smart & curious
A list of curious facts
- Couples are increasingly guilty of ‘quarantine phubbing’—i.e. preferring your phone to your significant other.
- Over the past decade, Bollywood films have become a whole lot like Hollywood films. And Mint has the data to prove it!
- Wild bisons will return to the UK for the first time in 6,000 years—thanks to a project that hopes to use them to revive lost woodlands.
- Penguins are projectile shitters. They hunker down, point their rear ends away from the nest, lift their tails, and let the shit literally fly—as far as 4.39 feet away. Ars Technica has all the science. We prefer Daily Mail’s specially designed infographic of the pooping penguin. 😂
- Jada Pinkett had an affair when she and Will Smith were on a break—and broke the news to him during a Facebook Live event (Hey, we couldn’t exactly file this under Headlines That Matter. And it is a curious fact.)
A list of good book-related reads
- “You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.” That’s the opening line of this hilarious decimation in the London Review of Books of the revered white male author genre. It’s from 2019, but we just discovered it, and totally must share.
- We also loved this informative thread in defence of the much-maligned ‘irregardless’.
- Also a must read: Mint on a 1973 book titled ‘The Camp Of The Saints’—which “depicts Indians as paedophiles who use their own faeces as fuel to cook.”
- A gem that landed in our inbox courtesy The Paris Review: An achingly beautiful poem by Jayanta Mahapatra titled ‘After the Death of a Friend’.
