In a corner of the Whitney basement, Yuka Otani is teaching an edible glass workshop. She's mixed together corn syrup and sugar, then she dips a metal loop into the mixture and starts to blow bubbles. They drift in the air and then plummet, hardening into something resembling plastic wrap. Twenty-five feet to her right, a philosophy professor from Brooklyn College halts a discussion of Kant to pull out a cordless reciprocating saw, a "Sawzall," out of a garbage bag. "Rationality and critique are the philosopher's sawzall," she explains. Towards the front of the room, a 10-year-old boy is teaching a group of adults how to draw cartoons.

It might be good to take a little break and read this open letter to Lauren Conrad: "I felt like I knew so many things about being an intern, that I had this deep understanding of what it meant to be an intern, mostly because of you and Whitney on the show. I felt like you and Whitney on the show had let me look into your lives as interns and see the things you did when you were interns and what it was like to be an intern so I could watch and learn and be prepared for my own eventual internship. I felt like this was a [...]

"In this third year of the Great Recession, it’s starting to set in for a lot of people that the rest of their lives will be, at best, a grim struggle. From early forced retirement for people who have no financial cushion to retire upon to the tens of millions of jobless younger adults still living with mom and (occasionally) dad, for all but the top 5%, it’s just a long hard slog from here on out. That’s why more and more new 'Internet companies' are based on the model of the whorehouse: Are you a reasonably attractive poor woman who doesn’t yet look 'used up'? Then you [...]

Things to think about during lunch! Here is a comment on a New York magazine Daily Intel blog post: "A writer at the NYTimes, Post (NY or Huffington), etc. researches and writes an article over X days/weeks/months. NYMag then takes the story and rebrands it as Daily Intel with (maybe) a link to the original source. Is the link considered payment for the source material? If so, is this journalism's method of leveraging valuable content?"

Looking for something to do with your life? Perhaps because your industry of choice has dried up and is currently thrashing around like a parched fish left out on blacktop on a hot summer day? Why not become an eviction agent? Thanks to the nearly 4,000,000 houses nationwide that are sitting on "severely delinquent" mortgages, it's a job with openings galore! Sure, it may result in you being pretty depressed because you're basically working for commissions that directly result from a series of poor decisions and exploded dreams, but money's money these days, right?