Is this a line from The Great Gatsby or a New York Times profile of Lena Dunham?

I'm just waiting on the Wikipedia brain chip.

 

While our DNA deteriorates from the very instant of birth, we are supposed to get smarter the farther down the road of life we progress.

 

"The only true wisdom lies in knowing you know nothing."

Suck it.

 

I'm not aware of too many things
I know what I know, if you know what I mean
Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box
Religion is the smile on a dog
I'm not aware of too many things
I know what I know, if you know what I mean, d-doo yeah

 

The Wikipedia brain chip will override that maxim.

 

Google has made everyone a wannabe research scholar.
It was a better world when you had to go out and find this shit.
Do you know how hard it was to find books on the Julio-Claudian emperors?

 

The Times can't stay away:

Ms. Dunham’s smart, funny new book, “Not That Kind of Girl,” is a kind of memoir disguised as an advice book, or a how-to-book (as in how to navigate the perilous waters of girlhood) in the guise of a series of personal essays. “If I could take what I’ve learned,” she writes in the introduction, “and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile.”

“Not That Kind of Girl,” Ms. Dunham suggests, was partly inspired by Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 book, “Having It All,” which she found in a thrift shop when she was 20 — a book whose advice she often found “absolutely bananas” (like subsisting on fewer than 1,000 calories a day), but whose essential message (that “a powerful, confident and, yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born”) she says she desperately needed at that time, when she hated herself and thought she would “never amount to anything.”

Only 28 now, Ms. Dunham is the creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series “Girls,” a show based on her experiences in those limbo years between college and grown-up life, when she and her friends were struggling with bad boyfriends, dead-end jobs and elusive dreams. Real and often raw (in contrast to the more candy-colored “Sex and the City”), “Girls” captures those years — at least as experienced by a privileged group of young Brooklynites — when it feels as if life-altering reversals of fortune were occurring several times a day; when wild clothes and self-dramatizing theatrics often cloak loneliness and confusion; when impulsiveness and strenuous navel-gazing tend to be emotional default settings.

With “Not That Kind of Girl,” Ms. Dunham brings a similar candor to the story of her own life, getting as naked in print as her alter ego Hannah often does in the flesh. The sharp observation and distinctive voice she honed in “Girls” and in her 2010 movie, “Tiny Furniture,” are translated to the page. If Nora Ephron (a mentor to Ms. Dunham and one of the people to whom this book is dedicated) came across in her books as your sophisticated, big-city aunt, knowing, worldly and savvy about just about everything, then Ms. Dunham sounds more like your high-strung niece: confiding, nervy and earnest. She is, by turns, acerbic and vulnerable; self-absorbed and searching; boldly in your face and painfully anxious; a survivor of many of the dating and friendship crises experienced by her “Girls” characters, though still flummoxed by the mysteries of adulthood.

nyti.ms/1mKVm7H

 

Thank God for this thread, or MC would be confused by the reference in this Time piece:

And, yes, LTL, I know. I wasn't aware of the legendary actor John Slattery, which does take some of the sting out of this schtick.

 

How is it that you can't avoid Lena Dunham think-pieces but don't know the No. 2 actor on Mad Men, the show that launched a million think-pieces?

 

Thank God. The coverage continues: "Turning a Book Tour Into a Literary Circus (and a Hot Ticket)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/arts/turning-a-book-tour-into-a-literary-circus-and-a-hot-ticket.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region


Gawker notes that the warm-up acts for the tour (for which she's charging $38 a ticket) aren't getting paid (or are getting paid in "exposure"):

http://gawker.com/lena-dunham-does-not-pay-1640249043

 

What a greedy twat.

 

OMFG this is a perfect description of Adam Driver. Brilliant.