That is their logic, IIRC. The costs to put together the show are reportedly over $10 million, so they tell performers it’ll give them wide exposure/a captive audience. There’s a reason why a lot of performers coincidentally perform right before they release a new album (Janet Jackson, for example, was dropping Damita…

I don't work in marketing but I so work with marketing folks at a large Corp, and I don't think it's intentional at all. They are just really that stupid/clueless/careless.

Oh my goodness, this is fantastic! And love that it’s for the arts - fields people keep telling college students are worthless, but enable us to tell our stories and represent ourselves positively for future generations. Spelman C'2008 

E, I don’t think that’s the greatest analofyt. I generally agree with your point, but Markle is faux-concerned about a family that Meghan is currently part of. It’s more like the person who pushed the old lady in front of the bus is your husband’s father. The case could be made, I suppose, that Meghan will also be…

Opinions can actually be wrong, you know. Just because you believe something sincerely doesn’t mean it’s correct.

No they’re not. There are many Christian congregations and Christian pastors who love and accept LGBTQ/SGL people. Christianity doesn’t require hatred of LGBTQ/SGL people, but some unscrupulous and unChristian pastors and religious leaders (past and present) are using religion to cloak their bigotry under an…

That’s not what she said, though. She said the show didn’t do anything for her career, and she didn’t add anything that implied or gave off the meaning you’re ascribing her. I mean, maybe that’s what she meant, but at the very least she did not express that well.

Me too! I loved Elyse’s LJ.

Not only that, but you can’t say that you didn’t know you were signing up for a reality show when you signed up for a show in cycle 21. Even if you had never heard of or seen ANTM before (which, girl please, of course you have) you could at least watch some early seasons or even just the season right before yours to…

I was thinking the same thing actually. I mean, obviously (hopefully?) the physical abuse isn’t happening everywhere, but the other part just seems like a more extreme version of what many hip for-profit charter school chains are already doing. Take some people with little to no experience in education, get some brown…

Is this the same process/logic that that might also allow universities to accept kids who were home schooled, or who attended private, often religiously affiliated schools?

That is the part that made me the most sad.

I was a graduate student at an Ivy and taught undergrads. Once the kids are there, they just pass them through, and give them As and Bs. I had a departmental administrator straight up tell me that they had to inflate their grades because otherwise, their students wouldn’t be competitive for graduate/medical/law school…

I have been finding the romance genre increasingly good these days. Many of these Victorian and Regency romances have been using the novels to illustrate the difficulties that women, poor people, and minorities had during their eras and writing fully fleshed-out characters...while also writing great sex (and building…

Lies. At least one John Grisham novel has a sex scene in it (The Testament), and I’m fairly certain that several of his other ones do, too (I vaguely remember one from The Firm, too).

This is the best comment on this post. Great points.

Everybody uses influencers. It’s just that some people are more unaware of it because they don’t realize that the person is an influencer, because the medium is different. People demonstrating products to sell you shit isn’t new or novel, and it didn’t start with YouTube.

Why? It’s not really any different than any other kind of marketing, other than that it takes place on social media. People have been marketing their wares for as long as we’ve had organized economies. Billy Mays, for example, is essentially an influencer from the infomercial age, using TV instead of YouTube as his…

No you don’t. There have always been influencers. They may have been called different things and came to their fame in different ways, but they’ve always been there.

There’s actually a company operating on this bet now - I saw an article about it the other day. They’re planning to sell brandless goods for less - accessories that are made in the same factories as the designer goods, but without the label and concomitant marketing.