Quelque part autour de 2009, Frédéric Beigbeder partage un repas avec Iggy Pop, parrain du punk et fidèle représentant du chaos. « Je m’imaginais qu’on allait boire deux bouteilles de vodka, se droguer à mort, sortir en boîte, draguer des top-modèles et finir dans le caniveau à 7 heures du matin », raconte au bout du fil l’auteur de L’amour dure trois ans et de 99 francs.
« J’en garde un bon souvenir, mais en même temps, j’ai connu des soirées plus rock’n’roll. Iggy Pop est aujourd’hui un homme très calme qui s’intéresse à la poésie, à la littérature. Il mange du quinoa, des légumes verts, boit de l’eau minérale. Il ne s’est pas mis torse nu sur la table, il n’a pas cassé de verre, il n’a pas dit qu’il avait envie d’être mon chien. »
- Le Devoir
Here is the “Antisocial” project of the American designer Mike Campau, who looks at the fall of the giants that have become Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or Snapchat. A reflection on loneliness and our solitary publications, lost in the middle of an ocean of information, but also on the first signs of decline of these famous social networks.
“Social Media is starting to get some pull back, and rightfully so. Each platform has it’s own problems, but all have had a large impact on society as a whole, both good and bad. Each image takes place in an empty parking lot which is a symbol of our singularly isolated posts, but placed in a location where it can be easily seen by many,” he wrote.
- Design you Trust
The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears.
When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman's account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with "takes" arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. "Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.
Why didn't she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.
- The Week
The photographer Eleonora Costi spent the last four years tracking down her country’s crumbling treasures.
Four years ago, Eleonora Costi, an Italian photographer based in Florence, was skimming through a local paper when she came across an article about an abandoned 14th-century villa located just few miles north of Milan. “It sounded like a good location to take photos, so I decided to go and check it out,” she says. “The first thing I remember is a vivid scent of wet wood and a haunting silence.”
- Atlas Obscura
“You’ve got your whole life in front of you. You’re pretty, you’ve got this house — well, you don’t have this house anymore. This house is my house.”
Alex Miller’s spare room had been on Craigslist for two weeks when, last March, she got the call she’d been waiting for. The man at the other end identified himself as Jed Creek. Creek was a lawyer from New York, but he had grown up just outside Philadelphia, only a few minutes’ drive from Miller’s apartment in the city’s well-to-do neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. Creek explained that he needed a place to stay while he tended to family matters — his mother was old and frail and his older brother was suffering from complications with hepatitis C, he said — and he’d been looking for a place without much luck. “I find Philadelphians to be very difficult,” he said. “A lot of flaky people.”
- NY Mag
When I finally puked on the fourth night, I felt an odd sense of pride.
Inside the loud, stuffy ceremony room, people were laughing, crying, chanting, gyrating, and, yes, vomiting, around me. When my time finally comes, I think: Just aim for the bucket and keep your ass above your head like the shaman told you.
I try to wipe my face but can’t grab the tissue paper because it melts every time I reach for it. Nearby, a man starts to scream. I can’t make out what he’s saying on account of the shaman singing beautiful Colombian songs in the other room.
I finish vomiting and start crying and laughing and smiling all at once. Something has been lifted in this “purge,” something dark and deep I was carrying around for years. Relief washes over me, and I slowly make my way back to my mattress on the floor.
- Vox
From getting into a taxi to asking a fellow train passenger to keep an eye on your luggage while buying a coffee, we’ve all put our trust in those we do not know.
Now researchers have revealed that strangers are more likely to be trusted if they look like someone who has earned your trust before – and more likely to be distrusted if they resemble someone who has betrayed your faith in them.
- The Guardian
He wants to sleep with her. She wants to sleep with other people. After 10 years and three kids together, what happens when your wife wants an open relationship and you really don’t ?
- Cosmopolitan
The men on the pulp fiction book covers were muscular, two-fisted, unsmiling and action-eyed. The women were titillating, often partially clothed, dangerous and suggestive. They were the lurid, raunchy, exploitative, popular and vilified faces of work by the likes of Mickey Spillane, Earl Stanley Gardner, Hammond Innes, Alistair Mclean and Helen McInnes, whose paperback books sold by the millions. The covers of these stories one reviewer called “daydreams for the frustrated and the sick” seduced readers. The wrappers on mass-marketed, accessible literature peeped from wire racks in supermarkets, drug store and kiosk. Publishing houses noted the success of these books for people who never read, and before long art in the pulp style was appearing on all manner of titles, not just on pulp fiction comic books for adults, but in magazines and around texts written by highbrow authors, like Simone de Beauvoir, Sinclair Lewis and CP Snow.
- Flashbak
Dès que la sexualité s'évade de la littérature érotique pour pénétrer la littérature grand public, les écrivains s'exposent au ridicule. On pardonne à Fifty Shades of Grey ses maladresses, car il n'a d'autre prétention que d'exciter la lectrice, mais moins à l'écrivain qui se frotte maladroitement à l'érotisme pour pimenter son roman. Mais puisqu'on peut lire le mot «cul» dans le mot «ridicule», nous posons la question: pourquoi écrire sur le sexe est-il si compliqué ?
- La Presse
