{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download Carry My Heart by J.S. Cooper Along Came Baby. I just wanted to have some fun. It all started when I moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn and met my neighbor, Olivia. We became fast friends and so when she had to go out of town on an emergency work trip, I agreed to give her brother her keys so he could look after her dog. And then I met him. Her brother was Carter Stevens and he was sex on legs. He was a banker by day and a musician by night; arrogant, handsome, with the most tantalizing smile I'd ever seen. When he invited me to his show, I couldn't say no. He wasn't looking for a relationship. The night of the show we stumbled back to my place and had fun I can only blush thinking about. I'd never had a one-night stand before, but one night soon led to two, which led to three. Carter was exciting and mysterious, but he was a total playboy. He made it clear that this was some no strings attached fun. But fate had other plans for us. I thought we'd been careful, but I guess there was that one time that we weren't. And now, I'm pregnant and Carter Stevens and I have to figure out what to do next because one thing we both know for sure is that the baby is coming in nine months and we have no idea what to do next. Genre: Romance. Carry My Heart. Sage Weston and Jacob Phillips met as children at Little Kitty Orphanage. They had the type of friendship that could weather any storm, and they vowed that they would always be there for each other. And then Jacob was adopted, and everything changed. At first, the letters were fast and furious, but then they stopped, and Sage was left all alone. Four years later, Sage and Jacob bump into each other at a college party. Sparks fly, daggers are drawn, and Sage wants nothing to do with Jacob or the bevy of women that seem to follow him everywhere he goes. Then Sage loses a bet, and she can no longer avoid Jacob. Though she does everything she can to let him know that they are no longer friends. But Jacob has plans and is determined for Sage to know the truth about what happened four years ago, even if it costs him everything. Carry My Heart is a stand-alone book by New York Times best-selling author J. S. Cooper. Genre: Romance. Carry My Heart by J.S. Cooper (ePUB, PDF, Downloads) Carry My Heart by J.S. Cooper – Free eBooks Download. Description: “Jacob Phillips was my best friend. He was my first love. We shared our first kiss together. He broke my heart.” Sage Weston and Jacob Phillips met as children at Little Kitty Orphanage. They had the type of friendship that could weather any storm and they vowed that they would always be there for each other. And then Jacob was adopted, and everything changed. At first, the letters were fast and furious but then they stopped, and Sage was left all alone. Four years later, Sage and Jacob bump into each other at a university party. Sparks fly, daggers are drawn, and Sage wants nothing to do with Jacob or the bevy of women that seem to follow him everywhere he goes. Then Sage loses a bet, and she can no longer avoid Jacob. Though she does everything she can to let him know that they are no longer friends. But Jacob has plans and is determined for Sage to know the truth about what happened four years ago, even if it costs him everything. The Next Hef: Hugh’s 25-Year-Old Son Reveals Plan to Remake Playboy “For My Generation” Cooper Hefner has assumed creative control at the brand his father launched 64 years ago as he brings nude images back to the magazine while lamenting the company's involvement in lowbrow licensing and reality TV: "Nudity hadn't been the problem — it was how it'd been presented." Gary Baum. Share this article on Facebook Share this article on Twitter Share this article on Email Show additional share options Share this article on Print Share this article on Comment Share this article on Whatsapp Share this article on Linkedin Share this article on Reddit Share this article on Pinit Share this article on Tumblr. Rizvi Traverse, the private equity firm that since 2011 has controlled 70 percent of Playboy and whose other investments include SpaceX , Twitter and Snapchat . (In Hollywood, Kohn is best known for tending to Rizvi Traverse’s since-divested interest in ICM .) Now the polished and self-aware scion, intent on sounding woke and mindful of the brand’s eternal need to provoke (intellectually and sexually), is charting the course for what he hopes will be a more valuable and relevant Playboy. It’s one that doesn’t revolve around his old man (who is ailing and a semi-recluse) or dated totems of lothario living. “Creating something that resonates with my generation and the generation that comes after mine is how I’ll measure my accomplishments,” Cooper says. “His father, when he started — the business succeeded because he found a way to uniquely speak to the young men of that time,” says board member Dick Rosenzweig, who’s been involved with Playboy for 59 years. “Cooper recognizes his father’s intent, and he has a feeling for going about it as well — in his own way.” Cooper is quick to mark distance from his dad’s notorious womanizing, but the two share many similarities, including deeply felt progressive politics. Cooper has thought of running for office but believes his affiliation with an adult entertainment company would likely render him unelectable. And both have a strong affinity for the armed forces. (Hugh served two years in the U.S. Army toward the end of World War II.) “I’m a liberal, and I have a real issue with the conservative side feeling like they own the military,” says Cooper, who joined the California State Military Reserve in January. Cooper began participating in board meetings as a nonvoting observer while still in college — spurred by anxiety about his father, who in recent years has receded from public view. (Contending with back trouble, the famously virile eponymous playboy doesn’t want to be photographed strolling with his walker and fiddling with hearing aids.) “It’s tough to watch him struggle, but I’m just happy it’s physical and not mental,” says Cooper. His father’s oldest friends still visit for weekly dinners and film screenings, and he provides periodic notes on the magazine. (The elder Hefner was not made available to THR for this story.) The mansion is quieter now, hosting a few parties a year (like one in April celebrating Amazon’s docuseries about Hugh, American Playboy ). Not long ago, the house was maxed out as a revenue generator, hosting a shindig a week, with business partners, potential business partners and random people willing to fork over the $50,000-a-night rental fee. In a highly publicized deal, Daren Metropoulos , the 33-year-old heir to the Hostess Brands fortune, purchased the mansion in 2016 for $100 million, with the stipulation that the elder Hefner remain there until his death. Metropoulos , who has no ownership stake in Playboy, lives next door in a home he previously had bought from Hefner (and where Conrad lived until Cooper was 18). Cooper, a child of ultra-privilege, is keenly aware of how he navigates his advantage. After attending the elite yet strict Ojai Valley School, he majored in film production at Chapman University in Orange County. He opted to pass on a legacy admission to USC, where his father has donated millions. “It made my heart feel better to go to Chapman,” he says. “It didn’t feel like it was given to me.” Still, he’s not above working his gold-plated connections. He met Byrne six years ago after crushing on her as Pansy Parkinson in the Harry Potter films and then finagling an only-in-Hollywood introduction put into motion by friend Scout Willis, daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. “I thought, ‘Wow, that girl’s really pretty — I’m going to go on a date with her,’ ” Cooper recalls. (They live together in Marina del Rey.) Not in the picture at Playboy is Hefner’s elder brother, Marston, 27, who was initially positioned as a co-heir apparent. He’s been out of the public eye since a February 2012 domestic violence incident in which Pasadena police were called to the home he shared with his live-in Playmate girlfriend, Claire Sinclair. Recently, he’s been teaching English in Japan. “My dad was public about wanting us to run the organization together, but it became evident as we got older that it was not something that spoke to him,” says Cooper. Cooper regularly seeks counsel from another sibling, half-sister Christie, 64, who ran the company for more than two decades ending in 2009. “She can relate to the situation more than anyone could,” he says. Christie often urges him to keep a clear head in business discussions: “For me as a 25-year-old, that’s sometimes challenging,” he admits. “My emotions get the best of me.” Also educational is what he saw as Playboy’s lucrative but demeaning involvement with reality TV and lowbrow licensing. He thinks The Girls Next Door , the E! reality show that ran from 2005 to 2010, damaged the company long-term. “[The show] collected a young audience but didn’t do a good job of conveying how Playboy is both playful and sophisticated,” he says. Kohn adds that the series “brought the company down- market.” Such thinking has prompted Playboy, a branding vehicle with a magazine as its hood ornament, to terminate $15 million in licensing revenue generated at mall shops like Spencer’s — a relatively small slice of the company’s portfolio — in a bid to go upmarket. “We’re not in the fuzzy dice business anymore,” says CMO Jared Dougherty. The company is developing two projects with Brett Ratner’s RatPac: a Hugh Hefner biopic (it’s not known who will star) and a reboot of the late- 1960s variety-talk mash-up Playboy After Dark . Says Ratner, with a director’s eye, of the elevation of Hefner fils : “It’s obvious, it’s organic. He even has the looks of his dad — so much so it’s bizarre.” Reality programming is out for now. Cooper claims to have been pushed into starring in a “mortifying” sizzle reel assembled by Gurney Productions (of Duck Dynasty fame) focused on his then-role as a brand ambassador. While MTV was interested, “I couldn’t stand it,” he says, noting the experience precipitated his departure from the company. Meanwhile, the company’s core video assets, including Playboy TV, which runs X-rated shows like Cougar Club L.A. , have after years of management by internet porn behemoth MindGeek been consolidated in-house and will be overhauled for a 2018 reset. “These are areas of the business that are, from a cash standpoint, performing very well that have not been on-brand,” says Cooper. “We need our story to be told with one voice across all platforms.” Cooper splits his time between content development and revenue opportunities ranging from branded nightclubs (one is in development in Manhattan) to apparel. “In China,” muses Kohn, “we’re viewed as an Americana fashion brand by the up-and-coming consumer; they’ve never truly been exposed to our media products because of censorship restrictions.” Meanwhile, the company has retooled its new-media efforts, which for a time were ramped up to compete with rivals. (Cooper admits Vice Media captured his demographic’s imagination by feeling fresh and competing aggressively while Playboy was on cruise control, yet he notes that, now that Vice is backed by 21st Century Fox and Disney, “nobody is viewing them as some pirate ship any longer.”) One of Kohn’s first acts was laying off a slew of digital staffers in a turn away from pursuing what he feels were the diminishing returns of online advertising. As the CEO puts it, “the market had changed.” It’s what hasn’t changed, though, that Cooper sees as his opening. He observes that the country has been reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkable in its similarity to the Eisenhower years when Playboy was founded. (President Trump is widely known to have venerated Hugh, but the feeling isn’t mutual: “We don’t respect the guy,” says Cooper. “There’s a personal embarrassment because Trump is somebody who has been on our cover.”) Cooper, sounding a lot like Dad, explains, “Yes, there are lifestyle components to Playboy, but it’s really a philosophy about freedom. And right now, as history is repeating itself in real time, I want Playboy to be central to that conversation.” On another day, he’s lounging on a sofa in the mansion’s library, ruminating on the blessing and burden of his patrimony. His father is nowhere to be found, likely somewhere in this iconic Gothic Tudor-style manor, essentially finished telling the story he began in 1953. Now it’s Cooper’s turn. “I suit up in my dad’s pajamas for our Midsummer Night’s Dream party; it’s a nice note to the past,” he says. “It would be a major mistake — ridiculous — to wear them to the office. I think about the Playboy philosophy constantly, but I have my own point of view. It’s what will have to carry me through.” ANATOMY OF THE PLAYBOY BUSINESS. Licensing This is Playboy’s biggest revenue driver. The company says a deal with global fragrance giant Coty tops $100 million in annual wholesale sales. Through a partnership with Handong United and Bally’s, Playboy distributes clothing, footwear and fashion accessories globally, with more than a third of global revenue coming from China. Playboy is mulling a $25 million-$50 million capital raise for a renewed push into lingerie and swimwear. Magazine Founded in 1953, Playboy peaked with a circulation of 5.6 million in the 1970s and now distributes about 450,000 copies of each issue. Television After years of third-party management, Playboy TV and other video assets are being managed in-house. This year, more than 20 series, including some made by Playboy, were produced for the X-rated network, which is seen in 60-plus countries. Digital Playboy.com attracts roughly 4 million monthly unique visitors. (By comparison, Esquire.com has 7 million.) Nightclub and Events This year, a Playboy Club will open in New York, joining properties in London, Hanoi, Bangkok and multiple cities in India. The Playboy Jazz Festival, held at the Hollywood Bowl since 1979, sells about 35,000 tickets each year. This story first appeared in the Aug. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. How Did Anderson Cooper Have a Baby? Hi everyone! Welcome to another episode of The Egg Whisperer Show. I am so excited to have Dr. Allison Rodgers here from FCI in Chicago. Dr Aimee: We’re so excited to have you on today’s show. And the topic is, How did Anderson Cooper Have a Baby? As a Fertility Expert, you’re one of the best people to talk to us about this. Before we get started, I want to read your bio because it’s so impressive. Dr. Rodgers is board certified in both OB- GYN and Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility. Practicing medicine since 2004, she completed her residency at Case Western Reserve Metrohealth Medical Center/Cleveland ClinicCleveland clinic followed by a fellowship at University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. She has also had some personal experiences with secondary infertility and pregnancy loss herself that she’ll share about. Dr. Rodgers, welcome to the show! Dr. Allison Rodgers: Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Aimee: So tell us a little bit about yourself. Dr. Allison Rodgers: Thank you so much for having me. So as you know, I’m a fertility specialist. I see patients in Chicago at Fertility Centers of Illinois, and I decided to go into fertility because I really love problem solving. And I really love trying to figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it. And there is no bigger joy than having a child. And I love being able to help families who are struggling then go on to be able to have the families they want to have. When I was a fertility fellow, so I was already a fertility doctor, I was trying to have my second child and struggled and we went through IVF. I ended up losing a few pregnancies. Then I finally had my miracle rainbow baby, who started off as twins and then self reduced to one, and she’s now nine. She is not such a baby anymore. I went on to have a third child as well with some help. So I can really empathize because I’ve literally been on the other side of the table when I’m talking to patients. So I can say, literally, I’ve been in your shoes. I know how it feels. While I was going through it, it was horrible. But looking back, I feel like I can relate to my patients in a really special way. Dr. Aimee: Well, thank you for sharing such a personal story. I’m sure it makes your patients love you even more knowing that you’re comfortable talking to them about this. So let’s talk about Anderson Cooper. As you know, he’s one of the most famous journalists, and I was so happy when I saw the tweet this past week that he had a baby. So let’s talk about it, whether gay or straight, how does that happen? I want you to talk us through those steps. So what is your approach when someone like Anderson Cooper comes to you as a patient? Dr. Allison Rodgers: So the first step is obviously to take a detailed history. We want to get to know each other, see if there are any medical problems. And mainly for men, we want to look for infectious diseases and genetic diseases. We want to make sure they don’t carry any genetic disorders that could be passed on. So we do some screening for that. And then really the first step is to create an embryo. And we do that with a donor egg, and we mix it with the patient’s sperm. And that is sort of the first step of this process. Dr. Aimee: And how do you go about finding an egg donor? I mean, it can be so overwhelming when you just Google “egg donor” online, and I imagine you’re a very hands on doc. So talk us through that process that you take your patients through. Dr. Allison Rodgers: I’m blessed because I’m in a large practice. I have my own team that helps. I have a team of nurses who help my patients with egg donors. And then I also have a team of nurses that help my patients with gestational carriers as well. So what we do, is we get an egg donor and we can either find a fresh donor who is willing to go through IVF just for that one set of intended parents. And this is the same whether you are a single man, a gay man, a single woman that needs an egg donor or a married woman to a man who needs to use an egg donor. So it doesn’t actually matter who you are, the intended parent. And you can either have someone do a fresh IVF cycle for you where they go through stimulation, where we give them hormones to make their ovaries grow a lot of eggs. And then we’re able to do a procedure called an egg retrieval where we have a small needle while they’re asleep, and we use an internal ultrasound probe to collect the eggs. I sort of say it’s (and I’ve been through it myself), so I can probably say this, but it’s kind of like getting your blood drawn except a little deeper and obviously not your arm. So it’s good that you’re asleep for it so you can stay still. Dr. Aimee: Never used that analogy. I love it. I love that analogy. Keep going! Dr. Rodgers: Well, we think about getting our blood drawn. We think it’s no big deal. So it’s kind of the same thing. I mean, it’s not like major surgery. It’s about 15 minutes. And it’s just a needle poke. And then the other way we can get eggs from an egg bank, just like we buy sperm from a sperm bank. You can buy eggs that are already frozen and ready to be shipped. It’s a little bit faster to do it that way for sure. And the other option is to use someone in your life: a known egg donor, like a family member or friend. Just to clarify, a single man would not want to use his sister because obviously they’re related. But if there’s a two male couple, then you could use a sister of the other partner’s sperm. If you’re looking for a specific ethnicity, that might be hard to find from an egg bank. If you really just want one child eggs from an egg bank may be quicker and a little bit faster and give you exactly what you need. If you want three kids, then you may want to get a fresh egg donor because you’ll probably get more eggs and that will lead to more embryos. With the frozen egg bank, you usually get about five to six eggs in a lot of eggs and that’s typically enough for one baby but probably not more than that. Dr. Aimee: You mentioned testing. Can you just go into a little bit more detail about the tests that you do on guys? Dr. Rodgers: So, of course we need to do a semen analysis and for a semen analysis we can either have men collect a sample at home, which we’re doing more now that it’s, you know, a pandemic, or they can collect it at the office. We have special collection rooms and if you collect at home, we like to have the sample around an hour after collection. And you want to keep it warm. So the funny thing is, I live in the Midwest, you know, it gets so cold and especially in the winter, you want to tell people you want to keep it at body heat, you don’t want it to get cold. However, then I did my fellowship at in Texas, and it was often 110–115 degrees, and we’d tell people “Don’t leave it in your car too long.” You want to keep it body temperature. We look for a bunch of things in the sperm sample. We look for sperm count. We also look for quality of sperm, so how the sperm cells are shaped. And we also look to see how many are moving. These are the ways we tell if the sperm is healthy and has a good chance of fertilizing the egg. Dr. Aimee: And then if you have two dads, i f one has better sperm than the other, would you choose between them? Is that something that you’ve done before? Dr. Rodgers: Yes. I think a lot of times they have already have come to see me with an idea of who they want. You know, sometimes they want to do both and they’ll split the sperm and the eggs will go half and half. So usually they already have that idea, but it’s certainly something we can do. Remember the FDA is regulating all of this and that sort of sounds scary when we use the words like regulation, but really it’s for everyone. We want to make sure everyone is protected from a mental health perspective, from a genetic perspective, from an infectious disease perspective, and from a ethical perspective. So it really is a good thing that the FDA oversees this process. There are some special infectious disease labs that we do, and that’s just blood work. We also recommend genetic screening because all of the egg donors are screened genetically. Almost everyone carries some rare genetic disorder. You just want to make sure that the egg source and sperm source are genetically compatible. I would recommend that patients who are looking into either an egg donor or a sperm donor know that almost everybody carries something. So it’s really important to not exclude people just because they carry something because almost everybody does. Both the egg source and sperm source would have to carry the same autosomal recessive disease for there to be a 25% chance of the baby having it. Dr. Aimee: What are the ethical considerations? Dr. Rodgers: We want to make sure everybody is comfortable. This is important for single people and couples. It is really important to talk through the process and think about things like, what is your future going to look like? When people say to you: “Oh, well, who’s the baby’s mom?” It’s important to be able to realize that people are going to ask questions and be very comfortable from an emotional perspective in this journey because obviously it’s a big step.I always tell people, these are supposed to be hard decisions. This isn’t like, “Hey, what are you having for lunch today?” This is a big life decision. And so it’s important that you take the time. We have all of our patients talk to one of our mental health providers for support and guidance, because this is a process that can be emotionally difficult. Sometimes people want to use like a younger relative, coworker or employee as the donor. There are some situations that, you know, come up that may not be the healthiest for everybody involved. So it’s really important from an ethical perspective that we make sure that everyone’s doing it for the right reasons. Dr. Aimee : And in the moment it might seem like a good idea, but that’s our job: to tell people about the pitfalls they haven’t considered. What about surrogacy? What is your approach to finding the right surrogate? Dr. Rodgers: When we think back, it was 20 years ago when people originally started doing surrogacy and sometimes you would take the man’s sperm and you would put this inside the woman’s uterus. It would be her eggs. She would carry the baby, and then she would give the baby to the parents. And we’ve really moved away from this because of the emotional and ethical concerns that we have about it. So when we use the term gestational carrier it means we will use someone else’s eggs with the sperm. You can find a gestational carrier through family and friends, an agency or online. It sounds sketchy when you first hear about finding a gestational carrier online. It’s kind of like online dating. Would you really want to do that? But I will tell you, like I said, this process is all regulated by the FDA. So even if you find somebody through an agency it is going to be still very, very important that they get screened and they still have to go through all that FDA screening. Now, the gestational carrier doesn’t have any genetics into the baby so they don’t need the genetic screening, but we need to make sure their uterus is healthy and can carry a pregnancy. We take a very detailed history, and remember. We hold gestational carriers up to a little bit of a higher standard than we would hold a maybe normal patient going through fertility. So if a patient had premature deliveries or multiple C-sections or medical problems that have affected a pregnancy, they may be declined as a gestational carrier. If she was a patient coming to me, I would have no problem with them getting pregnant. This is a situation in which we hold them to a little bit of a different standard. We take a detailed history. We get testing on their uterus. We do some blood work as well as we get some imaging of their uterus. Typically I’ll do something called a three dimensional saline sonogram. I look for any problems with the uterus, polyps, fibroids and scar tissue. If they’ve had a c-section, I will make sure the uterus is well-healed. I will also make sure there are no swollen tubes or anything like that. Even if you find this person outside of an agency, we will do a very, very thorough screening. It breaks my heart when I tell a patient their carrier isn’t a good fit. You spent all this time, you’ve flown in somebody you like, because sometimes they come from different parts of the country so I do understand that it’s hard to hear from a patient’s standpoint but at the same time, I do not want there to be a horrible complication. It’s really my job as their fertility specialist and reproductive endocrinologist to evaluate that gestational carrier and make sure that they are a good fit for the patient. Dr. Aimee : I’m sure you get this question all the time: What is the chance that the transfer is going to work the first time? Dr. Rodgers: That’s a really good question. So it actually boils down to the age of the egg donor. If you’re using a friend or a sister who is in her mid to late thirties the chances of miscarriage and the chances of things like down syndrome will be higher than a younger egg donor in her 20s. It’s all relative to the age of the egg donor. If you’re using someone in their early twenties, your chances of success are incredibly high. Chances of miscarriage are incredibly low. I would say it depends on the lab too. Obviously every lab has a little bit of a different success rate, but probably somewhere in that 65 to 75% range is pretty typical. It is unfortunately not a hundred percent. Dr. Aimee: If Anderson Cooper was a patient of yours starting his journey or any other gay dad, what is the most important piece of advice you would give them at the beginning of their journey? Dr. Rodgers: So I think it’s really important to understand that it is a journey. There are ups and downs in every journey. There are, you know, amazing things, but every part is worth it in the end. And I would encourage patients who want a family to go for it. There’s likely very little reason why somebody like Anderson Cooper couldn’t have a biological child. And it’s just everyone’s dream to have a baby, right? Not everyone’s dream, but certainly it is for our fertility patients, it’s their dream to have the family they want to have, and everyone deserves to have that family. It doesn’t matter who you are. You deserve to have the family you want. Dr. Aimee : Amen. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for being a guest on today’s show. Can you tell us where can patients find you? Give us all your social media accounts.