When reality TV isn’t exactly the rosiest.
I first joined Bachelor Nation during Peter Weber’s season, mostly because I couldn’t put it off any longer — I love good TV complete with melodramatic crocodile tears and frilly romancing as much as the next person, and The Bachelor was the classic golden show that everyone loved to hate. Peter’s season, for one, was the textbook definition of “dumpster fire,” but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t secretly enjoy Champagne-gate, the messy fantasy suite debacle, and the ensuing chaos when Peter decided to rekindle his romance with Kelley Flanagan, who finished sixth. Also, Barb.
Why are we so determined to pit women against each other?
A few days ago, as I was scrolling through Twitter, I came across this Tweet — a side-by-side of Kendall Jenner, supermodel and reality TV personality, and Alyssa Carson, a 19-year-old astronaut and the youngest in history to pass all of NASA’s space flight tests.
The Tweet explains that “While many women struggle every day to belong in historically male-dominated positions and trades, society continues to reward vanity and beauty over real skills and intellect,” among other things.
My initial reaction was stupefying exhaustion, especially when I scrolled down to the comments section and saw that one user had declared…
What’s the protocol when it comes to canceling yourself?
“One step forward, two steps back” should be a Bachelor Nation catchphrase. What disappointingly little ground that the franchise has gained in the past few years is now being painfully overturned with each new stumble.
Recently, Matt James’s pivotal season as the first Black Bachelor and his beautifully diverse cast was upended by the Rachael Kirkconnell and Chris Harrison saga. Now, the news of Emmanuel Acho hosting the “After the Final Rose” special is quickly getting outstripped by the latest Bachelor revelation: Taylor Nolan and her Tweets.
If the name “Taylor Nolan” doesn’t ring a bell, here’s a quick recap…
The facade of Calloway culture only goes to show that destroying an online persona is just as easy as creating one.
Love her or hate her, the internet can’t seem to get enough of Caroline Calloway. Since her reign as The Queen of Instagram, the 28-year-old influencer has:
- Rose to the spotlight of social media through her #adventuregrams — incredibly long, incredibly detailed captions that documented her life stories.
- Scored a half-million-dollar book deal based on her #adventuregrams (that she later, infamously, dropped).
- Been dubbed a “one woman Fyre Fest” from her $165 series of creative workshops, gaining buzzworthy notoriety as a “scammer.”
- Was the object of a viral The Cut exposé by her ghostwriter.
- Gained (and lost) nearly one million…
Less Tok, more Guac.
TikTok is the new frontier of Gen-Z marketing. As TechCrunch put it, “If you haven’t been paying attention to TikTok, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Evidently, the world’s top brands have been paying serious attention. Hundreds of companies including Pepsi, Nike, Walmart, and Skittles have dialed in, taking the opportunity to garner gargantuan levels of views and cult followings.
“What we tell brands is, this is essentially Instagram in the early days,” said Anish Dalal, chief executive of digital-marketing company Sapphire Apps Media.
Since the social media titan took off in 2018, it’s been the most downloaded, most-watched, most talked-about…
Get things done smarter, better, and faster.
Imagine that your day is devoted to cutting down a crammed agenda that seems to stretch on for miles. Picture your to-do list as a Hydra monster from Greek mythology: the moment you cross off a task, two more pop up in its place.
Time flies by and leaves you in its dust. Despite your best efforts, your calendar is just as jam-packed as it was an hour ago. Eleven p.m. rolls around, and, suddenly, an all-nighter seems inevitable.
The exhausting reality is that, for most people, this is a common scenario — even the best of us go about…
Research-backed tips for improving success and fulfillment.
Habits are similar to snowballs. As a snowball begins to roll downhill and gather snow, it compounds in size until you can hardly tell that it started as a muddy clump of ice.
In the same way, once habits gain momentum, they can snowball into remarkable breakthroughs.
- 1 healthy meal each day = 365 healthy meals annually.
- 5 minutes reading before bed = roughly 30 hours reading per year.
- 1 journaling prompt each week = 52 prompts by the end of the year.
The accumulation of habit-building comes down to a simple equation. As James Clear explained in Atomic Habits:
…
A publication editor’s take on how to make your article 10 times more clickable
Eighty percent of articles don’t flop because of the actual writing. It’s a bold statement, but I’ve seen it happen time and time again.
As an editor of Write Like A Girl, a publication housed right here on Medium, I too often encounter stories with wonderful potential — a brilliant introduction, meaningful advice, a wealth of takeaways, the whole shebang.
Even so, it’s these same stories that tank, racking up readerships in the single digits.
The writing’s certainly there, but it’s time to consider an unfortunate reality. …
Chicken caesar salad, but the “chicken caesar salad” is silent
When New York University student Ben Cresto opened his quarantine meal, he wasn’t expecting to see a steak-and-cheese salad.
Why?
Well, for starters, he’s vegan.
As NYU decided to return to campus amid the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly 2,600 students are in isolation, relying on the university for three meals a day. Considering their tuition is upwards of $74K this school year, with $20K going towards room and board, it wasn’t unrealistic for students to expect adequate meals.
Yet, over the past few weeks, NYU students have flooded TikTok in waves, documenting their equal parts laughable and tragic experiences — sour…
Reduce brain fog to perform at your cognitive best.
If you could watch your brain go through its cognitive practices, you’d be surprised by its complexity — the pathways in which it judges, decides, memorizes, learns, and builds strength.
In fact, the average person has roughly 48.6 thoughts per minute. To put this arbitrary number into perspective, that adds up to 70,000 thoughts in the span of a single day. With the sheer amount of thoughts bouncing around in our heads, it’s easy for our brains to become foggy and cluttered.
It’s the feeling we experience when rereading a sentence multiple times before finally comprehending it, the same hazy…
Zoe Yu
Writer, reader, & Oxford comma loyalist. Perpetual TK.
