December 2009
27 posts
Great News →
maxistentialist:
Comedy Central canceled Jeff Dunham’s show.
I wrote about what a horrible person Jeff Dunham is here and here.
GLORY GLORY HALLELUJAH
The Grinchenstein who stole Christmas
This was going to be a short post but then it turned into an entire essay. It doesn’t relate specifically to the Aughts, so it’s just a freestanding piece.
Christmas is not magic, but on television it seems like it might be. When I was a kid, I didn’t really have any other means of understanding what happened on Christmas, since most of my friends were Jews like me.
On TV,...
Mothers and daughters
My professor Mia said that once you become a parent, your perspective on yourself changes forever. Whereas before you were somebody’s child, now you are somebody’s parent. The older I get, the more people my age have had children. I still think of myself as a daughter and will for many more years (probably somewhere around 10, if I have kids at all). What an enormous psychological...
“Adrian Grenier, clad in a lumberjack hat and Velvet Underground T-shirt, played...”
– NY Mag
This sentence just gets more and more embarassing as it rolls on.
(via hotdoorknobs)
Brother Josh reacts to "The Anthropology of...
Josh: I have a personal stake in it also because i don't want you to be unhappy
so while it was well written and emotionally complex, it is sort of like watching your child fight for a lightweight boxing title
in that you are interested and recognize the talent, but also have some concerns not common to the average spectator
also, writing that essay necessitated you knocking out a Mexican southpaw
The Aughts: The Anthropology of Anthropologie
Like Britt, I am also contributing to a decade-end series of essays. These essays reflect on the intersection between pop culture, politics, and my psychological development during a stage of life (my tweens through early twenties) in which the former two impacted the latter profoundly.
The Anthropology of Anthropologie
(Marylouise Pels and Vanessa Giovacchini in The Selby)
The first time I...
“Like so many utopians, the Google visionaries have ridden roughshod over...”
– “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It” in the L.A. Times by Joy Press
Did you know?
In the director’s cut of Heidi, it was Nutella, and not the fresh mountain air, that enabled Clara to walk again.
The other day
I had an AARP-eligible customer tell me that putting his groceries in one bag would be “marvy.”
“It’s a term us old WASPs use. It means marvelous,” he said. I was mystified, since docking words seems like such a young phenomenon: maybz totes probz whatevs.
Then he asked why he didn’t see many “autos” in the parking lot.
Dialogue on unattainable standards of beauty ft....
Josh: it is probably very hard to look like that all the time
if you derive joy from activities that prevent you from looking like that, then you have to do cost benefit to decide which would make you happier
but to be that skinny, you have to forgo a lot of things and maintain a lifestyle many would find undesireable
me: you are so rational. Josh Stern: world's most rational man
Josh: i am trying to be a lawyer
