"Two years ago, Richmond, Va., installed 17 markers delineating a slave trail, running past the sites of slave markets and a slave jail."

"A national slavery museum is being planned, said Delores McQuinn, a state legislator, who has led the slave trail project. Charleston, S.C., has moved away from its traditionally genteel approach to antebellum history to one that acknowledges the central role of slavery in the city’s development. An International African-American Museum is planned there as well and is seen as good business."

"Tourism audiences are changing," said Mary Battle, a public historian with the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.

Nudging etiquette, French-style.

"A blackboard outside the cafe advertises advertises 'Un cafe' for seven euros (£5.90; $9.6) - but 'Bonjour, un cafe, s'il vous plait' costs just 1.40 euros."

"Lonnie is a good hugger. We lie down on the bed (above sheets) in a sort of couple-watching-a-movie pose."

"His arm is around me and I'm cozy but faced forward. We chat lazily for a while, then Lonnie's breath slows down, and I attempt to follow suit, meditation-style."

It's relaxing, no doubt. Between the calming music, the presence of a warm body, and Lonnie's superhuman lung power -- his breaths seem to take a minute apiece -- I find myself easing into a half-asleep state. After about 20 or 30 minutes he says, "If you're comfortable, you can put your head on my chest."

A description of a visit to Madison's Snuggle House, which — as we discussed 2 days ago — is now permanently closed.

"Men, to the best of my knowledge, don’t even read."

"When’s the last time you heard a man say, 'I’ve been reading this great book, you’d really like it’? My girlfriend always tells me about these books she’s reading, and I don’t even see her reading the book! Where does this book live?"

A quote from Bryan Goldberg, the founder of the website Bustle, quoted in this New Yorker article titled "FROM MARS/A young man’s adventures in women’s publishing." I enjoyed the whole article — Goldberg raised $6.5 million to start up a website for women, though he knew he knew nothing about what women want to read. He just knew there was money to be made from advertising if he could deliver big numbers of young female readers, and he hired a whole lot of young women to work for $50 or $100 a day writing blog posts about whatever interests them (because what interests them will kinda sorta already be what interests young women). His goal is 50 million readers a month, and as of the publication of that article (last September), he'd gotten the traffic up to 14,000 a day — i.e., about half the traffic I get here, with just my own self writing, albeit not to the demographic most loved by advertisers, even though I am sure that some of you do get excited by the newest innovation in eyeliner.


But what got me thinking about that quote about reading was running acrosss this new article in Slate: "Dan Kois’ Favorite Books of 2013." Dan, a man, apparently read enough books to have 15 favorites in one year. How many books do you need to read in a year to have 15 favorites? I'd say at least 1 a week. But he's the book editor there, so he'd better do some reading. The truth is, if you put me in a room with all the books sent to the book editor in a year, I could produce a 15 favorites list in a single 8-hour workday. You just need a methodology, right? Spend less than 10 seconds on most books until you've got about 30 that seem as though you're going to like them. Maybe 30 more that you'll give a chance. Go through the first pile of 30, 5 minutes per book, and see if you get 15 you like. If not, proceed to the second pile. Put another 10 minutes into each of the chosen 15 to check that you haven't been fooled. If you find any clunkers, swap in one of the also rans from the top 60, maybe something with a colorful title or strange author name. I see Dan has on his list "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories," by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Ha ha. Does my method sound like a male way to construct a top 15 list? It would amuse me.

Madison's Snuggle House closes for good — because "the push back and harassment is not worth it, honestly."

"It has nothing to do with the services. It has to do with how much hate you want to tolerate. It’s not worth it. Not these days."

Ooh. Sounds like somebody needs a hug.

What happened? Too much regulation... or just not enough customers? I don't know. Who were the haters? The city or the citizens?

Anyway, goodbye to Snuggle House, we here at Alt House enjoyed talking about the concept. I went from assuming it was a hoax, to facilitating a conversation about what it would be, to more or less rooting for it. 

Knowing there was — at least once — a dream of people paying $60 an hour to be snuggled, maybe we can all feel a little more warmly rewarded by the snuggles we get at home.

"Apple has acquired a company with access to 'the hose'..."

"... the nickname for Twitter’s stream of 500 million tweets per day."

$200 million for Topsy, which I've got to assume is named after the character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin":

A ragamuffin young slave girl. When asked if she knows who made her, she professes ignorance of both God and a mother, saying "I s'pect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me."... The phrase "growed like Topsy" (later "grew like Topsy") passed into the English language, originally with the specific meaning of unplanned growth, later sometimes just meaning enormous growth.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after a slave girl?

Or do you think the company was named after Topsy the elephant, famous for dying of electrocution, captured on film by Thomas Edison in the year 1903?

Initially, Topsy was supposed to be hanged, but other ways were considered when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested. Edison then suggested electrocution with alternating current, which had been used for the execution of humans since 1890.

Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide before the deadly current from a 6,600-volt AC source was sent coursing through her body, partly as a demonstration of how "unsafe" his competitor's (George Westinghouse) alternating current design was.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after an electrocuted elephant?



The hose.

Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting in a decision that upheld the ban on political and commercial advertising on public TV and radio stations.

"... I would set public television and radio free to pursue its public mission to its full potential. We'd all be better off for it."

The 11-judge panel of the 9th Circuit rejected arguments that were based on the First Amendment free speech guarantee.

Are you going to go all Black Friday today?

Is it an in-person sport for you or will you do it on line? If the latter, please exploit the occasion to show your support — if you have it — for this blog by entering Amazon through The Althouse Portal.

The persistence of hits and blockbusters in the era of the internet and "the long tail."

Nicely analyzed in The New Yorker. Excerpt:

Although “The Long Tail” proclaimed a coming revolution, [Chris] Anderson was careful never to predict the demise of blockbusters. “Hits, like it or not, are here to stay,” he wrote. But he believed that the cultural power of hits was fading, and he presented his economic analysis as a moral crusade. “For too long,” he wrote, “we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop.”
The language reflected his own tastes, which were self-consciously hip. (He was vexed by the popularity of boy bands and excited about a retro-futurist electronic genre known as “chip music,” which achieved micro-success in the aughts.) He hoped that more of us would discover “smaller artists who speak more authentically to their audience,” and that all of us might, at last, perceive “the true shape of demand in our culture.” He was flattering his readers by inviting them to be part of his community of connoisseurs. Long-tail economics would make good on the promise of the Internet, turning more people into experts on topics fewer people had heard of. Elberse flatters her readers, too. In her book ["Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment"], the old ethos of the Internet has given way to the new ethos of social media; while Anderson predicted the end of the “watercooler era,” Elberse sees the water cooler reborn, as fans track the progress of the latest cultural juggernaut across their Twitter timelines. “Because people are inherently social, they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do,” she writes, recasting our taste for hits as proof of our common humanity. Lurking behind her blockbuster thesis is the suggestion that being sociable matters more than being hip.

ADDED: The article says "Elberse's book is is written in the upbeat, anecdotal, gently exhortative style of an airport best-seller...." That's a way to say "Malcolm Gladwell" without saying it, right? But Gladwell's writing originated in The New Yorker, so it's a tad incoherent to tweak it as "airport best-seller" in The New Yorker.

"No, the [Chick-fil-A] CEO did not jump out of the hidey-hole slide, point at me... and yell 'You're one of the gays!' as I had imagined."

Writes Carolyn O'Laughlin, the Director of Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College, in The Wall Street Journal (which I'm reading because a reader emailed asking what the author's point is, whether her position as Director of  Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College is relevant to that point, and why The Wall Street Journal is publishing this sort of thing).

O'Laughlin is a member of a 4-person family consisting of 2 adult women and 2 male children, and they're on a road trip where they want to stop at the restaurant with a play area, and it happens to be a Chick-fil-A, which she put on her "list of places to avoid" when its CEO "went on record indicating his support for only families that meet the 'biblical definition of the family unit.'"

But O'Laughlin has a moderate approach to using her spending power to nudge businesses. She wanted to favor J.C. Penney, for using Ellen DeGeneres and "families like ours" in their advertising, but there was a pothole in the parking lot, so she went somewhere else, and she'd like to reward Starbucks, but it's overpriced, so she snubs it.

Noting that life is "complicated" and you've got to see the "nuance" and be "practical," she goes to the Chick-fil-A, buys the food, but hates the atmosphere — not because it's anti-gay, but it's noisy and chaotic (because of the very play area that made her overcome her political aversion to the place).

"Let's get out of here." I say to my boys.... Standing outside, my wife and I look around with road-trip decision paralysis. A kind Chick-fil-A employee comes toward us with four trays. "Y'all could sit on these if you'd like," she says. We smile, thank her, and set up a picnic on the grassy island between the parking lots of Chick-fil-A and Burger King. We're having it our way.

So what's the point? It seems to me that the point is that life is complicated, and we make individual choices to suit our own needs and tastes, some of which include politics and morality, and part of what we get to choose is how hardcore we want to be about where we go and what we buy. Also, the lower-down employees of a company are individuals with their own lives, making their own choices, just like you, and it's good for everyone to remember that.

This not the point of the article, but just something I'd like to add: Picnicking at ground level in a parking lot is not a good idea. Not only is it unfair to the business that has provided tables and chairs and wants to project an image of tidiness, but it's not a clean place to eat. Grassy does not equal clean. Grass doesn't magically repel the filth from the cars, and it attracts dog poop, human sputum, and dog and human pee.

"Lululemon founder Chip Wilson’s apology doesn’t pass the drishti test."

Well, there's a headline. That's in the Washington Post. I don't know what a "drishti test" is, but I got a laugh watching the "I’m sad/I’m really sad" apology video. What's he apologizing for? He said —explaining the transparency of some of his company's yoga pants — "Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work," and "It’s about the rubbing through the thighs."

I see the article explains "drishti" — which Wilson "should be aware of." It's "the gaze — outward and inward — that a yogi is supposed to apply to life."

Oh, you don't need any fancy-schmancy mystical stuff to know that if your low-quality-high-price scheme is exposed along with some ladies' asses, you shouldn't point out that the asses are fat. Having goofed that up, how should you keep the cash flowing, now that the ladies you've lured into overpaying know that your sucking up to them was just a sham? I sort of like his "I'm sad/I'm really sad" routine. It's like he's living and being real, right there on camera. Of course, it's bullshit. And is he really sorry? I sort of suspect that he's glad he got the message out that: "some women’s bodies just actually don’t work." Our clothes are not for everyone. Just the special women. The best women. 

It's the snobbery that justifies the price. Are you good enough for Lululemon?

"Reality"?

Upworthy has some interesting pictures from a British department store catalog and the headline is "A Catalog That Believes Reality Can Sell Clothes Better Than Photoshop." But is this "reality" or is just another kind of sensationalism? The first picture makes a nice bigger-is-better argument, but that bigger lady is fabulously large and even she has one leg angled forward and a strategically placed sarong to improve the proportions. And why the amputee models? Because of reality?

"We use transgender as an umbrella term that includes people who are transsexual, cross-dressers or otherwise gender non-conforming."

A definition in the sidebar of an article titled "The Heart Wants What It Wants" — supertitled "We Are as We Are" and "Dating Trans?," which is teased on the front page of this new website Ozy under the heading "Tricky Topic: Dating a Transgender Person/Have attitudes about the fluidity of gender migrated much on the T in LGBT?"

For a website with a 3-letter name, that's an awful lot of titles, dragging us this way and that. What caught my eye — among the many things clamoring to catch eyes — was that side-bar definition that I used for the post title. That made me think: Who's not under that umbrella? Only people who are gender-conforming, which in my book — who wants to be a conformist, a gender stereotype? — is an insult.
The erstwhile minority could become the majority by repositioning the line.

But the article doesn't get us any further than telling us about some new Jared Leto-Matthew McConaughey ("Oscar buzz"), the price of some "sex reassignment" surgeries ("creating a penis is difficult and costly"), the fact that the Social Security Administration will now record your change of sex without proof of surgery (why not?), and finally — as we reach the last paragraph, still searching for the multiple teased topics — 3 questions, essentially only repeating the question raised in all those titles/supertitles/teasers.

So that's my first encounter with Ozy. Here's a Business Insider article about it: "Former MSNBC Anchor Launches Ozy, A Fresh News Site With Money From Laurene Powell Jobs."

Watson is the kind of person who is so charismatic, an interview about Ozy required a follow-up phone call. 

What? Is the reporter — Alyson Shontell — saying she was so dazzled by the in-person presence of this man who "wore a gray fitted T-shirt and a bright smile" to their in-person meeting that she needed another interview at some distance from this man's powerful force-field?

[Carlos Watson] is a great schmoozer and I admittedly fell for it during our first meeting. He escaped tough business questions the first time around.

Ha ha. I wonder how Laurene Powell Jobs is doing. Does it matter? She has Steve's billions to throw around however she wants, at whatever cute guys remain amongst the living, now that poor Steve has oh-wowed.

"I think most people would say, 'No, we don't need another news site,'" Watson says. "But if you asked them, 'Has there been a change, such that people are hungrier now to see more, be more and do more than before?' I think they'd tell you there has been. That's why Kickstarter exists. That's why Airbnb has such a robust business. There's a reason why there are things called 500 startups, and a reason startup accelerators are in every city. There's a reason why American Idol is still strong 15 years later. There's a hunger people have for both for themselves and in the world for what's next and what's new."

Are you still hungry? Or does this put you off your feed?

"Supreme Court to Decide Whether Corporations Can Pray."

Snarky headline at the Bill Moyers website on an article about the pending Supreme Court case dealing with whether religious persons who have set up their business using the corporate form can be compelled by the government to provide their employees with health insurance that covers drugs that they believe murder human beings.

The case isn't about praying. It's about money and what it means to be compelled to contribute your money to something that you sincerely believe God requires you to fight to the end. I think it's close to the same problem that individuals face when they pay their taxes and believe that something the government is using the money for is deeply wrong. For example: war.

But the Bill Moyers operation thinks mocking religious people is a good move. I say it's prime jackassery... except to the extent that it's old-school, left-wing hatred of corporations. Let's see how they feel if Hobby Lobby loses its case — as I think it will — and its owners dissolve the entire operation to maintain religious purity — would they? — and throw 13,000 employees out of work. I suspect the the Bill Moyers folk would double down on their contempt for religion.

The article is written by Joshua Holland, not Moyers himself, but it is tweeted under Moyers' name. Moyers, the man, is 79, so I wonder if it's really him tweeting or whether it's some soulless incorporated entity doing business under the name Moyers & Company. Isn't it nice to say "company" instead of "corporation"? It's like back in the 1950s when your mother said "company's coming over" when family or friends were joining you for dinner.

So here's Joshua Holland, who's identified not as a legal expert, but as "a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com," and he's mostly just doing extracts from the amicus brief of the Constitutional Accountability Center.

The brief notes that the religious owners of the corporations have no obligation to do anything that contradicts their personal beliefs. The law applies to the corporations, which the law views as separate “persons” — corporations are themselves entities, and they can’t actually kneel down and pray.

But religious persons do business using the corporate form. Do you want to say that they must thereafter choose between doing business in that form or following their religion? If you were doing something you sincerely believed God would send you to hell for doing, do you think that by setting up a corporation to conduct that activity, God would not count it against you? The fact that "corporations are themselves entities" doesn't solve the problem! Let's say that you wanted to kill someone, and instead of doing it yourself, you paid another person to do the killing. The fact that the other person is himself an entity for legal purposes does nothing to cut off the guilt. That is easy to see.

Holland writes, quoting the amicus brief:

Here’s a key point: nobody has to form a corporation in order to do business. They do so because it brings real benefits under the law.

True, but so what? What is the general principle here? To take advantage of a legal form is to abandon your rights? On that theory, the government can censor the New York Times (and BillMoyers.com).

I don't mean to say that I think Hobby Lobby should win this case. I just feel compelled to point out what the Moyers company is smugly ignoring: Corporations are important and necessary tools for human activities conducted on a large scale; people care about their morality and their religion even as they conduct the activities by which they earn their living; and there are deep religious convictions at stake as the government binds us together in the immense undertaking of providing for everyone's medical treatments.

I can see I'm just saying, come on, Bill, at least show some respect for the values you mean to crush. I do see the absurdity.

"It’s just wrong that men look just fine the way they are, but we women are encouraged to believe we don’t look good enough unless we 'fix' our faces."

Writes Roz Warren in her anti-makeup manifesto in the NYT, where the first commenter plumps her up with "You go girl!"

Which highlights my point: Women can use makeup OR not use makeup and people think it's just fine. Women are encouraged to believe we can be whatever we want, either glammed up beyond recognition or utterly fresh-faced or anywhere in between. It's true that the expression "fix my face" originated with women — women with a sense of humor, by the way. (And it wasn't just "fix my face," it was also "put on my face," as if — oh, horror, from the viewpoint of a Women's Studies major! — a woman without makeup is faceless!!!)

But the truth is, the woman could and still can fix her face as much as she wants or not at all, and most of the time it only takes a couple minutes and those who do more are having fun with it.



It is men who are deprived of the option to tinker with what they've got naturally. The quote I put in the title would make more sense rewritten as: It’s just wrong that women look just fine whatever they choose to do, but men are encouraged to believe they look however they look and they're not allowed to fix their faces.

Not that there aren't big brands like Marc Jacobs attempting to liberate men from their prison of fresh-facedness: "There's the Remedy concealer that has a really lovely palladium tip that really feels nice and cool to your undereye area, and God knows I can always use a bit of Remedy Concealer myself... Then there's the brow tamer which has a lovely soft application wand and the formula itself is soft and smooth feeling rather than sticky and gooey or hard... there's the Liplock which has a nice minty fresh taste. It's very important to have a nice moist lip so you're always ready to kiss and make out with that right person."

Yeah, you laughed at him? See how oppression weighs on the male?

"Therapeutic cuddling is cuddling designed as a non-sexual way to stimulate oxytocin, the love hormone, which makes you feel safe and connected to others."

"These people are really lonely... There's a lot of need for touch," said the proprietor of Madison's Snuggle House, Matthew Hurtado. The City of Madison seems to be dragging its heels, fretting over the possibility of prostitution, and the place has had to delay opening.

According to Hurtado, there are 300 clients waiting for cuddling sessions, and that if the Madison sugglery is like NY's Snuggery, the clients are likely to be old people who — as the article paraphrases it — have "lost their spouses."

Lost their spouses? That sounds like carelessness. You know how old people are. Yes, they are old, so their spouses are more likely to die than the spouses of younger folk. But it's not the use of loss for death that bothers me. It's "spouse." What's the sex balance in that New York clientele? Are we talking about women and men or mostly (or nearly all or all) men?

Anyway, I note that "The Snuggle House occupies former law offices." Make a list of ways in which snuggling is not like lawyering and, next to it, a list of ways in which they are the same. On which list do you put "raises fear of prostitution"?

ADDED: Comment at the link: "I just know I'm going to get Snuggle House and Waffle House mixed up."

"I used to believe that negotiating was insulting... Americans believe it's cheap to haggle."

"Rather than feeling shame, I'm learning that seeking a fair, ethical price might actually feel good."

"Amazon workers shipping goods from inside P&G."

"Amazon (AMZN) has ensconced its workers in seven Procter & Gamble (PG) warehouses, where they ship consumer staples such as Pampers diapers and Bounty paper towels directly to consumers."

Hmm. Seems fine to me, as an Amazon Associate, who wishes that any time you need to buy diapers or paper towels you enter through the Althouse Amazon Portal, which is a way to support this blog without paying any extra... and without worrying about where Amazon really is. It's not nefarious (is it?). It's just diapers and paper towels.

"Our generation wants to know what is going on, but we want it to be fun.... We think people get virality all wrong..."

"The reason people share things are not just because they are shiny and cute and crazy and fun, but because it is about something they are deeply passionate about. It can be about putting your best aspirational self forward."

Says Peter Koechley, on of the founders of Upworthy, interviewed in the NYT.

They began thinking about a site focused on what they considered noble causes, but it took until 2011, when [Chris Hughes, an early founder of Facebook] gave them $500,000 in seed capital, for both to start working on it full-time....

Upworthy produces none of its own content. Instead, it employs roughly 20 “curators” who find obscure video and graphics (but not text) in topic areas — like sexuality, civil rights or economics — that they feel are meaningful, but being passed over. The site repackages the freely available content with snappy headlines and content teases....

Disclosure: Koechley was one of the editors of a Madison high school humor zine, who used to meet at my house back in the 1990s.

Related fact: If only I'd taken my first husband's name, it would be more obvious — on the internet — that I am the author of a non-existent book titled "Post-Divorce, Pre-Death."

"Lonnie Johnson is the only male snuggler. He's previously held 9-to-5 jobs..."

"... but he said he wanted to answer the call so that he could help people."

"I was thinking to myself, 'man that is such a good idea,'" said Johnson. "Whether they admit to it or not, every human being needs love, needs to be cared about, needs physical contact as well."