The Smithian

…the show wasn’t merely about clothes. The organization’s primary purpose is to push designers of color forward in the business of fashion.

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… if our incredibly thirsty power plants, factories, and municipalities don’t figure out how to cope with a hotter, drier climate, the Texas Miracle might disappear in a cloud of dust.

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She’s at the point where major New York tabloids are reporting on her love life, but she’s also only 21, and very publicly wondering what she wants to do with her life. Whatever Banks’s issues with rap media are, they seem beside the point. Mostly, it seems like this is a curious inside glimpse into a classic music industry arc: a very young, very talented person trying to figure it out as she goes along.

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…a symbiotic relationship [is] developing between the Obama campaign, with its style-conscious first lady who dons a wide variety of American designers, and a deep-pocketed, largely Democratic fashion industry, which has been increasingly coordinating its support of Obama.

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art: FLOTUS, December 2010 in

a vintage 1950s black lace dress by the late American designer Norman Norelli…Obama could possibly be the first American First Lady to wear a second-hand vintage dress at a high-profile public event…more.

…Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year—which would be a record for any American business…The growing digital economy presents a conundrum for lawmakers overseeing corporate taxation: although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed…

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“They (the studios) don’t talk about doing good work—they just talk about making money. In our day the studio was hoping to make a good film, which hopefully didn’t lose money.”

more from Dustin Hoffman, here.

From Cape Town to Cairo, there are signs of a continent on the move: giant infrastructure projects, an expanding middle class, foreign equity scrambling for opportunities in telecoms, financial services and products aimed at a billion consumers. Growth is no magic bullet for reducing inequality or fostering democracy, but the stubborn truth that it is still the world’s poorest continent has done little to dull the confidence and hype about the African renaissance…

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This glaring…discrepancy between what football and basketball players get and what everyone else in their food chain reaps has led to two things. First, it has bred a deep cynicism among the athletes themselves. Players aren’t stupid. They look around and see jerseys with their names on them being sold in the bookstores. They see 100,000 people in the stands on a Saturday afternoon. During the season, they can end up putting in 50-hour weeks at their sports, and they learn early on not to take any course that might require real effort or interfere with the primary reason they are on campus: to play football or basketball. The N.C.A.A. can piously define them as students first, but the players know better. They know they are making money for the athletic department. The N.C.A.A.’s often-stated contention that it is protecting the players from “excessive commercialism” is ludicrous; the only thing it’s protecting is everyone else’s revenue stream. (The N.C.A.A. itself takes in nearly $800 million a year, mostly from its March Madness TV contracts.) “Athletes in football and basketball feel unfairly treated,” Leigh Steinberg, a prominent sports agent, says. “The dominant attitude among players is that there is no moral or ethical reason not to take money, because the system is ripping them off.”

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Wine wholesalers/amateur beer makers want Congress to repeal a law that makes it illegal to ship alcohol by mail…medical supply companies…oppose the post office’s plans to cut Saturday delivery, saying the move would delay medicines and could add to the cost of mail-order drugs…companies representing a cross-section of American business are spending millions…lobbying lawmakers to oppose or support various proposals to keep the agency afloat…The service is the backbone of a mailing/shipping industry that employs more than 8.5 million people and supports almost $1 trillion in economic activity every year. The service itself employs 574,000 people.

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…the new….film promotes a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and private industry. Economic growth is maligned as a force for evil, while those so-called Truffula treesare put on a…polychromatic pedestal…businessmen are demonized as Orwellian overlords…And the movie even has the gall to glorify—gasp!—single moms…Though purists probably won’t be pleased to discover that Seuss’ enviro-gloom has been swapped for guitar riffs…and a happy ending, viewers will indeed notice that the book’s core remains intact.

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A power tie for a job interview…a dress for a…gala. A decade ago, we bought these items at the mall. Today, we rent them with a smartphone…That’s the sensibility that drove…Zac Gittens, 28, and Otis Collins, 27, to create Tie Society in November…The childhood friends run their business out of Gittens’s rowhouse…For a monthly minimum of $11, they mail members the sorts of designer ties found only in high-end department stores…The start-up went from local to national in less than a month.

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