Film professors at UW–Madison are curving final exams like never before — not because the material got harder, but because their students can’t finish a single movie. Half-watching while scrolling. Skipping the film entirely and hoping to absorb it through “vibes.” Then showing up to the exam and confidently writing…
Education
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Gen Z Became the First Generation to Lose Ground Cognitively — Here’s Why
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath stood before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in mid-January and delivered a message that should have stopped the room cold: Gen Z — the cohort born roughly between 1997 and 2010 — has become the first generation since cognitive records began in…
Culture
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Six More Weeks of Winter: The Groundhog Has Spoken (And We’re Not Okay)
The Groundhog Day winter prediction came in this morning: Phil saw his shadow. Six more weeks of winter. It’s Feb. 2, 2026, and somewhere in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a rodent emerged from a heated burrow at dawn, got waved around by a guy in a top hat, and sentenced the rest…
Food
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Food Companies Discovered Protein Sells — So Now Everything Has It
Walk down any grocery aisle and suddenly everything is shouting about protein. Chips. Cookies. Ice cream. Cereal that used to just sit there quietly being cereal. Now they all have biceps. It’s not that these products fundamentally changed. They just realized protein sells. How Protein Became the Hero Nutrient Somewhere…
Weather
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The Snow Globe Effect: When Winter Stops Being Charming
The tundra of white continued this morning. Not the picturesque, Hallmark-movie kind — the grim, industrial-grade accumulation that makes you wonder if the sun is just taking a personal day. Northern New Jersey in the winter feels like living inside a snow globe someone keeps shaking out of spite. I…
Culture
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Six Years of Receipts — And The Groceries Aren’t Getting Cheaper
A 5-pound family pack of chicken breast cost $15.01 in January 2020. Today, that same pack runs about $20.40. The eggs you bought for breakfast doubled in price, then crashed. Ground beef climbed 45%. Coffee — because the universe has a sense of humor — shot up 54%. MLive crunched…
Culture
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Doomsday Clock 2026: Closer to Catastrophe, Further From Solutions
The Doomsday Clock 2026 announcement landed this week with all the fanfare of a fire alarm in an empty building. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock four seconds closer to midnight. We’re now at 85 seconds — the closest humanity has ever been to self-inflicted annihilation since…
Culture
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Area 51’s “Dorito” Aircraft Reappears With Military Code About Beer and Cheese
A YouTuber camping in the Nevada desert just filmed what UFO researchers have been calling “the Dorito” — a flat, equilateral triangle that doesn’t match any known stealth bomber — flying over Area 51 at three in the morning. And the best part? Military radio scanners picked up transmissions full…
AI
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The AI CEO Who Actually Read the Room — And It’s On Fire
When did tech executives start sounding like doomsday preppers with venture capital? But here we are with Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, maker of Claude AI — publishing a 38-page essay that reads less like a product roadmap and more like a civilization-ending threat assessment. The title alone should…
Culture
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Two Dead, Three Weeks. The Civil War Simulation Didn’t Account for Body Count
I don’t know when “war gaming” stopped being a Pentagon basement thing and became a university ethics department warning label — maybe right after someone decided “defensive shots” was a better phrase than “we killed a guy” — but here we are anyway. In October 2024, the Center for Ethics…