Even in these dark online times, there are places on the internet that manage to shine through and offer us some form of digital redemption; places where we yearn to stay and build new forms of community.
The QVC-like streaming media service — soft-launched on Amazon’s mobile apps, in stealth mode on the web, and first discovered by TechCrunch — offers a carousel of teeth-whitened enthusiasts detailing all the ways a featured product will improve their lives.
An accompanying Amazon Live Creator app, released on Feb. 7, gives brands the power to “livestream directly to Amazon.com and the Amazon mobile app.”
At the time of this writing, there are four “live” channels on the amazon.com/live page (alongside a few dozen “recently live.” They include Review Revue, a kind of postmodern infomercial featuring actors reading what appear to be Amazon customer reviews, then riffing on them in amusing ways, as the associated product is linked below for purchase. (For example, one of the actors read a customer review of a waterproof phone, then mimicked being a person who hadn’t showered in years until they bought a phone.)
It’s hard to find the tone of the show encouraging to consumers, however. After all, if you do choose to buy the product, your review might end up as fodder for Review Revue.
Image: screenshot / amazon live
As watching for just a few minutes will reveal, the show is full of fast cuts and plays on a loop — which seems to stretch the definition of “live.”
Then there’s Smart Home Simplified, a channel that at time of writing features two people pitching a LG V35 ThinQ smartphone through forced smiles. If you watch long enough, you’re likely to catch a moment — just a split second after the camera has cut from a product closeup to the actors’ unaware faces — when their despair is on full display.
Blink and you’ll miss it, but it’s as real as the phones being hawked.
Click on the two other “live” channels, Back To Business and Valentine’s Day Gift Shop, and you’ll find an “app-based labeler” for $99.00, and a hot pink instant camera for somewhere between $49.95 and $90.41, respectively.
Image: screenshot / amazon live
If your business is labeling, and your Valentine’s Day plans consist of taking knock-off Polaroids, then these are the shows and the products for you.
That Amazon thinks we are all looking for the kind of human connection craved by QVC viewers — and hopes we’ll stumble on that connection on the soft-launched streams of Amazon Live — should tell you all you need to know about the company and its particularly sad corner of our shared internet realm.
Facebook has acquired GrokStyle, a shopping startup that uses AI to help you buy furniture and other items for the home.
The move, which was reported by Bloomberg, is the latest sign yet that the social network is looking to push deeper into e-commerce in 2019.
Facebook spokesperson Vanessa Chan confirmed the acquisition saying, “We are excited to welcome GrokStyle to Facebook. Their team and technology will contribute to our AI capabilities.”
GrokStyle, which was founded in 2016 according to CrunchBase, is a San Francisco startup specializing in visual search. The company is known for technology that allows shoppers to search for furniture and other items by taking photos with their phones. Last year, the company partnered with Ikea on its augmented reality furniture app.
In a note posted on its website, the company said it had “only scratched the surface of what is possible with computer vision.”
“Our team and technology will live on, and we will continue using our AI to build great visual search experiences for retail.”
It’s not clear exactly what team within Facebook GrokStyle and its “AI capabilities” will be a part of. But it’s another potential sign that Facebook plans to move deeper into shopping features.
The company has been steadily adding shopping features to Instagram, but hasn’t said much about similar shopping experiences in other places.
Enabling visual, camera-based search would certainly make sense if the company was looking to make it easier for users to connect with retailers. The fact that GrokStyle has previously been part of an augmented reality app is particularly interesting, given that Facebook is building out its own AR platform, including shoppable augmented reality features in Messenger.
Virginia’s embattled governor has refused to resign after a yearbook photo surfaced that reportedly shows him wearing blackface. Two other top-ranking Virginia officials are also under scrutiny, one over allegations of sexual assault and the other for having admittedly painted his face black in his youth. Here’s what’s happened so far and how the trio of scandals could affect the line of succession to the governor’s seat.
Virginia’s gubernatorial succession
First in line
Ralph Northam
Virginia Governor | Assumed office Jan. 13, 2018 | Democratic Party
Northam admitted to wearing blackface to look like Michael Jackson at a 1984 talent show. This admission comes after he confessed and then denied appearing in a yearbook photograph featuring two young men, one in black face and the other in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
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Second in line
Justin Fairfax
Virginia Lieutenant Governor | Assumed office Jan. 13, 2018 | Democratic Party
Fairfax was accused of sexual assault by Vanessa Tyson, a college professor. He insists that the encounter was consensual.
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Third in line
Mark Herring
Virginia Attorney General | Assumed office Jan. 11, 2014 | Democratic Party
Herring admitted to wearing blackface at a college costume party. Herring, who called for Northam’s resignation after Northam’s own blackface scandal, issued an apology on Feb. 6 indicating he might resign.
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Fourth in line
Kirk Cox
Speaker of the House of Delegates | Assumed office Jan. 10, 2018 | Republican Party
Cox became speaker last year after the Virginia Board of Elections drew lots to settle a tie in Virginia House District 4.
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Fifth in line
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According to the Constitution of Virginia, if the speaker cannot serve, the House of Delegates will convene to fill the vacancy.
We knew the upcoming Captain Marvel took place in the ’90s. We did not know that the movie’s official website would be a full-on meta blast to the past of the early world wide web.
You won’t have to fire up your dial-up connection, but you will want to look out for pop ups of that old lady Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers getting punched in face (like from the first trailer).
Complete with animated web art, references to Y2K, eye-bleeding amounts of color, flame borders, and even a guestbook, the website looks like your livejournal from 6th grade. If it’s any indication of what we can expect from the movie, prepare for full immersion in that ’90s utopia of girl power…and believing this whole internet thing was a good idea.
By far the best part of the website, though, is the WHO ARE THE SKRULLS game. Or, as the website describes:
Shapeshifters who live among us? Posing as grandmothers, small children, or even your friends? How can you tell and what can you do when confronted by this menace? Take the test and PREPARE YOURSELF for the coming events!!!
Every correct answer gets you a picture of Danvers throwin’ a totally radical hand gesture. But answer incorrectly and you get blasted with what we can only presume are skrulls in their true form.
That old lady just won’t stay down!
Image: marvel studios
There’s not much in the way of new information to be gleamed, providing only a standard synopsis:
Set in the 1990s, Marvel Studios’ is an all-new adventure from a previously unseen period in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that follows the journey of Carol Danvers as she becomes one of the universe’s most powerful heroes. While a galactic war between two alien races reaches Earth, Danvers finds herself and a small cadre of allies at the center of the maelstrom.
But we did learn one very important fact from this gem of a time capsule: Captain Marvel is the most relatable super hero in the MCU and was probably friends with Tom on MySpace.
Maybe you’ve never heard of the H.R. 1 bill, but chances are you’ve seen the viral video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez playing what she’s called the “Corruption Game.”
On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing about H.R. 1., also known as For the People Act of 2019, which would do things like establish automatic voter registration nationwide, make Election Day a federal holiday, and reform a corrupt campaign finance system. Ocasio-Cortez exposed the problems in that system in just five minutes.
Ocasio-Cortez’s sketch and line of questioning went viral after the hearing, which got people talking about the bill.
“To take a kind of esoteric issue, and executive branch ethics and campaign finance reform, and to bring that to life for people, and then it becomes this viral moment was really incredible,” says Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the grassroots organization Common Cause, and one of the expert witnesses at the H.R. 1 hearing.
Hobert Flynn credits Ocasio-Cortez for cutting through the “distorted picture” that Republican members of Congress had painted. Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado, claimed the bill is an attempt by Democrats to steal elections. In reality, Hobert Flynn says the legislation will diminish the wealthy’s ability to dominate politics and campaign speech.
Flynn says Ocasio-Cortez is successful at drawing attention to mundane issues because she takes a much more conversational approach.
“She speaks to the concerns Americans have about our democracy and about the ways that our current system is failing its people, its communities, their families,” she says. “She does it both through storytelling and by connecting clearly with people’s values.”
In the hearing, Ocasio-Cortez suggests a “lightning round game” in which she plays “the bad guy” putting their interests “ahead of the American people.” She first asks Hobert Flynn if there’s anything legally preventing her from running a campaign that is entirely funded by corporate political action committees. Hobert Flynn says there’s not.
“She speaks to the concerns Americans have about our democracy and about the ways that our current system is failing its people…”
As the hypothetical “bad guy”/elected official, Ocasio-Cortez then goes on to write and influence legislation that benefits the companies that funneled money to her campaign. She also manages to get rich quick because, as a stockholder in oil and gas companies, she deregulates those industries and their stock prices theoretically skyrocket. Ocasio-Cortez introduced these scenarios as part of a game, but they’re all plausible — and none of them are illegal.
“A lot of the American people would see that as a huge conflict of interest and just plain wrong,” says Hobert Flynn. “But it’s perfectly legal.”
Although Hobert Flynn didn’t know she was in the middle of an exchange that would soon go viral, she knows Ocasio-Cortez is uniquely good at making politics digestible.
“I, like everyone else, have witnessed the ability for Representative Ocasio-Cortez to really approach issues in a refreshing and new way that engages people all over the country,” she says.
The exchange also caught the attention of celebrities like John Legend, Katie Couric, comedian Patton Oswalt, and Late Late Show host James Corden.
“Oh my god. This is just sensational,” Corden wrote in a tweet sharing the video. “Please watch and retweet.” His tweet got more than 380,00 retweets and nearly 750,000 likes by the time this story was published.
Hobert Flynn says the brief exchange brought an incredible surge of interest in the bill itself as well as the issue of democracy reform.
“We saw unprecedented activity on Twitter and other social media as a result of this and we’re grateful because it has lifted our efforts to move transformative democracy reforms in Congress and across the country,” she says.
A 5-star prospect in the 2018 recruiting class, Fields spent his freshman year at the University of Georgia. He only attempted 39 passes last season playing behind Jake Fromm.
Fields announced in January he was transferring to Ohio State. He hired attorney Thomas Mars to help with his NCAA hardship waiver.
Following Friday’s ruling, Mars issued a statement to ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg about the NCAA’s decision.
“I’m happy for Justin and his family and all the Buckeyes fans who’ve been waiting for this decision,” Mars said. “Justin’s not only a great quarterback. He’s also an exceptionally mature and impressive young man. He fully deserved to receive a waiver.”
Fields will compete to be Ohio State’s starting quarterback in 2019 after Dwayne Haskins declared for the NFL draft. The Georgia native completed 27 of his 39 attempts for 328 yards and four touchdowns with the Bulldogs.
Axios on Sunday published President Donald Trump’s private schedules for the last three months that showed how he spent 60 percent of time in unscheduled “executive time.” | Alex Wong/Getty Images
An exasperated Trump is aware of the search, which is making use of the White House’s IT office.
The White House is aggressively investigating several leaks of President Donald Trump’s private schedules, a source of repeated embarrassment to the White House and the president himself.
West Wing officials managing the hunt have enlisted the help of the White House’s IT office, and believe they are making progress in narrowing the search for potential suspects. One Trump official said the culprit is likely a career government employee who works in the White House,not a person appointed by Trump himself, but did not offer specific evidence.
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The search has been approved bythe office of acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and Trump himself — who has been infuriated by leaks from within his White House — is aware of the mole hunt and supports the effort, according to one of the officials.
Axios on Sunday published Trump’s private schedules for the last three months that showed how he spent 60 percent of time in unscheduled “executive time.” Aides say he uses those time blocks to watch TV, call people, read newspapersand do other work.Based on a week’s worth of these same private schedules, POLITICO had also reported in October Trump’s extensive amount of free time that’s unprecedented for presidents, including 9 hours of “executive time” on one day.
Critics have ridiculed those time blocks, suggesting that they reveal a lazy and disengaged commander in chief who doesn’t take his job seriously. But White House officials and Trump allies insist such barbs are unfair, saying that the president actually makes productive use of his time.
“He’s not a slacker. The guy works. He may not have it all scheduled but the guy’s a grinder,” David Urban, a former Trump campaign senior advisor, said in an interview. “He’s not a guy who sits on his hands. Just because it’s not listed on the schedule,” that doesn’t mean that Trump isn’t doing substantive work. “I think it’s more the betrayal of who would give it up, more than anything,” Urban added.
On Twitter last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich even favorably compared Trump to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who often worked in bed while wearing pajamas, and said leaders’ schedules should be evaluated based on “achievement not activity.”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But after Sunday’s Axios story, the White House’s director of Oval Office operations, Madeleine Westerhout, tweeted that the leak had been a “disgraceful breach of trust” that failed to reflect “hundreds of calls and meetings.”
It’s a familiar position for the Trump White House, which has pledged to root out leakers in the past — most recently after a New York Times op-ed penned last year by a senior administration official identified only as “part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.” In the wake of the op-ed’s publication, the White House embarked on a search for the official that has yet to turn up the culprit.
Although officials have suspects in mind, they say it is too soon to implicate anyone with high confidence. “Both career and political staff receive the daily public schedule, but I want to be very careful that we don’t try anyone in the press,” said one of the officials.
“It’s unprofessional to be trusted with information that is not intended to be publicly disclosed and then disclose it, whether it’s related to the president, related to your co-workers or your office, it’s just not professional behavior,” said the official.
The other official also said that the version of the schedule that was given to Axios and previously to POLITICO “is very similar to the public version that we give to the press every single day. So that version of the schedule isn’t that secret.” The official noted that a much more tightly-held personal private schedule that shows every call and meeting has not leaked. That would be an even more alarming breach for the White House.
“We all have much bigger things to worry about and much bigger things that are going on so it’s not that big of a deal but it’s more just unnecessary and it was just a petty thing to do,” said the person. “If you’re leaking the schedule, what else could you be leaking or what other information?”
While White House officials want to punish past leaking, they also hope that a vigorous search might create a deterrent against future leaks of damaging information.
“You take the list of who the schedule was sent to and you take who was on that list and who has access to certain things and it’s not that difficult to find out who the person is,” said one of the officials. “The government tracks everything on [employees’] computers.”
While every president has suffered leaks and breaches of trust, they have defined the Trump presidency more than any other. From the outset, Trump was forced to contend with leaked transcripts of his phone calls to such foreign leaders as Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
After he telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin last March and congratulated Putin on his recent re-election, the Washington Post disclosed that his staff had specifically given him a message before the call reading “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”
Trump has also been contending with tell-all accounts from former loyalists within his White House. While disgruntled administration officials have aired their grievances in tell-all books before, Trump has endured more of these tomes, and earlier in his presidency, than any of his predecessor.
In the latest, former White House communications aide Cliff Sims recounts the president calling to demand the names of White House leakers.
“’Give me their names,’ he said, his eyes narrowing,” Sims writes. “’I want these people out of here. I’m going to take care of this. We’re going to get rid of all the snakes, even the bottom-feeders.’”
At 4 billion miles from Earth, MU69 (also nicknamed Ultima Thule) is the farthest-away object a human spacecraft has ever visited. For the past few years, scientists have labeled MU69 as an unknown, mysterious “puzzle.” After the 13-year-old New Horizons spacecraft eventually swooped by the frozen rock on New Years Day 2019, the object graduated to a snowman-shaped frozen rock.
Now, after receiving new images of MU69, planetary scientists suspect that both of its “lobes” are flattish, too.
“The larger lobe, nicknamed ‘Ultima,’ more closely resembles a giant pancake, and the smaller lobe, nicknamed ‘Thule,’ is shaped like a dented walnut,” the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (where the mission is headquartered) detailed online.
These latest observations, which revealed the object in a new light, create more puzzles. Other solar system objects similar to MU69 — like comets, for instance — have rounder, though still imperfect, forms.
“It would be closer to reality to say Ultima Thule’s shape is flatter, like a pancake,” Alan Stern, who heads the New Horizons mission, said in a statement. “But more importantly, the new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed. We’ve never seen something like this orbiting the Sun.”
New Horizons — the legendary spacecraft that captured these images of MU69 — shot the latest sequence of pictures on Jan. 1, 2019, as the spacecraft departed MU69 at 31,000 mph and hurtled deeper into the black abyss of space, toward still-unknown destinations.
These certainly aren’t the last images we’ll see of MU69, nor are they the closest. But they are the final views New Horizons captured of this far-off, icy world.
MU69 is a place of major scientific intrigue. It’s preserved in a ring of ancient frozen objects, called the Kuiper Belt, that form a ring around the solar system. Out here, temperatures drop to nearly absolute zero, or negative 460 degrees Fahrenheit, which is as cold as it can get naturally.
The latest conceptions of the shape of MU69
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Scientists believe that out here in this remote frigid realm, objects like MU69 have been frozen in pristine condition since the onset of the solar system some 4 billion years ago.
It’s an artifact of our ancient cosmic past.
As New Horizons beams more images through the solar system, we’ll almost certainly continue seeing weird, unprecedented stuff.
Top Democrats are calling on Justin Fairfax to resign. He forcefully denied the allegation.
A second woman has accused Democratic Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault, claiming through her lawyer on Friday that he raped her in college 19 years ago.
Fairfax forcefully denied the accusation, but he started to hemorrhage support, as former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and other top Democrats called on him to resign. The new accuser, Meredith Watson, also called on Fairfax to quit.
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“Mr. Fairfax’s attack was premeditated and aggressive,” Watson said through her attorney in a letter issued Friday. Watson’s lawyer said she attended Duke University with Fairfax in 2000 when the alleged attack happened and that she has statements from friends and electronic messages corroborating her account.
Watson indicated that she decided to come forward after California college professor Vanessa Tyson issued a public statement Wednesday that said Fairfax forced her to perform oral sex in his hotel room during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Fairfax denied that allegation with a written statement of his own Wednesday that said survivors of sexual assault must be given “the space and support to voice their stories.”
Fairfax’s Friday statement in response to Watson’s allegation was more combative.
“It is obvious that a vicious and coordinated smear campaign is being orchestrated against me,” Fairfax said, demanding an investigation to clear his name and calling Watson’s charge “demonstrably false.”
The shocking new claim against Fairfax capped a disastrous week for all three statewide elected Virginia officials, all of whom are Democrats: Fairfax, Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring. Both Northam and Herring were damaged by revelations they once donned blackface in 1984 and 1980, respectively.
Amid that triple crisis, the Republican majority leader of the state Senate, Tommy Norment, was accused of editing a Virginia Military Institute yearbook filled with racist imagery and language in 1969.
The crush of news left Virginia politicians stunned, though many Democrats in the state and nationally withheld calling for Fairfax’s resignation, muting their prior stance in favor of sexual assault accusers that they took during the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The National Organization for Women, however, demanded Fairfax quit. And, on Friday, former McAuliffe joined the call after the second accusation, from Watson.
“The allegations against Justin Fairfax are serious and credible. It is clear to me that he can no longer effectively serve the people of Virginia as Lieutenant Governor. I call for his immediate resignation,” McAuliffe said in a written statement. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a presential candidate, also said Fairfax should step down.
Virginia’s two sitting U.S. senators, former governors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, did not immediately comment.
Northam, who had also faced calls for his resignation over the blackface scandal, sent a letter to all state employees Friday announcing that he would remain in office. “You have placed your trust in me to lead Virginia forward and I plan to do that,” he wrote.
The offices of Northam and Herring did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the second assault allegation against Fairfax.
Watson’s lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith — who successfully represented Gretchen Carlson in her sexual harassment suit against former Fox News executive Roger Ailes — didn’t provide explicit details of her encounter with Fairfax. Her statement said that “the two were friends but never dated or had any romantic relationship.”
“The details of Ms. Watson’s attack are similar to those described by Dr. Vanessa Tyson,” according to Watson’s lawyer. “Ms. Watson was upset to learn that Mr. Fairfax raped at least one other woman after he attacked her.”
Fairfax drew attention to word of Tyson’s claims early Sunday when he issued a statement proactively denying the allegations and threatening to take legal action. Though Tyson wasn’t named at the time, Fairfax falsely claimed that the Washington Post had decided not to run a story about her accusations last year due to inconsistencies in her account.
Fairfax also attributed political motives to the allegations as they started to resurface just after the controversy began engulfing Northam.
Watson’s lawyer said that she “shared her account of the rape with friends in a series of emails and Facebook messages,” though the Facebook messages would not have been contemporaneous because the platform didn’t exist at that time.
However, her attorney said, “we have statements from former classmates corroborating that Ms. Watson immediately told friends that Mr. Fairfax had raped her.”
Watson, her lawyer said, “is reluctantly coming forward out of a strong sense of civic duty and her belief that those seeking or serving in public office should be of the highest character.”
Mental health bops, especially those by women, have become easier to find and groove to in the last year and a half. Take Ariana Grande’s Billboard hit “Breathin’” off her album Sweetener, which chronicles her struggle with the side effects of PTSD; Olivia O’Brien’s “Empty”, which navigates depression and self-medication; and Florence and the Machine’s “Hunger”, which originated as a poem about Welch’s experience with an eating disorder at age 17.
A new one, Julia Michaels’s and Selena Gomez’s “Anxiety,” is not only a girl-power anthem, but an honest look into what it’s like to live with anxiety on a daily basis, from how it affects relationships — friendships or romantic — to overthinking every little thing. For me, someone who’s suffered from anxiety and depression, it communicates solidarity and a recognition that I’m also allowed to feel, even when it means intense emotions often kept from societal acknowledgement.
I began seeing a therapist for depression when I was 16, learning coping skills first through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which focuses on identifying unhealthy patterns in one’s behaviors, and then through dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), which involves accepting behaviors that one can’t change and creating positive alternatives through mindfulness. Therapy is not for everyone, but I find it works for me.
Gomez, likewise, has been open about her struggle with anxiety and depression and her advocacy for going to therapy: “DBT has completely changed my life,” she told Vogue in 2017. “I wish more people would talk about therapy.” She’s quick to point out the pressure women in the industry have on them to keep up appearances, to not show weakness and how it holds them back from being honest about what they feel. “We girls, we’re taught to be almost too resilient, to be strong and sexy and cool and laid-back; the girl who’s down,” she said. “We also need to feel allowed to fall apart.”
Michaels, meanwhile, has long been outspoken about her battle with anxiety and how she also benefits from therapy, writing in an open letter to Glamour last month, “My first couple sessions, all I did was cry and panic. I didn’t realize how much emotional duress I was holding inside my body… I learned that the more toxicity I surrounded myself with, the more toxic my mind became. The more therapy I did, the more the panic became less and less. I learned that for each thing to have anxiety about, I had an association to link it to.”
With the help of many therapists over the years, I’ve developed techniques to use when I’m feeling anxious so I can ground myself and stop the chaos in my mind, even if it’s for a few minutes. But when my anxiety is at its worst and I don’t even give those coping skills a thought, my anxiety looks like ignored text messages from friends and hook-ups asking to hang out and outstanding emails in my inbox. In the first verse of “Anxiety,” Michaels shows she knows the feelings, singing, “Make all these plans with friends and hope they call and cancel / Then overthink about the things I’m missing / Now I’m wishing I was with ‘em.” Cancelling plans might seem like a good idea in the moment, but then I end up lying awake at night, sweating, my mind racing: Why did I cancel? Do they hate me? I’m such a bad friend.
When I ignore my friends because I’m anxious about conflict, it’s my anxiety swarming my mind with assumptions that isolating myself will somehow make the situation fix itself or disappear altogether: Is it even worth it to try to explain? Will it sound like I’m making excuses? This very pattern of overthinking motivated Michaels to write “Anxiety,” as she said in an interview with Beats 1 Radio. “I kind of wanna talk about these sort of things that I deal with on a daily basis,” she said. “Not just anxiety, but the fear of missing out and sort of wanting to do things but never actually having the ability to go through with anything that you want to do. It’s just a way into the mind of someone that has anxiety and has these struggles for someone that doesn’t understand it.”
On “Anxiety,” Michaels and Gomez both sing about how they were told that they could “take something to fix it” and that they “wish it was that simple.” I’ve been on three different types of anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications since I was 18 and have had both positive and negative experiences. Once I found the right antidepressant and the right dosage, I felt more in control of my emotions, as though I could get through the day without being set off by something as tiny as forgetting my locker combination or getting off at the wrong stop on the subway. But when my depression is at its absolute worst, it looks like two-months’ worth of Prozac still sitting in unopened bottles in my kitchen cabinet. It’s the realization that, after ignoring her calls and voicemails for a month, I should call my psychiatrist and set up an appointment.
“Feel like I’m always apologizing for feeling,” Michaels sings in the song’s pre-chorus. That’s exactly what anxiety does: demands we apologize in order to protect ourselves. But this openness in talking about mental health and raising awareness creates a bond between people, including Michaels and Gomez. “You’re never alone if you feel this way,” Gomez wrote in a poignant Instagram post prior to its release. For me, “Anxiety” is a declaration of just that: Michaels and Gomez are allowed to feel every emotion, no matter how messy or intense — and so are all of us.
If you or someone you know is struggling with their emotional health, head to halfofus.com for ways to get help.
By Jack Morse
Daily Trends Hunter 