Notes on 21st-Century Mystic Carly Rae Jepsen Jia Tolentino | The Awl “Carly Rae Jepsen is a pop artist zeroed in on love’s totipotency: the glance, the kaleidoscope-confetti-spinning instant, the first bit of nothing that contains it all. This is audible and immediate in her voice, whose definitive quality is a childlike ardency inflected with coyness; she sings like her smile is bursting, like there are stars imploding in her eyes.”
The Late, Great Stephen Colbert Joel Lovell | GQ “And then we got onto the subject of discomfort and disorientation, and the urge he has to seek out those feelings, and from there it was a quick jump to the nature of suffering. Before long we were sitting there with a plate of roast chicken and several bottles of Cholula on the table between us, both of us rubbing tears from our eyes.”
Who Is Marc Jacobs? Sarah Nicole Prickett | The New York Times Style Magazine “One of his tattoos is an all-caps ‘perfect’ on his wrist, reminding him that he’s exactly who and where he’s supposed to be at that moment, and that everything is good because it’s there. It’s really about acceptance, not perfection. He wants to make precious things that people aren’t precious about.”
Holding Off Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems Dwight Garner | The New York Times “I could not stop for Emily Dickinson, but she kindly stopped for me. Her raw, spare, intense poetry was written as if carved into a desktop. Now that I am older and somewhat wiser, what I prize about Dickinson is that she lives up to her own observation: ‘Truth is so rare, it is delightful to tell it.’”
Here’s What’s Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up Dee Barnes | Gawker “That’s reality. That’s reality rap. In his lyrics, Dre made hyperbolic claims about all these heinous things he did to women. But then he went out and actually violated women. Straight Outta Compton would have you believe that he didn’t really do that. It doesn’t add up.”
“Happily Ever After” for African American Romance Novelists Christine Grimaldi | The Rumpus “ ‘People need to see that love is love, regardless of who you are, whether you love someone of color, whether you love another woman,’ Jenkins said. ‘Love is love.’ In a society that routinely relegates black women to the margins, or worse, romance novels underscore that their desires and their bodies are worthy of happily ever afters.”
‘Dead’ Again: AMC’s Promising Return to Zombieland Andy Greenwald | Grantland “One of the sharpest choices made in Fear the Walking Dead is the way it doesn’t rush past the frustrating banalities of existence en route to the apocalypse. Perspective matters: We need to appreciate the leaky faucet before we can attend to the gushing artery.”
The Abridged History of Disney, 2015-2040 AD Chris Plante | The Verge “Audiences are more likely to watch reality shows in which all contestants wear superhero costumes than they are to watch similar reality shows in which superhero costumes are not prominently featured, according to a report from the Paley Center for Media.”
I Spent Four Seasons as Amy Poehler’s Stand-In Hadley Meares | Atlas Obscura “For years, I have described my job thusly: I am a moving piece of furniture. I am a crash test dummy with a working mouth. I am the understudy that never overtakes. I am the cheat sheet. The technical term for my job is ‘stand-in.’”
Why You Can’t Look Away From the Affleck Nanny Scandal Adam Sternbergh | Vulture “Ouzounian’s so fascinating because she’s our modern civilian surrogate, who’s passed over to the other side of the glass. Someone finally found a way to photobomb celebrity. Can’t you see her? There she is, popping up in the rolling Instagram feed of the famous, and she’s waving at us, and we can’t look away.”
“You can say almost anything to someone if they feel safe. Likewise, you can hear almost anything, if you feel safe. Now let me be clear — I’m not suggesting negative feedback will make you feel giddy — but I am suggesting that if you feel psychologically safe you’ll be able to hear it, absorb it, reflect upon it.”
Illustrator and cartoonist David Ostow's series of "updated inspirational quotes" is just the thing for people who are occasionally rubbed the wrong way by Pollyanna-ish "inspiration," whether it's in the form of a graphic shared by your most peppy social media connection or uttered verbally by a perky coworker first thing in the morning.
Ostow takes the most cliched of sayings and gives them delightfully twisted twists. But he doesn't take the whole thing seriously, and hopes those who read the series don't either. He told BuzzFeed,
"I’m all for the power of positive thinking but aphorisms are by nature reductionist…I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, I just hope these make people laugh.”
See a collection of Ostow's updated inspirational quotes here, and see his Instagram for more examples of his work.
The Internet is awash with guides for finding success on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. A quick search yields (in numerical order):
“6 Tips From Kickstarter on How to Run a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign”
“Crowdfunding Secrets: 7 Tips For Kickstarter Success”
“8 Things I Learned From My (Failed) Kickstarter Campaign”
“Kicking Ass & Taking Donations: 9 Tips on Funding Your Kickstarter Project”
“10 Tips I Wish I Knew Before I Launched My Kickstarter Campaign”
And so on.
But the best advice to those seeking money online might sound more like this: Be thin, fair-skinned, and attractive.
It is true that in many realms, crowdfunding has delivered on its democratic promise. Take female entrepreneurship: It’s been shown that professional investors consistently view pitches from men more favorably than those from women, even when the content of those pitches was the same. Kickstarter has subverted that. On the site, projects launched by women are more likely to secure funding than those started by men.
That said, some recent research suggests that when it comes to websites that connect investors with entrepreneurs and donors with charitable recipients, the Internet’s levelling power is not strong enough to dissolve other types of longstanding bias. Fundraisers’ physical appearance, which is evident from their profile pictures on sites such as Kickstarter and Kiva, can subtly guide donation or investment decisions. That’s worrying as a trawl through beseeching online profiles has become a more and more common way for donors, investors, and shoppers to decide how to give their money not just to any given entrepreneur, but even to homeless people and prospective college students.
Recently, researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the National University of Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University (also in Singapore) looked at how users of the microlending site Kiva decided who they’d give a loan to. (While they studied Kiva in particular, their findings are about the users of that site, and are likely relevant to how funds get distributed on other platforms that feature the profile pictures of those seeking money.) To start, the researchers coded and rated the profile pictures of thousands of potential recipients, recording their attractiveness, skin color, and physique. (These are glaringly subjective, but each picture was rated by four different people on two different continents, to make sure that ratings didn’t differ too wildly.)
After analyzing the tens of thousands of loans made in a single month, the researchers found that Kiva’s users appeared to rely on the physical characteristics visible in profile pictures when choosing a recipient. The discrimination could be quantified: For a loan of $700, the average size on Kiva, the beautiful received the equivalent of a $60 bonus. Recipients who were overweight or had relatively dark skin, on the other hand, would suffer penalties of roughly $65 and $40, respectively.
Even though Kiva has charitable elements, picking a recipient is still an investment: Even a purely charitable lender will try to maximize the chances of recovering his or her loan, if only to make another one on the site. Keeping that in mind, what if Kiva users are consciously seeking out the beautiful, the slim, and the fair-skinned because they think those types of people will be more likely to repay their loans on time? The researchers investigated this possibility, and found that these characteristics aren’t useful predictors of whether a recipient will pay back his or her loan. While Kiva’s users might not be consciously unfair, their biased decision making doesn’t lead to any smarter investments.
Regardless of whether such bias is conscious or unconscious, the researchers had a guess as to why some users were being swayed by physical characteristics. “We argue that implicit discrimination may characterize lending decisions on Kiva, because of the dizzying array of choices available and the lack of any obvious decision criteria for making a funding choice,” they write. Without anything else to go on, users default to old stereotypes. Indeed, it turned out that the same investment biases didn’t appear when the researchers analyzed only the loans made by the most experienced of Kiva’s lenders.
The perks of asking for money while beautiful don’t stop at Kiva—earlier this year, University College London’s Nichola Raihani and the University of Bristol’s Sarah Smith uncovered a similar effect in the fundraising efforts arising from the London Virgin Marathon. (Unlike in the Kiva study, Raihani and Smith focused on perceived attractiveness alone, not skin tone or body size.) As with many distance-running events, marathoners were encouraged to raise funds for various causes, and could set up pages with their fundraising goals and a list of donor names and their pledged amounts. As in the Kiva study, the researchers recorded recipients’ gender and attractiveness. Then, they closely examined the donations that accumulated on each page.
They noticed an interesting pattern. It wasn’t just that more-attractive runners of both genders brought in more money (which they did, netting nearly $300 more on average). It was that the order and size of the previous donations mattered: Whenever men donated a lot of money (“a lot” being twice as much as the average donation on that page) to an attractive woman’s cause and then were listed as the most recent donor on her page, the next man who donated tended to pledge an even larger amount of money. Ignoring gender, the typical follow-up contribution when one person donated a lot of money was about £10 larger than the average donation; when it was a man following another man’s large donation on an attractive woman’s page, the increase was closer to £30. Men gave four times as much in this case than they normally did following a large donation to a less-attractive woman. (Women demonstrated no such pattern.)
Men Donate More When Trying to Show Off on an Attractive Woman’s Profile
Raihani and Smith
To make sense of this behavior, Raihani and Smith thought of each donation page as a “tournament” in which men vied for the attention of attractive female runners. The researchers wrote of “a biological market, where individuals compete for access to partners with the highest market value by signaling their value through costly helping displays.” Whether the men knew it or not, the theory goes, they were using big donations to signal that they were wealthy or that they were cooperative—both of which are sought-after traits on the evolutionary market.
Parts of the online marketplace, then, are subject to the same old biases that reign in the analog world. Just as the Kiva study suggested, door-to-door fundraising experiments in the past have shown that attractive women and non-black people have an edge. And just as the marathon study revealed, men playing a small game in a lab were shown to be more generous when a woman was present—and even more so when that woman was attractive.
Some biases may be even stronger on the Internet. A study published earlier this year catalogued a series of interactions on World of Warcraft, and found that the appearance of players’ avatars ended up shaping how likely they were to get receive help from others in the game. Even though avatars are customizable and offer no useful indication of a player’s physical appearance (let alone personality traits), the more-attractive ones tended to get more help. And when female players picked male avatars, they received less public goodwill than male players who picked male avatars. Which suggests a corollary to an old saying: On the Internet, everyone knows you’re a woman.
Keeping a to-do list has long been one of the most efficient methods of managing errands, household tasks, and workflow. Whether it’s grocery lists, reminders, or repairs, the feasibility of a day’s workload is made much more palatable with a simple list format. In today’s world, however, with increased demand for productivity and output, as well as the drastically increasing speed of communication, it’s harder than ever to keep track of those lists.
If you’ve ever sat down to write a to-do list only to discover you’ve completely forgotten everything that would have actually been listed, I’m here to help. Below I’ve listed concrete steps to help you prepare a to-do list for your to-do lists:
1. Buy stationery and writing utensils
First and foremost you’ll need to take a trip to the store to purchase whatever your preferred stationery and utensils are. Generally speaking, most office supplies shops offer a wide variety of paper styles and fashions. Choose the store that you’re comfortable with, and purchase the materials that you can reasonably afford. Now, I realize you may be concerned about your ability to remember to perform this task since it isn’t actually a part of the to-do list. I’ve taken this into account for step #2:
2. Buy stationery and writing utensils
So, in order to make sure that you remember to take the initial trip to the store you must actually take an EARLIER trip to the store to buy paper and leave yourself a note about this matter. This way, you’ll know with absolute certainty that you won’t forget to head to the store to buy the materials to make the ACTUAL to-do list that will curate all of your to-do lists. It seems a bit overwrought, but taking the necessary steps as I’ve laid them out for you will make all the difference in the end.
3. Buy stationery and writing utensils
Okay, just bear with me here. To ensure that all the steps are followed you might want to just head over to the stationery store immediately. Just, drop whatever you’re doing and drive to the store, like, right now. Buy as much paper as you can afford so that you can write all of this down. If for some reason you start to get consumed by this process and forget to nourish yourself, remember you can always take breaks in between writing out reminders to hydrate and use the restroom.
4. Buy stationery and writing utensils
For legal reasons I think it is important to stress that last bit of step #3 — if you’re feeling faint or need to get out of the sun PLEASE remember to do so. Your health is the most important thing, and if you’re not nourishing your body you aren’t going to be performing at full capacity. Maybe at an earlier date buy a pack of uniquely colored paper or some sticky notes (so they will stand out!) and write all of this down.
5. Buy stationery and writing utensils
There’s a chance that I haven’t actually thought all of this through. In fact, there may not be enough paper being produced annually to fill your needs as I’ve laid them out for you. Still though, a trip to the stationery store won’t hurt. As a matter of fact, every time I’m in there I pick up some little knickknacks or things for my desk. I have this little metal helicopter that doubles as a paperweight. It’s kind of a fun little desk toy. In a way it kind of relaxes me, y’know? It’s kind of a little stress reliever, and lord knows we all suffer a little too much of that nasty business.
6. Buy stationery and writing utensils
I’ve been really depressed lately. I’m living paycheck to paycheck and it doesn’t seem like I’ll ever be able to dig myself out of this negative loop. I can’t shake this heightened sense that as a people we’re simultaneously united and divided by grief and heartache, and we’re just silently riding out the waves of our collective misery until the sun eventually burns out and all of life as we understand it gets sucked into nothingness. Here today, gone tomorrow, am I right? Hah. I had an uncle who used to say that all the time. He’s dead now, though. Death is inescapable. The booze helps.
7. Buy stationery and writing utensils
I’m really sorry but I don’t remember what I was supposed to be helping you with. I started toying around with my paperweight here at my desk and it kind of took me out of it. You did need help with something though, right? What was it again?
Writer Alain De Botton says that status anxiety is more pernicious and destructive than most of us can imagine, and recommends getting out of the game altogether.
If watching the same thing at the same time is becoming rarer and rarer, though, what about the viewing party? Attending three of them gave us some insight.
