Headlines from December 20, 2013

Obama stays home and instead sends three openly gay athletes as part of his Olympic delegation to Sochi.
Billboard in Coimbatore, India commemorates Morgan Freeman instead of Nelson Mandela.
Lapham: “All jokes are inside jokes and the butts of them are us, the only animal that laughs, but also the only one that is laughed at.”
Studies find laughter to be dangerous medicine.
Nabokov published 18 scientific papers on lepidoptery, the study of butterflies.
TMN’s Mike Deri Smith moves to Berlin to play tennis—the sport that’s equal parts therapy and sadism—and winds up on Nabokov’s old courts. #tmn
Ceiling collapses during performance at London’s Apollo Theater, leaving more than 80 injured.
Sample covers for The Parisianer—the New Yorker if it was based in France.
Smog begins to regularly photo-bomb Instagrams taken in China.
China has 3,886 museums, exceeding a five-year plan to have 3,500 museums by 2015.
Related: It is virtually impossible to write the words “sneeze,” “hiccup,” and “cough” in Chinese characters.
Women have been opting out of degrees like English and history in favor of social sciences for decades—thus, the decline in Humanities. #opinions
Uganda bans mini-skirts in anti-pornography bill—identical to a law Idi Amin passed in the ‘70s.
Gender dimorphism pervades contemporary Disney animations: men are absurdly large, women sport eyeballs wider than their wrists.
Winners selected for National Geographic’s best photos taken in 2013.
Ur-blogger Jason Kottke declares the blog format officially dead, as of 2013.
Ditching a big new novel partway through, Jessa Crispin explains what it’s like to love a writer but not her books.
Economists disagree with the idea that cash is the most effective and satisfying Christmas present.