Robin Hood is one of the West’s most beloved folk heroes. Robin Hood, the story goes, steals from the rich and gives to the poor. But no one would actually do that, right? Wrong. Italian bank manager Gilberto Baschiera got tired of rejecting poor people for loans while watching the rich get richer. From the article: 

He set up a shadowy banking system in the town of 1,100 people, taking money from wealthy clients and secretly transferring it to the accounts of poorer residents so they could qualify for loans. Within seven years, according to prosecutors, Baschiera diverted 1 million euros.

Saga Vanecek was on vacation with her family, playing around in a lake as eight-year-olds do. During her play, she found what seemed to be a weird-looking stick. It turned out to be something incredible: a sword. A really, really old word. “The sword was initially reported to be 1,000 years old, but experts at the local museum now believe it may date to around 1,500 years ago.” That means that the sword actually pre-dates the Vikings. The lake is now being searched for more ancient artifacts. 

If you frequent the conspiracy corners of the internet, you might have already read that China has instituted a “social credit” score for its citizens. The higher your score, the more “trustworthy” you are, and the more trustworthy you are the more perks you receive. You could get things like lower interest rates or faster government services. But if your score gets too low, you could end up penalized in those ways or worse––under house arrest. 

A hairdresser named Jordan Hunt has been fired from his job after being caught on video roundhouse kicking a pro-life protestor. In the video, you can clearly see Hunt stick his tongue out in concentration (do you want to bite off your tongue? Because that’s how you bite off your tongue) and kick the protestor. The kick was the sad punctuation to the end of an argument, and a reminder that we need to actually listen to each other instead of resorting to yelling and fighting. It should be noted that, after the kick, Hunt immediately said he meant to kick her phone. 

Unfortunately, most of us are going to wind up in the tangled web of a narcissist at some point in our lives. Narcissists are particularly tricky because they can be hard to detect. This video explains not only what narcissism is, but it also lays out the four kinds of narcissism that you’re likely to encounter: the classic, the malignant, the covert, and the community. Chances are you already have someone like this in your life. 

The standing vertical jump is an excellent test of overall fitness and athletic prowess in a variety of sports. Indeed, when you think of jumping high, you probably think of basketball. But in reality, football players are the real kings of the high jump. This video describes some of the ways that sports scientists measure the high jump, why those measurement techniques are controversial, and why it may be nearly impossible for anyone, ever, to jump more than fifty inches high.

A few days ago, Amazon announced that it would boost its minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour. The hopeful (or naive?) among us hoped that this signaled a new age of corporate responsibility. The cynical (or realistic?) among us figured that a corporation never opens a window without closing a door. And here we are: the wage increases are to be accompanied by the end of monthly bonuses and stock awards

Imagine living your whole life in a jungle-like environment, or in the desert, or in the mountains. Further, imagine you’ve never seen another environment or even other animals. Not even in a picture book. That’s roughly the situation of the folks in this video. Some have never seen a polar bear, let alone snow (!), and they watch some BBC Planet Earth clips. Their reactions help us see through new eyes and remind us how amazing our world really is.

The raccoons roaming around New York City’s Central Park are not your ordinary trash pandas. These are zombie raccoons. Authorities believe that they are suffering from canine distemper virus, which causes disturbing behavior:

The affected raccoons are described as being zombie-like because of their strange behaviour when they are affected by the virus. They begin to act weird and will appear to be confused, before they lose coordination, consciousness, then die.

The affected animals are being humanly euthanized. 

We use the terms narcissist, sociopath, and psychopath interchangeably. But they are very different terms with very different meanings. This video teaches you the difference between the three and how to spot those differences. It’s actually pretty simple. Let’s start with the former two, because they’re closely linked. Both sociopaths and psychopaths have limited capacity for emotion and empathy. They will do whatever they can to get ahead, and they won’t feel bad about it. The difference is that psychopaths are born, while sociopaths are made. Narcissists are different and a little more complicated to explain. Basically, narcissists have major ego malfunctions. They think they are amazing but at the same time they’re paranoid that they aren’t. 

The Kavanaugh hearings have dominated the news cycle for the past week or so, causing nearly everyone in America temporarily to forget the Mueller investigation. But once the Kavanaugh dust settles, our attention will come back to the Russia investigation. That investigation has frequently been compared to the Watergate scandal, so this video is more timely than ever. It explains the whole Watergate scandal in just seven minutes, giving you enough background to better understand the Mueller investigation. 

Amazon acquired Whole Foods in August 2017, and observers speculated wildly that Amazon was planning to turn Whole Foods into an automated grocery chain and fire all of the Whole Foods employees. “On 6 September, a group of workers sent out a letter to Whole Foods stores across the country reaching out to fellow employees to discuss concerns with how Amazon has changed the company as part of the Whole Worker community.” Amazon has hired a union-busting consultancy in order to quash the emerging Whole Foods union, and they have eliminated many of the perks of working at Whole Foods.