Harvard Elites, Burning Man, and Gawker: The Worst NYT Engagement Announcement You'll Ever Read

The Joshua Tree > Burning Man > East Coast Elite pipeline.

I’ve been largely out of the game. After getting married myself and understanding the gravity of the day, I began to feel a bit bad about how I’ve treated marriage announcements of New York Times past.

But my fancy? It got tickled.

What you’re about to read is the story of how two souls found one another in one of the most insufferable ways possible. It takes a lot for me to dust off the keyboard and go in on The New York Times these days, but the universe called. My wedding gift to them will be me avoiding their wedding announcement when it eventually hits the web.

(Maybe.)

As always, original text is in block quotes and the original article can be found here.

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One afternoon in May 2020, Julia Allison sat in a hot spring near Joshua Tree National Park, crying. A media strategist and tech-world socialite — who in her former life as a New York City journalist and media personality pioneered the sort of internet-driven microfame that we now call “influencing” — Ms. Allison was going through yet another breakup. She wanted to know: What was the point of it all?

None of us know who you are so you’re absolutely not allowed to feign that you’re above “influencing” now as you sit in a hot spring at Joshua Tree. Sitting in hot springs at Joshua Tree is taught on syllabus day at influencing school. Also, not sure if you’ve seen the numbers some of these “microfame” influencers are putting up these days, but Charli D’Amelio made like $23 million last year. She’s probably sitting in a gold-plated hot tub in St. Barts.

“This was not the plan,” she remembered thinking. “Thirty-nine and single. What has my life come to?”

Then Ms. Allison had an unusual epiphany, even for Joshua Tree: She needed to consult the Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School, Noah Feldman.

Totally normal behavior. Whenever I’m having an existential crisis, I default back to what I always default back to: Calling up my Ivy League buddies to figure my shit out. Oh wait.

Like Ms. Allison, Mr. Feldman first rose to prominence in Lower Manhattan in the aughts, as a wunderkind constitutional law scholar at N.Y.U. (In 2003, at 33, he advised the Iraqis in writing their Constitution after the U.S. invasion.) Also like Ms. Allison, Mr. Feldman had been unlucky in love, a bachelor since his 2011 divorce.

It took us four paragraphs and we’ve seen the following clauses:

“…sat in a hot spring near Joshua Tree National Park, crying”

“…an unusual epiphany, even for Joshua Tree…”

“…he advised the Iraqis in writing their Constitution after the U.S. invasion…”

This is almost as bad as me telling everyone I meet that I’m “90% pescatarian these days” which impresses exactly no one. This is like showing someone your bank account on a first date. This is leaving your receipt in the ATM just so the person behind you knows you’ve got it like that.

The two had never talked, but a mutual friend had described Mr. Feldman to Ms. Allison as “the world’s most fascinating man.” Through the friend, she had Mr. Feldman’s number, which she dialed from the hot spring. He picked up, and Ms. Allison asked him the meaning of life. They spoke for 90 minutes.

A lot to unpack from just three sentences but here we go, sentence by sentence.

1. Literally no one’s boy describes them that glowingly to anyone. If someone asked my group chat about me, they’d rake me over the coals and tell everyone about the time I fell asleep on a bench in front of my hometown bar.

2. Isn’t the point of being in a hot spring to zen out? Why are you thirst calling Harvard grads from your iPhone 15 Pro Max when you should be looking inward?

3. That’s what you lead with? The meaning of life? And you got through all that in an hour-and-a-half? Okay, yeah, totally, for sure.

“Neither of us can remember what Noah said, but I know it was so profound,” Ms. Allison said.

Yeah, it fucking sounds like it really moved you.

Now, three and a half years later, after a courtship that has been, while not precisely a secret, at least conspicuously discreet, Ms. Allison and Mr. Feldman are engaged.

It wasn’t until this moment that I realized this wasn’t a marriage announcement at all — just an engagement announcement. Yes, you’re reading this correctly — they exposed themselves like this solely to announce that they *might* get married.

On the surface, it was an unlikely match. Ms. Allison, 42, is a 10-time Burning Man attendee who had lived in California for a decade; her friends include start-up chief executives and psychedelic psychotherapists; she considers Bali her spiritual home. Ms. Allison described a period of her dating history as “10 years of relationships with polyamorous D.J.s.” (Ms. Allison said she also dated the former Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr. when she was a college student at Georgetown.)

Speechless. For the first time in my entire history of doing these, this is possibly the one paragraph that has left me the most speechless. A decade of Burning Man? The who’s who of Silicon Valley? She got run through by The Chainsmokers in her 30s? I’m truly in awe at the size of this resume. I mean, if we’re being totally honest, she was probably a fun hang in like 2008.

Actually, she probably just drank off people’s bottles and pretended to know everyone on every “30 Under 30” list under the sun.

Mr. Feldman, meanwhile, embodies the East Coast establishment. The son of an M.I.T. professor and a Harvard lecturer who graduated first in his class from Harvard, Mr. Feldman, 53, speaks five languages, has written nine books and is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. (Mr. Feldman has also been a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.) His first wife, Jeannie Suk Gersen, with whom he has two teenage children, is also a professor at Harvard Law School and a public intellectual.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to too much Grateful Dead but if I ever get described as “embodying the East Coast establishment,” please soak my madras pants in gasoline and set me on fire at the next lobster bake we mutually attend.

“People I dated seriously, subsequently, were people of substance,” Mr. Feldman said in a recent interview in his office. “Distinguished in their professions.”

Ms. Allison, sitting arm in arm with Mr. Feldman, smiled.

“Serious people,” she said in a stage whisper.

If you’ve got ten Burning Mans behind you and you’re cold-calling people from Joshua Tree, you’re not really in a position to determine who is “serious” and “unserious.” And yes, I’m allowed to say this because I’m a seriously unserious person.

But Ms. Allison’s call came at a time, early in Covid restrictions, when Mr. Feldman — then nearing 50, teaching remotely and spending much of his time alone at home — was questioning the basics of human connection.

“I was not at an optimistic point in my romantic life,” he said. He remembered wondering, “Will anyone ever meet any human ever again?”

The pair said they spoke every day for three months after that first call, often for hours at a time. Mr. Feldman invited Ms. Allison to Maine, where he owns a home.

Finally, something that feels at least somewhat humanizing. Okay, okay, maybe we need to turn around on these two.

It took some convincing. Ms. Allison was ambivalent about a bicoastal romance, and about the East Coast in general. Though she felt their chemistry was obvious, she was committed to California. Ms. Allison had moved there after a half decade in the late 2000s in which she became a recurring character in the New York gossip pages and was profiled by The Times as a kind of neo-Candace Bushnell — a dating columnist whom people both loved and loved to hate. An attention economy savant, Ms. Allison was perhaps best known as a foil for Gawker, which obsessively, and sneeringly, covered her social life. In exchange, she gained a kind of toxic fame, both hyperlocal and completely global thanks to the internet, which was a harbinger of the culture to come.

It took some convincing? The person who asked a Harvard lawyer the meaning of life needed convincing to visit his lavish East Coast getaway? I’d be on a plane right now if this dude called me up — you know he’s a member at like four country clubs that I’m too poor to even hear of.

Additionally, it’s not 2011 anymore. No one has cared about Gawker since the Obama administration. Call me up when she’s spotted at Via Carota on Deux Moi.

“She was too early,” said Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post tech columnist and chronicler of social media influence. “She predicted it all.”

“Bah Gahd! That’s Taylor Lorenz’s music!”

No one had a Taylor Lorenz appearance in this column. Despite the fact that she and I have since made up after she alleged that I plagiarized something I had never even heard of, you just know people start to perk up when her name graces anything.

Scarred by the experience, Ms. Allison has been living mostly out of the spotlight ever since. Early in their phone calls, she asked Mr. Feldman not to Google her.

“It’s not a representation of who I even was then, let alone now,” Ms. Allison said.

Ms. Allison: “I’ve been living largely out of the spotlight.”

Also Ms. Allison: “Here’s my entire life story that I want you print in The New York fucking Times ahead of my wedding.”

But eventually, she got on a plane. At the Portland airport, from his car, Mr. Feldman caught sight of Ms. Allison for the first time.

Let’s *ahem* gooooooo.

“I saw Julia dancing, alone, in a sundress on this tiny little triangle of grass in the middle of the airport,” he said. “It was a beautiful, moving image of somebody who was sourcing joy entirely internally.”

I once boarded a 6 a.m. flight next to one of those hula-hoop people you see at music festivals. While I don’t judge those people, I do try to avoid them at all costs. As she tried to shove her far-too-large hula-hoops in the overhead compartment, I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of what was going on.

Now I’m realizing that I’ve actually been in the human presence of Ms. Allison. What a world.

They spent five days together, picking out produce at the farmers’ market, lying in the grass, and, as Ms. Allison put it, “kissing on Noah’s boat.”

“I was completely magnetized by this man,” she said.

Okay, is this all one big humble-brag about the fish she’s landed? Don’t get me wrong, he’s not innocent here, either. But this just feels like the one perpetually single friend at the group dinner gushing about how in love she is now despite everyone else knowing this may be too early to talk this largely about the relationship.

It’s the same reason you never tell anyone a job interview went well. Because if you do that, you’re not getting that job.

Still, there was an acculturation process — particularly for Mr. Feldman, who is not really the dance-like-no-one-is-watching type. To begin with, Ms. Allison was immersed in a scene, centered on Burning Man, about which Mr. Feldman knew nothing.

W-w-w-w-wait — so you’re telling me someone who went to Burning Man wouldn’t shut up about Burning Man? No waaaaaaaay.

“Many of Julia’s friends have jobs I didn’t know existed until I met Julia,” Mr. Feldman said. “One is a fire dancer. She also has a friend named Purple — he only wears purple, and his métier is bodywork.”

“Noah is learning how to have fun,” Ms. Allison said. “But he’s a fast learner.”

Mr. Feldman’s got the vibe of someone who answers, “Uhhh, I don’t know, like 25 bucks?” when you ask him how much he thinks a gallon of milk costs. Major shouts to Purple though, that’s a vibe that I can get down with.

Ms. Allison took Mr. Feldman on several pilgrimages — acid tests, really — to make sure he could loosen up. First the pair went to the Indonesian island of Bali, where Ms. Allison lived for a year from 2017 to 2018 doing what she referred to as a “yoga and meditation sabbatical,” and which she said she paid for with earnings from her investments in cryptocurrency. (Mr. Feldman was familiar with the island in part through the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who wrote about the social dynamics at play in Balinese cockfighting.) Mr. Feldman was tense at first, but cycling the village roads north of Ubud, he began to feel himself pleasantly removed from the rigidly intellectual culture of Cambridge, Mass.

“It may be as far away as you can go from Boston,” he said.

No, we aren’t calling taking bike rides in Bali “acid tests” under any circumstances. As previously stated, I’ve made The Grateful Dead my entire personality since the pandemic which means I’ve learned a thing or two about acid tests from the late ‘60s. If what they’re doing is an acid test, then the honeymoon my wife and I took in Italy was our version of seeing The Allman Brothers at The Fillmore East off our minds on LSD when in reality we were just drinking Campari spritzes poolside.

Next, in the fall of 2022, came the final exam: Burning Man, the weeklong event where tens of thousands of people gather to camp and revel in the Nevada desert, and worldly accomplishments aren’t supposed to matter.

I don’t want to know if she was part of the 2023 Burning Man debacle, but I’m going to assume they were at a state dinner this year instead. Mr. Feldman very much puts out a “okay, I’ll do one Burning Man just to get it over with” vibe. Like he probably got dragged to Phish on New Year’s Eve in 1998 in Worcester, MA and still describes it as “the craziest night of his life” even though he just bobbed his head and drank six Budweisers.

“To say Noah was having trepidation about Burning Man would be a major understatement,” Ms. Allison said. “He understood it was a requirement. If you’re going to be with me, you have to go to Burning Man. He was vibrating with anxiety.”

Was his trepidation about going to Burning Man or was it about hitching his wagon to someone who refuses to miss a Burning Man? Both valid.

There, it was Ms. Allison’s turn to behold Mr. Feldman. The law professor had agreed to M.C. some events for Ms. Allison’s camp, which she described as a “matriarchy.” One session featured a woman in a large headdress leading the audience in a mind-body therapy that involved rapidly tapping certain points on the body. As Ms. Allison entered the tent, she saw Mr. Feldman in front of the crowd, tapping himself and repeating the mantra, “I love and accept myself unconditionally.”

“It was the best moment of my life,” she said.

Do we need to break him out? Like are we sure he’s agreed to all this? He’s either getting roasted by the dudes in his secret society or he’s just not telling them he’s doing all this. Like he probably had to cancel some Hamptons reservations to fly to Nevada just to see exactly why she’s so obsessed with this.

Still, for all the changes Mr. Feldman has made, it was Ms. Allison who agreed to pull up stakes. She moved to Cambridge in November of 2021, and last month, she began a master’s program at the Harvard Kennedy School. She said she hoped to work on issues that matter to her: environmental justice, gender issues and animal rights.

My senior quote was from the movie SLC Punk because I thought I had edge in 2005. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. But the quote was, “You can do a hell of a lot more damage from the inside than the outside.”

Her gap year (read: gap two-decades) officially got put to a halt once the group text roasted Feldman enough. Sad.

Because of her course load, she missed Burning Man this year for the first time in a decade — possibly a sign of kismet in and of itself.

She definitely just looked at the weather forecast this year and didn’t want to ruin her Golden Goose sneakers.

And she has moved into Mr. Feldman’s 5,000-square-foot mansard-roofed home, which she has, with her fiancé’s intermittently enthusiastic participation, redecorated.

“It was a sad, beige house for a sad, beige bachelor,” she said.

Ms. Allison’s changes include whimsical pink wallpaper with a pattern of monkeys and leopards; thick velvet drapes; Balinese statuary; antique chandeliers throughout the house; and a formidably deep, blue velvet couch in the living room, intended to encourage a kind of sensuous lazing that is not typically associated with Cambridge.

If you can’t sleep in an eighteen-person tent at Burning Man, bring the eighteen-person tent to Massachusetts.

(In all seriousness, there are photos of the home in the original New York Times article and it’s pretty cool despite being influenced a little too heavy by Ralph Lauren and Glossier stores.)

Now, Ms. Allison calls the house “the Bohemian Embassy,” and she sends guests a mission statement ahead of time. “Our home is more than dwelling,” the message reads. “It is a confluence of diverse minds and spirits, a space of exploration and enlightenment.” Ms. Allison hopes to turn the house into a place where the free-spirited sensibility of Burning Man can mix with the cerebral culture of Cambridge.

Honest Question: If someone sends you this text ahead of a long weekend where you’re staying in their guest bedroom, are you encouraged or discouraged? Because most of the time I’m just looking for a couple clean towels, a bathroom, and a room that’s not overheating at 3 a.m. when I wake up to pee.

“Noah is a sharp edge that needs to be softened; he is a square that needs to be rounded,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said of his longtime friend. (The two have been close since they were Rhodes scholars together at the University of Oxford.)

“This woman is a gift to him, a guy who has been walking a narrow pathway toward extraordinary success all his life,” he continued. “And she was on the side of the road in this wondrous field, filled with wildflowers, and she got him off the path, to dance.”

If Cory Booker is calling you boring, well, then maybe this Bohemian Gawker Princess actually is a saving grace for him. It’s not a good look when Cory Booker is bad-mouthing you. I mean, this is a guy who once said, “You are dipping into the Kool-aid and you do not even know the flavor” to Joe Biden in a debate. Biting stuff.

Editor’s Note: Yes, I’m ready for this to end soon too. If we’re interviewing Taylor Lorenz and Cory Booker, we’ve lost the plot a bit.

On a recent, humid August evening, the couple hosted a Shabbat dinner to put those hopes into practice. (Mr. Feldman, who is working on a book about the nature of contemporary Judaism, grew up modern Orthodox. Ms. Allison said that she planned to “join Judaism.”) The guest list featured friends of Ms. Allison’s — among them a professional intimacy coach, an entrepreneur who built a high-tech chair for meditation and a professional relationship coach — as well as two friends of Mr. Feldman’s, a physicist and a sociologist.

“Hey babe, is it cool if I invite my intimacy coach to this dinner we’re hosting? I promise there’s absolutely nothing between us.”

Have I ever had an intimacy coach? No. Do I plan to get one? Again, not something I’m really considering right now. Am I throwing a flag if my spouse asks to bring him to a dinner where I’m probably going to propose? Uhhhhh, h’yeah.

After a dinner of plank-grilled salmon, prepared by Mr. Feldman, and several glasses of Pouilly-Fuissé, the group retired to the living room. Mr. Feldman, wearing a rakishly unbuttoned pink oxford shirt, reclined on the sofa, where the meditation chair entrepreneur draped her legs across his lap. (Ms. Allison’s Burning Man friends place a premium on physical touch and soft surfaces, a phenomenon they refer to as “bringing the squish.”)

W-w-w-w-wait, he’s not proposing and we’re this far into it? O-okay.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a 10/10 Panic Room with truly no notes. While I think the intimacy coach may be “bringing the squish” in other ways, I still think I could catch a vibe here.

Ms. Allison sat on her heels on the floor in front of them, her full-length pink floral dress gathered around her. Topics of conversation included the potential for MDMA to treat trauma, the 19th-century German sociologist Max Weber and the nature of love.

Nevermind. If I wanted to listen to some armchair experts discuss things they just read about last night, I’d subscribe to literally any podcast. Including my own.

Starielle Hope, the intimacy coach, said that at first she had been skeptical about the match.

“To me they were so different,” she said. “He is a man who is part of a hierarchical system, and she is a woman who is seeking an unconventional life in balmy climates.”

Wooooooooooooooow, you don’t say. The intimacy coach being a skeptic? No way.

But based on this alone, Starielle may be the one person with a normal head her shoulders here. That’s how far from God’s light we’ve strayed in this column.

Ms. Allison laughed. “These two worlds could do so much together,” she said.

Like go to Burning Man.

The physicist, reclining in an oxblood Eames lounge chair, offered that the hippies had saved physics, to murmurs of assent. As the evening progressed, he performed sleight of hand.

Any criticisms I’ve had of these two are only amplified by the fact that they have an oxblood Eames lounge chair and I don’t. This isn’t an “I hate these people” situation anymore — it’s an “I’m jealous to the point of anger” situation.

This summer, Mr. Feldman and Ms. Allison went on a four-country trip to Europe to scout wedding locations. But the couple hasn’t yet set a date. Ms. Allison said that she was simply too busy with school to properly focus on the wedding she envisions.

“I have to plan an event worthy of waiting until 42 to get married,” she said.

And if I know anything about planning a wedding in Europe when you’re already short on time, then I also know she won’t get married until she’s 43.

Cheers to the happy couple. Just don’t get arrested in European customs because you thought it was a good idea to bring micro-dose capsules of mushrooms with you.

Actually, that won’t matter, Cory Booker will just escalate the matter and we’ll get them back in no time.

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