Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes

AMERICANS disapprove of marital infidelity. Ninety-one percent of them find it morally wrong, more than the number that reject polygamy, human cloning or suicide, according to a 2013 Gallup poll.

Yet the number of Americans who actually cheat on their partners is rather substantial: Over the past two decades, the rate of infidelity has been pretty constant at around 21 percent for married men, and between 10 to 15 percent for married women.

-NY Times

14 Totally Free Things On The Internet Everyone Should Be Taking Advantage Of

The wunderkinds over on Reddit recently took a break from uncracked safes and banana-based measurements to post a mega-thread addressing the best of the best of all things free on the interwebs, and I couldn't help but share some of the highlights with you all. If you're savvy, you might recognize a few of these bad boys already, but don't spoil the Supermarket Sweep-style fun for the rest of us, OK?

-Supercompressor

23 Things That David Letterman Invented

All of the fawning pieces praising David Letterman’s storied career as a late night television innovator are well deserved; he is, as cliché as it has become, the Johnny Carson of a generation. But Late Night in particular was funny and innovative because of its passionate irreverence for show business and television itself, which makes all of the current fuss about the end of Letterman's 33-year run as ironic as the legendary host's sense of humor. That being said, here are 23 recurring bits, features, and moments that the former Indiana weatherman and his writers invented for our amusement that will linger long after his final night in the Late Show chair.

-mental_floss

Death Denial

Does our terror of dying drive almost everything we do?

-The Chronicle

The doomsday vault: the seeds that could save a post-apocalyptic world

Set in an Arctic mountainside, the Svalbard seed bank contains the world’s most prized crops. But a row has erupted over whether this is the best hope of feeding the world after a catastrophe or just an overpriced deep freeze.

-The Guardian

The truth about adverts: selling the White Woman™

Hank Willis Thomas’s work examines the ways in which advertising has fabricated notions of gender and race, and then convinced us all to buy into them. “I always talk about racism as the most successful advertising campaign of all time,” Thomas says. His work serves as a sort of counter-campaign; one that aims to muddy the myths we’ve been marketed. “I want to complicate the way that I’m seen and the way that I look at other people.”

-The Guardian

I Went to a Blowjob Bar in Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok, Thailand, is one of the world's deepest pits of pure sin, a forbidden zone where you can get pretty much whatever sexual perversion tickles your pickle presented to you on a silver platter, with drugs and booze on the side. Countless massage parlors, brothels, and call services exist to cater to the humongous sex-tourism industry. So how does an aspiring entrepreneur, uh... stick out in such a super-saturated marketplace?

-Vice

Selections from Dennis Hopper's Trove of Drugstore Camera Photos

Intimate snapshots from Hollywood's legendary troublemaker.

-American Photo

Les 5 d'Oxbridge

Depuis le 12e et le 13e siècle, les universités d'Oxford et de Cambridge forment les élites du Royaume-Uni. Leur prestige et leur organisation similaire font que les Anglais en parlent comme d'une seule entité, Oxbridge. Pour en connaître les dessous, Urbania a réuni autour de la table cinq étudiants, qui ont accepté de nous révéler ce qui se passe derrière les portes des services académiques de Sa Majesté.


-Urbania / La Presse

Le monde secret des fraternités

Lorsqu'on parle de fraternités, notre premier réflexe, c'est de penser à des Américains, riches, dans un gros manoir, qui jouent au bière pong avec des gobelets rouges et qui portent des cardigans noirs. Pourtant, le phénomène est loin d'être réservé à nos voisins du Sud, puisque Montréal compte près d'une vingtaine de frat houses sur son territoire. Urbania a poussé les portes de la plus grande fraternité francophone au monde pour faire la lumière sur leur énigmatique univers.

-Urbania / La Presse

When society isn’t judging, women’s sex drive rivals men’s

Men just want sex more than women. I’m sure you’ve heard that one. Stephen Fry even went as far as suggesting in 2010 that straight women only went to bed with men because sex was “the price they are willing to pay for a relationship”.

-The Conversation

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

As she made the long journey from New York to South Africa, to visit family during the holidays in 2013, Justine Sacco, 30 years old and the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, began tweeting acerbic little jokes about the indignities of travel.

-NY Times

Saying Goodbye

Nothing prepares you for the exact moment when you see your loved one take their last breath.

Nothing prepares you for the utter, complete silence that follows.

-Medium

The True Cost of Gun Violence in America

It was a mild, crystal clear desert evening on November 15, 2004, when Jennifer Longdon and her fiance, David Rueckert, closed up his martial-arts studio and headed out to grab some carnitas tortas from a nearby taqueria. They were joking and chatting about wedding plans—the local Japanese garden seemed perfect—as Rueckert turned their pickup into the parking lot of a strip mall in suburban north Phoenix. A red truck with oversize tires and tinted windows sideswiped theirs, and as they stopped to get out, Rueckert's window exploded. He told Longdon to get down and reached for the handgun he had inside a cooler on the cab floor. As he threw the truck into gear, there were two more shots. His words turned to gibberish and he slumped forward, his foot on the gas. A bullet hit Longdon's back like a bolt of lightning, her whole body a live wire as they accelerated toward the row of palm trees in the concrete divider.

-Mother Jones

The American City Where Sex Offenders Live

When you are a registered sex offender in America, you lose the right to choose where you want to live. By law. Your backstory doesn t matter. Nor does the nature of your crime or your excuse. You are exiled from society, and only a few places will welcome you. Like this place in South Florida. The City of Refuge. Jay Kirk reports on life in an American community—yes, that's definitely the right word—like no other

 

-GQ

Lady Killers

Female serial killers are more rare than their male counterparts, but they aren’t nonexistent; about one in six serial murderers is a woman. As a group, they are often overlooked and underestimated. “I think society is in denial that women are capable of such hideousness,” Marissa Harrison, an evolutionary psychologist at Penn State Harrisburg, said. Harrison conducted a study of female serial killers that recently appeared in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology. It is part of a small but growing body of research into the subject, and the data suggests that female serial killers are lethal in their own unique way.

-The New Yorker