Surround Yourself With Good People

On Fridays, I’ve been curling up with my fleece blanket and coffee and typing out links to other sites worth reading.

Will Oremus points out how Selfie Culture has gone so far, the world is developing phones to accommodate it. Introducing the Selfie Phone…

The “Desire Eye” is a new midrange smartphone from Taiwan-based HTC, announced Wednesday, and people are already calling it “the selfie phone.” That’s because it boasts a ridiculously powerful 13-megapixel front-facing camera—the same resolution as its rear-facing camera

Phoebe Baker Hyde gifts the world an essay called “My Year Without Makeup.”

I didn’t start out this way. Some might call me “low maintenance,” but in the three-and-a-half decades of my life, I’ve done hundreds of ridiculous, bizarre, and embarrassing things in beauty’s name…. I was at war with the world around me and at war with myself—the only self I had. And so I swore off Beauty and all her trappings: makeup, new clothes, salon haircuts, jewelry, the works. I told very few people what I was doing, took detailed but sporadic notes, and had only a vague sense of a goal: something needed to change for the better.

Joshua Keating is cautioning the media against reducing Malala Yousafzai to a Cuddly Caricature of the “Bravest Girl in the World.”

There is something irritatingly smug and condescending about some of the coverage of “the bravest girl in the world.” It was a particular low point when, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said “I want to adopt you” to a young woman who’s spoken very publicly about the support she’s received from her father—a pretty brave guy in his own right.

(He also argues they shouldn’t have given anyone the peace prize since “the most notable eruptions of violence have been so grimly predictable, the result of years of individual and collective failures by governments and international institutions.”)

Here’s a couple bonus tweets for you two:

Friend comes from same root word as “freedom.” A friendship that isn’t “freeing” isn’t true friendship.

— Leonard Sweet (@lensweet) October 10, 2014

Publishers say “influencers” cause people to buy books. I don’t necessarily agree. I think it is the beautiful tribe of us ordinary folk. — Anne Marie Miller (@girlnamedanne) October 9, 2014

Happy Friday, friends,
Sarah

Photo Source: Selfie