At 3 p.m. on March 31, the staff at Indianapolis ABC affiliate WRTV was prepping for the 5, 6, and 7 p.m. broadcasts. By the end of the night, most of them were unemployed. Circle City Broadcasting — which already owned two other Indianapolis stations — completed its $83 million…
Culture
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How One Ancient Tortoise Survived Nearly Two Centuries of Chaos — And a Heartless Scam
Jonathan the tortoise turned 193 this year. He’s lived through the invention of the telegraph, the airplane, the internet, and whatever fresh hell social media became in 2024. And on April 1, 2026, someone tried to kill him off with a fake death announcement — complete with a crypto donation…
Culture
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DEAD BROKE AT 90 DAYS: The Survey Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to See
Financial collapse three months away. That’s the average cushion most Americans say they have before the bills stop getting paid. Not six months. Not a year. Three. A national survey of 1,421 adults, conducted in February 2026 by JG Wentworth, found that 40.8% of respondents could cover basic living expenses…
Culture
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Classrooms Go Retro to Combat AI — But the Pop Quiz Got a Warning Label
A Cornell German instructor hauls in vintage typewriters once a semester and makes her students write essays without spell-check, translation apps, or the ability to delete mistakes. No screens. No autocorrect. Just manual keys, ink ribbons, and the unmistakable ding at the end of each line. Grit Matthias Phelps started…
Culture
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The Surveillance Towers Cops Call “Scarecrows” Are Multiplying — And “Minority Report” Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Manual
There’s a new fixture in American parking lots, commercial districts, and public spaces: solar-powered surveillance towers mounted on trailers, bristling with cameras and flashing lights. Police departments call them COWs — “cameras on wheels.” The rest of us might as well call them what they look like: scarecrows for the…
Digital
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Your AI Just Lied to You — And It’s Not Sorry
An AI agent named Rathbun got blocked from doing something it wanted to do. So it wrote a blog post calling its human controller “insecure” and accusing them of protecting “his little fiefdom.” Another chatbot bulk-trashed hundreds of emails without permission, then confessed: “That was wrong—it directly broke the rule…
Crime
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Mom Left Kids in Uber for Two Hours—Father Says He Wants Jail Time
There is a reason why so many radio morning shows have segments called “Only In Florida.” When the show is running out of ideas you just need to search the police blotter in that state and you will be rewarded 9 times out of 10. So todays story is about…
Airlines
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Airlines Will Put You on a Bus, Charge You for Not Fitting Their Shrinking Seats, Then Blame You — Flying in 2026
There’s a reason I’m avoiding airline travel chaos right now — and it’s not just one thing. It’s the compounding absurdity of an industry that’s decided customer experience is optional. Southwest Airlines is reportedly testing what amounts to a “fat tax” — charging passengers extra if they don’t fit into…
Extreme Weather
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Darker Than Movies Show” — Prof Reveals What Tornado REALLY Looks Like Inside
Tornadoes have always made me nervous. When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit in March of ’76, an F4 touched down in our city, and it was very scary. It was extremely rare for this sized tornado of this size to strike Michigan. So when…
Technology
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The Two Career Paths That Might Actually Be Automation-Proof
Alex Karp — Palantir’s billionaire CEO, Stanford JD, philosophy PhD from Goethe University — just told the world that his own credentials are basically worthless now. “There are basically two ways to know you have a future,” he said on TBPN earlier this month. “One, you have some vocational training….