The Crockpot: A Weekly Digest 08.25.11

traffic-jamTalk about a traffic jam: Globally, there are now 1 billion cars on the road.

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Lori Adorable offers women 8 ethical tips in her guide to feminist erotic modeling.

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A travel guidebook writer achieves transcendence on a 30-hour van ride across Mongolia.

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French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s indictment may have been dismissed, but the case still shed light on the sexual assaults suffered by hotel housekeepers.

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Advice from the world’s oldest investment banker, the 105-year-old Irving Kahn: “There are a lot of opportunities out there, and one shouldn’t complain, unless you don’t have good health.”

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Get ready for “The Missing Piece,” a forthcoming documentary which chronicles the 1911 theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

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Eight movie clichés illustrated.

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“It’s all too easy to divide the world into people like us and outsiders,” writes Tom Jacobs at Miller-McCune. “Newly published research points to a surprising factor that exacerbates this unfortunate tendency: Boredom.”

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Apparently John Huntsman thinks the GOP presidential candidate should try to appeal to more than just 10 percent of the population. Interesting strategy, sir.

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If Frida Kahlo’s most memorable physical features were her eyebrows, then her most forgotten was her weak spine, a condition which required her to wear plaster corsets for most of her life. They were, unsurprisingly, another sort of canvas for the idiosyncratic artist. Paris Review’s Leslie Jamison writes that Kahlo decorated her corsets “with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the one whose handrail rammed through her body when she was eighteen years old.”

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Every year Beloit College releases a “Mindset List” that gives a snapshot of the “cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college” on a given year. The list for the class of 2015 includes factoids like “Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents,” “Life has always been like a box of chocolates,” and “Women have always been kissing women on television.”

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Even after decades of study, neuroscientists find the brain a mysterious thing. The posterior cingulate cortex—sometimes called “the dark energy of the brain”—uses more calories than any other part of the brain (which burns 20% of the calories you eat), but scientists have no idea what it does.

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Popular Science explains how to make crop circles and offers up a gallery of the phenomenon.

The Frida Kahlo Stare

frida What is it about women and their facial expressions that inspire such iconic portraiture? Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile is a riddle so intriguing it has become an obsession among art historiansand the subject of numerous crappy movies. Then there’s Frida Kahlo’s impressive stare (complemented by her freewheeling eyebrows), which is explored in a recent article in the Smart Set. The uncompromising severity of “The Look,” present in all of Kahlo’s self-portraits, becomes all the more curious when compared to the photographs of the painter, which, writes Morgan Meis, show her in “much softer, or more playful, or openly seductive” poses.

 

Morgan Winters

Frida Kahlo’s  Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird  , Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust.




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