A crash course in price points: why is a slice of cake $5?

Perhaps you could understand the price point (literally the amount you pay) as the cost of flour, sugar, strawberries and cream, plus a profit margin and cost of labor. Or maybe you could look at the cost of cakes in all the bakeries in town, and work out what the median cost of a slice of cake is, and what your customers are prepared to pay. Or maybe you look at the demographic of people who have access to a cash fee of $5, and come up with a strategy to make them all buy cake. All of this is…

Sexuality, like all things, comes with the good, the bad, and the ugly. It can mean incredible closeness, intimacy and affection between you and your partner. It can mean a slightly embarrassing crush at college. And it can mean having an attraction that is so monstrously warped that an individual ends up causing serious harm, or even death. As the big media platforms and mediums rightly take aim at sexual abuse and violence, it does however raise an interesting question: how should we, as as a society, navigate harmful and dangerous elements of sexuality?

A friend of mine, a hockey dad with three boisterous athletic daughters, discusses his latest worry at navigating a safe path for them in a world where girls as young as three or four are routinely sexualized and endangered through increasingly ugly pop culture. “I get that they want to be like their friends,” he says, anxiously, “But it really creeps me out when I see them copying sucking on their fingers, lollipops and a cutesy Lolita aesthetic. I’ve had to ban Arianna Grande in my house.”

It’s not really hard to see why. Queen of Lolita Pop, Arianna Grande…

I’m used to people treating me like a stupid bimbo when they hear I ‘work in PR’. The expectation of extraordinary stupidity and a vacuous grin. The unnecessary attempts to simplify everything down to what they assume a stupid, boring woman who can probably look pretty at a shareholder meeting could understand. The problem is that real PR, PR at a level that actually saves you millions, requires a whole lot more thought and research than what you’d probably thought. As AZ found out, the hard way.

I could go off in a rant here about the number of (predominantly male) clients who have suggested that I research their sector, or insist on explaining ‘profit’ to me, but that’s not why I’m writing this. PR isn’t, contrary to popular imagination, calling boring board members ‘babes’ at conferences as you hand around useless leaflets saying actualize and optimize. We don’t really do press releases anymore. Conferences are more egofests than any genuine attempt at learning or releasing anything. A lot of PR is gritty research, networking, getting information from hardcore academia and investor documents into an understandable format…

I’ve been on this planet for twenty-four long, drawn out years. Sometimes it seems like a lot longer, if I’ve spent too long going through my message requests. Throughout it all, from training bras to conference calls with Madrid, I’ve endured both the brilliant and beastly of male attention. I’ve seen success, and I’ve seen failure. I’ve been repulsed, and I’ve been overwhelmed.

And I don’t hate you, incels. In fact, I hope I can help.

Surprisingly for some, although definitely not for others, I haven’t always been the girl in the bright red lipstick rolling her eyes at frightened men in Players. In fact, if you knew me at all before I turned twenty, I think you’d find it surprising that I’d even be let into a club, let alone one where I’d have the dubious honour of having a Lord pin me against a vodka stained piano surrounded by hollow-hearted civil servants bellowing Mr Brightside. So, let that be a lesson to the bitter hearted among you: I was unattractive, too.

I was an…

I’m sorry I can’t love you the way you want to be loved.

There’s an honesty to conversations made beneath polyester sheets at four in the morning. The world sleeps, and you lie saline streaked beside a man you once loved wondering if the round wound of your heart will ever heal from those indelible thirteen words. Thirteen honest words that send you reeling in the dark for anything to say. But only tears. Childish tears, loud sobs between mouthfuls of pillow and chokes in the silence. It irritates him now. You irritate him now. He will not reach for…

Tawana Brawley was 15 years old. A tenth grader growing up in a crumbling district of New York, I wonder how many of her classmates knew what was happening when she went home from school. If they saw the bruises that lined her arms. If she ever talked about what her stepfather did to her when the door closed. If they ever knew her mother watched, or joined in. If she ever shared with a friend how he had stabbed his first wife fourteen times with a steak knife, before beating her and shooting her to death. If they ever…

Okay, yes. I have a vested interest in the US not screwing Britain over. I’m British, and I quite enjoy not being on the wrong side of a superpower. But, even if I wasn’t, I’d be advising Biden to tread very, very carefully on his ‘Fuck You’ attitude to the UK.

Britain might be a tragic, pathetic splatter of what it used to be, and objectively about as powerful as Norway or Italy, but we are also America’s strongest allies. We are America’s bootlickers. Every stupid, ridiculous war you’ve got involved in, we’ve backed you. Every policy you’ve wanted to…

WARNING: This article contains highly racist, offensive, and upsetting historical tropes that you will almost certainly find emotionally challenging. If this is likely to distress you, maybe skip this.

Let’s start with one very obvious, if oft overlooked point: viruses, parasites, and bacterium don’t care about feelings, morals, borders, politics, nationalism, or religion. They do not care if you are a god-fearing Protestant in Alabama, or a wicked heathen dallying in any number of sins in Soho. Variants can explode into transmission in any nation, in any neighborhood, and in any family. No matter how ‘good’ you are at being…