#also I bought it at Target ages ago. not sure I still have proof of purchase

[tonyglowheart]

😩 I had dropped my insulated mug last week, and just noticed now that it's leaking a bit. noooooo

[treatian]

The Chronicles of the Dark One: Breaking the Curse

Chapter 52: Identity Thief

He managed to walk calmly back to his car, to get inside of it without slamming the door shut, and drive off without making a scene. But that was only because he didn't want to make a scene. He didn't want Booth, whoever the fuck he might be, to see how he'd affected him, to know that he'd gotten under his skin. Which was exactly why, the moment he was away from the cabin, his discipline broke.

His body was shaking, and his chest was tight. Energy tingled in his fingers and toes far worse than it ever had when he had magic! He needed to hit something! So he did. He hit at his steering wheel as he drove, smacked it over and over, but it still wasn't enough. His anger bubbled over, but there was nowhere for it to go. He wanted to rage; he wanted to break things; he wanted to crash his car on the side of the road! Not to hurt himself, but rather to watch the metal twist and whine into useless junk just because he felt like that was what his soul was becoming!

But he couldn't do anything. He was aware of that. At his home, he could break whatever the fuck he wanted. But here, out in the open…people would talk. The entire town would notice if he did something so flamboyantly stupid and how the hell would he ever explain it all?!

He needed Belle.

With that realization, hers was the face that he brought to mind as he tried to settle himself because she had always had that kind of effect on him. She had been like a balm for his soul when she was around. Things were at peace; life was comfortable even when it wasn't perfect or even happy. She kept him stable, and he knew that this meltdown wouldn't have happened if he had her with him now. If he could have her with him now, she would have kept him calm and helped him think through his next steps. If he'd had her, this little trick that Booth had played would never have gotten off the ground.

But she was gone. And instead, he felt like…like anger and sadness and loneliness all wrapped up in one pathetic little human man! If he did something too extreme, the town would notice, but he felt like if he didn't do something extreme, then he would burst into flame! If he sat down at the wheel, he'd probably spin so fast he'd set it on fire!

What to do, what to do, what to do!

How was he going to channel this anger he felt? How was he going to push it out of his body and into something productive!

Something productive…

He gave a mad little laugh as an idea jumped into his head. The idea grew until he knew exactly what he was going to do.

He sped home, not caring in the least if Emma was patrolling the roads. He raced back to his home, slammed his car door shut, and went into his house as fast as his legs could carry him. It was late, but he wasn't tired like he should have been. No…he was dedicated. He needed something to channel his rage into, and he knew what he needed to do more than anything in the world.

Who was August Wayne Booth?

No one fooled the Dark One, at least not as bad as he had, and got away with it. He wouldn't stand for such a thing, and he had no intention of resting until he knew who the Man With Dark Hair, "August Wayne Booth," really was because even though he was beginning to come to conclusions about him, there was one conclusion in particular that he valued above all others.

He knew his son.

It was the most important thing, the only thing that mattered, the only thing keeping him from going back and plunging his dagger into the liar's heart.

August Booth knew his son. Not only had the Seer told him that years and years ago, but tonight was proof.

He'd known who he was, the Dark One. He'd known about the dagger. Of course, that all could have been a coincidence; lots of people in this town knew he was the Dark One and could find the legends of his Dagger, not that they would know to look at the moment.

But there was more proof. Booth had information about him that only Baelfire would have known.

He'd called him "Papa," which also could have been a coincidence. "Papa" was a popular pet name for a father that many people from their land used. He'd heard Belle call her father "Papa" when he'd first gone to fetch her. Using that name could have simply been a lucky guess. And he had spoken to him about Baelfire's disappearance when he'd fucking begged the swine for forgiveness. Looking back, he might have given away too much information for Booth to work with.

But there was more still!

The ball. In his shop. He'd targeted that ball, pinpointed it because he'd wanted him to believe he was his son. What had he said? Wanted him to want it? He'd wanted it. He'd wanted it so much he'd bought it hook line and sinker. Because there was no one, no one, alive today that would have known that ball belonged to Baelfire. That had to be more than a lucky guess.

And then he'd talked to him about his cane and how he'd kept the dagger in his boot when they were in the forest. Those weren't just lucky guesses. Those were precise facts! And the only one who could have told him that detail was Bae himself.

Booth wasn't his son. But he knew him. He was confident about that! He might even know where his son was right now! But how to get him to tell him?

He had to figure out who he was. Who he really was! He had to get the upper hand and force his cooperation! Getting Emma to break the Curse…that would come when he knew exactly who he was dealing with and why he thought he was the only one who could get her to believe there was a Curse to be broken in the first place!

So…who was he?

There was no doubt he belonged to their world at some point. He knew about him, which could have been explained by talking to Baelfire, but he hadn't denied that he was from home when he asked him.

He was from there.

So who the fuck was he supposed to be?! Well…what did he know about him? Where could he begin? What were the clues? He could narrow it down by a few factors—actually, more than a few when he began to make a list.

There was a clue, one other clue that the Seer had given him long ago. He cursed himself. If he'd thought of the clue, really and truly thought it through, then he would have known he wasn't Baelfire.

The clue was Archie.

The first time he'd had the vision of the Man With Dark Hair…he'd had it because of the cricket. Archie, formerly Jiminy…he knew the Man With Dark Hair. That narrowed it down a bit. Archie had a long life, but he hadn't really associated with many people in that long life.

He knew that he knew Snow White. And the seven dwarves. He'd helped during her…what had he called it after she'd had the potion? Intervention? They'd called on him because he happened to be nearby with Gepetto, Marco here. He'd stuck to Marco nearly all the time in Storybrooke, just as he had in the Enchanted Forest. Marco and…

His blood ran cold.

A son separated from his father under difficult circumstances…

One who had information about him that the Blue Fairy might have...

As he gathered up his town records, his jaw dropped, and he forced himself to breathe. His head was putting together a puzzle, making it work.

August…he was here. He knew about the Enchanted Forest, but he was a stranger to it, someone from the outside world, Like Sarah Fischer across the street from the shop…he hadn't been carried over in the Curse. He'd come here some other way, which meant that he'd aged.

How old was Booth? Best guess? Late thirties, maybe early forties at worst. That meant, twenty-eight years ago, August Booth would have been a child. Potentially an older child, but…

How old had that puppet looked when the Blue Brat made him human? He hadn't seen him often. Maybe in one or two glimpses. Seven? Eight? Certainly no more than nine? If he'd come over before the Curse at that age, then that would put him…middle to late thirties.

"You've been making plans to see your son again since before I was made..."

Made, he'd said, not "born" as most would have. Wooden puppets weren't born...they were made.

He felt suddenly electrified as he shuffled through some of his papers, looking for a list he'd made when he'd first awakened from the Curse. He'd used town records then to identify as many citizens as he could, thinking it would be helpful for whatever was to come. In addition to that list, he'd made one other. It was a list of those that were "missing" or unaccounted for. He hadn't expected to know everyone, but for those, he did know he'd wanted to know where as many of them were as possible. That list hadn't been long but-

He held his breath as he found the list and skimmed through it.

Geppetto's puppet…Pinocchio…he was on the list of the missing.

He hadn't thought anything of it at the time. The Curse was designed to take away happy endings; Geppetto had always wanted to have a family and be a father. At one point, he could remember thinking the man was surely going to call on him to make a deal for a child of his own! Removing the child that the Blue Fairy had given him from his care would have been natural for the Curse.

When he'd made this list, he'd assumed the boy would be cared for with another family like Grace, Jefferson's daughter was. He hadn't thought it was important to check the schools for the child because he hadn't really considered him or even Geppetto as people of importance for the Curse. Archie? Yes, because he knew the Dark Haired Man! But the boy who'd once had red hair? He'd never considered he might be the same person. But hair could be dyed. Or even change as children grew. The child...

Child. His biggest clue. Last he'd checked, Pinocchio had been a child. But there were months that he'd spent in his prison where he hadn't a clue what had happened or where people had gone. It was possible something had happened while he'd been in there. Something that made the child valuable? Something to get the child here where he could age. How? He wasn't sure. He hadn't been able to look in on anyone during that time. The result was that he didn't even know how Emma had managed to escape the Curse. The Seer had always kept that from him until…

Until the day the Curse struck. He'd had a vision. He dropped his head into his hands as he struggled to remember it. There had been so much going on! That vision was nothing but a hazy image in the middle of a world being torn to shreds! What had he seen?!

There had been a bloody David placing his daughter inside a wardrobe of some kind. He'd closed the door, and when he opened it again, she'd been gone. There was nothing there but the hallowed tree. No! Not a hallowed tree. A wardrobe with doors. It had been carved. The wardrobe he'd placed her in had been carved out of a tree. Carved…as if by a master craftsman. Geppetto. And Pinocchio…

Suddenly he remembered something he hadn't thought of in years. It wasn't a memory that would come easily to him because he'd been Cursed when it had occurred. But there was something familiar about all this, something coming together in his brain, making a connection.

He was exhausted from the night, but the next morning at first acceptable light, he got ready for work and went to the shop like he always did. In the back room, he dug out an old file he hadn't seen in ten years. It was the file on Emma that the caseworker had sent him when he asked for it. The caseworker had been reluctant to hand it over, but when he'd heard that the mother of the boy that Regina wanted to adopt had been found not far from Storybrooke, he'd plead for any more information on the girl, and he'd gotten it.

Inside the file was a newspaper article. He'd read it once when he was Cursed and then forgotten about it, but something about all this brought a single detail he vaguely recalled back to his mind. The newspaper article had been written about Emma when she'd been found in the woods not far from Storybrooke. It was a piece about a baby, meant to elicit sympathy, to bring the parents forward or find her a home. Babies were good for that sort of thing, but there was one fact in it that wasn't appealing as an abandoned baby, and so the article hadn't given it much attention. But there it was, in black and white.

Emma Swan had been found in the woods by a young boy. Toward the end of the article, he noted a single line that stated the boy wasn't identified either, but it did mention…the boy was seven.

Thirty-five...that boy would be thirty-five years old today.

He sighed as he set the file aside and fell into his chair in the back, relief and wonder and understanding coursing through him all at once.

He knew who he was. Not for certain, he'd have to put his theory to the test somehow, but he could the certainty in his bones as the weight of truth settled over him.

August Booth wasn't his son, but he was someone's son.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HACKERS AND SPEAKING

No company, however successful, ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months. Either way it sucks. We ask mainly out of politeness. If you think someone judging you will work hard to judge you correctly, there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to express every program as the definition of new types. If investors can no longer rely on their herd instincts, they'll have to get a foot in the door. -Oriented programming generates a lot of new work is preferable to a proof that was difficult, but doesn't lead to future discoveries; in the sciences generally, citation is considered a rough indicator of merit. If startups are mobile, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all they'll get at the local one will be the people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research. They're the ones in a position of power. I'm still not sure whether he thought AI was nonsense and that majoring in something rigorous would cure me of such stupid ambitions. I have never had to talk. When you change the angle of someone's eye five degrees, no one will pay for. Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want, regardless of how many are started.

Startups will go to work anyway and sit in front of them, so the odds of getting this great deal are 1 in 300. On the other hand, startup investing is a very strange business. Even if your only goal is to get every distraction out of the closet and admit, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. Just two or three lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized countries lived by farming. But software companies don't hire students for the summer as a source of cheap labor. But if you're starting a startup. I worried? I said what they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think they need to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to undermine the VCs by acting faster, and the VCs will gradually figure out ways to make money from. How casual successful startup founders are.

I write software: I sit down and blow out a lame version 1 as fast as angels and super-angels themselves. We think of the techniques we're developing for dealing with detail. I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. You're better off avoiding these. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Why is it that research can be done by collaborators. I'd guess the most successful startups we've funded haven't launched their products yet, but are definitely launched as companies. Fortran because not surprisingly in a language where you have to design what the user needs, who is the user? You may dispute either of the premises, but if you get funded by Y Combinator. But it seems more dangerous to put stuff in that you've never needed because it's thought to be a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how it turns out.1 But the startup world for so long that it seems promising enough to worry that you might not be the best solution. In Kate's world, everything is still physical and expensive.

Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. It's not super hard to get into grad school or just be good at math to write Mathematica. Google is afflicted with this, apparently. It has always seemed to me the solution is to tackle the problem head-on, and that people should work for another company for a few years down the line. With so much at stake, they have to be big, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. Why do you think so? Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be out of business, lies in something very old-fashioned: face to face for three months—so closely in fact that we insist they move to where we are. A lot of them. They believe this because it really feels that way to them.2

That solves the problem if you get a real job after you graduate. Because depending on the meaning of the word 'is' is. As usual, by Demo Day about half the founders from that first summer, less than two years ago, are now rich, at least in the short term. It was a lot of institutionalized delays in startup funding: the multi-week mating dance with investors; the distinction between termsheets and deals; the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter you from going to grad school, because very few people are quite at home in computer science, and it will seem to investors no more than superficial changes. It's not just because they were pulled into it by unscrupulous investment bankers. You're rolling the dice again, whether you want them as a cofounder. In the mid twentieth century there was a great deal of play in these numbers. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. They treat the words printed in the book the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. So when you find an idea you know is good but most people disagree with, you should get a job. Nowadays a lot of de facto control after a series A round needs to be a good time for startups to have traction before they put in significant money.

One of our goals with Y Combinator was to discover the lower bound on the age of startup founders.3 If taste is just personal preference is a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization. The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. Your tastes will change. So unless their founders could pull off an IPO which would be difficult with Yahoo as a competitor, they had become extremely formidable. The mobility of seed-stage startups means that seed funding is a national business.4 The puffed-up companies that went public during the Bubble didn't do it just because they want you to be a really good deal.

Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news? I know many people who switched from math to painting. This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA. As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will turn out worse. Some magazines may thrive by focusing on the magazine as a physical object. As long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive it as a period that would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the super-angels were initially angels of the classic type. Should you take it? Maybe, though the list of acquirers is a lot less than most university departments like to admit. VCs do now. It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to—that their startup will be huge—and convincing anyone of something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of salesmanship. The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like generals, they're always fighting the last war.

5% an offer of 6. How has your taste changed? I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages. So if you want to work for, they may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders. Even though Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps. And that statistic is probably not an option for most magazines. The seriousness of signalling risk depends on how far along you are with other investors seems the complementary countermove. Over in the arts. I don't know yet what the new rules will be, but it has to be better if both were combined in one group, headed by someone with a PhD in computer science, and it has to double: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be like, but I'm not too worried about it.

Notes

That's because the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the first year or two, because they need them to private schools that in Silicon Valley, but suburbs are so different from a startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco. We could be done, she expresses it by smiling more. It would have been the first question is only half a religious one; there is one that did.

The ordering system, which is probably part of a heuristic for detecting whether you realize it yet or not, and this is also a second factor: startup founders is how much they lied to them. Give the founders are driven only by money—for example, being offered large bribes by the financial controls of World War II was in logic and zoology, both your lawyers should be taken into account, they mean. It may be whether what you build for them.

We invest small amounts of new inventions until they become so embedded that they don't make users register to try to write it all yourself. It's lame that VCs play such games, but more often than not what it would be possible to have balked at this, but he got killed in the US treat the poor worse than Japanese car companies, but have no idea what's happening as merely not-too-demanding environment, and this trick merely forces you to agree. You're not seeing fragmentation unless you see them much in their target market the shoplifters are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. If an investor makes you a clean offer with no valuation cap is merely boring, we found they used it to the biggest winners, which was acquired for 50 million, and don't want to work like they worked together mostly at night.

Except text editors and compilers. Users dislike their new operating system.

Thanks to Dan Giffin, Jessica Livingston, Hutch Fishman, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, and Ron Conway for sparking my interest in this topic.

[nextcassie]

Unpopular Opinion: The #Bullytoo Movement in Korea is not a good thing...

Content Warning: I am going to talk about bullying and #metoo please be aware of these things.

So if you follow Kpop entertainment news lately you might have been noticing that a lot of idols and entertainers in general are having accusations of bullying brought up. Many knetizens have been posting anonymously in online forums about the promoting idols that bullied them in the past some with evidence and others without evidence. So for those of you who don’t know that this is happening or don’t know why I wanted to take the time to discuss this and why it’s not a good thing.

This movement started when a JYP trainee Yoon Seobin went onto Produce 101 X and it was revealed that he was an “injin” or someone who smoked and drank alcohol as minor. Many people were upset and took to bashing him online. However, he really caught attention when a netizen then stepped up and claimed that he had bullied him with physical violence and he was essentially condemned by the rest of the country resulting in him being kicked off the show. This led to Knetzs starting a movement called the #bullytoo movement.

 The #bullytoo movement was designed to have people step up and name the idols that had bullied them in the past, much like the #metoo movement. However, there are a few key differences to keep in mind about these two movements. The main one being that while people in the #metoo movement were sometimes accused of sexual assault, it was mainly to show support to other victims of sexual assault or harassment. But, the #bullytoo movement is not a movement to impower those who were bullied, but is specifically designed to pick out those in the entertainment industry who had bullied before. Another key difference is that members of the #metoo movement did not remain anonymous online but revealed their identities despite all the backlash. Those with the #bullytoo movement have been anonymous posters online who have not had to reveal any personal information about themselves, including contact information. The main difference is one was started to show support and turned into something that exposed many people in the media and the other is one that was specifically started to target those in the media.

 So what’s the problem with this? Bullying is bad and is definitely a trauma that many people carry with them throughout their life. I’ve been one to mention that I’ve been bullied and carried a lot of that with me as well.

 Let’s start off with three major problems. The first is that it’s almost impossible to verify if these statements are true or not due to the posters being allowed to remain anonymous. The second is that people are being held accountable for actions that were committed when they were ten years old or actions that happened twenty years ago. The last, it’s turning an entire nation against people and publicly shaming them for their actions that may or may not be true.

 Okay let’s start with the first one where it’s impossible to verify if things are true or not. Recently Berry Good’s Daye was a part of the #bullytoo movement where anonymous netizens claimed that she had used violence against in a large group of people to target the accuser. The netizens stepped forward with proof that proved that they had known each other and said that Daye had transferred schools multiple times in order to keep her record clean. Knetzs were immediate to hop on this and began to drag and accuse her online, despite the fact that she had bee on hiatus due to health reasons. She was unable to directly connect with her accusers due to the anonymity of the website and it was up to them to contact her. The accusers like many others claimed that they wanted an apology, but made it hard to contact them. Hyolyn, former member of sistar, also ran into an issue of someone accusing her, but not wanting to meet up with anyone (her or her company) to settle the issue. Although her accuser eventually talked with her it was after the accuser posted screenshots of Hyolyn “ignoring” her. Hyolyn had been on a flight coming from over seas at the time the netizen was trying to contact her. The two of them eventually met up and settled the dispute. The main issue is that everyone is aware of the celebrities involved, but no one has any idea of what the background of the victims of bullying involved are and this has led to problems that I will discuss later on. It’s impossible for them to settle things or issue a sincere apology if people can no even contact those accusing them.

  The second issue is that people are being held accountable for actions that they did when they were so young that Hyolyn saying she does “not remember” is something happened is not a completely ridiculous reason. In Daye’s case, her accuser was talking about something that happened in sixth grade where she would have been somewhere around 10-12 years old. That’s incredibly young. Hyolyn’s case took place about 15 years ago as well. It’s hard to recall a situation that far back and be able to give a definite answer of what happened. This is something that those accusing them have an advantage over them because they can instantly claim they forgot everything once they became a celebrity and no longer care. Something that does happen and absolutely enrages people. So much so that it no longer matters what the accuser is saying, they can issue statements and not have to take responsibility where the idol will have to because their face is attached to it. The main issue though is that we are punishing people for action in the past. Everyone grows up from this time period and significantly matures and it’s unreasonable to hold people accountable for these actions. Especially because everyone makes mistakes at this age because they are children. You should not punish a fully grown adult for something they did as children, especially when at that time it is not only the responsibility of the person who bullied someone, but members of the school faculty that should have been involved preventing this. If people are having this hard of a time coping bullying that happened, it’s a messaged that the schools failed in not only preventing bullying, but offering proper care to their students after bullying and proper consequences to the bullies. Children are reliant to be taught what is right and what is wrong. Without guidance things like bullying will keep occurring.

 Lastly, I mentioned that it turns an entire nation against an entertainer to publicly shame and humiliate them. This is a huge problem with this movement. I’m sure some people are like “They bullied someone let them feel pain”. However, most of these #bullytoo movements haven’t actually been 100% true so far. So Hyolyn, Daye, and Yoon Seobin were some of the most publicized ones so I will talk about them and the consequences they have suffered. Hyolyn runs her own company and manages everything as the only promoting artist under her label. This set not only her as an artist, but everyone in her small label back. She ended up settling the dispute and many had assumed that she had paid of the netizen that had accused her. Others had also anonymously supported the bully, but someone who also attended Hyolyn’s school stepped up to remind people that Hyolyn had also been bullied a lot during this time, including instances by her accuser. This was also something Hyolyn discussed years ago, but it got very little attention. Other people had stepped up and said that they had been bullied by the accuser as well and this led to the accuser quickly removing all her posts and then finally meeting with Hyolyn to come to a conclusion. Essentially, both of them were guilty, but Hyolyn will be the only one to receive major damage from this. In the case of Daye, everything the netizen had claimed ended up being completely false and the netizen was proven to have not only bullied Daye, but many of her friends as well. Luckily Daye made a very clear statement that I would recommend reading here. Accusing her online was almost an extension of the bullying that had happened to Daye in elementary school and many netizens had bought into it and continually sent her hate. Yoon Seobin was a bit of an interesting case because he had yet to debut. However, the accusations of bullying resulted in him being let go from Produce 101 X and contributed to him being kicked out of JYP. This left him to deal with all the backlash without a representative and on his own, despite being incredibly young. He was also proven completely innocent of his bullying accusations by his former teacher and classmates (here). However, he still faced consequences that were from this false accusation.

 So, all these people face public shaming and a large amount of hate when they were not the only one’s guilty of these actions or did not commit these actions. They are still being punished for these actions, but why? So I’ll tell you one of the first things you learn when you study media (yay finally a use for my degree…). It’s that we as human beings gravitate toward negative news more than positive news. Only on a very slow news day do many articles with positive information get posted on most publication sites. This means that essentially everyone following the news was able to hear the accusations and formed the opinion that they were guilty, but when evidence of them being innocent came out most of it was ignored in favor of different articles. Because no one is aware that they were cleared many people will continue to carry that very negative view of these idols in their mind. In Hyolyn’s case she was cleared on Korea media sites, but many places that translate news or write about news in English ignored this information and instead began posting articles online of Daye and her alleged bullying.

 Okay so what the issue? Why is this a big deal this will all die down eventually and go back to normal?

 But will it? Essentially by validating all these anonymous posts with little evidence of actual bullying we’ve just empowered a whole new group of knetz. They’re now fully aware that with a large enough claim and a bit of evidence as simple as proof of knowing an idol at some point in their life they can get attention and even potentially money from false accusations. Daye’s accuser was even able to secure an interview on national television, during a news program to talk about her being bullied. We’ve essentially started an online witch hunt for any and all people who have bullied someone in the past. Maybe people really will bring forth serious bullying claims that need to be addressed, but so far there has only been one that has had photographic evidence that has since been taken down due threats of the company suing those posting them for defamation (PM me for details. I do not have pictures, but I will let you know who it was). At this point anyone who steps up with passable evidence will be approached by companies who are going to want to control this and this more often than not results in not just an apology like people claim to want, but results in them being paid off with money. At that point, no matter if the idol is innocent or guilty they will be blamed.

 I just want to make it clear that I am not condoning bullying in any way shape or form. I myself still have certain instances trigger my past bullying experiences, like Wendy in Red Velvet making fun of back women. However, this isn’t something Wendy did in the 6th grade, but something she did currently as a promoting idol. It is not the internets job to shame people for actions that took place in school years ago. It is the job of schools to step up and take care of these situations. It’s also important to recognize that people do change from when they’re in school to when they become adults. It’s also important to recognize that a lot of bullies who are children usually suffer in some way as well. One of my childhood bullies in middle school who was never violent with me, but verbally tormented me was actually going through a lot of emotional pain after losing her father in a car crash and I became the target of that anger. While that does not excuse her actions, it does mean that she was not taught how to deal properly with her emotions and after being put into grief counseling by the school and being forced to deal with her emotions properly she stopped bullying me and others. It was the actions of the adults around us as children that stopped this bullying.

 I also want to bring up that continuing to threaten people online is also a form of bullying. These people were accused of bullying, but then thousands of people proved that they were no better by flooding them with hate and threats. If someone truly wants to start fighting against bullying, they need to look at the policies surrounding bullying at schools and not punish these people years later for something that should have been settled then. It is not helping those currently suffering from bullying. It is only helping destroy years of work put into a career and getting money in these accusers pockets. It is essentially giving knetz even more power over human beings who now have to live in constant fear of false accusations. Perhaps, if this movement was actually bringing to light recent instances of bullying it wouldn’t be so bad, but these are past actions that many people grow out of due to the guidance of others or just by maturing into adults.

 Yes, it would be nice to for victims to receive a verbal apology from every person that had ever bullied them. However, if to get that apology they have to publicly shame them, destroy their career, and rally thousands of people to send them aggressive messages and threats, it makes them a current bully.

 Feel free to respectfully agree or disagree with me.

[frazleclapclap-blog]

BEFORE WE GET STARTED

BEFORE WE GET STARTED Realize that self defense is for many ages, all communities, all body types, all the the time.  The skin tone, sex, area, workplace, income degree and any other variable don't exclude you from being a target of crime.  If you have a gentle goal you are certain to become chosen.  This list aims to make you a hard target, a challenging marker for a criminal to prevent any such thing from even happening but nothing is foolproof.  In this case, no quantity of awareness or training has been "crime-proof" nonetheless it is helpful.  These self defense tips may indeed cause more inmates to skip you but the reality remains that there are still times when, even your extreme vigilance remains inadequate to prevent a terrible guys plans. All knowledge and training arises out of a law enforcement foundation through COBRA while offering insight to the way the criminal thinks unlike any additional training encounter.  Recommended reading is "The Psychology of Self Defense".  You'll find it on the market on Amazon. The Ideal self defense hints#1 -- LOCK AND RELOCATE You went in into the grocery store for a evening ice cream encounter.  In the right path back into your vehicle in the parking lot you're planning of the ideal status upgrade to post with a fuzzy image about your trip and subsequent plans to devour the entire pint.  You achieve your vehicle, unlock the doors, put your goods on the passenger seat and then wind up opening your mobile program.  You're a sitting duck and a simple target.  Criminals prefer to see and await their own opportunity.  They watched you walk in and judged you to be weaker and smaller compared to those.  They then remained hidden in an close distance to your vehicle prepared to enact their plan up on your return. Consistently LOCK the doorway immediately upon sitting in your car and RELOCATE.  Up date your status at the upcoming red light or stop sign.  This opens our simple self defense hints and is 1 thought to reside. No2 -- SMART Social-media Another interpersonal networking example here, but be real you're deploying it and it is a significant portion of our society today for everything from business to pleasure.  Now I am certain you are not friends with a maniacal crime boss or bad henchmen but let us imagine your son's friend from throughout the street is able to realize your profile and a few among his friends is not the very best of influences.  Watch the connections that may be made here?  Putting your location, that you will lonely during a certain period of time, moving on holiday or otherwise announcing your aims ahead of time is not ever a good thing.  Ladies attempt to avoid this kind of upgrade; "time for you to enjoy a bath and also a picture in a lonely Saturday night with a glass of wine".  You don't understand that your seemingly harmless work secretary is obsessed with you personally, has found your speech through a collection of basic internet hunts and will arrive unannounced.  You simply gave the terrible guy Time and Position for a prime opportunity.  This leads us into the simple TPM formula which most bad guys control.  Time, Place and Method of Attack.  You can control your time and set to a degree however, the badguy will also have the drop for you when he takes action. Discussing of societal websites however....you should certainly  follow our FB webpage from more updates Discussing of societal media however....you should definitely  follow our Facebook page from more updates No3 -- UNDERSTAND In Tent Criminals want something from you personally.  The most usual are "Real Estate, Fun, Perversion or Revenge" That is their aim.  I recently had been asked concerning ATM safety and selfdefense and appeared on WTSP Channel 10 TAMPA.  My advice has been to be compliant and escape without any violence occurring.  It is possible to cancel your credit cards, regain your money or replace your jewelry at a subsequent time as you will be residing!  You never know what weapon that offender gets, how unstable they might be and when there was just another criminal with him hiding in the shadows.  When it's property afterward smart compliance, appropriate distancing and taking in the full description of this robber may be your thing to do.  Now, if the offense is switched into some of those other types of objective it is time to struggle with whatever you have.  This requires training.  Any quantity of reality self defense training is far better than nothing.  The important term there is REALITY.  Make sure that you're training for facts dependent situations in a program that is based around those experiences.  (Twist for COBRA Self Defense) Selfdefense Advice for women No4 -- ASSESS YOUR MOST Susceptible MOMENTS Think of a criminal.  I understand it's hard for individuals who comply laws and awaken in the daytime to work a real job but it's crucial when seeking to re engineer a match plan to work contrary to them.  My partner was putting our newborn daughter right into her car seat over one yr ago and she was still getting used to the entire routine.  There she was dutifully at work seeking to secure an infant with her handbag dangling off her outside shoulder, head buried within the vehicle and her rear into the world to get a good 3 minutes.  This is an opportunity.  We immediately realized this and began practicing at home until we could scan the place, take care of securing the child and be prepared to LOCK and RELOCATE in under 30 seconds.  Where have you been most vulnerable? No5 -- Do Not FALL FOR A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY

A self defense app, a taser, pepper spray, a weapon, years of martial arts training.  All of these are terrific self defense tools however they don't stop bad guys from beginning their plan.  Have you ever had to make use of your taser in a real life strike?  Have you ever used your martial arts training in street combat or simply in sparring?  If you own an instrument such as a taser, gun or other device then exercise using it regularly.  Simply take it out of it's concealed location and point it.  Go to the range to take each week.  Always bear in mind that reality and real time works much differently compared to game and theory.  Having been a formidable athlete and been trained in kickboxing I always thought I might handle a dangerous situation when it ever arose.  After being a section of a COBRA presentation 4 years ago I realized I wasn't prepared.  Everything I thought I'd do instantly failed and my strength and fighting styles skill disintegrated into a enormous confused mess.  Under stress the body starts to search our experience files  for a way to solve the life-threatening problem.  One's heart rate elevates, tunnel vision ensues and flight or fight gets control.  Even authorities officers/military still receive a amount with this and they've been around in combat situations!  Imagine the way youpersonally, with NO training would react?  There is no reality-based experience document for your stress reaction to find at the moment therefore it catches onto whatever it could.  Maybe that indicates you fall into floor and pay up.   Worst of you all do nothing.  You freeze.  Don't be lulled to sleep as you've bought a device/tool that many folks say may be your "ultimate self defense".  Practice prevention daily and become proficient with your weapon or apparatus.  

[trans-girl-sonic]

Your blog is really funny. False accusations against artists being pedophiles, but also transforming everything and everything into homosexuals or trans, whether it's been canon or not. Hope to see more laughable postings in the future!

Teen Boat! Kindle Editionby Dave Roman  (Author), John Green  (Illustrator)3.8 out of 5 stars    24 customer reviews See all 3 formats and editionsKindle $9.99Read with Our Free App

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Length: 144 pages Age Level: 12 and up Grade Level: 7 and upAvailable on these devices Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

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Product detailsFile Size: 70468 KBPrint Length: 144 pagesPublisher: Clarion Books (May 8, 2012)Publication Date: May 8, 2012Sold by: Houghton Mifflin HarcourtLanguage: EnglishASIN: B005OC305GText-to-Speech: Not enabled  X-Ray:Not Enabled  Word Wise: Not EnabledLending: Not EnabledEnhanced Typesetting: Not Enabled  Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,065,292 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)#164 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Pirates#293 in Books > Teens > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Pirates#1164 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Social & Family Issues > Emotions & FeelingsWould you like to tell us about a lower price?Related media

1:58Now Playing Teen BoatMore about the authorsDiscover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.John GreenJohn Green FollowFollow on AmazonFollow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations and more coming soon.Learn More

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5.0 out of 5 starsPouring the Teen Angst on so Thick that You’re Going to Need a Bilge Pump IByFredTownWardVINE VOICEon November 6, 2015Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseThis prequel to Teen Boat! The Race for Boatlantis is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. The parodies are laid on thick and fast. About the only nit I can offer up is that this book is much more episodic than the second one, and some of the chapters work better than others.Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsTHIS BOOK IS HILARIOUSByElaine Ritteron December 31, 2013Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseThis is quite possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read in my entire life. I was laughing the entire way through, cover to cover. I’m actually not sure what target audience this book was aiming at, because there are definitely some off-color sexual jokes throughout. I don’t think I would recommend this book to children, but it’s perfect for teens and adults. I loved it so much I ordered a second copy for a White Elephant Christmas gift and it was a hit!!Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsTeen BoatByJoseph R. Romanon June 11, 2012Format: Hardcover|Verified PurchaseJust love Dave Romans new book. I am a fan of his work.He writes really great stuff for kids to read.Hes a kid at heart,and he knows what kids like to read.Comment| 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse5.0 out of 5 starsFive StarsByAmazon Customeron June 28, 2016Format: Kindle Edition|Verified PurchaseAmazing book for speech and debate.Comment|Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse4.0 out of 5 starsSaturday morning cartoon spoofByLivianiaVINE VOICEon June 5, 2012Format: Hardcover|Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )Collaborators Dave Roman and John Green originally published the TEEN BOAT! mini-comic through their own Cryptic Press. You can still visit the old websites associated with that version of the comic. TEEN BOAT! won an Ignatz Award and now it is available in a full color version with extra comics and other bonus material.

The art of TEEN BOAT! is clean with easy-to-distinguish and consistent character designs. The girls aren’t overly sexified either. They look like teen girls and their designs are stylized the same as the guys. The art doesn’t stand out from the crowd, but it is definitely not hideous. And believe me, you’d be surprised how many comics and graphic novels get published with awful art.

TEEN BOAT! first came onto my radar when I read the AV Club review praising its light parody of Saturday morning cartoons. After reading it myself, I cannot come up with a better description than that. TEEN BOAT! is an updated, self-aware Saturday morning cartoon that invites the reader to laugh at the ridiculous premise and plots and enjoy the story anyway.

The protagonist of TEEN BOAT! is actually named TEEN BOAT! He’s a high school student who can turn into a boat at will, but must turn into a boat when wet. He gets in and out of trouble, dates an Italian gondola, and runs for class president. Like most teen guys, he’s pretty self-absorbed. One of the running gags is how he doesn’t notice that his best friend is both into him and has shape-changing abilities of her own.

Older teens will probably find TEEN BOAT! too short and silly. But hey, I’m an adult and thought it was cute. TEEN BOAT! is probably best for tweens, especially ones that still enjoy the cheesiness of Saturday morning cartoons. There is some underage drinking and gambling, but it the protagonist does not partake and the behavior is punished.Read moreComment| 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuse3.0 out of 5 starsNO WAY, JOSE!ByFrequent BuyerTOP 500 REVIEWERon June 2, 2012Format: Hardcover|Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What’s this? )Beware!! This gal’s got her Mom-Review Hat On…

I actually requested this book to see what the team of Roman and Green were up to; and with a mind to finding out whether this might be the beginning of a series I could introduce to my 10 year-old son…

…BUT NO WAY, JOSE. I might let a ’d-mn’ slide but it’s not cool with this helicopter mom to have marijuana, drinking and smoking (cigarettes this time) mentioned like it’s no big deal. [Not to mention that ‘getting to second base’ would have to be explained.] Sooo, me in my-mom-hat will not be suggesting this book for Tweens.

Which leaves the question of who it would be good for. Here’s my opinion:

No - for adults. There was some funny stuff here, but not enough to make it worth the effort.

No - for Tweens. At least if you’re a mom like me. If your child is already rolling their own, they might enjoy it.

Yes - for guys 13-16 years, if they feel like a fun read that’s based on goofy humor.

Yes - possibly for girls 13 - 15 years if they like non-violent graphic novels. Romance is the focal point of the stories. And I particularly like the sections that dealt with where Teen Boat (that’s his name) fell in love with a gondola named Risatina.

Maybe - for guys older than 16, but honestly all of the things I thought were inappropriate for younger kids, is going to be too bland for mosts tastes at this age. I mean, no super cool artwork, and no ultra violence or women with extravagant 'attributes’...I’m divided on this one and not prepared to give it a definitive thumbs-down because there might be a guy out there that will be motivated to pick up more books if he starts on this one. However, that said TEEN BOAT is just got the wrong synergy going. On the one hand it’s childish but has inappropriate things for children, and one the other hand it’s not sophisticated enough for most Young Adults, which leaves it possibly right for that thin band in between: 13-15 year olds.

Pam T~putting away her MOM-hatRead more4 comments| 5 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNoReport abuseSee all verified purchase reviews (newest first)Write a customer review

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3.0 out of 5 starsShallow and not-quite-funnyStock characters and situations pulled from Judy Blume and John Hughes. Heavy-handed metaphors for teen angst. It’s all part of the joke, right?Read morePublished 1 year ago by Irene Ringworm5.0 out of 5 starsA BOAT load of fun!!!!A great success! My Son LOVES It!!! He couldn’t put it down until he was done!! A MOST AWESOME BOOK…my sons says “I just like it a real lot!!”Published 1 year ago by I am a Children’s Librarian5.0 out of 5 starsIt’s very simpleTEEN! BOAT!! What more do you need? All the angst of being a teen … all the thrill of being a boat!Published on October 5, 2014 by Jennifer5.0 out of 5 starsWacky, silly funNot every book comes with a fool-proof litmus test, but this one certainly does. Just read the tag-line on the cover:

The angst of being a teen!Read morePublished on September 3, 2012 by Andrew C Wheeler4.0 out of 5 starsJoin the Adventure!This book immediately jumped out at me as I began reading because of the wonderful illustrations and vibrant colors, and the story didn’t disappoint.Read morePublished on July 21, 2012 by A. Lynn4.0 out of 5 starsFun parodyTeenBoat! is a one-trick pony. Whether or not you’re entertained will depend entirely on how much you like that trick.Read morePublished on July 18, 2012 by A. Reid5.0 out of 5 starsIf I’m any judge at all as to what teens will laugh at…This graphic short story collection is ridiculous, silly, and hilarious. It pokes fun at the genre, at the way teens are often portrayed, and yet, from my understanding of…Read morePublished on June 20, 2012 by Neal Reynolds2.0 out of 5 starsConcept Fail.Some things that are completely absurd can also be funny. This is not one of those cases.

The entire premise is ridiculous and simply doesn’t work.Read morePublished on June 13, 2012 by Hedera Femme1.0 out of 5 starsNot RecommendedI thought I was getting a fun, innocent little book. But no, it is not. The book is boring, plus there is profanity and mention of unmentionable things such as smoking, etc.Read morePublished on June 6, 2012 by AndreaSearch Customer Reviews

SearchSet up an Amazon GiveawayTeen Boat!Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon GiveawayThis item: Teen Boat!Set up a giveaway

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[samanthasroberts]

The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that lifes most difficult questions have one right answer

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

When my son was born, 15 months ago, I was under no illusion that I had any idea what I was doing. But I did think I understood self-help books. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve written a weekly column about psychology and the happiness industry, in the course of which I have read stacks and stacks of books on popular psychology. I even wrote one myself, specifically aimed at readers who – like me – distrusted the hyperbolic promises of mainstream self-help. Midway through my partner’s pregnancy, when I first clicked “Bestsellers in Parenting: Early Childhood” on Amazon, I naively assumed it would be easy enough to pick up two or three titles, sift the science-backed wheat from the chaff, apply it where useful, and avoid getting too invested in any one book or parenting guru.

After all, I knew that advice books in other fields often contradicted each other, and indeed themselves, and so should never be taken too seriously. I understood that the search for One Right Answer to life’s biggest questions was futile, even self-exacerbating, leading only to a downward spiral in which attempting the perfect implementation of any one book’s recipe for happiness only generated further anxiety, necessitating the purchase of another book in an effort to allay it. (My own book, The Antidote, argues that trying to think positively reliably leads to more stress and misery.)

I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?

And so “two or three” books became six, and 10, and eventually 23, all with titles that, even before the sleep deprivation set in, had begun to blur into one other: The Baby Book and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Happiest Baby on the Block and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and The Contented Little Baby Book. (Their cover designs blurred even more. It’s hard to imagine the jacket art meeting for most baby books lasting more than a few seconds: “How about … a photo of a baby?”) If there is a single secret of good parenting, it is surely to be found on the rickety, self-assembly bookcase in the little back bedroom of our flat.

A tone of overbearingly cheery confidence characterises almost all such books, which makes sense; half the hope in purchasing any one of them is that you might absorb some of the author’s breezy self-assurance. Yet for all this certitude, it rapidly became clear that the modern terrain of infant advice was starkly divided into two opposed camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the very existence of the other. On one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our newborn on to a strict schedule as soon as possible, both because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure, but also so he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household, allowing everyone to get some sleep and enabling both parents swiftly to return to work. This is the busy, timetabled world in which we live, the Baby Trainers seemed to be saying; the challenge was to make life with an infant workable within it.

On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all schedules – and, often enough, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to – were further proof that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, according to this camp, for all practical purposes the same.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

A handful of the books I bought resisted classification, but only by maddeningly insisting on the importance of both approaches at once: by the time he was 10 months old, I learned from What to Expect: The First Year, we’d need to be giving our son “¼ to ½ cup of dairy foods per day” and “¼ to ½ cup of protein foods per day”, while also not getting “caught up in measurements”. (There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.)

It may be no coincidence that hostilities between camps seem to rage most furiously in those areas where there is the least scientific evidence to favour one or another technique. In online discussion forums, the battles reach their most frenzied over the question of whether letting your baby cry itself to sleep is sensible or tantamount to child abuse. At first glance, the sheer level of emotional investment confused me: why were all these people, presumably very busy looking after their own babies, so obsessed with how other people were caring for other babies they’d never meet?

But such mysteries begin to disperse when you realise that baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning – surely not unique to parents – that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self.

The essential challenge confronting any would-be parenting guru is this: nobody really knows what a baby is. This is obviously true of the panicked new parents, suddenly ejected from hospital to home, and faced with the responsibility of keeping the thing alive. But it is barely less true of the experts.

To begin with, thanks to the still mysterious phenomenon that Sigmund Freud labelled “infantile amnesia”, nobody can remember what it was like to be a baby. Furthermore, the experiments that could decisively distinguish the best from the worst ways to treat an infant, in terms of future flourishing, would be blatantly unethical; and in the real world, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle the innumerable variables acting upon any individual baby. Does being breastfed really confer lifelong benefits, or do those benefits come from being raised by the kind of mother – older, better educated, better-off – who’s far more likely to breastfeed? (Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)

“Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien,” writes the philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – and babies are most alien of all. For example: are they clever or stupid? Clearly, they’re inept at pretty much everything; yet “science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again,” as Gopnik notes, which hardly sounds like ineptitude.

Nothing struck me more forcefully, in my early months as a parent, as the sheer strangeness of the new houseguest. Where had he come from? What was his business here? Sitting in our glider chair, rocking my son back to sleep at 3.30am, I’d often wonder what might be going on in there, but the question led straight to dumbfoundedness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what it was like to be him, but that I couldn’t imagine what it could be like, in his pre-linguistic world where every hour brought experiences of utter novelty. Perhaps it’s no wonder that philosophers have tended to deal with the puzzle of babies by ignoring them entirely: one mid-1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gopnik points out, contained zero index references to babies, infants, mothers, fathers, parents or families, and only four to children. (There were many more references to angels.)

This explains the unspoken promise detectable between the lines of almost every baby manual: that this book, this guru, might be able to turn the alien in the bassinet into something altogether less daunting and more manageable, reminiscent of all those complicated-but-doable projects you’ve handled at home or the office in the past. Sometimes this is little more than a matter of tone, as in the case of the bestselling parenting advice book in history, What to Expect When You’re Expecting – which has 18.5m copies in print, and has spawned more than 10 spin-off books and a mediocre 2012 romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. What to Expect tries to distract from the outlandishness of what’s approaching by means of a relentlessly upbeat tone, characterised by compulsive wordplay that makes you worry for the authors’ mental health: “With just weeks to go before D-Day, have you come to terms with your baby coming to term? Will you be ready when that big moment – and that little bundle – arrives?” It rarely failed to make me – or even my partner, far less perturbable despite being the one who was actually pregnant – more stressed.

Other authors promise to eliminate the uncertainty inherent in the situation by making inexcusably specific claims about how things will unfold. The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

Of course all babies don’t follow an extremely precise 10-stage schedule: the very idea, to anyone who is well-slept and thinking straight, is preposterous. But it is difficult to imagine anything more profoundly reassuring to the first-time parent of a one-week-old than the possibility that they might.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

This same urge to recast a baby as something fundamentally mundane and familiar suffuses the debate over sleep, where hostilities between the Baby Trainers and the Natural Parents are most acute. From five or six months old, I learned, we could choose to let our baby cry himself to sleep for a few nights, which the Baby Trainers felt was essential if he were ever to learn to “self-soothe”, but which the Natural Parents swore would cause lasting neurological damage. (Besides, they argued, if the baby did stop crying as a result of such sleep training, it would only be because hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had hardwired him to assume that if his parents weren’t responding, they must have been eaten by wild animals, and remaining silent was his only hope of survival.)

Or we could respond within seconds to every cry, sharing our bed with our baby, resigning ourselves to years of multiple nighttime wakings for breastfeeding, all of which the Natural Parents felt was the least a loving mother ought to do, not to mention the instinctive thing all mothers had been hardwired to do – but which the Baby Trainers warned would lead to brain-dead parents unable to properly discharge their duties, plus a maladjusted child incapable of spending five minutes in a different room from them, and probably also divorce. (In reality, there is no persuasive scientific evidence of long-term harm from sleep training; I lost count of the number of times I followed a link or footnote provided by one of the Natural Parents, only to find a study about rats, or babies raised in environments of severe and chronic neglect, such as Romanian orphanages.)

At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying. But the Natural Parents employed an even more outlandish analogy: that he was essentially an adult trapped in the body of a baby, so that letting him cry was equivalent to abandoning a distressed grown-up who’d lost the ability to speak. “Imagine being in an extreme panic attack but your best friend locks you in a room alone while saying ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine’,” as one Natural Parent blogger put it – which sounds awful, until you realise there’s no reason to believe this is what a baby’s experience is like. It was obvious to me that our son was neither a dog nor a miniature adult, yet each analogy had its appeal. If he wasn’t trainable at all, why were we agonising about the right way to do any of this in the first place? And if being inside his head wasn’t at least a little similar to being inside mine, why did the idea of letting him cry trouble me?

Eventually, around six months, after agonising over the question for several weeks, we decided to try sleep training. We re-read the relevant chapters, assembled the alcohol we planned to use to suppress our instinct to intervene during the inevitable hours of screaming that the books foretold – and steeled ourselves to feel like monstrous parents. But more strangeness was in store: the baby cried mildly for about four minutes, slept for 10 hours, and woke in a buoyant mood. I spent much of the night awake, convinced something must be terribly wrong. None of the books had suggested this turn of events; my son appeared to be following an entirely different manual of instructions.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement. New mothers have been advised to smear their newborns daily in butter or lard, or to ensure that they were always put to sleep facing due north. In one 1920 book by a team of eugenicists, unearthed by the writer Therese O’Neill for an essay in the Atlantic, pregnant women are told to “avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease”. Whiskey and even morphine were frequently recommended as solutions to the pain of teething.

The genre expanded greatly during the 19th century, as urbanisation and industrialisation broke apart the extended families through which advice had previously been communicated, from grandmothers, mothers, and aunts – and as male paediatricians, who were starting to preside over a field traditionally dominated by midwives, sought to burnish their authority with parenting systems bearing the hallmarks of modern science. Today, their advice seems horrifyingly chilly: mothers and fathers alike were standardly exhorted to pick up their babies as infrequently as possible, to resist the urge to play with them, and to refrain from kissing them. Yet with child mortality so high – in 1900, 30% of deaths in the US were under-fives – this advice embodied a bleak wisdom. Less physical contact meant less chance of communicating dangerous diseases, and there was a psychological rationale for not getting too emotionally invested in any one child.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this process, made possible by the advance of medicine, should end with a crop of parenting philosophies rooted in the passionate conviction that the era of modern science and technology has led us astray. Before the baby arrived, I’d had the luxury of avoiding debates over parenting styles, and no sense of how vicious they could get; but now I felt I had no option but to plunge into the controversy over “attachment parenting”, the most extreme expression of the doctrine of the Natural Parents. After all, what if we ought to be doing it?

Admittedly, the story of its origins inspired little confidence. In the 1950s, I learned, a part-time model from Manhattan named Jean Liedloff met a beguiling European aristocrat who persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Venezuela in search of diamonds. Instead, Liedloff had become entranced by the Ye’kuana tribespeople of the Venezuelan rainforest. Ye’kuana mothers, she found, carried their babies against their bodies, virtually without interruption, and these babies, she claimed later, were “uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, [and] always obeyed happily and instantly”. Far from “needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, [they] snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes”. By contrast, she lamented, westerners had learned “to overrule our natural response and follow the going fashion dictated by babycare ‘experts’.”

Not for the last time in the history of the baby advice industry, Liedloff turned her disdain for parenting experts into a successful career as one, publishing a 1975 book, The Continuum Concept, which urged American and European parents to embrace the laid-back ways of the Ye’kuana. It sold healthily, but its greatest effect was undoubtedly in the influence it had on William Sears, a devout Christian paediatrician from Illinois who incorporated its message into his own childcare philosophy, coining the term “attachment parenting” and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, written with his wife, Martha. In it, they urge parents to shun experts and reconnect with their deepest instincts – provided, of course, that these instincts coincide with the Searses’ prescriptions. These include near-constant “baby-wearing”, sharing a bed with your baby, and round-the-clock breastfeeding until age two or beyond. This, they wrote, was “the way that parents for centuries have taken care of babies, until childcare advisers came on the scene and led parents to follow books instead of their babies”. (William and Martha Sears, and their paediatrician sons James, Robert and Peter, have now published more than 30 books between them.)

It isn’t difficult, even when you’ve been up since midnight with a restless four-month-old, to see that there may be some logical flaws in this approach. Why assume that childcare practices that predate modernity are inherently superior? Even if they were, why assume they still would be when transplanted into an environment for which they were not designed? Isn’t there something deeply condescending in the implication that contemporary Venezuelan tribespeople are closer to “human nature” than those of us with better access to cutting-edge medicine – which is, after all, no less a product of our evolved human brains? And isn’t it possible that people dwelling in the rainforest spurn strollers in favour of baby slings just because they lack paved roads?

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. Apart from being disingenuous, this fails to quell anxiety anyway. Attempting to care for an infant in accordance with one’s instincts isn’t automatically more relaxing than trying to make them comply with a schedule, since you’re liable to find yourself constantly questioning whether or not you’re following your instincts faithfully enough.

“As a scholar, I consider this kind of worshipful but patronising attitude toward indigenous peoples a serious error,” the American academic Cynthia Eller has written. And “as a parent, I resent having to measure my civilised, bookish, awkward approach to mothering against the supposedly effortless, natural perfection of ‘simpler’ women the world over … especially when these ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’ women don’t actually exist.” For every indigenous tribe where babies purportedly never cry, she points out, there is another, such as the Munduruku of the Brazilian rainforest, who also carry their infants everywhere, yet whose children, to quote the anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, “do not have happy dispositions, and there is a heavy frequency of chronic crying and emotional upsets”.

The Searses, in any case, have another agenda: they have described attachment parenting as “the way God designed us to care for babies”. Many critics have pointed out that strict adherence to their advice is essentially impossible for mothers with jobs – which sends an implicit message that a working mother is not a good one. Advice literature is usually read by people looking to assuage their worries – but it might be better understood as an expression of an author’s anxieties about the ways society is changing.

Insofar as there is any main way in which “parents for centuries have taken care of babies”, the truth seems to be that for most of human history, they were largely ignored, until they were old enough to begin contributing to the survival of household or tribe. The really significant divide in approaches to parenting, according to the anthropologist David Lancy, isn’t between Baby Trainers and Natural Parents, or any similar disagreement about how to pay attention to your infant; it’s about whether to pay much attention at all. For much of history, and in many tribal societies today, he writes, young children have been viewed as “hardy plants that needed little close attention”.

In the cultures Lancy has labelled “pick when ripe”, babies are largely left to entertain themselves; it’s only in those he calls “pick when green”, such as ours, that they’re the centre of attention from day one. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: Lancy dates the emergence of what he wryly calls our “neontocracy” – a society organised around the interests of the youngest – to the emergence of the middle class in 17th-century Holland, which led Europe in urbanisation, the growth of commerce, and the liberalisation of culture, including towards children: “Among the growing [Dutch] middle class, children were no longer viewed merely as chattel but as having inherent value.” You need disposable income, and time, even to have the option of treating small children as valuable not only for the contribution they may one day make, but for what they already are.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” writes psychologist Alison Gopnik. That this should be their goal in the first place is itself a recent development; parents in an earlier era would have been unlikely to imagine they had such power over a child’s future personality. But in any case, the problem with this is hiding in plain sight: if there were a secret to raising happy or successful children, children whose parents didn’t know the secret wouldn’t end up happy or successful. Yet almost every human in history has been raised without the insights of almost every book of parenting advice ever published.

The anthropological literature is littered with contemporary examples of baby-rearing practices that would appal both Baby Trainers and Natural Parents: among the Hausa-Fulani of west Africa, for example, there is a taboo against mothers making eye contact with their children; the Swazi of southern Africa sometimes don’t even name a baby until it is several months old. Yet most children raised that way – presumably also like most of those babies smothered with butter or lard – turn out fine. It’s hard not to think of the search for the right techniques as a fuss over nothing – or, more to the point, the cause of added anxiety we’re at risk of transmitting to our children.

Our mistake, Gopnik argues, isn’t one of employing the wrong techniques, but of thinking in terms of techniques at all – in imagining that anything as complex as a relationship between humans could be reduced to a set of consciously manipulable variables. That’s an alluring thought, and one it might be natural to believe given how we’ve succeeded in using science and technology to control so much in our lives. But it’s for good reason that Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the pioneering psychologists who studied the basis of “secure attachment” in children, made barely any mention of specific practices such as breastfeeding, baby-wearing or co-sleeping; secure attachment, they concluded, didn’t result from the use of any such techniques, but from the overall quality of relationship between infants and parents who were “fairly consistently available” to them, attuned to their children’s emotions at least some of the time and – notwithstanding inevitable moments of inattention or irritability – basically loving. (“Attachment parenting” perpetuates a confusion by taking “attachment” to mean physical attachment to one’s baby, when a critical dimension of secure attachment, in Ainsworth and Bowlby’s sense, is the child’s ability to withstand the absence of the parent. There remains no body of scientific evidence to suggest that the specific techniques of attachment parenting make secure attachment more likely.)

“It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,” Gopnik writes in her recent book The Gardener and the Carpenter. “There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children ‘cry it out’ or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” Her book’s title refers to the shift in mindset she advocates: we ought to stop thinking of children as construction projects, and instead think of ourselves as gardeners, providing a secure and stable environment in which our children will prove remarkably capable of raising themselves.

Last year, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, conducted a study involving 354 new mothers, examining their use of parenting books “that encourage parents to try to put their babies into strict sleeping and feeding routines” – the manuals of the Baby Trainers. The more such books a mother read, Brown found, the more depressive symptoms and the lower self-confidence she reported. This isn’t surprising: rules create expectations from which a baby will almost inevitably diverge, triggering stress. (As the psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen has argued, rule-following also has the effect of making childcare more boring: the more you’re focused on the rules, the less you’re focused on getting to know your specific baby.) But the advice of the Natural Parents is hardly any better: their techniques are still techniques, with the added complication that you don’t even have a yardstick by which to judge if you’re implementing them properly.

But when I think hard about it, I’m not sure it’s truly possible to live according to Gopnik’s technique-free philosophy, either. It may be a matter of fact that I lack the influence I imagine myself to have over my son’s life, but it still feels as if I do. And whether or not they really matter, choices must be made: whether to call the doctor about that rash; when to start looking into pre-school; whether to try to make him read picture-books when he’d rather be playing with dustballs under the sofa. This, I suspect, may be the lasting lesson of the baby advice books that now sit largely unconsulted at the back of our flat. They failed to deliver on their promise to reveal the one right way to do things. Then again, they provided no firm reason to conclude it would be impossible to find the right way. Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Illustrations by Peter Gamlen

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Source: http://allofbeer.com/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/03/25/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/

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The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that lifes most difficult questions have one right answer

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

When my son was born, 15 months ago, I was under no illusion that I had any idea what I was doing. But I did think I understood self-help books. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve written a weekly column about psychology and the happiness industry, in the course of which I have read stacks and stacks of books on popular psychology. I even wrote one myself, specifically aimed at readers who – like me – distrusted the hyperbolic promises of mainstream self-help. Midway through my partner’s pregnancy, when I first clicked “Bestsellers in Parenting: Early Childhood” on Amazon, I naively assumed it would be easy enough to pick up two or three titles, sift the science-backed wheat from the chaff, apply it where useful, and avoid getting too invested in any one book or parenting guru.

After all, I knew that advice books in other fields often contradicted each other, and indeed themselves, and so should never be taken too seriously. I understood that the search for One Right Answer to life’s biggest questions was futile, even self-exacerbating, leading only to a downward spiral in which attempting the perfect implementation of any one book’s recipe for happiness only generated further anxiety, necessitating the purchase of another book in an effort to allay it. (My own book, The Antidote, argues that trying to think positively reliably leads to more stress and misery.)

I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?

And so “two or three” books became six, and 10, and eventually 23, all with titles that, even before the sleep deprivation set in, had begun to blur into one other: The Baby Book and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Happiest Baby on the Block and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and The Contented Little Baby Book. (Their cover designs blurred even more. It’s hard to imagine the jacket art meeting for most baby books lasting more than a few seconds: “How about … a photo of a baby?”) If there is a single secret of good parenting, it is surely to be found on the rickety, self-assembly bookcase in the little back bedroom of our flat.

A tone of overbearingly cheery confidence characterises almost all such books, which makes sense; half the hope in purchasing any one of them is that you might absorb some of the author’s breezy self-assurance. Yet for all this certitude, it rapidly became clear that the modern terrain of infant advice was starkly divided into two opposed camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the very existence of the other. On one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our newborn on to a strict schedule as soon as possible, both because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure, but also so he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household, allowing everyone to get some sleep and enabling both parents swiftly to return to work. This is the busy, timetabled world in which we live, the Baby Trainers seemed to be saying; the challenge was to make life with an infant workable within it.

On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all schedules – and, often enough, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to – were further proof that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, according to this camp, for all practical purposes the same.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

A handful of the books I bought resisted classification, but only by maddeningly insisting on the importance of both approaches at once: by the time he was 10 months old, I learned from What to Expect: The First Year, we’d need to be giving our son “¼ to ½ cup of dairy foods per day” and “¼ to ½ cup of protein foods per day”, while also not getting “caught up in measurements”. (There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.)

It may be no coincidence that hostilities between camps seem to rage most furiously in those areas where there is the least scientific evidence to favour one or another technique. In online discussion forums, the battles reach their most frenzied over the question of whether letting your baby cry itself to sleep is sensible or tantamount to child abuse. At first glance, the sheer level of emotional investment confused me: why were all these people, presumably very busy looking after their own babies, so obsessed with how other people were caring for other babies they’d never meet?

But such mysteries begin to disperse when you realise that baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning – surely not unique to parents – that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self.

The essential challenge confronting any would-be parenting guru is this: nobody really knows what a baby is. This is obviously true of the panicked new parents, suddenly ejected from hospital to home, and faced with the responsibility of keeping the thing alive. But it is barely less true of the experts.

To begin with, thanks to the still mysterious phenomenon that Sigmund Freud labelled “infantile amnesia”, nobody can remember what it was like to be a baby. Furthermore, the experiments that could decisively distinguish the best from the worst ways to treat an infant, in terms of future flourishing, would be blatantly unethical; and in the real world, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle the innumerable variables acting upon any individual baby. Does being breastfed really confer lifelong benefits, or do those benefits come from being raised by the kind of mother – older, better educated, better-off – who’s far more likely to breastfeed? (Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)

“Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien,” writes the philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – and babies are most alien of all. For example: are they clever or stupid? Clearly, they’re inept at pretty much everything; yet “science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again,” as Gopnik notes, which hardly sounds like ineptitude.

Nothing struck me more forcefully, in my early months as a parent, as the sheer strangeness of the new houseguest. Where had he come from? What was his business here? Sitting in our glider chair, rocking my son back to sleep at 3.30am, I’d often wonder what might be going on in there, but the question led straight to dumbfoundedness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what it was like to be him, but that I couldn’t imagine what it could be like, in his pre-linguistic world where every hour brought experiences of utter novelty. Perhaps it’s no wonder that philosophers have tended to deal with the puzzle of babies by ignoring them entirely: one mid-1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gopnik points out, contained zero index references to babies, infants, mothers, fathers, parents or families, and only four to children. (There were many more references to angels.)

This explains the unspoken promise detectable between the lines of almost every baby manual: that this book, this guru, might be able to turn the alien in the bassinet into something altogether less daunting and more manageable, reminiscent of all those complicated-but-doable projects you’ve handled at home or the office in the past. Sometimes this is little more than a matter of tone, as in the case of the bestselling parenting advice book in history, What to Expect When You’re Expecting – which has 18.5m copies in print, and has spawned more than 10 spin-off books and a mediocre 2012 romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. What to Expect tries to distract from the outlandishness of what’s approaching by means of a relentlessly upbeat tone, characterised by compulsive wordplay that makes you worry for the authors’ mental health: “With just weeks to go before D-Day, have you come to terms with your baby coming to term? Will you be ready when that big moment – and that little bundle – arrives?” It rarely failed to make me – or even my partner, far less perturbable despite being the one who was actually pregnant – more stressed.

Other authors promise to eliminate the uncertainty inherent in the situation by making inexcusably specific claims about how things will unfold. The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

Of course all babies don’t follow an extremely precise 10-stage schedule: the very idea, to anyone who is well-slept and thinking straight, is preposterous. But it is difficult to imagine anything more profoundly reassuring to the first-time parent of a one-week-old than the possibility that they might.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

This same urge to recast a baby as something fundamentally mundane and familiar suffuses the debate over sleep, where hostilities between the Baby Trainers and the Natural Parents are most acute. From five or six months old, I learned, we could choose to let our baby cry himself to sleep for a few nights, which the Baby Trainers felt was essential if he were ever to learn to “self-soothe”, but which the Natural Parents swore would cause lasting neurological damage. (Besides, they argued, if the baby did stop crying as a result of such sleep training, it would only be because hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had hardwired him to assume that if his parents weren’t responding, they must have been eaten by wild animals, and remaining silent was his only hope of survival.)

Or we could respond within seconds to every cry, sharing our bed with our baby, resigning ourselves to years of multiple nighttime wakings for breastfeeding, all of which the Natural Parents felt was the least a loving mother ought to do, not to mention the instinctive thing all mothers had been hardwired to do – but which the Baby Trainers warned would lead to brain-dead parents unable to properly discharge their duties, plus a maladjusted child incapable of spending five minutes in a different room from them, and probably also divorce. (In reality, there is no persuasive scientific evidence of long-term harm from sleep training; I lost count of the number of times I followed a link or footnote provided by one of the Natural Parents, only to find a study about rats, or babies raised in environments of severe and chronic neglect, such as Romanian orphanages.)

At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying. But the Natural Parents employed an even more outlandish analogy: that he was essentially an adult trapped in the body of a baby, so that letting him cry was equivalent to abandoning a distressed grown-up who’d lost the ability to speak. “Imagine being in an extreme panic attack but your best friend locks you in a room alone while saying ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine’,” as one Natural Parent blogger put it – which sounds awful, until you realise there’s no reason to believe this is what a baby’s experience is like. It was obvious to me that our son was neither a dog nor a miniature adult, yet each analogy had its appeal. If he wasn’t trainable at all, why were we agonising about the right way to do any of this in the first place? And if being inside his head wasn’t at least a little similar to being inside mine, why did the idea of letting him cry trouble me?

Eventually, around six months, after agonising over the question for several weeks, we decided to try sleep training. We re-read the relevant chapters, assembled the alcohol we planned to use to suppress our instinct to intervene during the inevitable hours of screaming that the books foretold – and steeled ourselves to feel like monstrous parents. But more strangeness was in store: the baby cried mildly for about four minutes, slept for 10 hours, and woke in a buoyant mood. I spent much of the night awake, convinced something must be terribly wrong. None of the books had suggested this turn of events; my son appeared to be following an entirely different manual of instructions.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement. New mothers have been advised to smear their newborns daily in butter or lard, or to ensure that they were always put to sleep facing due north. In one 1920 book by a team of eugenicists, unearthed by the writer Therese O’Neill for an essay in the Atlantic, pregnant women are told to “avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease”. Whiskey and even morphine were frequently recommended as solutions to the pain of teething.

The genre expanded greatly during the 19th century, as urbanisation and industrialisation broke apart the extended families through which advice had previously been communicated, from grandmothers, mothers, and aunts – and as male paediatricians, who were starting to preside over a field traditionally dominated by midwives, sought to burnish their authority with parenting systems bearing the hallmarks of modern science. Today, their advice seems horrifyingly chilly: mothers and fathers alike were standardly exhorted to pick up their babies as infrequently as possible, to resist the urge to play with them, and to refrain from kissing them. Yet with child mortality so high – in 1900, 30% of deaths in the US were under-fives – this advice embodied a bleak wisdom. Less physical contact meant less chance of communicating dangerous diseases, and there was a psychological rationale for not getting too emotionally invested in any one child.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this process, made possible by the advance of medicine, should end with a crop of parenting philosophies rooted in the passionate conviction that the era of modern science and technology has led us astray. Before the baby arrived, I’d had the luxury of avoiding debates over parenting styles, and no sense of how vicious they could get; but now I felt I had no option but to plunge into the controversy over “attachment parenting”, the most extreme expression of the doctrine of the Natural Parents. After all, what if we ought to be doing it?

Admittedly, the story of its origins inspired little confidence. In the 1950s, I learned, a part-time model from Manhattan named Jean Liedloff met a beguiling European aristocrat who persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Venezuela in search of diamonds. Instead, Liedloff had become entranced by the Ye’kuana tribespeople of the Venezuelan rainforest. Ye’kuana mothers, she found, carried their babies against their bodies, virtually without interruption, and these babies, she claimed later, were “uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, [and] always obeyed happily and instantly”. Far from “needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, [they] snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes”. By contrast, she lamented, westerners had learned “to overrule our natural response and follow the going fashion dictated by babycare ‘experts’.”

Not for the last time in the history of the baby advice industry, Liedloff turned her disdain for parenting experts into a successful career as one, publishing a 1975 book, The Continuum Concept, which urged American and European parents to embrace the laid-back ways of the Ye’kuana. It sold healthily, but its greatest effect was undoubtedly in the influence it had on William Sears, a devout Christian paediatrician from Illinois who incorporated its message into his own childcare philosophy, coining the term “attachment parenting” and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, written with his wife, Martha. In it, they urge parents to shun experts and reconnect with their deepest instincts – provided, of course, that these instincts coincide with the Searses’ prescriptions. These include near-constant “baby-wearing”, sharing a bed with your baby, and round-the-clock breastfeeding until age two or beyond. This, they wrote, was “the way that parents for centuries have taken care of babies, until childcare advisers came on the scene and led parents to follow books instead of their babies”. (William and Martha Sears, and their paediatrician sons James, Robert and Peter, have now published more than 30 books between them.)

It isn’t difficult, even when you’ve been up since midnight with a restless four-month-old, to see that there may be some logical flaws in this approach. Why assume that childcare practices that predate modernity are inherently superior? Even if they were, why assume they still would be when transplanted into an environment for which they were not designed? Isn’t there something deeply condescending in the implication that contemporary Venezuelan tribespeople are closer to “human nature” than those of us with better access to cutting-edge medicine – which is, after all, no less a product of our evolved human brains? And isn’t it possible that people dwelling in the rainforest spurn strollers in favour of baby slings just because they lack paved roads?

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. Apart from being disingenuous, this fails to quell anxiety anyway. Attempting to care for an infant in accordance with one’s instincts isn’t automatically more relaxing than trying to make them comply with a schedule, since you’re liable to find yourself constantly questioning whether or not you’re following your instincts faithfully enough.

“As a scholar, I consider this kind of worshipful but patronising attitude toward indigenous peoples a serious error,” the American academic Cynthia Eller has written. And “as a parent, I resent having to measure my civilised, bookish, awkward approach to mothering against the supposedly effortless, natural perfection of ‘simpler’ women the world over … especially when these ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’ women don’t actually exist.” For every indigenous tribe where babies purportedly never cry, she points out, there is another, such as the Munduruku of the Brazilian rainforest, who also carry their infants everywhere, yet whose children, to quote the anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, “do not have happy dispositions, and there is a heavy frequency of chronic crying and emotional upsets”.

The Searses, in any case, have another agenda: they have described attachment parenting as “the way God designed us to care for babies”. Many critics have pointed out that strict adherence to their advice is essentially impossible for mothers with jobs – which sends an implicit message that a working mother is not a good one. Advice literature is usually read by people looking to assuage their worries – but it might be better understood as an expression of an author’s anxieties about the ways society is changing.

Insofar as there is any main way in which “parents for centuries have taken care of babies”, the truth seems to be that for most of human history, they were largely ignored, until they were old enough to begin contributing to the survival of household or tribe. The really significant divide in approaches to parenting, according to the anthropologist David Lancy, isn’t between Baby Trainers and Natural Parents, or any similar disagreement about how to pay attention to your infant; it’s about whether to pay much attention at all. For much of history, and in many tribal societies today, he writes, young children have been viewed as “hardy plants that needed little close attention”.

In the cultures Lancy has labelled “pick when ripe”, babies are largely left to entertain themselves; it’s only in those he calls “pick when green”, such as ours, that they’re the centre of attention from day one. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: Lancy dates the emergence of what he wryly calls our “neontocracy” – a society organised around the interests of the youngest – to the emergence of the middle class in 17th-century Holland, which led Europe in urbanisation, the growth of commerce, and the liberalisation of culture, including towards children: “Among the growing [Dutch] middle class, children were no longer viewed merely as chattel but as having inherent value.” You need disposable income, and time, even to have the option of treating small children as valuable not only for the contribution they may one day make, but for what they already are.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” writes psychologist Alison Gopnik. That this should be their goal in the first place is itself a recent development; parents in an earlier era would have been unlikely to imagine they had such power over a child’s future personality. But in any case, the problem with this is hiding in plain sight: if there were a secret to raising happy or successful children, children whose parents didn’t know the secret wouldn’t end up happy or successful. Yet almost every human in history has been raised without the insights of almost every book of parenting advice ever published.

The anthropological literature is littered with contemporary examples of baby-rearing practices that would appal both Baby Trainers and Natural Parents: among the Hausa-Fulani of west Africa, for example, there is a taboo against mothers making eye contact with their children; the Swazi of southern Africa sometimes don’t even name a baby until it is several months old. Yet most children raised that way – presumably also like most of those babies smothered with butter or lard – turn out fine. It’s hard not to think of the search for the right techniques as a fuss over nothing – or, more to the point, the cause of added anxiety we’re at risk of transmitting to our children.

Our mistake, Gopnik argues, isn’t one of employing the wrong techniques, but of thinking in terms of techniques at all – in imagining that anything as complex as a relationship between humans could be reduced to a set of consciously manipulable variables. That’s an alluring thought, and one it might be natural to believe given how we’ve succeeded in using science and technology to control so much in our lives. But it’s for good reason that Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the pioneering psychologists who studied the basis of “secure attachment” in children, made barely any mention of specific practices such as breastfeeding, baby-wearing or co-sleeping; secure attachment, they concluded, didn’t result from the use of any such techniques, but from the overall quality of relationship between infants and parents who were “fairly consistently available” to them, attuned to their children’s emotions at least some of the time and – notwithstanding inevitable moments of inattention or irritability – basically loving. (“Attachment parenting” perpetuates a confusion by taking “attachment” to mean physical attachment to one’s baby, when a critical dimension of secure attachment, in Ainsworth and Bowlby’s sense, is the child’s ability to withstand the absence of the parent. There remains no body of scientific evidence to suggest that the specific techniques of attachment parenting make secure attachment more likely.)

“It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,” Gopnik writes in her recent book The Gardener and the Carpenter. “There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children ‘cry it out’ or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” Her book’s title refers to the shift in mindset she advocates: we ought to stop thinking of children as construction projects, and instead think of ourselves as gardeners, providing a secure and stable environment in which our children will prove remarkably capable of raising themselves.

Last year, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, conducted a study involving 354 new mothers, examining their use of parenting books “that encourage parents to try to put their babies into strict sleeping and feeding routines” – the manuals of the Baby Trainers. The more such books a mother read, Brown found, the more depressive symptoms and the lower self-confidence she reported. This isn’t surprising: rules create expectations from which a baby will almost inevitably diverge, triggering stress. (As the psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen has argued, rule-following also has the effect of making childcare more boring: the more you’re focused on the rules, the less you’re focused on getting to know your specific baby.) But the advice of the Natural Parents is hardly any better: their techniques are still techniques, with the added complication that you don’t even have a yardstick by which to judge if you’re implementing them properly.

But when I think hard about it, I’m not sure it’s truly possible to live according to Gopnik’s technique-free philosophy, either. It may be a matter of fact that I lack the influence I imagine myself to have over my son’s life, but it still feels as if I do. And whether or not they really matter, choices must be made: whether to call the doctor about that rash; when to start looking into pre-school; whether to try to make him read picture-books when he’d rather be playing with dustballs under the sofa. This, I suspect, may be the lasting lesson of the baby advice books that now sit largely unconsulted at the back of our flat. They failed to deliver on their promise to reveal the one right way to do things. Then again, they provided no firm reason to conclude it would be impossible to find the right way. Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Illustrations by Peter Gamlen

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/183699429317

[allofbeercom]

The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that lifes most difficult questions have one right answer

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

When my son was born, 15 months ago, I was under no illusion that I had any idea what I was doing. But I did think I understood self-help books. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve written a weekly column about psychology and the happiness industry, in the course of which I have read stacks and stacks of books on popular psychology. I even wrote one myself, specifically aimed at readers who – like me – distrusted the hyperbolic promises of mainstream self-help. Midway through my partner’s pregnancy, when I first clicked “Bestsellers in Parenting: Early Childhood” on Amazon, I naively assumed it would be easy enough to pick up two or three titles, sift the science-backed wheat from the chaff, apply it where useful, and avoid getting too invested in any one book or parenting guru.

After all, I knew that advice books in other fields often contradicted each other, and indeed themselves, and so should never be taken too seriously. I understood that the search for One Right Answer to life’s biggest questions was futile, even self-exacerbating, leading only to a downward spiral in which attempting the perfect implementation of any one book’s recipe for happiness only generated further anxiety, necessitating the purchase of another book in an effort to allay it. (My own book, The Antidote, argues that trying to think positively reliably leads to more stress and misery.)

I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?

And so “two or three” books became six, and 10, and eventually 23, all with titles that, even before the sleep deprivation set in, had begun to blur into one other: The Baby Book and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Happiest Baby on the Block and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and The Contented Little Baby Book. (Their cover designs blurred even more. It’s hard to imagine the jacket art meeting for most baby books lasting more than a few seconds: “How about … a photo of a baby?”) If there is a single secret of good parenting, it is surely to be found on the rickety, self-assembly bookcase in the little back bedroom of our flat.

A tone of overbearingly cheery confidence characterises almost all such books, which makes sense; half the hope in purchasing any one of them is that you might absorb some of the author’s breezy self-assurance. Yet for all this certitude, it rapidly became clear that the modern terrain of infant advice was starkly divided into two opposed camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the very existence of the other. On one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our newborn on to a strict schedule as soon as possible, both because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure, but also so he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household, allowing everyone to get some sleep and enabling both parents swiftly to return to work. This is the busy, timetabled world in which we live, the Baby Trainers seemed to be saying; the challenge was to make life with an infant workable within it.

On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all schedules – and, often enough, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to – were further proof that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, according to this camp, for all practical purposes the same.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

A handful of the books I bought resisted classification, but only by maddeningly insisting on the importance of both approaches at once: by the time he was 10 months old, I learned from What to Expect: The First Year, we’d need to be giving our son “¼ to ½ cup of dairy foods per day” and “¼ to ½ cup of protein foods per day”, while also not getting “caught up in measurements”. (There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.)

It may be no coincidence that hostilities between camps seem to rage most furiously in those areas where there is the least scientific evidence to favour one or another technique. In online discussion forums, the battles reach their most frenzied over the question of whether letting your baby cry itself to sleep is sensible or tantamount to child abuse. At first glance, the sheer level of emotional investment confused me: why were all these people, presumably very busy looking after their own babies, so obsessed with how other people were caring for other babies they’d never meet?

But such mysteries begin to disperse when you realise that baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning – surely not unique to parents – that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self.

The essential challenge confronting any would-be parenting guru is this: nobody really knows what a baby is. This is obviously true of the panicked new parents, suddenly ejected from hospital to home, and faced with the responsibility of keeping the thing alive. But it is barely less true of the experts.

To begin with, thanks to the still mysterious phenomenon that Sigmund Freud labelled “infantile amnesia”, nobody can remember what it was like to be a baby. Furthermore, the experiments that could decisively distinguish the best from the worst ways to treat an infant, in terms of future flourishing, would be blatantly unethical; and in the real world, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle the innumerable variables acting upon any individual baby. Does being breastfed really confer lifelong benefits, or do those benefits come from being raised by the kind of mother – older, better educated, better-off – who’s far more likely to breastfeed? (Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)

“Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien,” writes the philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – and babies are most alien of all. For example: are they clever or stupid? Clearly, they’re inept at pretty much everything; yet “science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again,” as Gopnik notes, which hardly sounds like ineptitude.

Nothing struck me more forcefully, in my early months as a parent, as the sheer strangeness of the new houseguest. Where had he come from? What was his business here? Sitting in our glider chair, rocking my son back to sleep at 3.30am, I’d often wonder what might be going on in there, but the question led straight to dumbfoundedness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what it was like to be him, but that I couldn’t imagine what it could be like, in his pre-linguistic world where every hour brought experiences of utter novelty. Perhaps it’s no wonder that philosophers have tended to deal with the puzzle of babies by ignoring them entirely: one mid-1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gopnik points out, contained zero index references to babies, infants, mothers, fathers, parents or families, and only four to children. (There were many more references to angels.)

This explains the unspoken promise detectable between the lines of almost every baby manual: that this book, this guru, might be able to turn the alien in the bassinet into something altogether less daunting and more manageable, reminiscent of all those complicated-but-doable projects you’ve handled at home or the office in the past. Sometimes this is little more than a matter of tone, as in the case of the bestselling parenting advice book in history, What to Expect When You’re Expecting – which has 18.5m copies in print, and has spawned more than 10 spin-off books and a mediocre 2012 romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. What to Expect tries to distract from the outlandishness of what’s approaching by means of a relentlessly upbeat tone, characterised by compulsive wordplay that makes you worry for the authors’ mental health: “With just weeks to go before D-Day, have you come to terms with your baby coming to term? Will you be ready when that big moment – and that little bundle – arrives?” It rarely failed to make me – or even my partner, far less perturbable despite being the one who was actually pregnant – more stressed.

Other authors promise to eliminate the uncertainty inherent in the situation by making inexcusably specific claims about how things will unfold. The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

Of course all babies don’t follow an extremely precise 10-stage schedule: the very idea, to anyone who is well-slept and thinking straight, is preposterous. But it is difficult to imagine anything more profoundly reassuring to the first-time parent of a one-week-old than the possibility that they might.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

This same urge to recast a baby as something fundamentally mundane and familiar suffuses the debate over sleep, where hostilities between the Baby Trainers and the Natural Parents are most acute. From five or six months old, I learned, we could choose to let our baby cry himself to sleep for a few nights, which the Baby Trainers felt was essential if he were ever to learn to “self-soothe”, but which the Natural Parents swore would cause lasting neurological damage. (Besides, they argued, if the baby did stop crying as a result of such sleep training, it would only be because hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had hardwired him to assume that if his parents weren’t responding, they must have been eaten by wild animals, and remaining silent was his only hope of survival.)

Or we could respond within seconds to every cry, sharing our bed with our baby, resigning ourselves to years of multiple nighttime wakings for breastfeeding, all of which the Natural Parents felt was the least a loving mother ought to do, not to mention the instinctive thing all mothers had been hardwired to do – but which the Baby Trainers warned would lead to brain-dead parents unable to properly discharge their duties, plus a maladjusted child incapable of spending five minutes in a different room from them, and probably also divorce. (In reality, there is no persuasive scientific evidence of long-term harm from sleep training; I lost count of the number of times I followed a link or footnote provided by one of the Natural Parents, only to find a study about rats, or babies raised in environments of severe and chronic neglect, such as Romanian orphanages.)

At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying. But the Natural Parents employed an even more outlandish analogy: that he was essentially an adult trapped in the body of a baby, so that letting him cry was equivalent to abandoning a distressed grown-up who’d lost the ability to speak. “Imagine being in an extreme panic attack but your best friend locks you in a room alone while saying ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine’,” as one Natural Parent blogger put it – which sounds awful, until you realise there’s no reason to believe this is what a baby’s experience is like. It was obvious to me that our son was neither a dog nor a miniature adult, yet each analogy had its appeal. If he wasn’t trainable at all, why were we agonising about the right way to do any of this in the first place? And if being inside his head wasn’t at least a little similar to being inside mine, why did the idea of letting him cry trouble me?

Eventually, around six months, after agonising over the question for several weeks, we decided to try sleep training. We re-read the relevant chapters, assembled the alcohol we planned to use to suppress our instinct to intervene during the inevitable hours of screaming that the books foretold – and steeled ourselves to feel like monstrous parents. But more strangeness was in store: the baby cried mildly for about four minutes, slept for 10 hours, and woke in a buoyant mood. I spent much of the night awake, convinced something must be terribly wrong. None of the books had suggested this turn of events; my son appeared to be following an entirely different manual of instructions.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement. New mothers have been advised to smear their newborns daily in butter or lard, or to ensure that they were always put to sleep facing due north. In one 1920 book by a team of eugenicists, unearthed by the writer Therese O’Neill for an essay in the Atlantic, pregnant women are told to “avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease”. Whiskey and even morphine were frequently recommended as solutions to the pain of teething.

The genre expanded greatly during the 19th century, as urbanisation and industrialisation broke apart the extended families through which advice had previously been communicated, from grandmothers, mothers, and aunts – and as male paediatricians, who were starting to preside over a field traditionally dominated by midwives, sought to burnish their authority with parenting systems bearing the hallmarks of modern science. Today, their advice seems horrifyingly chilly: mothers and fathers alike were standardly exhorted to pick up their babies as infrequently as possible, to resist the urge to play with them, and to refrain from kissing them. Yet with child mortality so high – in 1900, 30% of deaths in the US were under-fives – this advice embodied a bleak wisdom. Less physical contact meant less chance of communicating dangerous diseases, and there was a psychological rationale for not getting too emotionally invested in any one child.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this process, made possible by the advance of medicine, should end with a crop of parenting philosophies rooted in the passionate conviction that the era of modern science and technology has led us astray. Before the baby arrived, I’d had the luxury of avoiding debates over parenting styles, and no sense of how vicious they could get; but now I felt I had no option but to plunge into the controversy over “attachment parenting”, the most extreme expression of the doctrine of the Natural Parents. After all, what if we ought to be doing it?

Admittedly, the story of its origins inspired little confidence. In the 1950s, I learned, a part-time model from Manhattan named Jean Liedloff met a beguiling European aristocrat who persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Venezuela in search of diamonds. Instead, Liedloff had become entranced by the Ye’kuana tribespeople of the Venezuelan rainforest. Ye’kuana mothers, she found, carried their babies against their bodies, virtually without interruption, and these babies, she claimed later, were “uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, [and] always obeyed happily and instantly”. Far from “needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, [they] snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes”. By contrast, she lamented, westerners had learned “to overrule our natural response and follow the going fashion dictated by babycare ‘experts’.”

Not for the last time in the history of the baby advice industry, Liedloff turned her disdain for parenting experts into a successful career as one, publishing a 1975 book, The Continuum Concept, which urged American and European parents to embrace the laid-back ways of the Ye’kuana. It sold healthily, but its greatest effect was undoubtedly in the influence it had on William Sears, a devout Christian paediatrician from Illinois who incorporated its message into his own childcare philosophy, coining the term “attachment parenting” and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, written with his wife, Martha. In it, they urge parents to shun experts and reconnect with their deepest instincts – provided, of course, that these instincts coincide with the Searses’ prescriptions. These include near-constant “baby-wearing”, sharing a bed with your baby, and round-the-clock breastfeeding until age two or beyond. This, they wrote, was “the way that parents for centuries have taken care of babies, until childcare advisers came on the scene and led parents to follow books instead of their babies”. (William and Martha Sears, and their paediatrician sons James, Robert and Peter, have now published more than 30 books between them.)

It isn’t difficult, even when you’ve been up since midnight with a restless four-month-old, to see that there may be some logical flaws in this approach. Why assume that childcare practices that predate modernity are inherently superior? Even if they were, why assume they still would be when transplanted into an environment for which they were not designed? Isn’t there something deeply condescending in the implication that contemporary Venezuelan tribespeople are closer to “human nature” than those of us with better access to cutting-edge medicine – which is, after all, no less a product of our evolved human brains? And isn’t it possible that people dwelling in the rainforest spurn strollers in favour of baby slings just because they lack paved roads?

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. Apart from being disingenuous, this fails to quell anxiety anyway. Attempting to care for an infant in accordance with one’s instincts isn’t automatically more relaxing than trying to make them comply with a schedule, since you’re liable to find yourself constantly questioning whether or not you’re following your instincts faithfully enough.

“As a scholar, I consider this kind of worshipful but patronising attitude toward indigenous peoples a serious error,” the American academic Cynthia Eller has written. And “as a parent, I resent having to measure my civilised, bookish, awkward approach to mothering against the supposedly effortless, natural perfection of ‘simpler’ women the world over … especially when these ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’ women don’t actually exist.” For every indigenous tribe where babies purportedly never cry, she points out, there is another, such as the Munduruku of the Brazilian rainforest, who also carry their infants everywhere, yet whose children, to quote the anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, “do not have happy dispositions, and there is a heavy frequency of chronic crying and emotional upsets”.

The Searses, in any case, have another agenda: they have described attachment parenting as “the way God designed us to care for babies”. Many critics have pointed out that strict adherence to their advice is essentially impossible for mothers with jobs – which sends an implicit message that a working mother is not a good one. Advice literature is usually read by people looking to assuage their worries – but it might be better understood as an expression of an author’s anxieties about the ways society is changing.

Insofar as there is any main way in which “parents for centuries have taken care of babies”, the truth seems to be that for most of human history, they were largely ignored, until they were old enough to begin contributing to the survival of household or tribe. The really significant divide in approaches to parenting, according to the anthropologist David Lancy, isn’t between Baby Trainers and Natural Parents, or any similar disagreement about how to pay attention to your infant; it’s about whether to pay much attention at all. For much of history, and in many tribal societies today, he writes, young children have been viewed as “hardy plants that needed little close attention”.

In the cultures Lancy has labelled “pick when ripe”, babies are largely left to entertain themselves; it’s only in those he calls “pick when green”, such as ours, that they’re the centre of attention from day one. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: Lancy dates the emergence of what he wryly calls our “neontocracy” – a society organised around the interests of the youngest – to the emergence of the middle class in 17th-century Holland, which led Europe in urbanisation, the growth of commerce, and the liberalisation of culture, including towards children: “Among the growing [Dutch] middle class, children were no longer viewed merely as chattel but as having inherent value.” You need disposable income, and time, even to have the option of treating small children as valuable not only for the contribution they may one day make, but for what they already are.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” writes psychologist Alison Gopnik. That this should be their goal in the first place is itself a recent development; parents in an earlier era would have been unlikely to imagine they had such power over a child’s future personality. But in any case, the problem with this is hiding in plain sight: if there were a secret to raising happy or successful children, children whose parents didn’t know the secret wouldn’t end up happy or successful. Yet almost every human in history has been raised without the insights of almost every book of parenting advice ever published.

The anthropological literature is littered with contemporary examples of baby-rearing practices that would appal both Baby Trainers and Natural Parents: among the Hausa-Fulani of west Africa, for example, there is a taboo against mothers making eye contact with their children; the Swazi of southern Africa sometimes don’t even name a baby until it is several months old. Yet most children raised that way – presumably also like most of those babies smothered with butter or lard – turn out fine. It’s hard not to think of the search for the right techniques as a fuss over nothing – or, more to the point, the cause of added anxiety we’re at risk of transmitting to our children.

Our mistake, Gopnik argues, isn’t one of employing the wrong techniques, but of thinking in terms of techniques at all – in imagining that anything as complex as a relationship between humans could be reduced to a set of consciously manipulable variables. That’s an alluring thought, and one it might be natural to believe given how we’ve succeeded in using science and technology to control so much in our lives. But it’s for good reason that Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the pioneering psychologists who studied the basis of “secure attachment” in children, made barely any mention of specific practices such as breastfeeding, baby-wearing or co-sleeping; secure attachment, they concluded, didn’t result from the use of any such techniques, but from the overall quality of relationship between infants and parents who were “fairly consistently available” to them, attuned to their children’s emotions at least some of the time and – notwithstanding inevitable moments of inattention or irritability – basically loving. (“Attachment parenting” perpetuates a confusion by taking “attachment” to mean physical attachment to one’s baby, when a critical dimension of secure attachment, in Ainsworth and Bowlby’s sense, is the child’s ability to withstand the absence of the parent. There remains no body of scientific evidence to suggest that the specific techniques of attachment parenting make secure attachment more likely.)

“It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,” Gopnik writes in her recent book The Gardener and the Carpenter. “There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children ‘cry it out’ or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” Her book’s title refers to the shift in mindset she advocates: we ought to stop thinking of children as construction projects, and instead think of ourselves as gardeners, providing a secure and stable environment in which our children will prove remarkably capable of raising themselves.

Last year, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, conducted a study involving 354 new mothers, examining their use of parenting books “that encourage parents to try to put their babies into strict sleeping and feeding routines” – the manuals of the Baby Trainers. The more such books a mother read, Brown found, the more depressive symptoms and the lower self-confidence she reported. This isn’t surprising: rules create expectations from which a baby will almost inevitably diverge, triggering stress. (As the psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen has argued, rule-following also has the effect of making childcare more boring: the more you’re focused on the rules, the less you’re focused on getting to know your specific baby.) But the advice of the Natural Parents is hardly any better: their techniques are still techniques, with the added complication that you don’t even have a yardstick by which to judge if you’re implementing them properly.

But when I think hard about it, I’m not sure it’s truly possible to live according to Gopnik’s technique-free philosophy, either. It may be a matter of fact that I lack the influence I imagine myself to have over my son’s life, but it still feels as if I do. And whether or not they really matter, choices must be made: whether to call the doctor about that rash; when to start looking into pre-school; whether to try to make him read picture-books when he’d rather be playing with dustballs under the sofa. This, I suspect, may be the lasting lesson of the baby advice books that now sit largely unconsulted at the back of our flat. They failed to deliver on their promise to reveal the one right way to do things. Then again, they provided no firm reason to conclude it would be impossible to find the right way. Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Illustrations by Peter Gamlen

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/

[dankaroo-writes]

something along the way

Someone’s trying to destroy Supergirl and the Super name, too. In a freak accident, all of the Superfriends have switched bodies with each other — except Kara. Now they have to get the bad guy (and switch back) before he strikes again.

ao3

chapter 1/3

Kara Danvers loves a good sunrise. She’s well aware that sunsets are supposed to be more romantic or more beautiful or whatever, but there’s something about how the light creeps up the treetops and over buildings, up the toes of her boots and over her face, warming every inch of her— she can’t get enough of it. It has little to do with getting her powers from the sun, although she does appreciate the sentiment that’s she’s literally soaking in the strength of it as it rises. If she’s honest, it’s more about the serenity and quietness of dawn. She loves the silence right before the birds start chirping, the street lamps extinguish themselves, car horns blare, the airwaves clog with radio signals and pop hits singles of the week.

It’s the colors that she likes best of all, though. The soft pinks and oranges and yellows and blues remind her of the home she lost. Even though they have nothing on a Kryptonian moonrise, they’re as close as she can get these days. As close as she’ll ever get, probably. Kara doesn’t make a habit of getting up early enough to watch the sun wake up the whole city, but she’ll keep herself awake an extra half an hour to see it on the days she spends the early morning hours patrolling National City. It’s special enough to her to warrant the extra morning grumpiness that she — um, everyone else — will face later for that fleeting moment of peace. Those are the days she can fool herself into thinking that everything will be okay somehow, and that her life is pretty good. Not that she doesn’t like her life! She has wonderful friends and a loving family. And being a reporter makes — made — her feel like she is — ugh, was — contributing to something important. Like she’s making a difference, superhero or not. Sure, Supergirl could knock bad guys three city blocks away with a single punch and hold up a building until everyone can escape, but Kara wants to help too and now that she doesn’t have a way, she feels lost. Cliché? Yes. True? Double yes. She feels lost but not quite as lost as when she first came to Earth, of course. Nothing will ever compare with the loneliness of being the sole survivor of an entire culture. Maybe she’s having a quarter-life crisis or something. She hasn’t had one yet, not counting the whole coming out as Supergirl stuff. So what if she was born 50 years ago? She’s technically only 26, she’s as much a millennial as Winn and James and Alex. They all had one. Alex had, like, three. So maybe that’s what it is. She’ll have to ask Alex for her opinion later. The whole funemployment thing stopped being fun when it meant she had extra time to think about all this crap, genius-alien-brain-that-should-know-better-than-to-be-all-existential be damned. She heaves a sigh and is ready to turn in for the night. If she gets home now, she’ll have… forty-five minutes of sleep before she’s due at the DEO. Great. She decides that it’s a sunrise morning. She’s sitting on the roof of her apartment watching the rays peek over the CatCo building and then L-Corp, and then— The unmistakable sound of metal crushing against cement has her pushing off into the sky, full speed towards what can only be a car accident. She arrives to see the front end of a silver Lexus flattened against the side of an overpass. Without a moment’s hesitation, the hero rips off the roof of the car to free any people inside but instead finds a small gray device with a flashing red light. The device begins to blink more rapidly, and, oh shit, it’s a bomb. She scans the area for potential casualties and finds none, grabs the device, and launches herself and it into the sky. When she’s above any possible flight path or where any kind of living thing might be dwelling, Kara throws it further still as the light turns solid and the device explodes. Everything is quiet. The city is safe. Again. For now.

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“Supergirl! Check out this thing I did! It literally downloads—” Winn is flanking Kara with some sort of metal USB drive as she beelines to the center of the room, but she dismisses him with a quick Sorry, later! and a grimace. He heads back to his desk, grumbling and fiddling with the memory stick for a while before busying himself with security updates to the network. “Something weird happened this morning,” Kara walks up to J’onn, arms folded across her chest. “I heard,” J’onn says, “But I thought NCPD had it handled. Nothing extra-normal, alien or otherwise.” Kara inhales deeply and explains, “It just didn’t feel right. It was early morning. No one was out, no one was around. Why plant a bomb if there weren’t going to be any casualties? I’m glad no one was hurt, but…” “It doesn’t make sense.” J’onn says. “You think it was a decoy.” “Yeah, but, for what?” “Whoever is behind this is trying to lure you out.” “You read my mind,” Kara jokes, and the faint pull at the corner of J’onn’s mouth is the only indication that he appreciates her jab at the limitations of his Martian abilities. “Okay, so you’re being targeted. That makes this DEO territory.” Kara sighs as J’onn takes his leave to make some phone calls to the National City Police Department. “I’m gonna go get some food before something else blows up,” she announces to no one in particular, arms crossed. “Mind if I tag along?” Oh, Winn. She’d been sidetracked and completely forgot. It’s been a while since the two of them hung out one-on-one, since she and Mon-El started doing… whatever it is that they’re doing. On and off relationships are so not her thing, and she’s so stressed, and gosh, she misses her friend. She breaks into a grin. “Let me change real quick.” He drives them into the city, and Kara’s grateful for the sense of normalcy of not flying. Winn parks in front of Noonan’s. “Thought we’d go back to our roots,” he beams. “Also I’ve been dying for those almond bearclaws.” Kara laughs and agrees, “Yeah, I could eat probably ten and not get sick of them.” They chat idly in a booth, sipping their coffees and picking at the dozen pastries they bought to share. They reminisce for a while about working at CatCo together and how they met, and Kara laughs at the appropriate times but her smile doesn’t fully reach her eyes. Winn leans over the table and rests a hand on Kara’s arm. She looks him in the eye, a little surprised by the physical contact, and he asks, “Hey, Kara, are you doing okay?” She adjusts her glasses and looks at her lap. “Yeah, of course, why wouldn’t I be?” Winn looks at her with a sheepish smile, and treads carefully. “It’s just, you seem to be, wound up? I guess. I don’t know if that’s the right word. James and I were talking—” “Look, I know you guys do the whole vigilante thing together but talking behind my back—” the whispering makes it sound harsher than she means it, and she feels a little bad, but then Winn cuts her off. “Kara, come on. No, listen. We’re just worried about you. Ever since you stopped, y’know, having a routine that includes stuff other than saving people all the time, you’ve been a little… touchy. We were just thinking that maybe it’s time for a friend night?” He punctuates the proposition with what Kara affectionately coined his Winning smile back when they first started to become friends. (She’d laughed at her own joke for about five minutes, and Winn knew he’d found a true friend in that moment.) Kara inhales deeply and rubs her temples. “I’m sorry, I’m— you’re right. I am a little moody right now.” She fiddles with her hands and looks up at her friend. “I’d love that. Friend night.” They share a smile, and she continues with a wince, “Is it really that noticeable?” “Oh, yeah. You’re like, eat-a-Snickers levels of grumpy. I’m the only one with enough guts to say anything, though.” Kara clutches her chest in fake agony and bows her head in mock shame. “You’ve all been conspiring against me!” Winn’s glad to have gotten a positive reaction out of her. “Only because we love you! How’s tomorrow work?” “Yeah, that’s great.” But she sits on that for a second, and then remembers, “Oh, wait, I have plans with Lena, actually. Maybe Saturday?” He thinks for a minute, and then surprises himself. “Or,” he suggests, “you could just invite her like a normal person? Because she’s your friend? And this is your friend night?” Kara bites her lip in hesitation. “But she doesn’t know…” Winn gives her a look, eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline and half a smirk, that makes her want to draw her knees to her chest and curl up into a little ball. She knows she’s being silly, but the prospect of Lena knowing that she’s Supergirl has her stomach in knots. It’s her big life secret, that she’s an alien and a superhero. She and Lena are close, but are they there yet? Once they acknowledge it out loud, it’s kind of a best-friend-for-life deal. It’s a big step. A milestone, even. “Kara. The woman built a black body field generator, hatched a foolproof plan against her own mother to render a virus inert and save all the aliens in the city, runs a multibillion dollar corporation at the ripe old age of twentysomething, and has spent more than ten minutes with you. She knows.” “But!” Kara’s nerves have her reaching for any kind of proof that maybe Lena doesn’t know, but she comes up with exactly nothing. “She knows. Don’t insult her intelligence, I’ll tell her you think she’s not as smart as you,” he teases. He wouldn’t really, for reasons including he’s kind of afraid of Lena, but it’s fun to see Kara get flustered. She opens her mouth and gestures wildly with an index finger to defend herself, but only stammers out some vowels before she gives in, shoulders dropping in defeat. “I’ll text her.” She taps out a message and clarifies, “For the record, I don’t think I’m smarter than her. Or anyone else.” It’s not a fair comparison anyway, Kara thinks. Math and science classes are way more advanced on Krypton, and if Lena or Winn had the chance to learn there they probably would’ve done as well as she had. For sure. “Mhm.” Winn plays at being unconvinced, just to see Kara flounder a little. He misses this. She looks up to refute him and realizes he’s kidding. She sits back and crosses her arms, and then lets out a few short laughs before shaking her head and looking down at her phone. “If she doesn’t want to come, we’ll do Saturday, okay?” “She’ll want to come.” “But, I—” “You can’t keep her to yourself forever,” Winn says. She feels a little guilty about that, now that he mentions it. She wants Lena to be a bigger part of her life, she’s just worried because her friends didn’t exactly trust the Luthor at first, and that makes things weird. And Lena’s great, and Kara knows everyone will like her once they get a chance to really meet her, but it’s always hard to be the new person in a group and throwing her into the fire like this may not be the best way. For Lena’s sake, of course. Not because Kara’s afraid of taking that next step. Which she’s not. So Winn’s right. It’ll be totally fine. Just a normal old friend night. A night of friends. Of which Lena is one. “She’s a busy person, she probably won’t answer until tonight,” Kara says a little haughtily, “so I’ll let you know.” Her phone dings with a notification. Winn chuckles to himself, and Kara blushes a little. “She wants to come.” He whoops in excitement, mostly at being right, and they finish their lunch before heading back to the DEO.

---

It’s not awkward. Okay, it was at the beginning, but now they’re collectively three bottles of wine into friend night and things are great. Mon-El has been pawing at her hand for the better part of an hour, which has been kind of annoying, but other than that he’s behaving. Sort of. He’s also been pouting because she’s been paying more attention to Lena than him, but it’s only because Lena’s the newest and Kara’s her only connection to the whole group. It’s more important for her to be a good friend to Lena than a good girlfriend to Mon-El right now. She knows she’ll hear an earful about it later, but whatever. She’s having fun. And so is Lena. And everyone else, too. They’re playing a round of charades, with Kara acting and Mon-El and Lena trying to guess. James, Winn, Alex, and Maggie are sitting on the couch watching the hilarity about to ensue.

Kara holds up two fingers, prompting her team. “Two words,” Lena starts, and Kara makes a circular hand motion with both hands. “About…” Kara points to herself, “Supergirl.” Lena’s eyes are twinkling, and, yeah, it’s confirmed. Kara bites her lip and shakes her head no. “Kara, hero, hot girl, glasses?” Mon-El tries. Kara’s eyes widen and she shakes her head vigorously. She tries again and points between herself and Mon-El a few times. “Couple, dating, in love?” She rolls her eyes, and ugh, no, he’s not getting it, but when Lena blurts “Aliens!” Kara jumps up and down and claps, smiling. The other team is in stitches, and Kara’s pretty sure Alex is in tears. She holds up one finger. “First word,” Mon-El says. She starts to flap both of her arms up and down. A high pitched tone rips into her eardrums and she gasps in pain and doubles over, covering her ears. “Loud, sick, headache?” When she doesn’t respond: “Are you okay?” “Kara what’s the matter?” She’s not sure who’s asking what, but the tone stops and she drops her hands. “Sorry guys, there was this… never mind. It’s gone now.” She takes a breath and nods to show she’s okay, and starts flapping her arms again. Alex watches her carefully, and both Lena and Mon-El guess flying, and she’s ready to try for the second word when the tone starts up again. This time it’s reverberating in her skull and it’s persistent. She winces as she hones in on the source of the noise, and follows it to the windowsill. She picks up a small rectangular black box, and it juts out a lancet and pricks her hand. Well, tries to. The beeping stops when the lancet breaks off. Alex is off the couch in a second and steps towards her sister, holding up a cautious hand. “Kara, what’s —“ Something, no, someone smashes through the window. The intruder raises a massive blue fist and swings it at Kara, who ducks just in time and manages to get a hit in at his stomach on the way down. “Everyone, get back!” They’re matching blow for blow, so Kara throws her glasses aside and squints her eyes to zap his shoulder with her heat vision. The creature roars and grabs for her, misses, and stumbles. Kara takes advantage of his weak positioning to get a hand around his throat, and another around one wrist. She shoves him backward and has him pinned to the wall, next to the window he busted through. “You ruined friend night!” She’s mad, rightfully so, and headbutts the beast in his nose. One of his noses. Whatever. His face. He bares his teeth, but then his mouth twists into what can only be interpreted as a vicious smile. His confidence shakes her and she stares into his pitch black, beady eyes as she tightens her grip on him. With his free hand, he holds up a device identical to the one that Kara had found in her apartment and presses the small button on the underside. There’s a moment where Kara is afraid something terrible is going to happen, but then the brute’s face begins to fall, and oh, something is not right. All of the sound seems to get sucked out of the room, and then the device in his hand explodes. Kara is thrown across the room and lands in front of Lena and Winn, who are crouched behind the couch. The monster catches a glimpse of Lena as she’s pulling Kara behind it, and stumbles as he starts towards her. Kara looks up at him, confused by his hesitation at the sight of a human when he very clearly came prepared to attack a Kryptonian, and tries to stand up. She won’t let him hurt her friends. He takes one more look around the room, snarls, and then jumps out of the destroyed apartment wall to the street below. By the time the group has rushed over, he’s long gone. “Are you guys okay?” Kara’s facing her friends now, and they all look uneasy. Something’s definitely not right. There’s a few mumbled yeahs, and no one has a scratch on them. Thank Rao for small favors.

Kara turns around to inspect the damage to her house. The window is gone and the blast has taken a good chunk of the surrounding wall with it. A few pieces of drywall crumble and fall to the ground. She sighs. James walks up beside her and places a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay Kara, you can stay with me until this gets fixed.” Kara’s flattered, and her and James are good friends, but yeah, no. There’s hardly any awkwardness left from their break-up, and they made up after their fight about James being Guardian, but it would still be… weird, is what Kara settles on. She lets him down easy. “Thanks, James, but I think I’ll just crash with Alex.” She turns and offers him a reassuring smile, and then looks at Alex. Alex knits her brows and turns to look behind her, where no one is standing. “I’m not James,” James says, and then holds his hands up to look at them. “Wait, I’m James? No, I’m not!” “Did you hit your head? Should we go to the hospital?” Kara’s concerned, and reaches up to the man’s face to check for any missed injuries. “I’m James,” says Maggie, raising her hand. There’s a pause as everyone looks around the group. “I’m Maggie,” says Alex. “Wait, wait, wait. Everyone hold on.” Kara’s holding her hands out in front of her, trying to get her bearings. “I think I hit my head.” “Maybe, but, uh, I think something else has gone Super wrong,” and it’s Lena’s voice, but only Winn would talk like that. And make a joke at a time like this. “So if Maggie is Alex, and James is Maggie, who are you?” Kara turns back to ‘James.’ He huffs, “I’m your boyfriend, Kara.” Oh, great. So now her boyfriend is her ex, on top of this all. Perfect.

Kara looks between the two remaining people. Winn pipes up, "Alex." “Right. So if Lena’s Winn, and Winn's Alex, then you’re—” She faces the body of her boyfriend “—Lena.” Lena looks like she’s about to pass out. “I need to sit down,” Lena says. Kara closes her eyes and rubs them with the heels of her hands. “Okay, this is happening.” She takes a deep breath and picks up the device that has fallen to the ground.

“We need to call J’onn.”

[wineanddinosaur]

Wolves Is Dropping Whiskey Like Sneakers. Are They Selling Liquid Gold?

Alongside a lupine silhouette on a plain wooden box, which, I would later learn had been made from eight-foot-long pieces of solid Douglas fir, the following words had been hot-iron engraved:

“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”

Inside the box was a bulky bottle with a label made of a strange, soft, kid glove-like material. The accompanying press materials read like an Onion spoof of some hipster whiskey company, explaining that each bottle of Wolves is wrapped in Italian sheepskin leather, “which is hand cut, embossed, printed with UV light, and laid flush to the glass by hand. The bottle is heavy, French-cut glass, and the cork top is made of maple wood.”

As a booze writer, I get sent flashy bottles like these all the time. Ones shaped like skulls, cologne bottles, and oil drums. Once, I got a bottle that looked like a solid gold bar, and another time, a three-liter bottle of Belvedere with an LED light switch in the base that could be clicked on to illuminate the whole thing.

I’d seen it all before, and I knew that with such baroque packaging and hyperbolic marketing antics, there was no way this Wolves whiskey could possibly be any good. Nevertheless, I did my professional duty and took a sip.

It was incredible.

“God forbid you open that bottle and it’s garbage,” says Jon Buscemi, the co-founder of Wolves along with his buddy James Bond (the press materials identify them as the brand’s “creatives.”) “Even if the people aren’t into packaging and think it’s a gag, they’ll find great juice inside.”

It used to be that vodka was the spirit that elicited the biggest marketing hype, which makes sense, since it’s inherently odorless and flavorless — and often drawn from the same few mass-produced grain neutral spirit sources that everyone uses. The only way to differentiate it is through the marketing and packaging — and bullsh*t claims that might help make a brand stand out.

Whiskey has never really needed to do that. Sure, whiskey has similarly been a category with its own issues of puffery (no, that craft whiskey isn’t the same as the one once bootlegged by Al Capone), but when it comes to the packaging, it’s always been fairly humble and quotidian. That’s why you still see so many bourbon brands in the no-frills packaging they’ve used since their inception.

Jack Daniel’s is still packaged in its squared-off bottle with the black “Old No. 7” label. Jim Beam has a label so bland I bet you can barely picture it. Old Grand-Dad has some old grand-dad adorning the bottle. Even Pappy Van Winkle simply has a black-and-white side view of Pappy smoking a stogie. In general, if a whiskey tastes good, it typically markets itself. But as the whiskey marketplace grows and new customers are courted, that may all be changing. Wolves whiskey is banking on it.

The Catalyst

Wolves represents Buscemi and Bond’s first foray into the alcohol industry, which is yet another reason I expected their whiskey to suck. Both men hail from the fashion and designer sneaker industries. Buscemi is best known for his eponymous sneaker brand. Bond founded Undefeated, a designer footwear and apparel chain, which has locations in the U.S., Japan, and China.

It wasn’t even until about seven or eight years ago that the 44-year-old Buscemi became interested in whiskey. Like many men his age, he was into vodka when he was younger. Growing up in the New York City area, he had access to quality wines and spirits, plenty of which he gladly tried at dinner or in bars, but he was no connoisseur. It was when a friend introduced him to the whiskey-geek-beloved Willett that he got swept up by the emerging bourbon craze. “Drinking 110 proof, 16- or 17-year-old Willett Family Estate,” says Buscemi, “it changes your whole life.”

Still, Buscemi never had much desire to get into the industry himself. He was already a successful fashion entrepreneur. But one day, a friend brought over a bottle of California Gold (a famed underground blend I once broke the story on back in 2017). Buscemi couldn’t believe that some average Joe — an amateur! — had put together a whiskey this remarkable without the aid of a distillery or even industry know-how.

“It was kind of the catalyst — a lightbulb moment,” explains Buscemi, who is now based in Los Angeles. “I thought, we should put together a blend if we want to do something cool. We don’t have time to lay barrels down [to age] and all these other cool blends are hitting the scene as age statements take a back seat.”

The obvious first step would be to go to MGP, the massive bulk spirit factory that operates in Kansas and Indiana, and buy the same whiskey so many other startup brands buy, and then package it in their own slick bottles. And that was the initial plan. “We thought we could f*ck with it,” says Buscemi, “do it on our own and ‘hack’ it.”

Wolves Whiskey “creators” Jon Buscemi and James Bond.

While Buscemi and Bond were in the process of sourcing the whiskey for Wolves, however, they were introduced to a master distiller making some pretty extraordinary whiskey north of them in California wine country. That man was Marko Karakasevic, a 13th-generation family distiller who’s made a reputation for himself distilling local craft beer into whiskey.

“He’s into wacky sh*t,” says Buscemi, who during our conversation referred to Karakasevic as a both a hippie and a mad scientist. “He’s into just doing cool stuff. So why don’t we f*ck around and make a blend — start the brand this way?”

After several trials, the ultimate result was First Run, a blend made with whiskey distilled from stout beer and aged for eight years in French oak, whiskey distilled from pilsner and aged for five years in new American oak, and a rye whiskey (sourced from MGP) to round things out. The full blend is “lightly filtered with the mineral-rich water of Sonoma county,” according to the press release, to get it down to 106 proof.

I instantly recognized the one-of-a-kind hoppy yet underlying chocolate malt flavor profile when I tasted First Run. I was certain it was the result of distillate from Charbay Distillery in Ukiah, California — a cult favorite among whiskey geeks, though it’s never really broken out into the mainstream. Buscemi and Bond don’t cover up the fact that they source from Charbay — Karakasevic, whose father founded the distillery in 1983, is mentioned in the Wolves press materials — but they don’t completely own that fact, either.

But then again, the Wolves website doesn’t even refer to Buscemi and Bond as distillers or producers. Instead, they label themselves as a “unique creative group.” As they see it, their ideal customer has no idea who Karakasevic or Charbay are. In fact, their ideal customer might not even know Pappy Van Winkle. “I think the 1 percenters like you deserve the [sourcing] information,” Buscemi tells me. “But the 99 percent [of our customers] don’t really care about the story.”

Understanding Wolves’ Target Market

The New York launch party for Wolves was held in the Lincoln Room at Keens Steakhouse. I was invited, but unable to attend. Only one other journalist was invited — and not even a spirits writer:  Jonathan Evans, the style director of Esquire magazine. Judging by the Instagrams from the night, it seems like the rest of the attendees were equally cool scenesters: men in gold double-breasted jackets and wide-brimmed hats; women in statement glasses and fur-lined coats, lots of flashy watches, dangling chains and neck tattoos. (Buscemi insists there were a couple dozen whiskey geeks in attendance, too, but that they just aren’t perhaps as… photogenic.) Still, despite the fashion-forward crowd, Buscemi isn’t even sure who is ultimately going to be a fan of Wolves whiskey. “We’re slowly finding out,” he says. “We’re learning as we go. We don’t even know who our customer is yet.”

But Buscemi suspects that if he produces great whiskey and puts as much effort into the packaging, he and Bond will start attracting the same type of customers who’ve bought their other non-whiskey products in the past. Those people, or the 270,000 Instagram followers of the Buscemi brand, or the 1.8 million followers of Bond’s Undefeated, don’t need to know what Charbay is or who Pappy is; they just have to know what luxury looks like and what quality tastes like. Though it veers far from just about every other American whiskey brand’s marketing strategy, that’s the Wolves game plan.

“There’s a certain discerning customer that likes quality, digs New York street culture [and] East Coast late-’80/’90s [style] — that’s the overall umbrella,” explains Buscemi. “It could be a burger place, a hat, a sneaker, a hot sauce, a car, a whiskey. It’s a certain customer who likes a certain look. That’s always been our customer base, no matter what category we’re going after. No matter what industry.”

And yet, Buscemi also wants to intrigue the whiskey geek. Remember, he’s one himself. He recognizes that this luxury placement, this image-is-everything marketing and the fanciful bottle, might immediately turn off the connoisseurs he’s trying to court. “The packaging,” he concedes, “almost might be too thoughtful for the bourbon community.” But again, us whiskey geeks make up only a tiny fraction of Buscemi’s perceived target market — it’s the quality of the product itself that Buscemi and Bond are hoping will lure us.

A Fashion Strategy That Works for Whiskey

Wolves only had enough whiskey to produce 898 bottles of First Run, but that was fine because its sales model is also fairly unique. The brand doesn’t have any typical distribution or points of sale, such as liquor stores. All of Wolves’ whiskey is released online at the same time, exclusively available at Reservebar.com and Flaviar.com, which serve different states (though not all 50 states). Customers can find out about each new release by signing up (for free) for the allocation list, which currently has 4,500 names on it, though Buscemi admits a good 1,000 are family and friends.

In his article for Esquire, Evans described Wolves’ marketing strategy, referring to it as the “sneaker drop” model of releasing whiskey. “A limited-time-only release with just a handful (or fewer) points of distribution, scarce enough that you might miss it, even if you want it? That’s a sneaker thing,” he wrote. “A fashion thing.” But the “drop” is not a term Buscemi or Bond have ever used in Wolves’ marketing. They believe it’s simply the parlance of what their fashion-knowledgeable customers are most familiar with, so why not let the fashionmongers make that connection and believe Wolves whiskey is following this “sneaker drop” idea?

The second release, Winter Run, which (ahem) “dropped” in November, featured the same hyperbolic press-release language as First Run’s release. At that point, I just drank it up, poured myself a dram, and leaned back in my easy chair as I read it:

“[E]ach bottle is wrapped by hand in a chocolate espresso Italian sheepskin leather, which is laser cut, embossed, printed with UV light, and laid flush to the glass by hand. The bottle is heavy and French-cut, while the cork top is made of maple wood. Each bottle is delivered in a custom canvas sleeve that was stitched by hand and designed to fit Winter Run like a glove.”

Even if I couldn’t help but laugh again at how absurd this all was, I was pretty sure the whiskey inside was going to be great.

Indeed, I liked it even better than the First Run.

Wolves has four more releases planned in 2020 — and I’m sure four more hilarious press releases will accompany them, which I will copy and paste lines from and text to my whiskey geek friends so we can all share a good laugh. (Though, after laughing about it, I always tell them they should really try the whiskey as it’s, I-sh*t-you-not, actually great.)

There will be a Spring Run blend at the end of March, a second release of First Run in the fall (hopefully with a larger quantity this time). Wolves is also doing an upcoming collaboration with Neighborhood — Japan’s popular streetwear brand — that will be a bourbon finished in sake casks. The biggest and surely most ballyhooed release will occur late in the year, when Wolves sources whiskey from a distiller that isn’t Charbay (and that I agreed to keep off the record for now).

“I strive to create products that are obnoxiously high quality,” says Buscemi. “Wolves is a luxury and lifestyle fashion brand.” To market Wolves, he and Bond are applying their learnings and resources in luxury marketing to the spirits industry. “We see California whiskey as the vehicle.”

Back to Those Bottles

When they were planning the bottle design, Buscemi and Bond started by playing around with different materials for labels. “James and I are in charge of the forward-facing part of the brand, the marketing, the feel, the look,” Buscemi explains. “For the bottle we wanted something that incorporated both of our careers.”

Buscemi’s experience using leather goods from Italy for his designer sneakers and accessories seemed like a clever idea, especially when they found someone who could make and apply the sui generis labels. Since Bond is known for the utilitarian, military-inspired branding he used for Undefeated, they chose to go with similarly clean and simple typeface copy for the bottle, “like a BDU jacket,” Buscemi says. The production of the Wolves bottles also costs some six to seven times what, say, Jim Beam pays for its packaging.

Buscemi readily admits they spent as much time designing the bottles as they did the whiskey blend. His and Bond’s backgrounds have taught them that all the tiny details matter. As far as they’re concerned, that’s how you want to launch a brand. Maybe more American whiskey companies should follow suit.

“The thing is,” says Buscemi, “if you saw the Kentucky distilleries step out and do it, everyone would think it was corny, so it somewhat makes sense for them to stay in their lane. But, I’d love to see some kids down in Bardstown, [Kentucky, doing it]. I’d love to see a little more irreverence. I’d love to see some young, punk motherf*ckers making some great juice and putting it in sexy bottles.”

And, though Wolves may also move to simpler bottles with simpler paper labels one day, like everyone else in Kentucky and most of the whiskey-making world, for now the Italian sheepskin leather-wrapped French-cut glass bottle with the heavy maple wood cork inside the Douglas fir-bored box is how they’re going to continue trying to sell the country’s next great whiskey.

As Buscemi points out, “It’s kind of like getting an entire elevator pitch immediately when you just touch the bottle.”

The article Wolves Is Dropping Whiskey Like Sneakers. Are They Selling Liquid Gold? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wolves-whiskey-liquid-gold/

[johnboothus]

Wolves Is Dropping Whiskey Like Sneakers. Are They Selling Liquid Gold?

Alongside a lupine silhouette on a plain wooden box, which, I would later learn had been made from eight-foot-long pieces of solid Douglas fir, the following words had been hot-iron engraved:

“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”

Inside the box was a bulky bottle with a label made of a strange, soft, kid glove-like material. The accompanying press materials read like an Onion spoof of some hipster whiskey company, explaining that each bottle of Wolves is wrapped in Italian sheepskin leather, “which is hand cut, embossed, printed with UV light, and laid flush to the glass by hand. The bottle is heavy, French-cut glass, and the cork top is made of maple wood.”

As a booze writer, I get sent flashy bottles like these all the time. Ones shaped like skulls, cologne bottles, and oil drums. Once, I got a bottle that looked like a solid gold bar, and another time, a three-liter bottle of Belvedere with an LED light switch in the base that could be clicked on to illuminate the whole thing.

I’d seen it all before, and I knew that with such baroque packaging and hyperbolic marketing antics, there was no way this Wolves whiskey could possibly be any good. Nevertheless, I did my professional duty and took a sip.

It was incredible.

“God forbid you open that bottle and it’s garbage,” says Jon Buscemi, the co-founder of Wolves along with his buddy James Bond (the press materials identify them as the brand’s “creatives.”) “Even if the people aren’t into packaging and think it’s a gag, they’ll find great juice inside.”

It used to be that vodka was the spirit that elicited the biggest marketing hype, which makes sense, since it’s inherently odorless and flavorless — and often drawn from the same few mass-produced grain neutral spirit sources that everyone uses. The only way to differentiate it is through the marketing and packaging — and bullsh*t claims that might help make a brand stand out.

Whiskey has never really needed to do that. Sure, whiskey has similarly been a category with its own issues of puffery (no, that craft whiskey isn’t the same as the one once bootlegged by Al Capone), but when it comes to the packaging, it’s always been fairly humble and quotidian. That’s why you still see so many bourbon brands in the no-frills packaging they’ve used since their inception.

Jack Daniel’s is still packaged in its squared-off bottle with the black “Old No. 7” label. Jim Beam has a label so bland I bet you can barely picture it. Old Grand-Dad has some old grand-dad adorning the bottle. Even Pappy Van Winkle simply has a black-and-white side view of Pappy smoking a stogie. In general, if a whiskey tastes good, it typically markets itself. But as the whiskey marketplace grows and new customers are courted, that may all be changing. Wolves whiskey is banking on it.

The Catalyst

Wolves represents Buscemi and Bond’s first foray into the alcohol industry, which is yet another reason I expected their whiskey to suck. Both men hail from the fashion and designer sneaker industries. Buscemi is best known for his eponymous sneaker brand. Bond founded Undefeated, a designer footwear and apparel chain, which has locations in the U.S., Japan, and China.

It wasn’t even until about seven or eight years ago that the 44-year-old Buscemi became interested in whiskey. Like many men his age, he was into vodka when he was younger. Growing up in the New York City area, he had access to quality wines and spirits, plenty of which he gladly tried at dinner or in bars, but he was no connoisseur. It was when a friend introduced him to the whiskey-geek-beloved Willett that he got swept up by the emerging bourbon craze. “Drinking 110 proof, 16- or 17-year-old Willett Family Estate,” says Buscemi, “it changes your whole life.”

Still, Buscemi never had much desire to get into the industry himself. He was already a successful fashion entrepreneur. But one day, a friend brought over a bottle of California Gold (a famed underground blend I once broke the story on back in 2017). Buscemi couldn’t believe that some average Joe — an amateur! — had put together a whiskey this remarkable without the aid of a distillery or even industry know-how.

“It was kind of the catalyst — a lightbulb moment,” explains Buscemi, who is now based in Los Angeles. “I thought, we should put together a blend if we want to do something cool. We don’t have time to lay barrels down [to age] and all these other cool blends are hitting the scene as age statements take a back seat.”

The obvious first step would be to go to MGP, the massive bulk spirit factory that operates in Kansas and Indiana, and buy the same whiskey so many other startup brands buy, and then package it in their own slick bottles. And that was the initial plan. “We thought we could f*ck with it,” says Buscemi, “do it on our own and ‘hack’ it.”

Wolves Whiskey “creators” Jon Buscemi and James Bond.

While Buscemi and Bond were in the process of sourcing the whiskey for Wolves, however, they were introduced to a master distiller making some pretty extraordinary whiskey north of them in California wine country. That man was Marko Karakasevic, a 13th-generation family distiller who’s made a reputation for himself distilling local craft beer into whiskey.

“He’s into wacky sh*t,” says Buscemi, who during our conversation referred to Karakasevic as a both a hippie and a mad scientist. “He’s into just doing cool stuff. So why don’t we f*ck around and make a blend — start the brand this way?”

After several trials, the ultimate result was First Run, a blend made with whiskey distilled from stout beer and aged for eight years in French oak, whiskey distilled from pilsner and aged for five years in new American oak, and a rye whiskey (sourced from MGP) to round things out. The full blend is “lightly filtered with the mineral-rich water of Sonoma county,” according to the press release, to get it down to 106 proof.

I instantly recognized the one-of-a-kind hoppy yet underlying chocolate malt flavor profile when I tasted First Run. I was certain it was the result of distillate from Charbay Distillery in Ukiah, California — a cult favorite among whiskey geeks, though it’s never really broken out into the mainstream. Buscemi and Bond don’t cover up the fact that they source from Charbay — Karakasevic, whose father founded the distillery in 1983, is mentioned in the Wolves press materials — but they don’t completely own that fact, either.

But then again, the Wolves website doesn’t even refer to Buscemi and Bond as distillers or producers. Instead, they label themselves as a “unique creative group.” As they see it, their ideal customer has no idea who Karakasevic or Charbay are. In fact, their ideal customer might not even know Pappy Van Winkle. “I think the 1 percenters like you deserve the [sourcing] information,” Buscemi tells me. “But the 99 percent [of our customers] don’t really care about the story.”

Understanding Wolves’ Target Market

The New York launch party for Wolves was held in the Lincoln Room at Keens Steakhouse. I was invited, but unable to attend. Only one other journalist was invited — and not even a spirits writer:  Jonathan Evans, the style director of Esquire magazine. Judging by the Instagrams from the night, it seems like the rest of the attendees were equally cool scenesters: men in gold double-breasted jackets and wide-brimmed hats; women in statement glasses and fur-lined coats, lots of flashy watches, dangling chains and neck tattoos. (Buscemi insists there were a couple dozen whiskey geeks in attendance, too, but that they just aren’t perhaps as… photogenic.) Still, despite the fashion-forward crowd, Buscemi isn’t even sure who is ultimately going to be a fan of Wolves whiskey. “We’re slowly finding out,” he says. “We’re learning as we go. We don’t even know who our customer is yet.”

But Buscemi suspects that if he produces great whiskey and puts as much effort into the packaging, he and Bond will start attracting the same type of customers who’ve bought their other non-whiskey products in the past. Those people, or the 270,000 Instagram followers of the Buscemi brand, or the 1.8 million followers of Bond’s Undefeated, don’t need to know what Charbay is or who Pappy is; they just have to know what luxury looks like and what quality tastes like. Though it veers far from just about every other American whiskey brand’s marketing strategy, that’s the Wolves game plan.

“There’s a certain discerning customer that likes quality, digs New York street culture [and] East Coast late-’80/’90s [style] — that’s the overall umbrella,” explains Buscemi. “It could be a burger place, a hat, a sneaker, a hot sauce, a car, a whiskey. It’s a certain customer who likes a certain look. That’s always been our customer base, no matter what category we’re going after. No matter what industry.”

And yet, Buscemi also wants to intrigue the whiskey geek. Remember, he’s one himself. He recognizes that this luxury placement, this image-is-everything marketing and the fanciful bottle, might immediately turn off the connoisseurs he’s trying to court. “The packaging,” he concedes, “almost might be too thoughtful for the bourbon community.” But again, us whiskey geeks make up only a tiny fraction of Buscemi’s perceived target market — it’s the quality of the product itself that Buscemi and Bond are hoping will lure us.

A Fashion Strategy That Works for Whiskey

Wolves only had enough whiskey to produce 898 bottles of First Run, but that was fine because its sales model is also fairly unique. The brand doesn’t have any typical distribution or points of sale, such as liquor stores. All of Wolves’ whiskey is released online at the same time, exclusively available at Reservebar.com and Flaviar.com, which serve different states (though not all 50 states). Customers can find out about each new release by signing up (for free) for the allocation list, which currently has 4,500 names on it, though Buscemi admits a good 1,000 are family and friends.

In his article for Esquire, Evans described Wolves’ marketing strategy, referring to it as the “sneaker drop” model of releasing whiskey. “A limited-time-only release with just a handful (or fewer) points of distribution, scarce enough that you might miss it, even if you want it? That’s a sneaker thing,” he wrote. “A fashion thing.” But the “drop” is not a term Buscemi or Bond have ever used in Wolves’ marketing. They believe it’s simply the parlance of what their fashion-knowledgeable customers are most familiar with, so why not let the fashionmongers make that connection and believe Wolves whiskey is following this “sneaker drop” idea?

The second release, Winter Run, which (ahem) “dropped” in November, featured the same hyperbolic press-release language as First Run’s release. At that point, I just drank it up, poured myself a dram, and leaned back in my easy chair as I read it:

“[E]ach bottle is wrapped by hand in a chocolate espresso Italian sheepskin leather, which is laser cut, embossed, printed with UV light, and laid flush to the glass by hand. The bottle is heavy and French-cut, while the cork top is made of maple wood. Each bottle is delivered in a custom canvas sleeve that was stitched by hand and designed to fit Winter Run like a glove.”

Even if I couldn’t help but laugh again at how absurd this all was, I was pretty sure the whiskey inside was going to be great.

Indeed, I liked it even better than the First Run.

Wolves has four more releases planned in 2020 — and I’m sure four more hilarious press releases will accompany them, which I will copy and paste lines from and text to my whiskey geek friends so we can all share a good laugh. (Though, after laughing about it, I always tell them they should really try the whiskey as it’s, I-sh*t-you-not, actually great.)

There will be a Spring Run blend at the end of March, a second release of First Run in the fall (hopefully with a larger quantity this time). Wolves is also doing an upcoming collaboration with Neighborhood — Japan’s popular streetwear brand — that will be a bourbon finished in sake casks. The biggest and surely most ballyhooed release will occur late in the year, when Wolves sources whiskey from a distiller that isn’t Charbay (and that I agreed to keep off the record for now).

“I strive to create products that are obnoxiously high quality,” says Buscemi. “Wolves is a luxury and lifestyle fashion brand.” To market Wolves, he and Bond are applying their learnings and resources in luxury marketing to the spirits industry. “We see California whiskey as the vehicle.”

Back to Those Bottles

When they were planning the bottle design, Buscemi and Bond started by playing around with different materials for labels. “James and I are in charge of the forward-facing part of the brand, the marketing, the feel, the look,” Buscemi explains. “For the bottle we wanted something that incorporated both of our careers.”

Buscemi’s experience using leather goods from Italy for his designer sneakers and accessories seemed like a clever idea, especially when they found someone who could make and apply the sui generis labels. Since Bond is known for the utilitarian, military-inspired branding he used for Undefeated, they chose to go with similarly clean and simple typeface copy for the bottle, “like a BDU jacket,” Buscemi says. The production of the Wolves bottles also costs some six to seven times what, say, Jim Beam pays for its packaging.

Buscemi readily admits they spent as much time designing the bottles as they did the whiskey blend. His and Bond’s backgrounds have taught them that all the tiny details matter. As far as they’re concerned, that’s how you want to launch a brand. Maybe more American whiskey companies should follow suit.

“The thing is,” says Buscemi, “if you saw the Kentucky distilleries step out and do it, everyone would think it was corny, so it somewhat makes sense for them to stay in their lane. But, I’d love to see some kids down in Bardstown, [Kentucky, doing it]. I’d love to see a little more irreverence. I’d love to see some young, punk motherf*ckers making some great juice and putting it in sexy bottles.”

And, though Wolves may also move to simpler bottles with simpler paper labels one day, like everyone else in Kentucky and most of the whiskey-making world, for now the Italian sheepskin leather-wrapped French-cut glass bottle with the heavy maple wood cork inside the Douglas fir-bored box is how they’re going to continue trying to sell the country’s next great whiskey.

As Buscemi points out, “It’s kind of like getting an entire elevator pitch immediately when you just touch the bottle.”

The article Wolves Is Dropping Whiskey Like Sneakers. Are They Selling Liquid Gold? appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wolves-whiskey-liquid-gold/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wolves-is-dropping-whiskey-like-sneakers-are-they-selling-liquid-gold

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Wolves Is Dropping Whiskey Like Sneakers. Are They Selling Liquid Gold?

Alongside a lupine silhouette on a plain wooden box, which, I would later learn had been made from eight-foot-long pieces of solid Douglas fir, the following words had been hot-iron engraved:

“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”

Inside the box was a bulky bottle with a label made of a strange, soft, kid glove-like material. The accompanying press materials read like an Onion spoof of some hipster whiskey company, explaining that each bottle of Wolves is wrapped in Italian sheepskin leather, “which is hand cut, embossed, printed with UV light, and laid flush to the glass by hand. The bottle is heavy, French-cut glass, and the cork top is made of maple wood.”

As a booze writer, I get sent flashy bottles like these all the time. Ones shaped like skulls, cologne bottles, and oil drums. Once, I got a bottle that looked like a solid gold bar, and another time, a three-liter bottle of Belvedere with an LED light switch in the base that could be clicked on to illuminate the whole thing.

I’d seen it all before, and I knew that with such baroque packaging and hyperbolic marketing antics, there was no way this Wolves whiskey could possibly be any good. Nevertheless, I did my professional duty and took a sip.

It was incredible.

“God forbid you open that bottle and it’s garbage,” says Jon Buscemi, the co-founder of Wolves along with his buddy James Bond (the press materials identify them as the brand’s “creatives.”) “Even if the people aren’t into packaging and think it’s a gag, they’ll find great juice inside.”

It used to be that vodka was the spirit that elicited the biggest marketing hype, which makes sense, since it’s inherently odorless and flavorless — and often drawn from the same few mass-produced grain neutral spirit sources that everyone uses. The only way to differentiate it is through the marketing and packaging — and bullsh*t claims that might help make a brand stand out.

Whiskey has never really needed to do that. Sure, whiskey has similarly been a category with its own issues of puffery (no, that craft whiskey isn’t the same as the one once bootlegged by Al Capone), but when it comes to the packaging, it’s always been fairly humble and quotidian. That’s why you still see so many bourbon brands in the no-frills packaging they’ve used since their inception.

Jack Daniel’s is still packaged in its squared-off bottle with the black “Old No. 7” label. Jim Beam has a label so bland I bet you can barely picture it. Old Grand-Dad has some old grand-dad adorning the bottle. Even Pappy Van Winkle simply has a black-and-white side view of Pappy smoking a stogie. In general, if a whiskey tastes good, it typically markets itself. But as the whiskey marketplace grows and new customers are courted, that may all be changing. Wolves whiskey is banking on it.

The Catalyst

Wolves represents Buscemi and Bond’s first foray into the alcohol industry, which is yet another reason I expected their whiskey to suck. Both men hail from the fashion and designer sneaker industries. Buscemi is best known for his eponymous sneaker brand. Bond founded Undefeated, a designer footwear and apparel chain, which has locations in the U.S., Japan, and China.

It wasn’t even until about seven or eight years ago that the 44-year-old Buscemi became interested in whiskey. Like many men his age, he was into vodka when he was younger. Growing up in the New York City area, he had access to quality wines and spirits, plenty of which he gladly tried at dinner or in bars, but he was no connoisseur. It was when a friend introduced him to the whiskey-geek-beloved Willett that he got swept up by the emerging bourbon craze. “Drinking 110 proof, 16- or 17-year-old Willett Family Estate,” says Buscemi, “it changes your whole life.”

Still, Buscemi never had much desire to get into the industry himself. He was already a successful fashion entrepreneur. But one day, a friend brought over a bottle of California Gold (a famed underground blend I once broke the story on back in 2017). Buscemi couldn’t believe that some average Joe — an amateur! — had put together a whiskey this remarkable without the aid of a distillery or even industry know-how.

“It was kind of the catalyst — a lightbulb moment,” explains Buscemi, who is now based in Los Angeles. “I thought, we should put together a blend if we want to do something cool. We don’t have time to lay barrels down [to age] and all these other cool blends are hitting the scene as age statements take a back seat.”

The obvious first step would be to go to MGP, the massive bulk spirit factory that operates in Kansas and Indiana, and buy the same whiskey so many other startup brands buy, and then package it in their own slick bottles. And that was the initial plan. “We thought we could f*ck with it,” says Buscemi, “do it on our own and ‘hack’ it.”

Wolves Whiskey “creators” Jon Buscemi and James Bond.

While Buscemi and Bond were in the process of sourcing the whiskey for Wolves, however, they were introduced to a master distiller making some pretty extraordinary whiskey north of them in California wine country. That man was Marko Karakasevic, a 13th-generation family distiller who’s made a reputation for himself distilling local craft beer into whiskey.

“He’s into wacky sh*t,” says Buscemi, who during our conversation referred to Karakasevic as a both a hippie and a mad scientist. “He’s into just doing cool stuff. So why don’t we f*ck around and make a blend — start the brand this way?”

After several trials, the ultimate result was First Run, a blend made with whiskey distilled from stout beer and aged for eight years in French oak, whiskey distilled from pilsner and aged for five years in new American oak, and a rye whiskey (sourced from MGP) to round things out. The full blend is “lightly filtered with the mineral-rich water of Sonoma county,” according to the press release, to get it down to 106 proof.

I instantly recognized the one-of-a-kind hoppy yet underlying chocolate malt flavor profile when I tasted First Run. I was certain it was the result of distillate from Charbay Distillery in Ukiah, California — a cult favorite among whiskey geeks, though it’s never really broken out into the mainstream. Buscemi and Bond don’t cover up the fact that they source from Charbay — Karakasevic, whose father founded the distillery in 1983, is mentioned in the Wolves press materials — but they don’t completely own that fact, either.

But then again, the Wolves website doesn’t even refer to Buscemi and Bond as distillers or producers. Instead, they label themselves as a “unique creative group.” As they see it, their ideal customer has no idea who Karakasevic or Charbay are. In fact, their ideal customer might not even know Pappy Van Winkle. “I think the 1 percenters like you deserve the [sourcing] information,” Buscemi tells me. “But the 99 percent [of our customers] don’t really care about the story.”

Understanding Wolves’ Target Market

The New York launch party for Wolves was held in the Lincoln Room at Keens Steakhouse. I was invited, but unable to attend. Only one other journalist was invited — and not even a spirits writer:  Jonathan Evans, the style director of Esquire magazine. Judging by the Instagrams from the night, it seems like the rest of the attendees were equally cool scenesters: men in gold double-breasted jackets and wide-brimmed hats; women in statement glasses and fur-lined coats, lots of flashy watches, dangling chains and neck tattoos. (Buscemi insists there were a couple dozen whiskey geeks in attendance, too, but that they just aren’t perhaps as… photogenic.) Still, despite the fashion-forward crowd, Buscemi isn’t even sure who is ultimately going to be a fan of Wolves whiskey. “We’re slowly finding out,” he says. “We’re learning as we go. We don’t even know who our customer is yet.”

But Buscemi suspects that if he produces great whiskey and puts as much effort into the packaging, he and Bond will start attracting the same type of customers who’ve bought their other non-whiskey products in the past. Those people, or the 270,000 Instagram followers of the Buscemi brand, or the 1.8 million followers of Bond’s Undefeated, don’t need to know what Charbay is or who Pappy is; they just have to know what luxury looks like and what quality tastes like. Though it veers far from just about every other American whiskey brand’s marketing strategy, that’s the Wolves game plan.

“There’s a certain discerning customer that likes quality, digs New York street culture [and] East Coast late-’80/’90s [style] — that’s the overall umbrella,” explains Buscemi. “It could be a burger place, a hat, a sneaker, a hot sauce, a car, a whiskey. It’s a certain customer who likes a certain look. That’s always been our customer base, no matter what category we’re going after. No matter what industry.”

And yet, Buscemi also wants to intrigue the whiskey geek. Remember, he’s one himself. He recognizes that this luxury placement, this image-is-everything marketing and the fanciful bottle, might immediately turn off the connoisseurs he’s trying to court. “The packaging,” he concedes, “almost might be too thoughtful for the bourbon community.” But again, us whiskey geeks make up only a tiny fraction of Buscemi’s perceived target market — it’s the quality of the product itself that Buscemi and Bond are hoping will lure us.

A Fashion Strategy That Works for Whiskey

Wolves only had enough whiskey to produce 898 bottles of First Run, but that was fine because its sales model is also fairly unique. The brand doesn’t have any typical distribution or points of sale, such as liquor stores. All of Wolves’ whiskey is released online at the same time, exclusively available at Reservebar.com and Flaviar.com, which serve different states (though not all 50 states). Customers can find out about each new release by signing up (for free) for the allocation list, which currently has 4,500 names on it, though Buscemi admits a good 1,000 are family and friends.

In his article for Esquire, Evans described Wolves’ marketing strategy, referring to it as the “sneaker drop” model of releasing whiskey. “A limited-time-only release with just a handful (or fewer) points of distribution, scarce enough that you might miss it, even if you want it? That’s a sneaker thing,” he wrote. “A fashion thing.” But the “drop” is not a term Buscemi or Bond have ever used in Wolves’ marketing. They believe it’s simply the parlance of what their fashion-knowledgeable customers are most familiar with, so why not let the fashionmongers make that connection and believe Wolves whiskey is following this “sneaker drop” idea?

The second release, Winter Run, which (ahem) “dropped” in November, featured the same hyperbolic press-release language as First Run’s release. At that point, I just drank it up, poured myself a dram, and leaned back in my easy chair as I read it:

“[E]ach bottle is wrapped by hand in a chocolate espresso Italian sheepskin leather, which is laser cut, embossed, printed with UV light, and laid flush to the glass by hand. The bottle is heavy and French-cut, while the cork top is made of maple wood. Each bottle is delivered in a custom canvas sleeve that was stitched by hand and designed to fit Winter Run like a glove.”

Even if I couldn’t help but laugh again at how absurd this all was, I was pretty sure the whiskey inside was going to be great.

Indeed, I liked it even better than the First Run.

Wolves has four more releases planned in 2020 — and I’m sure four more hilarious press releases will accompany them, which I will copy and paste lines from and text to my whiskey geek friends so we can all share a good laugh. (Though, after laughing about it, I always tell them they should really try the whiskey as it’s, I-sh*t-you-not, actually great.)

There will be a Spring Run blend at the end of March, a second release of First Run in the fall (hopefully with a larger quantity this time). Wolves is also doing an upcoming collaboration with Neighborhood — Japan’s popular streetwear brand — that will be a bourbon finished in sake casks. The biggest and surely most ballyhooed release will occur late in the year, when Wolves sources whiskey from a distiller that isn’t Charbay (and that I agreed to keep off the record for now).

“I strive to create products that are obnoxiously high quality,” says Buscemi. “Wolves is a luxury and lifestyle fashion brand.” To market Wolves, he and Bond are applying their learnings and resources in luxury marketing to the spirits industry. “We see California whiskey as the vehicle.”

Back to Those Bottles

When they were planning the bottle design, Buscemi and Bond started by playing around with different materials for labels. “James and I are in charge of the forward-facing part of the brand, the marketing, the feel, the look,” Buscemi explains. “For the bottle we wanted something that incorporated both of our careers.”

Buscemi’s experience using leather goods from Italy for his designer sneakers and accessories seemed like a clever idea, especially when they found someone who could make and apply the sui generis labels. Since Bond is known for the utilitarian, military-inspired branding he used for Undefeated, they chose to go with similarly clean and simple typeface copy for the bottle, “like a BDU jacket,” Buscemi says. The production of the Wolves bottles also costs some six to seven times what, say, Jim Beam pays for its packaging.

Buscemi readily admits they spent as much time designing the bottles as they did the whiskey blend. His and Bond’s backgrounds have taught them that all the tiny details matter. As far as they’re concerned, that’s how you want to launch a brand. Maybe more American whiskey companies should follow suit.

“The thing is,” says Buscemi, “if you saw the Kentucky distilleries step out and do it, everyone would think it was corny, so it somewhat makes sense for them to stay in their lane. But, I’d love to see some kids down in Bardstown, [Kentucky, doing it]. I’d love to see a little more irreverence. I’d love to see some young, punk motherf*ckers making some great juice and putting it in sexy bottles.”

And, though Wolves may also move to simpler bottles with simpler paper labels one day, like everyone else in Kentucky and most of the whiskey-making world, for now the Italian sheepskin leather-wrapped French-cut glass bottle with the heavy maple wood cork inside the Douglas fir-bored box is how they’re going to continue trying to sell the country’s next great whiskey.

As Buscemi points out, “It’s kind of like getting an entire elevator pitch immediately when you just touch the bottle.”

The article Wolves Is Dropping Whiskey Like Sneakers. Are They Selling Liquid Gold? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wolves-whiskey-liquid-gold/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/190551662639

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Startup Success Stories: How Ari & Elle is Revolutionizing Gift Giving

The energetic, remarkably well-spoken, 26-year-old Shai Eisenman is nothing short of a prodigy. She finished college at the age of 18, managed an international company before the age of 20, and founded gift-giving company Ari & Elle in August 2017.

She’s also the wife of a driven entrepreneur and mother of a very lucky daughter.

How has she managed such success before the age of 30?

We had the same question, so we invited her to sit down with us to talk about her entrepreneurial journey, and how her newest venture, Ari & Elle, is changing the gift-giving industry as we know it.

Let’s start with a bit of personal background. You accomplished an impressive number of things before you turned 25. What all did you do?

Well, I won’t go back all the way, but I started college at age 15 and finished when I was 18. I was already working fulltime at that point so I had quite the hectic life as a teenager.

I’ll bet. What was the job?

I was managing a bullet-proof plate company—the kind used by a lot of security firms. I was in sales mostly, which meant I was flying all over the world, talking to military organizations and governments.

How on earth did you get into that line of work?

It’s actually a family business. I was running my dad’s company.

And then you transitioned into your first CEO position at age 20, is that right?

Well, I volunteered with the Israeli military for a year first. But then, I started working for a company called Babylon as a business development manager. I was promoted very quickly, and ended up as head of compliance before moving on to another job as a manager of several companies for an Israeli tech billionaire.

It’s hard to imagine that kind of success by your early 20s. It was also during this time that you met your now life partner, right?

I actually met him at a security conference when I was only 18. He was—and still is—a very career-driven entrepreneur with his own company, so the relationship moved slowly. We actually didn’t think anything lasting could come of it, but it did. And after six years together, we decided to have a child.

How do you manage parenting and a demanding work life?

My partner and I both understand each other and we work very hard. He understands that my travel and schedules keep me working until 2 a.m. and I understand the crazy demands of his work life.

Long ago, we decided that we would combine our careers and our parenting—not keep them separate. We look at it this way: Our daughter fits into our lives, not the other way around. That means we’re not changing our careers to accommodate her, but that we work together as a family to make our lives a success together.

To make that possible, she travels with us, goes to sleep very late sometimes, and works within our schedules. But we also make sure she gets three hours with us every day.

Have you faced any prejudice or disadvantage in your career because you’re a woman and a mother?

Oh, yes. When I was 8 months pregnant, I started attending investor meetings. At one point, one of the Indian investors said, “Whatever you tell me, I’m not going to buy it. I’m just not going to help you because the moment your daughter is born, you’re not going to want to do anything but spend time with her.”

I’ll admit—without shame or apology—that my daughter is the most important thing to me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to fulfill my career dreams and goals.

When I first heard this kind of feedback, I wanted to apologize. In fact, I wanted to keep all of my private life away from work. But at some point, I realized that if the person I’m working with doesn’t understand how committed I am to my career and what I’m willing to do to make it a huge success, then it’s not someone I want invested in the company.

We need more role models like that, I think. Hats off to you for taking that stand. And that’s a good transition, too, because it’s your commitment and vision that ultimately led to the creation of Ari & Elle. When did that launch?

The company was started in August 2017, but we launched the website and app in June 2018.

Ari & Elle’s AI-driven application

Oh wow—quite a new venture!

Yeah, and it’s so much fun because we’re now starting to experience some customer love. That’s amazing to me, because in all of my time running companies, there wasn’t a lot of gratification from people you were helping. What I love about Ari & Elle is that it’s all pure good—all we do is make people happy.

Can you briefly talk about the concept?

Sure. The whole idea behind Ari & Elle is to create a special, curated gift-giving experience that matches people’s personalities. It just makes the gift-giving (and receiving) so much richer.

How did you determine that this was a good business idea?

When I was living in London several years ago, I bought everything I needed online. At one point, I was shopping around for presents for a cousin and a friend. My cousin loved comic books, but I had no idea what I could get him that would fit that mold. And my cousin had just had a baby. I didn’t know what to get her either.

That’s when I thought: “What if there were a service that knows what kind of gifts to get certain people?”

I researched it, but couldn’t find anything. So, I decided to build the company myself—a gift-giving business designed around personalized gifts packaged in a very attractive way.

That sounds like a huge win for a lot of people who don’t have time to put together thoughtful gifts. But how exactly do you figure out what fits the recipient?

We have two different channels that we use—our website and our app. Both incorporate a very unique AI engine that asks questions to capture the gift recipient’s personality. Basically, it’s an avatar/bot that asks questions in a messaging format (“Ari” for male gift recipients and “Elle” for female). They’ll ask things like, “What does the recipient like to do for fun? Are they into a luxury lifestyle? Are they a free spirit?”

Based on the answers, the engine will then suggest several gift collections fitted to the personality the customer has defined.

Do you have enough gift collections to match all of the possible personalities?

I think we’re hitting most of them, and our selection is always growing. Right now, we have more than 800 different collections of more than 6,000 individual products.

What kind of market research did you do to determine what you would offer and how you would deliver it?

We went through a broad-scope research process at the outset, and determined that 45% of the gifting market is taken up by holidays and 55% by occasional gifting—for birthdays, anniversaries, and so on.

After we discovered this, we dug into the various occasions that might be important to customers. We knew that a house-warming gift, for example, is given in a very different context than, say, a get-well gift. So we wanted to see what has historically been successful for each occasion.

This research inspired our gift collections, and we continued researching and building the collections until we felt we had enough to launch the business.

Why is it necessary to create gift collections instead of single gifts?

We want to tell a story. So, for example, we have a box called “Take Me to the Movies.” It includes a small projector, an inflatable couch, and a Bluetooth speaker. It’s a cinema in a box and offers a complete experience to the recipient.

How did you land on price point? I noticed that many of the collections are $100+, which might be a bit steep for a casual thank-you or get-well gift.

We’re still working on that. We definitely want to add more collections in the $70-80 range, because we know that some people are not going to want to spend more than that on a friend or colleague they’re not all that close to.

You’ve also mentioned that you offer a picture of the final package to the gift purchaser before shipping. Why?

The first impression is important, and we know that places like Amazon don’t let you know what a gift will look like once it’s shipped. We want customers to feel confident in the gifts they’re giving—both how they’re displayed and what’s inside.

What kind of marketing are you doing to promote Ari & Elle?

We’re advertising on most of the platforms you’d expect—Good AdWords, Facebook, and so on. But we’re going to be focusing a lot more on influencer marketing in the coming weeks and months.

Part of the reason for this is that a landing page is a hard space to explain our service. But an influencer can show an audience how our service works and what you get. Their photos and videos can capture the unique elements of Ari & Elle.

Are there any lessons you’ve learned in the development process that you can share with other entrepreneurs?

Our industry is getting very digitally sophisticated. The data that’s available allows companies to find out exactly who is using their products and what their demographic information is. Because our products are so personal, we’ve tried to use that to create very targeted campaigns.

I would recommend more companies do this. It’s more work, but the conversions are higher quality.

Also, as you begin your company formation, seek out once-were founders who have become successful to help guide you through the process of building your own company. Thankfully, I did that and was able to avoid a lot of mistakes because of it.

Lastly, don’t be in a rush to launch. In retrospect, I would have spent more time marketing and fine-tuning the user interface on the site and app. The small problems we saw in beta testing didn’t seem like a big deal, but they became a big deal when we went to market.

And how do you keep happy customers coming back? What kind of ongoing communication do you have with them?

Since we’re learning about our customers as they chat with our AI engine, we can reach out and ask specific questions about searches they’ve done without purchasing a gift collection. And even when they do, we offer coupons inside gifts to encourage potential new customers to sign up with us. We also offer discounts to customers who post unboxing videos on Instagram and other social media platforms.

And, of course, we encourage feedback from customers if they have ideas on new gifts we can include.

How do you plan to grow Ari & Elle over the next 5-10 years?

We’re going to be focusing on two things: technology and merchandising.

We want to continue to improve our AI engine so users can tell us exactly what they want. That will be an ongoing process.

On the merchandise side, we’d like to round out our offerings with something that fits with almost every personality out there. As part of that, I hope to bring on a bigger team of researchers—experts who know specific careers, jobs, and industries inside and out. That will help us dig deeper into the diverse interests of our growing customer base and create the prefect gift collections for them.

For more information about Ari & Elle, and to snag the perfect gift for an upcoming holiday or special occasion, visit ari-elle.com.

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The post Startup Success Stories: How Ari & Elle is Revolutionizing Gift Giving appeared first on Early To Rise.

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