Thought Catalog

Old Spice brings their clever “Old Spice Guy” campaign to a whole new level, droping personalized custom messages via Twitter and YouTube to celebrities and average Joe’s for their support, love and admiration.

LeBron James made the “decision.” James, dressed in a pink and white checkered shirt and Hemmingway beard, towered over grand inquisitor Jim Grey like a lumber jack. The small children in the audience were all silent. Some have later called this moment the low point of Western Civilization. The stage was set for a public execution.

Kurt Vonnegut’s message was beautiful. He treated all of his characters equally and not one of his novels had a villain. He believed that society minored the hierarchy created by authors in epic make believe stories. He sought to remedy that. His black humor and dedication to honesty present the read with two options: to laugh or cry.

What to do, What to do? BP should turn the Gulf and the Mississippi River into “organic gas stations.” Just let people pull up to the beach and riverfront with their cars, go-carts, what have you – and let em’ fill up! They could spin it as a green initiative, an innovative undertaking

Antonella Arismendi is a self-taught fashion photographer and art director based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In her latest shoot, for the Spanish brand Kling, Arismendi captures the beauty of summer with a tinge of nostalgia and hint of something almost otherworldly.

Phillip Morris graced San Francisco with a new piece of colossal art (aka: a billboard) on Howard at Van Ness. The minimalist ad, created in conjunction with the West Hollywood, CA based creative agency the Billboard Liberation Front, simply states “My Life, My Death, My Choice.”

Adrien Field was born in Moorestown, NJ and moved to New York City in the mid-2000s to attend Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU where he contemplated concentrating in “Social Climbing” before he dropped out. He runs TheFieldNotes.com, a popular fashion and life style blog, and is a contributor to the print and web edition of Vibe Magazine, the urban quarterly founded by Quincy Jones.

The other day Francesco Ravo bought an Anglican church in Belgium and then hired a group of architects and interior designers (the Puresang group) to revamp it as nightclub. It’s a breathtaking accomplishment, baroque and modern, classic and chic. God is a DJ! (Yes he is!)

Like Provincetown and Carmel, Key West has long been known as an artists’ retreat, a spectacularly beautiful geography haunted by abiding spirits. Associated with writers like Hemingway, Bishop, Dillard, and Stone, Key West flourishes today, a vibrant, diverse community of writers, painters, and artists of all sorts. It is also home to Sand Paper Press, an independent publishing venture founded in 2003, part of a continuing tradition of small presses passionately focused on the verbal arts, particularly poetry.

The Eizo Nanao Group, a Japanese company in the sexy business of making medical imaging equipment, has released a pinup calendar as part of a new marketing effort crafted by the German ad firm Butter. It’s quite revealing, to say the least. When will the porn producers catch on?

Sam Brown was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and moved to Sydney, Australia to finish his early education at a Technology High School, then continued studying Multimedia Design at the Computer Graphics College Sydney and the Private SAE Institute before spending a year working at a boutique design house. Now, under the name Massive Blue, Brown runs an accomplished web design and development company from his hometown of Edinburgh, which serves clients from around the world.

In 2008, Nadia Moro, an Italian photographer, best known for her work in the fashion and advertising industries, spent five consecutive days shooting a group of synchro swimmers and dancers underwater. The result was this series – “Behind the Surface” – a footloose, gravity-free ballet, a sequence of images challenging the ways we traditionally look at the human body, clothing, and movement.

Sloane Crosley graduated from Connecticut College in 2000 with a degree in creative writing. She took the literary world by storm in 2008 with her debut collection of essays, I Was Told There Would Be Cake,which became a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Thurber Prize of American Humor. Her follow-up book, How Did You Get this Number (Riverhead Books), will be released June 15th.

There’s a lot more to Iceland than Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano which basically put a complete halt to air travel across western and northern Europe as of April. Sacha Heron, an emerging photographer living and working in Paris, captured another, less violent side of the country in his trip there in 2008. Heron cites the beauty of the landscapes as a crucial influence in his decision to quit his job…

For reasons known only to the author himself, Mark Twain ordained that his complete autobiography – all five thousand pages of it – should not be printed in its entirety until one hundred years after his demise. Since he died in 1910, that makes 2010 the year for which many have been waiting so impatiently and for so long.

Michelle Madonna (real name) was born in Long Island, NY and after a short stint in Los Angeles settled in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. She describes herself as “vampire, camera whore, and wannabe socialite with terrible insomnia.” She is currently finishing a degree in Visual merchandising at Laboratory Institute of Merchandising. She also makes pop and dance music.

Muriel Spark (1918-2004), Edinburgh born and bred, became one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished writers. Spark was a feisty, outspoken, independent woman who made it on her own – no family money, no university education, no man to “depend” on – nothing but abundant talent, extraordinary perseverance, and singular dedication to craft.

Michel Houellebecq — the misanthropic, caninophilic French novelist — and William Burroughs both deploy thorough visions of the world. They proffer more or less elaborate cosmologies, ethics, and particularly critical assessments of humanity. And both view the act of writing in general…