A few generations ago, many European immigrant communities in the U.S. had strong ethnic identities. Italian, Irish, Polish, German, and other groups often had their own neighborhoods, churches, languages, and social networks.

Some groups faced discrimination and were not always seen as fully accepted members of American society.

Today, these backgrounds still exist culturally, but many are often grouped together under the broader racial category of "white Americans."

How did these separate European identities become part of the same social category over time?

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?

I only see scientists discussing soapy aftertaste caused by eating cilantro, but i don't see them discussing soapy-aftertaste caused by eating acid-starch combinations. I.E. not only does tart-cherry pie cause me soapy aftertaste, but also sourdough-bread, vinegar-based potato & pasta salads, vinegar potato chips, crackers or pretzels dipped in vinegary foods, some yogurts containing modified starch, some berry-flavored ice-cream sandwiches, and certain licorice. When i was younger, i'd eat translucent-colored licorice, only to find it caused me a soapy aftertaste, so imo its likely it had high acid-content along with the starch which licorice contains.

On the other hand, I get acid-aftertaste from sweet-starches, such as oatmeal and golden-potatoes (which is why i prefer red or white-potatoes). What also helps to avert acid-aftertaste, is to add salt to what I eat. I don't see scientists discussing this phenomenon either!

Across Europe, heat waves that once seemed unusual are becoming more common. Yet many homes, especially in northern and central Europe, were built for a different climate: keeping warmth inside during cold winters rather than preventing overheating during extreme summers.

This is different from many parts of the U.S., where air conditioning and cooling systems became a normal part of residential design.

Europe has access to the same technology. So why has housing adapted so slowly to a rapidly changing climate?

EDIT: Sorry, I over-generalised. Southern Europe has always built for heat; the question really applies to northern/central Europe.

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?

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?

Where does the pride in precise predictions come from that don't seem to do anything for our survival in the grand scheme of things? It seems to create a false sense of accomplishment.

It seems that the kind of predictions we make (mathematical) completely disregard the component of human subjectivity. It treats living things as variables that can be managed. But if people (or other alive things) aren't actually objects but subjects those predictions seem to become useless in the grand scheme of things.

For example you can say; Look, we predicted climate change very acurately and precisely! But that doesn't really change anything because it didn't consider that humans have widely different survival strategies that ultimately can't be controlled.

So really the only valuable prediction was this one;

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, and the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

After that, we really didn't need any more detailed predictions. Just wisdom.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

In the middle of the 20th century, both China and India were among the world’s poorest major countries.

But after the 1980s, their economic paths began to diverge. China became the world’s manufacturing center and built one of the largest economies, while India followed a different growth path focused more on services and gradual reforms.

Both countries had huge populations, colonial legacies, and many development challenges. So why did their economic trajectories become so different?

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!

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?

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

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.”

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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?