E são assim assim as pics da photoshoot mais recente da Megan Fox para o The New York Times Magazine. Tirem suas conclusões.

Pra variar, ela tá sexy. Mas o melhor da matéria acabou sendo a entrevista, como sempre reveladora.
Leiam algumas partes, não fiquem só babando pelas fotos, mesmo sendo very hard.

Sobre esteriótipos:
“Não sei se as pessoas tentam me esteriotipar assim. Por qualquer razão que eu não sei, eu acabei interpretando a garota má. Talvez porque tenham mais atrizes loiras do que atrizes morenas por aí, então visualmente sempre querem os dois opostos, a da menina boa versus a menina má. Acho que eu fiquei com este oposto”.

Sobre suas fãs mulheres:
“Mulheres podem ser mais cruéis do que os homens. Acho que algumas mulheres adultas me odeiam por alguma razão. As adolescentes me aceitam bem melhor”.

Sobre as tatuagens:
“Não penso muito quando coloco uma tatuagem. Acho que coloco elas por impulso. Quando eu completei o primeiro Transformers, eu coloquei a tatuagem da Marylin Moroe. Sempre gostei dela e fiquei intrigada, porque ela criou um personagem por trás dela mesma, um personagem no personagem. A psicologia por trás disto é muito interessante. E não queria por ninguém no meu braço que eu quisesse me espelhar, como Ava ou Liz. É, poderia ter sido Liz. Posso colocar tipo uma flor de caras famosas no meu braço”.

Sobre ser atriz:
“Sempre falei para a minha mãe que queria ser atriz. Acho que talvez tenha começado com a Judy Garland e O Mágico De Oz, mas eu nunca tive nenhum desejo de fazer outra coisa, e não sei bem porquê”.

E quem não curte essa mulher?

Apologies, I’ve been an awful blogger of late. It’s been, well, months. Not much in the way of excuses, except for a lot of traveling and concentrating on my two WIPs, THE COMMONPLACE BOOK OF THALIA DAARKEN and DIVING FOR AIR. Plus some magazine articles. Anyway, I can’t resist posting a little about Jung’s The Red Book, which is ever-so-close to reaching my library. Only a few more weeks to go…here is a teaser for those who are interested. I can’t wait, as Jung’s visions have influenced a lot of my writing for CBTD, and am sure TRB will inform even more of CBTD as I continue to pen the first draft…

Carl Jung said the Red Book stemmed from his “confrontation with the unconscious,” during which visions came in an “incessant stream.”
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

Here are some pictures from TRB: click on them to enlarge…

And this is an excerpt of an excellent piece by Sara Corbett writing in the New York Times magazine.

“The Holy Grail of the Unconscious”

“This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.

Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.

Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.

A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists.

Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture at the time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young family, a thriving private practice and a big, elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to teeter and slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a life-altering crisis.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”

Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.

Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”

And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.”

For the full article go HERE

The New York Times Magazine is devoting it’s August 23rd issue to the role of women’s rights, or more specifically, a lack there-of, in various situations/scenarios/countries around the world. As part of it’s coverage, the NYT Magazine (via Mark Landler) conducted an interview with Secretary Clinton, which is excerpted below, but definitely go check out the whole article because it’s a very substantive discussion and props to Landler for that:

Hillary Rodham Clinton staked her claim as an advocate for global women’s issues in 1995, when, as first lady, she gave an impassioned speech at a United Nations conference in Beijing. As secretary of state, she pushed to create a new position, ambassador at large for global women’s issues, and recruited Melanne Verveer, her former chief of staff, to fill it. And she has drawn attention to women at nearly every stop in her travels, most recently on an 11-day visit to Africa, during which, among other things, she went to eastern Congo to speak out against mass rape. Hours before leaving on that trip, Clinton discussed women’s issues and the Obama administration’s foreign policy for 35 minutes in her elegant seventh-floor office at the State Department. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

Q: In your confirmation hearing, you said you would put women’s issues at the core of American foreign policy. But as you know, in much of the world, gender equality is not accepted as a universal human right. How do you overcome that deep-seated cultural resistance?

Clinton: You have to recognize how deep-seated it is, but also reach an understanding of how without providing more rights and responsibilities for women, many of the goals we claim to pursue in our foreign policy are either unachievable or much harder to achieve.

Democracy means nothing if half the people can’t vote, or if their vote doesn’t count, or if their literacy rate is so low that the exercise of their vote is in question. Which is why when I travel, I do events with women, I talk about women’s rights, I meet with women activists, I raise women’s concerns with the leaders I’m talking to.

I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last great impediment to universal progress — that we have made progress on many other aspects of human nature that used to be discriminatory bars to people’s full participation. But in too many places and too many ways, the oppression of women stands as a stark reminder of how difficult it is to realize people’s full human potential…

[snip]

Q: Do you have a point of view about what should come first: Do you empower women economically and then hope that they seize a political role for themselves? Or do you seek to give them more legal and political standing and hope that they can win a place in the economic sphere?

Clinton: That’s a great question, because I think the historical record would show both routes have worked. Women were not particularly economically empowered when we finally included the right of women to vote in our Constitution. So women’s rights were expanded in 1920, and that opened up a lot of doors to women to see themselves in different roles, including economic roles, outside the home.

India’s been a democracy for 60 years, and remarkably extended the vote to everyone, every caste, to both men and women equally. So women have been given the right to vote, but without economic empowerment, they didn’t have the influence that their votes should have brought, which is why the government of India has made such a big point of extending economic and political opportunity equally to women.

And when we visited SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association [in India], those women had the vote before they were born, but being economically empowered, being able to stand up for themselves inside their families, on the streets of their villages, is giving them a sense of autonomy and authority that just their vote couldn’t have….

[snip]

Q: There are counterterrorism experts who have made the observation that countries that nurture terrorist groups tend to be the same societies that marginalize women. Do you see a link between your campaign on women’s issues and our national security?

Clinton: I think it’s an absolute link. Part of the reason I have pursued it as secretary of state is because I see it in our national security interest. If you look at where we are fighting terrorism, there is a connection to groups that are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident in their treatment of women.

What does preventing little girls from going to school in Afghanistan by throwing acid on them have to do with waging a struggle against oppression externally? It’s a projection of the insecurity and the disorientation that a lot of these terrorists and their sympathizers feel about a fast-changing world, where they turn on television sets and see programs with women behaving in ways they can’t even imagine. The idea that young women in their own societies would pursue an independent future is deeply threatening to their cultural values.

Q: Many of the countries where the abuses against women are most prevalent are also countries that have a vital strategic importance to the United States: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India. How can you aggressively advocate for women without jeopardizing those strategic relationships?

Clinton: Well, in a number of these strategic relationships, there’s a commitment to advancing the roles and rights of women. In India, the changes that have been made are remarkable. There are still tens of millions of very poor women, but women have assumed more and more responsibility; they are seen in public positions and increasingly economic ones, where their stature is accepted by society.

When I meet with the Chinese leadership, as I just did in the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, they have women who are part of their leadership team, and women who are assuming greater and greater economic and political roles.

Obviously, there’s work to be done in both India and China, because the infanticide rate of girl babies is still overwhelmingly high, and unfortunately with technology, parents are able to use sonograms to determine the sex of a baby, and to abort girl children simply because they’d rather have a boy. And those are deeply set attitudes. But at the governmental level, there is a great deal of openness and commitment that I am seeing.
In other societies where we have strategic security interests, it’s a challenge to move the agenda forward in a way that includes women’s issues. When we did our strategic review on Afghanistan, we said very clearly, We can’t be all things to all people in Afghanistan. We have to focus on a few critical concerns. But one of them was the role of women, and women’s participation in society…

I hope this sort of coverage of Clinton’s agenda continues. I particularly liked how Secretary Clinton, in response to a question, made the link between societies which utilize terrorism as a means of achieving goals, with the prevalence of entrenched, societal views of women’s and girls inferiority.

With the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, we have been seeing some major attention to another powerful and intelligent woman. Forget that she and Al Franken share a love of Perry Mason, Sotomayor is only our third female Supreme Court Justice to date and she has just weathered a pretty tough time in our media.

The second female Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was recently featured in one media source that has consistently over the last few weeks been paying a lot of attention to strong and intelligent women: The New York Times Magazine. In celebration of the approach of her 10th year as a Supreme Court Justice, the NYT Magazine interviewed Ginsburg in their July 12th edition about Sotomayor, affirmative action, and being a woman in a man’s workplace.

Here is one of my favorites of her responses:

“I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women’s organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man’s world. If you’re going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.”

Two weeks later, the NYT Magazine featured another influential woman, this time on their cover.

Valerie Jarrett, ‘Obama’s BFF’ as the article’s title calls her, is featured as a mysterious yet powerful pal to the President and a force to be reckoned with in Washingtonian politics. More a story about what people think of her than what she thinks, Jarrett’s ear is a sure-fire way into Obama’s inner circle. When asked if he runs all his decisions past Jarrett, President Obama replied: “Yes. Absolutely.”

A week later the NYT Magazine continued its trend with an article about Julia Childs, an essay about our daughters needing female superheroes and another pages-long spread on a woman–actress Anne Heche–who is making yet another power play, but this time in Hollywood, not Washington D.C.

The article candidly looks at the complicated public life that the actress has lead–from stories of sexual abuse, to hetero- and homosexual relationships, to dealing with split personalities. Heche appears honest and willing to learn to live better from each curve ball thrown her way. In her words: “The message of my life has stayed the same. I think I was a wonderful spokeswoman for the right to be loved.”

This Sunday in the NYT Magazine?  Well, my calendar has a note about the magazine publishing something about women in developing nations. Kudos to you, NYT Magazine!

Posted by: Autumn.

I have been wondering how the recession would hit art magazines.  Would there be a noticeable change or would some magazines just disappear?

When I received the January/February 2009 issue of Art on Paper I was disappointed to see that it had shrunk down to half its former size.  It seemed ironic; art on less paper.  In the publishers note at the beginning of the issue, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett brush off  financial troubles, claiming their reasoning for the change in size was because of environmental concerns and the physical weight of the magazine.  They promise that content, quality, and the “publications spirit” have not been reduced.  I have mixed feelings about it.  I am sad to see the small version of Art on Paper, but I also agree with their reasons for reducing the size.  It seems not only representative of the current economic climate, but also of the shift from print to digital, and increasing eco-awareness.

Other art magazines have made changes in layout, design, size, and paper too.  Bomb, for example, has shed it’s glossy paper for a heavy matte, Capricious printed it’s last two issues on newsprint (although it doubled in size), and The New York Times Sunday Magazine is smaller, thinner, and has been redesigned to cram as much information onto the page as possible.

I also recently received a letter informing me that Artweek has gone out of business after 40 years of publication.  This is the first major art periodical to go bust.

The only successful story to report on is the choice editor Tod Lippy made with the most recent issue (no.12) of Esopus Magazine.  When faced with financial trouble he made a truly creative choice.  The theme of the magazine is black and white, which saved him the high cost of printing in color.  Read The Editor’s Note here.  With the exception of a simple black and white poster, no fancy papers have been used, there are no inserts, or other ephemera which adorned previous issues.  The content, however, is just as rich and colorful as ever, and I was most excited to see an article about Bern Porter with a reproduction of his artist book: Where to Go/What to do/When in New York/Week of June 17, 1972.

This is a reminder to support the arts!  Don’t let your subscriptions lapse.  Art Magazines are wonderful venues for emerging and established artists to exhibit, write, and speak about art.  But, if you are feeling truly strapped for cash, here are some *free* online art magazines, blogs, and websites:

Triple Canopy

e-flux journal

Shifter Magazine

Art Fag City

ASDF

Club Internet

The Highlights

I Heart Photograph

Loshadka

Netmares/Netdreams

Private Circulation

Ubuweb

VVORK

Why + Wherefore

Spring Break

*many of these links borrowed from the exhibit Let’s Meet in In Real Life at Capricious Space this past spring.

No, I think I actually do J’adore him haha

Julien Vallée’s work is FANTASTIQUE! (And I haven’t quite figured it out yet… but there is something French about him I’m sure? He is from Montreal, Canada but currently working in Berlin, Germany)

I first saw his work on the back of issue 70 of Eye magazine (year’s subscription from the ex). He is also mentioned in an article; ’Make it Real’

The pastel colours used with the sharp edges of the 3D objects create an interesting and inviting visual, drawing the viewer into the image to find out more about it, or so I think anyway. This work was for MTV if you recognise it and are wondering where you might have seen it before!

I love this motion-branding of The New York Times Magazine in which the hand-cut paper letters uncurl to reveal the text. I haven’t been able to find a viedo of it other than at The New York Times Magazine’s website so you can watch it here: http://www.yatzer.com/1224_motion_branding_by_julien_vall%EF%BF%BD%C2%A9e

And I know I probably shouldn’t say this because up until now I have been really complimentary and proffessional… BUT this guy is not only talented but he is also HOT

He has also done an arrangement of objects for the cover of Print magazine which is neat! (No pun intended)

The New York Times Magazine released “A Journey Through Darkness” last week, an article Daphne Merkin wrote about her depression. Merkin takes us, in a melodic prose, through her experience at 4 Center, a treatment hospital in Washington Heights, New York City. Here she describes the onslaught of a depressive mood:

Surely this is the worst part of being at the mercy of your own mind, especially when that mind lists toward the despondent at the first sign of gray: the fact that there is no way out of the reality of being you, a person who is forever noticing the grime on the bricks, the flaws in the friends — the sadness that runs under the skin of things, like blood, beginning as a trickle and ending up as a hemorrhage, staining everything. It is a sadness that noone seems to want to talk about in public, at cocktail-party sorts of places, not even in this Age of Indiscretion.

“A Journey Through Darkness” puts us in a place where the literary world and the world of medicine so often coincide: the psychiatric hospital. Underneath the monotony of her descriptions of the day-to-day life in the hospital, sits the fear that the cure for her depression may be the thing that takes away her personality, her memories and her sense of self. She writes: “the patients I saw returning from ECT acted dazed, as if an essential piece of themselves had been misplaced.”

The fear brings to mind The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but other than a passing line about Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Merkin avoids the literary analogies. Maybe she avoids it because those stories end badly. Maybe she avoids it because this experience is about her. Maybe she avoids it because that’s her point, that in the modern age there are options. There is choice. There is hope.

The tension propels the story forward, and despite its lethargic tone the philosophical questioning pulls you through to the end of the sixth page. Merkin also finds in the midst of the melancholy, displays hints of humor, such as the advice Merkin received from her sister: suicide can wait, try the hospital.

Merkin’s essay is self effacing, but that’s what saves it from preachiness. She envies the anorexics at the clinic because they can blame part of their condition on society and fashion icons. She does not pretend to believe in psychotherapy or in a solution drug. She does not feign to be cured. Instead, she does what we all do. She thinks of her family and her loved ones and continues to work.

Spotted: Leighton Meester wearing some very bright and colorful clothes in New York Times Magazine.  As well as wearing some funky kaleidoscopic outfits, Leighton also spills on what’s coming up for Blair, her career, and family.  

• On being Jason Wu’s date: “He’s such a sweetheart. We actually went to Anna Wintour’s house for dinner. It was very cool and quite the fashion baptism by fire.”
• On the paparazzi and if it’s to the point where she has to wear full makeup to take out the trash: “I would never do that! Take out the trash, I mean. [Laughs.] You know, I never really had a problem with them but recently there have been a couple of incidents that have made me say, “What?” I was getting in a car after an event — where I had been photographed all night, by the way — and I was done posing and just wanted to go home. When I refused to take any more pictures, one of the photographers outside actually said, “We know where you live.” That was creepy. But you know they don’t bother me on a daily basis. I can pretty much go anywhere.”
• On her character Blair being very carnal and knowing for an 18-year-old: “I actually find Blair naïve. I look at young girls like her who are obsessed with guys and with being the most popular and the prettiest, and I just want to shake them. Maybe you just grow up a little faster when you’re a young performer, but I was definitely never like that.”
• On whether Blair’s style has influenced her’s: “Not at all. If anything, it’s the opposite. Her style is a little expensive for my taste but it loudly communicates that she is who she is and that she does what she does. I find that admirable. And she’s always dressed appropriately, which I can’t always say about myself.”
• On Blair’s look: “It’s kind of this updated Japanese schoolgirl look. Every other outfit is larger than life — even when it’s prim and proper — and heavily accessorized. I wear ties, bows, colored tights, heels and stuff that you could never get away with at school. But I think that the most important part of Blair’s look is her headband, which is like her crown.”
• On the show’s mature references - from “Berlin Alexanderplatz” to Sarkozy’s being a bad kisser to Kristen Dunst’s rehab stint: ”It’s definitely a crash course in pop culture and global affairs. We just mentioned Madoff the other day. But remember, we’re talking about the kind of privileged kids who by age 10 already have 12 stamps in their passport. They’re very wordly.”
• [SPOILER ALERT!!!] On what happens to Blair next season: “It’s yet to be decided, but I’m definitely going to college — to N.Y.U. — and not wearing any more school uniforms. Thank god we’re not pretending we all get held back and just continue with high school like all those other high school shows. I guess I’ll wear magnificent clothes every day that don’t have anything to do with school.” [highlight to read]
• On her music and if can expect a Lady Gaga makeover: “Absolutely. I’m determined to no longer wear pants. The music is electric pop, with a little bit of rock element to it. It’s not like bubble gum — it’s actually very edgy.”
• On doing movies: “Well, first I’m going on a much-deserved vacation. Then I’m starting work on a comedy called “Date Night,” with Steve Carell and Tina Fey. I play the babysitter and they go out for a date one night and everything goes awry. After that I’m starring in this crazy movie called “The Roommate,” which is directed by Christian Christiansen and is sort of a retelling of “Single White Female.” I’m the emotionally detached narcissist, but it’s early days and I still don’t know who’s playing the psycho opposite me.”
• On the rumors that she was born when her parents were in jail: “This is the type of thing that you can’t be too sensitive about — it’s not like I did anything that’s worth talking about. I love my parents very much, but people either continue or break the patterns of what their life should be and I just want to completely break whatever patterns would lead me to the same life choices that they made.”

Q: What do you think has held back Africans?
Dambisa Moyo: I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption– historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty– and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

Interview with Dambisa Moyo, “The Anti-Bono“

In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo explains that aid from celebrities and foreign countries in fact weakens many African countries because it takes agency away from African people, much like Amistad’s culmination as an American victory stripped agency from Cinque & his Mende countrymen. Furthermore, it reflects on points made in Keim’s Mistaking Africa about celebrities’ (like Bono) use of Africa as a way to reflect a better image of themselves, which can be detrimental to the very people they purport to help. Moyo points out that rarely do people question aid and its impact on both aid-giver and aid-receiver. She encourages the proactive to, instead of giving charity, work with organizations like Kiva to microfinance and help create much more sustainable incomes for people in need.

Amherst College has a budding microfinance club that also works with Kiva. If anyone is interested in joining or learning more, please contact Michael Hinckley at mhinkley09@amherst.edu

WHAT IS RENEE ASHLEY BAKER GETTING FOR CHRISTMAS?

1.  9 Magazines:  Nine magazines to purchase and publish photos of Renee Ashley Baker wearing “13 Dresses”.  (The “9″ magazines are: US, Newsweek, WWD, International Herald Tribune, USA Today, The New York Times Magazine , Vanity Fair , Vogue and “The Star” to promote my “Live Internet Show” from Monte Carlo)….plus….

2.  A Personal Assistant.    I will hire a personal assistant who will “work for me in New York City” while I’m residing in Monaco Monte Carlo.  (If Judy Lederman wants the job she is hired.  She , Judy, can work “at  her home” approximately  50% of the time.   Judy Lederman of New York –was seen this week on the  ”M & J Show”)….plus….

3.  The Kennedy Family.   I will “work ” for the Kennedy Family’s charity: SPECIAL OLYMPICS 2.    I will receive a salary of $50,000 a year and   I will “headquarter”  my  ”work” for the Kennedy Family’s “Special Olympics 2″  in Monaco Monte Carlo….plus….

4.  Harper Collins.  I will receive a $ 3-5 Million Dollar Book Advance from Harper Collins.  I will receive a $3-5 million dollar cash advance  to write  the book: “How I Became Envoy For The Kennedy Family by Renee Ashley Baker”….plus….

5.  Microsoft.  I will receive $1 million dollars per  year from Microsoft for their “sponsorship” of my “Live Internet Show”  which– will be broadcast from my condominium in Monaco Monte Carlo….plus….

6.  $5 million dollars in real estate.  A $3 million dollar condominium in Boston Massachusettes and a $2 million dollar condominium in Monaco Monte Carlo.

“Casino de Paris Monte Carlo” by Fort Ogden (on Flickr)

                                   “Monte Carlo”  by Millionengewi

FOR MORE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS?   (SCROLL DOWN)

Do Freakonomics.com:

Economistas se infiltram na Casa Branca? E agora?

Stephen J. Dubner e Steven D. Levitt

Na semana passada, o presidente eleito Barack Obama dominou o noticiário -e talvez agradou os mercados, a julgar pelos ganhos do índice Dow Jones- ao passar três dias antes do Feriado de Ação de Graças apresentando um economista atrás do outro para o público americano.

Lá estavam Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer e Austan Goolsbee -sem esquecer Timothy Geithner e Paul Volcker, que não possuem Ph.D. em economia, mas que também não ficam atrás.

A revista “The Economist” apresenta um bom artigo sobre esta inundação de economistas. Ela se concentra no contraste entre o governo de saída e o que está chegando.

“As políticas de Obama podem não vir a ser mais bem-sucedidas no combate à crise financeira e a recessão do que as de George Bush. Mas parece seguro dizer que a teoria econômica terá um papel maior na formação das políticas. É um grande contraste em relação ao governo de saída, no qual os economistas não tinham muito peso. Considere o diretor do Escritório de Gestão e Orçamento que, na condição de supervisor dos US$ 3 trilhões em gastos federais, exerce um papel-chave no estabelecimento das prioridades econômicas. Bush teve quatro: um foi executivo de laboratório farmacêutico, um cuidado das relações com o governo para um banco de investimento e dois eram congressistas. Todos os quatro eram formados em Direito. O indicado de Obama, Peter Orszag, o diretor de saída do não partidário Escritório de Orçamento do Congresso, é um economista profissional conhecido por livros como ‘Saving Social Security’, um tomo de 300 páginas contendo 37 páginas de notas de rodapé e oito apêndices.”

Eu obviamente sou fã da arte praticada por economistas acadêmicos como Romer, Goolsbee e Summers. Logo, eu naturalmente aprovo essas nomeações. Mas há muitas advertências aqui, assim como muitas incertezas. A Casa Branca está repentinamente tomada de economistas com Ph.D.; qual será o efeito? (Implícito na pergunta está: será que lhes darão ouvido, quem dará e que tipo de influência se espera que eles tenham?)

Eu repassei a pergunta para um companheiro chamado Steven Levitt, para o qual já foi, como notei em um artigo para a “The New York Times Magazine” em 2003, “oferecido um emprego na equipe econômica de Clinton e que a campanha de Bush contatou para ser um consultor sobre criminalidade”. Eis o que ele tinha a dizer:

“Os políticos não dão ouvidos a economistas acadêmicos porque as soluções defendidas pelos economistas raramente são politicamente populares. Apesar de Obama ser um dos presidentes mais intelectuais que temos em muito tempo -o que pode predispô-lo a escutar os economistas- as políticas defendidas pelos economistas tendem a ser voltadas para o livre mercado, o que provavelmente não cairá bem junto ao seu círculo interno.”

“Dito isso, Larry Summers pode ser a exceção à minha regra de que políticos ignoram os economistas acadêmicos; porque apesar de Summers ser, em seu âmago, um economista acadêmico, ele já se disfarçou de tantas outras coisas (secretário do Tesouro, presidente de universidade) a ponto de talvez ser capaz de infiltrar algumas boas idéias econômicas disfarçadas como outras coisas.”

Me permita acrescentar alguma coisa a esta sábia resposta:

1. Eu acredito que o argumento de Levitt sobre as soluções politicamente impopulares defendidas pelos economistas é um fator significativo aqui. Mas também acho que a atual recessão assusta tanto as pessoas que será dado a Obama bastante espaço para fazer escolhas que não seriam toleradas em tempos menos turbulentos.

Também vale a pena lembrar o que aconteceu há vários meses, durante a campanha presidencial, quando os altos preços da gasolina levaram à idéia de uma “renúncia fiscal para a gasolina”. Apesar dos economistas terem desprezado a idéia, os candidatos McCain e Clinton a abraçaram prontamente. Obama, por sua vez, a tratou como realmente era: um artifício populista que não ajudaria ninguém, exceto alguns poucos políticos a curto prazo. Assim, essa combinação de tempos desesperados e um presidente que não se deixa enganar por truques econômicos poderá funcionar bem. Dito isso:

2. Não é garantido que economistas acadêmicos sejam as pessoas ideais, ou mesmo boas pessoas, para ajudar a navegar pela confusão econômica em que estamos. Já foi bastante argumentado que poucos economistas previram a atual confusão. Mesmo de forma mais ampla, eu acho que é seguro dizer que os economistas acadêmicos não são muito bons em fazer previsões macroeconômicas. Esse é um assunto para outro dia, mas basta dizer que o economista de torre de marfim têm um péssimo retrospecto de prever a economia e nem mesmo um bom retrospecto em descrever precisamente os eventos econômicos recentes. Se você pensar que as melhores mentes econômicas do mundo podem, no mínimo, fazer com que os mercados econômicos se curvem à sua vontade para lucrar com eles, apenas lembre-se do que aconteceu ao Long Term Capital Management. Dito isso:

3. Se você olhar para o tipo de pesquisa feita por Romer, Goolsbee e Summers ao longo dos anos, o que você encontrará é um corpo de obra incrivelmente robusto que cobre muitos dos problemas que os Estados Unidos estão enfrentando no momento: ciclos voláteis de negócios e o papel do Federal Reserve (o banco central americano); como a economia do século 21 -e especialmente a Internet- mudou a dinâmica de preços e competitividade; as conseqüências, indesejadas ou não, das mudanças na política tributária; e como o governo deve melhor lidar com uma população em envelhecimento que precisa de bom atendimento de saúde e pensões. E isso é apenas uma amostra. Em outras palavras: essas são pessoas que investigaram a fundo para chegar a conclusões empíricas sobre questões que, sim, geralmente são decididas com base nos méritos políticos.

Assim, apesar de não duvidar de que Levitt está certo, eu mantenho uma esperança considerável de que os melhores instintos dos economistas acadêmicos podem ser explorados para fazer uma diferença positiva para a economia americana e mesmo sua estrutura política e social.

Isso não quer dizer que não existam muitos instintos ruins -uma certa arrogância que acompanha os argumentos de muitos economistas, uma disposição de discutir para sempre pontos menores e esquecer as metas maiores em jogo, etc.- mas se o eleitorado americano pôde escolher seu primeiro presidente de uma minoria, realmente é esperança demais que um pouquinho da melhor pesquisa econômica possa se infiltrar na Casa Branca?

(Tradução do UOL Mídia Global)

Aprovechando el segundo aniversario de uno de mis blogs de lectura habitual, Quintatinta, recupero la galería que publicó el pasado mes de enero con quince de las treinta mejores portadas de la revista The New York Times Magazine, que fue el post más visto de su blog en los últimos doce meses.

Galería completa aquí.

Por cierto, muy gráfica la portada de esta semana sobre El final del fin de la revolución (cubana):

A recent question from one of my readers, Amanda M., sent me in search of Spanish inspired cocktails.  Sangria of course is the first drink that popped into my head, but my feeling was Amanda wanted something more.  Wine however is an excellent starting point for cocktails.  Wine is significant in its flavoring and warming in its tone.  When using red wine in mixed drinks as is traditional in Spanish inspired cocktails, wine adds a sense of daring or boldness to the glass by the richness of color.

 

Tinto de Verano is a refreshing drink similar to Sangria.  However, there are fewer ingredients in this wine based mixed drink making it much easier and quicker to put together.  Tinto de Verano translates to red wine of summer.  In some regions of Spain it is common for locals to drink Tinto de Verano while tourists drink sangria.

Tinto de Verano

Tinto de Verano

1/2 cup red wine

1/2 cup lemon-lime soda, such as Sprite or 7-Up

Slice of Lemon

 

In a tall glass place three or four ice cubes.  Add red wine and soda.  Garnish with lemon slice. 

 

Agua de Valencia is a pitcher drink served in a broad mouthed cocktail glass.  Constante Gil from the bar

Café Madrid de Valencia in the city of Valencia, Spain served the Agua de Valencia for the first time in 1959.  Although it was popular within the small group of locals that frequented the bar, it was not until the 1970s that the Agua de Valencia became more widely known and grew in popularity.  Although the recipe below may not be the original recipe, it is a common one and rather tasty.

Agua de Valencia

Agua de Valencia

1/4 liter Cava Spanish Champagne

3/4 liter Orange Juice

1 deciliter Cointreau

50 grams sugar

 

Place all ingredients in a pitcher and stir.  Allow to chill.  Serve cold.

 

Zurracapote is also similar to Sangria.  It is made from red wine and mixed fruit such as peaches and lemons with sugar and cinnamon added.  This mixture is then traditionally steeped for several days.  Some recipes call for additional alcohol or juices to be added during the steeping process.  The result is a mild to medium alcoholic wine based drink similar in nature to Sangria.  The Zurracapote is usually prepared in large batches for local fiestas in La Rioja and Navarre.  There are probably as many variations to the recipe as there are those who wish to consume it.  However there is one below to begin your journey of experimentation.

 

Zurracapote

2.1 pints Red Wine

9 ounces Dried Peaches

3.5 ounces Raisins

3.5 ounces Dried Plums

7 ounces Sugar

1 Cinnamon Stick

Lemon Peel

 

Leave the dried fruits to soak in water for two hours.  Pour the red wine into a saucepan; add sugar, cinnamon and lemon peel.  Heat the wine mixture until it comes to a gentle boiling point.  Remove from the heat and stir continuously.  Drain the dried fruits very carefully and add to the wine mixture.  Cover the saucepan with the lid and return to heat to a gentle boil for 15 minutes.  Remove from heat after 15 minutes are up.  Zurracapote may be served hot or cold as desired.

 

Sherry is a fortified wine from Jerez, Spain.  It is called “Vino de Jerez.”  Sherry is different from other wines in that it is fortified with brandy after fermentation.  All natural Sherries are dry.  Fino means “fine” in Spanish.  Fino Sherry is the driest and palest of all traditional varieties of Sherry.  Below are a few Sherry based cocktails.

 

Brazil Cocktail

1-1/2 ounce Fino Sherry

1-1/2 ounce Dry Vermouth (try Noilly Prat)

1/4 teaspoon Anis Liqueur

1 Dash Bitters

 

Combine all ingredients with ice.  Shake thoroughly.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. 

 

Jerez Cocktail

2 ounces Fino Sherry

1 teaspoon Peach Brandy

1 teaspoon Cointreau

 

Pour into an old-fashioned glass filled two thirds with ice. 

 

Balm Cocktail

2 ounces Sherry

3/4 ounces Fresh Orange Juice

1/2 ounce Cointreau

2 dashes Angostura Bitters

2 slices Oranges

 

Mix all ingredients with the orange slices in a cocktail shaker.  Shake thoroughly.  Strain into a chilled martini glass.  Garnish with a flamed orange peel. 

 

Since we are talking wine, we cannot forget the most famous of all Spanish drinks made from red wine; Sangria.  Sangria is made with red wine, fruit juices, sparkling soft drinks, sugar and whole fruit chunks.  Often liqueurs are added to the combination as well as spices.  As with all great tasting mixed drinks, you must start with a good base.  Begin with a good wine and the freshest of fruits. 

Sangria

Tony Abou Ganim

The following recipes were found in a press release from Hilton Hotels some time ago.  Mixologist Tony Abou-Ganim created these cocktails specifically for Hilton.  Tony’s specialty cocktails have been featured in Vanity Fair, Wine Enthusiast, Fortune, Wine Spectator, The New York Times Magazine and Nightclub & Bar among others.  Tony is also The Modern Mixologist.  While the press release is out of date, these cocktails may still be available on cocktail menus at Hilton San Francisco, Hilton New York, Hilton Chicago and the Hilton Austin.  It never hurts to ask.  In the meantime, you can still make them at home with Tony Abou-Ganim to thank.

The Barcelona

3 ounces chilled dry white wine

1 ounce Bombay Sapphire Gin

1/2 ounce Grand Marnier

1/2 ounce Elderflower syrup

1 ounce Fresh Lemon Juice

1 ounce Freshly Squeezed Orange Juice

Slices of Fresh Lemons, Oranges and Strawberries

Chilled Sprite

Add to large wine glass slices of fresh fruit (lemons, oranges and strawberries), pour in fresh squeezed lemon and orange juice, add elderflower syrup, dry white wine, Bombay Gin, Grand Mariner and Sprite. Add ice and garnish with a fan of sliced strawberries and a sprig of mint.

Sao Paolo Samba

2 ounces ABSOLUT Citron or ABSOLUT Mandarin

1/2 Muddled Fresh Lime, quartered

1 ounce Simple Syrup

Seasonal fresh fruits

Cut lime into quarters. Add lime, seasonal fruit and simple syrup into mixing glass and muddle ingredients together. Transfer ingredients into tin filled 2/3 full with ice. Shake vigorously 8 to 10 times. Pour into highball glass and serve.

The Road to Hana

1-1/2 ounce Captain Morgan Spiced Rum

1/2 ounce Myers’s Rum

1/2 ounce Hiram Walker Triple Sec

1 ounce Fresh Lemon Juice

1-1/2 ounce Pineapple Juice

1-1/2 ounce Fresh Orange Juice

1/2 ounce Orgeat Syrup

Pour pineapple, orange and lemon juice into glass. Add remaining ingredients except the Myers’s Rum to glass. Transfer ingredients into tin filled 2/3 full with ice. Shake vigorously 8 to 10 times. Strain into highball glass and float Myers’s Rum. Garnish with pineapple spear, orange and lemon slice.

There are other mixed drink recipes that have a wine base or have a Spanish influence in the mix: Borgona (cold red wine topped with strawberries), Jote (red wine with cola), Navegado (heated red wine with slices of orange and sugar), Pisco Sour (pisco, lemon juice, sugar, egg white), Piscola (pisco with cola and ice), Ponche la Romana (champagne with pineapple ice cream), Ronpon (Rum with milk, cinnamon, coffee and sugar), and Vaina (port wine and sugar) to name only a few.  The influence of Spain is far reaching.  You will find Spanish inspired cocktails the world over.  While researching this article I found Spanish inspired Mojitos, Margaritas and Cosmos.  The possibilities are as limitless as the imagination.

“Annemarie Bean, who goes by Anna and is a distant, poorer cousin of the family that owns the L.L. Bean clothing business, is the kind of professor who draws students to small New England liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan. She is funny, enthusiastic, devoted to her students and passionate about what she teaches. Her subject areas are offbeat and slightly avant-garde, the kind of stuff that students, and their ostensibly liberal faculties, are said to find thrilling: African-American theater, the history of minstrelsy, “whiteness studies” — essentially, the intersection of race and theatrical performance in modern America. Beyond her subject matter and top-notch education, including a Ph.D. from New York University’s acclaimed performance-studies department, she just seems like a good fit for Wesleyan. She is an alumna of the college, class of ’88; she is informal in her manner, tall and limber like a dancer, bright-eyed, the opposite of stuffy, eminently approachable; and she suggested lunch at It’s Only Natural, the pride of Middletown, Conn., a regional mecca for vegetarian, vegan and macrobiotic dining. (Nothing says “Wesleyan” like lunch at It’s Only Natural, where you eat bulgur wheat beneath paintings by local artists.) Bean knows that she belongs at Wesleyan, which is why she’s especially sad that her students fired her.” – Judgement Day

Thank you, Anna for teaching us all a life lesson in white privilege–one of your many “off beat” and “slightly avant garde” areas of study/expertise (like African American theater, duh) that we liberals (“excluding all angry and brooding white men who wear white hats on backward and secretly harbor resentment against the misunderstood WASP aficionado of blackface history”) find absolutely “thrilling”. And thank you, Mark Oppenheimer for showing the world what good reporting looks like (note to self: never take Yale seriously ever, especially not the director of Yale Journalism Initiative). I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive us for this inexcusable “miscarriage of justice” (really, Mark? you just had to be that dramatic?). The hard truth is we as students are OVER empowered by Wesleyan and the elevated role of our opinion in faculty’s fortunes is down right unfair to well-meaning, well-educated, and well-connected (not to mention “tall and limber like a dancer” and “bright eyed” white lady visiting) professors like yourself. Mark’s suggestion that “what students are really evaluating is less pedagogy than whether a professor is funny, handsome or, above all, an easy grader” is right on the money. We’re just superficial, shallow, and lazy saboteurs who have nothing better to do than write completely fictitious critiques about tokenism, disorganization, tardiness and lack of professionalism (Mark, I dare you to be more condescending and cliche next time, why don’t you say something about “voter apathy” and moral decay among our “bulgur wheat eating” youthful selves). Even if there were any grain of truth to the (articulate, well-written) negative evaluations, the fact that you are poorer than your cousin who owns L.L. Bean (gasp!) and an “It’s Only Natural” enthusiast (are you fucking kidding me?) quite obviously make up for any other relatively harmless shortcomings (like being racist or I don’t know, a terrible professor). You deserve a secure and prestigious position at an institution that will give you the respect and recognition that Wesleyan failed to provide (you are an overly dramatic and spiteful hater who needs to get over yourself and stop playing the white lady victim card and unpack that not-so invisible knapsack, girl. I’m sure Peggy McIntosh can help you out LOL). I hope that this report in the New York Times Magazine will help generate support for you and your noble cause (I hope you’re ready for the backlash and I hope you google your name and find this sarcastic as fuck blog entry and feel like a shithead). Yours truly, Isa. (Post-script: you are single handedly responsible for making me reconsider the performance studies program @ NYU, but I won’t let you determine my future so nevermind) Sorry y’all, I really had to get that off my chest, ya dig?

Wesleyan is everywhere. In your ipod, at your local movie theater, on the news, off broadway and all up in the blogosphere. You can’t escape the reach of it’s giant octopus tentacles (they can grow to 150 feet!). I never knew attending a small liberal arts college in Connecticut would eventually come to haunt me (that’s a bit dramatic but you get the point). Our good friends over at The New York Times Magazine recently ran a feature in The College Issue on Wesleyan alumni Jordan Goldman’s fairy tale success story of a once-upon-a-time-broke-Chinese-food-rationing-idealistic-college-graduate who through good fortune, blind ambition and basic Internet research (oh yeah and generous financial backing from former president of Soros Private Funds Management and Wes alum Frank Sica) successfully launched Unigo.com “a free, gigantic, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective applicants and their families”. I have to give Goldman props for putting google search results for “business plan” into action. As a recent college graduate suffering from a problematic entitlement complex in which I’ve convinced myself that I deserve a well paying/inspiring/relevant job, I can appreciate a good hu$tler who knows how to sell his idea and more importantly bring it to life without losing money. In fact, I’m not the least bit surprised that his initial method of reaching out to 500 Wesleyan alumnus working in finance was fruitful. In the article, author Jonathan Dee calls out Goldman for referring to his fundraising efforts as “untraditional” by noting: “it was as traditional as can be, but given that he was 23, Goldman can be excused for thinking that he discovered the Old Boy Network.” (Dee = extra sharp). Wesleyan definitely helps its own, I’m beginning to think that the Old Boy Network has a bigger payoff than the actual diploma. I won’t go through the trouble of paraphrasing Dee’s masterpiece on the birth and evolution of Unigo.com when you can and should read it yourself. Right here. Right now. I just checked Unigo.com out and there were a number of errors detected which prevented me from browsing the site to it’s full capacity but it seems simple and straightforward, nothing fancy or spectacular. And while I would recommend it to any prospective college student eager to read up on the nuances of college life outside Princeton Review, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it revolutionary.

“”Empowerment,” “Revolution,” “Grass-roots movement” –these are phrases Goldman and his employees toss around a fair bit. They’re not wrong, exactly, but there is something dispiriting about seeing that vocabulary applied here, as if the greatest empowerment to which young people can aspire is the empowerment of the focus group — the opportunity to offer marketers “reviews” that help determine how those who come after them will be marketed to. Several Unigo employees repeated to me a sort of party line that ran like this: Who’s a better judge of a college than its students? The potential counterarguments seem less important than the fact that they clearly consider the question a rhetorical one. Thus they feel no need to critique, for instance, their own tabulation that one of the most commonly voiced student complaints about today’s college experience, nationwide, is the lack of sufficient on-campus parking.” — Jonathan Dee

HA! On point. Hopefully that excerpt will motivate you to read the rest of the article. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way knocking his hustle. If anything, his story should provide some gleam of hope for the unemployed and frustrated college graduates out of luck and out of $$$. Although let’s be real about how many of y’all are fronting like you don’t have trust funds or enough cash to float/fuck around for at least another couple months. Why not invest in an impulsive web-based idea that could end up making you more money than a steady 9-5 job? But for most folks, times are hard and they’re about to get even harder. Economic crisis like whoa. And yet, I can’t find it in my heart to feel any drop of sympathy for billionaires crying over their recent downgrade to millionaire status. No more jet setting to Italy? Get. Over. It. Yikes, let me stop now before I channel all of my Dad’s end-of-the-world anxieties and conclude that we’re all doomed. Go forth my friends, “follow your dreams”…and/or hate on people who always seem to come into good luck and big fortune. I mean, Santogold and MGMT were featured in yesterday’s episode of Gossip Girl. When is it our turn to get famous? (Right, Rachie?) Just kidding…ish. Go Wes? In 500 words or less:

Christoph Niemann’s children are subway-obsessed, and it is lovely. Click on any image to go to the original post, at The New York Times

"My sons Arthur, 5, and Gustav, 3, are obsessed with the New York City subway system."

They can barely sit through an episode of “Sesame Street.” But when we go for aimless subway joy rides on the weekends, they sit like little angels, devoutly calling out the names of every station for hours.

People often ask me for directions in the subway. Even though I know my way around rather well, I still have to defer to Arthur very often. Yet it seems people don’t trust the advice of a preschooler. They should.

Comic courtesy of Natalie Dee.

The Times Magazine, usually the highlight of my Sundays (especially when paired with coffee and/or the occasional Bloody Mary), has been sorta eh in terms of it’s music coverage lately. Last week’s profile of the freak folky sister duo Coco Rosie was fairly well-written (a tad breathless at the sisters’ involvement in Paris’s fashion community, perhaps), but seriously confusing, timing-wise. Nothing against Coco Rosie – I was a fan of the emotional weirdness of their last record (as I noted last year), and they’re artists and fashion icons, I get it, I get it, but so’s everyone else making music in Paris and Brooklyn. Why write about them now? The whole “freak folk” trend is years-old news, Coco Rosie’s latest record came out over a year ago, and I wouldn’t say there’s been any sort of Coco Rosie craze lately – not even a music blog or Pitchfork-propelled one. It looks like Fernanda Eberstadt just reaaaallly likes them, and somehow convinced an editor at the Times mag that that was enough to warrant a story. And that’s what blogs are for!

Then again, not more than a month ago they also printed Emily Gould’s entirely-too-long, rambling, self-obsessed, shoulda-been-a-LiveJournal-entry piece, so maybe they’re still coming to terms with the whole “difference between blogs and a respected news publication” thing.

Anyway, this week they’ve gone and totally redeemed themselves! First off, Deborah Solomon’s interview with Patti Smith is hilarious and totally intriguing. An excerpt:

“You seem to cultivate a kind of wild-child mystique, even in your appearance. For instance, why don’t you use hair conditioner? I do use conditioner!

I’m surprised. You’re the queen of split ends. That’s very funny because I’ve just cut about eight inches off my hair because it was just too ratty-looking.”

The Queen of Split Ends? Damn Deborah! Way to just straight-up insult Patti Smith’s hair. Not everyone can have your shiny, bouncy, 100 percent split-end free locks. Elsewhere, Virginia Heffernan, the all-knowing voice of “adventures in digital culture” behind the Medium column – a weekly fav of ours – writes about enduring band presence on MySpace, despite the fact that most college kids have fled to the more stylish, application-filled Facebookland, with the main focus on Coldplay’s MySpace page:

“Mine is the 21,120,387th visit to Coldplay’s MySpace page. I am not greeted warmly. The British band — which is known for giant pop hits, a sheen of fakery and the marriage of its lead singer to Gwyneth Paltrow — does not exactly rush out to greet me. The page is rudimentary and indifferently decorated, like the apartment of four couchbound soccer addicts who barely look up when a girlfriend comes in.”

I love everything about that paragraph. Heffernan continues her dissection of “the world’s most insufferable band’s” MySpace page, with reference to Times music critic Jon Pareles’ infamous 2005 article, of course. Read the rest here.

Oh, and PS - I wrote a piece about drag kings. Maybe you saw me, dressed as a man, on the cover of the Phoenix this week. If not, check it out here.

Fashion-forward and multi-hyphenated career woman of the world, Tyra Banks, appears on the latest New York Times magazine. An excerpt:

Tyra Banks has 275 smiles. Like a star athlete who has perfected a jump shot or a curveball, Banks has studied, honed and mastered the smile. In her arsenal are the “surprise smile,” the “angry but still smiling” smile, the “flirting with boyfriend” smile and the “commercial” smile, which, like the rest of Tyra’s smiles, was designed and perfected when Banks, who is now 34, began modeling at 15. From the start of her career, when she was virtually plucked from an all-girl Catholic high school in Los Angeles and whisked off to Paris, to her days as a mass-market first-name-only supermodel strutting the catwalk in her underwear for Victoria’s Secret, Banks always treated modeling as a kind of beautiful science. Then, and now, the smiles were her secret weapons: they could compel, manipulate, seduce. Banks did not become a model to be a muse to designers or because she loved fashion. Modeling — and smiling — was a skill that could, if engineered and managed carefully, change the course of your life.

For the full length article, click here.

Here are some additional pics from the article by the way:

Love her or hate her, it can’t be argued that Tyra made our TV guilty pleasure pleasurable. America’s Next Top Model is on its way to the 11th season and I still see myself anticipating the reality series. I just wonder what Tyra has in store for the future, aside from her eponymous show and ANTM of course, critics and naysayers be damned.