“What is an It Girl? According to the dictionary installed on a MacBook Pro, she is ‘a young woman who achieves celebrity because of her socialite lifestyle’. … But the original It Girl, as the dictionary acknowledges, was one of the most successful and revolutionary film stars of the silent era, Clara Bow. When she earned the title, it meant something completely different.”
Tag: 12.22.14
Everyone’s Trying To Figure Out How Our Brains Work (It’s Really Really Difficult)
One “danger that the big brain projects will have to navigate is the temptation to consider the brain in isolation. This has been a prevalent tendency ever since the brain became established as the “seat of the mind:” as the popular view has it, all that we are and all that we experience takes place within this wobbly mass of grey tissue. But of course, it doesn’t.”
Why Uber – The Idea, Not The Actual Car Service – Crossed A Cultural Barrier In 2014
‘”Like an Uber for’ is shorthand for describing an item or service delivered wherever you are and whenever you want it, but the phrase also hints at a much larger shift in people’s expectations about their interactions with the world. It turns out one of the most hackneyed phrases in tech this year may also be one of the most profound.”
Gender And Writing, Blah Blah Blah – But Yes, It’s Still Important
“Everyone is shaped by their experience of gender, whatever that experience is; there is no view from nowhere. Men’s experience is no less specific than women’s; it’s just that we fail to see it as such.”
About To Go To Sleep? Put Your E-Reader In A Different Room
“The use of such devices ‘has unintended biological consequences that may adversely impact performance, health and safety,’ according to a research team led by neuroscientist Anne-Marie Chang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.”
Documents Shed New Light On Louis Armstrong’s Childhood
“There have been countless Armstrong biographies based on exhaustive research. More than 40 years after his death, you might think there would be nothing left to learn about the man. And yet there is.”
The (Useful) Role Of Cliches In Our Lives
“Consider, for example, the common phrases that are typically exchanged in friendly greetings. How are you? How’s it going? How are you keeping? What’s up? In most cases we do not regard these questions, or the typical answers to them, as clichés; instead they are formulas, a stock of frozen expressions whose purpose probably has less to do with encoding information than with the maintenance of smooth relations. They are unoriginal, surely, perhaps overused, but certainly not ineffective.”
“Almost Gleefully Flaunting Its Utter Ignorance Of The Field”: Anne Midgette On Amazon’s “Mozart In The Jungle”
“The factual errors are so great that it would be as though someone set out to dramatize the reality show Deadliest Catch by showing a group of fishermen sitting on a dock in Alaska trying to catch crabs with fishing rods.”
The 20 Most Powerless People In The Art World In 2014
“While other art publications sing the praises of the rich and powerful, we like to look at those who are largely overlooked (or worse, exploited) in order to understand the real state of the art world and its discontents. So, here you have our annual assessment of those below the most powerful.”
How To Write: A Year In Advice From People Who Really Know
Favorite suggestions from David Mitchell, Jane Smiley, Claire Messud, William Gibson, Billy Collins, and other contributors to The Atlantic‘s “By Heart” series.