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22,000 Wake Ups and Counting

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Don MacLeod

22,000 Wake Ups and Counting

Category: Culture

Culture

A Budapest Restaurant Made Ancient Roman Pizza the Originally Way — Before Pizza Existed

Posted on February 25, 2026February 25, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Culture

The Villages: Where Gen Z Moves In and Boomers Need Their Services

Posted on February 23, 2026February 23, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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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Business

Bathroom Demon and All: What Happens When Realtors Skip Quality Control

Posted on February 22, 2026February 23, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Business

Hershey Swapped Real Chocolate for “Chocolate Candy” — The Reese Family Noticed

Posted on February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Culture

AI Doesn’t Just Hallucinate — You’re Hallucinating With It

Posted on February 17, 2026February 17, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Culture

We’re Still Knocking on Wood — And 11 Other Superstitions That Refuse to Die

Posted on February 16, 2026February 16, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Culture

Nine Ways to Be Terrible at Restaurants (And Why People Do It Anyway)

Posted on February 15, 2026February 15, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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AI

The Week AI’s Mental Health Problem Became Impossible to Ignore

Posted on February 14, 2026February 14, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Culture

Shocking Betrayal Revealed: Shameless French Judge Destroyed Olympic Dreams

Posted on February 13, 2026February 13, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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Business

Stanford’s Dating Experiment Worked Too Well — And That’s Telling

Posted on February 12, 2026February 12, 2026 By Don MacLeod

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…

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