5 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(10/30/15 9:05am)
In a situation that seems fitting almost nowhere but on a sitcom, for the past week, I have been so disconnected from the network that a world populated by people perpetually in my circumstances would put everyone from online marketers to the bigger-than-life tech gurus like Apple out of business forever. Two weeks ago, I lost my 24/7 plug to constant and easy human connection in an accident involving my phone and some water. I took my Facebook habit—turned down a notch without the immediate notification of its direct messages—to my laptop, and sacrificed the automaticity of texting to a clumsy Wi-Fi app that made me cringe to imagine ever replying. It had been the first time in a while my life had been Snapchat-free. Moment to moment, I was also markedly free of the incessant group banter propagated by the like of GroupMe. As my laptop and outdated iPad became the intermediaries between my social interactions with the world, I felt my productivity soar. With my thumb no longer millimeters and micro-movements away from electronic portals to windows of wasted time, my social media use turned deliberate; I became conscious of my habits and critical of my recent seemingly-continuous, nearly-imperceptible self-indulgence. I felt as perfectly balanced between connectivity and self-autonomy as seems possible today.
(10/16/15 4:10am)
In my previous column, I said effortless perfection doesn’t exist; this time, I'm saying it does. Despite the seeming contradiction, I think this position is entirely consistent. Last column, I sought to undo the linguistic and social nightmare the term is. I called it a dragon that the entire campus has collectively imagined up and is constantly jabbing lances into, which rather ironically perpetuates it because to give credence to illusion, whether by support or denial, is to keep illusion alive. Its tyranny stems from its unchecked, vague usage that turns into something of an umbrella term for anything ranging from truly effortless perfection to unseen difficulties resulting in an inflated and uncritiqued appearance of goodness; essentially, in it’s current usage, it’s too applicable to take it seriously as defining itself by the rarity “effortless” and “perfection” together imply. But that’s not the effortless perfection I’m talking about this week.
(10/02/15 6:11am)
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the worst things Duke has done for itself this millennium is to run the Women’s Initiative which studies that ever established “effortless perfection” as a term. It’s not that the study wasn’t redeemable for its findings; it gave us a hard look at how women undergraduates at Duke are pressured to act and feel about themselves under the stresses of the social context. It’s that the term was ever established. Well, even that isn’t completely true. Like any good study, it coined its own terminology to, one, precisely and succinctly express a set of conditions (in this case the compulsion for women to be “smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful and popular” without visible effort) and, two, to make itself quotable (presumably for furthering itself in serious writing).
(09/18/15 11:50am)
From behind a magazine’s pages or a computer’s screen, it’s easy to underestimate why a photographer would endure pressing against the frozen rails of shaky, ice-cutting ships or packing tightly onto fragile, motorized floats to hunt for the Arctic’s greatest prey: icebergs. The landscape this far up north is a prefabricated work of art full of the photogenic, and the iceberg is its center piece. Simultaneously, their plain whiteness beautifully contrasts with the sky and waters, and their uniquely warped sculpture brings a completing complexity to the otherwise plain and predictable. No matter how inexperienced, travel to these waters and you are guaranteed some fantastic shots.
(05/15/15 8:57am)
"Euphemism treadmill" is a term coined by psychologist Steven Pinker to describe the life cycle of euphemistic terms designed to replace euphemisms that, in turn, fall into disrepute. For example, the offensive "crippled" was replaced by "handicapped", which then gave way to "disabled", and as that becomes politically incorrect as we speak, "challenged" gains favor. Working behind this phenomenon is the intention of increasingly distancing the names from the condition; a new word resets the meaning, drops its charge and rids itself of preconceived negative associations.
