The Super Bowl ended last night around 10:30 p.m. Eastern. By 6 a.m. this morning, an estimated 26.2 million Americans had already decided not to show up to work. Another 5 million? Arriving late with lukewarm gas station coffee and no apologies. Super Bowl Monday isn’t a federal holiday —…
Category: Culture
AI
Read more
AI Agents Get Social Media — Chaos Follows
The AI social media bots now have their own platform. Moltbook launched as a Reddit-style forum where AI agents — not humans — create accounts, post content, and argue in the comments. Over 1.5 million bot users. More than 102,000 posts across 14,000 topic forums. Humans can observe but can’t…
AI
Read more
AI Rent Human Bodies — And We’re All Just Tenants Now
The machines came for the jobs. Now they want the bodies. RentAHuman.ai launched this week with a pitch so blunt it almost sounds like satire: “Robots need your body.” Founder Alexander Liteplo — a software engineer with apparently zero interest in subtlety — built a platform where AI agents can…
Culture
Read more
American Demonyms That Actually Work — Unlike Whatever the Government Recommends
The United States Government Publishing Office thinks people from Indiana should be called “Indianians.” Indiana — and the rest of the country — disagrees. For nearly two centuries, they’ve been Hoosiers, a term popularized by John Finley’s 1833 poem “The Hoosier’s Nest,” and no amount of federal paperwork is changing…
Culture
Read more
Film Students Can’t Finish Movies Anymore
Film professors at UW–Madison are curving final exams like never before — not because the material got harder, but because their students can’t finish a single movie. Half-watching while scrolling. Skipping the film entirely and hoping to absorb it through “vibes.” Then showing up to the exam and confidently writing…
Culture
Read more
Six More Weeks of Winter: The Groundhog Has Spoken (And We’re Not Okay)
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…
Culture
Read more
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
Read more
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
Read more
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
Read more
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…