Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi was the last person on director Ali Abbasi’s mind when he was casting the lead role in his third feature film Holy Spider, which opens to U.S audiences Friday, and is based on the real-life case of serial killer “Spider Killer” Saeed Hanaei, who strangled 16 sex workers, typically with their headscarves, from 2000 to 2001.
Ebrahim…
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The conventional view of marriage holds that its satisfaction levels are U-shaped. There’s a crazy hyped-up romantic part at the start, and then a decline as people come to terms with the fact that life with another person is only sometimes an escalator to the upper reaches of happiness and often more of an Iditarod to a less hostile locale. And then, slowly, satisfaction returns, either beca…
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Americans eagerly anticipating the first total solar eclipse visible in the contiguous U.S. since 1979 — and the first to cross the country from coast to coast in 99 years — may know well know that what they’re watching is the moon simply passing in front of the sun. But even so, as long as eclipses have occurred, humans have interpreted them as a sign of something.
As T…
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As President Donald Trump weighs whether to keep U.S. in the Paris Agreement on climate change, leaders across the globe are preparing for the potential fallout.
Top White House aides are expected to meet this week to debate the new administration’s position, and a decision is expected before the end of May. During the campaign, Trump promised to pull the U.S. out of the landmark 20…
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What if we could pick up a bag of chips at the grocery store, and know, just by looking at the label, the climate impact as well as the calorie count? We aren’t there yet—at least not for most products in the United States—but a new web-based tool released by Swedish climate intelligence company CarbonCloud is bringing us closer to being able to calculate the greenhouse gas em…
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By now, many public health experts, and the public for that matter, have accepted that vaccinated people may need another dose of whichever COVID-19 shot they received in order to better protect against new variants of COVID-19. And on Aug. 18, the White House endorsed a third dose for those who received either of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. People who received the single-…
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You might not think you have much in common with Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, or Katniss Everdeen. But imagining yourself as the main character of a heroic adventure could help you achieve a more meaningful life.
Research published earlier this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology touts the benefits of reframing your life as a Hero’s Journey—a common stor…
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On Aug. 23, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first COVID-19 vaccine, one made by Pfizer-BioNTech, for anyone 16 years and older. The vaccine requires two doses and according to company studies, is 91% effective in protecting people from COVID-19 disease, including from severe illness. The vaccine received the FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) in December, whi…
Read moreOn Friday morning, Facebook executives faced yet another painful news cycle. Three days earlier, the engineering team discovered a security issue affecting roughly 50 million user accounts. Out of an abundance of caution, the company said on Friday as it revealed the hack, Facebook took action to shore up security not only for those accounts but 40 million others as well.
The issue at han…
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(Bloomberg) — Nick Winke, a photographer in the Pacific northwest, was perusing internet forums when he came across a complaint that alarmed him: On certain Samsung Electronics Co. smartphones, users aren’t allowed to delete the Facebook app.
Winke bought his Samsung Galaxy S8, an Android-based device that comes with Facebook’s social network already installed, when it w…
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