In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
As The Wire publishes an investigative series about activists and journalists being surveilled, a policeman yesterday came to their office for a “routine inspection.” Curiously, they asked about other journalists, and for some reason, actor Swara Bhaskar, who is known for her critical stance against the government. Stranger things have happened, but this wrong direction seems hardly coincidental.
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As the likes of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson come back from their jaunts into space, their long-term quest of building a “galactic civilization” has at its heart an existential question. We’re not sure how this will play out, but it begs the question: does all progress really depend on the “unreasonable” man?
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Indian cities are host to a long-drawn conflict between monkeys and people. From North Delhi’s Ridge to cities carved in fiction, the two have laid their claim to open spaces. An essay looks at urbanization from a lens we know all too well: “If we exchanged our environmental tolerance for development, they felt, there would never be peace in our time.”
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In the show “Hacks,” two female comedians defy the expectation of women being likeable, and show the merits of not trying to redeem themselves — challenging decades worth of moral cinematic portrayal. One character says “I think shitty things keep happening because I’m a self-centred asshole and I deserve it” — amen to that!
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A German sexologist in the late 1960s placed foster children under the care of paedophiles as an “experiment” — with the approval of the government. The harrowing account of unquantifiable trauma is recounted by a man decades later: “I was a product. I was turning into the thing he had made.”
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Cinderella is a fairy tale about transformation that is “used to describe exactly what it should look like to become beautiful—and thus, by extension, what it looks like to lack beauty.” For drag queens and queer people, the Fairy God Mother is anything but magical.
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A form of restorative justice involves allowing an abuser to meet the survivor. MeToo’s legacy four years after faces some poignant questions: what are the consequences for “bad men,” and how can we reintegrate them back into society? The survivor, having to choose between reliving their trauma or not seeking justice at all, is part of a system still untangling itself.
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Over the years, scientists have recorded disparate sounds from space to piece together what would a piano sound like on Mars. The question of how sound travels on other planets is related to the evolution of how soundwaves travel on Earth. But more importantly, is it still sound if no one is around to hear it? Well, NASA’s Mars rover is!
