When you grow up in a very socially conservative environment that makes a large point of reinforcing specific gender roles, it can be hard to shake that off. But over time you realize, in the nicest possible way, “who gives a f**k?” Boys, if it was considered more universally acceptable, what is a “girly” thing you would do?...
There’s a growing cultural awareness now that concepts of gender are not only unnecessarily restrictive, but also totally arbitrarily constructed. Did you know, for instance, that not all that long ago, pink was the default color for baby boy products, and blue the default for girls? We just switched it up. And it didn’t matter at all....
People will often use the phrase “one in a million” or “one in a billion” to mean something that’s never going to happen. But of course, that’s not correct. A one in a million occurrence is a thing that happens once every million instances. So if, say, a person has a one-in-a-million physical attribute, given...
Penn Gillett once said “luck is statistics taken personally.” It’s a clever little insight, perhaps only bogged down by the fact that statistics are really hard to grasp intuitively. Take the lottery, for example. If I go buy a lotto ticket right now in my home state, the odds of me hitting the jackpot are roughly 1 in 20...
Do you hear the people sing Singing the songs of funny tweets It is the music of a people who will not accept defeat When the tweeting of our hearts Matches the tweets of something dumb It is the future that we bring when tomorrow comes I hope that little anthem got you sufficiently excited for these tweets because they’re coming at you one...
When I look at all these dang teens and their dang TikToks, it really gets me thinking. A lot of what’s getting put out there on these attention-hungry social platforms is innovative and funny and great. But way more of it is just dumb cringe. And everybody is doing it. It may well never go away. And it’s going to age like milk. Which...
Feeling a little uninspired today? We get it. It happens to the best of us. Lucky for you, there’s an entire internet just teeming with prompts and inspiration that might just help you break through your mental fog. One place you might visit for such a thing is the wild world of Twitter, serving up hot takes all day every day. Here are a few...
If you’ve never had a roommate, I can only assume you’ve lived some kind of extremely blessed, wealthy existence. For the rest of us, it’s just a general reality of life. Sometimes a joy, sometimes a pain, usually just a necessity we gotta find our ways to deal with. But boy does it come with some weird side effects. For example:...
I’m not sure exactly when it happens, and it’s probably different for everyone, but there comes a time in each person’s life where they look at themselves and say “I am officially too old to have roommates.” And just like that, you can never do it again. You can’t even share a hotel room with a friend for a...
When I was doing theatre in college, I once played a character with schizophrenia. In preparing for the show, I did a fair amount of research. Since I was approaching it as someone portraying the condition rather than someone studying it, I wanted to hear about personal experiences. I read stories written by schizophrenics, I met a man living in a...