Ugh, this day, right? Let’s all relax for a minute and watch this little bear enjoy some of the bounty provided for him by whoever made this video. Feels good, doesn’t it? You’re welcome.

This is one of those Thursday Styles stories that people are going to make fun of on the Internet, but hold up. Truthfully we are all involved in the battle against male shininess! Quite some time ago we begged White House press dude Robert Gibbs to get his TV shininess under control. (The results have been good!) So the Times goes long to review the burgeoning market of men’s anti-shininess products but we all know there is only one: “Lancome’s Pure Focus T-ZONE POWDER GEL.” Believe it. (The next stop in our anti-shininess crusade: getting new anti-reflective coatings on The Nation’s Chris Hayes’ new glasses. He comes on the TV sometimes, and it’s all shiny!)

This is one of my weird hobbyhorses, so, sorry, but! Everyone I know is terrified by turbulence, so today’s PSA is: “About 60 people, two-thirds of them flight attendants, are injured by turbulence annually in the United States.” That’s also usually because they just weren’t wearing seatbelts. THE MORE YOU KNOW.

Feeling a little blue right now? Well, cheer up. Or else.

Alzheimer’s is a fatal brain disorder marked by memory loss and an inability to function in daily life. Researchers have long known that depression and Alzheimer’s disease are linked, but it wasn’t clear whether depression was a risk factor for Alzheimer’s or a symptom of the disease. Now, two studies published in the July 6 issue of the journal Neurology conclude that depression is indeed separate from Alzheimer’s and that depressive symptoms can raise the risk of dementia by 50 percent.

This bummer of a report follows the news that people with depression really do see the world as more gray than the joyful bastards who go through life singing a happy tune, blissfully ignorant of the sorrows all around them. God. Why is everything so awful? I guess the BEST I can hope for now is the possibility that I will eventually forget it all. Nah, not making me any happier. Basically my future will involve watching The Sorrow and the Pity over and over, never remembering I’ve seen it before. Gah.

This Jim Dwyer Times column actually does make the case quite well that New York City actively works to retain its 50% jobless rate for black men of working age-or increase it, I suppose, as the racial disparity in official unemployment increased during the latest recession-and that the City has a system of policies and procedures to not only create success and profit for the white and/or already well-off but also to keep black and/or poor people excluded from opportunity, not only by barring them from avenues of success but by introducing them disproportionately to the criminal justice system.

by Nate Freeman

Yesterday Martin Dunn ended his seven-year tenure as Editor-in-Chief of the New York Daily News. Surprised? You wouldn’t be if you’d been reading New York Post media columnist Keith Kelly, who was the first to report word of Dunn’s exit. Repeatedly. Over the course of many years. Let’s look back!

May 26, 2004 — NEW SNOOZE LOOKS LIKE OLD ; MASTHEAD SHIFT SHUFFLES DECK, BUT DOESN’T DEAL NEW BOSS
“The deck has been shuffled at Mort Zuckerman’s embattled Daily News, but there are few signs of new life at the paper. Editorial director Martin Dunn, who returned to the paper in October after several years in his native London, finally unveiled his new lineup — which looks a lot like the old lineup.”

June 3, 2005– BEA BILLY AT $5M — WARNER BOOKS SETS HIGH HURDLE FOR ‘700 SUNDAYS’
“Insiders say there is tension mounting between the two top British editors at the Daily News, Editorial Director Martin Dunn and Editor-in-Chief Michael ‘Footsie Monster’ Cooke. The two were seen having what to some newsroom sources appeared to be a heated argument last week. Dunn was gesticulating wildly, said one, and Cooke appeared to be listening glumly.”

August 10, 2005-IS DUNN DONE?
“Mort Zuckerman, the mercurial Daily News owner, generally doesn’t keep his top editors around for more than a few years.

As the News editorial director and associate publisher Martin Dunn closes in on his two-year anniversary, the rumors that he might soon be heading back to his native England were rekindled after a lengthy interview he gave to the London-based Independent newspaper earlier this week.”

‘Within a year or two, Dunn will want to return to Britain where his wife and his family remain,’ says the Independent.”

December 15, 2005 — OFF THE RADAR — POP CULTURE MAG, WEB SITE FADE OUT
“At the Daily News, Zuckerman yesterday subbed his editorial director Martin Dunn as editor-in-chief, to replace Michael Cooke. In the past six months, the Daily News’ circulation has tumbled to its lowest level since the Great Depression.”

December 28, 2005 — DAILY DEFECTION — POST PARENT POACHES NEWS’ TOP DOG GOODSTEIN
“That successor, insiders said, is unlikely to be Martin Dunn, the paper’s deputy publisher and editor-in-chief.

Dunn’s tenure has been marked by a series of high-profile gaffes, including a botched Scratch n’ Match promotional contest that wrongly ‘awarded’ $444 million in false jackpots to thousands of readers and sparked a wave of lawsuits.”

November 1, 2006 — MORT BLOWS NEWS’ FUSE — STAFF FEARS RESPONSE BY ‘PANICKY’ PUBLISHER
“Dunn, who is pulling in $1.2 million a year as the editor-in-chief, has about another year to go on his contract. Given Zuckerman’s penchant for canning editors, most think Dunn is the most vulnerable to the whims of the mercurial owner.”

June 6, 2007 — SNOOZE’S DUNN MAY BE NEWS
“IT could be that time is growing short for Editor-in-Chief Martin Dunn at the helm of Mort Zuckerman’s struggling Daily News… Dunn’s current contract expires at the end of the year, and talks about a new contract have not even begun.

Nobody is expecting that they will.”

June 8, 2007 — DUNN WRONG: NEWS BOUNCES 2 EDITORS
“Some see the shakeup as a last-ditch attempt by Dunn to prove himself to Zuckerman before his contract expires in the fourth quarter of this year.”

June 13, 2007 — FORMER SNOOZER: IT’S NO DUNN DEAL
“Dunn’s contract expires in October — so the heat is on to inject new life into the struggling paper, which during Dunn’s watch has lost its circulation lead to The New York Post. Both Dunn and Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman are said to be unsure if there will be a new contract. Talks between the two have not started yet.”

June 27, 2007 — PARIS NON GRATA FOR US AND MIN
“As Dunn scrambles to save his own job and try to prove to the mercurial owner, Mort Zuckerman that he is till capable of shaking things up at the floundering tabloid.”

January 5, 2008 — A BRIT DISS FOR SNOOZE
“The job offer to Wallace seems to raise anew questions about Martin Dunn, the incumbent editor-in-chief.

It had been widely reported that his contract was set to expire in October, 2007 and the belief was that he hoped to return to his native Britain.”

July 21, 2010 -Â NEW DAILY NEWS CHIEF
“Martin Dunn is out as the editor-in-chief of the Daily News, ending a seven-year run as the top editorial person in the Mort Zuckerman-owned paper.”

Despite what their tabloid press would have you believe, crime in Britain has actually declined over the last ten years. What could account for such a sizable drop in a nation so fond of stabbery and generalized knifeplay? Perhaps we can attribute it to the efforts of the constabulary, who apparently believe no infraction too minor. Take the case of Peter Cox, motorist, as an example.

A man was shot in the groin with a 50,000 volt Taser gun by police who wrongly believed he had been driving without insurance.

Peter Cox was given the electric shock after he climbed out of his BMW to talk to officers who had been following him.

He had a brief conversation with them but suddenly collapsed to the ground in agony when one of the policemen discharged the weapon.

Yesterday Mr Cox, 49, said he was considering legal action against the force after it said the gun had been fired accidentally. In addition, it later emerged Mr Cox’s car was insured.

If the lawsuit doesn’t work out he could probably make a decent bit selling “Don’t Tase My Todger” t-shirts. That or, “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The-OH MY FUCKING CHRIST YOU TASED ME IN THE GROIN.” Although that one might need to use both the front and back to get the whole message across.

Once again, the left in this country is completely screwing over the real patriots on the other side: “Thus to deny ‘progressive’ to the right is inaccurate and even disrespectful. And, instead of messing around with rebranding, the political left would be best advised to stick with ‘liberal’ — and to hunker down and defend the positions to which the word now refers. “

by Jane Hu

Ernest Hemingway wrote what might become his most-quoted lines in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, shortly after the publication of Tender is the Night. Hemingway called Fitzgerald “bitched” for having married Zelda Sayre, “someone who was jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you.” Leave it to Hemingway to describe creative impotency and emotional indulgence in overtly female terms.

The 30s, from our vantage point, seem so rife with modernist angst and Prufrockian figures of melancholy and embarrassed masculinity. All in all, perfect characters for castration theory to uncover man’s inner bitch. Nonetheless, Hemingway does not dismiss a writer’s propensity “to hurt like hell,” but welcomes the “damned hurt” in service of literary practice. At the same time, you see him urging for a level of objectivity: one must dissect one’s pain-and thus one’s art-like a “scientist.”

T. S. Eliot notes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) the difference between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Similarly, Gertrude Stein separates inauthentic art (a form of self-expression) with true art (narratives that exceeded the self).

And so always it is true that the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation. The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a masterpiece.

This divide between sappy, dismissible schlock and transcendental high art rings of Columbia comp lit prof Andreas Huyssen’s infamous argument [PDF] that woman was “modernism’s Other” and, by default, the producer of mass culture-as opposed to men’s “real, authentic culture.”

Gosh, the strain for male writers to achieve dispassionate greatness must have weighed so heavily!

It’s hard to say if Fitzgerald took Hemingway’s advice… because a lot of Hemingway’s own male characters are wounded, world-weary, tender souls themselves. Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry may keep up a stoic exterior but do not tell me you did not cry when Jake and Brett take that final taxi ride. Or when Henry walks back to the hotel alone. In the rain.

Even while Hemingway was advocating for objectivity, it’s not like he ever succeeded himself. His style mimicked a reporterly aesthetic, but his plot omissions also highlighted emotional significance. Hemingway never tells Jake to “Get over it, bitch,” because that’s never the point. Jake’s victimization, disempowerment, paralyzing hurt-all important and necessary.

Maybe Hemingway was reacting badly to Fitzgerald’s feminization of Dick Diver in Tender is the Night-Dick, who gives up his intellectual pursuits in service of a girl. But I don’t doubt that Jake would do the same for Brett in a heartbeat.

I have been woefully remiss in keeping you abreast of developments concerning the contract issues for the cast of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” I blame the ample distractions of the season, but that’s really no excuse: I’ve failed you. As a small attempt at making amends, let me direct you to this exhaustive discussion of the subject, which clarifies many misconceptions, elucidates the struggles of these talented young people, and addresses the poignancy of impermanence by way of a remarkably apposite quotation from 1995’s classic teaching tool Showgirls. It’s ALL there.