Americans Think Their Neighbors Are Trash — And We’re the Only Country That Does Pew Research surveyed 25 countries and asked people to rate the morality of their fellow citizens. In 24 of them, optimism won. More people said their compatriots had good morals than bad ones. Then there’s us….
Category: Culture
Culture
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France Just Knighted Its Last Newspaper Hawker — And With Him Goes an Entire Era
Ali Akbar has been selling newspapers on the streets of Paris for 50 years. Seven days a week. Ten hours a day. Rain or shine. On a secondhand bicycle, weaving between cafés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, shouting “Ça y est!” — his signature catchphrase meaning “That’s it!” Last month, French President Emmanuel…
Business
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Before Chatbots, Customer Service Followed These Eleven Unwritten Rules
Before apps, chatbots, and self-checkout lanes, American customer service followed a quiet code. These unwritten rules shaped how stores, diners, hotels, and service counters operated for decades — and most of them weren’t posted on walls or included in training manuals. Customers expected them anyway. The principles that made old-school…
Culture
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The PSL Scale Turned Teenage Insecurity Into a Spreadsheet — And Nobody’s Winning
I would not like to be a kid right now. It was hard enough growing up and trying to make your way. Judging and being judged are part of it, but what I found out this week, aw man, I don’t know how these kids survive. I found out about…
Culture
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We Lost the Bars and Bowling Leagues — Then Blamed People for Being Lonely
The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis — associated with depression, cardiovascular disease, even increased mortality risk — and the advice rolled out like clockwork: join a gym, download a friend app, try harder. As though the problem is you. As though fifty years of dismantled civic…
Business
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UK Chocolate Shoplifting Costs £408M — So Now You Need Permission to Buy a Creme Egg
British Supermarkets Lock Up Chocolate — Because Crime Gangs Love Ferrero Rocher The chocolate shoplifting situation in the UK has escalated to the point where Tesco and Sainsbury’s are installing anti-theft barriers on candy bars. Not razors. Not baby formula. Chocolate. Sainsbury’s confirmed it’s using security boxes on “regularly targeted”…
Culture
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A Budapest Restaurant Made Ancient Roman Pizza the Originally Way — Before Pizza Existed
A pizzeria in Budapest just did what most food historians only theorize about — they made pizza the way ancient Romans might have eaten it, which is to say, without anything we’d recognize as pizza. No tomatoes. No mozzarella. No running water to make the dough rise. Just fermented spinach…
Culture
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The Villages: Where Gen Z Moves In and Boomers Need Their Services
The Villages retirement community in Florida just landed the #2 spot on a national ranking of Gen Z migration hotspots — right behind Minneapolis and ahead of Manhattan. A 55+ community. Second-hottest destination for people born between 1997 and 2012. MovingPlace analyzed nearly 15 million moves throughout 2025 and found…
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Bathroom Demon and All: What Happens When Realtors Skip Quality Control
A rental listing in Fort Totten, just north of Washington, DC, briefly featured something no prospective tenant expects to see: a disfigured figure emerging from — and somehow also behind — a bathroom mirror. The listing has since been scrubbed from Apartments.com. Other versions remain on Redfin, minus the nightmare…
Business
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Hershey Swapped Real Chocolate for “Chocolate Candy” — The Reese Family Noticed
Brad Reese — grandson of H.B. Reese, the guy who invented Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in his basement in 1928 — posted an open letter to Hershey last week, accusing the company of “quietly replacing” the milk chocolate and peanut butter that made the candy iconic. The changes to Reese’s…