7 Tips for Buying Clothes Online

Suffering through ill-fitting clothes, scratchy materials, and shipping costs may sway you to stick to your current closet rather than hunt through countless sites. However, now that many dressing rooms are closed, online shopping offers an experience similar to being in the store, without the concerns of social distancing. Below are some tips to enhance the digital shopping experience.

1. Know your measurements and check for size charts

The biggest concern for online clothes shopping is usually the fit, because sizes vary greatly depending on the brand. To skirt the issue, take your measurements beforehand and check the size chart. Some sites’ size charts even tell you exactly where and how to measure your body, so you start with accurate information.

2. Read the reviews

Reviews can can attest to the durability of the clothes, the condition they arrived in, their comfort, and often how true they are to the size chart. Some reviews also include pictures from customers.

3. Check the material

This tip may not be intuitive for first-time online shoppers because material is easy to access in a store, but checking the fabric is important to determine the fit, look, and texture of the clothing. Knowing what a piece of clothing is made of helps you consider how the clothes will shrink, stretch, and feel when you wear them.

4. Try to find free shipping

Many online stores offer free shipping if you spend more than a certain amount of money. Buy the clothes you need all at once, and you won’t lose your shirt on shipping costs.

5. Filter your results

Online stores tend to offer more options than brick-and-mortar places because there is no storage limit. The vast amount of choices can be overwhelming. Most sites offer filters that can narrow your search by size, style, cost, and so on and make your shopping experience more efficient.

6. Read the return policy

Even with these tips in mind, the clothes you buy online may just not work for you. And that’s okay — if you know the return policy. Just make sure to send back any unwanted clothes in the given time. If a store doesn’t allow returns, consider looking elsewhere. You can often find a link to the return policy at the bottom of any page on the site.

7. Save time to ship

It could take about three weeks for the clothing to reach you — longer if you’re shopping internationally. Normally, this isn’t a big deal; just remember not to buy the dress you need for your friend’s wedding the day before the event.

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Contrariwise: Let’s Stop Bashing Millennials

“I believe that the abominable deterioration of ethical standards stems primarily from the mechanization and depersonalization of our lives — a disastrous byproduct of science and technology,” said Albert Einstein in 1946, as the first wave of baby boomers entered a new, post-war, consumerist culture that coincided with the rise of mass media. Those coddled, Dr. Spock-reared bundles of joy couldn’t have possibly known they’d grow up to be a cranky senior population complaining about their grandchildren’s addiction to smartphones. In fact, they formed the habits millennials would soon inherit.

Ever since the advent of the radio, older generations have complained about those damn kids and their new-fangled gadgets, fearing media consumption would lead to the degradation of society. In the 1950s, you may recall that satirists referred to TV as the idiot box or boob tube.

Let’s be honest — we’re all addicted to technology in one form or another unless we’re living off the grid.

Fast-forward to the present day, and the generational divide appears greater than ever as baby boomers and millennials trade digital blows in name-calling — from “snowflake” to “OK, boomer” — unaware that they’re more alike than they realize. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that while 93 percent of millennials own smartphones, baby boomers are not far behind at 68 percent with a rapidly growing adoption rate. Seventy years after television invaded our homes, we’re all staring at our screens, and now we’re bickering about them.

Let’s be honest — we’re all addicted to technology in one form or another — whether TV, Alexa, Nest, or Life Alert® — unless we’re living off the grid. While these new gadgets have had some negative impact, as all innovation does, they’ve done some good too.

Today, I can FaceTime with my grandma in Florida and see her smile each day without boarding an airplane. I can listen to records and watch TV shows without accumulating large quantities of crap in my home. My in-laws can leave me alone and go upstairs and watch Netflix on their iPad while I watch PBS on the overpriced cable I pay for. Should I go on?

No matter the current issue, oldsters have been groaning about younger generations for, well, generations. This concept isn’t new, it’s nature. If I had a dime for every senior I see complaining about millenials, I wouldn’t worry about having Social Security in 40 years.

—Raj Tawney is a journalist specializing in entertainment’s impact on culture

This article is featured in the July/August 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

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Gone, But Not Deleted: Keeping Your Loved One’s Memory Alive Online

I don’t remember the final conversation I had with my father. Toward the end of his life, he was hard to understand on the phone, as years of substance abuse and failing health had garbled his voice. He’d call at inopportune times — from a rehab center or hospital on the Cape, or the home of a friend in Florida he had somehow charmed his way into — and I’d hurry to get off the phone. Sometimes I’d find myself annoyed by his attempts to reconnect and let the call go to voicemail. It had been more than 15 years since we’d had anything resembling a normal relationship, and more than 30 since he and my mother had. Even in my frustration, though, it was hard not to think of his looming existential deadline. I may never get the chance to talk to him again, I’d say to myself. I always did. Until, of course, I didn’t.

On good days, he’d tell me about his latest living situation, calling from a flip phone with a number that changed as frequently as a drug dealer’s. He’d ask about my writing and where I’d traveled to lately, seemingly in awe of all the opportunities I had that he didn’t; even approaching 40, I’d revert to the role of a young boy eager to make his father proud, despite having received plenty of love from my mother and stepdad. He’d lobby me to put in a good word with my sisters on his behalf, a message I would relay. Just call the old bastard back, I’d tell them. You’ll regret it someday if you don’t.

I do, however, remember the exact day and time of our final few text exchanges, because they’re still on my phone, where, for at least as long as the cloud exists and I stay current on my bill, they’ll live forever. There’s a photo I sent him from December 2015, just after I’d had a chance to interview Tom Brady. What Massachusetts dad wouldn’t want to see that? It kind of breaks my heart to read his reply again now: “im so proud of u my son i cant wait to show everyone tomorrow i cant express my joy dad go get the big fish son agAIN IM TO PROUD FOR WORDS LOVE YOU DAD.”

Reading other texts from around that time makes me laugh: “i feel like such lo gool o gohurrf horp,” he wrote. “,,ro jlpw up pi f.” I still have no idea what he was talking about. And then in February 2016, the last message I’d ever receive: “hello my son how you doing today i have been in the hospital for two weeks now but I’m getting better TALK TO you Soon love Dad.” Three months later, he died of sepsis.

Our devices are where we carry out the business of living our lives. … Should they also be where we lug around our memories of the deceased?

I was thinking about those texts during a family dinner at my mother’s, not long after my father’s death. Someone had asked about a wall of photos that functions as an ad hoc memorial to assorted ancestors on my mother’s and stepfather’s sides, all mustachioed, bonneted, and stoic. The Wall of the Dead, we joked. But it occurred to me that the pictures are different from my father’s text messages — as are the letters I have stashed away from my beloved grandmother, stuffed with newspaper clippings she thought I’d like and uncashed $5 checks for “pizza.” My wife just found one in which my grandmother tried to persuade her to get me to give up on writing and find a real job. Those artifacts are moments frozen in time, part of my distant past.

Our phones, on the other hand, are tools we live with every day. I could respond to my dead father’s final text right now, adding to the running conversation. Our devices are where we carry out the business of living our lives and are increasingly our primary means of communicating with the people in them. Should they also be where we lug around our memories of the deceased? More to the point, do the digital ghosts the dead leave behind make it harder to let them go at all? The idea that the dead can speak to us feels like something from a horror or sci-fi movie. Yet the reverse, talking to them from the here and now, whether through prayer, quiet reflection, or even speaking out loud — You’d love this, wouldn’t you, Ma? — doesn’t seem strange at all. Keeping our loved ones stored in our smartphones, often not deleting their contacts for a long time after they’re gone, has made this even easier to do. We ask our devices for directions home, to bring us food, to broadcast our entire selves to the world. Now they’re also boxes we carry around that store our conversations with ghosts.

Megan Summers, who works for Facebook in New York, is the perfect example. She told me she has voicemails from two deceased friends that she can’t listen to now, but she needs to know they’re with her just in case. “It’s almost as though I am saving them for the future,” she says. “They just really need to be in the world to me. If I lost them, I’d be devastated.”

Shortly before Selene Angier, a copywriter from Cambridge, lost her mother, she received a voice message of her mom singing “Happy Birthday.” It was before she knew how bad her mother’s cancer was, and now, years later, the song serves as a time capsule of happier days. Angier listens to the recording on her cell on her birthday every year. She’s even backed it up, just in case she loses the phone. “I cherish that voicemail, and a few other random ones I have not deleted yet, even the super-boring stuff like ‘I’m running late, be there soon!’” she says. “It’s a great comfort to still hear her voice, more so on the day she brought me into this world.”

When we spoke, Angier’s father was dying of cancer and she was preparing his digital memorial, saving everything. “On my birthday,” she says,“I asked him to leave me a voicemail singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, so I’d have his, too. He mistimed the recording, and all that’s there is ‘…to you!’ followed by a minute of silence.” He’s since passed away.

Lindsay Mace, an administrative assistant for adults with disabilities who lives in Kingston, lost a close friend in 2011 and saved his contact in her phone for four years. For the first year and a half, she regularly dialed the number, telling me that “the saddest part was calling and not hearing his voicemail anymore but a disconnected line. I left one message for him after he passed. I just wanted to hear his voice and get some reassurance he wasn’t really gone.” Calling was a means of staving off some of the more overwhelming emotions, she says, things she couldn’t deal with all at once. “I finally erased it because I felt it was time. Long after the number had been shut off. Sort of like, I don’t need this anymore. I feel like I know he’s still here.”

Texts and voicemails are just two of the ways in today’s digital world that we can stay connected to those who’ve passed away. But when it comes to online memories, cherished or not, they’re hardly the only ones.

By some estimates,  8,000 to 10,000 Facebook users die every day. What survives is a trove of digital footprints, including posts, messages, and pictures. So where does it all go? Turns out you can name a legacy contact, typically a close friend or family member, to manage your profile in the event of your death. Immediate family members can also select the option to memorialize the account, turning off certain features, such as birthday reminders, which many users report are exceptionally painful to see.

Gmail, meanwhile, has a tool called the Inactive Account Manager that lets you tell Google what to do with your account after you have stopped using it for a certain amount of time. Before the deadline, Google will reach out to see if you’re still there, checking your digital vital signs. If you don’t respond, it will contact your preselected trusted contacts with a message you’ve written. “Hey man I’m dead lol. Don’t look at my nudes, please,” or something to that effect. And Twitter has the option to remove the account of a deceased family member, but only if you submit official proof of death — not exactly a breezy ask when you’re grieving.

Which brings me to my next point: As technology advances, it promises to change the very nature of how we mourn our loved ones. A few years back in Wired, writer James Vlahos documented his final few months with his father, during which he tried to ­capture the idiosyncrasies of his dad’s voice and upload it into an artificial intelligence chat software he called the Dadbot. It was an attempt to effect a sort of immortality — a concept many are working on around the world, and one sure to be improved upon.

Still, it’s worth asking: How can we ever move on in this brave new digital era if the dead are never truly gone? Right now, we don’t know much about the impact of our devices on mourning. There just haven’t been many studies of it, says Elsa Ronningstam, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital. I suspect that when it is studied, we’ll find that phones have vastly complicated, and perhaps even forestalled, our ability to grieve in a natural fashion.

Our digital mourning isn’t nearly as separated from our everyday lives as the experience of visiting a graveyard or holding a physical letter or photo. Such a ritual “is an act that has space and takes its time,” Ronningstam says. “That has been part of our human lives for many, many years.” The ease with which we can access memories of lost loved ones on our phones or social media accounts, on the other hand, may end up trapping us in our grief.

“Say you’re in a romance, and the romance breaks up and you’ve got that person’s voice on your telephone,” says Donnah Canavan, an associate professor of psychology at Boston College. “I think to the extent that you use listening to the person’s voice to keep you connected to that relationship, it’s bad for you.”

Still, allowing yourself to remember is part of the mourning process, says Michael Grodin, a professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine who works with trauma patients from around the world. “You can’t get rid of the memories, but you don’t want to constantly be in the ­moment.” In his estimation, there’s nothing abnormal or unhealthy about returning to digital artifacts; it’s no different from cherishing an old blanket or wearing a loved one’s T-shirt. It’s just a matter of monitoring the extent of it. “If it’s interfering with relationships, everyday functioning, your ability to work and carry on with life, then it’s worth seeking professional help,” Grodin says.

Even after all these interviews and the hours I’ve spent thinking about my father’s texts, it’s not entirely clear what they mean to me, or if they mean anything at all. Contending with the digital endpoint of a relationship with a person who was a constant and loving part of your life for a long time is a lot different from when it is a reminder of someone who was absent. I can no longer call my father on the phone, but that was true for most of my life anyway. Perhaps I should have done so more often. Perhaps he should have. Every text I have now is a glaring reminder that neither of us bothered to. I feel guilty about that. In part that’s because he had the foresight to die before my loving stepfather, hogging all of my good “my dad died” writing before the man who actually raised me could get the chance. I wonder if he was capable of thinking about any of this stuff in the last week or two he spent in a medically induced coma at the hospital as his children and exes reemerged to say goodbye one final time. It was like a dress rehearsal. We were talking to him, but he couldn’t talk back. I guess I’m doing the same thing now.

Although we still cannot speak directly to the dead, these days they can call back out to us. And what they say, whether in a voicemail, text, or tweet, is the most important message any of us will ever be able to convey: I was here. I am gone now, but I was here.

I just went back and looked at one of my last text messages to my father, sent shortly before he stopped responding. “Hi dad was planning on calling soon,” I wrote. “Glad to hear you’re well.” I wonder how long he saved that one from me? Probably right up until the end.

Luke O’Neil has written for Esquire, New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic and is the author of Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches from the American Dystopia (OR Books, 2019).

This article is featured in the July/August 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

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13 Virtual Festivals and Events This Summer

Summer is the time for rushing to crowded places to celebrate and experience culture. The best festivals and events in the country should be taking place in the next few months, but gathering hundreds of people together is ill-advised. Instead, lots of organizers have adapted their events to be experienced virtually. On the bright side, this could give even more people access to art, comedy, films, and other cultural events.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park Firefly Light Show

Each summer, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park lights up with 19 species of bioluminescent beetles, also known as fireflies. From late May to mid-June, a particular type of firefly flashes synchronously in the night during its mating season, and visitors flock to the park to witness the stunning display. Although the event was cancelled this year, Discover Life in America created a virtual experience with photographer Radim Schreiber so that anyone can see the natural light show from their own home.

The Pandemic Faire

This virtual art fair curates work from contemporary artists located around the globe for visitors to browse in lieu of attending art festivals in the real world. With new artists added weekly, the Pandemic Faire offers art lovers exposure to new creators along with links to purchase their work from galleries and personal websites.

Second City Online

The Chicago-based improvisational comedy troupe is offering a slew of free virtual programming for you to enjoy “from the discomfort of your own home.” By registering for the live performances with Zoom, attendees can watch and take part in weekly improvisational shows like Improv House Party, Girls Night In, and the family-friendly Really Awesome Improv Show Online. Second City has also released The Last Show Left on Earth, a four-episode YouTube variety show with sketches and musical guests (the first episode features one of the last appearances of the late, great Fred Willard).

All In WA

The first place in the U.S. to be hit hard by COVID-19, Washington state, has seen philanthropists and communities come together to organize a virtual concert to benefit its workers and families who have been hit hardest by the pandemic. All In WA is collecting donations to go toward food and housing insecurity in the state, and the concert, to be livestreamed on June 24, will feature Pearl Jam, Ciara, Macklemore, Dave Matthews, and more.

Blue Ox Music Festival

In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the Blue Ox Music Festival has brought bluegrass and Americana musicians to this family-friendly event since 2015. Although the festival will lack a live audience this year, the acts will still be livestreamed on YouTube on June 12 and 13. Sam Bush, Pert Near Sandstone, Charlie Parr, and Them Coulee Boys will perform, and Chicago-based bluegrass band The Henhouse Prowlers will give a talk about their experience teaching music in the U.S. and abroad.

Juneteenth

June 19th, the anniversary of the end of slavery in the U.S., is widely celebrated around the country. Denver’s celebration, which includes a music festival, awards, comedy, and financial literacy segments, will be livestreamed on June 18. Their celebration of African-American history also comes with a call to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

Stretching Arms

Through July 31, A Women’s Thing is holding an online exhibition and auction called “Stretching Arms.” The collection features young women artists from New Zealand, Russia, China, and Belarus and asks the question, “How do we transcend solitude?”

Electric Blockaloo

A rave, experienced through the videogame Minecraft, is calling itself “the world’s largest virtual music festival.” With more than 300 electronic artists and digital recreations of music venues and mini-games, admission to Electric Blockaloo on June 25-28 will require “guest list” links from artists distributed via social media.

Seattle Festál

Seattle’s summer (and fall) of cultural festivals will be taken online. The Chinese Culture and Arts Festival, Black Arts Fest, Iranian Festival, and more will offer dancing, art, workshops, and classes to anyone wishing to “make 2020 memorable for the resilience and beautiful moments of humanity,” and you don’t have to be in Seattle to enjoy it all.

CPR Summerfest

Colorado Public Radio’s annual festival of classical music features world-class musicians and singers performing for 10 weeks each summer. This year, CPR is bringing in Joshua Bell, the National Repertory Orchestra, and some of Colorado’s own musical institutions to keep classical selections playing all summer. You can tune in online or by using a smart speaker.

NYC Dance Week Virtual Fest

Dance studios in New York City are offering free dance classes from June 11-20, and they’re open to everyone everywhere. Ballet, yoga, jazz, hip-hop, and tons of other fitness lessons are on offer from a host of studios. If you ever wanted to try a professional class (or 10), this is your chance to do it with no commitment or cost.

Key West Mango Fest

If you were wondering what to do with all of those extra mangoes you have lying around, Key West Mango Fest might have a virtual answer for you. Join in on virtual cooking and cocktail demonstrations, contests, and shopping that revolve around the “king of fruits.”

deadCENTER Film Festival

Oklahoma City’s 20th annual film festival will be going virtual (with some possible drive-in options). By purchasing an all-access pass or individual tickets, you can stream the shorts, music videos, and feature films as well as see panels and workshops with filmmakers from around the globe.

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