nataliepo

I am Natalie Podrazik of 29th Street Publishing.

The cover art for the "Run for Cover" issue of V as in Victor speaks to me. It came out the week after cancelling the marathon, when Manhattan still sat in the dark.  It was when we were forced to remember that all New Yorkers are New Yorkers, and everybody needs help sometimes. Bill Vourvoulias, who was without power himself, wrote:

Personally, I didn’t remember any of it. By which I mean that I forgot that the marathon was being held on Sunday. (Forgive me, I was a little busy foraging for batteries and cadging candles from neighbors and looting stores for drinking water.) I did see people running in the street the day after the storm hit and thought to myself, “What kind of fanatic goes running on a day like today?” 

 

I haven't been blogging very much about what I'm doing at 29th Street Publishing. I'm sure you've read personal entrepreneurial stories before, and mine isn't very different. They'll say it's stressful to go out on a limb and pull non-believers out there with you. They'll say it's challenging to go into work every day to decide on the direction your day will take. If they don't say this, I will: it's terrifying to tell people what you do before you feel like it's done.

But, the truth about starting your own business is that not everybody can be an entrepreneur and it has nothing to do with their personality or their connections or even the difficulty of the job itself. It's because not everybody can take the very, very big risks. There's the huge professional risk can make or break the rest of your career, and also the personal risk that you take just by putting yourself in the spotlight. But most of all, it's the huge sacrifice that a lot of people - young and old, male and female, technical and not - can't afford to take because a stable paycheck is critical to them. In fact, if lots more people woke up one morning and decided to start businesses, I might call them reckless and selfish.

That's why I am incredibly humbled by the opportunity I've been able to take in the past two years. After dropping out of graduate school in 2007 and responding seeing a job posting on Craigslist, I moved to New York to work with a complete stranger: David Jacobs. I've been working non-stop in the intersection of technology and media ever since, and David and I started 29th Street Publishing last year.  And we've been honored to have Blake Eskin and Tim Moore join our team this year. All of those "never in my wildest dreams" phrases replay in my head regularly.

What's been fun for me is the breadth of problems we get to work on. Coming from Six Apart, in a known-yet-evolving software environment used by ordinary real people, the need to build something useful prevailed over something cool. Some developers look to scratch an itch, or solve a problem that had been bugging them. Truthfully, I was excited to return to a language that felt as powerful as C did to me in college. Managing procedures through multithreading has been much more exhilarating to me than chaining Javascript/JQuery responses in a web browser (though there isn't anything wrong with it, and I'm certainly not *above* any language). It's just that examining stack traces, setting up BREAKPOINTS (!) and instrumenting memory usages on REAL DEVICES brings me back to my favorite theme of CS: it is a science. One that requires professionals, critical thought, decision-making, and, most of all, mystery and problem solving. Beyond the literal bugs, it's the paths we choose with writers at heart and readers in mind. The feat of implementing a grand vision can make people go weak in the knee for developers, but I am just a normal person, like everyone else, making low-level code decisions with my empathy knob cranked up to 11.

What we're doing matters to me. I read voraciously -- novels, newspapers, blogs, magazines, subway advertisements for bedbugs or ESL courses -- and I want more things that I like to read as a part of my daily life. I have this thing that comes in a few colors that holds a lot of other junk for me like my wallet and my keys and my iPad, but it generally can't fit all that I want to read in a given day, like the news or opinions or what people are talking about. Our platform brings reading on digital devices to life because it offers something new from sources that you like all the time. And don't let us take credit for the experience that you love: that is the writing, the artwork, the editing (!) done by a very thoughtful, very hardworking Publisher for which the app is named. We just took care of the plumbing.

So, to you I say: try our apps. They're free to download and they include two or three (real, not "preview") issues in there so you get a sense of what the writing's like and what you'd be paying for. TAKE IT ON THE SUBWAY FOR CHRIST'S SAKES. Read it on a Sunday morning over coffee. Reminisce about Baseball Season in V as in Victor and look for his All-Time-All-Country teams. Read the Tippi Hedren article in The Weekend Companion and tell me her obsession with large cats after her traumatic Birds experience is irrational. Send me an email [email protected] or message me on Twitter because I am sincerely all ears.

 

New York vs Nature

Are New Yorkers entirely disconnected from nature as Via Media suggested?  My vote is a hearty Ain't No Way, Hon.

Couldn't we argue that New Yorkers are more in touch with nature than folks who never put a foot outside their home, office, cars, or garages? We live in a place where waste, or even roominess, is a luxury few can afford. We know what it takes for our human selves to make it under conditions the rest of the country would find suffocating. Besides, what's the difference in difficulty getting a taxi in the rain than a rural interstate's congestion during a rainfall? Natural disasters hit everyone and we're hardly ever prepared physically or emotionally.  

Besides, take a New Yorker outside and you'll get an instant tour guide in love with her surroundings. We observe the changing of leaves, their romantic translucence under streetlights. The drop in temperatures that affects not just our outerwear choices but the loud kick of our old homes' radiators awakening from its seasonal slumber. The crisp smell of an autumn night that invigorates after a long day in the office. People go weak in the knee at the beauty of Central Park and I am not exaggerating.

Sure, there are New Yorkers who don't care about the sunshine. Some that don't enjoy tall rubber boots in the rain, and some detest the taste and smell of the month of August in the city (me, on both accounts).

And what about the nature that New Yorkers genuinely care for -- human nature? The brave fire fighters, the countless volunteers, the generosity of supporting the arts -- these things happen in New York even when there isn't a natural disaster threatening our city's stability. And when the worst hits us, we aren't sipping our lattes, questioning our personal destinies: we're checking on our neighbors and family and friends; we're traveling great distances on foot to carry or retrieve supplies.

The worst thing about this storm is that I keep reading and rereading sites for better news and it still has not come. Our subway (our PULSE) is not running to full capacity, and 'heartbreaking' is too selfish a phrase to describe it. Sure, I want to go into work, I want to see what's happening in Manhattan with my own eyes, but, really, let people run their errands, visit their doctors, check on their family members, go back to their lives! Have you ever seen the morning in Manhattan, where all kinds of people are streaming out of the subway, carrying their bagged lunch or wearing their work clothes (uniform, casual, or ultra-fashionable), all driven by the same sense of purpose? Maybe some hate their job, and maybe some aren't challenged, but they all know that there is a job out there that they can do and do it well, and if their current gig isn't it, then the next one will get them closer -- it's some whiff of an American Dream that keeps us waking up earlier and working harder each and every day.

So in the man-vs-nature debate, it's ridiculous to call New Yorkers more disconnected with nature than the rest of the country. New Yorkers aren't a different kind of human: we're people like everyone else. And we have huge dreams, huge ambitions, and, yes, huge egos and huge mouths. Humans are fragile, but together, we're less so. Natural disasters are hard to plan for and even more challenging to recover from. Give us a break instead of heaping another helping of name-calling, eye-rolling, or an implied sense of an unfounded or directionless life.

I'm on my fifth day at home in Brooklyn, with power, internet, and provisions, and I'm very grateful. But, like everyone else, I'm more than ready for New York to get back on its feet and win the day. I <3 NY.