It’s hard to know where to start with this one. Named after a hormone the female body produces during pregnancy, the space-agey hCG Diet demands severe calorie restriction and daily injections of the hormone hCG, under the super-legit claim that it’ll help you’ll lose fat but not muscle. Who would have thought that if you restrict yourself to 500 calories a day, you’d lose weight? You’ll probably lose your hair, too. The pregnancy hormones are supposed to take care of those inconvenient pangs of hunger while you starve yourself. Thank the geniuses over at the Dr. Oz Show for publicizing it.
The Doctor’s Diet
Let’s just be a grammarian for a second and note that this diet is named The Doctor’s Diet. Not The Doctors’ Diet, implying that it is in wide use across the profession, or even “The Doctors” Diet, suggesting that it is the official product of the daytime show “The Doctors.” It’s merely an endorsed diet plan of a single cast member of “The Doctors”—Travis Stork, the emergency physician and television personality you might also remember as star of season 8 of “The Bachelor.” Sorry, The Bachelor’s Diet is just a basic high-protein/vegetable moderate-carb deal paired with exercise. Spoiler: you don’t get a rose when you shed that last ten pounds.
The Super Shred Diet
The other cast member of “The Doctors” with a trendy diet book out is Ian Smith, whose “Super Shred” diet not only sounds way cooler than his co-star’s, it’s intense—lose a bunch of weight in a short amount of time through “revolutionary” techniques like … eating fiber-rich vegetables later in the day and occasionally indulging in meal replacements? That’s no fun. Dr. Ian drops some science knowledge with his philosophy of “diet confusion,” though, suggesting that if you vary up what and how much you eat, you can totally keep your body guessing, which somehow increases your metabolism. Of course, there’s a “cleanse,” and the final stage of his six-week plan is called the EXPLODE phase. Fair warning.
The Dash Diet
This sounds like a euphemism for an amphetamine binge, but the Dash Diet, pushed into trending consciousness by its New York Times bestselling book, is based on actual research by the National Institutes of Health and is recommended by the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. It’s a high-fiber, low-to-moderate-fat diet meant to lower blood pressure and reduce cholesterol. In other words: boring, but not scary.As part of Salon’s series of year-end conversations with some of the most essential nonfiction voices of 2014, we spoke both over the phone and then by email about everything from Ebola to selfies to tattoos.
Your collection is in so many ways about pain, about how we face and discuss and experience illness and pain. So I’m curious about a story that broke after your book was published: How do you think our country is handling Ebola victims and the medical workers who have traveled overseas?
I was doing an event in Chicago a few days after Craig Spencer was diagnosed with Ebola — after returning from his work for Doctors Without Borders — and all of New York was going crazy and the Internet was publishing maps of where he’d gone bowling in Williamsburg and where he’d eaten a snack and which subway lines he’d ridden. Somebody asked me whether I felt like Americans were showing enough empathy about Ebola. It was something I’d already thought about in relation to the uproar over Spencer — how sometimes fear can be the enemy of empathy.
If this man were going through something similar in a faraway place — i.e., he’d been doing important medical work and had gotten diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness — people might have respected his bravery. But in this case, many people’s primary reactions had to do with their own proximity to danger. It was striking to me how that sense of fear — a kind of communal panic — seemed to trump feeling empathy for him, much less respecting him for the choices he’d made. One of the things we need to push back against in order to access feelings of empathy and understanding can be various kinds of self-concern, fear being one of those.
That said, to be totally honest and tell on myself, I was also checking which subway lines he’d been riding: had I ridden those lines? I know I’m not immune from the infectious quality of communal fear. I also think our response to Ebola illuminates something abiding and unfortunate — that we have a harder time caring about suffering when it’s far away.And she was the implied subject of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Beyond The Lights,” a romance about the inner life of a pop star—and how she might find romance and some kind of self-actualization in an environment that consistently denies her right to them. “Beyond The Lights” is separate enough from Rihanna’s life that there’s some plausible deniability—the film’s Noni is, like Rihanna, young, black, and accented, but she’s also biracial, British, and nearly friendless. But the vulnerability of Prince-Bythewood’s starlet living an empty life is really the connecting thread between the fictional Noni and real-life Rihanna. The film itself is thoughtful; and the fact that the film exists at all is even more thought-provoking. Because there’s something about Rihanna. There’s space for a film about her perceived inner life in a way there isn’t about other pop stars—not nearly with the same raw vulnerability.
The vast majority of the time—especially for the female artists in the business—pop music is a vast, ever-shifting field of signifiers and innuendos. The success of a pop star is often more about posture than talent; a single is a product and its performer is its brand. And without Rihanna—the lucrative public persona of Robyn Fenty—pop music feels emptier. RiRi occupies a unique, even irreplaceable place in today’s pop music scene.
Especially after “Beyond The Lights,” I was moved to explore Rihanna’s public persona, and how it compares to other artists. What I’ve noticed is that her absence from 2014 has said a great deal with mere silence.
2014 has been a year in pop music dominated by single female acts. There are dudes here and there—Ed Sheeran, John Legend, One Direction—but there are just a ton of solo female acts. This year has seen newcomers Lorde and Charli XCX come to prominence in the U.S.; it’s witnessed the release of Taylor Swift’s market-shaking “1989,” and Ariana Grande’s hit singles “Problem,” “Bang Bang,” and “Break Free.” All of these women seem to be taking up market space that Rihanna left available. Indeed, Nicki Minaj not only released a new album in 2014 but also snagged Rihanna’s longtime collaborator and sometime-lover Drake for her video “Anaconda.”
But the starlets replacing Rihanna feel much flimsier, as far as public personas go. Apparently, ever since the music industry’s sordid tales of drugs, debauchery, and dissipation throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the pop stars of the 21st century are single-minded professionals. The starlets of today exude more rational decisionmaking than tortured creative process, and it comes through in whatever image they’re producing for the public.
This became especially apparent to me a couple weeks ago, when I wrote about the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, the two bona fide pop stars performing on the runway, were curiously devoid of their sexuality, I observed, as was the majority of the proceedings. Both singers made their name appealing to a younger crowd, so it would make some sense that they’re sexuality would be tamped down. But it was the Victoria’s Secret show, with thongs and bustiers in every corner of the room—and both Swift and Grande were wearing lingerie, thrusting and gyrating, singing about passion and heartbreak. It all fell terribly flat—plastic and mechanized, clearly the products of an agreed-upon persona performed in an agreed-upon manner.
It’s hard to know where to start with this one. Named after a hormone the female body produces during pregnancy, the space-agey hCG Diet demands severe calorie restriction and daily injections of the hormone hCG, under the super-legit claim that it’ll help you’ll lose fat but not muscle. Who would have thought that if you restrict yourself to 500 calories a day, you’d lose weight? You’ll probably lose your hair, too. The pregnancy hormones are supposed to take care of those inconvenient pangs of hunger while you starve yourself. Thank the geniuses over at the Dr. Oz Show for publicizing it.
The Doctor’s Diet
Let’s just be a grammarian for a second and note that this diet is named The Doctor’s Diet. Not The Doctors’ Diet, implying that it is in wide use across the profession, or even “The Doctors” Diet, suggesting that it is the official product of the daytime show “The Doctors.” It’s merely an endorsed diet plan of a single cast member of “The Doctors”—Travis Stork, the emergency physician and television personality you might also remember as star of season 8 of “The Bachelor.” Sorry, The Bachelor’s Diet is just a basic high-protein/vegetable moderate-carb deal paired with exercise. Spoiler: you don’t get a rose when you shed that last ten pounds.
The Super Shred Diet
The other cast member of “The Doctors” with a trendy diet book out is Ian Smith, whose “Super Shred” diet not only sounds way cooler than his co-star’s, it’s intense—lose a bunch of weight in a short amount of time through “revolutionary” techniques like … eating fiber-rich vegetables later in the day and occasionally indulging in meal replacements? That’s no fun. Dr. Ian drops some science knowledge with his philosophy of “diet confusion,” though, suggesting that if you vary up what and how much you eat, you can totally keep your body guessing, which somehow increases your metabolism. Of course, there’s a “cleanse,” and the final stage of his six-week plan is called the EXPLODE phase. Fair warning.
The Dash Diet
This sounds like a euphemism for an amphetamine binge, but the Dash Diet, pushed into trending consciousness by its New York Times bestselling book, is based on actual research by the National Institutes of Health and is recommended by the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. It’s a high-fiber, low-to-moderate-fat diet meant to lower blood pressure and reduce cholesterol. In other words: boring, but not scary.As part of Salon’s series of year-end conversations with some of the most essential nonfiction voices of 2014, we spoke both over the phone and then by email about everything from Ebola to selfies to tattoos.
Your collection is in so many ways about pain, about how we face and discuss and experience illness and pain. So I’m curious about a story that broke after your book was published: How do you think our country is handling Ebola victims and the medical workers who have traveled overseas?
I was doing an event in Chicago a few days after Craig Spencer was diagnosed with Ebola — after returning from his work for Doctors Without Borders — and all of New York was going crazy and the Internet was publishing maps of where he’d gone bowling in Williamsburg and where he’d eaten a snack and which subway lines he’d ridden. Somebody asked me whether I felt like Americans were showing enough empathy about Ebola. It was something I’d already thought about in relation to the uproar over Spencer — how sometimes fear can be the enemy of empathy.
If this man were going through something similar in a faraway place — i.e., he’d been doing important medical work and had gotten diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness — people might have respected his bravery. But in this case, many people’s primary reactions had to do with their own proximity to danger. It was striking to me how that sense of fear — a kind of communal panic — seemed to trump feeling empathy for him, much less respecting him for the choices he’d made. One of the things we need to push back against in order to access feelings of empathy and understanding can be various kinds of self-concern, fear being one of those.
That said, to be totally honest and tell on myself, I was also checking which subway lines he’d been riding: had I ridden those lines? I know I’m not immune from the infectious quality of communal fear. I also think our response to Ebola illuminates something abiding and unfortunate — that we have a harder time caring about suffering when it’s far away.And she was the implied subject of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Beyond The Lights,” a romance about the inner life of a pop star—and how she might find romance and some kind of self-actualization in an environment that consistently denies her right to them. “Beyond The Lights” is separate enough from Rihanna’s life that there’s some plausible deniability—the film’s Noni is, like Rihanna, young, black, and accented, but she’s also biracial, British, and nearly friendless. But the vulnerability of Prince-Bythewood’s starlet living an empty life is really the connecting thread between the fictional Noni and real-life Rihanna. The film itself is thoughtful; and the fact that the film exists at all is even more thought-provoking. Because there’s something about Rihanna. There’s space for a film about her perceived inner life in a way there isn’t about other pop stars—not nearly with the same raw vulnerability.
The vast majority of the time—especially for the female artists in the business—pop music is a vast, ever-shifting field of signifiers and innuendos. The success of a pop star is often more about posture than talent; a single is a product and its performer is its brand. And without Rihanna—the lucrative public persona of Robyn Fenty—pop music feels emptier. RiRi occupies a unique, even irreplaceable place in today’s pop music scene.
Especially after “Beyond The Lights,” I was moved to explore Rihanna’s public persona, and how it compares to other artists. What I’ve noticed is that her absence from 2014 has said a great deal with mere silence.
2014 has been a year in pop music dominated by single female acts. There are dudes here and there—Ed Sheeran, John Legend, One Direction—but there are just a ton of solo female acts. This year has seen newcomers Lorde and Charli XCX come to prominence in the U.S.; it’s witnessed the release of Taylor Swift’s market-shaking “1989,” and Ariana Grande’s hit singles “Problem,” “Bang Bang,” and “Break Free.” All of these women seem to be taking up market space that Rihanna left available. Indeed, Nicki Minaj not only released a new album in 2014 but also snagged Rihanna’s longtime collaborator and sometime-lover Drake for her video “Anaconda.”
But the starlets replacing Rihanna feel much flimsier, as far as public personas go. Apparently, ever since the music industry’s sordid tales of drugs, debauchery, and dissipation throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the pop stars of the 21st century are single-minded professionals. The starlets of today exude more rational decisionmaking than tortured creative process, and it comes through in whatever image they’re producing for the public.
This became especially apparent to me a couple weeks ago, when I wrote about the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, the two bona fide pop stars performing on the runway, were curiously devoid of their sexuality, I observed, as was the majority of the proceedings. Both singers made their name appealing to a younger crowd, so it would make some sense that they’re sexuality would be tamped down. But it was the Victoria’s Secret show, with thongs and bustiers in every corner of the room—and both Swift and Grande were wearing lingerie, thrusting and gyrating, singing about passion and heartbreak. It all fell terribly flat—plastic and mechanized, clearly the products of an agreed-upon persona performed in an agreed-upon manner.
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