"Can These Panties Disrupt the $15 Billion Feminine Hygiene Market?"

THINX panties have "antimicrobial, leak-resistant fibers in the crotch that promise to absorb as much menstrual blood as up to two tampons or a pad � without the wearer feeling it � and promise to leave the wearer feeling dry."

The business is built on a buy-one-give-one model, by which every pair of THINX sold generates a donation to Uganda based AFRIPads, which trains women in developing countries to make and sell reusable pads, which are sold at affordable prices to local women.

On the environmental front, Agrawal says THINX panties can eliminate the landfill waste generated by traditional feminine products. The National Women�s Health Network reports that each year 12 billion pads and 7 million tampons are dumped into U.S. landfills. Agrawal says that by using only THINX during her period, she has made zero carbon impact for the past year.

"A Silicon Valley recycling plant is looking for an unidentified woman who dropped off a rare Apple 1 computer to give her a paycheck of $100,000."

$100,000 is half of the $200,000 that the computer sold for as a collector's item. The recycling place has a policy that it splits all proceeds with the donor (and now they have to find her).

When she dropped it off she said "I want to get rid of this stuff and clean up my garage." Asked "Do you need a tax receipt?," she said, "No, I don't need anything."

"I am not surprised Fox has censored Picasso�s breasts. It is absurd and creepy to blur out the bosoms of his Women of Algiers..."

"... in a report on the painting that set a new world record this week. But it is not completely impossible to understand, because if you were a puritan or a fundamentalist or just hated women�s bodies, Picasso�s breasts are the kind of breasts you might find shocking.... Picasso�s breasts are just black circles with big dots for nipples. It is a measure of his genius that he can convey all the roundness, fullness and touchability of a breast using this graffiti-like shorthand. There are four pairs of breasts in Women of Algiers (Version O) by my count � painted in various stages of cartoonish crudity... It is a cliche to see Picasso as a misogynist whose lust for women was aggressive and patriarchal... Who hates women � Picasso who painted all those breasts, or the TV station that smeared them out?"

That's from The Guardian, scoring political points off cartoonish breasts in a painting that you'd think conservatives would want to show because it was just so darned expensive this last time it was sold and even though it knows very well that it was just some local station that was afraid someone would complain. Objections could have come from lefties as well as righties. The Guardian admits, as it must, that Picasso was a big old aggressive misogynist.

Anyway, maybe it works over in England to say "Picasso's breasts," when you only want us to think of the women's breasts that he painted, but the American mind � mine, anyway � goes straight to moobs. And Picasso is a man who often posed for pictures shirtless. I went looking for a good picture to illustrate this and I found a whole page titled "A lot of pictures of Pablo Picasso without his shirt on." I picked this one:



It's been a good year for Picasso and a good year generally for shirtless men. Mitt Romney appeared shirtless the other day (in some boxing match, but who cares?, the big deal was that he was shirtless). And images of Martin O'Malley without a shirt are continually popping up as if to say look what I can do that Hillary can't.

"Even without knowing the backstory, there�s a sort of heaviness to the room" � The Peacock Room.

The artist Darren Waterston is talking about a truly fabulous room made by James McNeill Whistler. You can see Whistler's Room and � right next to it, � Waterston's homage to it, which is called "Filthy Lucre" (at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.). Look at how incredibly cool both of these spaces are:



The backstory:

A wealthy Englishman named Frederick R. Leyland asked his friend Whistler what color he should paint his dining room, which contained one of the artist�s paintings. Whistler volunteered to retouch the walls and add some decorative waves to the wood paneling. Leyland left town on business and Whistler went wild, gilding the ceiling and painting golden peacocks on the shutters. When the artist presented Leyland with the bill: 2,000 guineas (about $200,000 today), the businessman balked, and eventually paid half.

Incensed, Whistler finished the project by painting two peacocks poised for a fight: One of the birds represents Leyland and has silver coins scattered around his feet....

The client wasn't happy, the artist was only getting paid half, so the artist painted even more, the best part, the part with the birds? That sounds a little screwy. Is that the real story? I don't know if Waterston believes all that or not, but his alternate Peacock Room has the whole place falling apart. "I didn�t want it to look like some particular traumatic event took place, like an earthquake.... I wanted it to feel much more dreamy, like a surrealist painting." Beautiful!

"As much as anything, the Facebook deal is a concession by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. that the paper's app strategy failed to produce the turnaround the company hoped for."

"Now the Times is throwing its fate into Facebook's hands."

"Senate Democrats handed President Obama a stinging rebuke on Tuesday..."

"... blocking consideration of legislation granting their own president accelerated power to complete a major trade accord with Asia."

The Senate voted 52-45 on a procedural motion to begin debating the bill to give the president �trade promotion authority,� eight votes short of the 60 needed to proceed. Republicans and pro-trade Democrats said they would try to negotiate a trade package that could clear that threshold.

The link goes to the NYT, where the top-rated comment is:

Why the rush to fast track this? Why can't we, the voters, see what's in this agreement? Why are the details secret? A full transparent discussion of the whole thing should be conducted before signing on to such legislation. Who will make money and who will lose money? Americans deserve to know what exactly is in this trade deal. It is not as though we don't have good reason to be suspicious about this.

"The country�s rapidly growing marijuana industry has a tax problem."

"Even as more states embrace legal marijuana, shops say they are being forced to pay crippling federal income taxes because of a decades-old law aimed at preventing drug dealers from claiming their smuggling costs and couriers as business expenses on their tax returns."

"Male pedicure customers are despised by many manicurists for their thick toenails and hair-covered knuckles."

"When a man comes into the store, almost invariably a non-Korean worker is first draft for his foot bath, salon workers said."

Just one thing I'm extracting from the prominent NYT article "The Price of Nice Nails/Manicurists are routinely underpaid and exploited, and endure ethnic bias and other abuse, The New York Times has found."

Google does fashion reporting.

The NYT reports:

In its inaugural report, Google distinguishes between �sustained growth� trends, like tulle skirts and jogger pants; flash-in-the-pan obsessions like emoji shirts and kale sweatshirts; and �seasonal growth� trends, or styles that have come back stronger every spring, like white jumpsuits. It makes similar distinctions among sustained declines (peplum dresses), seasonal ones (skinny jeans) and fads that are probably over and done (scarf vests).

Lisa Green, who heads Google�s fashion and luxury team, said the company had begun working with major retailers, including Calvin Klein, to help them incorporate real-time Google search data into fashion planning and forecasting. �Fast fashion� companies, for example, can take a trend identified by Google and run with it, Ms. Green said....

ADDED: It's so funny to think of weird things becoming fashion trends after Google mistakes searching as an indication that people want to wear something when, in fact, they're curious about it for some other reason. I mean, I'm curious about scarf vests now, just because I don't know what they are, so I'd have to look it up. And if Google's presentation causes people to adopt something that wasn't a real fashion trend, then manufacturers will want to figure out strategies to cause certain words to get searched. Or maybe they'll just notice words that are picking up in the world of Google searching and start making whatever it is � tulle skirts or some such thing. (Aren't people Googling "tulle skirts" just because little girls want them? Maybe not.)

"Robin Givhan�s... piece about Lilly Pulitzer was hateful and not worthy of publication."

"Lilly Pulitzer clothing is bright and fun and evokes a carefree attitude, and Givhan took it upon herself to use this as a determining factor as to the socioeconomic background of the wearer."

From a letter to the Washington Post about an opinion piece about why women get so excited about a particular brand of clothing distinguished by bright colors and exuberant patterns like this:



One look at those patterns and you're ready to believe the letter-writer, no? How could a desire to swathe yourself in that mean anything more than lighthearted fun-loving? Givhan instructs:

Lilly Pulitzer is preppy. It is part of a preppy uniform that announces itself from fifty paces. It is not so much a declaration of wealth as it is a perceived statement about class, lineage and attitude. Anyone can work hard and save up enough cash to go out and purchase a Chanel suit or a Gucci handbag. A devoted student of Vogue can cobble together a personal style that speaks to its public identity. But Lilly Pulitzer suggests an advantage of birth. The clothes stir up scrapbook notions of ancient family trees, summer compounds, boarding school uniforms, and large, granite buildings inscribed with some great-great-grandfather�s name. Lilly Pulitzer represents something that money cannot buy.

The clothes are, upon close inspection, not so terribly attractive. Actually, they are rather unattractive. And that is part of their charm. They are not meant to be stylish � that�s so nouveau. The clothes are clubby. Country clubby. One-percent-ish....

Too hateful? How can you look at those patterns and feel hate? I know there's this old tradition of country club people wearing really bright colors and stupid patterns, but what was that ever about? Wasn't it lighthearted fun-loving? Why shouldn't people with less money see the fun too? There's a lot of expensive fashion that is adapted from what younger, poorer people are wearing in the streets. What difference does it make which direction fashion trends move? I think Givhan would answer that I'm asking the wrong question, because this isn't fashion � "Lilly Pulitzer is not fashion. It is clothes." � and non-clubby folks who purport to like these things are delusional. The stuff is ugly and so it must be that they only want to look like the rich.

ADDED: Givhan's argument belongs in the "What's the matter with Kansas?" school of liberal opinion-writing. The common people don't know their own real motives and interests and letting them think and do what they like is a problem.

MORE: I blogged about Lilly Pulitizer once before, at the time of her 2013 obituary, which I presented like this:

Lilly Pulitzer dresses were "really wearable only by the few who were so rich that they could afford to have bad taste."

Says the NYT in the obituary for Lilly Pullitzer, who built a "fashion empire" out of "tropical print shift dresses and lighthearted embrace of jarring color combinations like flamingo pink and apple green." Lilly was born into wealth and married into more wealth. She had 3 children and a nervous breakdown.

�I went crazy. I was a namby-pamby; people always made decisions for me. The doctor said I should find something to do.�

The family estate included citrus groves, so she opened a juice stand with another woman, and juice stains inspired the print dresses....

So the Times obituary declared not only that the clothes were in bad taste, but also that only the rich are allowed to act upon such bad taste. Now, 2 years after Pulitzer's death, Target offered a Lilly Pulitzer line that was cheap, and you can see how dissonant that is with the values of elite commentators like Givhan. It wasn't the price that put these clothes out of the reach of the non-rich. They can make the clothes cheap, but still, you have be rich for these clothes to be wearable.

The resurrection of the Twinkie.

"It was the risk. This was a rare circumstance in history when you see a company go completely off the shelves and have no employees, have empty factories and no working capital. We saw the opposite � this was an opportunity to take a great brand and for the first time be able to reinvent it."

The magic bullet turned out to be chemistry. Metropoulos spent millions on R&D, working with food lab Corbion to tweak the formula of starches, oils and gums in Twinkies, finally arriving at an acidity level that would prevent staleness and discoloration. The singular goal: Make the Twinkie warehouse-friendly. And while none of this will make Alice Waters� heart flutter, the team succeeded in making the indestructible snack even more so � [its] shelf life was more than doubled, to 65 days. Hostess switched to a warehouse system. Delivery costs dropped to 16% from 36% of revenue, and Hostess� retail reach expanded greatly. �We now ship to all Wal-Marts, dollar stores, 100,000 convenience stores, plus vending machines and food services,� says Jhawar. �There is no reason why Hostess can�t be sold in any place that sells candy bars.�

"I love that Etsy gives a platform to someone who can crochet these shorts and sell them to men who love pants made of yarn."

"I�m probably going to buy this glowing owl necklace right after I publish this story. I need this coffee mug. I like Etsy just the way it is. And that�s why I�m taking time to soak in the company as it exists today, before Wall Street forces it to change."

"This is not about starting a conversation. This is about coffee wars.... The sole objective here is to try to increase the brand�s cultural relevance."

Said a USC educator named Jeetendr Sehdev, in my favorite quote in the NYT article titled "Starbucks Initiative on Race Relations Draws Attacks Online."

ADDED: Jeetendr Sehdev � according to his Twitter profile:

Celebrity branding authority. USC professor. Brit in LA. Scientifically examining the world of celebrity. #IntelligentPop

Following!

"Dell Williams, who in 1974, after being humiliated by a department-store clerk when she tried to buy a vibrator, was moved to start Eve�s Garden..."

"... the New York boutique widely described as the nation�s first sex shop catering specifically to women, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92."

In the early �70s, Ms. Williams took a workshop from the sex educator Betty Dodson, an advocate of women�s masturbation. So that women might experiment in private, Ms. Dodson recommended the Hitachi Magic Wand, a cylindrical vibrator nominally sold for aching muscles.

Off Ms. Williams went to Macy�s to buy a Magic Wand. There, she wrote afterward, she found herself face to face with a �pimply 20-something� male sales clerk.

�What do you want it for?� he asked in a carrying voice.

�I left Macy�s that day,� she wrote, �clutching my precious, anonymous brown shopping bag and thinking: Someone really ought to open up a store where a woman can buy one of these things without some kid asking her what she�s going to do with it.�

It's interesting that she needed to say that the man had acne, considering the folk belief that masturbation causes acne. Was Williams subtly insinuating that the sales clerk was seeking the camaraderie of a fellow masturbator? Or did she feel a compulsion to humiliate him after he (accidentally?) humiliated her?

I went looking for a good link for the proposition that masturbation causes acne � which has got to be one of the all-time great correlation-causation misperceptions. I'll go with this page from "Acne For Dummies."

I also ran across � why have I never noticed this before? � Mark Twain's "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism" (a speech given in 1879 at The Stomach Club, a group of American writers and painters in Paris):

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: a disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke and tell indelicate stories � and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures. The results of the habit are: loss of memory, loss of virility, loss of cheerfulness and loss of progeny.

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it....

And yet, there was money in it... for Dell Williams.