On realising that friends often talk about you behind your back and that they don’t always give you the benefit of the doubt (New York Times°, from 2013).
Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world, and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they do, making all allowances, always on your side. There’s something existentially alarming about finding out how little room we occupy, and how little allegiance we command, in other people’s heads.
[…] The operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity.
We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.
The last seven Marvel movies haven’t been released in Chinese cinemas as their censors haven’t approved them (The Hollywood Reporter°).
We don’t know the exact reasons as the censors never explain their decisions. But, the likely reasons:
- ‘Anti-Chinese’ comments by Eternals’ director Chloe Zhao.
- The main star of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Simu Liu, made similar comments.
- Same story with Tom Hardy and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
- Black Widow had some anti-communist sentiment.
- Spider-Man: No Way Home featured the Statue of Liberty too much (ha!).
- Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness had a gay character.
- And Thor 4 has hints of a non-heterosexual character.
A barrel of 46-year-old Ardbeg whisky has sold for £16m (Financial Times°).
That’s more than double the price the entire Ardbeg distillery° was sold for back in 1997. The value of Scotch whisky grew 14% in 2021. I wrote last year about the increasing cost of whisky.
Child sexual abuse in Greenland is rampant (CBC°).
In the 2007… a staggering 52% of women and 22% of men said they experienced severe sexual abuse during childhood.
(via Slate Star Codex’s Suicide Hotspots of the World°)
The reason you ‘see stars’ after a hard whack to the head is because the cells in the occipital lobe (the visual processing area of the brain) get shaken and start sending out random electrical signals, which the eye displays as random bursts of light, or ‘stars’. (via Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health by Russell Foster)
