Dedicated to your stories and ideas. Learn about us.
Submit your writing to be published on Thought Catalog.
Learn more about working with Thought Catalog.
Everything is crazy. There is a new oil spill in the Kalamazoo River that threatens to become “a tragedy of historic proportions,” says Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, if it reaches Lake Michigan…
… and behind this mask Herge; and behind this mask Roald Dahl; and behind this mask Terry Brooks; and behind this mask Ernest Hemingway; and behind this mask Ken Kesey; and behind this mask Homer; and behind this mask J.D. Salinger; and behind this mask Mark Twain…
In the virtual and hardcopy seas of so much slush, Good Writing is a rare and rarefied feat commensurate with Good Conversation or Good Sportsmanship or Good Sex. It is, to say the least, all any of us can ask for.
There has been much talk about the state of black fashion models, why there are so few. And time and again I’ve heard the line: if you put a black face on a cover, the magazine won’t sell.
Christopher Drew is different and thus kind of cooler than other famous teenagers, like Justin Bieber, because he is an artist’s artist. Which is to say, the dude is a little cuckoo. And that his priorities aren’t necessarily all about making mad bank and getting his dick wet. Dude writes poetry and distributes it via MySpace for goodness sake.
Don Draper. Donald. Draper. It’s a strong name. Masculine. The “DD” initials look good on cufflinks. If it wasn’t a made-up name it would be the kind of name a guy would want to have. But then again in the world of the show it’s not a made-up name, is it?
Thus, the Best Coast story updates another age-old 60s concept outside of their music: pop-star mythmaking. Cosentino has crafted an unstoppably distinct web persona—bubbling with character, her online presence is why so many feel they can relate to her. She talks about everything from the Jersey Shore and Miley Cyrus to the Descendents and smoking tons of weed.
I don’t think the movie is that complicated. People dream in the movie and sometimes they dream within dreams. There are four “levels” of dreaming in the movie.
Tony Hayward finally got his wish, he got his life back. The former CEO of BP announced his resignation yesterday. To honor the occasion, here’s a look back at some of his most memorable quotes…
I was thinking about the poverty of Africans. I vomited in the bathroom, turned on the shower, and vomited again. I couldn’t stop hearing sentences repeating in my head. I tried to get in the shower and fainted. I woke up and crawled to the toilet and vomited. I was hearing demon-like noises coming from somewhere.
Bebe Zeva is a seventeen-year-old hipster from Las Vegas, NV. In 2009, she rose to ‘microfame’ when she was featured on Hipster Runoff modeling the “I Am Carles” t-shirt line. She maintains two popular blogs (a Tumblr and a Wordpress), has 1,167 followers on Twitter, regularly recieves ‘mad hype’ on LookBook.nu, and has been asked and answered over 2,000 questions on Formspring.
From the moment Pennywise the clown crawled out of the sewer and into the cultural landscape he has terrified horror fans. In this study of Stephen King’s 1986 opus It, John R. DeLamar Jr.
Bill Clegg’s memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, sizzles with the thrills, pain, and crushing delusions of a long-term affair with crack. What makes it stand out from the avalanche of addict memoirs on the market is Clegg’s ability to tell his story with objectivity and insight, without ever presenting himself as victim.
On Tuesday, Gawker covered one aspect of the legalization of medical marijuana with an article/ parody where, “in a bid to reassert itself as the dominant force in American life,” ‘Capitalism’ “announced that it plans to immediately counteract the coolness of the legalization of medical marijuana by poisoning it with the awfulness of factory farming.”
The next eleven days the Factory-Farmed Hamster is force-fed pellets containing the meat/bones/tumors/fur of “fellow, deceased” Factory-Farmed Hamsters grinded—along with their “waste,” which often is scientifically “not discernable” from their “bodies”—into a kind of paste that is “marinated” 4-8 hours in an antibiotic-hormone mixture and then dehydrated in gigantic microwaves.
“They gave this donkey a parachute ride in order to attract holidaymakers’ attention to this sort of entertainment. The parasailing donkey brayed and the children cried, but no one was smart enough to inform the police about the incident…”
Dude is wearing… ski gloves in this one, and there’s some popping noise in the background, which, I guess, is Facebook chat (??). Either that or he’s adding intermittent popping sound effects to the video with some third-rate video editor. Also notice that the man is displaying a pipe in his breast pocket—what seems to be a corn cob pipe. Just sitting there…
Could it be that critics missed this undercurrent of female intimacy because they’re so used to seeing women hashed out as shopping-addicted, marriage-crazed bimbos, or exploited as oppressed, self-sacrificing older women/mothers? Score one for nuance.
Christopher Nolan’s epic masterpiece Inception is just about as narcissistic as movies can get. I mean really: it’s 2 ½ hours long and you have to stay put the whole time or you’ll miss a crucial plot twist. Also: nobody knows what it’s about.
In a 2012 study of over ten thousand Unablehams 94% identified the sentence “I went to Wal-Mart, bought a black shirt and two bananas, paid with my HSBC debit card” as directly conveying one of the following: “America’s consumerist economy is destructive and amoral” (54%), “generation…
The New York Times and other major news networks, state BP and the Federal Government are once again at odds. BP claims that everything has been going great since they dropped a containment cap on the gushing well head on Thursday.
No one paid enough attention to notice I wasn’t getting dressed in the morning, just taking acid and going to school in my pajamas. I would walk in the hallways staring forward with a neutral facial expression. I was terribly depressed. My mom eventually found out.
There is undeniable pleasure in reading Mahmoud Darwish in that it feels like we are looking back on our present day from several thousand years in the future. But this effect also produces a kind of cultural-historical vertigo in which today’s world (which many in the West like to think of as belonging to an ever newer, better, improved era of history, an era blessed and, no doubt, sanitized by the perfect scientific godlessness of Progress (the non-ideological ideology par excellence)) is really no different than any other point in our deeply intertwined world history.
Coburn’s chief of staff and longtime conservative activist Michael Schwartz spoke last year as part of a conference session titled “The New Masculinity.” According to Schwartz, pornography has the power to make young people gay. Schwartz claims a gay man, his friend, who was dying of AIDS, remarked that “all pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.”
In her fiction she sought, as she put it, to capture “this loose shifting material of life,” and in order to do that, she experimented boldly. In her non-fiction, she challenged received assumptions: in A Room, she revised English literary history by including women writers, and encouraged her readers to write their own stories; in Three Guineas (1931), she wrote a stinging polemic linking male sexuality and the war culture.
Seems like Bret Easton Ellis woke up alone, moaned, got out of bed, made a small portion of scrambled eggs, took a mini bottle of spring water from his refrigerator and sat down with it and his scrambled eggs at his table in front of his already-opened MacBook, looked at Esquire’s and The New Yorker’s websites, went to Twitter and typed, “The song I’ve listened to most in the last five days: ‘Heartbreak Warfare’ by John Mayer.”
Edward Lucie-Smith’s The Glory of Angels is a sumptuous feast for the eye and spirit, a volume carefully researched, knowingly written, and elegantly illustrated, no illuminated. It’s an oversized (11” x 14”) production, a coffee-table book so beautiful that care must be taken that neither coffee nor any other beverage be spilled upon it.
Old Spice brings their clever “Old Spice Guy” campaign to a whole new level, droping personalized custom messages via Twitter and YouTube to celebrities and average Joe’s for their support, love and admiration.
I thought that it was kind of a cliché to be so into it – some of the other students who had seen it even told me that – but I realized that even if that was so, Breathless was still resonating with young audiences, and there was something about it that distinguished it from other landmark films. So why Breathless? Why is it one of the key films in cinematic history? Why is it so fascinating for critics but equally so for average intellectually-minded audiences? What mark has it left?
Jules et Jim is a candidate for the French New Wave film, and maybe the French film of all time. Perhaps the only generational epic (the clichéd tale of a generation-spanning friendship torn apart by love and war blah blah blah) that is able to maintain humbleness, idiosyncrasy, and intimacy, Jules et Jim is responsible for generations of off-beat yet sincere movies.
Why is there probably some living ‘thing’ producing a sound louder than the loudest known biological sound? In the ocean? This is terribly frightening. This makes me even more afraid of large bodies of water.
Not sure at all what’s happening with LiveJournal currently or in the past eight to twelve years. Seems possible that something like “Mountain Dew bought it” or “it was abandoned but people are still using it” has happened. Seems to lack a meme-able CEO or high-level executive to a degree that I honestly “suspect,” to some degree, with some sarcasm, that it’s owned by a socialistic collective of 39,291 anonymous teenagers across North and Central America—14,219 in or around Mexico City….
Don’t cha wish your boyfriend was gay like me? Don’t cha wish your boyfriend was fierce like me? Don’t cha? According to July’s Teen Vogue, gay dudes are this season’s Must Have Accessory. Hurry – everybody put down your ‘It’ bag and go get u a gay before we’re all sold out.
Schuyler went many rounds with mental instability, variously diagnosed as schizophrenia and depression, from the 1950s on… While his suffering figured in his writing, it was not its creative wellspring; the poems are not visionary, and do not aim to blur the line between sanity and madness. Yet he is often written about as a somewhat saintly figure, especially in later years, a holy fool with an effortless connection to his art.
LeBron James made the “decision.” James, dressed in a pink and white checkered shirt and Hemmingway beard, towered over grand inquisitor Jim Grey like a lumber jack. The small children in the audience were all silent. Some have later called this moment the low point of Western Civilization. The stage was set for a public execution.
Lately, or for forever, I guess, Gawker and its tribe of commenters has had a sort of obsession with Founder and CEO of American Apparel Dov Charney—most recently seen in them covering the shit out of AA’s exciting dress code ‘scandal.’ Gawker etc. mostly blames the hipster retailer for having a “looksist” dress/ grooming/ hiring/ firing policy, for not manufacturing ‘plus-sized’ clothing, and for Charney acting perverted.
Martin Amis is known for many things. His father, Kingsley. His penchant for attracting the media. His friendships. And it seems, at times, his writing. And while I’m one of those detractors that think his best work was published two decades ago, it doesn’t mean those books of yore are any less relevant today than they were those many years ago.
Reading Alix Cleo Roubaud’s journal is like standing in a pitch-dark room and flicking on the light for a split second. The flash of illumination reveals only an impression of the furniture but forbids a thorough appreciation. The photographer recorded her thoughts, aspirations, and, most especially, her fears (she attempted suicide multiple times…)
What do I want of summer books? In general, I want affirmative books: books that affirm genre conventions, books that affirm common sense, books that affirm my instincts about how to live. There are also practical considerations to keep in mind. I want books that I won’t feel guilty about dripping ice cream on or dirtying with sand and saltwater (or grimy subway hands).
I’ve never quite understood how the term “art-damaged” became a rock-critical commonplace, but if I had to explain it, I might play my interlocutor Kevin Dunn’s “Nadine.” The 1979 seven-inch makes creased, crushed junk-sculpture out of a 1963 Chuck Berry song, with Dunn’s treated guitar and Tom Grey’s synths holding a blowtorch to the familiar boogie-barrelhouse interplay…
Kurt Vonnegut’s message was beautiful. He treated all of his characters equally and not one of his novels had a villain. He believed that society minored the hierarchy created by authors in epic make believe stories. He sought to remedy that. His black humor and dedication to honesty present the read with two options: to laugh or cry.
She lived a hard life – smoking incessantly and downing plenty of her favorite scotch. She was a party girl, the delight of other guests with her madcap behavior and outlandish stories. In her Victorian manse in Camden Town, a life-sized stuffed water buffalo greeted visitors in the foyer. In her bedroom, an imposing, life-sized male mannequin with a Hitler moustache dominated one corner…
He was an enigmatic figure, inscrutable as a Chinese sage, elegant as any titled gentleman entering his exclusive club in Mayfair, witty as only an assured, cosmopolitan man of the world could be, financially successful in terms nearly impossible to calculate today.
What to do, What to do? BP should turn the Gulf and the Mississippi River into “organic gas stations.” Just let people pull up to the beach and riverfront with their cars, go-carts, what have you – and let em’ fill up! They could spin it as a green initiative, an innovative undertaking
The next scene shows people saying things like “did you wear a bag over your head?” and other people saying “no, I did not.” The girl says something like “well, somebody wearing Kevin’s clothes came into my room last night wearing a bag over their head, and they saw me naked.” Then the trailer said the movie was called Baghead. I was laughing almost uncontrollably…
But, in a world that craves and covets pretty babies like Miley, is it indeed so very wrong for little girls in the limelight to exploit their big-girl sex-appeal for pay? Is it fair for their kiddie-careers to be so picked-on and politicized?
Antonella Arismendi is a self-taught fashion photographer and art director based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In her latest shoot, for the Spanish brand Kling, Arismendi captures the beauty of summer with a tinge of nostalgia and hint of something almost otherworldly.
Knight and Day has two principal characters: Roy Miller, (Tom, the Man, Cruise) and June Havens (Cameron, the thirty-seven-year-old, Diaz). Cruise is an American spy gone rouge. He has supernatural powers. Diaz is a blond mechanic.
Phillip Morris graced San Francisco with a new piece of colossal art (aka: a billboard) on Howard at Van Ness. The minimalist ad, created in conjunction with the West Hollywood, CA based creative agency the Billboard Liberation Front, simply states “My Life, My Death, My Choice.”
Rest is free, and according to brain specialists like Devanchi, it’s also good for you. So drink up as much as you can. At the very least, taking a few minutes every day to reflect peacefully can remind us we still have our own thoughts, our own goals unrelated to work, and that we do have control over our lives, even when times are shitty.
