Latest news with #SecondLife
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Meet Anushka Salinas: The CEO Behind Leading Parenting Tech Company Nanit
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Welcome to Second Life, a podcast spotlighting successful women who've made major career changes—and fearlessly mastered the pivot. Hosted by Hillary Kerr, co-founder and chief content officer at Who What Wear, each episode gives you a direct line to women who are game changers in their fields. Subscribe to Second Life on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts to stay tuned. Anushka Salinas' career journey is the epitome of a second life. As the new CEO of parenting tech company Nanit, she has built a career defined by her ability to blend passion, business acumen, and innovation. Her journey began in a completely different industry: fashion. Salinas started at Lord & Taylor as an assistant buyer, a role that perfectly married her love for fashion with her fascination for the data and strategy driving the industry. As she grew eager to deepen her business expertise, Salinas pursued an MBA, which led her to meet Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss, the founders of Rent the Runway. She was intrigued—and incredibly inspired—by its revolutionary clothing rental concept, and she saw an opportunity to work at the intersection of fashion and business. In a bold move, Salinas turned down a stable job offer to join the fledgling Rent the Runway. Over three years, she helped shape its early success and explosive growth, leveraging her knack for data-driven strategy. Then, after a stint at Hudson's Bay and a start-up called Resonance, Salinas returned to RTR, where she spearheaded the development of its subscription business and eventually rose to the role of president. Her leadership was instrumental in scaling the company into a household name in the fashion rental industry. In 2024, Salinas felt ready for a new challenge. She stepped into the role of CEO at Nanit, a tech company revolutionizing how parents monitor their babies' sleep through a smart baby monitor—if you are a mom or soon-to-be mom, chances are you have heard the praises of the brand. While parenting tech may seem like a departure from fashion, the move aligns perfectly with Salinas' diverse skill set, as her mission is to empower parents with data-driven insights by building consumer-focused solutions that truly work. Listen to the latest episode of Second Life to hear how Salinas continues to trust her instincts, establishing herself as a true leader in innovation and impact. And keep scrolling to shop some of Nanit's best-selling products. View Deal View Deal View Deal View Deal Next: Meet Courtney Claghorn: The Founder Behind Sunless Tanning Empire Sugared + Bronzed
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
A New Memoir Explores the Complexities of Pregnancy and Parenthood in the Digital Age
Fact checked by Sarah Scott New York Times critic and journalist Amanda Hess' new book Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age is a portrait of a very online pregnancy. People who have become parents in the past decade or so can relate. Like Hess, many of us use apps to track our periods, calculate our expected day of ovulation, or update us on the size of the growing fetus. Before the release of Second Life—which hit shelves on May 6—there were two widely accepted ways of understanding these digital platforms: they were either harmless ways to pass the time, or nefarious collectors of our private data. But Hess takes a different approach: She recognizes that filtering pregnancy and parenthood through the internet helps us process the immense changes that our bodies, personalities, emotions, families—everything—are about to undergo. These digital spaces, which include not just apps but community boards where pregnant people and parents can interact, connect parents to each other, easing the loneliness that often accompanies pregnancy and parenthood. They also help us find likeminded people outside of the medical establishment with whom we can swap stories and experiences. But they have the potential to overwhelm us with information—and misinformation—sometimes heightening the natural anxiety that comes with this new phase of life. Hess doesn't answer whether or not the internet is good or bad for new parents. But she does avoid disparaging the online spaces where (mostly) women spend their days seeking advice, comfort, and camaraderie. Hess is open-minded about the ways these spaces benefit parents, and honest about where parents' reliance on technology seems to fall apart. Ultimately, her acknowledgment that the internet has granted pregnant people more power and autonomy over their care than they ever had before, and that spending time online as a parent is often an attempt to build community and become more informed is refreshing, and validating. Here, Parents speaks to the author and journalist about her experiences navigating a medically complex pregnancy online, the pitfalls of parents turning to digital platforms while desperately seeking answers to complicated questions, and how parental anxiety is manipulated into an opportunity to sell parents gadgets that might not even be keeping their kids safe. Some answers have been shortened for clarity In the book, you point out that some digital apps (Flo in particular) have this facade of cheerfulness and positivity, and meanwhile there is little to no information on medically complex pregnancies, or any type of pregnancy that might be outside of the norm. How did it make you feel to see that your experience had been erased from this digital space? When I paged through 'What to Expect When You're Expecting' and didn't see a situation that remotely resembled mine, well—I expected that. But when I searched Flo's pregnancy forums for 'fetal anomaly' and 'birth defect' and got an error message back—'please try searching for something else'—that surprised me. Here was this seemingly vast resource, and there was no acknowledgement of a pregnancy outcome that affects many millions of women. It made me feel very alone, and that my pregnancy, and ultimately my son's life, was not just being overlooked but actively stigmatized. It would certainly be easier for femtech apps if all pregnancies were predictable and politically neutral, even miraculous, but anyone who's actually been pregnant quickly discovers that is not the case. On these digital platforms there is a tension between having unlimited access to information about our bodies/fertility/pregnancy and being flooded and overwhelmed by misinformation. During your pregnancy how did you make sense of unlimited access to not just information but to other peoples' personal experiences with pregnancy that are posted online? During my pregnancy, I found myself searching for things that I did not want to talk to other people about—or felt that I could not talk with them about. It started early on, when I got a positive pregnancy test and had a lot of questions and an OB [obstetrician-gynecologist] who didn't want me to come in for several more weeks. Later, when my pregnancy got more complex, I searched for things that ashamed me—like the question of whether something I did during my pregnancy had caused a fetal anomaly. I searched for things that scared me—like all the potential outcomes of certain genetic results. If I had to do it over again, I would try to remind myself that the internet wasn't going to solve those problems for me, but that I could use it to find some offline resources—books relevant to my situation, support groups. I'm interested in the point you make about parental anxiety being translated into an opportunity for consumerism. Are products like the Owlet, Nanit, and others preying on parents very reasonable fears or genuinely offering a service. Maybe it's both! I think the baby gadget industry functions a lot like the cosmetics industry or the diet industry. It makes us feel insufficient and then sells us the product that makes us whole again. A lot of nursery gadgets capitalize on the parental anxiety that babies are vulnerable and we can't literally watch them 24 hours a day. Instead we can wire up all these gizmos to record their every movement and alert us to perceived problems. The vulnerability of babies is not made-up, but these products are not proven to detect or prevent any medical condition or emergency in infants; what they promise instead is vague parental assurance like 'peace of mind.' Meanwhile, they convert the baby's image and data into a form of entertainment. The baby-data-sleep-console might legitimately distract the parent from their anxiety, or at least make them feel less bored while they're awake at night, but I see them more as parental entertainment consoles than anything else. I felt the point you make about the Snoo [bassinet] offering insights in your child's sleep habits while it simultaneously "blocked me from understanding the real baby," was especially insightful. These products promise to unlock the secret to making parenting easier, but could they be increasingly alienating us from our kids in some way, too? Yeah, I think that distraction and entertainment comes with real costs. These products habituate parents and babies to see surveillance as equivalent to care. They can insert themselves in the relationship and make it harder to understand each other. I didn't really see that side of it until I installed a baby monitor camera over my child's bed to test it out for this book. It was only when I laid on the bed, viewing the room from my kid's perspective, that I noticed these four red eyes glowing in the dark of the bedroom. From my perspective, the camera beamed a beautiful image of my child to my phone no matter where I was in the world. But from his perspective, 'I' was just this cold and sinister digital presence. One thing that still haunts me from my experiences with pregnancy loss is that I could not get away from Instagram posts and ads about pregnancy after miscarrying. As you dealt with uncertainty in your own pregnancy, did you encounter a similar situation? I really felt during my pregnancy that the internet recognized me and my situation in a way that the real world did not. It 'knew' I was pregnant before my friends and my employer did, and that felt intrusive and intimate at once. But when my pregnancy turned complex and uncertain, all the Google ads for strollers and Instagram images of smiling, carefree pregnant women seemed to taunt me from my phone. I came to see this as a much more insidious problem than just the issue of companies trying to sell products to pregnant people. They also sell ideas—about what a normal pregnancy is, what a good mother is, what an adequate female body looks like. I had to really unwind the ideologies and histories behind those ideas to break the spell that some of this pregnancy content had over me. Read the original article on Parents
Fast Company
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
‘The music is better than at the clubs in Ohio': Virtual reality is the hottest new nightlife destination
The hottest parties right now are happening in the metaverse. VRChat, a video-game-like social platform hosted in virtual reality, saw more than 130,000 people in attendance on New Year's Day 2025, according to a VR culture blog. Before 2020, VRChat had hardly seen more than 20,000 concurrent users, according to Wired. While virtual clubbing began in the early 2000s on platforms like Second Life, VRChat, and AltspaceVR, the COVID-19 lockdowns brought a new wave of virtual ravers as traditional nightclubs closed and people looked for online alternatives. Today, VR clubbers line up each week for dozens of fully immersive virtual parties hosted across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Thanks to major advances in motion tracking, haptic suits, and customizable avatars, people can now dance to popular DJ sets and socialize—all without leaving their homes. Aside from the up-front hardware cost, events are free. But, like popular in-person clubs, there are often long lines for the most in-demand virtual nights, which are usually limited to around 80 guests due to software constraints. VR clubbing carries its own risks. Psychiatrists and ER doctors have reported some attendees going on 'digital benders,' partying to the point of total exhaustion, according to Psychology Today. One partier told Wired he's had friends hospitalized after binge-drinking on VRChat. Another said he partied for nearly 12 nights straight last August—without once stepping outside his apartment. Still, virtual partying has its perks. If the music's too loud, you can just turn it down. Ready to go home? No need to worry about Ubers or navigating public transport at 3 a.m. Personal safety and harassment are also less of a concern. Wired spoke to a trans woman from rural Ohio who described VRChat as offering 'a safer environment than a real-life club setting,' adding, 'the music is better than at the clubs in Ohio.'
Wall Street Journal
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Second Life' Review: Birth in the Age of Algorithms
'It took forty-eight hours for the brands to find me,' Amanda Hess writes of the cascade of algorithmic changes that hit her phone when she learned that she was expecting her first child. As a 30-something in 2020, she was accustomed to seeing what she calls 'millennial slop' in her social-media feeds. Now everything was about pregnancy. Soon Ms. Hess found herself drawn into a seething performative internet culture of mom-fluencers, birthing podcasts and freaky Reddit threads. In 'Second Life,' the author explores the ways that technology, by coded design and with our own connivance, has worked itself into life's most intimate spaces. Part memoir, part social critique, the book relates the author's turbulent experience of becoming a mother. With wit, discernment and candor (sometimes too much candor), she captures the anxiety and weirdness of reproduction in our modern screen-based, app-oriented culture. It is important to note that Ms. Hess is no Everywoman. She's an urban liberal, a critic at large for the New York Times, who sees the world from a specific political standpoint. She is pro-choice and aware of her whiteness, and she and her husband move in social circles in which, she writes, 'gendering unborn children [has] become an uncomfortable idea.' She's also exceptionally skilled at noticing things worth seeing. Ms. Hess begins, for instance, by talking of the curiously symbiotic relationship she developed with an app that tracked her menstrual cycle. Rather than having to 'cultivate bodily awareness,' she writes, with typical self-awareness, 'I could just outsource it to my phone.' The app warned her when her hormones might produce volatile emotions, and it informed her when she was at her most fertile. When a test confirmed her pregnancy, she told the app before she told her husband or her parents. Then came the shift in her social-media feeds.
Time Magazine
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The Best New Books to Read in May
The best new books to read in May include historian and best-selling author Ron Chernow 's biography of Mark Twain, United We Dream co-founder Cristina Jiménez 's debut memoir, and poet and novelist Ocean Vuong 's follow-up to his 2019 novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. There's something for everyone this month. Young adult author Christina Li makes her adult literary debut with a gothic ghost story for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane 's latest is a personal and political look at the legal rights of nature. And New York Times critic at large Amanda Hess dissects what it's like to raise a child in the digital age. Below, the 13 books you should read in May. The Manor of Dreams, Christina Li (May 6) The Manor of Dreams begins with the death of a fictional starlet named Vivian Yin, who has left her crumbling mansion to an unlikely heir: the daughter of her long-deceased former housekeeper. Vivian's children now find themselves in a battle over their mother's broken-down estate against someone they suspect may have had a hand in her demise. In hopes of piecing together Vivian's final days, the warring families move into the dilapidated home together only to discover that it is being haunted by the ghosts of the late actor's complicated past. Jemimah Wei's debut, The Original Daughter, tells the story of an unlikely sisterhood. Genevieve Yang's life is completely upended when, at eight years old, she suddenly gains a de facto younger sister who is actually the daughter of an estranged in Singapore at the turn of the millennium, the unexpected siblings quickly bond over the societal pressure to be the perfect daughter only to have a bitter betrayal tear them apart later in life. When Genevieve's mother gets sick, the two must try and put their differences aside in this decades-spanning saga about ambition, resentment, and forgiveness. With her debut memoir, journalist Amanda Hess uses her own experience as a first-time mom to look at what it's like to have and raise a child in the social media age. But Second Life isn't the new What to Expect When You're Expecting. Hess isn't offering parenting tips to tech-savvy caretakers. Instead, she takes readers on an eye-opening adventure down the parenting internet rabbit hole where she explores, among many things, the personification of pregnancy tracking apps, the surreal network of prenatal genetic tests, and the origins of the growing ' freebirther ' movement. In this follow-up to writer and editor Michele Filgate's acclaimed 2019 anthology, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About, authors, poets, and essayists including Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Kelly McMasters unspool their complicated relationships with their dads. Across 16 essays, What My Father and I Don't Talk About tackles difficult topics such as parental estrangement, toxic masculinity, and emotional availability in hopes of encouraging us to consider how we are shaped by our family. Ocean Vuong's second novel begins when an elderly Lithuanian woman with early-stage dementia saves Hai, a troubled 19-year-old, from taking his own life. Hai soon reciprocates this act of kindness by becoming her caregiver. The pair, both living on the fringes of society in their Connecticut town, form an unexpected friendship that leads the teen on a journey of self-discovery. Mark Twain, Ron Chernow (May 13) After tackling the lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Ulysses S. Grant with his previous biographies, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow returns with a definitive portrait of another American icon: Mark Twain. Across a whopping 1,200 pages, Chernow takes a comprehensive look at the life of the author born Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The book delves into Twain's early years working odd jobs—steamboat pilot, miner, journalist, just to name a few—before the release of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. From there, Chernow traces Twin's life and career up until his grief-stricken final days marked by undiagnosed madness. The latest novel from Kevin Wilson, the best-selling author of Nothing to See Here, starts with an unusual family reunion that leads to an even crazier family road trip. Twenty years after her father walks out on her and her mom, organic farmer Madeline 'Mad' Hill meets Reuben, a 40-something mystery writer who claims to be her older half-brother. With the help of a private detective, Reuben has tracked down their dad, who, it turns out, has fathered multiple children. Now, Reuben is hitting the road to gather up their siblings and confront their absentee dad, and he wants Mad to come with him. Looking for answers for her dad's disappearance, she agrees, embarking on an adventure to finally understand where she came from. Madeleine Thien's century-spanning fourth novel, The Book of Records, is set in a mysterious shape-shifting enclave for displaced people where the past, present, and future collide. After fleeing their home in southern China, Lina and her ailing father have taken up residence at 'the Sea.' There, they live alongside a diverse group of neighbors including a Jewish scholar from 17th century Amsterdam, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, and a philosopher fleeing Nazi persecution in 1930s Germany. After her dad reveals his role in their family's tragic past, Lina looks to her time traveling community for advice on how to reckon with her devastation. With his twelfth book, best-selling British nature writer Robert Macfarlane argues thatrivers are not just flowing bodies of water, but living beings with legal rights. Inspired by the Rights of Nature movement, the global effort to legally protect nature, Macfarlane visits a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, the wounded creeks, lagoons, and estuaries of southern India, and a wild river in Quebec at risk of being dammed to show how activists, artists, and lawmakers are putting the concept of environmental personhood to the test. Shamanism, anthropologist Manvir Singh's debut, traces the evolution of the titular spiritual practice. To investigate the origins of the ancient religion, Singh travels to the Mentawai archipelago in Indonesia, a cave in southwest France, and the northwest Amazon. He studies with shamans, healers who are believed to have the power to commune with spirits, in hopes of understanding why their practices have become as popular with Burning Man festival goers as they are with Wall Street traders. Blending memoir, investigative journalism, and anthropological fieldwork, Shamanism is a deep dive into a religious tradition that is as mysterious as it is timeless. With her second memoir, novelist Yiyun Li examines the unbearable pain of losing both her sons to suicide. Things in Nature Merely Grow paints a loving portrait of each of her teenage children, who died nearly seven years apart, and details her own battles with depression and suicidal ideation. (The latter was the focus of her 2017 debut memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.) Throughout, Li does not shy away from the magnitude of these losses. Instead, she writes of radical acceptance, offering a profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children. When activist Cristina Jiménez was 13, she and her family moved from Ecuador to the United States. Her debut memoir, Dreaming of Home, tells the story of what it was like growing up undocumented in Queens, NY, and how her experience inspired her to become a prominent voice in the fight for immigration justice. Lush, Rochelle Dowden-Lord (May 27) In Rochelle Dowden-Lord's debut, Lush, four wine experts—a wunderkind sommelier, a food writer, a social media influencer, and the owner of a popular, but mediocre wine brand—are invited to a French vineyard for the weekend. While there, they'll get the chance to taste the rarest wine in the world. But in order to achieve this professional milestone, they'll have to confront their personal demons in this intoxicating look at the world of wine and those who love it.
