In a sign that they are perhaps the least self-aware retailer ever, the facade of a new Urban Outfitters store being planned for the Upper West Side will be designed to look like four different storefronts: “a hat store, a hardware store, a neighborhood bar and a bodega.” I’ll just let the designer explain the brilliant, sensitive rationale:
“The whole idea was to do this kind of ironic statement of lining the building with storefronts that would be reminiscent of independent businesses,” says Ron Pompei, creative director of Pompei A.D., which designed the store, slated to open in August. “It’s the story about the streets of New York as they once were.”
In writing this piece for TFT about first kisses (and the zine of same name), I came across this cute and instructive eHow article, “How to Have a First Kiss.”
A week or so ago, Thursday Styles filled us in on the “end of the best friend“–apparently kids these days mostly hang out in big groups. Ah, yes: “The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship.” I’m skeptical.
This article about an 89-year-old woman who fought the police during the Stonewall riots in 1969 and now sits in a nursing home trying (and mostly failing) to remember it all, is beautiful and heartbreaking.
Here’s a compilation of Publishers Weekly’s annual bestseller lists since 1910. Meanwhile, The Awl looks at complaints about The New York Times in 1910 and 1911, and finds not much has changed.
I’m sort of fascinated by this article in Harvard Magazine that follows up with some people who dropped out of the ivy league in the sixties, both to see how their lives turned out after (gasp!) abandoning a Harvard degree, and to ask how they think back on that time today.
For Father’s Day, the BBC points out that that dads in earlier times weren’t always “tyrannical patriarchs whose children were seen and not heard and lived in fear of father’s punishments.” If we imagine that benevolent–even loving!–fathers are a recent invention, “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
I’ve never seen Leave it to Beaver, now available in an exhaustive box set. “Think of it as a 234-episode history lesson, of a family, a country, a medium,” explains Neil Genzlinger in the Times. “Each installment has a few pearls worthy of that necklace June is always wearing (even while doing housework).” Bonus: According to Ken Osmond, who played Eddie Haskell, “Kids are still the same as they were in 1810.” The very same day, the Times ran an article about the 30th anniversary of Airplane!
“50 years after [Playboy Clubs] were invented and 22 years after they closed,” NPR’s Scott Simon talks to some former Playboy Bunnies.
In Foreign Policy, Christian Caryl hazards a guess as to why the 1970’s “are still haunting us today.”
Finally, there will be a movie based on those troll dolls that haven’t been much of a thing in years.