A new name or new spelling, new avatar, new sexual orientation, new status, filtered photo—the self is a work in process. The most we did was try on crazy outfits, sweating in tiny dressing rooms and tossing stuff over the walls to each other. These kids try on whole identities.
Robert Capa and John Steinbeck, 1948, via Wikimedia Commons I received a link last week to a 60-page PDF booklet called “Wear Good Shoes: Advice from Magnum Photographers.” It is worth a look. Magnum is the photographers cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George…
Are we at the mercy of our machines, then? This is the crux, the reason I could not swat away this buzzing frustration. It feels helpless in a way that is bigger than the issue at hand.
Photo by artistmac, Wikimedia Commons. I had a piece to write, about the Mississippi. Flat shining basins, filled with river water made to slow its roll, lay on the other shore. I chose to write it because that stretch of river made me uneasy. Facing it, you know.
Extricating the female body from sexual desire altogether would be a societal wardrobe solution—but I doubt that is what anybody wants, even if it were possible.
We follow an identity, a persona, for what it brings us in digital form. We change our own identities, too, adopting a handle or username that no one will connect to the dork paying taxes on a ranch house in Poughkeepsie.
The curators of News on the Web did us a painful favor when they collected the new words of the past decade.
O’Farrell avoids naming Shakespeare in her novel, calling him “the tutor” when Agnes (Anne Hathaway to us) falls in love with him. This lets us avoid all the pompous scholarly baggage and know him as a young man driven by his love of language and theater, his gifts of wit and knowledge.
Most days, beauty opens doors—it makes people assume success and virtue and want to offer favors and opportunities. It attracts. But even that has an endpoint: Studies show that beautiful women hit a glass ceiling even faster.
“Here we are in Lake Charles, feeling like we are living out the book of Job in the Bible,” a Facebook friend wrote this week. “God has smitten us again.” “Who else is tired of Survivor Lake Charles?” someone else wrote. After a year with two hurricanes…