Prescribing Mushrooms for Anxiety →

Roc Morin:

For O.M., that anxiety had been crippling. Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at the age of 21, the then-pre-med student at first refused to accept reality. “I’m pretty domineering,” he laughed. “I told the nurses, ‘I can’t have this right now.’ I thought I could negotiate with cancer.” That domineering spirit served O.M. well through six rounds of chemotherapy. He even looked forward, he insisted, to the debilitating side-effects of his cancer-killing infusions. Enduring them gave him a sense of agency. He could withstand the punishment; his cancer could not. Only when the treatments ended, with his cancer in remission, was O.M. consumed by a feeling of abject helplessness. The fight was over. From that day on, all he could do was wait to see whether the cancer would return.

Is this the beginning of the next wave of drug decriminalization?

Christian Bale is the New Gene Hackman →

Carrie Rickey:

Bale is 40 years old. Onscreen for 28 years, he’s been starring in feature films nearly as long as Barrymore (32 years), Daniel Day-Lewis (also 32 years), and Tom Hanks (30 years). Unlike those performers, who almost always play leads, Bale is the prince of ensemble movies, feeding off the actors around him, elevating their performances as they electrify his. Excepting American Psycho and The Machinist, where he is the lead, Bale is an accomplished team player. It’s typical for Bale to play a role like G-man Melvin Purvis to Johnny Depp’s sensual John Dillinger in Public Enemies, or a haunted, prosthetic-legged bounty hunter to Russell Crowe’s charismatic, nimble outlaw in 3:10 To Yuma, or the introverted fanboy dazzled by glam-rock extroverts Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Velvet Goldmine. Even when he’s the eponymous character in the Dark Knight trilogy, he’s one in the ensemble.

I read this piece right after watching American Hustle for the second time this weekend, so I might have been primed to accept the premise, but if felt like such a clarification of something I’ve been thinking for a while—Christian Bale is a damn good actor. Rickey also nails something that I’ve been telling people for years—Empire of the Sun is a fantastic film and Bale is amazing in it, perhaps the best child actor performance I’ve ever seen.

All of a Penny’s Details →

Tobias Frere-Jones:

To accommodate the escalating price of copper, the Mint changed the penny’s composition in 1983, from 95% copper to almost entirely zinc, with a thin coat of copper to retain the traditional color. The change in material also reduced the coin’s weight by 20 percent, inadvertently dramatizing its dwindling value. At about the same time, the dies were made shallower to reduce wear, flattening the coin overall. The figures became lighter and more monotone, losing the modeled quality of sculpture. The trend towards flatter surfaces has gradually continued since then, and now a penny feels more like a laser print than the tiny sculpture it actually is.

Curiosity is the essential component of every good design.

Your Weekly Mad Men HW: Season 7, Ep. 2

Episode 2 of Season 7 of Mad Men was all about knowledge and the gap between how much people know about a certain situation and about how much other people know (or don’t know), about the same situation. Don doesn’t know that Sally knows that he wasn’t at the office (and Sally doesn’t know that he’s in job purgatory). The New York team doesn’t know that the Los Angeles team can still hear them when the conference call equipment shits the bed. Peggy doesn’t know that Shirley knows who the flowers are from. Joan doesn’t know that her promotion by Jim was a move against Roger. Nobody in the advertising world knows why Don is or isn’t out of a job and Don doesn’t know how he’s going to fix this, although his daughter, (who, philosophically is a carbon copy of him) doesn’t hesitate to point out that she knows exactly what the one thing is that he doesn’t want to do: “Why don’t you just tell her you don’t want to move to California?”

Mad Men is a great show because we care about what happens next not because we want that itch scratched, but because we dread the impact it will have on a universe of characters that we care about. I told my wife that I wished the show had ended with Don and Sally’s trip back to school simply because I felt like my brain had been reset when she got out of his car and I wasn’t able to finish processing the monumental crack in their relationship stalemate.

As always, there is much reading to do: Molly Lambert’s ‘Mad Men’ Week 2: You Don’t Bring Me Flowers; Matt Zoller Seitz’s Mad Men Recap: I’m So Many People; Alan Sepinwall’s Review: ‘Mad Men’ - ‘A Day’s Work’: Horrible Bosses; Tom & Lorenzo’s Mad Men: A Day’s Work. (And of course, do not forget to check for T&L’s Mad Style piece, which comes out on Wednesdays.)

Apple and Nike →

Ben Thompson:

What Nike is selling is the experience of being a runner (or a basketball player or a tennis player or a golfer, etc.) It’s not just the athletes in their advertisements, or the quality of their shoes, the sportiness of the clothes, or the sophistication of the apps. It’s the whole, and it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Nike is an experience company. They sell a commodity product, and make their profit off of the differentiation provided by the Nike experience. And they’re better at it than just about any company in the world, except maybe Apple.

Really, really interesting piece by Ben Thompson. Makes a ton of sense—I love Apple products and I love Nike products and even more so, I love Apple retail stores and Nike retail stores. And both have a distinct fetishization of their products on full display.

And because the universe works this way sometimes, Devour linked to a product video of the new Air Jordan XX9. Remind you any product videos you’ve seen before?

Russia’s Flair For “Maskirovka” — Disguised Warfare →

The New York Times:

The Kremlin insists that Russian forces are in no way involved, and that Mr. Strelkov does not even exist, at least not as a Russian operative sent to Ukraine with orders to stir up trouble. “It’s all nonsense,” President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday during a four-hour question-and-answer session on Russian television. “There are no Russian units, special services or instructors in the east of Ukraine.” Pro-Russian activists who have seized government buildings in at least 10 towns across eastern Ukraine also deny getting help from professional Russian soldiers or intelligence agents.

But masking the identity of its forces, and clouding the possibilities for international denunciation, is a central part of the Russian strategy, developed over years of conflict in the former Soviet sphere, Ukrainian and American officials say.

And now there’s evidence to back this claim up.

So, uh, when do we start to get seriously worried about this thing?

The Scarcity of ‘Frozen’ Merchandise is Making Parents Crazy →

Kayla Reed:

Because their children won’t love them unless they can produce an Elsa dress, parents have recently begun resorting to spending thousands of dollars on Frozen merchandise on eBay. The film’s DVD release has caused a surge of demand that Disney’s supply has yet to meet, prompting hissy fits across Disney Stores nationwide, as those stores have implemented a two-item limit on what little Frozen merch they have left in stock.

Sure, but can you really put a price on the adequate development on your daughter’s Cinderella Complex?

The ‘I Am Alive’ App →

William Brennan:

A 26-year-old graduate student in Paris, Hassan had gotten sick of worrying about family and friends whenever she heard news of a suicide bombing in her hometown of Beirut. A detonation on January 21, in the same neighborhood where a car bomb had exploded just three weeks earlier, spurred her to action. In what she describes as an “expression of discontent,” Hassan developed an app that allows users, with one touch, to tweet a reassuring message to their followers: “I am still alive! #Lebanon #LatestBombing.”

I don’t know how I feel about this story, and the app, and the world that we live in that makes it necessary and possible, but I know that I feel something.

A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross →

Walt Hickey:

Bob Ross was a consummate teacher. He guided fans along as he painted “happy trees,” “almighty mountains” and “fluffy clouds” over the course of his 11-year television career on his PBS show, “The Joy of Painting.” In total, Ross painted 381 works on the show, relying on a distinct set of elements, scenes and themes, and thereby providing thousands of data points. I decided to use that data to teach something myself: the important statistical concepts of conditional probability and clustering, as well as a lesson on the limitations of data.

So let’s perm out our hair and get ready to create some happy spreadsheets!

I love the internet.

Snow in New York in April is Only Weird Because You Have No Sense of Time →

Nate Silver:

It’s the middle of April — and it’s snowing as I write this in New York City. This isn’t quite as unusual as you might have gathered from the reaction on Twitter. Based on data collected in Central Park dating to the 1860s, 64 percent of New York Aprils have experienced at least some snow, although it usually comes earlier in the month.

Now, please, be quiet.