In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
This week, India banned 118 Chinese apps, including the popular multiplayer battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, much to the lament of an invested gaming community. However, the ban doesn’t just take away people’s favorite pastime, but also many gamers’ entire (sometimes million-dollar) livelihoods.
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Jessica Krug, a history professor at the George Washington University in America specializing in the cultural practices of Africa and the African diaspora, was recently found to only be pretending to be Black, while actually being a white woman. Here’s how she took her cosplay to a whole new level of appropriation by leaning into victimhood.
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Ever notice how puzzles never the right number of pieces in the box? Here’s a complex mathematical answer breaking down why that is. Figure it out if you can.
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As the pandemic goes on, and offices continue to remain close, the work-from-home debate keeps evolving, changing to fit the needs and decisions we become aware of every day. Here, a breakdown of what it takes to create “an office of the mind,” and why this generation might not ever recover from the hangover that is work-from-home.
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QAnon started as a far-right conspiracy theory thread on anonymous message board 4chan, quickly entering the mainstream in the past few years. Its influence, incitement of violence, and pervasiveness has elevated it from a mere conspiracy theory, at least according to BuzzFeed News. It’s now a collective delusion. Here’s why.
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A new book by artist and design researcher Sara Hendren makes the argument for disability not just being a part of the human body, but as part of a society that wasn’t built for non-normative experiences. Do we differentiate between ability and disability because of the physical differences, or do we do so because one can interact with the built world, and one can’t?
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What happens when you’re kinky about doing it in public places but are worried about being slapped with a sex offender status? You go to the library. Here’s a look into the minimally-surveilled world of library sex, and exactly what about doing it in the stacks, in the middle of thousands of books, is so appealing to people.
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English-language institutions around the world are rethinking their definitions of racism, and trying to understand the systemic scope of oppression brought to the fore by the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the U.S. Here’s a look at how the word ‘racism’ even made it into the dictionary (it’s more recent than you think) and how it evolved, painfully slowly, through the years.
