by Awl Staff

We would venture to say a few Awl readers have a mustache or would like to grow one. If so, then November is your lucky month.

Movember (AKA NOVEMBER!) is responsible for the sprouting of mustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo’s, men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

Once registered at Movember, men begin clean-shaven. For the rest of the month, these selfless and generous men, known as Mo Bros, groom, trim and wax their way into the annals of fine mustachery. Movember Mo Bros, with the support of mustacheless men and women in their lives (Mo sistas), raise funds by seeking out sponsorship for their Mo-growing efforts.

Our Internet-in-arms Mobros and sistas at Thought Catalog and The Art of Manliness have each created a team. You can even win prizes if you raise the most money. We encourage you to get in with Thought Catalog’s Movember here and The Art of Manliness’ here.

The funds raised in the U.S. support prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. Money is directed to programs run directly by Movember and their men’s health partners, the Prostate Cancer Foundation and LIVESTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Together, the three channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programs in line with strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

Is the honey in your cupboard secretly Chinese? Actually, there’s a pretty good chance that it is. [Via]

“To hear the city’s female entrepreneurs tell it, an ambiguous date-meeting with Charlie O’Donnell is almost a rite of passage — like living on ramen while you launch your first app…. What seemed to grate on many of Mr. O’Donnell’s targets was the sense that they’d been subjected to a romantic version of the bait-and-switch: expecting a meeting, they’d found themselves on a date. “ But why are you entrepreneuresses holding out on all this? (I mean, besides, I guess, that he lives in Bay Ridge. Must love R trains!)

“The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday. While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation.”
 — You know, nowadays, it’s the old man, he’s got all the money.

“’Future of News’ thinkers, who emerged only in the last few years, represent a new kind of public intellectual: journalism academics known for neither their journalism nor their scholarship. Yet, the fact is they are filling a void left by an intellectually exhausted journalism establishment, and filling it with crisp, readable — and voluminous — prose that offers to connect journalism to the technocratic vanguard…. To the extent that FON thinkers mau-mau the news business — that’s a good thing. The problem is that FON thinkers (but not Rosen, as we’ll see) sometimes let slip a light regard for journalism itself, that is to say, what journalists actually do.”
 — Who’s your boss paying to help figure out the “future of news”? All our most and least favorite consultants and media book writers!

The last calendar you’ll ever buy should be a great one! Cabinet’s pretty “The Last Calendar” documents throughout 2012 all the many dates in history when the world was and is proclaimed to end. Just $15! How can you not?

“An article on Saturday about reactions to Kim Kardashian’s announcement, after 72 days of marriage, that she would be divorced misstated, at one point, the surname of a prominent author who wrote a limerick about her in Twitter messages. He is Salman Rushdie, not Rushie.”

An Illustrated Look At Some Of Literature’s Near Brushes With Death

Last week, JK Rowling announced that, midway through writing the Harry Potter series, she nearly killed off Ron Weasley “out of spite.” Ron isn’t the first supporting character to narrowly avoid death in an author’s rough draft. Here we look at some other close calls — and how those deaths would have affected the culture at large.

Jon Methven is the author of This Is Your Captain Speaking, due out in 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He can be reached here, or follow him on Twitter @jonmethven.

“I apologize for any offense my remarks caused. It was a dumb way of expressing myself. Everyone who knows me knows that I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body. But as a storyteller I should have been much more thoughtful about the power of language and my choice of words.”
 — Director Brett Ratner is sorry he said that “rehearsal’s for fags.”

“In the industrialised world, roughly 1 person in every 25 has severe mental disorder, and nearly half of us will experience some kind of mental illness during our lives. Many conditions, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as developmental conditions like autism, are at least in part inherited from our parents. If they affect people’s chance of survival you would expect natural selection to have eliminated them, but instead they persist at high levels. Some argue that these genes bring benefits — mental illness and genius have a long-standing link — but archaeologist Penny Spikins at the University of York, UK, goes further. She believes that mental illness and conditions such as autism persist at such high levels because in the past they were advantageous to humanity.”