I wrote a piece for the online Colette Seamwork magazine about how sewing has helped me come to peace with my body – you can check it out (for free) here. They also commissioned this lovely watercolour of me – quite an unexpected surprise!
Has sewing helped you become more body positive? I’d love to hear about it.
Sarai at Colette also let me know that they’re looking for more stories about how sewing has changed people’s lives – if you have a story to tell, you can submit your idea here.
Stanford University expects families earning less than $125,000 will not have to pay tuition in the coming year. (AP/Paul Sakuma)
Stanford University has received a lot of attention for offering free tuition to students whose families make less than $125,000 — throwing in free room and board for those earning less than $65,000.
But there is a trend that could have a larger impact on college pricing. Small- and medium-sized private universities have been slashing tuition for all students in an effort to reverse sliding enrollment numbers. And while these schools are not as prestigious as Stanford, their willingness to cut prices could signal a shift in the cost of higher education.
Nearly a dozen private colleges reduced tuition for the current academic year. Southern Virginia University, for instance, cut tuition and fees 23 percent from $18,900 to $14,600 a year, while Converse College in South Carolina brought down its prices by 43 percent to $16,500 a year.
Back when these schools announced their plans in 2013, they said the new prices were closer to what most students were actually paying after factoring in grants and scholarships. Still, they said they expected the reduction in price to save money for most families.
Lowering tuition is a risky strategy for schools because families often equate price with prestige. To maintain the perception of quality, private universities got in the habit of raising tuition but offering deep discounts through scholarships and grants. About 89 percent of the freshmen class of 2013-2014 received enough aid to cover half of their tuition at private universities, according to a study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
But that high-tuition, deep-discount model is falling flat for small private colleges. Schools are failing to fill seats, which is bringing in less money. A recent survey by Moody's Investor Service found that 45 percent of private universities were anticipating declines in enrollment and another quarter expected revenue from tuition to dip. The board of Sweet Briar, a women's liberal arts college in Lynchburg, Va., recently voted to close the school because of severe budget shortfalls.
These smaller schools are under more pressure largely because they don't have the huge endowments of places like Harvard and Stanford. Those gold-plated schools enroll an outsize proportion of wealthy students and sit on multi-billion-dollar endowments that make it a lot easier to let some students forego tuition payments. (Stanford students will have to pay $5,000 each year, even if they qualify for the tuition benefit.)
Stanford has an endowment of $21 billion, compared to the median private college endowment of $26.2 million. The economic crisis pummeled the endowments of most colleges and universities, with many suffering 25 percent declines in value, according to an analysis of data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Many schools have not fully recovered.
There's no guarantee that lower costs will attract more students, and cutting prices won't solve the problem of rising costs. But the status quo doesn't appear sustainable. Families have grown sensitive to price increases in this uneven economic recovery. Tuition has risen faster than inflation at a time when wages have remained flat. If the schools that have cut prices start to see a few years of enrollment growth, more universities could get on board.
Les deux compères moscovites Dasha & Olya réalisent de somptueux cinémagraphes, cousin germain du GIF animé. Le procédé est simple, lorsque l’une prépare à manger, l’autre photographie et force est de constater que l’alchimie fonctionne tant leurs créations ouvrent l’appétit.
What would be the ideal menswear store? The editors of Apparel Arts thought they knew. In 1936, they published “Permanent Modern,” a fourteen-page article introducing their vision of modern menswear retailing.
The article spares little in details. Included are elaborate floor plans and descriptions of the materials that should be used for the architecture, fixtures, and display cases. According to the editors, things should look modern, but not “voguish modern,” as you want to catch the customer’s eye, yet also make the place feel inviting. They even specified the lighting and air conditioning systems (two whole pages were dedicated to that). Should the reader want to implement their vision, they included a directory for the contractors, suppliers, and equipment manufacturers who could help with the store’s construction.
The store they imagined was grand – something like a Saks Fifth Avenue, but solely dedicated to men. On the first floor, you have accessories and footwear. Low, countertop cases are used to display ties, pocket squares, and gloves. The departments for hats and shoes are sectioned off from the main accessories floor, so as to provide customers with a certain level of privacy. Replacing the old-fashioned theatre-chair seating arrangements in the footwear department is a group of modern, upholstered wall seats. And in the hat department, the display cases are designed so that they can be easily used to promote gifts during the holiday season.
Below is the basement, which is partly dedicated to shipping and receiving, as well as holding inventory and equipment. There’s also a large club lounge, which takes up most of the floor. Here, fruitwood furniture and brown/ white upholstered sofas decorate the main space. A bar sits at one end of the room, while a copper mantel fireplace is located at the other. Green carpet runs throughout.
The club is meant to be a space where customers can come in, relax, and have a drink, but they can also enjoy the valet service, barber shop, and provisions for massage, showers, and lockers. The basement has its own exits, which lead out to the sidewalks just beyond the front of the store, so that men can stay after-hours, even when the store itself is closed.
In a strange (and seemingly needless) plan, the editors also imagined that the first floor’s display windows could be mechanically lowered to the basement, where employees would do their trimming before raising them back up again. Why workers couldn’t just bring their materials up to the displays, I have no idea.
The second floor is devoted to sport and university clothing, with separate sections for each. There’s also a small area for robes and dressing gowns. In the above two images, you can see the imagined interiors of the sport and university shops. Along the wall are two tiers of clothing, with the lower one being enclosed.
The third floor is dedicated to high-end tailoring, with moderate priced clothing occupying the fourth. The back of these floors have sections for seasonal promotions and in-house alterations services. The front half is where the rest of the clothing is displayed, with a small lounge area separating the two. Lounges, I imagine, are necessary since we have four massive floors dedicated to men’s style at this point.
The fifth floor has two main divisions – the boys’ shop and the prep shop, with a lounge (again) separating the two. The boys shop has an animated and playful feeling, while the prep shop shows more dignity and restraint. The prep shop, as you can see, is mainly dedicated to tailored clothing, which – for boys of high-school age – has almost all but disappeared.
Finally, since trekking through five floors (six, if you came from the basement’s club lounge) must be tiring, the top-most floor has a penthouse restaurant with an open air dining terrace. Apparel Arts’ editors imagined that the terrace could be converted into a skating rink in the wintertime, for showing apparel on live models.
“Permanent Modern” was supposed to be an enduring concept of modern menswear retailing, but such massive commercial complexes feel so archaic now. For many men, including myself, places such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus feel too impersonal, which is why many have gone to smaller and more specialized boutiques.
The best menswear store I’ve seen is Battistoni. Rather than modern, it feels old-school – the wood-paneled walls, marble floors, and fine art lend a sort of a rarified air, and the shop consists of just a single floor (not six) with small, separate rooms dedicated to different goods. Supposedly, the place used to be something of a salon, where men would drink and trade gossip while they got measured. The owner of Battistoni once told me Humphrey Bogart came so often that he asked if he could leave a bottle of whiskey for himself here, but who knows if that’s just lore.
In any case, I guess tailored clothing can be timeless, but taste in retail changes.
Tea leaves collected from Boston harbor the morning after the Boston Tea Party.
Label reads:
“Tea that was gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester Neck on the morning after the destruction of the three Cargos at Boston December 17, 1773.”
i’m so pleased that this means someone during the event was like “yeah this is probably gonna be historically interesting” and just ran out there with, like, what, a net? some cloth? fishing around in the fucking bay to collect tea to put in a bottle? you go, buddy
Good job, anonymous 18th century person. Your commitment to historic preservation pleases me.
I don't know what this app does but obviously I need it
Diese Location-Based-Services-App präsentiert eine einzigartige Vielfalt multimedialer Informationen zum berühmten „Märchenkönig“ Ludwig II. von Bayern. Die App bietet faszinierende Augmented Reality Features, u.a. 3D-Mustererkennung, die in Echtzeit digitale Objekte direkt am Standort des Betrachters in das Kamerabild des iPhones einblenden. Als unentbehrlicher Begleiter zu den Schlössern, Orten und Ereignissen im Leben Ludwigs II. ist die App ein Must-Have für jeden Ludwig-Fan und alle historisch und touristisch Interessierten „auf den Spuren des Märchenkönigs“. Nahezu alle Inhalte der App sind auch offline nutzbar. Die App ist ein Angebot der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in Kooperation mit der Bayerischen Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen.
The origins of this app lie in online exercises in palaeography developed for postgraduate students in the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, U.K. The aim is to provide practice in the transcription of a wide range of medieval hands, from the twelfth to the late fifteenth century. Please note that it is not a tutorial on the development of handwriting in medieval western Europe.
Users can examine 26 selected manuscripts, zoom in on individual words, attempt transcription and receive immediate feedback. They can optionally compare their transcription with a full transcript. The user's transcripts can be saved and reopened. The saved transcripts are accessible via File Sharing in iTunes.
April Fool’s Day is drawing to a close, and it was a surprise to see the noble publication of Nature get in on the act with a paper on dragons by Andrew J. Hamilton, Robert M. May & Edward K. Waters claiming that
“that anthropogenic effects on the world’s climate may inadvertently be paving the way for the resurgence of these beasts.”
Global warming. Is there anything it doesn’t do?
See, it has a graph and everything:
Nature is not the first to try this. Back in 2004, a mockumentary called The Last Dragon made by Darlow Smithson Productions for the UK’s Channel 4 & Animal Planet expended rather more time and money on a one and a half hour mock up of the discovery and investigation of the remains of a dragon. Considering what it is, the piece is reasonably well done; but the whole mockumentary thing has fallen into disfavor after Discovery Channel’s misjudged flirtation with the genre during Shark Week back in 2013.
Of course, if you really want dragons, there are loads of them in Skyrim, and their resurgence was caused by Alduin waking them up. Really.
In 2013, Google announced the death of its RSS reading platform Google Reader. At the time, Google cited declining usage as the official reason for Reader's closure, wrapping it up along with things like Cloud Connect, Voice for Blackberry, and Building Maker as part of a second round of "spring cleaning."
It comes as a huge surprise then to see the app back in the Play Store almost two years later with a new icon and brand new interface, jumping from version 1.1.8 up to 2.0.
The girlfriend of the Germanwings copilot who crashed an Airbus plane into the French alps last week has fled her home in fear of being blamed for the disaster, the Daily Mail reports.
Kathrin Goldbach, 26, and her family, have left the small German town of Montabaur and do not have plans to return, the Mail reports.
"The hatred of the world is coming down upon her, and you know this place is so small, it is very hard for them to come back here," a family friend told the Mail.
Investigators believe Andreas Lubitz, 27, locked the Germanwings captain out of the cockpit and then deliberately steered the plane into the mountains, killing 150 people on board.
Lubitz's mental health has also been at the center of an investigation into the crash. Last week, investigators found a torn up medical note at Lubitz's home declaring him unfit for work.
Lubitz allegedly lied to doctors when seeking medical attention for vision problems, telling them he was on sick leave even though he was still flying commercial planes, German paper Bild first reported.
Lufthansa, which owns budget airline Germanwings, revealed earlier this week that Lubitz notified officials that he suffered from severe depression during flight training school in 2009.
Apple describes the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch as a "new chapter in the relationship people have with technology," and "the most personal product we've ever made." But early tests were anything but sophisticated.
The iPhone screen would then show a simulation of the Apple Watch's in-development user interface. It means that designers and developers weren't held back by the limitations of hardware, or lack thereof.
They made a custom dongle, an actual watch crown that plugged into the bottom of the phone through the cord jack. In a sense the first true Apple Watch prototype was, like 10,000 Kickstarter projects, just a weird iPhone case with a strange accessory sticking out of it.
One out of 10 Americans owns a smartphone but has no other Internet service at home, with the poor far more likely to find themselves in this situation than those who are well off, according to a Pew Research Center report released today.
"10 percent of Americans own a smartphone but do not have broadband at home, and 15 percent own a smartphone but say that they have a limited number of options for going online other than their cell phone," Pew Senior Researcher Aaron Smith wrote. "Those with relatively low income and educational attainment levels, younger adults, and non-whites are especially likely to be 'smartphone-dependent.'”
Pew said that 7 percent of Americans are in both categories—a smartphone is their only option for using the Internet at home, and they have few easily available options for going online when away from home. Pew refers to these Americans as "smartphone-dependent."
That the Japanese film is known at all in the West is due mainly to the pictures of Akira Kurosawa. That I am known both here and abroad is also mainly due to him. He taught me practically everything I know, and it was he who first introduced me to myself as an actor. Kurosawa has this quality, this ability to bring things out of you that you never knew were there. It is enormously difficult work, but each picture with him is a revelation. When you see his films, you find them full realizations of ideas, of emotions, of a philosophy which surprises with its strength, even shocks with its power. You had not expected to be so moved, to find within your own self this depth of understanding.
Banner hung near Iguala asks alleged leader of Los Rojos gang for information
Families despair six months later: ‘It is as if there is no government’
Parents of some of the 43 college students missing in southern Mexico since September say they have so little confidence in an official investigation into the disappearance that they have appealed to the leader of a local drug gang for help in locating their sons.
A Cambridge technology firm built a time machine on Wednesday, rolling back the clock to April 1, 1957.
Workers arrived on the 14th floor of Endeavour Partners’ Kendall Square office building only to find rotary phones and manual typewriters where their computers used to be. A portrait of President Eisenhower looked down sternly from the wall.
“I quickly realized it was an April Fools’ stunt,” said Neel Desai. It was his first time using a typewriter and he wasn’t that good at it. He typed phrases like “typewriters are dope.” And he spelled his name wrong.
“Unfortunately you can’t backspace on typewriters, believe it or not,” Desai said. “I believe I’m one of the first people to ever type the word ‘Apple Watch’ into a typewriter.”
The novelty, or, better said, non-novelty of an electric calculator wore off pretty quickly for Chief Financial Officer Henrietta Bernstein.
“In about a minute!” Bernstein said, laughing. “It had been a long time since I’d used something like that, and it would make my work impossible now.”
CEO Michael Davies (Courtesy of Endeavour Partners)
Those sort of realizations were the point of the prank, which took five weeks to plan and multiple trips to thrift stores as far away as Rhode Island. Endeavour Parnters consults for major corporations, helping them plan for what the economy will be like in the future and to know what technologies they’ll need in the workplace of tomorrow.
“We spend so much time looking out on the future,” said CEO and chief prank planner Michael Davies, “we wanted to take a moment, pause, think and reflect. And ask yourself, ‘How is our modern world different?’
“For me, because I actually did begin doing stuff on typewriters, it was actually a horrific flashback,” Davies added. “For them it was like, ‘Oh my God, how did you ever get anything done?!'”
It wasn’t long before Endeavour’s 30 employees, with their productivity rolled back by six decades, began getting antsy. They started pulling out their smartphones to email clients. Associate consultant Mary Tobin said it would have taken many more people do the same work back in 1957.
“It’s funny to think that there was probably a company doing the same thing,” Tobin said, “but writing all their proposals and strategy outlines on typewriters.”
Hours after the April Fool’s surprise, personal assistant Tara Huggins was still banging away on a manual typewriter.
“You don’t even need the free Wifi!” she said, laughing.
The Alameda County district attorney’s office has dismissed the case against two men who pleaded guilty to battery charges last week. The decision came after authorities reviewed a video that showed an interaction, between the men and two Downtown Berkeley Association workers, that began as a verbal altercation and took a violent turn.
In the video — which has been viewed on YouTube more than 60,000 times — a worker for the merchants association can be seen punching one of those men at least 10 times, pushing him to the ground. When the worker, identified in court papers as Jeffrey Bailey, initially told authorities about the March 19 incident, prior to the discovery of the video, he said he had just been defending himself.
Police arrested James Cocklereese, 30, and Nathan Swor, 23, based on Bailey’s report, and the district attorney’s office filed seven misdemeanor charges against the pair. Last week, police said they learned of the video — which was posted online by Bryan Hamilton on Sunday, March 22 — and alerted the district attorney’s office to it. But the two homeless men had already pleaded guilty to battery and been sentenced to probation.(...)
Governor Brown is calling for a 25 percent cutback in water usage statewide. [ 
