A 107-yr-old witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre just gave a powerful testimony to Congress
One hundred years ago, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma was a bustling Mecca of Black-owned businesses and a community where Black Americans thrived. It was known colloquially as “Black Wall Street,” and was an anomaly in a state where the KKK actively worked to keep Black people oppressed. On May 31 and June 1,…
One hundred years ago, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma was a bustling Mecca of Black-owned businesses and a community where Black Americans thrived. It was known colloquially as “Black Wall Street,” and was an anomaly in a state where the KKK actively worked to keep Black people oppressed.
On May 31 and June 1, 1921, it all changed. An alleged assault attempt by a young Black man against a young white woman (which never amounted to anything, as all charges were dropped) sparked protests, violence, and ultimately, a massacre by white mobs who murdered, looted, and set fire to Black Wall Street. More than 1200 homes were destroyed, churches were burned, and businesses wiped out. Thousands of white people descended on Greenwood and obliterated 35 city blocks in 24 hours, causing irreparable financial damage in addition to the emotional toll of the massacre.
The death count has never been verified. One newspaper initially only reported that two white people were killed in the “race riot.” Current estimates put the number killed at around 300, almost all of them Black residents. Thousands of those left behind had to live in tents and try to pick up the pieces of their lives, literally and figuratively.
But many Americans never learn this history. It has rarely been taught in schools, even in Oklahoma, partially because much of the documentation of the massacre was covered up. A 1997 commission organized by the city examined documents and interviewed survivors to piece together what really happened on those days, and they released a report on their findings in 2001. Of their many notable findings, the commission determined that white Tulsa officials participated in the violence, even providing the white mob with firearms and ammunition to terrorize the Black residents.
The survivors that the city interviewed are gone now, but there are still a few people left who witnessed the massacre.
107-year-old Viola Fletcher, the oldest living survivor, testified this week before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, asking the U.S. to formally “acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921” on its centennial. Her testimony was powerful.
“I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire,” Fletcher told lawmakers. “I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day.”
“I am 107 years old and have never seen justice,” she said. “I pray that one day I will. I have been blessed with a long life — and have seen the best and worst of this country. I think about the terror inflicted upon Black people in this country every day.”
“They burned houses and businesses. They just took what they wanted out of the buildings then they burned them,” she said.” They murdered people. We were told they just dumped the dead bodies into the river. I remember running outside of our house. I ran past dead bodies. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I still see it today in my mind—100 years later.”
The remaining survivors have called for reparations, citing the inability of the community to rebuild following the massacre, especially in light of the Jim Crow laws and racist economic policies that followed.
Many Americans tend to think of the history of blatant, violent, government-sanctioned racism as something in the distant past, but there are still people alive today who remember this massacre that took place in 1921. And that year was a mere 50 years after the start of the Civil War, which means many Black Americans living in the South at that time had been born into slavery. That history is simply not that far away.
All three of the testimonies from survivors of the Tulsa-Greenwood Race Massacre are powerful. You can watch the full House Judiciary hearing here:
In a small village in Pwani, a district on Tanzania’s coast, a massive dance party is coming to a close. For the past two hours, locals have paraded through the village streets, singing and beating ngombe drums; now, in a large clearing, a woman named Sheilla motions for everyone to sit facing a large projector screen. A film premiere is about to begin.
It’s an unusual way to kick off a film about gender bias, inequality, early marriage, and other barriers that prevent girls from accessing education in Tanzania. But in Pwani and beyond, local organizations supported by Malala Fund and funded by Pura are finding creative, culturally relevant ways like this one to capture people’s interest.
The film ends and Sheilla, the Communications and Partnership Lead for Media for Development and Advocacy (MEDEA), stands in front of the crowd once again, asking the audience to reflect: What did you think about the film? How did it relate to your own experience? What can we learn?
Sheilla explains that, once the community sees the film, “It brings out conversations within themselves, reflective conversations.” The resonance and immediate action create a ripple effect of change.
MEDEA Screening Audience in Tanzania. Captured by James Roh for Pura
Across Tanzania, gender-based violence often forces adolescent girls out of the classroom. This and other barriers — including child marriage, poverty, conflict, and discrimination — prevent girls from completing their education around the world.
Sheilla and her team are using film and radio programs to address the challenges girls face in their communities. MEDEA’s ultimate goal is to affirm education as a fundamental right for everyone, and to ensure that every member of a community understands how girls’ education contributes to a stronger whole and how to be an ally for their sisters, daughters, granddaughters, friends, nieces, and girlfriends.
Sheilla’s story is one of many that inspired Heart on Fire, a new fragrance from the Pura x Malala Fund Collection that blends the warm, earthy spices of Tanzania with a playful, joyful twist. Here’s how Pura is using scent as a tool to connect the world and inspire action.
A partnership focused on local impact, on a global mission
Pura, a fragrance company that recognizes education as both freedom and a human right, has partnered with Malala Fund since 2022. In order to defend every girl’s right to access and complete 12 years of education, Malala Fund partners with local organizations in countries where the educational barriers are the greatest. They invest in locally-led solutions because they know that those who are closest to the problems are best equipped to solve and build durable solutions, like MEDEA, which works with communities to challenge discrimination against girls and change beliefs about their education.
But local initiatives can thrive and scale more powerfully with global support, which is why Pura is using their own superpower, the power of scent, to connect people around the world with the women and girls in these local communities.
The Pura x Malala Fund Collection incorporates ingredients naturally found in Tanzania, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Brazil: countries where Malala Fund operates to address systemic education barriers. Eight percent of net revenue from the Pura x Malala Fund Collection will be donated to Malala Fund directly, but beyond financial support, the Collection is also a love letter to each unique community, blending notes like lemon, jasmine, cedarwood, and clove to transport people, ignite their senses, and help them draw inspiration and hope from the global movement for girls’ education. Through scent, people can connect to the courage, joy, and tenacity of girls and local leaders, all while uniting in a shared commitment to education: the belief that supporting girls’ rights in one community benefits all of us, everywhere.
You’ve already met Sheilla. Now see how Naiara and Mama Habiba are building unique solutions to ensure every girl can learn freely and dare to dream.
Naiara Leite is reimagining what’s possible in Brazil
Julia with Odara in Brazil. Captured by Luisa Dorr for Pura
In Brazil, where pear trees and coconut plantations cover the Northeastern Coast, girls like ten-year-old Julia experience a different kind of educational barrier than girls in Tanzania. Too often, racial discrimination contributes to high dropout rates among Black, quilombola and Indigenous girls in the country.
“In the logic of Brazilian society, Black people don’t need to study,” says Naiara Leite, Executive Coordinator of Odara, a women-led organization and Malala Fund partner. Bahia, the state where Odara is based, was once one of the largest slave-receiving territories in the Americas, and because of that history, deeply-ingrained, anti-Black prejudice is still widespread. “Our role and the image constructed around us is one of manual labor,” Naiara says.
But education can change that. In 2020, with assistance from a Malala Fund grant, Odara launched its first initiative for improving school completion rates among Black, quilombola, and Indigenous girls: “Ayomidê Odara”. The young girls mentored under the program, including Julia, are known as the Ayomidês. And like the Pura x Malala Fund Collection’s Brazil: Breath of Courage scent, the Ayomidês are fierce, determined, and bursting with energy.
Ayomidês with Odara in Brazil. Captured by Luisa Dorr for Pura
Ayomidês take part in weekly educational sessions where they explore subjects like education and ethnic-racial relations. The girls are encouraged to find their own voices by producing Instagram lives, social media videos, and by participating in public panels. Already, the Ayomidês are rewriting the narrative on what’s possible for Afro-Brazilian girls to achieve. One of the earliest Ayomidês, a young woman named Debora, is now a communications intern. Another former Ayomidê, Francine, works at UNICEF, helping train the next generation of adolescent leaders. And Julia has already set her sights on becoming a math teacher or a model.
“These are generations of Black women who did not have access to a school,” Naiara says. “These are generations of Black women robbed daily of their dreams. And we’re telling them that they could be the generation in their family to write a new story.”
Mama Habiba is reframing the conversation in Nigeria
Centre for Girls' Education, Nigeria. Captured by James Roh for Pura
In Mama Habiba’s home country of Nigeria, the scents of starfruit, ylang ylang and pineapple, all incorporated into the Pura x Malala Collection’s “Nigeria: Hope for Tomorrow,” can be found throughout the vibrant markets. Like these native scents, Mama Habiba says that the Nigerian girls are also bright and passionate, but too often they are forced to leave school long before their potential fully blooms.
“Some of these schools are very far, and there is an issue of quality, too,” Mama Habiba says. “Most parents find out when their children are in school, the girls are not learning. So why allow them to continue?”
When girls drop out of secondary school, marriage is often the alternative. In Nigeria, one in three girls is married before the age of 18. When this happens, girls are unable to fulfill their potential, and their families and communities lose out on the social, health and economic benefits.
Completing secondary school delays marriage, and according to UNESCO, educated girls become women who raise healthier children, lift their families out of poverty and contribute to more peaceful, resilient communities.
Centre for Girls’ Education, Nigeria. Captured by James Roh for Pura
To encourage young girls to stay in school, the Centre for Girls’ Education, a nonprofit in Nigeria founded by Mama Habiba and supported by Malala Fund and Pura, has pioneered an initiative that’s similar to the Ayomidê workshops in Brazil: safe spaces. Here, girls meet regularly to learn literacy, numeracy, and other issues like reproductive health. These safe spaces also provide an opportunity for the girls to role-play and learn to advocate for themselves, develop their self-image, and practice conversations with others about their values, education being one of them. In safe spaces, Mama Habiba says, girls start to understand “who she is, and that she is a girl who has value. She has the right to negotiate with her parents on what she really feels or wants.”
“When girls are educated, they can unlock so many opportunities,” Mama Habiba says. “It will help the economy of the country. It will boost so many opportunities for the country. If they are given the opportunity, I think the sky is not the limit. It is the starting point for every girl.”
From parades, film screenings to safe spaces and educational programs, girls and local leaders are working hard to strengthen the quality, safety and accessibility of education and overcome systemic challenges. They are encouraging courageous behavior and reminding us all that education is freedom.
Experience the Pura x Malala Fund Collection here, and connect with the stories of real girls leading change across the globe.
The word “trending” may have gained a whole new meaning in the Internet age, but trends have always existed as a social phenomenon. A video of teens in the ’90s doing “Cat’s Cradle” has people pondering how trends spread, sometimes worldwide, without social media.
For those who are unfamiliar, Cat’s Cradle is a game of sorts involving a long loop of string wrapped around your hands and fingers in a specific pattern. The game involves transferring the string from one person to another without getting it tangled. Here’s what it looks like:
The video on X triggered a ton of nostalgia in those who remember playing Cat’s Cradle. But the most remarkable thing is that people from all over the world say they played it around the same time:
“HOW is this a universal thing. We did this exact thing, exact same moves, in Norway in the early 90s. Pre internet.”
“That’s a great question. I used to play that game back in the ’90s, too, and I’m from Brazil.”
“Same in Italy.”
“What? This is a global thing, greetings from Chile.”
“This is a game we used to play in Korea. Seeing it for the first time in a long while makes me miss my childhood memories.”
“We did this in Romania too.”
To be fair, Cat’s Cradle has been around for a long time. No one appears to know its exact origin. But a specific reference to the game appears in the 1768 novel The Light of Nature Pursued by Abraham Tucker:
“An ingenious play they call cat’s cradle; one ties the two ends of a packthread together, and then winds it about his fingers, another with both hands takes it off perhaps in the shape of a gridiron, the first takes it from him again in another form, and so on alternately changing the packthread into a multitude of figures whose names I forget, it being so many years since I played at it myself.”
It appears the game has seen surges in popularity at various times—but how? Why did it specifically trend in the ’90s? How did games, fashion, music, dance styles, and more become popular across the country or even the world before the Internet?
Those who remember life before social media have shared recollections of how trends spread on forums like Reddit and MetaFilter. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a nearly forgotten past:
“Everyone at a school would do it. Then, one group of people from this school would go to a youth group, and meet a group of people from a different school. It would become common throughout the youth group.
People from the youth group would go to their own respective schools, and it would spread around the rest of their school mates who don’t go to that youth group – but perhaps go to a different youth group.
Once something got popular enough, it might feature in magazines or even on TV.” – LondonPilot
“Cultural transmission was a lot slower previously. In the 60s it was said New Zealand was five years behind England, later it was three years.
Broadcast radio and later TV sped up cultural transmission immensely. TV shows were transported on film and played on telecine machines at the studios, up to six years behind the original release.
Magazines were a bigger thing than now. International magazine subscriptions by airmail were extremely expensive so surface mail added up to two months to delivery. Many people read magazines via public libraries.
Note none of the above are interactive, and only magazines allowed niche interests. Broadcast media had very few channels (until the US got cable TV) e.g. in NZ in the 70s a in a big city there might be six radio stations and one TV station. Later there were four major TV stations.
There was much less diversity. Record shops had knowledgeable staff who could make recommendations. These were important as an album was a significant investment.
People travelled and brought back new ideas. (In those days, Western countries were different to each other 😉
Schoolkids spread jokes and games – one person could infect a whole school with a good game.” – cyathea
“I think in the pre-internet days some trends and fashions were spread broadly via mass media, but many were regional and local. My wife grew up in small town Midwest and I grew up in the Boston area, both in the 70s to 80s. There were music, fashion and other cultural trends that were part of everyday life for me in the early- to mid-80s that were entirely unknown to her at that time.” –slkinsey
“I think the big thing was that trends moved more slowly. So you’d have a thing that happened on TV and your weekly magazine (Time, Newsweek) would talk about it. Or your monthly humor magazine (Mad, Cracked). A lot more people watched the same channels, so you’d see people dressed on shows and dressed in commercials… I lived in a rural area, and when I’d visit friends in the big city I’d get ideas and some of those would filter down. I assume it was like this for other people, getting ideas from people more cosmopolitan and then the trickle down. Same with radio, there were only so many stations and there would be a culture that built up around each one which might include shows they promoted (you’d go, you’d see other people) and maybe local events or stuff around them.” –jessamyn
“I think social media is more about an acceleration in the spread of trends, as well as an increase in the scope of their spread, than the absence of trend-spreading before. Prior to Facebook/etc, people talked to one another, in person…
Media wasn’t ‘social’ as we mean it today, but it was still… media. That, and people did what people do – watched the ‘in’ person or people among them and often copied/followed along. Based on my memories of summer camp, trends spread there practically in minutes, sans phones or the internet. Some of this had to do with most of the campers originating in the same hometown. They all just… knew… what was “in” (based on all knowing each other, they decided what that was, in turn based on movies, TV shows, etc) and good luck if you weren’t from their town. People set trends, and others follow, or try to follow – whether through gossip and magazines and MTV, or through social media. All that’s changed is the speed in which trends get set, and the size of the area that they reach.” – Armed Only With Hubris
“- Cool kids moving from other parts of the country to my rapidly-growing Minneapolis suburb were a vector for fashion trends in particular.
– Older siblings would see shows at local venues, interact with others in the audience as well as the bands themselves and people traveling with them, and then bring those influences back to their friends and younger siblings.
Record shops played a big role in music trends before the Internet. Photo credit: Canva
– A handful of shops played important roles spreading culture. Music stores were hangout spots where music was discovered and ideas mixed.
– Alternative radio stations and college radio had a big reach even out into the small towns and countryside.” – theory
It’s wild to see these explanations and realize how much the Internet has changed things. Newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and record shops have struggled just to survive in the digital age. Rarely do they serve as influential forces in what’s popular.
The people we used to think of as trendsetters are now “influencers.” Real-life social connections have morphed into social media connections that spread trends in the blink of an eye. It’s hard to remember a time when trends spread slowly, either in person or through influences we all shared. But it sure is fun to remember a time when a simple string game could keep us occupied for hours.
For more than 2,000 years, humankind has known that the Earth is round. That fact was widely demonstrated in 1522, when the Magellan-Elcano expedition sailed around the planet without falling off its nonexistent edge. So for more than 2,000 years, people have made globes to help them navigate the planet and hone their geographic knowledge.
In the second century AD, a major step in globe-making came when Claudius Ptolemy developed a scientific method for locating places using coordinates known as latitude and longitude. Initially, elites exchanged globes with one another. You might also find one in a classroom. But globes began to be mass-produced in the early 19th century, giving more people a way to understand the world from their own homes.
Video shows how globes were made in London in 1955
A charming video by British Pathé, created in 1955, offers an inside look at what it was like to manufacture a globe by hand before machines took over much of the process. British Pathé was a newsreel producer that covered world events from 1896 to 1978, and today its entire archive is available to view for free.
Globe construction in the 1950s was a painstaking process. It began with covering a solid wooden ball with papier-mâché, which was then coated with plaster. Nine separate layers of plaster were applied to the sphere, bringing it to a thickness of 1/8 inch; the entire molding process took more than six hours.
Once dried, the globe was sent to the covering room, where the map was pasted on in small portions, “like restoring the skin to a peeled orange,” the narrator said. After the map was added to the globe’s surface, workers painstakingly smoothed out any lumps and removed excess glue. It was then attached to an axis for display. The entire process took around 15 hours.
In 1955, globes were available in sizes ranging from one inch (£0.60) to six feet (£1,000), which would cost roughly $24 to $35,000 in today’s dollars.
How are globes made today?
Replogle Globes, one of the world’s largest globe manufacturers, shared a video offering a behind-the-scenes look at how globes are made today and how modern machines have made the process much faster.
One big difference from how globes were made in the ’50s is that the maps are printed directly onto chipboard, which is then precisely cut with a hydraulic press and formed into half a sphere. During the pressing process, three-dimensional mountains are embossed into the globe’s surface. After the northern and southern hemispheres are pressed together, they are attached to a central hoop, creating a complete replica of planet Earth.
Globes have been around for more than 2,000 years, and they remain one of the few educational tools that we still use today. You can put a child in front of a computer and show them a representation of the Earth, which they will probably understand. Still, nothing beats running your fingers across a globe and spinning it in your hands to realize what an incredible planet we live on.
As Los Angeles-based content creator Paige Thalia shared with The New York Post, she had been walking her dog just outside the Dolby Theatre where the Oscars are held as crews were setting up for the March 15 ceremony.
Apparently, Thalia had just moved into a nearby apartment and needed a rug “that wasn’t crazy expensive” for her living room.
Then, inspiration struck. Why not deck out her living room with the famous red carpet?
Apparently, when Thalia first moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago, she attended a post-Oscars event at the Dolby Theatre, where she was allowed to “take home a tiny piece.” So, the dream seemed at least somewhat attainable.
Sure enough, when she asked security if she could hop into the dumpsters to procure some pieces, they let her. In her now-viral reel, Thalia is seen with multiple large rolls.
Later in her apartment, we see her casually vacuuming a piece of fabric that so many celebrity feet had traipsed across just hours earlier. No big deal.
After Thalia’s video began making the rounds, several viewers criticized the apparent wastefulness of treating the red carpet as single-use.
“I’m sorry. You’re telling me the Oscars don’t have a storage unit or something in order to reuse it??? They buy/make the carpet for ONE NIGHT and then THROW IT AWAY????? I’m shocked!!!,” one viewer wrote.
Another said, “I was today years old when I learned how wasteful the Oscars are…cause WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY BUY NEW CARPET EVERY YEAR?! but I can’t use a plastic straw.. Cool.”
Others hoped that Thalia’s story would inspire more sustainable measures in the future.
“Maybe next year they will not just throw it away,” a commenter wrote. “Let’s hope they donate or recycle it for some other use. It is crazy wasteful thank you for the attention you process.”
“That could make so many throw rugs for animal shelters!” someone on X added, while another wrote, “Could they not auction off sections of the carpet and donate portions of the proceeds to charity? Would make for better PR at least.”
It would seem that Event Carpet Pros, the company that has manufactured the carpet for the Oscars for more than 20 years, as well as events on both coasts like the Golden Globes, the Primetime Emmy Awards, and the Grammy Awards, has, in fact, been recycling its carpets as of 2023. Perhaps Thalia was lucky enough to go dumpster diving in a recycling bin. After all, the video shows the dumpster belonged to recycling removal company King Environmental.
Either way, we can probably all agree that, as one viewer wrote, walking through the streets with a random piece of the Oscars red carpet is “the most LA thing ever.”
In April 2020, Christina Marie was doing the math that millions of families were doing that spring, and the numbers weren’t adding up. A mother of four in Saginaw, Michigan, she was struggling to cover her bills as the pandemic ground everyday life to a halt. She had three packs of meat in her fridge and knew she’d need to make a grocery run soon, which meant going out during one of the most frightening early months of the outbreak. Then her landlord called.
His name was Alan, and he had something to tell her: don’t worry about rent this month. They’d figure it out later.
“SOOO My landlord Alan called me earlier and told me not to worry about rent this month and we will worry about it later i said okay!” Christina wrote in a Facebook post that would eventually rack up more than 500,000 reactions. She was grateful, she explained, and that was that. Or so she thought.
During the call, Alan had also asked her a simple question: did she have food? She told him about the meat, mentioned she needed to get to the store. He told her to be safe and hung up.
A little while later, her phone buzzed. It was a text from Alan, asking her to go check her front porch.
She opened the door to find 16 bags of groceries waiting for her. Cartons of milk, potatoes, diapers and more, quietly left without any fanfare. Alan had decided she shouldn’t have to go out at all.
“I couldn’t tell you how I feel right now for him to do this for my family my heart is so touched GOD BLESS YOU,” she wrote, alongside a photo of her porch overflowing with bags.
According to Goalcast, Alan had been inspired by another landlord, Nathan Nichols, who had publicly announced he was giving his tenants a rent-free April because of the “serious financial hardship” the pandemic was causing for hourly and service workers. Nichols had also put out a call to other landlords: “I ask any other landlords out there to take a serious look at your own situation and consider giving your tenants some rent relief as well.” Alan took that to heart, and then went further.
The post spread fast. Commenters poured in from across the country, many of them saying what a lot of people were thinking. “Better keep him as your landlord because it is really hard to find a good hearted person like that,” wrote Balentin Torres. Mivida Loca added, “It’s nice to know that we can stick together during such times and that there are decent human beings like that around.”
Others were more direct: they wished Alan was their landlord too.
The story keeps resurfacing because it captures something people were hungry for in those early, disorienting weeks of the pandemic, and still look for now. Not a grand gesture from a famous face or a corporation with a PR team, but one person quietly deciding that someone else’s situation was his business too, and doing something about it.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
Gen Z has developed many quirks that have come to define the generation. From “work minimalism” to “soft socializing” to their unique slang, they’re redefining their experience in the world.
They’ve also adopted their own views on grammar and punctuation. Many Gen Zers claim that using periods in texts is “aggressive.” The generation has also seemingly done away with capital letters, arguing that it “feels too intense.”
If you’ve ever texted with a Gen Zer, you may notice that they forgo capital letters and keep their typing all lowercase. But why?
Linguist Tom Scott addresses it in a video about Gen Z’s unconventional views on grammar.
Why Gen Z prefers lowercase letters
According to Scott, for Gen Z, it’s deeper than just bucking a long-standing grammar rule. It comes down to their lived experience in the digital age.
“We don’t speak to everyone in our lives in the exact same way,” he explains, noting that with bosses our speech becomes more formal, while with friends and family it becomes more casual. “We change our way of speaking depending on the identity that we’re trying to project.”
He notes that our voices have different registers and intonations, and that different varieties of language—and the way our voices rise and fall in tone to convey meaning—are used in different situations. The same goes for the written word, aka text messages.
In writing, capital letters simply indicate the beginning of a sentence and proper nouns, such as “A man named John traveled to London to see the Queen.”
“While that might make a paragraph easier to read, we don’t flag that at all when we speak,” Scott explains. “So in informal conversations, those that feel like speaking, we don’t need capital letters.”
Can someone explain this to me? From the most recent podcast episode, we talk about Gen Z not using capitals letters and also how the terms millennial, boomer and Gen z were created by Johnson and Johnson to sell you more soap. #podcast#podcasts#comedy#genz#millennial
In online communities, capital letters convey something else: tone.
“All-caps became shouting [CAN YOU HEAR ME?]. So lowercase is calm, normal conversation,” says Scott. “Remove the capitalization and you get this sort of aloof, don’t-really-care tone that works well for dead pan humor and irony.”
Scott adds that some people think all-lowercase typing is lazy, but intentionally typing in all lowercase requires changing settings and putting in extra effort to delete capitalized letters that get autocorrected, thus debunking that theory.
All-lowercase is a stylistic effect that Gen Z has adopted and used consistently, which Scott emphasizes means it’s understood within the group.
Gen Z responds
On Reddit, many Gen Zers explained why they prefer typing in all lowercase:
“We don’t type everything in lowercase. We know damn well how formal capitalization works. Can use periods too, thank you very much! The usage of no capitals is mainly a thing in informal contexts, and comes from when autocapitalization didn’t exist; when it was genuinely faster to type without them. It has developed into a social tool – along with rigid punctuation standards – to mark informal speech apart from formal.”
“Because it makes the text messages overly serious. Many of my peers find it rude if you text the way I’m texting now with proper punctuation and capitalization.”
“Because the boomers took the ALL UPPER CASE.”
“i write in lowercase when it comes to keeping things casual but then switch to a more formalized sentence structure in situations where i have to be serious.”
It was everywhere. Men, women, and even children did it every time they left the house. If you see old newsreel footage of men in the office or on commuter trains from the advent of the motion picture camera to the early ‘60s, nearly everyone is wearing a hat. Hats were just as common for women in that era. For a woman to go out without a hat in the first half of the 20th century was akin to going out without clothes.
The funny thing is that everyone’s headgear is so similar in the old-timey footage that it makes previous generations look like big-time conformists. Then, in the early ‘60s, everything changed, and men and women started to go out in public with their hair exposed. Why did such a big aspect of fashion seem to change overnight?
Warmbru Curiosity investigated the question recently in a popular YouTube video. Warmbru’s channel is a lighthearted look at some of the more unusual people and events from our history and how they have influenced the world in which we live.
Why did people stop wearing hats?
Warmbru says fashion changed dramatically after World War II, when people in developed countries began to care less about expressing their social status. “This was especially true among the younger generation the rise of youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s emphasized rebellion against traditional norms, including formal dress codes,” the YouTuber says.
Don Draper from AMC’s Image via
Another big reason for the change in fashion was technology. Cars became the preferred mode of transportation for many after World War II and indoor environments became more hospitable. “People spent far less time exposed to the elements as people increasingly moved to urban areas and started using cars,” Warmbru says. “The practicality of wearing hats diminishes. Hats can be cumbersome in cars and on public transport, improvements in heating and air conditioning reduce the need for hats to provide warmth.”
Warmbru adds that President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, rarely wore a hat and his decision to go bareheaded became associated with modernity. Further, in 1963, the mop-topped Beatles proudly flaunted their hatless heads as they shook them while singing, “Wooooo.” Hat-wearing among women began to decline around the same time as the restrictive and complex headgear clashed with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement.
John F. Kennedy with his family Image via Wikicommons
The decline in hat purchases meant that manufacturers closed and the headgear became harder to come by. This reduced availability further contributed to the decline in hat-wearing. As fewer people wore hats, there became a greater demand for high-quality hair products and services. “Why spend a fortune at the hairdressers or the barbers just to cover the end result with a hat?” Warmbru asks.
Ultimately, there were many reasons why people stopped wearing hats. It appears that it was a combination of technology, influential people such as Kennedy and The Beatles, and the overwhelming mood of change that swept most of the Western world in the 1960s. But if one thing is true about fashion, it goes in cycles. So, it seems that hats may be ready for their big comeback.
This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.
She had been on the job for four months when she was pulled without warning into a meeting with her manager, HR, and legal. Effective immediately, she was fired. The reason given: she took ten minutes to respond to emails.
“That was a bullsh*t reason,” she wrote in a post to Reddit’s r/MaliciousCompliance that has since racked up more than 19,000 upvotes. “To be honest, I was furious.”
The job itself had never been easy. She’d been hired as a speaker coordinator for a company that planned large conferences, and from the start, as she described it to Bored Panda, there was no onboarding, no training, and no clear point of contact. “I was simply given the log-in info for a couple of different websites and told to get to work.” She was the only person in the role. All the institutional knowledge about speakers, schedules, and upcoming events lived entirely with her.
Audience listening to a speaker at a conference. Photo credit: Canva
Her manager spoke limited English, which made communication difficult in ways that weren’t anyone’s fault but created real problems. When she once asked her manager for a call to clarify something, the response came back: “No cranne. Self skills is a must. I am bird without head.” It took her several days to piece together that her manager was trying to say she was overwhelmed and needed her employee to be more self-sufficient.
She adapted, figured things out, and by her own account, kept the speakers happy. Then came the meeting, the firing, and the reason that didn’t add up. Ten minutes to reply to an email. No written warning. No verbal warning. Nothing.
During the exit interview, HR asked her to hand over her files and walk them through where things stood with an upcoming event scheduled in 17 days. She reached into her bag and pulled out her copy of the NDA she’d signed when she started.
As she told it on Reddit, she pointed to a specific clause: as a former employer, they were now prohibited from receiving confidential information about the position under the terms of the very agreement they’d had her sign. “As per my NDA, I am not to discuss intimate details or share documents relating to this position with any employer, past or future. Since this firing was effective immediately, you are now a former employer and I am bound by my NDA.”
A non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Photo credit: Canva
HR pushed back. She held firm. Legal was brought in. Legal read the clause and confirmed she was correct.
The event, by her account, was a disaster. More than half the speakers pulled out once communication broke down. Her former manager nearly lost her job over it. The employee, for her part, closed her Reddit post with the mocking subject line that had gotten her fired in the first place: “All because I ~tAKe ToO lONg tO ResPoND tO EMaILS~”
The story resonated because it captures something many workers recognize: the particular frustration of being let go without cause, without warning, and without recourse, and the rare satisfaction of finding that the company had, in this case, handed her exactly the recourse she needed. Save your contracts. Read the fine print. Sometimes the NDA works both ways.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
For nearly four decades, a retired art teacher had been turning her rental house into something extraordinary. Every wall inside held hand-painted murals, Disney movies and fairy tales rendered floor to ceiling, the kind of place that people in the neighborhood knew by reputation. Outside, she’d added a cottage facade. Inside, it was unlike anything else on the street.
She had no lease. The original landlord had given her a verbal agreement that the art on the walls wouldn’t be a problem, and she’d been there since the mid-1980s with an informal understanding that the house might one day be hers.
Then the original landlord died. His son inherited the property, came to inspect it with his daughter, and they fell in love with what they saw. According to a post shared to Reddit’s r/pettyrevenge by a neighbor, u/ZZZ-Top, the family decided the art house should go to the daughter. Without a lease, the tenant had limited options. The murals she’d painted, the very thing that made the property desirable, were used as justification to push her out.
But she landed on her feet. Friends helped her find a property in another state at the last minute, one with a full art studio on the ground floor. The question of what to leave behind was where things got interesting.
She had originally planned to leave the murals intact. Then her neighbor, a friend who had been wanting to practice using a powered paint sprayer, made her an offer: he would restore the house to what he called “Rebecca standards” for free. As he explained in the post, “Rebecca standards” is neighborhood shorthand for the look of a flipped house: everything painted in the same flat white and depressing grey, every surface generic, every trace of personality gone. The landlord’s family had evicted her specifically to get the murals. Rebecca standards would make that impossible.
A woman paints a mural on a wall. Photo credit: Canva
She agreed.
Her furniture went into storage. Her neighbor let her stay in his guest house in exchange for one new mural on his living room wall. Then the work began. As the Someecards account of the story details, the painter friend sanded every wall in the house until the murals became nothing but blotchy color ghosts. Then came the Kilz primer, sprayed wall to wall. Then the grey. Wood paneling, trim, switch covers, outlet covers, counters, cabinets. All of it the same flat, lifeless shade. “The house looked dead inside when I went in to check it out,” the neighbor wrote. “It was weird not seeing all the murals.”
Outside, a landscaping friend cleared the cottage facade and the plants, replacing everything with gravel, sand, and a single boulder.
A few days after she left, the neighbor noticed the house was still empty. He asked around. Some U-Haul trucks had shown up earlier in the week, he was told, but none of them had been unloaded. Nobody had moved in.
The post drew over 38,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments from people who understood exactly what had happened. “They could have easily asked her for a commission to do the same murals in their own home,” one commenter wrote, “but chose to kick her out instead.” Another kept it simpler: “Kick me out? My art goes with me. Enjoy the blank walls.”
For anyone renting without a written lease, the story carries a quieter lesson. Verbal agreements offer almost no protection when ownership changes hands. The woman lost her home of 40 years because of a handshake arrangement with someone who was no longer alive to honor it. She found a better situation in the end, one with a proper studio and walls she actually owns. But the path there didn’t have to be that hard.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
