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Now, the links you’re here for:
Russian domestic violence: Women fight back (Lucy Ash, BBC)
“Mikhail Khachaturyan’s wife, Aurelia Dunduk, had an even worse experience. When she reported the beatings she’d received from her husband, soon after her first daughter was born, they immediately called him to the station. Then, when he arrived, they ripped up her statement in front of him. She never bothered going again.”
What’s behind a phobia of holes? (Chrissie Giles, The Guardian)
“Asked what first triggered their trypophobia, people describe everything from a Christmas bauble to a picture of a wasps’ nest, pitted bricks in a wall, bubbles in cake batter, or the way water beaded on their shoulder after a shower. As well as such triggering objects in real life, many trypophobes describe images as being particularly problematic. Pictures involving lotus seed pods are often cited as initial triggers. The lotus plant produces large green seed heads that look almost like a shower head, with many large seeds. The “lotus boob” meme, a fake image and story about an infected breast, caused quite the stir when it started circulating on email back in 2003.”
Don’t Blame the Internet for New Slang (Gretchen McCulloch, The Walrus)
“Both Wenker’s and Gilliéron’s dialect maps are meticulous, fascinating, and complicated, but if you know how to read them, you can trace the line between the villages in the north where French people around 1900 called Wednesday mercredi and those in the south where they called it dimècres. Or you can read Wenker’s hand-drawn map of Germany showing which regions pronounced “old” as alt, al, or oll. If you studied French or German in school, it’s easy to think that they’re each a single, unitary language, but that’s just the formal version: the maps showcase how these languages are truly constellations of dialects, hundreds of varieties that differ slightly from village to village.”
The Quiet Rooms (Jennifer Smith Richards, Jodi S. Cohen and Lakeidra Chavis, Chicago Tribune)
“The plywood box in the middle of Ted Meckley’s special-education classroom was 3 feet wide, 3 feet deep and 7 feet tall. The schools around Pontiac had been using boxes to seclude students for years, and Ted, a nonverbal 16-year-old with developmental disabilities, was routinely shut inside.”
He said, they said (Katie J. M. Baker and Jane Bradley, Buzzfeed)
“At the end of the last session, the guru had asked her to accompany him on a walk through the trees; they pressed on until they reached a clearing. There, she recalled in a 2,400-word account provided through her lawyers, he forced himself upon her — kissing her and groping her breasts in a prolonged sexual assault.”
Image credit: Teddy Hartanto