Here, for the uninitiated, is the timeline of 20-year-old Harlem rapper and mp3 blog darling Azealia Banks's rise to fame: Her delightfully raunchy breakout track, "212," hit YouTube sometime back in September, then was pulled owing to a sample dispute. Banks hit CMJ and started giving interviews about feminine power in the interim, and then right before Thanksgiving, the "212" video popped back up online. A day later, NME declared Banks the No. 1 Coolest Person on the Planet. (Predictably, some other British outlets chimed in to claim they'd discovered Azealia first. Relax, U.K.) The La Guardia High School graduate still doesn't have a record deal — she tells Pitchfork she's "not really scared of major labels" and is about to sign — and her first album won't drop until next year. But she's suddenly everywhere, thanks in no small part to the adorable, swaggerific "212" video, available for your viewing pleasure below. Watch her sass a Harry Potter hipster! See her Mickey Mouse sweatshirt! (via)did you know she went to the same high school as nicki minaj?!? in two months, i'll post the new york times article.
If you haven't already, visit Google.pl, where a mesmerizing Doodle honoring Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem will joyfully consume at least 20 minutes of your day. Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Lem's first but lesser known novel, The Astronauts, the black-and-white, pencil-sketched interactive Doodle is epic. (via)
Imagine a windswept moor in the north of England. Add a big house, where a clergyman and his four children live — isolated, pale little children inventing fantasy worlds in the nursery of a rambling old house.
These were the peculiar origins of the Bronte sisters, the novelists Emily, Charlotte and Anne who, with their brother Branwell, endured a grim and lonely upbringing by vanishing into fantasy worlds so obsessively and vividly imagined that they even had their own magazines. Next month, the auction house Sotheby's will sell one such manuscript produced by a 14-year-old Charlotte, estimated to fetch $315,000 to $475,000.
The magazine is tiny, "half the size of a credit card," Gabriel Heaton, deputy director of books and manuscripts at Sothebys, tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer, and designed to be the right size for the Bronte children's toy soldiers. Its 19 pages are crammed with more than 4,000 words — short stories, news, even advertisements — discernible only by magnifying glass. (via)
