"The minute the phrase 'having it all' lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces."

"It was a way to reorient ourselves — we were not in service to anyone else, and we were worthy subjects of our own care. It wasn’t about achieving; it was about putting ourselves at the top of a list that we hadn’t even previously been on. Wellness was maybe a result of too much having it all, too much pursuit, too many boxes that we’d seen our exhausted mothers fall into bed without checking off. Wellness arrived because it was gravely needed. Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness. Yoga at work is wellness... The organic produce section of Whole Foods. Whole Foods. Hemp. Oprah. CBD. 'Body work.' Reiki. So is: SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase 'mind-body,' meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked, clean anything. 'Living your best life.' 'Living your truth.' Crystals...."

From "The Big Business of Being Gwyneth Paltrow/Inside the growth of Goop — the most controversial brand in the wellness industry" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner in the NYT Magazine.

From having it all... to having little symbols of nonexistent meaning... essentially having nothing... but nothing in a graspable, tangible form. And it even has a face. The face of Gwyneth Paltrow.

ADDED: The "mindfulness jar" really is a thing kids are making. I did a search to make this image. Click to enlarge and read:

"When [Jonathan Franzen] started writing, a writer could just put his work out into the world without having to explain it...."

"But now being a writer, particularly one who wanted to be in the public favor, meant that you... had to participate. You had to hang out on social media. He hates social media — dreads it, saw it coming the whole time. He had already been on the fence about digital interaction since even before he wrote about Nicholas Negroponte’s 'Being Digital' in 1995 for The New Yorker. 'He was so excited about the prospect of a future in which you wouldn’t get the dull, old New York Times,' Franzen told me. 'You’d get via the web a new service called The Daily Me. It would consist only of things that were personally interesting to you and that suited your own view of the world. That’s exactly what we got. What’s crazy is [Negroponte] thought this was this wonderful, almost utopian possibility in the future.' Franzen found it absurd that anyone would celebrate the notion of not being faced with opposing points of view. 'I’ve never been a big fan of society structured predominantly along lines of consumerism, but I had made my peace with it,' he said. 'But then when it began to be that every individual person also had to be a product that they were selling and liking became paramount, that seemed like a very worrisome thing at a personal level as a human being. If you’re in a state of perpetual fear of losing market share for you as a person, it’s just the wrong mind-set to move through the world with.'"

Writes Taffy Brodesser-Akner in "Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It/The internet has turned on him, his book sales are down and the TV adaptation of his last novel has stalled. But he wants you to know one thing: He’s not even angry" (NYT).

ADDED: If you're looking for Franzen's 1995 New Yorker essay about Negroponte, it's in his collection "How to Be Alone," which I already had in my Kindle. See? I blogged about it on April 13, 2013:

These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

From Franzen's 1995 essay:

High above the clouds, the sun always shines. Negroponte paints a tomorrow of talking toasters, smart refrigerators, and flavorized computers (“You will be able to buy a Larry King personality for your newspaper interface”) that is Jetsons-like in its retention of today’s suburban values. To find clues to a deeper transformation, you have to read between the lines. Negroponte has a habit, for example, of reducing human functions to machinery: the human eye is “the client for the image,” an ear is a “channel,” faces are “display devices,” and “Disney’s guaranteed audience is refueled at a rate that exceeds 12,500 births each hour.” In the future, “CD-ROMs may be edible, and parallel processors may be applied like sun tan lotion.” The new, digital human being will dine not only on storage devices but on narcissism. “Newspapers will be printed in an edition of one . . . Call it The Daily Me.” Authors, meanwhile, as they move from text to multimedia, will assume the role of “stage-set or theme-park designer.”

"I hated the word 'feminine.' It reminded me of a tampon or a panty liner."

Said Tonya Harding, whose "sin" — as the NYT puts it — "was not being the Disney princess Barbie doll that the Figure Skating Association demanded of its skaters."

The NYT article is "Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now/In the movie, 'I, Tonya,' the disgraced figure skater looks back on the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal and her struggles to tell her side of the story" by — what a spectacular name! — Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

“You all disrespected me and it hurt. I’m a human being and it hurt my heart,” she said, her hand karate chopping the table lightly with every word for emphasis. “I was a liar to everybody but still, 23 years later, finally everybody can just eat crow. That’s what I have to say.”

Yes, but the world is different now, I tell her.... Look at Monica Lewinsky and how we treated her. Just yesterday I saw maybe the seventh essay comparing her with you, how rough the 90s were on women who needed support and ——

“Monica Lewinsky?” she asked, incredulous, using a modified version of the same obscene phrase involving male anatomy that she had just said she would never use.* “In the Oval Office! You don’t think that there’s something wrong with that? She disrespected the country.”

But you were both so young, I said. And the press was so hard on you before they’d heard the full ——

Stop it, she said. Don’t compare her to Monica Lewinsky. She is nothing like Monica Lewinsky, she said. Tonya wasn’t making mistakes like a privileged person who gets an internship at the White House....

I'm interested in Brodesser-Akner's use of the double em-dash. That would look crazy to me, but I recently read — in "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen " — that Charles Dickens had a penchant for the double em dash:

In Dickens I discovered something unexpected: an abundance of double dashes— two-em dashes, closed up. “Gaffer! If you think to get rid of me this way——” He uses the double dash in dialogue, to convey an interruption compounded by a threat. The double dash is strangely expressive, packing an extra dose of suspense, as if the speaker, rendered inarticulate by emotion, were resorting to his fists. And, when you think about it, suspense is what punctuation is all about: how is the author going to finish the sentence?

___________________

* Earlier in the article, we're told that in the movie, there's a scene with Tonya confronting skating judges, showing that "she gets frustrated and gives them an obscene directive involving male anatomy. Never happened, she said. 'I would never say that.'" I guess I could look up the movie dialogue. The "obscene directive" must be "Blow me." Or is it "suck my dick"? Oh! I looked it up. It's "suck my dick." Here's Vulture, "A Fact-checked Guide to I, Tonya":

Did Tonya tell a judge to “suck my dick” after the judge criticized her outfit? No. [the actress playing Harding, Margot] Robbie said in a late-night interview that the line was made up, but that when Harding saw the movie, she apparently wished she had said it. Harding did, however, tell the judge who criticized her outfit that unless she could come up with $5,000 to buy Harding a new costume she could “stay out of my face.”