 |
| Forever 21 Faux Leather Flap-Top Backpack |
▪ Forever 21 is running a store-wide 20% off sale with code VIP20. Shipping is also free on all orders until Sunday. My picks: Lace-Up Sweater Dress, Open-Shoulder Maxi Dress, Chiffon Flounce Crop Top, Scoop Neck Bodysuit, Contemporary Crossover Sweater, Lace and Mesh Scalloped Teddy, and Distressed Denim Jacket.
▪ ACLU Will No Longer Defend Hate Groups Protesting With Firearms (The Wall Street Journal): “The revised policy marries the 97-year-old civil-rights group’s First Amendment work with the organization’s stance on firearms, which aligns with many municipalities and states that bar protesters from carrying weapons … The federal courts are currently split on whether the Second Amendment guarantees a right to carry outside the home. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles, said federal judges may deem protest areas to be sensitive places, like schools, where the U.S. Supreme Court has said governments can impose firearm restrictions … The ACLU’s defense of pro-fascist groups during World War II created a rift on the organization’s board, and the group’s support for relaxing campaign-finance restrictions in the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruffled staff.“
▪ Instagram’s Kevin Systrom Wants to Clean Up the Internet (Wired): “Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, was at Disneyland last June when he decided the internet was a cesspool that he had to clean up … Instagram is a bit like Disneyland—if every now and then the seven dwarfs hollered at Snow White for looking fat … when Systrom returned from VidCon to Instagram’s headquarters … he told his colleagues that they had a new mission. Instagram was going to become a kind of social media utopia: the nicest darn place online … To Systrom, it’s pretty simple: Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to shitpost. His network isn’t a public square; it’s a platform people can choose to use or not.“
▪ The End of Season Tickets (The Ringer): “NFL insiders will tell you that their season-ticket-holder base is at almost 80 percent of capacity. NBA insiders peg that number around 70 percent. But the dirty little secret in sports—something even some owners don’t know—is that in many cases, the majority of a team’s season-ticket buyers are ticket brokers.“
▪ America Is Struggling to Sort Out Where ‘Violence’ Begins and Ends (The New York Times): “When people frame speech as a kind of violence, they’re often trying to turn that kind of invisible, impersonal violence into something more visceral—identifying the individuals responsible and confronting them directly, sometimes physically. This is one predictable result of expanding the category of violence to include words and beliefs: It begins to feel reasonable, or even like a form of self-defense, to respond to words and beliefs with physical action.“
▪ A select edit of summer styles in the ASOS clearance section are an extra 15% off (prices reflect discount). My sale picks: Little White Lies Rachel Lace Bib Detail Dress, Kendall + Kylie Flutter Lace Up Romper, Liquorish Pineapple Print Maxi Beach Dress, Liquorish Layered Lace Dress With Frill, Chorus Cropped Boxy Mutton Sleeve Denim Jacket, Moss Copenhagen Asymmetric T-Shirt Dress, and Mink Pink Float Denim Wrap Mini Skirt.
▪ End of the Checkout Line: the Looming Crisis for American Cashiers (The Guardian): “A recent analysis by Cornerstone Capital Group suggests that 7.5m retail jobs – the most common type of job in the country – are at ‘high risk of computerization’, with the 3.5m cashiers likely to be particularly hard hit.“
▪ A Cancer Conundrum: Too Many Drug Trials, Too Few Patients (The New York Times): “there is a lot of exuberant rush to market … And we are squandering our most precious resource — patients.“
▪ The Alt-Right Is Drunk On Bad Readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis Were Too. (Vox): “The alt-right renounces Christianity but insists on defending Christendom against nonwhites. But that’s not Nietzsche; that’s just racism … Nietzsche was interested in ideas, in freedom of thought. To the extent that he knocked down the taboos of his day, it was to free up the creative powers of the individual.”
▪ Who Are the Antifa? (The Washington Post): “Militant anti-fascist or ‘antifa’ (pronounced ANtifa) is a radical pan-leftist politics of social revolution applied to fighting the far right. Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead they advocate popular opposition to fascism as we witnessed in Charlottesville.“
▪ Want to Be Happy? Buy More Takeout and Hire a Maid, Study Suggests (The New York Times): “People who spent money to buy themselves time, such as by outsourcing disliked tasks, reported greater overall life satisfaction … despite its benefits, the practice of buying time is not as popular as one might expect … Even among more than 800 Dutch millionaires surveyed, all of whom surely could afford to do so, only a slight majority spent money on timesaving tasks.“
▪ All sale styles are an extra 30% off (no code needed; discount applies in cart) at Anthropologie. Shipping is free on orders over $150 for AnthroPerks members (membership is free). My picks: Riona Embroidered Dress, Scarlett Kimono, Crochet Mini Dress, Anastasi Smocked Dress, Lawn Party Midi Dress, Anika Lace Dress, and Gemma Floral Dress.
▪ Untuckit Strikes a Chord With Self-Explanatory Men’s Wear (The New York Times): “Untuckit … was an idea so ludicrously obvious that no high-paid marketing genius had bothered to think of it … Turbocharged by an infusion of $30 million in venture capital, Untuckit has gone from an e-commerce site shipping out of a spare bedroom in Mr. Riccobono’s apartment in Hoboken, N.J., to a brand worn by high-profile guys like the hockey star Patrick Kane, thanks in part to a steady flow of television commercials on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC … with Untuckit, shirt length, down to the millimeter, was the whole point. If it’s too long, it’s like any shirt. And if it’s too short, it looks ridiculous.“
▪ Why Suburban Schools Are Inflating Kids’ Grades (The Atlantic): “Those enrolled in private and suburban public high schools are being awarded higher grades … It’s not that those students have been getting smarter. Even as their grades were rising, their scores on the SAT college-entrance exam went down, not up.“
▪ How Much Protein Do We Need? (The New York Times): “The recommended intake for a healthy adult is 46 grams of protein a day for women and 56 grams for men.” (Related Read: “Can You Get Too Much Protein?“)
▪ Netflix Co-Founder’s Crazy Plan: Pay $10 a Month, Go to the Movies All You Want (Bloomberg): “[Mitch] Lowe, an early Netflix Inc. executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company’s movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens … MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people’s movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. … Ted Farnsworth, chief executive officer at Helios and Matheson, said the goal is to amass a large base of customers and collect data on viewing behaviors. That information could then be used to eventually target advertisements or other marketing materials to subscribers.“
▪ Let’s Hear It For the Four-Hour Working Day (The Guardian): “How much proper brainwork … should you aim to get done in one day? … the answer isn’t some sophisticated version of: ‘It depends.’ The answer is four hours.“
▪ Fleeing to the Mountains (The New York Times): “The Trump administration lifted a moratorium on new coal mining leases on public land, it is drawing up plans to reduce wilderness protected as national monuments and it is rapidly opening up additional public lands to coal mining and oil and gas drilling … When public lands are lost — or mined in ways that scar the landscape — something has been lost forever on our watch. A public good has been privatized, and our descendants have been robbed.“
▪ Recently purchased: Gucci GG Marmont Pearl Logo Leather Satchel, J. Crew Signet Flap Bag, BP Maddy Mule, Vans Old Skool Sneaker, Victoria’s Secret Lounge Jogger, and Lou & Grey Strappy Signaturesoft Jumpsuit.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
