Origami teabags

I love birds. I'm obsessed with tea. I used to make thousands of tiny paper cranes. The product for me? Clearly, Natalia Ponomareva's origami tea bags. Almost too precious to use.

Improv in the nabe

Improv Everywhere staged a grocery store musical in Astoria. Classic!

Ah, the New Yorker

My old friend. I've been lax in reading you lately. Sumeet has taken you with him to work in his backpack, and I've consoled myself with New York magazine, drooling over apartment renovations. Still: a front-of-the-book piece on Obama winning the Peace Prize, absent lobbying? I swoon.

If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don't force it on you while you're still waiting for the bus to take you to the stadium. They don't give it to you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don't award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling "Good job!" to a toddler who's made it to the top rung of the monkey bars. It's not a plastic, made-in-China "participation" trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteeem. It's not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of VIP fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It's not a gold star. It's a gold medal.

Moleskine!

I love my weekly planner, but this is pretty dope too. Buy yourself a Moleskine desk calendar from Amazon.com for a fetching $6.71 (or less?!)!

Functional illiteracy?

Different by culture?

Apparently so. A new study in Scientific American talks about the difference between dyslexia in America and China:

English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don’t have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds.

What about languages based on full-word characters rather than sound-carrying letters? Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception.

The pronunciation of detailed and complex Chinese characters must be memorized, rather than sounded out like words in alphabet-based languages. That requirement led researchers to suspect that disabilities in the visual realm might come into play in dyslexia in that language. “A fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be preformed by the visual system in order to activate the characters’ phonological and semantic information,” said lead author Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong, in a prepared statement.

Jingle jangle

Love these bangles by Lindsay Pemberton. Green! Repurposing! Tea-related!

The profession

Great interview with a New Yorker copy editor. Mary Norris, the woman profiled, also has a blog here. The money question and answer:

 Andy: What qualities make a person a good candidate for copy editing?
 
 Mary: Self-doubt. It’s always good, before changing something, to stop and wonder if this is a mistake or if the writer did this for a reason. When you’ve read a piece five or more times, it is tempting to believe that it must be perfect, but you have to stay alert for anything you might have missed. Eternal vigilance! It also helps to have read widely (and well), and to have noticed, while you’re at it, how words are spelled. Of course you have to be attentive to details—you have to be a bit of a nitpicker yet be constructive in your nit-picking. You have to love language. And not be too proud to run spell-check.

Feminism personified?

Last week, in Memphis, from the Dalai Lama: "I call myself a feminist. Isn't that what you call someone who fights for women's rights?" His Holiness is right on.

Current obsession

Sophie Blackall's illustrations of Craigslist "missed connections" ads. Ephemeral and yet so touching!

Let them eat cake!

50% of Brits report that eating a piece of cake a day helps them get more done. German chocolate, anyone?