If you’ve spent any time on BuzzFeed, you know you need a calculator to tally up the number of amazing kitty videos and celebrities with sexy abs on any given day. (It’s a lot!)

The articles with lists, better known as listicles, are paramount to the success of sites like BuzzFeed (and, yes, even EcoSalon). But why? Why are there so many numbers in our articles? And why are they so compelling and frustrating at the same time?

MediaBistro reported that BuzzFeed’s editorial director Jack Shepherd said, “At their best, lists are just scaffolding for stories: The list format grabs the attention because it’s an easy way for people to process information and for readers to know what they’re getting, but that’s not even close to half the battle. A great list that people share everywhere has to be an experience.”

Right. “An experience.” Well then, what about the rest of it? Why are we so hooked on numbers?

1. According to news syndication company Mobiles Republic, we’re on a steady diet of “news snacking”, which is just what it sounds like. You may bookmark that 10,000 word article in The Atlantic, but chances are you’d rather read 20 shorter articles in the same time period. It’s easier for us to digest smaller bits of information, and a listicle guarantees us just that. We know we’re getting 3, 11 or 311 pieces of information, which just seems more doable in the modern world.

But who likes being labeled a “news snacker?” Erudite or not, many people still want to digest real news as if having a real meal in France where savoring and enjoying are the real stars of the meal. Fast food day in and day out isn’t very appetizing, even for the frequent consumers. In the same sense, the lure of the list robs us of that holistic experience. Instead of reading the New Yorker cover to cover, you just read another one of Cosmo’s “10 Ways to Keep your Man Satisfied.” Chances are, one of those ways is to be well-read. Makes you feel kind of icky.

2. Lists are practical, sort of. If looking for the hottest trends or best recipes, sometimes seeing our options can be really helpful. Aggregation beats endless searching. Except, there’s an arrogance there, too. Who decided on the 19 best smoothies in the world? Was there a panel of judges? Were they taste-tested? Who was in charge of quality control?

3. We’re also genuinely curious creatures. Forty-six Beyoncé hairdos? Well we’ve got to see which ones made the cut, of course! But the downside is that once you start down the list, you can’t help but wonder what’s after? If those are the 46 best hairdos, what was number 47? Was there a 47? What if I like that one better?

4. They’re also kind of genius. After Bono’s lavender-tinted appearance at the Golden Globes on Sunday, BuzzFeed published “The 25 Most Iconic Moments In Purple Tinted Sunglasses History.” Not only does this pique my curiosity, but if I’m cool (which I’ve got lists both for and against), I can share this with my preferred social network and let the list of comments (another list!) entertain me for hours. Yes, BuzzFeed and their lists help break down barriers with our lists of friends we may or may not have actually met in real life, but are willing to engage in witty online conversations with.

5. But, of course, lists are also super annoying. They suck us in. Do we really care about Beyoncé’s hairdos when we have other more important things to worry about (like cute kittens)? It’s easy to feel rather lame and unaccomplished when you’ve spent your morning clicking through list after list.

6. They’re clickbait, too, which means that because it’s widely known that the human brain can’t resist the lure of the numbered list, once you’re there, you’re more likely going to be bombarded with ads, some of which use lists to lure you further.

493. It seems that we live in a list-vortex. It’s like a black hole with a lot of numbers in it; ergo, we get a glimpse into the inner workings of the universe, which upon further contemplation, appears to be just an eternity of lists, is it not?

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Image: thefunkyman

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With beliefs like these floating around, we have to remind ourselves that it’s 2012.

Welcome back everyone! Bad news, they did not cancel sexism this year so we’ve got a full list of horrific quotes about women made in 2012 to look forward to. All of last year’s rules apply, with this notable exception: you will find no Republican politicians here. They are Professionals and we’re dealing strictly with amateurs who play for the love of the game.

10. Licensed comedy expert Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood: “Beautiful actresses are not funny. They don’t know how to do comedy…Only women who grew up ugly and stayed ugly, or through plastic surgery became beautiful, can pull off sitcoms or standups [sic].” Women who were born beautiful but were mauled or otherwise mutilated can sometimes become funny but only after they have been disfigured for a period of time equal to or greater than the duration of their attractive years.

9. Justice Bhaktavatsala, an Indian judge on single female lawyers: “[F]amily matters should be argued only by married people, not spinsters.” Which, speaking of, how good is The Good Wife this season? So good, right? I would say “surprisingly good.” Anything that keeps Christine Baranski working, you know.

8. Gallus Strobel, German mayor who recently marked “difficult” male and “easy” female parking spaces in his small town of Triberg: “It’s been a great marketing gimmick. Women can come here and prove me wrong, and while they’re at it they can see the town’s attractions.” They will probably not do either of these things, but if all you’ve got on your resume at this point in your life is “Mayor of Triberg” and “the parking space guy,” I’m inclined to give you a pass on this one.

7. Douglas Brinkely, of the New York Times, on Jodi Kantor’s White House biography The Obamas: “chick nonfiction” (in his defense, her book is just a series of pencil drawings of Michelle Obama’s clothes with heart-shaped doodles scrawled in randomly around the margins). More importantly, this distinction opens up so many new categories of literature, like “chick war correspondence,” “chick magical realism,” and “chick large print.”

6. Chilean president Sebastian Pinera: “When a politician says ‘Yes,’ he means ‘Maybe,’ when he says ‘Maybe,’ he means ‘No,’ and if he says ‘No,’ he’s not a politician. When a lady says ‘No,’ she means ‘Maybe,’ when she says ‘Maybe,’ she means ‘Yes,’ and if she says ‘Yes,’ she’s not a lady.” Sebastian! There has got to be a quicker way to make that point.

5. Hong Kong billionaire Cecil Chao Sze-tsung on his £40 million pound bounty to any man who successfully courts his recently-married lesbian daughter: “[the money is] an inducement to attract someone who has the talent but not the capital to start his own business.” Awww, buddy. That’s not how love or money works.

4. Safeway Senior VP and General Counsel Robert Gordon opened this year’s shareholder meeting with a little joke: “The president flew into the White House lawn and an agent greeted him at the helicopter. The president was carrying two pigs under his arms and the Secret Service agent said, ‘Nice pigs, sir.’ ‘These are not ordinary pigs, these are genuine Arkansas razorback hogs. I got one for former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and one for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.’ And the Secret Service agent said, ‘Excellent trade, sir.'” I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that kind of bush-league dad joke at a Piggly Wiggly meeting, but I expected a little better from the people who brought us O Organics. Also why is the President carrying the pigs himself in this scenario? Wouldn’t there be a special pig handler nearby, or travel carriers at the least? This story is full of holes.

3. Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade, upon learning that the United States Navy Band was admitting female musicians: “Women are everywhere. We’re letting them play golf and tennis now. It’s out of control.” Just wait until the misandrist bloodbath that gets started once we break through the glass ceiling in badminton.

2. Masked commenter The Toronto Programmer on sexism within the tech community: “‘Brogrammer’ isn’t an exclusionary term…the female equivalent is called a ‘hogrammer’ and I have big respect for women that wear that badge proudly.” Yeah, there is going to be sexism all over Mars and in spaceships and just everywhere in the future thanks to this kind of tech-world sexism (Also I would totally wear a badge that said “hogrammer” on it).

1. Dom and James, creators of Facebook’s Twelve-Year-Old Slut Memes, on their raison d’être: “As long as there are sluts, we will put them in their place.”

This year’s Honorable Mention goes to Aaron Sorkin for his latest HBO series, Normally Capable Women Falling Into Fountains While Wearing Business Suits.

All quotes were calibrated and weighted scientifically in order of sexism and have been arranged accordingly. This list, as always, is comprehensive and exhaustive; nothing has been forgotten or excluded so if you heard anything else sexist this year that’s not here you probably just didn’t understand what they meant to say.

Image: adactio

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On simplicity, little black dresses, perceived beauty and how to have it all: 20 quotes about style.

Perhaps it’s time for another little style pick-me-up so here are 20 more of the best style and fashion quotes of all time. We can all probably agree with fashion greats like Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint-Laurent and Sophia Loren when they tell us that style is not about what you buy, it’s what you make of it. But still, it’s nice to hear it from the icons.

You cannot fake chic but you can be chic and fake fur. -Karl Lagerfeld

I think there is beauty in everything. What ‘normal’ people would perceive as ugly, I can usually see something of beauty in it. -Alexander McQueen

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -Leonardo da Vinci

Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world. -Marilyn Monroe

What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language. -Miuccia Prada

I like being a woman, even in a man’s world. After all, men can’t wear dresses, but we can wear the pants. -Whitney Houston

The most important thing to remember is that you can wear all the greatest clothes and all the greatest shoes, but you’ve got to have a good spirit on the inside. That’s what’s really going to make you look like you’re ready to rock the world. -Alicia Keys

Girls do not dress for boys. They dress for themselves, and of course, each other. If girls dressed for boys, they’d just walk around naked at all times. -Betsey Johnson

So soon as a fashion is Universal, it is out of date. -Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

Create your own style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others. -Anna Wintour

One is never over-dressed or underdressed with a Little Black Dress. -Karl Lagerfeld

The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It’s the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows and the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years. -Audrey Hepburn

Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman. –Coco Chanel

Fashion anticipates, and elegance is a state of mind… a mirror of the time in which we live, a translation of the future, and should never be static. -Oleg Cassini

A woman’s dress should be a like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view. -Sophia Loren

“Fashions fade, style is eternal.” -Yves Saint-Laurent

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. -Oscar Wilde

Anyone can get dressed up and glamorous, but it is how people dress in their days off that are the most intriguing. -Alexander Wang

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock. -Thomas Jefferson

You can have whatever you want if you dress for it. -Edith Head

All photos via WikiMedia Commons

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ColumnIt’s the season for eating outside with mason jars.

Even if you’re not on an academic schedule, the longer days of the season mean that you have way more time on your hands than usual. Which indicates that it’s high time to stop drooling over blogs about backyard homesteading and actually do something. Welcome to the official Foodie Underground Guide to Summer, with a list of everything you ever wanted to do when it comes to food, and a few things you never thought of.

1. Make your own potato chips.
2. Use a foodie pickup line on someone. Example: “I think we’d grow a great organic garden together.”
3. Pick your own berries.
4. Overdose on berries while out picking them.
5. Come home and realize you actually didn’t have room for 20 pounds of berries in a freezer.
6. Make up three new recipes for said berry and then go out and buy a chest freezer to house the rest.
7. Learn to sing a drinking song in a another language. Host a party and require all guests to learn it.
8. Diversify your mason jar collection.
9. Find a way to incorporate sea salt into everything you eat for 24 hours.
10. Learn how to prepare eggs at least ten different ways.
11. Pair a dinner menu with a playlist.
12. Go vegan for a week.
13. Take your lunch to work in a mason jar.
14. Refuse to go shopping for an entire week and see what recipes you can concoct from what’s in your pantry.
15. Write a food cart business plan.
16. Schedule a date to bone luge.
17. Go a week without taking a photo of a single meal.
18. Learn how to shuck an oyster.
19. Master a chocolate cake recipe so that you know it by heart.
20. Visit a farm.
21. Infuse. Anything.
22. Cook breakfast outside, even if you’re not on a camping trip.
23. Brew your own beer.
24. Bake something and send it to a far away friend. Priority Mail of course, you don’t want things to go stale.
25. Master a summer cocktail and bring it to every dinner party you go to.
26. Consider getting chickens.
27. When you have been woken up by your neighbor’s chickens three days in a row, opt out of getting chickens.
28. Get goats instead and start making your own artisan goat cheese.
29. Follow up every food remark you make with, “trust me, I’m a food blogger” just to see what happens.
30. Two words: fennel pollen.
31. Beer margarita? Yes, please.
32. Plan a meal without the help of a cookbook or the internet.
33. Rhubarb, raspberries and basil… go.
34. Join a co-op.
35. Invest in a red wagon. You will need it when going to the co-op.
36. Start your own kombucha.
37. Invite your friends over and gross them out with said kombucha.
38. Attend an underground supper club.
39. See how many different liquids you can make ice cubes out of.
40. Learn how to can.
41. Learn how to pickle.
42. Invest in a cookbook without images.
43. Keep a food journal, and instead of taking pictures of your food, write about it.
44. Honey, ginger and cardamom… go.
45. Find something to muddle other than mint.
46. Stick to a $10 a day food budget and see where it takes you.
47. Refuse to eat at any restaurant that has a menu in Helvetica for a whole week.
48. Harvest your own sea salt.
49. If you’re not into harvesting your own sea salt, at least carry around a travel container with some in it everywhere you go.
50. Make your own yogurt.
51. Order a pina colada on a first date, just to see your date’s reaction. Then follow up with a whiskey.
52. Find a Le Creuset at an estate sale.
53. Keep simple syrup on hand in your kitchen at all times.
54. Invest in a good spork.
55. Figure out a new use for truffle oil.
56. Get your mother to teach you how to make a pot roast.
57. Seduce someone with food. And only food.
58. Buy a cookbook from the 70s.
59. Laugh at said cookbook from the 70s.
60. Revamp a few recipes from your 70s cookbook.
61. Draft the outline to a sketch comedy food show.
62. Plan a road trip based around regional specialties.
63. Make your own ice cream.
64. Lavender, chocolate and lemon… go.
65. Color coordinate your food and plates and see if your guests notice.
66. Learn some key food phrases in French.
67. Find ten different ways to use quinoa.
68. Brew your own cold brew coffee.
69. Go foraging.
70. Eat figs with something other than goat cheese and honey.
71. Throw a hot sauce tasting party.
72. Marinate some cucumbers; it’s easier than pickling.
73. Eat dinner outside… in the rain.
74. Make cookies with bacon in them.
75. Learn how to make fresh cheese.
76. Film the intro to your new food television series.
77. Cure your own fish.
78. Build a picnic table. With reclaimed wood of course.
79. Read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and if you’ve already done that, read Food Politics.
80. Start a truck farm.
81. Mix up a few jam drinks.
82. Draw your most recent meal.
83. Hand write the menu for a dinner party.
84. Paint one of your kitchen walls with chalkboard paint so you can write on it and feel like you’re in a restaurant.
85. Buy cheap wine and make your own labels for it. Your friends will never know the difference.
86. Perfect your own sangria recipe.
87. End every meal with espresso.
88. Drive to a small town just to eat at the local hotspot.
89. Buy a trashy food magazine. It’s like brain candy.
90. Stop buying Nutella and make it yourself.
91. Host a party where all ingredients come from within a 100 miles radius.
92. Plant an edible flower garden.
93. Get to know a farmer at farmers market on a first-name basis.
94. Take a coffee roasting class. Someone has to.
95. Pickle eggs.
96. Learn how to make an actual pie crust.
97. Opt for cobbler instead.
98. Screen print your own apron with your favorite food quote.
99. Drink a kir royale.
100. Sign up to be grape harvest seasonal help. Fall is just around the corner after all.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

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More dash than trash: 20 quotes about style.

Sometimes we all need a little style pick-me-up so here are 20 of the best fashion quotes of all time that remind us we don’t have to buy more than we need. As the designers and style icons quoted already know, in fashion – like life – it’s all about attitude.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn. –Gore Vidal

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it. –Yves Saint Laurent    

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things. –Jean Cocteau

Women should look like women. A piece of cardboard has no sexuality. –Alexander McQueen

I don’t do fashion. I am fashion. –Coco Chanel

Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful. –Sophia Loren

The only real elegance is in the mind; if you’ve got that, the rest really comes from it. –Diana Vreeland

Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess. –Edna Woolman Chase

Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way you live. –Gianni Versace

You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes –Vivienne Westwood

Style is primarily a matter of instinct. –Bill Blass

When it comes to wearing something outrageous, it’s not a question of “Why?” but “Why Not? –C. Gallardo

It’s always the badly dressed people who are the most interesting. –Jean Paul Gaultier

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.
 –Coco Chanel

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.  –Epictetus

Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are. 
-Quentin Crisp

Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest. –Christian Dior

Only great minds can afford a simple style. –Stendal


Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests. –Karl Lagerfeld

The dress must not hang on the body but follow its lines.  It must accompany its wearer and when a woman smiles the dress must smile with her. –Madeleine Vionnet

All photos by Horst Diekgerdes

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We heart NY.

New York is the only real city-city. -Truman Capote

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years. -Tom Wolfe

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance. -Nora Ephron

New York remains what it has always been: a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring – it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence. -Paul Goldberger

I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid. -Sherwood Anderson

As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll live through the night. -Dorothy Parker

Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. -F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. –Joan Didion

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire. -Henry James

Each man reads his own meaning into New York. -Meyer Berger

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. -John Updike

I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it. -Truman Capote

New York City is all about sex. People getting it, people trying to get it, people who can’t get it. No wonder the city never sleeps. It’s too busy trying to get laid. -Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City

In Rome I am weighted down by a lack of momentum, the inertia of a spent civilization. In New York I feel plugged into a strong alternating current of hope and despair. -Ted Morgan

A great many people go after success simply for the shiny prizes it brings… And nowhere is it pursued more ardently than in the city of New York. -Stephen Birmingham

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world. -Pearl S. Buck

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy. -Evelyn Waugh

The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of license that distinguishes New York. It is rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be somebody. -Sydney J. Harris

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need. -Lady Gaga

Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage. New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down. -LCD Soundsystem

Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went. -Jack Kerouac

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. -Albert Camus

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world. -Alistair Cooke

Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. -Tom Hanks as Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. -Edna Ferber  

Everybody ought to have a Lower East Side in their life. -Irving Berlin

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible – because it is large enough to be incurious. -Ford Madox Ford

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream. -Helen Keller

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe. -Le Corbusier

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. -Agatha Christie

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? -Ayn Rand

More than anything else New York is a city of superlatives, a place where the best, the brightest, the biggest is the norm. -Marilyn J. Appleberg    

She has become a wicked and wild bitch in her old age has Manhattan, but there is still no sensation in the world quite like walking her sidewalks. Great surges of energy sweep all around you; the air fizzes like champagne, while always there is a nervous edge of fear and whispered distant promises of sudden violence. -Tom Davies

New York has a trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness if you have no inner stabilizer. -Henry Miller

He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion… no, make that: he – he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. -Woody Allen in Manhattan

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world’s great cities – in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East. -John Gregory Dunne  

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough. -Fran Lebowitz

In New York City, one suicide in ten is attributed to a lack of storage space. -Judith Stone

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them — this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air. -F. Scott Fitzgerald

New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don’t know what the hell the rest of the United States is. -Henry Ford  

If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe. -Ellen R. Shapiro       

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. -Simone De Beauvoir

New York is definitely haunted. Old lovers, ex-boyfriends, anyone you have unresolved issues with you are bound to run into again and again until you resolve them. -Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City    

Maybe New York’s just too big a town. There’s millions of people in this city. How in all this mess is a guy supposed to find the love of his life? I mean, where do you even begin? -Josh Radnor as Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. -Joan Didion

I’m going to show you the real New York – witty, smart, and international – like any metropolis. Tell me this: where in Europe can you find old Hungary, old Russia, old France, old Italy? In Europe you’re trying to copy America, you’re almost American. But here you’ll find Europeans who immigrated a hundred years ago – and we haven’t spoiled them. Oh, Gio! You must see why I love New York. Because the whole world’s in New York. – Oriana Fallaci  

New York walking isn’t exercise: it’s a continually showing make-your-own movie. -Roy Blount Jr  

Concrete jungle where dreams are made, oh, there’s nothing you can’t do, now you’re in New York. -Jay-Z

The city is an amusement park: Everything is concrete, it’s full of tourists, and food vendors line the sidewalks. It’s like living in a casino: The lights never dim, there’s an incessant din of bells and horns, and there’s always someone, somewhere, crying in a bathroom. -Jane Borden      

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die. -Walt Whitman    

Images: Kevin Dooley, laverrue, Ludovic Bertron, joiseyshowaa, Genaro

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Want to see more quotes? Go here.

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EcoSalon’s favorite quotes on accepting change as it comes.

Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history. -Joan Wallach Scott

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending. -Maria Robinson

You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler. -Denis Waitley

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position, and be bruised in a new place. -Washington Irving

The wheel of change moves on, and those who were down go up and those who were up go down. -Jawaharlal Nehru

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward. -C.S. Lewis

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations. -Faith Baldwin

If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. -Mary Engelbreit

All great changes are preceded by chaos. -Deepak Chopra

Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps, an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings. -Arthur Rubinstein

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. -Confucius

Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary it means accepting it as it comes… To accept is to say yes to life in its entirety. -Paul Tournier

Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one’s eternal peril. -Laurens van der Post

Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights. -Pauline R. Kezer

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer. -Shunryu Suzuki

We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves. -Lynn Hall

Things do not change; we change. -Henry David Thoreau

Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable. -Denis Waitley

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. -Anatole France

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. -Henri Bergson

Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it. -David Richo

The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing brings down walls as surely as acceptance. -Deepak Chopra

The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace. -Eckhart Tolle

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. -Lao Tzu

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. -Michael J. Fox

The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger. -Chuck Palahniuk

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what. -Andy Warhol

Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery. -J.K. Rowling

For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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A conscious artist uses his or her craft to help and to heal, as a full expression of the rights, the wrongs, and the comedy of our everyday.

Consciousness means a great many things to many different people. For the artists featured in our roundup of a mere twenty, their work signifies something beyond the canvas: a living force. Their work transcends the material and “the self” connecting us to the highest purpose of art. That purpose? Well, it’s in the eye of the beholder and the collector. Certainly their work has aesthetic value as well as monetary; but above all else, its cultural value is priceless.

Ai Weiwei is one of China’s most famous contemporary artists. ArtReview magazine hailed him as number one in their Power 100 list.

His mediums range from sculpture and installation to cultural and political criticism. He’s outspoken on the social and cultural implications of China as a superpower, has been put under house arrest, and is constantly under surveillance. But he has a sense of humor about it, though that, too, has been oppressed.

Scottish artist Katie Paterson sonic boomed her way into the art scene when she displayed her mobile phone number in neon on a gallery wall, inviting visitors to dial it. On the other end: Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest glacier. Her work encompasses installation, sculpture, transmission, and sound. Paterson exhibits her work all over the world and is now the first Artist in Residence with the Astrophysics Group in the UCL Physics & Astronomy department. She investigates ideas of “Ancient Darkness and Early Light in the Universe, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and very distant objects,” creating a new body of work based on her findings.

Kim Abeles is a multi-discipline and media artist who explores the urban environment and social issues. The Smog Collector series brought her work to national and international attention.

Seattle, Washington-based Chris Jordan is considered the “It” green artist. His large (and small) scale works depict mass consumption and waste.

Terike Haapoja is a visual artist who works and lives in Helsinki, Finland. Her mediums include video, installation and stage projects, which uses the innovations of new media and technology to address our interactions (both human and technological) with the natural world.

For more than three decades, Roy Staab has created art from materials as natural as reeds, grasses, twine, hand-woven ropes of hemp, stone, stray, snow and the earth itself. His work leaves little to no impact on the planet and last only as long as the materials do themselves.

Mary Mattingly creates photographs and sculptures depicting futuristic landscapes. She also creates wearable sculptures (e.g., her wearable homes series) and is also well-known for her ecological installations, including Waterpod.

Award-winning photographer Camille Seaman‘s work has been published in National Geographic Magazine, Outside, Seed and more. In 2008, she exhibited “The Last Iceberg” at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, which highlights the fragile environment of the Polar Regions.

Adriane Colburn says of her work: “I have developed a series of installations that investigate the complex relationships between human infrastructure, earth systems, technology and the natural world. These constructions, comprised primarily of layers of hand cut paper, digital prints, video and projected light, reimagine maps and photographs of places that are obscured by geography, scale or the passing of time.”

Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira creates recycled wood installations that seem to burst out of gallery walls and ceilings. He sources his weathered plywood from the streets of Sao Paulo.

Riva Weinstein works with found and reclaimed natural and industrial materials. Weinstein further explains, “[these] sacred works of art…document my daily life, and comment on our cultural material obsessions. I strive to open your eyes and your heart to new possibilties, hoping to inspire renewed connections to nature, and human nature.”

George Boorujy was a fisherman, carpenter, potter and hitch-hiker before he became a painter, known for his incredibly detailed ink paintings of North American birds and other animals.

Controversial and fabulously wealthy, he may be. Damien Hirst is also one of the most influential artists of his generation and creator of the iconic shark suspended in formaldehyde entitled: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. 

Peter Coffin references art history as a springboard for humorous re-renderings that bridge contemporary art and everyday life – for example his “Spiral Staircase,” a rendering of Escher’s “Infinite Staircase” in dizzying logic. Additionally, his “Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art” print, an everyman’s ode to Bruce Nauman’s famous neon sign. He also bases projects on aura photography and plant communication, including a greenhouse performance space for musicians and sound artists to communicate with greenery.

Through performance-based paintings, Ana Teresa Fernandez explores the boundaries of gender stereotypes.

Tony Matelli‘s hyper-realistic sculptures often depict primates and objects just “getting by.” Almost dead; perilously unwanted. Via Leo Koenig Inc, “these sculptures serve as metaphors for our own social malaise and our general struggle for survival…mimic[ing our own] conditions associated with trying to locate ones self within our social world.”

Artist Troy Gua says of his series, Pop Hybrids: [it’s] about the reduction of personality into logo, the reduction of individuality into the collective, the reduction of photography into design. They are a subtraction of images: the recycling, re-using and reducing of two or more images into one iconographic collection of shapes.”

Miru Kim is not an animal rights activist, she is an artist who dared to fuse her gaze with that of an animal considered most beastly. “Pig eyes are remarkable,” she said. “They see right into the eyes of a human being….There was no language to bridge that disparity – the mysterious gap between the gaze of a pig and that of mine. But when I mingled with them with my skin, the gap momentarily closed in, as if I had forgotten my own language. My words were lost, and I felt the swinish grunts resonate inside me.”

Julia Fullerton-Batten is known for focusing our gaze on the multifaceted world of women.

The post 20 Conscious Artists Who Go Beyond the Canvas appeared first on EcoSalon.

Apps for navigating the complicated world of conscious consumption.

When I vowed to become a more conscious consumer last New Year’s Eve, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Measuring the impact of your purchases can be a hefty task, between considering environmental impact, ethical manufacturing, animal cruelty, anti-trafficking practices, carbon footprints… it’s enough to make you reject shopping for good. But neither is the “Buy Less” philosophy a perfect one, and even the most ardent minimalists need to buy necessities like soap and toothpaste from time to time (we hope). These iPhone and Android apps can help you put your dollar where your values are.

GoodGuide

By scanning a product’s bar code, the popular GoodGuide app lets you instantly access health, environmental, and social performance ratings for over 120,000 food, personal care, and household products. The app also provides customized product recommendations and lets you create your own personal shopping lists.

Available for iPhone and Android for free.

Fair Trade Finder

Discover and share fair trade products with the Fair Trade Finder app from Fair Trade USA, which relies on crowd-sourcing to spotlight fairly traded items available in local shops.

Available for iPhone and Android for free.

Green Globe App

Travelers can locate sustainable hotels, resorts, attractions, cruise lines, tour operators, and other sustainable tourism projects that have received the Green Globe stamp of approval through the Green Globe App.

Available for iPhone for free.

Cruelty-Free

Find products that haven’t been tested on animals with the Cruelty-Free app, which pulls from a database of companies approved by the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics’ Leaping Bunny Program.

Available for iPhone and Android for free. 

Free2Work

Created by anti-trafficking organization Not For Sale and supported by the International Labor Rights Forum, the Free2Work app lets you instantly see how different products and brands relate to trafficking and forced labor with rankings on a scale from A to F.

Available for iPhone and Android for free.

Closet Swap

“Don’t shop – swap!” proclaims the Closet Swap app, which facilitates clothing swaps by letting you snap pictures of items that have been sitting in your closet and share them with friends.

Available for iPhone for free.

Thrift Buddy

If your ethical shopping strategy includes thrifting, the Thrift Buddy app can help you locate thrift and vintage stores in your area from a database of more than 10,000 spots.

Available for iPhone for free.

The Good Shopping Guide

Drawing from the popular print Good Shopping Guides from the U.K.-based Ethical Company Organisation, the Good Shopping Guide app lets you compare more than 700 brands across seven categories: Food & Drink, Health & Beauty, Travel, Energy, Fashion, Home & Office, and Money. Summary tables display the good, bad, and ugly within each product category.

Available for iPhone for £2.99 (around $4.75).

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EcoSalon’s favorite quotes celebrating sex and sexuality.

Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact. -Marlene Dietrich

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover. -Marge Piercy

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets. -Andy Warhol

For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time. -Isabel Allende

There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible. -P. J. O’Rourke

I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me. -Hunter S. Thompson

Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble. -John Barrymore

Men reach their sexual peak at eighteen. Women reach theirs at thirty-five. Do you get the feeling that God is playing a practical joke? -Rita Rudner

Instruction in sex is as important as instruction in food; yet not only are our adolescents not taught the physiology of sex, but never warned that the strongest sexual attraction may exist between persons so incompatible in tastes and capacities that they could not endure living together for a week much less a lifetime. -George Bernard Shaw

Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go it’s pretty damn good. -Woody Allen

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature. -Marilyn Monroe

There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don’t need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain. -Audrey Hepburn

I remember the first time I had sex – I kept the receipt. -Groucho Marx

My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live. -Erica Jong

When a man talks dirty to a woman, it’s sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s $3.95 a minute. -Author Unknown

I haven’t trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I’ve never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex. -Erma Bombeck

Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don’t believe the kids should be given homework. -Bill Cosby

Conservatives say teaching sex education in the public schools will promote promiscuity. With our education system? If we promote promiscuity the same way we promote math or science, they’ve got nothing to worry about. -Beverly Mickins

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t! -George Bernard Shaw

To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals. -Don Schrader

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions. -Woody Allen

A promiscuous person is a person who is getting more sex than you are. -Victor Lownes

Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other. -Marquis de Sade

A student undergoing a word-association test was asked why a snowstorm put him in mind of sex. He replied frankly: “because everything does.” -Honor Tracy

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex. -Aldous Huxley

Anybody who believes that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach flunked geography. -Robert Byrne

Sex is emotion in motion. -Mae West

Some things are better than sex, and some are worse, but there’s nothing exactly like it. -W. C. Fields

Literature – creative literature – unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. -Gertrude Stein

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill. -Henry Louis Mencken

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