If you’ve been jonesing for worldwide fame and recognition, right now is your chance: Game of Thrones is looking to cast some unknowns for season six. If you fit the bill of “Priestess,” “Pirate,” or “one of the greatest soldiers in Westeros,” drop out of medical school or whatever else you’re doing this instant and go to the casting call. Or, you can just forever keep being an Ordinary Person (OP), only remembered in old family photos or in unflattering, hyperreal sculptures by Duane Hanson like these other OPs. Look, when you’re famous (like Lena Dunham), you can post photos of yourself in your lingerie on Instagram and get almost 100,000 likes. Just like that. So what are you waiting for?
If worldwide fame is not for you, and you prefer to, say, spend your days and nights alone whittling books into sculptural masterpieces, there’s good news: you’re not alone. Book sculpting is a thing. In other news of things that are things, there’s now a digital table that tells you what you should cook based on what ingredients you put on top of it, and there are also handsome canines that model menswear with the august seriousness of human-male models, and there is a Vincent van Gogh doppelgänger living in Bed-Stuy who rides the subway with “his” mutilated ear covered up for a new web series.
In fact, I think I know someone who tweeted about seeing faux-van Gogh this morning. But, living in New York, you see a lot of things on the way to work in the mornings, like NYC Tourism Ambassador Taylor Swift (who had to tell a fan today to not call her “mom”) or, more frequently, people eating McDonald’s (which is about to give its buns a makeover). Sometimes, being in the subway makes me wish that I could move into one of these self-powered Ecocapsules on a mountain in the Czech Republic. Other times, I keep hoping I’ll see Anthony Bourdain on the 6 train again. “I can’t wait to read your new column,” I would tell him, trying to simultaneously keep it cool and not break any of these social rules.