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PROVOKED now comes on Wednesdays, too, with PROVOKED/Actually, our free health newsletter.
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Choose which emails you get.
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Early in my career I was an engineer, and everything I designed assumed the person using it was a man. Nobody said so. Nobody had to. The specs, the reach, the weight someone could lift all started from his body. I didn’t question it then, but I sure question it now.
Karen Korellis Reuther spent 12 years at Nike, ending as Global Creative Director, then led creative direction and innovation at Reebok. She sat in the rooms where the decisions got made. In her book, Man-Made, she tells us what she saw: a world built on male data, male bodies and male behavior, with the rest of us told to adjust. The industry even had a name for it: “shrink it and pink it.” That’s annoying on a sneaker and dangerous in a car. Women are 73% more likely to be seriously injured in a crash, and a car can still earn a five-star safety rating without ever being tested on a realistic female dummy.
Karen joins the PROVOKED Book Club on Dec. 4, and I want a full room. Books have shaped more of my thinking than any job I've held. PROVOKEDplus members have seen my nonfiction reading lists, from AI to decision-making. Karen's book belongs at the top of that stack.
Book Club is one reason to join PROVOKEDplus. The other is keeping PROVOKED independent. Eight dollars a month helps us do this work without investors telling us what we can or can't cover.
Read the book. Then come argue with us.
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Friday, Dec. 4, noon ET · Live on Zoom
Former Nike Global Creative Director Karen Korellis Reuther joins PROVOKED founder Susan Dabbar to talk about Man-Made and the world built around a man’s body, from the sneaker on your foot to the car in your driveway.
Book Club is for PROVOKEDplus members. Join for $8 a month, and your invitation to save a seat arrives by email.
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I Left a Yoga Group That Felt Like a Cult. I Still Believe in Yoga. |
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You watch the cult documentaries and wonder how anyone falls for it. Then life comes apart, and you’d settle for a quieter mind and a few people who get it. The chanting helps. The meditation works. Even the strange rituals sort of make sense. So where do you draw the line when the help starts to feel off?
Read this piece |
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MONEY
Don’t Make Your Kids Hate You (Or Each Other) After You’re Dead
BY MARGIE ZABLE FISHER
Your will says one thing. An old beneficiary form may say another, and the form usually wins. Five moves to make now, before your paperwork makes the decision for you.
Read this piece
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DEAR READER
Reinvention Doesn't Fix Everything
BY RENÉE G. PARDO
Quit the job. Start the business. Stop needing anyone’s permission to succeed. That’s the promise of reinvention after 50. But the pressure doesn’t go away. It diversifies.
Read this piece
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This is a paid sponsorship with Hungry Minds.
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Get your holiday gifting sorted early!
One meaningful gift, beautifully boxed and ready to give.
I bought The Book two years ago for myself. I have an engineering background and appreciate a beautiful mechanical drawing. This one has 400 hand-illustrated pages of them: how things are built, how they work, and how civilization figured out the telephone, the car, and electricity in the first place.
It has lived on my coffee table ever since, and nobody walks past it. Guests pick it up. My grandsons flip the pages. Everyone ends up asking how something works.
Meet The Book in a gift box: It's a world of extraordinary discoveries, ingenious inventions, and fascinating stories they’ll return to for years to come. More than 5,000 hours went into making it, with every illustration drawn by hand and every fact verified by scientists and experts.
It’s the answer for the hard-to-buy-for husband, boyfriend, son, or grandson. And for the curious woman who’d rather know how the engine works than be told not to worry about it.
The Book + Gift Box = $139
Get your Christmas shopping done before the rush and leave December for the things that matter.
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TAKE NOTE
Timely and worth your attention. |
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🎬 THE TEACHER WHO BECAME BIG MAMA
Irma P. Hall, who played Big Mama Joe in Soul Food, died Nov. 10 in Dallas at 91, her family announced. She was a Dallas schoolteacher and poet when a director heard her at a poetry reading and cast her in her first film at 37. She kept teaching for another decade, went full time in 1984, and did her biggest work in her 60s: an NAACP Image Award for Soul Food and a Cannes jury prize for The Ladykillers, opposite Tom Hanks. Hollywood calls that a late start. She called it a second career.
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👑 THE EMPRESS WHO HID HER FACE
The third and final season of Netflix’s The Empress arrives today, after its first two seasons hit the Top 10 in more than 85 countries. It follows Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, who fought for a place of her own inside a court that wanted her decorative. The real Sisi stopped sitting for portraits in her 30s and covered her face so no one could watch her age. We’re still negotiating those terms.
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🏠 THE BASEMENT AND THE HEART
Among more than 43,000 postmenopausal women, those living in counties with high predicted indoor radon had a 19% higher risk of heart failure and were 37% more likely to die from it, in a study published in JAMA Network Open. Radon is an odorless gas that the EPA estimates is elevated in nearly 1 in 15 U.S. homes. It’s already the leading cause of lung cancer after smoking, and this is one of the first large looks at what it may do to the heart. The study shows a link, not proof. The house you've lived in for 30 years may be part of your heart history. A test kit costs about as much as lunch.
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Confessions of a 64-Year-Old Vibrator Virgin |
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“Use it or lose it” is reasonable advice for a gym membership. It’s stranger coming from your doctor at 64, about your vagina. The fix sounds simple. The toy store has other ideas.
Read this piece |
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“Truth. Intelligence. Heart. I believe I have a defined mantra now. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing your journey. I am inspired to share more of myself because of you.” —Amy Jo on The Pump House and the Silence We Called Normal |
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Want to be featured next? Comment on your favorite piece—we read them all.
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I'm 57. Stop Calling Me Brave for Having a Life.
Six suitcases, a 75-year-old mother, and a one-way move to Mexico.
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💸 Before you spend $150 on a face cream, take a closer look at those two reassuring words: “medical-grade.” |
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🐦 My tree this year is strictly for the birds: hand-embroidered felt ornaments from Etsy, each one a little different, and you can personalize them too. |
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