flickering pictures

Writing for an awesome-sounding newspaper called the Tulane Hullabaloo, Jeff Silberman has put together a fine op-ed piece on the silliness of a media culture that bombards us with violent music, TV shows and video games but gets squeamish when somebody says the word “nipple.”
Here’s an excerpt:

On television, for every 10,000 murders, we see one […]

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Last September, a 22-year-old Women’s Studies major going by the pseudonym “Natalie Dylan” decided to sell her virginity to the highest bidder, sparking all sorts of debate about morality, sexuality and capitalism. As of yesterday, the bidding was up to $3.8 million. You read that right.
From The Daily Beast:

They say you should value […]

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Germany’s world-renowned Max Planck Institutes, whose science and technology researchers are among the world’s finest, accidentally printed an ad for a Chinese brothel on the cover of its latest journal.
The Independent reports:

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text […]

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If that’s not the strangest thing you’ve read today, I’d like to know what is.
From the Telegraph:

Mak Erot developed a family business empire offering penis extensions and cures for other sexual maladies using the power of Muslim prayer and a cocktail of 141 herbs. One of her 40 grandchildren, Haji Saifuloh, 37, explained that the […]

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A Greek court has quashed a legal motion by residents of the Greek island of Lesbos, who were fighting to “reclaim” the word “lesbian” from gay women. With signs bearing slogans like “If you are not from Lesbos, you are not a Lesbian,” angry islanders continue to argue that their identity has been hijacked. […]

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Here’s a story I bookmarked a few months ago and was saving for a rainy day.
On April 17, Pakistan’s Daily Times picked up an Agence France-Presse article about Iran’s experiments with condom and syringe vending machines targeted at drug users.

“Five machines will be installed at Tehran city’s welfare shelters for addicts,” the deputy head of […]

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Interested yet?
Having cured cancer and solved world hunger, U.S. researchers have focused their skills and public research dollars on an age-old quandary: why is James Bond sexy?
From the New Scientist:

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, […]

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Burmese ex-pat women are taking advantage of their ruling military leaders’ anti-panty superstitions to turn subjugation into subversion, resulting in one of the neatest political write-in campaigns I’ve ever heard of. So far, women across Europe, Brazil, Canada, the Philippines and Singapore are taking part.
From the Panties for Peace Canada website:

The Panties for Peace […]

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Coincidence? I think not.

Thanks to a U.S. federal appeals court ruling that struck down the Texas law, Mississippi, Alabama and Virginia are now the only states where they’re still illegal. Amazingly, the judges split 2 to 1.

Says the Statesman:

The state also argued in a brief that Texas has legitimate “morality based” reasons for […]

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