The Role of Yik Yak in a Free Society

The horror stories are all over the Internet. Anonymous-social-media app Yik Yak tore a Connecticut high school apart. (Among the anonymous “gems”: “L. M. is affiliated with Al Qaeda.” “The cheer team couldn’t get uglier.” “K. is a slut.” “Nobody is taking H. to prom because nobody has a forklift.”) A high school in San Clemente, California was placed on lockdown after an anonymous bomb threat was posted on Yik Yak. Two teenagers in Mobile, Alabama were arrested after using the app to make threats about a campus shooting. Even an article in the Boston Globe titled “The Good News About Yik Yak” emphasized how teenagers are rejecting its dark side. 


It goes without saying that threats of cyberbullying and violence are reprehensible and need to addressed quickly and effectively. But let’s not forget that anonymous speech -- and that’s what Yik Yak and similar apps like Whisper and Secret encourage -- plays an important role in a free society. The United States was founded on it. Thomas Paine, the “Father of the American Revolution,” signed his influential pamphlet Common Sense as simply “Written by an Englishman” lest his identity became known and he was hanged for treason. The authors of the Federalist Papers, the key documents used to interpret the Constitution, published under the pseudonym “Publius.” The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the right to speak anonymously, on and off the Internet, is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, a right that extends to the Internet.


And, in fact, anonymity apps have brought positives along with the negatives. Not long ago, a post on Secret reported that Google had acquired the poster’s five-person company and had hired everyone but her. Later posts revealed that she was the only female at the company and had been there since it was founded. The thread became the talk of Silicon Valley, generating a lively debate about suppressed sexism in the start-up community. The poster’s ability to remain anonymous was key to this information coming out. She could stand up to power, speak without embarrassment, and avoid alienating potential employers who might take a dim view of her controversial statements. That’s exactly why the First Amendment protects anonymous speech, and that’s why the value of anonymity apps like Yik Yak shouldn’t be summarily dismissed.

The targets of anonymous speech often resort to the courts to try to unmask the speaker. The plaintiff will sue a fictitious “John Doe” and immediately serve a subpoena seeking to force the Internet service provider to give up the defendant’s name. In one typical case, an anonymous poster on a Yahoo! Finance message board took part in a heated debate about the company’s managers, including the aggrieved plaintiff. The defendant posted a message saying that a male executive had made a New Year’s resolution to perform oral sex on the plaintiff though she had “fat thighs, a fake medical degree, ‘queefs’ and ha[d] poor feminine hygiene.” The plaintiff sued and served a subpoena on Yahoo! seeking the poster’s identity. The court quashed the subpoena, concluding that the statement didn’t convey libelous facts, but instead was merely crude, satirical hyperbole uttered in the course of a heated online discussion. The outcome in this case was correct, but not inevitable. (As one commentator notes, most of these John Doe lawsuits are about censorship, not money). The point is that anonymous speech can be a good thing, and often there are powerful entities out there that want to stop it.

by Robert Rotstein, Boing Boing | Read more:
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Programming the Moral Robot

The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research is funding an effort, by scientists at Tufts, Brown, and RPI, to develop military robots capable of moral reasoning:

The ONR-funded project will first isolate essential elements of human moral competence through theoretical and empirical research. Based on the results, the team will develop formal frameworks for modeling human-level moral reasoning that can be verified. Next, it will implement corresponding mechanisms for moral competence in a computational architecture.

That sounds straightforward. But hidden in those three short sentences are, so far as I can make out, at least eight philosophical challenges of extraordinary complexity:

• Defining “human moral competence”
• Boiling that competence down to a set of isolated “essential elements”
• Designing a program of “theoretical and empirical research” that would lead to the identification of those elements
• Developing mathematical frameworks for explaining moral reasoning
• Translating those frameworks into formal models of moral reasoning
• “Verifying” the outputs of those models as truthful
• Embedding moral reasoning into computer algorithms
• Using those algorithms to control a robot operating autonomously in the world

Barring the negotiation of a worldwide ban, which seems unlikely for all sorts of reasons, military robots that make life-or-death decisions about human beings are coming (if they’re not already here). So efforts to program morality into robots are themselves now morally necessary. It’s highly unlikely, though, that the efforts will be successful — unless, that is, we choose to cheat on the definition of success.

Selmer Bringsjord, head of the Cognitive Science Department at RPI, and Naveen Govindarajulu, post-doctoral researcher working with him, are focused on how to engineer ethics into a robot so that moral logic is intrinsic to these artificial beings. Since the scientific community has yet to establish what constitutes morality in humans the challenge for Bringsjord and his team is severe.

We’re trying to reverse-engineer something that wasn’t engineered in the first place.

by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type |  Read more:

Image: Frankenstein

Machines v. Lawyers

Law schools are in crisis, facing their most substantial decline in enrollment in decades, if not in the history of legal education. Applications have fallen over 40 percent since 2004. The legal workplace is troubled, too. Benjamin Barton, of the University of Tennessee College of Law, has shown that attorneys in “small law,” such as solo practitioners, have been hurting for a decade. Attorney job growth has been flat; partner incomes at large firms have recently recovered from the economic downturn, but the going rate for associates, even at the best firms, has stagnated since 2007.

Some observers, not implausibly, blame the recession for these developments. But the plight of legal education and of the attorney workplace is also a harbinger of a looming transformation in the legal profession. Law is, in effect, an information technology—a code that regulates social life. And as the machinery of information technology grows exponentially in power, the legal profession faces a great disruption not unlike that already experienced by journalism, which has seen employment drop by about a third and the market value of newspapers devastated. The effects on law will take longer to play themselves out, but they will likely be even greater because of the central role that lawyers play in public life.

The growing role of machine intelligence will create new competition in the legal profession and reduce the incomes of many lawyers. The job category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “other legal services”—which includes the use of technology to help perform legal tasks—has already been surging, over 7 percent per year from 1999 to 2010. As a consequence, the law-school crisis will deepen, forcing some schools to close and others to reduce tuitions. While lawyers and law professors may mourn the loss of more lucrative professional opportunities, consumers of modest means will enjoy access to previously cost-prohibitive services.

A decline in the clout of law schools and lawyers could have potentially broader political effects. For the last half-century, many law professors and lawyers have pressed for more government intervention in the economy. This isn’t surprising. Lawyers in the modern regulatory state reap rewards from big government because their expertise is needed to understand and comply with (or exploit) complicated and ever-changing rules. In contrast, the entrepreneurs and innovators driving our computational revolution benefit more from a stable regulatory regime and limited government. As they replace lawyers in influence, they’re likely to shape a politics more friendly to markets and less so to regulation. (...)

Discovering information, finding precedents, drafting documents and briefs, and predicting the outcomes of lawsuits—these tasks encompass the bulk of legal practice. The rise of machine intelligence will therefore disrupt and transform the legal profession.

by John O. McGinnis, City Journal |  Read more:

Image: Arnold Roth

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Paper Was Toast

Our eyes tell us that the words and pictures on a screen are pretty much identical to the words and pictures on a piece of paper. But our eyes lie. What we’re learning now is that reading is a bodily activity. We take in information the way we experience the world — as much with our sense of touch as with our sense of sight. Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects, a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols of things.

via: The eunuch’s children

Angelina Jolie’s Perfect Game

Most of us don’t know a life before People magazine. It was started in 1974 as a spin-off of the “People” section in Time magazine, and with the heft of Time Inc. behind it, it enjoyed one of the most successful launches in publishing history. And in the 40 years since its launch, it’s become a publishing juggernaut.

People has dominated a category of “personality journalism” that it created, telling stories, as its first editorial proclaimed, about “the active personalities of our time — in all fields.” Its success sparked dozens of copycats: USA Today, Entertainment Tonight, and one, founded in 1978, funded by the New York Times Company. It was called…Us Magazine.

Over the next decade, the magazine would switch hands several times before Publisher Jann Wenner, best known as the wunderkind responsible for Rolling Stone, took full control in 1989. He experimented with different formats, but by 1999, the magazine was losing $10 million a year, known in the trades as “Wenner’s folly.”

Until, that is, Wenner made the decision to funnel $50 million into a complete redesign and, in 2002, hired Bonnie Fuller as editor-in-chief, notorious for her sensational yet tremendously successful tenure at Cosmopolitan and Glamour. Fuller — and her successor, Janice Min — popularized a feature that we joke about today, but one that had tremendous ramifications on the industry at large, which, as you’ll soon see, dictated the coverage of Pitt and Jolie.

That feature was “Stars: They’re Just Like Us.” You’ve almost certainly seen it, or seen it satirized, but what it did was take photos of stars doing mundane activities — pumping gas, going to the grocery store — and captioned them to suggest that stars are, in fact, just like us. As I highlighted earlier, it’s nothing new, ideologically, but it was a brilliant business move. Because, as Fuller put it, “people don’t like to read,” she flooded the magazines pages with photos — but the cheapest kind available, namely, paparazzi photos of celebrities doing unremarkable things.

Until the late ‘90s, paparazzi had been a rarified vocation. Unless contracted to a specific agency, an individual paparazzo had to bear the cost of an expensive camera, miles of film, development, and distribution. But with the rise of digital technologies at the turn of the millennium, it had become increasingly easy — and cheap — to track a celebrity’s quotidian activities. Anyone with a digital camera and an internet connection could take and sell unauthorized photos of celebrities. The number of paparazzi grew from a “handful” in 1995 to 80 in 2004 and 150 in 2005. (...)

But as Us began to slowly encroach on People’s circulation and advertising dollars, the two began to engage in massive bidding wars over exclusive rights to various photos. With Time Inc. behind it, People was able to offer huge amounts of money for all types of photos, even ones it did not plan to use. For example, People spent $75,000 for a photo of Jennifer Lopez reading Us Weekly, simply to prevent Us from publishing the photo. People was driving up prices, hoping to shut out other magazines with smaller operating budgets from scooping them on any story, no matter how small.

People would always have more buying power, but Us relied on its wiles, as evidenced by the magazine’s scoop on the first photos of the Pitt-Jolie romance. People believed it had secured the rights at $320,000, and Us countered with an offer of $500,000, but only if the agency would sign a contract immediately, without going back to People.

People tried to retaliate with a $1 million offer, but the deal was done, and the magazine had to watch as Us took the glory. When, a year later, the bidding began for the first images of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, People refused to be outbid by Us, even if it meant paying a startling $4.1 million, which became a story in and of itself, especially when Jolie and Pitt turned around and donated that money to African charities.

Throughout this period, gossip blogs were gradually becoming a regular fixture — Perez Hilton, most notoriously, but also Just Jared, The Superficial, Go Fug Yourself, Oh No They Didn’t, and Lainey Gossip — all of which exploited the newly massive stream of digital paparazzi photos. Us and People provided weekly updates, but the blogs helped keep the Brangelina narrative in constant circulation, inundating web users with daily, even hourly updates.

The transformation of Pitt and Jolie’s “scandal” to one of “happy global family” could not have happened, at least not with the efficiency and clarity that it did, if not for the seismic changes in the gossip industry taking place at the same time. Indeed, the successful navigation of the potential scandal of their relationship could have been a fluke — if not for the masterful negotiation of the decade of Brangelina publicity to come.

Looking back, the Brangelina publicity strategy is deceptively simple. In fact, it’s a model of the strategy that has subconsciously guided star production for the last hundred years. More specifically, that the star should be at once ordinary and extraordinary, “just like us” and absolutely nothing like us. Gloria Swanson is the most glamorous star in the world — who loves to make dinner for her children. Paul Newman is the most handsome man in Hollywood — whose favorite pastime is making breakfast in his socks and loafers.

Jolie’s post-2005 image took the ordinary — she was a working mom trying to make her relationship work — and not only amplified it, but infused it with the rhetoric and imagery of globalism and liberalism. She’s not just a mom, but a mom of six. Instead of teaching her kids tolerance, she creates a family unit that engenders it; instead of reading books on kindness and generosity, she models it all over the globe. As for her partner, he isn’t just handsome — he’s the Sexiest Man Alive. And she doesn’t just have a job; instead, her job is being the most important — and influential — actress in the world.

Her image was built on the infrastructure of the status quo — a straight, white, doting mother engaged in a long-term monogamous relationship — but made just extraordinary enough to truly entice but never offend. The line between the tantalizing and the scandalizing is notoriously difficult to tread (just ask Kanye), but Jolie was able to negotiate it via two tactics: First, and most obviously, she accumulated (or, more generously, adopted and gave birth to) a dynamic group of children who were beautiful to observe; second, she figured out how to talk about her personal life in a way that seemed confessional while, in truth, revealing very little; and third, she exploited the desire for inside access into control of that access.

by Anne Helen Petersen, Buzz Feed |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Chrissie White
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Fashion Rio spring/summer 2014 collections
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The Shawshank Residuals

Bob Gunton is a character actor with 125 credits to his name, including several seasons of "24" and "Desperate Housewives" and a host of movie roles in films such as the Oscar-winning "Argo." Vaguely familiar faces like his are common in the Los Angeles area where he lives, and nobody pays much attention. Many of his roles have been forgotten.

But every day, the 68-year-old actor says, he hears the whispers—from cabdrivers, waiters, the new bag boy at his neighborhood supermarket: "That's the warden in 'Shawshank.' "

He also still gets residual payments—not huge, but steady, close to six figures by the film's 10th anniversary in 2004. Since then, he has continued to get "a very substantial income" long past the age when residuals usually dry up.

"I suspect my daughter, years from now, will still be getting checks," he said.

"Shawshank" was an underwhelming box-office performer when it hit theaters 20 years ago this September, but then it began to redeem itself, finding an audience on home video and later becoming a fixture on cable TV.

The film has taken a near-mystical hold on viewers that shows no sign of abating. Steven Spielberg once told the film's writer-director Frank Darabont that he had made "a chewing-gum movie—if you step on it, it sticks to your shoe," says Mr. Darabont, who went on to create "The Walking Dead" for AMC.

The movie's enduring popularity manifests itself in ways big and small. "Shawshank" for years has been rated by users of imdb.com as the best movie of all time (the first two "Godfather" films are second and third). On a Facebook page dedicated to the film, fans show off tattoos of quotes, sites and the rock hammer Andy, played by Tim Robbins, used to tunnel out of prison. Type "370,000" into a Google search and the site auto-completes it with "in 1966." Andy escapes in 1966 with $370,000 of the warden's ill-gotten gains. The small Ohio city where it was filmed is a tourist attraction.

In the days when videocassettes mattered, "Shawshank" was the top rental of 1995. On television, as cable grew, it has consistently been among the most-aired movies.

In a shifting Hollywood landscape, film libraries increasingly are the lifeblood of studios. "Shawshank's" enduring appeal on television has made it more important than ever—a reliable annuity to help smooth the inevitable bumps in a hit-or-miss box-office business. When studios sell a package of films—many of them stinkers—a "Shawshank" acts as a much-needed locomotive to drag the others behind it.

"It's an incredible moneymaking asset that continues to resonate with viewers," said Jeff Baker, executive vice president and general manager of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment theatrical catalog.

Warner Bros. wouldn't say how much money it has gleaned from "Shawshank," one of 6,000 feature films in a library that last year helped generate $1.5 billion in licensing fees from television, plus an additional $2.2 billion from home video and electronic delivery, according to SEC filings. But it's on the shortlist of films including "The Wizard of Oz," "A Christmas Story" and "Caddyshack" that drive much of the library's value, current and former Warner Bros. executives say.

by Russell Adams, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection

Frank Lloyd Wright Tried to Solve the City

Frank Lloyd Wright hated cities. He thought that they were cramped and crowded, stupidly designed, or, more often, built without any sense of design at all. He once wrote, “To look at the plan of a great City is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor.” Wright was always looking for a way to cure the cancer of the city. For him, the central problem was that cities lacked essential elements like space, air, light, and silence. Looking at the congestion and overcrowding of New York City, he lamented, “The whole city is in agony.”

A show currently at the Museum of Modern Art—“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal”—documents Wright’s attempts to fix the problem of the city. As it turns out, Wright wavered on the matter. Sometimes he favored urban density. Other times he dreamed a suburban or rural fantasy. (...)

The subtitle of the MOMA show—“Density vs. Dispersal”—suggests a dilemma, a choice. Yet the more you look at Wright’s plans—mile-high skyscrapers on the one hand, meticulously designed, spread-out, semi-rural communities on the other—the more you realize that Wright wasn’t conflicted about density versus dispersal at all. These were just two versions of the same impulse to escape. Wright was a man saying, “Get me the hell out of here.” Sometimes he wanted to go up. Sometimes he wanted to go out. If he pushed hard enough, upward or outward, Wright thought that he could find enough space for us to fix the dehumanizing problems of the city.

Wright spent his early childhood in a place he called “the Valley,” in Ixonia, Wisconsin. The Valley, Wright wrote in his 1932 autobiography, was “lovable,” “lying fertile between two ranges of diversified soft hills, with a third ridge intruding and dividing it in two smaller valleys at the upper end.” There were natural lines of demarcation between different kinds of terrain. Areas of bare land were set apart from concentrations of vegetable growth. Little houses were tucked in groves of trees here and there, along lanes “worm-fenced with oak-rails split in the hillside forests.” A root house was “partially dug into the ground and roofed with a sloping mound of grass-covered earth.” In short, there was room for each thing to be just what it needed to be.

The Valley made such an impression on Wright’s sensibilities that he created a code that would make modern cities more like the Valley. He wrote plans and rulebooks for how skyscrapers should be built and cities designed, trying to find the right amount of space between structures and over all. For Wright, implicit rules for “proper spacing” were simply true and universal. They were cosmic rules, written into the land from time immemorial. As an architect and urban planner, Wright’s job was simply to translate these rules into plans for the building of structures and cities.

In this way, Broadacre City makes a very specific kind of sense. Horizontal “spread” would leave room for parks, for personal space, for residential areas, for open vistas, and for light and air. Wright’s vertical ambitions are a little harder to understand. How would towering skyscrapers holding a hundred thousand people create a sense of freedom and space? The answer is in the context. The mile-high Illinois is not a building that stands alone. It makes space in the city. It allows for the other buildings to find their own height, even to be small. That’s the wonder of Wright’s city concepts. He envisioned his incredible urban structures as vertical “spreaders,” just as he envisioned his planned communities like Broadacre City to be horizontal spreaders, giving different aspects of a community room to exist.

by Morgan Meis, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Frank Lloyd Wright

Butterfly. Sacto. CA. 2014.
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Amazon Is Killing My Sex Life

I sat across from him and listened. He was trim, tall, bearded (as they all seem to be), a recent transplant, having only lived in Seattle for a year or so and worked at a start-up, after burning out at Amazon (as they all seem to have). He rode his bike around town; he had good taste in food and wine; and he lived across the street from where we were meeting. He was a software engineer or did something in tech (as they all did). And he was utterly unmemorable.

I don’t think he asked me a single question about myself. Our date—if you call these impromptu Internet meetings, dates—lasted an hour. It felt more like a job interview, but not the way a date is supposed to be a job interview. There was no grilling about where you were from and what your family was like and what you were looking for.

No, I spent a half hour or more listening to him talk about his job. Since I am not in the tech industry, I don’t understand any of it. It was all job speak—the type of language ladder-climbers use; it was the kind of talk that shuts vaginas down cold.

I hadn’t been out of the house all day, I work from home and I see no people except in a computer monitor, so human company, any kind really, was necessary. The restaurant was about to close and we had to go elsewhere or part ways. Even though I was bored, I wasn’t ready to go home, and I wanted to get a second drink. He offered wine back at his house and I said no. He was good-looking enough, but I wasn’t going to be able to get it up for a boring tech dude. And my city, Seattle, like San Francisco is lousy with them.

As technologist and writer, Jeff Reifman, pointed out in a post titled You’ve Got Male: Amazon’s Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene, Amazon, which is located less than a mile from my house, has had a huge, awful impact on Seattle’s dating scene. He estimated that in the 25–44 age group, Seattle “has 119 single men for every 100 single women, slightly better than San Francisco at 121—but equal if you add in the impact from nearby Bellevue, which is an awful 144.”

Many of those men are coming here for Amazon: Reifman estimated that Amazon had hired 15,026 new employees since April 2010. These guys—and as Reifman pointed it out, it’s very nearly always guys (75 percent of Amazon’s workforce is made up of dudes!)—are making $80K or more a year for their second or third job out of college, and their presence was driving the rents up in Seattle to near New York City numbers.

But Reifman’s post confirmed that as Amazon grows, the number of (boring) men grows too. The gender disparity is bad enough in San Francisco that one company, The Dating Ring, has resorted to flying women into San Fran from other cities.

Hold the Champagne, girls.

by Tricia Romano, Dame |  Read more:

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@HiddenCash

[ed. I love this... a red flashing "FAIL" button on so many levels (like crabs digging in the sand for a few discarded scraps). Just silly amusement for another 1 percent asshole.]

The sun was out as usual in southern California this weekend but, even so, one particular stretch of Hermosa Beach in south Los Angeles was unusually busy for a lunchtime on Saturday. Most of the beachgoers weren’t surfers or sunbathers, however, but treasure-hunters on the trail of free money, left by the anonymous benefactor behind the Twitter feed @HiddenCash.

A similar sight greeted visitors to the Empire shopping centre in Burbank on Friday evening, after @HiddenCash secreted three envelopes filled with dollar bills in the area. Reports suggested hundreds swarmed the mall, stopping traffic, clambering over a bus stop and rustling frantically in the bushes until the money was found. One man found $135 (£80) outside a restaurant, another got $200 from a rubbish bin, and a 14-year-old girl walked away with $210 pulled from a flower bed.

On Friday he hinted that the latest location “sounds like where a robin or eagle might keep their money”. A bird-bank? Yes, almost: Burbank. After the cash is found, he retweets photographs of the lucky recipients to his followers, of which he now has at least 410,000.

Each envelope or stuffed bird contains a relatively modest amount of cash, usually somewhere between $100 and $250, but that hasn’t prevented Californians travelling tens of miles to join the hunt. @HiddenCash has described himself as between 35 and 45, and a lucky member of the wealthiest “1 per cent” of America

The furtive philanthropist encourages those who find the cash to share it, calling the game an “anonymous social experiment for good”. In a statement, he said, “There really is no agenda here – not political, not business, not religious – other than bringing people together in a positive way and bringing a smile to people’s faces.” He added: “I’ve made millions of dollars the last few years, more than I ever imagined, and yet many friends of mine, and people who work for me, cannot afford to buy a modest home. This is my way of giving back to the community and also having fun.”

by Tim Walker, The Independent |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

You’re Right, I Didn’t Eat That

There are a number of euphemisms for female thinness that do not require a man to make the impolite admission of his exclusive attraction to women with very little body fat. Though “active” and “full of energy” make respectable showings, they are a distance second and third from “a woman who takes care of herself.” It seems a benign enough request, but one quickly learns that this man is not especially concerned that she has regularly scheduled self-care sessions like time with friends or spa days with a good book. He isn’t asking that her household finances be in order and that she be self-actualized. He is asking her to be thin. When he says “herself,” he means “her body.”

I am not especially bothered by men who desire thin women. They are just as susceptible to messages that these are the women that they should find most attractive as women are to messages that they should look like them. The more troubling kind of man has a caveat about a woman’s thinness. She must not be “obsessed” or “overly concerned” with it. Or at least not visibly so. She mustn’t always order salads or freak out when she doesn’t make it to the gym. Watching her eat a cheeseburger—or better yet, a steak—even oddly enthralls him. (I’m sure there’s a Freudian explanation about the appeal of watching big things go into small ones for that but I haven’t found it yet.) An Instagram trend of thin women posing with calorie-dense foods that functions partly to appeal to this desire has even made headlines recently as the “You Did Not Eat That” account has gained popularity. But the impulse to pretend is understandable. For a thin woman to betray the reality of her diet and regimen for staying that way would spoil the fantasy of a woman who is preternaturally inclined to her size rather than personally preoccupied by it.

Men seeking this woman are not seeking a carefree attitude as much as they are seeking a biological anomaly. For the majority of women, being thin is something with which she must be overly concerned in order to achieve and maintain it. Being effortlessly thin is no more achievable through a charmingly carefree attitude than becoming green-eyed or double-jointed. And while naturally thin women exist, of course, their numbers cannot keep pace with the number of men that desire them. And so we must be overly concerned as quietly as possible. (...)

And though I never had trouble getting a respectable amount of romantic attention, at a size 0 it rushed in at such a volume and with such enthusiasm that it was difficult not to be taken aback. I always thought it was a melodramatic cliché when thin women said that the more they disappeared, the more visible they became, but it was now undeniable. Male acquaintances suddenly wanted to spend more alone time together. Compliments during sexual encounters that were once full of the word “beautiful” became dominated by mesmerized declarations about me being so “little” and “tiny.” Men suddenly felt comfortable telling mean-spirited jokes about overweight women and lamenting how poorly other women took care of themselves. I’d only dropped a couple of sizes but I was in an entirely new country.

Covert concern about my body is easy to maintain in the dating phase of relationships. Men will touch a particularly small or toned part of me and remark, “Wow, you must work out.” Upon confirmation that I do, the most frequent reply is, “So what do you do, yoga?” It is generally safe to assume that such men have never practiced yoga. Yoga, in the minds of many straight men, is a placeholder for light but effective exercise done primarily by women. It is a sanitary practice, a form of exercise uncontaminated by sweat or gender-neutral footwear. Something that pretty girls do three times a week in flattering pants. But while the benefits of yoga are tremendous, it cannot turn overweight or average bodies into tiny ones. Real yoga—as opposed to cardio routines that borrow heavily from it—cannot create the calorie deficits required to be thin thin. Real thinness requires something much more brutal.

by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Alana Massey

The Full-Bush Brazilian

My bikini-waxer, Jola, recently told me about a pubic-grooming configuration I had not heard of, which patrons of her Williamsburg salon have lately been requesting. The “full-bush Brazilian,” as we agreed to call it, involves removing the hair from the labia and butt crack (in accordance with Brazilian-waxing tradition) while leaving everything on top fully grown. It’s the exact opposite of non-Brazilian bikini waxes, which shape the hair on the pubic mound but leave the undercarriage untouched.

Who gets the full-bush Brazilian? I asked this of Jola Borzdynski as I lay without pants atop a sheet of paper on a tiny bed at her salon, Audrey. “Girls with hippie boyfriends,” she said. “Hippies with porny sex lives, who need to be hairless for licking,” I concluded. As Jola proceeded to tear 90 percent of my pubic hair out by the roots, I winced and contemplated the wisdom of being a hippie in the front of your crotch and a porn star in the back.

“It’s the normcore of pubes,” my friend Megan said over drinks later that night. “Choosing an anti-grooming appearance, while still grooming pretty carefully, deep down. Literally.” After years of striving for a hairless-Barbie-doll-crotch ideal, prominent women are now rejecting the porny obviousness of total bareness. Hairiness is stylish: Even American Apparel mannequins are sporting full bush these days. As Amanda Hess wrote late last year in T, “there’s something refreshingly retro, delightfully expressive and confidently grown-up in getting back to nature.” For the generation of women who came of age when bare erogenous zones were the norm, the full-bush Brazilian caters simultaneously to the defiance of allowing your pubes to reach their full potential, and the sexual expectations of the modern hairless hookup. The full-bush Brazilian is “having it all,” with pubes.

by Maureen O'Connor, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Roy Lichtenstein, Blue Grapes 1972
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