Author: Alesh Houdek

Self Magazine recently “retouched” about 30 pounds off Kelly Clarkson for their cover photo

Self Magazine recently “retouched” about 30 pounds off Kelly Clarkson for their cover photo. But that sort of thing is nothing new, right? What is entertaining here is what Lucy Danziger, Self’s editor, came up with when her handlers apparently told her to write an explanation that ‘yeah, of course we “retouch,” but it’s all about producing a self-confident and happy image, not about making someone look skinnier.’ Here’s what she came up with: “This is art, creativity and collaboration. It’s not, as in a news photograph, journalism. It is, however, meant to inspire women to want to be their best. That is the point.” The hypocrisy here is on par with politicians talking about Social Security. There is the widening gulf between reality and what can be acceptably said, and there is the requirement for people willing to talk around that gulf. (via)

About Andy Kaufman

andy are you goofing on elvis? The Andy Kaufman Chronicles

Here’s a file I put together something like 12 years ago about Andy Kaufman, with information pulled from the then-internet.

Let me set the stage: back when I was your age, there was no YouTube, no Wikipedia, no blogs. There was no friggin’ Google yet. What there was were tons of websites, lovingly hand-crafted with the first wave of web authoring tools (Dreamweaver 1.0 was cutting-edge), which you browsed on your crappy bulging-front 15” CRT monitor. And these websites had tons of stuff on them. And so if a subject popped into your head, you could pull up the Yahoo[!] and find information — sometimes on multiple sites! — and get your information piped directly into your eye-stream, or whatever. And I used to put together these dossiers on different things to print out and read offline. Well, a dozen years and at least half that many computers later, these files live on (and who says hard drives crash?) on my computer, which suddenly seems like such a shame.

Microsoft Word, which I originally put these together with, of course now exports HTML (hideous, bloated html, but whatever, right?), which I was able to cobble together enough to get it into the most rudimentary of my templates.

I hope you’ll get a kick out of my younger self’s enthusiasm for Kaufman (of course today you can see a lot of the stuff I could only read about) and overlook the horrendeous design choices (more my fault then Word’s, a testament to getting over-the-top formatting stuff out of your system while you’re young) and probably copyright violations (I hope to add citations and links to this file at some point). I hope you enjoy it.

Five easy facts about healthcare

Five easy facts about healthcare: 62% of the bankrupcies in the United States are caused by devastating medical bills. 78% of those cases were people who had health insurance, but who found themselves not covered, or not sufficiently covered, when the time came. 18,000 people unnecessarily die here every year because of a lack of insurance. (Source.) Of the top 50 richest nations in the world, the United States is the only one that does not have guaranteed healthcare for everyone. (Source.) The last Republican administration had 8 years to fix the healthcare system their way, and they decided to do nothing.

Dear The Awl,

I do not think that I have never particularly cared about a single thing The Awl has written about, but I love reading it all the time anyway, because of the glorious wordsmithery of Choire, Balk, et al. However, it bothers me that there are two reasons why reading The Awl in an RSS reader is better than reading it on the site: (1) you can read as much of each post as you’d like instead of as much as the site’s editors would like without having to keep clicking “READ ON” and then clicking back and waiting for things to load and (2) you can see the name of the person who wrote it under the title of each post (i don’t know why all group blogs don’t assume that at least some readers care who writes what?).

But let us not leave it there. Let us point to this fun, which admittedly I might care about more than the average reader because said issue was the first in my subscription to said magazine and because I have actually enjoyed a couple of Dave Eggers books and other things. So, whatever. I’ll skip the story and see the movie, and I’ll try to hold in my heart a little skepticism directed toward the New Yorker’s fiction editor. And I’d urge anyone who read all (two pages!) of the post to also read enough of the comments to get to this bit by Choire:

But I absolutely do believe this is a pegged event for the promotion of the movie. Between the studio-supplied art–and I speak as someone who’s been doing a weekly silly Q&A feature for a major newspaper for the last three years or so, and for which even that little thing we would NEVER accept studio art–to the timing, to the Brand Naminess Quotient (in which you ask: would the New Yorker publish this submission from my Aunt Susan? No they would not): well, it all smells.

(Um, sorry: don’t try to parse that grammar and punctuation.)