Author: Lynn Peril
Lynn Peril is the author of Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office. She lives in Oakland, California.
Dorothy Day
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She was devoted to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
Read This PostEd “Big Daddy” Roth
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Even if you didn’t know his name, you knew his “Kustom Monsters.”
Read This PostMarie Vassilieff
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Find out why “the name of Marie Vassilieff will remain in the history of Montparnasse.”
Read This PostMary Leakey
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Meet the woman who transformed paleoanthropological field research.
Read This PostAri Up
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At the age of 15, ARI UP (Arianna Forster, born 1962) was lead singer of England’s all-girl punk band The Slits. No creamy underage dream vixen, she: Up was a teen Medusa who wasn’t about […]
Read This PostGypsy Rose Lee
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Dubbed the “Striptease Intellectual” by the American Mercury, GYPSY ROSE LEE (1911-70) wowed the boys with her witty chatter as she removed all but her G-string and two strategically placed bows. An autodidact who penned […]
Read This PostOscar Levant
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A virtuoso pianist with a biting wit, OSCAR LEVANT (1906-72) was equally at home with Schoenberg’s atonalism and Gershwin’s jazzy rhapsodies, dated a series of Broadway chorus girls, acted alongside stars like Fred Astaire and […]
Read This PostHarriet Monroe
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HARRIET MONROE (1860-1936) was the original zinester. In 1912, at the age of 51, the former Chicago Tribune art editor and moderately successful poet (her “Columbian Ode” — “Columbia! Men beheld thee rise/A goddess from […]
Read This PostPaul Simonon
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The Clash was on the front lines of the punk revolution of the late 1970s, but bassist PAUL SIMONON (born 1955) shared some similarities with an iconic rebel of the previous generation. Like the Beatles’ […]
Read This PostMaila Nurmi
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Finnish-born MAILA NURMI (1921-2008) kicked around Hollywood as a hatcheck girl and pinup model before a turn as the Charles Addams cartoon character later named Morticia changed the course of her life, not to mention […]
Read This PostTi-Grace Atkinson
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On September 23, 1969, a group of women, conspicuous among them a tall, patrician blonde, handed out mimeographed leaflets to passersby and newlyweds alike at New York City’s marriage bureau. Rather than wedding-day platitudes, the […]
Read This PostRobert Mapplethorpe
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Classically chiseled male bodies in sumptuous black and white.
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