Snapshot · TED Talks Daily
Joy, who cared for her friend Hannah during a 6-year battle with ovarian cancer, was not entitled to family medical leave because their friendship wasn't legally recognized.
Where this was said
At 8:50 · chapter starts 8:20
Cohen tells the story of a mother so invested in her son finding romantic love that she kept pushing him to date. When he told her he had found emotional wholeness in his best friend — his platonic life partner since high school, who had actually moved across the country to be near him and live with him — she simply couldn't compute it. 'I don't understand how you can be partners with someone you're not romantic with,' she said. [1] — Rhaina Cohen "A man told his mother he had found emotional wholeness not in a romantic partner, but in his best friend — his platonic life partner — who …" 08:15 Cohen treats this not as ignorance but as a culturally conditioned response, the natural result of growing up in a world where rom-coms, Supreme Court opinions, and workplace policy all reinforce the same hierarchy: romance is the hero; friendship is the sidekick.
Joy cared for her friend Hannah through six years of ovarian cancer — flying to New York for treatments, sleeping in hospitals. When Hannah died, Joy got nothing: no family medical leave, no bereavement leave, because the law doesn't recognize friendship. This isn't a gap in the rules — it's a statement about whose relationships count.
A total of 8 states have filed lawsuits against social media platforms, including an ongoing case in Tennessee, using product liability and public nuisance theories to seek accountability.
France built 56 nuclear plants in the 1970s and now has the cheapest energy in Europe, making it independent of Russian or Middle Eastern energy geopolitics.
Estonia has a single tax form, a law preventing the government from asking citizens for the same information twice, and a flat rate of tax — enabling competitive taxation.
Portugal's Lisbon, once a city with a major heroin problem, legalised drugs and redirected enforcement spending into rehabilitation and housing, dramatically reducing crime.
The first Boland Amendment banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras passed the House unanimously — yet the Reagan administration ignored it.
Over just two years, Saudi Arabia alone donated $32 million to the Contra rebels, giving loosely affiliated factions millions they had no way to spend on arms.
The National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty raised $6.3 million for the Contras but only $3.3 million reached them — a shockingly low 52% program expense rate.
Richard Secord and Albert Hakim marked up their arms shipments to the Contras by as much as 300%, making enormous personal profits from the covert operation.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, tapped to run the entire covert Contra support operation, had no prior experience in covert operations whatsoever — he was learning as he went.
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