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      The ‘Nontraditional’ Bridal Brand Capturing Hearts Online

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      Madison Chamberlain is carving a niche with her vibrant, over-the-top bridal designs.“Make me look like a disco ball.” For most designers this isn’t a common request, but for Madison Chamberlain, so-called disco brides, and anyone looking to splash extra color, sparkle or glam into their wedding day, are a mainstay of her business.Ms. Chamberlain, 29, started her bridal brand in 2022. “I’ve always been what you would call an occasion-wear designer,” she said. In college, at what was then known as Philadelphia University, she studied fashion design and made “jacquard coats decked out in embellishments and trimmed with orange fur,” she said. “Things that were just extreme.”In 2019, Ms. Chamberlain left a design assistant job at Free People, where she had worked on party dresses. She was feeling burned out from corporate fashion and dreamed of someday starting her own fashion line, one of “joyful things,” made in a size-inclusive, low-waste way.Ms. Chamberlain’s sweetheart veil in copper…Alyssa Rose Photographyand in white tulle.Alyssa Rose PhotographyFor about two years she worked for a wedding-invitation studio, painted pet portraits, did freelance design work and taught children’s art and sewing classes. Then, in 2021, a friend of a friend asked Ms. Chamberlain to make a dress for her wedding in New Orleans. She created a custom gown embellished with shimmering paillettes, and wound up being invited to the wedding. The experience inspired her to shift her focus to nontraditional bridal design.In August 2022, Ms. Chamberlain posted a TikTok video of her first veil, a rainbow sequin piece. It got more than two million views and sparked a flurry of inquiries. After that, she was able to make the brand her full-time job, running her business out of a studio in Philadelphia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It)

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      It’s not Joe Biden’s poll numbers that worry me, exactly. It’s the denial of what’s behind them.Among likely voters, Biden is trailing Donald Trump by one point in Wisconsin and three points in Pennsylvania. He’s ahead by a point in Michigan. Sweeping those three states is one route to re-election, and they’re within reach.Still, Biden is losing to Trump. His path is narrowing. In 2020, Biden didn’t just win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also won Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Now he’s behind in those states by six points, nine points and 13 points in the latest Times/Siena/Philadelphia Inquirer poll. Have those states turned red? No. That same poll finds Democrats leading in the Arizona and Nevada Senate races. The Democrats are also leading in the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.National polls find Democrats slightly ahead of Republicans for control of congress. The “Never Biden” vote now looks larger than the “Never Trump” vote. The electorate hasn’t turned on Democrats; a crucial group of voters has turned on Biden.This week, the Biden team appeared to shake up the race by challenging Trump to two debates. One will take place early, on June 27. The other will be in September. Biden’s video was full of bluster. “Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020,” he said. “Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate. Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal. I’ll even do it twice.”Biden, it seemed, was calling Trump’s bluff. He wanted the fight. But Biden wants fewer debates, not more. On the same day, he pulled out of the three debates scheduled by the Commission on Presidential Debates for September and October. He rebuffed the Trump campaign’s call for four debates. “I’ll even do it twice” is misdirection. He’ll only do it twice.This is bad precedent and questionable politics. Debates do more to focus and inform the public than anything else during the campaign. Biden is cutting the number of debates by a third and he’s making it easier for future candidates to abandon debates altogether.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      TikTok Attempts to Rein In Diet and Weight Loss Content

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      The company said it will work to remove content about drugs like Ozempic, extended fasting and more from the “For You” feed.Emma Lembke did not know what an algorithm was when she started using social media.The then-12-year-old was thrilled when her parents gave her permission to join Instagram. She quickly followed all kinds of accounts — from Kim Kardashian to Olive Garden, she said — and was soon spending five to six hours a day on the app. Then one day she searched for “ab workouts,” and her feed shifted. She started seeing 200-calorie recipes, pro-anorexia posts and exercise routines that “no 12-year-old should be doing in their bedroom,” she said.Ms. Lembke, now 21, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2023 about how social media led her to disordered eating, and what she and other advocates see as a dire need for stronger regulation to protect social media’s youngest users.Social media platforms have promised to take more action. On Friday, TikTok enacted what some experts called one of the most well-defined policies by a social media company yet on weight and dieting posts. The company’s updated guidelines, which come as TikTok faces a potential ban in the United States, include new guardrails on posts that show “potentially harmful weight management behaviors” and excessive exercise.TikTok said it will work to ensure the “For You” page, which serves as the main content feed on TikTok and is driven by an algorithm that caters to a user’s interests, no longer shows videos that promote “extended intermittent fasting,” exercises designed for “rapid and significant weight loss” or medications or supplements that promote muscle gain. The new regulations also aim to crack down on posts from influencers and other users promoting products used for weight loss or to suppress appetite, such as drugs like Ozempic. They also aim to curb content promoting anabolic steroid use.Under the new policy, machine learning models will attempt to flag and remove content that is considered potentially dangerous; a human moderation team will then review those posts to see if they need to remain off the For You feed, should be removed from age-restricted feeds or should be removed from the platform altogether, said Tara Wadhwa, TikTok’s director of policy in the United States.The elimination of problematic TikToks from the main feed is meant in part to “interrupt repetitive content patterns,” the new guidelines said. Ms. Wadhwa said the company wants to ensure users aren’t exposed to diet and weight loss content “in sequential order, or repeatedly over and over again.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taiwan, on China’s Doorstep, Is Dealing With TikTok Its Own Way

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      The island democracy was early to ban TikTok on government phones, and the ruling party refuses to use it. But a U.S.-style ban is not under consideration.As it is in the United States, TikTok is popular in Taiwan, used by a quarter of the island’s 23 million residents.People post videos of themselves shopping for trendy clothes, dressing up as video game characters and playing pranks on their roommates. Influencers share their choreographed dances and debate whether the sticky rice dumplings are better in Taiwan’s north or south.Taiwanese users of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, are also served the kind of pro-China content that the U.S. Congress cited as a reason it passed a law that could result in a ban of TikTok in America.One recent example is a video showing a Republican congressman, Rob Wittman of Virginia, stoking fears that a vote for the ruling party in Taiwan’s January election would prompt a flood of American weapons to aid the island democracy in a possible conflict with China, which claims it as part of its territory. The video was flagged as fake by a fact-checking organization, and TikTok took it down.About 80 miles from China’s coast, Taiwan is particularly exposed to the possibility of TikTok’s being used as a source of geopolitical propaganda. Taiwan has been bombarded with digital disinformation for decades, much of it traced back to China.But unlike Congress, the government in Taiwan is not contemplating legislation that could end in a ban of TikTok.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Birth Control Pills Make Some Women Miserable. But Are They Stopping?

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      The woman in the video looks resolute, and a little sad, as she cuts up a pack of birth control pills. “These silly little pills have literally ruined me as a person,” reads the caption. The clip, which is on TikTok, has 1.1 million likes. It’s one of thousands that have proliferated on social media in recent years with virtually the same message: The pill causes terrible, sometimes irreversible side effects, and women should free themselves from it.Anecdotal reports from news outlets have suggested that women are quitting the pill in large numbers because of this type of online post. “We’ve known for a long time that people really rely on their social circles to help them with medical decision making as it relates to contraception,” said Dr. Deborah Bartz, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Against a backdrop of increasingly restrictive abortion access, the idea that women might be giving up a reliable form of contraception because of social media hype has concerned researchers and doctors.But, according to initial data, prescriptions for the birth control pill are not actually declining at all. An analysis by Trilliant Health, an analytics firm that provides health care companies with industry insights, found that usage has been steadily trending upward in the United States; 10 percent of women had prescriptions in 2023, up from 7.1 percent in 2018. The analysis looked at prescriptions for the pill that were written and picked up. Even among those aged 15 to 34, who would be most likely to see negative social media posts, Trilliant found prescriptions had increased.The analysis was done at the request of The New York Times, and drew on Trilliant’s database of medical and pharmacy claims. It looked at a nationally representative sample of roughly 40 million women, aged 15 to 44, who used either Medicaid or commercial insurance. It doesn’t account for people who might get their birth control from telehealth providers that don’t take insurance, but that group most likely represents a small slice of the American population, said Sanjula Jain, chief research officer at Trilliant. Several of those telehealth companies also reported double-digit increases in birth control pill purchases in the past two years. The data also doesn’t include sales of the over-the-counter birth control pill, Opill, which has been available in stores in the U.S. since March.Ten percent of women had prescriptions for the pill in 2023, up from 7.1 percent in 2018.Source: Trilliant HealthThe pill has a reputation as a reliable, if flawed, form of birth control. Its known side effects — including blood clots, weight gain, a loss of libido and mood disruptions — have in fact been the main reason that some women do eventually quit the pill, Dr. Bartz said. When patients raise those concerns with physicians, they are often dismissed, she added, which can erode people’s trust in their doctors, and in health care institutions.

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      Are You Having a Millennial Mom Midlife Crisis?

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      Mothers have been exhausted since the beginning of time, but some difficulties are specific to the millennial generation.There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr. Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called.Dr. Casares, 42, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore., tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer. “But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” — who hadn’t picked up when the school called — “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’”In that moment, said Dr. Casares, the author of “Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You’re Meant to Be,” she related to a Taylor Swift lyric: “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve.”It has always been exhausting to be a mother, but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping. Boomer moms didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it. Generation X moms had to prove that they could do everything men could do — and then come home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were children of divorce, manifested an ironic detachment from their troubles and were prescribed Prozac to deal.And then came millennial moms, the women raised on “You go, girl!” in the 1980s and ’90s and who today are in their 30s and early 40s. On average, they enrolled in college in higher numbers than men, married later and delayed having children, sometimes to prioritize careers and other times because — with student debt and less wealth than previous generations — it felt impossible not to.Still, it seemed like some things had worked out in their favor. Perhaps they could juggle work and motherhood more successfully. Maybe their male partners, if they had them, would be more attuned to gender imbalances at home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside Miss USA Turmoil: A Leaked Letter and String of Resignations

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      Noelia Voigt’s announcement this week that she was stepping down as Miss USA set off a string of departures and prompted larger questions about the inner workings of the organization.When the reigning Miss USA, Noelia Voigt, announced this week she would be resigning from her position, she cited her mental health and wrote about her gratitude for the opportunity.“As individuals, we grow through experiencing different things in life that lead us to learning more about ourselves,” she wrote on Instagram on Monday.But an internal resignation letter by Ms. Voigt to Miss USA leadership and the Miss Universe Organization, obtained on Friday by The New York Times, presented a much darker picture.In the eight-page letter, Ms. Voigt, who represented the state of Utah and was crowned in September, described “a toxic work environment within the Miss USA Organization that, at best, is poor management and, at worst, is bullying and harassment.” She also complained in her letter that the organization had delayed making good on her prize winnings.The Miss USA Organization did not respond to request for comment.Ms. Voigt’s departure has spurred at least two other resignations. UmaSofia Srivastava, Miss Teen USA, announced she was stepping down from her role on Wednesday. Arianna Lemus, who represented Colorado at Miss USA in 2023, said on Friday she was resigning in solidarity after seeing Ms. Voigt’s post.“That was a call to help,” Ms. Lemus, 27, said in an interview.The sudden departures have touched off wider speculation in the pageant world that crowned winners are legally barred from speaking freely about their experiences with the Miss USA Organization. Many of Ms. Voigt’s past competitors, including Ms. Lemus, shared a statement demanding that she be released from any nondisclosure agreements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pro-Trump PAC Joins TikTok Amid Fight Over Its Chinese Ownership

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      The main political action committee backing former President Donald J. Trump joined TikTok on Wednesday, jumping onto the popular social media platform while it is at the center of a political battle over its ownership by a Chinese corporation, ByteDance.The super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., is independent of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, but the move to TikTok — using the handle @MAGA — signals a shift in strategy nearly three months after President Biden’s re-election campaign joined the social media platform.“There’s millions of voters on TikTok, and @MAGA will deliver President Donald J. Trump’s pro-freedom, pro-America agenda every day with the facts and stories that matter,” Taylor Budowich, the chief executive of the PAC, said in a statement. “We aren’t trying to set policy, we are trying to win an election.”The TikTok account, which had about 300 followers as of Wednesday evening, has posted five videos so far, four attacking Mr. Biden and one attacking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, as a “radical leftist.”Mr. Biden signed a law in April that would force a sale of TikTok by ByteDance, which sued the federal government on Tuesday in an effort to block the law. Under the terms of the law, ByteDance has about nine months to sell the app or it will be banned in the United States. The president can extend that time frame to a year.Mr. Trump had also tried to ban the app during his term, ordering ByteDance in August 2020 to divest the app. A federal judge blocked the attempted ban the next month, and Mr. Trump left office a few months later.But when House Republicans moved to force the sale of the app via legislation, Mr. Trump came out against the bill, saying that ByteDance’s ownership was still a national security threat but that a potential ban would anger young Americans.“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on CNBC. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”Mr. Trump himself is not on TikTok — preferring to use his own social media site, Truth Social — and neither is his campaign. With TikTok still operating in the United States, for now, and with Mr. Biden’s campaign using the app, Mr. Budowich said that Mr. Trump’s message should be “brought to every corner of the internet.”“We will not cede any platform to Joe Biden and the Democrats,” he said. More