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☆ Barbie, Nike Air, Cheetos, Mario: Why Movies Are All About Brands Now
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-20 | by ( Jared Holst | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

But the release of half a dozen movies about brands — Barbie, Flamin' Hot Cheetos, Tetris, Nike Air, BlackBerry, and Beanie Babies — in six months isn't just the result of Hollywood groupthink and coincidence. But just as these brand-centric movies ring hollow, so does the gig economy they're catering to. While the plot isn't about the making of Barbie, Barbie and Ken do step outside Barbie Land to peek behind the curtains of their creation.) As more companies look to gig workers to replace full-time jobs, more workers take up gig work. As the economy continues to emphasize the importance of self-branding through gig work, brand movies will continue to resonate.

Persons: Ryan, — Barbie, Flamin, isn't, Barbie, doggedly, Zach Galifianakis, Ty Warner, Ken, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Ben Affleck, —, it's, hadn't, they'd, it'd, Jared Holst, Jared Organizations: Nike Air, BlackBerry, Hollywood, Hulu, Mattel, Federal Trade Commission, Amazon, Economic, Institute, Brands Locations: American, New York, Brooklyn

☆ ‘Earth Mama’ Review: A Mother Dreams Inside a Brutal System
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Manohla Dargis | More About Manohla Dargis | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Leaf eases you into the movie, which centers on Gia (a lovely Tia Nomore), a pregnant single mother in recovery with two kids in foster care. In tight, precise scenes, Leaf sketches in Gia’s life, its uncertain horizons and crushing limitations. Mostly, Gia struggles to get her kids back, a time-consuming process that involves a reunification program in which she’s constantly monitored. The program’s demands mean that she can’t work more hours, but because she can’t work more, she’s behind in child-support payments, which in turn earns her a scolding from her case worker. If the system seems rigged for Gia to fail, it’s because, Leaf suggests, it is.

Persons: ”, I’ve, Tia Nomore, Gia, she’s, Jody Lee Lipes, Miss Carmen, Erika Alexander, Bokeem Woodbine, Kamaya Jones, Sharon Duncan, Brewster, Keta Price Locations: Gia, Bay

☆ To Make Art She Believed In, a Woman Needed to Live on Her Own
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-08 | by ( Anna Kodé | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When Roxana Kadyrova first moved to New York at age 24 nearly a decade ago, she felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Coming from Moscow, she’d always enjoyed the thrill of being in a new place all on her own, but this time was different. And in this city where everybody’s on top of each other, you’re just constantly living under the weight of it,” said Ms. Kadyrova, 34, an artist. To make the work she wanted to make, Ms. Kadyrova said, she needed to be on her own and once again feel that sense of not being tied down to anyone or anything. She needed precarity.

☆ America's broken housing market is making millennials and Gen Z lonelier
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( Eliza Relman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Loneliness is a perceived lack of connection — the discrepancy between the social connection someone has and the connection they want. Holt-Lunstad's widely-cited research has found that loneliness and social isolation have health impacts comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. People who live in communities with more walkable neighborhoods, shared space, greenery, and diverse types of housing, feel more socially connected and less lonely. In her work, Peavey has come up with six design strategies for creating third spaces — places that aren't home, work, or school — to facilitate social connection. But neighborhoods need to be dense and walkable in order for people to easily access these places because cars and physical distance get in the way.

Solari wasn't the only American to veer wildly between frugality and all-out spending sprees during the pandemic. In particular, younger people — Gen Z and millennials — have seen the early parts of their careers and critical years of their financial lives defined by the shifting sands of the pandemic economy. The strange pandemic-savings paradoxThe pandemic recession did not actually mean people had no money. The Fed found that the top quartile of earners added nearly $1.5 trillion to their savings through spending reductions, even as the pandemic consumed millennials and Gen Z's savings. If the mantra of the pandemic recession was giving everyday Americans money, the reaction is now to yank that back.

☆ In Nicole Chung’s memoir, "A Living Remedy," she blames U.S. health care for her parents' early death
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-06 | by ( Annie Nova | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

In author Nicole Chung's new memoir, "A Living Remedy," she tells the story of watching both her parents die in the span of two years. Chung blames the country's broken health-care system, at least in part, for the fact that her father died at 67, and her mother at 68. I spoke with Chung about her grief and the state of American health care. He knew he was getting sicker, but my parents just didn't have a way to pay for the extensive care he needed. NC: After my father died, I spent months trying to figure out why I was so enraged.

☆ Deel Speed: The inside story of a $12 billion HR startup's breakneck growth
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-20 | by ( Rob Price | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +32 min

Insider spoke with more than 30 current or former Deel workers about the HR company's extraordinary rise, and the unconventional tactics that made it possible. "I think if you talk to anyone, they would say that Alex is the face but all decisions run through Phillipe," one former Deel worker told Insider. "They lose every employment and labor protection," Valerio De Stefano, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, said of independent contractors. Alex Bouaziz, Deel on Centre Stage during day two of Collision 2022 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada. The company didn't have an internal human-resources team until sometime in 2021, by which point it had grown to hundreds of people.

☆ This Isn't What Millennial Middle Age Was Supposed to Look Like - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +25 min

Things have been difficult for her family, she says, but one thing she isn’t worried about: a midlife crisis, looming just over the horizon. One of our questions was about whether they had experienced a midlife crisis and how they would define the term. Many people said they felt they couldn’t be having a midlife crisis, because there was no bourgeois numbness to rebel against. “Who has midlife crisis money?”The traditional midlife crisis, as presented in popular culture, at least, unfolds amid suburban ennui. We just increase our Lexapro.”Was the midlife crisis ever even real?

☆ The tech meltdown comes for Gen Z
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-14 | by ( Aki Ito | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

The tech industry was teetering, and she wondered whether the future she had banked on would survive. On Handshake, a leading jobs board for college students, entry-level software positions in the tech industry slumped 14% last year. "I'm finding that students are pivoting to organizations that have IT functions but are not in the tech industry," says Laura Garcia, director of career education at Georgia Tech. Given the seismic downturn in tech, some students are rethinking their dreams of working for the Amazons and Googles and Metas of the world. Suddenly, in the eyes of Gen Z, tech seems to be just as ruthless and unreliable of an employer as banking did to millennials who came of age in the Great Recession.

☆ Meet the DINKWADs: The TikTok legion making everyone jealous with their double incomes, no kids, and a dog
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-04 | by ( Juliana Kaplan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

There's a new American Dream: Becoming a DINKWAD — double income, no kids, with a dog. It stands for double income, no kids, with a dog. You can also be a DINK — double income, no kids — or a SINK, meaning single income, no kids. And then I heard the phrase DINKWAD, which is double income, no kids, with a dog. There's an increasing acceptability of not having children; there's a decreasing stigma around not having children," Pamela Aronson, a professor of sociology and an affiliate of women's and gender studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, told Insider.

☆ Layoffs at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce Teaching Tech Employees a Harsh Lesson
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-29 | by ( Avery Hartmans | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

Tech workers are using all sorts of emotional phrases to describe the layoff wave that has gripped the industry and become the talk of the business world. "I'm shocked and hurt and still processing," Katie Olaskiewicz, a former human-truths strategist at Google, wrote on LinkedIn last week shortly after 12,000 Google employees were let go. Over the past two weeks, a total of 40,000 employees have been laid off from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, a nightmare come true for tech workers. The tech layoffs have been starkly different from Wall Street, which has in recent months instituted its own rounds of job cuts. Wall Street realitiesIn many ways, tech workers are waking up to a reality that their peers in other high-flying industries have always known.

☆ The Art Behind Supply Chains Is Front and Center at a Museum Exhibit
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Liz Young | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +6 min

Newsletter Sign-up The Logistics Report Top news and in-depth analysis on the world of logistics, from supply chain to transport and technology. “What we wanted to do was to make the invisible visible, to look at the supply chain as a key part of how AI works,” Dr. Crawford said. “The best artists are all geometry and symmetrical work coupled with creativity, and that’s what supply chain is. Some of the artists on display in the MoMA gallery have gone on to create more work centered on supply chains. “When you start to do this research, you see everything differently and the precarity of the supply chain was made so clear to me,” she said.

☆ An NYC group wants to keep homeless college students dropping out so they can achieve "a gateway to the middle class"
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-21 | by ( Jason Lalljee | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

A New York City non-profit is piloting a program to pay for students' housing so they can complete their degrees. The New York Times spoke with one student who was on the verge of dropping out before receiving this benefit. According to one 2019 reported from The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, almost three in five college students reported experiencing housing insecurity the previous year. 18% of two-year college students and 14% of four-year students reported experiencing homelessness at some point, the researchers found. Homeless students reported lower GPAs and higher dropout rates, according to a report by the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools.

☆ Kanye West's antisemitic rants are the tip of a much longer spear
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-25 | by ( Tal Lavin | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Recent comments by Kanye West, now known as Ye, echo ancient antisemitic tropes, writes Tal Lavin. Over on Instagram, where I'd posted a picture of me cuddling a goat, someone commented: "Kanye West was right about you people." But these sentiments are just the tip of a much longer spear. Ye's comments in particular echo a very long history of antisemitic tropes — tropes that have left a trail of blood in their wake. On "Drink Champs" Ye spit into the mic about the evils of the "Jewish media."

☆ Former J. Crew chief Jenna Lyons to join 'Real Housewives of New York City' cast
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-17 | by ( Zachary Schermele | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +3 min

Jenna Lyons, the New York City fashion designer who was famously outed by the New York Post over a decade ago, will join the cast of “The Real Housewives of New York City” next year for the show’s 14th season. Lyons will be the first queer housewife to join the franchise’s New York City series as one of its seven new cast members. Their romantic relationship was revealed by the New York Post after someone spotted Lyons and Crangi at a New York restaurant amid Lyons’ divorce. The New York Post was asking if she would like to confirm or deny that she was “seeing a woman,” they said. GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, praised the decision to cast Lyons.

☆ Constance Wu’s harassment claims reveal a painful trade-off women of color face
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-28 | by ( Kimmy Yam | Kimmy Yam Is A Reporter For Nbc Asian America. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +5 min

But the fact that she did not speak out points to an added layer of hesitation many women of color face when confronted with such harassment, experts say. She had been hoping for a “fresh start.”Advocates and scholars say Wu’s comments reflect a familiar issue that women of color regularly contend with: the pressure to uphold racial solidarity, regardless of the harm they face. In her upcoming book “Making a Scene,” which will be released on Oct. 4, Wu detailed the alleged harassment. The expectation women face to place race before any gender-based misconduct or abuse means that they often do not get to define what being Asian American means, she said. Bringing issues of harassment into the public domain oftentimes forces people to contend with long-ignored problems, she said.

☆ Influencers on social media are starting to fight back against the platforms that profit from their followings
▼ + stars: | 2022-08-31 | by ( P.E. Moskowitz | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

But then other users began noticing the same thing, and in late July, Kim and Kourtney Kardashian and Kylie Jenner all posted a block of text reading "MAKE INSTAGRAM INSTAGRAM AGAIN." Influencer as workerA study published last year compiled data from 30 in-depth interviews with content creators on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But often, creators don't see themselves as people with the ability to fight back. That may be slowly changing, with influencers and content creators realizing that they need to work together more to demand more transparency and standards in their industry. The second hurdle is more personal: Many, if not most, content creators still do not see themselves as laborers.

☆ Why this professor is using $50,000 of his retirement savings to realize his childhood dream and fly into space
▼ + stars: | 2022-08-21 | by ( Urooba Jamal | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

He finally will realize his dream in 2024 via World View, which offers more affordable space flights. "It's a cliche for people to say it's a childhood dream, but it is a childhood dream," Cokinos told Insider. This is a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that other space tourism operators charge. For Cokinos, World View's flight cost will easily be absorbed from his decades' worth of retirement savings. World View's capsule is designed to optimize views and includes personal viewing screens for each passenger.

Imagining possibilities is a big part of planning; I want LGBTQ women to be able to imagine success. LGBTQ women rarely see themselves reflected in the wealthiest groupsData on both LGBTQ people and women of all orientations evidences economic precarity for many people within these lived experiences. Transgender women have an even higher likelihood of experiencing life on a low income. McKinsey reported last year that cisgender people took home 32% higher wages for the same work transgender people did. LGBTQ women and others tend to resource stability and community outside social norms.

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