Everybody hurts

Google Maps time

Nature is magic

WTF

Oh, the humanity!

Are people working too much?

I remember dissecting my owl pellet like it was yesterday. I was in 4th grade and I was sick at home with the chickenpox. I'd been really looking forward the owl pellet project and so when I caught my little sister's infection, I was super bummed out. My best friend at the time was nice enough to offer bringing a pellet and tools to my house so that I could do mine at home. My mom was reluctant at first, but she gave in. It was for science, after all. Feverish and covered in bright red pox, I j…

Dollar Tree. Dollar General. Family Dollar. 99 Cents and Up. Discount stores here in the United States are not very inspired in the name department. And they really don't have to be. They serve their purpose: to provide inexpensive necessities to people who really, really need them. Over in the UK, we'd wager people feel similarly about the names of their own bargain businesses. But that's just because across the pond the word “pound” refers to currency instead of, um, doing the nasty. hi twitt…

How is it that someone can be perfectly affable and charming in person, but an absolute nightmare of a human on social media? Why does it feel like we're all walking around in a cloud of paranoia all the time? Why is it hard to tell which information is true and which is fake these days? Psychology buff @g_s_bhogal might have some answers. In a follow-up tweet to an insightful mega-thread of 40 psychology concepts, @g_s_bhogal explained that his goal “is to help people avoid the psychological t…

No one wants to read and Google

As adults, a lot of what we learned in history class has disappeared into the ether, or has become blurry, muddled by our very own hectic timeline. To make things more complicated, we learn about the past in a way that is very much centered on the places we've grown up in and call home. This type of tunnel vision can make the overlapping of eras seem pretty damn unbelievable. For example, unless you've seen or read The Last Samurai , it may seem surprising that samurai were around during the Ci…

There's plenty of injustice in the world. Every day, people are wrongly convicted for crimes they didn't commit. But while adults at least have due process to protect them to a certain extent, children aren't always extended the same respect. In elementary school, it's one kid's word against another, and adults can arbitrarily pick who they believe if they feel like skipping the whole due process thing. When comedian @itsnashflynn told a story about how she got in trouble as a kid for an egg-re…

Everyone knows that food delivery drivers are some of the most underpaid gig workers in the industry. Many drivers end up earning less than minimum wage. And on top of that, delivering food while navigating apps can be dangerous business. In 2021, The New York Times reported on a survey of delivery drivers facilitated by the Worker Institute at Cornell University. The survey revealed that "42% of workers had experienced being underpaid or not paid at all. Nearly half said they had crashed while…

In an evocative parallel scene from a Sopranos episode entitled, "The Strong, Silent Type," mob boss Tony Soprano and his loyal associate Furio cook dinner for themselves, alone in their respective kitchens. The scene starts out with Tony walking into the kitchen of his New Jersey McMansion. He calls out his wife Carmella's name before finding a note on the counter that reads, "Rigatoni in the fridge." Meanwhile, Furio (a native Neapolitan), tends to sizzling pots and pans in a humid, dimly-lit…

Scatterbrains, rejoice!

When I was a teenager, some friends and I were hanging out in a park one evening when we came across a wallet sitting in the grass. We opened it up to see if there was an ID and sure enough, there was, along with sixty bucks. We all agreed to bring it to the local precinct, but first we had a little fun and tossed it in a circle like a football. We briefly entertained the idea of keeping the cash, as any teenager would. But in the end, we did the right thing and turned the wallet in. I think in