Paintings by Marina Kappos from the exhibition You You You, which was on view last year at Shrine, in New York City © The artist. Courtesy Shrine, New York City
Makeup makes men more attractive, and Machiavellians have more unprotected sex. A low-ranking male Sapajus libidinosus named Fu was thrice observed masturbating to the sight of other monkeys mating. Straight men become increasingly aroused as women’s low-back curvature approaches the hypothesized optimum of 45.5 degrees. Persistent genital arousal without corresponding psychological arousal appears to be linked to eating disorders. Swear words, across languages, are low in approximant sounds, and positive words evolve more slowly than negative ones. People tend to describe their past immoral actions in concrete, mechanistic terms. Nazi propaganda shifted, with the onset of the Holocaust, away from moral disengagement concerning Jews and toward their agency. Countries with weak governance and strong conformism are more prone to belief in witchcraft, but such beliefs cannot be predicted by exposure to past misfortunes. Morning people tend to be conservative, especially in Switzerland, but morning people in Russia tend to be progressive.
Wild gloomy octopuses who propel debris at one another do so more forcefully when they have turned themselves dark. Middle-aged African-American couples in rural Georgia who perceive gratitude in their relationships report lower levels of ineffective arguing and financial stress, and financial stress during pregnancy leads to increased cellular aging in white but not black American children. The global collapse in human sperm counts and sperm concentration has accelerated in recent years, and the lifespans of lab-raised honeybees have dropped by half since the Seventies. Britons who prepay their energy bills consume less fruit and vegetables, underscoring the “heat or eat” dilemma. When preparing frozen stuffed chicken products, poor Americans are more likely than rich ones to use a microwave. Irritable bowel syndrome may arise in those whose bodies cannot deal with gravity. The earliest known sentence-length Canaanite inscription, discovered on an ivory comb containing louse remains, was a prayer for relief from beard lice.
Young Mars was covered by an ocean a thousand feet deep; Earth may be experiencing a seventh, not a sixth, mass extinction; and rising seas are expected to rapidly erode rocky coastlines in Devon and Yorkshire. The twenty-five-minute annual discrepancy between Earth’s axial tilt and orbital distance results in a 22,000-year cycle that affects the Pacific cold tongue. A Gobichettipalayam man seeking to rid himself of snake dreams presented to a priest, who advised him to flick his tongue at a Russell’s viper, who then bit the man on the tongue, whereupon the man presented to doctors. Russell Crowe stumbled shoeless upon a poisonous bandy-bandy snake, and Chicago’s goose harassment policy is not working. Dutch wolves were to be shot with paintballs to make them afraid of humans again. Veterinarians reported that localized intercostal blocks had proved superior to fentanyl infusion in the laparoscopic oophorectomies of twenty bitches, researchers were testing a fentanyl vaccine, and ketamine fails to mimic psychosis in some mice. Juvenile marmosets are resilient against social isolation if they are given ayahuasca before their families are taken away.
