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The destructive culture of pretty pink princesses

The destructive culture of pretty pink princesses
Girls the world over often go through a "princess phase," enthralled with anything pink and pretty — most especially the Disney princesses. When it happened to Peggy Orenstein's daughter Daisy, the contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine stepped back to examine the phenomenon. She found that the girlie-girl culture being marketed to little girls was less innocent than it might seem, and can have negative consequences for girls' psychological, social and physical development. Orenstein's exploration took her to Walt Disney World, the American Girl flagship store in New York City and a child beauty pageant. LiveScience: How did you get inspired to write the book? Orenstein: I'm a mother, and I think that when you're an adult, you don't really notice what's going on so much in the world of kids' culture. And so I started to go, 'What is this?' A lot of people were looking at issues of eating disorders or depression, or sexuality or culture, and issues in teenagers.

personal liberty? I'm against it I'm Still Not a Libertarianso I guess that means I'm opposed to personal freedom by Paul Kienitz If there is one political movement today that is so up-and-coming that it's downright trendy, it's Libertarianism. It's become very popular in the high-tech industries, where there are a lot of people who have reaped great rewards from the operation of the free market, who are trained to an engineer's habit of reductionist problem-solving, and who tend to have less contact than the average person with the areas of human experience that don't fall within the scope of these things. Libertarianism is tremendously in evidence in places where the high-tech subculture predominates, such as in public discussion on The Net, and in the computer industry in general. But such hypocrisy is not the issue when deciding whether one is going to personally support Libertarianism. The first fallacy is one I call the Fallacy of Revolution. Absolutism creates intolerance, of the sort that leads to violence.

100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!) In the spring of 2007, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, gave a legendary TED University talk: an ultra-fast-moving ride through the “100 websites you should know and use.” Six years later, it remains one of the most viewed TED blog posts ever. Time for an update? We think so. To see the original list, click here. And now, the original list from 2007, created by Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH.

The Modern Moloch On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.” And then the automobile happened. Much of the public viewed the car as a death machine. Pedestrian deaths were considered public tragedies. The main cause for these deaths was that the rules of the street were vastly different than how they are today. Turn-of-the-century footage from San Francisco’s Market Street shows just how casually people strode into the street. If a car hit someone, the car was to blame. The horrors of peace appear to be appalling than the horrors of war. Automotive interests banded together under the name Motordom. And it wasn’t just drivers who could be reckless—pedestrians could be reckless, too. This subtle shift allowed for streets to be re-imagined as a place where cars belonged, and where people didn’t. So they coined a new term: “Jay Walking.”

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