The Cultured Girl

First off, let me apologize for the much slower pace of Cultured Girl postings lately. There is a good explanation, which is that I have been in the process of switching jobs. Tomorrow, I start my very exciting NEW job as the Associate Managing Editor of Sugar Publishing, a San Francisco startup that is building a network of blogs for young women, which so far includes popsugar.com (celebrity gossip), fabsugar.com (fashion/beauty), and dearsugar.com (advice). Initially, I will be the blogger/editor of Fabsugar.com, and I am really excited about the opportunity, because I think what the company is doing is very cool.

However, Sugar is trying to do much the same thing as Cultured Girl, but with multiple sites instead of just one. So while I will keep updating CulturedGirl.com, I won’t be able to post new content as often. I also hope you will follow me to Fabsugar.com (or whatever site I end up working on) and bring your always insightful and entertaining comments.

Pick just a few paragraphs out of the Los Angeles Times’s five-part “Altered Oceans” series, and you’ll never want to drop so much as a bottle cap on the beach again. Hardly just another tirade about litter, the extensive investigative package traces the life cycle of trash from the world’s cities and into its oceans. Each article focuses on a different but harsh side effect, from how altered ocean chemistries are radically changing natural habitats to gruesome stories of dead albatross birds whose bellies have been stuffed with non-biodegradable garbage. But the most startling fact by involves the masses of flotsam converging in the ocean where cold and warm water systems meet:

Trash “gets trapped for decades in swirling waters called gyres, but known informally as garbage patches. The one off the western U.S. is about twice the size of Texas. A smaller gyre is south of Japan.”

Wow. Plastic bags never sounded so scary.