
While male characters are granted the human agency to be violent out of simple greed or malice, cinema frequently hits a psychological wall when it comes to women. The film Obsession proves a bizarre double standard: to make a female antagonist exhibit the same baseline level of violence as an average man, the narrative must invoke the ultimate extremes of demonic possession and magic spells.

She was married off at eleven. Assaulted for weeks by men who faced no consequences. Hunted by a government that had never protected her. Then she picked up a gun. On February 14, 1981 — Valentine's Day — Phoolan Devi led an armed gang into the village where she had been held captive and brutalized. Twenty-two men were shot dead on the banks of the Yamuna river. The Indian government launched one of the largest manhunts in Uttar Pradesh's history. They couldn't find her for two years. What happened next is the part nobody expects. The woman India was hunting would go on to surrender on her own terms, spend eleven years in prison without a single conviction, and then win a seat in the Parliament of the country that had jailed her. Twice. This is the real story of Phoolan Devi — the Bandit Queen of India. A story about caste, survival, justice, and what happens when every institution designed to protect you looks the other way. Read the full story below.

After Mean Girls and The Notebook made her one of the most sought-after actresses on the planet, Rachel McAdams turned down five blockbusters in two years and went home. The films she declined — Iron Man, Casino Royale, The Devil Wears Prada, Mission: Impossible III, and Get Smart — grossed billions. She said she needed to hear her own voice again

In 1985, cartoonist Alison Bechdel published a two-page comic strip in which a character stated she would only watch a film if it had at least two women who talked to each other about something other than a man. The last film that had met those requirements, the character noted, was Alien — released six years earlier. Forty years later, that joke is a metric used by Swedish cinemas, European film funds, and Hollywood studios.

In 1688 a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer noticed that soldiers sent far from their Alpine homes were dying — not from wounds or illness, but from longing. He named the condition nostalgia. For the next two centuries, physicians across Europe and America treated it, recorded it as a cause of death, and argued bitterly about how to cure it.

Until about 2015, family estrangement was one of the most common experiences nobody studied. Karl Pillemer at Cornell was stunned to find 27 percent of Americans were currently estranged from a family member. Here is what the research — slowly, carefully assembled across two decades — actually found

The viral version says your tears contain a painkiller six times stronger than morphine. The actual research — conducted across 35 countries, published in peer-reviewed journals, involving thousands of participants — is more nuanced, more honest, and considerably more interesting.
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