A.N

I’m a big fan of this lovely mug, which cleverly uses the “C” of the handle to let you be terrible in person:

 …and it really inspired me so I designed this:

Victor says no one will buy this but I disagree. Then he asked if I was going to buy one and I was like, “OH GOD NO.”

And then Victor was like “The whole point of the first mug is so you can walk around with profanity on your glass but not have it be noticed” and I was like, “Yeah.  Obviously.”  And he was all, “I’m pretty sure everyone will know what ‘unnilingus’ means”, but I just typed it in and spellcheck was like “THAT’S NOT A WORD.  NO GUESSES FOUND” so I’m pretty sure that proves it’s more subtle than Victor thinks.

Then Victor argued that, “You can’t just expect spellcheck to suggest ‘cunnilingus'” and I was like, “God, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that.“

Because then I’d have one nickel.

I also thought about making a mug that said “amel-toe” but that seemed weird and so instead I just wrote “WORD” on a mug.  That way you can carry it around  and people will think you’re just really into Vanilla Ice, but really it says another thing completely.

It’s subtle. And then not subtle at all.

If you don’t see it then you aren’t looking hard enough.

PS. Use the promo code: VETERANDAY14 at checkout to get 15% off all my profane mugs until Friday.

PPS. Some fabulous(ly disturbing) requests and suggestions have come in.  See the comments for even more terrible things.

In February of this year, Ann Leckie’s book Ancillary Justice won a Golden Tentacle Award from The Kitschies—an award that celebrates “the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” Leckie was elated. The Kitschie trophy is a hand-sewn stuffed tentacle of sorts, and it sits proudly on Leckie’s mantle. “I was like, ‘Oh that’s really wonderful, how could anything be more validating,’” she says. “I love my golden stuff tentacle with the sparkly pom poms.”

Then the rest of the awards rolled in. First there was the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Then the Nebula Award. Then the Arthur C. Clarke. Scattered amongst them is a BSFA Award and a Locus Award. It was hard for Leckie to believe. “It was kind of like hallucinating,” she says. “It’s still kind of like hallucinating. I’m sitting here on my couch and I can turn my head and see them on the mantle and it’s really hard to see that they’re there.”

It appears as though women in science fiction are having a moment, and perhaps even more. This year, women were nominated for, and won, close to half of the major science-fiction awards out there. And much of that work touched upon gender in some way. In Ancillary Justice, the main character is a space ship (this sounds strange, but it’s worth reading the book to see what I mean) and the genders of the characters are continuously ambiguous. LIGHTSPEED magazine Kickstarted a series called “Women Destroy Science Fiction” that showcases work entirely written and edited by women. It asked for $5,000 and got $53,136 in return.

But to say that all of this represents progress for women in the traditionally male-dominated world of sci-fi oversimplifies the history of the genre a bit.

As with anything else, women have long been working alongside men to create fiction that covers on science, the future, technology and more. Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein is often cited as one of the first classics of the sci-fi genre, and even before that Margaret Cavendish wrote The Blazing World—a satirical utopian vision—in 1666. “We’ve been doing this for ever,” says writer Kameron Hurley. This idea, that women have always been beside men everywhere from the battlefield to the writers’ room, is one that Hurley thinks about a lot. This year, her essay “‘We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative” on the long history of female fighters and why history writes them out of the picture, won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work. (She also won another Hugo this year for Best Fan Writer.)

Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Heinline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”

Today, both Hurley and Leckie say that female voices in science fiction are far louder than they used to be, largely thanks to blogs and social media. Now, when men wonder aloud (as they often do on their blogs) where all the women in science fiction are, those women can take to the comment section and point out that they’ve been there all along. They can use Twitter and Facebook not just to promote their work, but to connect with one an other. “We mirror a lot of what the overall culture is doing now,” Hurley says, “which is saying that we have always been here you’re just not listening. And we’re able to do that now because there are more channels. There’s incredible profusion of all of these other avenues for us to get our voices out there, and to collaborate right. To say okay let’s go flood that comment system, and have dialogue around that.”

Leckie agrees, saying that there is a community of women writers who have been bolstered by their ability to find and support one another. “The Internet really lets people connect that wouldn’t have in the past, and lets conversations happen and connections happen. That’s really something that happens, I’m not sure it’s a club with membership cards but I think there’s some kind of community.”

But both Leckie and Hurley express a combination of optimism and cynicism when it comes to whether or not women in the science fiction world are actually making progress, and how quickly. Leckie points out that this isn’t the first time women have been in the spotlight for writing award winning science fiction. “Sometimes I feel very optimistic about it, I say look at this, there are more women getting awards,” she says. “And then I look back and the ‘70s. The ‘70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.”

This was the time of Ursula K. Le Guin and Vonda McIntyre, who both won joint Nebulas and Hugos. Anne McCaffrey, Kate Wilhelm, Joan Vinge, and Marion Zimmer Bradley were all nominated for Hugo Awards that decade. In 1973, the Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. wrote the famous, feminist short story called “The Women Men Don’t See.” Joanna Russ’s feminist science fiction book The Female Man was published in 1975 and nominated that year for a Nebula.

Then, Leckie says, the ‘80s and ‘90s happened. The rate of women nominated and winning awards dipped down again. And today, once again, society has this idea that women who write science fiction are a strange and interesting breed. In other words, today the community is having the same conversation it had in the ‘70s about women writing science fiction.

And the challenges to being a female writer today are, while not entirely the same, quite similar to those of the earlier female writers. The Hugo Awards, for example, are decided by a vote—those who are members of the World Science Fiction Society decide on who is nominated and who, ultimately, takes home the prize. Which means that winning involves some amount of self-promotion—something women are discouraged from doing far more than men. Hurley points to the different reactions people have to Seanan McGuire (who sometimes writes under the pseudonym Mira Grant) and John Scalzi as one example. Both have been on the Hugo ballots regularly for the past 10 years. Both self promote on social media, reminding readers that if they liked their books or stories, they could vote for them. But McGuire gets flack for her promotion, while Scalzi does not.

Whether or not science fiction is going to repeat its own history, ducking back into the male-dominated years, remains to be seen. But Leckie and Hurley are generally, if cautiously, optimistic. “When I won I felt it was more of a win for the community,” says Hurley. “I think the community certainly had things to say and they were saying them by voting for me.” And Hurley also points out that winning isn’t everything. “It came with this sense of Peter Parker: With great power comes great responsibility. You realize wow people are listening to me, so I better be really clear about using my powers for good.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/women-rise-in-science-fiction-again/382298/

The most contentious issue Maine voters are facing in Tuesday's midterm election isn’t the Affordable Care Act or the Common Core but rather a referendum on bear hunting that seeks to eliminate the use of bait, traps, and dogs.

Attracting millions of dollars in outside money, the issue has been making national headlines and inciting passion from both sides of the debate, so much so that several employees of Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, which opposes the referendum, are under protection due to credible death threats.

What is it about bear hunting that provokes such strong emotions? The history of bear hunting is unusually complex, because the “bear” referred to in bear hunting is actually many species of bears, occupying a range of cultural categories from “predator” to “pet.” From the twelfth century onward, for example, courtiers and kings in Europe refused to hunt brown bears, but it wasn’t because they were too cute to kill: It was because they were ignoble beasts. This is why Molière’s play from 1664, La princesse d’Elide, included a scene where peasants ran after thieving bears while the princess hunted “noble game” (in this case, red deer).

Over time, the negative perception of bears shifted. Several bear species became endangered. Today, the polar bear, the panda, the koala, and the grizzly have become prominent symbols of habitat loss and accelerated rates of extinction. But to Americans, the most iconic bear of all isn’t a species but a stuffed toy, the teddy bear.

Famously, the teddy bear was the unexpected artifact of an actual bear hunt undertaken by president Theodore Roosevelt in the American South. Histories of the beloved toy typically foster a narrative that goes something like this: Chased by dogs, an injured black bear had been tied to a tree. When the president refused to shoot the sad creature, a charmed nation embraced “Teddy’s bear” to acknowledge his compassion for helpless animals.

Yet it wasn’t compassion so much as a hunter’s code that informed Roosevelt’s seemingly noble actions. In 1887, before he became president, Roosevelt founded the Boone & Crockett Club to champion big-game hunting, which he resumed with gusto after he finished his second term in office. Perplexingly, the Boone & Crockett Club is also the country’s oldest wildlife conservation organization, fighting to keep the wilderness wild because it supports hunting.

Still, on the face of it, the idea of naming a toy bear after a big game hunter would seem perverse, were it not for the fact that in 1902, this presidential hunt was taking place under fraught political conditions, elevating an otherwise mundane activity to the level of national discourse.

Roosevelt was touring Mississippi to resolve a border dispute. He decided to take a needed vacation, and accepted a longstanding invitation to hunt with Andrew Longino, the Democrat Governor of Mississippi. It was November and bear hunting season—and also the scene of a vicious fight for the governorship.

Up for reelection, Longino faced Mississippi senator James Vardaman, an ardent white supremacist who would go on to defeat Longino the following year. To Vardaman, African Americans were “lazy, lying, lustful animal[s], which no amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” His solution was lynching.

Against a background of inflammatory rhetoric, the presidential bear hunt embarked with a former slave named Holt Collier leading the way. For Collier to guide the sitting president through the backwoods of Mississippi carried immense symbolic weight. Among other things, it affirmed a particularly American version of the hunt, which challenged the European, aristocratic version by infusing it with a form of meritocratic individualism. Whatever else they may have thought of Collier, historian Douglas Brinkley noted, plantation owners “bragged” that that this former slave, who had served as a Confederate scout during the Civil War, knew the local terrain better than any other man and was an exceptional bear hunter.

The terrain was wide-ranging and dangerous, requiring fifty dogs to scent the quarry and give chase. After days of hard hunting, the pack cornered an adult black bear of 235 pounds. Collier successfully tied it to a tree, then blew the hunter’s bugle to summon the president to his location. When Roosevelt refused to raise his rifle to deliver the fatal shot, the other men in the hunting party killed it, threw it on the back of a horse. They brought it to their base camp, where they undoubtedly ate it for supper, as bear meat was a culinary delicacy.

On November 17, 1902, cartoonist Clifford Berryman created the now-famous image showing Roosevelt refusing to shoot a miniaturized black bear with a rope around its neck, captioned, “Drawing the Line.” The president’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, stressed in a telephone conversation with me that the caption was understood to be a double entendre. As he explained, the president’s refusal to shoot the bear not only reinforced the ethics of the hunt (which distinguishes itself from slaughter or extermination by requiring that the quarry has a chance to escape or fight), but drew a personal line against lynching, which at the time was a national problem and an especially acute one in the South.

In Berryman’s subsequent sketches, the black bear became smaller, rounder, and cuter, turning into an anthropomorphic baby bear named “Bruin.” The cartoon bear was so adorable that, as Roosevelt IV related to me, Brooklyn toymaker Rose Michtom had the idea to turn him into a stuffed toy and rechristen him “Teddy” after the president. (Roosevelt IV adds that the president didn’t think an association with him would help these toys sell, but was nonetheless flattered by the idea.)

The bear became an immense hit, in no small part because it had emerged out of the progressive, idealistic values of a nation struggling unsuccessfully to pass anti-lynching laws and contend with the legacy of slavery. Without the historical moment shaping the toy’s reception, turning it into a panacea for political guilt, naming a stuffed black bear after a Great White Hunter would have seemed ridiculous.

In 1907, Roosevelt’s vice president, Charles Fairbanks, sought the Republican nomination for presidency. Roosevelt did not support Fairbanks’ bid, prompting the satirical magazine Puck to mock his campaign by drawing him as a “Charliebear … to combat the alarming popularity of the Teddybear [sic].”

Neither Fairbanks nor the “Charliebear” won the public’s heart. Instead, William H. Taft snagged the nomination. When Taft won the presidency the following year, his boosters tried to replace the teddy bear with a stuffed opossum called “Billy Possum”.

Despite a flood of marketing pushing the new toy, Billy Possum was a dud. But the fact that Taft thought he could replace a baby bear with a beady-eyed marsupial helps place their shifting cultural status into historical perspective. Possums have remained varmints, an image that bears have largely shed. Much of that revised status can be attributed to the enduring popularity of a plushy whose success could hardly have been predicted.

A succession of his golden cousins—Teddy Ruxpin, Care Bear, Paddington Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Fozzie Bear, and many more—have since tied the bear to an image of childhood innocence and thence back to “nature” again. Ironically, that protective net was first cast by Roosevelt over a century ago, starting with the founding of Boone & Crockett. When his presidency created the U.S. Forest Service and America’s national parks, he launched the wilderness conservation movement that gave rise to the politics of sentiment now buoying today’s anti-hunting groups.

With each successive generation, the reality of the hunt has retreated, replaced with pop culture caricatures ranging from perverted rednecks (Deliverance) or gritty goddesses (Katniss of The Hunger Games). In real life, however, hunting is a study in patience. Kelly Meggison, a native of Cornish, Maine, hunts bear over bait, and passed up opportunities such as an adult sow (a female bear) because he suspected she had cubs. “Three cubs showed up,” he told me. Legally, he could have shot the mother but didn’t, because of the hunter’s code. In five years of bear hunting, he has filled one tag. The meat went into his freezer.

The story is a common one. Because the Maine woods are dark and deep, hunting over bait isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel, and hardly anyone uses traps or dogs because of the time involved. The low numbers of tags being filled is partially what is driving the exploding black bear population in Maine, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere, leading to increasingly common collisions between man and bear.

These bears are on their way to becoming nuisance animals due to their sheer quantities, which is why Maine state wildlife biologists do not support the referendum. The alternatives to legal hunting are much worse for the bears, in part because a bear that kills a human is never allowed to live even when the human is at fault.

If the politics of this issue are confusing, blame the teddy bear.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/maine-teddy-bear-midterm-election-roosevelt/382302/

Fun identity work by Moscow-based Denis Bashev for Russian bookstore Respublica University.

“The idea was to use a tiger as the key symbol, but in the style of a university emblem.”

“There are many departments in the store; each of them is presented by the emotions of the tiger.”

“Additional icons are directly associated with specific departments.”

Denis created accompanying patterns using the bookstore’s corporate colour.

“Each department has its own small emblem. The one with scissors for the office, one covered by drawings for the children’s section, etc.”

“Each department-related tiger can be shown holding a relevant icon — the skull for classic literature, the plunger for gadgets, and so on.”

The department emblems can be further enhanced with the addition of a heraldic shield incorporating the brand patterns.

A larger emblem was created that included icons from all departments, in order “to reflect the general values of the store.”

The project was topped off with a simplified logo for use at small sizes.

Denis Bashev is currently working as creative director at Sila Sveta. View a few more of his identity projects on Behance.

Tip of the hat to Christian Lindig.

‘Touchable Memories’ by pirate3D, turns photographs into 3D-printed objects for people without vision. This hits home, as I have a close family member that has been slowly losing his eye sight over the past year.

Ello - The logo doubles as a loading spinner.

/via Chris Dary

The Internet, like most world-changing inventions, came to life in a series of fits and starts. The thing that allows you to read these words, on this screen, right at this moment, is the result of multiple innovations and experiments on the part of multiple collaborations of multiple nerds. But one of the first collaborations—the one that is generally regarded as the collaboration that created the Internet as we know it—took place 45 years ago, on October 29, 1969.

On that day, the computer programming student Charley Kline hunched over an SDS Sigma 7 Host computer in Room 3420 of UCLA's Boelter Hall. His goal: to send a message to a computer 400 miles north of Los Angeles, at the Stanford Research Institute. Early computers being what they were, there would be no room for epic messages in the "what hath God wrought" vein; the message Kline wanted to send was simply a straightforward command to the Stanford computer: login.

At 9:00 in the evening, Kline began typing the communication that would allow, for the first time, computers to talk to each other. He got as far as the L and the O ... and then, as he was trying to enter the G, the system crashed. Which meant that a kind of accidental epicness had been achieved by way of a finicky computer: The first word typed on the Internet was "lo."

Kline waited for the system to reboot—a process that took, back then, an hour—and then, at 10:30, he began again. With L. And then with the O and the G and the I and the N. This second transmission attempt was successful. Kline had, from UCLA, logged in to the host computer at Stanford. The ARPANET—the infrastructural foundation of the Internet—was born. With, if not a bang or a whimper, a crash and a reboot. And with, appropriately, an LOL.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-first-characters-sent-through-the-internet-were-l-o-l/382074/

On Saturday, Iran hanged a woman convicted of murdering a former intelligence officer she claimed had attempted to rape her—a defense the court and the man's family ultimately rejected.

IRNA, Iran's official news agency, says 27-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari was hanged at dawn Saturday for the 2007 murder. The court ruling dismissed Jabbari's claim of attempted rape, saying all evidence proved she had planned to kill Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a former intelligence agent, after having purchased a knife two days earlier. However, the United Nations called on Iran for a retrial, saying the incident never received a full investigation and that she was denied a fair trial.

A robust campaign led by human-rights groups and prominent Iranians, which was amplified through social media, appeared to be gaining traction and it seemed for a short time that the sentence would be commuted. However, the execution was carried out after Sarbandi's family refused to pardon Jabbari or accept blood money—a possible provision under Sharia law.  

"The shocking news that Reyhaneh Jabbari has been executed is deeply disappointing in the extreme," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa Program, in a statement. "This is another bloody stain on Iran’s human rights record."

"Once again Iran has insisted on applying the death penalty despite serious concerns over the fairness of the trial," said Sahraoui.

In the U.S., the State Department took to Twitter to condemn the execution.

We condemn execution of Reyhaneh Jabbari, Iranian woman convicted of killing man she said she stabbed in self-defense during sexual assault.

— Department of State (@StateDept) October 25, 2014

According to the U.N., Iran has executed at least 250 people this year. Last year, China was the only country that executed more people than Iran.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/social-media-couldnt-save-reyhaneh-jabbari/381931/

Tiambrya Jenkins was just 14 years old when she got into a fistfight that would change the course of her educational trajectory. Following an after-school scuffle between Jenkins and a white classmate, the two girls—both freshmen at Rome High School in Georgia—were transferred to an alternative school as punishment. Her white classmate was allowed to return to their original school after 90 days. But Jenkins spent the rest of the year at the transitional academy, a place she describes as more like prison than school. "It was really, really boring. You just sat there all day until the bell rang," she says. "They didn't teach us anything."

At the academy, minor missteps such as talking out of turn or violating the dress code were used as reasons to delay a student's return to high school, Jenkins says. Simple organizational mistakes like showing up late or forgetting class materials were seen as acts of defiance and could turn the clock back to zero on a student's 90 days at the transitional academy. After forgetting her notebook one day and suffering the consequences, Jenkins began stashing spares in an abandoned house across the street from the school, "just in case."

Two years later, Jenkins is back at her old high school, but she still feels hopelessly behind. Once a top math student, she'll be lucky to achieve a passing mark in advanced algebra this year. "I don't even know what we're learning," Jenkins says. "The teacher, she'll be teaching something, and I don't even know what it is. I just see a bunch of numbers on the board."

Share of Disciplined Female Students, by Race

Jenkins is not alone in her experience. A recent report finds African-American girls were suspended at six times the rate of white girls, and more than any other group of girls (and several groups of boys). This is despite evidence that African-American students do not misbehave more frequently than their peers. The study, released in September by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Women's Law Center, outlines the barriers to African-American girls staying in school and shows how poor educational outcomes can limit their opportunities, from lower graduation rates to setbacks in expected lifetime earnings.

Education levels have an extraordinary impact on future wages, with academic attainment standing in as a rough proxy for future wealth. A female African-American college graduate typically sees an increase of about $657,000 over the course of her lifetime as compared to a female African-American high school graduate, according to the report. Should she fail to graduate from high school, her financial outlook worsens considerably. In 2013, 43 percent of African American women without a high school diploma were living in poverty, compared to 29 percent with a high school diploma and just 9 percent with a bachelor's degree, U.S. Census data show. Helping African-American girls successfully complete high school, then, could stave off a lifetime of poverty for them and their families.

"There's this widespread misperception that girls—all girls—are successful in schools. Full stop," says Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at the National Women's Law Center. "Much of this is fueled by not having data broken down by race and gender. Girls of color end up being invisible too often in these conversations." A close look at the data reveals that in 2010, one-third (34 percent) of African-American girls didn't graduate from high school on time. Only 18 percent of white female students and 22 percent of all female students could say the same. And African-American girls are more than twice as likely as whites to be held back a grade.

The reasons for such setbacks have less to do with student behavior, the report's authors argue, than with disproportionate and overly punitive disciplinary practices that remove African-Americans from classes for minor and subjective infractions (examples include violations of dress code or even wearing natural hairstyles). "Traditional" middle-class notions of femininity, which value passivity in girls, can clash with stereotypical images of African-American females as loud, assertive, and provocative, and generate differing punishments for similar conduct, the authors note. Subjective offenses like "disobedience" or "disruptive behavior" may signify little more than a student's failure to conform to dominant gender norms or fit a teacher's view of what constitutes appropriate "feminine" behavior.

Rosalind Wiseman, a best-selling author and educator, certainly sees the discipline gap in those terms. "Adults of every background need to challenge the ways in which we exercise our authority over students—all students—but especially minority students who have a legacy of domination," she says. To illustrate the point, Wiseman recalled a time she saw a white male vice principal reprimanding a young black teenager for acting out in the classroom. When the boy questioned him, the administrator construed the inquiry as disrespectful and and the informal talking-to quickly morphed into a formal detention, enraging the young man. "What you're really saying in cases like this," Wiseman says, "is, 'Get back in your place, which is below me.' "

In her work training educators in social and racial awareness, Wiseman—best known as the author of the book that inspired the movie Mean Girls—encourages teachers to start at the ground floor. Teachers of all races need to understand and be aware of their own racial assumptions and biases, she explains, then have the maturity to face it and be able to manage their behavior as a result. It also helps to view punishments such as detention and suspension as a last resort.

Some principals, like Pete Cahall at Wilson Senior High School in Washington, D.C, are already doing that. Three years ago, Wilson had 332 suspensions; two years ago the number dropped to 224; and last year, there were just 209 suspensions. "I'm not pleased with 209 suspensions," Cahall says, noting that while African-Americans make up half the student body, they account for 80 percent of those suspended. "I'd like to cut that by another 20 percent this year because I don't think suspension really solves the problem." Usually, he adds, kids act out because they're frustrated or embarrassed that they can't do the work. "If you take them out of school for 10 days, they're just further behind."

What's worse, Cahall found quite often it was adults who were causing, or at least escalating, the problems. "A kid would do something minor," Cahall says, "and teacher would get in their face and and yell." In recent years, he's started doing teacher trainings in how to better manage student behavior. He also handpicks his staff and instructs teachers to think about every kid in context. "You don't know what's going on in the life of a child," Cahall says. "You don't know if their parents are beating them at home or what, so you've got to be compassionate and drill down to get to the root of the problem."

For Jenkins, however, such compassionate resolutions look increasingly out of reach.

"My whole life has been affected by a fight that I was in when I was 14," she says. "It's not something that you can take back and not something that was premeditated, and I still have to deal with the consequences every day."

This article was originally published at http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-america/economic-empowerment/the-economic-impact-of-school-discipline-20141023

Aaron surprised me with a bottle of glow-in-the-dark nail polish! Perfect for Halloween! When I saw that it goes on clear I was skeptical that it would work, but it does! I put on two coats and sure enough the tips of my fingers lit up in the dark.

If your Sundays find you ogling the travel section of the newspaper like ours do, we’ve got some great inspiration to kick off your weekend. Twin sisters Elizabeth and Kathryn Fortunato have often used their far-and-wide travels as inspiration for their beautiful line of accessories, Lizzie Fortunato. This week, they are launching their first line of lifestyle and home goods called Fortune Finds, a collection of objects curated from their travels and favorite makers. With pieces from places as far ranging as Mexico and Japan, this lovely assortment is sure to satiate the travel bug in you. Check out more photos from the line after the jump! Have a lovely weekend! —Max

• We love this short piece by New York Magazine about 25 talented (and famous) women discussing what their college experience was like.
• Academia must be in the air, because It’s Nice That has compiled an entire Back-To-School collection of writing on Art School, from memorable projects to reasons why art school might (or might not) be for you.
• A fascinating (and beautiful) history of apples in the US, including some gorgeous heirloom varieties.
• Black & white bathrooms: forever chic and perfect for Halloween decorating.
• If there’s one thing we could stand to see a comeback of, it’s old-fashioned roller rinks. Curbed has a fantastic history of these wonderful places.
• If you’ve ever looked at a rubber band and thought “This is useful, but I wish this was more exciting,” this cube-shaped rubber band is the one for you.
• Um… Can we move into this hotel? Forever?
• Here’s one electric kettle design that you’ll actually want to keep on your countertop!
• Happy 20th anniversary to one of our favorite magazines, Martha Stewart Weddings! The all-things-Martha blog Martha Moments shares some of its best moments.

Some of this week’s highlights:

• Must Reads: 10 Things I’ve Learned about Life from Blogging, A Day in the Life of Fashion Designer Lela Rose, Velvet Ribbons of Saint Etienne, 10 Second Tour of Wishbone Letterpress, 9 Questions (Video) with Matt and Renato of Baked bakery.
• After the Jump (Radio): An interview with Quarterly, the curated gift subscription service.
• Recipes: Individual Baked Alaska Meringues
• City Guides: A Guide to the Greek Islands
• Biz Ladies: How to work with Online Influencers to Increase Holiday Sales
• Before & After: Herringbone Wall Makeover
• DIY Projects: Malachite Pumpkins, Copper Snake Pumpkins, Matisse-inspired Cocktail and Napkin, DIY Leather Folders, How to Carve a Pumpkin with Linocut Tools,
• Sneak Peeks: Touring Musicians Build a Beautiful Home in Kingston, A 19th Century Farmhouse with Southern Charm, A bright and airy home in Alberta.
• Weekend DIYs: Modify This~DIY Coat Hanger Chandelier, Ribbon Bordered Boxes, Customize Your Toothbrush
• New D*S Collection: Splurge-Worthy!

(more…)

Laboratory assistants have to do all sorts of terrible, embarrassing things, but surely this is among the silliest: Enter a bar in Grenoble, France. Identify people who look moderately drunk. Walk up to them, tap them on the shoulder, and say something along the lines of, "Uh, hey, this is awkward, but, would you be interested in answering some questions about philosophy?"

Such was the fate of some poor, unnamed graduate student who did "most of the recruitment" for a recent study about the relationship between alcohol consumption and ethical decision-making. In two separate experiments, researchers presented bar-goers with a questionnaire about philosophy and their state of mind; a total of 102 men and women took part. ("One participant was excluded from the study because he did not follow the instructions properly," the researchers note—a remarkably low number, considering that all their subjects were drunk.) After the participants filled out the survey, they took a Blood Alcohol Content test so that researchers could measure how intoxicated they were.

The researchers asked participants to give their opinion on two of philosophers' favorite quandaries: the so-called trolley problem and its cousin, the footbridge problem. In the first, people must choose whether they would flip a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person but sparing five others; the second asks about pushing someone off a bridge for the same purpose. "A drawing accompanied the text of each vignette in order to facilitate understanding of the story," perhaps in case the subjects were too drunk to read.

"The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making," said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers.* His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person—the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one.

This "really undermines the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation," said Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, charmingly titled, "The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas."

There's a fabulous irony in the idea that drunk people are emotionally steeled rationalists who are willing to do whatever it takes to save lives. But Duke and his research partner, Laurent Bègue, aren't necessarily arguing that drunk people are ace philosophers and logicians; it's more that their findings challenge common assumptions about how people make decisions.

"There's this argument that utilitarian ethics are correct; they're associated with people who are less emotional. Our finding was that this may not necessarily be the case," Duke said.

One explanation he offered is that drunk people might be less sensitive to what happens to the guy who's on the wrong side of the hypothetical tracks or bridge—"it seems like a reasonable explanation that the effects of alcohol would decrease emotional sensitivity toward someone else's pain." In general, he said, the study reinforces the complexity of figuring out why people make the choices they do. "Ethical decision-making is influenced by things like substances—it shifts the ethical frame by which we view the world."

Duke also recognized that the implications of the study are limited, especially because the sample size is so small. Plus, the questions themselves have flaws.

"To be honest, with the trolley problem in general, there is going to be a range of seriousness with which people view it, because it's kind of a ridiculous premise," said Duke. "I don't know that inebriated people would take it any less seriously. But alcohol can make it almost more simplistic—they may be less likely to question some of the assumptions upon which the task is based."

In other words, drunk people are more willing to "just go with it" when a random graduate student asks them to participate in a thought experiment about killing people. Utilitarian or no, the inebriated may be the philosophy researcher's dream.

* This post originally stated that the researcher's name is Aaron Blake. We regret the error.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-cold-logic-of-drunk-people/381908/

Love the idea behind Thing Industries’ indoor stoop. It’s a shelf, a staircase to something higher up and a drawer unit.

Famed fashion photographer Bruce Weber has turned his lens on the dogs he’s loved and been inspired by throughout his life with a series of beautifully designed and photographed travel journals and postcards for Shinola.

Check out Shinola’s complete pet collection right here.

The Economic Policy Institute has just released a report by Richard Rothstein that gives some sense of how the world of Michael Brown came to be. It turns out that that world was born from the exact same forces that forged cities and suburbs across the country—racist housing policy at the local, state, and national levels. Rothstein's report eschews talk of mindless white flight, and black-hearted individual racists, and puts the onus exactly where it belongs:

That governmental actions, not mere private prejudice, was responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once conventional informed opinion. In 1974, a three-judge panel of the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.”

Similar observations accurately describe every other large metropolitan area; in St. Louis, the Department of Justice stipulated to this truth but took no action in response. In 1980, a federal court order included an instruction for the state, county, and city governments to devise plans to integrate schools by integrating housing. Public officials ignored this aspect of the order, devising only a voluntary busing plan to integrate schools, but no programs to combat housing segregation.

A lot of what's here—redlining, housing covenants, blockbusting, etc.—will be well-known to those with a good handle on 20th-century American history. I focused on this particular era in my case for reparations. But it bears constant repeating: The geography of America would be unrecognizable today without the racist social engineering of the mid-20th century. The policy included—but was not limited to—mortgage loans backed by the Federal Housing Authority and the Veteran's Administration:

At its peak in 1943 when civilian construction was limited, the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide. During the postwar period, it dropped to one-third. But even when subdivisions were not built with advance FHA commitments, individual homebuyers needed access to FHA or VA insured mortgages, so similar standards for new construction pertained. Subdivisions throughout St. Louis County were developed in this way, with FHA advance commitments for the builders and a resulting whites-only sale policy.

The FHA’s suburban whites-only policy continued through the postwar housing boom that lasted through the mid-1960s. In 1947, the FHA sanitized its manual, removing literal race references but still demanding “compatibility among neighborhood occupants” for mortgage guarantees. “Neighborhoods constituted of families that are congenial,” the FHA manual explained, “… generally exhibit strong appeal and stability.” This very slightly sanitized language suggested no change in policy, and the FHA continued to finance builders with open policies of racial exclusion for another 15 years.

In 1959, the United States Commission on Civil Rights concluded that only two percent of all FHA-backed loans had gone to blacks. "Most of this housing," concluded the report, "has been in all-Negro developments in the South."

As it relates to black America, segregation must always be understood, as a system of plunder. Once the big game has been fenced off, then comes the hunt:

According to a study by the St. Louis nonprofit Better Together, Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees; for some surrounding towns it approaches 50 percent. Municipal reliance on revenue generated from traffic stops adds pressure to make more of them. One town, Sycamore Hills, has stationed a radar-gun-wielding police officer on its 250-foot northbound stretch of Interstate.

With primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers far exceeding their population share, according to a recent report from Missouri’s attorney general. In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people—despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites.

And this is but one aspect. I strongly suspect that if I talked to some housing attorneys in the region they could tell me a story.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-racist-housing-policies-that-built-ferguson/381595/

Reynolds American, the company that makes Camel cigarettes, announced yesterday that its employees are no longer allowed to smoke in its offices—down to its conference rooms, hallways, and elevators. “We’re just better aligning our tobacco-use policies with the realities of what you’re seeing in society today,” company spokesperson David Howard told the Associated Press. It’s the type of hazy explanation that seems like it was read from cue cards at gunpoint.

Even in an industry criticized for its lack of integrity, the hypocrisy stands out: It’d be like if The Atlantic banned its employees from reading (if reading caused cancer, that is). According to the AP, the smoking rate at Reynolds’ offices is roughly 18 percent (coincidentally, that’s the literacy rate among Atlantic editors), which, with 5,200 employees, means that this policy will nudge about 1,000 people away from smoking at work—which, in the end, isn’t a bad thing.

But that doesn't change the announcement's subtext. “In every state R.J. Reynolds lawyers work diligently to oppose public-health laws which would discourage smoking,” Dr. Robert K. Jackler, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, told me. “Now these same lawyers recognize the potential liabilities from worker lawsuits due to illness from secondhand smoke.” Jackler pointed out that before yesterday, Reynolds was one of the few American companies that hadn’t done anything about protecting its employees from secondhand smoke.

“There does seem to be some high hypocrisy here, but by connecting some dots, I see it as being found not with ‘management’ (which just wants to hold onto and recruit talented people), but with the employees,” James F. Pankow, a professor of chemistry and engineering at Portland State University, wrote to me in an email. Pankow suggests there’s a special kind of self-deception required to prefer not to be around a product you sell and promote.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-company-that-banned-its-own-product/381831/

With a plot featuring accidental dismemberment, death by leeches, serial arsonists, and rampant child abuse, A Series of Unfortunate Events seemed to descend from the Grimm's Fairy Tales tradition of juvenile fiction. The tragicomic 13-book series, which debuted 15 years ago, chronicled the plight of the three Baudelaire orphans, whose lives become a hamster wheel of misery after their parents die in a mysterious fire. The books sold more than 60 million copies internationally, spawning a video game, fan sites, companion books, and a 2004 film adaptation starring Jim Carrey.

A year after the series began, I received a copy of the first, alliteratively titled novel The Bad Beginning as a Christmas gift. I fell in love—partly because of the absurdist storyline and the likable but unlucky young trio: Violet the inventor, Klaus the reader, and Sunny the baby with sharp teeth.

And yet it was the books’ style, not content, I found most compelling of all. Each installment in the series would begin with some iteration of tortured narrator Lemony Snicket (who I didn’t know was actually author Daniel Handler) urging the reader to put the book down and find some happier way to spend his or her time. Snicket would refer to himself extensively, implying that he existed in the same universe as the Baudelaire children. He would repeatedly interrupt the narrative to rant, tell a story, or relay advice, creating a splintered reading experience. Not only would Snicket use ponderous terms like in loco parentis, but he’d also often spend several sentences defining them. And the endings were, as promised, irredeemably depressing.

I remained a devoted follower until the final book, The End, was released in 2006, but it wasn’t until several years later that I realized how the series transcended its popular children’s book context: Unfortunate Events was my first introduction to postmodern literature.

The loosely defined postmodern literature “movement” (for lack of a better word) started after World War II and adopted many elements from its modernist forbears: a heightened focus on formal experimentation, non-linear narratives, irony, stream-of-consciousness, and a sense of alienation and fractured identity. Postmodernism takes these elements a step further, but incorporates more humor, references to pop culture, and even greater self-consciousness about writing. Some writers of importance: John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gaddis, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace.

In college, I encountered postmodern novels including Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler…, Don Delillo’s White Noise, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. My professors presented them as works that were radical, at least in their day. But to me the tone and techniques they deployed felt familiar and somehow comforting.

For an example of postmodern hallmarks—such as metafiction, the unreliable narrator, irony, black humor, self-reference, maximalism, and paranoia—look no further than this excerpt from the seventh Unfortunate Events book, The Ersatz Elevator.

The word 'bubble' is in the dictionary, as is the word 'peacock,' the word 'vacation,' and the words 'the,' 'author's,' 'execution,' 'has,' 'been,' 'cancelled,' which make up a sentence that is always pleasant to hear. So, if you were to read the dictionary, rather than this book, you could skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' and read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night, weeping and tearing your hair out. But this book is not a dictionary, and if you were to skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' you would be skipping the most pleasant parts of the entire story. Nowhere in this book will you find the words 'bubble,' 'peacock,' 'vacation,' or, unfortunately for me, anything about an execution being cancelled.

The series also relies heavily on intertextuality, or the way the meaning of a text is shaped by other texts. A brief catalog of texts referenced in the books includes T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, J.D. Salinger’s “For Esme, With Love and Squalor,” and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Handler also constructed an elaborate, if purposely obscure, universe around the series, involving a secret organization known by the initials V.F.D. and a cast of shadowy members somehow involved in the death of the Baudelaire parents. With playful pedantry, Handler teased this invented world through allusions in the novels and fictional apocrypha such as the so-called Snicket file. The companion work Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (it was authorized and not an autobiography) fleshed out the backstory with a bizarre collection of photographs, letters, transcripts, and other mysterious documents.

Postmodernism’s influence can be found widely throughout children’s literature, particularly in picture books such as The Monster At the End of This Book or the 1991 Caldecott Medal-winning Black and White. Unfortunate Events merely exaggerated and broadened that trend to lengthier chapter books.

Why might postmodern literary techniques resonate with young readers? One explanation: By complicating the relationship between author and reader, narrator and character, these methods muddy the boundary between text and reality. Young readers might feel the distinction between fact and fiction slipping away, lost in the series’ story-within-a-story-within-a-story. Early in the series’ run, I found myself believing the Baudelaire children or V.F.D. might actually be real (a little more seriously than I believed I’d receive an admission letter from Hogwarts on my 11th birthday). Such was the intoxicating effect of this imaginary world and story that seemed to bleed from beyond the pages.

Of all the series’ postmodern gimmicks, the most endearing was perhaps how Unfortunate Events, in true metafictional fashion, championed the act of reading books as an inalienable good. For all the morally black and gray villains the Baudelaires and readers are forced to endure, the books regularly equated literacy with virtue (“Well-read people are less likely to be evil,” Snicket notes). Though the series’ earliest readers have now mostly grown up, the books will continue to offer a wellspring of sound advice: “When trouble strikes, head to the library. You will either be able to solve the problem, or simply have something to read as the world crashes down around you.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/postmodernism-for-kids/381739/

Updated 12:25 p.m.

Somewhere in the infrastructure of Apple’s mobile ecosystem, something has broken.

Last year, iPhone and iPad users upgraded in droves to the company’s new operating system, iOS 7. Just a week after its release, more than half had moved to the new system. A month after, more than 75 percent had made the jump.

This year, the release of Apple’s newest mobile operating system, iOS 8, isn’t quite going like that. That system came out more than a month ago, but, according to the analytics firm Mixpanel, yesterday was the first day more than half of users were registered as using it. It overtook iOS 7 only last week. Before that, it had lingered in the 45-percent area for weeks.

Thanks to this exclusive chart from Mixpanel, we can now see what those two upgrade cycles look like next to each other.

Comparing iOS 7 and iOS 8 Adoption Rates

There’s been a big, sticky gap between iOS 7 and iOS 8 upgrade rates.

This is more than a hiccup for Apple. The company promises that its hardware and software “just work,” but that tight integration requires consumers to upgrade every year. Perhaps this indicates more and more people sticking with older hardware rather than buying the newest phones—and avoiding the software upgrade due to worries it won't work on their older device. The chart also includes phones so old they can’t upgrade at all. The premier Apple blogger John Gruber called the lagging upgrades “very worrisome,” adding that they were “a canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator that casual users no longer trust Apple with major iOS updates.”

Is that true? It’s not as though iPhone users have always been thrilled to install a new Apple concoction. In the fall of 2012, many balked at the new version of iOS—the sixth—after it removed Google Maps and replaced it with a mistake-ridden Apple-made clone. But even that year, iOS 6 upgrade rates had still overtaken the 60-percent mark a month after release—a milestone iOS 8 has yet to reach. Despite all the Maps hoopla, consumers still installed it.

So we know something of what a software-associated rejection of a new iOS looks like. It looks better than this year’s pattern.

Gruber eventually came around to another view, though—one that I’m inclined to agree with. It’s not the software itself, he says, but the storage space that it requires. Upgrading an iPhone “over the air” (that is, not connecting it to iTunes) requires some five gigabytes of space on the phone. Who has five gigabytes of space on their phone?

Note this is only “over the air,” though. If you connect your phone to iTunes, it will upgrade it remotely, without requiring much extra space on the device. But many users long ago stopped thinking of their phone as tethered to a computer. Unless Apple reduces the size of that over-the-air upgrade, I wonder if an overwhelming upgrade to iOS 8 will ever happen.

So taste isn’t holding the new iOS back—only terabytes. And while it’s not the “canary-in-the-coal-mine” situation proclaimed at first by Gruber, with consumers distrusting Apple en masse, I do think the lagging iPhone upgrades this time around reflect an infrastructural crisis for Apple. Most iPhones still ship with a default 16 gigs. That’s just not very much. The new iPhone 5Cs ship with only eight default gigabytes.

If most users have switched to upgrading their phone over the air—and most, this chart hints, have—and if Apple continues to make phones with so little storage by default, then it will see its previously pristine upgrade rates plunge, and the nature of its products change.

One final note: These kinds of rates do vary wildly from ecosystem to ecosystem. It’s apples-to-oranges, or at least free-mobile-to-paid-desktop, but Windows 8 hasn’t even reached 14 percent of the market yet. It was released in 2012. And Windows XP, a 13-year-old piece of software, is still installed on almost 24 percent of PCs.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-upgrade-gap-apples-new-ios-problem-in-one-chart/381714/

This ring, created by the great Art Nouveau designer René Lalique, was obviously commissioned by a sorcerer who would wear it while poring over alchemical manuscripts from the library of Dr. Dee. It's exquisite, of course, but also stupendously creepy. (Note: the Wartski site does not link to pieces directly, so click on “Jewellery” and scroll down.)

Featuring a central carved ivory face set in yellow gold and crowned with a cabochon emerald, the ring showcases the quality of workmanship so typical of Lalique jewels. Long, flowing hair of deeply engraved gold forms the shoulders of the ring, contrasting with the more formal engraved leaf patterns that run along the tops of the shoulders. Small accents of black enamel provide further contrast.

I often find relics haunting, and I like the fragile, almost hazy look of this late 1800s French relic pendant. A tiny relief of Mary has been carved out of meerschaum—a soft white mineral used for centuries to create carved pipes and, later, cigarette holders—and placed under convex glass. The glass heightens the three-dimensional appearance of the carving. The piece is set in brass.

This 15k gold memento mori stickpin features a skull with a hinged jaw, allowing it to be opened or closed. The three-dimensional effect of a slightly raised nasal bone and individually etched teeth (not to mention the gaping eye sockets) should combine to make him creepy, but instead he's kind of cute.

Circa 1900, this Art Nouveau "Bat Maiden" ring, by the French designer Charles Boutet de Monvel (1855-1913), features a glowing center opal flanked by two crowned and bat-winged female figures in gold with diamond accents.

Toadstone is a fairly unattractive brownish-gray stone that was traditionally believed to come from the head of a living toad, but it's actually a fossilized fish tooth. It was highly sought after for centuries for its so-called magical powers, which could apparently detect the presence of poison, cure snake bites, and treat kidney disease, epilepsy and various other ailments. Christopher J. Duffin, in a great article for Jewellery History Today (the magazine of the Society of Jewellery Historians), also quotes Albertus Magnus, a 13th-century Dominican friar from Cologne, and his recommendation that unmounted toadstones be swallowed—“to cleanse the bowels of filth and excrements”—and then later, uh, retrieved.
Toadstones were also believed to protect mothers from fairies, preventing them from stealing their children and replacing them with changelings.

How does one get a toadstone, you may ask? It's easy: According to Edward Topsell's The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents from 1658, all you need to do is place a live toad on a red cloth, wait until it belches the stone out, and then quickly grab it before the toad snarfles it back up again. Piece of cake.

Toadstones were usually cut in smooth cabochon form and set into rings. This ring is circa 1700, and features a high karat gold setting. A very similar ring resides in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and 14 toadstones were also found in the Cheapside Hoard.

Circa 1200 B.C., this bronze ring originated in Luxor, Egypt. Depicting a sacred asp, it was excavated in the 19th century, and was formerly part of the Baron Amherst Collection (click through to the Doe & Hope site for more on the provenance and Amherst himself).

Snakes were both revered and feared in ancient Egypt, and they appear throughout their mythology and ornamentation. 1200 B.C. places the ring in the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt, a period that featured general unrest and decline, as well as around 4000 pharaohs called Ramesses (well, just Ramesses III through XI). Actually, since we're in a Halloween frame of mind, I should probably note that Ramesses III's mummy, which was discovered in 1884, was the inspiration for Hollywood’s infamous film mummies.

This creepy-crawly spider brooch, circa 1890, features a colored pearl body, cushion-cut diamond thorax, and cabochon ruby eyes. Rose-cut diamonds line the legs, and the piece is set in silver and gold.

I've featured a posy ring in the past, but this one has an unusual and fierce motto. Circa 1620, it states: Accvrsed be that wicked wicht that seeke to robb me of my right (Accursed be that wicked witch that seeks to rob me of my right).

Posy rings were usually presented to loved ones with secret messages of love and devotion engraved inside, but in this case the hidden motto was protective. It was essentially a good luck charm, acting as a talisman against witchcraft and reassuring the wearer of protection against anyone who would seek to harm their union. It's a fascinating and potent symbol of the widespread fear of witchcraft that existed in the 17th century.

Snakes, as shown above, have been featured in jewelry for centuries—sometimes loaded with symbolism, and other times simply decorative. Whether you like them in real life or not, their sinuous form often results in some exceptionally beautiful designs. This bangle bracelet is one of them. From a Philadelphia estate and up for sale in Freeman's November 3rd Jewelry & Watches auction, it coils around the wrist in 18k gold with green, white and red enamel.

Circa the 1940s, a sterling silver winged bat pendant with endearingly huge ears.

So, I don't know, maybe this is like a version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, except instead of an attractive dead sea captain, we have a ghostly floating package? Circa 1900, this Art Nouveau "erotica" pendant features a woman embracing exactly what you think she's embracing. The pendant (in gold with natural pearls and a small cabochon ruby) is also a locket, and may have been used to hold snuff.

This mourning ring doesn't mince words. In 18k gold with black and white enameling, it features a central panel that swivels, revealing a lock of braided gray hair under glass on one side, and the words "Prepare to Follow” on the other. The inscription engraved in the band states "Nath Hayward 0B 3rd Feb 1814 AET 73."

Depicting Medusa's head on bat's wings, this gilded silver Art Nouveau belt buckle was created by German designer Albert Holbein, and dates to circa 1900. According to the dealer, it's a variation on another design that was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.

Another form of talisman, Bavarian "charivari" amulets were believed to protect and bring success to hunters. Wearing a charivari—traditionally hung from a chain attached to the hunter's belt—was seen as a way to magically gain the attributes of the animal, making it easier to catch or kill. Gruesome, I know, but I can see how carrying a protective charm might be an appealing option when facing the forest alone.

Bits of antler, teeth, claws, the jawbones of small predators, and even the pincers of stag beetles were used in charivari pendants, and they're still worn today as an accessory to traditional lederhosen. You can see some more examples here.

This charivari dates to around 1901-1909, and features the jaws of what was probably a weasel or a stoat. It's set in German silver (which is not actually silver, but an alloy of copper, zinc and nickel), with an acorn and leaf detail on the top.

Another relic! This pendant is Portuguese, circa 1780. It's made of carved boxwood and gold, and features a tiny figure of St. Anthony. The Catholic Church has always used symbols to identify saints, so this little guy can be identified as Anthony by his robes (he was a Franciscan friar) and the child in his arm, because he’s usually depicted as holding the baby Jesus. The coffin-shaped box is a nice little touch.

This 19th century memento mori ring showcases a tiny skull hovering beneath rock crystal—a constant reminder to the wearer of his or her mortality.

Circa 1900, a beautiful little 14k gold Art Nouveau owl pin, with opal eyes and outstretched wings.

This piece is sold, but I'm including it because it's beautiful and OMG THE TINY OWL. Circa 1910, it's a Jugendstil—a.k.a. German Art Nouveau—silver and gold bat pendant, created in the style of designer Georg Kleemann (1863-1932). It is set with opal, moonstone, pearl, amethyst, lapis, turquoise, ruby and diamond, with touches of enamel. That owl!!!

I saved the best for last! This is a contemporary brooch by Spanish designer Andrea Coderch Valor. Made of silver, copper, steel and a plastic doll, the piece is part of her aptly named "Hieronymous Bosch" collection. It will haunt your dreams. Enjoy!

Previously: Hippocampi, 18th Century Febreze, and a Circus You Can Wear

Monica McLaughlin tweets about ridiculous old jewelry and other random nonsense at @rococopacetic. She also wants to mention: If you're in the New York area, don't miss the new "Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit examines the development of mourning fashions and rituals through the 19th and 20th centuries, including clothing, jewelry and other accessories. Good stuff! The exhibit opened on October 21, and will run until February 1.