Is globalization doomed? Economist Michael O'Sullivan believes so.

Why one expert believes it is knocking on death's door.

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  • Michael O'Sullivan's book The Levelling declares that the end of globalization is near.
  • In its wake, he believes the world will become a place of multipolarity, bereft of a central guiding international force of control.
  • These new poles of power will take on unique and divergent political and cultural ways of doing things.
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U.S. in Top 10 of most dangerous countries for women

#MeToo and #TimesUp catapult America into the club of world's most anti-women countries

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  • India tops a global ranking of most dangerous countries for women
  • Most other countries in the Top 10 cluster together in an Indo-Arab-African window of 'female-unfriendliness'
  • One outlier: the United States – 10th most dangerous country for women
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The dancing species: How moving together in time helps make us human

"In so far as bodily movements build the brain, every movement a human makes matters."

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Dancing is a human universal, but why?

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Listen to (what’s likely) Frida Kahlo’s voice

The iconic 20th-century artist might not sound how you'd expect.

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  • Experts at the National Sound Library of Mexico may have discovered the first known voice recording of Frida Kahlo.
  • The tape was found in the archives of a late radio personality.
  • With her unforgettably surreal (and often painful) self-portraits, Kahlo challenged 20th-century notions of sexuality, class, and gender.

The National Sound Library of Mexico has discovered what could be the first known voice recording of the iconic artist Frida Kahlo.

"Frida's voice has always been a great enigma, a never-ending search," Pável Granados, director of the sound library, said at a press conference.

The recording was found in the archives of late radio personality Alvaro "The Bachelor" Galvez y Fuentes. On it, a female voice reads from Kahlo's essay "Portrait of Diego" for a radio program about Mexican artist Diego Rivera, Kahlo's husband.

"He is a gigantic, immense child, with a friendly face and a sad gaze," the voice says. "His high, dark, extremely intelligent and big eyes rarely hold still. They almost come out of their sockets because of their swollen and protuberant eyelids — like a toad's. They allow his gaze to take in a much wider visual field, as if they were built especially for a painter of large spaces and crowds."

The speaker is thought to be Kahlo because she's introduced as the female painter "who no longer exists." (Kahlo died in 1954 at age 47.) Researchers are analyzing the tape to confirm it's Kahlo, and they plan to search the archives in hopes of finding other potential recordings of the artist, whose voice was once described as "melodious and warm" by Gisèle Freund, a French photographer and friend of Kahlo.

"Melodious and warm" — or however you'd describe the voice in the recording — seems at odds with Kahlo's painting style, which is often described as brooding and painful.

"I was expecting something slow and pained, dark and moody," Waldemar Januszczak, a British art critic, told The New York Times. "Instead, she's as chirpy as a schoolgirl reading her mum a poem. . . Where did all the angst go? So much younger and happier than anyone would have thought."

"Girl with Death Mask" [Niña con máscara de calavera] by Frida Kahlo

Kahlo is still celebrated today because her work viscerally challenged 20th-century conventions of gender, class, and sexuality. As Mexico's Culture Minister Alejandra Frausto said, she remains "one of the most iconic cultural personalities there is."

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Why we might want to rethink who we put on money

We put presidents on our money, but isn't there more to life than politics?

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  • American money is famous for only featuring statesmen who we sometimes refer to it as "Dead Presidents."
  • Other countries aren't so limited in their selection of people to display on their currency.
  • The recent discussion around putting Harriet Tubman on the twenty dollar bill raises questions about who gets on money and why.
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