Last Friday, citing the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Right’s Act, the US women’s soccer team filed an “institutionalized gender discrimination” lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation—and with good reason. Not only is the women’s soccer team paid much less than the men’s team, they are also not provided with the same standards when it comes to coaching, medical attention and pitch quality. (The men play on real grass, while the women’s team is consistently provided with artificial turf, which causes burns. The women have been objecting to this double standard for years, including a 2014 lawsuit against FIFA.)

Arguments have consistently been made that women don’t deserve equal pay in soccer because the men’s team generates more money. In a 2015 article titled “Equal Pay For Women World Cup Players? Seriously?” NBC Sports cited figures from 2011, when “the Women’s World Cup brought in almost $73 million [and] the 2010 Men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion.” But these figures don’t reflect what has happened in the years since. According to the New York Times, in 2016, the US women’s national team brought in a profit of $6.6 million, while the men’s team managed only $2 million. What’s more, between 2012 and 2016, the women played significantly more games (sometimes as much as 50 percent more) and earned twice as many wins as their male counterparts.

Even if you ignore the boom in popularity of women’s soccer in the last few years, it’s impossible to fathom why male players are paid $75 a day for expenses, while female players receive only $60, or why male players make $3,750 for sponsored appearances, while the female players receive $3,000. At its core, this lawsuit has the potential to be as important for the future of women’s soccer as Billie Jean King’s legendary fight for equal prize money in tennis was.

Even if the lawsuit is successful though, there is still a major stumbling block standing in the way of female athletic progress: sports media. Despite the fact that women make up 40 percent of all sports participants, female athletes receive only three to four percent of media coverage, with industry giants like ESPN and Fox Sports granting them a paltry one to two percent of air time. According to 2015 research, women’s sports received less TV coverage this decade than they did in the ’80s. It doesn’t help that in 2014, less than five percent of sports anchors were women.

Not only does this disparity impact the amount of money offered to female athletes in sponsorship deals, but it’s also a huge barrier to the accessibility—and therefore overall popularity—of women’s sports. Of the tiny fraction of airtime given to female athletes, nearly 82 percent of it is granted to basketball, which is probably why WNBA popularity has been on the increase since 2012. As long as women’s sports are denied TV coverage, they are always going to be treated as fringe prospects by the organizations in charge of them.

University of Southern California professor, Michael Messner, noted in 2015: “We’ve had this incredible explosion of girls and women going into sports in the last 40 years… What’s puzzling to us is that the increased interest and participation in women’s sports has not at all been reflected in news and highlights shows.”

Perplexingly, the fact that the 2015 Women’s World Cup final was the most watched US soccer match in history remains almost entirely ignored. Fox initially faced criticism over its decision to devote 200 hours to that World Cup, but the decision wound up making the network 400 percent more in advertising and sponsorship revenue than it managed during the 2011 championship. By any normal business standards, it should have been both a vindication for the channel and a signal to sports media at large to make some changes. Instead, it was dismissed as a one-off, and, as soon as it was all over, the channel and its peers went back to exclusion as usual.

In refusing to give them their due, not only is the mainstream sports media complicit in holding female athletes back financially, it is shooting itself in the foot by ignoring a growing market that remains almost entirely untapped. The same thinking that excluded female leads from blockbuster movies for so long is the same thinking that’s keeping female athletes off television, throttling their full career potential and making their inspiring successes nearly invisible for the girls wishing to one day follow in their footsteps.

As soccer player Megan Rapinoe told ABC News, “We know in our hearts, and we know with the facts that we have, that we’re on the right side of this… For us, it’s not only about leaving our sport in a better place, [it’s about] leaving it better for the young girls that will come after.” While a legal victory would be a great step forward, true equality will remain evasive until the big hitters in sports media step up and give female champions the full respect they have earned.

A total of four Korean entertainers have abruptly retired from the industry this week, in a widening scandal linking the glossy world of K-pop with a series of seedy sex crimes. The biggest players—Seungri, of the influential all-male group Big Bang, and the 29-year-old singer-songwriter Jung Joon-young—have both apologized to the public for their involvement in twin, interlocking cases of exploitation of women.

To catch you up: Investigators booked Seungri on Monday on suspicion of supplying prostitutes for businessmen at one of Seoul’s upscale night clubs, setting off a media feeding frenzy that ensnared the second star, Jung, and potentially more famous men to come.

Seungri is denying charges of brokering prostitution. But in statements to the press, Seoul Metropolitan Police say an investigation into his Kakaotalk messages (Kakao is South Korea’s dominant messaging platform) found evidence of “pimping”—they claim he was not only offering different types of women to investors, but he was part of a separate group chat with the other star, Jung.

That’s where the details get more sordid. Police say the near-dozen participants in the Jung chatroom were sharing hidden camera footage of sex with drugged and unconscious women. Korean broadcaster SBS showed the leaked text exchanges, which include Jung responding to a video of one unconscious woman by texting in Korean, “You raped her, LOL.”

Korean wire Yonhap reports Jung is under investigation for secretly recorded and shared videos of his own sexual encounters with at least 10 women he filmed between 2015 and 2016.

Jung, who rose to fame on a Korean equivalent of American Idol, is cooperating with police and released the following statement:

“I admit to all my crimes. I filmed women without their consent and shared it in a social media chatroom, and while I did so I didn’t feel a great sense of guilt… More than anything, I kneel and apologize to the women who appear in the videos who have learned of this hideous truth as the incident has come to light.”

The other men who have apologized and suddenly retired from the industry after being implicated in the chat rooms are Choi Jong-hoon, singer from FT Island, and Yong Junhyung, singer from Highlight, who admitted that he was in the chat and saw the videos and did not speak up.

K-pop is such major cultural export and economic boon for the Asian nation of 55 million that this scandal—or scandals, depending on how you’re counting—has attracted global attention. (One of the genre’s most successful groups, BTS, had the No. 2 and No. 3 bestselling albums worldwide last year.)

Within South Korea, the business’ darker underbelly is well-known. Its three top entertainment companies—SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment—are notorious for running their artists through a militaristic system of rigorous dance and singing training, restrictions on their private lives and cosmetic surgery regimens that begin when they’re teens. When women artists have come forward with allegations of sexual harassment or abuse in the industry, they are rarely investigated. K-pop is so interwoven with Korea’s soft power identity that Seungri said on Instagram, “I’ve been branded as a ‘national traitor.’ ”

His agency, YG Entertainment, dropped him on Wednesday, apologized for failing to “manage the musician more thoroughly” and has watched its stock shares tumble.

Celebrity involvement in these sex crimes threaten to taint the carefully-crafted image of the K-pop industry, sure, but for South Korea, it shines an international light on an already-festering societal problem: hidden camera porn, known in South Korea as “spycam,” or molka, and its role in promulgating a misogynistic culture. Since last year, outrage about law enforcement’s uneven response to spycam has swelled into the streets, leading 22,000 women to protest last June, marking the largest women’s protest in South Korean history.

South Korea is a modern country that boasts of its advanced consumer electronics and fast internet speeds, but on the measure of equality for women, it ranks at the bottom among developed countries. As we’ve reported, school curriculum even teaches that victims are to blame for sexual assault.

Combined, these factors feed a widespread spycam porn epidemic that’s gone on for years. Tiny hidden cameras that look like lighters secretly film women in dressing rooms, bathrooms, public places like subway stations and during private moments—while they’re having sex. The footage of sex acts is considered a “natural porn” that’s commonly distributed and profited off of on online platforms, without the victims’ knowledge.

Officially, police estimate more than 6,000 cases of people filmed on spy cams without their consent, each year, between 2013 and 2017. The victims are overwhelmingly women. But most of the time, people aren’t aware their images are being traded: A 2018 study by the Korean Women Lawyers Association found 89 percent of spycam crimes were perpetrated by strangers.

“There have been plenty of celebrity scandals before, including pretty serious charges like domestic abuse, but those usually ended being isolated incidents that faded from the public consciousness fairly quickly,” says Jenna Gibson, a Korea columnist for The Diplomat and a longtime K-pop watcher. “This time, because Korea has been directly grappling with issues like MeToo, spy cams, and women’s rights in general, there’s no way they will let these crimes go so easily. The things these men have allegedly done hit right at the heart of the biggest societal divisions in Korea right now.”

The justice system is also being put to the test, as the Korean public raises questions about police complicity in the prostitution brokered at nightclubs. “We will conduct a strong internal investigation, and … we will take stern measures regardless of their rank,” South Korea’s National Police Agency Chief Min Gap-ryong told lawmakers on Thursday, according to CNN, in response to questions about police looking the other way.

All of this is forcing a reckoning in several layers of the public sphere, but most notably for the entertainment engine that is K-pop, which churns out stars and groups that earn the devotion of fans worldwide. The packaging of these artists is squeaky-clean, but can you still love a product that’s cooked in an exploitative culture? And as it is often asked during this #metoo era: What do we do with the art of monstrous men? The K-pop fanbase is now the latest to be working these questions out.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

For the last couple of years, the smart devices we’re increasingly leaving in charge of our lives have given us pause on a number of occasions. Like when Alexa started laughing at people for no reason in the middle of the night, or when Siri just flat out ignored us for days, or when the world figured out that Google Home can both fart and swear like a sailor. Then there’s Cortana, who seems hell-bent on scuppering gaming sessions.

What we ponder a little bit less is why all of our electronic assistants have feminine voices by default. There are a number of theories around this; research suggests people just expect all administrative assistants to be female, and there’s also the suggestion that feminine voices will make this major tech influx seem less threatening. Either way, when the voices we bark demands at all day sound like women, it can’t help but double down on traditional gender stereotypes that have no place in technology this futuristic.

Enter Q, the first gender-neutral electronic assistant, and a breath of fresh air in a world which is increasingly less and less interested in a strict gender binary. Q is “neither male nor female,” and has been “created for a future where we are no longer defined by gender.”

Q was researched meticulously and designed around a mid-range frequency that simultaneously sounds like both genders and no gender at all. This shift from female-sounding assistants is an important step away from reinforcing old ideas around female servitude, while also pushing for a more non-binary future.

Q has the potential to surreptitiously change how we see gender and identity, as we move deeper into the 21st century. As the linguists, sound designers and technologists that created Q say themselves: “It’s a voice of progression, a voice of hope, a voice that moves us forward.”

This week, the decision by one of Germany’s wealthiest families to go public about their Nazi history was greeted with both shock and admiration around the globe. Of their own volition, the Reimann family—who own Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Pret A Manger and Peet’s Coffee, among many other companies—commissioned a three-year investigation into their family history. When the full horrific report came back, rather than stew in shame privately, the Reimanns took the brave step of going public.

Turns out, Albert Reimann Sr. and Jr.—the family members who ran the Reimanns’ conglomerate, JAB Holding Company, in the 1930s and ’40s—were pretty monstrous. The father-son team were avid supporters of Hitler, donating to the SS before Hitler was even in power. They used forced labor (12 million people from across Europe were abducted and used this way in Germany during World War II), and beat and sexually assaulted female workers from Eastern Europe. In 1940, Albert Jr. even wrote to the mayor to complain that French prisoners of war were not working hard enough in his factory. He also corresponded with the architect of “The Final Solution,” Heinrich Himmler. The Alberts died in 1954 and 1984, respectively.

A spokesman for the Reimanns, Peter Harf, revealed the family’s reaction to finding out what their ancestors did. “We were speechless,” said Harf, one of JAB Holding’s managing directors. “We were ashamed and were white as a wall. Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were guilty. They belonged in jail.” The Reimanns will be donating 10 million Euros (about $11 million) to charity.

For Germans, the Reimanns’ open handling of their dark history is probably a little less surprising than it is for the rest of the world. It actually falls in line with the manner in which Germany, on a national level, deals with that particular war. Rather than clearing its landscape of the primary signifiers of Nazi history—the concentration camps—Germany maintains them as a means to simultaneously reckon with the past and forge a better future. If you visit any of the remaining concentration camp sites, chances are you will see groups of school children solemnly walking around with their classes. It is considered a national obligation.

“In recent decades, Germany has accomplished an undeniably impressive feat,” Foreign Affairs noted in 2017, “a collective acceptance of moral responsibility for the terrible crimes of its recent past.” The Reimanns’ handling of their family history walks this same line. While it’s almost expected in their home country, it offers an example the rest of the world could—and should—learn from.

A 29-year-old woman in Taiwan took herself to the hospital this week, complaining of a swollen eye, after tending to a family member’s grave. “What could that be?” she probably wondered, casually. “Allergies? Dust? Pink eye?” Nope! On closer inspection, a doctor found and removed not one, but four (FOUR!) living sweat bees from her eye, after noticing “the tiny legs of the bees wriggling in her ducts.”

The reports around the incident initially left me with the overwhelming desire to blindfold myself and Bird Box my way through the world, in order to avoid becoming insect housing/ dinner. But, as the shock wore off, that fear turned into a lot of burning questions (not four-bees-in-your-eye kind of burning, but close). I shall now attempt to answer those questions, in order to facilitate sleep tonight.

What The Hell Is A Sweat Bee?

Sweat bees are teeny-tiny metallic-looking bees that feast on human sweat using their short tongues. (Feel free to take a minute or two to scream about that.) They come in a variety of colors including bronze, blue, green and black, and measure between 0.125 to 0.5 inches.

Why The Hell Were They In Her Eye? 

They were munching on her tears. (How’s that for symbolism!) It’s not the sweat bee’s first snack of choice, but it will do in a pinch, apparently. Though they were only in the woman’s eye for a matter of hours, she suffered severe corneal erosion and a bacterial infection. “Thankfully,” the head of the ophthalmology department who treated her said, “she came to the hospital early, otherwise I might have had to take her eyeball out to save her life.” Great.

They Just Live In Taiwan, Right?

I’m afraid not. Apparently, America, Canada and Central America host over a thousand species of sweat bee. Forty-four of those are in Florida, so you can go ahead and take Disney World off your to-do list.

They’re Not Organized Though, Correct?

Wrong again. While some species of sweat bee are lone wolves, most work in colonies, exactly like regular bees. According to Terminix, the Queen “digs burrows underground and carves out cells, then fills each cell with pollen and places an egg inside. Eventually, the worker bees emerge from these eggs. One worker bee guards the colony, while the others dig additional burrows and the queen returns to laying eggs.” Awesome.

Why Do They Hang Around Graveyards?

It’s not because they’re goths. Typically, sweat bees live in either fallen trees or little underground holes. They are big fans of graveyards, presumably because of all of the freshly tilled soil and human misery.

How Do I Not Have Sweat-Bee-Based Nightmares Now?

Good question. Try and seek comfort in the fact that sweat bees rarely sting and, even when they do, the Schmidt Sting Pain Index (which is a real thing) considers it the least painful of all the potential other stings you could get while out in the world. Also, when not trying to feast on human fluids, sweat bees perform vital pollination tasks.

Feel better? Me neither. Sorry, everyone.

Looking for things to do this weekend in the Bay Area? Look no further. Here are four (free!) ideas:

Cherry Blossom Festival

Over 220,000 people attend this annual two-week festival in SF’s Japantown, which celebrates Japanese and Japanese American culture. If you’re cool with crowds, you’ll be rewarded with cultural performances, martial arts, live bands and food—lots and lots of food. (Fun fact: San Francisco’s Cherry Blossom Festival is the second largest after Washington, D.C.)

The festival begins Saturday, April 13, 2019, and continues through Sunday, April 21, 2019.
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CUESA Goat Festival

Back for its tenth year, CUESA’s perennially-popular Goat Festival takes over San Francisco’s Ferry Building on the Embarcadero once more. Activities on offer include goat cheese tasting and meeting expert ranchers, but mainly: it’s all about hobnobbing with those goats (even though it looks like formal Goat Petting Tickets have, alas, sold out). Definitely not just for kids.

Saturday, April 13, 2019 (9 am – 2 pm)
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CAL Day 2019

UC Berkeley’s annual Open House jamboree isn’t just geared toward prospective students – it’s open to all, including kids and families, and hundreds (seriously) of free events all around the scenic campus. Highlights include Cal Men’s Tennis vs. Stanford at Hellman Tennis Complex, live psychedelic soul with The Marías in Memorial Glade, a walking tour of the Space Sciences Laboratory and a fashion lecture on the history of menswear.

Saturday, April 13, 2019 (times vary)
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Record Store Day

Yes, opinions “differ” among music lovers on whether Record Store Day is a good thing for independent vinyl sellers. Nonetheless, April 13 is the worldwide day on which you can pick up special, vinyl-only limited releases, take advantage of special promotions (raffles! giveaways!) and generally support your local record store.

Saturday, April 13, 2019 (contact individual stores for hours)
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Guava Island, Childish Gambino‘s long-awaited new project, has finally arrived. Hot off a headlining Coachella performance Friday night, Guava Island is the proverbial cherry on top of Donald Glover’s wildly successful year as a rapper, following his first Billboard No. 1 with “This Is America” in 2018 and that song’s wins for Song of the Year and Record of the Year at the Grammy awards earlier this year—the first rap song to ever win both those prizes.

Anticipation for Guava Island was first stoked months in advance with a single photo of Glover and Rihanna on set in Cuba, spurring grandiose speculation as to what the project would entail—especially since it’s tied to Glover’s retirement of the Childish Gambino project. Longtime collaborator Hiro Murai directed (Murai is also the director of the “This Is America” video and many episodes of Glover’s TV series Atlanta) and the screenplay was written by Stephen Glover, Donald’s brother and a writer on Atlanta.

Almost as if to curtail the expectations, the film itself is a modestly stunning—and at times unnerving—extended music video, shot in 4:3 aspect ratio, about music’s power to unite in the face of tyranny and greed. It features three new songs, “Die With You,” “Time” and the flamenco-tinged “Saturday,” as well as renditions of the previously released “Summertime Magic,” “Feels Like Summer” and notably, a sequence showcasing “This Is America” that recalls Murai’s music video from last year.

A quick summary of the plot: Glover stars as Deni Maroon, a Purple Rain-esque folk hero and local celebrity on the island—exploited for its natural splendor and transformed into a factory spinning silk run by a single despot, played by Nonso Anozie. Rihanna plays his partner, Kofi Novia. The pair meets in a gorgeous animated backstory at the start of the film. Deni’s set on uniting the island with a music festival, but it comes at a cost. Black Panther’s Letitia Wright also plays a role.

Guava Island is available only to Amazon Prime members. It also streamed once on YouTube’s Coachella live stream last weekend.

Because Scottish people definitely have their priorities in order, Historic Environment Scotland (the organization responsible for maintaining many of the castles and landmarks there) recently reconstructed the face of a 4,500-year-old dog using bones on loan from Scotland’s National Museums. After a bunch of diagnostic imaging, a little 3D printing, and some painstaking work by a forensic artist, we can now see what Celtic dogs looked like back in the day.

In what is probably not a massive surprise to dog-lovers anywhere, this Neolithic good boi—I’ve decided to call him Laddie—definitely deserves a boop.

At the time that Laddie was alive, humans hadn’t taken to selectively breeding dogs on a grand scale yet, so he or she resembles the great grandparent of all dogs: the gray wolf. The jury is still out on why humans started domesticating and cohabiting with them 130,000 years ago—either some daredevil hunters needed a little back-up while fighting mastodon, or cunning canines wanted some food scraps and shelter—but the action changed the course of human history by forging the very first relationships between people and what would later become dogs.

Today, the majority of the breeds we take for granted are products of human meddling in the pursuit of ever-cuter creatures. After the English Kennel Club was founded in 1873, Victorians embraced controlled dog breeding with a gusto that continues to this day—it’s on display every year at the Westminster Kennel Club and England’s Crufts. To give you some examples of newer breeds, French Bulldogs made their debut at Westminster in 1896, Miniature American Shepherds arrived in 1968, and Puggles didn’t get here until 2000.

So what happened in the interim? Where did Laddie come from? And which dog breeds have humans been lovin’ on the longest? Genetic testing, DNA analysis and historical artifacts go a long way toward telling us. Breeds that have survived the ages (unlike, for example, the now-extinct pups that accompanied Native Americans from Siberia) look entirely different on a genetic level to more recent breeds of dogs. These so-called divergent breeds can be put into three broad categories, based on region of origin: Middle Eastern, Northern and Asian.

The Middle Eastern group includes the Afghan Hound (representations of which have been found in cave art dating back 4,000 years), and the Saluki, which is basically an Afghan Hound minus all that glossy fringe. Representations of the Saluki can be found on rocks dating all the way back to 10,000 B.C., and in the art of the Sumerian Empire dating between 7000 and 6000 B.C. By 2100 B.C., the Saluki had become the official Royal Dog of Egypt. (We know this because they started showing up on tombs right around that time.)  Salukis got themselves a whole new audience thousands of years later, right around 1840, when they were finally introduced to Europe.

In the Northern group, we have the humble Alaskan Malamute and Siberian Husky, two breeds that are closely related to each other, and probably to Laddie too. They are believed to have been part of Eskimo settlements in the Arctic as far back as 4,500 years ago, and their tolerance of freezing conditions means they are still the go-to pooch for sled-related activities all over the world.

If you can believe it, the Asian group has an even higher gradient of floof than the Northern one. There’s the lionesque Chow Chow, which dates back to Arctic Asia 3,000 years ago; there’s the wrinkled and roly-poly Shar-Pei which had clay figurines in their likeness made as far back as 206 B.C.; and there’s the New Guinea singing dog, a close relative of the Dingo and the ancestor of a wolf that became extinct around 5,000 years ago.

As for Laddie, he or she was found along with the skulls of 23 other dogs in an elaborate burial ground on the Orkney Islands, just off the coast of Scotland. Orkney is a treasure trove of Neolithic life, with still-standing remains of Europe’s most complete Neolithic village, as well as communal buildings and imposing stone henges. Historic Environment Scotland’s Steve Farrar believes the way the dogs were buried there could be of great importance.

“The remains discovered at Cuween Hill suggest that dogs had a particularly special significance for the farmers who lived around and used the tomb about 4,500 years ago,” Farrar said in a statement. “Maybe dogs were [the community’s] symbol or totem. Perhaps they thought of themselves as the ‘dog people.’”

Apparently that’s an ongoing theme throughout the ages.

NEW YORK (AP) — Barack and Michelle Obama on Tuesday unveiled a slate of projects they are preparing for Netflix, a year after the former president and first lady signed a deal with the streaming platform.

The Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground Productions, on Tuesday announced a total of seven films and series that Barack Obama said will entertain but also “educate, connect and inspire us all.”

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Higher Ground is producing a feature film on Frederick Douglass, adapted from David W. Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. Also in the works is a documentary series that adapts Michael Lewis’ Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, the Moneyball author’s 2018 best-seller about government servants working under the political appointees of Donald Trump’s administration.

The production company’s first release will be Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s Sundance Film Festival documentary American Factory, about a Chinese-owned factory in post-industrial Ohio. Netflix and Higher Ground also acquired Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham’s Crip Camp, a documentary about a summer camp for disabled teenagers founded in upstate New York in the early 1970s.

The Obamas are also developing an upstairs-downstairs drama set in post-WWII New York titled Bloom, and an adaptation of The New York Times “Overlooked” obituary column, about deaths unreported by the paper. A half-hour show for preschoolers titled Listen to Your Vegetables & Eat Your Parents will instruct kids about food.

“We love this slate because it spans so many different interests and experiences, yet it’s all woven together with stories that are relevant to our daily lives,” Michelle Obama said. “We think there’s something here for everyone—moms and dads, curious kids, and anyone simply looking for an engaging, uplifting watch at the end of a busy day.”

Here’s a full list of the first slate of projects they’re working on:

1. American Factor
2. Bloom
3. Frederick Douglass biopic
4. Overlooked series
5. Listen to Your Vegetables and Eat Your Parents
6. Fifth Risk
7. Crip Camp

The projects are to be released over the next several years.

When Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why was released two years ago, depicting the life of a teenager who decided to take her own life, educators and psychologists warned the program could lead to copycat suicides. Now, a study funded by the National Institutes of Health shows that those concerns may have been warranted.

The series is filmed in and around Sonoma County, including Analy High School in Sebastopol, which stands in for the show’s Liberty High School. Other filming locations have included the Epicenter Sports and Entertainment Center in northwest Santa Rosa, Friedman’s Home Improvement in Petaluma, the downtown mall Santa Rosa Plaza in Santa Rosa, and various storefronts and residences in San Rafael and Vallejo. Many teenagers from Sonoma County have worked as extras on the show.

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In the month following the show’s debut in March 2017, there was a 28.9% increase in suicide among Americans ages 10-17, said the study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The number of suicides was greater than that seen in any single month over the five-year period researchers examined. Over the rest of the year, there were 195 more youth suicides than expected given historical trends.

Researchers warn that their study could not prove causation. Some unknown third factor might have been responsible for the increase, they said. Still, citing the strong correlation, they cautioned against exposing children and adolescents to the series.

“The results of this study should raise awareness that young people are particularly vulnerable to the media,” study co-author Lisa Horowitz, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, said in a statement. “All disciplines, including the media, need to take good care to be constructive and thoughtful about topics that intersect with public health crises.”

Lead author Jeff Bridge, a suicide researcher at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, told The Associated Press that an additional analysis found the April suicide rate was higher than in the previous 19 years. “The creators of the series intentionally portrayed the suicide of the main character. It was a very graphic depiction of the suicide death,” he said, which can lead to suicidal behavior.

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The study found that boys were far more likely than girls to kill themselves after the show debuted. Suicide rates for females did increase, but it was not statistically significant. Nor were there any “significant trends” in suicide rates for people 18-64, researchers said.

In a statement, a Netflix spokesperson said they had “just seen this study and are looking into the research. “This is a critically important topic and we have worked hard to ensure that we handle this sensitive issue responsibly,” Netflix said, according to The Associated Press.

The spokesperson noted that the study conflicts with research published last week out of the University of Pennsylvania. That study found that young adults, ages 18-29, who watched the entire second season of the show “reported declines in suicide ideation and self-harm relative to those who did not watch the show at all.”

However, that study found, viewers who stopped watching the second season before the end “exhibited greater suicide risk and less optimism about the future than those who continued to the end.” The results “suggest that a fictional story with a focus on suicidal content can have both harmful and helpful effects,” the authors wrote.

When the show debuted, the National Association of School Psychologists issued a warning statement: “We do not recommend that vulnerable youth, especially those who have any degree of suicidal ideation, watch this series. Its powerful storytelling may lead impressionable viewers to romanticize the choices made by the characters and/or develop revenge fantasies,” they said. “Suicide is not a solution to problems.”

After the criticism, Netflix added a “viewer warning card” before the first episode. Netflix also added language publicizing the website 13reasonswhy.info, which offers resources for people contemplating suicide. Season 3 of the show is expected to be released this year.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (En Español: 1-888-628-9454; Deaf and Hard of Hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

Louis XIV and Oscar Wilde, meet Björk and Lady Gaga.

What quality do they share, across the centuries? An innate sense of camp—the aesthetic that’s being celebrated in the new fashion mega-exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Camp: Notes on Fashion.

Think Björk’s famous 2001 “swan dress,” which is in the show, and Gaga’s unforgettable 2010 raw meat dress, which isn’t (it was real meat, after all). But lest you think camp is only artifice and theatricality, flamboyance and a desire to shock, Met curator Andrew Bolton wants you to think again.

“People are very quick to dismiss camp as being trite, glib, frivolous,” Bolton said in a weekend interview as he was putting finishing touches on the exhibit, which launches Monday evening at the star-studded Met Gala, to be co-chaired by Gaga herself, along with Serena Williams, Harry Styles, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, and of course Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

“But it actually has a lot of history, it’s really serious, it’s political—and it’s tragic too, disguised as humor,” he said.

The exhibit is built around author Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on ‘Camp,’” a 58-point essay which she dedicated to Oscar Wilde, the 19th-century poet and playwright whose camp sensibility is also featured in the show. Camp “is not a natural mode of sensibility,” she wrote. “The essence … is its love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration.”

She also called camp “something of a private code.” Bolton notes that in later years, it became mainstream, to the point where it lost much of its subversive meaning. Originating in gay culture, it slowly became assimilated into the culture at large along with other parts of gay culture, he says.

But every so often camp comes back as a powerful influence in fashion, Bolton says, and he thinks it’s having a new moment now, because it always returns at a time of political polarization and instability.

At a press preview on Monday, Bolton told the crowd that since he chose the subject of “camp,” everyone’s been asking two questions: “Why camp?” and “What IS camp?”

And so the exhibit, which features some 250 items, begins with history—and a grammar lesson. The term “camp” was first used as a French verb—se camper, or to flaunt—in the 17th century. In a 1671 Moliere play, the character Scapin tells a fellow servant to “Camp about on one leg. Put your hand on your hip. Wear a furious look. Strut about like a drama king.”

To remind us of one such drama king, there’s Louis XIV, in his official portrait: one leg in front, hand on hip, modeling his massive royal cloak, along with silk stockings and red-heeled shoes.

The exhibit then takes us from the verb to the adjective, “campish,” which had gay connotations in the 19th century, and then to the noun, where camp first enters a Victorian dictionary in 1909, defined as “actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis. Probably from the French.”

Then comes the fashion. There’s “naive camp,” which is intended to be serious but failing, versus “deliberate camp,” intended to be, well, campy.

There are enormous feathered dresses—Sontag wrote that camp was “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers”—by Armani and by Jeremy Scott, the latter surrounded by scores of attached butterflies. Scott, a specialist in camp, also is represented by a dress of dollar bills, and his McDonald’s-themed outfits for Moschino, where he serves as creative director.

From John Galliano, there are dresses that seem made of newspaper clippings and packing tape. And because the Palace of Versailles is seen as “a sort of camp [Garden of] Eden,” there’s a section of Versailles-style gowns by designers like Franco Moschino and Vivienne Westwood.

“Camp is ‘Swan Lake,’” Sontag wrote, so we also have Bjork’s famous swan dress by designer Marjan Pejoski, the bird’s long neck curving over the shoulder.

Representing what Sontag called “the convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’” designer Thom Browne contributes a man’s wedding outfit that combines a black tuxedo with a white filmy skirt.

And maybe there isn’t a Lady Gaga meat dress, but there’s a Jeremy Scott “prosciutto dress” (not real, this time), and his wacky TV dinner cape—with carrots, peas and corn on one side, mashed potatoes with butter on the other (they’re fake too, thankfully).

Because camp “sees everything in quotation marks” (Sontag again), there is designer Virgil Abloh’s 2018 little black dress that says “Little Black Dress,” with boots that say “For Walking.”

And there’s a gigantic birthday cake-like dress of cascading pink tulle by Viktor & Rolfe, which says “Less is More”—because camp is, above all, about irony.

Bolton says he started thinking about camp two years ago when mounting his show on Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons. He reread Sontag’s essay and was struck by how relevant it felt.

He was also inspired to mark the 50th anniversary this year of the 1969 Stonewall riots, a landmark moment in the history of gay rights.

Bolton notes that some designers have always embraced camp—Moschino, Scott, Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui, for example. “But what you’re seeing now is other designers adopting it, like Valentino, Armani. That’s when it shifts, when it’s going beyond a handful to a broader group.”

When the show opens to the public on Thursday, Bolton hopes visitors will be able to look beyond camp’s formal characteristics—irony, parody, artificiality and extravagance, to name a few—and see its broader meaning.

“It’s all of that,” he acknowledges. “But it’s much more.”

Met Gala pre-show begins at 5 p.m. EST on Monday, May 6. E!’s “Live From the Red Carpet,” will broadcast four hours of camp-tastic celebrity fashion inspired by the exhibition. Streaming also available on Hulu Live TV.

One of the greatest conspiracy theories in the history of the United Kingdom is the one that posits that Queen Elizabeth II is, in fact, a reptilian humanoid. The rumor was best explained by David Icke in his bonkers 1999 book, The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World. As such, every time a royal gives birth, a whole section of the population expects one of these:

Given the fact that Harry’s mother was Princess Diana (the first definitely human member of the British royal family) and Meghan Markle is an American “commoner,” the chances of the 7 pound, 8 ounce baby boy being even vaguely lizardly are the lowest ever, especially since Harry’s royal baby announcement was the most human in history.

Flanked by two royal horse friends, Harry said: “It’s been the most amazing experience I could ever possibly imagine. How any woman does what they do is beyond comprehension.”

Harry is the first royal man to ever publicly acknowledge that birth is even a little bit rough on their wives. To give you some idea of how unusual this is, when Prince Charles announced the birth of Harry’s big brother, William, it included a kiss from a strange woman, followed by him telling gathered journalists: “It’s rather a shock to my system.” Your system, Charles? YOUR system? No wonder Diana divorced you…

At least Charles showed up though. When William and his wife Kate had their first son, George, in 2013, it was announced outside Buckingham Palace BY A PHOTO FRAME ON A GOLD STAND containing text in far too small a font, that merely said: “The Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son.” Super personal.

William, Kate and George did roll out of the hospital together later on, but that meant poor Kate had to be up and radiant for the press the morning after giving birth. (By Baby Number 3, she managed to emerge within 7 hours, which is clearly insane.)

Back when Harry’s Grandma Liz was only a princess, the British capital was informed of Prince Charles’ birth by terrifying birds in two different locations—via cannon blasting at Hyde Park and bell ringing at Westminster Abbey.

It seems like only yesterday we stayed up all night to watch Harry and Meghan’s Oprah and Idris-attended wedding. As a couple that has consistently broken with royal tradition, one can’t help but hope they name the boy something totally un-royal and American. (Brad? Chad? Tad?) Either way, congratulations, Harry and Meghan! And thanks for definitely not being lizards.

Today, antiretroviral medicines allow people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to live long, productive lives. But at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, the disease was considered a death sentence. No one was sure what caused it or how it was spread. Some doctors and nurses refused to treat patients with the disease; others protected themselves by wearing full body suits.

Cliff Morrison, a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital at the time, remembers being appalled by what he was seeing: “I would go in patients’ rooms and you could tell that they hadn’t had a bath,” he says. “They weren’t being taken care of.”

In 1983, Morrison organized a team of healthcare providers to open Ward 5B, an in-patient AIDS special care unit at San Francisco General Hospital. The medical team on the unit encouraged patients to make their rooms like home, and allowed families and partners to visit whenever they could. They comforted patients by touching them, and would even sneak in pets.

5B was the first unit of its kind in the nation—and it became a model for AIDS treatment, both in the U. S. and overseas. Now, a new documentary, called 5B, tells the story of the doctors and nurses who cared for patients on the ward.

Dr. Paul Volberding was a doctor on Ward 5B and went on to co-create an AIDS clinic at the hospital, which was one of the first in the country. He emphasizes how critically ill the patients on the unit were.

“These were people that were really, sometimes literally, dying when they came into the hospital, so whatever we could do to make them more comfortable was really important,” he says.

The work on 5B was emotionally draining, and death was a constant reality. Still, Volberding describes his time there as a “blessing.”

“The care that patients were getting was really special and very different than the rest of the hospital,” he says. “It was always a complete privilege to do this work.”

Morrison adds, “I had some really wonderful experiences with people in their passing, and they taught me a great deal. It really put in perspective the fact that life is on a continuum, and death is just part of that continuum. I saw people have beautiful deaths, and that was wonderful.”

Interview highlights

On how everyone who came into the hospital with the virus in the early 1980s died

Volberding: I don’t think most people can understand today how devastating a disease AIDS was back in those days. … It’s just impossible to appreciate that HIV, if it’s untreated, kills essentially 100 percent of the people. It’s much worse than Ebola, much worse than smallpox. So, everyone died. Every patient that was sick enough to come to us to look for medical care would die from this disease. And people knew that there was a lot of education to be done, but they knew that this was a really bad situation.

On how they didn’t know if what they were seeing was infectious when the first patients came in with the rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, which ended up being one of the symptoms of the as-yet-unknown AIDS virus

Volberding: I wasn’t worried about catching anything from the patients because that’s not what I expected in taking care of cancer patients. I didn’t expect to be worried about anything, and wasn’t really. But the care that the patients were getting was pretty spotty in the hospital. I think that was one of the things that led Cliff and the others to really put together the nursing unit.

Morrison: In my experience, in already what had been seen and what I was hearing from the specialists around us with the information that was coming out, was that I wasn’t at risk providing care to people by touching people. And everybody around us was saying, “Oh you’re just being cavalier. This is really not what you should be doing, and you’re giving the wrong message.” And our response always was, “We’re giving the right message.” So we were dealing with a lot of hysteria and misinformation and just outright discrimination, I think, very early on.

On expanding the hospital’s family and visitors’ policy for Ward 5B

Morrison: We also noticed right away … that we needed to really look at issues around family and visitation, because healthcare was very rigid and was really stuck on this whole idea [regarding] visiting hours that it could only be immediate family. Most of our patients didn’t have family around. … We almost immediately began talking about, in all of these regular meetings and sessions that we had, that maybe we needed to start letting our patients tell us who their family was, and that we needed to kind of move away from this whole idea of traditional family and biological family.

Volberding: I think that the patients were so sick—and they were so in need of support — that the idea of visiting hours and keeping people away didn’t make sense.

Morrison: There were times when they were alone in their rooms and they always needed something. They were very anxious. It not only made them more comfortable, it made our lives a lot easier having people that were there in the rooms most of the time.

On the bond that existed among 5B staff members

Volberding: It was a family. The physicians, the staff and the clinic and in the inpatient unit—we all worked so closely together because those were our patients. As physicians, those were our patients. And we were on the unit every day seeing our patients, and it was, again, a very special group of people.

On how the homophobia of the time influenced patient care

Morrison: That was, I think, probably the most glaring reality of the situation. Even in San Francisco—which, even at that time was considered the gay mecca—gay people had very established careers and homes and families, and yet all of that started coming apart. And it really was centered around homophobia. There were people in the hospital that should have known better. … There was a group of nurses that basically said that what we were doing was crazy and that we were putting all of them at risk. It went before the labor board—but that was all homophobia.

On the evolution of AIDS treatment

Volberding: In 1987 we began to have some drugs that were doing something. … And then, by 1996, the so-called triple therapy was developed and that was really a turning point in the epidemic. We could suddenly start seeing some of our patients actually get better—not just die more slowly, but actually get better.

And some of those people are still alive today. The effort since ’96 has been to take those potent drugs and make them less toxic and more convenient. Today, we treat this very typically with what we call single tab regimens—one pill taken once a day that contains two, three or even four drugs—all in the same pill. Many of my patients don’t have any side effects at all from the medicines they’re taking. The change from the early days, and seeing the drugs being developed, and now seeing that this is truly a chronic condition is, I think, one of the most amazing stories we’ll ever hear from in medicine.

Amy Salit and Mooj Zadie produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin adapted it for the Web.

Copyright 2019 Fresh Air. To see more, visit Fresh Air.

For the vast majority of people, news of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting was shocking, confusing and, especially for locals, deeply upsetting. For Scott Adams, Dilbert comic strip creator, right-wing pundit and Chief Strategy Officer of WhenHub, it was an opportunity to promote his business.

The concept behind WhenHub is that the app allows users to search, consult and video chat with experts on specific topics for an hourly fee. WhenHub takes 20% of that fee as payment for using the service. Adams’ attempt to use it as a means to connect the media with witnesses to the Gilroy shooting was greeted with expletive-laden outrage on Twitter and sent Adams, a Danville resident, into defensive mode.

In an almost-hour-long video, purporting to be about “fake outrage trolls,” Adams explained that several months ago, he sent out a tweet similar to the one he posted in regards to Gilroy, trying to bring journalists and witnesses together after a deadly helicopter crash in New York. “I think there were zero people who complained,” he said. “Here’s why. There’s no political interest group that is involved with helicopter crashes. I did exactly the same thing… and nobody complained.”

Usually when there are attempts to profit from a tragedy as it’s unfolding, it’s a large company taking advantage of social media trending topics to shill its products or to increase website hits. The day after the Boston bombing, Condé Nast’s Epicurious food website posted two incredibly ill-advised tweets: “Boston, our hearts are with you. Here’s a bowl of breakfast energy we could all use to start today” and “In honor of Boston and New England, may we suggest: whole-grain cranberry scones!”

It was a remarkable misstep given the disgust that had greeted companies the year prior after attempts to capitalize on Hurricane Sandy. The day of the storm, The Gap tweeted: “All impacted by #Sandy, stay safe. We’ll be doing lots of Gap.com shopping today. How about you?” Simultaneously, American Apparel was sending a targeted email to customers in nine East Coast states that read: “In case you’re bored during the storm…” and offered a discount for anyone entering the code “SANDYSALE at Checkout.”

Though The Gap removed the offending tweet and replaced it with a clarification, American Apparel CEO Dov Charney felt no remorse for his company’s insensitivity. “We’re here to sell clothing,” he later told Bloomberg Businessweek. “I’m sleeping well at night knowing this was not a serious matter.”

It is Kenneth Cole, though, that offers us the most insight into why companies are willing to make such obvious gaffes. In 2011, the designer tweeted that the chaotic scenes accompanying that year’s Egyptian revolution were, in fact, caused by excitement over his new collection. Two years later, as the Syrian civil war escalated, he borrowed a phrase Barack Obama had used about the conflict and tweeted: “‘boots on the ground’ or not, let’s not forget about sandals, pumps and loafers. #Footwear.”

In an October 2013 issue of Details, Cole explained: “Billions of people read my inappropriate, self-promoting tweet, I got a lot of harsh responses, and we hired a crisis management firm… But our stock went up that day, our e-commerce business was better, the business at every one of our stores improved, and I picked up 3,000 new followers on Twitter. So on what criteria is this a gaffe? … I’m not even sure I used the words ‘I’m sorry’—because I wasn’t sorry.”

With this in mind, it’s not all that surprising to see the kind of insensitivity displayed by Scott Adams this week. For his part, like Cole and Charney, Adams is sticking by his decision to use tragedy for profit. “I do plan on doing the same thing in the future,” he said in a Twitter video. “Now, if it’s a mass shooting, I might think twice,” he laughed, “…just because of the pushback.”