Can You Really Delete Your Internet History?

It's a perennial joke: "If I die, delete my browser history." Everyone gets it because no matter how unquestionable your internet activity might be, we all have weird Google searches people might not understand when taken out of context. And we've all visited someone's Facebook page one too many times. But even though the internet has advanced in leaps and bounds, our understanding of our right to privacy on the internet has been slower to catch up.

-howstuffworks

Can sleeping apart help your relationship?

A few things that can wreck a good night's sleep? Caffeine, sure. Stress and anxiety, definitely. Being in a relationship? Well, yes, now that you mention it.

Specifically, it's the bed-sharing that messes things up. Simply put, sharing a bed means waking up more. In one 2007 study, nearly half of participants reported that they'd been woken up by their partner's movements, noises, or activities.

This presents an unfortunate predicament: You want to be able to sleep through the night, but you also want to keep on sleeping next to your partner. Ultimately, research suggests, most people end up choosing the latter, either because it's what's expected of couples or because they believe it's better for the relationship.

-The Week

L'hymne au célibat! Tiré du film ''Tango'' de Patrice Leconte

The Science Behind One-Night Stands and Drunken Hookups

An investigation of the link between alcohol and one-night stands highlights a drinking culture that turns sexual encounters into gratifying sex stories.

A study of one-night stands among hard-partying young people in Norway has found that, for many, the tail is secondary to the tale to be told. In other words: it’s not the sex — it’s the story.

-Seeker

Maggie Gyllenhaal: ‘Pornography is an art form’

The Honourable Woman star explains why her role as a prostitute in New York drama The Deuce changed her views on sex work.

Set in the grimy, trash-strewn New York of 1971, The Deuce is named after a notoriously seedy stretch of West 42nd Street that was populated by pimps and prostitutes, and home to live peep shows and porn shops. Written by David Simon, who created The Wire, and his frequent collaborator George Pelecanos, the series charts the rise of the pornography industry in New York City.

-The Guardian

Hugh Hefner, Playboy, and the American Male

The careers of certain cultural figures follow a predictable arc: first young and brazen, then oddly revered, then overly familiar, and then, at last, obsolete. Frank Harris had a career with a shape something like this: a cowboy and a lawyer before becoming the leading London newspaper editor of the eighteen-nineties, he then became known only as the author of a scandalous, multi-volume sexual memoir, ending up merely notorious. Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, who died on Wednesday, at the age of ninety-one, at the Playboy Mansion, in California, was another such figure. It is as hard now to recapture the period during the nineteen-sixties and seventies when Hefner actually seemed, if not exactly a cultural presence to be reckoned with, then at least a publishing magnate to be recognized, as it would be to return his magazine, Playboy, to the distinctive place, high up on the newsstand, that it once occupied. At one point, George Will could compare Hefner to Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby—not an entirely bad notion, given that the essential vulgarity of Gatsby’s taste, obvious to his creator, has been eclipsed by the retrospective glamour that has been placed on the book. But something like the opposite has taken place with Hefner. There was a time when his excursions into the Playboy philosophy, which was not quite as ridiculous a document as its title makes it sound, were, though never taken seriously, at least seen as significant. Now, they seem not merely quaint but predatory.

-The New Yorker

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The Genius of the Playboy Interview

Hugh Hefner was a complicated individual whose notions of sexuality and human relationships were at once woke and predatory, who stumbled upon a brilliant idea at a time when American culture was milquetoast. A loss of identity in the 1950s, particularly among men, was palpable for a generation who no longer had a war to fight. It took a magazine that paired the mind and the body, high culture and naked women, to shake the male from his slumber.

-Flipboard

Why Happy People Cheat

Most descriptions of troubled marriages don’t seem to fit my situation,” Priya insists. “Colin and I have a wonderful relationship. Great kids, no financial stresses, careers we love, great friends. He is a phenom at work, fucking handsome, attentive lover, fit, and generous to everyone, including my parents. My life is good.” Yet Priya is having an affair. “Not someone I would ever date—ever, ever, ever. He drives a truck and has tattoos. It’s so clichéd, it pains me to say it out loud. It could ruin everything I’ve built.”

-The Atlantic

« Blade Runner 2049 » : requiem hypnotique pour humains et robots

Denis Villeneuve a situé son film, magnifique et cauchemardesque, trente ans après celui de Ridley Scott.

Nous sommes aujour­d’hui à la veille des temps annoncés par le Blade Runner, de ­Ridley Scott. Les voitures ne volent pas, les planètes avoisinantes restent vierges de mines exploitées par des androïdes. Mais la frontière entre l’humain et l’inhumain s’est faite poreuse ; nous surveillons nos stations de travail, nos réfrigérateurs et nos téléphones avec inquiétude, en at­tendant le moment qui les verra prendre définitivement le contrôle de nos vies. Réalisé en 1981, situé en 2019, Blade Runner voyait loin, mais pas toujours juste, comme toutes les grandes œuvres d’anticipation.

-Le Monde

Un Blade Runner est-il un justiciable comme les autres ?

Alors que « Blade Runner 2049 » sort sur les écrans mercredi 4 octobre, retour sur un faux procès qui a opposé il y a quelques jours le personnage principal de « Blade Runner » à la toute-puissante Tyrell Corporation.

Le robot est-il un sujet de droit ? C’est la question fondamentale à laquelle devait répondre, dimanche 24 septembre, un tribunal un peu particulier, lors du (faux) procès de Blade Runner qui se tenait dans le cadre du Monde Festival.

-Le Monde

Keepers of the Secrets

I was told that the most interesting man in the world works in the archives division of the New York Public Library, and so I went there, one morning this summer, to meet him. My guide, who said it took her a year to learn how to get around the Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, led us to an elevator off Astor Hall, up past the McGraw Rotunda, through a little door at the back of the Rose Main Reading Room. Our destination was Room 328.

-The Village Voice

10 Etiquette Rules Nobody Follows Anymore

With each passing decade, a handful of well-intentioned, but old-fashioned etiquette rules unceremoniously bite the dust. Seriously, when's the last time you questioned whether or not it's appropriate for an unmarried woman to have dinner unchaperoned in a man's apartment, lest she be "ruined" in the eyes of other potential suitors? Social conventions and the rules that govern them are often forced to roll with the times, whether we want them to or not.

-howstuffworks

LUXURY: ENEMY OF VIRTUE, OR ECONOMIC ENGINE?

As the U.S. economy continues to expand at a sluggish pace, some sectors are seeing impressive growth. Luxury airlines, for example, and hyper-expensive New York City condos.

Today, economists tend to see anything that boosts consumption and production as a good thing. But that was decidedly not the case in earlier centuries. Looking at Dutch society, historian Jan De Vries explains that the prevailing view of luxury shifted dramatically when the country developed a prosperous middle class.

-JSTOR Daily

Attack of the Hick Flick! Redneck Cinema Posters and VHS Box Art

Yee-haw! Let’s have a look at those hard drinkin’, truck drivin’, moonshinin’ movies from the 70s known as Hixploitation films – a redneck subgenre of the exploitation film.

Exploitation films are defined as films that attempt to succeed financially by exploiting current trends, niche genres or lurid content, and are generally low-quality “B movies”.  The brands of exploitation films released in the 1960s-1980s was seemingly endless: blaxploitation, sexploitation, Ozploitation, nazisploitation, Mexsploitation, nunsploitation… it goes on and on.

-Flashbak

10 Ways Pop Culture Has Skewed Our Perceptions About Psychopaths

Over the years, psychopathy has been depicted extensively in popular culture. Whether these people are in movies, books, or television programs, we’re never too far from encountering a psychopath in a fictional sense or otherwise.As they’re portrayed, they’re not going to be the people you invite for dinner. The media paints psychopaths as cold, calculating individuals who can’t tell right from wrong. They are just downright evil in many people’s eyes.Sure, they’re not wired like the average person. But they’re not all sinister characters like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, either. Today, we’ll tell you the truth about psychopaths. It may not be what you expect.

-Listverse