This Means War

I watched this movie over the weekend and I've been watching bits of it every night after I come home from work. It's just an adorable movie about two spies (best friends, no less) pining over the golden blonde, gorgeous girl. Although it's a typical romantic comedy with an utterly predictable ending (which I liked, by the way), I still love it. It's a good movie for anyone with spare time. It has bits and pieces of Gustav Klimt, guns, cars blowing up and a silly but hilarious scene involving a Friday Night Spy version of This Is How We Do It. I've always liked Reese Witherspoon and I cannot, for my life, stop staring at the gorgeous eyebrows framing those deep blue eyes of Chris Pine. What are you doing? Watch it! 

Here are some other links I've read this week: 

Why Phillip Phillips won American Idol. - SoCal baby Jessica Sanchez losing to Phillip Phillips of the Mid West is perhaps the most upsetting news in our country today, after the soap opera over at our Impeachment Court and the constant push and pull between respecting LGBT rights and Church dogma.

Speaking of American Idol babies, have you seen Katherine McPhee playing a naive theater ingenue on Smash? Why haven't you started a TV marathon yet? It's like Glee for Broadway babies and theater nerds. This is the show Rachel Berry would watch and follow until oblivion had she been a real person. 

Slate Magazine (a sister magazine of Foreign Policy) explains how cranes get on top of tower skyscrapers. (I've always wondered how. You have been, too.) Slate also has a piece on the best comedy/mockumentary show out there today, Modern Family, on its cold-witted but warm-hearted humor. I love that show. 

Facebook and the redefinition of public space from Rappler. Follow Facebook's stocks here. 

Sweet Bonus: Life inside Facebook from Time Techland because it is the coolest office in the world right now.

Deadly Meetings in the Workplace from WSJ. I think this is quite helpful especially if you're with a team or a department that conducts weekly or daily meetings. Which one are you?

I love these very unscientific drawings about the anatomy of sea life over at pleated-jeans. I love the octopus best, of course. *cough* 

Favorite cooking blogs: Momofuku for two (because I do not live in New York and therefore, don't have access to the Momofuku Ssam Bar anytime I want to) and breakfast & brunch recipes from 101 cookbooks. I am happy to note that I have finally perfected fritata for one. Wee! 

Lastly, Stephen Walt's smart-ass article about the recently concluded G8 convention. I especially love the wonderful Star Trek convention reference, although I'm pretty sure Sheldon Cooper will beg to digress. Bonus: How to refute the logic of a Thomas Friedman op-ed, in which by imploring Michael Bloomberg to run for president, Thomas Friedman refutes the past version of himself. And in an excellent display of reason, Stephen Walt lists ten things that would have happened had neocons backed off and let realists run U.S. foreign policy.

Links I love: Fab Five Edition

Hello! Here are the links I love this week.

How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) - I love this quote from Steve Jobs:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” 

Why We Love: 5 Books on the Psychology of Love or What Oscar Wilde has to do with Hippocrates and the neurochemistry of romance.

Harry Benson’s Luminous Black-and-White Photographs of The Beatles, 1964-1966, From pillow fights to world domination, or what Beatlemania has to do with Jesus Christ - because a young Paul McCartney is one of my favorite faces in the world:

Sheryl Sandberg and the male dominated world of Silicon Valley. I've always liked profiles by the New Yorker, and this lengthy read is no exception. Shery Sandberg is one of the women I look up to, what with her gift for organizing and mobilizing structures and people, excellence in execution and overall personality. She is everything I want in a leader. My favorite snippet of the article, however, ties her success as a fruit of solid and extensive mentoring--which is really important when you are at the start of your career--and how it is hard for other women in the workforce to find someone akin to Larry Summers today.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who directs the Gender and Policy program at Columbia, read Sandberg’s speech and took exception. “I think Sandberg totally underestimates the challenge that women face,” she says. Hewlett agrees with Sandberg that women must be more assertive, but she believes Sandberg simply doesn’t understand that there is a “last glass ceiling,” created not by male sexists but by “the lack of sponsorship,” senior executives who persistently advocate for someone to move up. A third of upper-middle managers are now women—“the marzipan layer”—she notes. This number has increased in recent years, but the women aren’t rising to the top. She believes that Sandberg is insufficiently aware of this problem because she has benefitted from sponsors: “Sandberg, to her great credit, had Larry Summers. She has had sponsors in her life who were very powerful, who went to bat for her. That’s very rare for a woman.”

And lastly, a profile on the golden child of our generation, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. In a world that's in constant flux and  chaos, do we really want or need that kind of accessibility? 

Zuckerberg’s critics argue that his interpretation and understanding of transparency and openness are simplistic, if not downright naïve. “If you are twenty-six years old, you’ve been a golden child, you’ve been wealthy all your life, you’ve been privileged all your life, you’ve been successful your whole life, of course you don’t think anybody would ever have anything to hide,” Anil Dash, a blogging pioneer who was the first employee of Six Apart, the maker of Movable Type, said. Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, added, “This is a philosophical battle. Zuckerberg thinks the world would be a better place—and more honest, you’ll hear that word over and over again—if people were more open and transparent. My feeling is, it’s not worth the cost for a lot of individuals.”