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Dec 5, 2024 | 
yahoo.com | Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Generate Key Takeaways The history of how women have endeavored to change, and usually shrink, the shape of our bodies is littered with artifacts so horrible they are often humorous: the massive, vibrating Magic Couch that promised 1950s husbands weight loss for their wives as a perfect holiday gift; the mail-order tapeworms that packaged parasites as a beauty product; the 1970s head-to-toe sauna sleeve meant to “melt” fat away; and the closets full of ThighMasters, Ab Rollers, and Butt...
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Claire Potter |Nicole Hemmer |Natalia Mehlman Petrzela |Neil Young
On October 28, 2023, the morning of her baby shower, 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain was nauseous, running a fever, and in pain. Soon, the Texas teenager began to bleed and she started to vomit. Nevaeh’s mother, Candice Fails, took her to the hospital, where Nevaeh was diagnosed with strep throat and sent home. A second visit also resulted in no care. Both times, ER staff ascertained that the fetus she was carrying had a heartbeat. That was a problem—for Nevaeh.
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
msnbc.com | Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Neither Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, nor Dr. Mehmet Oz, his pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is a stranger to scandal. But it’s their connection to “wellness” ideology, which includes the belief that health is holistic and that individuals are the most qualified experts on their own experience — that should command our attention.
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
4 hours ago“Kakistocracy” is trending again. The obscure term, coined as early as the 17th century and defined by Merriam-Webster as “government by the worst people,” has surged on Google Trends since the election. What does government by the worst look like? To the cynical, that question calls to mind Dorothy …
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Edwin Frank |Mitchell Abidor |Adam Mansbach |Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Cover image of STRANGER THAN FICTION: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)This book began over the kitchen sink a long time ago. I was doing the dishes after dinner. A CD of Radiohead’s album Kid A was playing, which got me thinking about a recently published book, The Rest Is Noise, by the classical music critic (and Radiohead fan) Alex Ross.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Hannah Berman |Mat Cusick |Nicole Hemmer |Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Artificial Intelligence Concept Collage (2024)| KitohodkA / ShutterstockEmily Nussbaum is a highly celebrated intellectual and writer. She has written for the New Yorker for several years, first as a television critic, then as a staff writer. She’s the author of I Like to Watch, a collection of essays about her television hot takes; she’s also a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic. Her newest book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV (Random House, 2024), was published this June to great fanfare.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Alexander Sorondo |Chloe Cheimets |Adam Mansbach |Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Joyce Carol Oates at Brooklyn Book Festival | editrrix / CC BY-SA 2.0One of the challenges for a reviewer looking to write about Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent books is the context of her larger body of work, which is so huge that a mere mention of it can eclipse the new release. The two titles released this year join more than 60 novels (under three pen names), plus volumes of essays, poetry, stories, a memoir about widowhood, a collection of diaries, and scores of edited anthologies.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
culturedmag.com | Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in their studio, 1950. Photography by Hans Namuth. Summer in the Hamptons: an airy phrase that evokes sweeping beachscapes and verdant lawns. Yet the summer months out East can reach near-Manhattan levels of frenzy, packed with bonfires, garden parties, and snaking lines for anything from beach parking to a lobster salad to go. This brew of balmy ennui and high-octane activity reaches its ultimate expression in the form of Hamptons fashion.
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Aug 15, 2024 | 
msnbc.com | Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
It appears the remaining old guy in the 2024 presidential race is trying hard not to make age his most obvious problem. Former President Donald Trump, who once led the charge to ban TikTok, in early June joined the platform where nearly a third of people under 30 are most likely to get their news.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
wp.me | Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Natalia Mehlman PetrzelaIt’s not fitness. It’s life. This is a marketing slogan of a high-end fitness center where I have worked as an instructor, trained as a member, and which I have marshaled as a scholar to argue that, by the turn of the 21st century, exercise had expanded to become not just a physical pursuit, but a worldview.
