Photo: Thinkstock

Raise your hand if you've ever spent an evening trolling design and lifestyle and everything-pretty blogs, then looked up at your own imperfect life -- that messy living room, that unawesome wardrobe, that unletterpressed stationery -- and experienced a life-sigh. So-and-so-blogger would never eat her kids' leftover frozen pizza for dinner, your Internet-weary heart tells you, she's probably having a photogenic stir-fry made from voluptuous locally-sourced greens. Well guess what? Apparently, even the people with the prettiest blogs you know aren't perfect. And they have begun a kind of movement, revealing their imperfections in, it must be admitted, very pretty, lovely, perfect blog posts.

The "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" meme started with a post on Make Under My Life. Jess Constable writes, "Though I like to think I’m pretty much an open book online, there are things about me that I hide for fear of rejection or judgment. But my emotional, fearful mind freaks when I think about sharing some things in my life." And thus, she launches into a list of the things she's afraid to reveal.  Number one: "Yesterday after a tense customer service call, I cried in front of my assistant and new intern. (Not the “ugly cry,” but pretty close.)"

Within a few days, her friend Ez posted her own "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" to the Creature Comforts blog, about how the idea had gone viral, and shared, despite her professed nerves, her own list. She admits that, despite writing a blog devoted to perfect and pretty things, "The nitty-gritty is that some months have been so tight that I've worried about making my rent payment or even buying groceries...a handful of times it's gotten scary enough that I've had panic attacks daily just trying to think of how I'll make it through."

Since these first posts, the movement has spread to hundreds of blogs. It's really worth the time to peruse some of these posts, if for no other reason than to see how mundane some of these confessions are. We are all so afraid of revealing any imperfections at all, as if the ability to curate the image of a perfect life has created its very own brand of insecurity, a whole new cyber-neurosis. Why should we be afraid to reveal that we are uncrafty? That we care what people think of us? That we love sitcoms?

As Ez puts it, "we are all just a little bit sick of all this perfection." And many of these bloggers add in their TIATTY posts that this dose of honesty has changed the way they want to write -- real names appear for the first time, and pledges to share "real selves" in addition to images of aspirational lives. So if you're beating yourself up over a speck of imperfection, it may help to write your own "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You." Even if (especially if) your "You" is yourself.

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Photo: Thinkstock

A lot of parenting advice stresses me out (baby flashcards! no flashcards!) so I love when someone smart declares that the thing to do to help our kids is to read more. Reading I can do. Filling the house with books I can handle. An excuse to buy picture books, novels, and magazines? Yes, please. The only thing that would be better would be discovering that kids thrive when their parents drink a lot of coffee and wear yoga pants for days at a time. Mothering win!

Last year, Lisa Bloom's book Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World came out, and started a nationwide (and Internet-wide) conversation about how we talk to our little girls, and how simply saying different things to them (and encouraging reading and thinking) can help them grow up to be smart women. Boys, presumably, were doing okay. After all, men have it easy in today's world, right? I mean, they never have to wait in line for a public bathroom. How hard can their lives be?

Well, guess what.  Bloom's new book -- Swagger: 10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness, and Thug Culture (can this lady rock a subtitle or what?) -- is out, and now she is telling us that our boys are in trouble too. (I know. Bummer.) Apparently, we are not expecting enough of our boys, and in this way, undermine their early development. Bloom writes for The Huffington Post, "The new cultural trope is that girls naturally mature faster, that they have better innate verbal skills, and so pushing young boys to read is unrealistic and vaguely unfair to their boyness...Boys today do worse on national reading tests compared to their own gender a generation ago." And what's more, "Poor readers -- mostly boys -- struggle to read textbooks and tests in all subjects. They get suspended, expelled, flunk out and drop out at alarming rates - the majority of our African-American and Latino boys (who have the lowest reading proficiency of all) drop out of high school, with white boys faring only slightly better."

I admit to a sinking feeling of guilt upon reading this. My son is only 14 months old, but I already hear myself saying things all the time like, "Oh no, he doesn't really have any words yet. His sister did by now, but you know - boys!" As if I accept -- even expect -- that this smart kid is nothing more than a hammer-, truck-, ball-obsessed little caveman. How can our low expectations begin so early? Knowing that kids rise to the expectations (or lack thereof) we set out for them?

Thankfully, one of Bloom's solutions is, you guessed it, reading to our sons. "Make your home a reading mecca," she writes. "Kids with parents who read for pleasure are six times more likely to do so themselves -- and their grades shoot up." This I can handle. As soon as my little caveman stops hitting his sister over the head with that board book.

Read More:
Lisa Bloom on How to Talk to Little Girls
The Bond Between a Mother and a Son

Photo: Thinkstock

It was the classic city dwellers' folly: "We need some peace and quiet!" I decreed, whisking my husband and dog up to the Catskill Mountains for a tranquil country weekend. It was quiet all right, there in our rented cabin in the woods. So quiet we were terrified, and spent the night startling at every crack betraying a murderous woodsman creeping closer. Even the dog paced around growling all night. I could practically hear her inner monologue, pitched in a Woody Allen-ish tone: "I can't be out here in the country! There's no where to walk! How will they order Chinese food for me to beg for?" Pace pace pace growl.

It's a strange thing to be so unaccustomed to silence. To associate the sounds of leaves rustling and one's own heartbeat with ominous moments in horror movies. And that's just external quiet -- how many of us can imagine taking a vow of silence ourselves? We so often go through our days in a din, our ears plugged with music, our mouths talking talking talking. Wouldn't silence keep us from communicating, prevent us from connecting with our thoughts, and, you know, scare the crap out of us?

Writer Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston posed this question (sort of) to the Trappist Monks of Oka Abbey, in Quebec. Trappist Monks are known for being the only Western order that practices silence (it's not technically a "vow of silence," as he explains). Mesiano-Crookston explains that it was "their dedication to the enshrinement of silence" that compelled him to reach out to them. He wanted to know how the silence works, and what it does for them. So he interviewed them -- via email, of course.

Their answers are illuminating: "The silence does make me aware of my inner workings, however, what we call in the monastery, 'self-knowledge.'...Silence seems to keep me from idealizing myself...I've become very attuned to the sound of bird-song, the wind, water running through the pipes, identifying unseen monks by the sound of their footsteps—just paying attention to my surroundings."

In one of the more absurd episodes of my often-absurd existence, I found myself locked in the famous Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris, alone, at dusk. I know. Who knew it closed? Such is the life of 20-year-old monolingual American backpacker with her head up her, uh, in the clouds. I'd been so busy communing with the spirits of Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and the other heroes-of-a-20-year-old-American-backpacker-type, that I'd forgotten to check the time. And there I was, on the wrong side of the (lovely) gate, freaking the #$^* out. Despite the great story material, I decided I really would rather not spend the night, and ran like one of those modern, fast zombies toward the Crematorium (I know, I know) where a jovial groundskeeper in a diesel-powered gold cart picked me up and giggled Frenchily as he drove me back to the land of the living on the other side of the gate, from whence I dispatched to my youth hostel for a night of incredulous hyperventilating.

But what if being locked in a cemetary -- as it happens, Pére Lachaise itself -- were a kind of whimsical, enchanted romp? What if you could commune with those many eminent spirits in, you know, a fun way? Here is a short film that is beautiful, dreamy, and - bonus! -  helps me to come to terms with my traumatic experience. Leave it to the French.

The ghosts of Père Lachaise from ChezEddy on Vimeo.

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Photo: Thinkstock

Dorothy Flood has fond memories of riding trains to visit family every summer as a child, but there was always a strange moment, a moment that has gnawed at her for decades. As Flood told NPR recently, "When we'd get to Baltimore, that was the Mason-Dixon Line...The African-Americans would go in the back ... and white people would go into separate cars...It didn't make any sense because I was going to school with them. I lived next to them. But now that I crossed that Mason-Dixon Line, I couldn't be with them? I didn't understand it." Flood and her grandmother never got to eat in the fancy dining car, instead eating homemade meals from shoeboxes. In an especially affecting anecdote, Flood remembers standing on one side of the dining car's etched glass door and tracing the fingertips of a girl her age on the other side of the door -- a white girl eating in the dining car.

Well, recently Flood finally got her chance, at age 75, to dine in the dining car of the Royal Gorge Route Railroad. (This happened thanks to an awesome program called Wish of a Lifetime, kind of like Make-a-Wish but for seniors. ) "Oh she would have loved this," she said of her grandmother. Listening to this story, I thought of Flood's grandmother, of how heartbreaking it would be to explain to a child, This world we live in, it is unjust, and it is unjust specifically to you, and here is how you must deal with it. And how glad her grandmother would be, to see Flood in the dining car, enjoying a meal and a glass of wine. And how the simplest things—being on one side of a glass door or another—can make all the difference in a life, whether we realize it at the time or not.

Learn more about how Wish of a Lifetime, along with their partner, Brookdale Senior Living, enriches the lives of seniors.

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Photo: André Vergueiro

Well, it's June, and you know what that means: It's Skyscraper Month, of course! I know. Huh? And yet, there's something exciting about skyscrapers: the unlikeliness of their Jetsons-esque, extra-natural appearance; the enormous cajones it takes for someone to say, Yep, I am going to design and build a structure as tall as it can possibly be. Wait, taller.   A skyscraper is basically ambition in structure form.

So you've got to love this concept a group of Portuguese architects, Ana Luisa Soares, Filipe Magalhães, and André Vergueiro came up with for the awesomely-named Rooftops, Why Not? contest: putting public schools on top of New York City skyscrapers. As they put it, "What if suddenly the education would become the highest (and most visible) value of a society?" The resulting imagery is dreamy and futuristic, and evokes the question: How else can our urban spaces be reimagined? And: what do our structures say about what we value in life? And: how cute and raucous would the "School Elevator" be?

Be sure to visit the Cargo Collective site for more gorgeous images of architectural inspiration.
(via Curbed)

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The Invention That Makes Everyone Smile
Saving the Hair of Cancer Patients
Oprah's Search for New Ideas

Photo: Thinkstock

1. My mother used to have this card hanging in the laundry room on which a friend of hers had scrawled a quote from a poem:

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Today marks the end of National Short Story Month (NaShoStoMo for short—and yes, this exists, in addition to May being National Bike Month, National Hamburger Month, and National Moving Month. Who knew?) Some of our favorite works of fiction this past year were story collections (plus: remember Oprah’s 2009 Book Club pick, the short story collection about children in Africa, “Say You’re One of Them”?), and while looking for a way to celebrate them, we stumbled on Storyville, an app that lets you keep up with the newest ones out there without purchasing a library's worth of different collections. Every Tuesday, you receive a single fresh story right to your phone or ipad—ranging from tales by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors like Jennifer Egan to those by up-and-comers like Emma Straub and Tania James.

“Every year, hundreds of wonderful short stories are published, but readers have no idea they exist,” says Paul Vidich, one of Storyville's co-founders. “We’re trying to engage fiction fans in a new conversation. And with the stories on your phone or iPad, they’re always with you—on the bus, at the airport, in your bed. (Paul is right about that: I got so caught up reading writer Ana Menendez’s Traveling Fools, a whimsical yarn about a man who flies away on a weather balloon while waiting in line at Starbucks that I didn’t even hear the cashier call my name three times!)
 
Here’s a few more fast, easy ways to delve into short stories that should hold you over until NaShoStoMo 2013:

• The Library of America’s Story of the Week website curates a classic mix of authors (everybody from Edgar Allan Poe to Susan Orlean!) If you subscribe to the weekly newsletter, you get a new story in your e-mail inbox every Monday.
• FiveChapters.com publishes a short story online in five parts every weekday, kind of like an online, literary soap opera!
  
• One-Story.com sends subscribers short stories every three weeks in the mail. On the website, you can check out Q&As with the authors, discuss plotlines with other subscribers on the blog, and submit stories yourself.

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Unrequited love stories
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Vacation inspiration, part one: The Atlas Obscura: a compilation of curious and wondrous travel destinations.

"The internet tastes like a cup of peanut butter pudding and it looks like a star chart." A journey to the center of the internet.

Don't even think about eating a bagel. 23 energy boosters for getting through the day.

Vacation inspiration, part two: Quirk up your travel by visiting the World's Largest Things.

The Life-Lifter: Now that's a shopping spree. A Kentucky man spends $200,000 to buy out entire K-Mart store and donates everything to charity.

Photo: The Darwin Correspondence Project

There is no smile less convincing than the little kid picture smile -- the bared teeth, the expressionless eyes. And there is no smile sweeter than the fleeting ones that flicker across sleeping infant's faces -- though we're told those are just reflexes. What makes a facial expression expressive at all? How do we know what people's expressions actually mean? It was a question that interested Charles Darwin, and led to an experiment recently recreated by the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge. Darwin took (pretty creepy) photographs of human faces with their muscles artificially contracted by electrical probes, and then asked friends of his to interpret the expressions.

You can click through the images and note what expression you think they express, and then view the results of the larger experiment here.  One result? People today have different words for emotions than Darwin's Victorian crowd did -- reminding us that what we think of as being innate emotions may well be social constructs. I know, it's deep. What strikes me most, though, is how uncanny, unsettling the photographs are, proving, if nothing else, the intangible qualities that go into these nonverbal human communications. In other words, a smile is not just some muscles contracting.

via It's Okay To Be Smart

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Smile -- it's Contagious!