♥ Select styles are now up to 70% off at Abercrombie & Fitch, including the Canvas Backpack (on sale in two colorways), which is a lightly updated version of the “classic backpack” (seen above) that I picked up last summer and would recommend. Some more sale picks: Drapey Trench Coat, Cozy Ribbed Henley, Paperbag Waist Linen Shorts (in three colorways), Ripped High Rise Super Skinny Jeans, Linen-Blend Wrap Jumpsuit, Canvas Tote, Ultra High Rise Belted Ankle Jeans, and Tie-Waist Pinafore Dress.
♥ Ascena Faces Nasdaq Delisting (Retail Dive): “The retail group’s stock sold for under $1 for a period of 30 consecutive business days, prompting the notice [that the company has failed to meet its requirement for trading on the stock exchange] … The company has until Jan. 27, 2020, to regain compliance, which would require its stock to close at a price of more than $1 for 10 consecutive days.”
♥ A More Active Hurricane Season Could Lie Ahead, Scientists Warn (The New York Times): “… an above-average season is substantially more likely than the agency first predicted in May. NOAA now expects up to 17 named storms before the season ends on Nov. 30, with as many as four of those becoming major storms with winds of 111 miles per hour or more … While climate change is clearly warming the oceans … seasonal forecasters had chiefly looked to factors like El Niño and oceanic and atmospheric conditions … to determine what is likely to happen in coming months. The Atlantic is currently in a cycle of higher activity … and those cycles ‘completely dominate the record.’ None of these forecasts can say whether the coming storms will make landfall, which can only be predicted about a week in advance.”
♥ Password Alternatives Still Elusive, Experts Say (The Wall Street Journal): “Despite years of development, a viable alternative to the password has yet to be found that doesn’t introduce other security risks … Technologies including facial recognition … other biometrics … [and] more exotic approaches, such as using the heat patterns in facial muscles to identify individuals … come with drawbacks … If hackers obtained someone’s thumbprint patterns … they would effectively gain a skeleton key to that person’s life. Losing control of biometric information dwarfs the importance of having other identifying data exposed, which can be changed in extreme circumstances, whereas biometrics cannot.”
♥ Athleisure, Barre and Kale: The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman (The Guardian): “The ideal woman … is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself … Everything about this woman has been pre-emptively controlled to the point that she can afford the impression of spontaneity and, more important, the sensation of it – having worked to rid her life of artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree. The ideal woman can be whatever she wants to be – as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure, or, in other words, of ‘lifestyle’. The ideal woman steps into a stratum of expensive juices, boutique exercise classes, skincare routines and vacations, and there she happily remains.”
♥ The Vegetarians Who Turned Into Butchers (The New York Times): “… ethical butchers … have opened shops that offer meat from animals bred on grassland and pasture, with animal well-being, environmental conservation and less wasteful whole-animal butchery as their primary goals.”
♥ Select styles at Reformation are now up to 40% off online; shipping is free on all orders. My picks:
♥ How Social Media Shapes Our Identity (The New Yorker): “For those who have grown up with social media … childhood … is surprisingly accessible … this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity. What that effect will be we’re not quite sure … In the past, adults refused to acknowledge children’s agency, or imposed on them an idealized notion of innocence and purity. Adults were the ones writing books, taking photos with expensive cameras, and commissioning paintings, all of which tended to commemorate childhood—to look back at it—rather than participate in it. The arrival of cheaply made instant photos, in the nineteen-sixties, allowed children to seize a means of production, and the arrival of the Internet gave them an unprecedented degree of self-determination … Humans have always tried to cope with the difficulty of memory, to turn it ‘from an intolerable horror to something which is reassuringly innocuous and familiar.’ Social media just makes us more adept at it … such media can prevent those who wish to break with their past from doing so cleanly. We’re not the only ones posting; our friends and family chronicle our lives, usually without our consent. Growing up online, … might impede our ability to edit memories, cull what needs to be culled, and move on.”
♥ They Paid $42 for a SoulCycle Ride, Not for Trump (The New York Times): Stephen Ross, the chairman of the Related Companies, whose principals own majority stakes in SoulCycle and the fitness club chain Equinox, was … to host a fund-raiser at his Hamptons home for President Trump … Amid a summer of division and dissent over treatment of migrants, political rhetoric and gun safety, the anger that has roiled 2020 campaign events and social media feeds has landed with a barbell’s thud on the fitness studios … The controversy may seem trivial in the scope of things, especially to people directly affected by the news of the past week … But many bystanders, engaged or enraged by those events, were troubled by the financial connection to SoulCycle and Equinox and a president whose policies they do not support … news that Mr. Ross is supporting Mr. Trump’s re-election efforts was met with a swift outcry on social media, with indoor cyclers and club members vowing to boycott. Both companies have significant customer bases in liberal cities and promote themselves as safe havens for the L.G.B.T. community and stalwarts against bigotry.
♥ Uber and Lyft Suggest the Days of Cheap Rides Could Be Over (Wired): “Lyft officials told investors they had raised prices on routes in some cities in June, and touted the company’s upcoming pricing algorithms, which they hinted might be able to more precisely predict what riders might be willing to pay for a ride. Lyft said those pricing changes would boost revenue per rider by next quarter. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that his company’s rivalry with the other big San Francisco-based ride-hailing company had cooled—for now. ‘We and Lyft are big-time competitors here and have been for some period of time, but for now we’re seeing generally, category positions that are stable … We are focused on improving profitability in this market.'”
♥ The Endless, Invisible Persuasion Tactics of the Internet (The Atlantic): “Dark patterns are the often unseen web-design choices that trick users into handing over more time, money, or attention than they realize … The most common dark pattern is scarcity bias: Put an item in your cart, and you’ll be served a message claiming ‘Only eight left in stock!’ thereby urging you to buy immediately before the item is gone. But by analyzing webpages’ scripts and plug-ins, the researchers found that in many cases, these numbers are either generated randomly or set to decrease according to a schedule.”
♥ The Secret History of ‘Easter Eggs’ (The New York Times): “Over the years, Easter eggs in tech products have largely disappeared … Like any other software, Easter eggs, so named for the hunt to find them, cost time and money to design, build and debug. Why would a tech company develop features it can’t advertise or even reveal? In the beginning, the answer was revenge … These days, Easter eggs are anything but acts of defiance. They are meant to entertain, to lure potential hires, to pay tribute to executives — or to amuse the programmers themselves.”
♥ Hundreds of new styles have been added to Nordstrom’s sale section. Some picks:
♥ Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class (The Wall Street Journal): “Consumer debt, not counting mortgages, has climbed to $4 trillion—higher than it has ever been even after adjusting for inflation … Student debt totaled about $1.5 trillion last year, exceeding all other forms of consumer debt except mortgages. Auto debt is up nearly 40% adjusting for inflation in the last decade to $1.3 trillion. And the average loan for new cars is up an inflation-adjusted 11% in a decade, to $32,187 … The debt surge is … a byproduct of low borrowing costs the Federal Reserve engineered after the financial crisis to get the economy moving. It has reshaped both borrowers and lenders. Consumers increasingly need it, companies increasingly can’t sell their goods without it, and the economy, which counts on consumer spending for more than two-thirds of GDP, would struggle without a plentiful supply of credit.”
♥ Schizophrenia Runs in My Family. What Does That Mean for Me and My Baby? (The New York Times): “I am unbelievably, undeniably ordinary. This is a fact … that surprises many people who know my family history, but no one more than me. This should all be reassuring, but somehow, at least sometimes, it has the opposite effect. I’m often unnerved by this calm. It’s as if I’m walking on eggshells, certain that I have not escaped disaster and that disaster is merely running late to its own party, allowing me false comfort only so that the pain of its capture will be greater. It is around the corner, waiting for me. Yet deep down, I know that it isn’t. There’s nothing there.”
♥ 22 Percent of Millennials Say They Have “No Friends” (Vox): “A recent poll from YouGov … found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed … Furthermore, 22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had ‘no close friends,’ 30 percent said they have ‘no best friends,’ and 25 percent said they have no acquaintances …In comparison, just 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of baby boomers say they have no friends.”
♥ Liberty? Tony? Pretzel? New York Officials Puzzle Over Fare Card Name (The Wall Street Journal): “In the end, the team settled on OMNY, for One Metro New York .. OMNY, one of the most advanced transit payment systems in the world, is now in use at 16 subway stations and on Staten Island buses. The plan is to roll it out across New York City’s subway system and buses, as well as at two commuter railroads, by 2021. By then, eight million daily riders will be able to travel across the region by holding a contactless bank card, smart card or smartphone to a reader.”
♥ 8chan, Megaphone for Gunmen, Has Gone Dark. ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says Its Creator. (The New York Times): “In recent months, 8chan has become a go-to resource for violent extremists. At least three mass shootings this year — including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. — have been announced in advance on the site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.”
♥ Recently purchased: Tory Burch Gigi T Logo Sandals, Topshop Bardot Spot Print Dress, endless rose Polka Dot Mini Dress, Tory Burch Pleated Check Mini Skirt, and Ann Taylor Belted Marina Pant In Glen Plaid.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
