“I respect criticism.  But I know more about film than most of the people writing about me.  Not only that, I’m a better writer than most of the people writing about me.  And I can write film criticism better than most of the people writing about me.”

– Quentin Tarantino to GQ

“I feel like I’ve been sort of … anointed this voice in the culture by people who, if they’d seen me two years ago when I was just fixing motorcycles would have said, ‘What are you doing with your life?’”

So says Matthew Crawford, author of the new book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.  Five months into his career at conservative Washington, D.C., think tank the Marshall Institute, he abandoned it in favor of starting his own motorcycle restoration business.

Educated in philosophy and political thought at the University of Chicago, Crawford “takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual labor. …more

Annalise Ophelian is the director of Diagnosing Difference, a documentary about Gender Identity Disorder, premiering June 20 at Frameline 33, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. …more

Kevin Gift is a classical pianist. In some circles, however, he’s known as electronic musician Wendel Patrick. This is no ordinary stage name, however. …more

Regardless of how you feel about advice columns, something interesting came out of online magazine Slate‘s “Dear Prudence” chat/forum yesterday.

A graduate student in mathematics wrote in to ask what to say to strangers or acquaintances who seem to boast that her area of study is “beyond them” or something they’d “never be able to grasp.”

The columnist gave some quasi-helpful advice (I guess), but then another reader wrote in to say that this is, in fact, a deeper problem: …more

Helen Gurley Brown was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for thirty-two years and authored the bestselling book Sex and the Single Girl. She is now the subject of the biography Bad Girls Go Everywhere, written by Jennifer Scanlon, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Bowdoin College.

Perhaps more interesting than the book itself is the debate that emerges over Ms. Brown’s role in the history of feminism. The New York Times remains neutral, simply reporting Scanlon’s claim that “Ms. Brown belongs alongside figures like Betty Friedan in histories of second-wave feminism … and was a precursor of the third-wave, ‘Sex and the City’ feminism.” The Washington Post, however, printed a review of the book in which Naomi Wolf, author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, argues that “[i]n the long battle between the two styles of feminism, Brown, for now, has won.” …more

Alfred Kinsey had his own movie, but William Masters and Virginia Johnson remain the unsung heroes of human sexuality studies. The latest issue of The Economist, however, takes four paragraphs to celebrate them and the “audacious, rigorous and weird” goings-on of their laboratory: “Female volunteers masturbated with ‘Ulysses’, a Plexiglass motorised dildo containing a camera, while wearing paper bags over their heads to preserve modesty. Hundreds of wired-up couples copulated under conditions of intense scrutiny. Over 12,000 orgasms were logged in the research” for their first book, published in 1966. …more

The new “ladyblog” Double X, an offshoot of the online magazine Slate, just launched in Beta, with former Jezebel editor Jessica Grose one of the women at the helm. Oddly enough, one of the first entries is a piece called “How Jezebel is hurting women.”

Author Linda Hirshman argues that while the Jezebel writers look “a lot like the natural heirs of feminism,” and “are clearly familiar with the rhetoric of feminism,” the behavior they chronicle in their posts is dangerous to the movement, and the message: …more

The Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco is celebrating its current exhibit Jews on Vinyl: And You Shall Know Us  by the Trail of Our Vinyl (at the museum through June 9) with a musical revue “you just didn’t realize you were waiting for.” …more

In her art, Ariana Page Russell uses her skin in ways previously unimaginable: she makes wallpaper with it; she creates temporary tattoos with it, that she then affixes back onto her skin; and, most provocatively, she photographs welts and scratches on it that she herself creates. She has an auto-immune condition called dermatographia, meaning that these seemingly dramatic contusions are both temporary and painless, but the images are striking nevertheless.

(via Jezebel)