Previously: Is It Safe?, Ibraheem Youssef’s Quentin Tarantino Posters, Jamie Bolton’s Minimalist Movie Posters, Minimalist TV Show Posters, and Olly Moss’s Movie Poster Remakes.

Typographic poster for Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece. The famous quote is not included in the final version of the film but appears in Arthur C. Clakre’s original book. The em dash that breaks the phrase represents the ever present monolith. The poster is set in Futura Extra Bold, (Kubrick’s typeface of choice) and printed with glow in the dark ink, so the star field only becomes visual in the darkness of space.

(Via.)

(Via.)

1. “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”

“The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.”

2. “No Air-Conditioning, and Happy”

“For Mr. Cox, 54, the air-conditioner has not been turned on in any sort of regular fashion since 1977.”

3. “Doin’ Just Fine, Alone With Her Wigs”

“My thing is that it’s one thing to stay in the house, but I don’t stay in the house like a depressed person. I am celebrating life.”

4. “A Hat So In, It’s Got to Be Out”

“It’s an accessory that’s easy to wear. It doesn’t require great cleavage or washboard abs or a high threshold for pain. It’s got a bit of attitude, but it doesn’t make a noisy fashion statement. It’s men’s wear that looks good on women.”

5. “Snooki’s Time”

“She is busty and short-waisted with small legs; sort of like a turnip turned on its tip. There is the weird tan, but the pièce de résistance of Snookiness is the half-doughnut-shaped pouf on top of her head.”

6. “Prep, Forward and Back”

“People spent years hunting down rare copies. They traded them online for prices that reached into the thousands. They photocopied and distributed them in design studios like fashion samizdat.”

7. “Married, but Sleeping Alone”

“Nearly one in four American couples sleep in separate bedrooms or beds, the National Sleep Foundation reported in a 2005 survey.”

8. “Facebook Is to the Power Company as …”

“Here are services everyone uses, no matter how much people dislike the companies that provide them.”

9. “Girl Pop’s Lady Gaga Makeover”

“From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction while smuggling ideas about religion and social politics into her music. Most of the Gaga generation, however, is interested in distraction as an end in itself.”

10. “Everybody’s a Critic of the Critics’ Rabid Critics”

“I’m going to have to see it again.”

11. “The Errors of Our Ways”

“Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifle the urge to say ‘I told you so.’ The brilliance of this phrase … derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right — at any rate, really, extremely right, and really, extremely delighted about it.”

12. “Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes”

“Practically every antiquated creative process ends up inspiring some kind of digital filter, effect or add-on designed explicitly to mimic its singular properties.”

13. “New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap”

“It is a sad understatement to say that homosexuality and hip-hop make for an unlikely fusion: hip-hop culture is one of the most unrepentantly homophobic cultures in America, surpassing even its own attitudes toward women in bigotry and smirking advocacy of violence. But New Orleans’s tolerance of unlikely fusions is legendary, and today Katey Red, along with a handful of other artists — Big Freedia, Sissy Nobby, Chev off the Ave, Vockah Redu — are not just accepted mainstays of the bounce scene but its most prominent representatives outside New Orleans.”

(Via.)

1. “Whatever Happened to Mystery?”

“The world … no longer has any tolerance for — let alone fascination with — people who aren’t willing to publicize themselves.”

2. “As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out”

“Death, of course, is unavoidable, and so Facebook must find a way to integrate it into the social experience online.”

3. “The True Calling That Wasn’t”

“Education may well lead to internships, first jobs and, soon, experience and decent money in careers that seem unstoppable. Except for one thing: The work doesn’t feel like a true calling.”

4. “Creating Sabbath Peace Amid the Noise”

“Ms. Winner herself stopped shopping on Sunday a long time ago, and recently began keeping a sort of electronic Sabbath as well — she tries to stay off e-mail and to keep her cellphone turned off. She doesn’t eat out on Sunday, either, because she doesn’t want to benefit from what she considers the exploitation of the labor of the underpaid immigrants who staff the local restaurants.”

5. “Back to Work”

“Mad Men is a period piece that reverses the template. Historical dramas like The Tudors or John Adams sift through a remote, archaic culture to highlight the most familiar and contemporary concerns of historical characters. Mad Men wallows in the comfort of a recent and well-known past by way of characters who are always a little opaque and unknowable.”

6. “The Boss Unbound”

“Recent research on status and power suggests that brashness, entitlement and ego are essential components for any competent leader.”

7. “Born to Check Mail”

“We are wired by nature … to pay attention to new stimuli, thereby helping us to respond quickly to predators or to nab a potential meal.”

8. “Only Disconnect”

“In my quest for calm, I have a surprising ally. As far as I’m concerned, American Telephone & Telegraph has done more for the art of reading and introspection than all the Kindles and Nooks ever invented. Because up in the exalted summer greenery of the mid-Hudson Valley, completing an AT&T call is like driving a Trabant from New York to Los Angeles: technically feasible but not really going to happen.”

9. “When Funny Goes Viral”

“Wouldn’t it be funny and weird to create an event about things on the Internet that are funny and weird?”

Wake up around 11AM. Have some coffee. Call my kids, and my wonderful mother. I then shower up. Read fan mail. Have lunch. Back on the phone. Read a book or write some thoughts down. Have dinner. Phone. Pushups. Then I listen to ESPN on the radio. Read the bible, then sleep. That’s my day.

Wayne (née Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.) is currently serving a one-year prison sentence at Rikers Island for attempted possession of a weapon after a gun was found on his tour bus in 2007.

Last month, he literally phoned in a verse he wanted appended to Drake’s “Light Up.” Best lyric: “Behind bars, but the bars don’t stop / Recording over the phone / I hope the call don’t drop.” Indeed.

(Via.)

Related posts: “100-Year-Old Master,” “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Daily Routine,” “Donald Trump’s Daily Routine,” and “John Waters’s Daily Routine.”

(Via.)

Previously: Parts I, II, III. IV, and V.

1. “Until Cryonics Do Us Part”

“Neither Peggy nor her husband, Robin Hanson, can remember quite when he first announced his intention to have his brain surgically removed from his freshly vacated cadaver and preserved in liquid nitrogen.”

2. “Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot”

“The most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.”

3. “Factory Efficiency Comes to the Hospital”

“The main goals of the approach, known as kaizen, are to reduce waste and to increase value for customers through continuous small improvements.”

4. “Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality”

“Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found.”

5. “Online, We Pay With Our Time Spent Searching”

“As search becomes faster and smarter, it’s as if the Internet becomes a high-speed moving sidewalk whisking everyone to free loaves of bread. Paying for the search becomes irrelevant as the time spent searching becomes trivial.”

6. “Fans of Miley Cyrus Question Her New Path”

“‘It was weird. I feel like she acts 25. She looks so old. She is too old for herself.’”

7. “They Grow Up So Quickly, Don’t They?”

“The implication is that the younger set is doing better than their solipsistic, dysfunctional elders.”

8. “Hayek: The Back Story”

“The Road to Serfdom has a long history of timely assists from the popular media.”

9. “Sex and the Single Man”

“I make love a couple of times a week, and I take the Viagra when I’m going to be making love.”

10. “J. Crew Helps Preppy Go Euro”

“The stateside European, in J. Crew’s imagining, wears all our usual American stuff — shorts, T-shirts, cargo pants, polo shirts — but has no use whatsoever for the simplicity and androgyny that used to be hallmarks of preppy.”

11. “When Did We First ‘Rock the Mic’?”

“In ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ the M.C. Big Bank Hank raps, ‘I’m gonna rock the mic till you can’t resist,’ using what was then a novel sense of rock, defined by the O.E.D. as ‘to handle effectively and impressively; to use or wield effectively, esp. with style or self-assurance.’”

(Via.)

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1. “America, Illustrated”

“It is true that his work, for the most part, does not acknowledge social hardships or injustice. It does not offer a sustained meditation on heartbreak or death. Yet why should it? Idealization has been a reputable tradition in art at least since the days when the Greeks put up the Parthenon, and Rockwell’s work is no more unrealistic than that of countless art-history legends, like Mondrian, whose geometric compositions exemplify an ideal of harmony and calm, or Watteau, who invented the genre of the fête galante. Rockwell perfected a style of painting that might be called the American Ideal. Instead of taking place in lush European gardens, his playful gatherings are in a diner on Main Street.”

2. “What Big Eyes You Have, Dear, but Are Those Contacts Risky?”

“The lenses give wearers a childlike, doe-eyed appearance. The look is characteristic of Japanese anime and is also popular in Korea. Fame-seekers there called ‘ulzzang girls’ post cute but sexy head shots of themselves online, nearly always wearing circle lenses to accentuate their eyes. (‘Ulzzang’ means ‘best face’ in Korean, but it is also shorthand for ‘pretty.’)”

3. “The Man Behind the Dreamscape”

“‘It’s really, at its core, a big action heist movie.’”

4. “A Lone Figure, Standing Upright Amid the Cyclone”

“Keaton invited neither the audience’s identification, as Lloyd did, nor its sympathy, as Chaplin did. He presented a closed-off, self-sufficient figure, his emotions, if any, hidden behind his famous stone face.”

5. “A Rapper’s Long Battle to Go It Alone”

“Sir Lucious Left Foot has been largely finished since 2008, Big Boi said, but Jive never showed much enthusiasm for it. ‘They said, “This is a piece of art, and we don’t know what to do with it,”’ he said.”

6. “They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)”

“One of Ken Rogoff’s favorite economics jokes — yes, there are economics jokes — is ‘the one about the lamppost’: A drunk on his way home from a bar one night realizes that he has dropped his keys. He gets down on his hands and knees and starts groping around beneath a lamppost. A policeman asks what he’s doing. ‘I lost my keys in the park,’ says the drunk. ‘Then why are you looking for them under the lamppost?’ asks the puzzled cop. ‘Because,’ says the drunk, ‘that’s where the light is.’”

7. “The Great Rupture”

“Two hundred and thirty-four years into an American experiment launched in the name of the common good, it often feels, to me on the road, as if a battle is underway for the nation’s identity, a jockeying over the values that will govern whatever follows the Great Recession.”

8. “Humanity’s Database”

“When a site becomes this big, this powerful, there are ramifications — personal, cultural, economic and political.”

9. “Singing the Poet Electric”

“Whitman — an abstemious man and, for all his geniality, a loner — would not, I think, have recognized himself as the patron of the ’60s. He was no good at ‘communality,’ living all his adult life in boardinghouses or alone. Although Williams calls him ‘compulsively gregarious,’ Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising.”

10. “Ben Franklin Is a Big Fat Idiot”

“I was stunned to discover how many of Franklin’s axioms failed the acid test of validity and usefulness.”

11. “The Vuvuzela as Cultural Artifact”

“At an event notable for national grudges with intricate histories, playing out before an expected record worldwide audience, this simple, slightly silly, mass-produced noisemaker/instrument became a highly unlikely symbol of cultural meaning.”

12. “Mariano Rivera, King of the Closers”

“Life evolves toward increasing specialization.”

Excerpts from Matthew Cheney’s extraordinary essay on Rambo II:

Rambo II is a movie filled almost entirely with enemies … Rambo is a character who is thwarted at every step by people who can only be described by a thesaurus entry: lying, untruthful, dishonest, deceitful, false, dissembling, insincere, disingenuous, hypocritical, fraudulent, double-dealing, two-faced, two-timing, duplicitous, perfidious, perjured; antonym: truthful. Early in the film, Rambo says to Col. Trautman (Crenna), “You’re the only one I trust,” and both that trust and his distrust of everyone else is revealed to be utterly justified—it turns out he’s been sent back to Vietnam to a camp where the military thinks no POWs are. The politicians want him to show the world that the camp is empty so that the war can be, along with its warriors, finally forgotten. When Rambo is spotted running with one of the prisoners, the commander who sent him into the jungle orders the rescue mission to abort, and once again the grunts are abandoned by their country. It’s up to Rambo to fix it.

But Rambo is more than just the Avenger of Vietnam. He’s also Natty Bumppo and Tarzan, the man who lives best outside civilization, the man whose superpowers come from mixing the best of the “savage” world with the natural superiority of the white man. He can’t live in the United States any more than Tarzan can stay in Wisconsin; he’s too pure, too truly, archetypally American for the fallen world the US of A has become since those perfect days of 1776. His final act, after killing hordes of undifferentiated Vietnamese and scheming Russians (thus avenging the failures of the Vietnam War and furthering the cause of the Cold War at the same time), is to return to base and blow away a room full of computer terminals with an M60E3 heavy machine gun. These are the computers that the (lying, untruthful, dishonest, etc.) Murdock had told Rambo were the best technology available, and thus the best weapons, to which Rambo said, “I always believed the mind is the best weapon.” Murdock replied, “Times change,” and Rambo muttered, “For some people.”

Because he rejects computers does not mean Rambo rejects technology. His mind is pure, but his hands are aided by weapons he and the camera revere, the tools that are an extension of his own perfection. An early sequence intercuts shots of Murdock and the computers with shots of Rambo preparing himself for battle. Trautman calls him “a pure fighting machine with only a desire to win a war that someone else lost.” (The fighting machine—Rambo as cyborg.) Moments later, after Trautman has said, “What you choose to call hell, he calls home,” and after a few brief shots of a jet engine and the plane itself being fueled (the machine, warming up), we cut to Rambo’s sweaty, muscled shoulder.

There is no hesitation, no weakness. He moves silently through the jungle, a force of destruction first against the Soviet soldiers, then the Vietnamese. He is silent and invisible. He molds the Earth around him—the landscape itself is his weapon, and he is an extension of it. He reaches out of the darkness like a deadly vine to pull one victim down into a crevice. He vanishes into the mud, like Predator or Swamp Thing. His bullets reach out from everywhere, and they never miss their mark. But bullets aren’t enough—he has saved his exploding arrow tips, and now they fly through the air, bringing immense plumes of fire to all the heretics. Water and fire dance throughout these scenes, culminating in a sequence at a waterfall where a Vietnamese soldier shoots ineffectively at Rambo and then is vaporized by the Arrow of God.

The scenes, despite how much I revile their morality and politics, still bring shivers to my spine, gooseflesh to my own so un-Rambo arms. No matter the tortured screams of my inner pacifist, the archetype of the individual laying waste to forces of evil remains gripping.

And they say film criticism is dead. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Not only is it easily the best essay I’ve ever read on Rambo II (and I’ve read a lot of stuff about Rambo II), it’s a touching piece about the author’s father.

And don’t miss the related conversation between Brandon Soderberg and Benjamin Marra in which the term “New Wave of Hollywood Action” is coined, Cobra (a personal favorite of mine) is referred to as “one of the best action movies to come out of the ’80s,” and Stallone the actor is positioned as a Marlon Brando disciple: “All wounded, mumbly naturalism.” Soderberg and Marra sound like they’d be fun to hang out with.

Related posts: “The Default State for Most of Humanity” and “Rambo (IV).”

“I draft prose on-screen, work it over until I can’t find much wrong with it, then double-space it and print it out. At that point I discover what’s really there, which is ordinarily hazy, bloated, and boring. It looked pretty good on-screen, but it’s crap. My first drafts on paper, after what amount to several drafts on computer, look like a battlefield.”

—Jan Swafford

1. “Ac-shun! Now Brace for Impact”

“Good action is harder than it looks.”

2. “Golly, Beav, We’re Historic”

“There have perhaps been funnier sitcom scenes since, and certainly much louder, more frenetic ones. But has the craftsmanship — wonderfully believable brotherly chat as a foundation; sly incongruity laid on top — ever been bested? Doubtful.”

3. “In Documentary, Wall of Sound Meets Wall of Law”

“The film employs a greatest-hits collection of 21 Spector songs, played or performed in their entirety. And it does so without having obtained Mr. Spector’s written permission. Thus the film could become the latest flashpoint in the debate over what’s generally known as fair use, and copyright law. (Fair use refers to the right, under certain circumstances, like criticism, to use copyrighted material without permission. But the exact amount one can legally use remains a murky proposition.)”

4. “Surely It’s 30 (Don’t Call Me Shirley!)”

“The plentiful pop cultural references and anything-for-a-laugh attitude of Airplane! recalled early films by Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles) and Woody Allen (Bananas). But its velocity and density were new. Every scene was packed with surreal, often faintly metafictional sight gags (including a supporting turn by the N.B.A. giant Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a co-pilot who denies that he’s really Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and a cameo by Ethel Merman playing a psychiatric patient who thinks he’s Ethel Merman). And the film proudly served up jokes so astoundingly corny that they somehow managed to circle around the bend and become hilarious. (‘Surely you can’t be serious.’ ‘I am serious — and don’t call me Shirley!’) At the same time Airplane! wasn’t just a collection of bits. The narrative hewed closely to that of Zero Hour!, and if you can factor out all the silliness — no small feat with a movie that segues from a Casablanca-inspired romantic flashback to a Saturday Night Fever-like dance number — what remains is a compact, even classical piece of filmmaking.”

5. “I’m Not a French Maid, I Just Play One on TV”

“For Ms. Munn, making peace with this past sometimes involves therapy, and sometimes it involves dressing up as fictional male lust objects like Princess Leia or Wonder Woman (as she does in photos in her memoir), simultaneously mocking and indulging fanboy fantasies.”

6. “The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus”

“The centers look like academic versions of business incubators.”

7. “Urban Lands of Opportunity”

“Over the past couple of decades, a new way of working and a new kind of workplace have evolved.”

8. “Roll-Up Computers and Their Kin”

“‘The paper book is dead,’ says the digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte.”

9. “Death by Gadget”

“An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.”

10. “Are Cells the New Cigarettes?”

“Just as parents now tell their kids that, believe it or not, there was a time when nobody knew that cigarettes and tanning were bad for you, those kids may grow up to tell their kids that, believe it or not, there was a time when nobody knew how dangerous it was to hold your phone right next to your head and chat away for hours.”

11. “No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class”

“To what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?”

12. “The Mysteries of Tobias Wong”

“In 2007, the soft-spoken (and stage shy) Mr. Wong sent Mr. Chorpash, the professor and friend, to the podium at a design conference to give an entire presentation pretending to be him — never mind that Mr. Chorpash is tall and Caucasian — while Mr. Wong sat amid baffled audience members, wearing a devilish smile.”

13. “Turn Right, My Love”

“The origin of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women’s voices were used in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male aviators.”

14. “The Psychology of Bliss”

“In 2003, a German computer expert named Armin Meiwes advertised online for someone to kill and then eat. Incredibly, 200 people replied, and Meiwes chose a man named Bernd Brandes. One night, in Meiwes’s farmhouse, Brandes took some sleeping pills and drank some schnapps and was still awake when Meiwes cut off his penis, fried it in olive oil and offered him some to eat. Brandes then retreated to the bathtub, bleeding profusely. Meiwes stabbed him in the neck, chopped him up and stored him in the freezer. Over the next several weeks, he defrosted and sautéed 44 pounds of Brandes, eating him by candlelight with his best cutlery.”

15. “How HDTV Scrambles Beauty Standards”

“High def likes monochrome.”

16. “Where Do Gadgets Really Come From?”

“You might own a device made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard or Apple, for instance, but had you heard of Foxconn Technology before multiple suicides by workers became a big news story? Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen, China, with an estimated 400,000 employees, manufacture products for all three of those familiar tech names; the company has also reportedly made devices, equipment or components for Nintendo, Amazon, Cisco and others.”

—Alain de Botton

Michael Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009)

—Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

Oh, and for the record, I don’t smoke.

(Via.)

Related post: “Cigarettes Are Sublime.”

Related post: “Books vs. E-Books.”

1. “Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social”

“Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.”

2. “Now, Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom”

“Fathers are now struggling just as much — and sometimes even more — than mothers in trying to fulfill their responsibilities at home and in the office.”

3. “A Night at the Electronics Factory”

“He places two plastic chips inside the drive’s casing, inserts a device that redirects light in the drive and then fastens four screws with an electric screwdriver before sending the drive down the line. He has exactly one minute to complete the multistep task.”

4. “The Half-Life of Phones”

“There is something feverish in the rush to adoption, something almost obsessive in the way our desires are driven by these objects. The question is rarely ever, do I need a new phone? It is almost always, do I want one?”

5. “Reflections in the Facebook Mirror”

“How many times in life must we engage in self-description?”

6. “Affordable Boutique Hotels in New York City”

“Rooftop bars, rainfall showers and iPhone docks were everywhere.”

7. “Do I Contradict Myself?”

“Our protagonist is a bit of a disembodied brain, highly capable of poignancy but not exactly introspection or, as is welcome in memoirs, overwhelming indiscretion.”

8. “Inside the Box”

“Bissell was born in 1974, which puts him on the cusp of gaming’s generational divide. That transitional position affords him a perspective not unlike — if you’ll indulge the grandiose analogy — that of Tocqueville or McLuhan, figures who stood on the bridges of two great ages, welcoming the horizon while also mourning what the world was leaving behind. Bissell sees video games with open eyes. His book is about the profoundly ambivalent experience of playing them — close readings (close playings?) mostly of big-budget action and science fiction titles for consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation. These are the games most likely to draw a disparaging remark from a United States senator or a newspaper film critic. Extra Lives is a celebration of why they matter, but it is also a jeremiad about ‘why they do not matter more.’”

9. “Surfin’ Safari”

“During the Persian Gulf war, surfers used to say, ‘If only Saddam surfed!’ The ‘civilizing mission’ of the American military has ended up planting surf boards on beaches around the globe just as the British left cricket bats behind. According to Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, ‘Charlie don’t surf.’”

10. “How Old Can a ‘Young Writer’ Be?”

“The emphasis on futurity misses an essential truth about fiction writers: They often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young.”

11. “Dysregulation Nation”

“In the late 1970s, the historian Christopher Lasch famously described America as a culture of narcissism. Today we might well be called a nation of dysregulation. The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere.”

12. “The Real Marshall Mathers”

“I think if two people love each other, then what the hell? I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want.”

13. “What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?”

“By the end of the day, the seven human contestants were impressed, and even slightly unnerved, by Watson. Several made references to Skynet, the computer system in the Terminator movies that achieves consciousness and decides humanity should be destroyed.”

—Neil Postman

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1. “The Ahab Parallax”

“One of the great underlying themes of Moby-Dick, Mr. Delbanco observed, ‘is that people ashore don’t want to know about the ugly things that go on at sea.’”

2. “Long Road to Adulthood Is Growing Even Longer”

“People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent.”

3. “Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday”

“Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity.”

4. “The High Cost of Loving Your Phone”

“Some people may complain incessantly about their iPhone and AT&T’s service for it, but not that many are switching. And that’s just the way the companies have intended it.”

5. “The Glee Generation”

“We’re raising a generation of Broadway babies.”

6. “Lady Gaga Doesn’t Preach, Exactly”

“I like that she not only appreciates hats but understands the boundaries a hat and veil impose on other people.”

7. “The New Face of Hip-Hop”

“Biracial Jewish-Canadian former child actors don’t have a track record of success in the American rap industry.”

8. “Blockbuster 4: The Same, but Worse”

“Their persistence back there in the shadowy realms of collective memory testifies not only to the vexing ontological riddle that is Steve Guttenberg, but also — at least as profoundly — to a notable aspect of our deep human craving for narrative.”

9. “The Vanishing Mercury Class”

“It was basically a plain Ford, of course, but a little different, a little classier. Choosing a Mercury was a statement of measured individuality.”

10. “John Waters Looks Back”

“If H. L. Mencken was the Sage of Baltimore, Waters is, at least, the parsley. Just for fun, consider what these two share: impudence, contrariness, uproarious insults to bourgeois values that made them controversial, then fashionable, then had them prematurely posing for their native-son statues. That they’d have horrified each other is just your usual Balmer lagniappe.”

11. “My Backlogged Pages”

“Tired of buying bookshelves and anxious about the economic downturn, my wife recently instituted the First Law of Literary Thermodynamics, otherwise known as the conservation of libraries. No book can come into our household without another book leaving it. I am loath to give up any books. So I’ve been dipping more and more into my unread stock, which still numbers in the hundreds.”

12. “America’s Next Top Kill”

“I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.”

13. “Lifelong Earning”

“The nagging sense of needing to acquire new skills, all the time, is palpable. That anxiety dovetails with a self-improvement ethos that fills whole sections of bookstores, cross-matched with the various ways technology prods us to tabulate parodic amounts of personal-behavior data.”

14. “Pop-Up Stars”

“Many great American characters of the second half of the 20th century, from Holly Golightly to Jerry Maguire, are ‘real phonies’ …. What the real phony wants in his heart of hearts is to be like everyone else; his playing of parts, therefore, does not entail repressing another identity. Rather, it’s the expression of his deepest desires.”

15. “The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome”

“In his famous series of 1751 engravings, ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty,’ William Hogarth traced the life path of the fictional Tom Nero: Stage 1 depicts Tom as a boy, torturing a dog; Stage 4 shows Tom’s body, fresh from the gallows where he was hanged for murder, being dissected in an anatomical theater.”

—Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle” (1863)

—Tommy V.

No kidding.

(Via.)

—Jack London, 1915