Smoking seems to be a theme this week. I just saw the Stanford School of Medicine’s online tobacco-ad gallery where you can view images by theme or brand. Fascinating.
From the exhibit “Our intention is to tell—principally through advertising images—the story of how, between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, tobacco companies used deceptive and often patently false claims in an effort to reassure the public of the safety of their products.”
This McDonald’s Is All Out Of “Boy Toys,” via The Consumerist
This image, and others, can be found at Mental Floss under the heading of “Only the Creepiest Photos Ever Taken.”
The post includes the following quote from Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America by Stanley Burns.
These photographs were a common aspect of American culture, a part of the mourning and memorialization process. Surviving families were proud of these images and hung them in their homes, sent copies to friends and relatives, wore them as lockets or carried them as pocket mirrors. Nineteenth-century Americans knew how to respond to these images. Today there is no culturally normative response to postmortem photographs.
This interactive chart in the NYT uses shapes to represent how much the average American spends in different categories. Larger shapes make up a larger part of spending; colors show changes in prices from March 2007 to March 2008. Red means an increase in the relative cost, light tan and white relative stability, and blue a decrease.
Note from Gwen: Since it was causing some people with Firefox problems, I’m changing it so you have to click to see it, rather than having it come up automatically when you visit the site. Hope this helps.
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LeBron James got his turn as King Kong on a magazine cover. Now (an illustration of) David Stern, Commissioner of the NBA, strikes the pose on Sports Northwest Magazine.
From the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications 2007 report on the Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops.
