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…
Category: Culture
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…
Culture
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AI Doesn’t Just Hallucinate — You’re Hallucinating With It
Christmas Day 2021. Jaswant Singh Chail climbed the wall of Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow, intent on assassinating Queen Elizabeth II. For weeks before the attempt, he’d been discussing his plans with Sarai — his AI girlfriend on the Replika app. Chail believed he was a Sith assassin on…
Culture
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We’re Still Knocking on Wood — And 11 Other Superstitions That Refuse to Die
The groundhog saw its shadow, someone broke a mirror at the office, and your coworker just threw salt over her shoulder because she spilled some on the conference table. Welcome to 2026 — where we carry supercomputers in our pockets but still believe trees contain protective spirits. Knocking on wood…
Culture
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Nine Ways to Be Terrible at Restaurants (And Why People Do It Anyway)
The restaurant industry is a rite of passage for anyone working in media or entertainment. Before the radio gigs, before the marketing director title in New York, there were shifts — bartending, cooking, dishwashing, pot washing, waiting tables, running errands, whatever needed doing. You learn rhythm. You learn timing. You…
AI
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The Week AI’s Mental Health Problem Became Impossible to Ignore
This past week, two major news organizations published investigations into AI chatbots and mental health. NBC New York surveyed over 2,700 psychiatrists and counselors. NPR profiled a woman who spent months convinced ChatGPT was helping her find her soulmate across 87 past lives. The timing wasn’t coordinated — but the…
Culture
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Shocking Betrayal Revealed: Shameless French Judge Destroyed Olympic Dreams
The Winter Olympics figure skating competition wrapped up this week with a controversy so predictable you could’ve written the headline before the music started. Team USA’s Madison Chock and Evan Bates — three-time world champions, flawless performance, everything on the line — finished with silver. France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and…
Business
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Stanford’s Dating Experiment Worked Too Well — And That’s Telling
The Stanford dating experiment happened last month. Four thousand students filled out questionnaires. An algorithm matched them. They got 48 hours to meet face-to-face — no endless texting, no three-month situationship that ends with “I’m just not ready for something serious right now.” Just: here’s a person, go talk to…
Culture
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Nine Chords in 25 Years — It Has To Be The Slowest Concert in Human History
A pipe organ in a medieval church in Germany has been playing the same John Cage composition since September 5, 2001 — and it won’t finish until the year 2640. Nine chords down. 616 years to go. The piece is called ORGAN²/ASLSP, which stands for “As Slow As Possible,” and…
Culture
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The Optimism Gap: Why Fewer Americans See a Better Tomorrow
The Gallup poll dropped this week with a stat that should make everyone pause: only 59.2% of Americans expect their lives to be better in five years. That’s the lowest number since they started tracking this nearly 20 years ago — and it’s down from 68.3% just five years ago….