Before my first day of kindergarten, I was under the impression that every toilet came equipped with some sort of adjacent water shooting apparatus. In fact, it wasn’t until that fateful first day that I realized just how savage Americans really are. Because my family immigrated here...
Let’s set the record straight: Flowers aren’t just for when you’ve royally screwed things up. They’re also commonly afforded to dead people and people getting married! And as we’ve previously noted, they were even once used as a secret language: “During the Victorian Era, different flowers could...
One reason dudes don’t look like ladies is that most societies expect women to have significantly longer hair than men, despite there being no biological reason why that should be the case. Though disdain for men with long hair dates back centuries, it still lingers today. “There...
People fear crowds in several different ways. There’s the aspect where people feel they have no means of escape (agoraphobia); there’s the more obvious or relatable fear of an unpredictable mob (enochlophobia); and there’s the terror that strikes many of us when standing up and talking or...
We can all agree that washing your hands is totally rational. But refusing to touch a door handle afterward and freaking out that you’ll die of some terrible disease if you do? Not so much. It’s officially known as contamination OCD, but colloquially, we tend to call...
Obviously, no one really enjoys getting shots. But some people really, really hate needles, to the point where they suffer from trypanophobia, or a legitimate phobia of injections, blood tests and the like. Often, this goes hand-in-hand with hemophobia (a phobia of blood), for pretty obvious reasons....
Ahh, the miracle of flight: Being hurtled over land or sea in a thin aluminum tube, at an altitude so high you can’t breathe the air, as the whole plane periodically shakes so violently without warning that you can’t even stand up (not to mention tiny, smelly...
What the hell is so irrational about being scared of standing on the edge of someplace really high, you ask? It’s a fair question, and it’s true that a lot of phobias are grounded in a very basic, primal danger. But standing on a second-story balcony behind...
Ever been in one of those MRI machines, where you’re held down and slid into a tiny tube, with the strange whirring sound of huge, invisible magnets scanning your prone, helpless body as you’re ordered to be as still as a statue for several minutes? It’s pretty...
Last month, one frantic redditor desperately asked for advice when they received a letter declaring that they were being charged for battery after performing the Heimlich maneuver on a choking man. Despite saving the man’s life, the demand letter alleged that he bruised a rib in doing...
There are three main motivators in life: Fear (“I should work late so my boss knows he shouldn’t fire me!”); anger (“I’ll show her! I’m going to hit the gym and get swole!”); and positive thinking (“I can achieve my goals if I work hard enough!”). But...
I was once in a relationship that ended very badly, which resulted in me acquiring an ex-girlfriend that I’ll attempt to avoid for the rest of my life. I’m happy to say that I was successful in evading said ex-girlfriend for years and years, but nothing lasts...