Year: 2013

In an excerpt from The Baby Chase: How Surrogacy Is Transforming the American Family, Leslie Morgan Steiner has the answer:

The typical profile runs like this: married, Christian, middle class, with two to three biological children, working a part-time job, living in a small town or suburb rather than a big city, with a degree of college education but usually without a college degree. Women who shop at Wal-Mart and Costco, not Whole Foods and Neiman-Marcus. In the United States, statistics show that surrogates fall into the average household income category of under $60,000. About 15 to 20 percent are military wives. Some are single women. Those who are married have husbands who support paid surrogacy; surrogacy is obviously not something you can hide, or withstand with a spouse who is not on board emotionally.

She also notes some “quirks” in the system:

There are very few Jewish surrogates and almost zero Jewish egg donors. … Daughters of surrogates frequently decide to be surrogates themselves; surrogacy can become a family tradition. Gay men are the favorite clients of many surrogate moms; one emotional complication is removed from the tricky relationship, because the gay intended parents don’t suffer the understandable jealousy/inferiority issues that can plague infertile intended mothers.

Kat Stoeffel zooms in on the financial aspects of surrogacy:

No one gets into the surrogate parenting business for the money – for one thing, the agencies won’t allow it. … But if one were to get into it for the money, hypothetically speaking, one would probably be interested to know that surrogates do not pay taxes on the payments from intended parents, “which are technically for pain and suffering incurred, not for carrying a baby,” and run $20,000 to $30,000 a pregnancy, not counting good karma.

Daven Hiskey presents the above video, which explores (and dispels) some of the myths about how we refer to the day after Thanksgiving:

“Black Friday” as a name for the day after Thanksgiving was coined by police officers in New England. One of the earliest documented references of this was in December of 1961, where Denny Griswold of Public Relations News stated: “in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by… merchants with their Deputy City Representative… He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday.” (Referring to the traffic and number of accidents.) “Big Friday” never caught on, but over the next decade, more and more references can be found in various newspaper archives of this particular Friday being called “Black Friday” for this reason.

In the 1980s as the name’s popularity spread throughout the United States, a new origin theory popped up, often touted by the media, that most retailers operated at a financial loss for the majority of the year and Black Friday was named such because it was the day of the year when the retailers would finally see a profit, moving out of the red and into the black.

This simply isn’t true. While there are some retailers that depend on the Christmas season’s revenue to make a profit for the year, most see profits every quarter based on the quarterly SEC filings of major retailers in the United States. There are also no documented references to this potential origin predating November of 1981.

John Greenya is concerned about the affordability of youth sports:

An examination of who plays youth sports from ESPN The Magazine finds that while there may be 21.5 million kids between age six and 17 playing on a team, including teams at schools, the earliest participants come from upper-income families. “We also see starkly what drives the very earliest action: money,” wrote Bruce Kelley and Carl Carchia. “The biggest indicator of whether kids start young, [sports researcher Don] Sabo found, is whether their parents have a household income of $100,000 or more.” Kids from low-income families are the least likely to be on multiple teams.

And disturbingly, 3.5 million kids are expected to lose school sports by 2020, especially in financially strapped states like California and Florida and big inner cities: “Living in poor corners of cities culls even more kids from sports. Nationwide, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, only a quarter of eighth- to 12th-graders enrolled in the poorest schools played school sports.”

Tom Jacobs surveys a set of experiments suggesting that we buy more when we’re warm:

[R]esearchers manipulated the temperature in the room where the study was conducted, so it was either four degrees Celsius above or below the standard temperature of 22 degrees (72 degrees Fahrenheit). The 109 participants, all university students, filled out a form for three to four minutes to acclimate to the environment. They then looked at 11 images of “different target products that college students typically consume,” and asked how much they were willing to pay for each.

Those in the warm room were willing to pay more for nine of the 11 products. Although participants rated the room as equally comfortable on the warm and cool settings, “ambient warm temperature increased product valuation over a cool temperature by 10.4 percent,” [researcher Yonat] Zwebner and her colleagues report. Further experiments confirmed these results and indicated a likely mechanism behind this dynamic: “Physical warmth induces emotional warmth, which generates greater positive reactions.”

So don’t be surprised if shop owners keep things nice and cozy this holiday season: It’s good for business. And if you’re prone to impulse buying, be especially careful on warm days. That product that seemed overpriced a few days earlier may suddenly look like a bargain.

Proud to #DAREMIGHTYTHINGS at @usa_authentic‘s fall 2013 launch pic.twitter.com/4lfla0fQu7

— Authentic Apparel (@usa_authentic) November 21, 2013

Catherine Traywick is unfazed by the Army’s recent foray into fashion licensing, arguing that the launch of Authentic Apparel “underscores both the public’s boundless appetite for military-inspired garb and the surprising extent to which military accoutrement has already been absorbed into popular culture”:

Wristwatches, for example, were a military tool during World War I, when the U.S. Army used them to synchronize precision attacks (they were easier to consult than the more ubiquitous pocket watches). Similarly, RayBan aviators were designed for U.S. Air Force pilots in the 1930s, as a way to prevent headaches and altitude sickness caused by sun glare. They became a household a name two decades later, when Hollywood’s leading men adopted them as an accessory. Trench coats were developed for the British Army in the 19th century, and took their name from the grimy trenches in which soldiers fought and died during World War I. Even the iconic Burberry trench has military roots: In 1901, Thomas Burberry submitted to the British War Office an officer’s raincoat design made with his own proprietary water-resistant fabric.

And khakis, now a staple of casual menswear, were a product of colonial India. In 1846, a British district officer in charge of a troop in Peshawar realized that the soldiers’ white cotton uniforms proved easy targets for snipers. So, his troops began dying their uniform with tea (or mud, depending on whom you ask), to better blend in with their surroundings. Ten years later, the Magistrate of Meerut, a city in Utter Pradesh, adapted this discovery and formed the Khaki Risala, or “Dusty Squadron.” Since then, khaki has trickled down to every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Sarah Wanenchak thinks meme-speak is revitalizing the language:

[O]ne of the things I love about it is that what stuffy English teachers would be horrified by has become a powerful, interesting, nuanced style of writing unto itself, homegrown on the internets.  I recall – and I imagine you do as well – all the panic a while back (a lot of which remains) about how communication on the web and via text message was going to destroy language skills in those damn kids with the clothes and the hair, that it was going to ruin people’s ability to communicate coherently at all. But here we are, and “bad” English is doing a very important job in a way that really didn’t exist before. 

A recent and pretty terrific article on The Atlantic’s site deals with the evolving grammatical conventions around the use of “because”, the “prepositional because”. Or in other words, “because” is changing because internet. That’s also “bad” English. And it’s awesome, because language.

I can clearly only speak about English here – something I regret – and I would love to know if other languages on the web are going through similar processes. Mostly I’m just pleased that this is getting attention, and I want to see it get more. Things like this help erode the intensely silly idea that cultural change that occurs via the web is somehow illegitimate, or stupid, or not worth paying attention to at all.

Recent Dish on the subject here.

(Homage to National Novel Writing Month [NaNoWriMo] by Flickr user Mpclemens)

Doug Bierend spotlights the work of photographer Thomas Jackson:

In Emergent Behavior … Jackson coaxes scores of disposable objects like keg cups, cheeseballs, glow sticks and Post-it notes into persuasively organic formations. The vast variety of ways that swarms manifest in the world — in the animal kingdom, robotics, biology — affords Jackson a lot of conceptual material to work with. “It gives me an ability to find inspiration in a focused way,” he says. “I can look at photographs of schools of fish, or flocks of birds, or data swarms, or microorganisms or whatever and really get ideas from that.”

The concept coalesced for Jackson after working with the first two photos of the series — the first portraying shards of broken wooden palettes conspiring to jump over a city sidewalk, the second a matrix of leaves hovering among the trees in an upstate New York forest. “I spent a lot of time staring at them and I realized, these are swarms,” he says. “I arrived at my theme a little bit into the project, sort of like the novelist who doesn’t know where his story is going to go — he just starts writing.”

(Photo by Thomas Jackson)