DeSantis has been out-of-state on the campaign trail in his mythic quest to seek the Republican 2024 nomination. How is the charm-offensive working? Just ask this kid in Iowa who was sipping an Icee. Well as it turns out, he’s not the only one who’s been leaving Florida: people are pulling out of conferences and tourist visits, both key pieces of the Sunshine State’s economy. The reason? The slew of terrible bills DeSantis enacted has left many feeling like Florida is now a hostile environment for them. Per CNN:

Early numbers from Broward County: “Unlike leisure business, which is a very short-term booking window [in weeks or months], conference business is long term,” said Stacy Ritter, president and chief executive officer of the Visit Lauderdale tourism marketing agency in Broward County, Florida. “We’re booking ‘26 to ‘30 now, so any impact that this might have is not going to be seen for years to come.” As of July 26, Ritter said that Visit Lauderdale has tallied 10 events and conventions that were canceled by organizations citing recently enacted laws, policies and travel advisories. That amounts to 15,000 lost hotel room nights and an estimated $20 million economic impact, she said.

2025 bookings are low for Broward’s new $1.5B hotel: “Broward County has invested $1.5 billion in building an 801-room Omni hotel connected to our expanding and renovated convention center, [but] we are not seeing the bookings for ‘26, ‘27, ‘28, ‘29 and ‘30, which we would have anticipated — considering that we will have this shiny new toy in the neighborhood in late-2025,” she said.

AERA pulled to stand up for trans rights: AERA pulled its 15,000-person meeting in Orlando after Florida passed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which prohibits transgender female athletes from participating in women’s sports teams, said Tony Pals, spokesperson for AERA, in an email to CNN. In 2021, AERA adopted a motion that it would not hold a conference or event in a state with anti-trans laws, Pals added.

Some groups are canceling despite the money they will lose: It was a difficult decision for the National Society of Black Engineers to move its 2024 event from Florida, said Janeen Uzzell, CEO of the National Society of Black Engineers, which two years ago selected Orlando to serve as the host city for its 50th annual convention. But after conversations with the NAACP, the National Urban League, legal team, sponsors, members of Congress as well as other organizations in the same boat, the NSBE decided it was best to not have the event there, she said, adding that “significant sums” of money are potentially being left on the table.

A ‘gut-check moment’: [Co-founder and CEO of Equality Florida Nadine] Smith said that this is a “gut-check moment” for businesses that have talked about diversity and that “everyone’s paying attention to who stands up and who doesn’t.” She added that she fears the damage has already been done from these laws, and that it will take years to recover. “The thing about economic erosion, it’s like climate change: People go, ‘Oh, we’ve still got tourists and people are still on the beaches.’ Yeah, we do, and Florida is a beautiful place, but how do you tally what you’re losing?” Smith said. “How do you tally what it means to have the best and the brightest students after graduation go elsewhere with their talent?”

[From CNN]

It’s not just the students leaving, it’s the teachers too, in what’s being called a massive “brain drain.” But who actually thinks Meatball Ron cares a whit about talented minds leaving the state? Yeah, I thought so. He can’t even acknowledge the business drain happening in his state. When Disney announced they were abandoning a $1.3 billion office project the best DeSantis could come up with was “well it’s been two years already and they haven’t done it!” Yes, because unlike their cartoons, Disney corp can’t actually wave a magic wand or bibbity-bobbity-boo a building complex into existence. (At least, not yet…) DeSantis’s office issued an anemic response to CNN saying their story (otherwise known as the facts) were “nothing more than a media-driven stunt.” Touche, Ron. Can’t wait for the debate.

One thing I was really struck by was the National Society of Black Engineers being open about the fact that they will likely lose quite a bit of money in pulling out of Florida now. But they are willing to risk the “significant sums” in the name of their values. Funny, then, that it appears DeSantis is inadvertently doing the same thing. His culture war on “woke” is costing his state billions of dollars and countless opportunities. So in reality, Florida is where “work” goes to die.

photos credit: Avalon.red and screenshots from YouTube

This weekend, the Sun exclusively reported that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex bought the rights to Carley Fortune’s Meet Me at the Lake, a romance-drama bestseller. While Deadline picked up the story, I was unsure if this was really happening. As it turns out, it is. Carley Fortune confirmed the news and she sounds incredibly pleased that the Sussexes will produce the film adaptation for Netflix.

Author Carly Fortune has confirmed that her bestselling romance novel Meet Me at the Lake will be adapted for Netflix by Harry and Meghan’s production company. News that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Archewell Productions had acquired rights to Fortune’s book broke over the weekend, weeks after their exclusive, multi-million pound deal with Spotify was terminated.

In a statement to The Independent, Fortune said: “I’m so thrilled about working with Netflix and Archewell to bring Meet Me at the Lake to the screen. Will and Fern’s love story is dear to my heart, and I can’t imagine a more perfect partnership.”

A former journalist, Fortune’s second book Meet Me at the Lake was released in the US on 2 May, and debuted at No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It is published by Penguin Random House, who also published Prince Harry’s memoir Spare.

The book follows Will and Fern, “two strangers on a daylong adventure where they make a promise one keeps and the other breaks, with life-changing effects”. The plot bears some likeness to Harry and Meghan’s whirlwind romance, as one of the protagonists in Fortune’s story lost a parent in a car crash and struggled with alcohol and drug use.

[From The Independent]

Fortune is Canadian and the book is supposed to be a love letter to Toronto, a city Meghan called home for eight years. While the Sun’s report, over the weekend, made it sound like Fortune made a bad deal because of the Sussex connection – as opposed to more seasoned producers – it actually sounds like Fortune is beyond pleased that Meghan and Harry will take this on. I would imagine nothing will move during the strikes – the first thing that needs to be done is adapting the book into a screenplay, and the writers are still very much on strike, and Netflix is very much a struck company. So we wait! Seriously though, it sounds like a good fit and just an old-fashioned love story. People who have read the book: who are you dreamcasting in these roles? If any of you say Blake Lively, I will scream.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.

After all of the crap Sandra Bullock dealt with in her first and only marriage to Jesse James, she kept her romantic life out of the headlines. I didn’t even realize that she had been with Bryan Randall for the better part of eight years, that’s how low-key they were as a couple. They met in 2015 and they were together ever since. Last year, Sandra spoke about needing a break and being “burnt out.” Most of us didn’t blink an eye or think anything of it, but it turns out that she took this break to care for Bryan, who battled ALS in the last three years of his life. Bryan Randall passed away on Sunday.

Sandra Bullock’s longtime partner Bryan Randall died over the weekend, his family revealed in a statement to PEOPLE on Monday. He was 57.

“It is with great sadness that we share that on Aug. 5, Bryan Randall passed away peacefully after a three-year battle with ALS,” his family shared. “Bryan chose early to keep his journey with ALS private and those of us who cared for him did our best to honor his request.”

“We are immensely grateful to the tireless doctors who navigated the landscape of this illness with us and to the astounding nurses who became our roommates, often sacrificing their own families to be with ours,” his family added. “At this time we ask for privacy to grieve and to come to terms with the impossibility of saying goodbye to Bryan,” the statement concluded, signed, “His Loving Family.”

Bullock, 59, first met Randall, a model-turned-photographer, when he photographed her son Louis’s birthday in January 2015. They took their relationship more public later that year, including an appearance at Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux’s wedding.

Bullock, who is mother to her son Louis, 13, and daughter Laila, 10, addressed the topic of marriage during a December 2021 appearance on Red Table Talk.

“I found the love of my life. We share two beautiful children— three children, [Randall’s] older daughter. It’s the best thing ever,” Bullock said at the time. “I don’t wanna say do it like I do it, but I don’t need a paper to be a devoted partner and devoted mother,” she said, adding, “I don’t need to be told to be ever present in the hardest of times. I don’t need to be told to weather a storm with a good man.”

[From People]

This is so sad and so devastating for Sandra. There were photos, over the years, of Sandra and Bryan just doing normal-family things in LA, like going out for some ice cream or taking the kids somewhere. It was a real partnership and more of a marriage, frankly, then that Jesse James bullsh-t. He always sounded like such a solid guy. What an utter tragedy.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red.

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We’ve been seeing Hilary Duff comment a lot over the past year on her health practices, from her crazy good interview in Women’s Health to her divulging that she sometimes drinks coffee in the morning as a way to stave off hunger. Whenever she weighs in, she qualifies her choices with the note of “do what’s best for you,” and she gets candid about mental wellbeing going hand-in-hand with physical health. It makes sense, then, that she’s become an ambassador for OLLY, makers of my favorite melatonin (along with many other excellent products for the awake hours). On the heels of hosting a back-to-school brunch with OLLY in New York last week, Hilary spoke with Yahoo! Life’s It Figures series about her current body image views:

On her awkward years existing on the internet: “It’s funny, to an extent,” she tells Yahoo Life of the pictures and memes that exist of her at all ages across the internet. “And then there’s some days where I’m like, ‘Wow, that was a really hard time in my life.’ It almost hurts for me to look at that girl.” While so many idolized and envied the life of the young star, the 35-year-old hasn’t been shy speaking out about the scrutiny that she faced as a public figure. “The magazines were mean and the press was mean,” she says. The cruel remarks that were made about her body, specifically, led Duff to develop an eating disorder at 17 years old.

‘Be your own beauty icon’: “I don’t know what’s real anymore. Everything’s so heavily edited and filtered,” she tells Yahoo Life. “You just have to experiment and find out what works for you and what feels good… Kind of be your own beauty icon.” It’s a perspective that Duff partially credits to age. “As I get older, I’m more happy with who I am and how I look,” she says. “I care about being healthy, I care about feeling good in my clothes, but I don’t care about being tiny.”

Pregnancy & motherhood have helped her body image: “I’ve had three kids, I’m obsessed with them. I loved being able to grow them and give birth to them,” she says. “It did change my mindset to understand my body was like meant to do this and it’s changing. It just kind of forced me into a different zone.” She’s now mindful about speaking positively about bodies and food as a parent. “Especially having girls, I’m so careful about what I say and the rules that we follow at home.” Around all three of her children—son Luca Cruz, 11, who she shares with her ex-husband Mike Comrie, and two daughters, Banks Violet, 4, and Mae James, 2, with husband Matthew Koma—Duff preaches one thing: “We only have one body in this life and we have to take care of it. We don’t deprive it,” Duff says.

It starts so young: “My daughter is four and she was looking in the mirror the other day, and she was like, ‘My tummy is big.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? You’re the exact size that you’re supposed to be,’” Duff recalls. “Your belly is holding in all of your organs. You haven’t stretched out tall yet, you are exactly how you’re supposed to be.”

[From Yahoo! Life]

I am so here for the influx of body-positive stories we’ve been getting from celeb mamas lately. Granted, Hilary didn’t recently give birth, but she clearly credits the experience of pregnancy with transforming her body image–no easy feat after having your entire teenagedom be public and live on digitally. I both loved and was heartbroken over the story of her daughter already saying her tummy was big. Argh! How do we plug into this mentality so young? I thought Hilary handled it really well, though. She responded in a way that made sense to a four-year-old. Or maybe I just like her response because I, too, am waiting to stretch out tall.

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Summer is more than halfway over, and school districts around the country are starting to open back up for the new school year. My children are already back in school because we go to a year-round school, where every nine weeks, they get three weeks off plus a few extra weeks around Christmas/New Years and 4th of July. We love it. Our kids really benefit from getting a “brain break” every nine weeks. It’s also great that they’re not out of school long enough to forget what they’ve already learned. Another huge benefit is that we don’t really ever lose that school routine where we have to all do a stressful readjustment.

Jessica Biel has two (possibly unvaccinated) sons with Justin Timberlake. Her older son, Silas, is eight and her younger one, Phineas, is three. School is starting back up soon for Silas, and Jessica gets how stressful back-to-school time can be for parents. She’s been out there doing the “relatable mom” thing while hustling new bento-inspired pre-packed lunches that she teamed up with DoorDash to create in order to help parents during those hectic first few weeks back at school.

Back-to-school season presents plenty of challenges that families just don’t have to think about during the summer. And that’s something Jessica Biel says she’s absolutely experiencing in the ramp-up to her oldest son Silas’s return to class. And one of the most stressful conundrums is figuring out what to pack the 8-year-old for lunch.

“I was just griping to my friends and family and even on my social media, like, ‘What am I going to do about lunches? How am I going to handle this?’” admits Biel. “It’s so chaotic, the first couple of weeks of school, and it’s stressful. Your kids are feeling the stress, and you’re feeling the stress, and all you want to do is be on your game and be like one step ahead.”

It’s for that reason that she was inspired to partner with DoorDash to create Grab & Go Bento, bento-inspired lunches for stressed parents. The lunches were such a success that they sold out quickly, but the app is also touting their convenient grocery delivery, which makes it easy to stock up on groceries for the week or refresh what’s running out.

The way the app can simplify meal prep is particularly useful to Biel as she strives to find balanced breakfasts and lunches for her boys. “If I don’t ask [my son what he wants to eat, he] comes back and says, ‘You didn’t tell me what I was gonna have in my lunch,’” she shares. “So, he feels surprised by what I’ve put in there. Even though I think, ‘Oh, these are his favorite things. He’ll love this.’ It’s so funny. I feel like I can never win. I’m really all about trying to make my life a little bit simpler and trying to help other parents do the same just because I deeply know how hard it is.”

Biel adds that anything that takes the thinking out of creating balanced meals is “such an incredible help when you’re trying to get back in your rhythm to get back into school.”

[From Yahoo]

I understand what Jessica is saying here. Like I said above, we’re lucky that we never quite get to a place where we completely fall out of routine, but starting a new school year can still be stressful and chaotic. Honestly, when I first heard about Jessica’s Grab & Go DoorDash boxes, I assumed that it would be some overpriced Goop-adjacent thing. I looked it up on DoorDash’s website and turns out it’s five meals for $25, which seems fairly reasonable to me? The lunches also seem pretty standard: a bagel, sunflower seed butter and jelly, salami, fruit snacks, white cheddar puffs, etc.

However, I have to admit that I sort of snort-chuckled at, “What am I going to do about lunches? How am I going to handle this?” I know she’s shilling her product but she sounds soooo melodramatic. Bish, you aren’t worried about how you’re going to afford to feed your kid. You’re worried about figuring out how to throw some fancy PB&J, gluten-free goldfish, and organic apple slices together. FWIW, DoorDash does say that they’ll donate five meals per purchase to the All Peoples Community Center to “aid in the organization’s commitment to help children succeed at each stage of development.” It would be great if Jessica and Justin could at the very least match that donation since nothing says, “I want to help relieve parents who are stressing over lunches during the chaotic first few weeks of school” quite like donating to an organization that will help parents stressing over providing lunches to their kids during (and beyond) those first few weeks of school.

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Photos credit Faye’s Vision/Cover Images, JB Autissier/Panoramic/Avalon

Vanderpump Rules cast-member Scheana Shay said something on her podcast that I thought was worth covering. She shared about her experience auditioning in Hollywood when she was younger. On one audition a casting director told Scheana that her face moved too much for the type of role she wanted, on the 90210 reboot that aired from 2008-2013. Being expressive was right for “Disney,” but if she wanted to be on such prestigious programming as a teen soap on The CW, she was going to have to stop moving her eyebrows. Scheana says she was advised to get Botox by this casting director–in her mid twenties.

Scheana Shay is opening up about her decision to get Botox.

The Vanderpump Rules star, 38, revealed on her Scheananigans podcast with guest Shenae Grimes-Beech this week that casting directors on The CW’s 90210 spinoff series — which aired between 2008 and 2013 — were “some of the reasons why I ended up getting Botox.”

“They told me that for Disney, my facial expression was great. But for a more dramatic type of role, that I needed to learn how to control my eyebrows,” Shay said. “They were like, ‘The role is yours. Here is your callback. We want you for this but we are bringing in a couple more girls as well because if you can’t control your facial features then we’re not going to give it to you.’ They were like, ‘Maybe try some Botox,’ ” she continued.

Shay — who played the character Cassandra in one episode of the series, according to IMDB — then noted that she started getting Botox around ages 24 or 25, as she thought it would provide her with “the resting bitch face.”

“In my interviews, I don’t want my face moving,” Shay said on her podcast. “But back then, they were like, ‘Bitch, control your eyebrow.’ Because it was just like a mind of its own.”

[From People]

I have a renegade eyebrow too, my right eyebrow. It raises up whenever I’m questioning somebody’s judgment, even if I don’t mean to, which is why I’d really like to be able to turn my camera off in work meetings. It’s asinine that a casting director told Scheana she needed Botox for the part. Actors are supposed to be expressive! They won’t tell you this, but I believe that most actors/actresses in Hollywood who get Botox will let it wear off while they’re doing movies and seasons of shows. They do this so that they can be expressive (and good at their jobs). Then once the filming has wrapped they get Botox again. Botox only lasts 3-4 months, and you really notice it wearing off by the end of month 2, so it’s easy enough to strategically plan around filming. Anyway, maybe the casting director was trying to say that Scheana was playing the role too big and needed to tone it down, but it just sounds like typical image-obsessed Hollywood. No one in their mid twenties “needs” Botox unless they use it for medical purposes like treating migraines.

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photos credit: Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon, Getty

Beyonce paid to keep the DC Metro trains running late after her concert was delayed because of the weather on Sunday. [Just Jared]
Reality stars want to go on strike too. [LaineyGossip]
Check out the trailer for Dicks: The Musical. [OMG Blog]
Review of Meg 2: The Trench. [Pajiba]
Lily Allen’s London theater fashion show. [Go Fug Yourself]
Angus Cloud’s mother spoke about her son. [Socialite Life]
Adults are lining up to use the “cop slide” in Boston. [Jezebel]
Ed Sheeran does gender reveals now. [Seriously OMG]
Heidi Klum loves Capri! [Egotastic]
Celebrities at the age of 40, and how much has changed over time. [Buzzfeed]
Rest in peace, Mark Margolis. [Towleroad]
Gwen Stefani’s Naeem Khan outfit is bonkers. [RCFA]

I was going to link to this in another story, but I decided to devote a post to it because I actually find it sort of interesting, and people love to analyze the Duchess of Sussex’s fashion choices. While Meghan is not a full-on Taylor Swift-esque dresser, i.e. leaving a trail of breadcrumbs and easter eggs with how she dresses and what she chooses, Meghan does dress with purpose and you can tell that she loves fashion. She’s making deliberate choices and sending certain messages with her style. So, last week, the Sussexes appeared in a video announcing the winners of the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund. In the video, Harry and Meghan coordinated in browns. Meghan’s look was a t-neck sleeveless top and skirt by Bleusalt, a sustainable label out of Malibu. The Telegraph had a whole-ass style-section piece about whether Meghan’s love of brown was about “quiet luxury” or simply part of the “Sad Beige” trend.

Looking remarkably polished and glowing, Meghan was dressed in a £145 sleeveless turtleneck top and £165 tube skirt by Malibu-based label Bleusalt, which manufactures its designs sustainably in the US – a choice made with their American audience in mind, no doubt. She finished her look with a pair of Lanvin earrings. Meanwhile, Harry’s trousers were a similar shade of beige and teamed with a white shirt with Barack Obama-esque rolled-up sleeves. Beige has always been a signature colour for Meghan and there are competing explanations as to why she loves it so much.

You may have assumed that Meghan would use the freedom of her new life in California to experiment with colour, but she has remained faithful to the sludgy coffee shades which have come to epitomise the “quiet luxury” trend of recent years. It’s a look fuelled by the stealth-wealth style crystallised in TV shows like Succession and in the courtroom by Gwyneth Paltrow during her ski incident trial earlier this year. Where beige was once a tool for Meghan to blend in, it’s now a hallmark of her alignment with the 0.01 per cent – beige speaks of private jets, dry cleaners and generally never having to do anything that could risk a smudge or a stain.

Dressing in the tones of your favourite Starbucks order became so ubiquitous earlier this year that there has been a backlash against the look. In some quarters, it is now called “sad beige”, a term that originated from the trend among wealthy parents more interested in aesthetics than enjoyment to dress their children in neutral, minimalist colours rather than the cheerful brights usually associated with fun and childhood. There’s also the fact that the look is so easy to copy that you can now source it as easily at Brunello Cucinelli, where a beige coat costs £5,400, as Boohoo (now selling a beige off-shoulder top for £13.65).

Whether you are team “quiet luxury” or team “sad beige”, there’s no denying Harry and Meghan’s commitment to the look. It’s a way of visually joining a tribe of A-listers for whom sad beige life is sacrosanct, like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, founders of The Row (a label where you can buy a skirt like the one Meghan wears in this video for £1,380). Indeed, when the Duke and Duchess appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2021, they enlisted Aniston’s stylist Nina Hallworth to dress them (they went for black and white, not beige, on that occasion).

[From The Telegraph]

The Telegraph also quotes Meghan herself, from the Netflix docuseries, where she explained why she wore so many neutrals while she was in the UK, describing how she was trying not to stand out. While that is very likely true, I think it’s also true that during her years in the UK, Meghan wore a lot of pieces which were already in her closet (her pre-royal closet). Meaning, she already had a neutral-heavy style with lots of creams, whites, blacks and browns. I think her post-royal appearances have backed that up too – while she pops up with a bold color here and there (as she did in the UK), her baseline aesthetic is California White and the Sad Beiges (a terrific band name, if you ask me). Now, it’s a matter of opinion for the viewer as to what Meghan is actually projecting here: quiet luxury or that dull, sad, Kardashian-esque beige-heavy color palette? Well, Meghan and Harry do look rich, but to be clear – I was also sort of disappointed to see her in another sad beige outfit. She looks so good in green! And red, and blue and purple.

Photos courtesy of Vimeo, WENN, Backgrid, Avalon Red.

Real question: were any of you aware of BetterUp before Prince Harry joined the company as Chief Impact Officer in 2021? I was not, but I’m sure other people were, especially people in the corporate world (BetterUp has a lot of corporate clients) and people who like life-coaching stuff. Personally, I think Harry’s main work as CIO was to give the company a global platform and global hype – soon after his position was announced, BetterUp;s valuation skyrocketed and the company massively expanded in North America and Europe. Their client roster includes multiple Fortune 500 companies and they went on a hiring spree. What happened next was predictable: they grew and expanded too fast and demand for the “product” stabilized rather than increased. As such, the company has laid off 16% of staff, and the Daily Beast made sure to talk to disgruntled former employees who blame Prince Harry.

Last valued at $4.7 billion, BetterUp is perhaps best known for its chief impact officer: Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who joined the corporate team in 2021. But even with a former royal among its ranks, the startup has struggled to maintain its footing. Last year, its vast roster of contractor coaches staged a revolt after the company modified their pay; the relationship remains fraught, several coaches told The Daily Beast. And this week, BetterUp laid off 16 percent of its staff, the culmination of what multiple workers described as months of turbulence, filled with outbursts from executives, mysterious staff departures, and declining morale.

“We’re all there because of the same bullsh-t story they keep telling us: ‘We’re mission driven, and the mission is going to change the world,’” a recent employee said. But inside the business, he added, “they treat us like sh-t.”

Under Robichaux’s leadership, BetterUp steadily expanded, and the pandemic accelerated its ascent. “I think you’ve got a company that was kind of at the right place at the right time with the rise of employee health and mental wellness coming out of COVID,” a former staffer said. “BetterUp just saw a tremendous amount of growth.” That trajectory has seemingly flattened, however. Two people familiar with BetterUp’s finances said that, during the last fiscal year, the company fell more than 20 percent short of its initial revenue targets. “They were counting on really big expansion numbers,” one of them said. In reality, “they were nowhere close.”

As BetterUp struggles to regain momentum, recently departed staffers are eager to assign blame. Three employees described Robichaux as capricious and prone to flying “off the handle,” and alleged that he insulates himself with loyalists known as FOAs, or “Friends of Alexi.”

Amid the tumult, Prince Harry has become an easy target for aggrieved staffers as well. One former employee, mirroring statements by several peers, assessed the Duke’s day-to-day responsibilities: “I’m going to go with zero things.” Other staffers were more charitable, suggesting that he has helped the company increase its reach in Europe and has lended his celebrity to help close major deals.

Indisputably, though, Prince Harry has become a fixture of tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic, creating the risk that BetterUp’s reputation will be linked with the drama. “At first I was like, ‘This is cool,’” a recent staffer said of the Duke’s corporate position, but increasingly “it’s been more of a distraction.”

“Every article mentions his role at BetterUp, then goes on to roast [him and Meghan Markle].” At some point, the employee argued, “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”

[From The Daily Beast]

I’m not aware of Prince Harry taking the CIO position to work there 9-5, with the kind of daily responsibilities of a manager? It was always pretty clear that he took the position to help raise BetterUp’s profile and build the BetterUp brand because he legitimately believed in the company and wanted people to have access to the kind of coaching BetterUp provides. Of course, it also sounds like the business itself is being poorly run, and that the business model is somewhat flawed. Are you trying to actually support workers by giving them life-coaching and mental-health coaching, or are you just doing corporations’ bidding to squeeze as much as possible out of stressed, overworked and strung-out workers? What is the actual business model here, and is it aggressively staking out the “mental health coaching to Fortune 500 companies” franchise?

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, BetterUp’s Instagram and screencaps from BetterUp videos.

Dianne Feinstein is 90 years old and in seriously ill health. She had to take months off, away from the Senate, to recover from shingles. When she came back, she looked and acted noticeably unwell and senile. The thing is, if she was a powerful senator from a swing state, I would understand Feinstein’s need to keep both hands on her Senate seat. But she’s from California! There are literally four generations of Democrats waiting to take her seat. Well, Feinstein will retire next year – she’s not running for reelection, so there’s that. Still, there’s a lot of talk about how she needs to resign right now, given her inability to effectively work as a senator. What’s even worse is that Senator Feinstein has now given power of attorney to her daughter. Good lord.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has relinquished power of attorney to her daughter — even as she continues to serve in Congress at the age of 90, according to a report. The Democratic senator — who is the oldest member of Congress — has faced calls to resign after health complications kept her away from the Capitol for months earlier this year. Since returning to Washington DC, she has appeared frail and has had a number of public mental lapses.

Feinstein handed over power of attorney to her daughter, 66-year-old Katherine Feinstein, in part to help handle legal battles over her late husband Richard Blum’s estate, the New York Times reported on Thursday. In one dispute, Katherine, Feinstein’s only child, is at odds with Blum’s three daughters over the ownership of a luxury beach house owned by Feinstein, according to the paper. In a separate lawsuit, the two families are feuding over Blum’s life insurance, which Feinstein claims she needs to cover her increasing medical costs, The Times reported.

Feinstein, who has represented California for over 30 years, announced earlier this year that she would not seek re-election in 2024. Several longtime colleagues have leaked to the press that her mental acuity has significantly declined.

[From The NY Post]

I understand the legal reasons for a 90-year-old woman to hand power of attorney to her daughter to deal with various estate and lawsuit issues… but it’s plainly absurd for this to happen while Feinstein is still a sitting senator. This isn’t a case of whataboutism – cold and clammy Mitch McConnell should also resign, because he is also clearly unwell and unable to do his job. It’s just that I’m personally glad that the Republicans have someone senile in the job of minority leader. So, I’ve come around on this – Feinstein really does need to go. Gov. Newsom should be able to appoint someone in the interim, between now and the 2024 election.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.