Tax season is supposed to be the part of the year you survive, file, and then promptly try to forget. You paid what you were told you owed, possibly including penalties and interest for something that happened during the strangest three years of everyone’s lives, and you moved on. Most people did. The IRS counted...

El Niño is a pattern most people only think about when a meteorologist mentions it in passing during a forecast, usually in the same breath as “above-average temperatures” or “drier than normal conditions for parts of the Southwest.” It sounds technical, abstract, far away. Something that happens in the Pacific and maybe shows up as...

Electricity bills have climbed in ways that feel disconnected from anything a household actually changed. The thermostat is set the same way it was three years ago. The appliances haven’t multiplied. But the bill keeps going up, and the explanation most people get from their utility company amounts to vague gestures at infrastructure and demand....

A sitting president’s social media account is not supposed to be the place where you go to find out what’s actually on his mind. The official version is press conferences, prepared statements, policy announcements, the kinds of things that get drafted and reviewed and handed to a communications team before anyone sees them. Social media...

The Pizza Hut parking lot is one of those places most Americans have a feeling about, even if they haven’t been there in twenty years. The checkered tablecloth. The Tiffany lamp throwing colored light across the booth. Someone loading a plate at the salad bar for the third time. Your parents still together, or your...

Most people file hantavirus under the same mental category as plague or scurvy: a serious disease that belongs to another century, another continent, or at least somewhere very far from their everyday life. It’s the thing you vaguely remember hearing about in relation to mice droppings in an old barn, the warning on the National...

Every few years, something comes out of a laboratory that sounds so far beyond the current rules of medicine that it barely feels real. Not a better drug, not a refined surgical technique, but a finding that makes you reconsider what the body might actually be capable of. Scientists studying axolotls, zebrafish, and mice have...

Every now and then the internet trips over something so old it circles back to feeling brand new, and people stop scrolling. That happened recently with a collection of dog epitaphs from ancient Rome, two-thousand-year-old inscriptions carved into marble by people who had just lost their dogs and did not know what else to do...

The May 2026 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience featuring US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should have been, at minimum, an interesting hour of radio. Kennedy has strong opinions about institutional medicine. Rogan is genuinely curious about things when the topic suits him. The UK, as it happens, has...

Barron Trump turns 20 years old, and somewhere in the country, people who have never met him are deeply invested in whether or not his half-siblings were at his birthday party. Which, fair enough. When a family has three mothers, five children spread across nearly three decades, and a first lady who appears to run...

American politics occasionally produces a situation where the person standing at a podium, calling an incumbent mayor “an incredible liar” on live television, used to be best known for engineering feuds on a MTV reality show and spending $4,000 on a single bottle of wine. That is the situation Los Angeles finds itself in three...

When the Festus City Council approved a $6 billion AI data center on March 30, 2026, it probably expected a degree of community frustration. What happened next exceeded any reasonable expectation. Eight days later, every one of the four incumbent council members up for reelection had been thrown out of office by voters running specifically...