The way the water plays with their hair in a very painterly manner, and their facial expressions as the water is poured on them creates striking portraits. The dogs are caught at a vulnerable moment, half a second before they shake the water off their fur. The series was done in collaboration with groomer and pet stylist Ruben Santana.
“Through my photos in general, and this series is no exception, I want others to see dogs for what they are: more than just animals. Our bond is so strong and unique that they really have a special place in the human lifestyle. There are more than animals, they are life companions. So when I photograph dogs, I look for the human in them: an expression, the life in their eyes, a smile. It’s almost as if humans and dogs are morphing into one-another in my work. It’s more than just anthropomorphism though. I don’t try to attribute human qualities to dogs. I try to capture the ones that I believe are already there.”
Tom Jacobs surveys a set of experiments suggesting that we buy more when we’re warm:
[R]esearchers manipulated the temperature in the room where the study was conducted, so it was either four degrees Celsius above or below the standard temperature of 22 degrees (72 degrees Fahrenheit). The 109 participants, all university students, filled out a form for three to four minutes to acclimate to the environment. They then looked at 11 images of “different target products that college students typically consume,” and asked how much they were willing to pay for each.
Those in the warm room were willing to pay more for nine of the 11 products. Although participants rated the room as equally comfortable on the warm and cool settings, “ambient warm temperature increased product valuation over a cool temperature by 10.4 percent,” [researcher Yonat] Zwebner and her colleagues report. Further experiments confirmed these results and indicated a likely mechanism behind this dynamic: “Physical warmth induces emotional warmth, which generates greater positive reactions.”
So don’t be surprised if shop owners keep things nice and cozy this holiday season: It’s good for business. And if you’re prone to impulse buying, be especially careful on warm days. That product that seemed overpriced a few days earlier may suddenly look like a bargain.
Catherine Traywick is unfazed by the Army’s recent foray into fashion licensing, arguing that the launch of Authentic Apparel “underscores both the public’s boundless appetite for military-inspired garb and the surprising extent to which military accoutrement has already been absorbed into popular culture”:
Wristwatches, for example, were a military tool during World War I, when the U.S. Army used them to synchronize precision attacks (they were easier to consult than the more ubiquitous pocket watches). Similarly, RayBan aviators were designed for U.S. Air Force pilots in the 1930s, as a way to prevent headaches and altitude sickness caused by sun glare. They became a household a name two decades later, when Hollywood’s leading men adopted them as an accessory. Trench coats were developed for the British Army in the 19th century, and took their name from the grimy trenches in which soldiers fought and died during World War I. Even the iconic Burberry trench has military roots: In 1901, Thomas Burberry submitted to the British War Office an officer’s raincoat design made with his own proprietary water-resistant fabric.
And khakis, now a staple of casual menswear, were a product of colonial India. In 1846, a British district officer in charge of a troop in Peshawar realized that the soldiers’ white cotton uniforms proved easy targets for snipers. So, his troops began dying their uniform with tea (or mud, depending on whom you ask), to better blend in with their surroundings. Ten years later, the Magistrate of Meerut, a city in Utter Pradesh, adapted this discovery and formed the Khaki Risala, or “Dusty Squadron.” Since then, khaki has trickled down to every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Reading through the American Family Association’s annual Naughty Or Nice list, Alyssa rings in the War on Christmas. She calls the yearly panic “an opportunity to revisit how quick conservative organizations are to sell out their own purported values when the opportunity arises for them to get some publicity by doing so”:
First, the measure of whether a company is pro-Christmas is hilariously divorced from any theoretical Christian values or expression of the Christmas spirit, and determined solely by marketing. “BLUE: An [American Family Association] AFA ’5-Star’ rated company that promotes and celebrates Christmas on an exceptional basis,” the list’s key explains. “GREEN: Company uses the term “Christmas” on a regular basis, we consider that company Christmas-friendly. YELLOW: Company refers to Christmas infrequently, or in a single advertising medium, but not in others. RED: Company may use “Christmas” sparingly in a single or unique product description, but as a company, does not recognize it.”
The only stated value, in other words, is how much retailers talk about Christmas. By this metric, a porn company, or one that kills Bengladeshi child laborers it’s stolen from their families as part of its production process, could issue a statement declaring its belief that Christmas is the most important holiday of the year, slap the term “Christmas” on all of its products, and earn at least a Green rating (though in the former case, the AFA would certainly step in to intervene). …
I’d respect the AFA if it actually went after companies who tried to further the secularization of a fundamentally religious holiday by using it as an occasion to encourage people to consume, and sometimes, to consume beyond their means. I’d respect the organization if it acknowledged that Christmas has become a holiday celebrated even by non-Christians, and used the rituals around it as an opportunity to encourage members to buy trees, gifts, and decorations that are sustainable, or locally made, or sourced in a way such that income goes to support desperately poor or historically disadvantaged people. Instead, the organization’s rating reveals just how divorced its own worship of Christmas is from any sort of articulated Christian values, or any responsible values whatsoever. It’s just another marketing scheme.
Sarah Wanenchak thinks meme-speak is revitalizing the language:
[O]ne of the things I love about it is that what stuffy English teachers would be horrified by has become a powerful, interesting, nuanced style of writing unto itself, homegrown on the internets. I recall – and I imagine you do as well – all the panic a while back (a lot of which remains) about how communication on the web and via text message was going to destroy language skills in those damn kids with the clothes and the hair, that it was going to ruin people’s ability to communicate coherently at all. But here we are, and “bad” English is doing a very important job in a way that really didn’t exist before.
A recent and pretty terrific article on The Atlantic’s site deals with the evolving grammatical conventions around the use of “because”, the “prepositional because”. Or in other words, “because” is changing because internet. That’s also “bad” English. And it’s awesome, because language.
I can clearly only speak about English here – something I regret – and I would love to know if other languages on the web are going through similar processes. Mostly I’m just pleased that this is getting attention, and I want to see it get more. Things like this help erode the intensely silly idea that cultural change that occurs via the web is somehow illegitimate, or stupid, or not worth paying attention to at all.
Barry Ritholtz advises against believing reports about retail sales numbers that we’re likely to see in the coming days. He calls the National Retail Federation’s Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey “at best, utterly worthless”:
The surveys bear no correlation relative to actual future retail sales. The conclusions reached (and repeated ad nauseum) are not supported by the data. There are several reasons for this: First, people have no idea what they spent last year. No clue whatsoever. A surveyor stops someone on the way into a mall or other retail locale, asks them a few questions, the answers to which range between wild guesses and complete fabrications.
If you doubt what I am telling you, write down in the next 30 seconds what you personally spent last holiday season on all of gift purchases. Note that I have given you about 25 seconds longer than most people spend coming up with an answer to the survey questions. Now take a look at your checking account, credit card and Amex statements for November and December. How close did you come? Yeah, I thought so.
Now you know the baseline number is off considerably. Lets look at the next step: Asking people to forecast their own future spending. There is a treasure trove of academic research on the subject, which is incontrovertible. It proves beyond any doubt that You Humans have no idea what you will do in the future. Forget forecasting gross domestic product or nonfarm payrolls next year, shoppers have no idea what they are going to spend next week, let alone the holiday season.
Retailers are competing more fiercely than ever for consumer dollars this holiday season, with deep discounts on popular items to get people in the door. Many of those “sales,” though, are utterly meaningless: When the sticker price is arbitrary, the actual price can be whatever a store wants.
Over the years, retailers have floated prices upwards before Thanksgiving to create the perception of steep markdowns — while avoiding a big hit to their profits. Consumers, by now unwilling to pay full price for anything, have played right into their hands. When J.C. Penney tried to introduce “honesty” in pricing, shoppers abandoned the store in droves.
In Emergent Behavior … Jackson coaxes scores of disposable objects like keg cups, cheeseballs, glow sticks and Post-it notes into persuasively organic formations. The vast variety of ways that swarms manifest in the world — in the animal kingdom, robotics, biology — affords Jackson a lot of conceptual material to work with. “It gives me an ability to find inspiration in a focused way,” he says. “I can look at photographs of schools of fish, or flocks of birds, or data swarms, or microorganisms or whatever and really get ideas from that.”
The concept coalesced for Jackson after working with the first two photos of the series — the first portraying shards of broken wooden palettes conspiring to jump over a city sidewalk, the second a matrix of leaves hovering among the trees in an upstate New York forest. “I spent a lot of time staring at them and I realized, these are swarms,” he says. “I arrived at my theme a little bit into the project, sort of like the novelist who doesn’t know where his story is going to go — he just starts writing.”
The increasingly popular “Daniel Fast” provides yet another approach to weight loss:
In the Bible, the Jewish noble Daniel and his companions are captured by the Babylonians and inducted into the service of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. The Babylonians offer Daniel and his men rich food (“the King’s meat” and wine), but Daniel was wary of God’s prohibition of “unclean foods.” … Daniel said he and his friends would eat a diet of only vegetables (“pulse”). After 10 days, they grew healthier and stronger than the Babylonians, and his diet became a small demonstration of his opposition to the King’s power.
This passage is occasionally used to encourage Christians to resist the corrupting influences of the outside world. But several years ago, some Protestant churches began to take the “diet” aspect of Daniel’s story literally.
Motivated by both faith and fitness, today many protestant Christians around the country are, like Daniel, occasionally limiting themselves to fruits and vegetables for 21-day increments. Several such believers told The Atlantic that while their intention for the initial fast was simply to enter a period of Lent-like self-denial in deference to their Lord, they have since found that the fast broke a life-long pattern of unhealthy eating and seems to have set them on a course toward better nutrition even after the 21 days ended. Now, a longer-term version of the Daniel fast is being promoted by the California-based Saddleback Church, the seventh-largest church in the US. …
In 2010, Rick Warren, the best-selling author and leader of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, began to notice that his own and his congregation’s waistlines were expanding. On Jan. 15, 2011, Warren began to push what he calls “the Daniel Plan,” a year-round program that encompasses exercise groups, small-group gatherings, and a diet composed of 70 percent fruits and vegetables and 30 percent lean protein and whole grains—less strict than most Daniel fasts but still far more virtuous than the typical American diet. By last year, an estimated 15,000 people were taking part in Warren’s Daniel Plan, both in person and online. In December, Warren will publish a book based on his version of the regime, The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life, which he co-wrote with psychiatrist Daniel Amen and physician Mark Hyman.
In October 1863, in the midst of civil war, Lincoln reflected on the year’s blessings in his Thanksgiving proclamation:
John Eicher reflects on today’s meaning within the national narrative:
One of the most powerful features of the Thanksgiving story is its emphasis on unity—between different cultures, and between humans and God. Significantly, the Thanksgiving story was advanced when it was far from certain that a (re)union of North and South was possible. When Lincoln invited the nation to collectively “set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” he not only wanted to bind the nation together, but to bind the nation with the transcendent and eternal God of Christianity— a powerful seal indeed.
Unity remains elusive in America. The Atlantic/Aspen Institute’s 2013 American Values Survey reports that 61 percent of Americans believe the nation has become “somewhat more” or “much more” divided over the past 10 years, and a surprising 20 percent of the population is doubtful that the United States can remain united as one country. We’re divided by fault lines of race, religion, politics and class. Yet national traditions live on.
Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Christians of all denominations, and even the separatist Amish celebrate these traditions in their own ways. For both religious and non-religious Americans, the spiritual unity embodied by the Thanksgiving story has been supplemented with new commercial and cultural practices—parades and football—that would likely surprise Lincoln. Thanksgiving has proven itself to be quite malleable and inclusive of most Americans, despite—or perhaps because of—its debatable origins. Myths live and die, mutate and adapt, according to the interests of the societies that carry them. On an individual level, we cannot escape our collective myths because they are so personal. They are the glue that allows us to cultivate solidarity with others and make sense of our individual experiences. Though many Americans question whether we can remain one indivisible nation in a political sense, the civic practices of celebrating our unity, and the ways we incorporate the national myth into our own identities, remain strong.
So this Thanksgiving weekend, as you drive on an interstate highway to visit relatives, spend a common currency at the mall, measure the weight of your turkey by United States customary units, or gather at the bar to watch the Cowboys or the Steelers, remember that unity in America is alive and well in the most routine, yet effluvial, ways.
Petula Dvorak talks to Dennis Zotigh, a cultural specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian:
“It makes me really mad — the Thanksgiving myth and what happens on Friday,” said Zotigh, who is a Kiowa, Santee Dakota and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo Indian. He thinks the holiday, filled with stereotypes about Native Americans, damages Indians and non-Indians. “There are so many things wrong with the happy celebration that takes place in elementary schools and its association to American Indian culture; compromised integrity, stereotyping, and cultural misappropriation are three examples,” Zotigh wrote….
The National Day of Mourning is what the United American Indians of New England has called it since 1970, when they first led a march and protest to the area known as Plymouth Rock. Zotigh said he’s heard from Native American parents who sign their kids out of school on the day of their Thanksgiving reenactments. Their children have been punished in class for bringing up the American Indian’s side of the story and demanding that “the national moral atrocity of genocide” be acknowledged. Some simply call the day of national gorging “The Last Supper.”
Not everyone Dvorak spoke to felt the same way:
“Thanksgiving is like every day for us. Giving thanks is a big part of the native cultures. So the basic message of the holiday, that’s still part of who we are,” said Ben Norman, 32, a member of the Pamunkey tribe in Virginia. His tribe’s chief, Kevin Brown, said he travels to reservations all across America, and he hears about folks who won’t celebrate Thanksgiving. “But most people I know, we love eating and we love being together with family. And that’s what this day is about,” said Brown, 58. “I’m too busy eating and watching football to spend my life worrying about the past,” he said.
The Dish 