The article “Body Positivity Is a Scam” by Amanda Mull argued that the “progressive” movements in the advertisement industry of certain brands have not been to promote body positivity. Rather, these advertisements have been catered to the feelings of the masses and are meant to drive up sales. Mull uses the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty as their main example as it started the movement through showing the Photoshop process. The reason Mull believes that this method works is because Dove is doing the exact opposite of, for example, high fashion companies. Dove has been using people of all sizes and skin tones to represent their company.
The podcast Grace Kelly (Dead Blondes Part 11) from the You Must Remember This Podcast told the story of Grace Kelly’s life and tragic death. After watching Grace Kelly in Rear Window as well as in some other films, knowing that she was a princess, and learning of her death, I thought that this podcast would be interesting to listen to and would give a greater insight into her life. In the podcast, the host Karina Longworth started the podcast by telling the audience that most “blonde” stories are that of the “suffering” blondes like Marilyn Monroe. Grace Kelly had a different story with a sad ending. Longworth described how Kelly grew up in an unsupportive family, how she started within the acting and modeling industry, and what occurred with the fame she received.
Goffard’s piece “Framed” was truly a page-turner, or in this case, kept me scrolling. In 2011, Kelli Peters was the PTA president of the Plaza Vista School in Irvine, California. A parent called the police stating that Kelli was driving “erratically” and said he saw drugs in her car. However, Kelli was inside of the school helping a coworker at the time of the call. When Officer Shaver found the drugs in her car, Kelli’s world turned upside down.
Nick Bilton wrote this piece for Vanity Fair in 2016, two years prior to the publication of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Startup (which I must confess that I have yet to finish, but I am getting there.) It’s a piece which clearly profiles a now-famously delusional person, whose story rose to prominence again in the last year or two as the stories of other delusional scammers became the subjects of different stories much like this one. Bilton here profiles the things which are now widely known about Holmes: her jarringly deep voice, her obsession with Steve Jobs and subsequent affinity for black turtlenecks, undisclosed and professionally inappropriate relationship with an important employee.
He also does well to shed light on many other things which have become well known details surrounding the massive and criminal decline of Theranos. Holmes dropped out of Stanford without having received her degree but having shared her idea for a patent: a device which would run thousands of tests on a pinprick’s worth of blood, tests able to determine a wide variety of future medical decisions a patient might make. Bilton does a great job of making sure that the reader knows that while this might be a good idea in theory, there’s absolutely no way that it worked. Holmes put people in harm’s way and swindled a massive amount of money out of a lot of prominent people (and a lot of people just looking to invest some of their savings into a Silicon Valley startup.)I think there’s a lot of potential steals to be found here.
Maybe this is cheating, since I’ve been a regular listener of You’re Wrong About for about a year (or whenever I went down the rabbit hole of retrospective reading/listening concerning Monica Lewinsky--and their episode about her is wonderful,) but my favorite episode of YWA was re-released over Valentines’ Day weekend, and I decided to give it one more listen. I knew it was a piece of content that had really given me a new perspective on a situation in our popular culture, and I wanted to revisit that. The “Anna Nicole Smith” episode was one of the first YWAs that I ever listened to. Having been 9(?) when Smith died, it wasn’t a situation with which I was particularly familiar outside of having seen her face on the cover of magazines after she died. This particular episode brings into perspective a lot of the things we don’t think about often when the name Anna Nicole Smith comes to mind--”If they made some prestige Anna Nicole Smith documentary on Netflix today, it would win a thousand Emmys next year.” is one of my favorite statements in this episode, and it seems to be true.