Race is elastic + people who aren't male or female | Top 5

+ modern humans and Neanderthals lived side by side US Edition - Today's top story: Want to master Wordle? Here's the best strategy for your first guess [View in browser]( US Edition | 13 February 2022 [The Conversation]( Welcome to Sunday! The top five articles on our website this week are displayed below. Worth another read: Love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is tomorrow. No matter how you feel about the holiday, the idea of romantic love has been with humans for thousands of years – something our religion editors decided to explore last week with brief histories of two different gods of love. Joel Christensen, a professor of classical studies at Brandeis University, writes about Cupid, the chubby cherub who brings together “a baby’s body with lethal weapons.” Christensen explains that this odd combination is a feature, not a bug – many Greek and Roman deities held the power to do both good and bad. “The Roman poet Ovid writes about two types of Cupid’s arrows: one that metes out uncontrollable desire and another that fills its target with revulsion,” Christensen writes. This duality at the heart of Cupid helps us [understand the pleasures and dangers of desire](. Kamadeva, the Hindu god of love, desire and infatuation also shoots his arrows into hearts, writes professor of religion and Asian studies, Jeffery D. Long. The Hindu god is depicted as a handsome youth who rides upon a large green parrot named Suka. His bow is made of sugar cane, its bowstring is made up of honeybees and his arrows are made of flowers. “All these elements symbolize the sweetness of love,” Long writes. Kamadeva too embodies a tension – one between romantic love and solitary spiritual growth. In his article, Long relates a classic story about how [Kamadeva helps save the world from a dangerous demon by reconciling these two opposing priorities](. Emily Costello Managing Editor There are 2,315 five-letter words in Wordle’s dictionary. Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images [Want to master Wordle? Here’s the best strategy for your first guess]( Derek Horstmeyer, George Mason University Whether you want to win with as few guesses as possible, or you just want to figure out the right word before running out of turns, a scholar offers some tips. Although the medical establishment is now recognizing that sex is not binary, society as a whole has been slow to embrace the concept. Vera Livchak/Moment via Getty Images [Not everyone is male or female – the growing controversy over sex designation]( Carl Streed Jr, Boston University; Frances Grimstad, Harvard University Millions of people do not fit neatly into male or female sex designations at birth, and wrong identification can set them up for a lifetime of physical and mental harm. - [New research suggests modern humans lived in Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, in Neanderthal territories]( Ludovic Slimak, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès; Clément Zanolli, Université de Bordeaux; Jason E. Lewis, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York); Laure Metz, University of Connecticut Stone artifacts and a fossil tooth point to Homo sapiens living at Grotte Mandrin 54,000 years ago, at a time when Neanderthals were still living in Europe. - [Whoopi Goldberg awkwardly demonstrates how the idea of race varies by place and changes over time]( Robyn Autry, Wesleyan University In the absence of meaningful national dialogue about race, the American public often turns to entertainers to unpack complicated social issues. - [The high-speed physics of how bobsled, luge and skeleton send humans hurtling faster than a car on the highway]( John Eric Goff, University of Lynchburg It may look like athletes in bobsled, luge and skeleton simply grab a sled and hang on until the bottom, but high-speed physics and tiny motions mean the difference between gold and a crash. Like this newsletter? 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