James' World 2

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A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

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What body is perfect

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Click the link below for the article:

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Click the link below the picture

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A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

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What body is perfect

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Click the link below for the article:

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TIFFANI BOVA: Look, your employees spend one-third of their lives, 90,000 hours, at this thing called work. But unfortunately, a majority of employees are dissatisfied.

When we crossed the threshold into the digital revolution, we found ourselves really trying to reduce the effort for customer, and unfortunately, the effort for the employee went up. In the end, we saw the Great Resignation, and now we have quiet quitting. So many organizations are asking employees for more, but they’re giving them less. It makes you quickly realize employees are stressed, employees are burnt out.

So how do we fix this problem? My name is Tiffani Bova. I’m the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, “The Experience Mindset.” We’ve really been over-focused on being so customer-centric that we’ve left our employees behind. Some of the most well-known brands in the world are finding themselves facing a crisis of prioritization. They so over-prioritized customer that employees have said enough is enough. You may be the most customer-centric company on the planet, but maybe your employees aren’t happy. They’re saying, “I’m driving my delivery truck in 105-degree temperature with no air conditioning so that you can hit your two-hour delivery commitment.”

There is no shortage of reasons why employees are no longer as satisfied, willing, or committed to do what they do every single day. How supported are they to do their job? Are they trained and enabled in the skills that they will need not only today but in the future? Is there trust between the employee and the company? All of these things make up the totality of the employee experience, and when you get dissatisfaction in any or all of those categories, lots of things start happening. People start quitting their jobs, and then you don’t have enough people to work. Or you start to see that quiet quitting, where it’s just a paycheck. They continue working at their jobs, and they give poor service, which then means your customers don’t come back, which means the company doesn’t grow.

Make no mistake, there is a deep connection between what employees do and feel every single day and what the customers feel and do every single day. When you have an unhappy employee set, your customer really notices it.

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Interesting

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Tiffani May never saw it coming.

She was just a few minutes from home in North Las Vegas when a car came flying into an intersection at more than 100 miles an hour and crashed into hers.

“I remember getting hit, the sound of broken glass,” May said. “I remember seeing fire. And thinking, if I didn’t get out, my dog and I were gonna die right then.”

Nine people were killed in the Nevada crash in January of last year. Seven were members of a single family who were riding together in a minivan, including four brothers younger than 18.

May survived the six-vehicle crash, but it changed her life. She hasn’t given any interviews about it until now.

“I’ve been dealing with this from emotionally, spiritually, physically, cognitively, my entire being,” May said. “And I’m grieving like so many things.”

More than 40,000 people died in vehicle crashes in the U.S. last year, and speeding is a major reason why. Speed-related crashes accounted for roughly 12,000 deaths in 2021, the last year for which there are complete statistics and hundreds of thousands of injuries.

Safety advocates say it’s time for automakers to adopt new technology in cars to reduce speeding.

“We have a public health crisis, and we have to take action to prevent all of those fatalities and serious injuries,” said Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board.

The NTSB studied the Las Vegas crash, meeting last month to review its findings. And for the first time, the board called for U.S. automakers to install technology to reduce speeding in all new cars.

“We felt it was time to be more aggressive with what we think needs to be done, which is adoption of the technology in vehicles to prevent speeding,” Homendy told NPR. “Nobody has a right to speed. Nobody has a right to break the law.”

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Click the link below for the article:

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A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

.

What body is perfect

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

A few years ago, it seemed like the trajectory of body diversity and inclusivity could only continue going upward. Across several major industries—particularly fashion, beauty, entertainment, and music—we witnessed an incredible surge of representation for bodies of all sizes, skin tones, gender expressions, ages, and abilities. Plus-size models walked top designers’ runways! Disabled models starred in luxury campaigns! Trans models showed up on billboards—and not just in the month of June! Finally, it seemed the industries that long felt like the exclusionary gatekeepers of the “ideal body” now seemed to welcome all bodies, reflecting their diverse consumer bases.

Then, came the backlash—or, perhaps more accurately, a quiet retreat back into the beauty standards of the ‘90s and ‘00s. As low-rise jeans and Y2K fashion made their comebacks, so returned the ultra-thin ideal. As journalist Gianluca Russo noted in September 2022 for The Zoe Report, plus-size representation in New York Fashion Week has seen a razor-sharp decline. And, despite the Fenty effect leading to an industry-wide expectation of base makeup to have 40- and 50-shade ranges, Black models continue to experience discrimination on sets, with many still bringing their own foundations and concealers just in case the makeup artist’s case doesn’t carry the right colors for their skin tones. In 2023, another major shift arrived: The releases of Ozempic and similar treatments marked revolutionary developments and supported the long-held stance of many medical professionals and advocates that obesity is a matter of biology, not willpower—sparked frenzied responses, from debate and confusion to corporate pivoting.

None of these are easy or simple conversations. They all contribute to a larger dialogue that many activists, academics, writers, and regular folks have carried on, despite it seeing fewer headlines nowadays. We’ve brought together several stories by writers exploring the complexities of these issues, and shed light on their less-discussed elements. Now, the only question: How will you participate in the body-inclusivity conversation?

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What body is perfect

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Click the link below for the article:

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__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

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Nathaniel Kleitman, known as the “father of modern sleep research,” was born in 1895 in Bessarabia—now Moldova—and spent much of his youth on the run. First, pogroms drove him to Palestine; then the First World War chased him to the United States. At the age of twenty, he landed in New York penniless; by twenty-eight, he’d worked his way through City College and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Soon after, he joined the faculty there. An early sponsor of Kleitman’s sleep research was the Wander Company, which manufactured Ovaltine and hoped to promote it as a remedy for insomnia.

Until Kleitman came along, sleep was, as one commentator has put it, “a huge blind spot in the science of physiology.” No one bothered to study it because it was defined by what it wasn’t—sleep was a state of not being awake and, at the same time, of not being comatose or dead. (It’s unclear what exactly attracted Kleitman to this academically marginal topic, but it has been suggested that it fitted with his own marginalized background.)

In one of Kleitman’s first experiments, he kept half a dozen young men awake for days at a stretch, then ran them through a battery of physical and psychological tests. Frequently, he used himself as a subject. As a participant in the sleep-deprivation experiment, Kleitman stayed awake longer than anyone else—a hundred and fifteen hours straight. At one point, exhausted and apparently hallucinating, he declared, apropos of nothing in particular, “It is because they are against the system.” (Asked what he meant, he said he’d been under the impression that he was “having a heated argument with the observer on the subject of labor unions.”) In another self-administered experiment, Kleitman spent six weeks underground, in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, trying to live according to a twenty-eight-hour day. (He found that he could not.)

In the early nineteen-fifties, Kleitman’s research was sponsored in part by Swift, the meatpacking company, which was interested in finding out whether feeding babies a high-protein diet would make them sleep more soundly. It was at this point that he—or, really, one of his graduate students—stumbled onto a great discovery. Casting around for a dissertation topic, the student, Eugene Aserinsky, decided to hook sleepers up to an early version of an electroencephalogram machine, which scribbled across half a mile of paper each night. In the process, Aserinsky noticed that several times each night the sleepers went through periods when their eyes darted wildly back and forth. Kleitman insisted that the experiment be repeated yet again, this time on his daughter, Esther. In 1953, he and Aserinsky introduced the world to “rapid eye movement,” or REM sleep. Another of Kleitman’s graduate students, William C. Dement, now a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford medical school, has described this as the year that “the study of sleep became a true scientific field.”

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Sleep is a time suck. If you multiplied the average recommended number of hours we should sleep in a day—eight for a typical adult—by the number of days in an average lifespan (78.8 years in the United States), that would amount to about 9,587.3 days. That’s one-third of your life spent unconscious. From an evolutionary standpoint, sleep is quite literally a waste of your time, yet it’s fought its way through countless years of adaptation in nearly every living animal on Earth. So it must be important, right?

In fact, researchers have found that sleep plays a vital role in the functioning of nearly every organ system in the body. At the same time, medical conditions, a busy schedule, and even the simple unavoidable act of aging constantly challenge the number of hours we allow ourselves. But that begs the question: how much sleep do we actually need? And can we train ourselves to need less?

First, let’s talk about that eight-hour figure that gets tossed around. It’s far from some arbitrary number. It’s truly the number of hours we naturally crave, and there are two pretty strong pieces of evidence for it. In a series of experiments, researchers took study participants into a laboratory with no sunlight or other visual cues and, at night, gave them a non-negotiable, nine-hour-long opportunity to sleep. They did this each night for a number of weeks, and the results were always the same: even when provided with more time, humans will typically spend an average of eight hours catching up on their Zzz.

And that wasn’t the only study to support the eight-hour sleep schedule. Back in 1938, a sleep researcher named Nathaniel Kleitman and one of his students spent 32 days living in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the longest and deepest caves in the world—an environment completely void of sunlight. When they analyzed their sleep patterns, they found that they, too, slept about eight to eight and a half hours per night.

But what happens when we deprive ourselves, as many Americans do, of all or some of these recommended hours? It turns out, a lot. In 2003, David Dinges and Gregory Belenky, both sleep researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Walter Reed Army Research Institute, performed some of the most pivotal studies on the consequences of sleep deprivation thus far. Their goal was to figure out how little sleep a person could get away with, without having it affect their cognitive performance.

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How many hours of sleep do you actually need?. Pixabay

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