In The Buzz Cut, we bring you a round-up of all the weird, controversial, and wonderful stories we’ve been reading all week.
Major U.K. brands recently announced they’re banning glitter from all of their Christmas-themed products this year, listing glitter — essentially a microplastic — as an ecological hazard. With everything else that is going on with respect to climate change, however, is glitter the target we need?
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A Dutch penguin community made the news this week after a notorious pair of gay male penguins stole a bunch of eggs from a neighboring lesbian couple. The males are now sharing caregiving duties, taking turns monitoring the eggs.
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This week, U.S. representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew in hundreds of thousands of viewers while she played the popular multiplayer game Among Us with colleague Ilhan Omar, while streaming it on Twitch. It’s one of the rarest, most unique voter drive events in recent political history, significant for just how accessible, relatable, and normal it felt.
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Remember the endless definitions of redefinitions of the ‘bases’ of sexual intimacy glorified in ’90s movies? The baseball analogy that once felt like a part and parcel of describing any sexual encounter now feels dated, predominantly because today’s teens are actively rejecting it, instead embracing the complicated, non-linear, and more nuanced aspects of sex and intimacy.
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Since Kamala Harris got on the Joe Biden presidential ticket, pundits around the world have weighed in on the pronunciation of her name, while opponents actively say it wrong, perhaps to signal and denounce her seeming foreign-ness. Here, Anand Giridharadas shows why the incorrect pronunciations of Harris’ name are not mispronunciations, emerging from an honest mistake, but dispronunciations, emerging from a malicious ignorance.
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This week, Twitter was abuzz with the Jeffrey Toobin incident — where the New Yorker reporter was seen jerking off on a Zoom call, seemingly unaware of colleagues that could see him. Right after the news broke, male media figures rushed to Toobin’s defense, offering bizarre explanations for his behavior (which had gotten him suspended from his job). Many understandably wondered — why?
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This is a tale of a CIA operative who went to Russia on a diplomatic mission and suddenly started developing headaches, nausea and vision loss — for no apparent medical reason. Turns out, it’s what had happened to scores of CIA operatives and American diplomats before him, and no doctors had answers. This is a tale of a new kind of suspected terrorist attack — the “immaculate concussion.“
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Self-help tips and tricks to preserve mental health during the Covid19 pandemic have abounded all over the world, be it through the Internet or family Whatsapp groups. But the question remains — what good, or at least how much good, can changing individual behaviors do, when the world remains the same level of screwed up?
