If you combined Harper’s Index with its Findings section and dramatically lowered the research quality of both, you would get my mind after a good internet k-hole. Here are all the things I learned this week.

In 1982, Sweden enacted a Naming Law in order to prevent non-noble families from giving their children the names of nobility. (The House of Bernadotte is the reigning royal house of Sweden; “I think we can agree that we can not all be called Bernadotte,” said a lawyer for the Swedish Patent and Registration Office, which rules on potential name changes.) In 1983, the law was amended to permit Swedish men to adopt their wife or partner’s name. There are only nine states in America that allow this. Recently a Florida man named Lazaro Sopena was accused of fraud for attempting to change his last name to that of his wife. “It was an act of love,” he stated. An estimated 90%of married American women enact this name change; none of them seem fraudulent in their legal act of love.

Other common acts of love include moving in with your partner (an arrangement that allows two to live together for 1.4 times as cheaply as one) or buying a diamond engagement ring (a purchase with an average cost of $5200). The Beatles song “Can’t Buy Me Love” has sold over 1.5 million copies as of 2012; Taylor Swift’s “Red” album sold 1.2 million copies in its first week. Today, the dating services market generates over $2.1 billion in revenue annually. High-end Manhattan matchmakers charge $1,500 to secure a man four dates.

The Naming Law in Sweden also bans first names that could be deemed inappropriate. In the nineties, one Swedish couple refused to register a name for their child. When he turned 5, the parents were fined; in protest, they named their child “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116,” pronounced Albin. The name was rejected and the couple was fined $600. The Patent and Registration Office has also rejected Ikea, Metallica and Allah.

There are 131 people in America with the last name Bernadotte. There are 89  Catherine Middletons. There are 8 people named Justin Bieber and 18 people named Selena Gomez. There are 888 George Washingtons, 3 Abraham Lincolns, 67 Ronald Reagans and just one Barack Obama. There are 271 people in the US named Richard Head, 235 named Richard Butts and 87 people named Richard Sweat. There are 145 people in the US with the last name Assman; one of them is named Richard.

474 people in America are named Richard Rich, not counting Macaulay Culkin’s character in the 1994 movie Richie Rich. In the movie, Culkin’s father (also named Richard Rich) boasted a fictional net worth of $70 billion. America’s actual richest man is worth $66 billion, which is over 3 times the 2012 GDP of Afghanistan. The richest Richard of all time was Richard Fitzalan, the 10th Earl of Arundel, an English nobleman from the 14th century whose net worth at death was equivalent to $118.6 billion.

The 10th Earl of Arundel is entombed in Chicester cathedral in Sussex, England. The stone effigies of Richard and his wife Eleanor of Lancaster show them lying peacefully with their hands intertwined and their dogs sleeping at their feet. Philip Larkin described the image in his 1964 poem “An Arundel Tomb,” which ends with two famous lines whose irony can be invisible out of context: “Our almost instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.”

Jia Tolentino lives in Ann Arbor.

If you combined Harper’s Index with its Findings section and dramatically lowered the research quality of both, you would get my mind after a good Internet k-hole. Here are all the things I learned this week.

American couples spend an average of $25,631 on their weddings. The median yearly household income in Detroit is $27,862. The Royal Wedding flowers are estimated to have cost $800,000. At some McDonald’s locations in Hong Kong, you can buy a “Warm and Sweet Wedding Package” for $1,300, including food for 50 and a tiered “cake” made of stacked apple pies. In the “I’m Sorry” section of the 1-800-Flowers website, you can buy a four-foot rose, a message in a bottle, a box of chocolates, and a Swarovski necklace for $219. Flowers in Wisconsin are blooming up to a month earlier than they did a century ago. 

Hospitals in Michigan and Boston that adopted a “disclosure, apology and settlement” approach to medical error reduced their legal costs by over 50%. In 2010, Mitt Romney wrote a book called No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and charged a $50,000 fee from every venue on his book tour. At least half of the fee was paid in bulk purchases of his book, a move that immediately put No Apology on bestseller lists.

Wholesale food costs make up 30.8% of your check at a fast food restaurant. Fast food consumers spend 127% more at the restaurant than they would to make the same meal at home. McDonald’s runs an 80-acre training facility in Illinois called Hamburger University, with satellite campuses in Tokyo, London, Sydney, Munich, Sao Paolo and Shanghai. In China, the school has an acceptance rate of one percent. Harvard’s acceptance rate is 5.9 percent.

Textbooks are 812% more expensive today than they were in 1978. New homes cost 325% more. The average price per square foot of real estate in New York City is $1339; in Detroit, it’s $63; in Honolulu, it’s $507. In 2011, the Central Park West penthouse owned by Citigroup’s former chairman Sandy Weill sold for $88 million, or $13,000 per square foot. The apartment now belongs to Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the 22-year-old daughter of a Russian fertilizer magnate. She is a horse enthusiast and Harvard student.

In 2006, a Gustav Klimt painting sold at Christie’s for $88 million; Adele Bloch-Bauer II is a portrait of the only woman that Klimt ever painted twice. Gustav Klimt was never married, but he fathered over a dozen children and was known for keeping cats in his studio. Some say he swore by cat pee as a fixative for his drawings. Today a cat costs its owner a minimum of $670 per year. A child is said to create an annual cost of $12,290-$14,230 for an average-income family. In New York, a foster parent of a 2-year-old receives a stipend of $6,048 a year.

Jia Tolentino lives in Ann Arbor.

If you combined Harper’s Index with its Findings section and dramatically lowered the research quality of both, you would get my mind after a good internet k-hole. Here are all the things I learned this week.

The cigarette tax in New York is $4.35 per pack. Low-income smokers in New York spend 25 percent of their income on cigarettes. American families have an average of $4,000 in savings accounts. The more money parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn. Female non-athlete college students average a 3.24 GPA; male recruited athletes average 2.84. The SEC’s median academic spending per athlete is $164,000 per year, which is the same as the annual cost for Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s security detail.

Last year, Governor McDonnell amended his state’s Republican bill requiring a woman to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound before abortion. The new bill still mandates an abdominal—or, “jelly on the belly”—ultrasound before the procedure, which will be paid for out of pocket, and cost each woman between $300 to $1200. The Jelly Belly Candy Company averages $200 million in yearly sales and produces more than 37 million pounds of candy annually; retired jelly bean flavors include Baked Bean, Bloody Mary, Pumpkin Pie and Roasted Garlic.

Recently, an Illinois man stole more than $4 million from investors in his sleep clinic, using the money to buy a Range Rover, a two-acre mansion, and to operate a tattoo parlor in Chicago. Once Stephen Baldwin got “HM” tattooed on his arm because Miley Cyrus dared him to. Once Jermaine Dupri tattooed Janet Jackson as the Virgin Mary across his torso; in late 2009, the couple broke up. Silvio Berlusconi pays his second wife $132,000 a day in alimony. To remove a tattoo, it costs about $50 per square inch.

It costs between $2,000 and $6,000 for an American woman to cut off the inner lips of her vagina in order to achieve the Barbie-like aesthetic mainstreamed by porn. The American vaginal rejuvenation industry is worth at least $7 million. The World Health Organization estimates the annual cost of treating obstetric complications associated with female genital mutilation in Africa at $3.7 million. Jenna Jameson’s net worth is $30 million. Insiders estimate that DVD porn sales have dropped 50 percent since 2007. Over the last decade, music sales have dropped even more. On Christmas Day and Thanksgiving, there are significantly fewer visits to porn sites. The Biblical Magi are said to have followed their star from the East. An ounce of gold costs $1,684. An ounce of frankincense costs $19.78; an ounce of myrrh, the same.

Jia Tolentino lives in Ann Arbor.