New York Times, She Pioneered Internet Fame, He Helped Draft a Constitution. Now They’re in Love.:
Who would have guessed that the former New York media obsession Julia Allison and the law scholar Noah Feldman would make a great couple?
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?
“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.
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.
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.
“Neither of us can remember what Noah said, but I know it was so profound,” Ms. Allison said.
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.
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.)
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. …
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. …
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. …
[T]here 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.
“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.” …
[I]n 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.
“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.”
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.” …
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.
(Hat Tip: David Lat)
