Well, it’s Friday and that is good. February also draws to a close and that is even better.
Some llamas were on the run in Sun City, Arizona and Twitter had fun with it. Folks even got “Lorenzo Lamas” trending. Fine work, all around.
Speaking of ON THE RUN. Hail Beyoncé.
I hate being reminded that there is little reality to reality television. Pimp My Ride? More like Pimp Our Lies! Sadness.
If you are looking for something to do in NYC on March 19th, this looks like a cool event featuring Janeane Garofalo, Sara Benincasa, Naomi Ekperigin, and more!
HBO has announced a fellowship for diverse writers. Check it out.
The FCC has passed net neutrality. We are free to participate in llama memes without suffering unequal access to bandwith. Or something. Math is hard.
Diversity sells. This is something we know! Maybe producers and studio executives will finally get the message. Also, diversity shouldn’t need to sell for it to matter.
You can now fill in the blank to identify your gender on Facebook. Progress!
Is a student loan revolt beginning? This is an interesting article about some students who are refusing to repay predatory student loans.
In the fall of 2013, Mallory Heiney returned from a mission trip to Guinea with a plan to go into health care. She enrolled in classes at a for-profit college called Everest Institute, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, expecting to graduate with a degree that would help her become a nurse. But, after less than a year, she said, her instructors stopped showing up. Corinthian Colleges, the company that owned Everest, had admitted that its finances were in trouble, and that it expected to go out of business; it later said it would shut down several campuses, including the one in Grand Rapids. Heiney graduated but felt she had learned very little. When she tells people where she went, she told me, she gets sympathetic looks. She said, “You go to school so they look at you and think, ‘Wow, this person must be educated’—not so they look at you and think, ‘Oh, this person went to Everest. They must be trash.’ ” Heiney’s student debts include more than ten thousand dollars owed to the federal government and more than ten thousand dollars in private loans; that’s what remains after she repaid some of the interest on her debts while she was in college, in part by selling her own plasma.
KFC, continuing to do frightening things in food engineering, has made an edible coffee cup. Why? I do not know why.
I am not even going to get into that dress thing. I simply cannot.
“Travel writing” is hard, I guess.
(The dress is blue and black.)
Tags: link roundup, the internet
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NO ONE TALK ABOUT THE DRESS.
Or at least don’t share that pseudo-scientific nonsense about cones and rods that I saw on Tumblr, purporting to explain why people see it differently.
It’s all about the detail/lighting of the screen you view it on, and how you unconsciously interpret the shittiness of the photo’s lighting.
It’s really not though. My husband and I both saw it completely different on the same exact phone, and he sees it blue and black no matter what screen/room he’s in, and I can only see white and gold. I BELIEVE.
Yeah, I saw it immediately as white/gold, showed MrChouffe my phone screen, and he saw it as blue/black. We were in a relatively dimly-lit indoors during this exchange. This morning, he saw it on a different screen and daylight and saw it as white/gold.
But the other important element is: how you unconsciously interpret the shittiness of the photo’s lighting. Your phone may influence it, but the interpretation is just as important!
There are differences is the structure of our eyes, yes, but I think in this case, it’s how you’re looking at it.
I’m delighted by the entire kerfuffle. I don’t care what color it is.
I’m delighted by it too and don’t understand why people are so grumpy about it! I’ve seen so many people posting things like “WHO EVEN CARES” and “THIS IS WHY AMERICA IS DUMB” and the classic “THIS IS DISTRACTING US FROM REAL ISSUES!” Like???? No one is saying that it’s anything other than a very silly puzzle?
I know, it’s hilarious. Who are these people who discuss 100% “real issues” and how do I avoid them?
Seriously. Millions of people debated a legitimately fascinating scientific phenomenon. Not only that, last night the Internet performed an unprecedented, inadvertent scientific experiment on itself, involving MILLIONS of people all at once. Scientists who study this stuff were amazed at the vastly different reactions. Millions of people learned about color perception and how light affects it. That is AMAZING.
Yeah I agree. I completely missed the “whole thing,” because I am a person who spends most of her time in her own head. Upon learning about this event, I thought it was rather cool. Carry on, Internet!
HOW DARE ANYONE BE MILDLY AMUSED BY A THING. THERE IS BAD STUFF IN THE WORLD. BE SAD WITH ME.
What an awful existence it must be to demand of yourself (and all those within earshot) that everything be focused on the big bad things in the world all the time.
In spite of the fact that they originated them, Tumblr has an above-average number of these joyless types, and I have decided I am way over all of them.
I showed it to my husband on my phone in bed last night and he got SO ANGRY, saying that it was black and blue and anyone who thought it was white and gold was an idiot. In the morning, he went down to his desktop, and came back up looking sad. “It’s white and gold now. I don’t know what to think anymore.”
This is the best thing ever.
My fiancee started with white/gold and switched to blue/black, but was just as certain of her initial perception, and just as bewildered by her eventual switch. It amused me greatly.
Yeah I saw it as white and gold first (and still mostly do), but one time I looked it looked more blue and black. Very weird.
White and gold here too, but once I saw a picture where someone de-over-exposed it to its (apparently real?) blue and black state, I now see it as blue and black. Oh shit, but now it’s back to white and gold! I’m in awe of the person above who saw it as purple an green, though.
#teamwhiteandgold
#teamblackandblue
I see both goddamn colours and I am so freaking aggravated by the fact that it CHANGES IN FRONT OF MY EYES that I am giving up on life and running away to become a nun and solve problems like Maria instead of this damn dress mystery.
Me too. I thought it was a gif because I would clearly see white/gold, glance away, and it would be deep blue and black when I glanced back.
Same, but I saw Blue and Gold initially. Now I see all three. SOMETIMES THE GOLD EVEN LOOKS BROWN OH MY HAT!!
Oh my god, I’m not the only one! I’ve been saying “light blue and brown.”
it’s white and gold and that “other picture” is AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT DRESS
I literally don’t understand how anyone sees black. Like, the lighter part, legitimately tricky, could be white, could be light blue, whatever. But the other part is just… not black. By any stretch of the imagination. Possibly brown, possibly gold, but I have rarely seen any color that looks less like black.
How is no one else seeing it as BLUE AND GOLD???? Down with the blue/black–white/gold false dichotomy!
I am seeing it sometimes as blue and gold, sometimes as shadowed white and gold. Only seen one picture as black and blue and it was a different picture of what looked like the same frock.
I saw blue/gold first. Then blue/black. My head is spinning.
Thank you for this unambiguously true statement.
blue and gold yesssss
at first I thought it was white/gold because blue/gold seemed like an odd combination with how my brain wanted to interpret the dark bits. “Why would anyone make a dress in such an odd shade of brown-gold and sky blue? it MUST be white”
I had a hard time accepting the dark color is actually black, because the background isn’t entirely washed out, which I would have expected it to be to see such detail in the lace if it were black, and also on the lower left is darker black sections. Anyway, I shifted how I view the shittiness of the lighting and can see it as a bad representation of blue/black, but it doesn’t change that the actual colors in the image are blue and brown, which is what I see.
The white definitely has blue in it, because of the shade or color balance on the phone or whatever, it’s just sometimes your brain compensates for it. I’ve had it switch around a few times myself. Also I’m deuteranopic colorblind, I wonder if that affects it at all.
This is also how I saw it initially!
Can we talk about how most of twitter apparently slept through art class in school because why doesn’t anyone understand that the same object can appear to be different colors depending on lighting, the exposure of the image, etc
Although my boyfriend owns a shirt that he swears is blue even though it’s well within green territory and it aggravates me so much I’m thinking of giving him a color-blindness test.
My ex and I would argue all the time about whether something was blue or green. I see more ‘greenish blue’ colours as blue and he saw them as green.
So, different cultures separate colors into different categories, of course. What’s neat is that the order in which cultures differentiate is always the same. So if your culture had only three colors, they would be dark, light, and red. Blue and green are basically the last major color category to get differentiated from each other – there are a ton of cultures that only have “grue”. It makes a lot of sense that blue and green are hard categories to agree on!
had an EPIC throw-down with my dude in a fabric store about whether some pants he had were black or blue. i told him to bring dark blue pants and he CLEARLY brought a pair of faded out black pants. and then he argued with me about their color. the nerve!
he also fails at the nuances of reds which is made baffling by the fact that he has acquired, on his own and previous to me entering his life, many things in a very particular shade of bordeaux yet he somehow fails to recognize that not all the red things at the fabric store are His Shade. sometimes i think he’s trolling me.
I knew a guy who refused to acknowledge purple was a colour. He said it was all just blue. At one point, he was willing to say that he could see the difference between the “blue” that everyone agreed was blue and the “blue” that people would argue was purple, but he rejected the idea of it being a totally different colour.
My ALL-TIME FAVORITE ink for writing with is Diamine’s “Bilberry”. You are welcome to google image search and see what different cameras/editing software represent it as.
it is 100% purple, on the blue side rather than the warm magenta side. Next to a more typical magenta-toned purple or a violet, I can see how you’d focus on the blue tones, but it’s so very much NOT blue if you put it next to anything that is even remotely blue.
Drives me up the wall that when I’m trying to link it to people and go to the purple sections of ink sellers’ sites, only to have to backtrack to find it.
It is super beautiful, though. When you dabble it on an absorbent bit of paper and then let it wash out with water, it has this lovely pink and purple halo, which makes for neat washes. And if you apply it heavily to the paper, it has a distinct red sheen to it.
My husband and I have an ongoing argument about a specific type of color that he sees as grey and I see as blue, or blue-grey anyway. I have gotten legit mad about it before. Reading your comment makes me feel so much better as a human.
True, but this is a photograph and people looking at it in the same room at the same time on the same screen are seeing VASTLY different colors (blue/black vs. white/gold). Even scientists who study this stuff are perplexed at how different, and firm, people’s perceptions are.
But even in looking at a photograph you have to decide how to interpret the image! The photo is confusing because it’s unclear what/where the light source is. When I learned how to draw I was taught that in normal conditions, a surface that has light shining directly on it will have yellow/orange tones, and a surface that is in shadow will have purple/blue tones. We don’t “see” the yellow and purple because it gets simplified in our minds as “light/dark.” But if you crop the image in a way that obscures the light source and makes you focus on the colors themselves, you might think “what’s going on? Where did that color come from?” And different people might have a different answer to that.
Dang, I had more thoughts on this than I realized.
I kind of A LOT hate those fancy blue-white lightbulbs because they make everything so cool in the light and give a blue cast which is very confusing to my brain.
Drove home last night & the laundry room’s lights were on, shining through the sheer curtains to the street; I thought aliens had invaded our house.
Right, but I think it’s very rare for so many people to see such drastically different colors for the same still image. My wife and I argue all the time about what color this one jacket I have is (I say gray, she says green). But I can understand how the jacket might look green to her, especially in certain light, whereas, for the life of me, I cannot fathom how anyone can see that dress as anything other than dark blue and black (which is what it actually is).
But I think the whole dispute relies on people understanding that the photo’s lighting will make the dress look different from its “real” colors — the two positions are basically “I know it looks [lighter/darker] because it’s [washed out by the bright light/in shadow], but if you correct for that you can see it’s really [blue/white].”
YOU GUYS. It’s all about the color contrast and how your brain interprets blue tones. The white/gold is an unsaturated version of the blue/black. Check it out:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-c…
It’s already on Facebook, the dress is dead.
I like how you wrote NO ONE TALK ABOUT THE DRESS and there are 26 31 responses (and counting!) all talking about the dress.
Streisand Effect!
At least we now know that in our dystopian post-apocalyptic future, the two tribes fighting for dominance will be the WhiteGolds and the BlueBlacks.
Somehow my 9th graders have added to this an interpretation that if you see the colors one way your soul is “pure” but that if you see the other way you’ve been “touched by the devil”. I miss California.
Noooo that’s totally one of the things I was seeing on Tumblr, that the cones/rods configuration that lets you see blue means your eyes are “better” than if you can only see white (which I mentioned a little bit above), and it’s total bullshit.
Clearly at least one of your kids saw that and interpreted it their own way.
X TO THA SAY IT AIN’T SO 🙁 The full HuffPo article goes into way more depth, holy shit.
I mean, I figured as much. A guy that went to my high school was on the clone with Grandmaster Flash and he crashed his new car maybe two weeks afterward and I thought that was sweet, sweet karma because he was a jerk.
(The dress is black and blue but only reads as such to me when I see the black and white dress in the bottom left. Otherwise it reads white and gold.)
It’s okay, we’ll always have the delightful “Yo dawg, I heard you like X” meme. No number of devastating exposés can ever take that away from us.
I loved that Karl Ove travel writing piece. I can’t imagine the Times imagined something much different when they hired him. It’s like hiring David Foster Wallace to write about a cruise ship or a lobster fest. You’re not asking for a typical magazine piece, you want that writer’s voice and insights and way of looking at the world. I feel like that’s pretty much what I’d be like as a travel writer too–not very outgoing, nervous around people who were trying to help me, always feeling like I’m doing the wrong thing. I really enjoyed these lines:
“I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are replaceable and the products are identical. The identical cars are followed by identical gas stations, identical restaurants, identical motels and, as an extension of these, by identical TV screens, which hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment and identical dreams. Not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power had succeeded in creating such a unified, collective identity as the one Americans lived their lives within. When times got rough, a person could abandon one town in favor of another, and that new town would still represent the same thing.”
I really enjoyed the piece too — I thought it was well-written and just what you would expect from Karl Ove with his lyrical low-stakes sentences and near-constant introspection. That being said, and as the Slate piece points out, I think there were some ways in which the genre of travel writing highlighted what’s irritating about his style in general, which I couldn’t help but notice even as I was enjoying the piece overall.
He’s very unwilling to even try and get out of his head and do things for himself, instead relying on the kindness of strangers — strangers he can’t even muster up any kindness or gratitude for in return. His insistence on creating some metaphor out of the landscape he is traveling through only brought into relief what a poor job he was doing at describing and interacting with it in the first place.
He knew the metaphor was reaching, which was one of the aspects I really liked. Like the DFW comparison above, I like travel writing by people who are a bit too much in their heads about the whole experience, and who don’t have the expected reactions. I don’t really see the piece as travel writing–I see it as another coda to his autobiographical books, only this time instead of writing about his work or marriage or childhood he’s writing about visiting America.
Well, that sounds completely insufferable.
Not everyone has to like it. I find Jonathan Franzen to be insufferable. I really like Donna Tartt, and I’ve heard her books called insufferable. One person’s insufferable it another persons’ masterpiece.
I think it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of place theory of a certain era and background (basically, older white European men) and it’s all in this vein – decrying America because everything “looks identical,” it’s all strip malls or chain restaurants or whatever, the sky is falling, people don’t have values any more! And it’s this terrible, close-minded view of what places actually are, how people actually inhabit and use these “identical” places, how they have their own rhythms and identity and even individuality that the older European men don’t understand and don’t at all care to understand. And they’re obviously the superior ones with the correct opinions because they’re from some place with “culture.” It’s just become eye-rolling to me.
I think his view is interesting when taken with his similar view of his home country, Norway. He talks about how it’s the opposite of America in some ways, namely that in Norway you’re not supposed to be special or stand out. Everything is supposed to look identical. So when he discusses that view of America (which is a not uncommon one in popular culture) I see him as confused about it, because his vision of America as a child in Norway had been very different.
It still seems like an extremely shallow reading of place to me. I’ve read enough of that perspective to find it much duller than a Chili’s.
I do not understand why this dress thing is such a hot topic. Because people sometimes register colors differently? Is that worth talking about all over the goddamn internet? Or am I missing something?
I think it’s because there is such a dramatic difference in how people are perceiving the colors of that dress. Also, since it’s polarizing without involving any serious issues, it’s just a fun, silly internet thing for people to yell at each other over.
yes! It is fun to argue over something that doesn’t ultimately matter that much. I roped 3 co workers into it and we had fun debating it and my sister and I discussed it (she also with my parents). It’s not an issue where feelings actually get hurt, so it’s fun to be over the top about it.
Of course for some people it would be incredibly annoying, so as with many things, YMMV.
yup, it is SO FUN to go all in on an argument everyone involved acknowledges is totally frivolous*. And then…and then you look again and…your deeply held position has CHANGED! WHAT NOW?!
And then it turns into a conversation about how perception is so weeeeirrrrd.
*I feel like some Logical Rational Serious People are losing friends on the internet as we speak
Yeah, this meme is great because it’s not a Logical Serious Rational Discussion. And also completely pointless. Which is fine by me because I JUST LOVE FRIVOLITY OK.
it’s such a great antidote to all that stuff! And as a person who’s always hedging her arguments in an attempt to respect nuance & the limitations of my own knowledge, I’m having a blast going “Shut up, it’s blue & gold. Or not, I changed my mind and I’m still 100% right mwahahaha.”
I didn’t understand either, until I showed it to my husband as a “look what people are freaking out about on the internet!” and he was like, “yeah, it’s blue and black” when it is SO CLEARLY white and gold. Then he accused me of being colourblind and made me tell him every other colour in the room.
Basically, I wasn’t interested in it until someone I love and thought I knew was just totally wrong about the whole thing and I felt personally betrayed.
MrChouffe and I had the exact same interaction.
I had this same experience with my mother this morning. I only found out about it an hour or so ago, but when I looked, all I could think was “How on earth could this be confusing people? They must seriously just be making up the other colors and are wayyy dedicated to their trolling.” And then my mother saw the opposite colors that I did, and I was just totally floored.
I’m most interested in why this is happening, and why these two color groups not only appear, but appear so strongly that people aren’t just like “Oh ok, I guess the lighting just threw me off.” This is people confusing white/blue and black/gold in their minds’ eye and that to me is absolutely incredible, no matter which one you see personally.
Yes! I felt the same way — “It is so completely, definitely blue and black that the people claiming to see white and gold must be doing some weird-ass trolling” — and then I scrolled down to the bottom of the post to see that my friend who’d reblogged it had commented along the lines of “It is so completely, definitely white and gold that the people claiming to see blue and black must be doing some weird-ass trolling.” And no matter what I do, how many times I look away and back or cover up the darkest parts of the image or whatever, I CANNOT make it appear as white and gold, the way you normally can kind of make your brain switch back and forth between the two sides of an illusion. Even in the xkcd today, I can see that the two drawings of the dress are the same color values (like that illusion where the two grey squares are actually the same color), and the drawing on the left does look white and gold, but I can’t make the little strip of the actual photo between them resolve to “white and gold.” CAN’T. BRAIN WON’T DO IT. WHAT THE FUCK.
Yep, this morning I had convinced myself that it was some ridiculous “social experiment” about, I don’t know, seeing if they could get people to say that a white and gold dress looked blue and black through pure peer pressure. I believed that up until I saw this on The Toast and people are saying they really do see blue and black because I trust you all not to do shit like that. Now I’m just confused.
SAME EXACT experience with my husband. Dressgate is dividing and uniting us at the same time!
I just asked my wife what colors she saw and agreed with me that it was white and gold. United front! (although it did switch on me once).
People do love to go on about how they’re right and everybody else is wrong….
Why are all these people disagreeing with me when the truth is so obvious? Is it possible that I’m wrong? But I’m so certain that I’m not. But what if I am? What other things am I certain about that I might also have wrong? No — no, I must be right! I should forward this pic to even more people and see what they think…
It’s one thing in theory to know that everyone perceives color differently, but it’s quite another to be sitting on the couch with a person who is looking at the same image on the same laptop as me, but who claims to be looking at colors that are literally the opposite of the colors I see. So I’m a little glad I had that shared experience with my friend and the internet at large.
I tried to make a Matrix joke to said friend about taking the blue pill, but then I realized we no longer agreed on what color is blue!
What in the sam hill is a bullet-proof panic room?
A place for paranoid rich people who have enemies to hide when said enemies show up. Said enemies could be paid assassins, thieves who know there’s a big score, or people who just plain hate their guts.
At least, if I was a paranoid rich person, that’s who I’d be hiding from. As someone whose family has clawed their way from working class to middle class, I can only offer conjecture.
That this person has three speaks to just how paranoid, rich, corrupt, and/or hated they are.
When the poor people finally rise up against you, it’s an indestructible closet you can hide in to await a rescue that never comes, eventually starving to death and perishing in your own filth.
However, since they can never extricate you from your titanium-walled mausoleum without destroying the building, the presence of your dessicated carcass will continue to drive down the resale value in perpetuity. Thus, you will strike a final blow against your usurpers.
I know what a panic room is, but I’m not quite sure why the rich guy needed three of them. Unless everyone in the family got their own? That seems lonely, especially for scared starving people perishing in their own filth.
Lots of ink spent here on Everest College and how it seems to have been a scam. Luckily, in a lot of places, community colleges are allowing students to transfer in!
I’m really glad to hear that – good to know the students won’t be just cast out into the abyss. Mallory Heiney sounds like a certified badass, frankly, and I’m glad they have such a willing, vocal, spokesperson.
That edible coffee cup is actually several kinds of amazing.
It reminded me of those candy shot glasses we had in college – if memory serves, I drank many shots out of one and then proceeded to remove one of my dental crowns when I ate the glass. Not my finest hour.
The “heat-resistant white chocolate” freaks me out, because 1. White chocolate is the work of the devil, and 2. “Heat-resistant” is not a word that I ever wish to see as a descriptor of chocolate. Ever.
Agreed, I was somewhat intrigued until I hit the words ‘white chocolate’ which is a horrible invention I refuse to acknowledge.
I’m surprised some small coffee shop hasn’t done it before.
KFC is gross and the fact that they are the ones behind it makes me sad.
My only “dress” question is: why the widespread furor? Has no one seen an optical illusion before? Yeah, it’s amazing, but so are YOUR EYEBALLS. ugh.
I think it’s because people couldn’t (can’t?) figure out the trick. Most optical illusions, even if two people see two different things, they can each explain what they see and then the other person will be able to see it. But with this one, a lot of people can’t see what the other person sees even when they’re trying.
Right, plus it’s relatively rare to find such an effective illusion that is a) new to everybody seeing it and b) unplanned. Like, it’s all very well to see “two faces or a vase” when someone has drawn a picture to look like either of those things and that picture has been around since before you were born, but it’s weirder to see an effect like this crop up in the wild.
True. Though I’m almost surprised it hasn’t, in our world of white-balance, constant informal pictures in bad lighting, etc. I guess, as someone who’s been doing digital photography for years, I’m well aware of the weird funkiness of white balance. Even if I’ve never seen a perfectly captured natural example like this.
Right? I was giving informal drawing lessons to a friend and I just could not get him to wrap his head around basic basic color theory, like if an apple is red you can’t just make the part that’s in shadow black-red because if you really look at it, the color is more complex than the convenient way your brain likes to process it. Learning that stuff is a lot of fun (or it was for me) and I was disappointed that there wasn’t more discussion of it on twitter yesterday!
Yes! ART, PEOPLE. Do you think that the “white clouds” and the “red apples” you see in paintings are made by simply painting white or red paint on a canvas? Take this opportunity to go look at Monet’s Haystacks or Rouen Cathedral or something! 🙂
Everything I know about llamas – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBaUmx5s6iE
I want to eat the edible coffee cup so badly! I don’t care if it is terrible, it sounds so cool to be able to drink my coffee and then eat the cup like an ice cream. So disappointed it’s not coming to the US.
It would be like in Willy Wonka when they’re in the room with a chocolate river and Willy Wonka picks a teacup flower, drinks out of it, and then takes a bite. I always thought that looked so delicious.
I’m such a neurotic weirdo. All I could think about during that scene, even as an 8 year old kid, was “His teeth! Oh my god his teeth!!!!!!! Don’t bite into that!!!!!!!!! They’re going to break or rot off!!!!!!!”
I’m guessing the reason it’s not coming to the US is the heat-resistant white chocolate supplier is European. I’m so envious of their apparently superior candy technology.
“built-in saltwater aquariums…six-person jacuzzi overlooking the water…selling it because he never used it.”
It’s one thing to know intellectually that gazillionaires buy stuff and never use it, it’s another thing to read exactly what they are not using 🙁
can someone with more patience and grace please help me articulate my feelings about how lower class people are constantly harangued about “reduce, reuse, recycle”, cut coupons, carpool, be a better person, save the earth and then… there’s these dudes in the world pissing away of millions of dollars and god knows how many resources on shit they don’t ever even use.
Everest College was just abruptly shut down in Ontario — all 14 branches — by the government, in the middle of the semester, with no recourse for students. It’s awesome that it’s closing down, god what a corrupt institution, but it left a lot of students out of a lot of cash and incompletes they can never make up. Hopefully they let them do community college transfers here too but that’s a lot of students in a tough situation right now. :/
Also good for facebook on gender diversity BUT simultaneously they are also shutting down accounts with aboriginal names because they’re “inauthentic”, so there is still work to do.
Rich people, as usual, go to great lengths to justify the need for the Revolution.
I saw it as white & gold and didn’t see at all how it could be blue & black (even after seeing the other photos of the dress).
Then I saw it as blue & black and couldn’t believe I ever thought it was white & gold.
Now I’m seeing it as both and I’m fairly certain I’ve transcended the limits of spacetime.
ME TOO but it kind of hurts my eyes to do it so I am now attempting to avoid the photo.
Joel Anderson is an excellent writer and this is a fascinating look at Ben Carson. I knew he was a respected neurosurgeon, but I had no idea just how highly respected he is in that field. I still think his political ideas are wrong on almost every level, but it’s a good read nonetheless.
Knausgaard—provocatively low-affect, as if he’d wrought his prose from some insight-resistant material—is a master at arranging banal facts in a row and letting you wonder: Is this boredom I feel? Or drafts from the invisible wings of genius? Does it matter?
lol
“He spoke calmly and consumed Cheetos.”
I know this isn’t the open thread, but I really wanted to share this! For any toasters/butterers in NYC, MoMA is hosting a feminist art wikipedia edit-a-thon on March 7. With Wikipedia’s absolutely shameful ruling on the Gamergate article, it’s obvious that they need all the women editors they can get.
I’m with Slate re: Karl Ove Knausgaard. Small portions of his writing may be compelling, but I CANNOT get over his insensitive descriptions of people and culture.
“Everyone in the place, except the waiter, was fat, some of them so fat that I kept having to look at them. I had never seen people that fat before.”
Yes, yes, you can look away, asshole.
I would also love it if people could stop writing about Canada’s northerly parts as barren, cold and icy. Just stop it right now.
Finally, I cannot get past his gross inefficiency as a human being. Get your driver’s license, clean up your shit, tip the waiter, pay your bills, stop making excuses. I mean, how much money has the NYT paid to ferry this guy around? If you’re getting paid to travel, at least spend some of your time being curious about the world around you. Gah.
I hate him. I just hate him. It is based on secondhand information and sentences like that one and I just HATE him.
The Klaus Ove Knausgaard article, the original My Saga in the NYTMagazine and the weird take on it in Slate:
Marcus Samuelsson opened restaurant Aquavit in Minneapolis in the early 2000s, a restaurant featuring modern Scandinavian cuisine. It shut down, and he said he didn’t understand why a Scandinavian restaurant would fail in a state full of Swedes and Norwegians.
(Marcus spent a lot of time with his customers … ) And if he would have asked, I might have told him to imagine Swedish and Norwegian immigrants coming to the prairie in the 1850s and 1900s — open land, forests, lakes and rivers. Building their own houses, farming rocky soil. Eating what was there, not the cuisines of the land that they left behind. No seafood, but crappies and sunfish and Northerns and walleyes. Maybe not even bread, but hardtack. A husband and wife, alone on the land, each responsible for impossible amounts of work; and maybe no access to doctors. Women maybe giving birth with only the help of far-away neighbors. Little House on the Prairie — how the hell did Ma do it?
Culture and cuisine giving way to survival.
If Karl Ove would have been here in the 1970s, he could have spoken old Swedish and Norwegian with the old timers in the Chisago Lakes area (of Minnesota), a veritable Scandinavian ghetto. But it would have been the language of the early 20th, late 19th century Sweden and Norway. The words were different, the pronunciation was different, and authors from the Mother countries came to the region to do research for stories set back then.
The language was not passed on, because the immigrants were in this country now, and they were Americans. The only cuisine passed on was lutefisk, lefse, sausage, limpa bread, tosca cake, maybe krumkake, eaten at holidays; except in my family and maybe a few others, we ate lutefisk anytime we got the craving. Yes, you can crave cod cured in lye with butter and white sauce. (LOL).
Some things, of course, don’t change. We are still a taciturn people and long silences don’t bother us. (When I went away to college, I actually had to learn to talk — small talk — and give my opinions about things. In a conformist Scandinavian community, how you *feel* about things is a given, it doesn’t need to be talked about.)
And I’m embarrassed in advance for Karl Ove to come here to Minnesota, and for him to say that the people have disappeared into the identical buildings and land of the rest of the United States. I hope he has the imagination to see why things changed. But if he isn’t going to talk to anybody, he might not see what parts of the culture have survived.
I hope he finds a bit of the Minnesota prairie, and he sits down and imagines that it’s 1850, and he feels what the Swedish and Norwegian immigrants felt back then and how they had to adjust and survive. I hope this, but I expect he’ll be distracted by the similar gas stations and fast food places and suburban sprawl.
The second part of his “My Saga” will be published March11th and I’ll get my answer then.
Oh, you’re making me so homesick for MN! Every winter I miss the lefse with butter and sugar so much! And though I’ve had lutefisk, it was more of a rite of passage than an enjoyable meal. We only made it about once every 10 years. So much about MN is still so unique, even if most people only know enough Norwegian to understand Ole and Lena jokes, but I do agree that you have to get out and actually talk to people to see that.
I often remember how when Aquavit closed, there was a lot of moaning in the local press to the effect of “we can’t support a good restaurant, we’ll never be a first-class city.” And it’s weird to me, because there is just so much good food these days in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, interesting and creative food drawing on many cultures! It’s not New York or London but the way Aquavit was treated as some kind of canary in a coal mine seems to have awfully misguided.
I appreciate your take on frontier cooking. Scandinavians came here during a time of horrific poverty in their home countries, and modern Norwegian cooking comes out of a different place entirely.
Aquavit was pretty protein-heavy, when in Minnesota, I think we’re also about vegetables and fruit and of course, the starches. My daughter and I usually got the tasting menu at Aquavit so we’d have more variety — our version of a smorgasbord. Buffet, lol.
But yeah, I grew up in the country and I didn’t realize how poor we were until I went to the University of Minnesota. We lived mostly off our garden and the cows/pigs/chickens we raised. We did a lot of canning for the winter months. Um, but when I wrote this, I was thinking of my grandmother’s diet during the Depression years: lard sandwiches, pickles and field corn. She went off to work at a Summit Avenue mansion, for rich people, and became a pastry chef. But her meals (besides the exquisite desserts she came up with) — were fruit and vegetable heavy, especially during the summer months. So we might have chicken, but with fresh tomatoes, fresh green beans, peaches or plums, and stuff like that. I thought of it as a celebration of harvest food.
I think that’s what Aquavit was missing: how we feel after the winter months, when we can get fresh fruits and vegetables. I guess I could have told Marcus about my grandmother and maybe he would have understood, you know? But I think like any chef, he would have wanted to prepare the tomatoes (or the green beans, or the asparagus) — instead of just serving them fresh, as an accompaniment (sp?) to a perfectly prepared piece of venison.
I’m color blind. Welcome to my world, people of the Internet.
Kindly shut the fuck up about that dress. We are all going to be so embarrassed in about two or three days.
A good friend of mine now identifies as “trans as fuck” on Facebook.
They're attacking libraries, too – apparently thousands of books and manuscripts have been burned. It's horrific. I know killing people is worse, and it's not as if that's not happening too, but destruction of groups' cultural heritage has such a large effect – erasing the traces of the past as a precursor to erasing unwanted elements in the present – and it happens so often (Sri Lanka, Sarajevo, Cambodia …). So awful.
Partner thinks it's pink. Today is our anniversary, but I don't think I can live with him any longer.