The news, such as it is, is that there’s a height requirement for people who want to be part of the Super Bowl halftime show. Not the headliner. Not the star whose name goes on the announcement graphic. The field cast. The dancers, performers, and bodies whose job it is…
Category: Culture
Culture
Read more
Safety, Solitude, and the Strange Popularity of “Are You Dead?”
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…
Culture
Read more
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…
Culture
Read more
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…
Culture
Read more
Bizarre ER Injuries and the Quiet Collapse of Shame
Bizarre ER Injuries and the End of “Please Don’t” The headline did all the work. No irony. No flourish. Just a sentence from the New York Post that landed like a dropped tray in a quiet room. You didn’t want to click it. You clicked it anyway. Because a headline…
Culture
Read more
Bureaucratic Absurdity Has Entered Its Leaf Era
A Leaf, a Fine, and Bureaucratic Absurdity The scene is painfully ordinary: an 86-year-old man sitting outside in Skegness, England, minding his business, when a rogue leaf — dry, brown, doing what leaves do — blows straight into his mouth. He spits it out. The state intervenes. This is bureaucratic…
Culture
Read more
A Shopping Mall Solves Smoking With Humiliation
A shopping mall in Shenzhen has started installing bathroom stall doors that turn transparent if they detect cigarette smoke. Usually, the glass is opaque. Frosted. The kind you stop noticing the moment the door closes. But if someone lights up inside the stall, a sensor triggers and the glass clears….
Culture
Read more
Why Passengers Keep Grabbing Bags During Evacuations
The evacuation slide is deployed. The cabin lights are screaming red. Smoke is doing that low, theatrical crawl along the ceiling. Somewhere up front, a flight attendant is shouting words that should not require interpretation. And yet — arms go up. Not in surrender. In retrieval. This is the problem…
Culture
Read more
Political Exhaustion Is the Carryover Balance From 2025
Happy New Year The calendar flipped. That was the clean part. Everything else came with us — the noise, the backlog, the unresolved messes that never quite ended, they just lost their headline slot and waited to reappear. Political exhaustion isn’t something that suddenly arrived in 2025. It accumulated. Day…
Culture
Read more
A Bear Under the House — Why California’s Wildlife Laws Need a Rethink
It starts the way these things always do — a sound that doesn’t belong to plumbing, weather, or the polite imagination. A thud. A drag. The low-frequency reminder that something large has opinions about where it sleeps. Then the realization lands: a 550-pound black bear has moved into the crawl…