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Otago Daily Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Escaping into romantasy
The huge popularity of romantasy fiction's handsome princes and horny dragons tells us something about what women want, writes Sophie Heawood. Newspaper headlines on our collective mental health report loneliness, isolation and anxiety. And while doctors are yet to suggest tragic princes, horny dragons and 800-year-old faeries shape-shifting in the immortal realm as a potential cure, the publishing industry most certainly is. I've met a lot of romance authors who trade in happily-ever-afters, only to reveal their own love lives to be a pit of despair. So it's rather satisfying when Lauren Roberts, who is all of 23 and has sold well over 5 million copies of her romantic fantasy series Powerless , turns up with a strong-cheekboned fiance who looks not unlike the love interest in her books. Not that her man is Kai, exactly — the handsome killer prince with a tortured soul and the ability to channel anyone's magic powers, battling a cruel father who believes in an elites-only society — and not that she's quite Paedyn, a beautiful streetwise thief trying to pass herself off as a psychic to escape being put to death by the very royal she is falling for. "Because that doesn't happen", sighs the author from Michigan, who wears jeans and cardigans and black eyeliner and poetic tattoos about fragility, and whose books blew up in 2023 on TikTok. She certainly shares some of her heroine's relentless determination, though. At 18, she quit university to get a cleaning job so she could self-publish the book she'd been up excitedly writing until 4am some nights, only to then have it snapped up by major publishers Simon & Schuster and to speedily write several more. "But no, on our first date Zac and I went to see monster trucks at Detroit Stadium," she admits, sitting backstage before a sold-out event in London. Zac is with her, hanging on his girlfriend's every word just as a leading male character should. "But in a romantasy," says Roberts, "it's like: first date, oh my God that's my sworn enemy from a different kingdom and I'm riding a dragon". Romantasy, as you might have guessed, is the merging of romance with fantasy in commercial fiction, conjuring worlds where would-be lovers fight superhuman elements and oh-so-human feelings. It grew to critical mass in the pandemic, as people sought escape, with authors such as Sarah J. Maas, whose A Court of Thorns and Roses series starts with a 19-year-old woman falling for an ancient faerie man disguised as a beast. Rebecca Yarros only began in the genre in 2023, but this year published her third, Onyx Storm , which sold 2.7 million copies in its first week to become the fastest-selling adult novel of the past 20 years. The books are often dedicated to the readers themselves. Roberts's novella, Powerful , begins with the line: "To the girls with softer dreams — your purpose is just as powerful". Yarros goes a step further in Onyx Storm : "To the ones who don't run with the popular crowd, the ones who get caught reading under their desks, the ones who feel like they never get invited, included, or represented. Get your leathers. We have dragons to ride." "I think the reason 'romantasy' was coined in 2020 during the pandemic was because people were looking for that fun escape. That's why they are 500 pages, 800 pages — some of these books are like weapons," says Roberts, pretending to use one to whack someone over the head. Some of them are what the BookTokers describe as "spicy", written from the female gaze, full of orgasms and even interspecies love-making. But Roberts, who was raised as an evangelical Christian, writes for a young adult (YA) audience, keeping hers cleaner and full of longing. At a live London event she holds for her fans — many of whom have flown in from all around Europe — teenagers and young women fill the room with gasps and screams. As someone raised around women's rights activism in the 1980s, I did not foresee 2025 bringing me to vast rooms of young women willingly calling themselves "girlies". But this is the internet parlance that everyone here uses, Roberts in particular. It's all girlies, it's all "Oh my God, you look so pretty", it's the host Bella Pritchard saying she wants to link a Taylor Swift song to every relationship in the book and everyone squealing. "We all want tall, dark and handsome," says Roberts about her male leads. Looking around the venue, it's clear this is the generation who grew up watching makeup tutorials. Everyone looks immaculate, even if they're 12. I feel like I haven't seen a woman with short hair in 100 years. Humourless, middle-aged feminism surges within me. When the actor who plays Kai in the audiobook comes on as a surprise guest, the girlies scream in ecstasy. When he is asked for his own favourite book, and he says Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five , they fall into a bemused silence, apart from one lone voice whooping, and that whooper is me. Roberts then speaks about the concept of yearning — and she suddenly sounds deadly serious. "I really liked writing a man where there's not much toxic masculinity in the way they treat their women," she says, and despite her hero being, erm, an assassin, I can see exactly what she means. Reading the books, I became so desperately fond of him that it was hard to put the man down. So when we're alone, I ask her to expand. "OK, we're in 2025, where men, most of the time, are not good. Obviously there are exclusions. But it begs the question: what does romantasy have that is so intoxicating? And I truly believe it is that yearning. It's a man who's going to physically protect you. There's no texting. No phones. It's an emotionally available man who's going to tell you how he feels." Suddenly I get it. This isn't the backlash to feminism. No, this is the backlash to porn culture. To feeling expendable. To being swiped past, haunted by bad news, ghosted by your lovers. To a world where politics feels unfixable. In romantasy, whole kingdoms can crumble when a woman fights for the truth. Societies can be fixed. Love can be found. In fact, the Powerless world steers well clear of dragons and goblins, and while some people do have magic powers, the entire plot hinges on misinformation about the Ordinaries that is being used to prop up the Elites. I wonder if Roberts will shy away from political comparisons but no, she likes it "when people notice that it's topical. Because there very much are Elites and Ordinaries in our world. There's hierarchy, there's poverty, things that are not being addressed. But it wasn't that I wanted to write an expose of America. It was more that art imitates life and I write what I see". Back at the event, this phenomenon is also, according to one German woman I meet who has flown her daughters here from Dusseldorf, something that gets non-readers to read. "My daughter, Antonia, would usually rather shoot herself than write — she hates it. But she wrote to Lauren to thank her for writing that book. I've never heard her so emotional in 14 years", the proud mum tells me. "And her sister Victoria, she's 12, it's always a fight to get her to read at all. But, finally, two weeks ago, she picked up the first one and read it in one go, for the first time in her life! And then she wrote to Lauren, too, and said, 'I cried, I laughed, I went through every emotion a human being can go through. And I thank you'. And then I thought, 'Oh my God, I thank you too!'." The books are quite violent as well as romantic. When I speak to the kids, the deaths seem to break their hearts in two. One says, "I was literally crying so hard at the last one that my sister asked, 'Are you OK?'." They all speak about Roberts on first-name terms, feeling a kinship with the author who posts funny videos online direct from her living room, at the desk where she writes the books, sharing her plans, her sense of humour, the dog. It all feels so much nearer than it once did. I realise how cancel culture could be so meaningful to a generation for whom the art and the artist are both equally close to you. If you're in a parasocial relationship with someone, of course you care how they behave. There are adult fans, too. I meet two women in their 30s from Cambridgeshire: Katy, who works for the NHS, and her friend, Danielle. They are in a community on Instagram who engage in "buddy reads", 20 to 30 women in an online book club with people they've never met. Katy reads on her phone, syncs the audiobooks to her car as she drives to work, and has shelves full of the print versions at home. "But those are more like trophies," she explains. Lily and Jillpa, in their early 20s, tell me that social media, so often vilified for ruining our attention span, is making them read more books, because of the risk of someone posting a spoiler from a new release before they get to the end. I ask them about plots that keep you waiting ages for the romance to build up. "Slow burn," they reply, in unison — everyone knows the shorthand. On BookTok, one user will post about a new favourite, only for another to ask if it's a love triangle, because they hate that trope, they say, but they're good with forced proximity, or enemies to lovers, or even fated mates. "If I hear people shouting for a certain trope that doesn't affect the plot of the book," Roberts says, on stage, "I'm a woman of the people, I'll use it. So sue me". On the one hand, the audiences believe so deeply in this fictional universe that they're wearing homemade shirts saying things like "We Love Kai Azer" or "Team Kai", but they're simultaneously savvy of all literary devices that create these worlds. In my day you wouldn't have said the word trope unless you were doing an English degree, but Romantasy isn't afraid to be uncool. Or to mix the strange with the familiar: in fact, that's how it works. It uses escapist elements to take us away from our lives, only to build up to a swooning or heartbreaking moment that, crucially, could actually happen to any one of us. Readers relate most to the part where a prince who has fought his way through a supernatural trial, say, quietly picks up his beloved's shoes. When I tell my 13-year-old what I'm researching she sneers, saying she sees girls at school reading romantasy, that the covers look naff. I could agree with her — and these are YA novels, after all, so not meant for me — but the unfortunate truth is that I'm halfway through the trilogy and now deeply invested in it. The power of Lauren Roberts' writing is that, although very unsafe things happen in this world she has built, you start to feel very safe in it. The writing seems to hold you. Still, there are only so many ways to smoulder and suffer for 800 pages at a time. Like any genre of fiction, the tropes repeat and the sentences start to become synonyms for their predecessors. You're halfway through the second book before Paedyn and Kai even so much as kiss — and that's a tortured one. Then there's a decent snog, but it takes place in a sewer, in which they are about to drown. By this point I feel I might go and watch some pornography myself, just to speed things up a bit. Instead, I post on social media to tell my friends what I'm working on, and ask if anyone likes these books. I get lots of positive replies, but most sent as private messages. These are largely heterosexual stories written for women and they seem to be particularly popular at a time where actual romance has never felt more disconnected. Where the birth rate is down, marriage is down, and ghosting and loneliness are up. But it's not just the stories themselves that uplift people — the communities around them are creating real connection, too. Many romantasy authors start out self-publishing for grassroots readers, later to get picked up by mainstream publishers. Their fans often buy both copies — the "indie" version, then what they call the "traditional" — but with conflicted feelings, because a mainstream deal means the sequels are going to take so much longer to come out. Self-publishing is quicker. Indeed, while not denying the talent and commitment of the authors, the whole romantasy project feels quite crowdsourced. Roberts joined TikTok as a fan of other authors and built up an audience discussing their works, but once she had an idea of her own — about a heroine who, unusually, doesn't have any special powers, but is having to fake them to survive — she asked her followers if they would read it. They said hell yes, so she got to work, sharing extracts as she went along. She even called her heroine Paedyn after a follower in a TikTok Live who said she'd never seen her name in a book. Then came up with Kai and his brother Kitt by Googling "fierce hot male names". After the books started coming out, a fan theory grew about a pivotal character called Callum being a "dual". "It was wrong", Roberts tells me, but she worked with her editors to see if they could actually incorporate it into the story — and they did, so wrong became right. She calls her US and UK editors her left and right brain, the English one being very imaginative — "we're both dreamers" — whereas the US one brings her back down to earth. She leaves them voice notes every day to test out her new plots. I watch Rebecca Yarros being interviewed on YouTube by a group of women from Entertainment Weekly who all have enviable careers, also call themselves "girlies" and squeal a lot. "It's a little bit Hunger Games , a little bit Game of Thrones , maybe some How To Train Your Dragon for good measure", says one, when introducing Yarros's work, and the author sits there nodding as all her influences are reeled off. Most artists squirm if their art is compared to anyone else's, but in romantasy, you name your sources freely. Then they ask why she switched to romantasy after previously publishing straight romance novels. "When I knew my publisher was going to do a romantic fantasy line, I got really excited and I submitted five ideas," Yarros tells them. "She went through those and found where there was a hole in the market. She said: 'We're gonna go with the dragons'." I'll say one thing for romantasy: nobody, but nobody, is trying to hide how the sausage is made. Private Eye even reported in May that a couple of authors had been caught seemingly using ChatGPT to write sections of their books. Dark Obsession: An Age Gap Bratva Romance by KC Crowne apparently went on sale containing the following paragraph: "Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humour while providing a brief, sexy, description of Grigori. Changes are highlighted in bold for clarity." Roberts and her fiance have known each other since high school, where his mother was Lauren's English teacher — the one who encouraged her all along, putting her essays forward for regional competitions. Their families shared an evangelical Christian background; the young couple still have faith, but stress that they are "not rigid, not conservative" and believe the church should be "loving and welcoming". Roberts does thank the Lord in her book's acknowledgements, though, and tells me, "I do think all of this came to be because there is a higher purpose for all of this — truly, I do believe it — so I feel very blessed". But her English teacher helped, too. "Oh his mom's always taking the credit — as she should!" Zac brings his tech job on the road with them so he can help. At an influencer lunch, held by leading fantasy book-subscription service FairyLoot, he helps get video footage; at the auditorium event he deals with all the flowers and gifts before sneaking round the back of the venue to get the best photo of his beloved on stage. Men in these books want their women to thrive and be their best and brightest selves. They are turned on by their powerfulness rather than emasculated by it. Indeed, it interests me that romantasy heroines are never the glossiest candidates for passion: for example, Yarros's lead character, Violet, endures various chronic illness symptoms while battling to keep up with her overbearing mother. Of course, storytelling as a form has always championed the underdog (David and Goliath; now there's a trope). But there is something about these women, with their health conditions, their rough starts sleeping in a slum, surrounded by death — Jilly Cooper it ain't, but sexy it is. Underestimated women battling their way to greatness and their lovers desiring them for it. "I tried to date Lauren for years, but she would always ignore me," Zac tells me as I meet them for breakfast at Heathrow before they fly to an event in Dublin. All that yearning, finally paying off. We discuss her brand of escapism some more before I'm left alone to read that day's news. Ah, the real world, I think to myself somewhat reluctantly. Except all of the newspaper headlines are about our very own tragic prince, Harry, being estranged from his father the King, after breaking the immortal code of our kingdom and fleeing to another. The others are about Trump reshuffling his courtesans in a new bid to save his very own elites, while denying that they're elites at all. Then there's a third one about a man who may have developed a whole new kind of anti-venom after being bitten by 200 poisonous snakes. Romantasy doesn't seem so far-fetched after all.
Daily Record
4 days ago
- Daily Record
Parents of teen who plunged to his death say he was 'trying to escape' and not suicidal
The Met Police is facing mounting criticism over its handling of the mysterious death of a teen, who plunged from a luxury riverside apartment across from MI6 HQ. The parents of a 19-year-old public schoolboy who plunged to his death from a luxury apartment across from MI6 HQ insist he wasn't suicidal and the police should have done more. Zac Brettler, a pupil at the £30,000-a-year Mill Hill School in north London, died in 2019 after falling from the Riverwalk apartment complex on the banks of the Thames. The MI6 building's CCTV captured his fall, reports the Mirror. The teenager, who was said to be oligarch-obsessed, had spun wild stories about being a Kazakh millionaire, a friend of Virgil Van Dijk, and the son of a dead Russian oligarch. He was found dead with 'drowning and multiple injuries', according to the coroner. His jaw was broken, but the cause of that injury remains unexplained. Now, grieving parents Rochelle and Matthew Brettler, both 61, are demanding answers, accusing detectives of showing 'no curiosity' and failing to pursue critical evidence, The Times reports. Zac's father told The Sunday Times: 'I knew Zac and it just wasn't right, the overnight bag he'd taken, the messages he'd sent, the plans we'd made. It didn't sit well with anybody, not out of any stigma issue, but it didn't. Also, who commits suicide in front of someone else?' Scotland Yard originally treated Zac's death as suicide, reportedly not even attending the flat until four days later. It's reported that forensic opportunities were missed, including blood-like smears in the bathroom and bedroom, and a wiped section of glass on the balcony from which Zac is believed to have fallen. None of it was tested, the family says. Zac's grieving parents say he was trying to escape from whatever was inside the room, not attempting to end his own life. On the night he died, Zac had even emailed his mum about booking a driving test and packed an overnight bag with clothes for several days. Zac's final night was spent with two men: Dave 'Indian Dave' Sharma, 55, a known gangster with a heroin-smuggling past, and Akbar Shamji, 52, a cryptocurrency trader and son of a wealthy Tory donor. Both men were in a financial dispute with Zac. They were arrested on suspicion of murder but never charged. In a sinister twist, Sharma was later found dead in the same flat in 2020, from what was reported as a drug overdose. Two days before his death, Zac told a friend his family had been threatened, and he had searched online for information about witness protection, according to The Times. Text messages from the day Zac died appear to paint a chilling picture. At 4.30 pm, Sharma wrote: 'He's not allowed to run away now.' Six hours later, a string of disturbing messages followed: 'Heating up knives and cleaning the blood,' Sharma texted. In a voice note, he added: 'Come to f*** ing Pimlico and pick up this f*** ing car and drop me home, bro. I don't wanna drive right now. And give me the f***ing pill when you get here, man, s***t's about to go wrong. Wrong!' Zac, also known by the name Zac Ismailov, had become fascinated by wealth and power during his time at Mill Hill, where many students were the children of Russian elites. He claimed to be the heir to a fortune blocked by his mum in Dubai. According to one report, he hoped to go into business with Sharma, who had been previously arrested in 2002 for heroin smuggling, and was later linked to a gangland murder in 2003. Sharma fled to France to avoid capture, dodging a Europol manhunt, and later returned to London without being arrested, leading Zac's father to question if Sharma had become an informant. In response to mounting criticism, a Met Police spokesperson said: 'Our sincere condolences remain with Zac Brettler's family, and we understand the uncertainty about how their son died must continue to be the cause of unimaginable pain. 'Whenever someone dies unexpectedly in London, we have established policing protocols to follow, and the investigation into Zac's death was led by an experienced detective. 'The team worked hard to explore every possible hypothesis, which were shared with Zac's family, but ultimately we were not able to provide fuller answers. The case was also reviewed by specialist homicide detectives to ensure every line of enquiry had been exhausted. 'As with any case, we would always encourage anyone who believes they have additional information or evidence to contact police. Any new information will be examined on its own merit by a team led by experienced detectives.' Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! 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Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Daily Mirror
Teen died in London fall from luxury apartments, parents fear foul play
The parents of a teen who plunged to his death from a luxury apartment insist he wasn't suicidal and the police should have done more. Zac Brettler had emailed his mum the night before the incident about booking a driving test The Met Police is facing mounting criticism over its handling of the mysterious death of a 19-year-old public schoolboy, who plunged from a luxury riverside apartment across from MI6 HQ. Zac Brettler, a pupil at the £30,000-a-year Mill Hill School in north London, died in 2019 after falling from the Riverwalk apartment complex on the banks of the Thames. The MI6 building's CCTV captured his fall. The teenager, who was said to be oligarch-obsessed, had spun wild stories about being a Kazakh millionaire, a friend of Virgil van Dijk, and the son of a dead Russian oligarch. He was found dead with 'drowning and multiple injuries', according to the coroner. His jaw was broken, but the cause of that injury remains unexplained. Now, grieving parents Rochelle and Matthew Brettler, both 61, are demanding answers, accusing detectives of showing 'no curiosity' and failing to pursue critical evidence, The Times reports. Zac's father told The Sunday Times: 'I knew Zac and it just wasn't right, the overnight bag he'd taken, the messages he'd sent, the plans we'd made. It didn't sit well with anybody, not out of any stigma issue, but it didn't. Also, who commits suicide in front of someone else?' Scotland Yard originally treated Zac's death as suicide, reportedly not even attending the flat until four days later. It's reported that forensic opportunities were missed, including blood-like smears in the bathroom and bedroom, and a wiped section of glass on the balcony from which Zac is believed to have fallen. None of it was tested, the family says. Zac's grieving parents say he was trying to escape from whatever was inside the room, not attempting to end his own life. On the night he died, Zac had even emailed his mum about booking a driving test and packed an overnight bag with clothes for several days. Zac's final night was spent with two men: Dave 'Indian Dave' Sharma, 55, a known gangster with a heroin-smuggling past, and Akbar Shamji, 52, a cryptocurrency trader and son of a wealthy Tory donor. Both men were in a financial dispute with Zac. They were arrested on suspicion of murder but never charged. In a sinister twist, Sharma was later found dead in the same flat in 2020, from what was reported as a drug overdose. Two days before his death, Zac told a friend his family had been threatened, and he had searched online for information about witness protection, according to The Times. Text messages from the day Zac died appear to paint a chilling picture. At 4.30 pm, Sharma wrote: 'He's not allowed to run away now.' Six hours later, a string of disturbing messages followed: 'Heating up knives and cleaning the blood,' Sharma texted.,= In a voice note, he added: 'Come to f*** ing Pimlico and pick up this f* ** ing car and drop me home, bro. I don't wanna drive right now. And give me the f***ing pill when you get here, man, s***t's about to go wrong. Wrong!' Zac, also known by the name Zac Ismailov, had become fascinated by wealth and power during his time at Mill Hill, where many students were the children of Russian elites. He claimed to be the heir to a fortune blocked by his mum in Dubai. According to one report, he hoped to go into business with Sharma, who had been previously arrested in 2002 for heroin smuggling, and was later linked to a gangland murder in 2003. Sharma fled to France to avoid capture, dodging a Europol manhunt, and later returned to London without being arrested, leading Zac's father to question if Sharma had become an informant. In response to mounting criticism, a Met Police spokesperson said: 'Our sincere condolences remain with Zac Brettler's family, and we understand the uncertainty about how their son died must continue to be the cause of unimaginable pain. 'Whenever someone dies unexpectedly in London, we have established policing protocols to follow, and the investigation into Zac's death was led by an experienced detective. 'The team worked hard to explore every possible hypothesis, which were shared with Zac's family, but ultimately we were not able to provide fuller answers. The case was also reviewed by specialist homicide detectives to ensure every line of enquiry had been exhausted. 'As with any case, we would always encourage anyone who believes they have additional information or evidence to contact police. Any new information will be examined on its own merit by a team led by experienced detectives.'
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Can Sound Therapy Really Heal Your Brain?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." The term 'nervous breakdown' is no longer used—'mental-health crisis' is the nomenclature du jour—but I think I had one two years ago. My journey into the psychological night was precipitated by a propensity for clinical depression and catalyzed by the death of my father, the loss of two friends to suicide, and my husband's transition into a wheelchair after years of chronic illness. I don't believe that sound therapy cured me. I gradually escaped the darkness through medical intervention from a brilliant Russian psychiatrist who was well worth his exorbitant fee. But throughout my odyssey, I relied on sound-healing tools for comfort. I regularly attended in-person sound baths with a Los Angeles sound-bowl practitioner, Devon Cunningham, which helped me return to the world by lying on a mat in public, surrounded by strangers. At home, I soothed anxiety using a YouTube video with a very long title: 'SLEEP RELEASE [Insomnia Healing] Deeply Relaxing Sleep Music * Binaural Beats.' The 'SLEEP RELEASE' audio that accompanied me through what Emily Dickinson would call 'a funeral in my brain' was created by a musician from the Netherlands who, like Prince, is simply named Zac. Zac's YouTube channel, @SleepTube, offers a seemingly infinite collection of audio tracks with subtitles like 'Binaural Delta Brainwaves @2.0Hz' to alleviate worry and foster sleep. He has nearly a million subscribers, including one video ('The DEEPEST Healing Sleep | 3.2Hz Delta Brain Waves | REM Sleep Music – Binaural Beats') that has racked up more than 45 million views. But Zac's free YouTube channel is only the tip of the contemporary sound-healing iceberg. International media-music and intellectual-property giant Cutting Edge has launched a wellness division, Myndstream, and is currently partnering on wellness music with producer and rapper Timbaland, as well as on an album with Sigur Rós's Jónsi. In a 2023 interview with Harper's Bazaar, Reese Witherspoon espoused the benefits of falling asleep to binaural beats, and on a recent episode of Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast, actress Rashida Jones discussed using sound-wave technology to manage road rage. So why has sound healing, which has a 2,000-year history rooted in the singing bowls of Nepal, Tibet, and India, become so popular in the Western zeitgeist? What exactly is a binaural beat? And what does it do to our brains? Manuela Kogon, a clinical professor and integrative-medicine internist at the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine, describes binaural beats as an 'auditory illusion.' 'If you give the brain two different sounds that have different frequencies but are close together—within 30 hertz of each other—the brain is like, 'What the fuck? There are two sounds. What am I supposed to do?' ' she explains. 'The brain can't differentiate that. It can't say that it's two; it also can't say it's one. It just averages the difference and hallucinates a new sound. It's kind of funny.' The binaural beat may be newly viral, but Kogon points out that they've been around for more than a hundred years. A German scientist named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered them and published a paper about his findings in 1839. Kogon, a self-described 'brain junkie,' has been studying them for decades; she digs out one of her papers from the '90s for me where she states that 'binaural beats have been purported to induce mood alterations, contingent on the beat frequency. Claims range from entraining the whole brain to altering states of consciousness.' Modern sound healing is not limited to binaural beats alone. Modalities include sound baths, guided meditation, tuning-fork therapy, vibroacoustic therapy, audiovisual technology, and music therapy, and the espoused results range from mood enhancement, sleep improvement, stress reduction, and relaxation to wilder claims of destroying cancer cells and manifesting wealth. A binaural beat or sound bath has not been proven to cure cancer or make you rich, but the beneficial effects of sound healing, according to Kogon, involve 'modulating physiology, including blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, EEG … altering immune and endocrine function, and improving pain, anxiety, nausea, fatigue, and depression and have been extensively studied.' Like many alternative wellness treatments and approaches, sound therapy seems to have increased in popularity during Covid. 'We were all stuck at home,' says New York–based sound-healing practitioner Lavender Suarez, author of the book Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives. 'So how could we get these same healing tools?' A sound-healing practitioner for 10 years and an experimental musician for 20, with an academic background in counseling and art therapy, Suarez uses physical instruments like gongs, often in repetitive patterns that function in similar brain-entraining ways to digital audio files. She's wary, though, of the claims tossed around related to sound frequencies. 'When people are prescriptive about sound frequencies, I'm like, hold on. Brain waves and sound waves are not in direct correlation,' she says. 'I think the interest in specific frequencies comes from our culture's obsession with data. We want that single-shot fix that's always been building in the wellness industry. How do we get to things quicker, faster? 'I only have X amount of time.' ' The impact of sound on healing may be just as much about the recipient's goals as it is about the healer's design. 'It's more about the intentions you're putting behind these binaural beats when you're listening,' Suarez says. 'When people are listening to these essentially generic audio files online, they're taking what they're bringing into it. The creator is trying to steer the intention by saying, 432 Hz for self-love. You go into it thinking, 'Okay, self-love.' But you could listen to binaural beats for sleep and go for a jog.' I spoke with Robert Koch, an official musical partner of the Monroe Institute, which bills itself as 'the world's leading education center for the study of human consciousness' and has extensive programming around sound technology to 'empower the journey to self-discovery.' Koch, who goes by the stage name Robot Koch, is an L.A.-based composer, producer, and sonic innovator who began his career as a heavy-metal drummer. He now embeds signals produced by the Monroe Institute into his compositions. 'I'm my own guinea pig,' says Koch. 'I try these things on myself, and I can tell when something works on my nervous system because I get more relaxed. I trust it to be real because I experience it subjectively.' Koch sent me a Spotify link to one of his Monroe Institute collaborations, titled 'Ocean Consciousness.' I found the track relaxing and sleep-inducing, though the sirenic voices peppered throughout the piece made me melancholic. Maybe that's the point. 'It's powerful when people write to me about experiences they've had with my music helping them move through something emotional,' says Koch. 'Music isn't just entertainment. It's a language that speaks to the subconscious.' Virginia-based sound therapist and musician Guy Blakeslee works with clients on everything from alleviating anxiety and increasing physical energy to manifesting love and assisting with fertility issues. Blakeslee interviews his clients and then creates personalized 'sonic talismans' using custom blends of sounds, including Mellotron and Nord synthesizer tones, dolphin and whale sounds, honeybee sounds, and a heartbeat. 'Have you ever gotten anyone pregnant?' I ask him. 'I have met the baby,' he says. Blakeslee always believed in the healing properties of music, but it wasn't until he was hit by a car and suffered a traumatic brain injury that he began pursuing music as therapy. 'It was March 13, 2020, and I was unconscious in the hospital when lockdown took effect,' he says. 'I woke up in the pandemic with this brain injury and spent most of my time using music and sound to guide myself through the recovery process. I found that long, sustaining tones were healing and soothing. I went on to get certified through an online course. What I learned was what I'd intuitively discovered in my own recovery.' Musician, heal thyself. My sound practitioner, Devon Cunningham, who has played her singing bowls for Hermès and Dartmouth College and in outreach programs for Los Angeles County, also describes her trajectory from a job in real estate to sound-bowl practitioner as healing. Cunningham went on a plant-medicine retreat in Ecuador with her 80-something-year-old mother, and it was there that she first began playing the singing bowls. She found that sound healing provided additional benefits for her chronic lung disease. 'The bowls saved my life,' she says. When Cunningham ordered new quartz-crystal bowls for a residency at Colgate University, she discovered that 432 Hz, what she calls 'the god frequency,' had a heightened impact on healing. 'I witnessed people having experiences with these new 432 bowls that I hadn't seen with my 440 Hz bowls. Ever since then, I've been on the 432, and I've seen miracle after miracle.' While Cunningham's results with the god frequency are experiential, a 2022 study by researchers at University of Florence and Careggi University Hospital that was published in the journal Acto Biomedica concluded, 'Listening to music at 432 Hz is a low cost and short intervention that can be a useful resource to manage anxiety and stress.' Robert Koch composes music with a frequency called the Schumann resonance: a natural phenomenon, also known as the Earth's heartbeat, that has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hz. He's also pursuing vibroacoustics, where listeners feel sounds in their bodies. 'Einstein said that music is the medicine of the future,' he notes. 'Vibration. And I think we're just scratching the surface.' I, myself, am no Einstein. Maybe this is why I find Brainwaves—the most popular binaural-beats app in the Apple App Store—overwhelming. Upon downloading the app, I'm asked which goals I hope to achieve, and I'm given an abundance of choices: Body Wellness, Binaural Sleep, Relax and Calm, Spiritual Awakening. Who doesn't want all of these things? I go with Spiritual Awakening and am brought to another page, where my path to enlightenment is broken down into still more categories: Connection with a Higher Power, Fulfillment and Meaning, Self-Understanding and Clarity. As an existentially challenged person, I choose Fulfillment and Meaning, but then I get FOMO and go back to the beginning. Rather than soothing my nervous system, the choices give me more anxiety. This choose-your-own-adventure approach is unsurprising, given that some of the latest sound-healing tools emerged from gaming. SoundSelf, an interactive audiovisual therapeutic, uses video-game technology, vocal-toning biofeedback, and generative soundscapes to induce drug-free psychedelic states. On Zoom, I meet with the audio director for the digital therapeutics company SoundSelf, Lorna Dune, a Milwaukee-based sound designer and electronic musician. Dune walks me through several experiments with immersive audiovisual tech. First, we tinker with bilateral light signals: a visual version of binaural beats purported to induce brainwave states like theta (associated with relaxation) and delta (emitted during deep sleep). The light signals make me anxious. But to be fair, a lot of things make me anxious. We then play with binaural beats at varying frequencies, and this experiment is much more successful. As we transition from an alpha (alert but relaxed) to theta, I feel a palpable shift to a more serene physiological state. Maybe this is the power of suggestion, but I could stay here all afternoon. 'Just like with binaural beats, you can look at dance music and how when we're all moving together to one rhythm, we synchronize,' says Dune. 'Our brain wants to synchronize. It's normal behavior that we've been displaced from in modern society. But we find it again through festivals and in pop culture. We say, 'Oh, it's something new.' No, it's actually just who we are.' Of course, we can't always be at a rave. Or in a sound bath. 'I'm happy for people to receive care in whatever way they can, as long as it's not detrimental,' says Suarez. 'I'm not like, 'No, don't listen to the YouTube audio.' If that's what's working for you, go for it.' The takeaway, says Kogon, is that 'acoustic therapies make people feel better, and it might be as simple as that the relaxation happens through focusing on sound, or associated imagery, rather than stressful thoughts, which most of us have too many of these days.' Two years later, I am still listening to the same YouTube audio from Zac's channel. Sometimes I even sleep soundly. This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Harper's Bazaar. 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AeroVironment (AVAV) Beats Q4 Earnings and Revenue Estimates
AeroVironment (AVAV) came out with quarterly earnings of $1.61 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.44 per share. This compares to earnings of $0.43 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of +11.81%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this maker of unmanned aircrafts would post earnings of $0.58 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.30, delivering a surprise of -48.28%. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates two times. AeroVironment, which belongs to the Zacks Aerospace - Defense Equipment industry, posted revenues of $275.05 million for the quarter ended April 2025, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 12.88%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $196.98 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates three times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. AeroVironment shares have added about 24.3% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 2.4%. While AeroVironment has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for AeroVironment was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $1.41 on $285.78 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $4.13 on $995.41 million in revenues for the current fiscal year. Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Aerospace - Defense Equipment is currently in the top 22% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. One other stock from the same industry, Outdoor Holding Company (POWW), is yet to report results for the quarter ended March 2025. This company is expected to post quarterly loss of $0.02 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of -300%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 100% lower over the last 30 days to the current level. Outdoor Holding Company's revenues are expected to be $11.8 million, down 70.8% from the year-ago quarter. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report AeroVironment, Inc. (AVAV) : Free Stock Analysis Report Outdoor Holding Company (POWW) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research
