So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 44) Who wants a monthly recap?

Welcome to November, and welcome back to a world that doesn't have the hateful daylight savings time. What better way to start the new month than by recapping the month that was? Here's what So What, Who Cares? covered in October; the specific issue where each topic was covered in depth appears in parenthesis for easy searching in your mail client.

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Obviously the biggest story of the month was that Martha Stewart ran a hilarious feature on how to throw a punk rock-themed children's party (vol 1, issue 40), which puts the larger national trend -- punks are quietly remaking American institutions ranging from malls to churches -- in perspective (vol 1, issue 39), right?

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Here is tech news from the future: Facebook is among the companies that will be making a lot of money off you without bothering to tell you how it's selling your data or what data it's aggregating in the first place (vol 1, issue 26). Evernote is going to start cramming its partners' content into your notebooks (vol 1, issue 32). Wearable electronics could become the first female-dominated tech sector (vol 1, issue 36). Computer tablet sales are slower than analysts expected, mostly because analysts did not expect American consumers to finally find an electronics category they did not compulsively upgrade every year (vol 1, issue 39). Now that Kindles and iPods have taken the fun out of being a music snob, look to smartphone cases as the next way people will judge others based on their personal tastes (vol 1, issue 42).

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This is your reminder that if you're a water policy nerd, this is your moment to shine (vol 1, issue 25). And if you're all for giving animals legal personhood, there's some new fodder to support the notion that we are not the only species whose individuals have varying personalities (vol 1, issue 27).

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The Economist notes that technological advances are altering the employment markets in such a way where "vast wealth is being created without many workers; and for all but an elite few, work no longer guarantees a rising income." (vol 1, issue 28) America's big businesses are also beginning to get very nervous about the country's vanishing middle class and widening income gulf (vol 1, issue 37), and yet economists bicker over the feasibility of paying everyone as handsomely as the Container Store, Costo and Trader Joe's pay their people (vol 1, issue 38). One possible course of action in the face of a shifting workforce: a "maker economy" populated by small-scale artisans and the services they use (vol 1, issue 29). It may be the one way Americans can get something resembling a sense of control over their lives and how work fits into them; research supports the ideas that overwork is bad for productivity and work-life balance is the time-management equivalent of a beautiful pegacorn (vol 1, issue 41).

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Look for a few new trends in luxury markets: subscription boxes that offer "curated collections" to people who love getting rando stuff in the mail (vol 1, issue 34) and waitlists as part of an online luxury retail experience (vol 1, issue 29). Still, you should never underestimate the power of bricks-and-mortar retail outlets: Amazon's trying a pop-up shop in NYC to see if shoppers can be trained to want and expect a retail experience that moves across multiple channels (vol 1, issue 31) and it's wooing the Etsy class with its new payments hardware+ reports designed to gain it a class of merchants who regard multichannel as standard operating procedure (vol 1, issue 41).

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Offering egg-freezing as a workplace perk may exacerbate the growing gulf between socioeconomic classes when it comes to how and when women add to their families (vol 1, issue 33) -- the timing of which lends support to the observation that our cultural definition of adulthood has changed from "Got married, had kids" to "Accepted responsibility for self, gained financial independence and made independent decisions." (vol 1, issue 35)

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AND IN POP CULTURE NOTES ...

I gushed about a lot of comics last month, including: Gail Simone & Jim Calafiore's Leaving Megalopolis (vol 1, issue 26); Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez's Locke and Key (vol 1, issue 32); Promethea by Alan Moore (vol 1, issue 41); and Gail Simone's Secret Six (vol 1, issue 42).

I found some online videos that make you smarter -- We the Economy and The History of Western Architecture (vol 1, issue 40), a student movie that is a Wes Anderson/Land of the Lost pastiche (vol 1, issue 39), a funny little recut of the pending Avengers trailer (vol 1, issue 43), and a BBC Music redo of "God Only Knows" (vol 1, issue 30).

I need an excuse to share a story about zoo poop with you, so I recommended Kevin Allison's RISK! podcast (vol 1, issue 25) and Grace Bonney's After the Jump podcast aimed at creative professionals (vol1, issue 27).

I read books that were not comic books: Teri Agin's Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers (vol 1, issue 33); Sheri S. Tepper's Fish Tales and the Jinian trilogy (vol 1, issue 36); Kaya Oakes' Slanted and Enchanted: the Evolution of Indie Culture (vol 1, issue 29); Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (vol 1, issue 39).

I chatted a bit about television -- kvelling over Key & Peele (vol 1, issue 35), positing that Tom Cavanagh may be The Flash's secret weapon (vol 1, issue 37), and sounding the call on how great Lawrence Fishburne is on Blackish (vol 1, issue 28).

And finally, I talked about redneck reality TV and how it's coincident with the country's rising economic inequality. No word yet on whether any Container Store-hating economists will adopt the Honey Boo Boo indicator of national well-being (vol 1, issue 43).

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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "I remember there was an issue with a gratuitious picture of The Rock, but when ...?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was September 4, 2014, btw.)

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.