Strange facts (40 Pics)

Strange facts (40 Pics)

- Cuzz Blue

The Lies We Tell on Dating Apps

The lies most people tell on dating apps do serve a purpose.

Nearly one-fourth of young adults are looking for love through dating websites or apps. This relatively new form of courtship can give you access to a large pool of potential partners. It also presents a unique set of challenges.

- JSTOR Daily

CODY BRATT CAPTURES THE BEAUTIFUL SELF-DESTRUCTIVE NATURE OF LOVE IN HIS BOOK LOVE WE LEAVE BEHIND

Cody Bratt is a San Francisco-born photographer with an almost uncanny ability to capture the glamour of pain. He’s one of those artists, like Rimbaud. Bukowski, or Lana del Rey, that somehow, some way, are able to portray decadence and loss in an irresistibly alluring and cinematic way.

- Feature Shoot

Coloring For Grown-Ups: The Adult Activity Book

Two veterans of offbeat Internet humor hilariously combine the mindless fun of children’s coloring books with the mind-numbing realities of modern adult life.

With over 200 comedy videos and 75 million Youtube views to their credit, Ryan Hunter and Taige Jensen know how to make people laugh. Their YouTube video, “Hipster Olympics” racked up nearly three million hits and quickly attained worldwide cult status, which led to opportunities to create original content for Comedy Central, MTV, College Humor, the Huffington Post, The Onion and Slate. Now, the duo put their prolific creative talents to work in Coloring for Grown-Ups. The artwork resembles that of a children’s activity book, while actually offering an ironic look at the stereotypes, habits, and challenges of modern adulthood.

- Design you Trust

How steak became manly and salads became feminine

When was it decided that women prefer some types of food – yogurt with fruit, salads and white wine – while men are supposed to gravitate to chili, steak and bacon?

In my new book, “American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way,” I show how the idea that women don’t want red meat and prefer salads and sweets didn’t just spring up spontaneously.

- The Conversation

10 Things Your Ancestors Did Better Than You

We have a rather arrogant quality about ourselves in these modern times. We seem to truly think we have reached the acme of human society. Well, I hate to be the one to disabuse you of that notion, but I’m going to . . . Almost everything we do has been done better before us. Our ancestors hold the key to solving many problems of modern society and this list looks at those solutions.

- Listverse

What is to be done about the problem of creepy men?

These days, ‘creepy’ is a popular pejorative. From ‘Creepy Uncle Joe’ Biden’s hair-smelling antics to Justin Trudeau standing ‘too close’ to a tennis star, from the random dude who just slid into your direct messages to Zach Braff holding hands with a much-younger actress, many people are invoking creepiness as a factor, even a decisive one, in considerations about what is socially acceptable and even who is fit for political office. Creeps, it seems, are everywhere.

- Aeon

Just Because You Had an Orgasm Doesn't Mean the Sex Was Good

Yep, there's such a thing as bad orgasms—here's what that means.

Bad sex you're probably (sorry to say) familiar with. You know the kind, when you're too tired or stressed, or you're not 100% physically attracted to the person in your bed.

But now, researchers have identified what they're calling "bad" orgasms. In a new study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, they've come up with a description of what a bad orgasm entails, plus some of the reasons people experience them.

- Health

Derrière la porte: l’homme qui aimait les femmes

Jaco s’est séparé cette année. Après avoir été marié et s’être encabané pendant près de 30 ans, le voilà libre et épanoui comme jamais. Et ça paraît. Récit.

Après avoir été malheureux des années (« il n’y avait pas d’amour, un certain manque de respect, résume-t-il, de la jalousie extrême »), Jaco a tout plaqué du jour au lendemain pour refaire sa vie dans un trois et demie. Littéralement. « C’est une leçon d’humilité. Je roulais en Audi et j’avais une maison à un million, dit-il. Mais il ne me manque rien… »

- La Presse

Massage Parlors with 'Happy Endings' Give These Sex Workers a Decent Living

Often portrayed as hotbeds of human trafficking, workers, owners, and activists say these places can be a safe and reliable option for immigrants.

Amy points to the sign scrawled in black magic marker, Scotch-taped below an anatomical drawing of the human form. "No Sex No Massage Only Body Work," it declares. We're in a small, dark room on the second floor of a brick building on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, Queens, the heart of the Asian massage industry in America. Amy, a 40-year-old massage worker—her name, like that of others from the industry who appear in this story, has been changed to protect her identity—is clad in a not particularly seductive outfit: a canary yellow t-shirt and black leggings, a royal blue visor atop her head, black hair pulled back in a ponytail. 

- Vice

You’re Only as Old as You Feel

Each of us has a chronological age, the number we commemorate on birthdays. But some 50-, 60- and 70-year-olds look and feel youthful, while others do not. Scientists can measure these differences by looking at age-related biomarkers — things like skin elasticity, blood pressure, lung capacity and grip strength. People with a healthy lifestyle and living conditions and a fortunate genetic inheritance tend to score “younger” on these assessments and are said to have a lower “biological age.”

But there’s a much easier way to determine the shape people are in. It’s called “subjective age.”

When scientists ask: “How old do you feel, most of the time?” the answer tends to reflect the state of people’s physical and mental health. “This simple question seems to be particularly powerful,” says Antonio Terracciano, a professor of geriatrics at Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee.

- NY Times

Amsterdam's Red Light District Is in Crisis. Can the City's First Female Mayor Remake It for the 21st Century?

Everyone has an opinion about where Felicia Anna works. For the last nine years, the 33-year-old Romanian sex worker has attracted clients by standing in the glowing windows of the world’s most famous red light district. Sipping coffee outside a cafe on one of Amsterdam’s cobbled, canal-side streets, she says the area’s reputation means it attracts far more controversy than legal prostitution does in other areas. “We’re always in the public eye, literally” she says, laughing.

Named “De Wallen” (The Walls) in Dutch for its position inside the old city walls, the red light district’s medieval buildings have been a hub for sex workers since the 15th century—long before the Netherlands legalized brothels and began regulating and taxing prostitution in October 2000. Today, escort services and sex clubs make up a significant part of Amsterdam’s sex work sector. But De Wallen’s window brothels—popularized in the 1960s as authorities grew more tolerant of women opening their curtains to attract clients—remain iconic: the literal manifestation of the clear-eyed Dutch approach to activities that other countries would rather sweep under the rug.

- Time

40 Of The Worst Newspaper Headlines To Make You Facepalm At The Stupidity

Our team at Bored Panda has run, flown, and swum all over the planet looking for hilarious and idiotic newspaper articles, all for your amusement. So put your reading glasses on, scroll down, and upvote the headlines you enjoyed. We’d love to hear about any peculiar and giggle-worthy headlines that you’ve come across; even better if you’ve come up with them yourselves!

- Bored Panda

What It Was Like to Date a Cult Leader

In her new book, The Program, Toni Natalie describes her long and harrowing history with Keith Raniere, now infamous as the leader of NXIVM, a cult organization which engaged in sex trafficking, blackmail, and physical branding of its members, all while claiming to be a self-help group for professional women. Natalie met Raniere well before he went on to establish NXIVM, and, as both his business partner and his girlfriend, saw first-hand how manipulative and power-hungry he could be. She describes herself as Raniere’s “Patient Zero,” a kind of lab rat on whom Raniere developed his coercion techniques. And when she decided to end their relationship, she says, he made her life hell.

- The Cut

Oral History: The 'Eyes Wide Shut' Orgy Scene

Something curious happened in New York around Christmastime 2016. For a few weeks, most of the rep houses in the city were screening Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The director’s final film had become, somehow, a holiday staple. This was a fate no one could have predicted back in July 1999, when it was released to dismissive reviews and disappointing box office, owing in part to a fully revved-up Hollywood hype machine that touted the sex appeal of stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and prepared audiences for a much different film.

But look hard enough at this tale of an embittered husband seeking sex in the wake of his wife’s admission of adulterous longing, and you can sense a familiar structure. Cruise’s Bill Harford wanders a nocturnal landscape of potential transgressions, all of which remind him of the warmth of domestic life. Or, to put it another way: Eyes Wide Shut may have been based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”), but it also plays like a sex-drenched variation on It’s a Wonderful Life, a warning to its protagonist to learn to appreciate his lot in life and love.

- Vulture

How to Move Forward When You're in a Sexless Marriage

Recently, a 36-year-old man posted something stupid on Reddit. This is not breaking news—this happens likely thousands of times per day, but the post made it over to Twitter, and people went in. The issue at hand? The guy hated his wife’s haircut. While he knew he couldn’t tell her not to get her hair cut, he admitted, “I know it sounds stupid, but every trip back to the hairdresser feels like a little slap in the face.” However, the husband mentioned one small detail that got everyone’s attention: he and his wife do not have sex.

- GQ

Do we possess our possessions or do they possess us?

In 1859, around 450 passengers on the Royal Charter, returning from the Australian goldmines to Liverpool, drowned when the steam clipper was shipwrecked off the north coast of Wales. What makes this tragic loss of life remarkable among countless other maritime disasters was that many of those on board were weighed down by the gold in their money belts that they just wouldn’t abandon so close to home. Humans have a particularly strong and, at times, irrational obsession with possessions. Every year, car owners are killed or seriously injured in their attempts to stop the theft of their vehicles – a choice that few would make in the cold light of day. It’s as if there is a demon in our minds that compels us to fret over the stuff we own, and make risky lifestyle choices in the pursuit of material wealth. I think we are possessed.

- aeon

Unsung Heros of WWII: The All-Female WASP Squad

Where there’s a will, there’s a way — but for pilot Jacqueline Cochrane, there had to be even more. “To live without risk, for me,” she said, “would be tantamount to death.” One of the biggest risks of her career was pioneering the US organisation, WASPS (Women Airforce Service Pilots). In the heat of WWII, the WASPS proved that not only could women fly, but they could fly furiously well. They trained under the same rigorous conditions as their male counterparts under the hot sun of Sweetwater, Texas, piloting combat planes, ferry aircrafts – they even flew as live practice targets for the men – but were never allowed to enter combat. In fact, until the 1970s, they weren’t even granted military status. Only in recent years has credit been given to these unsung sheroes of the skies, who proved that “Anything you can do, I can do better – and in lipstick.”

- Messy Nessy Chic

Jenny Odell on why we need to learn to do nothing: ‘It's a reminder that you're alive’

The author and artist’s keynote address on our fractured attention spans went viral. Now she has a plan for how to heal them: lose ourselves in nature.

Nearly two years ago, the artist and academic Jenny Odell gave a keynote address on “how to do nothing”. In it she talked about the impact of modern life’s ceaseless demands on our time and attention, “a situation where every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living”. And she discussed how she herself had found respite in nature.

- The Guardian