by Jeva Lange

My boa constrictor who I’ve had since ’88 passed away this yr. She was over 25 yrs old. & very sweet. For a snake. RIP Pandora. I miss u.

— Slash (@Slash) January 21, 2014

I did not wake up this morning and expect to be moved by a tweet from Slash over his dead snake, and yet here we are. Live every day like it’s your last, we only have so much time with each other.

This is the winter people decided snow umbrellas were a Thing.

 — @juliarubin

This woman is right: You are all doing this, and it is horrifying. I don’t know why we don’t use umbrellas for snow as we do for rain, but THAT IS THE WAY THINGS ARE and to act in any other manner is one more troubling sign of how our selfishness and lack of decorum is dragging us all down. For SHAME, people. Have a little goddamn DIGNITY.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, New York magazine online producer Jazmine Hughes tells us more about an email she received after not calling her grandmother to say happy new year.

My grandma is AGGRESSIVE pic.twitter.com/0BLqE6MLWU

— Jazmine Hughes (@jazzedloon) January 12, 2014

Jazmine! So what happened here?

I come from a family of sassy women; I am the oldest of five girls and we are a village, basically, of sass and jokes and ethnic hair products. They are the funniest people I know. One of them got asked to prom and answered, “yeah, ok, sure, swag.”

I hit the jackpot with three grandmothers, too, so all my bases are covered: One is sweet and makes me cookies, one is saucy and hilarious and super fashionable, and one is crazy and a little bit racist. This is the fashionable one, my Mema. She’s my father’s mother, Eva — which rhymes with diva, lest you ever forget — and she’s awesome.

We email often, maybe once every other week, and she basically just asks me when I’m finally going to get my hair done (“The next thing we will have to work on is a hairdresser to do your hair. Summer is coming up so you want to have that looking PRETTY like Mema.” April 2013). We talk about our favorite wines a lot (“As a matter of fact had some Malbec over the weekend and it was sooo nice. Thanks for turning me on to it (even though you are much too young for it). I had never heard of it. Of course my head was in my hands after drinking it.” December 2013) and our favorite things to eat (“Okay, just showered, now on to dressing for Panera. I LOVE THAT place. Having a Greek salad and a panini with tomato, basil and mozzarella cheese, YUM YUM.” April 2013). She bought herself an iPad last year, so she is ON TOP of the internet now, although her caps lock usage is very inconsistent.

So last Saturday, I received that email from her. Here it is, in full:

Hi Jazzie!!!
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT IS 11 DAYS INTO the year 2014 and you have not sent me a HAPPY NEW YEAR’S greeting. That’s makes me so sad :-(. Hope that you are doing well and things are going well with you. I am doing very well, thanks for asking, Was at the computer and thought about you and decided to give you a warm shout-out.
BE safe and know that I think about you.
LOVE YOU, Grandmother aka Mema

It was a very sweet message, of course, but also unabashedly in-your-face and demanding, which I think are pretty good qualities in a 60-plus-year-old woman.

I immediately, drunkenly, emailed her back, incredibly apologetic, and then proceeded to leave the bathroom (most of my emails are sent from the toilet) and read it aloud to my friends. They thought it was impressive, so I tweeted it, and now everyone knows that my grandma runs me.

She seems pretty awesome. Is she always this feisty? And have there been any other doozies like this over the years?

In high school, she snuck and changed her middle name on her diploma to something she liked better, so yeah, she’s always been super feisty. She reminds me of a goofy Claire Huxtable, if Claire Huxtable once slapped a lady in church. When I was little, she would take out her dentures and chase me around with them, but then she stopped after I started yelling “MEMA TAKE OUT YOUR TEETH AGAIN” in public.

2014 must be the year of being in touch with your family a lot. My mother called me a few minutes after midnight on New Year’s Eve, because she knew I “wouldn’t be out partying,” and wanted to talk. Watching de Blasio being sworn in is a party, though.

Lesson learned (if any)?

In 50 years, my grandkids will probably post our cyber-text-hologram interactions to YouFace or whatever social network they’re using to make fun of me talk about how awesome I am.

Just one more thing.

I told my grandma that I was being interviewed about our emails. Here is her response:

OMG SMH smiling at this. Add that you won’t be in the inheritance if you don’t keep in touch. I just might not know you (line from the Color Purple, “I don’t know them people” ). LOL. Please change Eva Hughes to EvaDiva Hughes. LOL and loving it. Let me know how it goes. Smooches

I didn’t even know there was any inheritance. I should call her….

Meet A Future Tiger Meal

It’s much more fun to read these stories in the before time.

“Curiosities draw the most attention when the story about the story exceeds the story itself. In this case, the question of why American dialects even matter as a topic of public knowledge and citizen debate has been abandoned, for better or worse, in favor of the idea of its existence. That is to say, popularity online now depends on a thing’s thingness, on its ability to distinguish itself as a unique and precious snowflake, rather than by its meaning or its function.”

I am really into this song, but as someone who is sad and tired all the time and who spends most of his days in a deep morass of despair that seems impossible to break out of and who is only briefly comforted by a nostalgia that swiftly loses its powers of consolation on my recollection that the past was just as terrible as the present is and the only difference is the days that have already disappeared were filled with more potential for poor choices and desperate decisions and that those choices have all been made, badly, so now I am left with nothing but the terrible consequences and their attendant sense of sorrow to keep me company, I am somewhat inclined to find music of this ilk amenable. Your own mileage, as they say, may vary. [Via]

“It’s January, and for some of the movers and shakers in business and banking, that means it’s time to meet with other members of the global elite at an Alpine ski resort in Switzerland. But even before it starts, the World Economic Forum — which gets rolling Wednesday, after an opening ceremony on Tuesday, and runs through Jan. 25 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland — is being scrutinized on social media with an especially sharp eye on one of this year’s themes: economic inequality.”

by Awl Sponsors

The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University is now accepting nominations for the eighth annual Mirror Awards honoring excellence in media industry reporting. Application deadline is Feb. 14, 2014. Enter online at http://mirrorawards.com. Anyone may nominate, and there is no fee to enter.

Award categories include:

• Best Single Article — Traditional/Legacy Media ($1,000 prize)
• Best Single Article — Digital Media ($1,000 prize)
• Best Single Story — Radio, Television, Cable or Online Broadcast Media ($1,000 prize)
• Best Profile — Traditional/Legacy or Digital Media ($1,000 prize)
• Best Commentary — Traditional Media ($1,000 prize)
• Best Commentary — Digital Media ($1,000 prize)
• John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting ($5,000 prize)

Established by the Newhouse School in 2006, the Mirror Awards honor the reporters, editors and teams of writers who “hold a mirror to their own industry” for the public’s benefit. They are the most important awards for recognizing excellence in media industry reporting.

The competition is open to anyone who conducts reporting, commentary or criticism of the media industries in a format intended for a mass audience. Eligible work includes print, broadcast and online editorial content focusing on the development or distribution of news and entertainment. All entries must have been published or broadcast between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2013.

Entries are evaluated based on three criteria: Excellence of craft; framing of the issue; and appropriateness for the intended audience. Winners are chosen by a group of journalists and journalism educators. An awards ceremony will be held in June 2014 in New York City.

For more information, visit http://mirrorawards.com or contact Jean Brooks at (315) 443–5711 or mirror@syr.edu.

“As of January 2014, some 76% of American adults ages 18 and older said that they read at least one book in the past year. Almost seven in ten adults (69%) read a book in print in the past 12 months, while 28% read an e-book, and 14% listened to an audiobook. Women are more likely than men to have read a book in the previous 12 months, and those with higher levels of income and education are more likely to have done so as well. In addition, blacks are more likely to have read a book than Hispanics. There were no significant differences by age group for rates of reading overall. In terms of book format, women are more likely than men to have read a print book or an e-book, as are whites and blacks compared with Hispanics and those with higher education and incomes compared with others. Younger adults are also more likely than those ages 65 and older to have read e-books, as are those who live in urban and suburban areas compared with rural residents. Finally, adults with higher levels of education are more likely to have read audiobooks than those who did not attend college.”

“Machine learning has been around for years. New algorithms for data analysis, combined with increasing computer power and interconnectedness, means that intelligent machines will be able to comprehend massive amounts of contextual information. They would not only be able to understand what a piece of information is about, but how it relates to other information. The capability to understand correlations and get ‘the big picture’ could potentially enable them to set their own goals. Already there are autonomous robotic systems that do that, military drones being an example. Self-improvement could be next. Perhaps by exploring and learning about human evolution, intelligent machines will come to the conclusion that sex is the best way for them to evolve. Rather than self-replicating, like amoebas, they may opt to simulate sexual reproduction with two, or indeed innumerable, sexes. Sex would defend them from computer viruses (just as biological sex may have evolved to defend organisms from parasitical attack), make them more robust and accelerate their evolution.” [Via]

Photo by Magic of FX, via Flickr