Astral Codex Ten

New York Magazine

9 min read

New York Magazine

Article

New York Magazine is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between December 15, 2021 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece”; “named “Most Influential Tweeter In New York” by New York Magazine”; “Alex Tabarrok and New York magazine explain the Adderall shortage”. It most often appears alongside Google, New York Times, Substack.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: December 15, 2021
  • Last seen: January 13, 2026

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.

Ancient Plagues
December 15, 2021 · Original source
During our recent discussion of climate change, someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece making the case for doomism.
Inline links: this New York Magazine piece
Universe-Hopping Through Substack
September 29, 2022 · Original source
It’s a take on a profile of Adam Schefter, a sports reporter legendary for his ability to tweet news about trades before anyone else. According to his Wikipedia page, he was named “Best Newsbreaker of 2014” by a sports media site, and “Most Influential Tweeter In New York” by New York Magazine (both of these are apparently real things). He’s so good at what he does that ESPN pays him $9 million/year.
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
36: Alex Tabarrok and New York magazine explain the Adderall shortage. Summary: the DEA, in its crusade against opioids, has put such strict standards on medication factories that many have gotten shut down for “trivial infractions” (for example, “orders struck from 222s must be crossed out with a line and the word cancel written next to them. Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word”). In this case, the FDA is the good guys trying to get the factories to re-open again, but so far the DEA hasn’t budged.
Inline links: explain the Adderall shortage
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
December 04, 2025 · Original source
(source) It seems to have been declining since about 2010! Why? The government’s biggest student loan program is capped at $31,000, most people started hitting that max around 2010, the government never changed the cap, and the value of $31,000 goes down with inflation every year. (does this prove that the root cause of rising college prices was government loans all along?) Meanwhile, credit card debt, etc, are rounding errors in comparison. So the vibecession can’t be a debt trap. The Brooklyn Theory Of Everything In modern America, people in a tiny number of cities - NYC, SF, DC - dominate elite conversations. We have long since priced in that all the prestige information sources - New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The New York Review Of Books - share a certain perspective. But even the alternative media that has done the most to popularize the idea of the modern economy as hellworld for the young - Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, etc - grew out of the same New York environment. So how have rents changed in New York? Surprisingly, they’ve done no worse than the US average. Aside from the post-pandemic spike, they tracked cost of living. And their post-pandemic spike is comparatively modest. Does this disprove the Brooklyn Theory of Everything? Not necessarily. The new revised version says that the concentration of young elites and would-be elites in NYC and SF is itself a new phenomenon. Source: BLS, counting occupation code 27 as “the creative class” Since life in SF, DC, and NYC is especially pricy… Rent-to-income ratio of various metro areas (source) (source) …someone who moves from a counterfactual life in Boston to New York City has effectively had rent increase from 30% to 58% of income, even before we get to the secular trend! Then these people think “My life and that of everyone I know is unaffordable! It must be a generational crisis!” Then they write about it in the New York Times and The New Yorker, and their readers - including the average people who take the consumer sentiment surveys - believe the economy is uniquely awful. This isn’t the same as saying “it’s all vibes, there’s no crisis”. The crisis is that young people who want to join the elite are being forced into places they can’t afford. Would-be financial elites must spend years of misery chasing a lottery ticket that might not pay off; would-be cultural elites face the same challenge, plus their economic situation may not improve even if they win the culturally-prestigious (but low-paying) positions they seek. A natural test for this hypothesis would be to check economic sentiment in Brooklyn vs. the rest of the country. But this wouldn’t necessarily work: the hypothesis predicts that malaise will spread from Brooklyn to everywhere else. More Work To Stay In The Same Place Brenda Boomer applied to a local business she liked at age 18. She got hired, worked her way up from the bottom, and by age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,000 per year. Martha Millennial lost her adolescence to endless lessons in Mandarin, water polo, and competitive debate, all intended to pad her college resume; her only break was the three months she spent building houses in Rwanda to establish her social justice credentials. She eventually got accepted to Penn and earned a 4.2 in her college classes, despite having to complete several of them remotely from the Google campus where she was doing a simultaneous internship. After graduation, she applied to twenty-eight grad schools but was rejected from all of them, so she instead got two half-time jobs, one as a waitress and one at a startup that pitched itself as “Uber for humidifiers”. The humidifier startup failed, reducing her equity to $0, but she had only been in it for networking anyway, and by attending industry conferences every weekend she had collected the right contacts to get a warm introduction to the vice-president of their biggest competitor, “Uber for dehumidifiers”. She joined the dehumidifier startup, rose to associate manager, bumped up against a local ceiling (“we don’t promote from inside”), and successfully got herself poached by an air purifier startup, where at age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,001 per year. Technically Martha did better than Brenda at the same age. But she might still yearn for simpler times. (source) (source) What causes this one? It must be something big: after all, we see the same trend in college admissions, job applications, and (really!) dating, where matches that used to happen naturally have turned to an endless grind through hundreds of rejections and near-misses. The most likely explanation is technology removing frictions: when it’s easy to apply en masse to every opportunity in the world, every opportunity in the world gets thousands of applicants. They search for the best based on formal qualifications, so the value of formal qualifications goes up, so there’s an increasing arms race to achieve them. The only problem with this theory is that it doesn’t entirely match people’s complaints. They don’t complain that it was too hard to achieve their success, they complain that they are not achieving success, or that it feels hopeless. Speculatively, maybe people complain that they are not getting the level of success they expected based on their qualifications. That is, the same average-talent person is getting the same average-salary job they would have forty years ago. But since they have a masters’ degree and five internships and 12,000 LinkedIn contacts, they expected to get a better-than-average job. When they don’t, it feels like success slipping away. Conclusion Until now, we’ve tried to take disillusioned young people at their word. If instead we lean towards the economists, what might be ruining the vibes? The obvious answer is increasing negative bias in the media. I didn’t expect that Googling “graph about how negative media is over time” would work. We really do live in an age of wonders (source). This measure likely underestimates the trend towards negativity, because it only tracks a specific basket of media outlets. But the change could also have included viewers shifting consumption from more mainstream outlets towards more conspiratorial ones, including social media and blogs. (my Substack is tagged Science, but I hear the real money is in the Health Politics tag, where top performers feature articles like The Great Alzheimers Scam And The Proven Cures They’ve Buried For Billions and Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis) So, is that all there is? I think the strongest case for an economic crisis beyond vibes would be: Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HbCz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F83925817-3c85-4a63-83a7-8d0f622c398b_900x453.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Io3M!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc9d6d900-7d07-47c3-bc38-24731eead8ee_509x422.png, BLS, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hImJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Febd7f229-69cb-40df-952c-77c61cc30619_722x348.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Hi4e!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e8438f-82d9-4db1-b730-edc9f5cedc30_742x323.webp, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!33ZC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4fbed681-cd12-4f7d-9b42-1c98019eae4d_518x797.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!06v5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9fd4d840-0d95-402a-81e6-ff444ef09316_848x480.jpeg, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HlGa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c9d01fd-1834-41bd-abb7-5b935149bd17_726x227.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ll2f!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0095e4e7-7e15-4bcf-b64a-534e75fe0f3d_1080x884.jpeg, The most likely explanation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N2xe!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6c6ff762-10f4-4022-a759-206d873c2ec1_1456x807.webp, source, The Great Alzheimers Scam And The Proven Cures They’ve Buried For Billions, Russian COVID Vaccines Caused Global Turbo Cancer Crisis
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
1: New York Magazine profiles Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan:
Inline links: profiles Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan