google yourself when you get home

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.

- "LP" album review (Pitchfork Media; rated 6.8)

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.

Yes, please.

and in that moment, i swear we were infinite

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.

- "In Central Park, Nearing Consensus on Perfection" (NYTimes)

Picnics in the park; dancing after dark -- this is what summer will always mean to me.

fast-talking and twitchy

Arjun: i didn't know you were a youtube celebrity
Me: what?!

overheard at lunch

"There are parts of your body that your friends should never have to see. The inside of your uterus is one of them." - our lobbyist

i've never had an asian roommate

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.”

- "Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice" (NYTimes)