Inside New Balance’s Plans to Topple the Global Sneaker Hierarchy

With Kanye-dependency withdrawal at Adidas and engineered-scarcity blowback at Nike, the sneakerhead world has evolved into a legitimate plurality, and New Balance seems better equipped than anyone to capitalize. Joshua Hunt explains the company’s self-aware dadness with the context and verve to make this a rewarding read — even for those who never braved a predawn line outside Undefeated.

Understanding the evolution of the 990 is a useful way of appreciating how New Balance, America’s most sensible sneaker brand, has captured the zeitgeist in these decidedly nonsensical times. When the 990 was launched in 1982, its four years of development made it the first running shoe with a $100 retail price; a decade or so later, it found new life as a casual sneaker worn by dressed-down celebrities at red-carpet events; and by the turn of the millennium, the 990 had achieved a bizarre niche ubiquity among subcultures as disparate as straight-edge hardcore kids, underground hip-hop fans, and Upper West Side dads. Puzzling out how all of this came to be, and how New Balance managed to bridge the aesthetic gap between Bernie Sanders and Emily Ratajkowski to become one of the most coveted shoes on the planet—while in the process reordering the global pecking order in the $86 billion sneaker market—reveals one of the more improbable success stories in fashion right now.

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Can AI Perfect the IPA?

The competition between the nearly 10,000 craft breweries across the U.S. is stiff. With today’s emerging technologies, many brewers, especially smaller ones, are harnessing the power of AI and looking for more efficient ways to make their final products better. For Experience Magazine, Tony Rehagen reports on this trend: Beermakers in Australia are using consumer feedback collected via QR codes to fine-tune IPAs, while breweries in the U.S.’s drought-plagued Pacific Northwest are tweaking recipes with genetically modified hops.

Can AI deliver a perfectly hoppy concoction that’s fit for even the most discerning Benedictine monks of the past? This is a relatively shorter piece than most longreads we recommend, but it feels very of-the-moment (and entertaining, like other Experience Magazine stories I’ve recommended).

In 2021, Deep Liquid, an Adelaide-based company that partners with the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, helped nearby Barossa Valley Brewing create AI2PA: The Rodney, an AI-generated IPA. On each can of AI2PA, a QR code allows drinkers to submit their thoughts on the beer’s flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. That real-time feedback goes straight into a data set that is then plugged into an algorithm that can adjust the recipe accordingly.

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What Happened to the Women Prisoners at Hickman’s Farms

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:

Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.

Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.

Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.

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‘One Billionaire at a Time’: Inside the Swiss Clinics Where the Super-Rich Go For Rehab

Sophie Elmhirst takes an insightful look into the unique therapy options for the super-rich. Like many people, loneliness and a lack of connection lie at the root of their problems, but, as Elmhirst alludes to in this essay, if even rehab treats them differently from other people can they really hope to find what they need?

But beyond the desire for privacy, extreme wealth has an oddly separating effect. “If you put a billionaire in a group setting, even with well-off middle-class people, they will not be able to relate to each other,” Gerber told me. They are not like the rest of us, these people; their lives and minds have been transformed by their fortunes.

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Meet the Superusers Behind IMDB, the Internet’s Favorite Movie Site

What inspires people to contribute to a site for nothing? Stephen Luries goes on a mission to find the people determined to give credit where credit is due — and the automation getting ready to topple them.

Adams, now 88, has since written almost 7,000 plot summaries for films listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). In total, he’s contributed more than 890,000 pieces of information about film and TV, a chunk of which came straight from the files he hauled from Eastland. “If data was weighable,” he told me, “the IMDb owes a small ton of thank you kindly, sirs to Preston Smith and Victor Cornelius. I was only the messenger.”

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Are We Having Fun Yet?!: The Oral History of ‘Party Down’

“Party Down,” the cult-classic comedy series about cater waiters in Los Angeles, is back for season three a dozen years after Starz cancelled it because, despite the show being brilliant, hilarious, and poignant, no one was watching it. Its revival is great news for anyone who likes to laugh. Here, The Ringer delivers a behind-the-scenes look at how “Party Down” came to be in the first place, a story that involves Paul Rudd, weed, and the British version of The Office, as told by the creators and stars themselves:

Starr: The one thing that was tough is we just didn’t have time for improv. And I think a lot of us were familiar with, and wanting, to play in that way. And when it came down to it, we just didn’t have the time for it. We didn’t have the budget for it. But luckily, Enbom is such an incredibly talented writer that you don’t need it.

Hansen: In fact, so many people are like, “That’s got to be improvised, right?” The way John writes, it just feels so natural.

Enbom: Martin’s character always resented Kyle, and that was their relationship. Originally, Kyle did not pay much attention to Roman, just because he didn’t think much of him. And so the fact that this kind of little weird relationship evolved has a lot to do with just how the two of them got on.

Starr: When it was in the dialogue a little bit, we leaned into it and it became kind of our natural on-screen/off-screen rapport. Because it’s also a fun place to play. I think we enjoy that kind of humor naturally, anyway. So we kind of end up doing it even when we’re not working.

Hansen: You know what wasn’t in the dialogue? Martin slapping me on camera.

Enbom: It became this running thing of — without him even knowing it was coming — just Martin whapping Kyle.

Starr: It wasn’t in the face. It was mostly …

Hansen: A lot of nut shots.

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Her baby has a deadly diagnosis. Her Florida doctors refused an abortion.

“Deborah Dorbert is devoting the final days before her baby’s birth to planning the details of the infant’s death.” So begins this devastating feature about the impact of Florida’s abortion ban, implemented after Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, on one woman and her family.

For much of the time, her pregnancy is disconcertingly normal, though she has stopped going in for regular checkups to escape the company of expectant mothers. Deborah can feel the baby pushing against her ribs and hips and deep into her pelvis, causing pain that she believes comes from the lack of fluid cushioning the baby. On occasion she pushes back, mother and child adjusting to the give-and-take of life together.

In December, Deborah says,she texted the coordinator at the maternal fetal medicine office regularly, hoping to schedule an induction by Christmas. The response stunned her: After consulting health-system administrators about the law, the specialist concluded Deborah would have to wait until close to full term, around 37 weeks gestation, she recalled the coordinator telling her.

The doctor made his determination after having “legal/administration look at the new law and the way it’s written,” the coordinator reiterated to Deborah in a recent text message she shared with The Post. “It’s horribly written,” the text continued.

For Deborah, that meant resigning herself to a two-month wait, during which her anxiety and depression built.

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