In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
Kim Kardashian launched a ‘diverse’ shapewear brand, ‘Kimono,’ which is understandably drawing ire from the Japanese: Naming a line of body-hugging Spanx meant to sculpt and suppress body fat for an age-old Japanese clothing item steeped in culture reeks of blatant appropriation.
*
What does it mean to look like a footballer? In a sport dominated by men, expressions of self through physical appearance have often been limited to wacky hairstyles. For the Women’s World Cup in Paris, however, female footballers are expanding notions of what it means to look like an athlete, donning lipstick and experimenting with hair color.
*
How did the heavily popularized, and subsequently criticized website that broke the Aziz Ansari sexual misconduct story, Babe.net, crumble into nothingness? It’s the story of irresponsible media executives taking the ‘open office’ concept to whole new levels.
*
A community of women on Instagram are elevating to-do lists: gone are the days of a roughly hashed-out, bullet-pointed list drummed up for the day; the ‘Planner Addicts’ chart entire months’ worth of studying, working and self-care regimens, replete with color-coding and motivational notes on the sides.
*
There’s a Member of Parliament in the Indian government who is not afraid to speak her mind, who feels it is imperative “the voice of dissent” be heard. Mahua Moitra, of the Trinamool Congress Party in West Bengal, drew admiration from Indians on social media after she delivered a scathing critique of the ruling government’s “lust to divide,” while she slickly sidestepped fellow MPs trying to shut her up, calling them “professional hecklers.”
*
Plastic straws have become the most heavily publicized casualty of the green revolution, with a majority of people having cringed at the well-circulated photo of a dead turtle with a plastic straw up its nose. But what about members of the disabled community, for whom plastic straws are the best means to ingest food?
*
‘Dynamic resource allocation’ is a way to distribute resources on a large scale, based on mathematical models. But with climate change constantly altering the resources available to us, and the needs of the global population becoming increasingly unpredictable, resource allocation might be the toughest mathematical problem humans have ever had to solve.
*
Humans are wreaking havoc on the planet, which has led to the extinction of millions of species. Scientists say, however, we may be able to bring them back from the dead with the help of a gene-editing mechanism, CRISPR, that allows us to play around with DNA, and could potentially help with some resurrection on the side.
*
In an interview, spiritual leader Dalai Lama said if his successor were a woman, he hopes she is good looking because no one “likes a dead face.” You’d think external appearances wouldn’t matter to a man like him, but it turns out he’d said something along the same lines in 2015, adding it would be of “not much use” if his female successor wasn’t attractive.
