You kill the bear, eat the bear meat, and then put on the bearskin. The power of the bear shirt—or ber serkr in Old Norse—gives you the strength and fury of the great animal. This is what berserk means, "bear shirt." Do you actually turn into a bear-human hybrid? Maybe. Nobody liked to go to war against the berserkers, that much is known from the stories of the Roman Empire's long border conflict with the barbarians, which means not "bear brains" but "foreigners."

The human-bear combination exists in North American and Siberian tribal religions, too. These stories go back to the Bear Sons, born to an animal-god father and [...]

The stats-obsessed romantics who break down the calculus of love at OkCupid are claiming that anyone who's looking for love on its competitors — Match and eHarmony, specifically — is wasting their money and their time (which is money, you know!) by hunting around for potential partners there. All this through the power of math!

"He didn't trust anyone. He asked me why I had chosen a Russian bride and asked what business I had in Russia, and I said none…. He was scary. He would never introduce me to other Russian people who came to the house and he always seemed to have a lot more security than the other diplomats. He had a Land Rover with blacked out windows and there was always one car in front of it and one car behind." —That's Alex Chapman, ex-husband of the Russian spy Anna, talking about his ex-father-in-law Vasily Kushchenko to the Telegraph. Kushchenko was presented to Alex as a "high-ranking" officer [...]