How to Wear It is a feature combining several things I love: fashion history, museums, and window-shopping on the Internet. Every week, I’ll share a museum piece that caught my eye, and come up with a few different ways you could wear it when you pull off that heist you’re thinking about.
This week, it’s these gloves from Colonial Williamsburg’s collection! And you thought long fingerless gloves were just for emo kids.
Every Friday, I’ll link to a few interesting things I’ve read around the Internet this week. Feel free to discuss these, share your own, or both!
1. “As historian Charles Rosenberg wrote, ‘disease necessarily reflects and lays bare every aspect of the culture in which it occurs.’” Over at the New England Journal of Medicine, an argument that the entire field of “global health” owes a lot of its existence, or at least its current nature, to HIV.
2. From The Billfold, a modest proposal: bring back the debtors’ prison.
Considering the fact that I will likely still be paying off my education when I’m 80 (maybe later if the interest rates go up on July 1), considering that I can’t discharge these loans in bankruptcy, considering that my offers to let the government repossess my brain/diploma have been ignored, sometimes I can’t help but fantasize: if only Icould sign myself up for five years in a minimum security facility, banging out license plates 8 hours a day, and have it all erased! Then maybe I could possibly own a house before I die or have a kid before I hit menopause.
Surely I am not in alone in this. In a recent poll conducted over half-price margarita pitchers and free chips & salsa, four of five grad students said they’d consider it, depending on the logistics of conjugal visits. (Of course, these are students, like myself, in an MFA program, not known for good judgment or practicality.)
I…might actually go for that. Ha ha ha oh God.
3. LIGHTSABERS!!! Okay, fine, the big excitement is around how precise these plasma scalpels can be relative to metal scalpels. Still, try and tell me you didn’t read the lightsaber comparison and need a few minutes to run off somewhere no one could see you and lightsaber noises for awhile before you could come back and read the rest of the article.
4. Carey Mulligan is apparently the current frontrunner for the Hillary Clinton biopic, and y’all, I am so friggin’ jazzed about this prospect. Between this and the fact that the script has her and Bill meeting as the opening scene, going into the opening credits over “You’re So Vain”, this is on track to be the greatest movie ever.
5. Following reactions to the new season of Arrested Development, Linda Holmes mulls on The Critic, The Viewer And The Episode Dump. There’s a lot of interesting thought here about the changing nature of media and how it might force us to reevaluate the job of the critic, but also, you should talk to me about the new AD season in the comments, because man oh man.
Anyone else read anything interesting this week? Got anything exciting going on this weekend? I woke up with a massive migraine due to Andrea, but it’s starting to fade now, thank heaven. My house is also on top of a hill, which is nice, because it’s also about a quarter of a mile from the river and there’s a flash-flood warning in effect.
How to Wear It is a new feature I’ll be doing, combining several things I love: fashion history, museums, and window-shopping on the Internet. Every week, I’ll share a museum piece that caught my eye, and come up with a few different ways you could wear it when you pull off that heist you’re thinking about.
Linen coif, silk and silver-gilt thread, made 1600-1625, England (clipped to polyvore.com)
This week, it’s a fabulous 17th-century coif from the Victoria & Albert’s collection! Continue reading
Every Friday, I’ll link to a few interesting things I’ve read around the Internet this week. Feel free to discuss, share your own, or both!
1. Mara Wilson wrote a piece for Cracked, “7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider’s Perspective)“, and it is so interesting/depressing.
It’s basically a real-life version of Logan’s Run. A child actor who is no longer cute is no longer monetarily viable and is discarded. He or she is then replaced by someone younger and cuter, and fan bases accordingly forget that the previous object of affection ever existed.
I just find the whole phenomenon of child stars fascinating/horrifying in general, really, so thank you, Mara Wilson, for sharing this.
2. 400-Year-Old Plant Awoken in Arctic I was thinking that the headline must just be some linkbaity exaggeration and the actual story would be far less unsettling. NOPE. Any news story that involves scientists “awakening” something is not going to end well. Combine it with the word “Arctic” and come on, science, have none of y’all read Lovecraft ever?
3. The Incidental Economist has a fantastic post about the tendency to think of mental illness as different, less “real”, than physical illness (emphasis theirs):
It’s true that unlike mental illnesses, some physical illnesses kill you directly by stopping your breathing or your heart. But if you look at the data you find that the mentally ill die a lot earlier than those who do not have mental illnesses.
Really, TIE is pretty much always fantastic; if you’re interested in health systems and policy (WHO ISN’T), do yourself a favor and add them to your RSS feed.
4. Have you watched the new Arrested Development episodes? My brother and I finished them last night. What did you think? Or have you read anything else interesting this week? Feel free to share it here!
The foxy lady pictured is Frances (Fanny) Burney, an English author who wrote some brilliant novels and essays at the end of the long eighteenth century. She’s generally considered a precursor to Jane Austen, which is a bit unfair, because as much as I love Austen, Burney deserves more attention in her own right. If you’re in the mood for a protofeminist comedy of manners in the epistolary format (and who isn’t?), you could do much worse than to start with Burney’s first, Evelina.
Also, girlfriend had great taste in hats. Continue reading
Every Friday, I’ll link to a few interesting things I’ve read around the Internet this week. Feel free to discuss, share your own, or both!
1. Jennifer Weiner on gender and the literary/popular fiction divide:
It used to be a writer could just turn up her nose at chick lit, and say, “Oh, I don’t read those books, I don’t read books with that stuff on the cover, and I certainly don’t write books like that.” Only now that nobody seems quite sure what chick lit is, and everyone has recognized that authors—especially female ones—don’t always have control over how their books end up looking, a new code word is required. That word has become likable. Calling a novel’s characters the L-word doesn’t just imply that the author in question is writing like a girl; it hints that she is writing like the wrong kind of girl—a dumb, popular, easy girl.
I HAVE SO MANY COMPLICATED FEELINGS.
2. Sarah Emily Duff over at the always-wonderful Tangerine and Cinnamon has a lovely post about Scottish food, particularly in the context of the mythologizing of “Scottish” culture.
[The process of constructing a "Highland tradition"] was consolidated in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, with the popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s novels about an idealised Scotland, and the Victorian ‘discovery’ of the country. As clothing, music, and language were co-opted in this remaking of Scotland, so was food: shortbread, oats, smoked fish, haggis, and neeps and tatties also became emblematic of this new, imagined nation.
4. It’s my mother’s birthday! Well, she’s in Australia, so for her it’s the day after her birthday, but for me, it’s her birthday. A thing I wrote to her last week, in the course of our Torah discussions:
Glorious scientific achievement is all well and good, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum (at least, not for more than the time it takes for it to enter another planet’s atmosphere OH HO HO LITTLE VACUUM OF SPACE JOKE FOR YOU THERE, MOTHER).
One of the things I got her was Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace, which I will write a longer review of later, but since I don’t know how much longer the $1.30 Kindle price ($1.37 hardcover) will last, you should all just go buy it now and we can discuss it later. (Don’t give me that look, I bought her something that cost more than $1.30 as well, I just thought she’d like this, too.)
5. Last but most definitely not least, as y’all may or may not know, fandom was basically my introduction to the Internet way back in the day. For various reasons, I’m not really all that active in fandom anymore, but I still feel pretty connected to it. One of the big discussions that keeps popping up again and again in fandom is around the question of monetizing fanfic.
Which is why it’s going to be incredible to watch what happens now that Amazon is going to start allowing self-publishers to distribute fanfiction.
Honestly, I sort of cannot wait to see how this plays out. Feel free to discuss the comedy/horror potential with me at length, because heaven knows there is lots of both.
Anyone else read anything interesting this week?
1. One of the first Western references to bananas in the Pacific Islands comes from Antonio Pigafetta, who was introduced to it in Guam on the Magellan expedition in 1521. With no term for the banana itself known to him, he referred to them as “figs a span long” or “figs a palm long”, depending on the translation. The name for the ripe fruit on Guam was aga; for the tree and the green fruit, chotda. Continue reading
