(CNN) Whats in a word?

A lot, if you ask the folks at Merriam-Webster.

Merriam-Websters 2019word of the yearisthey.Last yearsword wasjustice. And theyear before that, it wasfeminism.

Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer and Merriam-Websters editor at large, said that Merriam-Webster doesnt set out to capture the zeitgeist in its words of the year lists, like some otherdictionariesandlinguistic organizationsdo.

Instead, Sokolowski said that Merriam-Websters word of the year is determined by data: it must have seen a significant increase in lookups on the dictionarys website and app from previous years.

But taken together, these words show how we grappled with issues of political ideology, social justice, and identity politics.

They remind us about the biggest news stories of the past 10 years and how many of them havent gone away.

And they tell us about the broader shifts happening in our culture and big ideas that inspire us.

What it tells me is that words matter that people pay attention, Sokolowski said. People want to find more nuance, more history, more description, more accuracy in the definition.

Heres a look back at the past decade, as defined by Merriam-Websters words of the year.

2010:austerity Enforced or extreme economy, by one definition. This word kept coming up innews reportsabout the economic panic and protests triggered by thedebt crisis in Greece, referring to pay cuts in the public sector, tax increases and other measures intended toprevent economic collapse.

2011:pragmatic At the time,Merriam-Webster wrotethat the word could suggest a national mood, an admirable quality that people value in themselves and wish for in others, especially in their leaders and their policies. But in hindsight, Sokolowski said its just a word people look up a lot.

2012:socialism, capitalism This was an election year, and the word socialism was often thrown aroundin reference toObamacare, as well as after party conventions and presidential debates. And when people looked up socialism, they usually looked up capitalism too.

2013:science It might seem odd that people were looking upsuch a basic word, until you remember theconversations we were havingthat year. Federal funding cuts threatened the future of innovation. Discoveries about theHiggs bosonand successes incloning human stem cellsprompted philosophical and ethical debates. Climate change was treated like a subjectup for debate, and science itself was facing acrisis of skepticism.

2014:culture Another extremely broad word. Merriam-Webster said it conveyed a kind of academic attention to systemic behavior, and allowed us to isolate and talk about ideas, issues, and groups. News outlets covered hookup culture,rape culture,car culture the list goes on.

2015:-ism So this one isnttechnicallya word. But Merriam-Webster said the suffixrepresents a group of wordsthat were collectively looked up millions of times: socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism. With Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump announcing presidential runs, and attacks like the one at a South Carolina churchcalling into questionthe definition of terrorism, its easy to see why.

2016:surreal Merriam-Webster said peoplelook this word up spontaneouslyin moments of shock and surprise, defining it as marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream. The 2016 election comes to mind, but the dictionary also saw spikes after the Brexit vote, the Pulse shooting and Princes death.

2017:feminism Byone definition, it means organized activity on behalf of womens rights and interests. This was the year of the#MeToo movement, ofwomens marchesaround the world. It was the year Wonder Woman and The Handmaids Tale captivated viewers on screens big and small. Coincidence? Merriam-Webstersays not.

2018:justice The word wasat the centerof some of the years biggest stories: the Mueller investigation, Brett Kavanaughs hearing in Congress, criminal justice reform, as well as the fights for racial, economic and gender equality.

2019:they We talkeda lot about pronounsthis year, and Merriam-Webster noticed. The word is increasingly used to refer to someone whose gender identity is nonbinary, showing up in email signatures, Twitter bios and conference name tags. In September, Merriam-Webster added that definition to its dictionary,noting thattheres no doubt that its use is established in the English language.

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What Merriam-Websters words of the year say about the past decade - WHNT News 19

Always' #LikeAGirl campaign.

YouTube

This decade, the ad campaigns that mattered did more than just try to sell stuff.

If there's a thread connecting the most memorable campaigns of the last 10 years, it's that big risks can pay off. Campaigns like Coca-Cola's "It's Beautiful" or Procter & Gamble's "#LikeAGirl" tried and succeeded in changing cultural conversation.

Here are some of the marketing campaigns that helped define the marketing and advertising world during this decade and continue to have an impact today.

What does it mean to do something like a girl? In 2014, a three-minute video from Procter & Gamble's menstrual hygiene brand Always asked a series of young people to act out various activities "like a girl." The young adult women and men flail their arms ridiculously or coif their hair as they pretend to run.

Then, the question is posed to younger children, who interpret it in a completely different way. When asked, "What does it mean to run like a girl?" one answers, "It means means run fast as you can."

A 60-second version of the video, done with Publicis Groupe's Leo Burnett, marked the brand's Super Bowl debut, and it kicked off a cultural phenomenon. The three-minute version of the YouTube video has nearly 68 million views today.

"This is the type of campaign you put in a time capsule to give future generations a read on gender stereotypes in the 2010s," said John Osborn, the CEO of Omnicom Group media agency OMD USA. "In taking a phrase that people have used often, and used without thinking about what we were really saying, it transcended any one brand or product to create a much needed conversation around gender stereotyping."

It also felt personal, Osborn added.

"As much as this appealed to me on a professional level, it also really struck a chord for me as a father," he said. "It made me ask myself if I've ever put limits on my daughter because of her gender. That kind of reaction is the gold standard for a great campaign."

Scott Goodson, CEO of cultural movement firm StrawberryFrog, added that the campaign had the quality of galvanizing people to do something.

"It's relevant and provocative and full of meaning," he said.

President Barack Obama buys ice cream for his daughters Malia and Sasha at Pleasant Pops during Small Business Saturday on November 28, 2015, in Washington, DC. Obama to urge easing 401(k) rules for small businesses.

Getty Images

Credit card company American Express started the "Small Business Saturday" campaign in the dregs of a recession in November 2010. The company said it started the movement "to encourage people to Shop Small and bring more holiday shopping to small businesses."

It became official in 2011, when the Senate passed a resolution.

Now a veritable shopping holiday (celebrated even by former President Barack Obama) with name recognition that borders on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the campaign transcended a company and a moment. American Express estimates Small Business Saturday spending has reached $103 billion since the day it began.

Goodson said Small Business Saturday "took a stand for Main Street and small business, folks who never have any support and who find themselves in the direct line of fire from the Amazons of the world," he said. "Amex SBS is purpose marketing that works inside small companies and among consumers inside out. It takes the boring traditional credit card advertising approach and turns it into activism and a movement that millions want to join."

Patagonia's "The President Stole Your Land."

Generally speaking, brands like to keep their distance from politics. But in 2017, outdoor apparel company Patagonia changed the homepage of its website to display a sinister message: "The President Stole Your Land." It continued: "In an illegal move, the president just reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. This is the largest elimination of protected land in American history."

The company said it also planned to sue the Trump administration over the matter.

"Not only did they cater to their target, but they didn't lose the others," said Kristen Cavallo, CEO of The Martin Agency, which is owned by Interpublic Group of Cos. She said though the message created a lot of drama, it probably helped pave the way for Nike and Wieden & Kennedy's "Dream Crazy" campaign with Colin Kaepernick.

"They put everything on the line for their values, and they risked everything, and they didn't lose," she said. "That actually became a case study; that clients could take much bigger risks without the fear of so much backlash."

Burger King had perhaps the most dramatic brand turnaround of the decade, from the edge of death to the center of the cultural zeitgeist.

The burger chain's old advertising involved a plastic-looking Burger King crawling into consumers' beds to feed them burgers. In 2009, The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wrote that "to the surprise of nobody, Burger King's horrible, creepy advertising campaign is not working, and the company finds itself falling further behind McDonald's... " But now it's a powerful turnaround story.

In the last few years, Burger King has done a lot of crazy stuff to right the ship.

It ran a television ad that prompted Google voice devices to pull up Wikipedia and start listing the ingredients of a Whopper. It ran a "Whopper Detour" campaign, which offered 1 cent Whopper burgers to consumers who were geographically near a McDonald's restaurant. It ran a limited edition collection of "moody" meals for Mental Health Awareness Month, ribbing McDonald's by calling them "Unhappy Meals."

In Sweden, the restaurant launched a "50/50 menu," which meant consumers who choose to order from the menu would be randomly served a plant-based or regular meat patty. Consumers had to guess which one they had been served, then could scan their box to see if they were correct.

"I think they have done more than any other brand to define modern marketing," Cavallo said. She noted that the brand employs social listening tools to show up in cultural moments.

Even Burger King's competitors have been jealous at times. Deborah Wahl, former chief marketing officer of McDonald's and now global CMO of General Motors admitted it.

"Despite being a former competitor, I love what [CMO] Fernando [Machado] demonstrated with the Whopper Detour," she told CNBC in an email. "He tackled a business problem, used marketing technology as a solution, and framed it up in a customer relevant and compelling engagement that drove results."

Coca-Cola's 2014 "It's Beautiful" was simple in concept; the minute-long spot, done with Wieden & Kennedy, shows scenes of people of all backgrounds all over America with a version of "America the Beautiful" that is sung in a variety of languages.

As innocuous as that might sound, backlash to the ad was swift (Glenn Beck argued that it was "in your face" and intended to divide people).

Kasha Cacy, global CEO of Engine, said the spot was "so, so in their heritage" and was reflective of where the country was in that moment.

The company re-aired the ad during a pregame commercial break before the 2017 Super Bowl, with the tagline "Together is Beautiful," right when President Donald Trump's travel ban order had been announced.

Cacy said it's another example of a company that took a risk on something and had the social media machinery behind the scenes to manage the conversation.

"I don't think another brand could have done it as well as they did," she said. "As governments become incapable to make anything happen, there's this expectation that brands are going to fill that void."

"Imagine the Possibilities" campaign from Barbie

YouTube

Barbie doesn't look the way she used to. She also isn't just some pretty girl in a skirt.

Mattel was grappling with what consumers saw as being dated and out of touch with the women of today. The brand in 2015 launched "Imagine the Possibilities," a viral video with Omnicom Group's BBDO that showed little girls taking over the jobs they dream of, and what the company said was hidden-camera reactions.

"As society evolved, Barbie and Mattel were criticized for the make and look of Barbie dolls and the influence of that on young girls," said Alicia Tillman, chief marketing officer of software giant SAP. "They introduced this campaign to respond to the criticism and demonstrate the positive impact Barbie has on imaginations based on how consumers were using Barbie."

Not long after, in 2016, Mattel said a new line of dolls would come in a range of body types, skin tones, eye colors and hairstyles.

Finally, little girls' fantasies could look more like reality.

"It is a beautiful campaign that demonstrates the true purpose of Barbie and Mattel and will forever be one of my very favorites," Tillman said.

Colin Kaepernick in a new ad for Nike.

Source: Nike

Shares of Nike plummeted right after it released its ad campaign with Wieden & Kennedy for the 30th anniversary of "Just Do It," featuring former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The football player gained attention after he began protesting police brutality against African Americans by "taking a knee" during the national anthem in 2016.

But in the aftermath, sales exploded, despite a social media campaign to boycott Nike.

More importantly, Nike solidified its position as a brand willing to put it all on the line to show what it felt mattered.

The way Cacy sees it, "There were very few things that capture the attention of everyone the way that did."

Read this article:

Nike Kaepernick ad will be among the most memorable from the 2010s - CNBC

"I like being a mess. It's who I am."

When most think of Ally McBeal, they think of skirts and dancing babies. That's fair. Those are the elements the zeitgeist most ran with. They're the same elements that made so many people from dismissive male critics to the most ardent feminists view the show as damaging drivel featuring the most heinous villain in all entertainment: the at-times unlikable and selfish woman.

The language used to discuss just how much they detested this character was violent and over the top to the point of parody. Glenda Cooper wrote this in the Independent: "I can't help it. I just hate Ally McBeal with a pure vengeance. Not the series I have great affection for Richard Fish, Renee, Elaine et al. I would just find it perfect if they could take the eponymous heroine out of it. A sort of Not Ally McBeal. Or Ally McBeal Without That Irritating Woman ... Show me a shot of Calista Flockhart with that cute little scarf round her neck and I get a Pavlovian reaction. I feel my blood pressure rising and an involuntary snarling at the back of my throat. I want Dancing Baby to stop grooving and squash her." Even a mostly glowing piece from the New York Times was headlined "You Want to Slap Ally McBeal, But Do You Like Her?"

Much of this negative coverage was under the auspices of feminist theory. Entire academic papers were written about the character's potentialnegative impact. And famously, Time magazine featured thiscover:

Ally McBeal: wearer of skirts, haver of sex, killer of feminism. Daenerys Targaryen only wishes her titles could be so powerful.

But beyond what the late-'90smedia portrayed the show to be, or, more accurately, the character (the rest of the show was apparently fine, smacking of "I'd watch a show about/see a movie about/vote for a woman, just not that woman"), Ally McBeal itself and Ally herself was something much different. Both more and less powerful than the covers would have one think. Ally McBeal couldn't destroy an entire social movement. She could barely pull together her life and career, existing in a constant state of frazzle and insecurity, and clinging to the comfort of an inner fantasy world that helped make the real one make a bit more sense. That's why they hated her and that's why I loved her.

"I like being a mess. It's who I am."That line I opened the piece with is what I think of when I think of Ally McBeal. Today, the entertainment world is filled with neurotic women attempting to navigate love and career and society's expectations. I love them all, too, even the ones that same media that saw Ally as some harbinger of Gilead would later write off as "quirkalicious" or "manic pixie dream girls." Like Ally McBeal, these characters all suffer from the same impediment: being women wrong.

Ironically, the public perception and backlash to Ally McBealwas reminiscent of the way female insecurity and anxiety manifests. That we're failing, that we're too much or not enough, that we're causing problems, that we are problems.

Is it any wonder then why Ally repeatedly turns to her fantasies?

Enter the Dancing Baby, the arrows to the heart, and the revenge fantasies against bad men andtelemarketers with poor timingalike.

Using the narrative device of fantasy, something used quite commonly onscreen today, we see Ally's inner fantasies as visual components of the show, and we better understand her and the way her mind works, the way she sees the world. Like so many of us, Ally wants love, wants sex, wants connection, and when those things are difficult she looks inward. Imagination became a respite from her unhappy home life as a child and she turns to it again and again in adulthood.

She's a mess. It's who she is. And the world she creates may be messy, but it's hers. As her best friend and colleague John Cage (Peter MacNicol) says,"At some unconscious level, I think you know that the only world that ultimately won't end up disappointing you is the one you make up."

Maybe that's true of all of us. The real world can be disappointing. Society demands so much, our careers and emotions demand more, and sometimes entire magazines blame you for the downfall of women as a gender. Ally McBeal took all of the things that make existing as a woman hard and gave us a heroine who felt and experienced every bit of it. And yes she was selfish and flighty and wore short skirts. She was a mess. So are a lot of us. Messy, and insecure, and hyperfocused at times on the things that will ultimately hurt us or do us no good. But she was also smart, funny, a true romantic, and a character who deserved better than what she was given.

In another episode, John told Ally, "The world is no longer a romantic place. Some of its people still are, however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win, Ally McBeal."

Here's to not letting the world win, to embracing fantasy, and to remembering Ally McBeal as more than her clothing.

See the article here:

Ally McBeal was ahead of its time in depicting women's inner fantasy life - SYFY WIRE

Early on a late May morning in 2018, Harvey Weinstein shuffled into a downtown Manhattan police precinct. The disgraced mogul was turning himself in to the NYPD for a litany of sex crimes, including rape, a criminal sex act, sex abuse, and sexual misconduct. Hours later, he was arraigned in Manhattans Supreme Court. For many people in attendance (including this writer) and for those watching the events unfold from afar, it was a landmark event the first time Weinstein was forced to publicly face the charges against him from numerous victims. It felt like justice.

But over 18 months later, Weinstein still hasnt been tried, and last week the New York Times reported that Weinstein and the board of the bankrupt Weinstein Company reached a tentative $25 million settlement with dozens of the women who accused him of sexual assault. If the settlement goes through, it would effectively end the majority of lawsuits leveled against him and the company since 2017. The deal would not require Weinstein to admit any wrongdoing, or pay anything out of his own pocket; instead, insurance companies representing TWC would be on the hook for the millions.

Two years after Weinsteins supposed reckoning, its hard not to feel as if hes continuing to evade true justice. And if he does, who else will be able to get off so easily?

However, theres reason to believe that this is not the end of the story. Some of Weinsteins most high-profile accusers including Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, and Salma Hayek are not part of this claim. Neither is Ashley Judd, who has expressed her own desire to take Weinstein to trial. Nor does the settlement include two outstanding criminal cases, including the one that first brought him to court in May 2018.

The settlement is a complex shared payout to more than 30 actresses and former Weinstein employees who have accused the disgraced mogul of hundreds of sexually based crimes, from harassment to rape.Financial settlements can perpetuate the idea that accusers are looking to cash in on accusations, but the truth is when criminal charges arent possible, or are prohibitively expensive, the only recourse can be their assailants pocketbooks.

However, its still galling that Weinstein would personally pay nothing, admit no wrongdoing, and not have to worry about future repercussions for the dozens and dozens of criminal acts.

When Weinstein was outed in October 2017, the impact altered the zeitgeist. Soon, a slew of other heavy-hitters became exiles Brett Ratner, Kevin Spacey, John Lasseter, Bryan Singer as they faced their own exposs.

The response in Hollywood, especially among the industrys most empowered women, was just as seismic. Within days of the first Weinstein stories, the hashtag #MeToo was retrofitted for women abused by the entertainment elite before it circled back to founder Tarana Burkes original intention to shine a light on all stories of sexual abuse. Other outspoken talents created the Times Up campaign to deal with workplace sexual assault, harassment, and inequality first for Hollywood, and then for other industries.

Weinstein appeared in court this week looking feeble. However, he spent the summer appearing around New York City, including a dinner at Cipriani (the location of at least one of his accused sexual assaults) and attending at least two artist events at a Manhattan bar (where he was infamously heckled by a female performer) all without the assistance of a walker or a cane. Two handlers navigated him into the courtroom and if it was a bid for pity, it didnt work: His bail was raised to $5 million after he was accused of mishandling his ankle monitor.

There is still the possibility of a real legal reckoning, the kind of due process that has yet to truly hit the #MeToo movement. And no matter what happens, the movement goes far beyond just one man and his alleged crimes and punishments that may or may not ever come.

Two years ago, there was a cultural shift that forced greater awareness of sexual harassment and assault throughout the industry and well beyond it. The revolution might not be here yet, but the conversations continue and show no signs of letting up. Even if Weinstein wins one battle, hes already lost the war.

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The Harvey Weinstein Settlement Shows He Still Hasnt Faced a True Legal Reckoning - IndieWire

Students need to be mentally and emotionally well in order to learn at full capacity.

As much money and effort have been put into demonstrating that, the need to consider the whole child in education was never really the subject of debate.

Nobodys in favor of half-child education, quipped Chester Finn, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute senior fellow, during a discussion of social-emotional learning, or SEL, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

To his point, the goal of the Dec. 10 conversation at the conservative think tank among a high-profile panel of education researchers, policy people and advocates was not to debate whether social-emotional learning is necessary, but whether the movement swiftly building behind it is the most effective way to deliver on its promises.

Rick Hess, moderator and AEIs director of education policy studies, wondered if, as with other reforms, the enthusiasm for social-emotional learning at the national level would end up turning ideas into something they were never intended to be.

To prevent that, panelists agreed that the quickly growing field needs to carefully balance local priorities and values with instruction rooted in the more universally accepted science of human development that underpins SEL and its goals of teaching students skills like self-regulation, collaboration, social awareness and empathy.

Panelists pointed to standardized testing and Common Core as top-down reforms born out of widespread agreement that high standards and consistency from school to school were inarguably good. Once put into practice locally, however, they were plagued by controversy, resentment and unintended consequences.

Hess mused that social-emotional learning could go the same way if shoddy vendors and insufficient training opened the door for more political and ideological motivation to creep in.

If social-emotional learning became a bastardized version of itself, a cheap tack-on to academic curriculum, Finn argued that it may be no more than a distraction from academics. An Aspen Institute report found that social-emotional learning, when properly executed, improves academic outcomes, but Finn pointed out that the length and complexity of that report alludes to how difficult fidelity might be to achieve. If overtaken by ideologues, he predicted, SEL would find itself with a cadre of enemies.

Tim Shriver, one of the founders of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), might share Finns and Hesss concern for quality, but he doesnt see SEL as a negotiable value-add or a volatile movement waiting to fall into the wrong hands. Shriver sees social-emotional learning as inevitable, even if it cant be done perfectly.

Children are growing as emotional and social beings influenced by their environments all the time, he said. Many of the issues panelists pointed to as being on the rise among kids depression, suicide and bullying demonstrate what fills the void when instruction rooted in developmental science is absent.

Anybody who thinks the way weve done it is working is not paying attention to kids, Shriver said. We dont have a choice as to whether we have a social and emotional learning program in our school. We have a choice as to whether its any good.

To reach good, panelists said, requires governments, schools and funders to embrace a slow, intensely local roll-out of social and emotional learning, beginning with teachers. Not only would this help the quality of the programs as teachers have time to properly train and develop, they said, it would also address another great risk with social-emotional learning community disconnect.

This happens when local teachers and parents are not included in the conversation, said Devin Carlson, a University of Oklahoma researcher and associate director for education at the National Institute of Risk and Resilience, and community engagement, so far, has not been a strength of education reformers. These movements, he said, have a history of promising one thing the dignity of high expectations, for instance and delivering another such as constant test prep.

Both funders and governmental agencies usually drive things at a scale and speed that steamrolls communities, panelists agreed. In the rollout of the Common Core, as Karen Nussle, president of Conservative Leaders for Education, recalled, communities were left out of the conversation on why such a change was needed. Teachers and parents confused by, for instance, new ways of doing math unified against The Man, she said. The federal zeitgeist had failed to justify itself to them.

Repeating that with SEL would be an unforced error, she argued, because grassroots demand for it as a concept is already there. Parents want life skills and pro-social behavior from their kids, she said: They are terrified theyre not doing enough of that at home.

However, as other panelists pointed out, they might not want it in the form of transcendental meditation and Eastern philosophy.

Education is, by nature, formative, much in the same way that religion is, said Jay Greene, chair of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, and if schools begin to encroach on the areas of formation usually addressed by religion character, values, identity its as if were trying to start a new religion.

For nonreligious people, it will be difficult to get the benefits of what is essentially moral education without the icky God part, Greene argued. At the same time, he said, people who do have a religious tradition already have elaborate pedagogy around character that has been refined over centuries and millennia.

Social-emotional learning would be well served to find the common strands between these value systems rather than ignoring them, Greene advised.

To do so will take some reversal of what Teachers Who Pray founder and CEO Marilyn Rhames characterized as a scrubbing of God out of public education. While she did not advocate proselytizing or enforcing moral codes that violate the safety of others such as anti-LGBTQ policies Rhames did point out that to reject the work already being done by churches and places of spiritual guidance would be detrimental, even if those institutions dont reflect the entirety of what social-emotional learning is trying to accomplish.

Faith groups have been doing for generations what schools will require time to learn, Rhames said, pointing to a partnership in Nashville where churches offer afterschool social and emotional learning programs for public school students.

Many teachers have relied on personal faith for their own social and emotional well-being, and they will have a hard time divorcing the two, she said: I believe hope comes from a spiritual place. So does diligence and excellence.

None of the panelists addressed it at length, but the separation of church and state looms large over these types of discussions, with school districts left to contemplate the line between religion as a content subject and religion as an enforced practice.

Although values and goals differ from place to place, the science of learning and human development is not subjective, said Jacqueline Jodl, a University of Virginia professor and former executive director of the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. Social-emotional learning isnt pulled out of thin air, she said.

Panelists gave various examples of SELs universal foundations. Knowing that environment affects learning isnt a value-laden statement. Its scientifically based, they said. The effect of the stress hormone cortisol on the brain is a studied phenomenon, not an opinion.

Ultimately connecting the universal how of the human machinery and the local and personal why of education and identity requires trust, said Bror Saxberg, president of learning science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He acknowledged the role of funders, like CZI, in giving permission to slow down and build that trust one community at a time.

The catch-22 for social-emotional learning is that the more success it sees, the more momentum could push it in the direction of the sweeping education reforms of years past. But it was exactly those funding tsunamis, bickering think tanks and cramped timelines that gave rise to grassroots movements against standardized testing and Common Core.

Better community engagement now, before mandates and assessments are imminent, could keep the grassroots on the pro-SEL side, Shriver said.

If we play the old game, were in trouble.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to the American Enterprise Institute and toThe 74.

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How to Avoid the Ghost of the Common Core in Social-Emotional Learning's Rollout? Emphasize Local Control and Community Connection, Experts Say - The...

Sat Maharaj -

EDMUND NARINE

SATNARAYAN MAHARAJ, tenacious fighter for Hindu equal rights in a hostile Afrocentric society, has departed; passed on to join the pantheon of TTs most illustrious ethnocentric promoters, foremost among them Eric Williams, Rudranath Capildeo, Bhadase Maraj, men reacting to zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, who could see only the empowerment of their own ethnic communities as compared to a quest for the illusive, all-inclusive and harmonious TT we so desire and truly deserve.

Maharaj was born April 17, 1931, 86 years after the Fatel Razack sailed from Calcutta to drop anchor in the Gulf of Paria on May 30, 1845, to unload the first human cargo of Hindus and Muslims destined for cane-cutting, and a clash of civilisations that reverberates to this day.

Contracted from India as indentured labourers, the Hindus, like the indigenous Caribs, Arawaks, and newly emancipated Africans, soon found themselves dominated by European capitalism and culture Eurocentrism.

Hindus embraced capitalism but rejected European customs, especially Christian religious worship, as compared to their practice of over 5,000 years of Hindu religion, philosophy, and culture.

The newly emancipated Africans, having no choice under Eurocentrism, practised a convoluted version Afrocentrism. The Europeans struck back. If Hindus were unwilling to accept European cultural institutions, then Hindus would have to pay a price.

That price was succinctly described by Marina Salandy-Brown: During my childhood I witnessed first hand the illiteracy, abject poverty and isolation of rural Indians from the rest of TT (Newsday, November 24). In essence, Hindus were ostracised from TT society.

In 1952, determined to combat the effects of Eurocentrism, concretised in the Hindu community as illiteracy and abject poverty, a young Hindu entrepreneur and wrestler, Bhadase Sagan Maraj, founder of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, and fighter against Eurocentrism and its lesser evil, Afrocentrism, launched a school-building programme in predominantly Hindu areas of Trinidad.

Upon Marajs death in 1971, his son-in-law, Satnarayan Maharaj, assumed leadership of the Maha Sabha.

Like Maraj who struggled against Eurocentrism, Maharaj struggled against Afrocentrism, the step-child of Eurocentrism.

Writing in the Express of October 21, 1971, Augustus Ramrekarsingh described the struggle as a continuity to make the Indians proud of their heritage in a society which was Christian and Afro-Saxon, hence hostile to them.

As head of the Maha Sabha, Maharaj built and improved schools, built and refurbished Hindu temples, and, most importantly, dedicated his life to maintaining both schools and temples.

Maharaj was no Gandhi who pursued equal rights for all Indians including Muslims, Dalits, and Brahmins in an independent India, and neither was he a Martin Luther King, the African American civil rights leader who dreamed of a day when little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls in an integrated American society, a society of equal rights for all.

Like King, Sat Maharaj dreamed of a day, not of African boys joining hands with Hindu girls in an integrated TT, but a day when educated little Hindu boys and educated little Hindu girls would arise from the ashes of the recalcitrant minority Eric Williams label of the Hindu community and take their rightful place as full-fledged citizens of TT.

If Maharaj was no Gandhi, no King, he certainly was no Makandal Daaga, the student activist who in 1970 sought to unite blacks and Indians in an effort to destroy the Afrocentric government and policies pursued by Eric Williams for the building of his new society guided neither by liberal capitalism nor by Marxism the dead-end concoction Williams latter-day acolyte, Selwyn Cudjoe, extols as the middle way; a rejection of capitalism to the Afro-Trinis economic peril.

Unlike Cudjoes middle way, Maharajs Hindus embraced capitalism. To his credit, he not only built schools, he also fought the Afrocentric Peoples National Movement (PNM) government all the way to the Privy Council to gain a licence for the creation of a Hindu radio station.

Maharaj practised an orthodox Hindu religious culture, while conversely engaging in an oftentimes acrimonious public race debate with Afrocentrist Cudjoe.

Those Maharaj-Cudjoe debates pursued very shallow ethnic interest, characterised by Cudjoes recollection of a Maharaj remark when he received public money for his private projects, I got mine, you go and get yours. The debates have deepened and widened the chasm between TT Hindu and African communities.

Sat Maharaj is dead, but his erstwhile fellow race debater, Selwyn Cudjoe, is alive to continue the divisive narrative.

In his latest Afrocentric salvo against the Hindus, Cudjoe writes: I wonder if she (Kamla Persad-Bissessar) is willing to tell the national community, in concrete terms, what the UNC (read Hindus) is willing to do about the disturbing disparities that exist in our society with regard to black young people as compared to young Hindu people, I might add (trinicenter.com November 20).

In the US that inherent accusation would be labelled passing the buck. Williams middle way or state capitalism provided jobs for Afro-Trinis while removing them from significant participation in business enterprise in the booming oil and gas economy. Now that state capitalism is in decline, so too are state jobs in decline. Thus, like Cudjoe, we must ask who should be blamed for the disturbing disparities that exist in our society with regard to black young people?

If Maharaj was no Gandhi, no King, no Daaga, then who was the real Maharaj? In private there must have been the virtuous Maharaj, but the public Maharaj that we know was the embodiment of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

To his credit, the good Sat created schools of excellence, created a Hindu radio station, made Indians proud of their heritage, while the bad Sat played an important role in deepening and widening the destructive schism between African and Hindu communities. The ugly Sat showed in his description of Tobago men as lazy and only looking for white tourists to rape.

Yet just as Eric Williams, Rudranath Capildeo, Bhadase Maraj have taken their place in the pantheon of tenacious ethnic Trini promoters, so too will Satnarayan Maharaj take his place.

Maharaj will be remembered and even memorialised not only as a Hindu-to-the-bone but for generations of educated little Hindu boys and educated little Hindu girls to come, he will be remembered as a hero, as an icon, and to his greatest satisfaction, as a Hindu Trini-to-the bone.

Sat Maharaj

Continued here:

Sat the good, bad and ugly - TT Newsday

We shape language as much as it shapes us. And it's constantly evolving.

The top 10 words and phrases that defined this past decade arent all necessarily new, but they did gain mainstream popularity, relevance, and acceptance between 2010-2019. To crown these winning terms, we consulted with a swath of experts, including internet linguist and author of Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch; Ponoma College sociolinguist Nicole Holliday, as well as Dictionary.com's lexicographer Heather Bonikowski and senior research editor John Kelly.

Whether or not the following words and phrases and the many more they spawned over time (bolded throughout) have short or long lives after the decade, they certainly captured the ideas and phenomenons that ruled this moment in our zeitgeist.

Over the past decade the hashtag changed the way we use social media, launched revolutionary social movements, and bled into IRL vernacular.

Tech innovator Chris Messina first told Twitter it should use hashtags in 2007 to create "channels" people could use for discovery. The nascent social media platform reportedly told him "these things are for nerds," doubted they'd become much of a thing, but then eventually embraced them anyway in 2009. By 2010, not only did Instagram also start using hashtags but they became integral to organizing a number of social movements on Twitter, from the Arab Spring, the Tea Party, and later Occupy Wall Street.

Twitter helped sound the alarm on important global issues.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

That legacy continues to thrive to this day, with #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo leading to revolutionary social change because their message can spread online on a global scale. Hashtags and the activists behind them used this power to bring widespread awareness to phenomenons like police brutality and enthusiastic consent, making room for citizen journalism and (from the more cynical perspective) slacktivism.

But outside that monumental impact, hashtags forever changed the way we shared experiences and information online. They enabled real-time, live-blogging of breaking news, like that time some guy on Twitter accidentally broke the news of the Osama Bin Laden raid.

Ironically, hashtags also opened the door for Twitter Moments and Trending Topics, which similarly gather conversations around a single topic, but without relying on the hashtag to do so. The hashtag still has pull at the end of the decade, but there are new ways to lasso together our fast-paced online conversations, too.

Every generation needs a derisive label for their trendy young people.

The peace-loving boomers in the 1960s were called a bunch of long-haired no-good hippies. Millennials in the 2010s became the vintage flannel and skinny jean-wearing hipsters who fetishize retro-tech like polaroid cameras. They come in various subcategories, too, whether it's lumbersexual, normcore, or nerd.

Dictionary.com traces the word hipster back to "hepster," first used in the late 1930s in reference to an in-the-know (aka "hip") "person who is knowledgeable about or interested in jazz." That still aligns with our modern stereotypes of arrogant hipsters blindly following of-the-moment trends who were, like, totally into that alt indie-pop band before everyone else was. Apparently some scholars even speculate that "hipster" eventually became "hippie," before then coming back again.

Aside from millennials, hipsters are also closely associated with the phenomenon of gentrification. Affluent, usually white young people take over low-income neighborhoods, spiking up the cost of living and displacing the communities that were there before. That's why the "hipster coffee shop" has become a favorite strawman to deride liberal hypocrisy.

We were over hipster before everyone else was.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

According to Dictionary.com, the connotation that hipsters appropriate marginalized cultures was there early on, too, as evidenced by Norman Mailer's popular 1957 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.

The exact parameters for what a hipster even is changes depending on what's en vogue at any given moment. But one specific shift we're seeing at the end of the decade is the notion that all hipsters are millennials. After killing just about everything else, soon millennials will see the death of their own relevance as the target demographic, giving way instead to Generation Z.

Ok Zoomers!

The modern concept of an American culture war dates back to the early 90s. But the polarizing "battle lines" only truly seem to have solidified in the 2010s.

Perceived threats to one's race, gender, religious, and cultural identity are one of the only commonalities shared by both sides.

Generally-speaking, partisan politics used to be defined by economics. But the past decade saw a sharp rise in increasingly personal and identity-driven political divides. Identity politics doesn't just refer to its derogatory connotation of social justice warrior snowflakes advocating for cancel culture and political correctness (though that's part of it). The rise of the alt-right, modern white supremacy, and men's rights activists show how perceived threats to one's race, gender, religious, and cultural identity are one of the only commonalities shared by both sides.

In truth, definitive, hard facts about the culture war why it began (like online echo chambers), when it began, or even the exact nature of its existence are kind of impossible to determine in any level-headed manner while we're in the thick of it.

But what's undeniable is its impact on language, with each side forming its own set of distinct terminology: problematic, microaggressions, virtue signaling, toxicity, gaslighting, safe spaces, triggered, red pilled, Q-anon, incel. In a world of alternative facts, when even words like fake news coined for the specific purpose of trying to objectively measure our post-truth existence lose all meaning, it's hard to be sure of anything.

Throughout the decade, climate change deniers like President Donald Trump have been claiming that "they" (whoever the fuck "they" are) changed the name of environmental collapse from "global warming" to "climate change" because the earth isn't getting warmer.

He is wrong.

Scientists have pushed for the switch from global warming to climate change since 2005 because it more accurately describes the fuller scope of what's happening. Global warming is only one factor within the larger umbrella of climate change. Before even that, in politics the switch happened under none other than former President George W. Bush for more dubious reasons, with one memo suggesting it be used because climate change sounded "less frightening" than global warming.

They were actually right. Studies have shown people to be less responsive to the term climate change. That might be part of why the general public's adoption of the term has been much slower than the political and scientific communities. But it seems the general public has latched onto climate change more in recent years. Comparing the two terms using Google Search trends shows climate change has overtaken global warmings search popularity since 2015.

However, to offset some of the psychological disadvantages of climate change, the advocacy group Public Citizen urged people to retire climate change in lieu of "climate crisis," and notable publications like The Guardian have followed suit. The idea is to remain scientifically accurate while also bringing back the sense of urgency and need for action appropriate to the scale of the calamity. Climate strike was even Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2019, since its usage shot up 100-fold from 2018 to 2019.

Still others encourage even more dire language, with teen activist Greta Thunberg preferring terms such as "climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency."

News alert: climate change isn't always warm.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

In his 1996 essay "Content is King," Bill Gates rightfully predicted how the internet would usher in a revolution in the way we think about, produce, supply, and monetize information and entertainment. With the hindsight of the 2010s, we can now say this bold title undersold exactly how radical that shift would be.

In the age of content creators, content marketing, #sponcon, influencers, vloggers, bloggers, streaming services, cinematic universes, and binge-watching, content isn't just king. It's everything from the peasants to our higher power.

Of course, people were blogging and vlogging basically since the internet's inception. But 2010 saw the first-ever Vidcon, an indication of content creation's growth and professionalization. With it came the idea that anyone can create content, proliferating the conceit of a personal brand, an acknowledgment that our online personas are curated ideals rather than our authentic selves.

While Netflix and Hulu launched their streaming services in 2007 and 2008, respectively, Netflix changed everything in 2013 with the release of its first slate of originals, including House of Cards. In 2019, we're still in the thick of the streaming wars, with old media mega-corporations like Disney only just now beginning to enter the fray.

Content is Prison.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

Alongside all that came the mainstreaming of expanded universes, a concept previously relegated to nerdy niches like comic books and fanfiction. But cultural phenomenons like Marvel and Game of Thrones gave way to the rise of IP (intellectual property) as the cash cow corporations feed with a never-ending stream of new content.

Content is the vague, ephemeral, yet omnipresent digital material that rules us all.

Internet culture obviously predates the 2010s (just ask AIM, Livejournal, and Tumblr). But what is new to the decade is a more complete interweaving of digital and pop culture. Digital culture became even more trendy, resulting in two distinct categories of people: those who know all the memes and are very online, or those who well... arent (aka locals).

As is to be expected, often this divide falls down the demographic lines of those who are "pre-internet" (adults before the web), "full-internet" (grew up alongside the web), and "post-internet" (born to a world ruled by the web). But the normalization of social media platforms made it so that following or not following the norms and memes of internetspeak is more of a choice now rather than predetermined by age.

Grandma can be very online if she wants to!

Image: vicky leta / mashable

For better or worse, the democratization of content creation on the internet also led to a blurring of lines between internetspeak and slang from marginalized groups. Some phrases like "on fleek" and "yaaas queen" have clear origins in black culture and queer drag culture respectively. Similarly "woke," "lit," and "throwing shade" all trace back to black culture, but following widespread generic online adoption theyre often deemed dead by the communities that originated them. Brands and influencers go on to make money by parroting them anyway, effectively whitewashing or pinkwashing their origins.

The question of whether the vast majority of internet slang should be considered cultural appropriation has no easy answer. But recognizing that the marginalized groups who popularize them are often quickly forgotten as the originators tells us a lot about the limits of a digital democracy.

In the 2010s, emoji became the most popular form of online gesture communication (though GIFs can serve a similar function as well). All that means is, in order to offset the lack of physical information we usually get from an IRL conversation, we started using symbolic images and icons.

From eggplants to prayer hands, the meanings of emoji took on a life of their own outside of just what each literally depicts. Some have even made it into IRL vocabulary, because we all know what "heart eyes" means when a friend asks if their outfit is cute.

And for that we're .

To reiterate, while most of the terms we're including in this section were coined decades ago by scholars, we're pointing to their popularization in the mainstream discourse outside of academia during the 2010s.

Inclusivity and intersectionality arrived in a big way on the mainstream stage during the 2018 Academy Awards, and not without some backlash. Much of their history and original meaning was lost in translation of their widespread adoption over the decade, leading some to criticize them as catch-all, meaningless buzzwords that lead to only superficial politically correct checklists.

Many wrongfully believe inclusivity and intersectionality can be used interchangeably.

New terms help give marginalized identities a voice.

Image: bob al-greene / mashable

Intersectionality specifically describes the often overlooked and unique discrimination experienced by people of multiple overlapping marginalized identities, like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. It enables us to address the subtleties of colorism, or the need for nonbinary and genderqueer versions of Latin identifiers like Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Chicanx

Inclusivity, on the other hand, is a more broadly applicable framework to ensure spaces and policies take all forms of identities into account to avoid discrimination and oppression. The past decade saw some promising linguistic growth around more widely-accepted inclusive language, with the American Psychological Associations official addition of the singular they/them and Merriam Webster naming the pronoun their Word of the Year in 2019.

Inclusivity allows us to call out TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and bi-erasure, for example, or to encompass a fuller spectrum of gender and sexual identity with a +, as in LGBTQIA+.

Intersectionality, inclusivity, and online activism became the defining components of what some now call fourth-wave feminism. Often associated with the #MeToo, Time's Up, and Women's March movements, it focuses on addressing the systemic power imbalance embedded in issues like sexual harassment, body shaming, slut shaming, and rape culture.

Back in 2011, we could do little more than scoff at the liberal leaderless protest movement that occupied Wall Street for months. Yet by the end of the decade, it's become clear just how effective it was at not only bringing widespread but long-lasting awareness to the movement's core issues.

"We are the 99%.

In 2019 many of the slogans (the 1% and we are the 99%) and concepts (the corrupting force of money in politics and widening income inequality) popularized by Occupy Wall Street continue to take center stage in national conversations like Democratic primary debates.

The Occupy protests evolved and matured beyond their initially more anarchist messines, and now an "eat the rich" and "fuck you pay me" mentality rings out in certain corners of the internet with a regularity we couldn't have predicted nine years ago.

We didn't just rail against the injustices of old establishments throughout the 2010s, though.

While the rest of the country still languished in the consequences of the 2008 recession, Silicon Valley and startup culture saw exponential growth. Another piece of tech speak coined in the 1990s went on to take over in 2010s: disruptive innovation.

Everything from Uber (which beta launched in 2010), tablets (the iPad released in 2010), rise of the cloud (iCloud launched in 2011), the proliferation of smart devices utilizing it (aka the Internet of Things), and various dongles (popularized in 2013) to connect them changed our ways of life.

Disruption, uh, isn't always great

Image: Vicky leta /mashable

The sharing and gig economy took over so rapidly that laws and policies still have yet to catch up in any effective way. Internet privacy concerns finally became unignorable with the cloud, and the seedy underbelly of Big Data profiteering showed itself through Facebook. A framework to ensure people's right to be forgotten is only just starting to emerge.

In 2010, society-shattering tech began to feel more inescapable than inspiring. Its unstoppable influence and power led to a general disillusionment with the utopian ideals the tech industry pedaled about connecting in a digital democracy.

Weve been through a lot over the past ten years. But we made it! And we lacked no ingenuity in the words we used to describe the journey.

View post:

The words and phrases that defined the decade - Mashable

There is an ongoing debate about what is included in the definition of Femtech, and the need to think beyond reproductive health and make the field more inclusive. However, there is power in using terminology that creates visibility for concepts or issues that have long been widely overlooked. Femtech has and continues to serve the purpose of creating a catchy reference to a business sector that primarily addresses the health and wellness needs of women -and people who experience similar health issues- through software, diagnostics, products and tech-enabled health services.

As this category continues to grow and be fueled by unwavering founders, investors and leaders, its impact is expanding beyond healthcare and into other domains, from workplace regulations, to advocacy against gender biases in advertising, from financial equity to state legislation.

2019 was an inflection point for this space which is on the path to becoming a consolidated $50 billion dollar industry (estimated for 2025 by F&S), while improving the lives of millions of women and their communities. To celebrate the accomplishments of leaders and visionaries who persisted, even after hearing for the hundredth time that the problems they were solving were too niche, heres a selection of the trends and highlights in Femtech in 2019.

Graphic by Vanessa Larco, Partner at NEA. $310M represents mid-year; $730M represents investment at ... [+] publishing date.

1. The Fertility Space Is Ready To Harvest What It Sow

Data Bridge, a research firm, predicts that by 2026 the booming global fertility industry could reach $41bn in sales, from approximately $25bn this year. No wonder investors are writing checks.

Manhattan based Extend Fertility brought in new talent into their leadership team, announced a $15 million Series A and total rebrand. Competitor egg-freezing and fertility clinic Kindbody also raised $15 million earlier this year, plus another $10 million from GV last week, totalling $31.3 million in capital raised. The company plans to support employers in offering better fertility benefits to their employees.

Nextgen Jane, a data-driven health company for women and people who menstruate, raised $9 million Series A. Its smart tampon platform allows users to collect menstrual and cervicovaginal samples and ship them off to a lab for in-depth analysis and disease detection.

2. At-home Testing Grows As Modern Consumers Demand Convenience And Affordability

Modern Fertility announced a $15 million funding round led by Forerunner Ventures to expand its affordable at-home hormone testing service and continue to collect anonymous data to contribute to womens health research and product development

Consumer lab testing platform Everlywell, which also provides womens health testing, raised $50 million this spring. The Texas-based company serves hundreds of thousands of customers, simplifying the often cumbersome and confusing diagnostic lab testing process.

3 . Female Founders Took A Stance Against Reproductive Health Bans, Unlocking Support From 200 CEOs

The initial 7 signing CEOs included Cora, Dame, Thinx, Sustain, Clary Collection, Fur and Loom. In their NYTs open letter they demanded that the CEOs of companies that use feminism and womens empowerment as marketing arsenal take a stance for womens rights, following the passing of bills restricting access to reproductive health services in several states. Weeks later, almost 200 CEOs and executives supported the movement under: Dont Ban Equality. The participating organizations and executives included big household names like H&M, tech entrepreneurs including MakeLoveNotPorns Cindy Gallop and Unbounds Polly Rodriguez, wellness founders Emily Weiss from Glossier and OUAIs Jen Atkins, and prominent investors such as Anu Duggal from Female Founders Fund and Wests Joanna Rees.

4. The Power of Community Support And Science In The Preconception Period

When it comes to maternal health, the conversation mostly revolves around (successful) pregnancy and motherhood. However, the ups and downs of the preconception journey are often left out of the conversation, causing many to feel lost and isolated.

Peanut, the social network for mothers, announced a $5 million funding round and the launch of TTC, a new site within Peanut specifically designed for the needs of women who are trying to conceive. Additionally, former CEO of RockHealth Halle Tecco launched Natalist and raised $5 million to address the gap in the market for better designed products and a more intelligent platform that supports the preconception journey.

5. Finance Meets Femtech To Increase Access To Family Planning

Cost is still the main barrier to access to fertility treatment, as explained in this white paper of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. 80% of people who undergo fertility treatment have little to no coverage and accrue an average of $30k in debt.

Fertility benefits company Carrot Fertility launched its Visa Carrot Card early this fall, the first fertility debit card for employees who have access to Carrot at work that makes it easy for employees to pay for treatment like egg freezing, IVF, and adoption, among other services.

Future Family aims to tackle the problem offering personalized financing plans for IVF and egg freezing, under a subscription payment model. Future Family recently announced that it will be offering free fertility testing for all members.

6. Menstrual Wellness Management Keeps Growing And Celebrates Two Exits

This is L. and competitor Sustain were both acquired this year by P&G and Grove Collaborative, respectively. This is L.s deal is said to be around the $100 million.

San Francisco-based Cora, which sells organic personal care items closed a $7.5 million Series A led by Harbinger Ventures. Additionally, femcare meets CBD, the darling wellness category of the year, in Daye, a startup that has developed a new type of tampon to help tackle dysmenorrhea. It raised $5.5 million this year, led by Khosla Ventures.

There is in fact a growing interest in the intersection of menstrual health and pain management that startups like FLO Vitamins and Elix are also tackling.

7. Digital Health Attracting Consumers Who Want A Better Experience

Navigating healthcare is a burdensome process that Millennials and Gen Z mostly dread and that can put people at risk due to health concerns that arent properly addressed.

Tia Clinic started as a digital womens health solution and has now gone brick and mortar. The startup opened its first location in NYC this year and memberships sold out in the first few weeks. Allbodies launched with the mission of covering the reproductive and sexual health questions and needs of all people, particularly addressing those areas that are still highly stigmatized.

Going back to the subject of inclusivity, Queerly Health, a digital health startup democratizing access to LGBTQ+ health and wellness, has had its first launch in NYC. Queerly Health will be linking LGBTQ+ inclusive providers with gay women, queer women, trans women, and gender variant folks (who may be assigned female at birth), among others. As explained by CEO Derrick Reyes, Queerly Health recently started enrolling providers in NYC and will be available to the public in 2020.

8. Progyny became the first fertility benefits company to ever IPO

Family benefits company Progyny (PGNY) went public on October 25. At the offering price, Progyny raised $130 million, and reached a fully diluted market value of $1.3 billion.

Fertility benefits coverage is consolidating as a must-have as more studies reflect that this is a key element in talent retention and employee satisfaction -62% of employees who had their IVF sponsored by their employer expressed that they were more likely to stay longer with the company.

9. One Billion in Funding: Investors Are Watching

Frost & Sullivans report stating that Femtech would reach $50 billion value in the next 5 years, paired up with the recent wins by leading companies and the awareness generated by the female entrepreneur community, has helped the space get on the radar of prominent investors. Just to name another example, Mahmee, a startup tackling the maternal health crisis, announced a $3 million round that included Serena Williams, Arlan Hamilton and Mark Cuban as investors.

This year the space surpassed $1 Billion in total funding since 2014. According to data provided by venture capitalist Vanessa Larco, Partner at NEA, this years total funding in the Femtech category falls just short of $750 million. Larco, who sits on the board of Cleo, a fertility to parenting employee support system, is a firm supporter of the space and hopes to see more exits in the near future: We need the investment community to see that you can make money while making a positive impact on womens health. The bigger the exits, the more money gets invested in the space, and the more companies we will see that should drive better outcomes. Its really the boost we need to get the flywheel going. Thats how you get a venture-funded industry going. And Im eager to see this happen as a woman and investor.

A celebrated funding round this year Elvies $42 million Series B led by IPGL, which was labeled as the largest in Femtech. In all fairness, this is strictly the largest funding round by a female founded Femtech company. However, if we look at the total market, we see that out of the 4 biggest funding rounds in Femtech, 3 were raised by companies founded and built by men (Nurx, Hims/Hers, Ro/Rory). In fact, two of these four were initially mens health companies, primarily selling on-demand pharma products, that then launched women-centered verticals (Hims/Hers, Ro/Rory).

10. Audioerotica Is Bringing Sexy Back

Think inclusive erotica and porn meet sexual wellness. Four companies aim to revolutionize the way people, and specially women, perceive and consume erotic content: Quinn, Dipsea ($ 5.5 million raised), Ferly, and Emjoy all have created digital platforms where audio is the main format, and science and a deep understanding of womens psychology are key elements.

This is part of a larger trend led by rising intimate and sexual wellness startups made by women for women that are creating safe spaces for sexual health education and conversation, while also transforming the way society views womens sexuality at every different stage in life.

Another female-founded startup addressing womens sexual health is Rosy, a digital health solution that supports women experiencing low libido.

11. Maternity And The Workplace: Transforming Culture Through Innovation

The struggle of juggling being a parent and thriving in the workforce is real, especially for women. The work/house role division is no longer set in stone, and employers need to think about supporting womens return after pregnancy and offering fathers the right to extended parental leave.

This creates an opportunity for technology to help reduce existing frictions. Companies innovating in the working mother space include wearable, silent breast pump makers like Elvie or Willow, lactation digital health solutions and communities like Pumpspotting, postpartum telemedicine and parenting benefits like Maven and Cleo, and milk shipping services like Milk Stork for lactating employees that need to travel for work.

12. Destigmatizing Menopause

Out of all of the life stages a woman goes through, menopause is probably the most overlooked by society. Ageism has made women practically invisible in the media after 45, and it transpires into the way we think about healthcare in perimenopause and menopause.

Gennev is an online clinic dedicated exclusively to this stage of life. Founder and CEO Jill Angelo raised $4 million this year and is excited to be launching an annual Zeitgeist study on menopause based on a survey of 6,000, the largest of its kind. Angelo adds that as women live longer and have more wealth than ever, they demand more information about their bodies and they want more care options whether that be traditional hormone therapy or lifestyle-based options for relief.

Elektra Health is another platform for women navigating perimenopause & menopause. Over 80% of women suffer debilitating symptoms (anxiety/depression, brain fog, hot flashes...) as a result of hormonal menopausal shifts, yet 75% of those who seek care dont receive it. Elektra is organizing monthly salon events with leading experts and, starting in 2020, will provide a virtual clinic for New York-based patients.

13. CPG Giants, Pharma, Insurers and Accelerators Make Moves Into The Space

P&G Ventures partnered with Vinetta project earlier this year to source its next billion dollar brand from the community of entrepreneurs, and has expressed a strong interest in the menopause space as well as aging.

Johnson and Johnson has been co-sponsoring innovation summits with a focus on womens health. Additionally, J&J has partnered with accelerator Founders Factory, which is launching a health hub in NYC. The project will be headed by former Techstars Managing Director Maya Baratz Jordan, and is said to focus initially on womens health.

Finally, Pharma companies are paying attention as DTC birth control startups like PillClub, Nurx and Simple Health gain traction among consumers. Insurer Axa, on the other hand, recently announced it will be selecting a group of women entrepreneurs for its first Femtech acceleration program.

Growing amounts of funding, acquisitions, Series A and B, growing consumer demand, and the attention of the biggest healthcare players... It all points out to an exciting 2020. Any bets? Ill be sharing some investor takes on whats to come in the next article.

Read the rest here:

Femtech in 2019: 13 Trends And Highlights In Womens Health Technology - Forbes

If youre reading this, chances are you care a lot about fighting climate change, and thats great. Maybe youre thinking about making a donation to the cause on Giving Tuesday, and thats great, too.

Climate change is the biggest emergency facing humanity. Our global response to it has been, in a word, pathetic. Over the past decade, our carbon dioxide emissions have actually risen 11 percent. We need to reverse that trend and fast.

The trouble is, it can be genuinely hard to figure out how to direct your money wisely if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Theres a glut of environmental organizations out there and a lack of rigorous research on their impacts and cost-effectiveness, though thatll hopefully change soon with the arrival of brand-new evaluators like Giving Green and ImpactMatters.

Ive written before about how billionaire philanthropists can spend their money to fight climate change. But lets face it: Most of us are not billionaires. While they can afford to spend influential sums on, say, trying to get a Democrat elected president, we might have only $10 or $100 to spend.

So if youre in this camp and you want to have the greatest impact possible per dollar donated to the fight against climate change, where should you give?

Below is a list of six of the most high-impact, cost-effective, and evidence-based organizations. (Im not including bigger-name groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund or the Sierra Club, because most big organizations are already relatively well-funded.) The six groups here seem to be doing something especially promising in the light of certain criteria: importance, tractability, and neglectedness.

Important targets for change are ones that drive a big portion of global emissions. Tractable problems are ones where we can actually make progress right now. And neglected problems are ones that arent already getting a big influx of cash from other sources like the government or philanthropy, and hence could really use money from people like us.

Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities, used these same criteria to assess climate organizations. Its comprehensive report, released in 2018, informed my research and the list below. As in that report, Ive chosen to look at groups focused on mitigation (tackling the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions) rather than adaptation (decreasing the suffering from the impacts of climate change). Both are important, but the focus of this piece is preventing further catastrophe.

Ive also intentionally selected organizations that are tackling this problem on different levels. Some advocate for high-level policy change or engage in long-term research, while others are achieving immediate emissions reductions through activities like stopping deforestation.

Dan Stein, director of the new Giving Green initiative at IDinsight, an organization that uses data and evidence to combat poverty worldwide, says we should have a diverse portfolio of mitigation strategies. There should be some short-term projects that give us certainty about reducing emissions now, he told me. But I also buy the argument that thats not going to be enough we need some moonshot projects.

Its very difficult to do a comparative cost-effectiveness analysis of different climate projects, and experts freely admit theyre not 100 percent sure theyve made the best recommendations. Sometimes theyll change their recommendations as new evidence comes to light. Likewise, I may update this piece as more information becomes available.

With that in mind, here are the organizations where your money will likely do the most good.

What it does: The Coalition for Rainforest Nations is unique in that its an intergovernmental organization of over 50 rainforest nations around the world, from Ecuador to Bangladesh to Fiji. It was formed after Papua New Guineas Prime Minister Michael Somare gave a speech in 2005, and since then its been partnering directly with governments and communities to protect their rainforests.

The Coalition championed something called the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism. Among other things, it ensures developing countries get paid if they can show that theyve been preventing deforestation, a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental degradation. This was folded into the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and enshrined in Article 5 of the Paris agreement. The Coalition now concentrates on implementing REDD+ and on increasing public and private funding for it.

Why you should consider donating: This group is believed by Founders Pledge to have had a huge impact on reducing emissions through REDD+. The group also played a big role in securing an agreement on forestry in the Paris agreement.

According to Founders Pledges cost-effectiveness model from 2018, a donation of just 12 cents to the Coalition for Rainforest Nations will avert approximately a metric ton of CO2 (or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases). This means that if you donate $100, you can avert around 857 metric tons of CO2.

These are definitely just estimates, but still, thats pretty damn good! For comparison, the average American causes around 16 metric tons of emissions per year. And most organizations cant avert a metric ton for less than $2.

If you like the sound of this, you can donate here.

What it does: The Clean Air Task Force is a US-based non-governmental organization (NGO) that has been working to reduce air pollution since its founding in 1996. It led a successful campaign to reduce the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants in the US, helped limit the US power sectors CO2 emissions, and helped establish regulations of diesel, shipping, and methane emissions.

Why you should consider donating: In addition to its seriously impressive record of success and the high quality of its research, the Clean Air Task Force does well on the neglectedness criterion: It often concentrates on targeting emissions sources that are neglected by other environmental organizations, and on scaling up deployment of technologies that are crucial for decarbonization yet neglected by NGOs and governments. For example, since 2009 its been working on a campaign for tax incentives for carbon capture and storage.

Founders Pledge estimates that a donation to this group would avert CO2 at a rate of $1 per metric ton. So, if you donate $100, you can avert around 100 metric tons of CO2 (or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases). Not bad!

You can donate here.

What it does: The Information Technology and Innovative Foundation, a highly regarded US think tank, runs the Clean Energy Innovation program. That program looks into smart clean energy research and development and the effectiveness of increasing spending in that space, then advises policymakers on the best course of action.

Why you should consider donating: Lets Fund, which is guided by the principles of Effective Altruism in its recommendations, argues its the best place to donate for climate change.

Heres why: By 2040, around 75 percent of all emissions will come not from the US or the EU, but from emerging economies like China and India. So in addition to reducing emissions at home, we need to make it likelier that those countries will reduce their emissions, too. A great way to do that is to stimulate innovation that will make clean energy technology cheaper everywhere. For example, if you bring down the cost of low-carbon technology in the US, you can make it competitive with fossil fuels in China and India, encouraging its use. Thats called a global technology spillover.

Lets Fund compared 10 innovation-stimulating policies (like carbon taxes, deployment subsidies, and cutting fossil fuel subsidies) and found that increasing budgets for public clean energy R&D is the most effective.

This sort of R&D is also neglected; only 0.02 percent of world gross domestic product is spent on it annually. (In the meantime, were spending 300 times that 6 percent on the energy we use up!)

In advanced economies like the US and EU, we can unilaterally increase how much we spend on R&D no international coordination necessary. That, Lets Fund says, makes this much more politically tractable than carbon taxes. And as my colleague David Roberts has written, Innovation is perhaps the one climate policy that virtually everyone agrees on, across the ideological spectrum. Even US Republicans support it, at least notionally.

You can donate here.

What it does: Rainforest Foundation US works to protect the rainforests of Central and South America by partnering directly with folks on the front lines: indigenous people in Brazil, Peru, Panama, and Guyana, who are deeply motivated to protect their lands. The foundation supplies them with legal support as well as technological equipment and training so they can use smartphones, drones, and satellites to monitor illegal loggers and miners, and take action to stop them.

Why you should consider donating: Rainforest Foundation US has shown an unusual commitment to rigorous evaluation of its impact by inviting Columbia University researchers to conduct a randomized controlled trial in Loreto, Peru. Starting in early 2018, researchers collected survey data and satellite imagery from 36 communities partnered with the foundation and 40 control communities. The analysis is ongoing, but the preliminary results are promising.

We see tentative findings that along the deforestation frontier where deforestation was most likely to occur there are reductions in the rate of deforestation, said Tara Slough, the Columbia University researcher leading the study, in a presentation this September.

Given that this year has seen massive fires and a surge of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, an ecosystem on which the global climate depends, it now seems like an especially good time to directly support the indigenous people who are holding the front line for all of us.

You can donate here.

What it does: Based in London and Brussels, Sandbag is a nonprofit think tank that uses data analysis to help build evidence-based climate policy. It advocates for carbon capture and storage in the EU, pushes for strong carbon pricing, and works to accelerate the coal phase-out in Europe so as to ensure all plants are closed before 2030.

Why you should consider donating: Since it focuses on the EU which is not projected to be one of the biggest emitters and so is not as high-priority a region as Asia or Africa Sandbag scores lower on the importance criterion than the groups mentioned above. But its still among the best groups out there (it made the Founders Pledge shortlist), particularly because its one of the few European charities working on carbon capture and storage, a sorely neglected mitigation strategy. And it works to change European legislation on climate by working with and influencing key policymakers.

You can donate by going here and clicking on the section on funding.

What it does: The Climate Emergency Fund is different from the groups listed above. It was founded very recently this July with the goal of quickly getting money to groups engaged in climate protest. It has already raised over $1 million and disbursed about $800,000 of it in 26 grants to groups it has vetted. The grantees range from the well-established 350.org to the fledgling Extinction Rebellion, an activist movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience like filling the streets and blocking intersections to demand governments do more to stave off mass extinction.

Why you should consider donating: Because its so new, the Climate Emergency Fund definitely has less of an evidence base than the organizations listed above, so well have to monitor its impact and cost-effectiveness. But it offers something important: immediacy. As David Roberts wrote for Vox:

The money is going to everything from hiring organizers to buying signs and bullhorns to organizing school trips. A second round of more than 30 grants is in the works, representing over $2 million more. The fund is currently raising money, accepting donations large and small. ... [The founders] came together around a shared conviction that street protest is both crucially important to climate politics and a longtime blind spot for environmental philanthropy.

And theres evidence that focusing on movement-building is essential in the climate fight. If youre skeptical that street protest can make a difference, consider Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweths research. Shes found that if you want to achieve systemic social change, you need to mobilize 3.5 percent of the population, a finding that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion. Thats not an impossible proportion of people to get into the streets particularly if the activists doing the work get funded.

Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, recently told me that building the climate movement is crucial because although weve already got some good mitigation solutions, were not deploying them fast enough. Thats the ongoing power of the fossil fuel industry at work. The only way to break that power and change the politics of climate is to build a countervailing power, he said. Our job and its the key job is to change the zeitgeist, peoples sense of whats normal and natural and obvious. If we do that, all else will follow.

You can donate to the Climate Emergency Fund here.

Its worth noting that there are plenty of ways to use your skills to combat climate change. And many dont cost a cent.

If youre a writer or artist, you can use your talents to convey a message that will resonate with people. If youre a religious leader, you can give a sermon about climate and run a collection drive to support one of the groups above. If youre a teacher, you can discuss this issue with your students, who may influence their parents. If youre a good talker, you can go out canvassing for a politician you believe will make the right choices on climate.

If youre, well, any human being, you can consume less. You can reduce your energy use, reduce how much stuff you buy (did you know plastic packaging releases greenhouse gases when exposed to the elements?), and reduce how much meat you consume.

Research shows that its very difficult to convert people to vegetarianism or veganism through information campaigns, which is one reason why I did not recommend donating to such campaigns (there are more cost-effective options). But with Impossible Whoppers and Beyond Burgers now available in so many grocery stores and restaurants, you can transition to a more plant-based diet without sacrificing on taste.

You can, of course, also volunteer with an activist group whether its Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement, or Greta Thunbergs Fridays for Future and put your body in the street to nonviolently disrupt business as usual and demand change.

The point is that activism comes in many forms. Its worth taking some time to think about which one (or ones) will allow you, with your unique capacities and constraints, to have the biggest positive impact. But at the end of the day, dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good: Its best to pick something that seems doable and get to work.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, youll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and to put it simply getting better at doing good.

Follow this link:

The best climate change charities to donate to - Vox.com

by: David KlemowDec 19, 2019

2010 may as well have been a lifetime ago. At the breakneck pace by which dance music throttles through the stratosphere, the decade is ending in an entirely unrecognizable place from where it began. For contextten years ago, Electric Daisy Carnival was held in Los Angeles, not Las Vegas, where the Los Angeles Rams now play. Only 250,000 people were paying for a Swedish music streaming service called Spotify, and Billie Eilish was finishing up second grade. Its been a wild ride through the 10s, largely soundtracked by EDMs global boom into a multi-billion dollar industry. Ten years ago our culture was creeping out of South London basements and New York warehouses, and now were performing at the Olympics.

So now, as the single most important, historic, and certainly memorable decade dance music has ever seen draws to a close, we had to figure out a new way to break down how far the culture has come. One master list couldnt possibly reflect the decade in review. In effort to properly recognize the remarkable collection of events that has brought us here, were tweaking our typical end-of-the-year model. Instead, were dividing the decades most deserving into a handful ofunique categories.

In review of 2010 2019, the most important factors that shaped the decade were Artists of the Decade, Labels of the Decade, Albums of the Decade, and Most Impactful Moments of the Decade. Together, they comprise Dancing Astronauts decade-end collection. Introducing,The Big 100.

Among the greatest techno deities stands Richie Hawtin, watching another ultra successful decade shrink in his rearview mirror. Hawtins emphasis on the intersection of technology and his craft have made him one of the most dynamic minds in all of electronic music, from his CLOSE live show to the production of his own Model 1 mixer. Hes clocked two Essential Mixes in the last decade, hosted a beloved party series on Ibiza, hit a list of the most prestigious festivals and events across the world, performed unforgettable back-to-back sets with deadmau5, brought techno to the Guggenheim, and even resurrected his Plastikman alter ego. Electronic music went largely mainstream in the 10s, but that didnt stop Hawtin from holding it down for the underground with a firm, unrelenting grip.

Lorin Ashton, better known to his loyal fans as Bassnectar, has spent the decade swallowing crowds with his proprietary blend of bass, punk rock, and electronica, with a fanbase perhaps best compared to the millennial generations Deadheads.

In the last ten years, the Bassnectar team has established themselves as an elite live entertainment group, capable of packing stadiums and festivals alike, from selling out Madison Square Garden for Bass Center VIII in 2014 to their homegrown, three-day, sold out, Deja Vroom Festival in Cancun. Selling out has become status quo for the project fronted by Ashton, whose decade-long staying power is fueled by the the ever-evolving bass landscape. Ten projects in ten years stamp a mark of prolific output from Ashton. From Divergent Spectrum (2011) to Unlimited (2016), the beloved king of bass claimed two No. 2 slots and three No. 1s on Billboards US Dance Album charts. Whats more, Bassnectar has supported some of the most successful bass music innovators of the day such as G Jones, Eprom, ill Gates, while uplifting the likes of PEEKABOO, and more. Chris Stack

Just as RL Grime did for trap and Flume did for future bass, tropical houses moment in the sun during the middle of the decade cant be discussed without crediting Kygos championing of the genre. The Norwegian hitmaker may even be the first real star of the streaming era, amassing a billion streams by 2015, just a year after his emergence, becoming the fastest artist on Spotify to achieve the benchmark. Behind his brand of sun-soaked poolside house, Kygo carved out his place in the decades top echelon, culminating in a historical performance at the Rio Olympics closing ceremony.

Easily one of Australias brightest musical exports of the decade, Anna Lunoe firmly holds her place as one of dance musics favorite curators while simultaneously rocking crowds as a triple threat producer, DJ, and singer. From her Beats 1 stint to appearances on Mad Decent, Fools Gold, Future Classic, and Ultra, Luney commands a certain sway among DJ circles while still maintaining her status as one of the most down-to-earth selectors in the game. In the summer of 2016, the Bass Drum Dealer made history alongside Alison Wonderland by becoming the first solo female DJs to perform on the main stage at Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas.

You never know what youve got until its gone. Well, in the case of Noisia, that couldnt be more on the nose. In 2019, the seminal Dutch drum n bass trio announced an impending split in 2020, exactly 20 years after their formation. Fear not, for a victory lap is in order for one of the most influential dance groups of all timehitting major festivals and events next year for an extended farewell. The decade was ushered in by their debut studio album Split The Atom in 2010, they helped break Skrillex to the world, they did their part to put British hip-hop on the map well before grime took a hold of the cultural zeitgeist with I Am Legion alongside Foreign Beggars, and now, after a monumentally successful run, Noisia is ready to hang it up in search of new creative journeys. Though, as the decade draws to a close and bass music currently commands more sub-genres and new incoming talent than any other category of electronic music, Noisias impact on that cant be understated.

Theres no talking about the last decade in electronic music without acknowledging trap musics moment. In 2012, Henry Steinway was already enjoying a successful career as a DJ, known as Clockwork. But the moment he donned the RL Grime moniker and he and Salva laid their unforgettable spin on Kanye Wests Mercy, things changed forever. Not just for Steinway, but for electronic dance music as a whole. Trap, or rather, hip-hops emerging intersection with club music, would go on to fuel the next two years of electronic musics meteoric rise, and firmly establish RL Grime as the genres forefather. His sound has changed considerably since his take on Benny Benassis Satisfaction, and hes become a label head in the latter part of the decade, championing a new wave of talent under the Sable Valley banner. This decade wouldnt be what it was without RL Grime.

Mat Zo has spent the decade keeping us guessing in the best possible ways. Hes been a chameleon of styles and genres, with a catalog that spans some of dance musics finest imprints. Not to mention founding his own esteemed label by the middle of the decade, Mad Zoo. But while Zo has shared his affinities for trance, bass, electro, and drum n bass in nearly equal measures over the last ten years, hes also been a vocal critic of dance musics shortcomings, generating a voraciously loyal fanbase in the process. His two studio albums, 2013s Damage Control and 2016s Self Assemble still deserved repeated plays as some of the most innovative works of the decade, and with allusions to a third LP sometime in the future, look for Mat Zo to continue commanding the respect hes earned as a new decade unfolds.

One would be hard pressed to imagine electronic dance music in 2010 without One playing in their head. Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso, and Steve Angello acted as a critical authority in early 2010s, ushering in dance musics global invasion with a commanding presence. The Swedes transported their electro and progressive house sound across the Atlantic and in the process, issued a new rockstar archetype that had everyone from Miami to Ibiza rocking a black v-neck and skinny jeans. Every single release the group delivered touched the charts, including the likes of Save the World Dont You Worry Child, both of which earned Grammy nominations. The Swedish supergroups impact was perhaps felt the most when, at the top of their game, they decided to call it quits on the Mafia life amid rising inter-group tensions and an unsustainable lifestyle. Their dissolution in 2013 was the first real massive victory lap EDM had ever seen; our parents would equate it to an Elton John or Kiss farewell stadium tour. The trios not-so-secret reformation in 2018 precisely exemplified their international notoriety when they took on closing duties at Ultra five years after they initially said goodbye. Between show cancellations and an absence of new music following their realignment, Swedish House Mafias final moments of the decade were undoubtedly less than ideal, but the new era only holds inklings of promise as they build upon their celebrated legacy. Ross Goldenberg

As trance legends, Above & Beyond have sustained themselves as one of dance musics most beloved artists of the decade for a multitude of reasons. Despite their artistic evolution from their Oceanlab work to critically acclaimed Group Therapy and their more modern dance stylings, one defining characteristic has remained constantan innate dedication to their community through the power of music. The groups unmistakable synergy across their Group Therapy Radio program, live shows and musicality, the English dance outfit never cease to champion music in a way that unites their listeners through the boundaries of country lines and language. Above & Beyonds proven longevity and ability to break down fans emotional pretenses and build them back up have made them an unstoppable force on the international dance circuit. Whats moreAnjunabeats and Anjunadeep have become mainstay brands for dance music fans across the globe, providing further evidence that the trio have undoubtedly earned a place among the top artists of the decade. Jessica Mao

Eric Prydz makes our Top Artists of the Decade list not by riding the surging wave of any particular trend but by simply honing his own craft year after year which translate into some of the most technologically forward performances in the dance music space. The Prydz sound falls somewhere between the progressive and electro side of house music, but his exceptionally unique flavor profile, paired with a fervor for melodies that are as sophisticated as they are aurally pleasing has given the Swedish icon a signature sound all his own. Of course, Eric Prydz is a seasoned veteran of electronic music, but between his thriving alter-egos (like Pryda and Cirez D), set lists of largely unreleased tunes, and a live show as ambitious as anybodys in the industry, its crazy to think that Eric Prydz best decades could still be ahead of him. Josh Stewart

Its almost comical to think that a decade ago, Gesaffelstein was just in the zygotic stages of his career. Prior to 2010, Michel Lvy had but three releases to his pseudonym obscure cuts which showed promise, but belied the magnitude of what was to come. Albeit, its unlikely that even Lvy himself could have imagined the heights his grandeur would reach by 2020. By reaching into the deepest chasms of musical possibilities, Gesaffelstein ascended to the pinnacle of a tower he himself built. His absence for most of the decades latter half was palpable, fraught by many imitators, but zero duplicators. To dub Gesaffelstein as the greatest artist of the century would only modestly stretch the limits of journalistic objectivity. As such, including him as one of the decades best is a no-brainer. Gesaffelsteins unprecedented talents have proven to serve as a stark beacon across the barriers of dance music. His is a light so overwhelming in its grace, that it casts over all contenders a shadow as dark as his Vantablack armor. Will McCarthy

Few artists took as much advantage of dance musics crossover into pop culture as Calvin Harris. The Scottish hitmaker started the decade as an already firm force in dance music, going on to found Fly Eye Records at the onset of the decade. By the middle of it he was producing chart-topping hits with Rihanna and commanding the second largest headlining crowd Coachella had ever seen. By the tail end of the 10s, Harris had a platinum plaque on his wall, working with Pharrell, Migos, Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, and Ariana Grande, closing in one nearly $200 million in earnings. From a dollars perspective, 2010 2019 unquestionably belonged to Calvin Harris.

Even as the entertainment industrys most elusive creators, Daft Punks impact can be felt all over the decade. From their contribution to Disneys Tron: Legacy to producing for the decades most dominant R&B force, the Android keep an omniscient eye over the ever-evolving music landscape. And each time they drop in, whatever they offer feels so new and fresh, it proves that Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter command a level of influence unknown to any other musical artist today. Their signing to Columbia Records and subsequent critically lauded 2013 comeback LP, Random Access Memories, was one of the biggest releases of the decade, and while theres never any promise the two knighted French visionaries will ever have more to offer, we take comfort in knowing theyre never really that far away.

Claude VonStrokes band of rump-shaking house aficionados were happy holding down their lane, representing the bay area with their looney, groovy brand of club music. But as house music splintered throughout the decade into sub-genres and movements, San Franciscos Dirtybird Players rose to the top of their respective game behind the papa bear leadership of VonStroke. Now, as a momentous decade for Claude nears its conclusion, the man who started out hosting barbecues in the park with nothing more than friends, a sound system, and delicious grilled meats has become an accomplished events curator behind the ultra-successful BBQ and Campout events that represent the labels humble beginnings. Now, Dirtybird and their brand of zany, fun-loving house music chugs into the next decade, their ethos being more of a movement, or even a family now, than a record label and its fanbase. It wouldnt have been possible without everyones favorite camp counselor, and for that Claude VonStroke easily places among the greatest artists of this decade.

ZEDDs near-singlehanded blurring of the pop and EDM lines made this an unforgettable decade for the Russian-German DJ/producer. Starting out as one of Skrillexs earliest protgs, ZEDD carved out an incredibly prosperous decade, ending it as one of the highest paid DJs in the world year-over-year clocking well over a $100 million over the last five years behind massive streaming numbers and a dominating track record of marquee Vegas residencies. He covered Forbes 30 Under 30 issue in 2017 after two ultra-successful LPs: True Colors (2016) and Clarity (2014), that peaked at No. 2 and No. 1 respectively on the US dance charts. Furthermore, the classically trained musician helped champion the likes of Alessia Cara, Maren Morris, Grey, Ariana Grande and more as his steep ascent to pop musics top echelon continued to trend upward. ZEDD continues to help bridge the gap between pop production and EDM, and with a new decade set to unfold, hes primed to write his trajectory through 2020 and beyond.

Despite an aversion to the fanfare and celebrity that being global superstar DJs entails, Justice quietly, authoritatively defined the decade behind their characteristically stoic French cool. Before 2010, the duo was instrumental in laying the groundwork for dance musics global takeover with material like We Are Your Friends and D.A.N.C.E., but with 2011s Audio Video Disco, Gaspard Aug and Xavier de Rosnay went from multi-faceted creatives to electronic music icons. The record led to a headlining Coachella set in 2012 and a live album, Access All Arenas the following year. By the end of the decade, the pair had enjoyed a relative hiatus and come back with Woman, a Grammy-winning Woman Worldwide live record, and a return to visual media with IRIS: A Space Opera by Justice. The pairs French disco and house roots bled into harder club sounds, cinematic progressive rock, metal, and more. When they re-emerge in the next decade, expect their influence to be as profound as ever, even if it takes a different shape entirely.

Dillon Francis inclusion on this list may come as a surprise, though, when factoring in the fact that he might be EDMs first crossover pop culture star speaks volumes to his impact on the decade. Francis, Dancing Astronauts Artist of the Year in 2018, started the 10s as a festival undercard act; a goofy white kid messing around with the burgeoning Latin-influenced moombahton that Dave Nada was credited with creating around the time. Ten years later and Francis is back to championing Latin sounds, even scoring a Latin Grammy nomination on the way, but not before he went full circle with a highly publicized Columbia Records deal and subsequent move to independent status. He delivered a full-length studio record, a handful of mixtapes, and a jump to TV to boot. Francis may have been among the first DJs to master branding oneself, and as the decade reaches a wrap, hes undoubtedly done his part to earn a designation as one of the most impactful artists in dance music today.

A decade can seem to be an eternity in the lifespan of electronic music, but Alex Ridhas musical journey began long before 10 years ago. Since the latter aughts, Boys Noize has been one of the most formidable figures in the adjacent realms of electro, techno, and acid house. In both his music and his live shows, the Berliner savant has set himself apart from the crowd with an unforgiving energy. From Power to Mayday and beyond, Boys Noize has packed sonic punch after punch with a punk-infused clamor that makes Sid Vicious seem more like Sid Rather Polite.Of course, Ridhas musical output is by no means limited to his Boys Noize oeuvre. Perhaps no one else in dance musics history has had a keener eye for recruiting collaborators. In his pairings, Ridha is a legend thrice over alongside Skrillex, Mr. Oizo, and Chilly Gonzales, hes headlined festivals, and created some of the most delightfully aggressive, utterly bizarre, and mystically soothing songs of the electronic music zeitgeist. Indeed, Dog Blood, Handbraekes, and Octave Minds could all reasonably be considered among the best acts of the decade in their own rights.

Most recently, Ridha has begun a crossover into the deeper house and techno scene with his ELAX alias, apparently vying for a fifth spot in the proverbial dancehall of fame. And, as 2020 ushers in the 15th anniversary of his Boysnoize Records imprint, there is little doubt that his continued contributions to the field will earn him countless more. Will McCarthy

Few have done more to bridge the gap between DJ culture and hip-hop than Brooklyns Alain Macklovitch, better known as A-Trak. Considering house music and hip-hops origins are about as close as Isaac and Ishmaels, its surprising that nobody has ever stood so firmly on both sides of the fence as Fools Gold Records co-founder. In a previous life he served as Kanye Wests touring DJ. In the years between 2010 2019, A-Trak successfully ran one of dance musics most in-demand labels, branded events offshoots, dabbled in fashion, founded an awards contest to keep turntablism alive, and creatively bounced between electro, trap, disco, house, and hip-hop with the likes of Young Thug, Baauer, Dillon Francis, GTA, and more.

During the decade where ten new DJs cropped up every day, A-Trak spent the last ten years reminding us why real DJing is so important while putting on a continuous masterclass in what that actually looks like.

It would be a stretch to imagine that Flume had pictured back in 2010 where he would be in 2020. In 2011, Harley Streten was an unknown bedroom producer in Australia with dreams of grandeur. A pairing with friend Emoh Instead brought about What So Not, and by 2012, Streten had released a self-titled LP under his own Flume moniker. What happened next would change the course of dance music for the decade. At the top of their joint game, What So Not split with Emoh taking the reigns on the project himself. Flume would go on to follow up with a sophomore studio LP in 2016 that netted him his first Grammy the following year. Following Flume and Skins respective successes would have been a tall order, but after a deserved hiatus, Flume capped the decade with some of his most ambitious works to date, proving that perhaps Streten is a once-in-a-generation talent whose mind and scope of capabilities as a producer largely overshadows electronic dance musics confines.

Hes the father of future bass, a genre thats captivated the masses in the latter part of the decade, formulating his own sound thats gone on to be duplicated innumerable times since his emergence. All the while, he managed to work with an incredible cast of collaborators that includes Beck, Lorde, AlunaGeorge, Raekwon, Vic Mensa, Vince Staples, Andrew Wyatt, and SOHPIE. Flumes dance between brash experimentalism and forward-thinking that still incorporates massive mainstream appeal make him an easy contender for Artist of the Decade.

It isnt too farfetched to postulate that by the end of his career, Porter Robinson will have been one of the most influential dance artists of all time. In his first decade as an electronic music superstar, the North Carolina-born Robinson went from wide-eyed bedroom producer with a serious anime fascination and an ear for how 8-bit video game music could inspire an entire generation of kids to one of the most brilliant minds electronic music has ever seen. Thats to say nothing of his Grammy-nominated side project Virtual Self.

But the metamorphosis from the 19-year-old that made complextro hits like Language to the forward-thinker than brought us his opus on the emotional, conceptual Worlds two years later was one of deep introspection. With a throttling ascent to DJ stardom alongside ZEDD and Skrillex on the first Mothership Tour came a halting realization of EDMs confines, and only after breaking down that barrier for himself was Robinson able to emerge even more focused and driven on making something that matters. Five years after Worlds, theres no doubt it was one of the most important albums of the last ten years, cementing Porter Robinsons place among the top DJs of the decade.

For better or worse, 2010 2019s most memorable moments can be quantified by the moves of the late, great Avicii. His name was synonymous with dance musics light speed rise to popularity over the last ten years. From the global ubiquity of Levels to his tragic death on April 20, 2018 with so many moments both bright and interminably dark in between, Avicii simply defined electronic dance music. There isnt much to say about Tim Berglings legacy that hasnt been said over the last year and a half since his passing, but suffice it to say that dance music would not be where it is today without the Wake Me Up producer. Moreover, wherever it winds up being 10 years from now will surely bear the mark of his influence too. Rest in peace, Avicii.

Think about dance music like a family tree for a moment. Picture the deadmau5 family tree, so to speak, over the course of this last decade. It starts with Skrillex just before Scary Monsters and runs all the way down to current torch carriers like REZZ and the next generation of dance minds like Rinzen. Then think about the branches of that treewho else came as a result of Skrillex, REZZ, and others going on to stardom? deadmau5s impact in dance music is simply inescapable. Since the release of his Grammy-nominated 44=12 in December of 2010, the Mau5 has spent the decade pushing the technological boundaries of music creation and performance forward. All while beefing with Disney, scoring films for Netflix, scooping up four Grammy and six Juno nods, successfully running one of the greatest labels in dance music, and in his free time adopting the power of live streaming to give fans an intimate inside look at his processes. Todays global dance music industry has been undoubtedly shaped for better or worse by Joel Zimmerman, making him a shoe-in for one of the top artists of the decade.

To adequately cover Diplos contribution to the culture over this last decade would take a dissertation. Love him or hate him, Diplo has soundtracked the decadetheres no two ways about it. From Major Lazer to Jack , with LSD, Silk City, and not one but two successful solo projects in tow, to say Wesley Pentz is the busiest man in music would be a pitiful understatement. And that would be to say nothing of launching three successful labels in the last decade. Hes brought sounds from all over the world to the masses, from the Afro-Caribbean to country western, while still managing to proctor some of the most consumed pieces of media in human history on the mainstream front. From Beyonc to the NFL, one cant open their cell phone or turn on the television today without being more than two degrees of separation from something Diplo is up to. Yet somehow, the next decade is likely to promise even more from Blondre 3000, and we cant wait to see it materialize.

This may have been the easiest placing on this list. There simply wouldnt be a decade in dance music to talk about without Skrillex. The Recess producers trajectory to the top of electronic music, and thereafter, is really reflective of dance musics global expansion over the course of the decade, isnt it? The parallels between the two journeys are clear, but the examination of their intersections proves unequivocally how instrumental Skrillex was in transforming dance music to the global enterprise it is today. Sold out Mothership tours, scoring for Disney, working alongside Mariah Carey, FKA Twigs, Rick Ross, Chance The Rapper, Kelsey Lu, Justin Bieber, and so many more in between, the sum of Skrillexs work over the last ten years far outweighs the individual parts, of which there are too many to count. He went from stage-diving dubstep kid, proctoring the most aggressive sounds American audiences had ever heard, to esteemed dance music producer, successfully running a label that for most of the decade promised electronic musics fiercest works. Then somehow, without a shift in momentum, Moore took his stardom to the top of the pops, all while maintaining a humility that has forced us to change our collective notion of celebrity.

But for a screamed-out punk from LA just trying to find his next creative outlet to transform into the undisputed king of popular music has been a remarkable journey to watch, cover, and enjoy. And yet somehow, the closing of the decade only seems to mark the end of the foreword in Skrillexs book.

Tags: Above & Beyond, Anna Lunoe, avicii, Big 100, calvin harris, deadmau5, Dillon Francis, diplo, End of Decade, eric prydz, Richie Hawtin, skrillex, Swedish House Mafia

Categories: Features, News

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Dancing Astronaut's BIG 100Top 25 Artists of the Decade - Dancing Astronaut

WORDS BY SASHA GATTERMAYR

Clothes for the mind.

Okay, so you might not actually have more time than you usually do. With Christmas lunches, delayed reaction times and plans postponed from October because this glistening holiday break already felt on the horizon, your calendar is probably pretty booked.

But, unpopular opinion: The week between Christmas and New Year is actually my favourite time of year. It feels like the whole world is moving in slow motion. The heat sets in, exiles to hometowns or down the coast commence, free to air TV pulls out reruns of the most ancient relics in its back catalogue and afternoon napping is democratised, no longer reserved solely for the elderly or infantile.

So no, you may not have more time. But what you have is the illusion of more time. And sometimes, thats all an idea needs to spark its journey from motivation into practice.

To feed that kernel of motivation, and the perennial New Years resolution thatthis will finally be the year you get back into reading, I have taken the liberty of curating a list of the books you should read this summer. Because finding your groove will be immediately stymied by the overwhelming dearth of recommendations and possibilities to dive into. So here is a dip, if you will, into the proverbial literary ocean.

1. My Brilliant FriendElena Ferrante

Youve heard about her,you may have watched bits of the HBO series and you might have even claimed to have read her. But nows the time to dive headfirst into the giddy headspin that is the Neapolitan novels. The quartet following the lives of Lenu and Lila from girlhood to old-age has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, making it one of the most successful literary debuts in a generation. Adding to the air of excitement is the mystery surrounding the author. The name Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, meaning no one knows the identity of this blockbuster writer who blends fiction with philosophy. Knocking off this addictive series over the summer break will place you firmly in the cultural zeitgeist.

Read when:You wish you were in Italy not part of the office skeleton staff.

2. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention EconomyJenny Odell

Im not one for self-help books, but this feels more like punchy cultural criticism. The kind that makes you nod with agreement and reel with recognition at the same time asking: How can someone say exactly what I feel?. Jennys ability to articulate our attachment to the technological world provides a non-condescending roadmap for the future of personal philosophy. Its more about understanding where we are now and where our agency lies, rather than telling you how things used to be in the old days and that you shouldnt be addicted to your phone. Shes an artist and professor by trade, and it shows.

Read when:Youve been hoping to use this break to get some perspective.

3. Lie with MePhilippe Besson

Following the blossoming relationship between two 17-year-olds in 1980s France, this slim piece of fiction wafts the same scent asCall Me By Your Name butwith the spark and intensity that Acimans more melancholic rendering of love lacks. In an ironic twist of 80s adolescent nostalgia, it is translated by Molly Ringwald (yes, that Molly Ringwald).

Read when: You want to cry over a summer fling but dont have a summer fling to cry about.

4. BunnyMona Awad

PartHeatherspartThe Secret History, four women attending an MFA all call each other Bunny and lure the unremarkable Samantha into their dark clique. A campus of intelligent sociopaths rapidly turns into a community of straight-up psychopaths, but you only realise when its too late to do anything about it. Wicked, funny and quick, its the perfect literary concoction of summer drama.

Read when:You just got your Year 12 score and already miss the theatrics of school.

5. Find MeAndre Aciman

Picking up whereCall Me By Your Name(the novel, not the film) left off, Aciman returns to the fractured stories of his beloved characters twenty years on from their initial summer meeting. Split into four sections and divided between Elio, Oliver and Sami (Elios father), the sparkle of love is dimmed by the passage of time and re-examined with a wistful air of missed opportunities.

Read when:Youve re-watchedCall Me By Your Name and dont want the steamy dream of a summer sexual awakening to end.

6. Salt, Fat, Acid, HeatSamin Nosrat

Chef and writer Samin Nosrat is one of the most delightful people on the internet. Her exuberant personality bleeds into her writing and her cooking, making the whole experience of reading a 600-page cookbook utterly pleasurable. Its like learning how to make really good food from a really wise friend.

Read when:Your New Years resolution is to FINALLY learn how to cook.

7. Trick MirrorJia Tolentino

The long-awaited debut from theNew Yorkers sensationally popular staff writer exceeded high expectations. Essays on internet culture vary from Fyre Festival to reality TV to the vastness of the wedding industry with wit and self-awareness. Youll be impressed by how perfectly someone can discuss the inanities of everyday life and make them glisten with philosophical insight and precision. Then you remember shes hailed as the voice of a generation and worthy of succeeding Joan Didion, and it kind of makes sense.

Read when:You want to impress your friends with nuanced perspectives on the contemporary condition over an Aperol Spritz.

8. The Patrick Melrose novelsEdward St. Aubyn

If you didnt catch the television adaptation last year, you might have missed the revival St. Aubyns notorious character underwent at the hands of Benedict Cumberbatch. Patrick is five years old when the first novella begins, charting a single evening from multiple characters as a horrifying and life-altering incident is privately inflicted on the small boy. Each book picks up more than a decade after the one before, as Patrick flits impatiently from rural France to New York to 80s London. Heroine-addicted, high functioning and tormented, he makes you hate him and adore him all at once as the harshness of reality chases at his coattails.

Read when: You finish the Neapolitan novels and youre ready to follow the life of another memorable character from childhood to harrowed middle age.

9. She SaidMegan Twohey and Jodi Kantor

The two New York Times investigative journalists who broke the Weinstein story recount the months it took to get it published. From finding witnesses who were willing to talk to dramatic confrontations between lawyers and informants in office lobbies, follow behind the scenes of a story that ignited a movement.

Read when: You need a beachside pageturner.

Go here to read the rest:

9 books to read this summer now you have free time - Fashion Journal

In a Parisian hotel suite in late November, Quentin Tarantino is hard at work. He is in town to launch the theatrical re-release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with a new cut that adds additional grace notes to the version released over the summer, and hes on a mini European tour in support of the movies home entertainment release. But his next task is already at hand: a novel he is writing, for which the research is laid out on the desk in front of him. A handful of books alongside a writing pad crammed with notes in his familiar block handwriting.

There are other future plans afoot too, of course. Not least among them, the subject of his nextand possibly finalpicture (he recently hinted theres an idea for Kill Bill Vol. 3, and then theres the question of his mooted Star Trek movie), and his recent personal news; he will soon become a father for the first time.

For now, though, Tarantino is content to reflect on this year. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has been an outsized success for a non-franchise, R-rated release, grossing more than $370 million at the global box office and sparking endless debate. It has been the kind of hit that might only have been possible for a movie trailed as the 9th from Quentin Tarantino. Now it is a major Oscar player, with five Golden Globe nominations among a string of other plaudits.

Still, Tarantino understands that the landscape the movie released in is very different from the one that greeted Reservoir Dogs, his directorial debut, when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992. He is still able to make movies on his own terms, but over the course of a 90-minute discussion, he acknowledges that others arent so fortunate, and wonders whether he would be able to repeat the success of Dogs if it had been released in the current landscape of cinema.

First, though, with enough distance from the films release, SPOILERS ABOUND as we talk about that ending.

DEADLINE: Lets begin with the end. At the climax of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, after Cliff and Rick have saved the day, and Rick has been invited into Sharon Tates house for a drink, the camera rises up above the house, and Cielo Drive, and we are lifted out of the movie, away from this fantasy world in which these people survived the events of that night. Was that shot always key for you?

QUENTIN TARANTINO: Oh, absolutely. I came up with that ending quite a few years ago. I had been working on this piece, little by little, in one way or another, for about seven years. I think sometime after Death Proof is when I first came up with the basic concept. And I came up with the idea for that last shot about five years ago. When I did, frankly, it blew me away. It was the thing that cemented that I was going to do this one of these days, because I had to film that.

Its strange, I dont have many examples of where Im walking around with a shot in my head for five years; one literal shot that starts here and ends there. The shot that we did was exactly the way it had been in my head all that time.

TARANTINO: It wasnt hard to execute it. The hard part was finding the house that would work for it. The gate had to be exactly where the gate was. You had to be able to go through the trees. I even wrote it in the script: It goes through the trees. You had to be able to do that, and then see into the parking lot and the entrance of the house. I even wanted that little welcome mat right there in the shot. But it also had to work out for the rest of the movie that Ricks house would be right next door. Nothing we looked at was exactly that. There was this thing of, well, I cant do what I wanted to do, but I could do this or that, so Im looking at that.

Frankly, to tell you the truth, it was Bob Richardson, my cinematographer, and my first AD Bill Clark, who found the house. They were like, Look, theyre not coming up with the damn thing. They got on Google Maps, and literally started driving through the Hollywood Hills on their own at the end of a day, and thats how we found both of those houses. Without a location guy in the car, they just rang the bells. Can we come in and look at your house? They said yes, and we go, This is it, this is the one. Now, that other house worked out just fine; it happened to be for sale, so there wasnt anybody living in it, and that wasnt a problem. So, it was Bob and Bill, just knowing exactly what I wanted in my mind.

And by the way, the location manager, he found one magnificent location after another. But that shot wasnt in his head in the way it was in Bob Richardsons head. He knew exactly what it needed to be.

The weirdest thing about it, though, since its the end of the movie and Id carried that shot around so long, we actually ended up doing that shotI dont knowmaybe around week five or six. Something fairly early on in the process.

DEADLINE: How long were you up entirely?

TARANTINO: I dont even remember now. I think it was something like three and a half months. So it was week five or six when we did that shot, and it was a little deflating to do it that soon. It was like, shit, thats the end. How could there be any movie left to do after that [laughs]?

DEADLINE: Its arresting, and bittersweet, because weve been introduced to Sharon Tate with a light touchthe idea of this bright spirit and all the promise she had ahead. And were left with the reality: she was stolen from her own life, and from all of us.

TARANTINO: Look, I think part of the way it worksand again, this was always in my headis that, with the exception of Jay [Sebring], when the victims of that night come out and we see them all, it was always that we saw them from behind. They were like figurines. Its like a cut-out of Sharon.

What I didnt expect to happen to me, and the strange thing that gets me about it, is its not just Sharon. Its Abigail [Folger] in that little robe. Her little blue robe became iconic to me, and so theres something about Abi puttering out of the house in that little blue housecoat she was wearing that really gets me every time I see it.

DEADLINE: My understanding of the genesis of this was that there were two ideas. Rick and Cliff, and the relationship between a struggling actor and his long-time stuntman, and Sharon Tate and the backdrop of the summer of 1969 and the Manson family. Was there a lightbulb moment when those ideas collided?

TARANTINO: Once I had that character of Cliff, it was a very quick leap to think, Well, what happens if they live on Cielo Drive? What if they lived next door to Roman and Sharon? Once I actually started thinking of it as a fully-fledged story, that came bizarrely easily. It was the first thing I came up with, actually, once I had that story. There were iterations of what could have happened but merging them together came very early on.

What started me thinking about this relationship between Rick and Cliff was witnessing an older actor on a movie. He came to me and said, Look, I got a guy, a stunt guy. Hes been my stunt guy for the last decade or so. I havent busted your balls about this, because theres nothing really for him to do, but you know that gag you have coming up on Thursday? He could do that. Itd be nice if we could throw that his way. Im like, Sure, sure, sure.

DEADLINE: How long ago did this happen?

TARANTINO: This was about eight or nine years ago, something like that.

So, this guy came down, and you could tell that there was a time he was a perfect double for this actor, but you could also tell: that time had passed. It was also interesting, because this guy wasnt working for me, he was working for the actor. But he was an interesting guy. I remember sitting on set, just looking across at them on the day this guy worked, and there was the actorthis old guy dressed in his outfitsitting in a directors chair next to this stunt guy dressed identically in the same costume. They were just sitting there, like Im sure theyve done for years on sets, just shooting the shit. It struck me: thats an interesting relationship. Its a relationship Ive never seen dramatized before. I thought, If I ever do a movie about Hollywood, that could be a really interesting way inside it; to explore that relationship.

DEADLINE: It must have been something youd read about, or known about before.

TARANTINO: Well, frankly, I had never thought much about it before. Other than, alright, this cinematographer likes to work with this camera assistant. Or this director has this go-to AD, and theyve worked together a long time. Of course, I know about stuff like that, and I think it happens less now than it did before.

But yes, I was very much aware that there was Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham, and there was Steve McQueen and Bud Ekins. I was aware of all that. But I had never really thought about it before.

DEADLINE: In hindsight, it seems like such fertile ground.

TARANTINO: Its funny, even telling you this story now, it seems so obvious. Why didnt someone do this before? Its so rich. Even the whole concept of the fact that, yeah, theyre buddies, but on the other hand, this guy is being paid to be there. And hes being paid to do all the things the actor supposedly does, but he really risks his life doing this. And also, hes being paid to be his friend. Hes paid to be on set, and talk to him, and help him out, and maybe run lines with him.

DEADLINE: And probably keep him out of trouble, too.

TARANTINO: Exactly. Especially if theres a drinking problem, which a lot of these guys had. So even talking about this now, it seems so obvious, but it was a little bit of a eureka moment.

DEADLINE: Its a melancholic relationship here too: this isnt Rick on his uppers, and Cliff tagging along for the ride. The ride is over. The fairground is moving on. Youve dealt with melancholy quite a lot in your career; most especially in Jackie Brown. But you dont seem like a very melancholic guy, so where does that come from?

TARANTINO: Yeah, Im not very melancholy, alright [laughs]. Life is pretty good. My life has been pretty charmed since Ive been working here in Hollywood, so I dont really have the right to be melancholy.

The thing about it is, if I didnt throw Sharon into this story, it probably wouldnt have been as melancholy. I dont know what it would have been, but just putting her into it, and knowing that youre heading towards that dayeven if I stopped in February, even if I never got to August, you know August is going to happenthat, in itself, adds a sobering aspect to the film, especially in a film like this that doesnt really have a story.

So, it was like, as I said, about four years of figuring out who Rick and Cliff werebetween other projects. A little bit of it was doing research on Sharon and the Manson family, but really it was just figuring out who Rick and Cliff were. Part of that involved writing almost an entire film book about Rick. First, I had to know his career; his filmography, and every TV show he did. I needed to know that all fairly well. And then I had to get over that, so I wasnt just shoving all that into the movie. Some people might say thats exactly what I did, but I did have to get over it.

The way I did that was by writing it all out. I had enough of the Marvin scenethe scene with Al Pacinoto put on a one-act play. Any time I needed to figure out where Rick was, I would just write it through the Marvin scene. It was never going to be in the movie, but the way to find out about Rick was to have Marvin ask him questions. It was as thick as a novel by the time I was finished with it. Never to be in the movie, but just to understand Rick.

Then after, OK, I know who these people are, the question became: what story do I want to tell? Now it was up to me. I had a couple of ideas early on that would have been more like an Elmore Leonard story. These guys were like Elmore Leonard guys any old way, and you could imagine them in one of his novels.

But then I thought, I dont think I need a story. I think theyre strong enough on their own. I can do just a day in the life of Rick, a day in the life of Cliff, and a little bit a day in the life of Sharon, and just follow them during that February. I thought the characters were strong enough, and I thought the milieu I was creating was strong enough.

DEADLINE: You mentioned earlier that we all know whats going to happen come August no matter what. Maybe thats where the melancholy comes in, because we know were about to witness the death of that classic version of Hollywood, too. Or, at least, we think we will.

TARANTINO: Yes, and the morbid thing about that was, once I realized it could be a day in the life, and started to write that, the murder that we know is going to happen was now operating as a dramatic motor to some degree. I dont know if you feel it much the first day, but once were onto the second day, its like every single scene is getting you closer to August 8th. It was morbid, the fact that this real-life murder was pulling the characters along.

I was not unaware of that. I became aware through doing it, and I had to constantly ask myself, Am I pulling this off? Because if Im not, this could be in really bad taste. Normally, I wouldnt mind veering into bad taste, but in this case, it mattered to me. I didnt want to exploit these victims. I dont think I did that, but it was a question I kept having to ask myself.

DEADLINE: The optimism of the movieand its there in that bittersweet final shotis that, OK, we know what happened on the night of August 8th/9th 1969. But the picture paints a hopeful what if. What if we could have lived in this moment forever?

TARANTINO: The weird thing about thinking about that ending, and then doing it in the context of the movie, was that I wasnt quite prepared for how Id feel when it came. When it was just an idea in my head for a story I was writing, it was like, Great, shes saved, done. But in the movie, when I watched it put together, it was like, OK, shes saved Dot, dot, dot.

Because no, shes not. Its that ellipsis where you have to realize, shes not saved. Things did not happen this way. To tell you the truth, I never thought about that during these five years I had that shot in my head. But, in context, you cant help but turn the page.

DEADLINE: Let me go back to what you said about the Marvin scene, and how you wrote all these conversations out. I was on the set of Django Unchained, and I was given a script that had a lot more material in it than the movie that eventually came out. You talked then about how you treat your scripts as novels, that you adapt as you go. There is material in there you never intend to actually shoot. In that movie I remember an entire sequence with Broomhilda, and a slave auction.

TARANTINO: Oh yeah, Broomhilda had a whole story and we didnt even film it. It was just too much.

DEADLINE: It was there for the reader?

TARANTINO: Yeah. Well, its funny. I think there was probably a time that we euphemistically thought we were going to shoot it. I cant imagine how we ever thought we were going to make a movie that was watchable in a movie theater with this 20- to 25-minute section in it, but I would have put it into the script anyway just for the reader. We even tried to cast that, and we briefly thought about shooting it, but Im always putting stuff into the script that I know probably will never see the light of day, but that makes the script better. Its a reading experience, and as a reading experience, it makes it fuller.

But then theres a whole lot of stuff where its like, OK, I hope this makes it, but I dont know. If Im lucky enough to shoot this, and get it out of my system, maybe this scene makes it, and this one doesnt. I can pretty much guess whatll make it for 80% of the movie, but theres 20% that I cant guess. Youre always surprised. Theres a couple of scenes in Hollywood that I would have bet the farm would make it into the movie, but they didnt. A whole little section that, to me, was at one time the soul of the movieat least when we shot itbut now its gone.

DEADLINE: Can you say what it was?

TARANTINO: The little girl [Julia Butters] had more things to do. She showed up a couple more times. Then, consequently, in the August section in the third act, I had this narrator come in, and hes describing this and that, and then he describes about how Rick cant afford Cliff anymore, and so he has to let him go. Tom Rothman had been reading the script, and he called me and goes, Hey, Quentin, this whole part with the narrator saying Rick has to let Cliff go That should be a scene. It shouldnt be narration; it should be dramatized. Believe it or not, as long as the movie was already, Tom Rothman was actually asking me to add a scene. He goes, I think you should write that, and make it a scene between the two boys.

So, I did. I think I even gave Brad [Pitt] and Leo [DiCaprio] a handwritten scene the day before we shot it, so they had it handwritten but not typed up. But they read it and were like, OK, here we go, lets do this. We banged it out, and they probably thought the scene would never make the movie, but its a terrific scene and it did end up being crucial.

Its a heartbreaking process. Its a little masochistic and heartbreaking to write this stuff that youre really happy with, and then not put it in. But at the same time, its also really fortunate to be in a situation where I do get to shoot some of this stuff. We do get to get it out of our system. We get to play around, and have fun doing it, and it exists. If I ever want to do anything with it, that stuff still exists.

I also think theres a quality to my movies where theyre bursting at the seams with material, and part of the making of the movie is sifting through it all. So yeah, Im not just writing a normal script and shooting that script, and when we do all the pages, were done. Every movie is an erstwhile novel adaptation. And by the way, theres a reason why people write scripts as a blueprint to be executed. I always make fun of it, but theres a very good reason they do that, and its the way most people do it. They dont do it my cockamamie way.

DEADLINE: Even out of Cannes, it made me curious what you would do with that material. The timing for The Hateful Eight landing on Netflix in episodic form made me wonder if there were darlings youd killed on Hollywood that you might one day also return to.

TARANTINO: To me, that version on Netflix wasnt all that different. Hateful Eight was already a long movie anyway, and the way I looked at it was, well, this is a play. I havent been to the theater in years where the play wasnt at least three hours long. Thats the standard for a real play. I figured that for this movie as a playespecially the way I was doing it with an intermission and everythingthat was par for the course.

DEADLINE: It was a change of form, though.

TARANTINO: It was a change of form, but at the same time Well, yes, it was a change of form. I had to rejigger the chapters a little bit to make it work, but they were already in chapters to some degree.

With The Hateful Eight, the timing was literally a situation where Netflix offered me that option, so it was like, if theyre offering me that option, and theyre even going to pay extra for it, well, I have all this stuff, I can do it, let me see if I like it. And I did, and I did like it. I thought it was an interesting way to watch the movie.

DEADLINE: All the movies youve made lately have been pretty big in terms of scale and scope. What keeps you engaged? What keeps your enthusiasm going as youre on the road to making and releasing a movie on this scale?

TARANTINO: Look, if I were doing really turgid dramas, or minimalistic pieces, it might not be that important to me. I think most of my stuff is really, really funny. There are laughs. And sometimes Ill call them comedies, sometimes I wont, but even if theyre not officially comedies, I think they have as many laughs as any comedy released that year, if not more. Im hearing laughs all through the writing of it, and Im hearing laughs when we do the scene, Im hearing laughs when we cut it together, and I definitely hear laughs when I get a reaction from an audience. Theyre not just sitting there, glazing over.

Thats my way of testing it out. Thats the reward for me, more than anything else. To sit in a theater and hear them chuckle at this line or that line. To laugh about this, and then to feel the tension when Cliff goes to Spahn Ranch. All of a sudden, the theater goes really quiet, you know what I mean? Thats the payoff. Thats the reward.

DEADLINE: It would be easy to have the kind of oversized success youve had in your career and then exhale. Not try as hard.

TARANTINO: I do feel Ive gotten a lot more jaded over the not quite 30 years Ive been doing this than I was in the first six years of the 90s, when I first came out. Nevertheless, the joy and the fun of making movies, and of seeing them up on the screen with a bunch of people who could do anything they wanted to do that day, and what they decided to do was pay money to come and see my movie Thats exciting.

DEADLINE: You started out in a fertile period for independent cinema in the early 90s. It was a richand perhaps a more optimisticworld to debut in.

TARANTINO: Yeah. I always imagined that, if I was going to break into movies, I would be breaking through in independent cinema, but that was before there was a legitimate independent cinema to break into. There were always those three or four movies a year that really broke through and became a thing. Even if it only played for a week or two weeks at one of the Laemmle theaters in Santa Monica or something, and it had a little ad in the Los Angeles Times, and it got a review in The New York Times, the LA Times and LA Weekly, that would have been good enough.

None of us knew, that year of 92, when we went to Sundance, that a good majority of the films that would be premiering at Sundance would be the harbinger for an entire movement. That most of us were going to get released over the next year. Even that other movies, that got turned down for Sundance that year, like Laws of Gravity, would find releases. Or even that, the way alternative music was taking off at that time, independent cinema would be taking off right alongside it. That they would become bedfellows.

DEADLINE: How do you look at the landscape today, then? Youre a celluloid guy. I dont even know if theres a way for a debut director now to get the money to make a 35mm film and actually get it onto a big screen.

TARANTINO: Well, some guys do. Its a fallacy that its less expensive [to shoot digital]. Youll spend money somewhere, so you could spend it there, on film.

I think the sad part is that a lot of filmmakers today just dont care. Theyre happy its digital because then the cinematographer isnt so much in charge, and theyre in charge. Theyve been shooting digital, making movies on their phone and in short films, and so thats what theyre comfortable with. Theyre probably intimidated or scared. How are we going to get an image? If we dont have enough lights, is this going to be bad? We were all scared of that too, but we had to wear the big boy pants and plow ahead anyway.

The independent market for cinema that did exist doesnt exist anymore. It doesnt exist the way it did when it was thriving in the 90s, but it doesnt even exist in the way I described it in the late 80s, where, yeah, maybe your movie played for only one or two weeks, but it had a foothold. It owned that little real estate in the newspaper. It was playing at the Loz Feliz 2, or the Music Hall, or even one of the shoebox theaters at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. There were a lot of movies I saw that never played everywhere else but in Cinema 6 or something in the Beverly Center.

DEADLINE: You cant even play at the Beverly Center anymore. That theater has gone.

TARANTINO: Yeah, but that was the place. It was that newspaper ad, it was a piece of real estate. You saw their little poster, the title treatment, and it was like, Im here! Now, a newspaper ad means nothing. Now its just lost in this or that or the other.

And, oddly enough, those movies are still being made. When you read the Los Angeles Times on a Friday, you have the big new comedyor whatever, two movies that make the front page as far as the reviews are concernedand then you turn the page just before you get to the TV listings, and theres seven or eight capsule reviews for films Ive never heard of. And sometimes they star known people. Ive never heard of them, theres no ad corresponding to them, and I dont even know where some of these theaters are. What are all these movies, and where are they going?

I even felt that about seven or eight years ago. I was on the Sundance jury and I watched all the films at Sundance that year because I was on the jury. We had some movies like Frozen River. That was the movie that won, so that played. The movie Ballast; that won something, and that ended up getting a theatrical release. There was another that played, and I cant even remember the name of it right now. It takes place in the 90s, and Ben Kingsley is a pot-smoking therapist.

DEADLINE: Oh, The Wackness.

TARANTINO: Yeah, The Wackness. That played and there were a couple of others, but back in the 90s, getting into Sundance was a thing. That was the holy grail. So we watched all these movies at Sundance, the premier American independent festival, and they had named people like Winona Ryder and Paul Giamatti and all those people in them, and I never heard from most of those movies again. I never even saw them show up on cable. I thought, OK, itll be on Showtime 4 or something like that, but no, I never saw them. They never got a theatrical release, and they literally got the pinnacle of what the goal was for independent cinema in the 90s. They just disappeared.

DEADLINE: Does it make us dinosaurs for hoping that movies exist and have a life in the theatrical space rather than just appearing one day on streaming and disappearing the next?

TARANTINO: A streaming platform is one thing, but those movies Im talking about? I dont think theyre appearing on streaming platforms either. When you read those little capsule reviews, the critics all seem pretty snotty about them, but theyll describe interesting-sounding stories, or an interesting take on a genre. Youll think, Maybe this guy doesnt like it, but it sounds like a cool movie. Maybe I wont see it this week at the San Gabriel blah-blah-blah, but Ill see it when it comes on cable. And then I never see it show up on cable. And those are the ones that actually got a theatrical release.

DEADLINE: If the 29-year-old Quentin Tarantino were starting his career tomorrow, with Reservoir Dogs, do you think that movie would break out?

TARANTINO: Ive thought about that a lot. I think the movie is a good movie, but I think at its heart what it has going for it is the Tim Roth/Michael Madsen aspect of it. If I had guys of that caliberwho they were then, nowI think that would be a thing. I could actually see Reservoir Dogs being picked up by one of the smaller divisions of the studios or something. Im being optimistic about that, but Ive thought about it, and its like, no, the market that existed, that took me under its wing and actually gave me a platform to do my movies That market doesnt exist anymore.

When it came to Reservoir Dogs, the film I wanted to emulate as far as what I hoped it would do, and the success it might get, and how it would stand out from the crowd, was Blood Simple. That was my jumping-off point. I didnt know if I was going to get the reviews that Blood Simple got, but I remembered that ad, and I trucked down to the Beverly Center to see it. Its an independent film, but it had a genre base. It was doing genre in its own way. Thats what I was hoping to emulate. What the Coen brothers did with Blood Simple.

DEADLINE: When Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came out, it spawned a million think pieces, many of which seemed to blithely ignore the context for what you were presenting. But it was also the motion picture event of the year. How gratifying was it to see it become this kind of phenomenon all its own in a world of superhero pictures and franchises?

TARANTINO: It felt wonderful. Look, I think a lot of us making movies are facing a dark night of the soul. I know I am, and so are a lot of us who make movies, where movies were one thing to us, and they were this one thing for a long time. We are wondering if well still be doing it this way 15 years from now. And my guess is not. I dont know what its going to be like 15 years from now, but I dont think this way will be the way.

Even more important than that, at the end of the dayand its sad, but its also how things changeyoure just talking about a delivery system for how people see stuff. Now, I think it is more than that, but you can reduce it to that if youre talking about the bigger question Ive heard many people pontificate on, on podcast after podcast. Thats the question of, do movies matter anymore? Are movies important? Are movies part of the conversation?

The thing about it is, there was a timeand it lasted for my entire lifewhere movies were at the center of the zeitgeist. A movie would hit, and become popular, and it would be at the center of the conversation. It would be the conversation. And then there were also the movies that opened in theaters and the critics didnt quite get them, and they didnt do so well at the box office, but five years later, after theyd been on cable and everything, the movies might as well have been big smashes because everyone has seen them and is quoting them. They become part of the fabric.

So, the question of do movies matter is a big question, and people are pontificating about that in print and in conversations in coffee houses and on podcasts the world over. Thats all depressing, but whats not depressing is when you make a movie andall that being saidyou are part of the conversation. There was an undeniable fact that, for the first four weeks of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood playing in its theatrical engagement, everybody was talking about it. It was in the conversation. Everybody was talking about it.

Youre being very sweet about a lot of the snotty think pieces that came out in the wake of the movie, but it took me a long time to realize something. I didnt feel like this before, and I would get mad at those things. Now, some of those pieces, yes, I think theyre being incredibly unfair in a lot of ways. But theyre not hurting me. Theyre actually, in their own, ass-backwards way, helping me. They are keeping the conversations alive. They are creating an argument about the movie. And frankly, maybe more important than a conversation is an argument. If youre going to have an argument, you need somebody on the opposing side. So, I might think theyre dicksand definitely, I think some of them were very, very unfairbut they were helping me in their own way, because the movie was worth fighting about. The movie was worth the arguments.

It was all a little less painful to me on this movie, those think pieces. Because to me, some of themnot all of them, but some of themhad their interesting points, and you could give them their due and everything. And many of them, they revealed exactly where they were coming from in the piece. Their unfairness was right there. They revealed it, and they were actually rather naked in their bias.

DEADLINE: Margot Robbie told me the other day that she had gone to the Bruin, which is the theater her Sharon watches The Wrecking Crew at in the movie, to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She said it was late into the run, there were only a handful of people there, and she sat in almost the exact same seat that Sharon does.

TARANTINO: I talked to her about that! Well, I havent talked to her about it since she did it, but I talked her into doing it [laughs]. I was like, Have you ever done that? She had some version of it, but not exactly what Sharon does in the movie. I go, Well, Margot, its playing at the Bruin right now. You could go next week, on a Wednesday afternoon for the 2 oclock show, and you could literally do what Sharon does. She was like, Oh my God, I think Ill do that. So, I knew she was going to do it.

DEADLINE: I didnt ask if shed put her feet up on the seat in front.

TARANTINO: Knowing her, she probably did [laughs].

DEADLINE: But she said it was fascinating to watch the people watching the movie and hear how they were reacting to it.

TARANTINO: Hear the laughs and all that stuff? Yeah.

DEADLINE: Thats something youve been doing since the beginning of your career, right?

TARANTINO: Oh yeah. Sharons basically me in that situation. Ive even done that at the Bruin. I remember the first thing of mine to play at the Bruin was True Romance. It was actually kind of funny, because I was already a little known when True Romance came out, because of Reservoir Dogs. I wasnt worldwide known, but some hip people knew who I was.

So, I was on a date, and we show up at the Bruin. Not during the daytime; they were getting ready for an evening show. I thought to myselfand not because Im cheapbut I thought, Well, I did write this movie. So, I talk to the manager, and I go, Look, I wrote this film. Do I have to pay? He goes, What do you mean you wrote it? I go over to the poster and I go, See? Thats my name, Quentin Tarantino. Thats me. He goes, How do I know its you? I go, Well, I can show you my drivers license.

And then my date proceeds to work out the deal with the manager. Im standing there, listening to them argue, and all of a sudden, some people come up to me, and they recognize me. Im over there by the poster, and these people come up and go, Oh, youre Quentin Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs is one of my favorite movies. Will you sign my autograph? I start signing the autograph.

My date, meanwhile, is still negotiating with the manager of the Bruin. And then hes like, Wait a minute. Whats all this going on? She goes, Those are his fans! Hes signing autographs for his fans. That shows you who he is.

DEADLINE: Did you get in?

More:

Quentin Tarantino Digs Deep On Once Upon A Time In Hollywood As He Fears Dark Night Of The Soul For Filmmakers: Q&A - Yahoo Entertainment

Zeitgeist translates as Spirit of Time and the Zeitgeist brand philosophy is to absorb the essence of interconnectedness that the Zeit Geist movement portrays and through that reflect the dominant global influences of streetwear, catwalk, culture, music and art of our time.

Based in Cape Town South Africa, the Zeitgeist brand was launched by design innovator Maxine Ginsberg and her dedicated team to take streetwear for men to the cutting edge and beyond. Maxine is the founder and owner of the company and her family has been involved in the South African Fashion Industry since 1905.

Original design and constant innovation is very important and capsule collections are done and updated all the time using the best in internationally sourced fabrics and trims. Production runs are limited to maintain exclusivity and to allow new stock to be introduced continuously so that the collection refreshes several times within a season. Zeitgeist regularly takes part in fashion showcase like South African Menswear Week.

The brand has through its strong online presence created a dedicated following of fans including celebrities, models and musicians. Zeitgeist is primarily aimed at men but due to high demand the collection has unisex pieces that also cater for women and a ladieswear range is being launched in the near future. The Zeitgeist customer is not a fashion follower but rather a first adopter and as such a free thinker that knows exactly what he wants and definitely not part of the pack.

Zeitgeist manufactures all garments within a 75km radius of their headquarters in Cape Town South Africa. This enables factory workers to stay employed and retain skill sets in an industry that has lost over 85 000 jobs to imports in the last 10 years. In many instances the workers are sole breadwinners and come from dire socioeconomic backgrounds where gangsterism, drugs, violent crime and abuse are the norm. It also allows for a much greener footprint as fabric and garment transport is kept to a minimum.

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Pictures: Supplied

Read more here:

Zeitgeist - men's streetwear made in Cape Town - CapeTown ETC

If you live in the Anglophone world and use the internet, you may already be familiar with /r/funny. With 27.3 million subscribers, /r/funny pronounced R slash funny when spoken aloud ranks as the most popular subreddit, the neologism to refer to topical forums on the eponymous link aggregation site. Like nearly all subreddits, /r/funny operates on the principle of social Darwinism: people post things that they believe are funny and which adhere to the lengthy and somewhat contradictory list of moderator rules that run along the side of the site and account-bearing users then vote on what they like. Those posts then rise to the top of the subreddit.

Hence, one scrolling to the /r/funny homepage this morning would see a webcomic by Little Porpoise about an anthropomorphic human heart wielding a knife; a visual pun on the word telekinesis; and a prank video filmed by a man tricking his mother into sitting on an air horn. All of these were, per Reddit's userbase, voted to be the most funny posts of the moment.

Because of the Darwinian nature of Reddit and the vast size of /r/funnys subscriber base, statistically speaking, the funniest videos should populate the homepage. But of course, humor is relative. There is a gulf between what you find funny and what a specific subset of internet users do. Thus, /r/funny is less of a repository of laughs, and more of an anthropological study on contemporary humor, and the popularidea of what "funny" means. It is a window into the zeitgeist.

Like much of Reddits ever-critical userbase, I am often perplexed at the kinds of things that are upvoted on /r/funny. Still, I find myself coming back frequently over the years sometimes to laugh, other times to cringe at the bizarre, frequently offensive, occasionally propagandistic images and videos that rise to the top.

Observing it over the years, you start to notice trends, certain topics or rhetorical constructions that recur among popular posts. One such trend, oft-seen but woefully unwritten about, is something I like to call the "Wife Didn't Approve" post. Usually, these posts consist of a picture of something that an adult man is doing, or is about to do, or wishes to do; the object is frequently puerile, and often involves something phallic, childish, or both.

The captions to the "Wife Didn't Approve" posts are performative. Here is something that is fun that I am doing, the men say. Yet my wife, who is not fun, does not approve. Isn't that relatable?

These kinds of posts are not, of course, confined to Reddit. Internet memes are ephemeral; they leak between the huge content aggregators and social media sites, and hence, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, 9gag, and other similar sites have thousands of variations on "Wife Didn't Approve."

A pattern like this always hints at something deeper happening socially and culturally. Why, then, are "Wife Didn't Approve" posts so popular? While we cannot easily gauge whether the people liking these posts are men or women, the rhetorical construction of it suggests that it is playing on a familiar sexist stereotype: the humorless, fun-killing protagonist's better half. Beyond that, theres the notion of marriage as some kind of entrapment, an end to the fun life of a bachelor. The men in these kinds of posts are implied to be immature, and celebrating their immaturity. Their partner, evidently, saps their youthfulness from them. They are rebelling against her regulatory whims, or so the posts seem to imply.

The Wife Didnt Approve guys are an interesting juxtaposition to the nascent internet phenomenon of the Wife Guy. The Wife Guy is a social media archetype whose personality is defined by his partner and his devotion for her. The phrase starting making rounds after a now-infamous Instagram post from Robbie Tripp, whose self-congratulatory writing about his wifes body became a viral, much-mocked meme. As the New York Times Amanda Hess wrote, the Wife Guy is worthy of suspicion because he appears to be using his devotion to his wife for personal gain. And Tripp was the consummate Wife Guy, inasmuch as hehelped normalize the neologism Wife Guy, as his life, vis-a-vis Instagram at least, revolved around depicting himself as a hero for loving his curvy partner. Capitalizing on that virality, Tripp later made a music video celebrating zaftig women like his wife.

In contrast to Wife Guys like Tripp, the "Wife Didn't Approve" guy or Anti-Wife Guy, as I call them defines his identity as counterposed to his wife. His existence is set against her rules, wishes or goals. Anti-Wife Guy is, thus, an anti-hero, a perpetual child whose baser impulses have to be curbed by his wife, who behaves more like a mom. Anti-Wife Guy basks in puerile humor and childish hobbies. He is who the man-cave was invented for. But his ability to engage in such hedonism is foreshortened by his wifes domineering disapproval. Or, so say the memes.

It is probable, given the huge amount of Anti-Wife Guy content, that many Anti-Wife Guys are exaggerating their wives' point of view. Perhaps in many cases, said posters either dont have wives, or their wives actually do approve, or they dont care. But the employment of the "Wife Didn't Approve" phrase allows one to play on recognizable archetypes both of the fun-hating harpy wife and of the manchild husband that many in the Anglophone internet world identify with.Infusing memes and jokes with wife didnt like this or wife disapproved adds a new element the idea of opposition, and of the poster and reader taking part in a collective subculture with all the other Anti-Wife Guys.As an omnipresent meme that plays on sexist stereotypes, the Anti-Wife Guy is not that dissimilar from Anti-Vax Mom.

One of my favorite Anti-Wife Guys, and perhaps the most self-aware example I have ever seen, appears on the X-Men subreddit in a post from about a year ago. In this post, an Anti-Wife Guy posts a picture of a Deadpool action figure that he stuffed in the family shopping cart without his wife's approval.

Had it in the basket already but the Wife didn't approve [of] me getting this for myself, he writes. She said we're doing Christmas shopping for the kids [not] for me. I says Im a big ass kid.

Why does every persons marriage on reddit sound awful? someone asks in the comments. The Deadpool-loving Anti-Wife Guy contemplatively replies:

Haha because our [wives] don't let us be ourselves at times haha. My wife [has] had [it] with the stacks of comic books I have in my living room. I also just recently started collecting Figurines an[d] she was like[,] ["You] don't get full its never enough for [you]. Lol. [...] I see it as we are some big ass kids and our wives are like our moms. No don't get that or no can go there and that bad for your health [...] I guess that's why we love them. My marriage is [great] can't complain.

There is something tragicomic about the Anti-Wife Guys and those who love them. Why get married if your partner disapproves of everything you do? Younger generations have taken to mocking the tendency of Boomer cartoonists to celebrate hatred of ones life partner as if marriage were something we must endure because monogamy and partnership are more important than happiness.

Those irrational Boomer beliefs about love and commitment abound in media: Al Bundy and his family on Married With Children perhaps best exemplify this nascent male Boomer attitude towards matrimony. The two sentiments are related, but not quite the same, I think: Anti-Wife Guy isn't a Boomer meme specifically, as the Anti-Wife Guy's modus operandi is to depict his partner as shrill, nagging, and mom-esque; whereas the Boomer wife-hater merely detests his partner.

One of the defining traits of a patriarchal society is that its men have more freedom to do what they please, whereas women are socialized to be more bound to a specific subset of duties that serve mens needs. Hence, men are taught that they have the ultimate freedom to pursue their passions and pleasure, and hence, dont have to grow up. In many cases, men aspire not to. Women are acculturated to take on more housework and childcare labor, and therefore responsibility. Despite the successes of the modern feminist movement, there is still a vast housework labor gap, and a concomitant childcare labor gap. As with many stereotypes, Anti-Wife Guys stereotyped partner springs on the sad reality of this social situation. I suspect I would be miffed by my partner, too, knowing that I lived in a society where my partner was expected to embrace behaving like a child, and I was expected to embrace household labor.

More here:

The wives of the Internet don't approve - Salon

As the lovely New York spring of 1977 turned into the worst kind of New York summer, I did two things over and over again: I watched Robert Altmans mid-career masterpiece 3 Women, at a theatre in midtown, and I read Joan Didions astounding third novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Released within weeks of each other that year, when I was sixteen, these two revelatory pieces of art shared a strong aesthetic atmosphere, an incisive view of uneasy friendships between women, a deadpan horror of consumerism, and an understanding of how the uncanny can manifest in the everyday. Reading and watchingit wasnt long before Altmans and Didions projects merged in my mind, where they constituted a kind of mini-Zeitgeist, one that troubled, undid, and then remade my ideas about how feminism might inform popular art.

After falling under the sway of A Book of Common Prayer, I turned to Didions first two novels, Run River (1963) and Play It as It Lays (1970). (All three novels were reissued in November, as part of a handsome volume from the Library of America, Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s.) Run River, published when Didion was not yet thirty, was conventional in a way that reflected not the fascinating slant of her intractably practical mind but, rather, her formidable ambition: writers wrote novels, so she wrote one. Still, the book, which is set in Didions home town of Sacramento, is not just a reflexive or academic exercise. Its protagonist, Lily Knight McClellan, is a kind of ruined Eve living in relative wealth in an Eden that the next generation will want no part of. Lily cries, drinks, cheats on her rancher husband, Everett, and aborts a child, because she cannot forgo the comfortable loving fictionsthe story of being a wife and thus socially acceptable, according to the rules of her tribe. What no Didion heroine can entirely reconcile herself to is the split between what she wants and what a woman is supposed to do: marry, have children, and keep her marriage together, despite the inevitable philandering, despite her other hopes and dreams. Didions women have an image in mind of what life should look liketheyve seen it in the fashion magazinesand they expect reality to follow suit. But it almost never does. In Didions fiction, the standard narratives of womens lives are mangled, altered, and rewritten all the time.

Play It as It Lays also centers on a woman failing to live up to social expectations, and it comes as close as any book has come to representing what repression does to the soul. In this slim novel, where sometimes a few words constitute a chapter, Didion gives shape to ghosts, the ghastly, and the ephemeral. Maria Wyeth, a sometime B actress, suffers a number of misfortunes, including the birth of a disabled child, but what makes her still the best known of Didions early heroines is how she queers the image of American womanhood even as she presumably lives it, in her nice house in Los Angeles, a city where failure, illness, fear... were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants. Maria feels an existential gnawing in her bones, a dread she can never quite shake, but instead of clinging tighter to the rules she has presumably been taughtpolish the furniture, make an apple pie, prepare her husbands Martini as he rolls up the drivewayshe makes a list of the things she will never do: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to,... carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.

Play It as It Lays was published not long after the Stonewall riots, in New York, at a time when there were few stories about gay male life out there, representing. The book, which features a significant gay male character, could be read both as a metaphor for queernessthe girl who doesnt fit inand as an early, un-camp depiction of the fag hag, a woman who questions convention by avoiding it and finds safety in the company of gay men. I admired Play It as It Laysthere isnt a closeted gay adolescent on the planet who wouldnt identify with its nihilism played out in the glare of glamorous privilegebut it didnt thrill me like A Book of Common Prayer, which has a full-bodied pathos and yearning that Didions other early fiction lacks or suppresses.

When A Book of Common Prayer came out, the country was still drunk on Bicentennial patriotism; 1976 had given us a big dose of pomp and ceremony. Over the receding jingoistic din, Didions voice told another story, about womens inner lives formed in a nation that was, as Elizabeth Hardwick put it, in a 1996 essay about Didion, blurred by a creeping inexactitude about many things, among them bureaucratic and official language, the jargon of the press, the incoherence of politics, the disastrous surprises in the mother, father, child tableau. The first three items listed have to do with language generally and rhetoric specificallyhow we fashion the truth, and why. In Didions noveland in most of her fiction, including her 1984 masterpiece, Democracybelieving that empirical truth exists is like believing that the water in a mirage will satisfy your thirst. What interests her is why people still want to drink it. Certainly Charlotte Douglas does. Charlotte is the person whom the books narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is referring to when she says, at the start of the novel, I will be her witness. When I first read those words, that long-ago summer, I was struck, as I am now, by the feminist ethos behind them: I will remember her, and therefore I, too, will exist.

I had grown up with the art and politics of such early heroes as Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Ntozake Shange, but Altmans potent film and A Book of Common Prayer were the first works I encountered that embodied the second-wave white feminism that mattered to me as well. Not that Didiona graduate of Berkeley and a staffer at Vogue during the age of Eisenhower, who was already writing pieces steeped in originalitywas part of the feminist movement. In her 1972 essay The Womens Movement, she objected to several of the movements tendencies, including its invention of women as a class and its wish to replace the ambiguities of fiction with ideology. It was clear from Didions writing that not only was she allergic to ideology, which she avoided like a virus in most of her work, but her ways of thinking and of expressing herself were unlike anyone elses. In a 2005 essay in The New York Review of Books, John Leonard recalled how startled he was, in the sixties, by Didions syntax and tone: Ive been trying for four decades to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours... something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than could be expected, as if to square a sandbox for the Sphinx. Still, in A Book of Common Prayer, Didion tried to close the gap between herself and others, to write about the responsibility inherent in connecting.

To me, A Book of Common Prayer was feminist in the way that Toni Morrisons Sula, published four years earlier, was feministwithout having to declare itself as such. But, whereas the two friends in Sula live inside their relationship, Didion wrote about a woman trying to enter into a friendship and a kind of love with another woman who is ultimately unknowable. A sixty-year-old American expatriate living in the fictional Central American city of Boca Grande, Grace inhabits an atmosphere of opaque equatorial light. Boca Grande, a sort of ersatz movie set, has no real history; its airport is a way station between more desirable destinations. A stomping ground for arms dealers and rich people with offshore accounts, Boca Grande is as good a place as any for Grace, who has cancer, to live and die. Not once during the course of the novel does she ask who will remember her when shes gone. Grace, who shares some of her creators moral rigidityIn order to maintain a semblance of purposeful behavior on this earth you have to believe that things are right or wrong, Didion told an intervieweris always looking out, rarely looking in. In a way, by moving to Boca Grande, Grace sought to escape life, or, at least, the life she was supposed to have as an American woman. And yet it followed her across the sea, in the real and ghostly presence of Charlotte, who died before Grace began telling this story.

Born in Denver, Grace was orphaned at a young age: My mother died of influenza one morning when I was eight. My father died of gunshot wounds, not self-inflicted, one afternoon when I was ten. Until she was sixteen, she lived alone in her parents former suite at the Brown Palace Hotel. Then she made her way to California, where she studied at Berkeley with the cultural anthropologist A.L.Kroeber, before being tapped to work with Claude Lvi-Strauss, in So Paulo. But make no mistake: her pursuit of anthropology was not the result of an intellectual passion, or any kind of passion. I did not know why I did or did not do anything at all, she says. After marrying a tree planter in Boca Grande, Grace retired (quotation marks hers) from anthropology. She gave birth to a son, and was eventually widowed and left, she says, with putative control of fifty-nine-point-eight percent of the arable land and about the same percentage of the decision-making process. Graces inheritance makes her the head of the household, but money isnt everythingit isnt even a start, when your real interest lies in something other than profit and waste. The flesh and the spirit are on Graces mind; her terminal illness no doubt contributes to our sense that, for her, the day is a long night filled with questions about being, questions she attaches to her memories of Charlotte.

Referred to by the locals as la norte-americana, Charlotte, during the brief time that Grace knows her, is a perfect denizen of Boca Grande. Pretty, ginger-haired, she seems to have no past, though she has an intense interest in the past, which spills over to the present and infects the future. She believes in institutions and conventionality, but they dont believe in her. She has a daughter, Marinmodelled on Patricia Hearstwho has disappeared after participating in a plane hijacking. Charlotte fills that absence with invention: she makes up a version of Marin who is forever a child. Charlottes husband, Leonard, isnt around much, either. When asked about him at one of many cocktail parties, Charlotte says carelessly, He runs guns. I wish they had caviar. That Charlotte is a mystery to Grace is part of the story: what sense can be made of a woman who spends half her time at the airport, watching planes take off for other places? Grace tries to shape these fragments and images of Charlotte into a coherent whole because she loves her, though she has no real language to express that love and Charlotte isnt around to receive it.

A Book of Common Prayer is an act of journalistic reconstruction disguised as fiction: a Graham Greene story within a V.S.Naipaul novel, but told from a womans perspective, or two womens perspectives, if you believe Charlotte, which you shouldnt. In a review of The Executioners Song, Norman Mailers 1979 book about the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, Didion writes, of life in the West, Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories. This is true of life in Boca Grande, too. Grace wants to pass down what she knows about Charlotte and, thereby, what she might know about herself. And yet some of the drama rests, of course, in what she cant know. After marrying, Grace says, she pursued biochemistry on an amateur level. The field appeals to her because demonstrable answers are commonplace and personality absent. She adds:

I am interested for example in learning that such a personality trait as fear of the dark exists irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the Mato Grosso or in Denver, Colorado.... Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids. Fear of the dark is a protein. I once diagrammed this protein for Charlotte. I dont quite see why calling it a protein makes it any different, Charlotte said, her eyes flickering covertly back to a battered Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalogue she had received in the mail that morning in May.... I mean I dont quite see your point.

I explained my point.

Ive never been afraid of the dark, Charlotte said after a while, and then, tearing out a photograph of a small child in a crocheted dress: This would be pretty on Marin.

Since Marin was the child Charlotte had lost to history and was at the time of her disappearance eighteen years old, I could only conclude that Charlotte did not care to pursue my point.

Also, for the record, Charlotte was afraid of the dark.

Facts dont necessarily reveal who we are, but our contradictions almost always do: its the warring selfthe self thats capable of both caring for others and intense self-interestthat makes a story. And if Grace is drawn to anything its a story; narrativeinvestigating it, creating itgives her something to live for. Part of what so captivates me about A Book of Common Prayer is that, on some level, its a book about writing, which captures Didions love of cerebral thriller-romances, such as Joseph Conrads 1915 tale Victory or Carol Reeds 1949 film version of Graham Greenes The Third Man, in which a man tries to piece together the story of his friends life. But the dominant ethos of the novel is one that Didion discovered as a teen-ager, while reading Ernest Hemingway. Writing about Hemingway in this magazine in 1998, Didion noted:

The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source.

Charlottes failure is that she attaches. She cant move through in the way that Grace can, or believes she can. Charlotte has her own stories to tell, but how can you give force or form to a piece of writing when youre immune to veracity? You can only write fantasy, tell the world not who you are but who you want to be. Charlottes fantasy includes the conviction that her strange and troubling family is a family. In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind, Didion noted in her wonderful 1976 essay Why I Write. Theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion. Charlotte composes several Letters from Central America, with a view to having The New Yorker publish her reportorially soft, inaccurate work, but the editors decline. Charlottes ineptitude doesnt keep us from rooting for her, though, because, despite it all, she doesnt complain and never loses heart, and how many of us could do the same, if, like Charlotte, we loved a child who couldnt love us, or married a man who was indifferent to our pain? Graces sometimes smug responses to Charlottes high-heeled strolls into political and emotional quicksand are more upsetting than Charlottes mistakes, because Grace believes she knows better, when, in fact, no one does. What Charlotte teaches Grace, directly and indirectly, is that, no matter how much you want to tell the truthor, at least, your truththe world will twist and distort your story. Didion closes her most lovelorn and visceral novel with Grace saying, with sad finality, I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

I dont think its necessary to read chronologically through the Library of America volumewhich, in addition to the novels, includes Didions seminal essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). Almost any page of this invaluable book will take you somewhere emotionally and offer a paramount lesson in the power of Didions voice. Some readers came to Didion later in her careerthrough her National Book Award-winning memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), about the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, for instance, or Blue Nights (2011), about the death of her daughterand its interesting to go back and explore the origins of the impulse that drives those memoirs. Indeed, in The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion confesses a Grace-like tendency to try to distance herself from the unfathomable through writing and research: writing, for her, can be a means of controlling the uncontrollable, including grief and loss.

A story thats as interesting as the ones Didion tells in important works like A Book of Common Prayer is how she found and developed that authoritative literary voice. In her review of The Executioners Song, this daughter of California wrote:

The authentic Western voice... is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of The Executioners Song is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls The immense blue of the strong sky of the American West... not too much makes a difference.

So whats out there in the blue? What words can we try to grab and shape as theyre fading away? How can we describe intimacy, or the failure of intimacy, without getting too close to it? Part of Didions genius was to make language out of the landscape she knewthe punishing terrain of Californias Central Valley, with its glaring hot summers and winter floods, its stark flatness, its river snakes, taciturn ranchers, and lurking danger. Those extremes affect the way you deal with the world, she said in a 1977 interview. It so happens that if youre a writer the extremes show up. They dont if you sell insurance.

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Joan Didions Early Novels of American Womanhood - The New Yorker

The ruling elites, the sacred establishers of Israels bureaucracy are coming with their knives sharpened closing in on Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. After all it is their state their establishment and not his. This was made clear to Menachem Begin, the man who Bibis father served as secretary, when David Ben Gurion ordered Yitzhak Rabin to fire on the Atalena destroying it, the ammunition in it, and killing many passengers most of whom were Holocaust survivors. The real target had been Begin who made it out alive.

Israel Eldad had warned Begin not to trust the Mapai, the forerunner of the Labor. Menachem, do you really think they will just let you walk in with enough weapons to take control? It is their state not yours and they rather destroy it than hand it over to you.

Eldad was right of course. The destruction of the Altalena led to the fall of Jerusalem since the ammunition and weapons Begin was bringing in would have led to its capture.

When Avichai Mandebilt declared his intention to indict the Prime Minister, he essentially paved the way for the leftist super-structure, Israels Deep State to begin the process of finally wresting control of the country from the street it lost it to when Begin surprised the parochial classes and Laborites in 1977.

True, there have been right wing leaders before, but each eventually bent to the will of the courts and the media, but not Netanyahu he has always been smarter than the left. The street, the disadvantaged, the religious, the settler, the sefardi, they have all sensed Netanyahu was different.

True, Netanyahu has not always acted the way any one group would want, but changed the face of Israel, steering it away from failed policies and turned it into a powerhouse a true global leader. The Prime Minister has been a thorn in the side of the Left, because he mainstreamed positions that were at one time unthinkable, steering a shaky ship after Olmert went down and turned the State around in the face of tremendous systemic opposition .

At the End of Days, a leader will arise that will be a forerunner to Mashiach ben David. This forerunner is dubbed Mashiach ben Yosef, whose whole aim is to safeguard the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in a material sense. His power and ability is to utilize the physical vessels available and harness them for the good of the Nation of Israel while protecting the nation from harm.

The Mashiach be Yosef is also a concept or a movement, represented by thousands of redeemers since the birth of the Zionist movement. This movement has been encapsulated by the State the one which has been uplifted by the current Prime Minister in a way never previously imagined.

Along with Mashiach ben Yosef, there is the Erev Rav named for the mixed multitudes that left Egypt with the Nation of Israel. At the End of Days, it is said that these mixed multitudes will be control of the Land of Israel and ultimately destroy the Mashiach ben Yosef, which is both the leader himself and the physical restoration of the Nation of Israel in the Land of Israel.

Sometimes we think Redemption and we feel the End of Days is sometime in the future, but it seems now we are at that point.

And I will pour out upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplications. And they shall look to me because of those who have been thrust through [with swords], and they shall mourn over it as one mourns over an only son and shall be in bitterness, therefore, as one is embittered over a firstbornson.Onthat day there shall be great mourning in Jerusalem, like the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the Valley of Megiddon.Zechariah 12:10-11

The first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Palestine Rav Kook wrote the following in 1904 as a eulogy on the occasion of Theodor Herzls death:

The characteristics of nationalism was prominent in Ahab, who had great love for Israel. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Omri, who founded a city in the land of Israel. Scriptural commentators said: Everyone receives a portion in the world to come. Gilead is mine refers to Ahab, who fell in Gilead. At the height of battle, despite being shot through with arrows, Ahab hid his injury so as not to alarm his soldiers. Such courageous spirit is derived from tremendous, abundant love. He also honoured the Torah, for he outwardly preserved the nations dignity in the eyes of Ben-Haddad. Nonetheless, he did not recognise the value of the Torah and of Gods unique holiness, in which Israels entire advantage lies. Therefore, he followed the ways of Jezebel and the despicable customs of other nations to the degree that they then prevailed over the Zeitgeist.

In contrast, Josiah elevated the spiritual aspect as no king before or after him. As the text testifies, And before him there was no king like him, who returned to the Lord with all his heart and soul and might, in accordance with the entire Torah of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him. To that end, he wanted Israel to have no relationship with the nations of the world. He therefore did not heed the words of Jeremiah, who advised him in Gods name to allow the Egyptians to pass through Israels territory.

Thus, Ahab and Josiah combine the two aspects of Joseph and Judah, the power of the Messiahs of the House of Joseph and the House of Judah. When the people are ready, the distortion of each separate dynasty will be removed, for in the times of the Messiah the two kingdoms will join together and come to fully realise the full potential of their power as a chosen nation. At that time, with this reunification, the mourning [in Jerusalem] will also reach a climax, for what was lost and the distance from true fulfilment will finally be recognised, and the mourning for both Ahab and Josiah will combine and grow exponentially. [This great mourning] will serve as a moral that [both kingdoms] must combine their powers in order to create the balance that will lead to the greatest general good.

What we are witnessing now is the tearing apart of an approach to make way for something far bigger. After all, Bibi and those within the Revisionist Zionist movement tried to balance between a redemptive vision of the state and an out of date nationalism that relied on secular concepts rather than the Torah and Jewish faith. In this case, the Erev Rav were never done away with because in order to destroy them, the Revisionists would have to rely on a force beyond their cognitive abilities. This force is the light of the Mashiach ben David, which is above time and space.

At the End of Days Mashiach ben Yosef falls, which leads to the next stage of the Redemptive process. Of course this comes with chaos and fear, because all of us no matter what camp we have been in, understand that what has been in existence cannot truly continue as is. Netanyahus fall is the fall of the State as we know it.

How the road to the final Redemption will play out now is anyones guess, but one thing is certain it will be a surprise.

Read more here:

Is this the end of Mashiach ben Yosef? - israelrising.com

NEW YORK, United States Drew Elliott has, by his own admission, engineered some of the most important pop culture images of the past decade.

Its not an idle brag: it was his decision, as chief creative officer of Paper Magazine, to put Kim Kardashians naked, glistening derriere on the cover of the publications infamous #BreakTheInternet issue in 2014. The images came close to meeting that hashtags promise, bringing in upwards of 50 million page views for Papers website, a coup for a niche fashion publication in a time when print had lost much of its lustre.

Now, Elliott, 38, is once again helping an ageing institution beset by online competitors to recapture the cultural zeitgeist. Only this time, its on a far bigger stage. As the newly appointed senior vice president and global creative director of MAC Cosmetics, hes tasked with reviving the fortunes of the worlds biggest prestige makeup brand.

I'm going to give them blockbusters, Elliott told BoF at MACs offices in Soho, in his first interview since starting in his new role three weeks ago. Some 300 employees are spread across four floors, connected by a massive red Ruby Woo staircase named for the brand's longtime bestselling lipstick (it was recently dethroned by Devoted to Chili.). The 86,000-square-foot space exists as a hip offshoot to the stuffier Midtown offices of The Este Lauder Companies, MACs parent.

Among Elliotts first orders of business: attract Gen Z customers with a revamp of the labels imagery, messaging and voice on social media. He said he will help MAC communicate through a lens of pop culture, although hes mum on specifics. He also wants to rethink the brands approach to its signature collaborations, green-lighting fewer new products but expanding the notion of these partnerships to include campaigns and other concepts that dont involve putting more items on shelves.

Elliotts arrival marks the completion of a total makeover of MACs upper ranks, a changing of the guard the likes of which havent been seen since Este Lauder acquired the brand from founders Frank Toskan and Frank Angelo in 1998.

Creative Director James Gager and Global Brand President Karen Buglisi Weiler, who built MAC from a fledgling Canadian label into a multi-billion-dollar cosmetics empire, exited in March 2017 and February 2018, respectively. Buglisi Weiler's replacement was Philippe Pinatel, the former head of operations at Birchbox, who joined last year as MACs senior vice president and global general manager. He will have help from Ukonwa Ojo, who starts next month in the newly created role of senior vice president of global marketing.

We were not in the channels of distribution where young people were shopping.

The decision to pluck executives from a digital-first beauty subscription service and a print magazine was an unusual one for the company, which almost never looks outside the Este Lauder universe when filling leadership roles.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. MAC was able to scale because its expansive selection provided something for everyone and it was primarily sold at department stores, once the leading sales channel for prestige beauty. Plus, there were less makeup brands, which gave fewer options to consumers now bombarded with new launches on a daily basis. MAC was a pioneer to the inclusivity movement labels are rushing to be a part of, from challenging gender norms to offering the requisite 40 to 50 shades of foundation decades before the rest of the industry.

But the brand has seen US sales falter in recent years, where digitally native labels like Glossier have invented a new way of selling makeup centred on building community among consumers under the age of 25. Glossier operates out of the same Soho building as MAC.

Though MAC has been the largest prestige makeup brand in the US for over a decade, sales dipped 10 percent in the first half of 2019. The picture looks better globally, with strong demand from emerging markets expected to drive global sales for fiscal year 2020. Global business is growing by high, strong single percentages, and MACs now the second biggest prestige makeup brand in China. Singles Day sales totalled $38 million and included 1.2 million lipsticks, a 67 percent lift from last year. MAC is the second largest label in the Lauder portfolio, after theEste Lauder brand, with annual net sales that top $2 billion.

A lip wall in Mac cosmetics' Shangahi store | Source: Courtesy

We took our success a little for granted and didnt fundamentally understand the fragmentation and profound disruption of what social media and content brought to the marketplace and the conversation, particularly with Gen Z, said John Demsey, executive group president at Este Lauder. We were not in the channels of distribution where young people were shopping.

MAC needs to change its sales pitch. In the past, the label played such a central role in the cultural conversation about beauty that it could dictatea single trend across all markets(when Strobe Cream came out in 2000 there was only one shade that the brand talked about using in one way as a highlighter on cheekbone). A different approach is necessary today, where trends vary by region and consumers might get their makeup tips from micro-influencers instead of television and magazine ads. People want options and dont want to be told what brand to buy.

We used to have a very strong, fashion-centric point of view where we would say, This is a trend, this is what is hot and MAC was delivering it, Pinatel said. The brand is also developing new products to appeal to the regional market, a departure from MACs previous one-size-fits-all strategy.

We are innovating from New York, but for the [different] regions and countries and for the consumer, he said.

MAC recently launched a mascara in Latin America for consumers who had trouble curling their eyelashes, and cushion compact foundations that are only sold in Asia. Both have become bestsellers in their respective markets. A store in Eaton Centre in Toronto, which has a large proportion of Chinese shoppers, sells products from Asia-specific lines. Customers at Nordstroms new Manhattan flagship can check out looks from New York Fashion Week.

Mac Cosmetics' display inside the new Nordstrom New York store | Source: Courtesy

MACs problems arent limited to messaging, however. Pinatels focus initially is on revamping the companys distribution strategy, which sees the brands makeup sold via 4,650 locations worldwide. They include about 680 freestanding doors, including 162 in the US and 50 in Canada.

Until 2017, points of sale did not include US specialty retailers, which have stolen a large share of makeup sales once made by department stores, historically a MAC stronghold. Two years ago, the brand entered Ulta Beauty, and is now sold in 350 of the chains roughly 1,200 stores. MAC is sold in Sephora in nine markets internationally, including China, South Korea, Brazil and Canada.

Demsey said MAC opted for Ulta because the chain, which operates hair and nail salons, allowed the brand to hire its own in-store makeup artists. The company employs 19,000 makeup artists worldwide, but is incorporating more digital elements and a stronger self-service component into stores for customers who prefer to explore on their own.

Pinatel is confident the revamped store format, which will roll out to all doors within three years, will help the North American business. Sales are up 10 percent in about 80 percent of the US and Canadian stores that have already incorporated the updated design.

He talks a lot about re-tapping into culture, pointing to makeup collaborations with mainstream icons like the Disney movie Aladdin and the singer Mary J Blige, as well as more niche cultural touchstones such as Commes des Garon. The brand was an exhibitor at video game convention TwitchCon this year as an effort to reach gamers, and has been working to build a presence on Tiktok to connect with the apps young user base.

For every VSCO girl, theres a Euphoria boy or girl that goes against it.

Makeup trends are diverging, with labels like Lady Gagas Haus Labs embodying a makeup for everyone ethos to Gucci Westmans Westman Atelier and Victoria Beckham Beauty taking a clean approach to colour cosmetics. Glossier appeals to teens and twentysomethings with an affinity for no-makeup makeup and Huda Beauty attracts the exact opposite. MACs role in this world is to service everybody, Pinatel said.

We have seen, in the past, a swing between a lot of makeup, less makeup, then a lot of makeup, said Pinatel. The new story is that theres this young customer with authority saying, Im not wearing a lot of makeup, and thats a clear choice that they are speaking very loudly about.

Or as Demsey put it: For every VSCO girl, theres a Euphoria boy or girl that goes against it.

MAC has one advantage over other beauty brands: it was the first label to challenge mainstream societys ideas and values around gender norms, sexuality and alternative lifestyle, most notably through early collaborations with RuPaul, who starred in the first Viva Glam campaign in 1994. The MAC Aids Fund, founded at the same time, has raised over $500 million to date.

The brand has struggled to communicate this in a way that resonates with American teens, and despite strong growth abroad, MAC fell out of favour with a younger demographic.

MAC Cosmetics' collaboration with Comme des Garcons | Source: Courtesy

The Gen Z consumer mindset is so completely different than ours, said Shireen Jiwan, founder of Sleuth Brand Consulting, of todays youth who categorises gender, sexual preference and ones physical sex as three separate entities. For older generations, your pronoun and your gender and your sex are all one thing.

Digitally native newcomers like ColourPop, Lime Crime and Morphe have become the go-to for this group, despite MACs deep history and roots in the arts and theatre communities that have typically been the ones most elastic in their thinking about whats now referred to as gender fluidity.

They [MAC] ushered it in, they were the pioneers and then everybody else rushed into this space and all of that noise drowned them out, said Jiwan. Its going to be about taking these issues around gender and sexuality out of the realm of niche and shoving them firmly in the faces of the mass mall consumer. We havent seen that yet.

Its a tall order for Elliott, who underscored the importance of maintaining MACs rightful place inside pop culture. For him, its less about product and more what the brand will put out from an image perspective, taking cues from Instagram, TikTok or anyone with an influential voice or following.

My job is to prioritise those things and to articulate them through our brand filter so it's 100 percent clear, Elliott said.

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How MAC Cosmetics Plans to Get Back on Top - The Business of Fashion

In a riverside venue in Durham with sensational views of the citys castle and cathedral, John Theobald is getting to grips with a fancy new digital oven. LED lights flash on and off apparently randomly, but soon enough a plate of handmade peri-peri pork sausages, champ mash and buttered spinach is on the counter.

The Durham Sausage Company is one of seven independent food businesses under one roof at the Food Pit, which officially opened on Friday. Its plates of sausages and mash had previously been available at a local pop-up, but Durhams new food venue was a chance for Theobald and his business partner to go a step further without the investment and risks of opening a restaurant. Anyway, I dont think theres demand for a restaurant dedicated to sausages, said Theobald. This is a bit like a food cart, but on a bigger scale.

In another booth, Richie Parker of Spread From The Med offering chicken gyros, souvlaki and halloumi fries had spent the summer touring festivals in a converted horse box. Were still doing the van, but this is a toe in the water to see if theres scope to become a bigger company.

From Durham to Brighton, Preston to Cheltenham, in Liverpool, Leeds and London, food markets and halls are bringing street food indoors. The largest, Market Halls West End, opened nine days ago in a redundant BHS store at Oxford Circus, London, offering more than 900 covers a day in a 35,000 sq ft venue. One of the smallest, the Street Food Market in Preston, will open on Wednesday after local businessman Irfan Asghar borrowed money from family and friends for the venture and spread the word on social media.

The food market movement is a runaway train, according to Big Hospitality, a website that reports on the industry. The new wave of food halls with multiple restaurants in one venue is sweeping the UK at an alarming rate, it says.

Food courts are a common feature of Asian cities, but there they can be chaotic and brash experiences, with noisy hawkers, formica tables and bright fluorescent lighting. The concept has spread across the world and moved upmarket: last week, the 50,000 sq ft Time Out Market Chicago opened following similar ventures this year in Miami, New York, Boston and Montreal, five years after the first Time Out Market opened almost 4,000 miles away in Lisbon. In Chicago, customers can choose from 19 outlets and three beautiful bars.

In most UK food markets, a developer will operate the venue, choose the independent food businesses for the hall, pay business rates, utilities and insurance, provide cutlery and crockery, hire uniformed staff to clear tables and clean toilets, and critically the developers run the lucrative bar. The independent food outlets either pay a fixed rent or a share of their turnover.

These markets are blurring the lines between street food and restaurants, said food writer Hugh Thomas. They are more democratic and less formal places to eat, and the food is more affordable. You dont have to go for a full-on meal, you can spend a tenner for great food along with a drink. For customers, the biggest advantage is choice. Those socialising in groups can eat different food, depending on taste or dietary restrictions. Everyone pays for what they eat; no tortuous dividing up of bills at the end of the meal.

These markets are blurring the lines between street food and restaurants

For families, food markets have the informality of fast-food venues but are more relaxed, pleasant places and some provide games, play areas and activities. Solo diners are common, with a choice between communal tables or eating alone.

Mark Laurie, director of the Nationwide Caterers Association which supports street-food traders, said the rapid growth of food markets was partly due to the slow death of retail. There are more spaces available on high streets and in town centres. People who would have invested in restaurants are now investing in market halls.

In Durham, Nick Berry of Clearbell Capital, the developer behind the Food Pit, said there was an experiential trend in retail and eating out. Customers were looking for something unusual, with a local feel and good value. And small food businesses dont want to sign up to long-term liabilities if they cant be sure they will be successful. Were trying to remove those barriers.

Colin and Mandy, who had eaten their lunch at the Food Pit, were delighted. Spot on, said Colin. I like the fact that theres all different variations of food in one place. And its very relaxed. Dawn, who was among a group of women taking a break from their workplaces, said they had tried pretty much all the restaurants around here in the past 10 years and were grateful for something new and different. Its good to have a choice, especially when you have a fussy eater with you, she said, indicating one of her co-diners.

Two hundred and seventy miles away in London, Market Halls West End is the firms third food hall in the capital, with two more planned to open by the end of 2020. Were bringing young, independent, chef-driven businesses that wouldnt normally have a chance of trading in these sites, to the West End, said Simon Anderson, the companys chief creative officer.

The venue offers 11 kitchens, including Malaysian Tamil cuisine, Japanese sushi bowls, Chinese savoury crepes, tacos from Tijuana and vegan and gluten-free wok dishes. There is a rooftop bar and a demonstration kitchen.

On Friday, the lunchtime clientele included office workers, tourists, construction workers in hi-vis jackets, students and families. It has a busy vibe. You can come on your own or in a big group and be part of something, said Anderson. It breaks down a lot of barriers.

But Laurie warned of a battle for the soul of street food. There was a risk of the street-food movement being taken over and exploited by big corporations, he said.

Food halls done right are a great addition to the UK food scene. They fit the experiential zeitgeist and suit the British weather. But they need to maintain the authenticity that made street food so popular, and they need to continue to facilitate micro-businesses and start-ups.

Street food has disrupted the traditional food and beverage sector, and it is now disrupting the entertainment sector and night time economy.

The passion, skill, innovation, and theatre of street food is what makes it special. Hopefully as the market hall sector grows, this will continue to flourish otherwise punters will head back to the streets or elsewhere.

Read the rest here:

Tokyo, Lisbon, Leeds: the indoor food halls sweeping the world - The Guardian

These days, memes are a way of life. No rapper knows thatbetter than Drake.

Drizzys debut album,Thank Me Later, was released six months prior to the launch of Instagram in October 2010, and since then, the rappers every move has served as fodder for the viral phenomenon known as internet memes.

Drake is the right mix of popular, polarizing and ever-present in the cultural zeitgeist that all eyes are constantly on him. That amounts to Aubrey pretty much not being able to do anything without the potential of it becoming the internets next meme craze. Every album cover, every awkward face made while sitting courtside at a Toronto Raptors game, every screenshot from a music video or snippet of footage from tour has the potential to be the days most entertaining tidbit. The rap superstar isnt even safe checking his phone in the club these days.

In 2016, he acknowledged the fact that he is every meme makers top priority during an interview with Instagram.

"I have become the most memed person aside from the Michael Jordan crying face," Drake said. "I love that Im the guy that doesn't take himself too seriously. I like laughing even if it's at my expense. It doesnt feel like it's necessarily malicious or hurtful stuff. Im conscious of it."

He added, "I really enjoy it more than watching television. It brings joy to my life. I hope it brings joy to other peoples lives too."

The same year, he appeared on Saturday Night Live and jokingly sprinkled his opening monologue with a song called More Than a Meme about constantly being the butt of internet jokes.

Earlier this year, he fed into the meme mania, urging people to meme his post-game rant following the Toronto Raptors winning the NBA Finals, to which he was obliged.

Aubrey is definitely ingrained in the meme culture. With the decade coming to a close, XXL compiles a list of the best Drake memes of the past 10 years.

Drakes Degrassi character Jimmy Brooks got shot on the show andbecame wheelchair-bound. When Drizzy broke out to stardom around 2010, it didnt take long for the memes about his former gig to surface.

Drake made his way inside the University of Kentucky locker room and found himself under the arm of friend and then freshman center Demarcus Cousins while the hooper was giving his post-game interview following a NCAA tournament win over Wake Forest. The glowing look in Drakes eyes instantly became a meme mainstay.

Drake (especially when he first dropped) was considered by some to be softer than satin because of his rap ballads and tender slow jams. The perceived lack of toughness birthed an abundance of Drake the type of nigga posts on social media that still continue on today.

Memeufactures made easy work of out Drakes laggard Take Care track Marvins Room, specifically the part where Drizzy stands in front of a mirror and repeats, I hope no one heard that.

A photographer captured photos with Drake displaying polar opposite moods on his face, and the internet caught the alley-oop and slammed it home.

A screenshot of Drake rocking Timb boots, a throwback DaDa Supreme fit and turned at an awkward angle was all the internet needed tofreeze in time one of the most memorable meme moments of the year.

When the Miami Heat won the NBA Finals in 2013, Drake was front and center with the Big Three and crew popping bottles in the club. Some called foul on Drakes seemingly bandwagon behavior.

Drakes profile photo backdropped by a blue sky for his Nothing Was the Same album quickly started getting replicated after it was revealed, with many people putting their own head in the clouds.

The University of Kentuckys loss to UConnin the 2014 NCAA Tournament left Drake looking sad in the stands. Leave it up to the Internet to revel in Aubreys sorrow.

Drake has been spotted at many Serena Williams matches over the years. When she went head to head with Andrea Petkovic in 2015, Drakes spirited claps of support were caught by the camera and flipped into Internet entertainment.

Madonna laid a big wet one on Drake right in front of the crowd during her set at 2015 Coachella. The scene left people stunned including Drizzy whose immediate reaction to the pop stars tongue being shoved in his mouth gassed up meme content for days.

The Hotline Bling video may hold the record for most memes generated from a single work. Drakes dance moves, facial expressions and hand gestures have been the meme gift that keeps on giving.

Drakes rudimentary If Youre Reading This Its Too Late mixtape cover quickly turned into something people were making on their own. Fans came up with some entertaining alternates.

When the beef is on, the memes come out. When Drake and Meek Mill were mortal enemies in 2015, the internet played a large part in adding entertainment to the friction with memes that helped push the narrative.

The release of Drake and Futures joint effort, What a Time to Be Alive, had the internet teetering on the verge of maximum overload. Once fans started taking in the project, the memes started rolling in.

Drake and Futures alliance on WATTBA proved they were a dynamic duo and two of the hottest rappers in the game. But when someone unearthed their high school photos, the internet had fun with speculating about their pre-fame lives.

Drakes Views album cover depicts the rapper sitting atop Torontos massive CN Tower. It didnt take long for hilarious recreations to pop up.

On-again, off-again, probably never-again couple, Drake and RiRi partied the night away at E11even Miami in the summer of 2016. When the paparazzi captured a shot of Bad Gal whispering something in Aubreys ear, speculation of what was said started running rampant in meme form.

It was a simple check of the phone at the club but, because the Internet, it turned into a whole damn wave of memes with empathetic commentary.

Drake scribbling words down into a notebook gave people open season to come up with what the rapper must have been scribing.

When Drake invited fans to caption a blurry concert photo in 2017, the hilarious captions and memes started piling up.

Drakes Gods Plan video got touching at moments, especially the part where Aubrey shares a warm embrace with a couple he just hooked up with some cash.The teary-eyed moment became the motivation for another meme movement.

Drake let his soul glow in Migos throwback Walk It, Talk It video, with the internet having a good ol time coming up with jokes about the rappers curly wig selection.

Drakes mind was blown when magician Julius Dein turned a regular lollipop into a bust of Batman right before his eyes. The 6ix Gods look of surprise will forever be jotted down in meme history.

When cameras caught Drake pouring up a beverage while sitting courtside at a Toronto Raptors game last season, he jokingly slid the drink to the side, reminding people of similar situations theyve been in.

Drakes fake smile during the 2019 NBA Playoffs was accompanied by some of the best memes of the year.

Drake was on one after the Toronto Raptors won Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals and predicted his home team to win it all in a fiery post-game interview. Drakes intense demeanor was hilariously logged into the meme catalogs.

When Kevin Durant injured himself during the NBA Finals, Drake was upset. Orwas he? The internet had a field day deciding if the show of frustration was real via meme.

People had no chill after seeing Chris Brown and Drakes extended No Guidance video. Drakes Ooo. Wow line has been the subject matter for several funny memes.

The unthinkable happened when Drake performed at Tyler, The Creators Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival: Drizzy got booed offstage. It happens to the best of them, but since it happened to Drake, we got a bunch of memes poking fun at the moment.

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The 30 Best Drake Memes of the 2010s - XXLMAG.COM

By no means am I out to delegitimize Costello as a musician or human being. The man has released records with musicians as genre-spanning as Burt Bacharach and The Roots, for Gods sake. So accomplished and admirable. What a marvel.

Yet, my Elvis Costello vibe is this: Have you ever had someone you know and feel safe with do something bizarre or creepy? I have. My whole feeling about them changes. They dont feel safe anymore. I might want to like them, but the memory of the way I felt in that instance cant be erased. Now, Ive listened to and sung along with Alison for years, but over the last few, particularly while rewatching New Girl, the song hit me in a different way. So, while I respect Costello and his impressive and expansive oeuvre, he lightly creeps me out. And for that reason, I will not be seeing him play at the Orpheum on Nov. 24. I wont settle for less than the choicest vibes. Im sure its no skin off his back.

On the same note, Im actively ridding my record collection of what I refer to as creepy old man music, like recent castoff Rolling Stones Some Girls. (The title track is atrocious.) There were scant options not to identify with angry young man music at that precious point in my life. (Nod to the Riot Grrrl movement for throwing me a life preserver.) And in identifying with an overtly masculine zeitgeist at a tender age, I felt I also had, in some way, to excuse the depiction of women as inferior humans, glorified or reviled through the male gaze. Granted, my origins are far from feminist, so I cant pin this solely on creepy old man music. But many people particularly women ("girls," in the nomenclature) dont get a peek outside of this limiting and oppressive perspective. For that, I cant bring myself to participate in the misogynistic, problematic charade any longer. Not for all the catchy nostalgia in the world.

Scott: I think what's also really hairy here is that if you get into Costello in your teens or early 20s, his work often feels like an escape from, or at least a counterpoint to, the machismo you expect from male rock musicians like the Stones. It's nerdy, it's sardonic, its anger feels like the anger of the underdog, at least until you scratch the surface. Of course, we know it isn't that simple, that a man doesn't stop playing his role in broader societal imbalances just because he strikes a goony pigeon-toed posture or credits his guitar playing to "the little hands of concrete." We're hardly the first to ask what role misogyny plays in Costello's music, and he has written that he finds that line of critique "bewildering."

It's interesting that you mention "This Year's Girl," because that song by itself has been pretty central to the debate over how Costello's music portrays women. He addressed this in his memoir, even, asserting as you do that the song targets not the woman but the man's way of looking at her. He also claims in the same passage that maybe some critics and listeners were just projecting their own misogyny onto him. Which, I mean, come on, we know he can look inward a little harder than that. It's a bit of a dodge. The question here isn't necessarily whether Costello is a particularly odious misogynist, but whether he can grapple with the assumptions and worldviews and blind spots he carries into his work. I think it'll still be a great show and I've had four very good experiences seeing him live, but I can understand feeling icky enough to stay away.

Holly: Good point on the machismo front, Scott. Elvis Costellos a cool rock guy, right? Not some hair metal schmuck or like stereotype. Similar to Rivers Cuomowho probably picked up some style, if not lyrical, tips from Costello. Nerdy Cuomo wrote No One Else and Across The Sea in the mid 90s. The formers about wanting a girl who lives her life essentially for his enjoyment. The latter? A sweet tale of yearning to put the moves on an 18-year-old Japanese schoolgirl who sent him fan mail, admitting it would be wrong, yet creeping out all the while.

It comes down to context. Cuomo was a non-macho rock guy for his day, as was Costello. At the time, the kind of sentiments in Alison and the aforementioned Weezer songs were accepted as sweet, relatively emotionally mature alternatives to songs that blatantly objectified women. Look, these nerd rock songs say, I have a mind and a heart. And thats great. Rock music needed that. Yet toxic masculinity has come across as progressive on many fronts.

Its much easier to sweep this subject under the rug and bask in nostalgia. So thank you for having this discussion. In analyzing these instances of misogyny and heteronormativity, we can focus on untangling problematic ideas, rather than vilifying the artists who expressed them 20-40 years agoregardless of whether the artists have changed their minds. Freedom of expression is a right and fuck ups are inevitable. Learning from the past is whats important. If more young people and musicians are exposed to ideas about how these kinds of songs oppress others, theyll be better equipped to write more empoweringand sexy!songs about relationships. Music by women expressing themselves with little concern for the male gaze definitely had a lasting impact on me, and for that Im eternally grateful.

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Growing up with, and outgrowing, Elvis Costello - tonemadison.com