Over the holidays I redesigned Emma & Lorelei’s blog. This is their new home since The Daily Bedpost shut its doors at the end of the year: EMandLO.com (warning: maybe just a little NSFW, depending on your employer).

Anyway, they’re updating the site daily with new content, and there have been some great debates going on in the comment sections. So take a look.

The following excerpt is from what is easily the funniest piece to appear in the New Yorker in years:

I. A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.

DAD: O.K.

GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.

DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.

UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.

DAD: We all are.
(more…)

107-year-old Australian woman Olive Riley has a brilliant new blog (or “blob,” as she endearingly calls it). It’s charming, sweet, funny, a bit rambling at times, and just plain fascinating—just what you’d expect from someone who’s lived for over a century. I hope both Olive and her blob are with us for a very long time.

Here’s an excerpt about the time Olive decided to get dentures at the ripe old age of thirty-one:

Olive:
I went down to the dentist and he said; “Oh yes, you’ve got a couple of decayed teeth there.”

Mike:
Just a couple, though?

Olive:
Yeah. So, I said take ‘em out. “What, now???” He said. (I was on me lunch hour, yer see.) And I said yes, now! And so he took ‘em out. Then, I said; while you’re about it, you might as well take the lot out.

Mike:
But the thing I don’t understand is, why you would have asked [the] dentist to take everything out? It’s so drastic.
(more…)

The NYTimes Magazine ran an interesting article this past Sunday on the prevailing evolutionary theories regarding humans’ propensity to believe in God:

The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation.

The article comes on the heels of the release of a very important book by Sam Harris, a refreshing and much-needed voice of reason.

Of course, if you’re in a hurry, there’s always this little graphical rendition that spells it all out pretty clearly.

Here’s a hilarious and brilliant (very) short story by Terry Bisson.

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

(via kottke.org)

The BBC has a great little test on their website to see how well people can tell the difference between real and fake smiles. There’s a small collection of 2-second video clips of people grinning, after which you guess if the smile is real or fake. I scored 16/20, which brought a big fake-smile to my lips.

Being that this was a BBC study, I was reminded of this NYTimes magazine article from a little over a year ago that points out an alleged difference between British and American smiles:

On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.

Here’s a great article from NY mag about the effects of praise on kids.

It reminds me of an article I read years ago on young, naturally-gifted major league pitchers. They were prone to career-ending pitching slumps because they couldn’t account for the provenance of their gifts. The guy who throws a thousand pitches a day through a tire in the backyard feels secure in whatever talents he has. The pitcher who believes he’s simply a “natural talent” is confounded by the occasional failure on the mound—occasionally to the point of no return.