Kate Groetzinger

In 2013, Cheerios aired a commercial featuring an interracial couple and their biracial child.

There’s a new way into Europe. Under mounting pressure at home, faced with likely tragedy on the Mediterranean, and turned away by border police in eastern Europe, some Syrians are forging an unlikely path across the Arctic Circle.

The pointed, tiled roof is iconic, and nostalgia-inducing. It’s the architecture that put the ”hut” in Pizza Hut, and now it can be spotted around the world on buildings from churches to Chinese restaurants.

Scientists aren’t the only ones who can experience the beauty of a mouse colon at 63x magnification—and it is beautiful. At high magnification, even a worm or a moth’s antenna can be stunning, and photomicrography makes these wonders of the atomic world visible to everyone.

By capturing their environment with a trained eye, the top wildlife photographers of the year remind us how precarious natural ecosystems really are.

In the first week of September, the Syrian refugee crisis finally came to Western Europe.

Wendy Tsao has created a collection of feminist dolls all women will want to play with. Jane Goodall, J.K. Rowling and Malala Yousafzai stand among the ranks of Tsao’s “Mighty Dolls,” a collection of repurposed Bratz dolls meant to inspire young girls to greatness.

Women have out-enrolled men at the undergraduate level in the US since the late 1970s, but only in the past year has the percentage of women with a bachelor’s degree in the US surpassed the percentage of men with one. In 2014, 32% of women in the US had attainted a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to 31.9% of men, according to data from the US Census Bureau.

Though Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich has been the recipient of multiple European book awards, her work has gone largely unrecognized in the United States. It’s probably due to the fact that she writes in Russian, and only four of her books have been translated into English.

If you picture the archives of American history as dusty boxes piled in an airless room somewhere, think again. A US government collection of 170,000 historic photos is now available to the public through a sleek website with interactive browsing tools called Photogrammar developed by Yale University.

New York City’s hottest vegan restaurant is owned by a steakhouse chain.

Every Muslim with the means to do so must travel to Mecca at least once during their lifetime.

Some adults have outgrown buying comic books—but that’s about to change. Marvel has just announced that Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic (which, like Quartz, is owned by the Atlantic Media Company) and arguably the country’s preeminent voice on racial issues in America, has signed on with the comic book house to pen a series starring reprised superhero the Black Panther. 

In his recently released book, Date-onomics, Jon Birger explains why college educated women in America are so dissatisfied with their love lives. He writes: 

Jodi Goldstein, the managing director of Harvard’s Innovation Lab, brags that “when Zuckerberg came back to visit, he said ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have dropped out if the i-lab had existed.’”

In the latest Wonder Woman comic (released in digital format on Aug. 20), the feminist icon becomes the first DC hero to officiate a marriage between characters of the same gender.

“If you were to take a ride down there today, you would think Hurricane Katrina happened last year, not 10 years ago,” photographer Marissa Williams tells Quartz, referring to New Orleans’ historic Lower Ninth Ward.

The notion that parents drop off their kid at college with a tearful entreaty to write home has significantly changed in the age of digital communication. Research shows that college students now communicate with their parents on average more than 13 times a week, with about 40% of students contacting parents by phone, email or text every day.

Thanks to California’s historic four-year drought, some specialists are now referring to frequent wildfires as a “new normal” for the state. For the past two years, Los Angeles-based photographer Stuart Palley has been chasing these flare-ups to capture their unusual beauty.

In 1980, cruise ships served about one and a half million passengers worldwide. By 1990, that number had leapt to about three and a half million, according to Cruise Market Watch. In 2000, the number of people taking cruises had nearly doubled again.

“Comfort women,” translated from the Japanese term ianfu, is a euphemistic name for the prostitutes and sex slaves forced to serve Japanese soldiers during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). These “women” were mostly young girls from occupied regions, who were held and forced into sexual slavery at ”comfort stations” established by the Imperial Japanese Army.

What could be better than coloring books for adults? Adult coloring books featuring badass feminists, of course!

Last August, Scotland-based artist Charles Young happened upon a paper sculpture he had made, and it gave him an idea.

The recently released trailer for the upcoming film Stonewall surprised and angered many viewers. The trailer features an ahistorical white, cis-gendered male named Danny around which much of the narrative has been constructed. At one point in the trailer, Danny is shown throwing a brick through a window—presumably instigating the Stonewall riots. This is disheartening for anyone who understands the history of the Stonewall riots, which were led by a diverse group including drag queens and other queer people of color. Indeed, witnesses actually attribute the brick incident to African American drag queen and LGBT activist Marsha P. Johnson, who appears as only a supporting character in the film.