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Paulina Porizkova on the podcast
And I think you will want to listen to it.
I’m old enough to remember when the gossip came out that supermodel Paulina Porizkova had taken up with Ric Ocasek, front man for the band The Cars. People were surprised and they were mean. How could one of the most beautiful women in the world - on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue twice! - be with a guy who looked like a space alien?
When the two of them were photographed out on the town in a New York newspaper, the headline read, “Beauty and the Beast.” (Ocasek said to Porizkova, “Don’t worry, honey. I don’t think you’re a beast.”)
But the pairing makes more sense to me after having this interview with her. Ocasek was a lot like her father. Looked like him, acted like him, and this was the father that had left her mother when Paulina was nine years old. It’s hard to avoid writing run-on sentences here because everything is connected. That parental split came when Paulina had only just been reunited with her parents in Sweden after being separated from them in Czechoslovakia at age three.
Many years later, after being with Ocasek for more than three decades, that marriage fell apart and the two were heading for divorce when Ocasek suddenly died. In his will, he stipulated that nothing should be left for his wife because, he said, she had abandoned him.
We also talk about her early days as a teenage fashion model in Paris where creepy men would routinely expose themselves to Paulina and other models, a practice that they didn’t even realize was sexual harassment until hearing about the practice on Oprah.
It’s a good interview, I think, and it may have gone deeper and to more painful places than Paulina expected. At the end, as recorded on the podcast, she announces her intention to go drink a bottle of whiskey. So I think that’s a good sign.
Paulina met Ric Ocasek on the set of the video for the Cars song “Drive”. It’s a song that wasn’t even sung by Ric so I guess he had time to hang out and chat with the supermodel.
The Cars performed “Drive” at Live Aid. Back in the 80s, we gathered by the hundreds of thousands to hear synth ballads! IT’S JUST HOW THINGS WERE DONE:
Seattle schools sue big tech companies for messing up kids’ minds
There is no shortage of research pointing to the harmful effects of social media on kids and teenagers. Now there is legal action, coming from the public schools in Seattle.
Seattle Public Schools filed the lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court. The 91-page complaint says the social media companies have created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children.
It blames them for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying; making it more difficult to educate students; and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring additional mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media, and providing additional training to teachers.
The schools are trying to, you know, be schools but it’s getting harder.
The lawsuit says that from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 30% increase in the number of Seattle Public Schools students who reported feeling "so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row" that they stopped doing some typical activities.
The lawsuit does not target the content on sites like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok directly, rather it goes after the people running the platform for promoting some of the most harmful content.
Internal studies revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 showed that the company knew that Instagram negatively affected teenagers by harming their body image and making eating disorders and thoughts of suicide worse. She alleged that the platform prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public.
Oh no! Our poor monetized productivity!
I like to think of the mental health crisis in America as being bad because people are suffering. And I think it needs to be addressed because people are all donked up and they shouldn’t be. But there’s more than one way to look at how bad it is, and one of those ways is to see how much it costs your corporate puppet masters in terms of your toil.
According to a recent online Gallup survey with 15,809 respondents, 19% of U.S. workers rate their mental health as “fair” or “poor," and that cohort is four times more likely to have unplanned absences because of it. Based on those results, Gallup projected that these workers are estimated to have almost 12 days of unplanned absences a year, costing the U.S. economy $47.6 billion in lost productivity on an annual basis.
…
Certain industries have more employees reporting mental health struggles than others, according to the survey. For example, 75% of construction employees and 71% of those in the arts/design/entertainment/sports media category either have no easily accessible mental health support services in the workplace or are unsure if they exist. Meanwhile, among those reporting their jobs have had an “extremely negative” impact on their mental health, government and public policy workers saw the highest rate at 13% followed by transportation (goods) at 10%.
Yes, I watched football this weekend. Yes, I’m an enabler.
And my endless cycles of self-loathing and NFL-induced soothing are too complex and shameful to detail here. Fortunately, we have Psychology Today to ask whether football fans can watch the games with a clear conscience. UNfortunately, the answer ends up being “yes and no”. Great.
PRO:
Football strengthens community, bucking the American pursuit of loneliness as technology privatizes experience. In small towns in the Midwest and South, restaurants and movie theaters close as patrons turn out in force for Friday night games. On Saturday afternoons, enthusiastic alumnae deepen their identities as Spartans, Wolverines, Warhawks, and Razorbacks. And pro football helps entire regions understand their connection on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays.
Football also inspires shared fidelity across cultural and political divides. When fans root for their team, they root together. There is nothing quite like the feeling of belonging as a hundred thousand voices cheer in unison. Fans may share little else and still bask in the civic pride that follows a winning season.
CON:
Well, there is the abundance of chronic head injuries. But also…
If football fosters bravery and camaraderie, the game also protects bullies. Sheer size and great strength contribute to this. But the flip side of ability and drive on the field may translate to arrogance and belligerence off it. Everyday social navigation requires compromise and conciliation. Playing football entails and celebrates aggression. We await the spectacular hit. We read, far too often, of domestic violence and assault perpetrated by college and pro athletes.