Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about a cache of trash bags containing unsold H&M clothing that had been mutilated and trashed behind the H&M store on 35th Street. More unworn mutilated clothes were found in the trash of a Wal-Mart contractor nearby. The story enraged people and rightfully so, and it became the 2nd most tweeted topic on Twitter yesterday, forcing H&M to finally release this lame statement by spokeswoman Nicole Christie: "It will not happen again. We are committed 100 percent to make sure this practice is not happening anywhere else, as it is not our standard practice.”

The reason H&M mutilated the clothes is simple. If they trash them intact, H&M the retailer will be in competition with H&M the gifter. Clearly H&M is not concerned with street scavengers or mongo hunters colonizing their dumpsters. They are more concerned with their cheap merch flooding discount channels or coming back as "unpaid" returns at their cash registers. I understand the theory of not wanting to undercut your business. But I can't understand why H&M would deliberately trash its unsold merch when it could easily turn it into a revenue stream.

Destroying new clothes is a shameful and irresponsible act. It was also fiscally dumb, perhaps the least profitable way of handling unsold inventory. I called one of my sources (I'm writing a book about this topic), a man who buys and resells unsold textile inventory from retail and charity circuits. He asked that I withhold his name and business (the business is highly competitive and secretive). According to this "ragpicker," H&M could have done the following:

1. H&M could have made arrangements with a charity that would have carted away the garments and sorted and sold them as they do other high-volume donations. For this plan, H&M would have to be OK with the fact that its unsold merchandise would be resold as is and accept the potential market flooding and self-competition this would trigger. This plan is for karmic purposes only—but it could have been deftly used in a public relations campaign.

2. If the charities could not absorb the costs of trucking to and fro (no small matter) or integrate the H&M pick-up into their schedules, or if H&M was hellbent on mutilating the unsold merch to avoid competing with itself, the mega-chain could have opted to PAY approximately 10 cents per garment to have them carted away by a clothing recycler who would then shred the clothes into reusable fiber. (Usually, fiber ends up as car-seat and airplane-seat stuffing.) H&M could also use this as the basis of a "green" marketing campaign and, I wager, write off the costs as a marketing expense. Instead, however, they were caught punching holes and lobbing heels off their own merch, in a location that happens to be adjacent to a charity that clothes the poor. In the process, H&M pissed off Twitter and by extension, the universe.

3. By far the savviest option would have been for H&M to make a deal with a textile sorter and recycler—the same enterprise that could organize the fiber conversion—to cart away the garments but resell them to used clothes importers in Africa and South America. There are boatloads of money to be made by H&M in this scenario: The clothes would be picked up FOR FREE by the textile recycler (which would also save on labor—all that time cutting holes and packing Glad bags), plus H&M would be PAID about 50 cents per garment by the recycler. When you consider the volume of unsold clothes produced by the fast-fashion mega-chain, I'm guessing the revenue could reach tens of millions.

Many designers destroy their unsold stock. This is one of the many secrets of the fashion industry. They don't want their brands ending up on the hoi polloi or in some unsightly discount bin. I can't name the brand, but a VERY high-up and profitable one recently sent two million dollars worth of clothing and purses to the shredder. This goes on all the time; it's part of the business. Companies would rather destroy serviceable products than risk diluting their brand. The next time you're on a flight, think about what's inside the chair. If they advertise in Vogue, your butt is on it.

Fashion is a filthy business. I'm glad the cat's out of the bag.

Photograph of NYC H&M by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: clothing recycling, clothing waste, h&m, Wal-Mart

The New York Times published an article yesterday on how social media complicate relationships when a couple shares passwords. To share or not to share has been a point of contention in relationships at least since the '90s, when Seinfeld's George Costanza is bullied into giving up his ATM password to a girlfriend (it's Bosco). Now that everyone needs a password for her phone, her e-mail, her Netflix account, her Facebook, and her Twitter, the pressure to share passwords is even more intense. How do we redefine dating etiquette in the digital era? DoubleX contributors debate:

Jessica Grose: My fiance knows my various passwords and I know his. I would never, ever, ever, even if I suspected he was cheating, go into his e-mail, search his chats, read his facebook messages, etc., and I know that he would give me the same courtesy. I would not share such things with someone I wasn't getting married to, but I have no desire to know what he says about me to his friends, even if it's complimentary. It's like reading someone's diary—always better not to. I wouldn't even want to know what my exes said about me to friends! It's so masochistic.

Ellen Tarlin: I wouldn't go so far as to say sharing passwords is laziness for my husband and me—not that we are not the laziest people on the planet—but it is expeditious. Like if I get something in my e-mail that he needs to access for whatever reason (and I neglected to send it to him for whatever reason), or he needs me to look something up for him in his while he's at work, or I order from his Amazon account because he has free shipping or whatever, or we are doing something together but only one of us is sitting at the keyboard. It was not a decision for us. It just happened. Fortunately, I don't think our dog knows any of our passwords.

Dahlia Lithwick: My husband and I know each others' passwords. More worrisome, I think our son knows all our passwords, too.

Victoria Bosch: When I was a 'tween in the pre-Facebook days of yore, my "two best friends" and I knew each other's passwords and sometimes snuck a peek at the others' e-mail. It actually caused drama once when I logged into the girl's account and found out she was "secretly dating" someone and mentioned not telling me. I've never looked at anyone's e-mail since. I learned my lesson as a 14-year-old!

Ellen Tarlin: I read my sister's diary once when I was a teen or preteen. It said there were four kinds of kisses: corn, wheat, sprouts, alfalfa. It took me decades to figure out what the hell that meant. It plagued me! So, really, don't do it!

Claire Gordon: My friend shared her Netflix account with a long-distance boyfriend and started to reconsider the relationship (and her boyfriend as a human being) when she saw that his most recently watched films had some recurring, unsavory themes. Even in the most innocuous examples of online intimacy, there can be inadvertant over-sharing ... but maybe that was definitely for the best.

Vanessa Gezari: I think the context makes a difference. In the NYT story, the anecdote is about a woman who had a relationship (doesn't say how serious) in which she and her boyfriend not only shared their passwords, but she had no problem going breezily into his e-mail account one day and reading a message he'd sent to his mom about why he was no longer in love with his girlfriend (the very woman who now found herself "stung" by his e-mail). The next graf says:

A new dating order has emerged in the era of social media. Couples who used to see each other’s friends only at parties now enjoy 24-hour access to their beloved’s confidants thanks to Facebook. Sharing passwords to e-mail accounts, bank accounts and photo-sharing sites is the new currency of intimacy." (Italics are mine.)

WTF??? The "new currency of intimacy"? I hope not. Maybe this is what I'm reacting to more than the bare fact of sharing passwords. What this means to me is that if I really like someone I've been dating for a few months, and I want to show that, I'm going to share my passwords with him. Not so. So not so. I think that reading other people's mail is a bad idea under any circumstances. I'd hit the roof if someone—even the person closest to me—read mine without permission. One thing I wonder is: Although it's great when you're with someone or married and things are going well and you need to check their Hulu account, what happens if you break up and it's ugly? Well, I guess you can change your passwords then. In the end, I guess what bothers me most is the breeziness with which some people apparently go from dating to oversharing to reading other people's mail, which may have more to do with my sense of privacy than with living at the apex of the Internet age.

Jessica Lambertson: What interested me so much (as someone who has been on both sides of the inappropriate e-mail sharing) is that it's not so easy to break as you would think. When my long-term boyfriend and I broke it off a few years ago, I used to sign into his e-mail account obsessively. It was sort of my way of hanging on while also trying to rationalize it was over (reading hurtful Gchat convos about all my faults as well as convos with his new lady).

On the other side of the coin, I found out my current boyfriend used to check my Gmail and was FURIOUS. It's hard to separate yourself from what you do that is a breach of privacy and what you expect for yourself. When you share passwords (which always inevitably happens to me), you share a new piece of information that didn't exist before. It means new problems!

Photograph of couple at laptop by Jack Hollingsworth/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: email, Facebook, oversharing, passwords, relationships, secrets & lies

Having encountered the complicated love life of Peter Orszag, the media's primary response seems to be shock that multiple women would willingly procreate with the man. Personally, I'm more taken by journalists' enduring attachment to the phrase "love child." I've yet to read an Orszag analysis that does not make liberal use of the phrase. What distinguishes love children from non-love children? Presumably the former is a euphemism for children born out of wedlock, and it's certainly softer than various other euphemisms for the same. But it does seem odd that we're still calling out the 40 percent of American kids born to unmarried parents. (I'm not even sure who this stigmatizes; are kids born to married parents conceived out of dreary obligation?) The phrase also connotes scandal and secrecy; John Edward's daughter was baptized as a love child the moment she was discovered. But again, this seems weird in the Orszag context. Young Tatiana was apparently conceived within the dull confines of a committed relationship. It's not much of a scandal at all, which is perhaps why everyone is leaning so hard on the geek-chic angle.

Photograph of Peter Orszag by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: peter orszag

I am of two minds about the story from the Newark Star-Ledger that says that the recent Newark airport security breach was caused by a couple kissing goodbye. On the one hand, it’s outrageous (though not entirely surprising, alas) that people could be so absolutely selfish that they would violate security protocols and inconvenience thousands of people for hours to sneak a few last moments together before a flight. I only hope they had the decency to be ashamed of themselves when they realized what a mess they had created.

On the other hand, we probably owe this as-yet-to-be identified couple a huge thank you. Because they have exposed that, mere days after an attempted flight-based terror attack and at an airport from which one of the 9/11 flights departed, that all you have to do to get past TSA is lift a rope. Kinda makes all the debate about the full-body scanners seem pointless and proves Anne Applebaum right for saying that all our spending on Homeland Security and TSA has been misdirected.

Tags: Homeland Security, Newark security breach, terror, Terrorism, TSA, underwear bomber

Is Jay-Z the only black man to make it big in the white world without giving up his authenticity? A new piece in Esquire seems to think so. As part of the magazine's "People Who Matter" February issue, writer Lisa Taddeo profiles the rapper/entrepreneur and concludes that Jay-Z has managed the near-impossible: He's maintained his roots (or what Taddeo calls his "black black" as opposed to "Barack black") while still fully entering the upper echelons of old-school white gentility (the piece opens with an anecdote about how Jay-Z charmed Bill Clinton to belly guffaws at New York's Spotted Pig, a restaurant Jay-Z co-owns). In Taddeo's own words:

But there is a deeper significance — a racial philanthropy — that perhaps neither man intended. Jay-Z is black black. He is old-school double-dark-chocolate-chunk black. He is black the way Labatt is blue. He is not white black, Barack black, like our president. Or the kind of black that doesn't curse and deplores the n-word, the genteel black, like Oprah. He is, arguably, the first black-black guy to cross over into Oprah-land and Bill Clintonworld without making the Oprah-sized no-look-back forward flip that means you're selling not necessarily your soul but perhaps something fleshier, a little more external.

Of course the Taddeo's concept of a more "authentic" black is a troubled one to parse, and bravely—or maybe stupidly—she doesn't tiptoe around it. There is something to be said for Jay-Z's ability to gather an audience that very literally identifies with the subjects of his lyrics—his upbringing in Bed-Stuy, selling crack on Brooklyn street corners for survival, a teenhood of violence and unrest—and one that hasn't experienced any of it, what Taddeo labels a "bar-mitzvah flavored audience," under the same stadium roof. But the most interesting parts of the article are when Taddeo delves into Jay-Z's very unique political foxiness with specific examples—say, how he essentially leveled Oasis's Noah Gallagher on stage after Gallagher said the rapper had no business headlining a rock festival, but shortly thereafter offered to collaborate with the Oasis frontman on a track. Or how he admonished Kayne West's VMA escapade at the same time he forgave it—chalking the outburst up to West's natural passion. His political deftness alone seems enough of a qualification for a Person Who Matters designation.

Tags: esquire, hip-hop, Jay-Z, Race

Late last year, a woman named Abby Johnson from Bryan, Texas, made a small splash by giving the Christian right some wank material by "converting" from being the director of the Bryan Planned Parenthood to an anti-choice activist, working with the very people who not only picketed her former workplace but also personally made her feel threatened. Johnson's story—how she saw an ultrasound-assisted abortion and suddenly realized that she was a naughty lady who had to change—immediately set off alarm bells for those of us who follow anti-choice mythology. Her story fit anti-choice narratives a little too well, while having real life holes that you could drive a truck through. Luckily, Nate Blakeslee of Texas Monthly decided that this story was too good not to investigate.

Rachael Larimore suggested at the time that we need to know more before we judge Abby Johnson, and boy, do we learn a lot from this story. Blakeslee tries very hard to be fair to Johnson, but finds her obtuse and untrustworthy, particularly since she says things to his face that are easy to disprove. Her claim that Planned Parenthood performs abortion for profit takes about two seconds worth of research to dispel, and her claim that she never felt threatened by anti-choicers is undermined by the fact that she had security cameras installed in her house. Blakeslee paints a compelling narrative of what likely happened: Johnson was being disciplined by her employers for poor job performance, and she got her revenge by switching sides, having heard daily promises from protesters that they would find her another job. And now Johnson enjoys the myriad benefits of being on Team Fetus that you don't get when you actually have to work hard to help people—making a bunch of speeches composed of nothing but anti-choice talking points means getting praise and validation without much work at all. Johnson admits to having more fun with this easier lifestyle and glowing under all the praise and attention.

But the biggest coup of Blakeslee's exposé centers around the conversion story itself. Pro-choicers have always been suspicious of Johnson's claim that she saw an ultrasound-assisted abortion and then saw the light. This sort of story seems ripped straight from anti-choice propaganda and doesn't really owe much to the daily life of a clinic worker in the real world. But this turns out to be more true than even the most cynical of us could have imagined. Blakeslee examines Planned Parenthood's records on the day that Johnson claims to have seen this abortion performed, and found no evidence of an ultrasound abortion. When he asked her to describe the patient, she said she was a black woman, and Blakeslee discovered that the only black patient to have an abortion that day was at six weeks, not 13, as Johnson described.

I wish I could say I'm surprised by this revelation that yet another anti-choice activist appears to have a loose relationship with the truth, but I'm not. Nor can I say I'm especially surprised to see anti-choicers gain a convert by preying on someone's personal demons and resentments; when your movement is organized around hostility to sexual liberation, preying on people's resentments is basically what you do. I hope this revelation gives folks pause who want to think the best of anti-choice activists—when they tell stories that sound too good to be true, that's because they are. We all want to believe that there's something moral and good below the surface of anti-choice protesters, because the surface appearance—people who seek out known sexually active women so they can guilt them, scream at them, try to scare them with threats of exposure by taking their picture, lie to them, and even chase them for physical confrontations—almost seems too ugly to be believed. But sometimes we just simply have to believe our eyes and accept that the ugliness we're seeing is real.

The people who deserve sympathy and understanding are the stalwart employees of the Bryan Planned Parenthood. They work in the toxic stew that is the Bible Belt, where judgmental attitudes about sexuality result in the predictable irresponsible sexual behavior, from people who want to work out nature's urges but are too ashamed to take basic contraceptive precautions. Nearby Texas A&M ranked No. 79 in the most recent Trojan Sexual Health Report Card, compared with the University of Texas in the far more liberal Austin, which ranked No. 16. The employees at Bryan Planned Parenthood have to crawl over a sea of protesters to get to work so they can spend their day cleaning up the messes that those same protesters—and their judgmental, sex-phobic comrades who don't protest—created.

Tags: Abby Johnson, planned parenthood

We try to be patient with the right’s enduring queasiness about homosexuality, but then every once in a while they drop one so obnoxious it makes you want to assign their kid the gay teacher on purpose. The Family Research Council’s latest crusade—Stop Obama’s Cross-Dresser Protection Bill—launched this morning. Of course there is no such thing as the “Cross-Dresser Protection Bill.” What the Christian right group is referring to is the following:

On New Year's Eve, when most Americans were waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square, the Obama Administration dropped another bombshell in its agenda to radicalize America by appointing its first openly "transgender" person to a high federal post. "Transgender" is an umbrella term for anyone who "expresses" a "gender identity" contrary to their biological sex at birth-in other words, men who claim to be (and dress as) women, and vice versa.

Note the spy-boudoir scene setting, the military metaphor, the extraneous Dr. Evil-style parentheses. Now, either it was a bombshell or a stealth maneuver; it can’t be both. The truth is that the administration was very low-key about the appointment of Amanda Simpson as a senior technical advisor to the Commerce Department, which is hardly a visible post. She has worked for many years in aerospace and defense, and convinced Raytheon, where she worked, to adopt gender identity into its workplace policies. She also ran for a House seat in Arizona. If Raytheon, not a bastion of pro-gay radical thinking, can handle it, so can the federal government.

Now for the true yokel insult. Amanda Simpson is not a cross-dresser. She had a sex-change operation. If you think for a moment about what that entails, you should bow before that intense level of commitment, not mock it.

Tags: Amanda Simpson, crossdresser protection bill, Mitchell Simpson, Obama appoints transgender, transgender and Obama