In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
Victoria’s Secret is purportedly course-correcting: the pursuit of unattainable body goals and sexist gaze is being swapped for “inclusivity” in a rebranding. But this VS Collective, comprising big names like Megan Rapinoe and Priyanka Chopra-Jonas, appears to be “using the language of empowerment feminism to suggest that they, too, have listened, and will eventually change, maybe.”
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Every year ahead of Pride Month, the internet debates whether kink has a place at parades meant to celebrate LGBTQ people and identity. But the clash can be interpreted as a sign of progress as discourse evolves: the “Queer movement has grown in exactly the way it should.”
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What does a brief history of India’s starvation problem look like? A look at colonial history, government schemes, and institutional poverty is a reminder that hunger is avoidable. But so far, “the trick of the state is to persuade you that the problem is too big to solve.”
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Having that “Kodak moment” captured the beautiful story about middle-class aspiration. But while Kodak changed the way the world saw itself, it struggled to reinvent itself for the digital age. The rise and fall of a tech giant also resembles the American Dream — short-lived, sweet, illusionary.
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Mindy Kaling’s Scooby-Doo spinoff reimagines “Velma,” the orange turtleneck-wearing protagonist, as Asian — a decision that has left the internet unsettled. But as one writer argues: “To flap one’s hands in grief over a cartoon woman being anything other than white is to show… that you are racist, and two, an incurable, irrepressible herb.“
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The pandemic has changed how we maintain friendships, redefining what we care about. In the age of phone calls and odd celebration on Zoom, “one gradually learns which relationships are held by enduring fondness and which will crumple amid structural collapse.”
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A pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz was stolen in 2005 from Minnesota. Solving the mystery of who stole them, where they went, and why it matters “became a matter of cultural resurrection and, for some people, an obsession.”
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An essay by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reopened unhealed wounds: about power dynamics within feminist circles, literary cancel culture, and what constitutes womanhood. But essential background reading to understand the context and motive includes an explanation by author Akwaeke Emezi, who called out Adichie for her transphobia.
