In The NY Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago, Carina Chocano launched another one of her missiles of insight, this time at the double standards about age for men and women in a column entitled “Girls Love Math. We Never Stop Doing It.” Her jumping off points being the pilot of Mindy Kaling’s new show, The Mindy Project (in which a 31-year old Mindy expresses more than a little angst about being ‘over the hill’, marriage-potential-wise), and a recent debate about the guidelines for runway models, i.e. that they must be at least 16 years old. But as worthy…
Longing Machines and the Pinteresting World of Online Curation
Here’s a meta one for you. In the most recent issue of The NY Times Magazine, the ever inspired Carina Chocano offered some wise and timely reflections on the “curation” phenomenon that occupies so many of our waking hours these days, esp in the form of websites like Pinterest and Tumblr. Chocano interprets the popularity of these sites as evidence of an addiction to (spiritual) longing–a desire to be understood via the objects (and people) we identify ourselves with. In her view, we are not after the objects/vistas/works of art themselves so much as the way those things make us…
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Another Week Ends: Immortal Smartphones, Jefferson Bethke, Adolescent Rewards, Profound Comedy, Therapeutic Irony, more George Lucas, Pixar and Hunger Games
1. In last weekend’s NY Times Magazine, Carina Chocano explained “The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg” – AKA what our current obsession with “data” has to say about our humanity – dropping her usual allotment of insight bombs along the way. Not only does she point out the increasingly prevailing illusion that if something wasn’t ‘documented’ it didn’t happen, she gets at the real crux of our smartphoned existence: the false promise of immortality. In other words, a familiar serpent has found its way into the, um, Apple Store:
This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that…
The (D)Evolving Dreams of an Everyday Housewife: Bravo’s Postfeminist Status Olympics
This is so good. In the NY Times Magazine recently, Carina Chocano traced the strange subversion of the word/concept “housewife,” particularly how the Bravo “Real Housewife” brand has taken the conventional notion of the word to its semantic extreme opposite. What was once a term that connoted humble domesticity, frugal compliance and resignation now signifies unfettered indulgence and plastic ambition, not to mention a revulsion to any actual housework. Yet ironically, as Chocano points out, the archetype has maintained its judgmental undercurrent, serving as a backboard against which to define ourselves: a lightning rod for disdainful self-righteousness in other words…
James Franco and Bradley Cooper Are More Perfect Than You
A wonderfully insightful article by Carina Chocano in The NY Times Magazine, “Our Imperfect Search for Perfection,” using, among other things, the two recent Hollywood releases “The Adjustment Bureau” and “Limitless” to discuss our profoundly troubled relationship with perfection. Certainly the first time I’ve ever seen Pelagius in the Times (and certainly in conjunction with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills). I was only disappointed she gave the Christian understanding of human fallibility such short shrift. Weird, almost – because fashionable or not, what she’s describing here is nothing less than the unshakeable and inherent religiosity that plagues all of…
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