Culture Making Articles items tagged youth

Your arms too short to box with Billy Collins

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy
: ?A funny, telling story about what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence." One way or another, we've all been there.?

The poem, titled “Upon Reading Canada,” was an epistolary one-pager. No rhyme, meter, rhythm, or purposeful cadence worth mentioning—“free verse” would be what they aptly call it. It shared with Mr. Collins’s poetry only its general typographic shape. The rest was a haphazard cocksure motif of Billy Collins himself, cast as the heavy weight champion of the world. You see, boxing rings have lines in the form of boundary ropes, which you must grapple within. This is metaphorically similar to writing, which also incorporates lines—this time, of words.

You can see that the Muses had clearly favored me with a friend request.

from "Letter to a Young Poet," by Daniel Nayeri, The Curator, 16 January 2009

Botox for teens

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy
: ?More than 87,000 invasive surgical procedures were performed on teenagers for cosmetic reasons in 2007. Ten thousand 18–19-year-olds had breast augmentation. And Botox was used 11,000 times on teenagers (though because that counts injection sites, the number of patients was smaller). A few years ago I could get gasps from a crowd by reading a Wall Street Journal story about "Botox parties" hosted by 33-year-olds. Guess I'll have to revise that anecdote. Many of these procedures are no doubt a real source of mercy. I had a friend in high school with gynecomastia, and the corrective surgery made a marked difference in his self-esteem. Yet the fact that I have to resort to that wretched twentieth-century word "self-esteem" to explain the benefit of his surgery is telling, and troubling.?

from "2007 Cosmetic Surgery Age Distribution," by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Procedural Statistics Trends 2000–2007 :: via Fuller Youth Institute

Perfectly unfashionable

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy
: ?One of those times when the phrase, "You go, girl," seems completely appropriate.?

Girls Gone Mild pays tribute to young women who have tangled with corporations and campus authorities to challenge the status quo. One such heroine is Ella Gunderson, who at age 11 appealed to Nordstrom for more modest clothing selections. It began with a shopping trip with her mother, 13-year-old sister Robin, and friends. When Robin tried on jeans that they agreed were too tight, they asked for the next size up—only to have the Nordstrom clerk advise them, “No you don’t want that size, you want the smaller size, the tighter size, because it’s The Look.”

That didn’t sit well with Ella. She wrote a letter to the company (her mother didn’t find out until Ella asked for help addressing it) expressing frustration at clothes cut too tight and too low and clerks too narrow in their concept of fashion. “I think you should change that,” Ella told Nordstrom.

A few months later—while the Gundersons were helping produce a local Pure Fashion show—they were surprised to receive two apologetic responses from the company. Ella’s letter and the Nordstrom responses were added to press kits prepared for the fashion show. Soon the story made the front page of the Seattle Times. Radio and television interviews followed, including an interview on the Today Show. Today‘s Katie Couric also interviewed Pete Nordstrom, who acknowledged receiving such complaints from other teenage girls for some time. A question raised at a stockholder meeting pressed the matter further with the company: “What do you plan to do about the Ella Gunderson issue?”

from Ladies, Please, by Jennifer A. Marshall, The Weekly Standard, 28 July 2008 :: via Arts & Letters Daily