FEATURED STORYNEW10 MIN READ
Hollywood Called Her the Next Julia Roberts. She Went Home to Canada Instead
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
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“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 wom…”
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Hollywood Called Her the Next Julia Roberts. She Went Home to Canada Instead
Human Interest · 10 MIN READ02
It Started as a Joke in a Lesbian Comic Strip. Then Hollywood Had to Take It Seriously
Entertainment · 12 MIN READ03
Nostalgia Was Once a Deadly Disease. Here Is Its Strange Medical History.
History · 13 MIN READLatest Stories
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History·13 MIN READ
Nostalgia Was Once a Deadly Disease. Here Is Its Strange Medical History.
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.
Science·11 MIN READ
What Decades of Research on Family Estrangement Actually Found
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
Science·10 MIN READ
The Real Reason You Feel Better After Crying (It's Not What the Internet Says)
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.
Science·11 MIN READ
Scientists Actually Mapped Where Emotions Live in the Body. Here's What They Found.
In 2013, a team of Finnish researchers gave 701 people a blank outline of a human body and asked them to colour where they felt each emotion. The results — published in one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals — were consistent across cultures and changed how scientists think about the relationship between the body and the mind
History·15 MIN READ
In 1929, Virginia Woolf Stood Up at Cambridge and Said What No One Had Said Before
In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women students of Cambridge University. A year later she published them as a single essay. Ninety-six years on, the argument she made that evening — that literature had been catastrophically impoverished by the doors shut on women — has never been seriously refuted
History·14 MIN READ
They Admitted Everything. Here's What Happened Next
Saint Augustine admitted his sins to God and changed Western civilisation. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted his failings to the world and invented modern autobiography. Oscar Wilde admitted everything to the man who had destroyed him — and the man burnt the letter without reading it. Confession, it turns out, does not always go as planned
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