Annalisa Merelli

Gender disparity in Hollywood and the entertainment industry has been talked about quite a bit in the past few years.

Brunello Cucinelli, the founder and CEO of the eponymous Italian fashion house, is known for his luxury cashmere but also for his love of arts and culture and for his philosophy of what he calls a “humanistic enterprise.”

The old cliché “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold,”  seemed apt when the Great Recession hit the US in 2008. With the exception of China, the world’s biggest economies, and especially the large European ones, all paid the consequences.

The basilica of Siponto, on a quiet road outside Manfredonia, in Italy’s Puglia region, has long been easy to miss—just another church among the thousands around the country. But these days, the 12th century structure attracts a crowd, sometimes even queues.

Alongside sprouting beans and lentils, winemaking has been an occasional feature of science classes for Italian children for decades. At age seven, I remember making white and red varieties, and waiting with my classmates for them to ferment into wine. They turned into vinegar—so we learned that grapes make wine and vinegar, too.

After over a decade of research & development, on March 26, India launched a vaccination campaign employing Rotavac, the word’s cheapest vaccine against rotavirus—containing a strand of the virus isolated, manufactured and tested in India.

If the number of extreme sportswomen is any indicator, women appear to be a lot less daring than men—at least when it comes to athletic endeavors.

These are dark days for Europe. Today, Mar. 22, at least 31 were killed in bombing attacks at a subway station and the airport in Brussels. On Mar. 20, a terrorist attack in Istanbul’s central Istiklal Caddesi killed 10. And on Mar. 18, an agreement was signed between the EU and Turkey to send back new refugees attempting to cross the border into Greece, likely sending thousands of people to seek even more perilous ways to escape the horrors of war in Syria and elsewhere.

The unfortunate views on women’s tennis expressed yesterday (Mar. 20) by the CEO of the Indian Wells tennis tournament, Raymond Moore, set off a firestorm, with perhaps the most powerful response coming from Serena Williams.

European Union member states will now be able to choose whether they want to subject women to a tax on their tampons and sanitary pads.

Last Sunday (Mar. 13), 53 people were killed in two terrorist attacks a few hours and 4,500 miles apart.

Brandon Stanton started his Humans of New York (HONY) project in 2010, with a plan to take portraits of 10,000 New Yorkers and put them on a city map. The project took a somewhat different direction when Stanton started accompanying the portraits with short interviews of his subjects. It evolved further when he expanded beyond New York, collecting portraits and interviews from places as far afield as Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

As anyone who’s seen The Revenant will confirm, ice is a very manly thing. This might be the reason why climate scientists are disproportionally men—or it might be that, like most other scientific fields, it is harder for women to break into the boys’ club of climate STEM.

We’re kind of a small animal on a really big planet, so there’s much to be frightened of. Death by lightning, raccoon eyes at night, sinkholes—these are all perfectly terrifying things.

By day, Emily Temple-Wood, 21, is a student of biology at the university of Loyola in Chicago on a path to start medical school in 2017. But by night, she is even more impressive: she runs Wikipedia’s Women Scientists project to improve the coverage of women scientists on Wikipedia. She was inspired, at 18, after finding out that many of the profiles of women scientists belonging to the Royal Society of Science didn’t have a Wikipedia page.

If you’ve ever enjoyed a pizza, you have Naples to thank.

“Of course if you listen to the pundits, we weren’t expected to win too much, and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country. And soon the country’s going to start winning, winning, winning. […] We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. ”

We live in an unequal world so long as “working mom” is an expression and “working dad” isn’t—which is why Bill and Melinda Gates aren’t taking it for granted that their daughters will have an easy time juggling their careers with family.

Bill and Melinda Gates went on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Feb. 24 to promote their annual letter about global concerns. Because they want a lot of people to read it, they did what any smart, technologically savvy couple would do and created a viral video to promote it.

In their annual letter laying out their philanthropic priorities and philosophies, Bill and Melinda Gates wrote about two superpowers they wish they (and everyone else) had: more energy and more time. Melinda Gates’ part of the letter focused on the second one, and in particular its relevance to women the world over.

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try,” says Dr. Seuss. This is an advice perhaps best spent on children, whose imagination can indeed think up what for most adults is literally unimaginable.

Abortion (and hence, women’s rights), are under threat again in America, after a number of state laws promulgated in the past few years have rendered it nearly impossible to access abortions in several states: Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and Missouri only have one abortion clinic serving the whole state, Alabama has no abortion clinics in 93% of its counties, and Texas might soon be left with a whole of 10 abortion clinics to serve millions of women of reproductive age.

Umberto Eco changed my life.

This item has been corrected.