In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
The platypus, an Australian wonder known for its nocturnal, secretive nature and its adorable appearance that looks like something between a duck and a beaver, may be heading for extinction in light of the Australian bush fires that have wreaked havoc on the region’s ecosystems since the start of 2020. It’s a sad day for the weird, little, aquatic mammal. Farewell, friend.
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Kangana Ranaut, Bollywood’s resident troll, is at it again: responding to activist and senior lawyer Indira Jaising’s comment against the death penalty, in which Jaising urged the mother of the 2012 Delhi gang-rape victim to forgive her daughter’s rapists, Ranaut said any woman who sympathizes with rapists is the kind who births them. She also asked to put Jaising in with the rapists in jail.
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Mean Girls is returning to the big screen. Tina Fey is adapting the Mean Girls musical, borne out of the cult classic itself. Might we just say — it’s all so fetch.
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Since its creation in 1947, the symbolic doomsday clock created by scientists to judge humankind’s proximity to extinction has never been as close to midnight as today. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists changed the hands of the clock to only 100 seconds away from midnight, signaling an impending civil collapse from nuclear weapons and the climate crisis.
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There’s a dangerous new startup in the digital landscape — Clearview AI — that allows users to snap a photo of a stranger and find out their name and address. What implications could this have for women’s safety?
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Experts working for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have concluded with “medium to high confidence” that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s WhatsApp account was involved in the hacking of Bezos’s phone, reportedly regarding bin Salman’s animosity with the Bezos-owned The Washington Post. Could this be the undoing of all of bin Salman’s attempts to show Saudi Arabia more progressive than it actually is?
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Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has largely blamed misogyny and sexism for her loss to President Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election; she has hinted at similar misogyny coming from presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders when asked if she would endorse his campaign. Amid all of this, however, Clinton’s own feminism has been called into question.
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Oprah’s latest book club pick, American Dirt by Mexican author Jeanine Cummings, is being called exploitative. How did an overtly stereotypical book about the immigrant experience find a captivated audience in North Americans?
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Girlboss culture has become a mainstay in contemporary feminism — through women start-up founders, feminist merchandise, and messaging. But underneath capitalism’s co-opting of feminism, has Girlboss culture exploited the very same demographic it purported to empower?
