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ryanmeft · 5 years ago

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Movie Review: The Irishman

One of the reliable story beats of Martin Scorsese’s mob movies is that loudmouths don’t last long. The heroes, as it were, of these films are hitmen, fixers and soldiers who nonetheless behave as if they were just going into their 9-to-5 job at the local water plant. In the case of his latest film, the unassuming day-to-day hack is Frank Sheeran, who recounts his mob days from a wheelchair in an old folk’s home, and the loudmouth who doesn’t know what’s good for him is none other than Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa’s fabled end takes up a tiny portion of the film, which is more about Frank and how completely mundane his life is when he isn’t shooting people in the head.

Chronologically speaking, we first meet Frank, played by a de-aged Robert De Niro, as an ordinary truck driver who, in need of extra cash, offers to secure the good beef for a small-time mob player (Bobby Cannavale). Frank does the penny-ante job of stealing meat until he steals so much someone’s gonna notice. He’s gotten off the hook by Bill Bufalino (Ray Romano), a lawyer for the union, which in this case means he’s also a lawyer for the mafia. Bufalino is impressed by Frank’s unwillingness to name names rather than go to jail, and introduces him to his cousin Russell (Joe Pesci). If you’re good at what you do, you hope to get promoted, and Frank gets promoted indeed, from small-time theft to everything from racketeering to murder. Soon he’s put in front of Hoffa himself, played by Al Pacino.

The movie flashes back and forth between Sheeran’s earlier days in the mob and a road trip he and Bufalino are taking, which we find out or realize is intended to end in Hoffa’s death. The structure is rather ingenious: the bulk of the movie concerns the burgeoning friendship between the two men, and so each return to the fatal drive feels like it is drawing us on to an end we don’t want to see.

This has always been Scorsese’s gift to the crime genre: that he can make us watch terrible men for hours and feel for them. De Niro is the all-American working stiff whose work just so happens to be killing other mobsters; De Niro plays him as a straight-forward, matter-of-fact kind of guy, the type who knows exactly what line of work he’s in but doesn’t make a lot of hay about it. De-aged or not, it’s the kind of role De Niro has always excelled in; he’s never been good as a flashy actor. Pacino’s Hoffa is the opposite kind of man. He’s fiery, passionate, quick to anger, and neither running a union nor being in the mob is just a job to him: he’s firmly attached to both and will do a hell of a lot to get his way. Pacino gets to turn on the drama so De Niro does not have to, and the rapport works. Pacino has had an interesting career, with a few really big hits followed by the better part of a couple decades in utterly forgettable stuff, but this role reminds us why he’s famous to begin with.

The runtime may seem, to audiences not accustomed to the long character dramas Hollywood used to make, like an obstacle, but the time is valuable: it establishes everyone, but especially Sheeran and Hoffa, as real people, giving their fates the air of Greek tragedy. There is a scene in which Hoffa angrily berates a roomful of his subordinates, and Frank gets offended and leaves. One of the most powerful mob men in the world interrupts the meeting to chase after him and apologize. This, at least if Sheeran’s account is to be believed, is real friendship, and Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Gangs of New York) put the seemingly daunting 209-minute runtime to good use by firmly establishing it, building up the tension and making the inevitable end a real wrench.

Other ways the time is used is by Scorsese and Zaillian letting characters have the space to simply have conversations that don’t advance the plot. There is a conversation with a man who is insecure about the size of his ears. There is a nearly ten-minute debate about how long it is appropriate to wait for someone if they are late to a meeting. In writing, this sounds boring, but like the conversation about socks from Clint Eastwood’s Million-Dollar Baby, what they are doing is drawing us into the way real people who know each other talk, instead of just rushing forward to the next plot point. Similarly handled are scenes of mob guys doing mob stuff. Frank patiently sets up an explosion at a rival laundromat, but we only see the set-up, and hear about the bombing. An attempt to ruin a taxicab business consists of men pushing the cars into a river while bemoaning how much hard work it is. Flash and dazzle is easy, but this is arguably more interesting.

There are times when Scorsese could have stood to compact things a little bit, most notably in the number of characters we’re fleetingly introduced to. Every time a true-to-life mobster shows up on screen, the movie informs us briefly who they are and how they eventually died, and Frank, Jimmy and Russell meet with so many of these people, many of whom have one or two scenes, that Scorsese would have been fine going with a couple composite characters; the heart of the film is Frank and Hoffa, and the best stuff focuses on that relationship. If you have no idea who Hoffa was except that he disappeared, the film still works on that level.

The last act of the film does something Scorsese’s previous mob films have only hinted at: focuses on the end of Frank’s life. Sheeran died in 2003, and his claims to have been Hoffa’s killer have been disputed, but true or not, watching this once-powerful man decay and simply die, slowly and unglamorously, of old age and boredom is a double-edged sword: De Niro makes us feel the weight of his own mortality, while at the same time it is hard to sympathize with a man who, however ordinary he seemed, lived his life in blood. Scorsese, as his custom, does not tell us what to think of Frank. He just places him before us, and lets us decide. The Irishman is treading mostly familiar ground for the director, but in a way that draws us into this world and these people arguably better than any of his previous efforts.

Verdict: Highly Recommended

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

You can follow Ryan's reviews on Facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/ryanmeftmovies/

Or his tweets here:

https://twitter.com/RyanmEft

All images are property of the people what own the movie.

#Martin Scorsese #Robert De Niro #al pacino #the irishman #movies #joe pesci #ray romano #steven zaillian

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lindawood · 6 years ago

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How Permethrin Can Help Protect You From Ticks

As reported in The New York Times (Wirecutter’s parent company), the CDC recently announced that insect-borne illnesses have more than tripled in the US in the past 14 years. Those numbers are for mosquitos, fleas, and ticks combined, but if you’re going to get an insect-borne illness in this country, you’re statistically most likely to get Lyme disease, carried by black-legged ticks, aka deer ticks, and most prevalent on the East Coast and in the Midwest. As we say in our bug repellent guide, a 25 percent picaridin repellent works pretty well—against mosquitos. It’s not as effective against ticks. Plus, ticks that simply walk to a part of your body without bug spray can avoid DEET-treated areas, according to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (PDF).

The best thing to keep ticks from biting you is permethrin. As an insecticide, permethrin will actually kill ticks, not just keep them away, and it’s different from DEET in that you put it on your clothes rather than spraying it on your skin. If you need to get serious about tick protection this summer, we’ve done the research on where to find permethrin, how to use it, and what safety concerns may arise.

What you can do now

You have a few ways to use permethrin. You can buy a spray and treat clothes you already own, buy already treated clothes, or send your clothes to a service for treatment.

If you go into tick-infested areas only occasionally, we think buying a permethrin spray is the easiest way to quickly take action. The Sawyer brand has worked well for me. It has a concentration of about 0.5 percent permethrin, plus inactive ingredients to help bind it to fabric. Although we haven’t put Sawyer’s spray through the usual Wirecutter testing wringer, it’s what the TickEncounter Resource Center suggests too, and Amazon customers seem to dig it, with 4.5 stars out of five across 3,471 reviews at this writing.

Other permethrin sprays intended for personal use should be equally effective, but don’t get sprays made for a yard or for agricultural use. Since those formulas are meant to be sprayed on plants, they won’t stick to your clothes as well, according to Thomas Mather, aka The Tick Guy, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Vector-Borne Disease and the TickEncounter Resource Center. Depending on what brand you end up with, treating clothes yourself means that the permethrin will last anywhere from four to six washings. Even if you don’t wash your treated shoes, Mather recommends re-treating them about once a month.

Pull Quote

Buying a permethrin spray is the easiest way to quickly take action against ticks.

Sprays are a great everyday fix, but if you’re a dedicated outdoorsperson, looking into pretreated clothes might be worth your time (and remember, they also keep mosquitoes from biting you). If you want to buy pretreated garments, you have a ton of options: Amazon, BugBeWear, Insect Shield, L.L.Bean, and REI all sell permethrin-treated clothes; Insect Shield also sells clothes just for kids (and a few things for dogs). These treatments last for about 70 washes.

Insect Shield can also treat clothes you already own. This is the same treatment the company applies to clothes it sells, both under its own brand and others (such as ExOfficio). Insect Shield charges per item of clothing but offers bulk discounts. Getting your treated clothes back takes about two weeks.

Pretreated is the way to go from a cost effectiveness standpoint, Mather told us. “Seventy washes probably gets closer to the life of the clothing for the most part. Four or five doesn’t.” And it can be hard to remember to treat clothing yourself every month, he added. Buying it pretreated solves the upkeep problem.

Where to spray it and when

Ticks are less likely to bite if you’re wearing permethrin-treated clothes, and by far the most important thing to treat is what you’re wearing on your feet. Although studies have found that wearing a treated shirt or shorts makes ticks about two to four times less likely to bite, if you treat just your shoes and socks, you’re about 74 times less likely to be bitten by a tick than if you’re wearing untreated footwear, which is a pretty big deal.

“We’ve done tests with clothing, and we can watch the ticks fall off and die. So there is good scientific evidence that this works and it actually works pretty well,” said Mather. However, you have to be strategic about what treated clothes you wear and when.

Pull Quote

In the spring and summer, it’s best to treat your socks and shoes. That could make you about 74 times less likely to be bitten by a tick, according to one study.

For the spring and summer, it’s best to treat your socks and shoes, Mather said. The immature, or nymph-stage, ticks are in the leaf litter at that time of year, and they’re most likely to get on your shoes and crawl up. They’re also so small that they can actually crawl through the weave of your socks, Mather said. “So spray your shoes the first of May, the first of June, first of July, first of August, and that will help you against the ticks that you can’t see.”

In the fall, the adult-stage black-legged ticks come out. They tend to crawl up on plants and get on your body higher up, usually around your shins or knees, Mather said. “Then you would like to have treated pants, and you’d like to tuck your shirt tail in so that the ticks stay on the outside of your clothing longer.” If you’re still wearing shorts at that time, make sure to spray them both inside and out if they’re not pretreated.

In the winter, black-legged ticks can still be active as long as they’re not frozen on the ground, Mather told us. “These are the first to emerge in the very early spring, followed fairly quickly by the American dog tick adults and the Lone Star tick, both nymph and adults.” So put those permethrin-treated pants back on when the snow melts.

Safety concerns

Some people worry that since permethrin is an insecticide, it will harm them. This is pretty unlikely. It kills ticks by interfering with how neurons fire in bugs’ little brains, causing them to spasm and die. But how our neurons fire is slightly different, plus we’re much larger and can metabolize permethrin before it can get to our nervous system (permethrin is over 2,250 times more toxic to ticks than to humans). Obviously, you shouldn’t eat it, but even if you’re exposed to a lot of permethrin, it’s unlikely to hurt you. According to the TickEncounter Resource Center permethrin fact sheet, a 140-pound person would have no adverse health effects even if exposed to 32 grams of permethrin in a day, and a bottle of clothing treatment has less than 1 gram of permethrin. (If you’re pregnant, know that animal studies have found no evidence that permethrin is harmful. The government gives it a Category B rating since there haven’t been meaningful permethrin studies with pregnant women.)

Permethrin can potentially harm bees, fish, and aquatic invertebrates. And oddly, cats—but only when it’s wet. When the permethrin spray dries, it’s okay for your cat to be around. This goes for fish too—if you step in a stream wearing permethrin-treated shoes, it won’t wash off and hurt the fish, Mather said. “Once it’s dried onto the fiber, it doesn’t come off very well. That’s why it can go through the wash five or 70 times, depending on the mode of application, because it’s stuck.”

But will it come off in the laundry and pollute the environment? That’s a much bigger question. Permethrin is a type of molecule known as a pyrethroid. These substances are pretty widely used: They’re in more than 3,500 registered products, including those used on pets and in treated clothing, in mosquito control, and in agriculture, according to the EPA. It’s also the main ingredient in some over-the-counter lice treatments. Permethrin spray for clothing is designed to stick to fiber and comes off only minimally in the wash. Still, research into pyrethroid pollution is ongoing.

Our favorite tick-check method

If you do get a tick, it’s important to remove the insect relatively quickly. Once one crawls onto your body, it can be hours until the tick attaches its horrible sawlike mouth onto you, and then another 12 hours until it starts transmitting disease—except for deer tick disease, which took only 15 minutes in a study on mice (yikes). Remember, black-legged ticks are tiny when they’re nymphs, about the size of a poppy seed (thank you for ruining all poppy seed things forever, CDC), so they can be hard to see.

Because ticks often attach in areas you tend not to pay much attention to—which makes finding them harder—Mather suggests doing tick checks fairly regularly, perhaps during one of life’s most intimate moments. “I noticed that I could see a lot if I just paid attention while I was sitting on the toilet,” Mather said. “I can see down the inside of both of my legs and behind my knees by doing a little twisting. I can push my junk to the left and to the right, and I can kind of check it out to see if I see any ticks there.” He did note that it’s hard to see your own butt, and you might still need help in that area. “But if I do that once or twice a day, I’m doing a pretty reasonable tick check just while I’m multitasking.”

If you do find a tick, don’t panic. First, get some fine-tipped tweezers. Grab the tick as close as you can to your skin, and pull it straight out. Rub the bite with alcohol and wash your hands. Take deep breaths. Eat a poppy seed muffin. Mather said you should try to ID the tick before doing away with it. The TickSpotters program can help identify the type of tick and give you a risk assessment if you send in a clear picture. “If the tick is a risky tick, attached long enough to transmit any germ they might be carrying, then we suggest that people might want to have the tick tested, for peace of mind, and to have more information to pass along to their primary care or veterinary care provider,” Mather said. If you come down with a fever a few weeks later, call your doctor. But remember that if the tick is on you for less than 24 hours, your chances of getting a tick-borne disease are small. And if you remember to wear your summer socks, you have a good chance of killing ticks before they attack.

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adasexton1993 · 4 years ago

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davisonqad-blog · 4 years ago

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Hillary Benton is hatching a plan to stay in bed.

“Starting a new lifestyle blog called Diet Coke and Klonopin where I will share secrets on how to minimize your time spent out of bed,” the 26-year-old Brooklyn-based marketing professional tweeted in August.

Some tips she shared in advance of the proposed blog launch included stowing all morning and evening skincare products in a nightstand basket, setting up a coffee making station within reach, and avoiding the shower. “Showering requires being upright, as well as being SPRAYED with WATER!” she points out. “You can lay down in the bath, throw some bubbles in, almost as good as bed.”

Later, over the phone, Benton says she was joking about starting the blog, but serious about everything else. “Staying in bed is something I feel very strongly about.”

Benton is not alone — she’s part of a big and profitable demographic of young women who sleep. Or, more broadly, stay home, in bed, acting as the center of what we can call the homebody economy. The hit novel of the summer was Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a story about a beautiful 26-year-old New Yorker who comes up with a plan to spend only 40 hours awake in a four-month period. The plan is mostly drugs, but her goal is to emerge refreshed and renewed, “bolstered by the bliss and serenity [she had] accumulated.”

“The narrator — relatably enough — is passionate only about sleeping,” Jia Tolentino wrote in her review for The New Yorker. “There is something in this liberatory solipsism that feels akin to what is commonly peddled today as wellness.”

“Staying in bed is something I feel very strongly about.”

A January analysis using 10 years worth of the American Time Use Surveys conducted annually by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that millennials spent 70 percent more time at home than the general population. As with everything millennials do or don’t do, this is annoying to some people, and the New York Post ran a headline in June 2016 announcing “Millennials don’t deserve NYC.”

But it’s an opportunity for others. Younger Americans who are ensconced in their homes and uncharmed by nightlife, with all its associated “effort,” are also spending more money on food delivery than they are in restaurants and talking about self-care in terms of the products that it involves.

They’re the reason that nascent alcohol courier apps in limited markets can partner with Netflix, and the reason that the fiercest and dirtiest brand rivalries are now between mattress-in-a-box companies. They’re responsible for the boom of Korean skincare in the United States, which is why K-beauty e-commerce site Peach and Lily now has a line of its own face masks available at its Target mini-shop, which sold out their first day.

The economy built around it is made up of clothes and homegoods and streaming services and courier apps and millennial-friendly zero percent APR financing on a set of luxury sheets.

Obviously anyone who makes a living via the delivering of things benefits from the homebody. It would be inefficient to run through them all, but just know that Postmates makes $1 billion worth of sales annually, GrubHub (which owns Seamless) was valued at $2 billion when it went public in 2014, and there is a ridiculous number of alcohol delivery startups that essentially all have a cutesy name that sounds like a euphemism for peeing or sexual harassment. (Thirstie, Drizly, Tipsy, and so on.)

Saucey (gross), an LA-based alcohol courier app that will also bring you cigarettes, ice cream, and Doritos — all in 30 minutes or less — launched in 2014 and has since raised $10.2 million in funding and expanded throughout California and into Chicago. “The new going out is staying in,” marketing director Danielle Silveira tells me. “Why go out and wait in a line? Sit back and chill on your couch with Netflix … or Hulu or Amazon or any streaming service.”

Nobody wants to drive to a grocery store in LA, she argues. Especially during a heatwave. And now that Saucey is in Chicago, it’s relevant to point out that nobody wants to go outside when it’s cold. Basically, nobody wants to go outside.

The bulk of Saucey’s weeknight customers are ordering small quantities of wine and beer, around 7 PM, a trend that competitor Minibar has also noticed. Co-founder Lindsey Andrews tells me that more than 50 percent of Minibar’s sales are wine, and most orders are for one or two bottles. She says it’s also been “the year of spiked seltzers,” and other lower-alcohol drinks — cider, rose, Ketel One’s new line of vodka that comes in flavors like Grapefruit Rose and Cucumber Mint — that people can drink slowly, and are more popular with women.

Minibar often partners with Netflix to create tie-in promotions — tweeting an emoji of a wine bottle while you’re binge-watching a popular show can lead to a free bottle of pinot noir at your door. The New York-based startup raised $5 million in funding last summer.

Netflix loves the stay-at-home, drink, watch Netflix crowd — see these wine-themed socks that will turn off your TV when you fall asleep — even though it has reportedly explicitly asked people to stop saying “binge-watch,” because it sounds tacky and has connotations related to alcoholism and junk food.

You know who else loves a stay-at-home millennial? Everyone who makes things that are comfortable to sit or lie on. A handful of warring but wildly successful mattress-in-a-box companies have sprung up in the last few years, all chasing the “urban professional” millennial market.

There’s Casper, with its subway ads and its rent-by-the-hour nap pods. There’s Brooklinen, which offers financing plans for $129 sheet sets and has 75,000 followers on its tangentially related lifestyle Instagram. There’s Burrow, a couch-in-a-box company that has recently taken over vacant New York storefronts and filled them with elaborate dioramas of laziness, captioned with the tagline “Good for nothing.”

“Wellness trends and self-care trends — going out doesn’t align with people’s goals in that regard. The drinking. The eating out. Everything in the world makes us want to stay home.”

There’s Walmart sub-brand Allswell, which carries only two mattresses and explicitly markets the “Firmer” option as ideal for sitting, working, and watching TV in an “Instagram-worthy dream bed.” President Arlyn Davich tells me it is much more popular than the classic design.

She also says, when I ask if she loves the napping millennials, “It’s fun to stay home. And it’s scary out there, with the political environment. Wellness trends and self-care trends — going out doesn’t align with people’s goals in that regard. The drinking. The eating out. Everything in the world makes us want to stay home.” That’s nice for Allswell because people who stay in all the time will spend more on things for inside, like a new mattress or a $70 decorative pillow.

“People are spending more time in bed, so they’re asking not just how good are these for sleeping, but how good are they for doing all the things I do in bed,” she says. “You’re seeing people spend more time, and wanting to make sure it’s a beautiful environment.”

Moshfegh’s anti-heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation sleeps in part as a response to a wealth-obsessed culture she finds noxious. And Malcolm Harris, author of last year’s Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, says the broader homebody culture is a response to something too: “I think it’s basically just a happy face on declining living standards,” he tells me. “Like how we all supposedly love tiny houses. We don’t love staying home; we’re tired and anxious and alienated and have a historically low stock of free time and public, common spaces.”

Gen X may have been known as the Slacker Generation, but brands didn’t see them as people who loved to stay in bed. Coming into their 20s at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, they were young during the height of American wealth culture — the (first) Trump years, the Hilton years. This is when Kim Kardashian was hosting vodka launches, not narrating her at-home remedies for psoriasis on Instagram behind a four-foot thick brick wall in Calabasas.

And before them? Baby boomers helped T.G.I. Fridays open 100 locations in the United States in 10 years — becoming the first bar to come up with the idea of “ladies night” (and potato skins!), and the first restaurant chain to codify the notion of happy hour, kicking off an entire era of reasonably-priced frozen cocktails and an expectation of making out in public places. It launched in tandem with birth control; it went public via Goldman Sachs in 1983.

Brand imagery for Allswell’s sheet sets. Allswell

What young people buy isn’t the best way to understand them, Harris argues, since they don’t control what’s for sale. What’s more pertinent is their relationship to labor, which is “a bad one.”

Millennials are ordering from Postmates and they’re the ones doing delivery for Postmates, Harris points out. Service work constitutes a higher percentage of American labor than it has in the past, which means more “affective labor, the work of feelings,” is required of today’s workers. “That can be a strain on your ability to perform socially.”

“Wages are down, exploitation is up,” he says. “A heavy divergence between productivity and the wage rate is what characterizes the millennial experience more than anything. Being exploited, that’s going to make you want to stay home.”

If you haven’t heard, this generation is into self-care. This is not just face masks, but it is partly face masks.

“The Korean beauty routine has so many different layers,” Peach and Lily co-founder Alicia Yoon tells me. “That plays into this moment of self-care.” She’s noticed customers gravitating toward sheet masks because they have a longer application period — “You’re empowered to focus on yourself and connect with yourself.”

Along with a sheet mask, you can also pick up T-shirts at Target that read “Naps and snacks,” “Namast’ay in bed,” and “I want it all and I want it delivered,” designed by a brand run out of the Chico, California, airport that boasts licensing rights for Marvel, Coca-Cola, and MTV, among other big names. Fifth Sun, started by former civil engineer Dan Gonzalez in the early ’90s, is one of the largest graphic T-shirt manufacturers in the United States and sells its mass appeal products via every other major retailer you can think of — Walmart, K-Mart, Macy’s, Kohl’s, etc. (Asked to comment for this story Gonzalez replied, “no thx.” Why should he! The proof is in the pudding.)

You can find the same “Namast’ay in Bed” untrademark-able nonsense phrase on over 1,300 items on Etsy (yoga sweaters, doormats, pillowcases, coffee mugs, wall decals, mason jars, hand-stamped mimosa spoons), and you can find people who live off of that.

Namast’ay in bed mimosa spoon. SycamoreHill Etsy store

Courtney Lovenberg, a 27-year-old nurse from Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, says she makes about 20 percent of her income from the Etsy store where she sells slogan-based T-shirts — a side gig that takes about 10 hours of her time per week. She started the shop when she got engaged two years ago, focusing on designs that pertained to being a fiancée or a bride. But since she’s settled into married life in the last year, she’s noticed that she’s hanging out at home more, and making shirts that reflect that.

“Sometimes I feel like ‘I don’t know if people are going to relate to this,’ but then you realize how many other introverted, ‘I just want to be lazy on a Friday night’ women are out there,” she says. “I’ve had tons of repeat customers.”

Top-sellers like “Homebody,” “I just want to stay home with my dog,” and “Introverted AF,” are each ordered about 10 times per month from her modestly sized shop.

The “Homebody” shirts that Courtney sells are negligibly different than the ones that 27-year-old Wooster, Ohio. mother Emily Weckesser sells in the Etsy shop she runs with her husband Brad — a project they started seven years ago and which now provides their primary household income. Their shop is mostly sets of graphic tees designed to be worn by babies, or parents and their babies, or parents who are not coordinating outfits with their babies at present but do still want you to know that they have a baby, and that they and the baby are both homebodies.

“We’re introverts and work from home,” Emily says. “Our designs reflect that and we treasure that. I think introverts are reclaiming their spot in the world and not being ashamed to own up to it. We love our home and we love our kids. At this stage, we’re curled up on the couch.”

In the era of Instagram, curling up on the couch makes for — by some measures — as productive a night as going out in a stellar outfit.

Just ask an influencer: Hélène Heath is a fashion and beauty writer and consultant based in New York, with a moderate Instagram following and a popular lifestyle blog. Last summer, the Chill Times (the editorial arm of SoHo cafe and spa Chillhouse) paid her to pose with the Public Hotel’s digital manager Shelby Eastman and Instagram influencer Tesa Pesic, wearing Morgan and Lane silk pajamas, feeding each other cheeseburgers ordered via Postmates, braiding each other’s hair, sipping out of gold champagne flutes and pink mugs that read “Literally Can’t Even,” then cuddling up in the same bed, under a loose-knit blanket.

“Smart brands today understand that it’s about creating moments of social shareability,” she told Vox in an email. “Think of last year’s hygge trend, or how a lot of candle brands are popping up and gaining momentum thanks to Instagram, or how masking has become a huge trend.”

Don’t just stay home — stay home beautifully. The hundreds of available and nearly identical homebody-themed graphic t-shirts exist because they’re perfect for Instagram, she points out, making being alone still-shareable. “We are undoubtedly not done with derivative products in my opinion … especially as we head into winter cocooning season!”

The original concept of a girls’ night is a pop culture trope as old as women being permitted to appear in groups in cinema, and at least partially explains why the homebody economy is directed more explicitly at women, who were already having sleepovers and spending their discretionary income on each other and on their homes.

What is somewhat new is the affiliation of “girls night in” and true luxury products. Suddenly, it’s everywhere. Lenny Letter — the email-based media company founded by Lena Dunham and her producing partner Jenni Konner in 2015 — is currently offering readers a chance to win a three-day “BFF” trip to Mexico. A lucky pair of buds will go to Mexico and then … stay inside: In addition to the resort comps, the winners receive a “girls’ night in pack” that includes designer candles, expensive moisture-wicking underwear, and two “vibes” from Dame (“the Glossier of female vibrators”). So, everything they need for a chill night in a hotel room in Juluchuca, ignoring the landscapes and masturbating together, which I’ll admit would bring two pals a lot closer.

Girls Night In is also the name of Alisha Ramos’s successful lifestyle brand and recommendation newsletter. (Ramos was previously a design director at Vox Media, Vox’s parent company.) Girls Night In is explicitly about self-care, illustrated by Instagram posts in which women in charcoal masks read fake newspapers. The philosophy it espouses is big on going to bed early, saying no to plans, taking a bath, and reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking to get into a “magical thinking” mood on a Monday morning. (For the record, that book is literally about mourning the surprise deaths of your husband and only child.)

The idea is that you shouldn’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to — and you shouldn’t! — but if you’re going to stay home there is some stuff you should probably buy.

Girls Night In partners with Penguin Random House, Outdoor Voices, Girlboss, Sweetgreen, and Madewell, to name a few listed on its website, and sells merchandise that says, can you guess? “Homebody.”

Moshfegh’s narrator does leave the house periodically. For example, she buys a new VCR at Best Buy so she can tape the news coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center, which she watches “over and over” to “soothe” herself.

The novel is satirical, viciously pulling apart New York City’s vapid culture of wealth and image-obsession at the turn of the millennium, but there are a few thoughts that flit through the sociopathic narrator’s head that feel true enough: “It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident?”

“Implicit in the introvert, stay-at-home discourse is the idea that life is increasingly bad”

Probably all of the homebodies have one good reason or another for doing what they’re doing — lying around. And one of those reasons is that it sucks to be outside in the terrible world.

It’s not a ridiculous question: If you can do everything at home — including date and drink and eat and live-stream Coachella — why wouldn’t you? Millennials get shamed nonstop no matter what, but having pizza and wine delivered via some apps instead of going out to a fancy restaurant or any bar can have explanations beyond laziness and misanthropy.

As the generation that will never pay off its student loans or own homes or retire, we are also just working more and for less — it’s at least partly as simple as being physically tired and not making very much money.

“Going out into the world and enjoying it and spending money to be in public and have fun is a pretty standard way to measure well-being and your ability to enjoy things,” Harris says. “Or it has been in the United States. We have less of that, which means life is worse. Implicit in the introvert, stay-at-home discourse is the idea that life is increasingly bad.”

So if you would prefer to celebrate namast’aying in bed rather than admit that it’s basically your only option … okay, sure, why not? Urban Outfitters launched its own beauty line this week and all of the creams are called “Have a moment.” They’re a mere $10; I will buy them.

It pays to never leave the house. I mean, it doesn’t pay you but it pays someone.

Original Source -> The homebody economy, explained

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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whatchamagadget · 7 years ago

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How Permethrin Can Help Protect You From Ticks

As reported in The New York Times (Wirecutter’s parent company), the CDC recently announced that insect-borne illnesses have more than tripled in the US in the past 14 years. Those numbers are for mosquitos, fleas, and ticks combined, but if you’re going to get an insect-borne illness in this country, you’re statistically most likely to get Lyme disease, carried by black-legged ticks, aka deer ticks, and most prevalent on the East Coast and in the Midwest. As we say in our bug repellent guide, a 25 percent DEET repellent works pretty well—against mosquitos. It’s not as effective against ticks. Plus, ticks that simply walk to a part of your body without bug spray can avoid DEET-treated areas, according to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (PDF).

What you can do now

You have a few ways to use permethrin. You can buy a spray and treat clothes you already own, buy already treated clothes, or send your clothes to a service for treatment.

Pull Quote

Buying a permethrin spray is the easiest way to quickly take action against ticks.

Where to spray it and when

Pull Quote

In the spring and summer, it’s best to treat your socks and shoes. That could make you about 74 times less likely to be bitten by a tick, according to one study.

Safety concerns

Our favorite tick-check method

#Wirecutter: Reviews for the Real World

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drewkatchen · 8 years ago

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2002 ad for rooms in an apartment in Somerville, Mass.

I’m starting to recognize the underlying theme of most of what I’m writing here lately has everything to do with available space and how I respond to it. Not in the city (either New York or Jersey) or the world, but in our home, the humble square footage that holds two sizable adults. Now that we’re officially a married unit and Ryan doesn’t have just some things in the apartment but the bulk of his belongings (not including the entirety of his vinyl collection) there, I’ve really had to part with a variety of things -- be it a slew of faded old shirts and hordes of holey socks to, of course, that main culprit of space invasion: books. Honestly, it’s mostly books. They’re so damn easy to pick up and collect in any unruly configuration you like, and I can’t help myself because I want them all, especially the big bulky ones with tons of pictures.

The first big paper purge came a few years ago when Chris, my stepfather, helped excise two bulky old Ikea shelves from my home when he gave me a needed upgrade in the form of a custom wall unit, which effectively opened up the office area, enabling a desk bigger than two feet to finally grace the area. He’s really handy like that and always willing to put in the elbow grease to help out. A good amount of books went high up on the wall and the rest I schlepped to the Unitarian church sale down the street. This collection wasn’t stocked with rare items, but I amassed it over two decades and they were mine, so I was sorry to see them go. But they’re hopefully now being loved by someone else and have likely been passed again on down the church donation chain. at the least, parting with them gave us a lot more space to spread our arms.

So yes, space is something I seem to grapple with and therefore write about. Lucky you.

But it’s not just writing about space for the sake of it.

In that incremental process of paring down my collection -- which never seems to end, really -- I’ve come across all manner of personal nostalgia that ended up being unwittingly preserved for the future. It seems I was a habitual stuffer of novels, and I never went back to remove what I put there either in some odd and knowing act of preservation or, more likely, my ADD got the best of me and I’d moved on and could no longer remember which novel held which personal artifact. A bookmark from We Think The World of You in Boston’s South End (closed, seemingly with little fanfare) tucked inside Seamus Heaney’s version of Beowulf, in Michael Byers’ Coast of Good Intentions (which I kept) a picture of me, arms crossed awkwardly, resting on a couch with someone I thought I loved completely but maybe just liked a lot for a brief moment, dried flowers, bad poetry (my own), receipts from B-grade burrito joints, notices of overdue fees from a crummy San Francisco hostel I stayed in during my lost summer between junior and senior year of college. It’s a curious young life I had simultaneously straddling anxiety and ecstatic joy, these items indicate. Not my entire existence, but they do point specifically to real peaks and valleys that I cherish and, on the other side, view with a feeling well below enthusiasm. It’s the collections of half a person, if I may borrow from this man.

And then there’s this roommate advertisement, the paper still crisp, that presented itself in one of my fits of organizational fury. It’s from 2002. At the time I was twenty-five and struggling to keep afloat, both financially and emotionally, in Somerville, a leafy and pretty damn perfect town of denim-clad graduate students, just a bit north of Boston. I am originally from nowhere near there, but I needed to dive somewhere to see if I could swim, whatever swimming really meant in actual, lived reality. To think back on it, it’s a complicated time of my life, both tender and choc full of tumult and fear of totally falling off a financial cliff. To swim, I tried, but I also did a lot with my head just a bit underwater, struggling for air, so to speak. And good friends that propped me up, too.

It was also a time where I was on the hunt for a new apartment, because it took me several tries in that town to lock down a home with just one roommate as opposed to two or three that seemed to have been the creation of someone’s nightmare, be them slovenly, loud as a fleet of trucks or both. This is also where my friends came in, as luck would have it.

I’ve been wanting to write about this ad since I exhumed it from hiding several months ago and what I’ve learned since about the person who placed it, but I wasn’t sure how or I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate or even interesting.

I guess I’m just going to wing it and see how it goes.

The one thing I can say is it’s not an apartment I sought out, and I never responded to the ad. Before I could, a savior in the form of an indefatigable soul with sterling credit pulled us both up by her bootstraps and got us into an amazing place -- top floor of a quiet house, clean, huge porch, wood flooring, quiet street -- we both still discuss it as idyllic. I still owe her for it, too. I’m almost being literal when I say I went from living in a ditch to living in the sky. But, as you can see in the picture above, I did selfishly take the entire flyer rather than a mere tab, most likely so others couldn’t get to it before I did. The ad is for September of 2002, and by this point, I was well into living in the Boston area for a year-and-a-half. I would be gone from the city in less than a year after losing a job and after living there became just financially unmanageable. I felt rich in friends, but Boston destroyed me otherwise.

But more on the ad.

“I’m a 30-year-old responsible, professional, gay white male,” it began, which I no doubt at the time read as everything I aspired to be: A little older, seemingly stable but not above having roommates to help with the bills and able to use the term ‘professional’ (in any capacity, really) when describing myself at parties. Sure the guy was single at 30, but that’s still young in an urban, urbanish area. “I’m outgoing, sociable, and friendly,” and prone to the vice of watching too much TV (who isn’t?) it continued after describing a situation where for $700 (!!!) the applicant with the right credentials and vibe could have a “good-sized bedroom with closet” near Tufts and access to a “large back porch,” which would no doubt be useful from May to October. If the ad maybe doubled as romantic, which in a way it seems to, that’s smart to me. It is my sincere hope it all worked out for him.

As I said, I never followed up on this place, and I went on with my life living in near total bliss in a great living situation not far from the bustling Davis Square. Life continued.

---

For the nearly three years I lived in Boston, I didn’t so much as have a single proper date with a man, a fact that has as much to do with my not really seeking one as it does no one was really asking me for my hand. Sure, I had moments of meeting people on Internet sites, but nothing really panned out there, and it’s honestly for the better because I was all about solitary self-improvement at the time. It was just me and my portable CD Discman and not a lot of thoughts about romance, really.

But I also looked around a bit because I paradoxically always yearned for someone. Because we all do even if we think we don’t, and I hit the clubs both alone and with friends. Just to see, I guess, what people thought of me and I of them. Still though...nothing serious came of my many dance marathons to The Cure at Manray or Kylie at Ramrod or The Standells at Common Ground or of my voyages to loud and ebullient basement hardcore shows.

There were always men I noticed in my regular comings and goings: A rugged construction guy I would sometimes see on the bus, the bearded college kid at Au Bon Pain who sometimes assembled my mozzarella and pesto sandwich when I could afford such a splurge. And also this one guy I’d see around town on my walks to the Diesel Cafe or when I was having an Ana’s burrito on the concrete block in Davis Square across from the Somerville Theatre. Several years older than me and more muscular and in better shape -- he was built like a football player -- and seemingly kind in how he interacted with baristas or people he knew, he became something of a private crush. I could discern he had a generous smile and an unencumbered gait, two things I also desperately wanted for myself. My heart always skipped a beat when I would see him out but knowing myself and where I was in life, I would’ve been too much a flawed mortal for him to consider me a worthy partner. I remember nearly having a panic attack when I later discovered he and I briefly shared a gym. I admired from afar and never got close; I would’ve been too tongue tied even if I did work up the nerve to ask him to, say, spot me on the bench press. I was a buffoon when it came to such social niceties. As crushes tend to go, the butterflies eventually lessened as our paths crossed but only a few times, and I soon moved away and began dating the person who would become my first real boyfriend.

Time pressed on, and I never thought about him again.

---

Fifteen years later and the Internet being what it is now, it took very little effort to put a few things together rather quickly when I started digging a bit into the unearthed ad. I guess I was just curious. Finding it now seemed so peculiar. Why did I keep it?

Because an email address was attached to the ad -- one seemingly bearing a last name -- I learned his full name in seconds, which I obviously never knew before. I thought maybe if I found him, I would send a picture of it back to him on Facebook or something for fun, explaining how I’d come across it and we’d have a laugh over it and call it a day.

But that wouldn’t be possible.

In the next mouse click, learned the man behind the ad that was affixed to a wall or pole on either Elm Street or Highland Ave or Chester Street (or wherever I found it) sadly was no longer alive. He died in 2007, while in his thirties, due to complications from surgery, according to his online obituary. As I also read a story online about his volunteer work as a phone counselor for an LGBT crisis hotline, I learned the man behind the ad had to an extent lived his life with compassion. It seems he was inspired to give back to his community after the same helpline assisted him as a teenager. I loved reading that.

And, of course, as you would suspect, I learned the man behind the ad and the man of generous spirit who is no longer alive is also the man I saw from time to time in Davis Square or at the gym -- the one I privately admired in my twenties. I couldn’t make any of this up, and why would I want to? A thumbnail picture of him at the very top of his online obituary showed me his face. It was unmistakably him; I recognized him instantly. Everything together blended into such an odd coincidence that I couldn’t help be struck by it, and I couldn’t help but wonder if my life would have been any different had I applied for one of the rooms and gotten it.

After that, I just thought about the minimal impression I had of him. Someone I didn’t know but could still picture with what I think is real accuracy and just how odd memory is when it comes to picking up and holding onto seemingly insignificant faces or events.

And I hope he had a wonderful remaining five years. I hope he had great roommates and people who cared for him. I hope he had someone to watch Ally McBeal with and someone to consume copious amounts of coffee with. I hope he had fun, and I hope he had long talks on the phone with old friends and family and I hope he ate great meals and read good books.

Like I said, I never knew this guy, but I’ve now been gay and in my thirties and single, and I know what that feels like now. There are times where I consider sending this ad to his family, just so they can have another little something to remember him by, a tiny piece of him they may or may not know exists. But I’ve never struck out to do that because that also maybe feels inappropriate or something they may not want. Maybe somehow they’ll find this despite the fact I don’t name him.

It’s an odd thing to discover something a decade later from someone no longer alive, something that maybe no one else has. And it’s even stranger when you never knew the person but you also know the very rough outline of their life’s arc thanks to breathtaking technological advances.

But I can see his face when I think about it, plain as day. And in his own way, even thought I’ve never found an apartment based on an ad placed on the street, he’s had an impact on a complete and total stranger who now lives hundreds of miles from that time and place with his husband in northern New Jersey.

#storytelling #roommate wanted #Boston

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oliviasfashion · 1 year ago

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Unveiling the Secrets to Choosing the Ideal Running Socks

Clocking in at under an ounce, a vital component of running gear ensures you step forward on the right foot, quite literally.

#athletic sock manufacturers in Ohio #athletic socks wholesale in New York #best athletic socks in Florida #bulk athletic socks in Washington #custom athletic socks wholesale in Sydney

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myselfariana · 3 years ago

Link

It may seem that wearing cotton socks in cold weather is a recipe for frostbitten toes and cold feet, particularly if you are participating in tough activities, no matter how pretty your winter boot might be. The reason for that? Just fast you are not purchasing them from the right manufacturers. Over the winter season, donning cotton socks from private label socks manufacturers have the power to keep your foot colder than if you were wearing no socks at all, that is why you should make a shift towards warmer variants.

#wholesale wool socks in new york #sports socks wholesale in georgia #sports socks manufacturers in florida #private label socks in california #private label sock manufacturers uk #personalized socks bulk North Carolina #custom socks usa #custom sock manufacturers usa

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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How Fitness Culture Enlisted Ballerinas To Profit Off Our Insecurities

Its 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the exercise studio is starting to fill up. Participants are filtering in, each of them claiming a place at the ballet barres that are bolted to floor-to-ceiling mirrors along every wall. Theres not a leotard or a pair of tights in sight; everyones wearing running leggings and t-shirts. Their hair is in ponytails, not stiff ballet buns. And the music that soon starts pumping through the speakers is not classical piano, but pulsating EDM and Rihanna remixes. This looks like a ballet studio, but therell be no ballet happening here today. Welcome to barre class.

Ballet is having a cultural moment right now. From Misty Copelands crossover into mainstream celebrity to the proliferation of barre classes and the use of ballerinas as models for athleisure and fashion lines, ballet is once again fashionable and aspirational.

As a fashion influence, ballet has come and gone for decades: legwarmers cycle in and out of style, and American Apparel spent years trying to convince hipsters everywhere that leotards are comfortable. Ballerinas from New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater are currently serving as models for luxe clothing brands like Wolford, Thakoon and Negative Underwear. But ballets current mainstream moment goes beyond fashion, crossing over into fitness culture and serving as a revealing reminder of the kind of female athleticism the kind of female bodies that American culture deems acceptable and admirable.

This is not surprising. After all, the ballerina is the perfect emblem of our anxieties and aspirations around female athleticism: shes fit and physically strong, but she also bears a striking resemblance to a catwalk model. The ballerina, as most of us envision her, is everything women are encouraged to aspire to be: thin, ultra-feminine, wealthy and white.

Lets start with barre classes, the blend of pilates, yoga and basic dance moves, some of them done while holding on to the same kind of barre that ballerinas use while warming up and strengthening their bodies at the start of every ballet class.

Barre has spiked in popularity in the last several years, with Pure Barre and Barre3 franchise studios popping up all over the country. Barre was the breakout trend for 2016, said Ashley Hennings, the Head of PR at Class Pass, in an email to The Huffington Post. Hennings says that last year, barre accounted for 17 percent of all classes booked through the subscription program, and saw the highest yearly increase in bookings of any fitness category.

Barre bears little resemblance to what ballerinas do in a ballet studio: Its a lot of squats, there are exercises that require free weights and inflatable balls, and the music is for getting you pumped, not for dancing.

Promotional copy for Pure Barre promises a full-body workout concentrating on the areas women struggle with the most: hips, thighs, seat, abdominals and arms, and reassures that each strength section of the workout is followed by a stretching section in order to create long, lean muscles without bulk. Barre3s copy says the workout mixes athleticism, grace, and the latest innovations designed to balance the body, and promises that it will tone and lengthen all major muscle groups, resulting in proportion in the body that is shapely and attractive. It purports to improve your posture, too, presumably to help you to stand tall and regal, like an elegant ballerina. The words long and length appear a lot on the Barre3 website. Lean, not bulky, muscles are the goal here. The technique works to defy gravity by tapering everything in and lifting it up! the Pure Barre website assures, perkily.

Raleigh News & Observer via Getty Images

A Barre3 teacher leads a class in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Long, lean, lengthy, lean muscles that definitely arent bulky dont come cheap.

In New York City, a class at Barre3 will run you $33 for an hour of exercise. In Dallas, a single Pure Barre class costs $22, with discounts if you buy a package of classes. Classes are tailored to their markets, so a single class in Fayetteville, Arizona, is $15. And a monthly subscription for online Barre3 workouts, complete with recipes and a chat function to consult instructors, is $29. Pure Barre recommends that beginners start by taking four classes a week for optimal results.

Then, theres the gear: studios sell workout wear, weights and balls you can use at home, plus special socks purported to improve your grip and balance during a class that most people do wearing regular socks, or nothing at all, on their feet. The workout wear is pricey, too: There are $56 cotton tank tops and $98 leggings. The grip sox are $16.

The gear isnt mandatory or necessary, of course, but it is part of what the Pure Barre website explicitly calls more than just a workout … a lifestyle. Barre life isnt just about the squats. Its about the gear, about carving out time for you, about doing exercises designed for women and taught by women. This is about creating a particular kind of female body one that is strong but not bulky and living a particular kind of feminine life. An expensive one.

Purity or proximity to classical ballet aside, barre classes do claim to offer participants a way to sculpt a ballerina-esque body. Despite its tenuous connections to actual ballet, barre uses the promise of a ballerina body to market to customers (Pure Barre was founded by a former dancer; while the founder of Barre3 describes herself as renowned wellness expert and media personality).

Barre studios are not the only ones in the fitness industry who are doing so. With the rise of athleisure, brands have begun hiring ballet dancers to help them market apparel for the gym, yoga, running and other workout activities. New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns serves as a model for Cole Haans recently announced athleisure line. Fellow principal Lauren Lovette models for athleisure line MPG Sport. New York City Ballet corps de ballet member Olivia Boisson models for Puma, and the brand just released a Swan Lake-themed line of workout and athleisure gear, created in partnership with City Ballet and modeled by their dancers. American Ballet Theatre soloist Calvin Royal III models for GapFit, along with a racially diverse set of ballerinas. And American Ballet Theatre principal Misty Copeland has a high-profile endorsement deal with Under Armor.

I love releasing myself into my art because it offers me a constructively MEANINGFUL outlet for the strong emotions I am encouraged by my own self to suppress. Real artists feel strongly. @mpgsport #feeleverything #useitforgood

A photo posted by Lauren Lovette (@laurenlovette) on Oct 28, 2016 at 6:05am PDT

There are many forms of exercise that require, or seem to require, the kind of athleisure wear that has been embraced by retailers and celebrity merchandisers at a staggering rate in the last few years. And there are many forms of exercise that will give you, or promise to give you, the kind of long, lean muscles advertised by barre studios charging $30 per class. Plenty of workouts will leave you looking athletic, muscular, toned all those words that reveal the truth behind the strong is the new skinny movement, which is that, in addition to being strong, you should still, wherever possible, please be skinny. Yet its ballerinas who are increasingly modeling the athleisure wear, and its barre classes that are spiking in popularity.

The choice of the ballerinas body as a way to market exercise gear and of ballet as a marketing tool for exercise classes (excuse me, lifestyles) is not coincidental.

PUMA X NYCB // Weve teamed up once again. Just in time to open our Winter performances of Balanchines one act Swan Lake, PUMA is launching their Swan Pack collection inspired by the power and grace of this iconic ballet. #rachelhutsell @rachelhutsell #mimistaker @missssmimi @puma @pumawomen @pumatraining #PUMA #PUMAwomen #PUMAtraining #swanpack #nycballet #nycb #newyorkcityballet #ballet #linkinbio

A photo posted by New York City Ballet (@nycballet) on Jan 18, 2017 at 1:37pm PST

The rise of athleisure highlights the extent to which a body that is regularly exercised has become a status symbol. Athleisure wear, which gives one the appearance of always heading to or from a gym, and reveals your size and shape and musculature in a way that regular street clothes do not, is one means by which to flaunt that status symbol. At a time when, for women, wealth and low weight are correlated, and where poverty and obesity often go hand-in-hand, athleisure wear, and the body youre clearly meant to have or aspire to when youre wearing it, is not just about having the right kind of female body its also about having the right kind of bank account with which to dress it.

It makes sense, then, that ballerinas would be recruited to market athleisure wear and the barre classes for which you supposedly need it: Ballet is, in the public imagination, an activity for the elite. Its not only the ballerina body thats aspirational; so, too, is the economic status that the art form of ballet itself suggests.

In the U.S., ballet watching it and doing it has long been viewed as an elite activity. In her book Nutcracker Nation, dance historian Jennifer Fisher writes that there is a rarefied elegance associated with the art form, which has an aristocratic subcode and a tony profile. Ballet has a perceived exclusive quality … conferring on its participants the gloss of something high class. She describes a mid-1990s documentary in which a fundraiser for Londons Royal Opera House called elitism one of [her] biggest selling points.

We like it because its elitist, thats why people come here, the fundraiser says. Part of what makes this place special is that the audience is special.

This attitude is implied in the U.S.s grand ballet spaces, like Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, and Fisher notes that it applies to both watching ballet and to learning it: in her ethnographic research, people repeatedly referred to ballet as a classy thing to do.

This perception is rooted in fact: Ballet tickets and ballet training are expensive. Even the cheapest tickets to a premiere company like New York City Ballet can cost close to $50. Ballet classes and gear are costly, too, especially as children grow quickly out of leotards, tights and shoes. Pointe shoes start at about $50. This is to say nothing of the cost of performance costumes, competition fees and, for very advanced students, room-and-board at full-time residential ballet schools.

All in all, ballet is not simply perceived as a feminine pursuit, but as one for wealthy women and girls. No wonder, then, that ballerinas so strong and lean, so athletic in their pricey leggings and racer-back tank tops, so fancy would be used to market athleisure and fitness classes. Theyre a way to sell apparel and exercise by advertising aspirational upper-class feminine beauty.

Brad Barket via Getty Images

A Puma executive, left, with New York City Ballet dancer Mimi Staker, right.

And that upper-class feminine beauty is white.

The archetypal ballet dancer, in the public imagination, is not only a woman shes a white woman. Thats largely because of the whiteness of the ballerinas who, historically, have risen to the top of the ballet world and become known beyond it. True, there are notable exceptions, reaching back to the beginning of American ballet: Maria Tallchief, widely considered the U.S.s first ballet star, was Native American. Still, those exceptions are just that: deviations from the norm. The norm in ballet, particularly in the highest ranks and the most prestigious companies, is white.

The most obvious contemporary exception to that norm is, of course, Misty Copeland, the first black woman to become a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. There are other visible exceptions New York City Ballets Boisson and American Ballet Theatres Courtney Lavine (who is the face and body of an Avon perfume) but Copeland is by far the nations best-known ballerina, of any race. In addition to her documentary, her several books and her leotard line, which are marketed at dancers, she has her more mainstream endorsement deal with Under Armor and another with Seiko. Shell appear in Disneys live-action Nutcracker movie, and she has her own Barbie. She has emerged as a ballet star, a civil rights figure and a celebrity of sorts. Still, her celebrity and her visibility rest not just on her talent, but also on her status as an outlier in the world of ballet. She is a principal because she is a terrifically talented, hardworking and beautiful dancer; she is famous because she is the only black woman in a world of white ballerinas.

@underarmour Copeland wont let you define her. How do you #RuleYourself? Share your rule with #RuleYourself and @Underarmour and your story may be featured in our next documentary! Rules in Bio.

A photo posted by Misty Copeland (@mistyonpointe) on Mar 21, 2016 at 8:18am PDT

Exceptions aside, ballet remains, in reality and in the public imagination, overwhelmingly white. And GapFit notwithstanding, the ballerina body that is deployed to market athleisure gear is usually a white one, and the aspirational lifestyle that is marketed via ballet-adjacent barre classes is implicitly for white women. While the websites for Pure Barre and Barre3 splash sleek professional photos of ethnically diverse classes, the roster of barre enthusiasts who say the regimen has changed their lives for the better is almost entirely white. Barre classes may be a new and growing trend, and ballerina-fronted athleisure may be booming like never before, but scratch the surface of ballets new visibility, and theres very little thats novel about it.

For those who love ballet and prefer it to be present in mainstream culture, rather than cosseted away in what Fisher calls its usual swank milieu, its tempting to be cheered by its current popularity and prominence. Now, for the first time in perhaps a generation, ballerinas are visible and accessible to mainstream audiences, held out as role models and as actual models.

But its worth looking closer at how the idea of ballet, and the bodies of ballerinas, are being used to sell women on an acceptable vision of feminine athleticism one thats muscular but not bulky, strong and skinny and on a version of femininity that promises a body, and a lifestyle, marked by wealth and by whiteness. The goal of all that squatting and pulsing remains unchanged, the costume of athleisure leggings and fitted hoodies is for the same desired performance: be thin, be rich, be white. Be the right kind of woman.

As barre enrollments around the country swell and athleisure brands proliferate, you have to ask: Isnt this just the same old dance weve always done?

Read more: http://ift.tt/2k3carz

from How Fitness Culture Enlisted Ballerinas To Profit Off Our Insecurities

#How Fitness Culture Enlisted Ballerinas To Profit Off Our Insecurities

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poledancertoday · 8 years ago

Text

How Fitness Culture Enlisted Ballerinas To Profit Off Our Insecurities

[Chloe Angyal | Huffington Post]

It's 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the exercise studio is starting to fill up. Participants are filtering in, each of them claiming a place at the ballet barres that are bolted to floor-to-ceiling mirrors along every wall. There's not a leotard or a pair of tights in sight; everyone's wearing running leggings and t-shirts. Their hair is in ponytails, not stiff ballet buns. And the music that soon starts pumping through the speakers is not classical piano, but pulsating EDM and Rihanna remixes. This looks like a ballet studio, but there'll be no ballet happening here today. Welcome to barre class.

Ballet is having a cultural moment right now. From Misty Copeland's crossover into mainstream celebrity to the proliferation of barre classes and the use of ballerinas as models for athleisure and fashion lines, ballet is once again fashionable and aspirational.

As a fashion influence, ballet has come and gone for decades: legwarmers cycle in and out of style, and American Apparel spent years trying to convince hipsters everywhere that leotards are comfortable. Ballerinas from New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater are currently serving as models for luxe clothing brands like Wolford, Thakoon and Negative Underwear. But ballet's current mainstream moment goes beyond fashion, crossing over into fitness culture and serving as a revealing reminder of the kind of female athleticism ― the kind of female bodies ― that American culture deems acceptable and admirable.

This is not surprising. After all, the ballerina is the perfect emblem of our anxieties and aspirations around female athleticism: she's fit and physically strong, but she also bears a striking resemblance to a catwalk model. The ballerina, as most of us envision her, is everything women are encouraged to aspire to be: thin, ultra-feminine, wealthy and white.

Let's start with barre classes, the blend of pilates, yoga and basic dance moves, some of them done while holding on to the same kind of barre that ballerinas use while warming up and strengthening their bodies at the start of every ballet class.

Barre has spiked in popularity in the last several years, with Pure Barre and Barre3 franchise studios popping up all over the country. Barre was “the breakout trend for 2016,” said Ashley Hennings, the Head of PR at Class Pass, in an email to The Huffington Post. Hennings says that last year, barre accounted for 17 percent of all classes booked through the subscription program, and saw the highest yearly increase in bookings of any fitness category.

Barre bears little resemblance to what ballerinas do in a ballet studio: It's a lot of squats, there are exercises that require free weights and inflatable balls, and the music is for getting you pumped, not for dancing.

Promotional copy for Pure Barre promises “a full-body workout concentrating on the areas women struggle with the most: hips, thighs, seat, abdominals and arms,” and reassures that “each strength section of the workout is followed by a stretching section in order to create long, lean muscles without bulk.” Barre3's copy says the workout “mixes athleticism, grace, and the latest innovations designed to balance the body,” and promises that it will “tone and lengthen all major muscle groups,” resulting in “proportion in the body that is shapely and attractive.” It purports to improve your posture, too, presumably to help you to stand tall and regal, like an elegant ballerina. The words “long” and “length” appear a lot on the Barre3 website. “Lean, not bulky, muscles” are the goal here. “The technique works to defy gravity by tapering everything in and lifting it up!” the Pure Barre website assures, perkily.

RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER VIA GETTY IMAGES

A Barre3 teacher leads a class in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Long, lean, lengthy, lean muscles that definitely aren't bulky don't come cheap.

Then, there's the gear: studios sell workout wear, weights and balls you can use at home, plus special socks purported to improve your grip and balance during a class that most people do wearing regular socks, or nothing at all, on their feet. The workout wear is pricey, too: There are $56 cotton tank tops and $98 leggings. The “grip sox” are $16.

The gear isn't mandatory or necessary, of course, but it is part of what the Pure Barre website explicitly calls “more than just a workout … a lifestyle.” Barre life isn't just about the squats. It's about the gear, about carving out time for you, about doing exercises designed for women and taught by women. This is about “creating” a particular kind of female body ― one that is strong but not bulky ― and living a particular kind of feminine life. An expensive one.

Barre studios are not the only ones in the fitness industry who are doing so. With the rise of athleisure, brands have begun hiring ballet dancers to help them market apparel for the gym, yoga, running and other workout activities. New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns serves as a model for Cole Haan's recently announced athleisure line. Fellow principal Lauren Lovette models for athleisure line MPG Sport. New York City Ballet corps de ballet member Olivia Boisson models for Puma, and the brand just released a Swan Lake-themed line of workout and athleisure gear, created in partnership with City Ballet and modeled by their dancers. American Ballet Theatre soloist Calvin Royal III models for GapFit, along with a racially diverse set of ballerinas. And American Ballet Theatre principal Misty Copeland has a high-profile endorsement deal with Under Armor.

instagram

There are many forms of exercise that require, or seem to require, the kind of athleisure wear that has been embraced by retailers and celebrity merchandisers at a staggering rate in the last few years. And there are many forms of exercise that will give you, or promise to give you, the kind of long, lean muscles advertised by barre studios charging $30 per class. Plenty of workouts will leave you looking athletic, muscular, toned ― all those words that reveal the truth behind the “strong is the new skinny” movement, which is that, in addition to being strong, you should still, wherever possible, please be skinny. Yet it's ballerinas who are increasingly modeling the athleisure wear, and it's barre classes that are spiking in popularity.

The choice of the ballerina's body as a way to market exercise gear ― and of ballet as a marketing tool for exercise classes (excuse me, “lifestyles”) ― is not coincidental.

[READ MORE]

The post How Fitness Culture Enlisted Ballerinas To Profit Off Our Insecurities appeared first on Pole World News.

0 notes

imreviewblog · 8 years ago

Text

How Fitness Culture Enlisted Ballerinas To Profit Off Our Insecurities

It’s 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the exercise studio is starting to fill up. Participants are filtering in, each of them claiming a place at the ballet barres that are bolted to floor-to-ceiling mirrors along every wall. There’s not a leotard or a pair of tights in sight; everyone’s wearing running leggings and t-shirts. Their hair is in ponytails, not stiff ballet buns. And the music that soon starts pumping through the speakers is not classical piano, but pulsating EDM and Rihanna remixes. This looks like a ballet studio, but there’ll be no ballet happening here today. Welcome to barre class.

Ballet is having a cultural moment right now. From Misty Copeland’s crossover into mainstream celebrity to the proliferation of barre classes and the use of ballerinas as models for athleisure and fashion lines, ballet is once again fashionable and aspirational.

As a fashion influence, ballet has come and gone for decades: legwarmers cycle in and out of style, and American Apparel spent years trying to convince hipsters everywhere that leotards are comfortable. Ballerinas from New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater are currently serving as models for luxe clothing brands like Wolford, Thakoon and Negative Underwear. But ballet’s current mainstream moment goes beyond fashion, crossing over into fitness culture and serving as a revealing reminder of the kind of female athleticism ― the kind of female bodies ― that American culture deems acceptable and admirable.

This is not surprising. After all, the ballerina is the perfect emblem of our anxieties and aspirations around female athleticism: she’s fit and physically strong, but she also bears a striking resemblance to a catwalk model. The ballerina, as most of us envision her, is everything women are encouraged to aspire to be: thin, ultra-feminine, wealthy and white.

Let’s start with barre classes, the blend of pilates, yoga and basic dance moves, some of them done while holding on to the same kind of barre that ballerinas use while warming up and strengthening their bodies at the start of every ballet class.

Barre bears little resemblance to what ballerinas do in a ballet studio: It’s a lot of squats, there are exercises that require free weights and inflatable balls, and the music is for getting you pumped, not for dancing.

Promotional copy for Pure Barre promises “a full-body workout concentrating on the areas women struggle with the most: hips, thighs, seat, abdominals and arms,” and reassures that “each strength section of the workout is followed by a stretching section in order to create long, lean muscles without bulk.” Barre3’s copy says the workout “mixes athleticism, grace, and the latest innovations designed to balance the body,” and promises that it will “tone and lengthen all major muscle groups,” resulting in “proportion in the body that is shapely and attractive.” It purports to improve your posture, too, presumably to help you to stand tall and regal, like an elegant ballerina. The words “long” and “length” appear a lot on the Barre3 website. “Lean, not bulky, muscles” are the goal here. “The technique works to defy gravity by tapering everything in and lifting it up!” the Pure Barre website assures, perkily.

Long, lean, lengthy, lean muscles that definitely aren’t bulky don’t come cheap.

Then, there’s the gear: studios sell workout wear, weights and balls you can use at home, plus special socks purported to improve your grip and balance during a class that most people do wearing regular socks, or nothing at all, on their feet. The workout wear is pricey, too: There are $56 cotton tank tops and $98 leggings. The “grip sox” are $16.

The gear isn’t mandatory or necessary, of course, but it is part of what the Pure Barre website explicitly calls “more than just a workout ... a lifestyle.” Barre life isn’t just about the squats. It’s about the gear, about carving out time for you, about doing exercises designed for women and taught by women. This is about “creating” a particular kind of female body ― one that is strong but not bulky ― and living a particular kind of feminine life. An expensive one.

Barre studios are not the only ones in the fitness industry who are doing so. With the rise of athleisure, brands have begun hiring ballet dancers to help them market apparel for the gym, yoga, running and other workout activities. New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns serves as a model for Cole Haan’s recently announced athleisure line. Fellow principal Lauren Lovette models for athleisure line MPG Sport. New York City Ballet corps de ballet member Olivia Boisson models for Puma, and the brand just released a Swan Lake-themed line of workout and athleisure gear, created in partnership with City Ballet and modeled by their dancers. American Ballet Theatre soloist Calvin Royal III models for GapFit, along with a racially diverse set of ballerinas. And American Ballet Theatre principal Misty Copeland has a high-profile endorsement deal with Under Armor.

A photo posted by Lauren Lovette (@laurenlovette) on Oct 28, 2016 at 6:05am PDT

There are many forms of exercise that require, or seem to require, the kind of athleisure wear that has been embraced by retailers and celebrity merchandisers at a staggering rate in the last few years. And there are many forms of exercise that will give you, or promise to give you, the kind of long, lean muscles advertised by barre studios charging $30 per class. Plenty of workouts will leave you looking athletic, muscular, toned ― all those words that reveal the truth behind the “strong is the new skinny” movement, which is that, in addition to being strong, you should still, wherever possible, please be skinny. Yet it’s ballerinas who are increasingly modeling the athleisure wear, and it’s barre classes that are spiking in popularity.

The choice of the ballerina’s body as a way to market exercise gear ― and of ballet as a marketing tool for exercise classes (excuse me, “lifestyles”) ― is not coincidental.

PUMA X NYCB // We’ve teamed up once again. Just in time to open our Winter performances of Balanchine’s one act Swan Lake, PUMA is launching their Swan Pack collection inspired by the power and grace of this iconic ballet. ⠀ ⠀ #rachelhutsell @rachelhutsell #mimistaker @missssmimi @puma @pumawomen @pumatraining #PUMA #PUMAwomen #PUMAtraining #swanpack #nycballet #nycb #newyorkcityballet #ballet #linkinbio

A photo posted by New York City Ballet (@nycballet) on Jan 18, 2017 at 1:37pm PST

The rise of athleisure highlights the extent to which a body that is regularly exercised has become a status symbol. Athleisure wear, which gives one the appearance of always heading to or from a gym, and reveals your size and shape and musculature in a way that regular street clothes do not, is one means by which to flaunt that status symbol. At a time when, for women, wealth and low weight are correlated, and where poverty and obesity often go hand-in-hand, athleisure wear, and the body you’re clearly meant to have or aspire to when you’re wearing it, is not just about having the right kind of female body ― it’s also about having the right kind of bank account with which to dress it.

It makes sense, then, that ballerinas would be recruited to market athleisure wear and the barre classes for which you supposedly need it: Ballet is, in the public imagination, an activity for the elite. It’s not only the ballerina body that’s aspirational; so, too, is the economic status that the art form of ballet itself suggests.

In the U.S., ballet – watching it and doing it – has long been viewed as an elite activity. In her book Nutcracker Nation, dance historian Jennifer Fisher writes that there is a “rarefied elegance” associated with the art form, which has an “aristocratic subcode” and a “tony profile.” Ballet has a “perceived exclusive quality ... conferring on its participants the gloss of something ‘high class.’” She describes a mid-1990s documentary in which a fundraiser for London’s Royal Opera House called elitism “one of [her] biggest selling points.”

“We like it because it’s elitist, that’s why people come here,” the fundraiser says. “Part of what makes this place special is that the audience is special.”

This attitude is implied in the U.S.’s grand ballet spaces, like Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, and Fisher notes that it applies to both watching ballet and to learning it: in her ethnographic research, people repeatedly referred to ballet “as a ‘classy’ thing to do.”

All in all, ballet is not simply perceived as a feminine pursuit, but as one for wealthy women and girls. No wonder, then, that ballerinas – so strong and lean, so athletic in their pricey leggings and racer-back tank tops, so fancy – would be used to market athleisure and fitness classes. They’re a way to sell apparel and exercise by advertising aspirational upper-class feminine beauty.

And that upper-class feminine beauty is white.

The archetypal ballet dancer, in the public imagination, is not only a woman ― she’s a white woman. That’s largely because of the whiteness of the ballerinas who, historically, have risen to the top of the ballet world and become known beyond it. True, there are notable exceptions, reaching back to the beginning of American ballet: Maria Tallchief, widely considered the U.S.’s first ballet star, was Native American. Still, those exceptions are just that: deviations from the norm. The norm in ballet, particularly in the highest ranks and the most prestigious companies, is white.

The most obvious contemporary exception to that norm is, of course, Misty Copeland, the first black woman to become a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. There are other visible exceptions – New York City Ballet’s Boisson and American Ballet Theatre’s Courtney Lavine (who is the face and body of an Avon perfume) – but Copeland is by far the nation’s best-known ballerina, of any race. In addition to her documentary, her several books and her leotard line, which are marketed at dancers, she has her more mainstream endorsement deal with Under Armor and another with Seiko. She’ll appear in Disney’s live-action Nutcracker movie, and she has her own Barbie. She has emerged as a ballet star, a civil rights figure and a celebrity of sorts. Still, her celebrity and her visibility rest not just on her talent, but also on her status as an outlier in the world of ballet. She is a principal because she is a terrifically talented, hardworking and beautiful dancer; she is famous because she is the only black woman in a world of white ballerinas.

@underarmour Copeland won’t let you define her. How do you #RuleYourself? Share your rule with #RuleYourself and @Underarmour and your story may be featured in our next documentary! Rules in Bio.

A photo posted by Misty Copeland (@mistyonpointe) on Mar 21, 2016 at 8:18am PDT

Exceptions aside, ballet remains, in reality and in the public imagination, overwhelmingly white. And GapFit notwithstanding, the ballerina body that is deployed to market athleisure gear is usually a white one, and the aspirational lifestyle that is marketed via ballet-adjacent barre classes is implicitly for white women. While the websites for Pure Barre and Barre3 splash sleek professional photos of ethnically diverse classes, the roster of barre enthusiasts who say the regimen has changed their lives for the better is almost entirely white. Barre classes may be a new and growing trend, and ballerina-fronted athleisure may be booming like never before, but scratch the surface of ballet’s new visibility, and there’s very little that’s novel about it.

For those who love ballet and prefer it to be present in mainstream culture, rather than cosseted away in what Fisher calls its usual “swank milieu,” it’s tempting to be cheered by its current popularity and prominence. Now, for the first time in perhaps a generation, ballerinas are visible and accessible to mainstream audiences, held out as role models and as actual models.

But it’s worth looking closer at how the idea of ballet, and the bodies of ballerinas, are being used to sell women on an acceptable vision of feminine athleticism ― one that’s muscular but not bulky, strong and skinny ― and on a version of femininity that promises a body, and a lifestyle, marked by wealth and by whiteness. The goal of all that squatting and pulsing remains unchanged, the costume of athleisure leggings and fitted hoodies is for the same desired performance: be thin, be rich, be white. Be the right kind of woman.

As barre enrollments around the country swell and athleisure brands proliferate, you have to ask: Isn’t this just the same old dance we’ve always done?

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2kogfq4

#Healthy Living - The Huffington Post

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babysaftynews-blog · 8 years ago

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The most effective Pregnancy and Child Tech Products at CES 2017 Declared by The Bump as well as Living in Digital Times

LAS VEGA, Jan. 5, 2017/ PRNewswire/-- After an extremely competitive second year, which innovations took the baby tech globe by tornado? The Bump, the conclusive voice for millennial moms and dads, in collaboration with Residing in Digital Times (LIDT), producers of the brand-new Infant Tech Top at CES, today revealed the winners of the 2nd annual The Bump Best of Child Technology Honors at CES ® 2017. The champions, recognized for their leading innovations in fertility, pregnancy as well as baby modern technology, were recognized at a honors ceremony organized by The Bump and also Randi Zuckerberg, digital way of living specialist and also host of SiriusXM's "Dot Complicated," on the LIDT Phase at CES Technology West.

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Owlet Infant Wellness & Wellness Monitor is a wise sock display with brand-new features consisting of an ingenious new sock layout, 8x variety boost, and also a Connected Care system that tracks infant's heart price and also oxygen levels as well as signals parents if degrees fall outside present zones.

Audience Fave

Kaishi is a fetal heart-rate display that allows anticipating families to pay attention to the infant's heart beat on their phone and also share it over social media.

A total checklist of the victors could be seen The Bump Best of Child Technology Awards.

Results were based upon a compilation of on the internet votes and also experienced courts. The evaluating panel included:

Dr. Taz Bhatia, MD, Integrative Health Expert, Proprietor of Centre Springtime MD + Pediatrics Simon Isaacs, Co-founder as well as Chief Material Officer, Fatherly Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO, GoldieBlox Jeana Tahnk, Family Tech Expert, Top Tech Mother Julia Wang, Head of Digital Material, The Bump Randi Zuckerberg, owner as well as Chief Executive Officer of Zuckerberg Media

Tweet this: The wait is over! @TheBump #BestofBaby Technology Honor champions at #CES 2017 are http://bit.ly/22wiI2u #BabyTech

Regarding The Bump The Bump is the clear-cut voice for millennial moms and dads as well as parents-to-be, providing a Baby-Träger, real-time specialist recommendations, varied way of life web content and also time-saving tools for moms and dads on-the-go. As the go-to destination for new moms and dads, The Bump utilizes its single-list innovation to accumulation as well as sync child pc registries from several retailers onto one, very easy to utilize listing for moms and dads who are managing their computer registries and also those buying for baby. The Bump belongs to XO Group Inc. (NYSE: XOXO), the premier consumer Net and also media business dedicated to weddings, maternity as well as every little thing in between. Adhere to The Bump on social media sites @TheBump.

Concerning Staying in Digital Times Founded by veteran modern technology journalist Robin Raskin, Staying in Digital Times combines one of the most well-informed leaders as well as the most up to date advancements impacting both technology and also way of living. It assists companies identify and act upon emerging fads, create compelling company stories, as well as do better service through solid network links. Living in Digital Times generates modern technology conferences, exhibits and also occasions at CES and also various other locations throughout the year by lifestyle verticals. Core brand names include Digital Wellness Summit, Digital Money Forum, FitnessTech, Infant Tech, Kids@Play, Household Tech Summit, TransformingEDU, FamilyTech TELEVISION, Charm Tech, Wearables and FashionWare path program, Mobile Apps Showdown, Last Device Standing, Robotics on the Runway as well as the KAPi Honors. The business also deals with various structures and also manages the Appreneur Scholar honors program for fledgling mobile entrepreneurs, along with the 10 Under 20: Young Innovators to View awards recognizing pupil STEAM developments in New york city City. For more details, check out www.LivinginDigitalTimes.com and also keep up with our latest news on Twitter, Linkedin as well as Facebook.

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