A recent survey conducted by YouGov revealed that most French people are not planning to have themselves a merry little Christmas. When asked if they were looking forward to Christmas this year, 57% of French respondents said they were not—far more than any other country polled.
Amid the ongoing hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia, social media is overflowing with the hashtag #illridewithyou. Meant initially as an offer to actually ride with Muslims who might feel unsafe using public transportation in the wake of the hostage situation, the hashtag has now been adopted globally as a gesture of solidarity with Muslims everywhere.
Do all dogs go to heaven? Pope Francis this week staked out his position in that crucial debate when he told a little boy whose dog had recently died that paradise is open to all of God’s creatures (paywall).
Microsoft now accepts bitcoin payments for video games, apps, music, and movies on Xbox consoles and Windows devices—another sign that the company, often perceived as slow to adapt, is embracing the future under CEO Satya Nadella.
There are some major shifts in the 2015 edition of Glassdoor’s annual “Best Places to Work” rankings.
Life ain’t all that grand if you work at the US Department of Homeland Security. Go figure.
The Discovery Channel has completed its devolution.
In many of the world’s fast-growing cities, there isn’t enough room for people to live, let alone wildlife. Our friends beneath us in the food chain are becoming increasingly marginalized—world wildlife populations have decreased by about half over the last 40 years alone. Now, there’s a plan to give urban homes back to wildlife. But these homes aren’t quite urban. They’re, essentially, giant floating trees.
In what turned out to be a rather disheartening social experiment, the Russian news site City Reporter only reported good news to its readers for an entire day.
On November 6, 2015, James Bond will return to theaters in Spectre, director Sam Mendes’ follow-up to the colossal 2012 hit Skyfall. Daniel Craig, once again, stars as the venerated secret agent. Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz will play a character known only as “Oberhauser,” though it’s rumored he’ll actually be portraying the famous Bond supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
The long and illustrious legacy of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan simply wouldn’t be possible without one little-known but vital person: the Rock’s head gardener.
Meet Madison Reid, a third-grader from Cleveland, Ohio. She loves books.
One of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s quibbles with Interstellar is that the faraway planets that the movie’s astronauts explore in search of a safe haven for humanity seem a lot more dangerous than our very own next-door neighbor—Mars. Tyson, then, is likely among the millions of people who have now seen the sci-fi short film sweeping the internet which imagines what the future of space colonization might look like. It includes, among other destinations in our solar system, a visit to the Red Planet.
On the face of it, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who recently argued that Muslims discovered America, appears to have put his foot into his mouth again.
On Sunday (Nov. 23), three astronauts—an American, a Russian, and an Italian—escaped the surly bonds of earth and voyaged to the International Space Station, the giant orbiting research vessel that they’ll call home for the next five months. The explorers were greeted by three of their crewmates who, a few weeks earlier, traveled to the ISS in a separate launch. This was the 42nd expedition (pdf) to the station, the latest chapter of a program that has continuously dispatched astronauts to it since 2000.
This is part three of our holiday gift guide for your Quartziest friends and relatives. Collect all the installments here.
By now, everyone probably knows that sitting all day at your desk can pose some health risks. And so the standing desk craze was born—promising hundreds of calories burned per day, and all kinds of miracle cures to boot.
Soon-to-be dads in one Chinese province can now sign up for a new kind of childbirth preparation: free sessions in which they are literally shocked into understanding what their partners are about go through.
The latest report from the Canadian broadband networking company Sandvine reveals that Netflix is still the king of the American internet. The streaming video service is responsible for a staggering 35% of all bandwidth usage in North America—the next most, YouTube, accounts for only 14%.
“Will somebody please hospitalize Bill Cosby?”
Why do we go to the movies?
Public transport powered by human waste and sewage could be the next big trend in sustainable energy. For real.
The network that popularized reality TV with The Real World, and then brought you such hard-hitting docu-style series as True Life: I Want a Threesome, has now put out a nationwide casting call for a new documentary about what it’s like to be white in America.
Five student protestors were arrested in Thailand today for holding up the three-fingered “Mockingjay” salute, which opponents to the country’s military junta have adopted from The Hunger Games as a symbol of their resistance.
