links for 2009-01-09

I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. I have been aware that, subject to renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others. I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in doing so I have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend. I am deeply grateful for the concern of all those who have constantly prayed for my happiness.

For those that need it.

Did we simply transform overnight into a nation of venal assholes?

The medium—unfiltered, unedited—is revolutionary, opening the closed ranks of the literary world to anyone who owns a mobile phone. One novelist I met, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two who lives in the countryside around Kyoto, told me that she thinks up her stories while affixing labels to beauty products at her factory job, and sometimes writes them down on her cell phone while commuting by train to her other job, at a spa in Osaka.

The most notorious neo-Thoreauvian might be Colin Beavan, a 45-year-old New Yorker better known as No Impact Man, and even better known as The Man Who Doesn't Let His Wife Use Toilet Paper.

One way this embodiment of contradictions gives people charisma is when it makes them both grand and approachable. "People need to resent their idols as well as to adore them," Roach said in an interview, "tearing them down even as they build them up. People seek out figures whose personalities broadcast contradiction because they make it easier for them instantly to gratify their own contradictory needs. One of those needs is for 'public intimacy,' the assurance that the person who's not like anyone we've ever met is just like one of us after all."

But if nothing else, the debate is on. "Maybe the metaphor of the archive is the best one I can come up with," says Columbia's Peter Bearman. "What the discipline needs to understand is that there is this fabulously rich, potentially informative new archive out there, and we have to ask: How are we going to make use of that new information? How are we going to orient ourselves to that new data?"

I will be good.

Sharing an experience with another person may change the perception we have of our own self, such as the recognition of our own face.

Surprisingly, there actually hasn't been much research on the effectiveness of humor in ads.

Raise high the coffee bean!