It’s been a particularly uncomfortable few weeks when it comes to stark revelations on how society treats women. Abigail Hess added another demerit:

• Women hold two thirds of America’s student debt, while making up a little more than half of all college students.
• The primary reason is that just 35% of households with girls save money for college (compared to 50% of households with boys).
• Parents may be saving this money for a wedding instead.
• Institutional biases contribute to the problem – the average merit based grant for boys is greater than that for girls – even though girls often outperform boys in school.
• And then there’s the persistent gender wage gap which makes it more difficult for women to pay back their loans.

Read more on CNBC.

Allie Jones looked at what winners and losers of shows like The Bachelor, and The Bachelorette, do after their run comes to an end:

• Contestants of the show aren’t paid for their appearances.
• To capitalize on their nascent star power they have to get moving while the show is on the air, and before a new set of contestants takes away the limelight.
• The first step is to get Instagram. Audiences may not remember your name but they will know your face.
• At the same time you don’t want to seem too eager for fame. After all your primary purpose to be on the show was to find true love.
• Next up is to find brands who will pay you to post photos of yourself with their products. It’s possible to make up to $7,000 a photo this way.
• Feel like your profile is fading after a while? You can keep the reality TV flame burning by getting a spot on Dancing With the Stars, which will even pay you a six figure salary.
• Winners who find their soulmate on the show have other money making opportunities. The most common is to televise the wedding. The couple from the first season of the show earned $1 million this way.
• After that? Televise sessions from couple’s therapy! Two couples have done that. In one instance the therapy show started filming just three months after the wedding.
• Five couples have stayed together long enough to produce children, who look set to become budding social media stars of the future.

Read the full, fascinating article on New York Magazine.

Weddings can be expensive affairs. In China you can add the cost of a professional bridesmaid to the list:

• At Chinese weddings bridesmaids are sometimes expected to drink on behalf of the bride. And since each guest might be toasted “bottoms up” individually, this has been known to lead to alcohol poisoning and death.
• It can also be tradition for the bridesmaid to stand between the groom and the bridal suite, acting as a final symbolic hurdle. With all the alcohol, the groom and the groomsmen can become rowdy and violent.
• Bridesmaids are subject to intense scrutiny, and may be objectified. The beauty of the bridesmaid is seen by some as a signal of the couple’s status and wealth.
• Still things are better now. In ancient times the bridesmaid would dress up like the bride and be her double, in case there was a kidnapping attempt by a rival clan.
• But the pressures remain strong enough that some close friends will decline the offer to be a bridesmaid.
• Enter the free market. Companies have sprung up that offer “professional bridesmaids” for about 800 yuan (US$120) per wedding.

Read more at Quartz.

All of us have phones that tell the time. Why then do people pay thousands of dollars for watches? Simon Garfield delved into the industry:

• Entry level luxury watches cost about £42,000. Others can cost as much as £1 million.
• They’re expensive in part because of the complexity of luxury mechanical watches. They can have as many as 1,366 miniscule parts – about six times the number of bones in the human body.
• Due to the need for precision these parts are expensive. Even the smallest screw can cost $10.
• And then there are the wages for the few craftsmen that are skilled enough to spend their time meticulously building the watch by hand.
• One of the reasons demand is high is because for men it is one of the few forms of broadly acceptable jewelry.
• Watches have also taken on the air, of, well…timelessness. A person’s name can be etched on it, as, say, a wedding gift, and the recipient could conceivably use it for the rest of their life, in a way that would never be true of a luxury smartphone.
• The purchase process is unique. Flagship stores will take customers back to an earlier era with shops that lack any type of digitization. Clerks are taught calligraphy so that they can create receipts by hand.
• Private rooms are available for customers to spend time with the watch and get to know it before making the decision to purchase. If they go ahead with it, then they can expect the store to bring them a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
• The Swiss dominate the market. They sell just 1.7% of the world’s watches, but command 58% of the revenue.
• Time plays a weird role in the world of watches. Top watches will often have a waiting list as the few craftsmen that can build them usually have a backlog.
• The industry also plans in advance. One company recently approved designs for its 2028 collection.

The full article talks a lot more about the industry, its history, and much more. Read it at The Guardian.

Natalie Zarrelli wrote about grooms that get their own cake:

• Until the 1940s it was tradition for a wedding to have two cakes – one for the bride and one for the groom.
• While the tradition has faded in parts of America it’s still strong in the south.
• The bride’s cake is the main one. It is larger and fancier and embodies the colours and the theme of the wedding.
• The groom’s cake is usually more representative of the groom’s personality and a way for them to leave their own mark on the wedding.
• Thus the groom’s cake might have R2-D2 on it, the logo of a favourite sports team, or be in the shape of an Xbox.

Read more here.

Source: Atlas Obscura

Polly Mosendz wrote about the staggering amounts that people are shelling out for bachelor parties:

• Elite Wall Street types hire planners that charge around $5,000 – or 10% of the total cost of the party – to plan the event.
• The most expensive ones can cost as much as $10,000 a person and involve international trips to global party destinations.
• While those are extremes, the averages are still pretty high. One survey found that groomsmen spend $680 for their friend’s bachelor party, while bridesmaids squeak by on just $437 for bachelorette parties.
• The best man, meanwhile, shells out around $1,000, while the maid of honour is in for $550.
• Things even out by the time the wedding rolls around – women spend more money on things like wedding dresses than men.

Read other details here.

Source: Bloomberg

Matthew Shaer wrote about Adidas’ efforts to overthrow Nike’s dominant market position:

• Sneakers have gone from being casual footwear to several hundred-dollar fashion statements worn to weddings and Church.
• Nike has dominated. It has 62% of the market – compared with Adidas’ 5%.
• In fact, just one line of Nike’s shoes, the Jordans, has 20 times more market share than Adidas’ entire basketball selection.
• The domination is driven by an $8 billion endorsement budget that has led to the company sponsoring pretty much every major sports star in the United States.
• Adidas is trying to make a comeback. It can’t match Nike’s endorsement budget but instead of signing the biggest athletes it’s looking to sign younger, edgier athletes, who are blurring the lines between sportspeople and fashion models.
• It is doing so in part by giving shoe designers more freedom. Kanye West recently moved his line of shoes from Nike to Adidas due to his concerns about creative freedom.
• The 9,000 Kanye West shoes that went onto debut under Adidas retailed for $350…and were being resold for up to $5,000.

Read more about Adidas’ efforts to poach Nike’s employees, the executives at Adidas that are leading the charge, and what Nike thinks about all of this here.

Source: GQ

Ella Morton wrote about Presidential Libraries:

• The tradition began when, instead of keeping his White House documents with him when he left office, Franklin D. Roosevelt donated them to the Federal Government.
• To showcase them the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum was built.
• By 1978 handing documents over to the government at the end of one’s tenure in office had become law since documents from previous administrations such as George Washington’s kept getting lost or destroyed.
• Libraries serve the purpose of complying with the law and a museum section builds a story of the President’s legacy.
• Money for the libraries is raised by a foundation while the President is in office. The foundation for George W. Bush raised $500 million.
• Because of this the libraries are biased to portray the President in a positive light – even for infamously notorious one such as Nixon.
• Over time, as the administration’s team begins to age and fade away, it is possible for the library to take a more critical view of the President’s legacy.
• For example Truman’s Presidential library wasn’t able to scrutinize the President’s decision to use the nuclear bomb against Japan until long after he had passed.
• As libraries age, and the President’s they’re focused on begin to fade from public memory, the libraries struggle to draw visitors.
• They can then be repurposed as community areas with events such as speakers.
• Nixon’s library is actually a surprisingly popular place to host weddings.

Find out which Presidential Library is the most popular and which is the least, as well as many more details here.

Source: Atlas Obscura