Solidarity in Heels

Male servers at Ottawa restaurant Union Local 613 wore dresses and heels to work for part of a shift last Wednesday, after seeing on TV that some women feel compelled to wear sexy outfits to work.  Reportedly the men felt uncomfortable.  Their feet hurt.  People made jokes and stared.  It was ridiculous. We should all wear identical burlap boilersuits, and be done with sexual dimorphism.  It's a failed experiment.

More Things That Are Now “Racist”: Thor, Heavy Metal Music, Viking Cosplay

“Folk metal serves as a comfortable leisure space for those that have lost power in recent decades: the white European, working class men who have faced challenges to their assumed privileges from women, globalisation, immigration and postmodernity. However, at the same time it should not be easily dismissed in this way, and I believe it remains central to the idea of heavy metal as a form of leisure that makes masculinity and whiteness the norm.”

‘Magic’ Will Replace Normcore, Trend Forecasters Report

How does this all relate towards brands and the fashion landscape? "In the broadest strokes, it is saying, 'This is about people’s experiences.'" Segal says. "It is saying, ‘What’s important is how people are experiencing the world, experiencing their spirituality, experiencing anxiety, so there is a motion back toward the emotional landscape of consumers instead of their pocketbooks."

Send aliens modern messages of Earth's equality and diversity, say scientists

There’s also the possibility that rather than an advanced alien race, our messages might find a civilisation slightly behind us. Sandberg said: “If we got a message from aliens in the 1930s it might have freaked us out a bit, but would it have crushed us? No. Unless we had received transmissions of Big Brother, perhaps.”

Why the World's Remaining Hunter-Gatherer Societies Are Some of the Biggest Pot Smokers

"Countless rituals have developed around food that do not relate to nutrition. The same goes for sex, clothing, shelter and other utilitarian behaviors. All these behaviors are (and were) essential to survival and reproduction, but we humans have a tendency to elaborate everything. We think the same might be true of recreational drugs."

Down the Rabbit Hole: Curiouser and Curiouser

"The study of strange phenomena, which so often finds itself arrayed against an imagined monolith of science, might justifiably consider itself a manifestation of a seemingly oxymoronic 'post-modern' science, the application of reason to the breakdown of ideological containment, in this instance the ideology of the real."

'Mansplaining' the return of political correctness

"As the social critic and author Robert Hughes put it in his brilliant 1993 book The Culture of Complaint, 'paleo-conservatives and free-speech therapists are both on the same wagon, the only difference being what they want to ban.'

But re-reading Hughes's book I am confident of one thing: in another generation or two, language that now seems so inclusive and tolerant, words designed to create a 'safe place' for discourse, will undoubtedly seem jarring, if not insulting. Language police will be insisting on new argot."

The Universal Feeling in All Human Communication Revealed by Massive Study

“When experienced in isolation and weighted properly according to use, words, which are the atoms of human language, present an emotional spectrum with a universal, self-similar positive bias."

Chimps joining new troop learn its 'words'

"Unanswered is what motivated the Dutch chimps to sound more like the Scots: to be better understood, or to fit in by adopting the reining patois?"

Bowhead whales heard singing unique new songs

"It would be really great to understand not only why they sing but why they sing so many different songs."