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This photo of Imagine Dragons' Dan Reynolds is even more amazing with context.

If you haven't heard of Dan Reynolds, you've at least heard his voice on the radio — probably many, many times.

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

He's the 30-year-old frontman of the hugely successful American rock band Imagine Dragons.

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.


Right now, the band is performing at venues around the world before bringing their tour home to North America this summer. And at Lollapalooza Brasil in São Paulo over the weekend of March 23, 2018, Reynolds — who identifies as straight and cisgender — did something pretty fantastic during his performance: He took out a rainbow flag and waved it around the stage.

In a heartfelt post following the performance, Reynolds called on our world to "fully embrace" LGBTQ youth.

He also explained how he sees "loving" someone and truly "accepting" them as two different things.

"To 'accept' does not simply mean to 'love,'" Reynolds argued. "It means you give true validity and fully embrace and support diverse sexual orientations and do not see ones sexuality as 'incorrect' or 'sinful.' Love is an empty word otherwise."

The message is an especially telling one in Brazil right now.

While São Paulo's gay pride is often billed as the world's largest, and Brazil offers some protections and rights to LGBTQ people — such as marriage equality — a recent surge in anti-LGBTQ violence has the queer community in Brazil on edge.

At least 445 LGBTQ Brazilians died directly due to homophobia or transphobia last year, according to watchdog group Grupo Gay de Bahia — the highest ever on record. The organization tracked 387 murders attributed to hate crimes and 58 suicides inextricably tied to anti-LGBTQ sentiment.

Brazilian music artist MC Linn da Quebrada, who is transgender. Photo by Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images.

Some advocates claim the alarming figures correlate with a steep rise in ultraconservative political leaders using their platforms to promote bigotry. Luiz Mott, president of Grupo Gay de Bahia, told The Guardian in January that increasing evangelical influence in Brazil is to blame for the violence: "It’s a discourse that destroys solidarity and equates LGBT people to animals."

With the Trump administration in power — along with a Republican-controlled Congress — LGBTQ advocates in the U.S. worry the same effect is happening in America. A recent study by GLAAD found that, for the first time since 2014, more Americans report feeling uncomfortable with their LGBTQ neighbors.

Reynolds' message of acceptance needs to be heard all around the world — even in the countries where it's deemed less vital today.

Reynolds at  The Trevor Project's 2017 TrevorLIVE L.A. event, where he was honored with the Hero Award for his support for LGBTQ youth. Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images.

"To be gay is beautiful and right and perfect," Reynolds told Billboard in 2017. "To tell someone they need to change their inner-most being is setting up someone for an unhealthy life and unhealthy foundation."

If you are an LGBTQ youth and need some help, don't hesitate to reach out to your friends at The Trevor Project.

Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

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Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

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Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

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Photo via Canva, @WhattheADHD/Twitter

The 'bionic reading' font is designed to help keep you focused and read faster.

Reading is a fundamental tool of learning for most people, which is why it's one of the first things kids learn in school and why nations set literacy goals.

But even those of us who are able to read fluently might sometimes struggle with the act of reading itself. Perhaps we don't read as quickly as we wish we could or maybe our minds wander as our eyes move across the words. Sometimes we get to the end of a paragraph and realize we didn't retain anything we just read.

People with focus or attention issues can struggle with reading, despite having no actual reading disabilities. It can be extremely frustrating to want to read something and have no issues with understanding the material, yet be unable to keep your mind engaged with the text long enough to get "into" what you're reading.

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A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

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Only child asks her friends what it's like to grow up with siblings.

Ahhh, siblings. Sometimes they're your best friends and other times your living room turns into an MMA octagon over the remote control. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be an only child. (That's not to say you didn't dream about it when your sister stole your favorite shirt for the 30th time.)

But not everyone has siblings, so it can be equally as hard for someone who grew up as an only child to picture what it would be like to have them. Only children also likely had moments where they dreamt of having a little brother or sister, not realizing the literal torment siblings can inflict on each other.

TikTok creator Lonnie IIV recently posted a video of himself with two other friends seemingly out to lunch, when the girl in the group asked what it was like to grow up with siblings. In less than a minute she realized she lucked out being an only child because her two guy friends gave her a crash course in sibling behavior.

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Photo: courtesy BioCarbon Engineering/WikiCommons

Technology is the single greatest contributor to climate change but it may also soon be used to offset the damage we've done to our planet since the Industrial Age began.

In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire "seed missiles" into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

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Health

Artists got fed up with these 'anti-homeless spikes.' So they made them a bit more ... comfy.

"Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable."

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy

Spikes line the concrete to prevent sleeping.


These are called "anti-homeless spikes." They're about as friendly as they sound.

As you may have guessed, they're intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they're pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

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