Latest news with #TheShallows'
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Blake Lively Causes A Small Donut Shop To Face Investigation Over Alleged Health Code Violations
Actress Blake Lively may have been attempting to step away from the drama caused by her 'It Ends With Us' lawsuit, but it appears that the backlash was quick to follow her. The small donut shop that she visited in Wilton, CT, earlier this week, is now facing an investigation and possible fines due to the 'Gossip Girl' alum working behind the counter. In her Instagram Stories, 'The Shallows' actress shared a photo of her working at a mixer and putting treats out for the customers. 'Baking with genius food friends and their kitchen mixer the size of a car,' she wrote over the photo. 'This is what my happy place looks like.' The problem? Lively's long blonde hair can be seen dangling over the food that she was serving to customers, which presents a health risk. She did not tie her hair back out of her face, or even put on a hairnet or hat, which means that a strand of hair could have fallen in the mixer and ended up in the food. Many social media users took to Yelp and other platforms in order to complain about the health risks posed by Lively's hair and threatened to reach out to the health department to look into it. It turns out they did, as a spokesperson for the Wilton Health Department told TMZ that they have received numerous complaints and that the donut shop is now under investigation. While food safety standards vary by state, The Blast learned that the restaurant can face fines or other health code violations for not wearing hair restraints, like hairnets or hats, to prevent hair from contaminating the food. Generally, all food employees who prepare, serve, or handle food or utensils must wear hair restraints; however, there are exceptions for counter staff who only serve beverages and wrapped foods. This does not apply to Lively, who was leaning over a tray of freshly baked pastries. The company is now being monitored by Yelp due to a series of 1-star reviews. A warning at the top of the page reads, 'This business is being monitored by Yelp's Support team for content related to media reports.' An additional pop-up message warns, 'This business recently received increased public attention, which often means people come to this page to post their views on the news. While we don't take a stand one way or the other when it comes to this incident, we've temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events.' 'Please note that we apply this same policy regardless of the business and regardless of the topic at issue,' the message continues. 'If you're here to leave a review based on a first-hand experience with the business, please check back at a later date.' Many customers are now questioning the sanitary measures of the business if they allowed Lively to work without a hair net, especially since another woman can be seen standing in the kitchen who is also not wearing any hair restraints. 'Is it the practice at this doughnut shop to allow employees handling the food to wear their hair loose & hang a few inches above a tray of doughnuts? Why don't your employees have to wear hairnets?' one user asked. 'This does not seem sanitary.' Several users have also questioned photos that have been shared on Instagram that show workers around the equipment without hair restraints. Another user gave the business a big thumbs-up, writing, 'DON'T LISTEN TO RECENT 1 STAR REVIEWS - a bunch of internet trolls are upset that Blake Lively was 'baker for a day' at this Wilton locally owned donut shop! These people do NOT live in the area and have never stepped foot inside of Rise.' 'As an avid customer, I can confirm that Rise donuts are the best around!! The flavors are so unique and the donuts are well made!!' they continued. 'The staff is incredibly friendly, make you feel so welcome the moment you open the door, and the owners are always willing to support local school and sports fundraisers.' Although it's clear that the bakery's loyal customers aren't swayed by the negative media attention, it still remains to be seen what kind of fines or other health code violations the bakery might face.
New York Times
29-01-2025
- General
- New York Times
How Big Tech Mined Our Attention and Broke Our Politics
On April 15, 1912, shortly after the Titanic collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, the ship's radio operator issued a distress call — a formidable display of the power of the radio, a new technology. But a lack of regulation in the United States meant that a cascade of amateur radio messages clogged the airwaves with speculation and rumors, and official transmissions had a hard time getting through. It was an early-20th-century form of information overload. 'The false reports sowed confusion among would-be rescuers,' Nicholas Carr writes in 'Superbloom.' 'Fifteen hundred people died.' Carr has been sounding the alarm over new information technology for years, most famously in 'The Shallows' (2010), in which he warned about what the internet was doing to our brains. 'Superbloom' is an extension of his jeremiad into the social media era. Carr's new book happens to be published the same day as 'The Sirens' Call,' by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, which traces how big tech has made enormous profits and transformed our politics by harvesting our attention. Both authors argue that something fundamental to us, as humans, is being exploited for inhuman ends. We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment. 'Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires,' Carr writes. 'It's successful because it gives us what we want.' He lays some of the blame with tech companies, which ply us with the digital equivalent of junk food. They engineer how we relate to one another online by selecting for content that whips up strong emotions to draw us 'deeper into the feed.' But Carr also suggests that regulation can only do so much: Blaming the technology industry lets us off the hook. This is a book that gestures repeatedly to a tragic, if nebulous, concept of 'human nature.' More communication does not necessarily lead to more understanding. The title refers to a rare 'super bloom' of California poppies in typically arid soil, an episode that drew selfie-taking influencers, flower-trampling crowds and a frenzied backlash. Left to our own devices, so to speak, we can get vain, careless, resentful and cruel. There's an unmistakable skepticism of progress in this book, at least when it comes to modern communication technology. Our antisocial proclivities were once kept in check by more effortful methods of reaching out to one another. 'The deliberate, reflective practice' of composing a handwritten letter, Carr laments, has been superseded by the 'short, snappy' idiom of texting. By removing barriers to communication, social media has enabled us to let loose our worst instincts and transmit to a huge audience whatever thoughtlet comes to mind. (Mostly avoiding the subject of Donald Trump, he glancingly mentions 'the election to the presidency of the United States of a malevolent coxcomb with a tweeting habit.') Abundance, in this case, stokes conflict. 'Different points of view are seen not as opportunities to learn but as provocations to attack.' Instead of the curation imposed by 'the public-interest standard' and 'the fairness doctrine,' a deteriorating media ecosystem selects for clicks. Consider Mark Zuckerberg's explanation of Facebook's bespoke News Feed: 'A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.' The grotesque comparison was an early salvo in our informational war of all against all. 'News, entertainment, conversation and all other forms of human expression would from now on be in direct competition,' Carr writes, 'angling for both the consumer's fleeting attention and the algorithm's blessing.' It's a phenomenon that Hayes, as a TV news anchor, knows all too well. 'The Sirens' Call' is mostly about the social and political deformations wrought by the new attention economy. But Hayes has also been parsing the predicament of attention for a long time. 'Every waking moment of my work life revolves around answering the question of how we capture attention,' he writes in the book's early pages. And the marketplace has been getting ever more ruthless. 'Increasingly over the course of time I've been on air, my competition isn't just what other cable news shows are on during that time, but literally every single piece of content available in any media: every movie ever made, every TV show ever made, every video on TikTok or Instagram, every app and video game available.' Of course, it's not as if there's been a dearth of attention paid to the subject of attention. Books like Tim Wu's 'The Attention Merchants' and Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' have traced how our attention has been measured and monetized — sliced and diced into salable packets so that it's now commodified like never before. A raft of memoirs and self-help books have explored what those markets have done to our individual psyches. What Hayes offers in 'The Sirens' Call' is an ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics. Where Carr's tone is elegiac and mournful, Hayes's is more pragmatic. He makes ample use of social science studies that parse how human attention works. We get overstimulated when bombarded by stimuli, but we become restless when left alone with our thoughts. Our phones — 'little slot machines we hold in our pocket' — pull us in both directions, providing us with a simulation of sociability while exacerbating our loneliness, and capture our attention on the cheap. Book publishers and Hollywood producers may have always been preoccupied with the question of how to sustain an audience's attention, but social media entrepreneurs don't have to bother with anything so mysterious (and expensive): 'They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention and then repeat those.' It turns out that a reliable way of grabbing people's attention is to ping that deep need inside all of us, carried over from our helpless dependency on our caregivers in childhood: Someone is paying attention to me! We typically crave positive forms of attention and shrink back from negative ones — except for people like Trump, whose 'psychological needs' are 'so bottomless,' Hayes says, 'that he'll take attention in whatever form he can get.' Trump has intuited that we live at a time when fortune favors the brazen: 'He'll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you're thinking about him.' Attention isn't a resource like coal or oil, which exist outside us; attention is what makes us human, Hayes maintains, and this particular stage of capitalism is fueled by a fracking of our minds. It's not as if Trump is keen to regulate any extraction industry, let alone the one that helped bring him to the White House. So it isn't surprising that both 'The Sirens' Call' and 'Superbloom' end by emphasizing the need for each of us to reintroduce the friction of the physical world into our informational lives. Instead of submitting to the endless scroll, Hayes now makes a point of sitting down with a print version of the newspaper. Carr, for his part, extols a 'more material and less virtual existence.' I think they're both right, even if trying to change one's own behavior feels small next to the structural forces delineated in their books. But for now, yes — it's going to take willful acts of sensory deprivation for us to come to our senses.
