Culture
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Reflecting on the case of Cyntoia Brown – talking with the director of ‘Murder to Mercy’
Highlights The Netflix documentaries “Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story,” and “Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story,” Many juveniles are locked up in America like Cyntoia Brown and have their own stories that the law may not be sensitive to. A journalistic approach to documentary depends on balancing a story by vetting facts through research […]

Dating over Zoom? Don’t be surprised if those online sparks fizzle in person
Highlights The likeness of online dating and the Netflix’s reality series “Love is Blind.” Compatibility requires engaging all of our senses. And absent the touch, taste and smell of a potential partner, people online dating during quarantine have essentially been flying blind. Muzzled neurotransmitters when online dating from the lack of various physical intimacy when […]

Coronavirus diets: What’s behind the urge to eat like little kids?
Highlights The COVID-19 pandemic has upended nearly every facet of our daily lives, from how we dress, to how we work, to how we exercise. These foods have one thing in common: They’re kids foods. During periods of stress, people tend to eat more and show a greater preference for higher calorie foods. Food can induce feelings […]

The dirty history of soap
Highlights The history of soap and how it works. Originally used not for human hygiene but rather in the preparation process of making clothes. From cleaning objects to cleaning bodies. The Civil War was the watershed. Thanks to reformers who touted regular washing with water and soap as a sanitary measure to aid the Union […]

Ashamed over my mental illness, I realized drawing might help me – and others – cope
Highlights Living with anxiety, depression, shame and self-doubt. Chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. I started what became the Anxiety Project, which now contains over 500 drawings and two performance pieces Sharing what it’s like to live with anxiety and […]

Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar
Highlights Common design elements make similar websites for us to view often. It’s virtually impossible to study the entire internet; there are over a billion websites so how do we measure similar websites? How the internet has changed across all three metrics – color, layout and AI-generated attributes. Is conformity healthy? Similar websites are more user-friendly, […]

As states weigh human lives versus the economy, history suggests the economy often wins
Highlights Human lives often loses out to economic imperatives. A love for tobacco. From 1607 to 1624, approximately 7,300 migrants, most of them young, traveled to Virginia. While the first enslaved Africans had arrived in Virginia in 1619, their numbers grew significantly after the 1660s Their importance has become even more apparent during the pandemic, and […]

How the rich reacted to the bubonic plague has eerie similarities to today’s pandemic
Highlights The coronavirus can infect anyone, but recent reporting has shown your socioeconomic status can play a big role “The Decameron” begins with a gripping, graphic description of the bubonic plague, which was so virulent that a person who contracted it would die within four to seven days. How wealth and advantage can impair people’s abilities to […]

What’s lost when we’re too afraid to touch the world around us?
Highlights I find myself thinking about Johann Gottfried Herder, an 18th-century German philosopher who published a treatise on the sense of touch in 1778. For Herder, touch was the only way to understand the form of things and grasp the shape of bodies. Herder changes René Descartes’ statement “I think, therefore I am” and claims: We […]

‘Tiger King’ and America’s captive tiger problem
Highlights Tiger King” takes viewers into the strange world of big cat collectors. All the rest are privately owned tigers, meaning they don’t belong to one of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ 236 sponsored institutions. These are considered generic and fall outside of federal oversight. The U.S. is plagued with complicated and vague laws […]