The Future of Online Dating Is Unsexy and Brutally Effective

When I give the dating app LoveFlutter my Twitter handle, it rewards me with a 28-axis breakdown of my personality: I’m an analytic Type A who’s unsettlingly sex-focused and neurotic (99th percentile). On the sidebar where my “Personality Snapshot” is broken down in further detail, a section called “Chat-Up Advice” advises, “Do your best to avoid being negative. Get to the point quickly and don’t waste their time. They may get impatient if you’re moving too slowly.” I’m a catch.

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Short Film: Fox and the Whale

We strive towards specificity in film storytelling because it is the antidote to the generic. It has been codified as a rule within the script-coaching industry, and it is generally solid advice. But shorts are allowed to break rules whenever they like, especially when they are self-financed passion projects like Robin Joseph’s Fox and the Whale. Joseph isn’t concerned with finding meaning through dramatization, there is no richly developed protagonist with a compelling backstory. You’re not meant to connect to his film via a recognition of the plotting of the story, but through it’s spirit. It is not a film about a fox in search for a whale in any real sense, though that is what takes place on screen, but is no less than an allegory about the meaning of searching.

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FAA proposes ban on large electronics in checked baggage

While most of us probably keep our laptops and other large electronics in our carry-on bags, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still wants to avoid the risk associated with exploding lithium-ion batteries in the cargo hold of passenger aircraft. According to an official FAA document uploaded by PetaPixel‘s Michael Zhang, the agency is proposing a ban on large personal electronics (anything bigger than a cell phone) in checked baggage.

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Why This Woman Might Disrupt the Condom (and the Pill)

When your job involves trying to bring to market what could be the biggest breakthrough in birth control since the pill, you keep your mornings predictable. Every weekday, Saundra Pelletier gets up at 4:30 a.m., trying not to wake her 10-year-old son while she slips into her workout gear, which includes a sweatshirt with the word bullshit printed on the left shoulder. By 5, the 48-year-old single mom–who lives about a half hour from the San Diego offices of her company, Evofem Bio­sciences–is on the phone, often with her investors in London. At 5:30, still on the phone, Pelletier exits her garage with a quick nod to the nanny, who is on her way in. Half an hour later, she’s at either CrossFit or Fitwall, where she can work all the major muscle groups in 40 minutes. As the cool-down session begins, Pelletier bolts, already en route to her next stop and a triple soy latte from Starbucks. Since there are no locker rooms at either gym, she swings back home–the phone automatically clicking over to a waterproof speaker in her bathroom–to clean up. Back in her car, she dictates emails to her assistant, until arriving at the office by 8:30. “We get quite a lot done, actually,” she says.

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