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

Former United States President Barack Obama, in his new memoir The Promised Land, revealed a lot of things, among them — his college pick-up skills. Be it the long-legged socialist or the ethereal bisexual, he didn’t discriminate on the books he had to brush up on to impress them. Was he successful?

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In the past few years, we’ve seen the rise and fall of call-out culture, in which someone transgressing social boundaries is publicly shamed for their behavior, in the hopes of guilting or shaming them into being better. But we now know this only alienates people, makes them afraid. What if we replace calling out with calling in, the latter to be done with love, compassion and conversation?

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This week, an Indian Edtech company, WhiteHat Jr., that sells coding lessons to children, was exposed for its aggressive, and oftentimes bordering-on-harassment marketing strategy. It started a conversation about India’s start-up culture, and how it can potentially be hell for customers.

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 “Why would you tell me to read a book about fucking poor people?” Ivanka Trump once asked one of her closest friends. Now, more than a decade later, that friend bares all in an exposè of how a young woman progressed to imitate one of the most hated man in America, her father and soon-to-be former, President of the United States.

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In this review, we see an alternative, much-less-talked-about side of popular, and oftentimes hailed as one of the most progressive films of the year, Super Deluxe, and how it may not have carried the trans representation we needed.

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In stanning the idea of any celebrity, we need to ask ourselves what we’re putting our attention and energy into, and whether the rewards are worth the labor we expend to keep billionaire celebrities billionaires. In this open letter to stans, we see a need to divest from the idea of celebrity, as it’s inherently tied to capitalism, and ask ourselves whether we’re supporting the art, or the performance of Celebrity.

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A ‘cursed objects’ expert explains how some unassuming objects take on the aura of being cursed, accumulating tragedies and gaining infamy. And even better yet, how to make sure we don’t end up with one in this curse of a year.

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Ever thought about the inherent ties between the genre of horror, and porn? In pop culture, the two have been linked for decades. One expert explains it as both being a part of the ‘body genre,’ required to elicit physical responses from the viewer — be it a scream, a gasp, or horniness.