Out in the real world news is happening and here are the highlights.
Violence on the up in Lego Land
According to a study by the University of Canterbury, Lego toys are slowly but surely getting more violent. Roughly 30% of Lego sets contain some sort of weapon, and the prevalence of weaponry on catalogue pages increases by some 19% every year. Won't someone please think of the children? – NewsHub.
Facebook is warping our reality
Zuckerberg recently took some stick when word got out that Facebook has been filtering out conservative viewpoints from trending news, but its regulation of information goes much deeper than that. Our circle of online friends, the purchases we make, the likes we click, all of these factors cocoon us into a digital echo chamber that has little semblance to objective reality. – New York Times.
White extremists major threat to U.S.
Over the past 15 years, Islamic Jihadists have replaced communism as the bogey men hiding under American beds, all while angry, disenfranchised white dudes have been legally stockpiling assault rifles and dreaming of overthrowing the government like a slack-jawed George Washington. The Patriot Movement, more appropriately satirized as "Y'All Qaeda" is probably a much bigger threat to the U.S. than faraway Muslims without passports or means to reach America in any shape or form. – Washington Post.
Fashion industry in meltdown on all sides
As you may have heard, the fashion industry is in a bit of a crisis at the moment: China's economy is slowing down, designers are fleeing major labels, the ready-to-wear model is falling apart at the seams. It's such a mass that it's impossible to tell where one calamity stops and another one begins. Financial Times crunched the numbers, summing it up succinctly so you don't have to. – Financial Times.
Mourinho to replace Van Gaal at Manchester United
The celebrations had hardly died down following Manchester United's 2-1 FA Cup final victory against Crystal Palace, when word filtered through that the team's unloved manager, Louis Van Gaal, was set to be replaced by the prodigal Jose Mourinho – his former protege. After boring everyone to tears for two years and making only the most incremental of improvements on the pitch, Louis' time was up, bringing the curtain down on his final job of a much trophied career. – The Guardian.
Britney's Back
Having finally recovered from her shaven-headed meltdown all those years ago, Britney Spears made her comeback performance at the Billboard Music Awards this weekend. Celebs in attendance were impressed, but is there space in our modern culture for a Y2K relic like Britney? – Refinery29.
