Face it: we love . . . ourselves. And therefore anything that resembles us or adores us. Which made switching to the sloth seem incongruous. Those stupid unicorns were our creation and could fulfill our fantasies. Sloths just hang there.
The word “feminine” is seldom feminist. But I chose it deliberately, because Fortuny’s dress frees the body to be both elegant and erotic. He did not throw us into a well-tailored pantsuit. Instead, he and Negrin made a dress that required no undergarments, and they did so in a corseted and slipped Edwardian era that refused to trust the female body to be itself.
Washington University political science professor Betsy Sinclair co-authored a study that found angry partisans more likely than non-angry partisans to become so socially polarized, they would refuse to help an out-partisan neighbor or avoid a conversation with one. This kind of negativity spreads like a noxious gas, and it becomes easier to insult, vilify, wish the other dead.
Wilde’s solution to work was machines, and they did make life easier. AI will make a lot of life easier, too. But many of us—if we are lucky enough to still be employed—will shift from doing work to making sure it gets done, updating and downloading and programming and monitoring and double-checking. All of which is far more stressful than doing the work itself.
My packaging was not exactly sexy. That streamlined Old English font would have better served a book of Christmas carols. Also, I was darker than the competition, in a racist country, and less sweet, in a country seduced by sugar.
Parents used to lecture their kids to clean their plates because little children in Africa were starving. The smartasses would retort, “Then wrap it up and send it to them.” I would like to snatch an octuple bypass burger and do exactly that.
Shallow breathing starves us of air; gulps through the mouth come in cold and unfiltered, and our lungs hate us for it. We breathe in many ways—and most of them are wrong.
Absence only makes the heart grow fonder under limited conditions; extend it, and you are looking at a different cliché entirely: out of sight, out of mind.
The First Nations taught us the fun of chomping on sweetened tree resin. So what did we do? We replaced it with a synthetic gum made of butyl rubber, paraffin, petroleum wax, polyethylene, polyisobutylene, and polyvinyl acetate. Now, in the first ten years of this millennium, we have manufactured more plastic than we made in the entire twentieth century.
What does it mean to live in a country where anger is entertainment and power, and fights break out on airplanes? Some of this rage is by now a cultural habit; the rest is raw and fresh.
Western scientists conveniently overlooked emotion for decades, dismissing it as irrational and female, a source of bias and hysteria best avoided altogether. Now they are forced to acknowledge that simply by paying attention to internal sensations, you can head off hysteria, angst, or dejection.
Writing for The Atlantic, game designer and Washington University media prof Ian Bogost calls “metaverse” “a sexy, aspirational name for some kind of virtual or augmented reality play.” Also: “a fantasy of power and control.” Which seems to be the key.