December 20, 2013
By The Morning News
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
