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….
Category: Culture
Culture
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Super Bowl Monday Is the New National Holiday We Won’t Admit Exists
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 —…
AI
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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…