A.N

After another long silence, I return with something to share for once: a quick little tool I made to package HTML emails when I’m working outside Campaign Monitor and/or Premailer.

Developing HTML email templates that render consistently is, of course, the worst. If you’re new to this phenomenon, it’s like web page browser testing that’s 8-12 times more awful. You’re required to delve into authoring markup that would be considered deplorable on the modern web, marrying late-90’s-style methods with a careful awareness of how a plethora of email clients will interpret your work in not-so-sensible ways.

I usually have the pleasure of developing templates for Campaign Monitor, which is an all-around great product for clients and developers alike. A WYSIWYG HTML email composer seems like the last thing that could ever work well, yet they’ve nailed it. Templates still need to be carefully designed and tested, but Campaign Monitor makes tools and advice readily available that can help with this. One major component is the quiet magic performed by Campaign Monitor before an email takes flight: common fixes are applied, including the conversion of embedded styles to their inline equivalents.

But sometimes clients don’t work with Campaign Monitor, or you’re required to put together a template that will be managed and utilized by some mysterious entity.

In this case I’ll build a template with embedded styles, keeping it as human-friendly as possible when it comes to edits. I’ll test by running it through Premailer and then getting detailed screenshots from Litmus. Campaign Monitor has a similar service for $5/test, but I usually go with the safety of Litmus’ unlimited tests for the $79 monthly fee.

Finally back to the thing I referred to at the beginning of the post: sometimes Premailer adds unwanted junk as it works its magic on the HTML, and I’m not often (or ever) in the mood to convert all my styles inline by hand. A nifty bit of PHP already exists for such a thing, and it’s called Emogrifier. I previously built a tool for a client that used Emogrifier as part of an email preflight process, and I recently ripped that out and made a standalone tool I’m calling Email Packager that does three things:

1. Takes your pasted or uploaded HTML and Emogrifies it.
2. Downloads all absolute images that are referenced in the HTML, optionally replacing their links with relative equivalents.
3. Gives back a ZIP file with message.html (your original), message_inline.html (Emogrified), and an images folder. It’s timestamped so you can tell your versions apart, and the web-friendly filename comes directly from the HTML’s <title> element.

You’re welcome to use it now, dear Internet, just know that it’s a fairly rough little thing at present. I happily welcome any feedback, ideas, or even problematic reports. I experienced a silent failure, for example, when I accidentally added two style properties to a single HTML element. If it doesn’t work as you’d expect, try validating your HTML (hah!) and looking for any surprising oddities. If it still doesn’t work, email me!

Enjoy, and happy email-making!

Email Packager »

• I am quite fascinated by the story of indie film Escape From Tomorrow, which was shot—entirely covertly—on the grounds of Disney parks in Orlando, Florida and Anaheim, California. The director text messaged the actors and crew their directions; the cameramen were just assumed by Security to be happy parents filming their vacation; and not once did they arouse the suspicion of any kind. Amazingly, Disney is not attempting to halt its release. (Slate)
• Fashion week hosted its first plus sized show, which is pretty great, even though what will be even greater is when this is not news. (Jezebel)
• Check this out and then tell me that dogs aren’t the awesomest thing ever. (Time)
• This roundup of what precisely words like “low,” “imitation,” “free,” “light,” and “natural” really mean when they’re employed on food labels is actually quite useful. (Mental Floss)
• Speechless. (Death and Taxes)

According to a Census report out this week, women today still make up a frustratingly small 26 percent of workers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs. But whereas their presence has at least grown or held steady in most of these fields, it's been on a 20-plus-year decline in computer workers, such as developers, programmers, and security analysts. 

In 1990, a third of computer workers were women. Now: 27 percent. 

The dearth of women is worse in some corners of computer world than others. Two in five Web developers are women, but 78 percent of software developers are men.  

One of the issues might well be academic, in a literal sense. Women peaked as a percentage of all computer science undergraduates in the 1980s, not long before they topped out in the computer workforce. And while researchers are still trying to explain the falloff, it seems pretty plain that culture—the way society at large still treats tech as a male bastion, and the often nerd-frat hybrid culture of the field itself—plays a role. 

So here's why everybody, whether or not they've ever given a hint of thought to brogrammers and the social mores of Silicon Valley or Alley or Beach, should care. A large part of the pay gap between men and women boils down to the different careers they pursue. And STEM jobs, with their generally high salaries, are an especially important factor. Meanwhile, as the Census notes, computer fields make up about a half of STEM employment. So when you talk about women retreating from computer work, you're talking about a defeat for their financial equality. 

One thing users can't do in GTA V? Play as a female character. The game doesn’t feature any playable women, Rockstar Games co-founder and VP of creativity Dan Houser said, because "the concept of being masculine was so key to this story," just like it has apparently been key to every previous GTA installment.

It's frustrating, to say the least, that a vanguard company like Rockstar Games brushes off the idea of allowing for female leads with statements like Houser's. While it's not an outright "fuck you" to female gamers, it's a pretty implicit one. The decision to have three characters allows for what Houser calls "nuanced stories, not a set of archetypes." But if Rockstar really wants to showcase diverse character types, why is the company so dismissive of having a female GTA lead? Houser's statement assumes that women aren't capable of criminality, that violence and mayhem are inherently masculine. But Houser is wrong. And as GTA continues to push the envelope for scope, story, and vision, it's insulting that women are still excluded.

Molly Lambert takes on Grand Theft Auto's trio of male leads, and the pathetically stubborn male creators behind them: "Women have violent nihilist fantasies, too." [Grantland]

Maybe you’re heading back to school, setting new goals for the remaining months of the year, or applying for a new job. Whatever your situation, fall is a great time to think about renewal, change and improvement. And if you’re looking for an inspirational story to kick you into high gear, look no further than nail artist Jessica Washick.

After graduating from Parsons for Fashion Design and joining the design team at Coach, Jessica’s longtime boyfriend moved across the country for a job. Unfortunately the relationship didn’t make it, and in an effort to distract herself from the pain she was feeling (you know, after the requisite pints of ice cream and Sex and The City marathons), she started to give herself manicures. She got more and more into it, relishing the new creative outlet and distraction. And then finally, one day, she happily realized she was really starting to move on – and she told herself, “You don’t need a man. You need a manicure!”

Fast forward a couple years and now Jess is busy running the successful blog named, you got it, “U Don’t Need a Man, U Need a Manicure.” She left Coach, got her Nail Technician license and is working as a full-time nail artist, collaborating with everyone from Maybelline to Nylon Magazine and being featured all over the place. Talk about turning lemons i­nto lemonade!

So in honor of new seasons and fresh beginnings, we asked Jessica to create a custom D*S nail design – something simple and stunning, that even a manicure novice could put together. She nailed it (har, har!) with a perfect transitional summer-to-fall look. A loose play on a plaid, the design features some of our absolute favorite colors for fall: nude, pink and deep red! Huge thanks to Jess for spending some time with us and if you’re looking for a little more inspiration, head on over to her blog!

(more…)

Trypophobia is the fear of clustered holes like those shown in the lotus seed pod above. The lotus seed is the classic example of the sort of holes that frighten trypophobics, but sponges, soap bubbles and even aerated chocolate can be triggers. Trypophobia is not recognized in pyschiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it is present in 16 percent of people, according to a new study in Psychological Science, which is the first to address the strange fear.

“The stimuli are usually clusters of holes of any variety that are almost always innocuous and seemingly pose no threat,” the authors note. But they induce visceral reactions all the same.

“[I] can’t really face small, irregularly or asymmetrically placed holes, they make me like, throw up in my mouth, cry a little bit, and shake all over, deeply,” one trypophobe involved in the study said. My apparently trypophobic friend Monica says of the lotus seed pod: “That photo actually makes me want to stab my eyes out.”

The study found that this fear might actually be an evolutionary adaptation, not just a weird human quirk. One of the researchers encountered a trypophobe who said he couldn’t stand to look at photos of the blue-ringed octopus, which is one of the most poisonous animals in the world, and a cartoon lightbulb clicked on over his head.

The researchers analyzed images from trypophobia.com and found that many of them have high contrast at midrange spatial frequencies, as do images of poisonous animals like the octopus, as well as the deathstalker scorpion and many poisonous snakes and spiders.

“We therefore suggest that trypophobia arises because the inducing stimuli share a core spectral feature with such organisms—a feature that does not reach conscious awareness,” the researchers wrote.

Many people may not yet have a name for the uncomfortable feeling they get from looking at images like these. The word “trypophobia” first made tentative forays into the Internet’s consciousness around 2009, according to Google Trends, and didn’t start skyrocketing until 2012. Monica says she “never connected the dots” until she read an article about the fear. “Even just seeing the words clustered holes freaks me out,” she adds.

“This survival account is based on the notion that humans have been selected, via Darwinian principles, for their ability to notice poisonous organisms,” the study reads, and while throwing up in your mouth or stabbing your eyes out may not be particularly effective strategies when faced with a poisonous animal, these trypophobes may be on to something all the same.

I cannot describe my feelings about Tim Flannery's piece about jellyfish in the New York Review of Books without slipping into meaningless hyperbole, so please accept these quotes as textual evidence for why you've got to read it in full, you just really, really do. All emphases my own.

1. "Box jellyfish have bells (the disc-shaped “head”) around a foot across, behind which trail up to 550 feet of tentacles. It’s the tentacles that contain the stinging cells, and if just six yards of tentacle contact your skin, you have, on average, four minutes to live—though you might die in just two."

2. "In November 2009 a net full of gigantic jellyfish, the largest of which weighed over 450 pounds, capsized a Japanese trawler, throwing the three-man crew into the ocean."

3. "Salmon swimming in pens can create a vortex that sucks jellyfish in. Tens of thousands of salmon can be stung to death in minutes."

4. "By 2002 the total weight of [the] Mnemiopsis [jellyfish] in the Black Sea had grown so prodigiously that it was estimated to be ten times greater than the weight of all fish caught throughout the entire world in a year. The Black Sea had become effectively jellified."

5. "Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles."

6. "[Portuguese man-o-war and long stingy stringy thingies] are not, strictly speaking, organisms at all. Instead they are made up of collections of jellyfish species, the individuals of which are referred to as “persons” (as in food-catching persons, digestive persons, defensive persons, etc.) that function collectively like, and indeed appear to be, a single individual. And they can be enormous—up to 150 feet long."

7. "Biologists characterize [Mnemniopsis] as a “self-fertilizing simultaneous hermaphrodite"…. It begins laying eggs when just thirteen days old, and is soon laying 10,000 per day."

8. "Mnemiopsisis able to eat over ten times its own body weight in food, and to double in size, each day… Jellyfish “can eat anything, and often do,” Gershwin says. Some don’t even need to eat, in the usual sense of the word. They simply absorb dissolved organic matter through their epidermis."

9. "The question of jellyfish death is vexing. If jellyfish fall on hard times, they can simply “de-grow.” That is, they reduce in size, but their bodies remain in proportion."

10. "One kind of jellyfish, which might be termed the zombie jelly, is quite literally immortal."

Photo via This Is Awkward/flickr

[NYRB]

In the past, you could press pound to escape Robocall hell, but that's not so much the case anymore. These days robocalls are like spam: If you press anything, even the number they say you should press to be removed from the list, you'll get more calls. The solution? Hang up immediately.

Read more...

Green Mountain and Campbell Soup Co. are teaming up to make new one-minute dishes that can be made using Green Mountain’s Keurig machines. The meals will consist of a K-cup of broth that can be brewed over a packet of dried vegetables and noodles.

AP | Freshness

This weekend I attended PAX. If you’ve never heard of it, PAX stands for Penny Arcade Expo, a gaming festival for people who like computer, console, and table games.

Afterward, I heard that PAX has had some controversy over the last couple years, much of it stemming from a rape reference made in a comic called Penny Arcade, which is published by PAX organizers. I had an embarrassed flash of, “Did I just go to a thing that doesn’t like ladies? Ah maaaaaan.”

So I researched what happened last night, and this morning WIRED published a piece about the whole deal. Quick synopsis:

THE PAX CONTROVERSY

• In 2010, PAX organizers Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, published this comic.

  
  The rape reference upset some attendees.

• Organizers then published a couple of unapologetic and somewhat flippant posts reffing the incident, and this ham-fisted explanation in comic-form, which further offended the offended parties.
  
• Later, Krahulik drew the aforementioned Dickwolf onstage at PAX:

  

• Organizers made Dickwolves merch for the fans who felt the controversy had been blown out of proportion:

  
  And subsequently pulled the merch when some attendees, speakers, and companies voiced the collective equivalent of, “Uh. Seriously, guys?”

• Krahulik tweeted that he’d still be wearing his shirt to PAX.
  
• Then at this year’s PAX, Krahulik said onstage, “I think that pulling the Dickwolves merchandise was a mistake.” (2:34:57 in the video)
  
  Watch live video from PAX East 2012 on TwitchTV
  Huh.

THE CONUNDRUM

The original comic didn’t bother me much personally, because as Rachel Edidin put it in the Wired piece, the joke was more of “an illustration of the screwed-up ethics implied by the quests in videogames like World of Warcraft.” However, I got more incredulous and angry as I read on.

To be fair, I knew nothing else about these guys going in. Further, I don’t know the personalities at the heart of the complaint, which are always a factor. That said, this was not handled well. Krahulik in particular seems to be in a defensive crouch, belaboring a subject that is obviously painful for some of his fans.

I sat down to write this feeling ready to do another round of, “Rape references are creepy. Please stop being so cruddy.” But then I watched the video above, and came away feeling dejected.

PUTTING A FACE TO THE BLAME

The running theme in that onstage interview, which is actually a conversation between friends and business partners, is what it’s like to be a stereotypical nerd rising to success. I encourage you to watch a bit of it. The organizers are vulnerable, with lots of self-effacing humor about insecurity, the desire for physical and emotional intimacy with women, and surprise that life has granted a measure of success, even as the result of hard work.

Krahulik mentions being glad he met his wife when he did, because he fears his subsequent success would have made it difficult to find someone who really understood him and cared for him otherwise. They tease each other about girls, “Do you remember when you had that girlfriend and your first date was, like, writing up a contract for each other?” Holkins mentions that the team’s financial success unsettles him, having come from a poor background, and worries aloud that he doesn’t pull his weight in the business. Krahulik hesitates before telling a story, “Can I please say it?” he asks his wife from stage, then having acquired her assent, proceeds to tell the world’s tamest story about his first visit to a strip club as an adult who doesn’t like to drink.

These aren’t callous guys. They are guys who have been candid about having some psychological problems, and have trouble seeing themselves as role models.

THE CONFERENCE

I’ve attended years of web, tech, and blogger conferences, and know these events often reflect the intentions and personalities of the organizers. Before I knew about the controversy, I thought the feeling at PAX was lovely.

I was preparing to write a post about how I’ve never been around a huge group of people who were more polite and aware of each other. Lots of smiles and small kindnesses, holding doors open for each other, stepping to the side if someone wanted a photo, noticing if someone had dropped something. There was an overwhelming sense of courtesy, cooperation, and goodwill.

But the actions of the PAX team on this point make it more difficult to enjoy the environment they’ve created. Not because of the original comic, but because of their ill-considered behavior in the aftermath. If they’re genuinely nice guys, as they present themselves, why have they been so reactive?

IN THE LOOP

In these situations, we often cast public figures in one-dimensional roles. For many women who hear about this issue around PAX, Krahulik and Holkins will be the rape joke guys. It’s natural that our tendency to label should spark defensiveness on the part of organizers. We are not mean people. We did not set out to wound you, therefore it is unfair to hold us accountable for your wounds. The response isn’t particularly evolved, but it is human.

What’s more, these are men at the center of a world comprised mostly of men. It doesn’t excuse their behavior, or their unwillingness to listen, but I’m hardly surprised. Living in a tech-centric town, I know lots of nice guys who nonetheless seem baffled when you bring up the most rudimentary feminist issues. It can be frustrating.

In the video, the audience cheers when Krahulik expresses regret at having pulled the Dickwolves merchandise. He’s in a feedback loop of people, many of them presumably decent people, who agree that he hasn’t done anything wrong. That must be good to hear, and must make it hard to hear much else.

Update: Gabe Krahulik clarified his on stage statement regarding the Dickwolves merch, apologizing for much of the incident, but asserting that he believes it would have been better had they not taken further action by removing the shirts.

The post PAX Controversy: Nice Guys Finishing Last appeared first on Mighty Girl.

A sketchbook is where creatives gave birth to their most amazing ideas ever. And to get a chance to take a glimpse into a sketchbook of a creative genius is a rare opportunity. A Redditor just did after gaining access to the personal sketchbook of acclaimed director Guillermo Del Toro and posting some photos of the illustrations and notes on Imgur.

The series of photos revealed Del Toro’s notes which are mostly illegible and his gothic/dark fantasy illustrations which depict scenes and characters from his popular films including Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone and his latest hit Pacific Rim. Some of the sketches also reveal the director’s unreleased project, At the Mountains of Madness.

Scroll down below for his sketchbook illustrations and see which can you recognize.

Which of the sketches is familiar to you? Tell us your thoughts and suggestions in the comment box below.

Find You The Designer on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus for more updates.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for the latest design inspirations, stories and freebies. Speaking of freebies, check out our free print templates page for your print design needs.

Stay awesome everyone!

Read more posts by Cadence Wu

As we move into the back-to-school months of autumn, the always-appealing smell of new books is about to reach peak irresistibility. This fall has already brought a handful of talked-about reads in fiction (Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam), in nonfiction (David Epstein's The Sports Gene), and even in nonfiction about fiction writers (David Shields and Shane Salerno's Salinger), and the remaining months of 2013 offer more promising picks. Whether they're big releases from best-selling authors or works by lesser-known writers poised to delight or enlighten, here are 22 books we're looking forward to.

The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler
Ben Urwand
September 9 (Harvard)

As Hollywood courts international audiences more than ever, Ben Urwand’s investigation into cinema’s darkest time shows just how low the industry has gone to reap profits from across the globe. Following Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, many American studio heads—several of whom were Jewish themselves—agreed to leave anti-Nazi sentiments off the silver screen so as to ensure access to the lucrative German market. Studios submitted scripts for German approval, changed credits to erase Jewish performers, and canceled any project that was remotely critical of the Nazi party or its genocidal persecution of Jews.

Urwand’s decade of archival research uncovers rampant cinematic censorship, but it also brings to light some more horrifying history: MGM not only helped fund Nazi weaponry, but its top Germany executive divorced his Jewish wife at the Propaganda Ministry’s request shortly before she wound up in a concentration camp.

Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II 
Farah Jasmine Smith
September 10 (Basic Books)

Columbia University professor Farah Jasmine Griffin spotlights the achievements of three young, artistically brave black women who lived in Harlem during the Second World War and laid the framework for the Civil Rights movement: writer Ann Petry, dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus, and musician and bebop pioneer Mary Lou Williams. According to Publishers Weekly, the book marks “a giant step to securing the place all three subjects merit in American cultural history.”

Nine Inches 
Tom Perrotta
September 10 (St. Martin's)

Tom Perrotta returns with his first collection of short fiction since 1994’s Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, which eschewed the easy wisecracks about disco and Charlie’s Angels in favor of intimate, frank looks at the milestones of small-town youth.

Publishers Weekly deemed Bad Haircut “a convincing portrait of a time of life, illuminating all the profound cruelty and tenderness of adolescence,” so take it as a good sign that Nine Inches, similarly, finds depth in the seemingly mundane: an instant, surprising spark of connection between an elderly woman and a benched high-school football player; a fleeting romance between two teachers.

Sister Mother Husband Dog etc.
Delia Ephron
September 17 (Blue Rider)

The Most of Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron
October 29 (Knopf)

When multi-talented writer Nora Ephron died last year, her contemporaries and collaborators—from Lena Dunham to Tom Hanks and Billy Crystal—immediately and ardently remembered in the fondest of ways. The Most of Nora Ephron, a collection of her best and most famous writings, places her final work, the play Lucky Guy, alongside the text of her funny, ferocious commencement address at Wellesley and the famous deli scene from When Harry Met Sally, among others.

Delia Ephron’s latest compilation of stories and essays, meanwhile, deals largely with the process of mourning her sister Nora. But the similarly well-rounded other Ephron, also an author and screenwriter, additionally includes humorous musings on their projects together, their relationships with their other two sisters, and why every news station’s daily weather report should be replaced once and for all with a how-to-wear-your-hair-today report. 

Bleeding Edge
Thomas Pynchon
September 17 (Penguin)

Thomas Pynchon’s “technothriller” takes place in his own birthplace—Long Island—and follows single mom and small-time fraud investigator Maxine Turnow as she misadventures through the world of post-dotcom-boom, pre-9/11 New York. When she starts sniffing around the finances of a computer-security firm, though, people start dying—and suddenly Maxine finds herself in a weird web of deception, tangled up with hackers, coders, the Russian mob, and a “professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave.”

Bleeding Edge is Pynchon’s eighth novel; his previous seven, most notably his 1974 National Book Award winner Gravity’s Rainbow, have been hailed for their intense complexity, as well as sometimes called “unreadable.” 

The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football 
Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian
September 17 (Doubleday)

It's common knowledge, by this point, that there’s more than a little casual corruption happening in college sports. But when an investigative reporting team gained unprecedented insider access and then spent almost two years observing some of the nation’s most football-fanatical schools, they were both fascinated by the grand infrastructure of college sports  and shocked all over again by what they saw and heard. Some of the darker accounts in the book describe a student “hostessing” program to lure in University of Tennessee recruits, and hushed six-figure payments to Texas A&M recruits’ parents.

Jeff Benedict is a Sports Illustrated feature writer and author of several books examining the intersection of sports and law (perhaps most famously Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL), and Armen Keteyian is an 11-time Emmy winner who regularly contributes to Showtime’s 60 Minutes Sports. Given their credentials and their chosen subject matter, their first book-length joint effort could have some explosive consequences.

Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age
Mathew Klickstein
September 24 (Plume)

Today, Nickelodeon nostalgia is mostly fodder for BuzzFeed listicles and gossip items about Amanda Bynes’s downward spiral. But the channel’s rise to prominence was actually a major breakthrough in children’s entertainment, as Klickstein illustrates through interviews with more than 200 insiders, including Doug creator Jim Jinkins, SNL alum Kenan Thompson, and Double Dare host Marc Summers. Slimed! explores the behind-the-scenes drama of controversial shows like Ren & Stimpy and the family lives of its child stars, but it also reveals the network’s unconventional programming and knack for recruiting up-and-coming talent (Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins was on the writing staff for Clarissa Explains It All)—as well as the secret ingredients to the network’s famous green slime.

Doctor Sleep
Stephen King
September 24 (Scriber)

As we wrote earlier this year, Stephen King’s long-awaited sequel to The Shining revisits its tortured protagonist Dan Torrance several years into his adulthood. Dan, now using his “shining” to help others, encounters another magical being in the form of 12-year-old Abra Stone, who he must save from the True Knot, a clan of malicious paranormals who live off the steam that children with the “shining” produce when they die.

The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri
September 24 (Knopf)

Set in the 1960s, Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel tells the story of Subhash and Udayan, two identical-looking but ideologically opposite brothers from Calcutta. When they reach adulthood, Subhash immigrates to America while Udayan stays and joins the Naxalite movement to fight poverty and inequality in India. But when a family secret is revealed, Subhash returns to his homeland to help heal the wounds to his broken family.

Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies and followed up with the bestselling The Namesake three years later, has been called a “one-trick pony” for her tendency to revisit the theme of Indian-American immigration—but the Man Booker Prize judges might disagree, as they’ve longlisted The Lowland for this year’s award.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Malcom Gladwell
October 1 (Little Brown & Company)

Malcolm Gladwell’s first four social-psychology-for-everyone books all hit the international bestseller lists, so there’s little reason to doubt that his fifth—a critical look at heroism, underdog mentality, and the ingrained idea of “overcoming obstacles”—should be any different.

Few details have been revealed about the book’s contents at this point, but according to the publisher, David and Goliath “examines the battlefields of Northern Ireland and Vietnam, takes us into the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, and digs into the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms”—and explains when a disability is really an advantage, when a trauma-filled adolescence is really a good thing, and under what circumstances it’s best to not send your kid to the best school he or she can get into.

Mad About the Boy
Helen Fielding
October 15 (Knopf)

There’s not much yet known about the first Bridget Jones novel in 14 years (after 1996’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and its 1999 sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), except that it finds the Austen-inspired modern heroine in what author Helen Fielding has called “a whole new idea for a phase of her life that I can't jinx by describing it.”

So as Bridget herself might say, Well, bollocks.

But there’s no shortage of intrigue as to where the older but maybe-not-wiser Bridget will go next. At the end of the last book, “Bridge” was engaged to nice-guy hero Mark Darcy, and the newly released cover has generated some speculation that motherhood is part of the mysterious next phase of Bridget’s life. And then there’s this: In this latest, present-day installment, according to Fielding, Bridget discovers Twitter.

Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment
Anita Elberse
October 15 (Henry Holt)

Thus far, 2013 has seen a startling number of big-budget flops as well as a wave of high-profile Kickstarter projects that sought the funds major studios wouldn’t provide. Why is Hollywood so insistent on the philosophy that bigger is better, even when the results can be disastrous? To answer that timely question, Harvard Business School’s Anita Elberse explains how mass-market franchises are the only way the entertainment industry can rake in astronomical profits—especially as digital technology erodes older models. Though its title focuses on film, Blockbusters addresses all aspects of entertainment, from the inner workings of book publishing to why Lady Gaga’s paychecks are as inflated as her on-stage persona.

Humans of New York
Brandon Stanton
October 15 (St. Martin’s)

The first of two collections from the popular blog of the same name, Humans of New York is the coffee-table rarity that’s both visually arresting and disarmingly deep. Since he started his photographic census in 2010, Brandon Stanton has captured more than 5,000 people’s images and recorded more than 50 of their life stories. The photographs in this volume, some of which have never been published before, capture the city’s inhabitants with a commendable eye for demographic diversity and everyday street fashion. But it’s Stanton’s interviews with his subjects, usually excerpted from their rawest moments, that are the most captivating as they highlight both the hardship and the little victories of an often-unforgiving city.

The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
October 22 (Little Brown & Company)

When 13-year-old Theo Decker survives an accident that kills his mother, he gets absorbed into his wealthy family friends’ decadent lives. Alienation sets in, as does persistent, acute longing for his mother, and Theo clings to a small token that reminds him of her: a tiny, strange painting that, as he grows older, draws him into art’s dark, dangerous New York netherworld.

Known for her long-gestating but critically acclaimed forays into the disturbing inner lives of traumatized kids (a la 1992’s The Secret History and its 2002 follow-up The Little Friend), Tartt will likely seize the opportunity to once again showcase her unique, unsettling narrative power.

We Are Water
Wally Lamb
October 22 (HarperCollins)

Artist Annie Oh has been married for 27 years and has raised three children when she falls in love with Viveca, the wealthy, well-connected art dealer who jumpstarted Annie’s career—so she sheds  the life she’s known and begins planning a new one with Viveca. Set in a small New England town during the first years of the Obama administration, We Are Water tells the story of two women whose impending same-sex marriage is newly legal but nonetheless disruptive to Annie’s suddenly shattered family.

Wally Lamb, a former writing instructor and facilitator of a writing program in a women’s prison, returns to the fictional town of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where he’s set some of his past works, like 2008’s The Hour I First Believed and the 1998 bestseller I Know This Much Is True. The latter was selected alongside his first novel, 1992’s She’s Come Undone, for Oprah’s Book Club.

Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS
Rebecca Eaton
October 29 (Viking)

The woman who brought Downton Abbey, Sherlock, and Upstairs, Downstairs to your television set shares the story of how PBS’s Masterpiece series—the longest-running drama series in the country—grew from small public broadcasting project to Anglophile television powerhouse. Since its inception in 1971, Masterpiece has adapted numerous biographies and literature classics for television, and Eaton, whose decades-long career as its executive processor earned her a spot on Time’s Most Influential People list, documented much of it. The book includes Eaton’s personal photos, interviews with directors and writers, and anecdotes about some of Masterpiece’s biggest names, including Maggie Smith, Benedict Cumberbatch, and even Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe.

The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling
David Shoemaker
October 31 (Gotham)

The author of Deadspin’s widely read “Dead Wrestler of the Week” column steps into the ring to defend professional wrestling’s reputation once and for all. The first book from Shoemaker, also a Grantland contributor, traces the sport’s history from its early 1900s origins to its modern-day incarnations, which are frequently written off as “fake” philistine spectacles. Yes, performance and showmanship have become integral elements of wrestling, but as he profiles some of its most famous personalities, Shoemaker makes a case not only for the intelligence and self-awareness of wrestling fans, but also for the sport’s role as a time capsule of American values.

The Valley of Amazement
Amy Tan
November 5 (Ecco)

Amy Tan’s last novel, 2005’s Saving Fish From Drowning dealt with American tourism in a foreign land instead of her traditional subject matter—Chinese families, particularly mothers and daughters, and how their lives change as a result of immigration—and New York Times reviewer Andrew Solomon lamented, “Tan is wonderful at old fictions of ancient lands; let us hope she will return to that territory in the future.”

Well, lucky you, Andrew Solomon: Tan’s latest is a “family saga of fate and identity that moves from the lavish parlors of Shanghai courtesans to the fog-shrouded mountains of a remote Chinese village.” In The Valley of Amazement, one mysterious painting touches the lives of three generations of women in a narrative that spans 40 years and reaches from the faraway mountains of China to turn-of-the-century Shanghai to 19th-century San Francisco.

Like Jhumpa Lahiri, Tan has a clear favorite subject area. But, also like Lahiri, Tan seems to have a why-fix-it philosophy: Her best-reviewed novels have been variations on her core theme, and 1993’s The Joy Luck Club has been translated into 35 languages and is considered by some to be a modern classic. 

Double Down: Game Change 2012
Mark Halperin and John Heilermann
November 5 (Penguin Press HC)

When Game Change surfaced in 2010 and told the inside story of the 2008 presidential election in the form of a fast-paced political thriller, there were aftershocks both in literary circles and in politics. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani called it a “spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations, and allegations”; meanwhile, an unnamed “former top Clinton aide” told Politico that “Everybody talked. Anybody that tells you they didn’t is lying to you.” The book was later adapted for a TV movie and became this year’s Golden Globe darling of the same title (much to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s aides' chagrin).

This year, Game Change’s authors, journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, are at it again, this time drawing inspiration from the 2012 presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

This Land That I Love: Irving Berlin, Woody Guthrie, and the Story of Two American Anthems
John Shaw
November 5 (Public Affairs)

Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” have a lot in common—both were written by sharp-witted buskers flush with talent but often strapped for cash. Yet the two songs that rank among the country’s most patriotic paeans have radically different takes on the land of the free: Guthrie hated his most famous work, which he wrote while homeless, and the song itself is a bitter response to Berlin’s more sincere composition, which became popular amid Hitler’s overseas ascent. Much of the songs’ mythology is, at this point, well-known history, but this book from author and composer John Shaw is not without new insights. Shaw’s research uncovers a previously unprinted verse to “This Land Is Your Land,” and, along the way, he explores the complex origins and cultural appropriations behind some of America’s other enduring musical relics.

Dangerous Women
George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
December 1 (Tom Doherty Associates)

The premise of Dangerous Women is simple and promising: George R.R. Martin and some of his neighbors on the New York Times fiction bestseller list—like Joe Abercrombie and Sharon Kay Penman—have written a collection of new, original short works that focus on tough, complex, deadly female characters. Of the 21 stories included in Dangerous Women, seven are set in their authors’ famous invented worlds. According to the publishers, that includes “a new ‘Outlander’ story by Diana Gabaldon, a tale of Harry Dresden’s world by Jim Butcher, a story from Lev Grossman set in the world of The Magicians, and a 35,000-word novella by … Martin about the Dance of the Dragons, the vast civil war that tore Westeros apart nearly two centuries before the events of A Game of Thrones.”

The state fair is going on in our area right now – it’s extremely well attended, and it’s known for, well, being one of the best state fairs in the country. 

Of course, the food is a huge draw at the fair.  Unless you have food allergies.  Then, you recreate the food at home. 

New this year was a mini doughnut batter ice cream.  It sounded amazing.  Now, I have no idea how to make a mini doughnut batter, but I can make ice cream and doughnuts! 

So, to celebrate the last day of the fair, Labor Day, and the official end to summer, here’s a scoop of Mini Doughnut Ice Cream just for you.

Mini Doughnut Ice Cream  - Inspired by the State Fair

Ingredients

• 1-2 cinnamon sugar doughnuts (I used this recipe base)
• 1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 3/4 C sugar
• 2 C whole milk
• 1 C half and half
• 1 C whipping cream

Directions

Begin by making (or purchasing) doughnuts.  We made our favorite buttermilk doughnuts and rather than glaze them we brushed melted butter on the doughnuts and rolled them in cinnamon sugar. 

Then, I took 1-2 doughnuts and broke them apart into small pieces.  I flash frozen these pieces by arranging them on a cookie sheet and placing them in the freezer for about 20 minutes. 

Meanwhile, mix together 3/4 C sugar with 2 C whole milk, 1 C half and half and 1 C whipping cream.  Sprinkle in the 1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon. 

Whisk all these ingredients together. 

Pour into the freezer bowl of your ice cream maker. 

Make according to your manufacturers directions. 

When the ice cream is ready, scoop into a large container and stir in the frozen doughnut bits. 

Cover and freeze for 3-4 hours and then serve.  Store leftovers in the freezer. 

Enjoy!

South Korea has long been a pioneer of human improvement through words ending in “-oplasty.” The country has helped paved the way for double-eyelid surgeries, dimple injections, calf reductions and even double-jaw surgery, to name a few.

Now South Korean plastic surgeons are taking on surgery that alters the appearance of emotion. Cosmetic tweaks like Botox have long minimized furrowed brows and frown lines. But a new technique called “Smile Lipt” carves a permanent smile into an otherwise angry face. The procedure, whose name combines “lip” with “lift”—get it?—turns up the corners of the mouth using a technique that’s a milder version of what Scottish hoodlums might call the “Glasgow grin.”

Glaswegian thugs missed out on a potential fortune; the Seoul-based Aone Plastic Surgery has patented the procedure, according to the clinic’s blog. For $2,000, it now offers patients the chance to be thus transformed:

Here’s what you’re seeing, in the words of Aone’s Facebook page:

“After Smile Lipt surgery, mouth corners lifted upward even with just a little bit of movement and makes smiling lips, thus the middle part of upper lip won’t be lifted to show the gum. If gum is exposed with smiling, Smile Lipt is the most effective and simple method. At the same time, the smiling feature becomes very elegant.”

This 23-year-old shows that dudes can rock Smile Lipt, too. [Aone]

---

Put another way, Smile Lipt helps gummy smilers smirk less gummily. It also might benefit “patients with short mouth,” says the Aone blog, and "young people with innately downturned mouth corners.” People with those afflictions suffer psychologically, says Dr. Kwon Taek-keun, head of Aone. ” Even when you are looking like your normal self, people keep asking you: ‘Why are you frowning?’” Dr. Kwon told Korea Real Time. “That’s a lot of stress.”

As summer winds down, we find ourselves heading into our own season of change here at These Are Things. We will be quiet for a while as we work behind the scenes to get everything settled. There are lots of exciting new adventures ahead for us and we look forward to sharing them with you soon!

Major Cay is an uninhabited island in the Bahaman Exuma Cays. Uninhabited, that is, by people. On a pristine sandy beach on its northwest corner, there's a colony of around 20 pigs who retrieve food from passing boats and bathe with tourists.

Beyond the opportunity to have your photo taken in a real-life New Yorker cartoon, this phenomenon is both visually stunning and zoologically confounding.

Various theories persist as to how the happy pigs found themselves living a life of tropical luxury.

Some say sailors left the animals there to breed and one day provide a source of food for inhabitants of the island, and they never came back. Others claim a shipwreck dumped them there on the rocks, or that the pigs were introduced by the Bahaman government as a tourist attraction. If the latter were true, it was a wise move -- boat tours from the neighboring Fowl Clay and mainland Exuma run daily, and feeding the pigs is encouraged.

The level of mystery surrounding the swine's origins is somewhat peculiar, since the pigs first appeared as recently as 2001.

Major Cay, or "Pig Beach" as it's locally known, is an anomaly -- pigs do not normally live on beaches. In warm climates, pigs wallow in mud as a way of protecting their skin from UV rays. However, it seems that when there is tourist treat to be had, these animals will gladly risk the tropical Bahaman sun.

For years it was widely believed that pigs could not swim at all because they would cut their own throats with their sharp trotters, a myth perpetuated in Samuel Coleridge's 19th-century poem The Devil's Thoughts:

"Down the river did glide, with wind and with tide,

A pig with vast celerity;

And the Devil looked wise as he saw how the while

It cut its own throat. "There!" quoth he, with a smile,

"Goes England's commercial prosperity.""

But as Major Cay shows, pigs are actually very strong swimmers. Their island home is approximately one square mile in size and has three natural springs that provide fresh water for drinking. The beach is sheltered by neighboring islands from large waves caused by tropical storms, leaving tranquil waters for piggy paddling.

Neighbors include Johnny Depp, Nicholas Cage, and David Copperfield, all of whom purchased their own islands nearby in the Cays. It's also near Staniel Cay -- a.k.a Thunderball Grotto -- where the 1965 Bond movie was shot.

Most report that the animals are friendly, but caution should be taken when large mammals are chasing food. Eric Cheng, and underwater photographer who has visited the beach twice, described the scene to me via email.

"One thing that isn't obvious from the pictures is that the adult pigs are actually quite big and can run you over as they try to get to the food that tourists bring. While this is typically humorous when it happens, it is only funny because it is rare for a real injury to occur."

The herd has thrived; population estimates have increased from seven in 2011 to 20 today, and recently tourists have spotted three or four piglets on the sand. And although somewhat tamed by the tourist interaction, this wild herd provides an interesting insight into what zoological curiosities can manifest in the absence of man.

The pigs appear to be domestic breed gone feral, and not wild boars gone tame, and so it is likely that man played some part in placing them in their current habitat, as the theories suggest.

"The pigs appear to be somewhere between wild and tame. They are wild animals, but are docile and singularly interested in the pursuit of food, which is why they plunge into the ocean and swim out to boats." Eric told me.

If by some luck these animals are allowed to continue to live and procreate in the sandy saltwater, the long-term results of this unintended experiment could prove even more fascinating. But, for now, they provide a unique and myth-busting sight.

Last winter, I was declined by five health insurance companies. I am 26, do my preventative screenings like clockwork, and have no physical health problems. As my boss told me when I started working at a small start-up a few months ago that has no group health plan: “You’re young and healthy, I assume you’ll have no problems finding a new plan.” I smiled and weakly said, “of course.”

Five applications and four declines later, I anxiously awaited my last and final letter. The verdict came: Declined. Reason: Bipolar II/ADHD.

So there is my secret: Like millions of other Americans, I have a mental illness.

The most frustrating thing isn’t the insurance—with Cobra I can stay on the plan from my last job for 18 months. It costs $675 a month, but at least for now I have that option, which makes me luckier than many. No, the most frustrating part of my situation is that I can count on one hand the number of people who know about my mental illness. The stigma that surrounds mental health is suffocating, and I don’t feel comfortable talking about it with most of my friends and family, and certainly not my boss or colleagues.

But my illness is a huge part of my daily life. Just shopping for the perfect mix of medications is a full time job, with side effects from drugs tried and failed ranging from the merely awkward (flushed cheeks) to annoying (dry mouth) to incapacitating (flu-like symptoms that last for weeks). To keep my illness secret and managed, I go to therapy every week (for a while I did phone therapy at 6 a.m. so I could get to work on time), sneak to the kitchen or bathroom to take my morning and afternoon medications while at work, and make sure I go to my psychiatrist once a month during my lunch hour—often rescheduling and putting it off a week because a meeting or conference call comes up.

I mainly just want to tell my friends. I feel awkward even around my three close friends who do know. They get quiet and cock their heads, nodding and trying to understand—and I love them for that. But from the outside, they can’t fully understand—I’m 26, I graduated from Duke, I have a full-time job at an excellent company, I come from a nice Boston suburb, I lead what appears to be a typical twentysomething life—how could everything not be perfect?

There is a documentary that was recently released called Of Two Minds. It profiles several individuals around Los Angeles living with bipolar disorder, but no one featured was from the corporate world. In one review, the director mentioned that they had a Wall Street banker confirmed to be interviewed, but he dropped out last minute because he was afraid to lose his job. This is why I keep my mouth shut.

I worked an intense corporate job for four years before joining the start-up I’m at now. I work in a highly-coveted industry, and it was generally known that if you didn’t like your entry-level job, you were welcome to leave, and there would be a line of people out the door, happy to be your replacement. Few people have the opportunity to move up. After working hard for years, I was at the head of the pack, and felt like showing the slightest weakness would hurt my chances of getting a promotion. No one would say that out loud of course, but in every office I’ve worked in, I never once heard another employee openly mention dealing with a mood disorder, and given the size of my company, statistically I know I can’t have been the only one.

My doctors long suspected I was Bipolar II and I’ve had a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder and ADHD for years, but last summer I experienced my first hypomanic episode (the first of many), thus sealing the Bipolar II diagnosis. By continuing to work 14-hour days throughout the episode (which caused me to sleep less and expend way too much energy), I found that when it finally ended, I crashed much harder than usual. Making sure no one saw a difference in my work was my number one priority, and I was exhausted, spending my nights and weekends in bed either sleeping or too depressed to get up.

I needed to change meds quickly, but diverged slightly from the doctor’s recommendations to make sure the withdrawal and new side effects wouldn’t make me too sick to show up each day.  I considered taking a medical leave of absence, but was worried about the repercussions when I told my boss why. I just kept on working, definitely to the detriment of my sanity, because I felt like I had no choice. My only goal was to make sure no one knew what was happening and it meant my recovery took much longer.

I was able to keep working without letting anyone know I was sick. I was and continue to be just as reliable as the rest of the employees at my company. I work hard, constantly get stellar reviews, and hardly ever take a day off. I have always shown up earlier and left later than most, and am confident that despite the extra work it requires, I have never once let my mental health affect my job.

But I still feel like I can’t tell anyone. At my former company, everyone gossiped in mock horror about a manager who "had a mental breakdown” and went away for awhile, as though he had a contagious disease no one wanted to catch. And he was a manager. As a millennial in the early stages of my career, I can’t afford to be seen that way.

When one of our high-profile clients committed suicide last year, for days my co-workers said that they couldn’t understand why he would ever feel that way. He was so successful. I sat there mute, thinking about how many times I’ve been on the edge, and how many times I’d heard offhanded comments describing colleagues as "crazy,” "schizo," and "bipolar.” At one point I mentioned the ADHD part of my diagnosis to a colleague I was close with, trying to test the waters on the mental illness topic, and her response was “Whatever, you just love taking Adderall,” which ironically, is the drug I hate taking the most. I realized after that conversation that I wouldn’t be mentioning I was bipolar to anyone anytime soon.

I know I’m being hypocritical. Though I may wax poetic about erasing the stigma of mental illness, I’ve changed my name and the particulars of my life. I’m still scared of people treating me differently and of my boss feeling like I’m less capable of doing my job. I want to be the person that uses my real name and admits what I’m going through to put a face to the stigma of mental illness in the workplace, but I can’t. It terrifies me.

My doctor said I need to see this like having diabetes—it is a lifelong chronic illness that I just have to manage. Instead of insulin, its daily meds, therapy, making sure I get enough sleep, avoiding alcohol, and limiting high-stress situations. None of that advice is compatible with working in an inflexible corporate setting where I can’t be open about this. When I travel for work, I need to make sure the flights aren’t too late or early. When I go to work dinners, it’s awkward not to partake in the expensive bottles of wine going around—I often end up drinking at least one glass, even knowing that it could set off a hypomanic or depressive episode. The constant balancing act of managing my illness and keeping people from knowing about it creates its own stress, further compounding the issue.  

I would love to be able to sit down with my boss and/or HR and explain what my illness is, the precautions I need to take, and how lessening that stress would make me a better employee. But I can’t do that while feeling like I could put my job at risk. If companies really treated mental illness like diabetes, it would do wonders to make these diseases more manageable for people dealing with them. 

The Miley Cyrus – Robin Thicke performance was the perfect storm. The failure of the Disney Girl to turn into a Disney Princess, combined with the rapey mysogyny of Thicke’s song served, despite everyone’s vocal horror, to uphold the exact sexist tendencies we projected on to both of them.

Does that seem extreme?  Let’s start with Miley.   At the age of 12, Miley Cyrus was cast in Hannah Montana, where she would play a dual role – the girl next door with a secret double life as a pop star. For most of the series, the main character – named after Miley herself – was able to transition between her two identities rather seamlessly, with manageable problems.

Metaphorically, this is what Disney Girls are supposed to do.  They are supposed to be innocent girl-next-door types during their lucrative shows, then seamlessly transition into their sexier adult selves, in a perfectly contained way.  This transition is completely different from what is expected of Disney Boys.  They are expected to turn into Princes, to be sure, but they get to wear the same amount of clothes they did as boys and aren’t expected to be as flexible.  Literally.

This transition from Virginal Girl to Sexual Woman is expected of most women, I believe.  And most experience it a little more locally, or religiously – they should remain pure until a certain date that society decides – probably marriage – then turn into a sexual tiger.  Traditionally, sexuality is forbidden until the moment society decides it should be obligatory, though only for the appropriate party, the husband. Everyone else knows, but can’t fully see, the transition.

This dynamic plays out in celebrity life, but voyeuristically.  How many headlines say that a women is flaunting her bikini bod when the fact is that the paparazzi were hiding in the bushes a hundred yards away taking the picture while she was trying to enjoy some time off? (I’m looking at you, Huffpost)  She’s flaunting it….we’ll come back to that later.  For now, let me summarize the first sexist projection by saying that the public expected Miley to grow into a sexpot but expected her to do it in a way more comfortable for us to watch and allow us to be proud of little Hannah Montana.

But in addition to the being the demure sexpot, Miley was also supposed to be a mom.  Witness the many, many comments today about how people hope her younger fans weren’t watching. She was supposed to be an example of how to go elegantly into adulthood.  That’s what she agreed to at the age of 12, right?

Turning to Mr. Thicke.  There is the same theme of virginal girls waiting to be turned into sex fiends at the hands of the right man.  She’s not making it clear – hence the blurred lines – but that must mean she really wants it.  The bitch.

Thicke could have made a perfectly reasonable song about how its hard to read people sometimes because of conflicting signals and emotions, but hoping for certain results.  This wasn’t that song.

Miley was the perfect choice to pair with Thicke.  She can be labeled as the good girl who wants it.  She’s asking for it – you’ve seen the video right?

And so Thicke struts calmly around the stage, just a guy trying to sing while Miley begs him for it.  She’s flaunting it…And thus gets what she deserves, which is condemnation by the audience who can’t believe how Hannah Montana turned out.  And little comment about Thicke, who has seemingly proved that good girls want to get nasty.  He’s merely an observor to her embarrassing act.

So – the performance was merely sexist expectations taken to their logical VMA extreme.

The take-away?

1.  Miley is not a princess.  She is rather awkwardly trying out different forms of sexuality and identity.  As most people do, but without handlers and lots of money to make videos of it.

2.  Miley has no responsibility to lead your kids morally.  Any parent who bought a Hannah Montana back-pack with Miley’s face on it should have explained to their child that Hannah is fictional.  And that Miley is only human and thus prone to doing stupid things.  And a 12, or 14, or 18-year- old does not have the life experience to have any idea what being a good role model is.  At best they are imitating what someone else told them.

3.  That being said, Miley does have responsibility.  She is choosing to stick her tongue out an annoying number of times and masturbate in front of a video camera. She is old enough to be making her own mistakes, which I believe she is in fact doing, and hopefully she will learn.  Especially if she realizes that while she might have been rebelling at the VMAs, she was also being used by others to prove the opposite of the point that she was trying to make.

4.  Blurred Lines is just one of a thousand stupid male songs that both casts women as innocent and a little bit scared, yet also wanting nasty sex and to be completely controlled.  Yawn.  I wish I could just make some sort of Napolean complex joke and move on, except the ramifications of this kind of thinking result in the real-life problems of rape culture and blaming the victim.

The winning submission to The New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest #388, by Jerry Sobol, of New York, N.Y., appears to the lay reader, or the person in need of glasses, to be a simple joke about how careless middle-aged men can be about their spouses. A closer read reveals a dark, Cheeveresque narrative penned by Sobol, who likely harbors retrograde opinions about women’s place in the world that would horrify the average New Yorker reader.

A chinless man carrying a bag of golf clubs and wearing golf clothing, has burst into a surgery, perhaps while attempting to locate a stray shot (whether he is playing golf within the hospital or nearby is immaterial, though both, we must point out, seem equally absurd). The surgeon and his support staff look on, dumbfounded. The man asks: “How’s my wife doing?”

Classic. Famously described as “a good walk spoiled,” golf is so much more than that to a certain breed of American men. It is an affair without the affair. A long-running poker game without the disgusting cigars (well…). The sport may have become more inclusive since the Augusta National Club invited its first black member to join way back in 1990—or, I suppose the year right before that—but rest assured that few men are happy when their wives take it up. It is a five-hour ticket away from all familial duties, which goes a long way to explaining why so many people spend so much money playing a game that is so consistently vexing and humiliating.

So the lay cartoon reader, whether male or female, hardly has to think about this—which is “the idea” of a New Yorker cartoon, after all, a quick interstitial chuckle, to give you a break from the emotionally draining narrative about a Turkish restaurant that makes Turkish people cry, or whatever. Clearly a sandbagging, Polish-joke-telling, hideous-swing-swinging scumbag golfer has taken the opportunity presented by his wife’s second breast augmentation to catch a quick round. Har-har. Whattadick! That men who golf are careless toward their wives is such a fat and juicy trope-fruit on the trope-ula tree in your average New Yorker reader’s backyard that the branch hangs so low the neighbor’s cat routinely paws at it while writhing around on its back in the way that cats do. It’s so goddamned obvious that we’d be rubes to not assume it this what it could only be: a diversion, sleight of hand—a mere layer of gloss over the hideousness that lies beneath it.

But no. Take a look at the area surrounding the surgeon’s mask.

Even a child would recognize these lines to be the universal cartoon sign for movement, indicating that the surgeon’s mask is moving, from which we can infer that he is speaking. Once you realize that the surgeon is asking the golfer how his wife is doing—and not the other way around—the scene takes on a depraved air.

Seeing past Sobol’s trickery, the story writes itself: the Surgeon works surgeon’s hours (erratic), making surgeon’s pay (handsome), enough that his wife doesn’t have to work, but, this being 2013, she’s not sure she wants kids either, and so she takes up a hobby—on a whim, golf. Part boredom, part loneliness, part just honest-to-God not-giving-a-shit, she starts sleeping with the pro. It’s not even that she finds him attractive, it’s his un-Surgeon-ness that appeals to her. You know how these things go: one second he’s helping her with her backstroke, hands around her waist, like that one scene in Tin Cup (1996), the next they’re always finding reasons to book the (private) area with the high-tech swing analysis equipment.

This goes on for some time, rather discreetly until it hits an inevitable snag. The surgeon gets called in for what he thinks will be an all-night thing—another texting-while-driving case where a kid got all intertwined with a roll of chicken wire from the flatbed that had been in the other lane—but the patient died before the Surgeon even had a chance to operate. He came home to the sound of the back door slamming, and found one of those screw-in plastic golf spikes and a combination divot-remover/yardage finder left behind on the rear patio. Why are you home so soon? his wife asked, stepping out of the shower, her hair barely wet. His beeper goes off before he can say a thing: 911. The other guy, the guy driving the chicken-wire truck, he just showed up.

Apologies if that is all a bit obvious. It’s just that some people are terribly bad at inferring what has happened just “before” the events of a single-panel cartoon unfold.

The Surgeon, furious, fools both the golf pro and the hospital staff into allowing the confrontation we witness to happen. (If you must know: by telling Golf Pro and the staff that it was the Golf Pro’s younger brother upon which he was operating. Distraught, Golf Pro was in such a hurry, he forgot to leave his clubs behind.) As Golf Pro bursts in, Surgeon’s entire staff looks up him—ruling out the possibility, which might cross a less-capable reader’s mind, that the Golf Pro is an apparition brought on by jealous rage—distracting them from the patient’s surgery. “How’s my wife doing?” says the Surgeon, scalpel in hand, chill in his voice.

Golf Pro hardly has time to reach for his six iron. We all know how it ends for the truck driver.

One cannot witness a morality play this heavy-handed without wondering about the author’s intent. Thematically, it’s practically an homage to the midnight movie favorite The Room (2003), about an affable but severely mentally handicapped Moldovan man driven to an unintentionally humorous suicide by his scheming jezebel of a bride-to-be. Just as viewers would be right to wonder if Tommy Wiseau, The Room’s auteur, harbors a deep-seated hatred of women, we must wonder the same about Sobol. Why else would he subject us to this absurd tragedy unless he wanted to teach us some lesson about how he believes women, liberated as they are now from their traditional responsibilities, bring men low?

This column typically assumes that New Yorker readership understands, or at least intuits, the deeper meanings behind the Caption Contest winners, but if that were the case here, it would be an ugly glimpse into their collective psyche. No, it’s clear the wool was pulled over both the readership and even, perhaps, the editors’ eyes: all the finalists to the contest are submissions that assume the Golfer is speaking. This widespread misreading of the cartoon concerns me, as it should any scholar of single-panel cartoons, but it also offers relief, of a sort. No, not all subscribers to The New Yorker harbor a misogynist agenda. It’s just Sobol, that magnificent trickster.

Willy Staley contributes to Shitty New Yorker Cartoon Captions.

“I’m not a car guy,” writes our submitter from Los Angeles, “but I’m in love with my neighbor’s car. I walk by every day hoping a ‘For Sale’ sign will show up.” Today, he happened to found this note (which I read more like the beginning of a story story) stuck to the windshield instead.

related: Signed, Your Proud Wife

Indulging in food doesn’t always have to mean eating huge portions of something heavy and filling. Sometimes for me it’s more about having a nibble of something really special. So when I finished my tough work week this past Friday, I wanted to make a really fancy little snack to welcome in the weekend. I got a loaf of nice crusty French bread, some good ricotta, a really ripe and juicy peach, and I indulged.

These Peach and Ricotta Crostini combine crunchy French bread with creamy ricotta, sweet-tart peaches, and a hint of salt and pepper for contrast. The simple flavors play perfectly against one another and make for a really great food experience.  Add a glass of chilled white wine and Friday night is set (I like to Liz-Lemon my Friday nights with a movie, wine, and snack – going out is for the young ones). If you’re hosting a party, there’s no appetizer faster, easier, or more impressive.

There are a few key factors that will make or break these little wonders:

• Good French bread – None of that soft fluffy stuff, please. Get a real baguette.
• Good Ricotta – Not all ricotta is created equal. They can range from tasteless and rough to sweet and smooth. Find a brand that tastes good enough to eat on its own.
• Ripe Fruit – If peaches aren’t in season at the moment, try plums, pears, apples, or nectarines.
• Freshly Cracked Pepper – Freshly cracked pepper tastes 100x better than that black flakey stuff in the shaker. Having a pepper grinder will change your cooking forever.

If you want to get fancy, you can also brush some good olive oil on the bread before toasting, use a specialty salt, or add a couple sliced almonds. I wasn’t trying to go too overboard, so I kept it simple… but in my mind the sky is the limit!

Peach Ricotta Crostini

Step by Step Photos

Make sure to get a good loaf of French bread. It should be crusty with a chewy interior and have nice big holes. Oh perfection! Anyway, slice it up into about 24 slices (you can easily make a half batch, too).

Toast the slices in a 400 degree oven for a few minutes, or just until they become a little crisp. If you want, you can brush a little olive oil over the surface before toasting.

Meanwhile, slice your peaches very thin. I sliced each half into 12 pieces. 

Once the bread has toasted a little, spread a bit of ricotta over each slice. Now, whole milk ricotta is going to be the most delicious. I’ll give you a pass for part-skim, but fat free is NOT allowed. It will just not be good and it will hurt my feelings.

Add a small pinch of salt and a sprinkle of freshly cracked pepper to each crostini. The little bit of salt makes the most wonderful contrast to the sweet peaches and the pepper gives a little-bitty-baby kick. It’s so perfect.

That pepper grinder right there – my secret weapon! And it’s inexpensive!

Mmm… juicy peach.

The post Peach Ricotta Crostini appeared first on Budget Bytes.

(via CargoCollective)

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Neil Hilborn has OCD, and he's a slam poet. His love poem “OCD," below, was recorded at a poetry event called Rustbelt in Madison, Wisconsin in June. In it, Hilborn describes the first woman to become the focus of his obsession, and the good and bad of that.

Today the Internet, namely Reddit, found the video, and apparently it spoke to a lot of people, because suddenly Hilborn had a lot of fans who wanted to thank, congratulate, and know more about him.

Hilborn says the tics "are an intentional performance, but they are also my actual tics. Sometimes in performance they become real."

Other Reddit users sympathized:

As a fellow OCD sufferer, I know all too well how much truth your poem has. That girl who makes you better, and helps all the ticks go away. She's the last thing you think about at night, and the only thing you obsess about. You feel bad for making her go through all your motions, but she does it because she loves you. When she's not there, you get lost in your own thoughts, and that feeling of anxiety and nausea comes back, and you just can't wait to be able to talk to her again to get your mind off of it. For anyone who doesn't understand how awful OCD is and thinks this poem is just a bunch of hyperbole, it's not.

Hilborn also said that the relationship in question did not last. The odds did seem against it. But he's doing well in terms of the OCD symptoms nonetheless, after years of therapy.

Did you think you'd be engaged by hipster slam poetry today?