Hey <<Name>>! If you missed last week's edition – Woody Guthrie's lovely 1942 New Year's resolution list, the best biographies and memoirs of 2011, and more – you can catch up right here. And if you're enjoying this, please consider supporting with a modest donation.

Advice to Sink in Slowly: Designers Share Wisdom with First-Year Students in Charming Poster Series

Unpacking the secrets of happiness and creativity one poster at a time.

What better way to kick off the new year than with words of wisdom from those who have threaded before us? That's precisely the premise of advice to sink in slowly, a wonderful project enlisting design graduates in passing on advice and inspiration to first-year students through an ongoing series of posters – part Live Now, part Everything Is Going To Be OK, part Wisdom, part something completely refreshing, based on the idea that we all have subjective wisdom we wish we'd known earlier, but often don't get a chance to pass it on to those who can benefit from it in a way that makes them pay heed.

Advice is subjective. But, by passing on advice in a creative way, it is possible to create something that lasts, that people will want to live with and which can let the advice sink in slowly and help out later on."

'to create ideas is a gift, but to choose wisely is a skill' by Ryan Morgan

'Do what you love' by Andy J. Miller

'Take Time' by Temujin Doran

'Finish what you start* *it may seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.' by Irina Troitskaya

'if in doubt, make tea' by Owen Davey

'Don't be afraid, everything will be alright' by Ben Javens

'eat breakfast' by Always With Honor

'Find some place to stop & be quiet' by Lizzy Stewart

'everything is possible' by Lee Basford

Free posters are available to first-year students across the U.K. upon request. Four of the posters are available for purchase in a fundraising effort, with 100% of the proceeds feeding back to support this wonderful project – so go ahead and grab one, then let its wisdom sink in slowly.

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Drawing Mental Illness: Artist Bobby Baker's Visual Diary

Harvesting the daily flow of consciousness, or what group therapy has to do with marine life.

Despite our proudest cultural and medical advances, mental illness remains largely taboo, partly because the experience of it can be so challenging to articulate. But when performance artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 1996, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis, she set out to capture her experience and her journey to recovery in 711 drawings that would serve as her private catharsis over the course of more than a decade. In Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me, Baker makes, at long last, this private experience public through 158 drawings and watercolors – poignant, honest, funny, moving, shocking – spanning 11 years of mental, physical, and emotional healing, a journey Marina Warner aptly calls in the preface a "chronicle of a life repaired." The book is at once a personal journal and a tenacious thesaurus that helps translate the misunderstood realities of mental illness into an expressive and intuitive visual language the rest of the world can understand, reminiscent of the wonderful Drawing Autism.

I think mental illness is the worst of anything. The hierarchy of suffering is sort of bound into our society. But my personal experience is that the isolation and anguish of severe mental illness was much worse than…having something physical that people could understand better." ~ Bobby Baker

From how the tears flow into her ears when she does yoga (Day 320) to the weight gain side effects of medication (Day 397) to the uplifting "butterflies of academia" (Day 579) to the strain of chemo (Day 698), Baker's illustrated micro-narratives are startlingly raw, yet incredibly eloquent and layered.

The sequence of the drawings follows the artist's painful but, ultimately, triumphant recovery, with the last stretch of pictures exuding a kind of cathartic exhale, a "huge, happy, light-headed relief," as Warner puts it. Baker's favorite drawing is from Day 771, titled "The Daily Flow of Consciousness," which she believes represents her current state:

The Guardian has a wonderful audio slideshow of Baker's work, narrated by the artist herself.

From Andy Warhol to Mark Twain, 400 Years of New York Diaries

What Jack Kerouac's existential divide has to do with earmuffs, 9/11, and Edison's "mechanical mind."

For the past four centuries, New York City has been courted, confabulated, and cursed, in public and in private, by the millions of citizens who have called it home. New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 is a remarkable feat of an anthology by Teresa Carpenter, culled from the archives of libraries, museums, and private collections to reveal a dimensional mosaic portrait of the city through the journal entries of the writers, artists, thinkers, and tourists, both famous and not, who dwelled in its grid over the past 400 years – easily the most dynamic and important depiction of the city since E. B. White's timeless Here Is New York.

In an ingenious touch, Carpenter arranges the entries by day of the year, rather than chronologically, which brings to the foreground certain common patterns of daily life that appear to shape our experience of the city, be it in 1697 or 1976. At its heart, however, the collection exudes a certain unflinching quality of the city, unshakable solid ground that stands tenacious beneath the tempestuous weather patterns of great wars and great loves and great losses that swirl over.

Every century produces a diarist who laments, 'This is the worst catastrophe ever to befall New York!' Surely it seems that way at the moment. The city takes the blow, catches its breath, then moves along to the insistent rhythm of the tides. New York, as it emerges from these pages, is by turns a wicket city, a compassionate city, a muscular city, a vulnerable city, an artistic wonder, an aesthetic disaster, but forever a resilient city – and one loved fiercely by its inhabitants." ~ Teresa Carpenter

Regarding her curatorial sensibility, Carpenter explains:

The criterion for selection was simple. I chose these entries because I liked them. They moved me, fascinated me, made me angry, made me laugh, invited tears, or simply satisfied my curiosity. They also serve a more vital purpose, and that is to transform the New York of postcards, the gray, still abstraction of granite, the denatured Gotham of science fiction, the out-of-time videoscape of crumbling towers, into a living city. And so in this spirit, they provide the kind of detail of daily life that so delights the armchair anthropologist."

And delight it certainly does. From the voyeuristic glimpses of famous lives (Edison, Kerouac, Twain, Roosevelt, de Beauvoir) to the textured anonymous masses (businessmen, clergymen, Victorian teenagers) that constitute the intricate living fabric of the city, the diary entries are at once engrossingly intimate and strikingly prototypical of the human condition.

Here are some favorites.

A tender, romantic Jack Kerouac on November 19, 1947, while living with his mother:

Dark Eyes came to my house tonight and we danced all night long, and into the morning. We sat on the floor, on the beautiful rug my mother made for me, and listened to the royal wedding at six in the morning. My mother was charming when she got up and saw us there. I made Dark Eyes some crêpes suzette. We danced again, & sang."

On February 18, 1867, a 32-year-old Mark Twain paints a portrait in stark contrast with recent portrayals of the NYPD:

The police of Broadway seem to have been selected with special reference to size. They are nearly all large, fine-looking men, and their blue uniforms, well studded with brass buttons, their jack boots and their batons worn like a dagger, give them an imposing military aspect. They are gentlemanly in appearance and conduct… I hear them praised on every hand for their efficiency, integrity and watchful attention to business. It seems like an extravagant compliment to pay a policeman, don't it? I am charmed with the novelty of it."

And who knew Thomas Edison had such a penchant for the poetic? On July 12, 1885, he captures beautifully a morning experience all too familiar:

Awakened at 5:15 A.M. – My eyes were embarrassed by the sunbeams – turned my back to them and tried to take another dip into oblivion – succeeded – awakened at 7 A.M. Thought of Mina, Daisy, and Mamma G – Put all 3 in my mental kaleidoscope to obtain a new combination à la Galton. Took Mina as a basis, tried to improve her beauty by discarding and adding certain features borrowed from Daisy and Mamma G. A sort of Raphaelized beauty, got into it too deep, mind flew away and I went to sleep again."

Then, a few sentences later, a haiku-esque, Yoda-esque treat:

A book on German metaphysics would thus easily ruin a dress suit…"

And on the following day, a deadpan blend of dark humor and entrepreneurship:

Went to New York via Desbrosses Street ferry. Took cars across town. Saw a woman get into car that was so tall and frightfully thin as well as dried up that my mechanical mind at once conceived the idea that it would be the proper thing to run a lancet into her arm and knee joints and insert automatic self-feeding oil cups to diminish the creaking when she walked."

On the subject of fashion, Leo Lerman writes of Marlene Dietrich's insight into Greta Garbo's wardrobe, September 3, 1951:

Marlene says Garbo has only two suits of underwear. They are made of men's shirting. She waears one for three days, then washes it, does not iron it. Then she wears the other. Marlene says she doesn't mind the not ironing, but three days! Garbo uses only paper towels in her bathroom, has two pairs of men's trousers, two shirts, and little else in her wardrobe. She is very stingy."

On October 29, 1985, a little over a year before his death, Andy Warhol meditates:

I broke something and realized I should break something once a week to remind me how fragile life is. It was a good plastic ring from the twenties."

My favorite entry comes on November 29, 1941, from a 19-year-old Jack Kerouac – at once a living testament to the richness of life as a college-dropout-turned-lifelong-learner (cue in Kio Stark's new project) and a poignant meditation on the most fundamental tension of the human condition:

I returned to college in the Fall, but my mind wasn't at rest. My family was not any too well fixed; I felt out of place, the coaches were insulting, I was lonely; I left and went down to the South to think things over. Since then, on my own, I have been learning fast, writing a lot, reading good men, and have been slowly making up my mind, seriously & quietly. Either I am loathsome to others, I have decided, or else I shall be a beacon of rich warm light, spreading good and plenty, making things prosper, being a cosmic architect, conquering the world and being respected, myself grinning surreptitiously. Either that, Sirs, or I shall be the most loathsome, useless, and parasitical (on myself) creature in the world. I shall be a denizen of the Underground, or a successful man of the world. There shall be no compromise!!! I mean it."

My only lament? Susan Sontag, one of my greatest intellectual heroes and a formidable New York diarist, didn't make it into the collection. Omission notwithstanding, New York Diaries is an absolute masterpiece blending a curator's discernment, an archivist's obsessive rigor, a writer's love of writing, and a New Yorker's love of New York – the ultimate celebration of the city's tender complexity and beautiful chaos.

A List of Don'ts for Women on Bicycles Circa 1895

"Don’t ask, 'What do you think of my bloomers?'"

We've already seen how the bicycle emancipated women, but it wasn't exactly a smooth ride. The following list of 41 don'ts for female cyclists was published in 1895 in the newspaper New York World by an author of unknown gender. Equal parts amusing and appalling, the list is the best (or worst, depending on you look at it) thing since the Victorian map of woman's heart.

• Don’t be a fright.
• Don’t faint on the road.
• Don’t wear a man’s cap.
• Don’t wear tight garters.
• Don’t forget your toolbag
• Don’t attempt a “century.”
• Don’t coast. It is dangerous.
• Don’t boast of your long rides.
• Don’t criticize people’s “legs.”
• Don’t wear loud hued leggings.
• Don’t cultivate a “bicycle face.”
• Don’t refuse assistance up a hill.
• Don’t wear clothes that don’t fit.
• Don’t neglect a “light’s out” cry.
• Don’t wear jewelry while on a tour.
• Don’t race. Leave that to the scorchers.
• Don’t wear laced boots. They are tiresome.
• Don’t imagine everybody is looking at you.
• Don’t go to church in your bicycle costume.
• Don’t wear a garden party hat with bloomers.
• Don’t contest the right of way with cable cars.
• Don’t chew gum. Exercise your jaws in private.
• Don’t wear white kid gloves. Silk is the thing.
• Don’t ask, “What do you think of my bloomers?”
• Don’t use bicycle slang. Leave that to the boys.
• Don’t go out after dark without a male escort.
• Don’t without a needle, thread and thimble.
• Don’t try to have every article of your attire “match.”
• Don’t let your golden hair be hanging down your back.
• Don’t allow dear little Fido to accompany you
• Don’t scratch a match on the seat of your bloomers.
• Don’t discuss bloomers with every man you know.
• Don’t appear in public until you have learned to ride well.
• Don’t overdo things. Let cycling be a recreation, not a labor.
• Don’t ignore the laws of the road because you are a woman.
• Don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes “to see how it feels.”
• Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run.
• Don’t cultivate everything that is up to date because yon ride a wheel.
• Don’t emulate your brother’s attitude if he rides parallel with the ground.
• Don’t undertake a long ride if you are not confident of performing it easily.
• Don’t appear to be up on “records” and “record smashing.” That is sporty.

For more on the history of women and bikes, see the excellent Wheels of Change, among both the best photography books and the best history books of 2011.