Haunting the Web Since 1999
The New Yorker‘s Adam Alter surveys the recent data suggesting something that accords well with my overall worldview: Positive thinking is for suckers. “In a provocative new analysis, Oettingen and her colleagues have suggested that public displays of positive thinking may even predict downturns in major macroeconomic outcomes…the staggering results in this most recent paper are consistent with more than a decade’s worth of studies in Oettingen’s lab.”
Ably channeling the spirit of Mencken, Gawker’s Tom Scocca writes in defense of Snark, and skewers the evil that produced it, Smarm. “We have popular names now for the rhetorical tools these flacks are deploying: the straw-man attack, the fake umbrage, the concern-trolling. Why are those tools so familiar? It is because they are essential parts of the smarmer’s tool kit, the grease gun and the rag and the spatula.” If you judge a man by his enemies, Scocca picks a lot of the right ones here.
To kick off his new Slate column “Anything Once,” friend Seth Stevenson finds himself reveling in the sensation of sensory deprivation. “I emerged in a profound daze. I spoke slowly and quietly, like a smooth-jazz DJ, to the person at the spa desk who inquired how my session had gone. I felt more rested than if I’d slept for 16 hours on a pile of tranquilized chinchillas. Outside, colors were saturated; sounds were vivid. I had to try this again, as soon as possible.”
“[N]obody knows who the faceless figures, who often appear as motionless couples are, or why they are turning up at high profile events. Theories include the possibilities that they are limelight-seeking pranksters, performance artists or that they are at the centre of a viral marketing campaign for an as-yet unknown product of forthcoming horror film.” I, for one, welcome our new faceless overlords.
We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re waterboarded. Uh…As part of a “team-building exercise,” a Provo-based motivational speaker apparently held a waterboarding “in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.” We just took a big step closer to Brazil. (Via TPM.)
“Kinsey’s pioneering work is still one-of-a-kind because in all the time since, only a handful of sex researchers have even tried to match his breadth, depth, and scale. For all our obsession with sex, we’re skittish about studying it. There’s one major exception: a large survey, conducted in the 1990s, that far outdid Kinsey in terms of statistical reliability. It’s the most authoritative sexual self-portrait the country has. But you’ve probably never heard of its author, because unlike Kinsey, he has worked hard to keep it that way. Alfred Kinsey may have gotten the biopic, but according to Slate‘s Amanda Schaffer, it’s the University of Chicago’s Edward Laumann we should now be turning to for reliable data on carnal matters. “Kinsey’s data aren’t the last word on matters sexual, but they’re sometimes still the first.“
This site’s been languishing in the bookmarks for a good while now, but that doesn’t make it any less hilarious. By way of mkh at Hidden City, Someecards.com, for “when you care enough to hit send.” It’s got exemplary Onion-like ecards for almost any occasion, and many, many ways to express the inexpressible. Hallmark, you are in a world of pain.
“‘People are increasingly busy,’ said Margaret Gibbs, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University. ‘We’ve become a society where we expect things instantly, and don’t spend the time it takes to have real intimacy with another person.’” CNN delves into the broadening landscape of American loneliness, which, according to the NYT, is becoming particularly acute among middle-aged men without college degrees.
“Money is a funny thing with hipsters. They exist in a state of perpetual luxuriant slumming. They drink blue-collar beers but hold white-collar jobs. Or vice versa.” As seen on Slate, two choice essays on the Wes Anderson aesthetic and the cultural baggage of contemporary hipsterism (the former by a college friend of mine, Christian Lorentzen of N+1.) They said that irony was the shackles of youth.