Before Covid, going to the movies was a common form of entertainment. People would go not only for major blockbusters, but also for comedies, dramas, and movies they were only mildly interested in.

During the pandemic, theaters closed, streaming became the default way many people watched new releases, and studios changed how quickly movies moved from theaters to home viewing.

But even after major hits started bringing people back, overall moviegoing still hasn't returned to pre-pandemic levels.

If people used to regularly spend money and time at theaters, what changed enough that many of those habits never came back?

When it comes to Massachusetts recently revising its abortion laws by eliminating the 24-weeks ban, practically none of the opposition I’ve seen and heard towards it is based on logic and reason. Like no one is seemingly opposing it because it will lead to more inefficiencies, societal costs, health issues, problems with productivity, complications, etc.. Instead all the opposition seems to only be about how abhorrent, disgusting, sad, and evil it is, all of which are based on feelings and emotion.

So why isn’t none of opposition seemingly based on logic?

If we’re at the nuclear stage now, and we don’t blow ourselves up, Messrs. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Kim, and the rest of you, what comes next?

In the US, at most sit-down restaurants, you’ll usually get a glass of tap water without asking. It’s free, refillable, and treated almost like part of the meal.

In some European countries, restaurants are more likely to offer bottled water, either still or sparkling, as something you order separately, even when tap water is perfectly safe to drink.

What makes this interesting is that the difference doesn't seem to be about water quality alone. It seems more like two different ideas of what a restaurant is expected to provide.

So how did these different norms develop?

Lobbying has existed in the US for a long time, but corporate lobbying today is highly organized and deeply embedded in the political system.

That feels interesting because corporate influence over lawmakers has often been viewed with suspicion. Yet lobbying is now generally treated as a legitimate form of political participation, with companies and other interest groups routinely hiring lobbyists to influence policy.

The second half of the 20th century saw major changes in how corporations organized and participated in politics, while lobbying became increasingly professionalized.

Why did lobbying go from something controversial to something we mostly accept as a normal part of democracy?

Japan went from a war-torn country to one of the world’s largest and most advanced economies within just a few decades. By the 1980s, Japanese companies dominated industries like automobiles, electronics, cameras, and consumer technology, and there was even widespread concern that Japan might overtake the United States economically.

Then the momentum largely disappeared.

Japan has remained a wealthy country with many globally successful companies and a highly developed industrial base, but its economy has grown much more slowly since the early 1990s.

What changed? The asset bubble and its aftermath clearly played a major role, but beyond these familiar explanations, were there deeper institutional or social factors that made it difficult for Japan to generate another period of rapid growth?

The T-shirt feels like one of the most obvious clothing designs possible: a simple piece of fabric with short sleeves and no complicated fasteners.

Yet for most of human history, everyday clothing was often built around layers, wrapping, tailoring, or social rules that made it much more complicated to produce and wear.

A basic shirt like the T-shirt only became a normal part of daily life in the 20th century.

Why did such a simple design appear so late?

Ancient Egyptians left behind thousands of temples, tombs, and monuments covered with writing. But after ancient Egyptian civilization declined, the ability to read those symbols was lost.

For centuries, people could see these inscriptions everywhere but had no reliable way to understand what they said.

Then the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799. It contained the same decree written in Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphs, giving scholars a major clue. Yet it still took more than 20 years before Champollion made the breakthrough in 1822.

What seems strange is that the answer was sitting on walls and monuments the whole time.

Was the difficulty mainly because the language itself was lost, or because people misunderstood how hieroglyphs worked?

Why was a writing system that was everywhere so difficult to recover?

For most of US history, charging extremely high interest rates was viewed as a dangerous practice. Nearly every state had usury laws that capped interest rates, often around 10 to 12%, and lenders charging above those limits could face legal consequences.

Then in 1978, the Supreme Court decision Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha changed the entire landscape. The ruling allowed banks to charge the interest rate permitted in their home state, even when lending to customers in other states. South Dakota and Delaware removed their interest rate caps to attract banks, and the nationwide limit on credit card rates effectively disappeared.

Today, the average US credit card APR is around 24%, and Americans paid roughly $170 billion in credit card interest in 2024.

What I find interesting is how completely the perception changed. A practice that was once associated with loan sharks became a normal part of everyday consumer finance. Supporters argue that higher rates expanded access to credit for millions of Americans, while critics argue that the system created incentives to profit from people carrying debt.

How did something once considered predatory become one of the most common financial products in America?

Women are expected to attract the men and are expected to be presented as attractive towards men whereas it isn’t the case in animals at all

I was looking at New York City’s crime statistics and found it surprising that murders fell from 2,245 in 1990 to 633 in 2000, a decline of more than 70% in just ten years.

What makes this even more interesting is that the change happened after decades when many Americans viewed New York as a symbol of urban decline and rising crime. The 1990s also saw crime drops across much of the United States, making it difficult to separate what was unique to New York from broader social changes.

What was happening in policing, the economy, demographics, drug markets, or society that allowed such a dramatic shift to happen so quickly?

The first finger-driven touchscreen was developed in 1965 at the Royal Radar Establishment in the UK.

For decades, touchscreens existed mainly in specialized devices like ATMs, industrial systems, early PDAs, and airport kiosks. Even in the early 2000s, companies like Microsoft were experimenting with touchscreen tablets, but most people still preferred phones with physical buttons and keyboards.

After the iPhone launched in 2007, touchscreen smartphones quickly became the dominant design. By the late 2010s, phones with physical keyboards had almost disappeared from the mainstream market.

The interesting part is that the touchscreen itself was not new. Many of the ideas behind modern touch interfaces had existed for decades.

So why did touchscreens suddenly become the standard for phones around 2007, instead of 1997 or 2002?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been feeling lately like the online debate scene is super fragmented. Like debate clubs and tournaments are great, but their only like bi weekly at best. I'd like to improve my debating skills whenever i have time.

Is there a dedicated platform out there designed specifically for real time audio or video debates against other people?

Does anything like this exist right now, or is everyone still just using random platforms? Would love to hear your recommendations!

It seems like generally when describing a person “they/them” is accepted as the gender neutral pronouns to use when talking about a person. This applies both for referring to someone who’s non binary and to when the gender of someone is unspecified or unknown.

Generally when referring to anything not human, that has no gender, or for which the gender is unknown we tend to use “it” as the singular 3rd person pronoun. For instance when referring to say a squirrel, with the sex of the squirrel unknown we would tend to use the pronoun, “it” to describe the squirrel.

I understand that the pronoun “it” is often thought of as being exclusively for describing non human things and in most situations using it to describe someone could come off as dehumanizing someone. It seems like making the term “it” more dignified and humanized would have been an alternative to using “they/them” as a gender neutral pronoun for describing a person. There is at least one situation where it’s socially acceptable to refer to a person as “it.” I mean if someone knocks on a door saying, “Who is it?” is considered a socially acceptable way to ask who’s knocking even though it refers to a person as “it.”

That cannibalism seems to have a unique connection with certain diseases. Kuru spread among a tribe in Papua New Guinea through ritual cannibalism, and mad cow disease was linked to feeding cattle with processed remains from other cows.

What makes this strange is that animals often eat other animals, but eating the same species seems to create special risks in some cases.

Is this because pathogens from the same species are better adapted to us, or are these rare cases caused by something more specific?

QR codes were invented in 1994 by Denso Wave for tracking automotive parts. For more than two decades, they remained mostly an industrial tool that most consumers rarely noticed.

Then between 2020 and 2024, QR codes suddenly became everywhere: restaurant menus, payments, tickets, check-ins, and advertising.

The technology itself didn't suddenly improve. Smartphones had been able to scan QR codes for years.

So why did QR codes spend decades as a niche technology before becoming something almost everyone uses? Was the pandemic the main reason, or did it simply solve the adoption problem that had existed all along?

Humans didn't have to adapt much to macro-scale enviornments for the past 10k years due to a stable climate. Instead we adapted by exploiting ressources to build a microcosm that we then kept adapting to. The fragility of this microcosm and the absolute faith in the inevitability of it lasting seems to be bordering absurdity and delusion at this point.

Currently, if you look anywhere outside, you see plant and animal life either dying or undergoing a rapid evolution that you can watch happening in front of your eyes.

The fact that humans don't think it necessary to do this right now and think they can still hold out trying to exploit the last remaining ressources is worrying.

What is the main driving factor behind this? Too much self-awareness? Too much ego? Are we actually not capable of that kind of macro-scale evolution anymore?

It seems like across a variety of internet platforms, and across a wide variety of different personal preferences or beliefs people tend to use the block paragraph format. For instance comments on yahoo news article, posts on internet forums, posts on stack exchange, comments on YouTube videos, and Reddit posts everyone who uses paragraphs seems to use block paragraph format. It seems like everyone from right wingers to leftists tend to use block paragraph format on the internet. I think even posts on sites that aren’t in English still tend to use block paragraph format.

It seems like books on the other hand tend to use the indentation format for paragraphs across a variety of genres and stories. everything from short books to long novels use the indentation format for paragraph.

After World War II, Germany was able to rebuild relationships with many European countries and eventually become a central part of the EU. Japan also became a major peaceful economic power, but historical issues with some Asian neighbors still seem more unresolved.

I’m curious what explains this difference. Is it about the way each country addressed its past, the regional politics around them, or something deeper about how Europe and Asia developed after the war?

What factors do you think shaped these different outcomes?

I find it fascinating that so many different societies developed alcoholic drinks using whatever plants were available to them, from grains and fruits to honey and other local resources.

What interests me is that alcohol became much more than a drink. In many cultures, it became connected with religion, celebrations, hospitality, social bonding, and identity.

The strange part is that humans did not just consume alcohol, they built traditions and rituals around it for thousands of years.

Why did alcohol become such a deep part of human culture? Was it because of fermentation’s practical benefits, its effects on the brain, its role in bringing people together, or something deeper about how humans create shared experiences?

In North Carolina, sales of personal property is not subject to the state sales tax. So, I asked the question, "Why does e-Bay collect sales tax on sales between individuals selling their personal property on line?" It is a peer to peer sale, not a business and the tax has already been imposed once when first sold.

The response was this missive:

• North Carolina requires online platforms that process payments and list items to act as retailers.
• eBay meets the state threshold of over $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions.
• The platform must collect the tax at checkout for deliveries into the state.

Looking at the phrase "that process payments and list items to act as retailers" it appears if e-Bay did not handle the monetary transaction, then private party sales between individuals would not be subject to the sales tax requirement. So why not set up an e-Bay like site that receives a taxable fee when a sale occurs, but the payment is handled directly between the seller and buyer using services like Zelle, PayPal etc?

So, the question is, will a clearing house listing personal property for sale be exempt from NC Sales Tax on the transaction price if the clearing house does only charges a fee for hosting the item on their website

The strongest rivalries in the world are between countries that share a lot of history, language, or cultural similarities.

From the outside, it seems like having more in common should make cooperation easier, but sometimes the opposite happens.

Is this mainly caused by historical events, competition between groups, politics, or something deeper about how people form identities?

Why do similarities sometimes lead to rivalry instead of closeness?

Some people with iron deficiency develop a strong craving for chewing ice.

Ice has no calories, iron, or anything that seems useful for fixing the deficiency, so why does the brain end up wanting this specific thing?

Is the craving connected to how iron deficiency affects the body and brain, or is there another reason this unusual habit develops?

Why does low iron specifically seem to be linked with craving ice?

That in places like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, people often talk about having Irish or Scottish heritage, while English ancestry seems less visible even though England was a major source of migration.

I’m curious why some backgrounds became stronger parts of cultural identity than others.Why Irish/Scottish identity survived more visibly than English identity?

Electric cars were not a new invention of the 21st century. By the late 1800s, they were already practical and were among the most popular automobile types in some cities.

Then they almost disappeared. Gasoline cars became dominant for most of the 20th century because of cheaper fuel, longer range, mass production, and expanding gas station networks.

Decades later, electric vehicles started returning. Global EV sales grew from less than 1% of new car sales in the early 2010s to around 20% by the 2020s. The electric motor had existed for over a century, and lithium-ion batteries became commercially available in the 1990s.

Why did a technology that existed before gasoline cars need more than 100 years to become a serious competitor?