Tag Archives: culture

In harrowing testimony on Thursday, a woman told jurors about how Keith Raniere, the head of the self-empowerment group and alleged sex cult NXIVM, groomed her as an adolescent to have sex with her on her 18th birthday — only for him to deem her too overweight when the day …

A criminal record, even for something as seemingly minor as weed possession, can serve as a lifelong stain, preventing someone from getting a job, a house, an education, or a loan. A few states, in legalizing marijuana, have attempted to rectify the great disparity between the wealthy white men now …

Voters in Denver, Colorado, passed an initiative making the city the first in the United States to decriminalize the use and possession of psychedelic mushrooms. As of early Wednesday morning, Initiated Ordinance 301 trailed by several thousand votes, with 73,450 “no” votes to 68,711 “yes” votes, according to the Denver …

Illinois Governor J.B Pritzker has announced a bill that would legalize recreational marijuana in the state. The legislation, which Pritzker unveiled Saturday in Chicago with other Democratic lawmakers, would allow for possession of up to 30 grams for residents 21 and over, and up to 15 grams for non-residents, The …

Charles Van Doren, the 1950s quiz show contestant who infamously cheated his way to stardom by using answers he received in advance, has died at the age of 93. His son John told The New York Times that Van Doren died from natural causes at a retirement community in Cornwall, …

From Elizabeth Holmes to the college admissions scandal, we’ve found ourselves awash in stories of grifters lately. But we perhaps reached Peak Scammer Obsession last summer with the tale of Anna Sorokin, a.k.a. Anna Delvey, an aspiring socialite who managed to convince the New York City elite that she was …

Even though the e-cigarette industry is incredibly lucrative one, there’s a lot we really don’t know about vaping. But because there’s some evidence to suggest it’s marginally better for you than smoking tobacco, many people will do it in places where they would probably never smoke cigarettes, even though it …

The producer of the current Broadway rendition of To Kill a Mockingbird has offered a compromise to the theater companies hit with legal action over their productions of a previous adaptation of the Harper Lee novel. Small-town and collegiate theater productions of Christopher Sergel’s To Kill a Mockingbird play were …

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has upheld the involuntary manslaughter conviction of Michelle Carter, who pressured her boyfriend via text messages to commit suicide. She will serve 15 months in prison for the 2017 conviction,followed by five years of probation. “The evidence against the defendant proved that, by her wanton or …

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán paid a $100 million bribe to former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, according to trial testimony provided on Tuesday by Alex Cifuentes Villa, The New York Times reports.Cifuentes,a Colombian drug trafficker, worked with Guzmán for multiple years. This is not the first time during Guzmán’s ongoing …