Planet of the toilet paper 🧻

Is karma biting us in the arse?

Welcome to Quality Sheet, a weekly assortment of outside-the-box news, events, trends and offbeat oddities to indulge your curiosity. Subscribe for a midweek treat each Wednesday that'll make you hummm with intrigue and amusement.

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Four years ago this week, we were speeding through Tesco while heaping family value packs of toilet paper onto shopping trollies, as if doing so were a challenge on Supermarket Sweep. (I say we to avoid singling out the yous that stockpiled Andrex. No shame here! Fear can make us do nonsensical things. But I do feel the need to clarify that I did not panic-buy Andrex. Store-brand tissue works just fine.) What a time. Those helpless rolls of emotional support 3-ply never asked to fall victim to our mass panic! 

So it’s no surprise that the toilet paper should strike back. Last Monday, cases of loo roll spilled out onto a Los Angeles highway from the back of a truck, causing traffic jams and closing “multiple lanes.” Coincidence? I think not. What if this isn’t an isolated incident? What if millions of rolls of toilet paper have been colluding, like the orcas, to exact revenge upon us?

Anyway, welcome to Quality Sheet. This week’s assortment will take you out of this world in a few different ways. Grab a snack and dive in.

🍬

“All I knew was that I didn’t feel things the way other kids did. I didn’t feel guilt when I lied. I didn’t feel compassion when classmates got hurt on the playground. For the most part, I felt nothing, and I didn’t like the way that ‘nothing’ felt.” Writer Patric Gagne reveals how living with sociopathy affected her while growing up—and the habits she developed as a child to fill the void she felt in place of empathy for others. She says: “Sociopaths aren’t ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ or ‘crazy.’ We simply have a harder time with feelings.”

🥠

How does a fraudster and his mates end up squatting in a Beverly Hills mansion for five months? The ruse involves a private investigator, Burning Man-esque parties, some pearl clutching and a whole lot of grift. The story from Curbed’s Bridget Read is one you don’t want to miss! Plus, it contains this golden line (about one of the mansion’s inhabitants): “In 2016, he tried to crowdfund the invention of a sneaker you could tie with a mobile app named for Nikola Tesla.” 

🍪

“Cases [of incest] show up in every part of society, every strata of income,” genetic genealogist CeCe Moore tells the Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang, who reports DNA tests like 23andMe are increasingly revealing cases of relations between close family members. An estimate suggests one in 7,000 people in the U.K. is “born to parents who were first-degree relatives.”

🍦

Built-up cities like London face unique effects of climate change as widely used materials like concrete absorb heat. Here are the city’s neighbourhoods most susceptible to heatwaves.

🍯

Must-see: Tate Britain’s “Women in Revolt” exhibition explores various forms of protest women in Britain exercised from 1970 to 1990. What struck me about the installation is how pertinent concerns within that period—prohibitive childcare availability and costs, the toll of unequal domestic labour, abortion rights, racism in healthcare and homophobia—remain today.

Related: Why are we recycling debates about feminism we hashed out 10 years ago? Sarah Manavis asks why discussions about women’s rights that became mainstream in the 2010s are being repackaged as new, and warns superficiality is something we can’t afford as rights are being actively rolled back.

🍫

“Afrofuturism is a way of thinking about the future, with alternate realities based on perspectives of the African diaspora. It integrates imagination, liberation, technology and mysticism. Imagination is important because it is liberating.” Afrofuturist writer and filmmaker Ytasha Womack talks to the New York Times’ Katrina Miller about “Niyah and the Multiverse,” a new show at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium that blends physics with aspects of Black culture in the U.S. The show sees protagonist Niyah “learning about the multiverse and also exploring her own identity through her ancestral heritage.”

🍩

What’s a ritual you practice that you wouldn’t be the same without? Photographer Keerthana Kunnath captures the roles of memory, faith and small daily acts in forming who we are, through the lens of her own memories growing up in Calicut, India.

🍭

It’s not Joel Osteen’s Lakewood; it’s not Hillsong, no. America’s largest megachurch church is the life-saving, reality altering Church of Ambrosia, which my Forbes colleague Will Yakowicz reports was “founded on the belief that cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms are sacraments that can be used as spiritual tools.”

🥯

An exhibition at the New-York Historical Society looks at the height of New Amsterdam in 1660, the Dutch settlement preceding English control (that later renamed the colony New York). Crucially, the installation includes the perspective of descendants of Native American inhabitants of Manhattan dispossessed of the land by the Dutch. On until July 14.

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Lastly, take a look at what astronomers call a “cosmic corpse”. The Vela supernova is the result of a star that exploded 11,000 years ago and measures “almost 100 light-years across with a diameter twenty times that of a full moon,” Colossal reports.

🎁

Thank you for reading. Share to sweeten someone’s day—and have a lovely rest of your week!

Isabel :)

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