Old instructional videos aimed at women are a comfort — they show how far we've come since the time when a woman asking something like, "I've always wondered about something: why is it called a revolver?" wasn't totally condescending.

Gun Safety Is Different For Women [Everything is Terrible]

The magazine is Cosmopolitan, from that almost unrecognizable halcyon age of women's magazines when Mademoiselle was publishing Truman Capote's short fiction and Joan Didion was working at Vogue. (That story about "modern psychiatry," grandma's common sense, and the vexations of motherhood sounds kind of familiar, though.)

Meet Tippi "Hedrin"! The best part about this page is that she is holding a lobster.

Do you hear that? Hedren loves everything about modeling. Even the scratchy-looking "removable dickey" on that sheath dress.

By 1953, Hedren had already gotten her first film role, in The Petty Girl. The Birds would come ten years later — and after her divorce from Peter Griffith, pictured. (Apparently the love of animals was lifelong.)

See what you can do with a good wardrobe of stoles?

I just learned that Tippi Hedren was apparently partly responsible for Vietnamese immigrants to California taking up the manicurist trade. Hedren met some Vietnamese refugees in the mid 1970s, and they remarked upon her nails. "I noticed that these women were very good with their hands," Hedren told the Los Angeles Times. "I thought, why couldn't they learn how to do nails?" So she organized training for that particular group of women. Their relative success motivated others, and now California nail technicians are 80% Vietnamese. The more you know!

The Model Life [ModernMechanix]
A Mix Of Luck, Polish [LATimes]