EXCLUSIVE: Edie Campbell Pens Open Letter on Model Abuse
LONDON — “We have a problem: We operate within a culture that is too accepting of abuse, in all of its manifestations. This can be the ritual humiliation of models, belittling of assistants, power plays and screaming fits. We have come to see this as simply a part of the job.”
So says Edie Campbell, one of Britain’s best-known models and a vocal member of Cameron Russell’s online campaign to raise awareness around the harassment of models at the hands of photographers and members of the fashion industry.
In an open letter to the fashion industry penned for WWD, the 27-year-old admonishes mainstream media for their silence of the sexual abuse suffered by male models, which she describes as “more complex.”
To her point, a 2016 post on Facebook by male model Cory Bond represents a rare admission: “Inside the modeling business, I have been the victim of inappropriate touching, sexual assault and was drugged once in the course of my 19-year career. I haven’t spoken much about it out of fear of not working and doing the job that I love. You just want it to go away. But trust me, some men in power think that they can do whatever they want to because of their powerful position. So I can believe the allegations against them even if they come years later. People should keep their hands to themselves.” Through his agent, Bond declined comment on Wednesday.
Read the rest of this article at: WWD
Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking
Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.
From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.
Read the rest of this article at: Nautilus
Drug Hunters
On a July day a little over a year ago, over 30 people collapsed on a street in Brooklyn. They lay on the ground, vomiting down their shirts, twitching and blank-faced. Some, half-naked, made jerking movements with their arms, eyes rolled back. Others groaned and clutched onto fire hydrants to try to stay upright. Witnesses said the scene was likeThe Walking Dead. Headlines claimed that people had turned into “zombies,” while police said that the 33 affected were lucky to be alive.
All had smoked an “herbal incense” product called AK-47 24 Karat Gold. Eighteen people were sent to the hospital by ambulance. The situation had all the signs of a drug overdose, and so doctors ordered the usual tests: blood count, urine analysis, heart rate monitoring.
The first patient tested was a 28-year-old man who was slow to respond, but otherwise showed few clear signs of trauma. Heart sounds: normal. Blood count: normal. His lungs were clear and there were no major neurological problems, no excessive sweating or skin lesions. He tested negative for opiates, cocaine, amphetamines. Nothing came up.
Read the rest of this article at: The Verge
Where the Small-Town American Dream Lives On
Orange City, the county seat of Sioux County, Iowa, is a square mile and a half of town, more or less, population six thousand, surrounded by fields in every direction. Sioux County is in the northwest corner of the state, and Orange City is isolated from the world outside—an hour over slow roads to the interstate, more than two hours to the airport in Omaha, nearly four to Des Moines. Hawarden, another town, twenty miles away, is on the Big Sioux River, and was founded as a stop on the Northwestern Railroad in the eighteen-seventies; it had a constant stream of strangers coming through, with hotels to service them and drinking and gambling going on. But Orange City never had a river or a railroad, or, until recently, even a four-lane highway, and so its pure, hermetic culture has been preserved.
Orange City is small and cut off, but, unlike many such towns, it is not dying. Its Central Avenue is not the hollowed-out, boarded-up Main Street of twenty-first-century lore. Along a couple of blocks, there are two law offices, a real-estate office, an insurance brokerage, a coffee shop, a sewing shop, a store that sells Bibles, books, and gifts, a notions-and-antiques store, a hair-and-tanning salon, and a home-décor-and-clothing boutique, as well as the Sioux County farm bureau, the town hall, and the red brick Romanesque courthouse.
There are sixteen churches in town. The high-school graduation rate is ninety-eight per cent, the unemployment rate is two per cent. There is little crime. The median home price is around a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, which buys a three- or four-bedroom house with a yard, in a town where the median income is close to sixty thousand. For the twenty per cent of residents who make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, it can be difficult to find ways to spend it, at least locally. There are only so many times you can redo your kitchen. Besides, conspicuous extravagance is not the Orange City way. “There are stories about people who are too showy, who ended up ruined,” Dan Vermeer, who grew up in the town, says. “The Dutch are comfortable with prosperity, but not with pleasure.”
The town was founded, in 1870, by immigrants from Holland looking for farmland, and until recently almost everyone who lived there was Dutch. Many of the stores on Central Avenue still bear Dutch names: Bomgaars farm-supply store, Van Maanen’s Radio Shack, Van Rooyen Financial Group, DeJong Chiropractic and Acupuncture, Woudstra Meat Market. The town’s police force consists of Jim Pottebaum, Duane Hulstein, Audley DeJong, Bruce Jacobsma, Chad Van Ravenswaay, Wes Van Voorst, and Bob Van Zee. When an Orange City teacher wants to divide her class in half, she will say, “A”s through “U”s to one side, “V”s through “Z”s to the other. Once, many years ago, an actual Dutch woman, from Rotterdam, moved to town with her American husband. She found the Dutchness of Orange City peculiar—the way that most people didn’t speak Dutch anymore but sprinkled their English with phrases that nobody had used in the Netherlands for a hundred years.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
