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Post by Admin on Jul 29, 2020 20:49:51 GMT
Though she's known for her unflinchingly personal lyrics, Taylor Swift is gradually touching more on the sociopolitical state of things. The singer recently released her surprise eighth studio album Folklore, which she wrote over the last few months, and many have suspected that the haunting 13th track "Epiphany" touches on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the sacrifices being made by healthcare workers as a result. Upon first listen, "Epiphany" seems to be about soldiers off to war and the emotional toll of combat. (Swift sings in the first verse, "Keep your helmet, keep your life, son / Just a flesh wound, here's your rifle.") That is partly the case, as Swift referenced her grandfather's service during World War II in the Folklore liner notes. "My grandfather, Dean, landing at Guadalcanal in 1942," she wrote in a list of the album's inspirations. What's more, a photo of Swift's grandfather in military uniform is shown in the "Cardigan" music video. The second verse, however, is where listeners will begin to pick up on allusions to the pandemic. "Something med school did not cover / Someone's daughter, someone's mother / Holds your hand through plastic now / 'Doc, I think she's crashing out' / And some things you just can't speak about," Swift sings in the verse, which references the way in which many healthcare workers have to comfort patients in their final moments since family members have been kept out of the hospital for their safety. The repeated bridge, meanwhile, may refer to the demanding schedules of those who work in medicine: "Only twenty minutes to sleep / But you dream of some epiphany / Just one single glimpse of relief / To make some sense of what you've seen."
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Post by Admin on Jul 30, 2020 8:36:06 GMT
When Taylor Swift announced that the cozy af looking sweater from her "Cardigan" music video was actually available for purchase, Swifties everywhere couldn't pull out their credit cards fast enough. On Friday, though, founder of online retail store, The Folklore, Amira Rasool, pointed out that the logo on the sweater looked very familiar. http://instagram.com/p/CDB_44fgzui "This morning, it came to my attention that musician #TaylorSwift is selling merchandise to go along with her new album 'Folklore,'" Amira wrote on Instagram. "She is currently selling merchandise with the words 'The Folklore' printed on them. Based on the similarities of the design, I believe the designer of the merch ripped off my company's logo." Amira then shared a side-by-side of the sweater and her company's logo, showing that the two definitely have similarities. "I am not going to let this blatant theft go unchecked," she wrote. "It’s just very hard to believe that [Swift’s team] didn't come across it," Amira told In Style. "And if they did come across it—which I believe they did—for them to model Taylor’s merchandise on our logo, especially having seen what our company is about, is especially disheartening to me." http://instagram.com/p/CDMMaHdgkSN Amira continued, saying, "I had people who asked me, 'Oh, did you collaborate with Taylor on these?' They just assumed that it was a collaboration because of how similar the logos are."
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Post by Admin on Aug 14, 2020 6:42:19 GMT
Jasmine Obra believed that if it wasn't for her brother Joshua, she wouldn't exist. When 7-year-old Josh realized that his parents weren't going to live forever, he asked for a sibling so he would never be alone. By spring 2020, at ages 29 and 21, Josh and Jasmine shared a condo in Anaheim, Calif., not far from Disneyland, which they both loved. Both worked at a 147-bed locked nursing facility that specialized in caring for elderly people with cognitive issues such as Alzheimer's and where Jasmine, a nursing student, was mentored by Josh, a registered nurse. While COVID-19 takes a far deadlier toll on elderly people than on young adults, an investigation of front-line health care worker deaths by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian has uncovered numerous instances in which staff members under age 30 were exposed on the job and also succumbed. Among 167 confirmed front-line worker deaths the reporters investigated, 21 medical staffers, or 13% of the total, were under 40, and eight (5%) fatalities were under 30. The median age of a COVID-19 death in the general population is 78, while the median age of health care worker deaths in the database is 57. This is in part because the reporters included only people of working age who were treating patients during the pandemic — but it is also because, as health workers, they are exposed to the virus far more. Young health care workers are at a "stage in their career and a stage of life at which they have so much more to offer," says Andrew Chan, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. "Lives lost among any young people related to COVID really should be considered something that's unacceptable to us as a society," he adds. As coronavirus cases surge — and shortages of lifesaving protective gear such as N95 masks, gowns and gloves persist — the nation's health care workers face a disproportionate risk. Chan's research has found that health care workers of any age are at least three times more likely to become infected than the general population, and the risk is greater if they are people of color or have to work without adequate personal protective equipment. People of color are also likelier to have inadequate access to protective gear. In interviews, relatives and friends of these younger victims described a particular and wrenching sorrow. Everything lay ahead for these front-line workers. They were just embarking on their careers. Some still lived in the family home; others were looking forward to getting married or had young children. Several parents of victims contacted by The Guardian and Kaiser Health News said they were simply unable to talk about what had happened, so immense was their grief.
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