Before Sarah Rachul was a Disney adult, she was a Disney baby. “I don’t really ever remember a time when the Disney movies or characters weren’t a part of my life,” says the 29-year-old account director, who is based in Ohio. When Rachul was a toddler, her parents and grandparents began taking her to Disney theme parks; today, she holidays there regularly, usually with a pair of mouse ears atop her head. Sometimes, she subtly dresses up like Disney characters, which is known as “Disney Bounding” (full-character costumes are banned inside the parks, so guests aren’t confused with employees). She even hosts her own podcast about Disney, The Pixie Dust Project.
Rachul is a proud “Disney adult” – a nebulous and often pejorative term for a grown-up who is a fervent fan of the Walt Disney Company. In the popular imagination, a Disney adult is a childless, self-infantilised and overly excitable millennial; someone who lacks both self- and social awareness. People have said as much to Rachul. In 2022, 2.2 million people watched a video of her breaking down in tears upon meeting a Goofy mascot at a Disney park – many commenters told her to “grow up”, but others told her she was “pure”.
Whether Disney adults are embarrassing or enchanting is largely a matter of opinion. What is missing from endless comment sections is the fact that they are a creation of the Walt Disney Company – a character constructed just as carefully as Elsa or Donald Duck. Disney does not hide its desire to create lifelong consumers. In 2011, Disney representatives visited new mothers in 580 maternity wards across the US, gifting them bodysuits and asking them to sign up for DisneyBaby.com. In 2022, the company announced plans to build residential “Storyliving” communities across America, with special neighbourhoods for those aged 55 and up.
Rachul grew up in the 1990s, during the so-called “Disney Renaissance”, when Disney debuted a string of critically successful films and re-released its earlier classics on VHS. Merchandising reached new heights: 7,000 products were released to promote 1997’s Hercules alone. It was, Rachul says, “almost like you couldn’t avoid having [Disney] as part of your childhood”. She wept when she saw Goofy in the parks because the anthropomorphic dog was her late grandfather’s favourite character, and her grandfather was her best friend. For Rachul, hugging Goofy was like having “this little piece of my grandpa back”.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Statesman
In 2019, a government contractor and technologist named Mike Yeagley began making the rounds in Washington, DC. He had a blunt warning for anyone in the country’s national security establishment who would listen: The US government had a Grindr problem.
A popular dating and hookup app, Grindr relied on the GPS capabilities of modern smartphones to connect potential partners in the same city, neighborhood, or even building. The app can show how far away a potential partner is in real time, down to the foot.
In its 10 years of operation, Grindr had amassed millions of users and become a central cog in gay culture around the globe.
But to Yeagley, Grindr was something else: one of the tens of thousands of carelessly designed mobile phone apps that leaked massive amounts of data into the opaque world of online advertisers. That data, Yeagley knew, was easily accessible by anyone with a little technical know-how. So Yeagley—a technology consultant then in his late forties who had worked in and around government projects nearly his entire career—made a PowerPoint presentation and went out to demonstrate precisely how that data was a serious national security risk.
As he would explain in a succession of bland government conference rooms, Yeagley was able to access the geolocation data on Grindr users through a hidden but ubiquitous entry point: the digital advertising exchanges that serve up the little digital banner ads along the top of Grindr and nearly every other ad-supported mobile app and website. This was possible because of the way online ad space is sold, through near-instantaneous auctions in a process called real-time bidding. Those auctions were rife with surveillance potential. You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It’s tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it’s making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies.
Read the rest of this article at: Wired
In 1979, Penny Pinkham wrote an article for The Atlantic titled “Sportspeak,” a brief overview that provided readers—specifically those who might be novices to the landscape of professional sports in America—with the necessary context and lingo to fake their way through dinner-party conversations. Rather than writing would-be entries for Encyclopedia Britannica, however, Pinkham took a slightly more unorthodox approach.
Excerpts include:
Baseball players wear tight-fitting uniforms in stretch fabrics and they often display bulging paunches along with the bulging cheeks. They spit a lot and spend a lot of time in the clubhouse playing cards.
and
Football players are called Bill or Steve, with a sprinkling of Bubbas. Their coaches are called Chuck.
and
Most basketball players went to college at UCLA or North Carolina, except for those over 6’10” whose first and last names begin with the same letter, who are allowed to come to play directly out of high school. Many basketball players have big round beds and long fur coats.
Pinkham also commented on hockey, tennis, golf, auto racing, and the Olympics, giving each sport a few paragraphs—each, that is, except soccer. For Pinkney, soccer warranted a single sentence: “You do not need to know anything about soccer yet, although you should be able to pronounce Pelé (Peh-lay).”
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
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If you have been to the Melting Pot before, it was likely on a date. Maybe it was a first date, where dipping bread cubes and apple chunks into a pot of burbling cheese, cooked right at your table, offered a welcome distraction from the awkwardness of getting to know a new person. My own first experience at the restaurant was a first date with a man whose name I do not remember, but I vividly recall that I accidentally (lightly!) stabbed him with a fondue fork whilst reaching for a chunk of bread.
Since its founding in the 1970s, the Melting Pot has been a special occasion staple, the kind of place where romantic little nooks for couples to canoodle provide the perfect spot to make googly eyes at a brand-new flame, or where the semiprivate booths perfectly nestle a family celebrating their kid’s high school graduation. It’s where you go when you’re freshly flush with cash from your first teenage job and want to feel fancy with your friends as you try to figure out how the hell to pronounce “Emmentaler.” The Melting Pot is undeniably gimmicky on some level, and it’s a gimmick that’s worked for more than 40 years.
But now, after those four decades — and nearly two since my fateful, totally accidental fondue stabbing incident — the Melting Pot is looking toward a new era. “People’s tastes are constantly evolving and changing, and we try to stay ahead of that,” says Melting Pot CEO Bob Johnston. For the fondue chain, that means selling people on the idea that a pot of Gruyere and raclette isn’t just for special occasions or worth visiting as a jokey bit, but is just as appropriate for a random Tuesday night.
At one Oklahoma City location, the future of the Melting Pot looks bright. Natural light pours in through big street-facing windows in the cool historic building. Some of the restaurant’s familiar secluded booths remain, but much of the open space creates an atmosphere more suitable for groups thanks to larger tables, canary-colored banquette seating, and specially designed tables that can be easily pushed together. (It’s a more complicated task than one might think: Each tabletop cooking surface must be plugged into an outlet.)
Read the rest of this article at: Eater
Everyone knows that inequality has gotten out of hand in the United States. Thanks largely to the work of three now-famous economists—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman—it’s probably one of the most widely accepted facts in modern American life. Since the early aughts, they have meticulously documented the rate at which the richest have pulled away from the rest. Their research transformed domestic politics, leading President Barack Obama to declare inequality the “defining issue of our time,” and turning the one percent into a shorthand for excessive wealth and power.
But what if this “fact” was never true?
That’s exactly the claim that Gerald Auten and David Splinter, economists at the Treasury Department and Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, respectively, make in a paper published last September. The massive rise in income inequality since the 1960s, they argue, is mostly a statistical illusion based on a series of methodological errors. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman found that the top one percent’s share of after-tax income rose from 9 percent in 1960 to 15 percent in 2019. But, according to Auten and Splinter, the one percent’s share of income has actually remained basically unchanged.
The paper caused an immediate stir among economists and pundits. “Can a single self-published paper really refute decades of work by three famous economists?” wrote the influential economist Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg. “The answer—with qualifications—is yes.” In the Financial Times, the columnist Chris Giles asked, “How would you feel if you found out that U.S. income inequality had not risen over the past 60 years?” And The Economist, reviewing the debate, concluded that “the idea that inequality is rising is very far from a self-evident truth.”
When I first heard about the new paper, I assumed it would convince me, at the very least, that inequality had risen less than I thought—that the reality was somewhere between the two groups’ estimates. But the deeper I dug into the debate, the more I felt that both teams were underestimating the extent of inequality in America. Both are limited by assumptions and definitions that are standard in the economics profession but contrary to how regular people think about inequality—or, for that matter, money itself.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic