a friend of a friend on her sixteenth birthday. I made signs to welcome my new acquaintance. Strung up HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMMA and WE HEART EMMA on poster board in neon sharpie above the wooden porch to greet her when she arrived. Nice to meet you Emma, I remember saying. The formality was awkward because I really wanted Emma to already be my friend. Later, I posted a photo of Emma and I hugging on the beach. Happy birthday Emma, I posted. Like plastering our pseudo-friendship online would make it real. After Emma and I became friends, and after Emma got her learner’s permit a few months after that, she would drive around Natick, Massachusetts with me hidden in the back of her trunk looking for parties that we’d find posted on YikYak. We would come home disappointed, usually, drinking a few warm beers in her parents’ basement or sitting with people we didn’t really know on the outer edges of my parents back yard. A few years had passed that way, and then another year hitchhiking around the Balkans after high school. Emma had convinced me to come bartend in Budapest and so I’d lost or maybe gained another life, here, drinking liquor and taking pills from strange cups in hostel hallways. Hitching rides from strange women across the Montenegro border. We’d bought loaves of bread and tomato sauce and bottles of wine to drink in the backseat and we'd driven for quite some time along coastlines and corn fields. They burned brush to prevent forest fires in this part of the world, and so often the sides of the highway would be almost totally ablaze. Emma and I were always half asleep, half drunk, half larping as destitute and disassociated and developing an early onset case of Peter Pan syndrome as mostly mine but kind of our cerebral ambitions paled in comparison to the magical ephemerality of our alcoholic, older, nomadic, wandering compatriots. My best friend Emma was more solid than I was. She had traveled for a while longer while I washed up in a hotel room in Albania and then, a flight back to Boston. Emma sold coffee in Morocco and then attended Georgetown. Emma calls mid afternoon. Are you still in New York? Emma asks me. She’s in the car in San Diego and she’s driving home from the beach with her boyfriend. Emma and her boyfriend are laughing. The perfect little life. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New York studio apartment and I’m feeling kind of giddy because here I am, suddenly, with this perfect little window into the perfect little life. It’s exactly as I suspected. I talk quickly at Emma for about twenty minutes when I pick up the phone, mostly recounting the events of the spring and summer, but there are other things, too. Sorry, I say when I finish my story. Sorry sorry sorry. Emma sighs, though she remains cheerful. I always thought you’d marry young, Emma says. Are you ok? Emma asks. You should talk about yourself now, I tell Emma. And so Emma tells me that she is in San Diego with her boyfriend. They have been there since the spring now, and they have started to make some friends. They are driving home from the beach. They are stopping for food. Emma is in a city on the Pacific coast of California known for its beaches, parks and warm climate. Emma is on the edge of a deep harbor that is home to a large active naval fleet. I imagine that it is misty there sometimes and sunny at other times and the houses are bright colored beach bungalows and they are always filled up with a little bit of sand. All my dreams this summer have been about California, I tell Emma. There is an OctoberFest party in San Diego, Emma tells me. Come to San Diego, Emma urges me. Do you surf a lot?, I ask Emma. Where are you getting food? Is everything made of wood and is everyone barefoot all the time and do you buy blue dresses at second-hand shops and wear them as you wander down the coast? Do you feed seagulls scraps of fish as they fly over your perfect white wooden balcony and do you go to the carnival and get massages at open air studios on the pier and is everything kind of pastel and creaky and at what pace does time pass? So, I will go to San Diego. Not in October but sometime soon. Sometime in the spring. Emma and Arthur will drive me around in their perfect little car and I will sleep on their perfect little couch and I will drink Corona with lime and wear a bikini in March and everything will be kind of pastel and creaky and I imagine I won’t be too aware of time passing at all. I will be embraced and absorbed by a life that does not belong to me. Maybe it’ll be like Never Land. Maybe I’ll stay forever. Monday, September 8 In New York City, people feed birds scraps of food and then grab them by their bare hands, too. In Washington Square Park, the tourists from Prague are doing this today. Washington Square Park, which is peppered with falling leaves and fountain mist and Bad Luck Spots, which I will never make the mistake of stepping on again. The park is still green but becoming less so. I’ve been praying for the cold, and now it is almost here. It is September 8th. It is Day One of being Cerebral and Ascetic and I am feeling very horrified that I ever thought it might be good to opt for any other alternative path. I am feeling regretful for my experimentations in self-abandonment and trying-on-new-personalities though, I suppose, this is where God comes in. And it was a God filled day yesterday, which is something I still hope to be somewhat watchful with and let things happen to me rather than intellectualize it all. The greatest thing is to Love and Know and Be Loved And Known, strangers kept on telling me yesterday. I already knew this, but I wrote it down anyway. Write it down and filter it through new contexts. Begin the day. It is Monday now. It is September 8th. I run into Emilia at Caffe Reggio, where I always sit and where she always finds me. You seem kind of volatile, she tells me. You should write about God if you are sick of writing about yourself. You should write about art. You should not write about politics. You should come to Slovenia. I was sitting in a church last night and someone was laughing outside. The laughter was reverberating inside. The laughter was distorting sound waves off the walls and causing interference with the incense and the air and with the silence. Because it was, otherwise, silent. Felt very frozen. Felt like fall. Felt like it was all beautiful even here in stupid NYC. Felt like I slowly noticed myself, shaking. What's your favorite book, a stranger asked me at the bar, later. V by Thomas Pynchon I said, because that's the book I read last and my mind was moving kind of slowly. What's your favorite film, the stranger asked. Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix because that is the film I watched and liked last or also; Manhattan and Match Point, I said. What's your favorite book, I asked the stranger. The stranger smiled. I always say The Bible when people ask me that. Tuesday, September 9 In the criss-crossed wood-roofed apartment, the lights start to flicker around eight pm which is a good reminder, then, that one is never supposed to linger in the sort of place like this. One is supposed to live in a city like this so that one might pace around and wait for omens. It is Fashion Week which means even less to me this year than Art Week did the week before. It is energies and after parties and humiliation rituals when I'm wearing my cotton non-synthetic workout wear all around Soho at a time like this and; all of this of course, means nothing at all and so this week is just like any other. This summer passed kind of dusty and endless and I do not feel sorry for myself anymore because first of all there is no need for that it is just one life all at once and second of all, Accidie is the only truly mortal sin and so one must proceed with caution. I sat with Amelia in bars with sparkling water in June for a while because I just could not go home. I sat with other sorts of substances for a while after that and I took it too far. Day One (trying again) of being Ascetic and Cerebral tonight. September 9. 999. People on the Internet say that means something and I'm good at taking people at their word. Sitting in the basement of Night Club 101 at the AltCitizen show with Joe and Darby and a cup of Suju waiting for the after party to start. The basement of Night Club 101 feels kind of like a high school music room classroom particularly now, particularly empty. Joe and Darby and I are talking about the gap between self possession and self awareness and a Kinsey Scale sort of method of categorizing people this way. Self possessed people often lacking self awareness and vice versa. The lowest form of discourse being discourse on discourse. Smart people talking about ideas average people talking about events stupid people talking about other people; though, I sort of disagree with this concept. Other people are the root of all loftier things like "Ideas", I am saying. It's like The Backrooms down here, Darby is saying. It's like a kind of weird vibe but we don't want to leave. We're near the bathrooms and so others keep drifting by but they don't want to stay. Fabulous outfits. Rockstar Girlfriends. Los Angeles apparel unitard and big black boots lining up for the restroom or to buy socks that say I CAN DO ANYTHING ON DRUGS. Patchwork style neon dress and small gray loafers, silver ballet flats leather pants light green linen v neck top. Lots of girls with long and flowy and jet black hair here. Lace black dresses that look like spiderwebs paired with emerald necklaces. Lots of guys in jeans with long and curly hair or long and greasy hair and they all are carrying guitars. I'm perched in the bleachers in the basement with my one kind of SEC-school-style-tattoo and an A-line dress watching everyone kind of wistfully. So, there were a few different lives and now there is something else. Maybe in the next one, I will pick a life like the club kids. Micro-bangs and rock music. Fall asleep in Bushwick or in the back of a bus. Buy a bus and drive across the country with a lust for Music above all. Drive past things like diners in Wyoming or sacred hot springs in New Mexico or the haunted Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire or Motel 6s and 8s somewhere along the way. Drive to California wearing True Religion low rise jeans and shredded tees. Drive all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Can't stop thinking about the Pacific Ocean. Drive to San Diego. Wash up on Emma and Arthur's door. I would do fewer things each day in this life, but maybe each of them would matter more. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Friday, September 12 From 7:30pm - 9:00pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — It’s your last week to see ARDOR - a very special play following a group of nine artists and friends on an annual retreat to their aging patrons Vermont farmhouse. Nothing and everything has changed and will change.
Inline links: Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, ARDOR

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