The England Vs. Italy game was exciting. No-one told Phil.

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These Italians share more than just a similar name.

Richard Heathcote / Getty

Astrid Stawiarz / Getty

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Go with your gut…or don’t.

Now we get it.

AP Photo/Christophe Ena

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Police scattered about 3,000 Argentina fans with pepper spray and batons Saturday in the Copacabana area of Rio de Janeiro.

Argentine soccer fans in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday.

AP Photo/Leo Correa

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“The Notebook [is] the standard by which all romance films are judged in popular America since it was released.” So says Marty Bowen — who, as the producer behind the Twilight series and The Fault in Our Stars, knows a few things about film romance.

And up until the record-breaking success of The Fault in Our Stars this past weekend, The Notebook held the mantle as the most significant love story of the last decade. With two relative unknowns (Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling) as the younger versions of two established actors (Gena Rowlands and James Garner), it grossed $115 million worldwide on a $29 million budget — a stellar number for a “female-oriented” film, especially one not released on Valentine’s Day. Over the last 10 years, it has sold an astounding 11 million DVDs — a sales number usually unique to Disney films, Harry Potter, and superhero films.

The Notebook is classic Nicholas Sparks, which is to say that it follows a pair of good-looking protagonists who resist each other until, under the slanting light of the coastal Carolina magic hour, they don’t.

But The Notebook also has two things that render it spectacular: There’s the genuine chemistry and charisma between all four of its leads, including the revelation of Ryan Gosling. Yet it also takes the traditional Sparks narrative to a second, more profound level. The soul of the story is Noah and Allie’s courtship: all of the parts with McAdams and Gosling. But the true heart is the secondary, shadow narrative of the aged Noah caring for Allie as she descends into Alzheimer’s, attempting to rekindle the memories of their enduring love before, at film’s end, they die, peacefully, in each other’s arms.

By setting the initial story so far in the past, we’re able to see the fruition of their love in the present. Unlike the rom-com, which cuts to the credits at the very beginning of a relationship, The Notebook proves that the romance went on far beyond the ending credits. Not just a year beyond, or a child beyond, but decades upon decades and a sprawling family beyond. In this way, The Notebook offers both the Sparks hypothesis — “true love conquers and endures all” — and its proof.

New Line Cinema / Via tumblr.com

That — and the exhilaration of watching McAdams jump into Gosling’s arms — is what makes The Notebook so addictive. The potential danger, however, is that the version of love proffered by the Sparks narratives — of which The Notebook is the apotheosis — might also be a form of what can only be called emotional pornography.

And yes: The Notebook and the rest of the Sparks genre are escapism. They’re melodramatic. But they’re also a coping mechanism, and an expression of frustration with a world that’s increasingly difficult for women — and men — to safely navigate.

If the contemporary rom-com is filled with the stresses of urban life — text messages, high heels, workplace drama, stylish high-rise apartments, shopping montages — then the Sparks love story is rooted in an almost pre-digital arcadian space, a stone’s throw from the ocean, filled with ancient trees bathed in golden light, and nary a computer or smartphone in sight. In the city, it’s all concrete and stoplights; in the Sparks utopia, it’s always 70 degrees and sunny, except when a thunderstorm comes and cues a love scene.

The rom-com focuses on the contradictory and frustrating demands that structure the lives of twenty- and thirtysomething women; the Sparks love story, however, offers a fantasy space in which money and race are invisible and the past — and any trauma associated with it — can be cured by the love of a good man. The rom-com has to be comedic in order to distract us from its implausibility, and the Sparks narrative is replete with tears in order to tether us to its emotional core and overarching message: Namely, that in the end, it’s love, not romance, that matters and endures.

Sparks himself has been adamant about the difference between his work and the “romance”: “I haven’t written a single book that could even be accepted as a romance novel,” he told Mediabistro. “I mean, there’s a completely different voice. They've got very specific structures; they've got very specific character dilemmas; they end completely differently; and they've got certain character arcs that are required in their characters — I do none of those things.” Sparks has been criticized for attempting to distance himself from the feminized genre of the romance novel and, indeed, his distinctions are, at bottom, a matter of semantics. Sparks’ works are certainly love stories, but what makes them powerful — and so successful in our contemporary moment — is their embrace of melodrama.

Melodrama, however, isn’t a genre so much as a mode: a register in which you render the world. Today, we mostly think of the word in pejorative terms — “stop being so melodramatic” — but melodrama has a rich and complex history that, when applied to narratives like the Sparks oeuvre, helps illuminate why otherwise preposterous narratives hold so much sway.

If you were living in the Western world pre-Enlightenment, your understanding of the world was guided by one thing: the church. The church composed the outer edges of the moral universe, dictating what was right and wrong, sinful and righteous. The world was filled with mysteries — what happened inside the body; what was the sun; was the earth a flat plane and were we going to fall off of it — and the spread of the church, and Christianity in general, was a manifestation of its ability to provide explanations, however vague, for those mysteries.

But the Enlightenment and the various scientific revelations that accompanied it undercut the church’s authority. The seasons, for example, didn’t happen because God willed them; they happened because we rotated around the sun. It’s easy for us to be blasé about these type of truths, but try to imagine just how seismic they would’ve been at the time. To be clear, it wasn’t as if droves of people were suddenly fleeing the church and taking up atheism. But if before, the moral compass was fixed, then post-Enlightenment, it began to spin wildly. Thus: the proliferation of some of the most influential philosophers of the last 500 years, many of them attempting to articulate new terms and negotiations of morality.

But not everyone in the late 18th and 19th centuries was up to reading a little light Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, or Kant. So where’d the masses find their solace? The stage, which began to develop narratives, gradually deemed “melodrama,” that offered clearly discernible good guys, bad guys, and narrative resolution: a world that was morally legible and, by extension, cathartic and comforting.

Melodrama, however, wasn’t a genre so much as a mode — a register in which you render the world. There’s the basic genre (romance, tragedy, action, comedy) and the melodramatic mode imposed upon it: In a romance, for example, you still have all the same tropes (man, woman, love notes, angry parents, rings, kisses, weddings), but the arrangement of those tropes, and the truths they elucidate, are firmly rooted within the moral legibility that characterizes melodrama. In a melodramatic romance, for example, the woman who compromises her virtue must either suffer or die; in a melodramatic action film, the righteous hero will vanquish the deceptive villain. You left these productions secure that the world made sense.

With melodrama's basic modality set in place, it manifested over the next century in everything from “blood and thunder melodrama” on the stage, early silent film shorts involving women in peril, and the women’s film of the 1930s and ‘40s. It was in the “wet, wasted afternoons” of films like Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager that melodrama began to accumulate its pejorative, feminized connotations.

These melodramas aren’t always happily after ever, but they are, at bottom, morally ever-after. And that, above all else, is the appeal of the melodrama: It may not be realistic, it may seem facile, or overblown, or filled with acute highs and lows, but it’s always offering an escape — not to a world that doesn’t exist, but one in which, even amidst the horror and ennui and confusion, the moral compass stays true.

All melodramas represent a fractured world that can, ultimately, be righted. And that’s the overarching narrative thrust of the Sparks love story: The contemporary world may be filled with sadness, anger, and distrust, but that world, once blessed with love, can be transformed — and everyone else along with it. As the complications of real life fade away, the clarifying righteousness of enduring, self-sacrificing love remains, a guiding beacon in an otherwise morally murky world.

It’s easy to see how that sort of story would be appealing. But it doesn’t quite explain the incredible popularity of the Sparks oeuvre, which has grossed more than $740 million worldwide.

So what makes some of us keep watching? Part of the answer lies in predictability: The Sparks narratives are all slight variations on the selfsame themes. The protagonists’ ages, vocation, and locations vary, but only superficially — and the same goes for who dies, and for what reasons, and at what points in the narrative. They’re formulaic, but so are superhero movies, rom-coms, Westerns, and the rest of the films that top the box office. The formula is part of the solace; “genre” is nothing but a contract with the viewer, a promise that things will go as expected and desired.

Sparks thus follows the basics of the genre — there’s a man and a woman, something that separates them at first and brings them together at the end — and just modifies the attributes that structure the narrative, always keeping within a very Sparksian rendering of the world. Setting, characters, plot, and resolution — the details of each are crucial to the Sparks fetishization of the traditional American dream.

If the popularity of the Sparks oeuvre springs from a desire to return to the spirit of the pioneering American dream, it makes sense that the majority of his novels take place in the settings that come closest to that nostalgic ideal: the South, where time has stood mostly still — at least as depicted in the Sparks movies. Life moves slower, seems smaller. People care about their neighbors, and kids run free through the streets.

But the Sparks films take place in an even more specific version of the South: either North Carolina (Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe, The Last Song, Safe Haven), South Carolina (Dear John, The Notebook), or Louisiana (The Lucky One). The Carolinas offer all the picturesque qualities of the ocean without the connotations of wealth affixed to living next to the sea anywhere else: In California, you live next to the sea because you’re a fancy snob; in the Carolinas, you live next to the sea because you’re a landscape painter, or you run the corner store, or your family always has. That’s not true, of course, but that’s how the Sparks universe works.

It’s also a South wholly removed from any specter of racial struggle or history. All Sparks protagonists are white; when there is a character of color (Viola Davis as the inn owner in Nights in Rodanthe; Al Thompson as Shane West’s best friend in A Walk to Remember), their race is never mentioned. The Sparks South, then, is a South absent its history and, in most cases, stricken of any visual reminders of its fraught past.

The Boone Hall Plantation, which doubles as Allie's summer home in The Notebook.

Rennett Stowe / Via Flickr: tomsaint

Wormsloe Plantation, aka Will's family home in The Last Song.

Chuck Redden / Via Flickr: redden-mcallister

Indeed, many of the most striking Sparks settings are, in fact, old plantation homes: In The Last Song, the Wormsloe Plantation doubles as the home of Will (Liam Hemsworth); in The Notebook, the Boone Hall Plantation is Allie’s summer home; Beth’s ex-husband’s family lives in the Housmas House Plantation in The Lucky One; and Savannah’s family home in Dear John is the Cassina Point Plantation. Granted, the owners of these grand structures are almost always antagonists: barriers to love, or stricken by the lack of love. Not because their money most likely came from a history of exploitation and racialized violence, though — but because they’re rich and therefore blind to the powers of love.

Sparks films take place almost entirely en plein air. On the beach, of course, but also at the fair, in the stables, at a construction site, going canoeing or, in so many cases, eating a meal (a picnic, a fancy dinner, attending a family gathering) under the moonlight or at twilight. Even the interior spaces — usually family homes and churches — have so much light as to feel outdoors. And if the outdoors is our natural state, then the Sparks setting places us firmly within it: When we’re outside, the cares of civilization melt away; only the most essential cares (love) remain.

Relativity Media / Warner Bros.

Sparks films are also, without exception, in close proximity to a large body of water: usually the ocean, but a lake or lazy river will do as well — as will a tremendous rainstorm. Water functions as a clarifying narrative catalyst, the place where characters let down their guards and become their truest, most honest selves. In the beginning of several narratives, characters spend significant amounts of time staring at the water, as if desiring that sort of honesty but not quite ready to give themselves to it. Somewhere around the end of the 45-minute mark, the character is persuaded to revel in some body of water — in The Last Song, Will takes Ronnie scuba diving in the aquarium; in The Notebook, Allie and Noah frolic in the waves; in Safe Haven, Katie gets invited to a family outing to the beach — and, in the process, let down his or her guard.

But it generally takes a rainstorm for the real emotional revelation to happen: most famously in The Notebook, but also in Dear John and Safe Haven. In The Lucky One, the figurative rain comes from an outdoor shower; in Message in a Bottle, the storm takes place just outside the window; in Nights in Rodanthe, it’s a veritable hurricane, threatening to take down the entire house.

In the Sparks film, the abundance of emotion is too much for any character to articulate; the unspeakable thus overflows into the mise-en-scène, manifesting itself in the imposing form of the plantation, the roiling sea, the thundering sky. These filmic tropes are the descendants of classic melodrama: a way to communicate emotions too abundant to put into words.

The South, the water, the easygoing familiarity of rural life: They’re all backdrop, but they’re a backdrop that amplifies the personality and actions of the Sparks character types — of which there are approximately five.

1.) The Woman

If the rom-com heroine is the postfeminist paragon, obsessed with shopping and sex — always put together, always walking with a purpose — then the Sparks heroine is her casual inverse: She looks great in cutoffs and a tank top, and her hair looks best when misted with the sea air. The rom-com heroine rarely has children, although she feels her biological clock silently ticking; the Sparks heroine is either a single mom — and a good one — or naturally maternal.

Touchstone Pictures / Relativity Pictures

Brazil’s troubled World Cup is upon us. If you’re going, pull yourself away from the games, the beaches, and the bars for a while to visit these incredible, off-the-beaten-path destinations.

Courtesy The Maze

An inn tucked into the labyrinthine Tavares Bastos favela, the Maze is the rare place that's designed to accommodate visitors yet still feels hidden and mysterious. It's the handy work of Bob Nadkarni, a British ex-pat who for years has been gradually building the inn himself. The result is a Gaudi-esque tangle of rooms, passageways and overhangs that offer jaw-dropping views Rio's cityscape.

Nadkarni told BuzzFeed earlier this month that rooms at the inn are already mostly booked out for the World Cup, but the Maze is still worth a visit; in addition to it's views and architecture, it's also a world-class jazz venue. During the World Cup, the venue will hold a jazz night July 4th. Also worth noting: visiting a favela can be a fraught activity for tourists, but the Maze is a long-established part of the community and Nadkarni is there to welcome visitors rather than exploit his setting.

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Wow, the Japanese supporters are turned up.

Almost game time. Time to get pumped.

vine.co

I'm so pumped.

Showing reverence, but still very pumped.

AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan

And then Keisuke Honda scored and Japan's supporters were like...

vine.co

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Grab your kneepads and helmet, because things are about to get physical.

Via mypartyshirt.com

Think Ali Rogwhani’s abrupt and unceremonious dismissal from Twitter this week was bad? Check out these brutal executive ousters.

When Ali Rogwhani resigned from the chief operating officer job at Twitter on Thursday, he announced it with a tweet, surely a first for a $22 billion company. But the real story of his stepping down well predated social media: Twitter's CEO, Dick Costolo, had kind words for him in public ( as well as absorbing his responsibilities), but Rowghani had actually been under heat for months following Twitter's poor user growth, the lagging stock price, and for a friendly Wall Street Journal story that called him Twitter's "Mr. Fix-It" and had Twitter employees describing him as "co-CEO."

Less than seven weeks later, he was gone. Internal rivalries, poor results, frowned-upon media coverage — these are all ingredients in the toxic stew that can lead to executive defenestration. Here are 15 of the most brutal corporate executions presented in chronological order.

Steve Jobs, Apple

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

When: May, 1985

Why: The Apple co-founder had helped introduce the personal computer to the masses, overseen a massively successful IPO, and was well on the way to global icon status when he was fired from the company he created at 30 years old. He was removed by the company's CEO, John Sculley, a Pepsi executive brought in by Jobs to run the company while he headed the Mac division.

Apple was floundering — several product launches had not impressed critics or customers — and Jobs' famously intense leadership style had alienated many of his underlings and fellow executives. Jobs described his ouster as "devastating" and like being punched in the stomach. Jobs would later found Pixar and the computer company NeXt, which Apple bought in 1996 when Jobs came back on as CEO. The rest is history.

Michael Ovitz, Disney

AP Photo/Rick Bowmer

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THE FATHER OF ALL QUIZZES.

Urine for a real treat!

You stay classy, Japan.

On Saturday, we declared that Japan has the best fans at the World Cup.

vine.co

And showed how they go all out for the games.

Well now we can make that title official. After losing to Ivory Coast, Japan fans were reportedly spotted cleaning up their section of the stands.

Via Twitter: @WorIdCupProbs

And they really cleaned it, too.

Via Twitter: @WorIdCupProbs

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This series was produced by the Brazilian investigative journalism nonprofit Agencia Publica , and translated by BuzzFeed.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

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Art is life, life is art.

livefastdontdie.tumblr.com

meangirlsarthistory.tumblr.com

livefastdontdie.tumblr.com

themobilemovement.tumblr.com

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Pattinson talks about his bleak new thriller The Rover , changing people’s perceptions, and being the guy who “never played team sports.”

Robert Pattinson (right) with Guy Pearce in The Rover.

A24

In The Rover's bleak universe, there is virtually no backstory — illustrative of a world in which nothing really matters — and we know little about Robert Pattinson's Rey other than that he and his older brother (Scoot McNairy) are in a small band of thugs who were violently thwarted during a criminal act we don't see. An injured Rey has been abandoned for expedience's sake, which is how he becomes a hostage to Eric (Guy Pearce), whose car has been stolen by Rey's former friends. (Eric really wants that car back, for a reason that is revealed only in the movie's final moments.) As Rey, Pattinson plays a "half-wit," as Eric calls him, a far cry from Twilight's Edward Cullen, the emo vampire who served as a tweenage fantasy.

The Rover is David Michôd's second feature as a director, following up on 2010's lauded, provocative Animal Kingdom. And though it takes place in Australia, where Michôd is from, Rey and his brother inexplicably have American Southern accents. It's good for Pattinson to sound nothing like Edward, the character that made him famous. Rey starts out fearful — in one scene he folds himself into a fetal position. But he also changes as the movie goes on (to describe would be to spoil). In Variety, Scott Foundas called it a "career-redefining performance" for Pattinson.

In an interview with BuzzFeed this week in Beverly Hills, Pattinson discussed The Rover (which premiered at Cannes last month and comes out in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, and will be released nationally next Friday), and his post-Twilight career. And he has been working a lot: In addition to David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, which also premiered at Cannes, he will soon appear in Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert, Anton Corbijn's Life, and Olivier Assayas' Idol's Eye with Robert De Niro, which has not yet begun filming. As someone who tripped into huge stardom after he was cast in Twilight, and then fell into a viper's nest of paparazzi as one-half of a tabloid couple while he dated his co-star Kristen Stewart, Pattinson, now 28, described life after Edward as a "process."

He has now lived a good portion of his life hunted, both by paps and fans, but in person, he is neither brooding nor tortured. Actually, he was quick to laugh. And he seems to have figured out how to live a sane life, if not a normal one.

You do a Southern accent for this movie, as well as a number of vocal and facial tics. Were those as written or did you develop them with David Michôd?

Robert Pattinson: It said he was from the South, but not a specific place. I guess all those sorts of tics and things — it was just quite jerkily written? So when you start saying it out loud, it just ends up coming out in your body.

The Rover seems like it was grueling to make. It looks hot, and there are all those flies. Was it? And was that helpful for the role?

RP: I thought it was really easy. I think the most stressful thing in movies is when the weather is really random. Then everyone is just panicking all the time. But it was just sort of hot all the time. If you were trying to play someone who was clean, then it would be incredibly stressful. To have someone coming in and touching up your makeup every 10 seconds — but you were just sitting in a pile of mud, it doesn't really make a difference. You could just play in the dirt.

You were wearing the same thing the entire time.

RP: I don't even think they had doubles of the clothes. It took a long time. We went through hundreds of pairs of jeans. It was mainly about the feel — the way the costume department distressed them. We literally put glue in it to make them sit a certain way. They were, like, thick. But I just kind of knew how I wanted to feel. Also, the T-shirt, I knew from the audition exactly what T-shirt I wanted to wear. The colors and everything.

I want to ask about the scene when you sing along with "Pretty Girl Rock." It's out of nowhere, and lovely.

RP: When I got to that part in the script, that was one of the main turning points: Wow, this is completely on another level to most things I'm reading. And so brave as well — doing something that could be completely baffling to people. I thought it was going to be a tiny insert, and when I walked in to do the scene, David's got this massive push-in on a track that's like a 100-foot-long track. And just pushing in for almost the entire song. It was kind of great.

It was a sweet moment — you really feel for the character who's never lived a different kind of life.

RP: He's never really learned how to think like a normal person. He has no concept of what his decisions will affect, because no decision he's ever made has ever affected anything before.

Pattinson with director David Michôd.

A24

Twilight made you a rich movie star and paparazzi target. Now that it's been almost two years since Breaking Dawn Part 2 came out, how do you look back on the experience?

RP: I knew when I signed up after the first one came out, I knew it was going to be about a 10-year process to really — I'm not sure what! To get to the next plateau. I've been extremely lucky as well, but it kind of does seem like there's little gradations — every year, every job, something happens, and people's perception changes a little bit. I don't look back on it being a different part of my life. It's all one road, really.

A lot of are actors go back and forth between big studio movies and smaller indies. But since Twilight, you seem like you've avoided studio films. Is that deliberate?

RP: It hasn't really come up. Maybe there was a little period after the first Twilight where just because you're the new thing, you get offered a bunch of big budget things. And nothing really connected with me. But I think my energy and also how people perceive me — I don't fit too many roles like that. I never played team sports in school, and I think people can tell! As I get older, the parts become a little bit more open. But the young guy parts in big budget movies, you can always tell the guy has played team sports. I hated them.

I was going to ask you whether you feel Twilight has held you back, but now I think I should ask whether or not playing team sports has.

RP: It's just weird. I think I just gravitate toward loner parts. I feel my emotional reactions to things are quite off a little bit. I remember doing Twilight and Catherine Hardwicke just being, like, "Why are you looking at her like that? You look like you want to kill her." I'm, like, "I do? That's, like, a love look!" I try to do things with Cosmopolis and this — it's an emotional spectrum that's slightly off. I feel like I can commit to that a little bit more than hit the traditional beats.

You seem very director-focused in your choices.

RP: You try and limit the margin for error as much as you can. Even if you end up doing a shitty movie, but you've been working with Herzog or something, you're not doing a superhero movie that's supposed to be something completely different. And then if you make a shitty superhero movie, it's like, what do you expect?

Did you just say that the Werner Herzog movie you're in, playing T.E. Lawrence, is shitty?

RP: No, not at all! I'm hardly in it anyway.

Oh, is that right? I couldn't tell.

RP: I was only there for like 10 days. No, I think it's going to be cool. I saw some of the stuff with Franco and Nicole Kidman that looked really good. It's insurance. With Michôd, I wanted to work with him for ages. I thought Animal Kingdom was one of the best debuts in the last 10 years.

You have a bunch of movies coming up, but one that jumped out at me was Life, the story of James Dean and Dennis Stock, the photographer. A lot of the parts you've taken since Twilight seem to have nothing to do with your life experience — but the idea of photography and a young star does intersect.

RP: It's funny, I didn't think about that. What I liked about it was that it was about professional jealousy. It was before James Dean was famous, but obviously he loved having his photo taken. Both of them were super arrogant, and they both think they're the artist. Dennis was so filled with neuroses and jealous of everything. I didn't really think about the celebrity aspect of it. I don't think Dennis ever thought about it. Also, I think afterward, he was pissed that that was his legacy.

I read an interview with you recently in which you said you weren't sure whether you've found your feet yet as an actor. Do you think you ever will?

RP: I don't know. In some ways, hopefully not. The only thing I deal with every single job is trying to overcome confidence issues. I think in some ways, it's helped me just having fallen into it, and not really being, like, I need this. That's when you go crazy and you lose control of your personal life. In some ways, it is very frustrating when I'll know how to do something in my head, and something inhibits it. It just drives me nuts. I think it's good when there's no expectations of the character. And then I'm fine.

What do you do when you find you can't do something?

RP: It's just, like, horrible. There was one moment when I was doing Life. I knew exactly how to do this scene. I'd been planning the whole scene for the whole movie. And it just, for whatever reason, it was just not happening. And no one else knows. I'm just, like, losing my mind on the set. Everyone's so uncomfortable. Also, with a little bit of experience you realize, OK, I'm just going to not let anyone else speak, and deliver each line in about 10 different ways. And hopefully they'll fix it in the edit! Can you just make my performance for me?

Is it frustrating?

RP: It's the most horrible thing ever. Especially because most of the time, especially in big emotional scenes, it's just because you feel like you're faking it. And you know how not to fake it, but it's not happening in your body. And there's nothing you can do. At the end of the day, people watching it half the time can't tell at all. Or 90% of the time, you can watch a scene you think is the worst scene ever and you're completely faking it — and no one knows.

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For the bride AND the bridesmaids.

Create custom T-shirts with the number of years you've known the bride, or the upcoming wedding date.

relaxpics.com

Make everyone a survival kit for the weekend, and fill it with all the essentials!

Or you can also buy the kits here.

etsy.com

Don't forget the hangover kits, too!

Buy a set of 20 here.

etsy.com

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For summer reading that breaks glass ceilings.

Captain Marvel (Kelly Sue Deconnick, 2014)

What It's About: Carol Danvers, former fighter pilot, current part-alien superhero, and all around badass proves why she's Earth's Mightiest Avenger as she battles time travel hijinxes, dinosaurs in Central Park, and her own deteriorating mind.

Number Of Male Tears Shed: The number of times you've wished you could rock Cap's excellent fauxhawk.

Where To Start: Here, and the current 2014 run continues here.

Marvel Comics

Ms. Marvel (G. Willow Wilson, 2014)

What It's About: Kamala Khan is just an average Muslim teenager in Jersey City until an * incident * that leaves her with shapeshifting abilities, trippy visions of the Avengers, and the mantle of Ms. Marvel. Bonus points for including a very practical fanny pack in the homemade costume.

Number of Male Tears Shed: The number of times #MURICA scrolls across your Twitter feed.

Where To Start: Here.

Marvel Comics

Pretty Deadly (Kelly Sue Deconnick and Emma Rios, 2013)

What It's About: Death's daughter Ginny rides the through the land of living in search of retribution, not only for those women who call for her help, but also for herself. Death himself will fall, and Ginny will be there to watch it happen.

Number Of Male Tears Shed: The number of times Clint Eastwood has squinted into the sunset.

Where To Start: Here.

Image Comics

Sex Criminals (Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, 2013)

What It's About: Suzie and Jon are a sex-having, time-stopping couple who are using their powers to fund their Robin Hood-esque life of crime.

Number Of Male Tears Shed: The number of vibrators sold in 2014.

Where To Start: Here.

Image Comics / Via starlorrd.tumblr.com

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God Bless World Cup players.

On Thursday, the Croatian team lost to Brazil, 3-1, in the opening match of the World Cup. Like any team, they were very sad and gave one another sad shirtless hugs:

Elsa / Getty Images

Here is Croatian player Dejan Lovren casually standing around naked while Luka Modric looks on.

CROPIX

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Do you know the original name for the Powerpuff Girls, what Krabby Patties are made of, or why Timmy Turner’s hat is pink? Well you’ve come to the right place.

The Powerpuff Girls were originally called the Whoopass Girls.

Animator Craig McCracken first developed the show as a cartoon short called Whoopass Stew! When Cartoon Network picket up the show, they wanted to... tone things down a bit.

Cartoon Network

Sesame Street has won more Daytime Emmys than any other show.

Sesame Street's been around since 1969 and in that time, it's managed to haul in 108 Daytime Emmys and be nominated for 15 Primetime Emmys. That's quite a lot of Emmys...

PBS

Nickelodeon

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