Weekend Links
My puppy is teething and the clocks leapt forward overnight, depriving me of a precious hour of sleep, so the intro this week is bare minimum but the weekend reading batch is extra juicy to make up for it.
Jia Tolentina from the New Yorker tackles the recent Ozempic craze and how it may force society to confront the realities of the variety within the human body and that fatness and thinness may be more built in than the self-help industry would like us to be. She also tackles the lingering desire to be thin - a topic that I struggle with in all senses of the word.
NOT JUST GUYS, I TOO AM A HYPER STAN.
The most important fashion news to come out of the Oscars was the surprise retirement of Law Roach, a megastylist most famous for his partnership with Zendaya. Why did this happen and why does it matter? Mr. Roach gave an interview to The Cut which is scathing in its critiques of the styling industry and the relationships on which is operates. For further context, Tom and Lorenzo’s Pop Style Opinionfest podcast is an excellent listen.
In my civilian life, I work in communications and so spend most of my working time thinking about how messaging is developed and delivered. Hence my recent obsession with the leaps in AI capabilities - both where I think where the chatter is wildly overestimating where the technology is currently at, and where I’m worried that we are underestimating how the technology is going to be deployed and its impacts. (Horrifying new vectors of mis and disinformation is upon us.)
The rollback of abortion access is having exactly the negative ripple effects that activists warned us of. One that hit me close to home (as a Utah voter) was the news that an Idaho hospital closed its maternity because so many doctors had left the area citing difficulties in providing care. Meaning that in this area of Idaho is completely unserved by this level of care. Gee, hope no woman has any complication ever in pregnancy or delivery!
ProPublica is doing a good job on reporting on the rolling effects of the loss of abortion access, but this particular piece hits hard.
And speaking of, let’s talk about the onslaught of anti-trans media and legislation (along with its adjacent drag-banning or just generally queerphobic counterparts). If you have wondered why this particular culture war erupted “suddenly,” first of all you haven’t been paying attention, and secondly, it’s on purpose. A common rightwing talking point right now is that it is trans, nonbinary, and queer people who have suddenly “taken over” the culture - the invasion and dominance language being intentional to position them as “other” and threatening. But as is all too often the case, the reality is more complicated. Groups with vested interests have been coordinating legislative pushes and accompanying PR campaigns from the right to gin up this culture war. I get frustrated when my fellow leftists and progressives get baited by this into having the fight that the right wants to have (“pronouns are toxic,” “bathrooms are being invaded") rather than the actual we should be focused on: human rights and legal protections. But I also fall for the baiting because it’s not an accident that having failed on women’s rights and gay rights more broadly, the far right has selected trans people for their next scapegoat. They are the smallest demographic group in the LGBT community, the least well understood, and now the easiest to malign. But as a reminder, the goal of the most rightwing or hyper-ideological amongst those making this push is not just to legislate this one group. They are approaching the entire project through a very specific lens (sometimes religious but just as often nationalistic or both), that anything that is not heteronormative in the strictest sense, organised around patriarchal norms (and often plenty of racial or religious hierarchy thrown into the mix) must be at best forced underground and at worst eradicated.
Whew, okay. A gentler topic now, J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep.
Let me make a case for the Canonitas Spritz, which I discovered on holiday with X in Mallorca last year. But I would love to see what regional US homegrown options could be!
