ALICE ROOSEVELT WAS HARDCORE. “She was known as a rule-breaker in an era when women were under great pressure to conform. The American public noticed many of her exploits. She smoked cigarettes in public, swore at officials, rode in cars with men, stayed out late partying, kept a pet snake named Emily Spinach (Emily as in her spinster aunt and Spinach for its green color) in the White House, and was seen placing bets with a bookie.
So what I’m reading here is, she was a Roosevelt?
Well I have a new hero.
Her whole wikipedia article is gold
"When her father was governor of New York, he and his wife proposed that Alice attend a conservative school for girls in New York City. Pulling out all the stops, Alice wrote, ‘If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.’"
"Her father took office in 1901 following the assassination of President William McKinley, Jr. in Buffalo (an event that she greeted with "sheer rapture.")"
“During the cruise to Japan, Alice jumped into the ship’s pool fully clothed, and coaxed a congressman to join her in the water. (Years later Bobby Kennedy would chide her about the incident, saying it was outrageous for the time, to which the by-then-octogenarian Alice replied that it would only have been outrageous had she removed her clothes.”
"She was dressed in a blue wedding dress and dramatically cut the wedding cake with a sword (borrowed from a military aide attending the reception)"
"When it came time for the Roosevelt family to move out of the White House, Alice buried a Voodoo doll of the new First Lady, Nellie Taft, in the front yard."
"Later, the Taft White House banned her from her former residence—the first but not the last administration to do so. During Woodrow Wilson’s administration (from which she was banned in 1916 for a bawdy joke at Wilson’s expense)…"
"As an example of her attitudes on race, in 1965 her African-American chauffeur and one of her best friends, Turner, was driving Alice to an appointment. During the trip, he pulled out in front of a taxi, and the driver got out and demanded to know of him, "What do you think you’re doing, you black bastard?" Turner took the insult calmly, but Alice did not and told the taxi driver, "He’s taking me to my destination, you white son of a bitch!"
“To Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had jokingly remarked at a party “Here’s my blind date. I am going to call you Alice”, she sarcastically said “Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice. The trashman and the policeman on my block call me Alice, but you may not.”
There are many ways to brew instant coffee, but this is one of the most creative. Origami is Starbucks Japan’s take on the single-use pourover filter, a product that coffee brands have long sold at Japan’s ubiquitous convenience stores.
Starbucks calls it “personal drip,” and offers it in three roasts. We picked up this Christmas Blend kit (link in Japanese) while meeting with Starbucks in Tokyo late last year.
Origami is simple—and, dare we say, fun—to use: Open a sealed bag, one per serving. Unfold the “origami” filter that’s pre-filled with ground coffee. Place it on a mug. Slowly pour hot water over the grounds. Enjoy your coffee! And then toss the whole contraption in the trash—grounds, filter, and stand.
The coffee tastes about as you’d expect—pre-ground Starbucks beans, with a pleasantly smoky aroma. But it’s at least a more interesting technique than, say, dumping instant coffee into a mug of hot water.
“Invoking the artistry and hand-crafted nature of Japan’s ancient art of origami, this innovative product allows customers to brew a single cup of Starbucks coffee at home that does not require any special equipment,” Starbucks said when it launched the product in 2010 in partnership with Ajinomoto General Foods, a Tokyo-based instant coffee manufacturer.
Instant and ready-to-drink coffee products, by the way, have long been eyed as potential growth drivers for Starbucks, which still generates most of its sales from its stores. In the US, Starbucks sells three types: its own VIA packets and Verismo pods—and, more recently, K-Cups for Keurig machines. On Starbucks’s earnings call this week, the company announced that 100 million Starbucks K-Cups were shipped last December, up 20% from the prior year.
I love the hauntingly dreamy Erdem pre-fall 2015 collection by Erdem Moralioglu. His designs are always so glamorous, but somehow feel accessible. The way he plays with textiles and layers is always a thrill. It’s so clear that Moralioglu has so much respect for history, embroidery, other classic crafts and the work that goes into creating fabric and shapes that are truly special. Plus, he just seems to understand shapes that are flattering on a lot of body types. I think my favorite is that long, belted floral dress — it just glides. I’ve also been a fan of oxfords paired with pretty dresses forever. More Erdem HERE.
My dear friend and amazing hairdresser, Kassandra Sommerville, showed me these stunning photos with her hair and makeup work a while back and I’m so happy to be able to share them now. Kassandra and wonderful floral designer Judith Edwards collaborated on these dreamy portraits of some lovely local ladies and worked with photographer Lane Oliveri to capture the beauty. I love that you can tell that they took a lot of time sketching out the floral piece, hairstyle and makeup for each model. Kassandra thinks that every woman should have a beautiful portrait of herself that she loves and can pass down to family members or just keep to admire over the years. Love that idea! You can see lots more inspiring makeovers at @kassandrasommerville on Instagram.
On January 22nd 2015 The Economist Group's board of directors announced the appointment of Zanny Minton Beddoes as our 17th editor. She will take up her post on February 2nd. The gallery below shows the early covers of her 16 predecessors, starting with our first issue in 1843, under the auspices of James Wilson, and ending with the first of the 450 issues edited to date by John Micklethwait, our outgoing editor.
Like something you’d find on one of those soft/nature blogs?
Well you are in for a surprise
The Bolton Strid in England is one of the most innocent looking streams.
Though it looks like you could just hop across the rocks, but if you miss you will die for sure. It packs very rapid currents just a couple of feet below its surface. No one really knows how deep it really is. Nobody who has ever fallen into the Strid has survived. It has a 100% fatality rate.
It’s always the things I google expecting to be false that wind up being horribly true.
"It’s relatively common for people to assume they can jump the creek, walk across its stones or even wade through it (again, just looking at it, the Strid really seems to be only knee-deep in places, and certainly not the instant, precipitous drop into a watery grave that it is). Most of the time, they never even find the body. Which means there are just dozens of corpses down there, pinned to the walls of the underground chasms, waiting for you to join them…"
how dare you leave out the best quote
“It’s exactly how water works in a video game: It looks all stupid and harmless, but the second your foot touches the surface, you get some bullshit drowning animation and die instantly.”
I tried and tried to get someone to take me here while I was in England, but apparently “chases frogs into traffic” and “has been known to fall into ponds she wasn’t even close to” is a combination that makes my friends forbid me the Strid.
"parents who opt out of vaccinating their children tend to cluster"
hey, I'm going to Berkeley in a few weeks
"The Happiest Place On Earth" is ground zero for a recent measles outbreak centered in California. Now, u nvaccinated people are being warned to avoid visiting Disneyland parks.
Wrapping up his visit to the Philippines this week, Pope Francis stirred up controversy by taking an unequivocal stance on climate change and calling on the international community to step up during United Nations climate talks in November.
“I don’t know if it is all (man’s fault) but the majority is, for the most part, it is man who continuously slaps nature in the face,” he told reporters. “We have in a sense taken over nature.” Scripted remarks that the Pope did not read out go on to say, “As stewards of God’s creation, we are called to make the earth a beautiful garden for the human family. When we destroy our forests, ravage our soil and pollute our seas, we betray that noble calling.”
The pope’s comments are particularly fitting in the Philippines, an island country that has been hard-hit by typhoons and other extreme weather, and is expected to be severely impacted by rising sea levels. Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 left over 7,000 people missing or dead. Things could get worse. US scientists announced last week that 2014 was the hottest year on record, with temperatures about 0.68 Celsius or 1.24 Fahrenheit above average and unusually warm ocean surfaces that fuel storms.
Predictably, climate change deniers are denouncing the pope’s message. “The Vatican apparently now has been infiltrated by followers of a radical green movement,” read an editorial in Investors Business Daily. And conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said, “The Vicar of Christ believes man is not part of nature?…My religious beliefs are one of many things that inform me that we couldn’t have any impact on the climate, the planet, the globe, creation, no matter what, no matter how much we wanted to. It’s beyond our reach.”
Methods of type design have shifted over the years — from moveable type printing presses to copper plate engraving to modern design software — but fonts are still largely created by hand. And with globally successful fonts containing nearly 600 characters in various languages, a single typeface with several weights and styles can take a year or more to design.
A new algorithm places shadow gradients on typefaces
Now, design company Hoefler & Co., which names Nike, Starbucks, and Barack Obama among its clients, has figured out a way to expedite the process: algorithms. Company founder Jonathan Hoefler and Andy Clymer, senior designer at Hoefler, told Wired algorithms can start doing some of the work that previously fell to designers. This is true especially for ornamental fonts. Their vectors — graphic pathways that shift an image around stable points — must not only determine the curves of the letters, but also dimensions and lighting.
The first font to get this treatment is Obsidian, a decorative, three-dimensional font inspired by the ornamental look of old maps. To give the font a contemporary feel, Clymer and Hoefler began with a popular type called Surveyor, and built Obsidian using its preexisting structure. Then they designed an algorithm which would rapidly light the 3D typeface and create the shadows necessary to show dimension. Because Obsidian was created in a virtual environment capable of simulating light on any letter in the set, the designers were freed from the task of painstakingly drawing shadows on each character.
"A whole new way of thinking about letters as a generative process."
"[Obsidian] is sort of computationally driven, it really has that kind of texture and dimensionality," Hoefler says. "For us it’s a whole new way of thinking about letters as a generative process."
The algorithm does fall short on one important mark: multiple use. Hoefler says the next challenge is how to re-use the algorithm without creating the same font. Because Obsidian's dimensions are computer-generated, its gradients are made up of digitally pinpointed pixels, not hand-crafted shadows, leaving less room for unique variations.
And that's where humans still have an advantage. The glacial process of type design, in which designers must individually tweak and nudge vectors to their liking, prevents the creation of exact replications — something the algorithm can't yet do.
The Historical Thesaurus of English Project, started in 1965 by British historical linguist Michael Samuels, works to chart “the semantic development of the huge and varied vocabulary of English.” After 44 years of research and collaboration primarily at the University of Glasgow, a print edition of the thesaurus was published in 2009.
Language is always changing, of course, so the project is ongoing at the Historical Thesaurus of English website, launched just last week on the 50th anniversary of the start of the project. The digital version–containing almost 800,00 words–is the self-proclaimed “first historical thesaurus ever produced for any language, containing almost every word in English from Old English to the present day.”
This hierarchical structure differs from the organization of many other thesauri; Historical Thesaurus categories relate to others not just linearly, but can operate either horizontally (on the same hierarchical level) or vertically (on a higher or lower level, either containing or being contained by another category). In addition, each concept is able to contain a series of subcategories within itself, separate from the main sequence. You can see this on any category page on this site, which each have navigation options to travel “Up the hierarchy”, “Down the hierarchy”, a set of subcategories (if present), and links to move horizontally to other parts of speech which refer to the same concept. Choosing to go up the hierarchy and scrolling down to the bottom of a category page can let you see the neighbour categories of any given concept.
On a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, host Jimmy Kimmel mused about the greatness of Benedict Cumberbatch‘s name and whether or not the actor would enjoy the same respect and popularity had his name been different.
Not only is Benedict Cumberbatch a very gifted actor, his name might be the greatest name ever given to a human being. What if he wasn’t named Benedict Cumberbatch? Would he have the same amount of gravitas?
Cumberbatch graciously agreed to try on new and different names while introducing himself in an anonymous bar. Needless to say the actor carried them all off quite well, even if some of the names bordered the ridiculous.
My name is John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. Oh, that’s your name too? What are the chances? …Nice to see you again. We’ve met before, remember? My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. …Hi my name is Luigi McPenis.
A churchgoing Army veteran and father of four who lovingly penned his mother’s obituary two months ago apparently “snapped” yesterday when he spirited a gun into Brigham and Women’s Hospital and fatally shot the heart surgeon who had operated on her, according to the suspect’s sister.
The 44-year-old heart surgeon shot to death yesterday at Brigham and Women’s Hospital courageously yelled for patients and staff to flee moments before the gunfire erupted, his heartbroken father-in-law told the Herald today.
“He was a hero — he told everybody to get out,” Michael J. Davidson’s father-in-law said. With tears welling in his eyes, Davidson’s father-in-law said the Brigham and Women’s doctor thought of others even as the gunman was moments away from pulling the trigger.
Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster is at the forefront of exceptional craftsmanship and innovative eyewear concepts in Korea. Its use of animal bones, vintage leathers and dynamic colours and motifs convey a futuristic glamour and effortless cool – as does the design of its spaces in various showrooms. The second showroom stands out in the young and chic neighbourhood of university area Hongdae, where the 3-storey space dedicates its first floor to art project Quantum that rotates every 25 days with different themes. ENCOUNTER is the latest in a series of art invasions. In collaboration with Korean design trio NEN, the 14th edition of the project features a light installation that interacts with physical gestures, allowing viewers a fresh experience of light, space and boundary.
Prior to ENCOUNTER, the space has witnessed 13 collaborations with artists for themes such as OFF, a reproduction of a greenhouse using lightweight fabrics and wool; IN BETWEEN, an electronic reflection of emotions; VISIT, a glass craft workshop, and BEFORE SUNSET, an interactive LED and dancing performance. – Maria Mao Cui
As has been discussed time and time again (and again, and again, and again, and again, and again) on this site, there are some big things happening in Japan right now. Yes, we all know that Japanese designers take inspiration from America, but the fact of the matter is, we really can’t compete with the level of excitement (and honestly the amount of money) that is fueling Japan’s budding menswear community at this moment. Some brands, such as Haversack, Nanamica, Journal Standard, and N. Hoolywood have made an international impact, but many companies, especially those that are only a few collections in, remain virtually unknown here in America.
A large part of this has to do with the tendency of Japanese designers to pick really terrible brand names. No offense to Rulezpeepz or Foot the Coacher, but Japanese brands really do have an uncanny knack for unfortunate monikers. Despite their head scratching names these brands are still creating some incredible pieces, and in many ways are guiding what men are wearing, not just in Japan, but around the world. Therefore we decided to lean into the confusion and bring you the best young Japanese brands, with the worst names.
1. James Wilson, 1843–57
2. Richard Holt Hutton, 1857–61
3. Walter Bagehot, 1861–77
