Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources."

--Jonathan Franzen, in a New York Times piece adapted from the commencement speech he delivered May 21 at Kenyon College

i don't really care about fashion. or designers. nor do i follow what many high end clothing companies say/do. but this made me really happy to read.

Hugo Boss has financed independent historical research into the company's activities during World War II, to be published today in Germany. It is the second such study that the company has commissioned. "We don't want and have never wanted to hide anything, but rather want to bring clarity to the past. It's our responsibility to the company, our employees, our customers and everyone interested in Hugo Boss and its history," said the company's head of communications. Hugo Boss says it had no influence over the research or writing of the new book, which concludes that Hugo Boss was indeed one of the more than 15,000 German factories that produced uniforms for the Nazi military during the war, although it was not a leading producer or a designer of Nazi uniforms. Hugo Boss also employed 140 forced laborers, and 40 prisoners of war. The company has made donations to the international fund set up to benefit former forced laborers. It's interesting that Hugo Boss seems to take an open attitude towards its wartime history. In contrast is Chanel, which continues to deny mounting evidence that its founder, Coco Chanel, was not only a wartime collaborator, but an actual Nazi spy. Modern-day Chanel has even tried to spin Coco Chanel's involvement in a Nazi plot as a benign attempt to negotiate an end to the war.

Common sense is all too often a casualty of the media culture we live in. Parents assume the sexual content and innuendo in the programming they are watching will go over their child's head, or think it's cute to dress their child in sexy clothes or encourage her to imitate Beyonce's dance moves so they can post it on YouTube. In reality, they are teaching their children what kind of behavior will help them get noticed.

...Everyone in society suffers when children are sexualized, but those hurt worst are the children themselves. In February 2007, the American Psychological Association released a report on the sexualization of girls that found that girls' exposure to hypersexualized media content can negatively impacts their cognitive and emotional development; is strongly associated with eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression; leads to fewer girls pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; and causes diminished sexual health.

But it's not just our daughters who are being affected by these images. Boys and adult men are also learning to value women only for their sex appeal, which the report says can lead to increased incidents of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and increased demand for child pornography.

- excerpt. Melissa Henson, CNN

The really frustrating thing about the “Save the boobies” campaign and similar ones is that it gets it exactly backward. Often, the point of breast cancer treatment is to destroy some or all of the boobies in order to save the woman.

Saying that we should work to cure this disease because it threatens breasts is really upsetting. For starters, it suggests that women are worth saving because they’re attached to breasts, rather than the other way around. But worse, it tells any woman who’s had a life-saving mastectomy that she’s given up the thing that made people care about her survival. What a punch in the stomach.

Randall Munroe, writer of xkcd


thank you, sir. and amen.