In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
Twitter users this week wrote quirky tales on modern love — referencing eccentric, pop culture ways to describe their perfect “meet-cute” in an age of dating apps. The old-fashioned romance sure is dreamy (think flying dupattas and stolen glances) but bumping into strangers hardly ever seems to work out well. We’re still deleting our dating apps.
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Bombay boys, Goa trip, romance, heartbreak, all-well-that-ends-well climax. 20 years of Dil Chahta Hai is a milestone for any Indian cinema watcher, but an oral history of the movie’s making argues it’s time we give the movie credit for changing “the rules of Hindi cinema.”
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced that he and his brothers are flying to space this year, people are wondering if Bezos earned all this money just to make that trip up, up, and above. But a more urgent question on everyone’s mind is: “how many billionaires can space hold?”
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A woman returned to the office to find an apple left behind pre-pandemic. The apple was unrotten, firm to the touch, a “biological marvel.” So she did some detective work to find out why it “hadn’t become a putrid puddle of goo.” Her motivation? To figure out if she could eat it.
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The premiere of Marvel’s Loki marks the peak of “appointment television,” an anomaly in the age of streaming, where the audience eagerly awaits releases. The urgency of watching something as soon as it was out was last felt with Game of Thrones; let’s just hope Marvel’s latest TV run doesn’t meet the same end.
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An interview about the struggle for same-sex marriage in the United States shows what makes it makes it different from other civil-rights movements. Notably, an author notes the backlash to marriage equality helped the cause: “[LGBTQIA+ individuals] basically ended up inadvertently baiting the whole coalition into defending something they hadn’t wanted to defend.”
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Satan has become a shorthand to refer to all forms of human evil — depictions of the “devil” over the years range from three-headed monsters to lizards with spooky tails through the Bible and recent literature. The evolution shows “a parade of the many meme-ified devils that have come to permeate the public imagination.”
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Some doctors still look at asexuality as an “abnormality” that needs treatment, which is disrupting people’s access to medical care. “People like me shouldn’t have to be afraid of going to the doctor,” one person urges, arguing the unnecessary tests, procedures, or medications are a symptom of societal stereotyping.