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10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild
The premise was simple but high stakes.
It sounds like the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. However, in the mid-2000s, it was a very real and very controversial reality television experiment.
Footage from the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone is captivating audiences all over again. It offers a fascinating and chaotic look at what happens when you remove parents from the equation.
The premise was simple but high stakes. Twenty children, aged 11 and 12, were split into two groups by gender. Ten boys and ten girls were placed in separate houses and told to live without adult supervision for five days.
The Setup
While there were safety nets in place, the day-to-day living was entirely up to the kids. A camera crew was present but instructed not to intervene unless safety was at risk. The children could also ring a bell to speak to a nurse or psychiatrist.
The houses were fully stocked with food, cleaning supplies, toys, and paints. Everything they needed to survive was there. They just had to figure out how to use it.
The Boys: Instant Chaos
In the boys’ house, the unraveling was almost immediate. The newfound freedom triggered a rapid descent into high-energy anarchy.
They engaged in water pistol fights and threw cushions. In one memorable instance, a boy named Michael covered the carpet in sticky popcorn kernels just because he could.
The destruction eventually escalated to the walls. The boys covered the house in writing, drawing, and paint. But the euphoria of freedom eventually crashed into the reality of consequences.
“We never expected to be like this, but I’m really upset that we trashed it so badly,” one boy admitted in the footage. “We were trying to explore everything at once and got too carried away in ourselves.”
Their attempts to clean up were frantic and largely ineffective. Nutrition also took a hit. Despite having completed a cooking course, the boys survived mostly on cereal, sugar, and the occasional frozen pizza. By the end of the week, the house was trashed, and the group had fractured into opposing factions.
The Girls: Organized Society
The girls’ house looked like a different planet.
In stark contrast to the mayhem next door, the girls immediately established a functioning society. They organized a cooking roster, with a girl named Sherry preparing their first meal. They baked cakes. They put on a fashion show. They even drew up a scrupulous chores list to ensure the house stayed livable.
While their stay wasn’t devoid of interpersonal drama, the experiment highlighted a fascinating divergence in socialization. Left to their own devices, the girls prioritized community and maintenance. The boys tested the absolute limits of their environment until it broke.
The documentary was controversial when it aired, with critics questioning the ethics of placing children in unsupervised situations for entertainment. But what made it so enduring, and why footage keeps resurfacing years later, is what it reveals about how kids are socialized long before anyone puts them in a house together. The boys weren’t born anarchists and the girls weren’t born organizers. They arrived at those houses already shaped by years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, what boys do and what girls do. Whether that’s a nature story or a nurture story is the question the documentary keeps asking without quite answering, which is probably why people are still watching and arguing about it nearly two decades later.
This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.
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9-year-old girl asks Steph Curry why his shoes aren’t in girls’ sizes. The response was perfect.
“… it seems unfair that the shoes are only in the boys,” Riley Morrison wrote, starting a chain reaction of positive change.
Nine-year-old Riley Morrison from Napa, California is a huge basketball fan. She roots for the Golden State Warriors and her favorite player is four-time NBA champion Steph Curry. Morrison loves to play basketball so she went online to pick up a pair of Curry’s Under Armour Curry 5 shoes, but there weren’t any available in the girls’ section of the site.
But instead of resigning herself to the fact she wouldn’t be able to drive the lane in a sweet pair of Curry 5’s, she wrote a letter to the man himself. Her father posted it on social media:
“My name is Riley (just like your daughter), I’m 9 years old from Napa, California. I am a big fan of yours. I enjoy going to Warriors games with my dad. I asked my dad to buy me the new Curry 5’s because I’m starting a new basketball season. My dad and I visited the Under Armour website and were disappointed to see that there were no Curry 5’s for sale under the girls section. However, they did have them for sale under the boy’s section, even to customize. I know you support girl athletes because you have two daughters and you host an all girls basketball camp. I hope you can work with Under Armour to change this because girls want to rock the Curry 5’s too.”
“I wanted to write the letter because it seems unfair that the shoes are only in the boys’ section and not in the girls’ section,” Riley told Teen Vogue. “I wanted to help make things equal for all girls, because girls play basketball, too.”
The letter got to Curry and he gave an amazing response on X (formerly Twitter).
Many might be surprised that a megastar like Curry took a nine-year-old’s letter seriously, but he’s long been a vocal supporter of women’s issues.
That August, Curry wrote an empowering letter that was published in The Player’s Tribune where he discussed closing the gender pay gap, hosting his first all-girls basketball camp, and what he’s learned from raising two daughters.
In the essay he shared a powerful lesson his mother taught him. “Always stay listening to women to always stay believing in women, and — when it comes to anyone’s expectations for women — to always stay challenging the idea of what’s right,” he wrote.
Curry clearly practices what he preaches because when a nine-year-old girl spoke up, he was all ears.
Steph Curry and Under Armour didn’t just fix the girls’ sizing issue, they launched a special edition Curry 6 “United We Win” co-designed by Riley, created a $30K annual scholarship for girls, and shifted to unisex sizing across Curry Brand shoes.
Since then, Curry has stayed active in promoting gender equity: he’s hosted girls’ camps, added girls to his elite training programs, mentored players like Azzi Fudd, and launched the Curry Family Women’s Athletics Initiative to fund 200+ scholarships at Davidson College.
Riley and Steph bumped into each other at an event where they caught up and took photos. She is now a high school athlete at Vintage High School in Napa, still playing basketball. And yes, still rocking Currys.
This article originally appeared seven years ago. It has been updated.
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Why Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ endures
A restored masterpiece still provokes awe and debate.
Michelangelo’s fresco of “The Last Judgment,” covering the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, is being restored. The work, which started on Feb. 1, 2026, is expected to continue for three months.
The Sistine Chapel is one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance art. As the setting where the College of Cardinals of the Catholic Church meets to elect a new pope, it was decorated by the most prestigious painters of the day. In 1480, Pope Sixtus IV commissioned Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino and Cosimo Rosselli to paint the walls. On the south are six scenes of the “Life of Moses,” and across on the north are six scenes of the “Life of Christ.”
In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling. The theme is the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The images show God creating the world through the story of Noah, who was directed by God to shelter humans and animals on an ark during the great flood. The ceiling’s most famous scene may be “God Creating Adam,” where Adam reaches out his arm to the outstretched arm of God the Father, but their fingers fail to meet.
At the sides, the artist juxtaposed the male Hebrew prophets and the female Greek and Roman sybils who were inspired by the gods to foretell the future. It was completed in 1512; then in 1536, Michelangelo was asked to create a painting for the wall behind the altar. For this immense work of 590 square feet (about square meters), filled with 391 figures, he labored until 1541. He was then nearly 67 years old.
As an art historian, I have been aware how, from the beginning, Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment” sparked controversy for its bold and heroic portrayal of the male nude.
Many layers of meaning
Michelangelo liked to consider himself primarily a sculptor, expressing himself in variations of the nude male body. Most famous may be the Old Testament figure of David about to slay Goliath, originally made for the Cathedral of Florence.
The artist’s ceiling for the Sistine Chapel had included 20 nude males as supporting figures above the prophets and sibyls. Originally, Michelangelo’s Christ of “The Last Judgment” was entirely nude. A later painter was hired to provide drapery over the loins of Christ and other figures.
“The Last Judgment” scene also contains multiple references to pagan gods and mythology. The image of Christ is inspired by early Christian images showing Christ beardless and youthful, similar to the pagan god of light, Apollo.
Group of the damned with Minos, judge of the underworld. Sistine Chapel Collection, Michelangelo via Wikimedia Commons At the bottom of the composition is the figure of Charon, a personage from Greek mythology who rowed souls over the river Styx to enter the pagan underworld. Minos, the judge of the underworld, is on the extreme right.
Giorgio Vasari, a fellow artist and historian who knew Michelangelo personally, later recounted the criticism by a senior Vatican official, Biagio da Cesena. The official stated that it was disgraceful that nude figures were exposed so shamefully and that the painting seemed more fit for public baths and taverns.
Michelangelo’s response was to place the face of Biagio on Minos, the judge of the underworld, and give him donkey’s ears, symbolizing stupidity.
A detail of a scene connected to the Apostle Bartholomew in ‘The Last Judgment.’ Sistine Chapel Collection via Wikimedia Michelangelo included a reference to his own life in a detail connected to the Apostle Bartholomew, who is located to the lower right of Christ. The apostle was believed to have met his martyrdom by being flayed alive. In his right hand, he holds a knife and, in his left, his flayed skin whose face is a distorted portrait of the artist.
Michelangelo thus placed himself among the blessed in heaven, but also made it into a joke.
Thought-provoking imagery
The Last Judgment is a common theme in Christian art. Michelangelo, however, pushes beyond simple illustration to include pagan myths as well as to challenge traditional depiction of a calm, bearded judge. He uses dramatic imagery to provoke deeper thought: After all, how does anyone on Earth know what the saints do in heaven?
In these decisions, Michelangelo displayed his sense of self-confidence to introduce new ideas and his goal to engage the viewer in new ways.
A digital reproduction of the painting will be displayed on a screen for visitors to the Sistine Chapel during this period of restoration. Behind the screen, technicians from the Vatican Museums’ Restoration Laboratory will work to restore the masterpiece.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.
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