Why So Many Perish in Fires | Erotica for the Ears

The world’s highest rates of death by fire are mostly in former Soviet states.

When a deadly blaze tore through the Winter Cherry entertainment complex in Kemerovo, Russia, in March 2018, it captured the world’s attention. Trapped inside a movie theater, dozens of people — more than half of them children — died. “We’re burning,” wrote one girl in a series of frantic social media posts to her friends. “I love you. All of you.”
Later, it emerged that the theater’s fire alarm system was broken and the emergency exits blocked. The tragedy fueled protests against the government, which critics accused of covering up the actual number of deaths. But while it was one of Russia’s deadliest blazes in recent memory, fire casualties are hardly uncommon there — or elsewhere around Eastern Europe. In fact, you're more than five times as likely to die in a fire in Russia than in the United States.

Rose Lavelle is fun off the field and creative on it, leading the U.S. attack in the Women’s World Cup.

Rose Lavelle’s most vivid World Cup memory isn’t her favorite.

She was 8 years old, and the U.S. women’s national team had just been knocked out of the 2003 World Cup by Germany, who had thoroughly outplayed the Americans. Lavelle had been watching the game at her parents’ house in Cincinnati and became so upset that she stormed up to her bedroom. When her mom came to check on her, Lavelle said, “I just want to be left alone.”

“I cried in my bunk bed the rest of the night,” she says. Clearly, Lavelle, now 24, has been invested in the U.S. national team for a while.

New companies are providing listeners — particularly women — with the nonvisual porn they actually want.

To Gina Gutierrez, the gap in the porn market became obvious when she talked to her friends about it. These are open-minded, modern women. But she would ask them where they go for porn and be met with blank stares. “You could ask a friend, ‘What vibrator do you love?’ and get a quick answer,” she says. “But the idea of inspiration was not something that had been innovated on.”

It’s not that surprising: The internet is a cesspool of bad porn, with several sites offering crude search features that tend to turn up poorly produced videos without much story. Gutierrez started researching female sexuality, and, for want of a better phrase, what women want. And a basic video of two people having sex in “some weird Airbnb in Miami” — where you’re left wondering if it was made ethically, if your pleasure is real, if you’re even enjoying yourself — wasn’t really it. So she decided to turn to a whole different format of erotica: for the ears.