This week, an app with a name most of us wouldn’t put on a greeting card topped the paid iPhone charts in China — Are You Dead? — and it’s worth stopping to watch what that says about this moment we’re in. You scroll through the story, and it’s almost…
Animals
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The Bear Is Gone, the Policy Remains
The bear left. Not dramatically. Not on camera. There was no official announcement timed to the moment the crawlspace went quiet. At some point after the new year, the homeowner noticed what had been promised all along: the bear was no longer under the house. That was always the ending…
Culture
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Sometimes the Ground Really Does Give You Money
A man in Neuville-sur-Saône, France was digging a hole for a swimming pool and hit something solid. Not rock. Not a pipe. Something else. What came up were five gold bars and a pile of gold coins, wrapped in plastic bags and buried in his own backyard. Once the local…
Brands
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Why Flipz’s Latest Stunt Actually Works
It has been a long time since I’ve watched a brand stunt and thought, yes, that’s the whole thing—and that’s enough. Flipz decided that “coin toss” is the wrong phrase. Not morally wrong. Not politically wrong. Just inaccurate. Coins flip. Tossing is incidental. So they did what only a snack…
United States of America
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Radiation Fog Alerts and a Very Specific Plane in the Sky
The week started with fog. Not the poetic kind. The kind that shuts down visibility, slows traffic to a crawl, and earns an official warning. “Radiation fog,” the alerts said, which immediately did what that phrase always does — it set off a small internal alarm before the brain caught…
Mother Nature
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Just Because You Can Get Close to Lava Doesn’t Mean You Should
There’s something about fire on the horizon that grabs us — especially when that fire is molten rock flowing down the flank of a volcano. Mount Etna in Sicily, Europe’s most active volcano, lit up again this winter with lava flows that have tourists itching to get nearer. But what…
AI
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Wegmans, Facial Recognition, and the Feeling You Can’t Shake
I should say this up front, because it matters. I love Wegmans. My wife’s family in Rochester introduced us to it in the early ’90s, back when it was still something you had to explain to people. Wide aisles. Food that didn’t feel like an afterthought. A store that seemed,…
Journalism
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Tony Dokoupil’s First Night, the Pause, and the Edit That Followed
On Tony Dokoupil’s first night anchoring the CBS Evening News, the show briefly stopped pretending it wasn’t live. The moment came during a transition. Dokoupil moved from one segment to the next and discovered — in real time — that the handoff wasn’t where he expected it to be. The…
Medical
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A Human Brain Was Recorded While Dying. It Happened More Than Once.
This wasn’t a planned experiment. However, it was not a one-off. An 87-year-old man was being monitored with EEG equipment because of epilepsy. The recording was routine. Continuous. Then he suffered cardiac arrest. The machines kept running. That case produced the clearest data. But it wasn’t the only one. Two…
Culture
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7 Guinness World Records You Can Aim to Set in 2026
Guinness World Records has published a list called “The seven records you should set in 2026.” Not could. Should. Which already tells you something about where we are. The institution built on documenting extremes is now pointing at blank spaces and saying, please, someone occupy these. What follows isn’t a…