#Judith Thurman, "Eye of the Needle," The New Yorker," March 29, 2021. - "[Dressmaker's] Lowe's driving ambition, she told Mike Douglas, as a guest on his talk show in 1964, was to prove that a Negro could become a major dress designer."
"Women of color have been dressing First Ladies at least since the 1861,when Mary Todd Lincoln hired Elizabeth Keelay as her personal [designer.]" Mary Todd Lincoln, like Jackie [Kennedy], was a Francophile and a clotheshorse."
"The American South has never been a bastion of modernity in fashion. Even in the North, chic women of Lowe's generation -- of of Jackie's -- looked to Paris."
"A black dressmaker could not get credit or rent a workplace in the downtown business district; her clients had to visit her in a segregated neighborhood."
#Ian Parker, "Fixer-Upper," The New Yorker," March 29, 2021. - "American cable-TV subscriptions peaked twenty years ago. The broader category of linear pay television -- cable and satellite combined -- peaked in 2009, when subscriptions were maintained by eighty-eight of American households."
"An hour of HGTV may cost about two hundred thousand dollars to make." "An increasing number of network's shows in recent years have centered on contests or celebrities. But he rest is renovation. The implication that the hosts are involved in day-to-day management is less authentic."
"HGTV's audience is still seventy per cent female, but according to Scott Feely, at 'High Noon,' there's evidence that scenes of demolition help 'help the men around.' " "According to Loren Ruch, ninety per cent of HGTV's renovations involve open floor plans." HGTV's primary value to its corporate parent lies for the moment in the "size of its library, which includes nineteen hundred episodes of 'House Hunters,' in its various formats."
#Patricia Marx, "Stand Up Straight!" The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Remarkably, I am not among the estimated eighty per cent of Americans who suffer from back troubles." "A study reported in the 'Annals of Internal Medicine' in 2017 found that subjects who interrupted their sitting every half hour reduced their chances of dying by fifty-five per cent." "A survey among seven hundred and seventy-eight software workers in lockdown last spring, found that shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain had doubled."
"Sander Gilman, a historian, said over ZOOM, in regard to 'Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture,' that he regards posture as a critical construct, a way to read an individual's social status, and 'a means for society to separate the 'primitive' from the 'advanced,' the 'ugly' from the 'beautiful,' and the 'ill' from the 'healthy.' "
"At Ellis Island, immigrants' spinal bumps and bows were thought to indicate moral weaknesses, and provided grounds for denying people entry into the country."
#Jelani Cobb, "The Battle for Georgia," The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Today, eighteen Fortune 500 companies have operations in Georgia, the same number as in Florida, a state with twice the population." "To the extent that there is an impediment to the leadership's plunging the state into its ugly past, it will not likely to be love of democracy or the Constitution. It will be for reverence of another piece of paper that embodies deeply held American values: the dollar bill."
#Carrie Battan, The New Yorker, March 29, 2021. - "Yarn shops, like bike or record shops, can be alienating to newcomers; patrons and employees sometimes act like members of an exclusive club who share the the language of obscure wool blends."
"The easiest type of hat to knit is a flat rectangle, folded and sewn together, which produces floppy corners that resemble cat ears. [Kat] Coyle, owner of 'Little Knittery,' knit three prototypes, and within a few days, her group had named it the Pussyhat, a reference to Trump's hot-mike moment with Billy Bush." "After Coyle posted the Pussyhat pattern to the site, [her group] worked with more than a hundred and seventy-five yarn shops around the world, which served as drop-off and pickup points for knitters and hat recipients.'
" 'Revelry,' which is often called the Facebook of knitting, has nine million accounts -- about a million of which are active every month." " 'Revelry' became the largest crochet-and -pattern database in the world."
"Knitting was also a tool in the war against society's great fear: idleness. Anyone yielding a pair of needles takes on an air of industry, and one newspaper writer during the Revolutionary War, extolled the 'Knot of Misses' busy at their needles... . where they exclude idleness from their solitary moments."
#Margaret Talbot, "Measure Twice," The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021. Home economics was a movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century with high ambitions." "Home economics offered a feminism palatable to non-feminists, a social-reform vision that highlighted personal habits. They promoted training in baby care on a utopian model, as in the practice houses, but for the most part did not agitate for shared or government-subsidized child care."
"As Danielle Dreilinger, author of 'The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live' (Norton) shows, these home economists had remarkable success. They created the seven food groups, they recommended daily allowances, and other approaches to virtuous eating." "Later, home ec collaborated cozily with the food industry, encouraging women to favor canned and frozen goods, and cake mixes, and coming up with recipes that provided convenience, and generated sales for their products."
"Women on farms worked, on average, between sixty-four and seventy hours a week, and this, along with bearing many children was killing them younger." "Takeout and technology have deskilled us. Young people leave school unprepared for adulting, clueless about laundry, primed to annoy one another when they cohabit with housemates or partners." "Th new banquets of food shows, and how-to videos tend to be clear on one thing: neither the cooking nor the comforting is women's work only."
#Maggie Doherty, "Adjunct Hell," The Nation, 5.17 - 24.2021. - " 'No Future' has become more of a lament than a rallying cry. The future is no longer something to protect or reject; it's something that's slowly being taken from children and adults alike. We're facing climate apocalypse, widening inequality, and a global pandemic. Is it any wonder that birthrates and rates of happiness are down in the United States, while rates of mortality and suicide have been rising? Can any of us imagine the future?"
After forecasting such a troublesome future, the author goes on to focus on the dire state of graduate and adjunct workers, but she still sees hope amid the despair. "Along with egregious working conditions, rage is fueling graduate and adjunct union drives across the country, one of the small signs of hope in a grim landscape of higher ed. The Service Employee International Union has organized academic workers at more than 60 campuses across the country. The United Auto Workers now represents over 8,000 graduate and adjunct workers nationwide."
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