For those of you in the DC area: Tangysweet (which tastes exactly like Pinkberry) is now opening up another Red Velvet Cupcakery at their Dupont location, and they're giving out free cupcakes today starting at noon.
And in honor of it being exactly one week (7 days! 168 hours! 10080 minutes!) until my 21st birthday: here are 17 of the worst shots ever created. Scroll down to see my personal favorite from this summer: the Four Horsemen (Jim, Jack, Johnny, and Jose).
Yesterday I went to a free sneak preview showing of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, which will be released Aug. 7. Based on the true life stories of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), the beloved cook (and spy?!) who wrote the 734-page book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation employee turned blogger turned writer, the film weaves together Child's memoir My Life in France with the creation and carry-through of the Julie/Julia Project.
It's no secret that the real star of the movie is the food (even The New York Times wrote about it in its article "Film Food, Ready for Its 'Bon Appetit'"), but Streep is pretty flawless herself as the eccentric, larger-than-life, and lovable chef. Both her and Adams, who sports an androgynous haircut in place of her normal red waves, pass the hardest test of playing a real person: believability, although both women do seem to have unnaturally perfect marriages and Adams appears to have an unnaturally fast metabolism given all the butter she claims to use. While the film drags on a bit towards the end, making it seem longer than the 123 minutes it actually is, for the most part the plot is engaging, the writing entertaining, and the comedic timing on point (but what else would you expect from the director of When Harry Met Sally and You've Got Mail?).
The only downside: a strong craving for rich French food immediately following viewing.
"I don't think a pre-born child is yearning for anything. Douche."
- our lobbyist
I love the people I work with, but most of the time I feel like the cubicle is sucking my soul out. I'm dying to be outside, moving, exploring, but instead I'm stuck in a 6 by 6 cell, without even a window to longingly look out of.
The indie world can't live on fingerpicking and textural guitars alone, and a varity of sounds and multiculturalism in indie rock isn't the enemy here; shitty Jackson 5 covers are.
Cat introduced me to Discovery, the spin-off project of Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij (keyboardist/producer) and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles (singer), who released their "LP" album (yes, that's the title) this summer. Imagine the beat dynamics of both bands combined and then projected through a flurry of synths and waves of electro-pop sound, with a dose of MJ and a remix of Ra Ra Riot's "Can You Tell" thrown in for good measure.
Or, since Pitchfork calls it "your electro-pop summer soundtrack," maybe you could just think of it as the musical equivalent of drinking a lemon fizz while whirling down a pool slide.
They carried wine from Trader Joe’s, blankets, almonds and goldfish (the Pepperidge Farm kind), and they were headed to the Great Lawn in search of a patch of grass. It was 6:15 on Tuesday evening, a breezy, golden 77 degrees, and people were streaming into the park with plastic bags of picnic food, like pilgrims bearing offerings, for one of the city’s great summer rites: At 8 p.m., on the grassy oval ringed by oaks, skyscrapers and the almost-too-cute turrets of Belvedere Castle, the New York Philharmonic would start to play. Free.
A study of students at Duke University, using lists of their close friends before college and at the end of freshman year, found that white students, the least likely to have had close friends of a different race, were the most likely to develop more diverse friendships as freshmen — while black students, who came in with more interracial friendships, had a decline in cross-race friendship freshman year. The study found little change freshman year in the diversity of Asian and Hispanic students’ friendships.
Freshmen with roommates of a different race — or those who lived alone in a dorm — were the most likely to diversify their friendships.
“Just having diversity in classrooms doesn’t do anything to increase interracial friendships,” said Claudia Buchmann, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio State and an author of the Duke study. “But the intimacy of living together in residence halls, with no roommate, or a different-race roommate, does lead to more interracial friendships.”
