The Good, the Bad, and the Curious (Link Round-Up!)

Here's what I've been reading that made me smile (The Good), cry (The Bad), and think (The Curious). Feel free to add anything you've been reading/writing in the comments!

The Good

Check out this list of stereotype-busting princesses from A Mighty Girl. 

Chipotle continues to deliver beautiful, thought-provoking, and rhetorically-savvy advertising (here's my discussion of their previous effort).

Here are some classic sculptures dressed up like hipsters. 

Grading shortcuts in Microsoft Word made me ridiculously excited. 

Hunter S. Thompson. 

The Bad

Salon has a piece on the very real toll playing politics has on millions of people's lives:

HHS expects that 56 percent of the 41.3 million eligible uninsured people across the country will have access to affordable coverage next year thanks to the law. But if the two dozen states still refusing to expand their Medicaid programs decided to stop harming their residents just to spite Obama and weaken his law, that percentage would be 78 percent. 

The Curious

Musing Momma has a great post on what happens when your principles (in this case, a belief in non-discrimination and gay rights) butts up against real-life choices (in this case, her son's deep desire to join the Boy Scouts).

Beauty Redefined asks us to consider whether we are physically Photoshopping ourselves out of reality:

We can’t help but imagine how different our world looked just a decade or two ago – not just in terms of what women in media looked like when digital manipulation was only science fiction – but what women in real life looked like. Cosmetic surgery was nearly non-existent. In just the last decade, there was a 446 percent increase in cosmetic procedures (namely liposuction and breast enhancement) in the U.S., which raked in $12 billion in 2010 alone.

This Huffington Post article about a man who explains that he didn't love his wife when they got married irked me in places (It's not "helping out"  if you're cleaning your own house!), but it also made some interesting points about love as an act, not a feeling:

No, love isn't an emotion or even a noun.  It's a verb.  Better defined as giving.  As putting someone else's needs above your own.

I know several people who like Robin Thicke's song "Blurred Lines" (which I've mostly been ignoring), but reading these two pieces sent shivers down my spine as I think about the number of times I've turned off the radio when it came on in the past few weeks. Sociological Images has a post juxtaposing the lyrics next to pictures of people holding up the phrases their rapists said to them. Meanwhile, this post from Labancamy Jankins voices the frustration of a man whose female friends and relatives don't seem to be the racist and sexist history repeating itself through this song.

As I've talked about here before, I'm really interested in the generational divide in workplace expectations and general life goals. Two recent articles (one a response to the other) are discussing Gen Y's expectations and realities. This stick-figure illustrated call to hard work is making the internet rounds. And this response to it with the grim realities of actual lives is worth a read, too.