A chat client, in my experience, needs to do one thing besides facilitate a text exchange between two or more parties: It needs to inform you whether someone is or is not available to send and receive such messages. Gchat used to do that fairly well—in a small box of frequent contacts, it displayed which of your past…
Another round of emojis is expected in June to aid us in gradually phasing out unnecessary written and spoken language. Among the 69 potential useful selections are breastfeeding emojis, a Merman and Mermaid, a vomit emoji, and a genie, all of which seem pertinent to daily living.
Russian researchers say they have recorded the first “conversation” between a pair of dolphins. The dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, could apparently create sentences of up to five “words.” This is cool, and overwhelming. What were these dolphs talking about? Do you think they were talking about me?
Dear Abby, the widely syndicated advice column written by Jeanne Phillips (daughter of original Abby, Pauline Phillips) has had a long, uneasy relationship with what rape actually is. Her most recent column is a confusing cocktail of her old-fashioned bad views mixed with what we can assume was some kind of editorial…
Texting/sexting, direct messages, Twitter, Instagram DMs and online dating aren’t enough when it comes to getting to know a person. What a healthy relationship really needs is a lot less... how do you say... talking. If the human race is to survive, there needs to be a severe reduction in our level of interaction with…
Nothing sucks quite like a performance review. Even when you know you’re doing well, hearing about your weaknesses is never any fun, so it’s no surprise that I’ve never met a person who has said, “You know what I’d like? For people to judge me in my personal life like they do at work!” That’s why it’s so strange that…
Austin’s assistant city manager has resigned after widespread controversy over a training he organized for city staff on how to deal with their new, mostly female city council. The training warned that ladies talk a lot and are bad at math, and was, strangely, quite controversial.
There's a new app on the market: It's morally questionable, almost entirely useless, and marketed largely towards single women. Naturally, the world is abuzz.
A recent article in The Guardian says that most people in the U.K. call to check in on their mothers about once a week, usually on Monday nights "after work and before the decent telly starts." The calls, on average, last about 22 minutes. So that's true for the Redcoats, but is it true for you?
Bye bye, vocal fry. All the cool kids in 2013 are ending their sentences with invisible question marks.
When heterosexual couples cooperate well, so a new study suggests, men act like responsive marionettes and women act like emotional puppeteers. That is, men tend to mimic their partner’s mood, while women try to regulate their partner’s emotions because we’re all just trying to appease each other and keep from…
If there's one thing that still sucks about living in a technologically-advanced society in the year 2013, it's the fact that we're all expected to communicate with one another using long strings of words that (ugh) sometimes abide by the rules of grammar. How has technology not eliminated this inconvenience yet? I…
Sooooo word lengthening is totally a thing now. It used to be that only young people did it in text messages and over IM, but now it's popping up in workplace emails and other more formal settings. This might be hard to deal with, especially if you're particularly attached to the integrity of the English language or…
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first text message. Should we be afraid of what's next? No way. Texting doesn't replace conversation with connection; it enhances it. I love texting, and you'd have to pry my phone from my cold, dead hands to get me to stop typing out my feelings. (And I'd probably still figure out…
Womanhood is full of frustrating hunches, and society is full of people who want to pooh-pooh those hunches. "I'm pretty sure I'm being treated like shit right now because of my vagina," we women say. "Shut UP, women! Because men get injured in industrial accidents! Therefore, equality reigns!" the pooh-poohers reply.…
Communicating about and during sex is imperative if you don't want to get hurt (or get an STD), but it's also directly (and unsurprisingly) linked to sexual satisfaction, according to new research/something I'm pretty sure Miranda once experienced on Sex and the City.
Remember those good old days when we all used to sit around in the parlor and snipe cleverly to each other's faces? Remember when we used to spend hours (and $$) making long-distance calls to our far flung loved ones? Remember when we used to leave each other voicemails? Man, those were the days. But now it is all…
A new study has found that dolphins have their own cute little signature whistles that they use to introduce themselves to others when meeting up at popular ocean hangouts. It works kind of like a "What's goin' on, man." If Ryan Gosling was a dolphin, his signature would probably be the whistle version of "Hey girl."
Babies are pretty fun as it is, but now a new study has found that they might be even more entertaining than we thought—we just haven't been paying close enough attention. Researchers at Charles Sturt University in Australia wanted to study how babies interact with each other while in childcare. So they strapped tiny…
Anyone who spends any time in public knows that there are any number of ways a cell phone can turn a person into an asshole, but now science has discovered yet another way that phones are ruining us and destroying our social fabric. It turns out, according to a study from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith…
