POP CULTURE & TRENDS

Vacations Feel Like They’re Over Before They Even Start – Why?

6Jul

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Vacations Feel Like They’re Over Before They Even Start – Why?

Selin Malkoc, The Ohio State University For many people, summer vacation can’t come soon enough – especially for the half of Americans who canceled their summer plans last year due to the pandemic. But when a vacation approaches, do you ever get the feeling that it’s almost over before it starts? If so, you’re not alone. In some recent studies Gabriela Tonietto, Sam Maglio, Eric VanEpps and I conducted, we found that about half of the people we surveyed indicated that their upcoming weekend trip felt like it would end as soon as it started. This feeling can have a ripple effect. It can change the way trips are planned – you might, for example, be less likely to schedule extra activities. At the same time, you might be more likely to splurge on an expensive dinner because you want to m...

Legal Protections For Black People’s Hair Are Still Gaining Momentum, 2 Years Later

2Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POP CULTURE & TRENDS

Legal Protections For Black People’s Hair Are Still Gaining Momentum, 2 Years Later

Advocates of the CROWN Act reflect on its impact and the many remaining challenges on changing beauty standards. Candice Norwood Originally published by The 19th Two years ago, California became the first state to sign a bill expanding anti-discrimination protections to hair textures and styles like afros, braids and locs that reflect Black identity, turning a national spotlight on hair restrictions affecting Black people in workplaces and schools. The Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act, or CROWN Act, has since been passed in 12 other states and 29 municipalities. Legal experts and champions for such policies told The 19th that the new laws have led to important discussions about how White-centric standards of professionalism and beauty harm people of color. Stil...

29Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POP CULTURE & TRENDS

Broken Mirrors Cause Bad Luck – How Did The Superstition Start And Why Does It Still Exist?

Barry Markovsky, University of South Carolina Every human culture has superstitions. In some Asian societies people believe that sweeping a floor after sunset brings bad luck, and that it’s a curse to leave chopsticks standing in a bowl of rice. In the U.S., some people panic if they accidentally walk under a ladder or see a black cat cross their path. Also, many tall buildings don’t label their 13th floors as such because of that number’s association with bad luck. The origins of many superstitions are unknown. Others can be traced to specific times in history. Included in this second category is a superstition that is between 2,000 and 2,700 years old: Breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck. It so happened that in both ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, reflected images wer...

Middle-Aged Americans In The US Are Stressed And Struggle With Physical And Mental Health – Other Nations Do Better

11Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POP CULTURE & TRENDS

Middle-Aged Americans In The US Are Stressed And Struggle With Physical And Mental Health – Other Nations Do Better

Frank J. Infurna, Arizona State University Midlife was once considered a time to enjoy the fruits of one’s years of work and parenting. That is no longer true in the U.S. Deaths of despair and chronic pain among middle-aged adults have been increasing for the past decade. Today’s middle-aged adults – ages 40 to 65 – report more daily stress and poorer physical health and psychological well-being, compared to middle-aged adults during the 1990s. These trends are most pronounced for people who attained fewer years of education. Although these trends preclude the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19’s imprint promises to further exacerbate the suffering. Historical declines in the health and well-being of U.S. middle-aged adults raises two important questions: To what extent is this confined to the...

Bans To Benefits On The Outside, Ex-Prisoners Are Going Hungry Amid Barriers

2Jun

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POP CULTURE & TRENDS

Bans To Benefits On The Outside, Ex-Prisoners Are Going Hungry Amid Barriers

Around 600,000 people are released annually from the U.S.‘s sprawling prisons network. Many face considerable barriers as a result of their convictions when it comes to essentials in life, like getting a job or a home. It can even be harder to feed themselves. Formerly incarcerated people are twice as likely to suffer food insecurity as the general population, with 1 in 5 ex-prisoners finding it difficult to obtain regular, nutritious meals. A 2013 survey of recently released prisoners came up with an even more stark finding: More than 90% were food insecure. Of the more than 100 formerly incarcerated people included in that study, 37% reported that they did not eat anything for a whole day at one point in the previous month. Lifelong ban on benefits Compounding the problem is that some ...

Police Body Cameras Can Invade People’s Privacy But Help Monitor Police

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism, POP CULTURE & TRENDS, VIDEO REELS

Police Body Cameras Can Invade People’s Privacy But Help Monitor Police

In the course of their work, police officers encounter people who are intoxicated, distressed, injured or abused. The officers routinely ask for key identifying information like addresses, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers, and they frequently enter people’s homes and other private spaces. Police see some difficult scenes; body cameras can record those and make them public. Tony Webster via Flickr, CC BY-SA With the advent of police body cameras, this information is often captured in police video recordings – which some states’ open-records laws make available to the public. Starting in the summer of 2014, as part of research on police adoption of body-worn cameras within two agencies in Washington state, I spent hours riding in patrol vehicles, hanging out at police stations, ...

A Place For Trans Youth To Find One Another And Explore Coming Out Was Created By The Early Internet

25May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

LGBTQ, POP CULTURE & TRENDS

A Place For Trans Youth To Find One Another And Explore Coming Out Was Created By The Early Internet

Follow coverage of trans issues, and you’ll hear some people say that teens who change their gender identity are participating in a fad, and that social media is the culprit. As one proponent of legislation that would restrict access to care for trans teens claimed, social media platforms are where trans youths are falsely “convinced” that their feelings of identifying as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth – known as gender dysphoria – are valid. These fears of Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok as breeding grounds for instilling gender dysphoria in young people recall other moral panics over new media, from the Victorian-era paranoia that serialized stories called “penny dreadfuls” were going to incite a youth crime wave to 20th-century anxiety over children’s exposure to v...

21May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POP CULTURE & TRENDS

When The First Baby Is Born In Space

When the first baby is born off-Earth, it will be a milestone as momentous as humanity’s first steps out of Africa. Such a birth would mark the beginning of a multi–planet civilization for the human species. A permanent Moon colony could become a reality in a few decades. NASA/Dennis Davidson/WikimediaCommons For the first half-century of the Space Age, only governments launched satellites and people into Earth orbit. No longer. Hundreds of private space companies are building a new industry that already has US$300 billion in annual revenue. I’m a professor of astronomy who has written a book and a number of articles about humans’ future in space. Today, all activity in space is tethered to the Earth. But I predict that in around 30 years people will start living in space – and soon afte...

The Sex Scene, It’s Simply Shifting From Clichéd Fantasy To Messy Reality – It Isn’t Disappearing

20May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POP CULTURE & TRENDS, VIDEO REELS

The Sex Scene, It’s Simply Shifting From Clichéd Fantasy To Messy Reality – It Isn’t Disappearing

Writing during what seems – in retrospect – to have been the wildly carefree summer of 2019, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday lamented that “sex is disappearing from the big screen.” Fast forward two years, and, improbably enough, it’s conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat who’s pleading for “sex and romance [to] make a comeback at the movies.” Both commentators blame this sexual stagnation on what they see as an abstinence-only policy in Hollywood, fueled by the Weinstein effect on one hand and family-friendly franchise fever on the other, where libidinal energy has been sublimated into buff-yet-sexless superheroes. To Hornaday and Douthat, sexual prudence seems to be tipping into prudery. Hornaday and Douthat are correct that the traditional sex scene – a tasteful...

The Discomfort We Have Over Hearing Our Voices

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism, POP CULTURE & TRENDS

The Discomfort We Have Over Hearing Our Voices

As a surgeon who specializes in treating patients with voice problems, I routinely record my patients speaking. For me, these recordings are incredibly valuable. They allow me to track slight changes in their voices from visit to visit, and it helps confirm whether surgery or voice therapy led to improvements. Yet I’m surprised by how difficult these sessions can be for my patients. Many become visibly uncomfortable upon hearing their voice played back to them. “Do I really sound like that?” they wonder, wincing. (Yes, you do.) Some become so unsettled they refuse outright to listen to the recording – much less go over the subtle changes I want to highlight. The discomfort we have over hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mix of physiology and psychology. For o...