On my way! To purchase an Army Tactical Brassiere
Just kidding: they're not for purchase
Featuring baby naming mania, book recommendations, and the new clean-air scarcity economy.
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Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny (Prenatal Edition)
Having a baby soon? Having trouble picking out a name? Don’t worry, there’s a consultant you can pay hundreds of dollars to for that. In an era where everyone in America is desperately searching for scraps of the so-called rugged individualism this country was built on, affluent people are being as weird as possible about picking names for their children. This long read from Philly Mag goes deep into the phenomenon:
The desire to find a unique name — to be both part of and ahead of the cool-but-not-common name trend — has even ushered in a wave of baby-name consultants. These self-proclaimed experts in nomenclature, who’ve been taking TikTok by storm of late, will come up with a perfectly bespoke name for your little one — for a hefty price, of course. (Some charge upwards of $30K!)
Wanting your kids to be their own people — to make a name for themselves with the name you’ve given them — is a pretty typical hope of parents. But when did everything get so complicated, so anxiety-ridden, so out of control? From millennials and Gen Zers manifesting “main character energy” in their everyday lives to the rise of for-hire name experts, we’re living through the Great Name Awakening, where baby names, gently used, are indeed for sale.
There is one compelling point here - America used to be big on assimilation and we, as a country, are trying to leave that behind. So now everyone is working overtime to make sure their kids have a head start on separating themselves from the pack.
I will add my own arguments for this unique naming frenzy: getting yourself a gmail account is simpler if you can just go firstnamelastname@gmail.com, which is definitely tough if your name is Emma Smith and less tough if your name is, say, Keightlynn Smith or, perhaps, Trunk Smith. And you might be less likely to fall victim to credit score mix ups if your name is statistically unique.
Is all of that worth up to $30,000? Golly, I don’t think so.
A Less Serious Item (Have a Book Recommendation!)
I loved this short piece on people being better at recommending books than algorithms. Maris Kreizman (who hosts her own podcast about book recommending) goes over why people are better at it, and also offers a fun list of book recommendations for a few common categories of books she often gets asked about (think “sad girl books,” “fiction that’s actually funny”).
This Week’s Theme: The Military Goes Bra & Other Sports Bra Histories
Women! They’ve been letting them into the armed forces for decades now, but only now has the U.S. military remembered that women often, and especially during combat, might need a bra to be most effective at their jobs. Cue the Army Tactical Bra, which has been designed (as four different prototypes) with data collected from 18,000 women in the armed forces in mind. Writer Patricia Marx, for The New Yorker, was allowed into the high-tech design lab where the A.T.B. was developed to look around and eventually try it on:
The original purpose of devcom Soldier Center, which was founded as the Quartermaster Research Facility, in 1949, was to update equipment that had proved tragically inadequate during the Second World War. The journalist Roy Rivenburg, reporting in the Los Angeles Times, has detailed some of the shortcomings. For instance, the tents. They might have fared fine if the war had taken place in Santa Barbara, California, in May, indoors. In the muggy South Pacific jungle, though, the fabric succumbed to mildew and disintegrated after two weeks. Soldiers wearing uninsulated boots when they invaded the Aleutian Islands sustained more injuries from trench foot and exposure than they did from enemy fire.
The Soldier Center’s purview these days includes not just textiles and uniforms but shelters, airdrop systems, weaponry, and food. Rivenburg reported that projects have included a uniform that can change color and one that would enable troops to leap over twenty-foot walls; a courage pill; an “instant chapel,” which can be parachuted into war zones and which contains camouflage-patterned Jewish prayer shawls and compasses that point toward Mecca; a prototype for a protein bar (but doused with kerosene to insure that a soldier would eat it only in an emergency); and, as part of a pest-control experiment in 1974, irradiated cockroaches, which (whoops) escaped from garbage bags in the town dump and invaded homes—a screwup that required six months of repeated DDT and chlordane spraying to fix.
The people at this military innovation center are quite reluctant to share on most things, but even more so about letting the author actually try on the bra - citing concerns that the prototypes might not fit her right and it wouldn’t be relevant unless she trained in them. After a lot of back and forth and a fun deep dive into military history of the bra, the author does get to try on the bra at the end and “immediately felt cozily swaddled.” Alas, there have been no reports since this article that the bra has actually been launched, or that the military has worked on any of the other ill-fitting combat gear they provider for their female members.
And if that hasn’t whetted your appetite for deep sports bra analysis, we can zoom out even further with an article from The Triathlete (which is, yeah, a website for triathlon news) about the actual invention of the sports bra - which is younger than both my parents and most of my aunts and uncles - and its progress since then. The Jogbra was invented in 1977, and actual studies into sports bras’ effectiveness didn’t start until 1984, much to the chagrin of government watchdogs:
After the Jogbra’s invention, the sports bra was quickly in demand by active women, causing numerous lingerie companies, including Vanity Fair and Olga by Warner’s, to rush into the sports bra market. Most simply copied the design of the Jogbra to meet consumer demand; as a novel concept, the sports bra was already better than the alternative (a flimsy fashion bra, or worse, nothing at all) so there wasn’t much demand for improvement.
But there was also a lack of science to suggest a better way. Unlike running shoes, which quickly got an infusion of cash for research and development, scientific studies of sports bras didn’t begin until 1984, when Utah State University student LaJean Lawson used a movie camera rented from Hollywood to record and analyze the breast movement of 60 different women while running. By scrutinizing 16-millimeter film, shot at a rate of 100 frames per second, Lawson was able to ascertain how sports bras performed across various bra cup sizes. Her work was the first to discover that a one-size-fits-all approach to the garment doesn’t work. The way sports bras are usually designed—for competitive athletes who typically have smaller chests—are less effective at controlling the breast movement of the average woman.
Despite breaking into a new realm of research, Lawson’s study was widely panned by government watchdogs—not because of shoddy methodology, but because it was considered a waste of taxpayer dollars to study breasts. Puritanical politics got in the way of progress.
Don’t worry, by 2009, they had advanced the study of boobs and how they jiggle, but it was a long hard road and it’s still very, very difficult to get a good sports bra if you clock in over a D cup (don’t worry, the average bra size in these United States is a DD) because applying the science to the design of the bras is cost-prohibitive.
I really implore you to read the entire article, it’s one of the only pieces of journalism I’ve ever read that feels like it accurately assesses the issues women face when it comes to dressing for sports:
McGhee’s research shows this is a major barrier to exercise: the larger the breast size, the less likely women are to engage in physical activity. If women feel discomfort, pain, or embarrassment about excessive breast movement, they simply won’t exercise. As obesity rates climb around the world, it becomes ever more important to remove barriers to exercise. A supportive sports bra may change the game for elite athletes, but it may be even more important for the everyday woman wanting to run her first 5K or sprint triathlon.
It’s another beautiful day to be a busty woman who wants to join the army and/or go for a jog.
P.S. My official recommendation for larger-size sports bras is SheFit - they have a strap-em-down style that’s good for running and a vacuum-seal-the-boobs style that’s good for yoga-style exercise. Not an ad, just bras I own!
Politics (How Much Would You Pay for Clean Air?)
How much would you pay for a deep breath of fresh air? It turns out rich people have decided to find out! The newest luxury offering in a fancy new apartment building is filtered air in your apartment. Premium air is in high demand now that, at any moment, your neck of the woods could be doused in wildfire smoke from thousands of miles away. And the real estate market is only happy to oblige:
The building’s approach to filtration is undeniably sophisticated. The air in each unit isn’t shared with any other. Outside air is brought in, filtered, treated with an ultraviolet-C light that kills 99.9 percent of pathogens, and completely changed out once per hour. Circulation can be boosted or slowed. Most apartments with similar systems recycle the air every four to five hours a day. “We were thinking, if we’re already going to build a Ferrari, then why would we only give it a 200-horsepower engine?” Roe said. “Let’s put a 1,000-horsepower engine into it.” The quadruple-layer, triple-paned windows feature museum-quality glass and are generally opened only for cleaning. Otherwise, you’d let in air far dirtier than what’s circulating inside.
P.S. For any fans of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, these apartment buildings often have “passive house” certification, which I was truly stunned to learn is a real thing and not something they made up for the show.
A Celebrity Thinger (Flo Rida Is At…The Wedding?)
Demoralized doesn’t quite begin to cut it when I try to describe how this article about “hiring a pop star for your private party” made me feel. Sure, there were highlights (there are still 13 year olds who consider Flo Rida their favorite rapper?), but mostly it was fascinating lowlights:
The other trend is the birth of a new aristocracy, which since 2000 has tripled the number of American billionaires and produced legions of the merely very rich. As musicians have faced an increasingly uncertain market, another slice of humanity has prospered: the limited partners and angel investors and ciphers of senior management who used to splurge on front-row seats at an arena show. Ruggiero, the drummer, told me, “People didn’t use to do this, because they couldn’t afford to have, like, the Foo Fighters come to their back yard. But now they can. They’re, like, ‘I can blow a hundred and fifty grand on a Thursday.’ ”
But this is, still, a New Yorker article, so stay for interesting historical tidbits about private concerts like the following:
The tension between the talent and the money has a long history. In ancient Rome, wealthy music lovers had enslaved performers put on private concerts, known as symphoniae—even as Seneca scolded those who preferred the “sweetness of the songs” to “serious matters.” Caligula liked to be serenaded aboard his yachts, and to pantomime with performers in a kind of pre-modern air guitar.
Music appreciation is ever-evolving!
Would You Rather? (The Valleys of Womanhood Edition)
Would you rather be a stay-at-home girlfriend or call all the women who have ever been on SNL ugly?
A Recommendation (What’s on TV?)
For the sake of not sounding the same as every other quirky recommendations newsletter distributed via Substack, I won’t explicitly recommend Peacock/Netflix’s Girls5Eva or Netflix’s One Day, but I will spend one sentence saying they’re both very good TV shows that just released a new season. Instead, I’ll dig very deep into the annals of all the TV I watch all the time and recommend an AppleTV+ show with a high-falutin concept that I’ve been enjoying: The Big Door Prize. It’s about a Springfield-like town called Deerfield where a machine appears suddenly in the local corner store that tells people their “potential” in the form of a shiny business card with one or two words on it. Think ominous, many-meaning words like “father” and “storyteller” as the types of thing the machine might spit out. The town has an Olive Kittredge-y, Empire Falls-y like vibe to it - a lot of characters and a few sad secrets, and it’s excellent to watch the characters enter crises about what each of their cards tell them their supposed potential is.
There are no gifs of the Big Door Prize because I’m 99% sure I’m the only person who’s seen it, so here’s a screenshot from Girls5eva.
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
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Want more pop culture content? Listen to my podcast Flop Soup that I host with (sometimes) Good Links contributor Justin Crosby.