BlackBerry and Alicia Keys: This might actually work
By Mika Rekai - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - 0 Comments
Introducing the Grammy-winner as global creative director brings the Z10 a celebrity endorsement
In a single day last week, Research in Motion launched a new operating system, two new smartphones and changed its company name to BlackBerry. It also introduced a new employee, global creative director Alicia Keys.
The Grammy-winning singer said her “goal is to inspire creativity” in her new job (despite tweeting from an iPhone a day earlier). But will she be more than just a celebrity endorser? Giving musicians lofty creative director titles (will.i.am at Intel in 2011, Lady Gaga at Polaroid in 2009) has become an oft-ridiculed trend at tech companies. Kenneth Wong, a marketing expert at Queen’s University, says a true collaboration with Keys could actually be beneficial. “Celebrity culture is deeply integrated with the Internet and social media,” says Wong. And Keys could serve as a bridge to the app world that BlackBerry ignored in the past. “For BlackBerry not to use her would be a missed opportunity,” he says.
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Tsk-tsking the ‘spinster’ has got to stop
By Emma Teitel - Thursday, August 23, 2012 at 11:29 AM - 0 Comments
Celebrity popular culture simply cannot accept the notion that a famous and beautiful woman is happily unmarried
Marc Piasecki/FilmMagic
If you were to put the North American tabloid industry into one political camp, you might guess that like the rest of the mainstream media, it has a largely liberal bent. Gay marriage, drug use and prostitution scandals: these are things the tabloids thrive on, and the politicians most averse to those things (think Romney-Ryan 2012) probably don’t pique their interest—or get their votes. US Weekly and People magazine, for example, may count the “traditional family” among its largest demographic of subscribers, but they don’t have much time for traditional families within the pages of their publications. You’re an elderly Jewish comedian who married his adopted Korean stepdaughter? Excellent. You get a four-page spread. You’re a washed-up middle-aged sitcom actor with two live-in porn stars? Perfect. You get the cover. Ten times in a row. Libertinism, it seems, is the rule of the rag.
Except when it isn’t. The only time the smutty principle does not apply—when tabloid institutions tend to have more in common with the traditional values camp than they do with the Marquis de Sade—is when unmarried women in Hollywood are pushing 30 or 40 and are unapologetically—gasp—happy. Somehow, this is news. Front-page news. Celebrity popular culture has gotten over intermarriage, gay marriage, even gay intermarriage, but it simply cannot accept the notion that a famous and beautiful woman is happily unmarried—as 43-year-old actress Jennifer Aniston insisted she was prior to her recent engagement to actor Justin Theroux. The former Friends star has been dissected under the media’s lens for years, along with “spinster” contemporaries Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Diane Keaton, and Oprah (the latter two technically “old maids” by tabloid standards), because of an alleged failure to wed. Prior to Theroux, who proposed last week, none of Aniston’s relationships with post-Brad Pitt boyfriends resulted in marriage. They did, however, result in a lengthy series of tabloid covers about the greatest mystery of our time: why wasn’t Jen getting hitched, and why did she always look so happy regardless? Where was her baby bump? Or adopted Namibian refugee? “It’s very narrow-minded,” Aniston said recently, about the controversy and speculation (she has been “confirmed” pregnant about a dozen times by nearly every tabloid in America.) “It doesn’t measure my happiness or success.”
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How mothers should raise their daughters
By Julia McKinnell - Monday, November 8, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 14 Comments
Your daughter treats you like an ATM and is growing up too fast. Here’s what to do.
Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute
Susan Shapiro Barash’s two daughters are seven years apart in age. Her younger daughter isn’t inherently different than her older daughter, but raising her was far more of a challenge. “I felt my values and opinions were less effective,” she says. Curious about the change in seven years, Barash, a Manhattan teacher, began interviewing other moms about their mother-daughter problems. The result of her research is a new book called You’re Grounded Forever . . . But First Let’s Go Shopping: The Challenges Mothers Face With Their Daughters and Ten Timely Solutions.
Her advice covers all manner of mistakes made by today’s moms who are “much more involved with their daughters at the same time that they’re less certain of their roles.” Barash blames “celebrity culture” and the Internet. “Our daughters are informed in a way that we weren’t. You can’t sit down with a 13-year-old and say, ‘Things are going to change around here.’ It’s too late,” she tells Maclean’s from her home in New York City.
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Now I’ve got to worry about flies, too
By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
Going Gaga: Today’s extreme and celebrity culture has even affected the Animal Channel
Shuji Kajiyama/AP
“I was an exile in Manhattan” has an improbable ring, rather like the fifties radio program I Was a Communist for the FBI. All the same, it wasn’t Duluth or Thunder Bay, but glorious, stenchingly hot Manhattan that became my exile during recent court proceedings. All I missed were my panting white dogs whom my husband had never seen, but who are now with us. There’s a bonding thing going on between little Arpad, 90 lb. at eight months, and my husband, undisclosed pounds at 792 months.
Conrad lectures him about the 10th century’s Prince Árpád, who led the Magyars over the Carpathian Mountains to establish Hungary, while Arpad wags his tail with joy and establishes himself on our bed.
