In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.

This week, Kim Kardashian caused a stir when she posted pictures of her private island birthday-vacation — attended by 40 of her closest friends, all diligently tested and fresh from quarantine — to everybody’s chagrin and ridicule. It exemplifies a new trend as people make their own decisions about how often, where, and how to gather socially: performative quarantining and Covid19 responsibility to justify their risk-taking.

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This week, the Liberation Panthers Party in southern India joined anti-caste feminist activists to demand a ban on the Manusmriti, a Hindu religious text that many say has formed the basis of the caste system in India and the enslavement of women within it. Feminist activists are once again calling for a ban on the text, urging women all over India to join the resistance.

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U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair this week, apparently enraging right-wing critics for her perceived hypocrisy — donning an expensive suit in the photo, while advocating for socialism in her politics. But at the root of it all, it’s not AOC’s smartness or political savvy that threatens them, it’s her attractiveness. Hear this out.

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The Covid19 pandemic has led us all to think about safety in a persistently cautious manner that many have never considered before. But now that lockdowns are lifting, and people all around the world are free to live by their own definitions of safety, an important question to consider is: what is the difference between feeling safe, and actually being safe?

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With the Bihar elections coming up, Indiaspend evaluates the repercussions of one of the biggest decisions taken the last time around — the declaration of Bihar as a dry state, after women, frustrated with their alcoholic husbands, rallied for the policy. Four years later, it’s clear the prohibition on alcohol has only created a robust and illicit alcohol trade and led to a rise in drug abuse.

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The rise of the reddit forum “Am I The Asshole” reflects our society’s need to constantly evaluate ourselves in relation to others. On social media, this manifests as “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher,” in which we’re all stuck in a loop, crowdsourcing our ethics. Does it signal the death of a universal moral code?

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As India’s music scene develops and establishes itself as staunchly separate from, even superior to, Bollywood, it creates the space for deeper engagement with socio-political issues — apparent in the country’s punk scene.

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In 2016, YouTube was bustling with content creators taking up the burden of sex education so deeply missing from our educational institutions. In the past four years, many attained iconhood, only to eventually reveal they weren’t as responsible as they had first positioned themselves. In the end, the lesson here is: we don’t need icons in sex education, we need iconic sex education — inclusive and consent-focused.