News Sidequest

The Guardian profiles a booming category of faith-based energy drinks — with brands called Yahweh, 4gvn, and Praise Energy — that claim to spread the gospel through caffeine. The theology here is thin, but the market opportunity is apparently real. Also: physicists at ETH Zurich just published a landmark paper in Nature demonstrating certifiably perfect randomness for the first time in human histo...

A new PNAS study from Tufts University finds that Americans born between 1970 and 1985 are dying at higher rates than any previous generation did at the same age — with rising deaths from cardiovascular disease, colon cancer, and external causes including overdoses and suicide. The lead researcher called it "genuinely alarming." Also: Art Ulene is a physician, television personality, and author wh...

A Travel Guard survey of 1,022 Americans finds 97% have taken at least one trip they regret — and the most regretted destination in the US is Las Vegas. Also: The Atlantic profiles the solitude influencer, a growing genre of creator documenting life alone — and one woman's formula ("you live alone in NYC and have no friends") has 195,000 followers and sparked a real cultural conversation. And a ne...

The New York Federal Reserve just published the most direct answer yet to why young college graduates can't find jobs — and it's not AI. Remote work accounts for 64% of the surge in youth unemployment since the pandemic, because companies won't hire inexperienced workers onto distributed teams they can't train. Also: a University of Illinois study finds gratitude journaling and optimism training c...

A new Michigan State University study finds people consistently underestimate how cynical their friends are — and the blind spot appears to be deliberate, a kind of social glue that keeps friendships intact. Also: an aerospace engineering professor at Georgia Tech just did the math on interstellar travel, and the numbers are not encouraging for anyone hoping an alien civilization is on its way her...

The Brookings Institution just released the most precise picture yet of American household financial fragility — and the number that should stop everyone is this: a single $1,000 increase in annual living costs would push 3 million more households over the edge. Also: prediction markets and sports betting apps are using memes, leaderboards, and social media to recruit users as young as 18 — and a...

Bloomberg reports that younger consumers are redirecting their entertainment budgets from bars to boutique gyms, and some are spending $300 or more a month to do it — because the gym has become the social infrastructure that everything else used to provide. Also: physicists at the University of Toronto just published a peer-reviewed study in Physical Review Letters confirming that photons can spen...

A new survey finds 48% of Americans say their lives are currently lacking fun — and the survey was commissioned by Dave and Busters, which tells you everything about the source and nothing about whether the finding is wrong. Also: a Harris Poll/Indeed survey finds 52% of professionals with degrees say their degree wasn't relevant to their current job, and among Gen Z that number rises to 51% who c...

A new NYT/CNN poll finds 61% of Americans changed what they buy at the grocery store to stay within budget — a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and independents all said the same thing. Also: a rural North Carolina school district stopped students from using screens on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a public health professor who studied the results shares what happened — including the kid whose ey...

Space Camp registrations doubled after Artemis II splashed down — and the NASA administrator who attended Space Camp as a kid is now running the agency. Also: Luis Salazar walked into a Wawa bathroom in Riviera Beach, Florida, found a fanny pack with $30,000 in cash, spent days trying to find the owner, and returned every dollar. The owner was carrying it for a family emergency. He cried. He hugge...

A new Adelaide University study of more than 20,000 students found that well-being declines across every single measured category after the move to high school — and the damage can persist for more than two years. Also: Burning Glass Institute data shows master's degree unemployment for workers under 35 is at the 77th percentile over the past two decades — near a 20-year high — while PhD, law, and...

Oxford researchers just published the most comprehensive answer yet to why 90% of humans favor their right hand — and it turns out it has everything to do with how we learned to walk. Also: a three-bedroom colonial on Nantucket that sold for $3 million five months ago is yours for free — you just have to move it off the property in 180 days, and the moving bill runs between $150,000 and $500,000....

The research on money and happiness has been debated for 15 years, but the most current numbers adjusted for inflation put the sweet spot around $100,000 to $111,000 — and the story of why problems scale beyond that is more interesting than the headline. Also: Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft got a microscope when she was seven years old, wanted to be a doctor her whole life, raised four children, worked as a...

At NC State's Wilson College of Textiles commencement on May 8th, donor Anil Kochhar stood up and announced he and his wife were paying off the final-year student loans for all 202 graduates — in honor of his father, who came from Punjab, India to study there in 1946. Also: a man who changed his Bitcoin wallet password while high eleven years ago just recovered $400,000 worth of cryptocurrency by...

Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth researchers just published a national education scorecard and the reading results are sobering — scores have been declining since 2013, well before COVID, and the states making gains all have one thing in common. Also: new data shows college-educated dads cut their paid work by six hours a week and added four hours of childcare between 2019 and 2024 — the biggest s...

Adult band camps are having a moment — and they're being described as an antidote to isolation, which tells you something about why they're catching on right now. Also: the optimism research is genuinely interesting — optimistic brains are measurably different, they process good and bad news in distinct ways, and about 80% of people have an optimism bias they don't even know about. And Oxford phys...

A new Gallup poll of 141 countries finds young Americans are more pessimistic about the job market than their older counterparts — creating a generational gap bigger than any other country in the survey. Historically, young Americans have always been more optimistic than older ones, even through the Great Recession. That pattern just broke. Also: the American Academy of Pediatrics just released it...

A new survey of 6,400 older Americans finds that looking back, people report peak life satisfaction at age 52 — and the reasons why make a lot of sense once you hear them. Also: a major new study finds that one specific flavor of anxious, neurotic personality is linked to a 35% lower risk of death over 15 years — and the mechanism behind it is genuinely interesting. And the Wall Street Journal spe...

A new study confirms what every teenager already knew: they're not telling their parents about the sketchy stuff they see online, because they're afraid of the freak out that would follow. Also: just one night of bad sleep can spike the exact brain proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease by 25 to 30 percent — and a week of poor sleep makes it worse. And four volunteers at NASA's Johnson Space...

A new study finds 37% of Americans have ended a friendship, family relationship, or romantic partnership over political differences — and the rate has accelerated since 2016. Also: a new Allianz retirement study finds 67% of Americans are now more worried about running out of money than about dying, up 10 points in just three years. And a Texas A&M researcher has identified the specific compou...

A new survey finds the average American with a $79,000 household income would spend $57,000 a year — nearly three-quarters of it — just to feel okay. Also: a TikToker named Hunter Peterson posted a joke video about buying Spirit Airlines after it shut down Saturday, and 125,000 people pledged $88 million in four days. And a major 15-year study of nearly 40,000 older adults finds that eating at lea...

A new survey finds nearly half of Gen X workers are pushing back their retirement dates — and more than half expect to raid their retirement accounts early just to cover near-term costs. Also: rage workouts are having a moment, and the psychology behind using anger as athletic fuel is more interesting than it sounds — and more effective than punching a pillow. And a new study published in PNAS fin...

A new survey of 2,000 Americans finds one in three is currently having an existential crisis — and for Gen Z it's more than half. The top word people used to describe 2026 so far is "stressful." Also: a Paris Brain Institute study of 92 adults finds that dream-like mental experiences can and do happen during confirmed wakefulness — the boundary between dreaming and being awake is far more porous t...

A new Gallup poll finds 55% of Americans say their financial situation is getting worse — the highest number since 2001, higher even than during the pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis. This is the fifth consecutive year of declining financial confidence, and the only comparable stretch was the Great Recession. Also: a new study finds two-thirds of babies under two watch screens, some for up to...

A new study finds dreams function as a complex social simulation space — your brain running rehearsals for the challenges it thinks you'll face. Also: Pam Cronrath promised her husband of nearly 60 years a "super wake," and she delivered — a life-size hologram of Bill appeared at his own memorial service, took questions from 200 mourners, and told his wife he loved her one last time. And college s...