It's hysterical

My friend Clayton Cubitt launched his Hysterical Literature site today, and it includes an essay I wrote: "The Last Real Porn Star."

This is the number of people who have watched a video of porn star Stoya read an excerpt from Supervert's Necrophilia Variations: 6,986,096.

Stoya is not: naked, having sex, in a porn movie.

She is: reading a book.

By the time you read this, over 7 million people will have watched Stoya read a book.

"We were at a party, you and I," Stoya reads, and everybody listens.

Don't tase me, girl

I talked to TASER about Tasers, women, and targets:

The pink C2 was released in 2007. “Women may not want to look tactical in all black,” Tuttle reports, and with the pink model, “If it falls out of her purse, no one’s going to think, ‘Oh my god, what’s that?’”

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This is not a reinvention story

I've switched beats at Forbes, and it's been pretty rewarding so far. I wrote about the process:

The week before that I took a pole dancing class and discovered that I would make a terrible stripper: “Gyms for Women Sell More Than Fitness.”

Today, I interviewed a porn lawyer, talked to a co-founder of Taser, and set up a meeting with a molecular mixologist.

I plan to talk to the guy holding the sign on the corner with the reference to the Bible on it, but I haven’t done that yet.

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I'm a pole dancer

For my Forbes blog, I took a pole dancing class.

In pole dancing class, there is nowhere to hide. At the start of class, I had chosen a pole in the second row. Presciently, most of the other women had chosen poles in the back row.

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The Bitcoin girl

I really loved Kashmir Hill's bitcoin survival story. Hilarious, interesting, smart. Definitely check it out.

Kenna unlocks a barred door next to the T-Mobile store on 20^th Street to a bicycle-choked staircase that leads to the second-floor “halfway hacker house.” He tells me he took over the space 14 months earlier and convinced the landlord to let him live in it for 9 months rent-free while he and his childhood friend, Jeff, cleaned the place up.

“We think it was basically a crackhouse,” says Jered. “We were sweeping hypodermic needles off the floors.”

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Price

From my latest on Forbes, "The Price of Investing in Sin":

In a way, the Asian carp are not unlike sin businesses. Forced to meet extraordinary challenges, both thrive under dire circumstances, surviving despite public dislike, under shifting environments, and circumventing genocide attempts.

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I need a stripper

I am looking for a stripper in Chicago.

Do you know one?

Are you one?

Do you know someone who knows one?

If you post this somewhere you hang out, might a stripper in Chicago see it and reach out to me?

Do you think kismet is possible when the subject is gentleman's clubs?

Email me.

Medium

I wrote a piece on Medium about when my brain got squishy.

You realize there is a problem when you cannot sort the laundry.

Picture it:

There you are, in the laundry room.

The laundry basket is full of dirty laundry.

You look out the window.

It’s:

1. overcast
2. the sky is a pale blue with cloud streaking across it
3. it’s raining and you’re wondering if the roof is going to start leaking again

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Plimpton!

"After that, he's, well, a collector of experiences."

Repent, Sinners

Porn Awards, Las Vegas, Nevada
I renamed my Forbes blog.

Now it's SIN INC.

There I will be working the vice beat.

Booze, broads, bozos.

It's the most interesting thing I've done in at least decade.

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Baller

My all-time most popular Forbes post just topped 500,000 views.

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How much can you make?

Stripper, Las Vegas, Nevada

"3) How much can a contributor make? As I’ve written, a writer who attracts 1 million unique visitors a month for 12 consecutive months, with a solid base of repeat visitors, can earn a six-figure annual income. That’s not easy to accomplish. In 2012, only the second year of our model, two contributors topped $100,000. We had a few at $75,000 and $50,000, and 25 hit the $35,000 mark. There is a long tail at $10,000. Using their individual data dashboard, a contributor can track how they’re doing in real time. For comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average full-time reporter or correspondent’s salary at $45,270. Remember, being a contributor (many have worked for major national and regional news brands) is a freelance job, with considerable freedom to publish content for others." -- "Inside Forbes: Amid the Finger Pointing, Journalists Need to Explore New Payment Models"

Clayton Cubitt is always on

My pal photographer Clayton Cubitt has launched a new art magazine/blog. It is very cool. He's famous for, among other things, creating the Hysterical Literature series, seen above.

What began for me in the placental alchemical gloom of darkrooms, the whir of enlarger fans, the cascade of water washing over silver halide prints, has, with the revelatory chime of a computer booting up, evolved into the blue under-lit glow of distributed LCDs, the whir of RAID cooling fans, and the cascade of message notifications from social media. 

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Take my advice

Over on my Forbes blog this week, I'm doling out advice. Got a question? Want my advice? Prefer to be anonymous? Email me.

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The great freelancing debate

You know what's embarrassing? Watching this debate over freelancing for free. Which started here. Had an orgy here. And reached its peak here with this interesting insight c/o Felix Salmon:

"Digital journalism isn’t really about writing, any more — not in the manner that freelance print journalists understand it, anyway. Instead, it’s more about reading, and aggregating, and working in teams; doing all the work that used to happen in old print-magazine offices, but doing it on a vastly compressed timescale."

I was in Boca Raton, Florida, when the whole thing went down. (Which, of course, is a ridiculous thing to say: "I was in Boca Raton, Florida, when [FILL IN THE BLANK].") Everyone where I was in Boca was rich. Actually, I realized, they weren't rich. They were wealthy. "What do all these people do?" someone asked me at some point. I had no answer. They drove convertible Bentleys and had young men in white shorts set up beach chairs for them and stayed out of the water when the lifeguard saw sharks. Observing the wealthy in their native habitat, it occurred to me what the wealthy want: For the time between when they want something and when that want is sated to be as short as possible. That is wealth. To buy that which cannot be bought: time.

Mostly, though, reading over the freelance debate, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed for the freelancers who couldn't decide whether or not freelancing for free meant they were worthless. I was embarrassed for the editors publicly admitting how poorly they paid their contractors without admitting how embarrassed they were by their actions. Embarrassed by what the internet has become -- a red light district in which the whores pretend they're not whores by fucking for cheap.

You know what else is embarrassing? I wrote a piece for The Daily Beast back in October, and I still haven't been paid for it. $300. I email, I ask, I remind, and they haven't paid it yet. That's embarrassing. Embarrassing for the woman in accounts payable who has to deal with it. Embarrassing for Tina Brown, whose 2011 salary was estimated by the NYT to be $700,000. Embarrassing for freelancers for whom there are no solutions, just more humiliation.

The forever war

How long do you think you’ll continue covering Guantanamo?

There are people who call the War on Terror the "forever war"; if this is the forever war, then this is the forever prison. I want to stay here for the 9/11 trial, which I think is years away. I feel like I have an institutional knowledge. Everyone else rotates in and out of here. The soldiers come and go, the lawyers come and go, most of the reporters come and go. I feel a responsibility to stay. I want to see how it ends. I’m a little concerned it’s never going to.

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Scenes from my life as a freelancer

Mannequin, Chicago, Illinois
I finished up my "How to Get a Freelance Job in 5 Days" series on Forbes with this post:

You think reading advice is the same thing as taking action on advice that has been given.

You think being inspired by watching a TED talk is the same thing as being inspired by creating something no one has ever seen before.

You think writing Facebook status updates for $100 an hour is impressive.

It isn’t.

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Trouble

Brandi Grissom's "Trouble in Mind" is a great piece of longform journalism.

That night, as he lay in bed, still high and muttering about angels, Andre stabbed himself in the chest with a knife, then fell asleep. The next morning, his mother, who had moved in with him, took him to the hospital, where Andre explained that he had cut himself trying to “cross over into heaven.” A nurse noted that Andre was psychotic. An emergency room physician, Dr. William Bowen, examined him while he rattled on about a new world order and the hidden meaning of symbols on the dollar bill. After determining that Andre’s self-inflicted stab wound was not serious, the doctor left the room to apply for an emergency detention order to keep him hospitalized. But by the time Bowen returned, Andre had slipped out of the hospital unnoticed. Bowen called the police and provided a description of him, explaining that he could be dangerous.

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Five days

   American Apparel, Chicago, Illinois
I'm doing a five-part series on my Forbes blog this week about how to get a freelance job in five days. Join me, won't you?

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Sausage

Doll, Las Vegas, Nevada

In a 2011 Forbes article entitled “Women Write Differently Than Men (Duh),” Susannah Breslin writes that she was simultaneously more compassionate and more ruthless when she wrote about the pornography business, because she could identify with women in a way that men could not. “The fantasy and the sex didn’t interest me,” she recalls. “I was looking for the ordinary in the extraordinary, the mundane in the hardcore, the human beings in the sausage factory.”-- The Walrus