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There’s a new trend online: “competitive hygiene.” Vox explains how social media users are washing their fake Christmas trees, flashing their collections of Clorex wipes, and otherwise performing cleanliness on Instagram and TikTok. Michelle Cyca unpacked an adjacent trend: the idyllic, staged world of mom-fluencers:
My Instagram feed: a chic Brooklyn mom with a cherubic infant, beaming in the sun, the stroller and apparel brands tagged; a beachy Australian influencer with her favourite brand of natural, eco-friendly cleaning products and a discount code for her followers ... Every post offers a way to be the mother you want to be: stylish, responsible, surrounded by all things organic and sustainable. One imagines the purchases fitting together like puzzle pieces, eventually forming a complete picture of a fully realized, perfect mother. But, no matter how many organic cotton bralettes or enriching wooden toys you buy, there’s always something missing. [Read more]
The US has embraced bitcoin, with financial regulators approving a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund for the first time. Other countries have been much more eager to jump on the bandwagon. Ethan Lou provided a dispatch from Pyongyang, in “North Korea’s Mysterious Cryptocurrency Ambitions,” adapted from his 2021 book:
North Korean interest in cryptocurrency is also at least partly ideological. The idealized self-sufficiency that cryptocurrency grants, after all, is reflected in the country’s official state doctrine, Juche (the incompatibility of cryptocurrency ethos and the country’s broader communist ideology notwithstanding). In 2017, an article on the website of the government-controlled Kim Il-sung University, named after Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, stated that, in order to improve the country’s financial structure, it was vital to master cryptocurrency. Experts said that Kim Jong-un himself had given a thumbs-up to the blockchain conference we were all attending. [Read more]
Vice has a powerful piece about a poet, a descendent of the Ndyuka tribe, encountering an artifact stolen from his people. Repatriation has been a hot topic, and we’ve covered the fight to return looted art and artifacts back to their original communities, whether they’re Indigenous or African. Connor Garel covered the issue recently in “What Should Canadian Museums Do about Their Stolen African Art?”
Artistic inspiration, like wealth, has often been built on the backs of Africans. And this mass dispersion of relics made it easy for Canadians to wander into museums and bask in the light of treasures once far beyond our national sphere of attention. These were no longer just artifacts; they had become fine art. David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, says as much in a 2022 story for The Atlantic, in which he simultaneously dismisses curatorial efforts for repatriation as a “ritual of self-purification through purgation” and also praises his parents, Barbara and Murray Frum, as being “[a]mong those engaged in the fight to recognize African art as art.” The highlights of their collection, reportedly one of the most significant private holdings of African art, can be viewed today at the AGO. [Read more]
According to managers, workplace etiquette is deeply lacking as people return—often begrudgingly—to the IRL office after the ascendancy of remote work. But Zoom isn’t exactly a frictionless worker utopia either. Samantha McCabe explored this in “Workplace Harassment Goes Virtual”:
Across the board, employers are failing in their duty to protect their staff, with terrible consequences. Koster says that almost every client she has at the moment is on stress leave, and some have even developed PTSD from the barrage of abuse. The added inescapability of online work—like the subtle peer pressure of seeing your colleagues fire off emails at a cool 11:48 p.m.—only compounds the problem. If home is the office, there’s no such thing as out of office. When harassment becomes part of that space—when you can be accosted by a lewd picture while curled up on your couch, for example—it can begin to feel like no place is safe. [Read more]