« Crise existentielle estivale » : c’est le moment où en vacances, vous rêvez de tout plaquer

Pendant dix ans, Anaïs Vanel a passé ses vacances à imaginer plaquer son quotidien qui, depuis la plage, lui semblait absurde. Un jour, elle l’a fait.

Sur un transat, en camping sauvage ou à l’heure du rosé, une pensée vous cueille : et si c’était ça la vie, la vraie ? Celle qui coule doucement dans la chaleur de l’été, loin des réveils matins, des transports en commun et des salles de réunion.

Celle où l’on prend le temps de regarder autour de soi, de rencontrer de nouvelles personnes, de mieux manger et de vraiment dormir. Entre introspection semi-philosophique et remise en question de notre monde capitaliste ultra-consumériste, vous vous cognez à une crise existentielle estivale.

- L'OBS

Is Fight Club's Tyler Durden film's most misunderstood man ?

As the 20th anniversary of the Chuck Palahniuk adaptation approaches, its lead character has become an unironic poster-boy for men’s rights, writes David Barnett.

When David Fincher’s movie of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club was released 20 years ago, it polarised the critics.

Many people just did not know which way to jump on this twisted allegory about an American wage slave, played by Edward Norton, who is a cog in the capitalist economy and does his bit to keep all the other cogs turning. He assesses insurance claims for a living and in turn spends the money he earns on things he thinks he needs from the Ikea catalogue.

- BBC

The real midlife crisis confronting many Americans

The way my mom imagined it, midlife was going to be great: counting down days until retirement, spending winters in Florida and checking off destinations on her bucket list. But it hasn’t turned out that way.

Instead of more time spent in Florida, she’s still stuck in snowy upstate New York. She traded romps in the sea and traveling the world for her daily visits to her mom, who’s in a nursing home. Instead of the joys of living the snowbird life, she’s saddled with stress, guilt and the challenges of caring for my grandmother, who is 89 and dealing with dementia.

“This is not how I imagined my life at midlife,” my mom, who is 61, tells me.

She isn’t alone.

- The Conversation

Donner du temps au temps

On a beau en être avare ou l’économiser, le temps ne se met pas en banque ni dans les paradis fiscaux, quoi qu’on en pense. Exception faite de ceux qui « accumulent » des jours de congé, le commun des mortels est en dette matérielle et immatérielle. Le temps, dont on a bien raison d’être jaloux, nous file entre les doigts comme du sable entre les orteils. Il fait partie de ces intangibles dont on ne mesure le précieux qu’en bout de piste, dans un lit d’hôpital ou à la fin d’une retraite bouddhiste de Vipassana. Parvenus au 8e jour sans avoir prononcé un mot, on a songé 150 fois à décamper pour s’arrêter dans le premier Dairy Queen et hurler « Fuck l’équanimité !!!! Euh oui, extra chantilly siouplaît. »

- Le Devoir

PLONGÉE EN APNÉE AVEC GUILLAUME NÉRY

Il y a les mythes, les fantasmes et les monstres marins imaginaires. Il y a des images, souvent sublimes, de cet autre monde. Il y a parfois les mots de ceux qui en reviennent. Mais le mystère des profondeurs demeure insondable pour le commun des mortels. Que vont chercher les apnéistes dix, trente ou cent mètres sous la surface de l'eau, tout souffle coupé ?

- Libération

19 Creepy, Unnerving, And Surprising Facts About Area 51 That Will Keep You Up At Night

1. The name "Area 51" came from a simple grid reference on an atomic energy commission map.

- BuzzFeed

La crise de la quarantaine de Stéphanie

« Le métro-boulot-dodo, dans la quarantaine, ça tue le couple. » Stéphanie* le sait. Parce qu'elle le vit. Récit.

Elle nous a écrit à la fin de mai pour nous dresser son portrait : jeune quarantaine, professionnelle, mariée depuis 10 ans, avec jeunes enfants. Son mari ? Un homme de carrière comme elle. En apparences, donc : la belle vie. « Grosse maison, gros chalet, on voyage, résume-t-elle. Je sais que les gens autour de moi m'envient. »

Va pour les apparences. Mais la vérité ? « Depuis déjà cinq ans, voire plus, nous ne faisons presque plus l'amour. Deux ou trois relations sexuelles par année. J'étouffe. »

- La Presse

Science Still Doesn't Understand Female Ejaculation

In the ancient Taoist tradition, female ejaculate was considered a sacred water, vital to the mental and physical health of both men and women. Ancient Chinese physicians and philosophers considered it a routine stage of female arousal. The Kama Sutra described a female emission during orgasm, and the Tantra said that female ejaculate, or “amrita” (meaning “divine nectar” in Sanskrit), contained healing properties. In the ancient West, Hippocrates wrote about female “semen,” and Aristotle wrote about a female discharge that is far greater in volume than a man’s. Centuries later, in his 1672 work, New Treatise Concerning the Generative Organs of Women, Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf noted that the discharge from the female prostate causes as much pleasure as does that from the male prostate and clearly differentiated between female lubrication and ejaculation noting that women with “lascivious thoughts and frisky fingers” can achieve the latter.

- bitchmedia

Why Didn't Anyone Stop Jeffrey Epstein? - How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight

In 1972 or 1973, I went to the circus with my friend and afterward her father picked us up. We were 9 or 10 years old, and while we had been enjoying the circus, her father and his new girlfriend had gone to see the porno Deep Throat, which at the time was a groovy thing to do. The film was a phenomenon. News accounts depicted couples cheerfully waiting in front of theaters in broad daylight, a signal of their open-mindedness. The New York Review of Books described the film’s fans as “middle-class intellectuals and bohemians and their feminist wives and girlfriends.” Film critics called the movie “porno chic.”

- The Cut

Deepfake Jim Carrey is creepy as hell in this clip from The Shining

The Shining is good, isn’t it? A classic – arguably perfect – film. And yet ever since its release in 1980, the question on everyone’s lips has always been: but what if Jim Carrey starred in it? Well, thanks to deepfake technology, our collective dream has come true.

- Dazed

Climate Despair' Is Making People Give Up on Life

"It's super painful to be a human being right now at this point in history."

n the summer of 2015—the warmest year on record at the time—it was the literal heat that got to Meg Ruttan Walker, a 37-year-old former teacher in Kitchener, Ontario. "Summers have been stressful to me since having my son," said Ruttan Walker, who is now an environmental activist. "It's hard to enjoy a season that's a constant reminder that the world is getting warmer." 

"I think my anxiety just reached a peak," Ruttan Walker continued. It felt like there was nowhere to go, and although she had spoken to her primary care doctor about anxiety, she hadn't sought help with her mental health. Suddenly, she was contemplating self-harm. "Though I don't think I would have hurt myself, I didn't know how to live with the fear of... the apocalypse, I guess? My son was home with me and I had to call my friend over to watch him because I couldn't even look at him without breaking down," Ruttan Walker said. She eventually checked herself into an overnight mental health facility.

- Vice

«FLYING TO THE MOON…»

Il y a 50 ans, Neil Armstrong et Buzz Aldrin foulaient le sol lunaire tandis que Michael Collins patientait en orbite. Retour sur les préparatifs et coulisses d'une mission historique.

- Libération

Review: ‘Stranger Things’ Reaches 1985 and Goes to the Mall

Netflix’s hit blend of sci-fi, horror and big-hair nostalgia adds John Hughes-style teenage romance and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to its recipe.

In addition to a portal to a bleak alternate dimension dubbed The Upside Down from which terrifying monsters try to break into our world, the semirural town of Hawkins, Ind., now has a new mall in which much of the season’s action takes place. The parameters of the Duffers’ movie love shift accordingly — where Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” was the guiding spirit of the first two seasons, Season 3 pays tribute to the ultimate mall movie, Amy Heckerling’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” (The Duffers, always generous in their acknowledgments, make an explicit “Fast Times” reference, in case the Phoebe Cates jokes and a major character’s Spicoli haircut didn’t clue you in.)

- NY Times

Bonne écoute, mon amour!

Le diamant pénètre le sillon du vinyle 180 grammes de la réédition, en épouse les creux et saillies, en saisit les contours. Jouissance auditive, évocations suggestives. Des cuivres qui pétaradent au lit, des guitares funky-psych au rythme des ébats, de la pop coolissime et de la bossa pour lubrifier le tout sans s’énerver le poil des jambes pendant la partie de jambes en l’air : c’est le programme que propose la bande sonore absolument géniale créée en 1970 par le pianiste-compositeur-arrangeur-chef d’orchestre Paul Baillargeon avec le producteur Dean Morgan pour le film québécois Viens, mon amour.

Viens, mon amour ? Nous, pas connaître. C’est pourtant, comprend-on en lisant la grande double feuille insérée amoureusement dans la pochette, le troisième long métrage « softcore » que produisit Cinépix, après les immenses succès populaires de Valérie (1968) et de L’initiation (1969), déclencheurs de la déferlante de ce qu’on appela au Québec « les films de fesses », véritable partouze commerciale du cinéma d’après la Révolution tranquille. Film néanmoins plus que méconnu, fut-ce par les aficionados du genre. C’est à Sébastien Desrosiers, historien autodidacte de la chanson d’ici, belle tête chercheuse à lunettes, grand dénicheur de pépites psychotroniques, que l’on doit la ressortie inespérée de ce chef-d’oeuvre oublié. Lui et Victor Simoneau-Helwani, cofondateurs de l’étiquette Trésor National.

- Le Devoir

Why Your Perception of ‘Old’ Changes as You Age

How we see ourselves, and how we treat ourselves, can have a major impact on how we feel as we age.

My perception of old age is inextricably linked to my grandmother. When I was a kid, I thought this 65-year-old, white-haired woman whose entire body wobbled when she walked was very old. Now that I’m 66, my personal perception—or perhaps, misperception—of old age has changed. I suspect I’ve got lots of company.

- The Epoch Times

Sex After Jesus

A sex life limited by religion and marriage ends, and one of discovering the joys of the ‘sinful’ body begins.

I bought my first vibrator at thirty-five, off the dusty shelves of a sex toy shop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I tried not to be embarrassed. After all, I was a grown-ass woman. The mother of two children. Certifiable sex-haver. Anyone could look at me and see the mom jeans, sneakers, ruffly blouse and know that I was a Midwestern mother. And as such, it was very likely I had had sex at some point. Still, I parked around back and hoped no one saw my car. Not too far from this sex shop was where I had once attended church with my ex-husband. An Assembly of God church, where pastors preach about the evils of lust, the horrors of porn, the sin of sex outside of marriage — all the new joys I was just discovering. A town of 132,000 people can feel small when you are newly divorced and dating.

- Medium

Can We Get Better at Forgetting?

Some things aren’t worth remembering. Science is slowly working out how we might let that stuff go.

Whatever its other properties, memory is a reliable troublemaker, especially when navigating its stockpile of embarrassments and moral stumbles. Ten minutes into an important job interview and here come screenshots from a past disaster: the spilled latte, the painful attempt at humor. Two dates into a warming relationship and up come flashbacks of an earlier, abusive partner.

The bad timing is one thing. But why can’t those events be somehow submerged amid the brain’s many other dimming bad memories?

- NY Times

INSIDE BACKPAGE.COM’S VICIOUS BATTLE WITH THE FEDS

IN MICHAEL LACEY’S younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice: “Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle.” Lacey grew up in the 1950s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son’s intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad “came home and beat me again.” But the boy toughened up, and he carried the lessons he’d learned into adulthood. He became a newspaper editor and earned a reputation as a down-and-dirty First Amendment brawler. Early on in his career, he struck up a partnership with James Larkin, a publisher whose sensibilities matched his own. Together, they built the nation’s largest chain of alternative newsweeklies.

LACEY AND LARKIN were heroes to many—micks from the sticks who made a fortune thumbing their shanty-Irish snouts at authority. Their papers went after mayors and police chiefs, governors and senators, Walmart and the Church of Scientology. They provoked outrage with their business practices too, by setting up Backpage.com, a kind of red-light district for the internet. 

- Wired

Cannabis et sexe font-ils bon ménage?

Depuis sa légalisation, les adeptes lui trouvent toutes sortes de vertus : baisse du stress, réduction de l'anxiété, amélioration du sommeil. Et si le cannabis pouvait en prime pimenter la sexualité ? C'est du moins ce que les premières études sur la question semblent pour l'instant confirmer, notamment chez les femmes. Mais attention : avant de vous en rouler un bon, lisez ce qui suit. Le point, en quatre temps.

- La Presse

Against cheerfulness

Practising the Greek virtues of wisdom and courage is one thing. But being cheerful the American way borders on psychosis.

I once ended up at a Boy Scout ceremony in the northeast United States, where I inhaled the American spirit unfiltered. The boys’ uniforms had Stars-and-Stripes patches sewn on next to their badges. We recited the Pledge of Allegiance in front of an oversize US flag, and we prayed to America’s vague God, giving thanks for this and that, and asking for some strength or protection. The boys recited their Scout Law: to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, and… cheerful.

- aeon

A Wonderful Collection of Mid-Century Postcards of Airports From Around the World

A Wonderful Collection of Mid-Century Postcards of Airports From Around the World.

- Flashbak