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The term “cultural appropriation,” which emerged from academia but has been applied more broadly — say, to refer to Washington Redskins fans wearing feather headdresses or white people in cornrows — has drawn ire from opponents of political correctness. But supporters say it captures a truth: that the melding of cultures is often about which group has the power to take symbols, styles or language from another.

The video issued by the University of Washington shows students from various ethnic groups and of various sexual orientations saying that almost any portrayal of them can cause a wound: For example, dressing in drag can denigrate the struggles of gay and transgender people.

At Duke University, the Center for Multicultural Affairs has filled its Facebook page with images of young people holding up pictures of offensive stereotypes, including white people in blackface and a man dressed as a suicide bomber, with the hashtag #OurCulturesAreNotCostumes.

One morning in May, I rolled out of bed to find that my hip flexors were at it again. Dragging my rolled-up yoga mat to the middle of the floor to arrange my body into the now-familiar contortion—one leg straight back, the other forward and bent against the floor, then switch—I tried to piece together what was going on. Like most Americans, I hadn’t been on an airplane since February. I had been sitting at home virtually all the time, a situation of relative comfort and incredible luck. But in the weeks that followed, I folded my body into pigeon pose again and again, with minimal returns. As I lost hip flexibility, I also gained other problems, which accumulated over the next several months—low-grade headaches, sore shoulders, a stiff neck, dry skin.Recommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullAfter the Pandemic, the Office Dress Code Should Never Come BackAmanda MullAmericans Got Tired of Looking Bad on ZoomAmanda MullRecommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullArticleRecirc_itemMedia__1z

And people aren’t just working in more challenging physical circumstances; they’re also spending more time doing it. “In the office, people work for eight or nine hours, but now they find themselves working 10 or 12 hours at home just because there’s no commute time,” Natalia Ruiz, a physical therapist at NYU Langone Orthopedic Center, told me of her patients. “Expectations of productivity have increased because you’re working from home.” In her practice, she’s seen more complaints of back and neck pain, but also more “repetitive strain” injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis in the hands and forearms, and pinched nerves in the elbows.

For people who aren’t of working age, the orthopedic concerns are a little different. Elderly people, who are at the highest risk from the virus itself, have also experienced some of the worst physical consequences of isolation. “The elderly are not taking their walks and are getting weaker in their legs,” Singh said. “They are losing confidence in their gait, which causes further weakness, and they enter a vicious cycle.” Many people have sharply reduced their exercise this year as gyms have closed, or they fear catching the coronavirus at those that have reopened, but for younger adults, who are generally more physically fit and less prone to injury, regaining some movement in creative ways is easier, and novel, unsupervised exercise is less risky (although Singh noted that he has seen some injuries from people who have used their new Pelotons vigorously but incorrectly).

To many, the costumes at the "Stop the Steal" riot seem ridiculous. "We spend $750 billion annually on 'defense' and the center of American government fell in two hours to the duck dynasty and the guy in the Chewbacca bikini,"

But when we actually read the T-shirt slogans and interpret the symbols — especially given the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan — what the Capitol insurrectionists wore becomes more consequential and a lot more menacing.

When the Ku Klux Klan started in the mid-1860s, Klansmen did not wear the white hoods and robes we imagine them in now. They had no uniform. As historian Elaine Frantz explains in her essay "Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan," the early Klansmen wore something far more similar to the hodgepodge we saw on display at the Capitol last week: animal horns, fur, fake beards, homemade costumes that drew on traditions of carnival or Mardi Gras, masks, pointy hats, polka dots.

Long considered the dusty uniform of an older, more conservative generation, the erstwhile dress of the Alpine regions of Bavaria and Austria has become a wildly popular symbol of the good times and good life of Germany’s most prosperous region.

“Ten years ago, nobody was wearing dirndl and lederhosen to Oktoberfest,” said Thomas Andersch, a Munich native who recently wore his knee-length leather trousers and a traditional shirt to the office so he would be ready to attend a pre-Oktoberfest festival after work. “Now it looks strange if you show up in jeans.”

the revived popularity of the dirndl among young people as a reflection of the confidence of a new generation of Germans who are turning to tradition to define themselves in the face of the encroachments of globalization.

the idea persists that there is something wrong and oppressive about people of one background adopting and adapting the artifacts of another.

A Canadian university cancelled its yoga classes as culturally appropriating—notwithstanding that most of the strenuous moves taught in a modern class actually originate in Danish gymnastics and British army calisthenics, which were in turn appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs seeking to update yoga from a meditative to an active practice for the body-conscious modern age.

The cultural appropriation police answer the yoga and banh mi objections with a familiar counter-argument: it’s about power. It’s fine for colonized Indians to incorporate European fitness regimes into their yoga; wrong for Canadians of European origin to incorporate yoga into their fitness regimes.

the £5 dress epitomises a fast fashion industry that pumps hundreds of new collections on to the market in short time at pocket money prices, with social media celebrity endorsement to boost high consumer demand. On average, such dresses and other products are discarded by consumers after five weeks.

But behind the price tag there is an environmental and social cost not contained on the label of such products. “The hidden price tag is the cost people in the supply chain and the environment itself pays,” said Sass Brown, a lecturer at the Manchester Fashion Institute. “The price is just too good to be true.

nvironmental degradation, the textile industry creates 1.2bn tonnes of CO2 a year, more than international aviation and shipping combined, consumes lake-sized volumes of water, and creates chemical and plastic pollution – as much as 35% of microplastics found in the ocean come from synthetic clothing.

Jonathan Clarke, writing in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, of which he is a contributing editor, said the “democratization of dress” in recent decades has produced “the rapid casualization of American life.” But this has calcified into an unattractive norm

Is there a more obvious contemporary ostentation than tech billionaires conducting business wearing T-shirts to advertise that they are too rich to have sartorial concerns?

Clarke, who confesses a “slightly antique sense of propriety,” writes “few things are more heartening than to see a man or woman of advanced age very well dressed.

England finally has its watchful protector, a silent guardian.

A man dressed as Batman is fighting crime in the northern city of Bradford, and he’s already proven himself to be a successful hero

The costumed crusader, dressed in the garb of the 1960s television Batman — not in the style of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy — turned in a wanted man to a police station late last month. The vigilante hasn’t made an appearance since then, but that hasn’t stopped news station camera crews from showing up, hoping to catch a glimpse of England’s new hero.

By 2050, there will be about 10 billion of us, and how to feed us all, healthily and from sustainable food sources, is something that is already being looked at

The Norway-based thinktank Eat and the British journal the Lancet have teamed up to commission an in-depth, worldwide study, which launches at 35 different locations around the world today, into what it would take to solve this problem

Their solution is contingent on global efforts to stabilise population growth, the achievement of the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement on climate change and stemming worldwide changes in land use, among other things

“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”

How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different

(They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition

Stop dressing your kids in political slogans

There’s nothing like a clever slogan to make people even more self-righteous than they already are. Feminists, so proud of their Women’s March signs that are now being collected by the Smithsonian, have now returned to everyone’s favorite vehicle for ideological sloganeering: the T-shirt.

“In the past, if I saw a tee complimenting my kid in any way, chances are it was complimenting their looks . . . And typically, any comparisons to Mom or Dad were paired by gender (girls were ‘pretty’ like Mommy, and boys were ‘handsome’ like Daddy).”

After the attack on three Georgia spas on Tuesday, which took the lives of eight people, Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old charged with the slayings, told the police that the women murdered were “temptations” he needed to “eliminate.”

For too long, women have been punished and killed because of men’s inability to deal with issues around rejection, desire and shame. Women of color are especially at risk; they’re disproportionately attacked and more likely to be blamed for the violence perpetrated against them.

Thanks to decades of academic and activist work, we know more than ever about why men lash out at women in this way and how we can curb the violence. Still, the occurrence of mass killings targeting women shows no sign of stopping.

For government officials:Legislate the “personal choice” of mask noncompliance the way you have for decades tried to legislate women over their own deeply personal decisions.

After refusing to wear a mask or to instruct his staff to work remotely, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) tested positive for the coronavirus. He then tweeted that he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, despite top infectious-disease specialists, including Anthony S. Fauci, noting that the anti-malarial drug has not been proved an effective treatment. “It is what was decided as the best course of action between my doctor and me — not by government bureaucrats,” Gohmert wrote.

Was he plagiarizing Busy Philipps? Because last year at a hearing on abortion, the actor and activist told Gohmert, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.

Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case

She is unfazed by the attention, and in fact silently proud, because with each passerby she’s one step closer to achieving the goal she’s traveled halfway around the globe to accomplish: to keep her culture alive.

The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MTV and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of TV” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming.

It’s not just TV, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice.

offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality.

17th century widow Louise de Quengo, wearing her shoes and cap, was found along with heart of her husband in lead coffin

French archaeologists have uncovered the well-preserved body of a noblewoman who died 350 years ago – along with the clothes in which she was buried, including her cap and shoes, still intact.

The corpse of Louise de Quengo, a widow from an aristocratic family from Brittany, was discovered in an hermetically sealed lead coffin placed in a stone tomb at a convent chapel in the western city of Rennes.

In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas, according to Cotton Inc.'s Lifestyle Monitor survey, which includes consumers, age 13 to 70. The typical wardrobe contained, among other garments, 16 T-shirts, 12 casual shirts, seven dress shirts, seven pairs of jeans, five pairs of casual slacks, four pairs of dress pants, and two suits

By contrast, consider a middle-class worker's wardrobe during the Great Depression. Instead of roughly 90 items, it contained fewer than 15. For the typical white-collar clerk in the San Francisco Bay Area, those garments included three suits, eight shirts (of all types), and one extra pair of pants. A unionized streetcar operator would own a uniform, a suit, six shirts, an extra pair of pants, and a set of overalls. Their wives and children had similarly spare wardrobes. Based on how rarely items were replaced, a 1933 study concluded that this "clothing must have been worn until it was fairly shabby."

Thanks to our bulging closets, over the past couple of decades, clothing has become a much more discretionary good. New purchases are as easy to go without as restaurant meals or entertainment

All we know is that Mrs. Obama questions the encounter and has misgivings about it. For her, it’s a feeling. Others might hear this story and feel that Mrs. Obama possibly overreacted or misconstrued the meaning of the request.

But that is, in part, what racial discussions come down to: feelings. These feelings are, of course, informed by facts, experiences, conditioning and culture, but the feelings are what linger, questions of motive and malice hanging in the air like the stench of rotting meat, knotting the stomach and chilling the skin.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”