Pop Culture

The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. It's certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein. - Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

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When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning. 

Jeremy B. Jones

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Courtesy of South China Morning Post: 

A creepy kissing device with moving lips designed to allow people to feel “real” intimacy with long-distance lovers and even land smackers on random strangers, has gone viral on Chinese social media.

The “lips” – made from silicon – simulate the actual pressure, movement and heat of a kisser’s lips using sensors, allowing the device to send an exact replica of the smacker to the recipient’s device.

It works using a pairing mobile phone app, the Chinese news outlet Sichuan Guancha reported on February 20.

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In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is, reasoning that, on average, these males will feel that relatively and subjectively their own penis was smaller; compared to those told that the average penis size was smaller than true average. We then asked them to rate how much they would like to own a sports car. These facts and questions were buried amongst other items giving information and asking for product ratings, so that our hypothesis was masked from participants. We found that males, and males over 30 in particular, rated sports cars as more desirable when they were made to feel that they had a small penis.

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The New York you live in now is the best version of New York.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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podcast.ai | Joe Rogan interviews Steve Jobs

Podcast.ai, a podcast that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence. 

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It’s like, acting’s bullshit, right? Like, at the end of the day, it’s all about fucking bullshit.

Mila Kunis

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We tested if boredom is associated with pornography use and what role low perceived meaning in life plays in their association. Following work on the …

We tested if boredom is associated with pornography use and what role low perceived meaning in life plays in their association. Following work on the existential escape hypothesis, we hypothesised that pornography consumption may be used to escape from the perceived meaninglessness that boredom signals. We tested whether perceived meaninglessness predicted increased pornography use via boredom and using pornography for emotional avoidance. Subsequently, we tested this indirect serial relationship using scales that measured pornography use for excitement seeking and sexual pleasure. We found significant indirect relationships in each case. Our research contributes to understanding the role of boredom in promoting pornography consumption and how it may function as an escape from perceived meaninglessness in life.

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OVO Sound ... is the genre’s death drive. It’s a bare bassline, stutter claps, a sad metronome, and a lot of sighing. This is the soundtrack for a record-low birth rate.

Justin Charity