On Thursday California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a new order for all residents to stay at home and for all non-essential businesses to close—bars, shopping malls, and gyms among them. “Essential services” that will remain open include gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores, hardware stores … and cannabis dispensaries.
As the coronavirus spreads around the world, public-health experts are encouraging people to engage in social distancing: The limiting of non-essential gatherings. And thanks to technology, many professionals can now work from anywhere with a laptop and a high-speed internet connection.
As the novel coronavirus spreads, we are all faced with questions about how best to care for ourselves, and for others, in a public health crisis.
It’s hard to keep up with everything coronavirus, and generally I don’t recommend it. But if you happened to take a long walk in the past few hours, or have been re-watching Contagion, there are a few Covid-19 developments you might have missed.
If you are among the horrified would-be passengers watching cruise ships become floating microcosms for flimsy coronavirus containment efforts, have we got an offer for you! “You couldn’t pay me enough to take a cruise right now,” you say?
On Friday evening, US vice president Mike Pence announced that 21 of the 3,500 people aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship being held off the California coast had tested positive for the novel coronavirus—19 crew members and two guests of the approximately 45 total who were tested. Today, Princess public relations director Negin Kamali confirmed to USA Today that the ship would dock in the port of Oakland, California tomorrow. Kamali said those requiring “acute medical treatment and hospitalization” would disembark first, and that it was “unclear” whether others would be allowed to leave as well.
With fall 2020 Fashion Weeks now in the rearview, a champion accessory has emerged. It is not Jacquemus’ most miniature micro-bag, Bottega Veneta’s mushy pouch, or Marine Serré’s full-skirted baseball cap. No, if you must leave the house for a fashion show, premiere, or Positano getaway in 2020, just be sure to bring your hand sanitizer.
For a professional athlete, a typical bad day at the office might include a broken rib, torn ligaments, or mild traumatic brain injury. So it’s unsurprising that drug use—both legal and illegal—is rampant amongst these modern-day gladiators, who depend on substances not only to enhance their performance, but also to ease their pain. As cannabis legalization spreads across the US, bringing the popularity of plant-derived natural compounds such as CBD along with it, professional sports leagues in the US are updating their policies accordingly.
Baselworld, the world’s largest watch and jewelry show, has been cancelled due to the Covid-19 coronavirus. Originally scheduled to take place in Basel, Switzerland during the first week of May, the annual fair has been postponed until January 2021, following news that the Swiss Federal Council would ban gatherings of more than 1,000 people. Even with dwindling attendance, the century-old fair attracted about 81,000 visitors in 2019.
Colorado had its biggest year yet for legal cannabis sales in 2019: total revenue topped $1.74 billion, according to data from the Colorado Department of Revenue.
You can now major in weed.
Industrial hemp is the fastest growing crop in US agriculture.
It’s been a brutal year for weed. The six largest publicly traded cannabis companies lost a collective $25 billion in market value since late March—a bloodletting Kevin Murphy, chairman and CEO of Acreage Holdings, compared to “2008 for the cannabis industry.”
Quartz lifestyle correspondent Jenni Avins and culture and lifestyle editor Oliver Staley discuss the transformation economy—the trend toward selling customers a better version of themselves.
Sanna Marin, Finland’s 34-year-old transportation minister, was selected today (Dec. 8) as the country’s prime minister, making her the youngest leader to ever hold the job, and the world’s youngest sitting PM. Marin will be taking over from Antii Rinne, who resigned from the position last week after just six months on the job, following controversy over his handling of a postal strike. Like Rinne, Marin is a member of the Social Democratic Party, the largest in Finland’s five-member ruling coalition.
The highest-paid author in the world is spreading some of his wealth to indie booksellers. James Patterson, the wildly prolific author of more than 150 books—including the Alex Cross thriller series and the 2018 Bill Clinton collaboration The President Is Missing—this week awarded 500 booksellers at independent bookstores around the US with $500 holiday bonuses. Patterson’s bonus program, now in its sixth year, has awarded over $1.3 million to date, according to Publishers Weekly.
Jennifer Lopez, notable 50-year-old, hosted Saturday Night Live on Dec. 7 and told anyone who didn’t already know: 2019 was her year. For her opening monologue, the Hustlers star wore a tuxedo, like a woman who has never feared being mistaken for one of the caterers, and accessorized with Veronica Lake waves, a Carrie Bradshaw-ish lapel flower, and her Chiclet-sized diamond engagement ring.
For the last few years, products containing cannabidiol—the cannabis-derived compound commonly known as CBD—have proliferated, from vape pens to face creams, tinctures to dog treats.
The Esalen Institute was founded in 1962 in Big Sur, California, as a center for countercultural thought and exploration.
A few days before I left for a healing retreat in Taos, New Mexico, I gave my editor a warning: “This is either going to be really good, or really bad.”
Twenty years ago, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore coined the term “the experience economy” in their seminal article in Harvard Business Review and soon-to-be-reissued book of the same title. Pine and Gilmore wrote about how over centuries, consumers’ dollars—and workers’ hours—have shifted from commodities, to goods, then to services, and finally to experiences.
The nascent vaping industry has encountered an abrupt change of fortunes, following a series of mysterious vaping-related illnesses and deaths.
People like vaping because it’s a smokeless, convenient, and fast-acting way to consume pleasure-inducing chemicals including THC and nicotine. It’s also potentially quite dangerous—and that’s also true when it comes to vaping cannabidiol, the popular cannabis-derived compound known as CBD. In fact, thanks to a regulatory no-man’s-land, a consumer craze, and manufacturers who dilute extract with oils better suited for salad dressings, CBD vapes are uniquely risky.
In one short month, vaping has gone from industry on fire to industry under fire. More than 1,000 cases of a mysterious vaping-related illness, and 18 related deaths, have been reported in the United States, prompting Congressional hearings, emergency bans, and plummeting stock prices. But in the haste to address what some are calling a moral panic, officials and pundits are conflating separate—though related—issues: teens’ adoption of e-cigarettes, and the evolving reports of vaping-related symptoms that point largely to the illicit THC market.
