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The trick was that Eminem made the performance of his own pop-cultural role the subject of his music. Instead of music about violence, he made music about our awkward, hypocritical relationship with violence. Instead of music with swear words, he made music about the moralizing around bad language. He summed this up best on ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ where he rapped, ‘Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records / Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you, too.’

—from ‘Rhymes With Aguilera’ on n+1

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She came for a marriage, but the salesman said that the model she wanted was no longer available. Down a labyrinthine hallway they walked, past rows of closed doors, rusty water fountains, a long expanse of plastic grass. “When I was your age, people wouldn’t even look at a marriage.” He unlocked a steel door and led her into a light-filled room, silvered with nostalgia, where there was a table with two cell phones and linen napkins. The flora was better than she had expected; the foam insulation, a surprise. Ivy had overgrown the bed.

“If anything should go awry,” he said, “we offer thimble gardens, hypnosis, a two-week fragment of inauspicious lives. Of course we want you to enter the relationship with confidence.” She had a reservation, but when she tried to voice it, he gathered the plumbing magazines from the bed, removed the frozen pizzas and the scissors. “Listen, take five minutes,” he said and helped her lie down. “I’m going to dim the lights.”

On the coverlet she lay and stiffened her heart. Was this a marriage? Mariachi music played, then the sound of water trickling on stone. Then snoring and the smell of maple syrup and something animal, musky. As if miles overhead came the long mournful cry of a gull. The sound of a hundred vacuum cleaners. “Yes, I’ll take it,” she said huskily, impulsively, and tiny drops of rain, or something wet, spattered the room.

by Sara Levine; found in Requited

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Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

—from David Foster Wallace’s speech at Kenyon University’s 2005 commencement

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Great design by Mario Stipinovich

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

‘East Harlem’ by Beirut

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taken by Noah Kalina

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‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as ‘weird,’ ‘whiny’ and ‘immature.’

—Kids don’t like The Catcher in the Rye anymore. I find that ‘weird,’ ‘whiny’ and ‘immature’.

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The font family was originally called Underground, it became known as Johnston’s Railway Type, and later simply Johnston. It comes with two weights, heavy and ordinary. Heavy contains only capital letters. A further change occurred in 2008 when Transport for London removed the serif from the numeral ‘1’ and also altered the ‘4’, in both cases reverting these to their original appearance.

—from the wikipedia article on the typeface ‘Johnston’ which is the official typeface for the London Underground