Stuff I like by Benita
I'm awesome.
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‘Mad Men’ Fifth-Season Date Is Uncertain - NYTimes.com
Fans accustomed to spending their summer Sundays with Don Draper may have to wait a while longer. It looks increasingly likely that the fifth season of “Mad Men,” the three-time Emmy Award-winning AMC series, will not have its debut until later in 2011 or possibly 2012.
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Osama bin Laden Was the Most Wanted Face of Terrorism - NYTimes.com
Holy shit, NYT, seven-page obit! I wonder how many years they’ve been waiting to publish this.
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The Twitter Trap - NYTimes.com
I promise this isn’t just another piece lamenting the demise of today’s youth from a curmudgeon. It’s actually pretty thoughtful.
“The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”
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(via 1,500 Reported Missing as Teams Search Tornado Wreckage - NYTimes.com)
A volunteer in Joplin, Mo., is sporting a D.
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"Recluse Heiress" Huguette Clark's Fascinating Obituary
Little-known fact (now widely known): I really, really love reading the NYT obituaries. Like, really love. I always look forward to their annual December “people who died this year who aren’t super famous but made an impact” obits feature.
This one doesn’t disappoint.
“Mrs. Clark was from her 30s onward an antisocial socialite, an enigmatic figure whose closest companions were her mother and her dolls.” The whole thing is incredible, but if you’re stingy with NYT pageviews, a few of the best parts are below. (Her $24 million Connecticut mansion is also for sale, on a website with an incongruously chipper auto-soundtrack.)
At Huguette’s birth, her mother was 28, her father 67. …
In 1928, at 22, she married William MacDonald Gower, the son of a business associate of her father’s. The union lasted nine months: she charged desertion; he maintained the marriage was unconsummated …
By the late 1930s, Mrs. Clark had disappeared from the society pages. Most if not all of her siblings had died; she lived with her mother at 907 Fifth Avenue, painting and playing the harp. Her mother died there in 1963.
For the quarter-century that followed, Mrs. Clark lived in the apartment in near solitude, amid a profusion of dollhouses and their occupants. She ate austere lunches of crackers and sardines and watched television, most avidly “The Flintstones.” A housekeeper kept the dolls’ dresses impeccably ironed. …
By all accounts of sound body and mind till nearly the end of her life, Mrs. Clark had lived, apparently by choice, cloistered in New York hospitals since the late 1980s. There, first in Doctors Hospital and later at Beth Israel, she was reported to have lived under a series of pseudonyms. …
In the hospitals, Mrs. Clark, whose given name is pronounced hyoo-GETT, was attended by round-the-clock private aides and surrounded by the fine French dolls she had collected since she was a girl.
And where will the dolls go now? Adam Martin at The Atlantic guesses they might be donated to the New York Toy Museum or the Princeton Doll and Toy Museum, although it’s also possible some will inexplicably be given to women who work on websites.
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In four hours, the crew filled 22 bags. Among the contents: Cigar wrappers. Empty bottles of vodka and coconut rum. A gold lamé thong. A studded dog collar. Stapled pages of a manuscript. Subway cards. A hypodermic needle. Chips packets. Breath mints. A raccoon skull. And, according to the volunteers’ estimates, upward of 2,000 condom wrappers and 600 condoms.
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My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant - NYTimes.com
This is such a good piece. Sometime today, be sure to read the whole thing.
In April 2008, I was part of a Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. Lolo died a year earlier, so it was Lola who called me the day of the announcement. The first thing she said was, “Anong mangyari kung malaman nang tao?”What will happen if people find out?
I couldn’t say anything. After we got off the phone, I rushed to the bathroom on the fourth floor of the newsroom, sat down on the toilet and cried.”
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“My advice would be you’ve gotta make things. You’ve gotta build things. You can’t say, I’ve got a clip from my college newspaper. There’s gotta be a travelogue that you did with your pals from Bonnaroo. There’s gotta be an audio file that you made. I used to hire people all the time when I worked at weeklies, young people, and if they were coming now I would just say, well, show me what you’ve made with your own two dirty little hands. I don’t really care what you say, I want to see what you’ve done. It’s a time when you can make stuff so much more easily. Now, getting that stuff to rise above the clutter, and getting it seen is a battle, getting paid for it on top of it, yeah, that’s another battle.”
I can’t get enough of this guy.
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Should Vanity Fair Be a Spelling Vigilante? | Blogs | Vanity Fair
This is my favorite response to the NYT piece causing a stir today.
“Just as New York Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane is concerned whether his newspaper is printing lies or the truth, we here at V.F. looking for reader input on whether and when Vanity Fair should spell “words” correctly in the stories we publish.
One example: the word “maintenance” seems like it should only have one “a” in it. It should be “maintenence,” right? But it’s not. So is it our job as reporters and editors to spell it correctly?
Another example: who decides “Michele Bachmann” should be spelled with one “l” in “Michele” and two “n”s in “Bachmann”? I’ve never seen it spelled like that in any other circumstance, so should we print it just because that’s how she spells it? I don’t know.
As one reader recently wrote in a message to the spelling editor:
“My question is what role the magazine’s news coverage should play with regard to stupidly spelled words. In general, Vanity Fair spells stuff correctly, but sometimes words just look wrong. ‘Broccoli,’ for instance, looks dumb. If a magazine’s overarching goal is to be correct, but something makes you do a double-take because it just looks so bad, should Vanity Fair just let these oddities stand?”
Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can Vanity Fair do this in a way that is objective and fair? Whose job is it to decide what words look strange and what words just look fancy? And at what point does an exotic extra consonant become distracting?”
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Tasty Burgers, Without the Meat — Recipes for Health - NYTimes.com
Five recipes for vegetarian burgers that don’t use imitation meat products! I’m really looking forward to trying all of these.
Newspaper copy editor, semi-new homeowner, amateur baker who is in love with words, sarcasm, news, pop culture, bright colors, music, design, books, Detroit, DIY.
