Let's write about how to predict fashion trends! What every fashionista wants to know!

I found this weirdly fascinating short fashion echo essay in The New Yorker, reported by Lauren Collins.

Maine Writer:  So, fashionista trends are reduced to dull data entries? Let me get this right?  If wearing sneakers on a fashion runway is determined to be trending down by 34 percent, this means the women who dare to wear ankle length cocktail dresses should not also wear sneakers at the same time?  I don't get it.  Haha.....I am of the age when the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor and Lauren Bacall were the data trendies.

Tagwalk Takes on the Hemline Index

The cerulean sleeve and the smoky eye have long been the province of whim, but Alexandra Van Houtte (the catwalk’s Bill James) is changing all that with fashion-data analysis.

Fashion is an emphatically subjective industry. “Pink is the navy blue of India” (Diana Vreeland). “There is a famine of beauty, honey” (André Leon Talley). “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat” (Karl Lagerfeld). “An evening dress that reveals a woman’s ankles while walking is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen” (Valentino). A whim or a feeling can seal the fate of a cerulean sweater, a smoky eye, or a mutton sleeve.

Yet, just as sabermetrics transformed baseball, data is coming for fashion, supplementing the hemline index—the theory that skirt lengths rise and fall with the stock market—with data lakes, traffic-share analyses, and lots of graphs. The other day, Alexandra Van Houtte, the Bill James of the catwalk, was sitting in a conference room in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris. Her company, Tagwalk, is known as “Google for fashion.” But, instead of typing “weird rash” or “post office hours” into its free search engine, you can search every runway look by season, city, designer, color, model, and trend. “People are always scared of data, but data is inspiring to creativity,” Van Houtte said.

Van Houtte—in Chloé sneakers, soft black pants, and a long black coat embroidered with frangipani and chrysanthemums—founded the company in 2016. At the time, she was assisting a stylist, who was preparing for a shoot with Angelina Jolie and needed to see black dresses: every single one on the market. Van Houtte got to work, clicking through slide shows, screenshotting looks, compiling them into PDFs, and compressing the documents, then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. “It was massive torture,” she recalled. Now a buyer or a designer or an editor can enter “black dress” into Tagwalk and, within seconds, find seventeen thousand four hundred and ninety-seven of them, from a 2019 fish-net number by Dolce & Gabbana to a one-shouldered mini from Balenciaga’s recent show in L.A.

Tagwalk’s business model relies on two sources of revenue: smaller brands can pay to have their images appear on the site, while big brands buy trend reports that tell them who’s looking at what where. “I don’t care who’s cool, and it’s not my place to care,” Van Houtte said. The day’s order of business was to finalize a book—the first volume in a series—of takeaways from the Spring/Summer 2024 collections, which had concluded in Paris just a few days earlier. Van Houtte and a trio of analysts gathered around a table and opened their laptops.

“You have these other trend reports that are, like, ‘Orange is the color. We think leopard’s going to be a really big thing,’ ” Van Houtte said. “There’s this thing where data’s becoming cool, so sometimes people are just throwing numbers everywhere, like, ‘Data, but make it fashion!’ ” She pulled up an Instagram post, which claimed that a certain brand had enjoyed “140% more press” during Paris Fashion Week. “Compared to what? Compared to when?” Van Houtte said. “I really do not know how this was calculated.”

A draft of the book appeared on a wall-mounted screen. “O.K., let’s go!” she said.

A slide ranking the “20 Hottest Brands” according to Tagwalk users’ searches filled the screen. Miu Miu was No. 1, followed by Chanel, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Valentino. The team moved on to trends, which the site tracks using descriptive tags. Each look can have up to thirty, including americana, androgynous, babydoll, bantu knot, chapka, chelsea boots, dominatrix, earmuffs, equestrian, face jewels, gavroche cap, minaudiere, nomadic, oceanic, pastoral, polka dot, rave, round buckle, schoolgirl, spaghetti strap, taupe, visible underwear, and zig zag.

Van Houtte’s team cycled through a series of slides. glittery was surging (+783 per cent), as were ladylike (+235 per cent) and skirt (+30 per cent), while technical, animal print, bodycon, and pink were all trending down. Next came a pie graph (N.B.: it’s called a “Camembert” in French), which examined the colors of the season.

“There’s no more green!” she exclaimed. “It’s crazy.”

A two-page spread dealt with accessories, but she thought it needed more of a narrative.“If I was to buy this book, I’d be, like, ‘I spent this money, but you’re telling me that models carry bags and wear jewelry, which isn’t really groundbreaking information,’ ” Van Houtte said. They decided to go more granular. “O.K., a hundred and fifty per cent more bags were carried by hand?” she said. “That’s interesting.”

She had a hunch that she’d seen fewer sneakers on the runway, but she wanted to know whether the data bore it out. The team went searching in their spreadsheets, and a few minutes later returned with confirmation: sneakers were down thirty-two per cent.

Van Houtte looked at them excitedly. “Guys, this is like gold!” ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 1 & 8, 2024, issue, with the headline “Designer Data.”

Let's write more about Henrietta Lacks

The donation of Henrietta Lacks' cells began what was the first, and, for many years, the only human cell line able to reproduce indefinitely. Her cells, known as HeLa cells for Henrietta Lacks, remain a remarkably durable and prolific line of cells used in research around the world.

HeLa cells were the first discovered immortalized human cell line (cells that can be continuously grown) in 1951 and have since become one of the most important cell lines in medical research.

Henrietta Lacks Family, Thermo Fisher Settle Cell Use Lawsuit

The settlement with the Massachusetts-based company came more than 70 years after doctors took Lacks' cancer cells without her consent.  Echo report by Megan VerHeist published the Dundalk (Maryland) Patch.

BALTIMORE, MD — Lawyers for the descendants of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent more than 70 years ago, said a settlement had been reached with the biotechnology company they sued in 2021.

What many people using this cancer cell line did not know, was that these cells were unknowingly harvested from a 31-year-old African-American woman being treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. This woman’s name was Henrietta Lacks.

The settlement with Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher came after Lacks' family accused the company of using Lacks' cells for "unjust enrichment" and accused its leaders of reaping billions of dollars from a racist medical system.

The family did not ask for specific monetary damages in the lawsuit, according to reports.

The settlement came after closed-door negotiations that lasted all day Monday inside the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Several members of the Lacks family were in on the talks.

Attorney Ben Crump, who represents the Lacks family, announced the settlement late Monday. He said the terms of the agreement are confidential.

"The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement," Crump said in a statement.

The lawsuit against biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific claimed Lacks' cells were taken while she was receiving treatment at Johns Hopkins in 1951. Lacks, who was from Baltimore County, died at 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave. A poor tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, she was raising five children when doctors discovered a tumor in her cervix and saved a sample of her cancer cells collected during a biopsy.

The cells taken from Lacks became the first human cells to be successfully cloned, according to a report from The Associated Press. Now called HeLa cells, they have enabled numerous scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping, and even COVID-19 vaccines.

HeLa cells were discovered to have unique properties. While most cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, her cells survived and thrived in laboratories. This exceptional quality made it possible to cultivate her cells indefinitely — they became known as the first immortalized human cell line — making it possible for scientists anywhere to reproduce studies using identical cells.

The discovery and the science involved were detailed in a 2010 bestselling book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Oprah Winfrey portrayed her daughter in an HBO movie based on the book.

Johns Hopkins said it never sold or profited from the cell lines, but many companies have patented ways of using them.

In their complaint, Lacks' grandchildren and other descendants argued that her treatment illustrates a much larger issue that persists into the present day: racism inside the American medical system.

"The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history," the complaint reads. "Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism."

Thermo Fisher previously argued the case should be dismissed because it was filed after the statute of limitations expired, but attorneys for the family said that shouldn't apply because the company is continuously benefitting from the cells.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Let's write about Fascism in Italy

A CHILL IN THE AIR:  Living With Fascism in Italy

An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940
By Iris Origo

Iris Origo (1902-1988)

Echo essay published in The New York Times Review of Books,

by Alexander Stille,  in the September 18, 2018 edition.

(Maine Writer:  This article was found among a stack of "waiting to read" articles and I am glad it was saved. Gives proof to  the French proverb "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose")

Iris Origo’s early life sounds like something out of a Henry James novel. Her father, Bayard Cutting, who came from an extremely wealthy American family, traveled the globe in search of relief from the symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him at age 29. Before he died in 1910, he wrote to his wife, Sibyl, a British aristocrat, that he wanted their young daughter, Iris, to grow up in Italy, “free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong.”

Origo’s father was to prove remarkably prescient, given that Europe would soon be consumed by World War I, followed by the rise of fascism — the apotheosis of nationalism — whose fever broke only with its catastrophic defeat in 1945. Raised among the British expatriate community in Florence and married to an Italian, Origo was in a perfect position to observe the unfolding events of World War II. Her journal of those years, “War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944,” became an instant success when it was published in 1947. It described the unusual war experiences of Origo and her husband, Antonio Origo, observing the denouement of the war from the vantage point of southern Tuscany, which became a major theater of operations with the Germans occupying Italy in September 1943 and the Allied armies inching their way up the Italian peninsula. Shortly after their marriage in 1924 (when Iris was 22), the Origos bought a large, rundown estate of some 7,000 acres in the Val d’Orcia; it included numerous old ruined buildings and some 57 farms. As the fighting approached their area, the plucky Marchesa Origo took in war orphans, hid fleeing Italian partisans and Allied paratroopers, and negotiated with the German military units that patrolled the area.

Origo’s diary offered an image of wartime Italy that the world was eager to embrace: a country that was fundamentally anti-Fascist, that welcomed the Anglo-American troops and that, through its partisan resistance, helped defeat the Nazis. Now we are fortunate to have an earlier diary, “A Chill in the Air,” that Origo kept but never published, recounting her experiences from mid-1939, to the summer of 1940, after Italy had entered the war on the side of Nazi Germany. Here she demonstrates the same keen eye for telling detail: paunchy middle-aged Fascists squeezed into their old black-shirt uniforms for an anniversary celebration that has the air of a college reunion; a young expectant mother who prays to have a girl so the child will not be dragged off to war; the blank expressionless look of the local peasants, men who have mastered the art of hiding their feelings, as they listen to Mussolini’s declaration of war.

“War in Val d’Orcia” was written during a time of moral clarity, when the tide had turned in favor of the Allies. As a result, it tends to offer a somewhat simplified portrait of good (anti-Fascist) Italians and bad Germans. One of the great values of this brief but highly readable earlier diary is that it was written when the direction of history — whether there would be a war and how it would turn out — was far less clear. As a result, it more accurately represents the moral and political complexity of Italian life under Fascism. The people Origo encounters represent a much broader range of views: from convinced anti-Fascists to unquestioning Fascists who repeat phrases like “A good Italian’s duty now is to have no opinions.” Most occupy a swampy middle ground: They are uneasy about the slide into war but accept the regime’s argument that Italy has little choice but to fight.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (July 29, 1883- April 28, 1945)

A journal kept in the middle of tumultuous events makes us realize how wrong most people, including many intelligent and well-informed people, can be about the import of events that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seems obvious. “It is curious — the unanimity with which everyone here refuses to believe in the possibility of war,” Origo writes in mid-July 1939, six weeks before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Only days before the fighting begins, Origo is in Florence listening to comments from ordinary Italians. “‘Don’t you worry, nothing’s going to happen!’ says the hairdresser, as he sees me reading the papers. ‘You’ll see, the Duce will stop the war at the last moment,’ says the taxi driver.”

Observing the strange calm of the Italian public amid the growing international tension, a young Italian officer tells Origo: “‘Look what Fascism has done for our people! … Compare their calm with the feverish tension in France and England!’ But it isn’t exactly calm. It is a mixture of passive fatalism, and of a genuine faith in their leader: the fruits of 15 years of being taught not to think.

Certainly, it was not a readiness for war, but merely a blind belief that, ‘somehow,’ it would not happen.”

A few days later, Origo describes the scene at a dinner in Rome, as the wealthy, well-connected guests await the arrival of Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, Italy’s foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, while Mussolini is trying to broker a peace plan. “When at last he arrived,” Origo writes, “he was beaming. ‘You can set your minds at rest,’ he said. ‘France and England have accepted the Duce’s proposals. … So go to bed tonight with your minds at rest!’ The guests followed his advice, and woke the next morning to the news of the invasion of Poland! Neither the Duce nor his son-in-law were told of it until two hours before the event.”

Much of Origo’s mental energy is spent trying to make sense of what’s happening, by hunting down foreign newspapers, piecing together accounts of events from different sources, trying to read between the lines of official statements. “Last night,” she writes, “there was no attempt to interrupt the foreign radio transmissions. Is one to conclude that Italy has definitely decided to be neutral?” In the absence of reliable news, Italians place a great deal of faith in rumor.

The radio, which the Fascist regime used with great skill, plays a large role in Origo’s account, and it is hard not to see some parallels with our current situation, with its constant claims of “fake news.” “The ultimate result of unceasing propaganda has now been to cancel out the effect of all news alike,” Origo writes. “One man said to me, ‘The radio has made fools of us all.’”

Origo notes that as the Fascist regime nudges Italy toward war, there is careful psychological preparation: Supposedly scientific articles on the negative effects of coffee and meat appear weeks before the government will ration the sale of those items.

In one very powerful passage, the day before Mussolini’s official declaration of war, Origo poses a question that seems deeply important in this time of resurgent nationalism: “Is it possible to move a country to war, against its historical traditions, against the natural instincts and character of the majority of its inhabitants, and very possibly against its own interests? Apparently it is possible.”*

*Maine Writer-  In other words, "Group think" : The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.

Let's write about our amazing universe via the James Webb Space Telescope

Echo report published in The New York Times Magazine by Kate LaRue and Daniel Zvereff:

Nearly a million miles away, the James Webb Space Telescope just took a picture. Since transmitting its first data in late 2021, Webb has made stunning discoveries, including a plume of water spanning 6,000 miles in our solar system and a galaxy that formed only 390 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago.

The telescope is an engineering marvel: Its massive mirror makes it possible to collect light from the faintest objects. It has multiple ways of blocking and dissecting that light, giving us detailed portraits of distant galaxies and close neighbors alike. And its position orbiting the sun allows it to take pictures around the clock, sending us up to 57.2 gigabytes of data — the equivalent of tens of thousands of standard iPhone photos — every day. 

What’s it telling us about our past — and the future of cosmology?

Webb can gather data even in the most distant, violent places, like the areas around massive stars.  In one of its first pictures, Webb photographed the Carina Nebula, home to dozens of giant stars, some of which are 50 to 100 times more massive than our sun.

Carina Nebula

Around them, scientists found previously unseen baby stars and pockets of hydrogen.

We think that our solar system was born in this kind of volatile environment.  Scientists recently used Webb to analyze a similar nebula and found water, carbon dioxide and other complex molecules — the elements that make up terrestrial planets.

“We have proven that it is possible to form an Earthlike planet even in the harshest environments in our galaxy,” says María C. Ramírez-Tannus, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. “We now need to know: How often does this happen?”

Space is a dark, dusty place — to the human eyeball. The light that is visible to us represents a tiny slice of the light that’s in the universe. Humans perceive different types of light as colors: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. Bluer light is more energetic, and when it encounters dust — the tiny, solid particles floating around up there — it scatters, obscuring things from our view. Webb can see light just beyond what we can see, called infrared, that can easily pierce through dust. Animals like goldfish have evolved to see infrared light so they can navigate in murky waters.

In this image of the Eagle Nebula taken by the Hubble telescope in 2014, we see mostly visible light. The dust and gas form giant columns, inspiring the name the Pillars of Creation.

Eagle Nebula

Other layers of dust are illuminated in the infrared giving scientists a more three-dimensional portrait of events like the death of stars known as supernovas. 

Pictured here is Cassiopeia A, a star that exploded more than 10,000 years ago. Webb’s image showed us previously unseen gas and dust in its center.

When stars explode or die, new elements are forged, including the calcium that makes up our bones and the oxygen that we breathe. That’s what Carl Sagan meant when he said, “We’re made of star stuff.

Webb can also see further back in time — a mind-bending thought.

The light from this galaxy traveled through space for 40 million years before reaching Webb’s mirrors, which means we’re seeing it as it looked 40 million years ago.  

In the same photo, there are four other galaxies. The five are known as Stephan’s Quintet.

These four look as if they are close to the first galaxy, but they are 250 million light-years farther away. In one photo we see both tens of millions and hundreds of millions of years into the past. 

“We’re looking at a snapshot in time,” says Macarena García Marín, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb. “Who knows what Stephan’s Quintet looks like now? Maybe they became a single big galaxy.”

For centuries, we could record only what was visible to the human eye, first with illustrations, then with photographs. 

Cave drawings, monuments and folklore that have survived for thousands of years show us that early humans had a sophisticated understanding of the cosmos.

In the 1200s, the Maya made records of Venus’s position in the sky on paper made from fig-tree fiber. Hieroglyphics carved into their monuments feature three stones surrounding a fire, a cosmic hearth of creation. Today K’iche’ Maya people in Guatemala understand the constellation of Orion to include those three stones and the fire in the center to be the Orion Nebula.

In the dust and gas that the Maya see as a fire, the Webb telescope  found a molecule that we had never detected before outside our own solar system. Called methyl cation*, it is believed to play a key role in the creation of complex carbon molecules — the molecules that make up all life on Earth.

Perhaps Webb’s greatest power is not to capture light, but to scatter and measure it. In 1789, William Herschel used a handcrafted telescope to discover Enceladus, the sixth-largest of Saturn’s 146 moons. Later, he used a prism to disperse sunlight into a rainbow and, using three thermometers, found that the temperatures of each individual color — and colors beyond those visible — were different. He had discovered infrared radiation and furthered the field of spectroscopy.

On Webb, thermometers and prisms have been replaced with dozens of filters and intricate mechanisms. One tool has a quarter of a million tiny shutters that can be used to gather light from 100 individual objects simultaneously. The spectra that it creates reveal granular details — chemical composition, temperature and mass — of individual stars, planets and galaxies. Recently, Webb trained its instruments on Saturn.

Transient Saturn features that appear to come and go with each yearly Hubble observation. The banding in the northern hemisphere remains pronounced as seen in Hubble's 2019 observations, with several bands slightly changing color from year to year. The ringed planet's atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium with traces of ammonia, methane, water vapor, and hydrocarbons that give it a yellowish-brown color.

Saturn, like Earth, experiences seasons. But because of its wide orbit, these seasons each last about seven and a half years.

Data collected using Webb was combined with information from Cassini-Huygens (a Saturn-specific mission) and Hubble to refine our understanding of the seasonal change.

Webb also observed Saturn's moon Enceladus. Scientists think it’s one of our best hopes of finding life in our solar system. Using the modern equivalent of Herschel’s prism technique, scientists analyzed a giant fountain of water vapor gushing from the moon. 
“We were shocked to see water in every single pixel of the data,” says Geronimo Villanueva, lead author of the study. Webb was also able to map the whole feature: The water vapor spanned over 6,000 miles.

In 1995, Robert Williams, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute at the time, pointed Hubble at an empty piece of sky and left it there for 10 days. His approach was risky — normally scientists use their precious telescope time to look at known objects. “Throughout my scientific life, I tended to rely on instinct, probably more than I should,” Williams says. He and his colleagues chose a spot just above the Big Dipper.  

Webb was trained on a similar patch of black sky. Its image shows nearly 94,000 galaxies.

“We live in this beautiful galaxy, the Milky Way,” says Brant Robertson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We can’t see the Milky Way from inside, and we can’t fly out and see it. But we know that our galaxy developed from other galaxies. By looking at these distant objects, we begin to understand the process by which a galaxy like our own home could come to be.”

Webb is showing us the earliest moment in our universe’s history, fossilized in light.

It’s tempting to decide that all this seeing amounts to knowing. But some of Webb’s observations challenge fundamental assumptions in our timeline of the universe.

For instance, we thought it would take more than a billion years after the Big Bang for enough gas and stars to coalesce into big galaxies like our own, but Webb has found more than a dozen big, bright galaxies that may have started forming in the first hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Six galaxies in particular are so bright that in order to fit into our current thinking about galaxy formation, every single atom in the area that they were forming would have had to become a star. 

‘‘In general, star formation is very inefficient,’’ says Erica Nelson, assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder. ‘‘Only like 5 percent of the gas becomes stars, and in these galaxies it’s 100 percent.’’ Astronomers are trying to account for this by tweaking different variables in their standard models of galaxy formation, including reconsidering the role of dark energy and dark matter. In the latest models of cosmology, these unobserved phenomena make up 95 percent of the universe.

Webb helps us know but also to “unknow”: It gives us stunning new discoveries while simultaneously challenging us to rethink and rebuild our understanding of the past.

*A correction was made on November 21, 2023: An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the James Webb Space Telescope's position in space. It is not the case that the telescope uses Earth as a shield. Additionally, the methyl cation molecule found by Webb has been detected elsewhere in our solar system; it is not the case that it had never been detected outside our own planet.