Carousel: The Best Of January!

Carousel: The Best Of January!

January is o-v-e-r, which means it can only get warmer from here on out! Hooray for that! I’m heading out to Palm Springs in a couple of days for a much-needed dose of sunshine, and needless to say, I can’t wait! (Be sure to follow me on Instagram so you can keep up with my assuredly ridiculous antics!)

Okay, here we go with the best links of the month… Enjoy ’em!

Make Something Useful Instead. Wise words from Paul Jarvis.

That Goddamned Blue Bird and Me: How Twitter Hijacked My Mind.

The trouble with Twitter isn’t that it’s full of inanity and self-promoting jerks. The trouble is that it’s a solution to a problem that shouldn’t be solved. Eighty percent of the battle of writing involves keeping yourself in that cave: waiting out the loneliness and opacity and emptiness and frustration and bad sentences and dead ends and despair until the damn thing resolves into words. That kind of patience, a steady turning away from everything but the mind and the topic at hand, can only be accomplished by cultivating the habit of attention and a tolerance for solitude.

Darling, it’s time to own it. Love this piece from Justine and the info about the age at which we start to suppress our natural voice (boys at 5, girls at 12).

Have you ever considered donating your eggs? Here’s the truth about doing it.

Doctors Are Now Prescribing Books to Treat Depression. Fantastic!

Recreating selfies: this woman’s phone went missing, and now the new owner’s photos are being uploaded to her cloud. Sooooo she’s recreating them (complete with glorious moustache). Pretty amazing.

“There are no stats programs here. There is no like button.”

It reminded me of Greil Marcus, talking about the early days of Rolling Stone, when they said, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t.”

Need help with your blogging? Try writing for two people, instead.

What does it mean to be a quantified writer?

Ooooooh! Fascinating Portraits of Michael Jackson Impersonators.

Sarah Wilson just turned 40 and I love, love, love what she had to say about it.

Here is a good list of places to visit in New Orleans if you, like me, are enchanted by American Horror Story: Coven.

A great and powerful piece by Kate: the low-grade misery of wanting to be thinner

Trapped by TL;DR.

This is the Motivation That Helps Your Business Succeed.

As you begin the new year in your business, ask yourself if you’re as passionate about sharing your work with others as you are about creating it.

How has BUST magazine survived? Loved this piece!

Why Is Self-Promotion Considered the Eighth Deadly Sin? By perennial genius Justine Musk.

This is great: 5 reasons weight-lifting is better than cardio. I only do cardio to warm-up!

Does a high IQ equal a high sex drive? Students at Cambridge university spend more on sex toys than at any other university, closely followed by students at Oxford, figures show, sparking speculation that higher IQs can lead to higher sex drives.

10 thoughts on focus.

Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out

Materialism forces us into comparison with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.

Wish you could improve your skin? Try the face-lift in your fridge!

Oh my god. If you’re squeamish, don’t click this… But if you can take it, click to read these hilarious gummy bear reviews.

Lena Dunham is on the cover of Vogue. GO LENA! And the feature on her is brilliant.

In such moments, she thinks about an observation Antonoff made one day when she was feeling low. “He’s like, ‘You know what’s hard? People want the person who wants to share it all. But they want the person who wants to share it all minus foibles and mistakes and fuckups. They want cute mistakes. They don’t want real mistakes.’ If I placed that many censors on myself, I wouldn’t be able to continue to make the kinds of things that I make. And so I just sort of know there are going to be moments where I take it one step too far.”

Lol. Reversing gender roles makes for some really good engagement photos.

There are some great ideas in here: 10 creative rituals you should steal.

Fashion psychologists do style from the inside out.

This niche group of professionals apply psychological theories to what we wear, understanding that our clothing choices impact not only our own thoughts and emotions, but also those of the people we come in contact with. “I style my clients from the inside out and bridge the gap from perception to reality,” Karen says.

James Altucher tells us how to get an MBA from Eminem. Brilliant!

How to help people who are grieving or suffering.

This is fascinating and brilliant: 5 Surprising Ways Your Language Affects How You Think

I Tried Jackie Kennedy’s Caviar Diet. Man, I love this weird celebrity diet series. It makes you realise how silly the whole thing is.

Trainer Tracy Anderson and the Epidemic of Self-Sabotage. Tracy and her BFF, Gwyneth, have a new show called The Restart Project. This interview with her is smart and honest.

What do you hope that viewers will take away from the show?

Hopefully [they’ll] get the message of not wanting to crumble under any circumstances they’ve been dealt, whether their boyfriend breaks up with them or their best friend disappoints them or they don’t get recognized at work. Or, that they may have no reason in their life to not be achieving and that they’re really not bringing their best to the table. I hope women [realize] it’s important to take care of me for myself and I would really love to turn the focus away from the noise of [celebrity bodies]. It’s hard in this position that I sit in because I watch so many women who are such beautiful people and have such beautiful potential telescope their desires and just dim their own lights every single day because they’re so focused on what’s in magazines (that’s not even real) or what it is on their body that they don’t like (but yet they don’t really want to show up for themselves to change it in a sustainable, natural way). It brings the human aspect of why we should take care of ourselves into focus.

What if women already have it all?

I recently installed Nanny for Chrome (a free plugin) which restricts your access to the sites you use to procrastinate. It has kind of CHANGED my LIFE!

Killing Yourself to Live: on the value of the teenage death wish.

Get married + be submissive (my ass). Justine Musk’s take on a disturbing trend of romanticising the way “marriage used to be”.

Traditional gender roles are easy. Real intimacy is not.

Veronica’s spell for becoming the person you want to be in 2014.

Oh man, this made me laugh. Miserable men on shopping trips.

On being straight meh-dge.

The boys from Full House — John Stamos, Bob Saget and Dave Coulier — did an Ask Me Anything. Funny!

And finally, to celebrate hitting 30,000 followers on Facebook, I’m running a little contest! Go get it!

Je t’adore!