All Posts Tagged as 'Modernization'

United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz acknowledged key pain points customers face when traveling today, including airlines' increasingly shrinking seat sizes.

"I think we are nearing a point certainly that we can't do that anymore," Munoz told ABC News. The interview was conducted prior to the U.S. grounding of the Boeing 737 Max.

He said that air travel used to be a thrilling experience but has turned into a laborious process.

"It's become so stressful," he told the outlet, "from when you leave, wherever you live, to get into traffic, to find a parking spot, to get through security."

Grocery stores have shut down self-serve salad bars during the pandemic. They’ve taken away displays of fresh olives and dips. And they’ve replaced giant kettles of ready-to-ladle hot soup with sealed to-go containers.

The deli and prepared food areas that used to draw traffic to stores and differentiate grocers have fallen from favor as customers worry about the spread of the coronavirus, cook more from scratch and try to limit their time in stores.

Grocers are trying to revive those parts of the store with new approaches. At Publix, salad bars and hot bars have reopened, but employees dish out each item. Wegmans moved hummus, olives and more behind a counter where cheese shop employees fill orders. And at Texas-based H-E-B, some coolers carry prepared meals from local restaurants and a former food bar became an ice chest of beers.

The videos, created by erotic hypnosis site aim to condition their mostly cishet male viewers into believing they’re a “sexy bimbo girl,” a process known as “feminization” or “sissification.” This is most commonly known as “sissy hypno,” a genre of porn in which men typically dress in makeup and hyper-feminized outfits, and are sexually submissive to any gender.

Of course, there are a few problems with categorizing any of those things as “self-destructive.” But when I ask Adrian if there are homophobic or transphobic undertones to his desire to “recover” from feminization, he insists there’s not.

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer,” according to faculty.

Last month, faculty members approved changes to the Classics department, including eliminating the “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, according to Princeton Alumni Weekly. The requirement for students to take Greek or Latin was also removed.

The couple looked troubled. Everything that they thought they'd figured out, that had been explained by their pastor, no longer made sense. "OK, then, if it's not sex addiction, what is the problem?" A moment passed. Then another. "Well," I said, "for starters, it's worse than you think."

Sex addiction, as a pseudoscientific concept, is so very emotionally appealing. First of all, it definitely labels the objectionable sexual conduct as a disease and nothing but a disease so, really, there's no need to look any further. But the reason I told my clients it's worse than what they thought is because it's not the so-called addict who has a problem. The problem is about them as a couple.

As it turns out, Sunshine Sammy was a race man. Farina and Stymie too, and even Buckwheat for a minute or so.

This may be hard to fathom, considering the designation was generally applied, back around the '20s, to men who exemplified the most righteous and upstanding attributes of black people, and advocated for fair and dignified treatment. It’s also hard to fathom because, at the time, they were just young black boys.

But they were young black boys with starring roles in Hollywood, and among the most popular performers of their time. There weren’t very many blacks of any age getting any sort of featured screen time back then, at least not in roles that didn’t demean the race. Thus, these young people were heralded in the black press, and even by the NAACP, as some of the leading exemplars of blackness, well before any of them were old enough to drive.

Sunshine Sammy, Farina, Stymie and Buckwheat were the principal black characters throughout the 20-year run of the Our Gang film series. The black community treated them (respectively, Ernie Morrison, Allen Hoskins, Matthew Beard and Billie Thomas) like rock stars. But their lives were much more complicated than the movie roles ever let on. Their regard within the black community would be transformed decades later, as the Our Gang franchise lived on years after its heyday.

Since it was shuttered in early 2019, the LGBTQ-themed website Into, launched by Grindr, has frequently been positioned as a media casualty, evidence of the shambolic state of queer publishing (and perhaps the shambolic state of media, period). A sprawling 2019 Buzzfeed article by former Into managing editor Trish Bendix used her layoff as a jumping-off point to explore the state (as well as history and apparently bleak future) of LGBTQ media. More recently, a piece in Mel (a site launched by Dollar Shave Club, which is a fact I would like you to keep in your head while you read this), contextualized the disintegration of Into within a bigger picture of upheavals and downsizing at such queer and queer-adjacent outlets as Out, The Advocate, Instinct, them, and Mic.

It is not absurd to survey the landscape and report back that the earth has been scorched. It has been. It’s curious to witness a queer-media drought at a time when queer people are more visible (and perhaps more numerous, at least in terms of those who are out) than ever. In the absence of extensive data, we can only guess whether the problem is overall reader apathy, disinterest in reading about niche queer content, or issues with the specific content that has been published. None of the sites mentioned were doing consistent blockbuster numbers, regardless of whatever upswings or momentum they may have achieved via editorial tinkering.

Queer people -- and particularly trans people -- are often introduced to sex in a way that can skew their relationship with it later down the line. For trans people that can manifest in the form of relationships with “chasers”: cis men who see trans bodies as a purely carnal, rather than emotional thing to engage with. Heteronormative and cis-Eurocentric ideals of dating often make it feel like if you’re not in a relationship, you’re not worthy of one. As a result, you end up reaching out to whoever is willing to give intimacy as a way to feel like you are, too, part of the expected normality.

At this point in my life, my relationship with sex is skewed. Fucked, if you will. As I lay on my back looking into the mirrored ceiling, wondering whether or not dinner is going to be fish and chips or the leftover stir-fry from the night before, I forget that there’s a person in between my legs. Another late night turned into a hook-up that means nothing. Another person to avoid when trotting around the supermarket next week. It makes me ponder whether or not celibacy could be the answer to my problems. Like many people who have negative or harmful relationships with sex, I’ve been asking myself: is going cold-turkey the best way to sort it out?

A lot of young queer people are switching up the way we see casual sex. Research in the US of LGBTQ+ students at college saw that they were more likely to ensure their 'hook-ups' were the antithesis of heteronormative: focusing more on communication and discussion and sometimes not even including sex at all. Celibacy is often confused with asexuality, an orientation in which someone may experience romantic feelings -- but not physical, sexual attraction. Voluntary celibacy, however, is something that queer people actively choose to partake in, as a reaction to their complex sexual history.

When people ask her if she has children, Münter, who is 44, has a prepared answer: “No, my husband and I are child-free by choice.” Saying child-free, she argues, doesn’t imply you are deprived, as the more standard “childless” might. And by letting them know it isn’t a sad topic to be avoided, she says, “it opens up the door for them to ask: ‘Oh, that’s interesting, why did you choose not to?’” Münter wants to move the awkward topic of overpopulation into the mainstream. “The more we talk about it, the more comfortable people will feel talking about it and then, maybe, things will change.”

For too long, she feels, the issue has been swept under the rug. “We can talk about emissions and climate change, but talking about population gets such an emotional reaction.”

The last thing she wants to do is make parents feel guilty, or to shut them out of the conversation. Procreation, after all, is natural. And if you have two children, you are only replacing their parents, rather than adding extras. But if you’re not yet a parent and can’t suppress your parental instincts, says Münter, “my ask is that you consider adopting one of the 153m orphan children that are already on the planet and need a home. Or, if you are dead set on having your own, my hope would be that you just have one and then if you want more, adopt.” Ultimately, she says, “your kids and your kid’s kids will be the ones who benefit from humans deciding to slow down our rate of growth. It will slow down climate change, ocean acidification, cutting down the wild places.”

There is a shortage of affordable housing in every state in the country, but it's especially bad in California, where more and more people are discovering the only place they can afford to live is inside a car.

There's only one affordable housing unit for every five extremely low-income households in the state, and the gap isn't just pushing more and more people out onto the streets — it's also creating a new, fast-growing, and hidden class of homelessness.