December 2008
32 posts
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Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs? →
On the heels of my idle musings about creative types and suburbia comes a much more eloquent article in the WSJ by Lee Siegel*. Wrapped up this review of Revolutionary Road — funny, the article is actually in the Real Estate section — are insights like this:
One of the most glaring ironies of American life is that, a quarter-century later, the cities have metamorphosed into the...
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squidet:
The Ting Tings - Shut Up and Let it...
The Worst Gift I Ever Received →
On the (dismal?) art of gift-giving. Strategies:
Reflexive Regifted
Gifts Replacing Gifts We’ve Accidentally Broken
Gifts We Keep on Giving
Gifts in Bulk
Bonus Track: You Me and the Bourgeoisie - The Submarines
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O Suburbia!
If modern television (Mad Men) and Hollywood (Revolutionary Road) are to be believed, suburbs were troubled places even at the height of their idealization in the 1950s. The women were just more elaborately coiffed and divorces a tid more scandalous. Like the 50s, suburbia today is still all about repression and broken dreams. At least according to creative types in the media.
Tom Perotta is...
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Dear Santa
All I want for Christmas is a shiny gold box of charisma. A magic dust to sprinkle on myself to erase my awkwardness and smooth the edges of my sarcasm. Beauty, intelligence, or wealth can only take you so far, limited by the jealousy they incite. Virtues make you a bore.
Parents, give the natural gift of charisma today!
A Gladwellian conclusion based entirely on...
A pattern has emerged out of my recent reading: many of our great artists have pursued brief, unsatisfactory careers as lawyers. Paul Cézanne, Henry James, and Goethe to name a few. I wonder if law was like the investment banking of the 19th century - soul-sucking but lucrative enough to also suck up all the young talent. Except for the few that escaped. So does the collapse of Wall Street...
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Sarah is an Irreverant Gossip
If Proust was a Neuroscientist sounds like a heady book to read on vacation, I assure it is not. Yes, it’s chock full of things I love (marrying science and humanities, neuroscience), but the real reason I’m sneaking out this book while in line for Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular is because it’s so damn gossipy.
The premise of the book is simple yet ambitious: examine how a...
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“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do...”
– JFK, September 12, 1962, Rice University
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“Buy me a lifesaver!”
– So demanded my brother after the Star Wars ride. Lifesaver — the candy or the floatation device? Neither, as the careful readers among you may already be getting at, he wanted a lightsaber. He didn’t get one and sulked all the way home.
What should I do? Chalk it up to Christmas and...
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The Stuff Dreams are Made Of
Plastic, I’ve determined. Disney’s Hollywood Studios is essentially fake Hollywood — a fact made ironic by the further fact that Hollywood is just a fake, plastic version of the world. Its creators are certainly in on this joke, and the attractions at Hollywood Studios are rife with meta-gags such as tour guides gone “missing,” tour cars “breaking down,”...
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Non-content-ental Breakfast
I used to love the free breakfast at hotels. They seemed like such luxuries: all you can eat, Belgian waffles irons for your use, and so many varieties of bread and muffins — like feasts compared to the sparse choices at home.
Since I’ve started to eat breakfast at college though, the continental breakfasts seem like drab affairs in comparison. Only four kinds of cereal? Two kinds of...
What do you think of Malcom Gladwell?
KC: Malcom Gladwell ruined my first two years of college.
Me: ??
KC: I read Blink and it made me want to be a psych major.
I read the first two chapters of Blink and it made me want to run far, far away from pop psychology. What silliness I thought — plus, from my experiences in meeting new people in college, my first impressions were so often wrong. But things have come full circle,...
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Tupper's Self-Referential Formula →
Amazingness.
Is there a difference people who use colons in...
I use equal signs, probably out of pure laziness. No shift, one fewer key to press. =)
I feel gooey inside. Like the underbaked middle of a 10 inch monster cookie or that portabello-lentil patty I had for dinner. The flavors of the patty were actually tasty, but it had the consistency of paste, which made it neither chewable nor mashable. *Chomp* Figuring things out has been like chewing glue — a lot of stickiness, a lot of friction, and not a lot of results to show for the...
The State of the Cookie →
Slate, how did you know this is exactly what I wanted to read? Not the state of the economy or the union or anything a well-informed person should care about — but cookies. I said before that all I wanted to do was bake cookies and eat cookie dough, and it’s still true. Will definitely be baking tonight. Hopefully this shall mitigate the dreariness of rain, old knee injuries, and...
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Playlists for Harper's Findings →
The back page of Harper’s Magazine is a summary of the latest “Findings” in the science world. It’s written in a style reminiscent of breezy dreamscapes. This is a typical sentence:
Scientists bred a race of lazy mice, gave sedentary mice a drug that provided them with the benefits of exercise, created sleepless fruit flies, stopped mouse livers from aging, gave knee...
You are the apple of my indigestion
magicmolly:
There’s only one reason I’d wish to be an undergrad in mathematics at Harvard circa 1965, and that’s so I could angle for a class with Tom Lehrer. This fits squarely into the category of “Dad Humor”—perhaps even defines it—but one of my favorite records as a teen was Tom Lehrer’s Songs by Tom Lehrer, featuring such staples as “The Old Dope Peddler” and “The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz”.
...
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Girl Talk
I forgot how much fun it can be to just girl out. Crowded in front of the mirror — the air thick with hairspray. The girls with straight hair sit with their hair tangled in curling irons and the girls with curly hair sit with their hair set in straightening irons. (Is there any better evidence of the truth that we always want what we can’t have?) After the primping is done, picture...
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All You Need (Uni) is Love (Luv)*
Uniluv - n. The warm afterglow of overnights at the UniLu Harvard Square Homeless Shelter. A giddiness that persists despite lack of sleep, hard-core cleaning, and cold weather. Fueled by ABP pastries, grilled cheeses, conversations in the dark, and the general awesomeness of the people and places that make up UniLu.
Listened to The Beatles during morning clean-up: All Uni is Luv!
*Title...
“Relationships are like stem cells. You have to direct them towards being what...”
– (via)
ETA: Oh dear, this post seems to be attracting a lot of people googling the above quote. Perhaps I should clarify that this post is a joke — a joke that probably only I get but an exercise in irony nonetheless. Since I seem to be in the habit of adding songs to my posts recently, bonus...
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Personal Light Cone →
(via)
The constant speed of light (299,792,458 m/s) is a fact so thoroughly drilled into our heads by science textbooks, it becomes banal. We rarely consider the consequences. But having struggled through special relativity, I have been confounded, tickled, and bemused by the consequences of light’s constant speed. Math aside, it’s also a beautiful, humbling concept. For all...
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Black Cab Sessions →
One song, one take, one cab. Featuring awesomeness such as
Emmy the Great
St. Vincent
Noah and the Whale
Jens Lekman
The Raveonettes
Death Cab for Cutie (of course!)
I am tragically unhip, not just ironically unhip, for not finding out about this earlier. (via The Tragically Unhip)
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The Past Returns in Pairs
Plympton St. 11 AM
The girl had a Demidec alpaca puppet* pinned to her backpack. She was holding hands with my former salsa instructor, who despite all nerdy appearances, is a fierce salsa dancer. Ah, reminders of that summer before college! When all seemed new and exciting— my first paid job, daily commutes into the city, salsa dancing after dark. College [almost] and the promise of...