In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
British athlete Tom Daley is dabbling into influencer territory with his crochet interests. After days of watching Daley knit on repeat, the diver finished his Olympic-themed sweater for the world to see, noting how it’s an important part of his mindfulness routine. With his knitting needles out, Daley is stitching up a novel idea of mindfulness and mental health.
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A landscape architect is looking at oysters to defend coastal cities against climate change. This is in preparation for the day “the storm winds will pick up again, and the ocean will come back for the land.” Oysters, by forming dense reefs that slow the movement of water, can mitigate the impact of these storms.
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The Brazilian butt lift is the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure in the world, but it is also one of the most dangerous. The $5,000 quest for the perfect butt has a murky origin: it was aimed to erase all signs of Black and Indigenous physical appearance. The BBL has taken over Instagram and TikTok, but its cultural legacy is marred with appropriation, body dysmorphia, and lacking regulations.
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Women like Simone Biles and MyKayla Skinner are changing the culture of silence in gymnastics and, by extension, sports. Their grit is a “testament to the determination of a new generation of gymnasts to rethink the expectations—and reject the abuses—that previous generations endured for the sake of their dreams.“
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Fans of the now-discontinued cheeseburger-flavored Dorito lamented the loss of the delicacy over Facebook groups; keeping them company is a growing number of online campaigns asking for a comeback of their favorite snacks. The memory of snack items tingles with childhood nostalgia, and inevitably helps brands create recall in the long run.
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Online harassment has spiked during the pandemic as online moderators struggle to keep novel methods and misogyny in check. A new way to train AI that focuses on social demographics could help shape a “state-of-the-art misogyny detection algorithm,” which is believed to be accurate at least 75% of the time.
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The story of a pioneer of the Kannada film industry began in the tumultuous year of 1943 and has since carved an incomparable legacy. D. Shankar Singh extended the market of the Kannada film beyond Karnataka, allowing the whole world to experience these films that are “islands of their own excellence.”
