"Jeah! We Mapped Out the 4 Basic Aspects of Being a 'Bro." A Venn diagram of bro-ness, courtesy of Jean Demby of NPR's Code Switch, a blog about the frontiers of race, culture and ethnicity.
"The usage of "bro" as a term of endearment isn't new, obviously. (As the indispensable Know Your Meme points out in a useful short history, people have been abbreviating 'brother' this way for centuries, although its iteration as a synonym for 'friend' — or more accurately, 'friend-dude' — is much more recent.) Over the past decade or so, though, 'bro' has evolved into a shorthand for a specific kind of fratty masculinity. Baseball cap with the frayed brim (possibly backward), sky-blue oxford shirt or sports team shirt, cargo shorts, maybe some mandals or boat shoes. Y'all know who we mean."There’s nothing quite like the solidarity of the film community here, as two other movie palaces helped the show go on by lending their facilities to the NCFS to continue their summer schedule—and what a schedule it has been! With the addition of the estimable Kyle Westphal, late of George Eastman House, as a partner and programmer, NCFS has learned of and been able to secure prints of rare films and restorations that have flown under the radar of most other venues. I was fortunate to be part of a packed audience at the Patio Theater to see High Treason, an extremely rare British talkie made on the cusp of the conversion from silent to sound pictures, with both silent and sound versions created and released. The restoration of the spotty nitrate and badly damaged soundtrack was funded by the Library of Congress/National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation, but the new print has only been shown once before at the Library of Congress Packard Campus Theater. Thus, we were only the second American audience in more than 80 years to see the sound version of High Treason on the big screen."
In honor of the late James Gandolfini, here's RogerEbert.com editor Matt Zoller Seitz's 2007 recap of the finale of The Sopranos, with its now-legendary and still controversial "cut to black" ending. Originally published at Seitz's first blog, The House Next Door.
"For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they've received a job offer and if they've ever had either a paid or unpaid internship. And for three years, it's reached the same conclusion: Unpaid internships don't seem to give college kids much of a leg up when it comes time to look for employment. This year, NACE queried more than 9,200 seniors from February through the end of April. They found that 63.1 percent of students with a paid internship under their belt had received at least one job offer. But only 37 percent of former unpaid interns could say the same -- a negligible 1.8 percentage points more than students who had never interned."
"Mad Men, Season Six: Sunny Products, Rotten World." For Vulture, Margaret Lyons writes about a sub-theme of the season, the agency pitching products that convey the idea of "sun" and hope, despite living in an increasingly dark and decayed universe.
For old time's sake, here's Pop Culture Pirate's wonderful video from March, using single-word snippets of Mad Men dialogue to create a kind of mash-up karaoke.