Here’s sort of a dreamy funk rap where a handful of all-star collaborators dish on the sacrifices they’ve made to get where they are. In the process, they remind everyone listening that stardom is work; they also bring their own styles to each verse, but use structural parallels to cohere the mic handoff. Around the top of each verse, the rapper-in-charge makes some metaphor about himself: Saba is Asics; Smino is “Atlanta Claus;” and J. Cole is both Batman *and* Superman. Why? Listen and find out.
Adding to the laundry list of no-go consumer items, it turns out toilet paper is *also* bad for the environment, between all the virgin wood used, energy consumed, and chemicals expended to produce it. So suddenly there are all these startups looking to disrupt the space by “doing better”. “Who Gives A Crap;” “Cheeky Monkey;” and “No.2” of Goop Fame all make TP out of recycled paper and/or bamboo, and they’ll even deliver straight to your door– via subscription, no less– incurring enough environmental damage through freight and cardboard that you might as well have bought Charmin in the first place. Responsibility isn’t easy, kids.
And now for a product that adheres a bit better to its own values: Bite toothpaste is a glass bottle of capsules that you bite to burst, and then brush as usual instead of squeezing paste from a tube. The bottles are refillable, which means you’re not dumping impossible-to-recycle tubes in the trash, though it does require you to ship them back and forth. It would be sweet if a product like this could come anywhere near matching the price of Colgate or whatever (it’s currently $12 for a month’s supply)– more access = more impact.
To round out our bathroom offering, I looked up the world’s most sustainable soap, and the winner of my very cursory search appears to be these Living Naturally Soap Nuts, which are conveniently branded more on the hip side than hippie, and inconveniently are shipped from London for five times their selling price. Note to self: shipping actually does have a cost.
