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…
Category: Culture
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…
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…
Culture
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The Coast Guard Did Its Job Perfectly — Rescuing Someone From a Completely Avoidable Situation
Recently, the Coast Guard released a press release about a rescue 1,100 nautical miles east of Puerto Rico — which is already so far from land that “east” becomes theoretical — and I had to reread the part about what this guy was doing out there. Benoit Bourguet, 47, from…
Consumers
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The Stationery Shop That Needs a Bouncer
A stationery shop in Chicago now requires a bouncer — not for crowd control at a nightclub, but to manage the line of people desperate to buy fountain pens and planners. Paper & Pencil, a 400-square-foot Andersonville store, has customers wrapping around multiple blocks. Some waited four hours to shop…
Culture
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Measles Is Back — Because We Decided Vaccines Were Optional
A kid at Clemson has measles. Let that land. One of the most contagious viruses on earth—something we eliminated from the U.S. in 2000—is back. Not in a remote, rural pocket. Not overseas. Right in the middle of a 30,000-person university. The university confirmed the case. They’re contact tracing. The…
Culture
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Lunar Hotel Reservations Are Here — And They Cost More Than Your House
Recently, a startup began accepting lunar hotel reservations — not for a property that exists, but for one that might exist, orbiting the Moon sometime in the unspecified future. The deposit? A quarter of a million dollars. Galactic Resource Utilization Space (GRU Space) is the company behind this. They’re asking…
Culture
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The Dog Poop Business Is Real — And Making $30K a Year
I was reading about a guy in Derbyshire, England — you know, the place where sheep outnumber humans and the hills look like a screensaver — and his name is Kyle Newby. He’s 39. And he makes over $30,000 a year scooping dog poop out of people’s yards. Not as…