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Don’t tell us that it’s impossible and that there is no budget for glitter. Give us a wheel to reinvent. … We are more than the sum of our parts. We get presidents elected.

Wonderful manifesto for the creative class, a term coined by Richard Florida in his 2002 modern classic The Rise of the Creative Class. Second only to the cinematic Holstee LifeCycle manifesto.

Pair with 5 manifestos for the creative life.

Seth Godin writing advice culture and society media and communication

The best approach is to not try to write things that will go viral. No, the best approach is to write for just one person. Make an impact on just one person. Even better, make it so they can’t sleep that night unless they choose to make a difference for just one other person by sharing your message with them. The rest will take care of itself.

Seth Godin echoes Kurt Vonnegut, who in the seventh of his 8 timeless tips on writing advised, “Write to please just one person.”

culture and society history and literature media and communication science and technology

Some suggested that the advent of Freudian psychology — or perhaps the mass popularization of the novel — had contributed to this inward turn by America’s diarists. As the profession of journalism began to rise at the beginning of the 20th century, the independent writer was becoming increasingly self-reflective, creating the expectation of privacy that we were familiar with prior to the arrival of the Internet. … Before we had a mass media, there was a system of personal writing that looked like a slower, more loosely networked version of Twitter.

Are diaries the original social media? Peek inside some of yesteryear’s most stirring diaries here, then see these 5 vintage versions of modern social media.

LGBT culture and society maps data visualization marriage equality media and communication politics

Mapping LGBT rights by country. Also see this map of LGBT rights in the American workplace and the Guardian’s stellar visualization of LGBT rights by state.

Pair with The Politics of Homosexuality, the seminal 1993 article that turned the tide.

LGBT Andrew Sullivan politics culture and society history and literature history media and communication marriage equality

Silence, if it does not equal death, equals the living equivalent.

On May 10, 1993, Andrew Sullivan published his seminal essay “The Politics of Homosexuality,” which changed the course of gay rights and presaged many of the modern debates on marriage equality.

culture and society animation media and communication psychology thought and opinion science and technology tech Nicholas Carr

What the Internet is doing to our brains – a charming animation based on Nicholas Carr’s rather reductionist, techno-dystopian book The Shallows. For a more dimensional look at how digital culture is affecting cognition, see this.

(↬ Laughing Squid)

women history and literature culture and society politics letters history media and communication

One day last week I pulled up to a four-way stop in my taxi. At one of the other stop signs sat a police officer in a chase cruiser, and at the third, a telephone installer in a Bell Canada van. What made the occasion memorable was the fact that all three of us were women. We celebrated with much joyful laughter and raised thumbs.

Jill Wood
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
November 1980 issue

Letters to Ms. – remarkable selections from the “social media” of the 1970s and 1980s, the vehicle through which the women to whom we owe so much stood together and raised their voices.

art and design language media and communication culture and society infographics history and literature lit

19 emotions for which English has no words, in an infographic by design studen Pei-Ying Lin.

Among the most beautiful is toska.

English, meanwhile, has plenty of unusual words of its own.

education data visualization culture and society media and communication

The length of the average dissertation from the top fifty majors, visualized. The humanities and social sciences – anthropology, history, and political science – clock in longest, whereas “hard” sciences like economics, mathematics, and biostatistics tend to be shortest.

language history and literature culture and society media and communication

Linguists identify 15,000-year-old “ultraconserved words” that even our hunter-gatherer forbearers would understand. Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf reminds us that words are meant to change.

history and literature lit interviews thought and opinion media and communication Salman Rushdie censorship

I’d say that, in general, [it’s] gotten worse. But one of the things our report highlights is that people have more tools to resist censorship using new media. For instance, in China, while there’s increased repression in the form of arbitrary arrests, artists held incommunicado and put under house arrest, and increasing hostility towards literature and free expression, there is at the same time a growing willingness of Chinese citizens to find ways to express themselves. In spite of all the repression, there’s been a growth of independent, non-state publishers to print things that wouldn’t be approved by state houses, and people have shown the willingness to post things online even if they’re not to the liking of the state.

Salman Rushdie on the state of censorship in the world. Essential addition to literary icons’ sentiments on censorship.

(↬ The Dish)

women culture and society history and literature media and communication letters feminism

It occurred to me the other day to wonder at the discrepancy in wages that I pay to those high-school students who baby sit and those who do lawn cutting and gardening for me. Most of the “lawn and garden” people, who happen to be boys ask for a dollar an hour. Most of the baby sitters, who usually happen to be girls, ask seventy-five cents an hour.

Now I ask myself, is caring for my children less important, less valuable, less a responsibility? Or is lawn cutting and gardening considered harder and more taxing physical work? (Two active children under five can be pretty hard, taxing, physical work, too.) Or is it that boys just ask for and receive high wages from the beginning? And is it that child care is, anyway, considered to be “women’s work” and not deserving of pay? Click!

Marge Mitchell
Baltimore, Maryland
September 1974 issue

These vintage letters to pioneering feminist magazine Ms. bespeak both how far we’ve come in some ways and how little has changed in others.

women culture and society history and literature history politics media and communication letters advertising

Why do advertisers persist in selling the image of the beautiful, shapely woman executive who keeps the same perfectly made-up face and styled hair, even after a hard day of earning a six-figure salary, dining in expensive restaurants, having a brisk game of tennis at the club, and a late night of discotheque hopping? It’s no surprise that real women are tempted to wonder what they’re doing wrong.

How little has changed since this 1980 reader letter to pioneering feminist magazine Ms.

Mary Thom feminism culture and society media and communication Gloria Steinem

Speaking at the memorial for reconstructionist Mary Thom, who died in a motorcycle accident in April, feminist icon and fellow reconstructionist Gloria Steinem eloquently captures Thom’s lasting legacy as pioneering editor:

Mary chose to be backstage and without her there would BE no stage.

Meanwhile, Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center where Thom was editor-in-chief, noted with bittersweet pride that in a today’s landscape where major media systematically fail to published obituaries for notable women compared to their male counterparts – something Thom herself had actively fought – more than 600 media stories covered Thom’s death and legacy.

thought and opinion culture and society media and communication Dan Pink interviews advertising branding psychology

If a brand is making a promise that you’re going to feel better about yourself if you buy it, they’re making a false promise. Human beings metabolize their purchases very quickly. … This is an element of what social psychologists call “the hedonic treadmill”: If you’re always looking to validate yourself and get satisfaction from buying stuff or having a bigger house, then you’re on an endless, addictive treadmill. There’s no enduring satisfaction to this. If a brand’s only purpose is to get you on that hedonic treadmill, it might be good for business in the short run, but in the long run, you’re doomed. If you look at the components of long-term well-being, it has nothing to do with material goods. Once you’re past a certain level of material well-being, people’s long-term happiness and wellbeing is about having deep personal relationships, believing in something larger than themselves, and doing something meaningful that they enjoy.

Dan Pink on the psychology of consumer culture and how marketers manipulate it. Pair with the science of whether money can buy you happiness.