by Zoë Pollock
Emily Colette Wilkinson explains why you now have no excuse not to volunteer:
Sparked directs you to challenges suited to your skills and interests submitted by nonprofits around the country and the world who need help with brainstorming, copy editing, IT, translations, marketing, fund-raising, and more. Now you can volunteer without leaving your desk.
by Zoë Pollock
Eric Barker summarizes a recent study:
Among men, indoor tanning was positively associated with symptoms of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder … Among women, indoor tanning was positively associated with the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other substances.
Tim Cavanaugh adds his two cents to the anti-penny rant:
While everybody talks about the government “printing money” to fight the recession, in reality there has been less physical money produced since the start of the credit unwind. Weller notes that many fewer coins are minted during slow economic times, because people open their penny jars and put those coins back into circulation. “You can almost plot GDP and coin production along parallel lines,” he says. …
Will the penny survive? On one hand you have economists with their fancy book learnin’, and on the other you have generations of retailers who know pricing items with 99-cent suffixes still gets people to part with cold, hard cash. It may be stupid, but I don’t trust anybody who leaves a penny on the ground.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I can't help but agree.
Andrew Howley reports on a new paper that argues you can find in cave drawings and a carving of a bison/mammoth that not only do "the animals share a contour or a few lines, but that just two small details allow the entire image to be read as either of the two species, and seeing one causes the other to 'disappear.'":
The details in question are the eyes. [Duncan] Caldwell describes how there is "both an upper eye, which turns the crescent beneath it into a tusk, and lower eye, beside the front leg, that transforms the same crescent which we just interpreted as a "tusk", into a bison's overhead horn." Looking back and forth between the eyes then, we are able to see the entire shape transform from one animal to the other, an effect much more like the classic Gestalt shift of the duck-rabbit….
If Caldwell's analysis of the mammoth-bison phenomenon is correct, we begin to get a view not only of what prehistoric people saw, but also how they thought, and that has the potential to change our perspective and how we see other artifacts as well.
That perspective shift is also what makes these ambiguity illusions so appealing in the first place. Nigel Warburton said he chose the duck-rabbit as the logo for "Philosophy Bites" because it's also what he likes about philosophy itself. "Part of what philosophy does," he said "is, sometimes, make you see what you already knew in a completely different light." Perhaps someone enjoyed the same thought sitting in a cave, some 15,000 years ago.
by Conor Friedersdorf
There’s a piece up at The Awl the Good Men Project that raises the subject:
Street harassment has a negative effect on us all. No single man wants the actions of a few to be attributed to his entire gender, but studies show that male harassers impact victims’ perception and reaction to men in general. Still, most street harassers aren’t “bad men”—they don’t fully realize why their actions are hurtful or disrespectful to the female population. Sometimes they don’t even realize they are harassing women at all.
That’s why it won’t end until both men and women start engaging with harassers.
This is a topic that astounds me everytime I discuss it with female friends, because I am utterly blind to it on the streets. It confounds me. When I traveled in Italy and lived in Seville, I witnessed men cat calling on a daily basis. So it isn’t just that I’m personally oblivious. Yet in the United States I just never see it, whether on the streets of New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or Los Angeles. Women I trust completely in all those cities confirm that it happens all the time. It’s a very strange thing to wrap my mind around.
Richard Rushfield dismays at Sofia Coppola's oeuvre and her latest film, Somewhere, an agonizingly slow account of a bored actor's stay in the Chateau Marmont hotel in L.A.:
In three luxury hotel films, there is nary a shot of that oldest of tropes, the servant quarters, not even a wink at the Upstairs, Downstairs dichotomy of these worlds that so bore their protagonists. Instead, in Somewhere’s most cringe-inducing scene, the one moment in any of her films when a servant actually becomes a character, a Chateau Marmont waiter is permitted to sully the frame so that he may serenade Stephen Dorff and daughter Elle Fanning, in a moment highly suggestive of a plantation minstrel show for the massa and his family. …
Once upon a time, the sight of a man walking across the screen of an independent film in a $500 silk shirt was immediate shorthand for the presence of evil. One might as well have cued the Darth Vader theme music when such a figure appeared, walking on, in all likelihood, to lay off the film’s hero from his dead end job, provoking his journey of self-discovery. Now the man in the $500 shirt is likely to be the film’s hero, and if anything we are meant to feel sympathy for the emptiness all that glitters brings.
by Patrick Appel
Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.
by Zoë Pollock
Kit Eaton tracks a new experiment in Amsterdam where addicts seek Facebook friends in lieu of drugs:
The idea seems to be that by affirming positive images of helpful people in society, and gaining support from strangers–even via the digital medium of Facebook–drug addicts self-confidence will get a significant boos[t] and may help inspire them to quit the drugs. Monica's page sets out the terms and conditions: "Don't be afraid! If you decide to become my friend you will get an interesting peek into my daily life (with a maximum of two posts a day). I will NEVER ask you for money."
by Zoë Pollock
Kitty Kelley defends her unauthorized biography of Oprah, a market flop:
Championing the independent or unauthorized biography might sound like a high-minded defense for a low-level pursuit, but I do not relish living in a world where information is authorized, sanitized, and homogenized. I read banned books, I applaud whistleblowers, and I reject any suppression by church or state. To me, the unauthorized biography, which requires a combination of scholarly research and investigative reporting, is best directed at those figures, still alive and able to defend themselves, who exercise power over our lives. So I only pursue the kings (and queens) of the jungle.
by Zoë Pollock
Rob Horning explores the thinning line separating business and our personal lives as production and consumption merge. Money quote:
What makes this potentially worse is that such work (being online and contributing or organizing information, sharing), so much closer subjectively to consumption or self-actualization, will register as meaningful and will feel like progress. Perhaps this sort of work (sometimes called immaterial labor), combined with welfare payments, could be the foundation of a less exploitative social order in which what people do “for a living” actually seems to constitute the meaning of their life, and no one is left “unemployed” and rendered socially worthless. But under our current conditions, immaterial labor mainly makes life more precarious, and taints the things we ordinarily would enjoy doing with an urgent anxiety. We can’t just be ourselves; we have to make ourselves a personal brand that we desperately need our friends, i.e. networked nodes, to buy into.
The Dish 