January 9, 2015 by jenks

The Possibly Real Trend of Possibly Real Trends

What’s current when nothing is certain.

Health Goth.

“Somewhere in between normcore, cyberpunk, goth, and sportswear chic exists the possibly real trend known as “Health Goth,” wrote Allison P Davis in New York Magazine’s The Cut blog back in October. “It’s been kicking around since spring, actually, but it seems to have entered the mainstream this week.”

The source for this possibly-real trend’s possibly real tipping point was an article in Marie Claire the week prior, titled, likewise dubiously, “Health Goth: The Latest Trend You’ve Never Heard Of.”

After which “came the inevitable cavalcade of follow-on articles,” wrote Jay Owens in the Hautepop post, The Week That Health Goth Broke. “Rather poetically,” Owens added, “many trend pieces are declaring it stillborn, dead before it arrived”:

20 Oct, Oyster Magazine: RIP Health Goth: The Trend That Never Was

21 Oct, Racked: The Health Goth Trend: Over Before You Even Heard About It

22 Oct, Stylelist: Introducing Health Goth: The Trend That Never Was

Meanwhile, Health Goth may or may not be the new “Street Goth.” Which itself is not to be confused with “Goth Ninja.” And there are also the lesser-known, possibly-real trends, dubbed, Pastel Goth, and Beach Goth. Because goth, apparently, never dies:

Lumbersexual.

Ushered in by appropriately uncertain headlines like, “Are you a Lumbersexual?” (Gawker); “Are you dating a Lumbersexual?” (Cosmopolitan); “Who Is the Lumbersexual and Is Anything About Him Real?” (Jezebel), another possibly-real trend arrived in November. As Tom Puzak explained in Gear Junkie:

Today, the metrosexual is a disappearing breed being quickly replaced by men more concerned with existing in the outdoors, or the pseudo-outdoors, than meticulous grooming habits.

He is bar-hopping, but he looks like he could fell a Norway Pine.

Seen in New York, LA and everywhere in between, the Lumbersexual is bringing the outdoor industry’s clothing and accessories into the mainstream.

Whether the roots of the lumbersexual are a cultural shift toward environmentalism, rebellion against the grind of 9-5 office jobs, or simply recognition that outdoor gear is just more comfortable, functional and durable, the Lumbersexual is on the rise.

Possibly.

“20 years ago, Mark Simpson coined the term ‘metrosexual,'” reads the Telegraph headline from June 2014. “But now a new, more extreme, sex- and body-obsessed version has emerged.” Simpson calls it the “Spornosexual.”

The term is a portmanteau to describe “these pumped-up offspring of those Ronaldo and Beckham lunch-box ads, where sport got into bed with porn while Mr Armani took pictures,” Simpson explains. “But unlike Beckham’s metrosexual ads of old, in which his attributes were possibly artificially enhanced, today’s spornosexuals have photoshopped themselves in real life. Glossy magazines cultivated early metrosexuality. Celebrity culture then sent it into orbit. But for today’s generation, social media, selfies and porn are the major vectors of the male desire to be desired. They want to be wanted for their bodies, not their wardrobe. And certainly not their minds.”

“Spornosexual” didn’t take off in the zeitgeist quite the way Lumbersexual has. Perhaps for being a little bit too foreign-sounding. And perhaps for being a little bit way too real to be possibly-real.

While I was writing this post, “Highsexual” happened. “What spawned the new psuedo-identity,” Michael D’Alimonte writes on MTL Blog, “was a slightly scandalous question posed to the reddit community, which basically can be summed up by a guy asking: I’m straight when I’m sober, but when I’m super high, I wanna bang guys, is this normal? And that is the crux of “highsexual,” a guy (or girl) that only ponders/enacts in gay sexual activity when stoned.”

While it’s true, as D’Alimonte notes, “You can apparently tack on -sexual to any word and create a new stratum of society,” (Goth too, evidently), in this particular case, the term pertains to sexuality directly rather than a fashion or aesthetic trend. Nevertheless, it’s still worth asking, as D’Alimonte does, “Is being a highsexual a real thing?” The answer? “Well, now that it’s an internet-used term, it kind of is.”

Normcore.

Perhaps the most notorious of 2014’s possibly-real trends, and no longer an anomaly so much as a harbinger, is Normcore. I wrote about it at the beginning of last year. The jury never really came back on whether Normcore is a real fashion movement or an Internet meme that the mass media fell for and self-fulfilled into becoming real. As Alex Williams put it in The New York Times:

A style revolution? A giant in-joke? At this point, it hardly seems to matter. After a month-plus blizzard of commentary, normcore may be a hypothetical movement that turns into a real movement through the power of sheer momentum.

Even so, the fundamental question — is normcore real? — remains a matter of debate, even among the people who foisted the term upon the world.

The catchy neologism was coined by K-Hole, a New York-based group of theoretically minded brand consultants in their 20s, as part of a recent trend-forecasting report, “Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom.” Written in the academic language of an art manifesto, the report was conceived in part as a work of conceptual art produced for a London gallery, not a corporate client.

As envisioned by its creators, “normcore” was not a fashion trend, but a broader sociological attitude. The basic idea is that young alternative types had devoted so much energy to trying to define themselves as individuals, through ever-quirkier style flourishes like handlebar mustaches or esoteric pursuits like artisanal pickling, that they had lost the joy of belonging that comes with being part of the group. Normcore was about dropping the pretense and learning to throw themselves into, without detachment, whatever subcultures or activities they stumbled into, even if they were mainstream. “You might not understand the rules of football, but you can still get a thrill from the roar of the crowd at the World Cup,” the report read. The term remained little more than a conversation starter for art-world cocktail parties until New York magazine published a splashy trend story on Feb. 24 titled “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion.” The writer, Fiona Duncan, chronicled the emergence of “the kind of dad-brand non-style you might have once associated with Jerry Seinfeld, but transposed on a Cooper Union student with William Gibson glasses.” An accompanying fashion spread dug up real-life L-train denizens rocking mall-ready Nike baseball caps and stonewashed boyfriend jeans without apparent shame.

Even so, it was difficult to tell if anyone actually believed the hype. For one thing, the normcore brain trust started to circle the wagons. Christopher Glazek, a journalist and friend of the K-Hole founders took to Facebook to blow holes in the “trend.” “It doesn’t really make sense to identify normcore as a fashion trend,” he wrote. “The point of normcore is that you could dress like a Nascar mascot for a big race and then switch to raver ware for a long druggie night at the club.”

The Trends They Are A-changin’.

Last year, some friends of mine accidentally became health goths. They didn’t mean to. It just happened. They were goths who grew up and got too old to keep going out to clubs the way they once had, so they got into crossfit, and that was that. Unbeknownst to them, they’d become classified into a whole new, possibly-real style.

This is something that didn’t used to happen. You didn’t just accidentally become hiphop. You didn’t one day trip over yourself to discover you were unwittingly wearing 30-inch bottom raver pants. Your clothes weren’t punked out and ripped to shreds for no particular reason that you were aware of until you read a New York Magazine trend piece about it. Now, a lifestyle neologism goes viral and you discover you’ve contracted a trend.

Alternative fashion trends used to be representative of a larger lifestyle or subculture emergence. The fashion brands that defined these aesthetics were often overtly and inextricably linked to these cultures.

“I was messianic about punk,” Vivienne Westwood, the High Priestess of Punk fashion said, in 2002.

The Kikwear brand’s history reads: In 1993, one of our key accounts in San Francisco asked us to make them a 23″ bottom for their store because the Rave scene was beginning to emerge in Northern California and the kids were walking into the store with their homemade “wide leg” pants. We moved on this tip and sure enough those denim pant sold out immediately! We quickly realized that this Rave Movement was starting to come on strong throughout Southern California and we started launching wider leg pants known today as “phatties.”

The late designer, Tiffa Novoa, was one of the founders of the seminal, circus subculture performance troupe, El Circo. In designing the troupe’s costumes she also created the postapocalyptic fashions that became associated with the Burning Man style, and carried over into an aesthetic that spanned west coast underground dance culture of the mid aughts. In a 2005 SF-Bay Guardian article, Steven T. Jones describes the personally transformative effect the fashion aesthetic Novoa defined had on its adherents, changing the way they conceived of themselves. “At first, this was all costuming,” The article quoted, Matty Dowlen, El Circo’s head of operations. “But now it’s who I am.”

Meanwhile, aggregating the de riguer health goth brands for the requisite The New York Times article on the subject, Meirav Devash listed: “Mainstream brands like Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, or gothic streetwear from Hood by Air, Cottweiler, Whatever 21, Nvrmnd Clothing, Adyn and Skingraft.”

When I asked Jonny Cota, the owner of Skingraft, about health goth, last year, his response was skeptical amusement. Like everyone else’s.

Perhaps that is what makes possibly-real trends so dubious: the lack of intentionality. Fashion choices used to have specific and unironic meanings. Hippies, punks, ravers, goths — these were cultural philosophies that spread through adoption, not (solely) aesthetic replication. Now, we don’t claim participation, we are simply colonized by memes, unwitting bystanders, just sort of swept up in cultural trend redistricting.

In the days of slow-moving, 20th century media, emergent cultural expressions had time to incubate below the radar before they tipped into mass awareness. Pre-Tumblr, the only way to find out about a new cultural emergence was through the unassailably real channel of one of its actual practitioners. There was no need to wonder about veracity. Now, a nascent trend doesn’t really have the time to mature into something legitimate before the trendhunting hyenas descend upon it, exposing it to a sudden burst of scrutiny. What remains becomes neither niche enough to be authentic nor mass enough to be indisputable. Maybe no new trend seems quite real because it hasn’t had the chance to become real before we’re looking it up on urban dictionary and just as swiftly are click-baited on to the next dubious dopamine hit of meme culture.

Or perhaps, this is what happens now that subculture doesn’t exist. Back in analog days, you wore the clothes you did to express your identity as a participant in the lifestyle they represented. Now that there’s simply no unimpeachable way to really know what is or isn’t “real” at all anymore, possibly-real trends are the reflection of this new, post-certainty reality.

Then again, maybe it’s all just Pizza.

Pizza.

“The Chicest New Trend Is Pizza” (New York Magazine, September, 2014):

Much like any other “It” girl, pizza’s popularity was ignited by internet fascination and possibly endorsed by the Illuminati.

Tumblr and Twitter memes dedicated to pizza’s power appeared, among them the Twitter account Pizzaminati.

Loyal followers still carry on the work via usage of #Pizzaminati on Twitter and Instagram. As such, “pizza” quickly took on new meaning — for example, pizza as a substitute in romantic relationship. The phrase “touch her butt and give her pizza” became a widely accepted way to keep your bae happy and “Pizza Is My Boyfriend” the new “Single Ladies” rally cry.

Then came the various pithy pizza message tees at clothing retailers like Forever 21 and Asos and Urban Outfitters.

However, almost as quickly as the Pizzaminati emerged, it disappeared. This, a screenshot of a funny tweet — “shots fired in the club over the last slice of pizza” — is all that remains. Where did you go, Pizzaminati? Were you really a sect of the Illuminati, destroyed once the pizza takeover was initiated? Yes, probably.

Or, you know… possibly.

September 12, 2011 by jenks

The Post-Empire’s New Shoes

On September 8,2011, Nike announced they would be releasing a limited number of pairs of a new product. As the shoe’s official site explains:

In 1989, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield was asked to design a shoe for the second chapter in the Back to the Future series. He created the power-lacing, self-illuminating, Nike MAG. Riding on a pink hoverboard, Michael J. Fox made them the most famous shoe never made.

Over 15 years later in 2005, Tinker’s attention was caught by an online petition asking that the shoes come back. With no mold and nothing but an original prop shoe from the film, Tinker and footwear innovator Tiffany Beers began rebuilding the MAG from scratch. It would take six years, three restarts and many thousands of hours. But when it was all said and done, the shoe was a perfect replication of the original and the true predecessor to the 2015 power-lacing Nike MAG.

It would only make sense that the shoes be auctioned to benefit the foundation of the man who made them famous.

And with your help, the proceeds of these shoes will help erase Parkinson’s from existence.”

As Fox himself adds:

That something which has previously only existed in the realm of fiction is becoming real, that Nike is actually making a shoe it predicted would exist in the future, that a franchise about a time traveler is being leveraged towards changing the future both by and for the actor who embodied him, as well as for others who suffer from Parkinson’s disease…. basically everything about this is totally fucking awesome in a uniquely 21st century kind of way.

Back in March I wrote about another celebrity who came up in the 80’s and has recently been doing his part to blur the lines between “real” and “not real.” Charlie Sheen has gone a long way towards making that distinction irrelevant by transforming his life into an existential performance. In a Daily Beast article titled, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” author Bret Easton Ellis (also a pop culture staple spawned from the same decade as Sheen, Fox, and McFly), called Sheen, “The most fascinating person wandering through the culture.” Ellis’s concept of “Empire” and “Post-Empire,” is based on Gore Vidal’s definition of global American hegemony, a period Ellis dates from 1945 until 2005: the era that defined the 20th century. As Ellis sees it, Empire was a lie, a self delusion the global west lived for 60 years while it kept up appearances and didn’t think about the future; post-Empire, on the other hand, is where we are now, a world 10 years after 9/11, seeming to teeter perpetually on the verge of economic collapse and endless other global crises. If Empire was binary (truth vs. lie; real vs. counterfeit), then post-Empire is meta. As Sheen has shown, he is both real and not real at once. And so are the Nike MAGs, sneakerheads’ long unattainable holy grail, “the most famous shoes never made”…. until they were.

These kicks haven’t just crossed over from fiction, they’ve arrived from the future. Right on schedule.

“It’s like in Terminator when John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time so that he can be his father,” says Simon, from the British TV show Misfits, a character who sends himself back in time to die so that he can live in the future. (Side note: Five years before Marty McFly, Kyle Reese also wore Nikes in 1984’s Terminator. Hopefully those don’t come back to the future.)

“In 1981, I was a futurist,” said William Gibson, author of the seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, in an interview with New York Magazine’s, The Vulture Blog last year, “Or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally and I wrote about the 21st century. Now I’m here in the 21st century and if I write about it, I think it makes me a literary naturalist.” Gibson’s three latest books have all been set not in a dystopic, sci-fi future world but contemporaneously with the one we all inhabit. A recurring character throughout this trilogy is Hubertus Bigend, the charismatic founder of an alternative marketing agency, whom Gibson describes like a 21st-century Cheshire Cat as CEO (“He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white;” “An overly wealthy, dangerously curious fiddler with the world’s hidden architectures.”) So fitting is Bigend as an antihero for a post-binary, meta reality, this fictional character’s actual Wikipedia entry cites a passage from his fictional Wikipedia entry. (Your head hurt yet?)

In an interview for the release of his 2007 book, Spook Country, the second of his 21st century-published novels, Gibson said:

I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up. And I found that to absolutely be the case. If I’m going to write fiction set in an imaginary future now, I’m going to need a yardstick that gives me some accurate sense of how weird things are now. ‘Cause I’m going to have to go beyond that. In the ’80s and ’90s–as strange as it may seem to say this–we had such luxury of stability. Things weren’t changing quite so quickly in the ’80s and ’90s. And when things are changing too quickly you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.

Case in point: Gibson’s most recent book, Zero History, which came out last year, has characters using silent, hovering, iPhone-controlled surveillance drones. Less than a year after Gibson wrote it into his book, it’s a thing that’s now on the market. In fact, it’s a toy:

Pattern Recognition is the first of Gibson’s “present tense” trilogy, and the first of his books I ever read. It was given to me by an acquaintance in 2004. The book follows Cayce Pollard, a marketing consultant with an intuitive sensitivity for branding so acute its anaphylactic. Her clients hire her to research street culture in search of the next new trend. “She’s met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward,” Gibson writes. “She’s that good.” The person who gave me the book told me, “This is you.” At the time, barely a year out of college, where I’d been a film major, I’d never really considered I’d be working in marketing. And yet, it’s where I ended up. Two novels and seven years later, Cayce Pollard makes an anonymous cameo near the end of Zero History. Her name is never mentioned, but if you’ve been following along, you know it’s her even before she says, “I’d been a sort of coolhunter, before that had a name, but now it’s difficult to find anyone who isn’t.”

The Nike MAG exists now not because it’s where 21st century sneaker trends were naturally headed but because a vision of footwear future (which Nike itself created) 20 years ago predicted it would. If Charlie Sheen’s contribution to Post-Empire has been to embody the now indistinguishable nature of real and fictional, Nike has taken it one step further and shown us that the future is no longer strictly linear. In our new century the future is recursive. It is a future we have sent back in time, to become itself.

January 15, 2010 by jenks

The Cyberpunk Future of… Now

The 7.0 peak from the Haiti earthquake indicated by a seismic analyst at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

On Tuesday, January 12, I went into a meeting at 3:00pm PST, and when I came out, about an hour and a half later I quickly discovered that something had happened in Haiti during those 90 minutes of radio internet silence. As everyone in the connected world now knows, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake (the worst in 200 years) hit Port-au-Prince, the capital of the small Caribbean country. Twelve aftershocks greater than magnitude 5.0 followed, destroying basically a third of the entire city, displacing millions, and killing possibly thousands more.

From the Boston Globe photo essay on the aftermath of the quake:

(Tequila Minsky for The New York Times)

(LISANDRO SUERO/AFP/Getty Images)

The badly damaged presidential palace – the center portion formerly 3 stories tall. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)

Displaced residents sleeping in the street after the earthquake.
(REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)

People looking at earthquake victims lying on the street, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

And those are some of the less disturbing images of what’s going on.

Scrolling through the photo essay I know I got just a small inkling of the immense devastation in the already impoverished country, but then came shots of something that struck me as even more profound:

Venezuelan rescuers loading medical equipment onto a plane heading to Port-au-Prince, on January 13, 2010 at the Simon Bolivar international airport in Caracas. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images)

British Search and Rescue teams preparing to leave Gatwick airport, West Sussex to provide assistance to relief and rescue teams in Haiti. (CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images).

Taiwan rescue teams standing by at the fire department in Taipei as they prepare to head to Haiti. (SAM YEH/AFP/Getty Images)

Los Angeles County Fire Department urban search and rescue team loading equipment before traveling to Haiti to help with rescue efforts (REUTERS/Gus Ruelas)

Rescue dogs awaiting departure for Haiti at the Torrejon military airbase in Torrejon de Ardoz, Spain. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

It’s like stills from the third act of a Roland Emmerich movie, except it’s not. This is the future, now. Decry globalization all you want, but to me this is the true significance of the word. A tragedy in a place of no real political or economic interest, can literally overnight mobilize the aid and compassion of the entire world. According to TechCrunch, within just a few hours of the earthquake the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the relief effort. By January 14th, 2 days after the earthquake, the program had raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, with donations said to be coming in at the rate of $200,000 each hour. Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation has also been running its own text donation drive, and by Thursday had raised another $1 million, According to ABC News. Albe Angel, founder and CEO of Give On the Go, the company helping process the Yele Haiti donations, said, “Never has so much money been raised for relief so soon after a disaster. This is a watershed moment. It’s historic.”

It’s also intensely futuristic. Six years ago, when natural disaster struck Indonesia, what’s happening in 2010, in the support effort for Haiti simply did not exist. Even by 2008, text donations raised by charities only amounted to $1 million total. Yele Haiti got that in one day.

If what’s happening in the Haiti relief effort is accelerated, then the current situation between Google and China is basically prophetic. At almost the same time as the earthquake struck, the following was posted on the Official Google Blog:

A new approach to China

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

So basically, after discovering a Chinese security breach, Google, a multinational corporation, is now essentially sanctioning the Chinese government either with the threat of uncensored access to information for its citizenry, or otherwise, with a withdrawal from the market altogether. Not to be left behind, the Secretary of State of an actual government, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has issued the following statement:

We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy. I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear.

Once again, Cyberpunk predicts the future, one in which multinational corporations replace governments as centers of political and economic power. Though in this case, in a particularly literary twist of cyberpunk fate, the multinational corporation in question (which is, itself, actually made up of hackers — the erstwhile anti-establishment protagonists of the genre), whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil,” is wielding its might by imposing a threat of increased access to information against a totalitarian regime. It’s enough to make William Gibson suddenly seem like a contemporary satirist rather than a science fiction writer. But, then again, Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet, describing a global communications network long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, and that hasn’t necessarily led us into a dark dystopia…. yet.

In the meantime, though, what it has done, is allow us to become more united as humans, on a global scale. Jay Smooth articulated the underlying sentiment driving the response behind the Haiti relief effort on his Illdoctrine vlog: “We, as human beings, have a responsibility to act.” A century ago, the situation in Haiti would have been considered a Haitian crisis. A decade ago it would have been an “international” crisis. Now, it is simply, immediately, instinctively a human crisis.

Welcome to the future.

Ways to help Haiti:

Donate $5 to Wyclef’s Yele Foundation by texting YELE to the number 501501

Donate $10 to the American Red Cross by texting HAITI to the number 90999

Or donate online to:

UNICEF

Doctors Without Borders

UN Foundation

Partners In Health