Former Duke Students Flirt with Fame

In typical Duke fashion, Dana Vachon took the i-banking route. After graduating Trinity in 2002, he went to New York to work for JPMorgan Chase. A blog was soon born out of boredom, leading to freelance writing assignments for such publications as the New York Times and Men's Vogue. On June 1, Vachon officially left Wall Street, having just signed a two-book deal with Riverhead Books. If that's not enough, according to Gawker-the bastion of NYC gossip-the deal also included a $650,000 advance. Recently, Vachon spoke to recess about blogging, Duke and his new deal. recess: Why did you go into i-banking? Dana Vachon: It's a question that I asked myself the moment I showed up. I had been working on Wall Street since I was 16 and my dad worked on Wall Street. Wall Street is the quickest way for a man to set himself up financially, which is a really important thing to do. As a young man, it was the best option that I had available to me. What were your impressions? Some of my best friends were there. It's very fun to satirize it, and it's easy to satirize it, but there are very interesting people that work there. Why did you start writing again? I really missed words. I missed Microsoft Word; I hated being in Excel. New York wants to put you in a bubble-finance person or lawyer. The blog was just a great way [of escaping this]. Whether you're writing about Lindsey Lohan or God, you're a winner because what you're doing is diverse. How did you begin the blog? The first article I did was for The American Conservative. They were one of the first to break ranks and say that going into Iraq was a bad idea. I told Elizabeth Spiers about it. She also went to Duke, and she had just had just launched Gawker and was at New York Magazine... She made me set it up, and she linked to it from New York Magazine. I just looked at [the blog] and 1,000 people had read what I wrote. Does it bother you to be lumped in the category of bloggers-turned-authors? None of the people who bid on the book knew about the blog. I'm writing a book about Wall Street and there are very few people on Wall Street who are inclined- or, frankly, given the quantitative nature of the business, capable of doing that. What is your novel about? It's a novel of manners set in the world of New York's jaded and gilded youth at the beginning of the end of the American empire. That's the quote. The characters are the real beneficiaries of the prosperity, and they don't expect that it's going to be ending. Is it based on your own life? Only to the extent that anything you create is informed by your own experiences. On to Duke: Did you enjoy your time here? I loved Duke, but I was there purely to satisfy my intellectual curiously, not to post numbers. High school was so grueling, so to go to Duke, I felt like I was with a promised land. I took a class on Nordic Saga... I really indulged my curiosity. What was your social experience like? I always thought Duke resembles all these different spheres that never overlap. I tried never to get stuck in only one sphere. DUI was a great place to go when the bacchanalian aspects of social life got too much, but I enjoyed those bacchanalian aspects of the fraternity. What lessons have you learned since graduating? The greatest luxury of journalism is that you get to be excited about what you do. For me the lesson was that there was never certainty, even if you went to JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs. Even if you're a dentist. There's nothing more certain than tooth decay. But, you're still going to have to go somewhere and set up shop. Last question: Are you working on anything new that we should know about? I'm working on a piece now about young museum boards for the Times. Actually, this is cool in light of your own Nasher Museum. At some point, the Met decided they didn't care if people came into the museum with notebooks, just having them in the museum with the art was enough. [The director said], "Let boys bring boys, let girls bring girls. I don't care if they're drunk. Just get them into the museum."