News Sidequest

Living with nuns is a real option now / Solar just beat coal / Should you be able to design your child?

The Wall Street Journal reports that young New Yorkers are moving into convents to escape a rental market where Manhattan's median one-bedroom just hit $4,680 a month — and some of them say it's genuinely great. Also: in May 2026, for the first time in US history, solar power generated more electricity than coal — 12.8% to 12.2% — and solar is now the third-largest electricity source in the country. And Columbia University geneticist Dieter Egli and his team just published a landmark preprint demonstrating precise base editing of human embryos with high efficiency — and the conversation about where this goes next has officially started. Plus therapy donkeys, a period in a text message, Bigfoot's right to privacy, and a Pasadena horseplay situation. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

A year of college now costs $100,000 / She said "that's the law" about noodles / Why fact-checking doesn't change minds

New data from the Princeton Review finds 16 American colleges have crossed the $100,000-a-year threshold for total cost of attendance for 2026-27 — Harvey Mudd tops the list at $104,512 — and the trend is accelerating. Also: a woman at a Florida noodle restaurant went to war with staff over her son's uneaten $5 bowl, invoking "the law" and threatening to call the owner and sue, and the internet mostly sided with the restaurant. And new research from Penn State and the University of Colorado finds that AI fact-checkers face the same problem human fact-checkers always have: people's politics strongly shape whether a fact-check changes their mind at all — and for conservatives, the reputation of the source matters more than the verdict. Plus an alligator DWI getaway, a whale graveyard, a satanic ritual at an Olive Garden, and a lightning-struck church. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The iPhone is birth control, apparently / The economics of solo-maxxing / The pilot who flew 900 flights without a license

Two new papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research find that US fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007 — the year the iPhone launched — and access to smartphones correlated with birth rate declines of up to 8% among teenagers. Also: the average all-in cost of a date in the US has hit $189, up 12.5% in a year, and a growing number of Gen Z and millennials are responding by opting out of dating entirely — a trend they're calling solo-maxxing. And Geoffrey Wall, a 59-year-old former Air Canada captain from Barrie, Ontario, flew more than 900 commercial flights on Boeing 767s, 777s, and 787s between 2009 and 2025 — allegedly without ever obtaining the license required to do so. Plus a fake boarding pass, woolly mammoth DNA in squirrel poo, a Florida man arrested on the way to court, and a hot sauce shortage. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The restaurant that stopped charging / Why June is disappearing / Gen Z can't read a sentence

A 15-year-old Minneapolis café called Post Modern Times stopped charging for food in January as an act of protest and community care — converted to a nonprofit, kept the model, and owner Dylan Alverson says: "Stepping out of the capitalist system gave us more support than existing in it for 15 years." Also: Cambridge neuroscientists scanning 577 brains found that older adults' brains register fewer distinct "moments" per unit of time — literally processing fewer neural transitions — which is why years vanish faster the older you get, and what you can actually do about it. And a Pepperdine professor told Fortune: "It's not even an inability to critically think. It's an inability to read sentences." Plus dynamite in a freezer, mashed potato litigation, AI-look plastic surgery, and a mysterious cold blob. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Remote work is making us lonelier than we realized / What it means to be a man in 2026 / Gen Z has gone quiet online

A landmark study published in Science — 590,000 workers, 13 years of data — finds remote work explains about a third of the increase in isolation and mental distress since the pandemic. Workers in remote-capable jobs became more likely to see mental health professionals and fill prescriptions for anxiety and depression. Also: a new survey of 2,000 men finds 57% say financial struggles have made them feel like they're failing at manhood, 77% were taught growing up that a man's primary role is to be a financial provider, and 72% say society expects them to handle that stress quietly and alone. And a Zety survey of 900+ Gen Z workers finds 95% have stopped sharing their real opinions online to protect their careers — and 90% have already faced workplace consequences for something they posted. Plus $8.65 returned to the Pope, a goat in a London office, a spider in disguise, and a four-winged velociraptor cousin. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.