A question for everyone who grew up within a Christian tradition: what translation of the Bible did you read, and did you know that Catholics got extra secret Bible, like the first 100 callers for an As Seen on TV product? Conversely, did you Catholics know that Protestants get less Bible than you, and also weren’t allowed to get our ears pierced until we were thirteen?
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Grace Choi calls 3-D printers “thingy makers” (“It just got bookended as a 3-D printer because it makes a 3-D object, but essentially it’s a thingy-maker. You could call it an ink-jet printer that makes a 3-D object. It’s whatever you want, but it’s an object-maker”) and wants to fix the color problem in the beauty industry:
For instance, let’s say you want to make a BB cream. I wanted to make one and went to the manufacturing guy and I was like, “I want to make beauty cream for everyone. I want as many SKUs as possible. I want to make 50 shades for every single skin color and every single skin tone.” And he was like, “Sure, that’s going to cost you about a jillion dollars.” [Laughs.] And I’m like, “Why?” He said, “Well, we have these huge kettles and each kettle only makes one color at a time, and so if you want it, you’re going to have to pick one color or a few colors.” It’s very inefficient, because you have to decide which colors are going to be the most worth your money. And therein lies the problem of skin color and the beauty industry: You’re forced to decide which ones are the most important.
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Anne Helen has been writing some killer stuff lately (did you see her thing on Nicholas Sparks? I did not think I would want to read that many words about Nicholas Sparks, but I did) and this Aeon piece about dude ranches and Western mythology is pretty interesting, especially if you grew up going to dude ranches, WHICH I DID. There are a lot of home videos of me carrying a little cat as a dude named Travis leads me gently around an arena on top of a pony.
“What’s the kitty’s name, Mallory?” my mom gently prompts.
“Kitty doesn’t HAVE a name.” Anyhow, that’s all I have to say about dude ranches.
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DON’T WORRY, I’m still working on a long piece about the Lost Cosmonauts theory, but in the meantime please enjoy this five-year-old forum discussion.
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The “See Also” section for the Wikipedia article on true names is going to lead you down a K-hole to end all K-holes. Adamic languages, Enochian, Ineffability, Phonosemantics…it’s like an episode of So Weird.
“According to practices in folklore, knowledge of a true name allows one to affect another person or being magically.” 100% TRUE.
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Take a minute to look through Essence‘s gallery on Ruby Dee’s life. Have you read the book she and Ossie Davis wrote about their open marriage? (“One thing is certain: The best of me has been subsidized by the best of what you are. I have no hungers that you do not feed.”) It’s fantastic. You should buy it. She also had an amazing part in The Tall Target, which is a Civil-War-era proto-noir thriller that almost nobody talks about anymore. Buy her book and watch one of her movies while wearing a fur this weekend in honor of her.
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“Frog’s tongues much stickier than thought.” Well, that is just fun.
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“Urban youth are affected, collectively and individually, by trauma. But it’s not the trauma everyone says it is…we don’t think of this condition as PTSD. Instead we think of it as: PTSE: Persistent Traumatic Stress Environment.
We want to take the discussion of trauma away from the pathology of the individual, and treat it as the persistent state of an environment. Youth are living in the midst of painful and stressful events that ongoing. Walking to school, coming home, looking out the window, going to the store, scrolling through social media feeds — in these mundane activities, they are exposed to the very same violence, racism, gender oppression, and poverty that is disturbing in the first place. We are not responding to past trauma. We are responding to living trauma. And while the approaches that have been developed to deal with PTSD are valuable, they are not totally relevant. A new approach, an approach custom made for urban youth, is needed.”
My buddy Carvell Wallace is doing a very cool thing.
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