Throwback Thursday 2011 is the year everything was normal right up until it wasn’t. The Space Shuttle Atlantis glided home in July with no engines and one shot at the runway and human spaceflight went quiet. The Arab Spring started…
Marilyn Gladue floor crossing to the Liberals is the kind of news that made Rob Breakenridge wonder if he was thinking of the wrong person. Then wonder if it was a late April Fools joke. Then confirm it was real…
Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet sets Shakespeare’s tragedy inside London’s South Asian community, keeps the original language almost entirely intact, and puts the most famous soliloquy in theatre history inside a car cutting through London traffic. That choice alone earns two hours…
Movies getting longer is not a feeling. A researcher named Steven Follows checked the runtimes of 36,000 theatrically released films from 1980 to 2025. Average wide release length went from 106 minutes in the 1990s to 114 minutes today. Films…
2011 was the last normal year. That’s not nostalgia. That’s what historians who study decades for a living actually call it. Go find concert footage from that year. Everyone is holding up a drink or a lighter. Nobody has a…
Athlete social media pressure has changed what it means to be a professional. It used to stop at the rink doors. Now there are dedicated accounts tracking every NHL player’s follows and likes in real time, and Nazem Kadri’s liked…
Artemis crew splashdown is at 8:07 Eastern tomorrow and before they come home there is one thing worth sitting with. The Earthrise photograph from Apollo 8 in 1968 is probably one of the most important images ever taken. The astronaut…
Above and beyond customer service has gotten so rare that when it happens, people put it on the internet and send a stranger a hundred thousand dollars. A pizza delivery driver. A missing Diet Coke. Twenty-six days to retirement. That’s…
Customer service above and beyond has a hundred-thousand-dollar price tag on it tonight, and so does crossing a conservative floor to the Liberals. Both decisions landed this week. Neither one is easy to explain. The Hundred Thousand Dollar Diet Coke…
Gas prices dropping thirteen cents a liter in one day is news. Diesel falling twenty-eight cents a liter is something Dan McTeague says he has genuinely never seen before. Friday is the day to fill up. The reason it’s happening…
Customer service at a small business hits different when the number on the bottle goes straight to the guy who makes the product. No hold music. No chatbot. No ticket number. Just a person who picks up and knows the…
Space inspiration and doom scrolling are fighting for the same fifteen seconds of attention. One of them is winning right now, and it isn’t the rocket. Tony Chapman noticed that and decided it was worth his time to do something…
Artemis mission engineers call the moon a stepping stone. Not a destination. A rehearsal for Mars, for Titan, for whatever comes after that. The question was never why go back. The question was always what you miss if you don’t.…
Corporate jargon sounds like communication. Researchers built a test to find out if it actually is. Real mission statements went up against randomly generated business nonsense, assembled specifically to mean nothing, and participants had to rate the earnestness of each.…
Conspiracy theories don’t start with a villain. They start with a feeling, the specific uncomfortable feeling that somebody must be in charge of how bad this all looks, because the alternative is that nobody is. Lee Kuhnle has spent over…
