What I learned this week, December 24, 2021

Tough Chicks

Tough Chicks are the coolest type of female around, except maybe for Tough Rich Chicks. But those are rare.


Main Street Park Dallas, Texas

On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.​ Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.


Bicycle Drag Races Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge Dallas, Texas

Here’s How Much to Ride a Week to Keep Your Brain 9 Years Younger

Cycling definitely helps keep you in great physical shape, but that’s not the only benefit your favorite activity has on your body. According to new research out of Durham, North Carolina, aerobic exercise has some serious perks for your brain, too—like helping to reverse its age by almost nine years.


The mola we bought at the estate sale.

The Secret History of Panamá’s Most Colorful Clothes

In Guna Yala, indigenous women sew stories of legend, revolution, and even Minnie Mouse into the elaborate textiles known as molas.


Commemorative Air Force, Wings Over Dallas, Dallas, Texas

How a White Lie Gave Japan KFC for Christmas

One cunning business maneuver created a tradition and saved a franchise.


St. Vincent’s, New Orleans

Brutal and Unreformed—Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ at 50

December 22nd will be the 50th anniversary of the release of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, a film so marked by violent killings and violent sex that, according to Peckinpah’s biographer, David Weddle, a third of the audience walked out of its premiere before the end.


The Dangerous Rise Of Men Who Won’t Date “Woke” Women