Unlimited access to 5,000+ magazines. One low monthly subscription.

Walk into any hip startup and what’s the one word you’ll hear echoing across the cubicles and over the Keurig despite best efforts to rein in its use? No, it doesn’t rhyme with luck or hit. This one rhymes with hike and should be wildly familiar to anyone who’s seen the movies Valley Girl or Clueless. Like may sound juvenile, but it has taken over our linguistic nooks and crannies in almost every variety of global English. It appears at the beginning of sentences, in the middle of clauses, and now it even introduces quotes. This expanded use of like is so widespread that news outlets ranging from The Atlantic to Time to Vanity Fair to The New York Times have covered what seems to be its troubling and meteoric…

‘We don’t want that image of sex and drugs any more’Els Iping De Wallen resident Thick fumes of cannabis smoke were noticeably absent from the air of Amsterdam’s red light district, the familiar smell replaced by dank canal water and rats on the first day of a ban on smoking marijuana in public. After years of complaints from residents about wild behaviour from visitors, who number 18 million a year, a crackdown on nuisance tourism is in full swing. Last month, the municipality introduced a “stay away” campaign – aimed first at misbehaving Britons – that banned alcohol sales in shops at the weekend and imposed earlier closing times for window brothels and pubs. Now, tourists and residents alike face a €100 ($105) fine for public cannabis smoking in and around the red…

Does your cat or dog suddenly get a burst of energy and perform athletic feats around the house? Welcome to the world of zoomies – intense periods of high-energy activity including running, spinning, jumping and rolling. All at top speed. A proposed scientific name is frenetic random activity periods (FRAPs). In rabbits these high activity periods are called ‘binkies’. But many cat and dog owners simply call them ‘zoomies’. You might see post-bath zoomies, dog park-zoomies, midnight-zoomies and good ol’ out-of-nowhere zoomies. The trigger may be excitement or a sudden increase in stimulation. PART OF PLAY ROUTINE Zoomies can be characterised as play as the two behaviours share many of the same characteristics. This would make zoomies intrinsically pleasurable – in other words, a whole load of fun. If the zoomies are occurring as…