BlackBook: Twitter Might Actually Be Useful
As a lifelong hypochondriac and a fan of the movie Outbreak, it was with great interest that I read Jared Keller’s new piece on Twitter and disease control on The Atlantic‘s blog. For the attention deficient among you, here’s the gist: because complaining makes us feel alive, people tweet about being sick. When lots of people in the same location tweet similar symptoms and/or diagnoses, it can be posited that a particular illness – the flu, say – is spreading rapidly in said location. Therefore, looking at data from Twitter is an easy way to manage disease outbreak. This is good.
Blackbook Features Liza Minelli
There are few performers capable of captivating the world’s attention like Liza Minnelli. Some of that attention has been good (her Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards; her “Single Ladies” cameo earlier this year in Sex and the City 2), some of it bad (her stint at the Betty Ford Center in 1984; her serious bout of viral encephalitis in 2000), and some of it downright ugly (her nasty divorce from concert promoter David Gest in 2007, just five years after the three-ring circus that was their wedding).
How To Sell Luxury Goods
Sales of luxury goods are up across the board, thanks to soaring profits in recession-proof regions like China. But with the economy still in an extraordinarily unpredictable state, luxury brands are continually forced to ask the question of how to market high-end fashions in such uncertain times. Now, there’s a graduate program that intends to answer just that question.
Athletes’ Stock Rises In Fashion Industry
Forget plus size models. Female athletes, according to a story today in the New York Times, are pushing the boundaries of what the public perceives as ‘classic beauty.’ Guy Trebay pegs his argument on a long roster of muscular, yet cosmetic endorsement-ready sports stars–from Maria Sharapova and Mia Hamm to the Williams sisters. But a new face, that of women’s basketball player Brittney Griner, is apparently giving the cause even more steam.
“She is part of a slowly unfolding civilized response in the country to the slightly androgynous female,” a scholar tells the paper. “I can imagine a market for that,” Paul Rowland–a revered scout at the modeling agency, Women–adds of his potentially signing a gender-bending, yet conventionally “good-looking” female athlete such as Griner.
The Electric Cigarette
The great Mark Twain once wrote, “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.” It’s the perfect summation of the eternal struggle between a smoker and his cigarette, at once a loyal friend and two-faced bastard. But an even greater struggle that smokers face is against themselves. Read More
