Ellen Ciurczak, Hattiesburg American Published 4:00 a.m. CT Oct. 28, 2019

It's become a tradition for Oak Grove High School to shine in Mississippi's accountability rankings - which rates schools from A-F and places them in state order by points.

Oak Grove High School isn't all about football. The school has done it again academically. It's landed in the top 10 high schools in the state.

According to the Mississippi Department of Education's 2018-19 accountability ratings released in September Oak Grove HighSchool was No. 6 in Mississippi with an A grade.

The schools are ranked by points. Oak Grove High School scored 790 points out of 1,000.

Ocean Springs High School came in at No. 1 with 811 points.

In the past five years, Oak Grove High School hasbeen as high as No. 1 and as low as No. 14 always ranked A.

"It's a tradition here," said Principal Helen Price. "The students and the teachers enjoy being part of a good thing.

"We work hard to keep that tradition of excellence."

Senior Calvin Pierce is proud to be part of a No. 6 school. He realizes how it's benefited him as he's been accepted to six colleges.

"I think it's really cool," he said. "I didn't understand how lucky I was to be here to realize I've been getting an excellent education all four years."

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The tough part about giving kids an excellent education, according to Price,is:

To participate in the standardized testing that goes into the accountability rankings, Oak Grove High School students must take a variety of tests:

They're not allowed to take the same test from year to year.

"You have to kind of start over each year," Price said. "Those who took English (II) one year will be taking U.S. History the next year.

"It's not like we can use their English data to help with their U.S. History (scores)."

Price said the teachers begin the school year by assessing their students' strengths and weaknesses.

"Then we address our instruction accordingly what will help the students grow academically," she said. "Then we work really hard."

Price said the high school faced a special challenge last year because it had several dozen English language learners.

"This accountability grade that we just got was the the first score to include points in that category," she said.

It has a feature called Tribe Time named because the school mascot is a Native American warrior. It's ahalf hour each day where every student even those doing wellgoes to the classroom of the teacher of their choosing.

Requirements are:

But Price said Tribe Time benefits every student even the academically successful ones.

"I see students who work feverishly trying to finish their homework assignments," she said. "If they'll use that time to get the assignment done, then they have time for (a job)or after-school activities."

Price said the teachers also participate in Professional Learning Communities where instructors of the same subject discuss:

Reaching students is perhaps the most important key to success.

"I build relationships with teachers and teachers implement relationships with students and together we can build an interest in each other's lives," Price said. "Students have to know teachers care about them personally and about their success then you get the most in return from that student."

Teacher Jennifer Kelly gets up close and personal with her students.

Here's what she does:

"In close, I have a better gaugeof their learning," she said.

Even though staying a top school is difficult, Price is not complaining.

"I think the good thing about accountability is it builds accountability for every student not just the high-performers, not just the low-performers, not just the English speakers," she said. "Even though it's a huge challenge, it's a good thing so we can reach all of our students."

Principal Rob Knight: On top-ranked Petal High: 'We can always get better'

Going for the top: Sumrall High School Principal Sheila Kribbs: 'She doesn't accept less than the best'

Contact Ellen Ciurczak ateciurczak@gannett.com. Follow @educellen on Twitter.

Oak Grove High School state accountability rankings

2018-19: State rank: 6 Grade: A Score: 790 out of 1,000

2017-18: State rank: 3 Grade: A Score: 829

2016-17: State rank: Tie for 6 Grade: A Score: 832

2015-16: State rank: 14 Grade: A Score: 765

2014-15: State rank: 1 Grade: A Score: 790

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'It's a tradition here:' Another achievement for Oak Grove High School - Hattiesburg American

Weve been asking to hear your travel success and mistake stories to both celebrate and help our TPG U.K. community.

This week, Scott contacted us to share details of how he and his wife are about to travel to the Caribbean in first class with one Companion Voucher and how they are in line to each earn another valuable Companion Voucher:

I came across the TPG site around a year ago and obtained a BA personal Amex and BA corporate card.

My wife and I are now off to Barbados next May. We managed to book first class on the way out and business class on the way back. This cost us 121,000 points (using my Companion Voucher) and 1,100 in total fees, taxes and surcharges. When I looked at the price to pay for the flights, it was more than 7,000.

My wife now has a separate BA personal card. Well each earn a Companion Voucher every year, and by grouping our points, I reckon we can use the two Companion Vouchers to redeem for two long-haul business-class trips a year!

Scotts tale is a true example of the value that can be had from a Companion Voucher earned from a cobranded American Express card. Whether you have 50,000 Avios, 100,000 Avios, 150,000 Avios or 200,000 Avios to spend, Companion Vouchers can be a great way to maximise your return on one of the most valuable credit card perks in the U.K.

Featured photo by Tristan Ashurst/Getty Images.

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A Companion Voucher for me and another for my partner TPG reader success story - The Points Guy UK

Executive Summary

Many organizations aspire to have cultures that embrace data, analytics and AI, and other new technologies, but few make specific attempts to create such cultures.TD Wealth, the wealth management unit of Toronto-based TD Bank Group, created a program called WealthACTfor Accelerate Change through Technologyto get senior and middle-level executives in the business unit excited about what technology can do for their business. This article describes how the program works and how it has performed.

Many organizations aspire to have cultures that embrace data, analytics and AI, and other new technologies, but few make specific attempts to create such cultures. TD Wealth, the wealth management unit of Toronto-based TD Bank Group, is one organization that isnt content to think wishfully about this sort of cultural change. It created a program called WealthACTfor Accelerate Change through Technologyto try to get senior and middle-level executives in the business unit excited about what technology can do for their business.

I was only a bit player in this program, having spoken to participants in the first WealthACT program in the summer of 2018. They visited Cambridge and Boston to hear from MIT faculty, startup entrepreneurs, and assorted experts like me. At that program I met Atanaska Novakova, a heat-seeking missile of a banker who led the design of the program and in her day job leads operations and shared services for TD Wealth. Novakova, who originally hails from Bulgaria, worked with TD Wealth business head Leo Saloman analytical, data-driven decision-makeras executive sponsor of the program. Senior leaders of the unit felt that its data assets were finally ready to be used, and the most important factor in using them effectively was demand from executives. Novakovas passion for technology and change was evident even to an outsider like me, and Ive now heard from many at TD that her personal example inspired a lot of program participants.

An Ambitious Program Design

The first participant group of about 100 wealth specialists didnt just troop to Boston. They also visited Silicon Valley and the UK, studying not only new technologies but also the open banking movement. It wasnt just industrial tourism; participants had various assignments throughout the five-month program and even participated in a hackathon to develop new apps. The trips were memorable, but the bulk of the program involved expert-led instruction and hands-on and immersive workshops to build customer empathy, understanding emerging tech, and practice pattern recognition to spot trends and opportunities ahead.

The specific goals of the program were to develop six core skills:

TD Wealth worked with consultants from Deloitte Canada (I am a Senior Advisor to Deloitte, but only to the U.S. firm) to help design the program and to serve as coaches for the participants. Alex Morris, Deloitte Canada partner and head of innovation and design, has a particular focus on user-centered design. He told me that from the beginning of WealthACT he wanted participants to recognize that mindlessly throwing technology at customers is not the answer. He hoped the program would foster not only much deeper awareness of technology, but also greater sophistication about it, and a deep understanding of the customers TD Wealth serves today and how they are changing. Some aspects of the program involved visits to customers homes, for example, and penetrating conversations about death and inheritance.

Morris said that the design of the program continues to evolve. The first iteration, he said, involved a lot of classroom learning with blather (my word, not his) from talking head types like me. Subsequent program versionsWealthACT 3 is just getting startedhave become more experiential and immersive. The second cohort did go to exciting places like Israel (to learn more about cybersecurity advances), San Francisco (primarily for voice technologies), and Montreal (which has a thriving AI ecosystem), but it also involved more interviews and collaborative projects by participants. Morris thinks the program is working: It has certainly nurtured the innate curiosity of these people, he says. I hear participants say that this program has shifted them from fearing change to embracing change with joy. Some new initiatives, like using AI to better serve customers, can be directly traced to the program.

Not surprisingly, as both Morris and Novakova report, other business units at TD, and other companies in the close-knit Canadian business community, are beginning to implement similar programs.

One Participants Perspective

To understand the types of changes in thinking and acting that the WealthACT program has engendered, I spoke with Braunwyn Currie, who leads mutual funds operations for TD Wealth. Currie was in the second iteration of WealthACT, and was particularly interested in the impact of automation since her mutual funds process had been deemed well-suited to automating. She was, she admits, apprehensive of and inexperienced with technology before the program. I love to read and learn, but my strengths were on the human sidein the past I always liked working with people, but generally avoided technology whenever I could. Before the program, however, she worried about how she could ever support her team through initiatives like automation without personally embracing the new technology.

Entry into the ACT programs is competitive, and the application process thorough. Currie had to say why she wanted to apply, what skills she would bring to the program, and what she expected to get out of it. She believes she got in because she gave the application considerable thought and time, and was able to demonstrate a strong need for personal change.

Participants in Curries offering of the program visited Israel, San Francisco, or Montreal; she was selected for the Montreal trip. There the participants met with the well-known AI researcher Yoshua Bengio at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), and Currie was impressed by his thoughtful and humanitarian perspective on AI. The Montreal visit also involved a visit to the Deloitte Greenhouse in the city, where the program focused on the neuroscience-related aspects of a customers visit to bank websites.

Her perspective on technology has changed completely. She now finds the capabilities of new technology to be exciting. She realizes that what humans want from technologies is a critical aspect of their success at the bank, and her own orientation to people can make user-centered design a personal strength. Shes leading a multi-stage implementation of automation technologies in her groups mutual funds processes. Where she was previously concerned that the automation systems would eliminate human workers, shes now enthusiastic about how they can change human work for the better (consistent with that view, the technology is called innovation automation or IA, at TD). Participating in WealthACT was, she says, life-changing.

Next Steps

Now that about half of the senior management team of TD Wealth has graduated from a WealthACT program, Atanaska Novakova, the program leader, knows the program is a success. We have turned anxiety into excitement, and now everyone whos been through the program is a change agent, she explains. I hear all sorts of ideas from business leaders about how we can use AI and chatbots in the business. It used to be that the push for those came from our IT people, and IT would get the blame if they didnt work out. Now the business sees these projects as a joint responsibility. Weve also created some great relationships among people who have never gotten the opportunity to work together, which was an unexpected benefit of the program.

However, shes restless to improve the program. It was expensive, she says, and she doesnt want it to be viewed by anyone as obligatory. She believes that such an intervention should never be viewed as a right, but rather an opportunityand shes not sure that those who havent applied thus far are sufficiently motivated to gain anything from the program. Shes also wondering about how to make these one-shot programs an ongoing experience for the business units leadership team.

She also knows that its not just the leaders of TD Wealth who need to participate. Shes in the process of designing a WealthACE program Accelerate Change through Execution. She envisions that the program will involve less travel, will involve some of the ACT participants as trainers, and will involve many of the same design components. This program is aimed not at 400 managers but at 4,000 individual contributors, and Novakova expects that it will go on for a long time.

Its too early, of course, to know if these cultural change programs will have a long-term impact on TD Wealth or TD in general. However, there is little doubt that wealth management and banking are becoming increasingly technology and data-intensive, and that the industry leaders of the future will have that focus embedded in their strategies, business models, and products. The WealthACT program has clearly helped TD take a big step toward having a tech-focused DNA. How that plays out in day-to-day business and competition will be fascinating to watch.

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Building a Culture That Embraces Data and AI - Harvard Business Review

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission continue to probe Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) breadwinner Google for evidence of efforts to maintain monopolies. Meanwhile, Congress has quietly introduced a bill that could at least address the privacy concerns surrounding social networking giants like the aforementioned Facebook, as well as Twitter (NYSE:TWTR). The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act of 2019, or ACCESS Act, aims to mandate a way for individuals to transport their personal information from one social media account to another.

Investors in these tech companies should be worried. Although the proposal has only recently been unveiled and may or may not become a law, it's another glimpse into the mindset of regulators and lawmakers. If not this bipartisan bill, one like it could eventually be squeezed through. A seemingly small tweak could open the door to competition the world's top social media platforms and tech names have thus far been able to keep at bay.

Senators Mark Warner (D-Virginia), Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) are the authors of the bill Warner says will make it "easier for social media users to easily move their [personal] data or to continue to communicate with their friends after switching platforms." Perhaps more important in this case, "start-ups will be able to compete on equal terms with the biggest social media companies."

Image Source: Getty Images.

Social media users already have this option in a certain sense, but the proposed law will require web companies like Facebook and Google to develop a clear, uniform method -- with instructions -- for a newcomer to the social media landscape to retrieve and procure the user data about themselves that has been compiled and stored by those companies.

The wording of the bill calls for a "third-party custodial service" to facilitate the data exchange. It also permits charging a fee for performing such a service, though it's conceivable that a new social networking platform would be willing to pay such a fee in exchange for gaining new users.

It hasn't taken the world's dominant internet companies long to realize they can leverage their size and complexity to prevent rivals from mounting a major affront. There were no laws to prevent the application of such leverage, as the internet itself is still a relatively young (even if overwhelmingly important) means of transacting business and sharing information. Consumers have also been mostly unaware of how much digital data is being gathered about them and then used on them by advertisers and others willing to pay for access to the detailed information.Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal arguably brought both long-brewing problems to a head.

But unlike most such scandal-prodded movements, this one hasn't faded. It's continued to swell in popularity. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now found himself answering questions about user privacy as part of a congressional hearing more than once, including this week. Alphabet, Twitter, and Amazon executives have also sat in the same hot seat.

In that same vein, consumers are largely on board with the regulatory scrutiny of so-called big tech. A survey performed by Trust Radius earlier this year found that only 29% of the respondents trusted Google. That's far better than Facebook's rating of a mere 5%. Apple and Amazon earned the trust of 27% and 25%, respectively. For perspective, the average level of consumer trust in companies observed by the study was a notably better 56%. More eye-opening is that more than 40% of respondents indicated they didn't trust any of the big four tech names.

The reason for the distrust? A separate study done by Dentsu found that roughly two-thirds of distrust in tech companies stemmed from misuse of personal data.

Again, it's only a proposed bill at this time and far from becoming law. Similar privacy-minded and portability measures have been put on the table before and ultimately been rejected, most before they were ever put into bill form.

Those efforts weren't made in an environment like the current one though. The FTC and the DOJ and consumers and lawmakers appear to have had enough, even without knowing exactly what they've had enough of. Such legal and regulatory efforts don't appear to be going away.

Regardless of when it may finally take shape, it was Charlotte Slaiman -- policy counsel for digital-rights advocacy group Public Knowledge -- that arguably lays out the full extent of the threat to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and others. She explains "It's really hard in today's environment for a company that would rely on this thing that doesn't exist yet to survive without it for a while. So I think that if we are able to have interoperability required, then innovators will know if you come up with a new start-up that is based on this system, you will have the opportunity for success."

It's that potential success of a newcomer prompting the present giants of social media to slow-walk and stall the ACCESS Act and other akin proposals. It's apt to come at their expense.

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Congress Explores "Backdoor" Plan to Disrupt Facebook, Twitter, and Others - The Motley Fool

The nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) made sweeping gains in regional elections on Sunday, inflicting heavy losses on Angela Merkels Christian Democrats (CDU).

Bjrn Hcke, a politician who has been compared to Hitler by German national television, led the AfD to second place in the eastern state of Thuringia with 23.8 per cent, according to initial projections.

The AfD was held off by the Left Party of the current regional Prime Minister, Bodo Ramelow, which came first with 29.5 per cent.

But Mr Hcke beat Mrs Merkels party into third place in a state it has dominated since German reunification.

Following a campaign that saw far-right death threats against its regional leader, the CDU limped in with just 22.5 per cent -by far its worst ever result in a state where it has come first in every previous election since 1990.

With the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) also recording their worst ever result in the state with just 8.5 per cent, the mainstream German parties appear to have lost control of Thuringia. Instead the state is now starkly divided between the hard-left and the hard-right.

The result will be seen as personal vindication for Mr Ramelow, Germanys first regional Prime Minister from the Left Party, a successor to the former East German communist party.

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AfD candidate compared to Hitler inflicts crushing losses on Merkels party in regional vote - The Telegraph

A few days after Suzy Batiz learned that shed made Forbess 2019 list of Americas richest self-made women, she lay down on her kitchen floor and wept. Batiz, whose net worth is estimated at more than two hundred and forty million dollars, grew up poor. She describes her family as Irish potato-famine people on her fathers side and cotton pickers from Arkansas on her mothers. For most of her life, she was driven by an intense desire to make money. I really believed that money was going to get me out, she said. Not just out of Arkansas and generational poverty, but out from under her oppressive religion, her mothers low expectations, her fathers alcoholic volatility, her childhood sexual abuse, her suffocating first marriage, her tumultuous second marriage, and her cash-strapped third marriage.

As an entrepreneur, Batiz has prodigious drive but a spotty track record. Heres a non-exhaustive list of her gambits: Shes sold exercise equipment; started a clothing line; opened a clothing store, a beauty salon, and a tanning salon; and sold cheap lingerie at a markup to strippers, until a club owner with three missing fingers demanded a percentage of her profits. Shes sold green-tea patches and at one point wanted to create a caffeinated gum. (You know those Listerine strips? I tried to make those with, like, Red Bull, she said.) There was a tanning-bed-repair business and a hot-tub-repair business. One time, I sold a tractor-trailer load of gearboxes. Another time, a couple tractor-trailer loads of fabric, she said. I needed money, so I would call manufacturers and see what excess inventory they had that I could turn. I was just a hustler, you know?

In 2001, she was in the final rounds of fund-raising for a startup, a recruiting firm that matched job seekers and companies by cultureThe problem was that it was twenty years ahead of its time, Batiz saidwhen the dot-com bubble burst. Her investors backed out, and within a year shed lost her house and her Range Rover.

She swore off business and stayed home, painting and listening to the heavy-metal band Disturbed. They were very energetically aligned with where I was at the time, she said. One day, she went to see a hypnotist, who told her that her life lacked purpose. He gave her the book Mans Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, which inspired Batiz to take what she calls a spiritual sabbatical. She studied Buddhism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, and metaphysics. I had an insatiable desire to find something, she said. I was the ultimate seeker. At a bookshop, she came across Loving What Is, by the motivational speaker and author Byron Katie, who teaches a method of self-inquiry called the Work. Two weeks later, Im at her ten-day workshop, Batiz said. I went in drinking a big thing of Yellow Tail every night, and, when I came out, I was sober for eight years. After that, I was in a bliss state. I knew there was a larger meaning here. She developed a self-help course called Inside Out: How to Create the Life You Want by Going Within. She started to meditate. She got out of her head and into her body. She listened to her gut. Then, she recalled, I was at a dinner party, and my brother-in-law asked, Can bathroom odor be trapped? And lightning went through my body.

Batiz is the creator of Poo-Pourri, a bathroom spray made from essential oils, which has sold sixty million bottles since it launched, in 2007. As its name suggests, Poo-Pourri is designed to mask the smell of excrementor, more precisely, to trap unpleasant odors in the toilet, below the surface of the water, and to release pleasant natural fragrances, including citrus, lavender, and tropical hibiscus, in their stead. Its ostensible mechanism is depicted in an animated video on the products Web site, in which cartoon bombs and missiles plunge into a toilet bowl, detonate, and trigger an efflorescence of vines, daisies, and butterflies. In 2012, Poo-Pourri formed its first national partnership, with the home-shopping network QVC. In 2014, it made its first national brick-and-mortar appearance, at Bed Bath & Beyond. Earlier this year, it rolled out at Costco. The company recently expanded into shoe odor, and also released a line of cleaning products, called Supernatural, which sold out within two hours of premiring on Gwyneth Paltrows life-style site, Goop. Scentsible L.L.C., the parent company of Poo-Pourri and Supernatural, is projected to generate a hundred million dollars in revenue in 2019. Batiz owns ninety-seven per cent of the company, and her three children own the remaining three per cent.

There are many remarkable things about this story: that a toilet spray could make someone as rich as Reese Witherspoon, with whom Batiz is tied on the Forbes list; that Batiz, who has no background in consumer goods, created not just a successful product but also an entirely new product category (Poo-Pourri is not so much an air freshener as an air prophylactic); and, perhaps most surprisingly, that Batiz no longer sees herself as a mere businesswoman, but as a spiritual explorer whose medium just happens to be business. Linking financial success to spirituality is nothing new: its been done by people from the productivity guru Stephen Covey to the basketball coach Phil Jackson. But Batiz is an especially improbable example of the C.E.O. as spiritual leaderher gospel is late capitalism taken to its extreme. Business, for me, isnt just something I do. Its a purpose, she told me. This is not a rags-to-riches story. Its a spiritual-evolution story.

Batiz, who is fifty-five, has large blue eyes and wavy blond hair, and speaks with a soft twang. Although she lives in Dallas, her clothing style is reminiscent of a Venice Beach moon-circle facilitator: she favors rock-band T-shirts and silky floral dusters. She lives in a fifteen-thousand-square-foot, century-old restored Methodist church, which she bought after the end of her twenty-six-year marriage to her third husband, Hector Batiz. She overheard someone at a hair salon talking about a church that was on the market, found the listing, and called the owner, who didnt take her seriously. People who have the money lack the vision, and people who have the vision lack the money, he told her. She replied, I might have both. She purchased the church over the strong objections of her real-estate agent, who told her that it was a bad investment in a bad neighborhood.

Five years later, after several million dollars worth of renovations, its a serene, light-filled space, with white brick walls, cathedral ceilings, and pine flooring. Its also a shrine to wellness and personal growth. Batiz calls her home the Temple of Transformation. Im only about transformation, she said. Thats just what I do. Thats my whole life. I transform poop into smelling good.

Two enormous trees, named for Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, flank the former nave, which serves as a living and dining area. Upstairs, theres a sauna and a massage room. Batiz set up a laboratory in the former Sunday-school classroom, with a wood table where she keeps essential oils for experimenting with aromatherapy blends, bath products, and perfumes. Her kitchen counter, which used to be an altar, holds a cluster of devotional candles and a row of jars containing wild-blueberry leaves, collagen, lions-mane mushroom, cordyceps, and other ingredients for a tea that Batiz drinks every morning. (She calls it her little potion.) The former choir loft is a sitting room with crystal singing bowls for sound baths. The former parking lot is a Zen garden, complete with Buddha statues, fountains, and a beehive rescued from inside the church walls.

Batiz sometimes hosts personal-development workshops for women, and occasionally she shares her home with young female entrepreneurs in transition. Katie Anderson, the founder of Save Water Co., a data-based water-conservation firm, was one such entrepreneur. I woke up to aspects of myself while staying with Suzy, Anderson told me. Shes tapping into herself in a place of authenticity: What does self-care really look like? What does authenticity look like? And self-inquiry?

When I visited Batiz, in August, we ate breakfast at her enormous dining-room table: scrambled eggs with tomatoes and arugula, prepared by her chef. My plate came with toast grilled with coconut oil, which Batiz called a game changer, remarking wistfully that she wished she could heal enough to eat gluten again. Next to both of our plates was a little dish containing a vase with a yellow flower, a crystal, and a statuette of Ganesh, the Hindu god revered as a remover of obstacles.

Batiz is proud that Poo-Pourri shattered a taboo. I remember one day I was sitting on the plane with an attorney. Hes telling me all these poop stories, and he goes, I cant believe Im a sixty-something-year-old man and Im sitting here talking to you about poop! she said. We dont want to talk about our shit. We dont want to smell it. We dont want to face it. But she sees the companys goal as something larger. Its not just a toilet spray, she said. The underbelly is transformation.

When Batiz tells her life story, it hews to a particular American narrativeredemptive, merging New Age corporate mysticism with the traditional recovery speech. Its a Horatio Alger story for the new millennium. Her father, a musician who opened for Buddy Holly, was a bipolar alcoholic. Her mother, an artist who got pregnant at eighteen, suffered from depression and became addicted to pain pills.

Batiz was raised in the Church of Christ, an evangelical denomination. She was taught that God loved her but wouldnt think twice about consigning her to Hell for wearing shorts. On movie nights, the kids were shown films about Armageddon. Batiz rebelled. In 1981, when she was seventeen, she had an idea for denim pumps that matched jeans, and made a demo pair. She received so many compliments that she called Guess, the clothing company, to suggest that it manufacture a similar item, and was invited to come to New York. (She didnt go; her mother told her, Youre just a little girl from Arkansas. Theyll chew you up and spit you out.) At nineteen, Batiz dropped out of college and got married; by the time she was twenty-seven, shed had two kids and two divorces, and had declared bankruptcy, after a bridal salon that she bought with her first husband failed. For the next twenty-one years, she worked in retail or recruiting full time, but was always launching one side hustle or another.

By 2006, when Batiz had the dinner-party conversation about bathroom odor, she had begun mixing essential oils as a hobby. She couldnt get the idea of a smell-trapping spray out of her head. She began experimenting with an oil mixture that, when sprayed directly onto the water in a toilet bowl, would suspend on the surface. To test the formula, she followed family members and house guests to the bathroom. Batizs husband, Hector, was her official tester. (Which made her the official sniffer, he told me.) Nobody thought that the business would work; it seemed like just one more in a long line of crazy ideas. Batizs son C.J. said, I thought that she was completely nuts. Shed be chasing us to the bathroom all the time, and shed be, like, Hey, go in there and smell the bathroom. Im, like, Mom, youre insane. Ive got to pee. Please let me pee. Then, one day, Hector burst out of the bathroom, shouting, Were going to be millionaires! Batiz didnt know what he meant. He said, Do you realize what youve done? Youve taken the smell out of shit!

Batiz shared ten bottles of the spray with friends, and Hector built a Web site. The first shop to sell her product was owned by a friend of a friend. The day she delivered the spray, there was a customer in the storea woman with a mink headband and a Louis Vuitton bag, Batiz told me. The shop owner asked Batiz to tell the customer about her product, which shed brought in a plastic milk crate. I go, Poo-Pourri! Two sprays before you go, nobody will ever know! Batiz said. And she looks at me and goes, Thats clever. Ill take four. I was freaking out. And then the next day another store called, and then another.

Poo-Pourris breakthrough came in 2013, when the companys first commercial, Girls Dont Poop, went viral. The commercial featured the company spokesperson, Bethany Woodruff, a pretty Scottish redhead with a convincingly posh English accent, sitting on a toilet in various locations, primly extolling the products benefits in shockingly scatological terms. You would not believe the mother lode I just dropped, she says conspiratorially. And thats how I like to keep itleaving not a trace I was ever here, let alone that I just birthed a creamy behemoth from my cavernous bowels. Potty humor is so prevalent at Poo-Pourri that it took an outsider to see how over-the-top the commercial was. One of the commercials writers, Daniel Harmon, added the line Yes, this is a real product, and, yes, it really works, so that people wouldnt mistake it for a comedy sketch.

The response to the commercialwhich claimed that Poo-Pourri had better Amazon ratings than the iPhone 5, and which was eventually viewed more than forty-two million timeswas matched by the response to the spray. Kathie Lee Gifford mentioned it as one of her favorite things on the Today show, and the media started to pay attention. Customer reviews were giddy. (Nose and Family saver, one read.) Within days of the commercials release online, Batiz had four million dollars worth of orders. The sudden success was chaotic. We only processed, like, a hundred orders a day, C.J. told me. We could only print out as fast as the printer could go. We were screwed. The bookkeeper quit on the spot. Batiz slept in the warehouse on a bed of empty boxes and bubble wrap.

That year, Batiz gave a talk at the Harvard Business School Club of Dallas, and people waited for hours afterward to meet her. They wanted advice on how to tap into a new market. Batiz felt that she didnt have answers, and decided not to speak in public again until she did. Then she saw a political ad in which a candidate used the metaphor of doors being slammed in her face to talk about the experience of being a woman in the military. It just clicked, Batiz told me. I was, like, Her through line is doors, my through line is shit. In a spoken-word piece that Batiz wrote for Hustle Con, a startup conference, she uses the word shit a hundred and twenty-one times, in every imaginable context. She summarized the speech as: I was shit, I was in shit, I got out of shit, I became alive in shit.

Batiz attributes Poo-Pourris success to the fact that it was an alive idea, which, she said, means that it had an energetic resonance that aligned with her own. The company made a million dollars in its first year. At the same time, Batizs oldest son, Dustin, was going through a period of depression. Batiz suggested that he go on an ayahuasca retreat. Four days later, he was on a plane to Peru, and soon he called her from Iquitos to announce that God was real. Batiz began going on ayahuasca retreats, too. She has participated in ninety-four ayahuasca ceremonies to date. Each time, I would come back from Peru with a little more of myself, she said. (At one point, I asked Batiz if shed ever tried micro-dosing. She smiled and said brightly, I may or may not be micro-dosing right now!)

Batiz began to wonder whether she should be a shaman, and asked for advice from one of her own shamans, whom she described as a former heroin addict who owned one of the largest psychic networks in England. He replied, Shamans move energy. They pull negative energy out. They make space for positive energy. Money is energy. And business is the biggest way to move money. Youre going to do more good there and impact more people than pouring ayahuasca to twenty people at a time. Batiz told me, Thats when I was, like, Oh, Im a business shaman!

The history of American capitalism is littered with inventors who connected magical claims to prosperity. In the late nineteenth century, this trend manifested as the cult of success known as New Thought. Incorporating ideas from early Christian mysticism, Eastern religion, mesmerism, hypnotism, and nutrition, and drawing on the emerging fields of neurology and psychology, New Thought posited that matter was merely a projection of the mind and could therefore be shaped by the spirit. Negative thoughts created bad situations, and positive thoughts happy ones. As Beryl Satter, a professor of history at Rutgers University, wrote in her 1999 book, Each Mind a Kingdom, when the movement began, it was largely led by, and aimed at, middle-class white women who saw themselves as inaugurating an era of spirituality, virtue, and selflessness.

By the early twentieth century, New Thought had shifted its focus from health and social betterment to the attainment of wealth. It spawned dozens of best-selling books, such as Wallace Wattless The Science of Being Great, The Science of Being Well, and The Science of Getting Rich. Although New Thought lost momentum in the nineteen-twenties, the central message of thought-as-power lived on, according to Satter, in everything from The Power of Positive Thinking to the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step groups. More recently, Oprahs enthusiastic embrace of the 2006 book The Secret, which was inspired by the writings of New Thought authors, popularized the mantra of Ask, believe, and receive and spurred the sale of some thirty million copies. American business took a turn toward the mystical at around the same time, in part because of the rise of Silicon Valley, with its deification of the visionary founder, embodied by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. (Technological innovation, as scholars have pointed out, often has a messianic tone, promising a glorious future that will eradicate the sins of the present, so long as we place our faith in the prophetic leader and his company.)

The tech industry and Oprah had a lot to do with the shift toward spirituality, Kathryn Lofton, a professor of religious and American studies at Yale, who writes about capitalism and celebrity culture, told me. But the element Id really add to that is the housing bubble. Lofton thinks that stories like Batizs are comforting in the new reality that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis. Batiz, who lost her house in an earlier crash, went on to build her company with no funding, no network, no formal education, and no structural help. Even women who lost their house in the financial crisis can relate to the woman who says, I was beaten down, I had a revelation, and now I continue to find mystical power, Lofton said. As the wealth gap has widened, she said, weve seen the normalization of spiritual talk from the pulpit of commerce.

Recently, Alan Murray, the president of Fortune, wrote about a fundamental and profound change in the way that American C.E.O.s speak about their roles. He first noticed the shift in 2008, when Bill Gates introduced the idea of creative capitalism at Davos. During the next few years, Murray wrote, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter began pushing what he called shared value capitalism, and Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey propounded conscious capitalism. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote a book on compassionate capitalism; Lynn Forester de Rothschild, CEO of family investment company E.L. Rothschild, started organizing for inclusive capitalism; and the free-enterprise-championing Conference Board research group sounded a call for sustaining capitalism. Lofton told me, Weve heard all sorts of new arguments for compassionate capitalism and spiritual capitalism, because were trying to explain how capitalism can still be a moral good.

Batizs guide to navigating contemporary capitalism is her mentor, Gay Hendricks, who is a psychologist, a writer, and a personal-growth guru. About two decades ago, Hendricks and his colleague Kate Ludeman published a book called The Corporate Mystic, inspired by Hendrickss observation that many tech luminaries draw on mystical principles. Basically, the premise of the book is that youll find more actual spiritual principles being practiced in a corporation oftentimes than you will in a monastery, Hendricks told me. He pointed to the rise of once countercultural practices such as meditation, yoga, and mind-altering drugs as tools to boost the productivity of executives. An alternative title for his book, he said, was Conscious Business.

This migration from counterculture to corporate culture has been particularly prominent in the wellness industry, which now represents a $4.2-trillion market. Like New Thought, it has given rise to a new kind of success guru. Gwyneth Paltrows empire promises a life of spiritual perfection and physical purity through high-end consumption, and Amanda Chantal Bacons Moon Juice, an emporium of herbal supplements and skin-care products, promises to bring cosmic health to well-heeled customers. The rhetoric of these companies and their imitators has filtered into nearly every area of lifeincluding, with Poo-Pourri, the management of our lowliest functions. When I asked Lofton about Batiz, she laughed and replied, Theres something so pure capitalist magic about her! She literally picked one of the three possible symbolsblood, water, shitthat root you in so many metaphysical systems. Batizs company, Lofton said, is actually about how to manage the stuff that makes you dirtier, and the stuff that can make you healthier, purer, a better person.

Poo-Pourris headquarters are in a strip mall in Addison, Texas. Inside, there are neon poop-emoji signs and poop-shaped pillows; scatological inspirational quotations (Do epic shit) line the walls. The company employs almost eighty people, including a happiness manager and a feng-shui master, and offers Transcendental Meditation classes.

Batizs latest venture is the Supernatural line of cleaning products. The idea came to her after her mother was given a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of cancer that has been linked to chemical exposure. Batiz began thinking about the prevalence of chemical cleaning products in her mothers home. She wanted to start a company that used all-natural ingredients and glass bottles, and, after experimenting with blends at home, she hired a rogue hippie chemist to work with her on concentrates. The Supernatural Web site features naked people frolicking in nature, with a directive to save the worlds butt. Here, too, Batiz sees products meant to deal with human detritus as an opportunity for self-care. One user quoted on the Web site attests that, with Supernatural, cleaning has become a therapeutic and sacred experience through ordinary daily ritual.

Batiz is currently in the process of reviving her self-help workshop. Shes also trying to more effectively integrate her message of transformation into the Poo-Pourri brand. We have the world talking about poop now, she said. But how can we let people know the emotional aspect of the release? In early October, the company went on tour with a giant inflatable poop emoji. The vision, Batiz told me, is about letting shit go. Inside the inflatable structure, visitors encounter an immersive experience: they are asked to sit down on a toilet, and are then surrounded by a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree video projection in which they are encouraged to write down, and flush away, all the crap you need to let go of. You really have a physical reaction when youre in it, Batiz said. Its, like, literally, not only can wastepoopbe released, but toxic thoughts and toxic energies.

In Batizs living room, above the fireplace, theres a painting that she commissioned from a Kauai-based artist, Isabel Mariposa Galactica. Its an image of a woman surrounded by animals. Shes got this leopard on her head and these two coyotes down below, and then she has owls, Batiz said. The coyotes are a reminder to be aware of tricksters. The owls are a reminder to use your wisdom. The butterflies represent freedom. Right in the center is a lotus flower. In Buddhism, a lotus grows out of mud, Batiz continued. Interestingly enough, the shit in our lives is what usually produces the most beautiful flowers, right? Its the fertilizer.

Read more from the original source:
Suzy Batizs Empire of Odor - The New Yorker

One of the stranger things about the history of moviemaking is that women have been there all along, periodically exercising real power behind the camera, yet their names and contributions keep disappearing, as though security had been called, again and again, to escort them from the set. In the early years of the twentieth century, women worked in virtually every aspect of silent-film-making, as directors, writers, producers, editors, and even camera operators. The industrynew, ad hoc, making up its own rules as it went alonghad not yet locked in a strict division of labor by gender. Women came to Los Angeles from all over the country, impelled not so much by dreams of stardom as by the prospect of interesting work in a freewheeling enterprise that valued them. Of all the different industries that have offered opportunities to women, the screenwriter Clara Beranger told an interviewer in 1919, none have given them the chance that motion pictures have.

Some scholars estimate that half of all film scenarios in the silent era were written by women, and contemporaries made the case, sometimes with old stereotypes, sometimes with fresh and canny arguments, that women were especially suited to motion-picture storytelling. In a 1925 essay, a screenwriter named Marion Fairfax argued that since women predominated in movie audiencesone reason that domestic melodramas, adventure serials featuring acts of female derring-do, and sexy sheikh movies all did wellfemale screenwriters enjoyed an advantage over their male counterparts. They were more imaginatively attuned to the vagaries of romantic and family life, yet they could write for and about men, too. After all, men habitually confide in women when in need either of encouragement or comfort, Fairfax wrote. For countless ages womans very existencecertainly her safety and comforthinged upon her ability to please or influence men. Naturally, she has almost unconsciously made an intensive study of them. Alice Blach, the French-born director behind some six hundred short films, including The Cabbage Fairy (1896), one of the first movies to tell a fictional story, was one of many women to head a profitable production company. She founded hers, in 1910, with her husband and another business partner, in Flushing, New York, and moved it to Fort Lee, New Jersey, the pre-Hollywood filmmaking capital. Blach wrote in 1914, There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art.

In a way, the early women filmmakers became victims of the economic success that they had done so much to create. As the film industry became an increasingly modern, capitalist enterprise, consolidated around a small number of leading studios, each with specialized departments, it grew harder for women, especially newcomers, to slip into nascent cinematic ventures, find something that needed doing, and do it. By the 1930s, Antonia Lant, who has co-edited a book of womens writing in early cinema, observes, we find a powerful case of forgetting, forgetting that so many women had even held the posts of director and producer. It wasnt until a wave of scholarship arrived in the nineteen-ninetiesthe meticulous research done by the Women Film Pioneers Project, at Columbia, has been particularly importantthat womens outsized role in the origins of moviemaking came into focus again.

Now we are in the midst of a new round of rediscoveriesthis time of womens behind-the-camera roles well into the golden age of Hollywood. Theres a romance to ushering lost women back into the light. Second-wave feminism has made a particular mission of doing so, starting with poets and novelists, who were in some ways the easiest to find again. There were so many of them, their work had (mostly) survived in libraries, and feminist scholars soon began pumping out theories on how to rethink the canon based on such rediscoveries. Sometimes the work was itself a revelation. Zora Neale Hurston had been well and truly forgotten until Alice Walker published her article In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, in Ms., in 1975. And sometimes the fascination lay in the sheer unlikelihood of such an author existing at all, amid the most inauspicious circumstances: a houseful of children, a neer-do-well husband, a spindly desk in a drafty hallway.

The challenges of tracking down lost female moviemakers, on the other hand, have been both material and theoretical. Only a small portion of the movies made in the silent era, when women were particularly active behind the camera, still exist. Many silent films were allowed to disintegrate or were purposefully discarded or destroyed, sometimes by the very studios that had produced them. Fires took otherssilver nitrate, the compound in early film stock which makes the images shimmer, is so flammable that a tightly wound roll of such film can burn even submerged in water. As the film historian David Pierce writes, the industry considered new pictures always better than the old ones, which had very little commercial value, and so many films simply did not last long enough for anyone to be interested in preserving them.

Trying to figure out who actually worked on films is not as easy as you might think. Credits were assigned haphazardly in the early days of filmmaking. Then, too, the first generation of feminist film scholars, in the nineteen-seventies, didnt tend to look for evidence of women exercising creative or administrative authority in Hollywood, because they wouldnt have expected to find it: they were preoccupied with theorizing the male gaze. And auteur theory had little time for creative figures other than the director.

In the tendentious but mostly persuasive book Nobodys Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood (Oxford), J.E. Smyth, a film historian at the University of Warwick, documents the movie-production jobs that women succeeded in, even after the silent era. In fact, she argues, they held such jobs in greater numbers between 1930 and 1950 than they would for decades after. Although there were few women directors left at the height of the studio system (you can basically count them on two fingers: Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino), Smyth tots up an impressive array of women film editors, costume designers, talent agents, screenwriters, producers, Hollywood union heads, and behind-the-scenes machers whose titlesexecutive secretary to a studio head, for instancebelied their influence. Its little wonder that studios of the era catered to female audiences, with scripts built around the commanding presence of such actresses as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and with stories thought to reflect womens prevailing concerns. Smyth quotes Davis, who pulled enough weight in Hollywood to have been dubbed the Fourth Warner: Women owned Hollywood for twenty years, she said in a 1977 interview, so we must not be bitter. Smyth may have a point when she says that academics and media critics, intently depicting the industry as monolithically male and hell-bent on disempowering women, sometimes overlooked the women who thrived there.

Smyth burrows enthusiastically into humble sources that, she suggests, other scholars have looked down on: studio phone directories, in-house newsletters. Researchers on similar quests have come upon evidence in still more unlikely forms and places. Reels of film forgotten or lost sometimes turn up randomlyinterred in an archive in New Zealand, or sealed into a swimming pool in a remote town in the Yukon. Esther Eng was a Cantonese-American director who lived openly as a lesbian and, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, made Chinese-language films with titles like Golden Gate Girl and Its a Womens World (the latter of which had an all-female cast of thirty-six). Sadly, very little of Engs cinematic work still exists, but her photo albums, discovered in a San Francisco dumpster in 2006, became the basis of a documentary by the filmmaker S.Louisa Wei. PamelaB. Green, the director of the 2018 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blach, tracked down photos and letters of the directors that distant relatives had stashed in cardboard boxes in garages and basements, on the hunch that Tante Alice had been an extraordinary person.

Mallory OMeara, a young horror-movie writer and producer, is the author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick (Hanover Square), an intermittently entertaining and exhausting work about rediscovering the stylish life and scary art of its heroine. Patrick designed the memorable fish man in the black-and-white, drive-in-ready, atomic-age tingler Creature from the Black Lagoon. OMeara located a niece of Patricks whod held on to bins full of her aunts photographs and papers, and a horror-movie writer whod kept files on Patrick in an office crammed with monster-movie ephemera, like something out of an episode of Tales from the Crypt. But it was in an archive at the University of Southern California that OMeara found the telltale heart of her story: through internal Universal Studios memos, she pieced together the story of how Patricks achievement had been discounted.

In addition to designing monster makeup and special effects, Patrick was a glamorous bit actress with lush, dark hair and a penchant for cocktail dresses that showed off her shoulders. Universals publicity department grasped the possibilities right away: when Creature from the Black Lagoon came out, in 1954, the studio sent her on a promotional junket that was to have been billed The Beauty Who Created the Beast. But Bud Westmore, the domineering head of the makeup department, complained, and the publicity team dutifully rebranded the tour as The Beauty Who Lives with the Beasts, downgrading Patrick, in OMearas words, from creator to the monsters cute roommate who had to deal with dirty dishes and nag at them to put the toilet seat back down. Worse, though Patricks tour seems to have been a great successshe charmed the press and travelled like a trouperWestmore evidently couldnt abide being upstaged, and when Patrick returned to L.A. he fired her. She lived out her life as a small-time society lady, attending charity events and the like, and making an occasional onscreen appearance.

Being the first woman to design an iconic movie monster might not seem the most exalted of feminist achievements. But OMeara makes a good case that it matters, because womens psyches matter. The forms in which women project and objectify their fears ought to have the chance to scare the bejeezus out of us as often as those of men do. Almost every single iconic monster in film is made and was designed by a man: the Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong, OMeara writes. (If only Mary Shelley could have been a creative consultant for the screen versions of her creature.) The emotions and problems that all of them represent are also experienced by women, but women are more likely to see themselves as merely the victims of these monsters.

Sometimes the key to womens success in Hollywood was fairly simple: to work in a place where the men in charge did not act like monsters. One of those places, it turns out, was Walt Disney Studios. That might seem surprising for an enterprise associated with pliant storybook princesses. But Disney heroines were always more varied than detractors would have it, and certainly have become more so as of late. And perhaps theres something about bringing imaginary worlds to life every day that can make anything seem possible. Milicent Patrick, for one, got her start at Disney. And she wasnt sketching princesses; she was helping to create the brooding monster in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence of the 1940 movie Fantasiaa task that perfectly suited her talents.

In a sprightly new book, The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History (Little, Brown), Nathalia Holt, a science journalist and a popular historian, introduces us to a handful of women who worked on some of the classic Disney Studios films, spins them around, sprinkles some pixie dust, and has them take a bow. Shes a little like a fairy godmother, wanting us to think nothing but the best of her charges, perhaps wishing that she could send them back out into the world with a bluebird or two twittering at their shoulders. I wasnt always convinced that the five women she focusses on were as influential as she suggests, but I enjoyed reading about them in the workplace they shared.

Bianca Majolie, the daughter of Italian immigrants, moved with her family to Chicago and attended the same high school as Walt Disney. Later, as a thirty-three-year-old commercial artist, she wrote him a letter telling him about the comics she drew at home. It was 1934, and by then Disney was ensconced in Los Angeles, where hed launched a company on the success of his early Mickey Mouse cartoons and was beginning to plan an ambitious, full-length animated feature based on the fairy tale Snow White. To a teasing comment in Majolies letterI am only five feet tall and dont bitehe replied, I am sorry you dont bite, but nevertheless I should be very glad to have you drop in and see me any time at your convenience. Disney ended up hiring her as the first woman among his dozens of story artists.

Majolie created the lead character for a Disney short called Elmer Elephant, in which poor, sweet Elmer is bullied by the other animals until he proves his usefulness through a trunk-mediated rescue. The longtime Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston later credited it, and Majolie, with a revelation: We could not have made any of the feature films without learning this important lesson: Pathos gives comedy the heart and warmth that keeps it from becoming brittle.

Majolie generated concepts and drawings for a number of other movies, but most of her work never made it to the screen, Holt writes. She was shy, and at a chronic disadvantage as the only woman in boisterous story meetings, where the standard practice was to pitch ideas by acting them out, complete with cartoon voices. She escaped her desk on missions that would fill any office-bound introvert with envy: heading deep into the majestic hush of the downtown-L.A. library to study Italian editions of Pinocchio, or settling into record-store listening booths to try out potential movie scores. On one of those trips, she found Tchaikovskys Nutcracker Suite, which, strange as it might seem to anyone who has lived through an American Christmas season, had never been performed in the U.S. Walt Disney was as taken as she was with Waltz of the Flowers, and it inspired one of the loveliest chapters in Fantasia, a sequence for which another of Holts subjects, Sylvia Moberly-Holland, became the story director, the person responsible for conceiving the over-all action and feel of a piece. Moberly-Holland relied on Majolies sketches of fairies flitting from flower to flower, which some men at the studio were reluctant to draw, deeming the task too girly. But Disney was enchanted, and said that the sequence was like something you see with your eyes half-closed. You almost imagine them. The leaves begin to look like theyre dancing, and the blossoms floating on the water begin to look like ballet girls in skirts. In 1940, though, Majolie, who had grown depressed at work, took a vacation to recuperate; when she came back, she was fired.

Two of Holts other subjects had similarly brief careers at Disney. Grace Huntington was hired in the story department in 1936, and was gutsy as all getoutas an amateur aviator, she set altitude records. But she doesnt seem to have left a profound mark at the studio. Retta Scott grew up in rural Washington State and moved to Los Angeles with a scholarship to attend art school. She proved particularly adept at drawing animals. In 1942, she became the first woman to receive a screen credit as an animator on a Disney film: she did storyboards for Bambi and drew the hunting dogs that menace the deer and his mate.

By and large, Disney in the thirties and forties seems to have been a fairly rewarding place for women to work. True, there was a male-only penthouse club at Disneys Burbank studios that featured, along with a stupefying mural of naked and half-naked women, a restaurant, a barbershop, a bar, a gym, and a section where men could sunbathe in the nude. It couldnt have been easy to be a woman of that era trying to assert her ideasespecially, perhaps, if you were young and pretty, like Huntington. Holt includes two wonderfully evocative pencil sketches made by Huntington. In one, she depicts herself striding past male colleagues into a story meeting wearing full armor, and in the other, a two-panel drawing, a bloated Mickey Mouse looms over her desk, declaring I luv you! while she recoils, hair standing on end. Graces desire to flee was represented in the next frame, Holt writes, where all that was left of her was a cloud of dust and the word Zip!

On the other hand, the studios Ink and Paint Departmentwhere the animators character drawings were painstakingly copied onto clear plastic sheets, or cels, then colored inwas made up almost entirely of women. The basis for that arrangement may not have been uplifting; women were thought to be delicate and precise, rather than bold and creative. But the job did have its artistic satisfactions, and it paid a decent wage. The women from Ink and Paint got to see their work (if not their names) onscreen, preserved in beloved movies, and their camaraderie was palpable. Mindy Johnsons unusually informative coffee-table book, Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disneys Animation, features delightful photographs of the women at work and on their breaks, lounging on the lawn in the California sunshine, laughing and goofing around for the camera, sipping tea from cups and saucers. (At breaks, tea, not coffee, was the norm for inkerstoo much caffeine made your lines shaky.) The department, which was headed by Walt Disneys sister-in-law Hazel Sewell, gave clever women an ambit for their ingenuity: they devised airbrushing techniques that made it easier for the films to evoke effects such as smoke or fog or moon glow; invented celluloid-friendly tools, such as a wax pencil that could bring a soft blush to Snow Whites cheek; and established an on-site lab to concoct and test new paint colors.

By the end of 1940, Walt Disney had inaugurated a program that would train women from Ink and Paint so that they could be promoted into animation, where the original drawing was done. After male employees grumbled, Disney called a meeting in which he justified the new policy. It was intended partly, he said, as a hedge against losing male staff to the military should America enter the war. But there was another important rationale: The girl artists have the right to expect the same chances for advancement as men, and I honestly believe that they may eventually contribute something to this business that men never would or could. Don Peri, a historian of Disney Studios who has conducted oral histories of many of the employees from that era, told me, Walt Disney was a product of his time, but I think he cared about the women who worked for him, especially the women in the Ink and Paint Department. He was a very moral person, and I am sure the women who worked for him appreciated that.

Of the five women Holt writes about, the one who left the strongest imprint on animation in general, and on me, was Mary Blair. She worked for Disney for more than a decade, longer than the other four women Holt profiles, generating concept art for such classic films as Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland, as well as for the Disneyland ride Its a Small World. (Dont blame her for the earworm of a song, though.) Blair was an exuberantly imaginative artist with a trippy color palette, rich in pinks and violets and teal blues, and a cool mid-century aesthetic. Walt Disney loved her work, at one point telling her that she knew about colors he had never heard of before. She could evoke the childlike whimsy and nostalgic, folk-art-inspired Americana that he craved, combining them with something chic and modernevident both in her personal style and in her artthat struck him as highly valuable.

John Canemakers earlier book The Art and Flair of Mary Blair is better when it comes to what makes Blairs work distinctive, but The Queens of Animation fills in more of her personal life. Blair was married to another well-regarded Disney artist, Lee Blair, whom she had met in art school. Both Blairs drank to excess, and Lee was sometimes verbally and physically abusive. The couple had two sons, the elder of whom was ultimately institutionalized with what may have been schizophrenia. As Holt says, few people knew that Mary Blairs joyful art was created in domestic circumstances that were often dark and dispiriting.

Holt suggests that the jealousy of male colleagues made it hard for Blairs concept art to reach the screen in anything like its original formshe was a favorite of Walts and a woman, and some of them resented her. After Walt died, in 1966, her work at the company dried up almost entirely. Perhaps if he had loved her less, Holt writes, she might have been more readily employed after his death. Canemaker emphasizes the difficulty of translating Blairs stylized, decorative, collagelike art into the more familiar, approachable Disney style, with its detailed, rounded characters. As much as Disney admired her work, he also feared losing the believability that his mass audience expected, Canemaker writes. As for Its a Small World, if the ride had been built the way she suggested, Karal Ann Marling, an art historian who has written on Disneys theme parks, told Canemaker, it would have looked more like Frank Lloyd Wright married to Andy Warhol.

Still, elements of Blairs background design did make their way into Disney filmsthe surreal playing cards in Alice in Wonderland, for example, and the tropical train on a black background in The Three Caballerosand this, along with her sense of color, Canemaker points out, had an effect on Pop art, from Peter Max to Keith Haring. The concept art for the Pixar director Pete Docters films Monsters, Inc. and Inside Out was influenced by Blair. As Docter told Canemaker, In every production, theres a phase where we say, Lets look at the Mary Blair stuff! So its odd that she was scarcely mentioned in the standard books on Walt Disney and that, when she was, it was often only in tandem with her husband. Neal Gablers massive 2006 biography of Disney contains just three brief references to her. Michael Barriers The Animated Man, from 2007, mentions her once, in connection with Its a Small World.

For women in the film industry, there is a cost to such forgetting. Without a history, there seemed to be less of a future. In Hollywood, script supervisors, who have historically been women, were once known as continuity girls. Ive always liked that term, because, although it actually entails noting down all the information about each take for the benefit of the editor, who will put everything together, it sounds like a more philosophical sort of taskinsuring the internal consistency and, therefore, the integrity of the narratives we tell ourselves. Reading about the history of women in film, the way they dropped out of the frame time and again, Ive started hearing that phrase in my head less as a job description and more as a rallying cry, a protest against selective amnesia. Continuity, girls, continuity!

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The Women Who Helped Build Hollywood - The New Yorker

Real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran of Shark Tank is a favorite of aspiring entrepreneurs. Her strong gut instincts and business savvy helped her build a real estate empire from the ground up with a $1,000 loan, later selling it for $66 million in 2001,according to CNBC.

Corcoran often shares what shes learned over the years on the ABC reality show, and wishes she had known this one thing at the beginning of her professional life.

The Shark Tank star believes in pushing yourself toward your dreams, regardless of any personal doubts or insecurities. The hardest lesson you always learn, I think, is that youre more capable then you think you are, Corcoran said, according to Inc. Its when you shy away from stuff because you think you cant do it, or that the results are going to be likely bad.

Corcoran sees benefits to starting your career at a young age when there arent so many financial responsibilities on the table. If youve got that dream in your head, you better go for it before you have the wife, three kids and a mortgage, she explained. Or the husband, whos finding himself and even without kids, life gets in the way. So the rush to go and do it when youre young is very important.

The real estate mogul has been very open in the past about having dyslexia, a learning disorder that affects your ability to read, spell, write, and speak, according to WebMD. Corcoran shared that the disorder can bring a great deal of insecurity.

I feel like my whole life Ive been insecure about looking not smart, Corcoran said, according to Entrepreneur. So I feel like everything I do is a constant attempt to prove to whoevers around me that I can measure up. Im also proving to myself that Im always running around with insecurity.

She advises others who struggle with self-doubt, as she did, to tune out the internal critical voice. Try not to listen to the negative self-talk inside your head. Youre going to get that from the outside, your competitors are going to beat you up and spit you out. Thats the real poison I battled with it early, Corcoran shared. My negative self-talk was saying things like, you shouldnt have done that, or theyre making fun of you, or you dont belong here.'

Corcoran encourages those who wrestle with insecurity to combat it with positive messages. Ive learned to replace it with a new thing, my little tape goes like, Screw you, Im going to be rich, I have just as much right to be here as the old boys sitting here. I could be your competitor and beat you too,' she said. I start when I feel myself being like Alice in Wonderland sliding down that little rabbit hole with the self-talk.

The Shark Tank investor clearly overcame her own obstacles and became a massive professional success. Corcoran feels it would have made a significant difference if she had realized earlier in life that her grades in school did not determine her worth or her future.

It would have been helpful for me to see that there were a lot of people successful in life that couldnt read, couldnt write and yet, many of them were billionaires, she revealed. I had to discover that little by little as I built my own world successfully. It would have been useful to see that you dont define someones intelligence as we do in a school system. Its a cruel thing that sadly makes so many kids feel like theyll never be successful.

The real estate pro finds that many who had a straight-A school experience dont necessarily excel as business owners. The kids that are so good at school, that dont have to fight for it, very often they dont do as well in life and business because theyre not flexible, Corcoran said. Theres no system dictated to them out there like it is in school and they certainly tend not to make good entrepreneurs.

Corcoran has learned to see the benefits of having dyslexia rather than looking at it as a detriment. It made me more creative, more social and more competitive, she said. Theres a great freedom to being dyslexicifyou can avoid labeling yourself as a loser in a school system that measures people by As and Bs.

Shark Tank airs on ABC on Sunday nights!

Continued here:
'Shark Tank's' Barbara Corcoran Says She Wishes She Knew This One Thing Earlier in Life - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Wegmans is expecting a line outside its doors when the Rochester, NY-based grocery emporium opens its first New York City store this weekend. But will New Yorkers used to bodegas and baskets embrace this wide-aisled, family-focused grocery mecca?

With 100 stores across seven states, Wegmans is as well known for its quality products at steep discounts as it is for its "Wegmaniacs," the legion of fans who remain loyal to their hometown store long after they move away.

But at a time when retailers are struggling to lure shoppers into their brick-and-mortar locations, how far can nostalgia carry a grocer into success in New York City when it is formatted for suburban living? It could be quite far.

Wegmans seems to be bucking the general trend -- it is expected to grow at a 4 percent annual rate over the next five years, according to business consulting firm Kantar.

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Wegmans is known to draw people from as much as 45 minutes away -- which, in the New York City area, equates to more than 7 million people, said Doug Steiner, CEO and founder of Steiner NYC, which developed Wegmans and Admirals Row in Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the new store is located. He said 10,000 shoppers a day are expected.

The store will have nearly 700 parking spaces, including a four-deck parking garage. Shoppers get free 90-minute parking if they spend $15. Inside, the store is enormous by Manhattan standards -- 74,000 square feet -- yet it is one of the regional chain's smaller locations.

The wide aisles are filled with a selection of best-sellers, from organic chicken broth at $1.99 to Greek yogurts for 79 cents. Near the entrance of the store is a coffee shop; food counters serving $7 personal pizzas, $12 meatless Impossible burgers, and fresh sushi; and a hot food bar. Up one flight of stairs is a restaurant-style seating area that overlooks the store, and a bar. Its a slice of suburbia in Brooklyn.

It could be [suburban shopping in the city], but it could be whatever you need it to be, Jo Natale, a spokesperson for Wegmans, told NBC News. We know that there will be new ways for us that people will shop here.

Wegmans has partnered with Instacart for its Brooklyn location and, although e-commerce accounts for only 4 percent of grocery sales today, it makes up nearly one-third of total growth, according to a recent Nielsen report. But those online shoppers will make the trek to a brick-and-mortar store for fresh high-quality food at an affordable price. The firm found that online grocery shoppers spend 1.5 percent more in-store on fresh food than the average consumer.

Erin Lux, a resident of the Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesant, told NBC News that she has fond memories of driving to Wegmans with her college roommate. She plans to shop at the Brooklyn Wegmans once every couple of months as a special occasion shopping trip, because its not super convenient to get to."

While it remains to be seen whether the suburban grocery store experience will take off in the heart of urban living, Kyle Chase, who lives in Manhattan's East Village and is a longtime Wegmans shopper, is optimistic about the store's success.

Anyone I know who lives in Brooklyn loves the popular trendy thing, and Wegmans will turn into that," he said.

Leticia Miranda is a business reporter for NBC News.

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As Wegmans opens in Brooklyn, will New Yorkers (ever) be ready for suburban-style shopping? - NBCNews.com

New academic research on a progressive income tax hike in California should be a warning to Illinois voters deciding on Gov. J.B. Pritzkers progressive income tax hike in November 2020.

California now has proof that taxing the rich caused the rich to leave, leaving the rest of the states taxpayers to pick up the tab.

A new paper by Stanford University researchers shows wealthy residents were about 40% more likely to leave after Californians in 2012 passed a progressive income tax hike. Those departures and other responses to higher taxes also eliminated 45.2% of the revenue the state expected to get from high earners.

California voters were persuaded to pass the Temporary Taxes to Fund Education, Proposition 30. It turned out the taxes were neither temporary nor did they fund education in the way voters expected. The rates are still in place and a Stanford University public policy expert determined all the education funding went to pensions rather than classrooms.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker finds himself in the same place as then-California Gov. Jerry Brown was in back in 2012 trying to convince voters that a progressive state income tax hike will fix state finances in crisis. Brown claimed the burden of those tax hikes would only harm those earning $250,000 or more the top 3% of earners. Thats exactly what Pritzker promises with his fair tax proposal.

Brown was wrong. By depressing aggregate economic activity, the California tax hike depressed improvements in living standards for everyone and the state collected less tax revenue than expected.

Here are the main findings of the new study:

The new research validates fears surrounding Pritzkers push for the same in Illinois, which voters will decide in November 2020. Illinois is the only state experiencing five consecutive years of worsening population decline driven by outmigration. And high-income earners are the most likely to leave.

When taxpayers respond to tax hikes by reducing their contribution to the states economy or by leaving the state altogether, they slam the brakes on economic growth. Everyone suffers, not just the rich.

Illinois is headed down a similar path.

In November 2020, Illinoisans will get a rare opportunity to have their voices heard on a statewide policy question. They will face a ballot question about adopting a progressive state income tax, where tax rates rise with income.

Should voters approve the referendum, Pritzker has already signed into law thenew rate structurethat would take effect. It is a $3.4 billion tax hike on individual taxpayers and businesses in Illinois.

Californians faced multi-billion dollar budget deficits when they were convinced to approve Prop. 30 in November 2012 as a way to fix the state and fund education. The new taxes included a 3.45% sales tax increase as well as $42 billion temporary increase in the states progressive income tax rates of:

Despite netting a 42% increase in the state general fund revenues after Prop. 30, California estimated it would face a $4 billion deficit if the temporary tax increase were to expire, prompting politicians to go back to taxpayers for more. Meanwhile, many services are actually receiving a smaller share of the budget than in the past despite record revenues. Even schools, which were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the tax increase, have little to show for it, as all the money that went to education from Prop. 30 went to cover rising pension costs instead of going to classrooms.

It is a story that Illinoisans should be familiar with.

In 1989, state lawmakers passed a two-year temporary income tax hike, bringing the personal income tax rate up to 3% from 2.5%. Transcripts from the Illinois General Assembly show lawmakers framed the debate around providing school funding and property tax relief. In 1991, they made the education portion of the tax hike permanent, with the rest extended for another two years. In 1993, they made the entire tax permanent.

The same thing happened in 2011 when lawmakers promised that another temporary income tax hike would fix Illinois ailing public finances. By 2017, lawmakers had broken another promise by making the tax hike permanent.

Despite shouldering the largest permanent income tax hike in state history, within a single year Illinoisans saw their states net financial position worsen by a staggering 35%, or $47.4 billion. The hike lowered Illinois jobs growth for the rest of the year.

The similarities between California and Illinois dont end there.

What can Illinoisans expect?

Evidence shows Prop. 30 had serious negative consequences for economic activity and aggregate income. The tax increases also fueled an exodus of those affected by the tax hike.

Prop. 30 exacerbated the outmigration and in the first year alone, the state lost an additional 0.8% of households that would have been directly affected by the passage of this new tax hike.

This finding is consistent with a large body of research that has shown that certain segments of the labor market, especially high-income workers and professions with little location-specific human capital, may be quite responsive to taxes in their location decisions.

Prop. 30 also caused a decrease in non-investment pre-tax income by $1.5 million on average for top earners between 2012 and 2014, indicating either a change in tax filing behavior or a reduction in labor market activity for these workers.

Proposition 30 harmed the middle class

Research suggests that Prop. 30 may have reduced Californias contribution to U.S. personal income. A 1% increase in the top marginal personal income tax rate reduces the state share of U.S. personal income by 0.27% one year immediately afterward. That decline continues by up to 0.6% five years after impact. Prop. 30 may have hindered Californias growth and reduced the states status in the national economy. This decline can be expected to continue, as the tax has been extended, and will have persistent negative implications for the state economy.

Evidence from all 50 states also shows that higher taxes kill innovation. By punishing innovation, tax hikes cause economic activity to decrease, thus reducing the rate of economic growth. When the economy grows more slowly, tax hikes harm everyone, not just the rich. Furthermore, the reward for innovation is higher income, so tax hikes on the rich raise the cost of innovating. By slowing the creation of ideasthat drive economic growth as well as improve standards of living, top income taxation reduces everyones income.

More progressive income tax rates also discourage risk taking. When the marginal tax rate rises with income, then entrepreneurs save little in taxes on losses but can wind up owing substantial taxes on any profits. Entrepreneurs receive more severe punishments for failure, and diminished rewards for success. As such, more progressive tax schedules lower the expected after-tax return from entrepreneurial activity.

Other research also finds that entrepreneurs job creators are very responsive to changes in their tax burden. Entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. is heavily concentrated among the top earners in the population. Wealthy individuals who choose to be entrepreneurs are able to decide the fraction of their wealth that they will invest in risky projects. Entrepreneurs respond to higher taxes by creating fewer jobs and paying workers less.

This happened in Connecticut the last state to adopt a progressive income tax. In the 90s the state scrapped taxpayers flat income tax for a tax on the rich that was sold as magic pill for middle-class tax relief. Instead, job creation fell, the states labor force shrank, and the states poverty rate increased.

Illinois already lags the nation in employment growth and income growth. Another income tax hike in Illinois will translate to more of the same: even fewer opportunities for everyone, as well as a decline in real wages for hard-working Illinoisans.

Learning from others mistakes

Similar to California, an Illinois progressive income tax will fail to fix state finances and likely see most of the money devoted to the states massive unfunded pension obligations. Instead of opting for a progressive income tax hike that is likely to worsen Illinois record exodus and opens the door even farther to income tax hikes on the middle class, lawmakers should realize that Illinois woes stem from the expenditure side of the ledger. And that ledger is becoming increasingly unbalanced as pension costs continue to rise, currently eating up 26% of the state budget and expected to rise dramatically.

Just like in California, further tax hikes on Illinois already overburdened taxpayers are not going to solve the states financial problems. Illinoisans would be wise to learn from Californias and Connecticuts mistakes.

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California's 'fair tax' hike spurred taxpayer exodus, hurt middle class and went mostly to pensions - Illinois Policy