The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.
The low point for neon came in 1982, when Holiday Inn did away with its signature 'Great Sign,' replacing the neon extravaganza with a forgettable green plastic box.
Although people often equate them, glamour is not the same as beauty, stylishness, luxury, celebrity, or sex appeal. It is not limited to fashion or film; nor is it intrinsically feminine. It is not a collection of aesthetic markers - a style, as fashion and design use the word.
Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician.
'CSI' has not only remained a top-rated show through seven seasons; it has had real-world consequences. Police and prosecutors complain of a 'CSI' effect' that leads juries to demand more physical evidence than they used to expect. College officials use the same term to describe spiking enrollment in forensic-science programs.
What makes a loft authentic isn't its layout or its history but its ability to give people a true home - a dwelling that reflects their personalities and aspirations, including their dreams of urbanity.
Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kids is not the only important contribution a person can make to their future.
Cable companies aren't bad because they're parts of unwieldy media conglomerates. They're bad because they're monopolies (even where they are no longer legally exclusive) and because the government policies that made them monopolies rewarded lobbying over customer service.
Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant - that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous - but also not so far above us that we can't identify with the person.
I think glamour has a genuine appeal, has a genuine value. I'm not against glamour. But there's a kind of wonder in the stuff that gets edited away in the cords of life.
The common intuition is that e-books should be cheap because they aren't physical - no printing, no shipping.
Apple doesn't need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive-sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop.
Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.
Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous. The less experience we have with them, the more glamorous they are. So you can do a glamorized picture of a car, but you can't do a glamorized picture of traffic.
'The Matrix' is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on 'The Matrix' and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look - sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world.
Kidney donors don't have to be close relatives of recipients, but they do need to have the right blood type. And kidneys from living donors tend to last many years longer than kidneys from deceased donors.
Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.
Like Disneyland, luxury retailers have long had to figure out how to overcome customers' natural inertia. Unlike less pricey stores, they tend not to attract idle browsers who make impulse purchases.
The intimate contest for self-command never ends, and lifetime happiness requires finding the right balance between present impulses and future well-being.
We know we need bosses and deadlines to help us get work done. But sometimes we can also use an external push to make us have a good time. In both cases, our future self will appreciate the help.
