Do You Want to Be Right—Or Do You Want to Be Happy? |
A therapist of mine asked me, "Would you rather be right, or happy?" My answer: "I'm happy when I'm right." I'm most set off by people who also need to be right especially if they speak in absolutes, make blanket statements, savor debate, and worst of all, lack a sense of humor or irony. Could be anyone—a stranger at the bakery, colleagues, friends, never mind family. Naturally, nobody sets me off more than my wife, Emily, and she doesn't even have a hang-up about being right. With Em, I don't need to be right as much as I fear being wrong. A few weeks ago, when she asked me to put my clothes in the hamper, not on the floor, I looked at her wild-eyed. I'd only put them on the floor because she once told me that if the hamper was full not to stuff it more. At least that's how I remembered it. Turns out, I didn't even hear her accurately. She really said, "Did you drop your clothes on the floor because they were wet from hiking?" Surprised at the vehemence of my response she asked, "Why are you so angry?" I stared at her in disbelief. How the hell was I supposed to know? |
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| Evangeline Lilly Is Going Through It |
"I've always kept myself on the outside," Evangeline Lilly says. "I've never lived in LA. I've always worked very little on purpose to sort of have a normal life outside of Hollywood." The actress, forty-three, says this from her bedroom inside her home in Hawaii, on a recent January day that, at least via Zoom, appears to be as covetously bright and sunny as you'd expect a midwinter day in Hawaii to be. She moved there to film the TV show Lost around 2004, and when it wrapped six years later, she stayed. Her dyed-blonde hair is cut short, with brown roots showing beneath. Her face is the same face that many a Lost fan will remember: high cheekbones, arrestingly bright eyes, a smile like a canyon. She has a friendly, disarming warmth, one that pairs deftly with the strong, often well-armed characters she has played: first in her breakout role as Kate Austen on Lost, then as the bow-and-dagger-wielding woodland elf Tauriel in The Hobbit, and, for almost a decade now, as Marvel's the Wasp (government name: Hope Van Dyne). When we talk, Lilly is a couple weeks away from the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (out now), the third entry in the franchise, in which she and Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd, head into the infinitesimally small (even for insects) quantum realm to face off against Kang the Conqueror, played by Jonathan Majors, and kick off the next phase of Marvel movies. It has been two decades since she started her acting career, and those twenty years have taught her, among other things, about her limits, what she can and can't give of herself physically. |
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Shop the Best Presidents' Day TV Sales Happening on Amazon Right Now |
We'll say it: Presidents' Day is one of the most underrated shopping events of the year. And this year, deals are dropping way before February 20, and even further as the date gets closer. Sure, the mattresses and furniture deals are great, but for us, it's all about the tech deals—especially TVs. When it comes to buying a new TV, February has become one of the best times of the year to do so. It goes without saying that the market is saturated with television options, ranging from QLED or OLED models to TVs that double as wall art. Regardless of your space or your budget, there's a screen out there that will meet your needs, and it just might be on sale right now. The hard part is finding the one, so we did the searching for you. |
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My Bug-Out Bag, The Wilderness, and Me |
In late November, on a Tuesday afternoon, my husband locked me out of the house. It was the first real day of snow in northern Wisconsin, gray and cold, and sticky flakes dusted the forest around our home. Not the weather I'd have chosen for a night unsheltered in the woods, but in a way, I reassured myself, that made the experiment realistic: survivors can't be choosers. The week before, a package had arrived in the mail from a company called Echo Sigma (motto: "Be ready for anything") with a backpack, or "bug-out bag," containing all I needed—supposedly—to survive for three days in an emergency, after "bugging out" of modern life. My mission was to live out of it for twenty-four hours, and to learn something along the way about survival, or at least about the ways that we try to prepare for it. I hadn't peeked in the bag; I wouldn't know its contents until I got into the woods. I wore insulated coveralls—I'm not a complete masochist—and brought nothing else with me but a camera and Pepé, my most competent dog. The pack was the size of a high school book bag, which seemed awfully small to hold food, water, shelter, and warmth, but at eighteen pounds, at least it had a comforting heft. I crossed a broad meadow and entered the trees, where it was instantly colder and darker. Pepé trotted ahead. Already the snow was starting to stick. I found a rock to sit on, took off my pack, and unzipped it, waiting to learn my fate. |
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A Full List of What Ron DeSantis Is Trying to Ban |
Freedom means the government bans something new every day. Just ask the newest rising star in the Party of Small Government—at least according to very savvy politico types—Florida Governor Ronald DeSantis. He cut his teeth as a national figure by styling his state as the last bastion of human freedom in the United States during the pandemic, a place where the government wouldn't make you do anything ever. But DeSantis is almost inevitably going to run for president, and now that the pandemic is finished as a public policy issue, he needs some grand public gestures to get him into the news cycle and onto the Fox News airwaves on a regular basis. It's certainly more fun than talking about his record on Medicare and Social Security. Enter the bans. Below, you'll find a list of things whose banning the Florida governor championed or carried out directly. As you reach a new subject, remember that you've taken another stride towards true freedom. |
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Inhaler Are Breaking Big. But They Still Want More. |
Inhaler began in 2012 when Elijah Hewson, Ryan McMahon, and Robert Keating met as pre-teens at St. Andrew's in Dublin; three years later, they settled on a band name. The early days were nothing auspicious—they describe themselves as the world's worst heavy metal band or, as McMahon puts it, "feather metal." But there is an additional factor at work in the case of Inhaler: Hewson's father is Bono—as in U2, global activist, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, jump-in-the-crowd-at-Live-Aid Bono. And if you didn't recognize the name at first (Bono was born Paul Hewson), the facial and vocal resemblance is unmistakable. It's a bit of a complicated spot at a time when the world is hotly debating the advantages enjoyed by "nepo babies" in show business (Elijah's sister Eve Hewson, star of the AppleTV+ series Bad Sisters, recently poked fun at on the controversy, tweeting "2023 Goals: be successful enough to get recognised as a nepo baby.") Hewson and his bandmates seem to be at peace with the matter of his birthright. "I wouldn't make a very good architect, put it that way," he says. "I think if you grow up around those people and that environment, and music is constantly talked about, that naturally must affect you in some way to go in that direction. If my dad was a doctor, maybe I'd be trained to be a doctor. I think Lily Allen said it really well—it's just entertainment, the real nepotism is in finance and politics. All we're doing is to try and put a smile on somebody's face." |
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