The NFL has declared that any players kneeling during the national anthem will now be hit with a fine. Looking at the racial breakdown of…
NOT SO DIFFERENT
Americans living in cities are not any more lonely and depressed than everyone else
City dwellers have a reputation for being hardened and unfriendly. At the opposite extreme is the utopian rural community, where everybody knows everybody else’s name…
REALLEIGH?
American parents invented 1,100 new baby names last year
American babies were given 29,910 distinct names last year. Of those, 1,100 were brand-new ones that hadn’t appeared in the data before 2017, new data…
STUDYING ABROAD
Why are so many people in Sweden studying Swedish?
When people choose a new language to learn, they don’t generally pick the one that everyone around them already speaks. Germans don’t typically decide to…
TOO REAL
Venezuela’s unfolding crisis, as told by its version of The Onion
Venezuela’s presidential election will take place on May 20, amid various crises. Inflation is by some measures 18,000%, meaning basic food items can cost a…
BOMBERS AWAY
Beijing’s South China Sea ambitions now include nuclear-ready bombers
This is a video of a nuclear-ready Chinese bomber aircraft landing on an island in the South China Sea. It marks the first time Chinese…
WHEN HARRY MET MEGHAN
Everything you need to know to pretend you watched the royal wedding
Today, a big wedding happened in the UK. There were lots of big hats. If you are reading this, you probably didn’t watch it. That’s…
PROMISES
Trump made a list of promises to protect schools. Here are the ones he kept
After seventeen died in a February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the White House issued a list of ways in which it promised to “secure…
FIRST BABY
A lot more Americans are naming their babies Melania and Ivanka. Donald, not so much
One Trump-family member can claim to be the inspiration for one of the fastest-growing American baby names. It is not Donald. That honor belongs to…
CLIMATE CHANGED
Linguistic analysis shows oil companies are giving up on climate change
Oil companies don’t like talking about climate change. As the prime movers of fossil fuels, they’d probably prefer not to mention it at all. But…
PUTIN PERSPECTIVE
Chart: Putin’s dwindling optimism about Russia becoming the fifth largest economy
Earlier this week, Vladimir Putin made a bold claim: By the end of his current six-year plan, in 2024, Russia would become the world’s fifth-largest…
UH… HUH?
Google is, um, trying to get AI to talk as awkwardly as, like, humans
At its annual developer pilgrimage in California yesterday, Google announced Duplex, a new feature for its virtual assistant. Duplex aims to make the boring phone…
