David Karp, 25, the founder and chief executive of Tumblr, lives his life out loud on his sleek blogging platform. He and his girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, who is a trained chef and a graduate student in psychology, recently moved to the West Village, where they spend their weekends exploring their new neighborhood and playing with their puppy, Clark, a French-English bulldog mix. Pictures from their meandering Sundays just might end up on Mr. Karp’s Tumblr.
Sunday Routine | David Karp
Kill the Alarm and Rev Up the Vespa
James Estrin/The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER
Published: September 16, 2011
Related
ASHLEY PARKER
NO ALARM On the weekends we don’t set the alarm. We just wake up or the dog gets us up. Neither of us is very inclined to sleep in particularly late. We’re both restless sleepers. Weekends are the same thing; we tend to wake each other up. And by 9 a.m., we’re both pretty restless, pretty ready to jump out of bed.
BIG BRUNCH We almost always go to Café Mogador in the East Village. It’s spectacular. We were running all over the place trying all these different brunch spots. Once I had Mogador a few times, that was pretty much it — it’s our standard brunch place. We try and get there before the crowds start up and we’re more likely to get a table outside. Large orange juice, iced Moroccan mint tea. Either eggs Florentine or eggs champignon. And a side of bacon. And we usually split an avocado salad.
SCOOTING AROUND We usually scoot over there, even though it’s right across town, because we like to have the Vespa out. We’re pretty O.K. to take the Vespa either way uptown or over to Brooklyn. We have a bunch of friends in Williamsburg, and my family’s on the Upper West Side.
WANDERING THE VILLAGE We have been making a real effort to check out our new neighborhood. Growing up on the Upper West Side, I was really freaked out by anything off the grid. It feels like a totally different country down there, but I really don’t know how to navigate it at all. So we’ve been spending a lot of time just poking around the streets.
SEE CLARK RUN We’ve been doing dog runs a lot on the weekends. We’ll take Clark out. The funny thing that happens is it will be the medium-sized dogs that pick on him a little bit or play too rough with him, and the big dogs will look out for him. It’s amazing to see.
OPEN-AIR READING I’m very into the iPad at home. One really cool thing about our new apartment is it’s got a little terrace. So we can now sit out there in the sun, and it’s pretty lovely. Reading for me will be a combination of books, magazines, Tumblr and just kind of the Web in general on the iPad. Rachel will usually be out there doing her work, and I’ll be out there just messing around on the iPad, basically. At some point, it will occur to one of us that we’re hungry, and we’ll just order food from Seamless Web in the afternoons.
COMEDY MARATHON We also generally watch most of our TV from the week, cued up on the weekends. So that’s “30 Rock,” “Daily Show,” Colbert, “The Office,” all that stuff.
TEAM DINNER Lately I’ve been trying really hard to have dinner with someone from the team, usually them and their spouse or special other. It’s so much fun to have one person who I love working with, who I don’t get to spend nearly as much time with during the day as I’d like to, to get to hang out for a few hours and drink with him or her and their significant other.
POWERING DOWN We have people over and we’ll be finishing up around 12:30 or 1 a.m., and then Rachel and I are going to crash. We kind of have a “no screens in the bedroom” rule. Not a real rule, but it’s just something we both try to do.
Get 50% Off The New York Times & Free All Digital Access.
