+ The ‘It’ Coat This Winter Is … a Pasta Puffer? (The New York Times): “The farfalle has become Rachel Antonoff’s best-selling print, and the jacket — which retails for $425 — has sold out three times since it was introduced at the end of 2021 … It’s not unheard-of for outerwear to develop a cult following … But the pasta puffer seems more niche … Rental companies have also played a role in the pasta puffer’s ubiquity. The coat has been rented more than 1,000 times through the clothing rental service Nuuly. On Rent the Runway, rentals of the coat grew by 10 percent from fall and winter of 2021 to the same period in 2022 — a rarity for any item of clothing … But many pasta puffer enthusiasts also acknowledged the jacket’s downsides: It’s not very warm. It’s boxy. It’s expensive … But with a coat like this, it’s not really about the fit. It’s about the joy.”
+ At the Home of Zara, Fast and Slow Fashion Collide (The Business of Fashion): “Inditex’s massive output of garments was a factor behind the European Union’s pledge last year to reverse the ‘overproduction and overconsumption of clothing.‘ It wants all clothes sold in the bloc to be ‘long-lived and recyclable’ by 2030 … Around 5.8 million tonnes of textile products are discarded every year in the EU, equivalent to 11 kg per person. A truckload of textile products is landfilled or incinerated somewhere in the world every second … Inditex had 565,027 tonnes of garments on the market in 2021, more than the 528,797 tonnes in 2018 … The company may disclose a further increase when its 2022 annual report is published next month. So far, Inditex shows no sign of slowing production. But it is changing some processes, aiming to reduce its environmental impact while sticking to its strategy of regular new ranges.”
+ What Happened to Birchbox? (Retail Dive): “Birchbox … was acquired by women’s health company FemTec Health in October 2021 for around $45 million … Birchbox and its parent company are … struggling to pay some vendors … Prior to its acquisition by FemTec, Birchbox was already showing signs of strain … Getting acquired by FemTec offered Birchbox a chance to grow with fresh funding … Since the acquisition, though, Birchbox’s problems have grown. In the company’s most recent Instagram post dated Nov. 7, the company told its more than 520,000 followers that it was facing unprecedented setbacks and was searching for a viable solution. Around the same time, FemTec Health was reportedly considering bankruptcy … FemTec offered creditors the option to receive FemTec shares instead of payment.”
+ Meet the Superusers Behind IMDb, the Internet’s Favorite Movie Site (Wired): “Although there are over 83 million registered users of IMDb in the world, only a small fraction of those ever add information to it. That group includes actors adding their own credits; production companies filing content for their productions; and most of all, individual volunteers contributing wherever they see fit. The top 300 contributors … are memorialized annually in the site’s Hall of Fame for the extraordinary amounts of time and energy they spend helping build the preeminent reference source for film and TV. Beyond that, they don’t get public recognition; they are largely pseudonymous and don’t divulge much about themselves on the site. They don’t get paid, either … And yet their contributions have an incalculable reach across the web—viewed by millions on IMDb, repurposed on Wikipedia and TikTok, copied into movie event listings, cited in scholarly articles … IMDb … is sourced from a crowd, but a crowd where everyone works alone. It’s a grassroots project, and yet it’s owned by one of the biggest companies in the world. It’s a repository of knowledge premised on the idea of giving credit where credit is due—but its own story is less frequently acknowledged.”
+ What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In? (The New York Times): “Calling out may be described as a sister to dragging, cousin to problematic, and one of the many things that can add up to cancellation … Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect … That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone (!) to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen-shotting or demanding one ‘“‘do better‘”‘ without explaining how. Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it.”
+ What’s the Value of Viral Fashion? (The Business of Fashion): “Whether it’s dressing celebrities in over-the-top looks, churning out meme-able products, or staging runways shows with clear storytelling hooks, brands have turned to stunts in a fast-paced media environment where competition for attention is more intense than ever … The use of ‘earned media’ metrics that valorise quantity — rather than quality — of online discussion has become pervasive in the fashion industry in recent years, but all buzz isn’t good buzz … For smaller businesses, creating a viral buzz is still often seen as the best way to compete for visibility, with the potential reward outweighing risks.”
+ ‘The Idol’: How HBO’s Next ‘Euphoria’ Became Twisted ‘Torture Porn’ (Rolling Stone): “Though the show was ordered to series in November 2021, it’s been months since HBO gave a concrete update about when The Idol will debut. One source with knowledge of the production schedule tells Rolling Stone the network initially hoped for The Idol to premiere last fall, taking over the Sunday time slot left open by House of the Dragon, which ended in October. Yet three teaser trailers have come and gone, and HBO can still only offer a vague “later this year” … Now, production sources tell Rolling Stone that even they are in the dark on when the show will make it to air, and have little idea about what the final version will look like … the drastic delay was caused by Levinson taking over as director and scrapping the nearly-finished $54-75 million project to rewrite and reshoot the entire thing … ‘It was a show about a woman who was finding herself sexually, turned into a show about a man who gets to abuse this woman and she loves it.’ “
+ Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S. (The New York Times): “Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country … Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. This labor force has been slowly growing for almost a decade, but it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down … These are not children who have stolen into the country undetected. The federal government knows they are in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring sponsors will support them and protect them from trafficking or exploitation. But as more and more children have arrived, the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults. Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors. While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children … Far from home, many of these children are under intense pressure to earn money. They send cash back to their families while often being in debt to their sponsors for smuggling fees, rent and living expenses … The growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance. Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And H.H.S. behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine … Now, just a third of migrant children are going to their parents. A majority are sent to other relatives, acquaintances or even strangers … Nearly half are coming from Guatemala, where poverty is fueling a wave of migration. Parents know that they would be turned away at the border or quickly deported, so they send their children in hopes that remittances will come back … In the last two years alone, more than 250,000 children have entered the United States by themselves.”
+ Americans in Their 30s Are Piling On Debt (The Wall Street Journal): “American millennials in their 30s have racked up debt at a historic clip since the pandemic. Their total balances hit more than $3.8 trillion in the fourth quarter, a 27% jump from late 2019. That is the steepest increase of any age group.”
+ The Hidden Epidemic of Brain Injuries From Domestic Violence (The New York Times): “The danger of mild brain injuries — an impact on or a shaking of the head that alters consciousness — grew in public awareness in the early 2000s, when neurologists began examining the brains of deceased football players and other former athletes and noticed a spike in traumatic brain injuries among military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan … Researchers showed that even slight blows to the head, when repeated often enough, could result in long-term neurodegenerative disease. These discoveries led to improved safeguards for athletes … Head injuries had to be fully evaluated by doctors before players returned to the game, ensuring that the brain could heal without further damage, a process that sometimes takes days, weeks or months. But even with this heightened awareness, few connected the experiences of women who endured similar or even higher levels of bodily violence to traumatic brain injuries — not even in the shelters to which they fled … The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in five women in the United States experience severe intimate-partner violence over the course of their lifetimes, resulting in physical injuries, most commonly to the head, neck and face. Concussions are likely to appear with alarming regularity. Every year, hundreds of concussions occur in the N.F.L.; thousands occur in the military. Valera’s estimated number of annual brain injuries among survivors of domestic abuse: 1.6 million. But unlike injuries in sports, war or accidents, domestic assaults happen almost entirely out of view. Victims themselves may not be able to process or remember what happened, and their assaults are often not reported to the police … A similar study of domestic-abuse survivors from 2002 found that nearly all respondents had been knocked in the head, with 40 percent of them losing consciousness. ‘“‘The frequency and severity of symptoms reported here would make it difficult to think through or cope with the complex, often formidable organizational tasks required for battered women to stop the violence, disengage from violent partners and/or establish independent lives’ … anyone who worked closely with these survivors bear these difficulties in mind to help contextualize frustrating behavior and emphasized that neurological disease may not be resolved with psychosocial interventions.”
+ Life After Food? (The Cut): “Ozempic and its cousin drugs, Wegovy and Mounjaro — all, medically speaking, GLP-1 receptor agonists — are reshaping more than just waistlines. In tweaking appetites, they tweak our whole relationship to food, to bodies, and to ourselves and the psychology that links all three …Although it’s been approved and prescribed since 2017, the buy-in of Hollywood, openly or not, took Ozempic from medicine to status symbol. The message that dramatic weight loss is now readily, effortlessly available for those who can afford it spread across text chains and friend groups along with referrals to willing prescribers. Not since Botox, and before that Viagra, has a drug brand become so well known so quickly.”
+ The End of the English Major (The New Yorker): “… from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates … saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils. During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent … What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.”
+ ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes (The New York Times): “Logan needed to get home to meet with a tutor, so she headed to the subway. With the end of her senior year in sight, and the pressures of adulthood looming, she has also pondered what leaving high school might mean for her Luddite ways … On a leafy street in Cobble Hill, she stepped into her family’s townhouse, where she was greeted by a goldendoodle named Phoebe, and she rushed upstairs to her room. The décor reflected her interests: There were stacks of books, graffitied walls and, in addition to the sewing machine, a manual Royal typewriter and a Sony cassette player. In the living room downstairs, her father, Seth Lane, an executive who works in I.T., sat beside a fireplace.”
+ Recently purchased: J. Crew Emilie Patch-Pocket Sweater Lady Jacket in Stripe, Free People Kimmi Cotton Blend Top, Franco Sarto Katherine Knee High Boot, LAM GALLERY Clear Purse with Chain, Cole Haan GrandPrø Rally Canvas Penny Loafer, J. Crew Semi-Circle Rattan Clutch, and Sensi Studio Bow Pouch.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
