Each week, we share the top five articles that caught our attention. Here are your must-reads, published here and abroad, for the week of November 5, 2018.
Why do so many pop songs talk about female masturbation?
Last week, Carly Rae Jepsen released the song “Party for One”, a bubbly, synthy pop track about “alone time”. And she’s not the only one to have done so. Are we seeing a cultural shift here?
→ Read it on New Statesman
Meet the plantfluencers
The Millennial obsession with household plants is still growing, as tenacious as an ivy in its spread. To the point that plant influencers—or plantfluencers—are now getting book deals, sponsors and thousands of followers online.
→ Read it on The New York Times
LA’s cult of betterness
In Los Angeles, people adopt new self-improvement projects with cultish devotion: at boutique juice bars, at hallucinogenic ceremonies, at mysterious wellness retreats. Journalist Rosecrans Baldwin decided to try everything he could for one month. Here’s what happened.
→ Read it on GQ
The web whisperers
ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos are edgy, unnerving and almost avant-garde. Is it time to consider them art?
→ Read it on Washington Post
Fortnite fashion
Fortnite is free to download, but the developer generates more than $100 million in revenues every month thanks to “micro transactions”, including purchases of “skins” or outfits for avatars. Each skin adds to the unique flavour of each character.
→ Read it on 1843 Magazine
In your earbuds: Language Stories
As Lindsay Williams and her husband Ashley travel the globe, they share stories and interviews of the multicultural places they visit, with a focus on the multilingual, bilingual and monolingual people they meet along the way.
→ Listen to it on Player.fm
Instagram fave
The Queen of Memes, April Eileen Henry, combines art and existential quotes to populate this popular Instagram account, which now boasts more than 458,000 followers.
Photo: Havas Montréal
