The word dazi (搭子) comes from Shanghai slang for “card-playing buddy.”

Back then, you sat down, slapped cards on the table, and didn’t necessarily exchange birthdays. Now? The same stripped-down logic applies to almost anything: dinner, karaoke, the gym.

By 2024–2025, dazi had gone viral on Chinese platforms like Xiaohongshu and WeChat.

According to Radii China, young people are openly advertising for “meal dazi” or “travel dazi,” and not pretending it means forever friendship. Researchers now call this “precise companionship”—the opposite of the emotional sinkhole so many of us call “friendship” (China Daily).

Amsterdam: city of canals, tulips, and recently a thousand folks explaining how to monetize their genitals in the gig economy.

Europe’s largest pornography conference took over a riverside hotel, which is ordinarily the sort of place where German capitalists meet to discuss their supply chains.

Last week, however, it was flooded with roller skates, sequined bras, and the relentless optimism of people who believe burnout can be solved with branding.

Out in the lobby, two buses of American retirees clutched their tickets for the cheese-and-windmill tour.

They looked on in horror as women in diamanté heels rolled past with ring lights. The retirees will, most likely, never recover.

Many folks have a story about a miracle.

A cancer scan that comes back clear. A loved one surviving an accident against all odds. Or simply making it through a season of life that seemed impossible.

But what does believing in miracles actually do for our mental health?

A new study in Mental Health, Religion & Culture offers an intriguing answer: sometimes, belief in miracles can buffer against depression—but not for everyone, and not in the same way.

My fascination with human behavior at work has caused me to notice how hiring managers love to say, “We only care about qualifications, and hire accordingly.”

It’s a noble sentiment, right up there with “I don’t judge a book by its cover” or “I only eat potato chips in moderation.”

The problem? None of those claims survive contact with real life.

Most revivals ask you to buy something—vinyl, vintage denim, another “sustainable” hoodie.

Naturism’s pitch is simpler and far more subversive: you already own the outfit. You were born in it, and it still fits.

For decades, clothing has been treated like emotional duct tape: armor against judgment, a billboard for your status, a filter for your insecurities.

The naturist revival suggests something different. The body doesn’t need a disguise. The body is the disguise.

is family nudism becoming a thing?

Not every love story ends with an explosive blowout.

More often it fades the way air leaks from a tire—slowly, quietly, until you’re startled by how flat things feel.

You wake up one morning and realize you haven’t really laughed together in weeks.

Conversations have been whittled down to weather updates and grocery lists. You’re still under the same roof, still sharing a bed, still splitting the bills—but intimacy has thinned until you feel less like partners and more like polite roommates.

This is emotional distance. It isn’t always the death of love, though it often masquerades as such. More often, it’s the nervous system’s survival strategy: a partner shutting down to cope with stress, exhaustion, or the unspoken backlog of resentments.

Love can still be present, flickering in small gestures, even when connection feels faint. Here are a few hopeful signs.

For centuries, swearing has been condemned as vulgar, lazy, or proof of a limited vocabulary. But new research suggests your grandmother was dead wrong.

Swearing doesn’t just make you sound more human—it may also make you stronger, more motivated, and more emotionally engaged.

Yes, really. That four-letter word might just be a performance enhancer.

It starts with a glance. Not the quick, casual kind, but the one that lingers—measuring, scanning, assessing. For most women, it’s a familiar experience.

A new study in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology confirms that this gaze is more than harmless attention: it sparks measurable anxiety about personal safety.

Yet the findings also reveal a paradox.

That spike in safety anxiety doesn’t always dampen women’s choices to self-sexualize, especially when the man is described as attractive or high in status. In short: risk and reward collide in the space of a single look.

Itzhak Bentov thought the heart and brain were tuning forks for the cosmos. Nikola Tesla insisted everything could be explained through vibration. John C. Lilly floated in darkness until he was convinced the universe was being run by “cosmic programmers.”

Edgar Cayce shut his eyes, went into a trance, and spoke about health and Atlantis in the same sitting. Jacques Vallée looked at UFOs and decided they were less about aliens and more about the human imagination.

Put them all together and you don’t really get a coherent school of thought, do you?

You get a strange constellation of characters — brilliant, reckless, often wrong, but unwilling to accept the idea that consciousness was nothing more than neurons firing in the dark.

Most UFO researchers chase hardware: saucers, propulsion systems, and the occasional green alien with big eyes. Jacques Vallée went after something stranger — the way these sightings reflect the human mind.

Born in France in 1939, Vallée trained as an astronomer and computer scientist. He worked on the technology that would eventually become the internet, which should have earned him a safe life as a respectable scientist.

Instead, he took a sharp turn into the murky business of UFOs. But Vallée wasn’t interested in proving that we’re being visited by extraterrestrials.

His heresy was more subtle: UFOs might be real enough as experiences, but they were also psychological, symbolic events — mirrors more than machines.

While Tesla fried eggs on coils and John Lilly floated with dolphins, Edgar Cayce just took a nap. That was his whole method in a nutshell.

He lay down, went into a trance, and started talking. And for reasons that baffled his family and most of the scientific community, people listened.

Born in 1877 in rural Kentucky, Cayce became famous as the “Sleeping Prophet” — a man who could, while unconscious, diagnose illnesses, prescribe cures, and occasionally wander off into Atlantis.

He wasn’t a trained doctor, he wasn’t a laboratory scientist, and he wasn’t much of a showman either.

He was a soft-spoken, church-going man who looked more like your kindly uncle than a psychic celebrity.

Which made it all the stranger when thousands of people wrote him letters begging him to bestow attention upon them and heal them from afar.

Some scientists spend their careers tidying up data.

John C. Lilly spent his tearing holes in the curtain of reality. A physician and neuroscientist by training, Lilly began as a careful brain researcher.

But somewhere between mapping monkey neurons and building the first sensory isolation tank, he decided science wasn’t asking nearly big enough questions.

What happens to the mind when all stimulation is removed? Could dolphins be taught human language? Could psychedelics unlock a cosmic operating system?

Lilly chased each of these questions with the same intensity — and not always with the same caution.

His life was a mix of genuine discovery, hubris, and a kind of reckless mysticism that makes him one of the strangest figures in the history of consciousness studies.