In 1918, with Gen Black Jack Pershing off to France to stop the Germans in World War I, the United States instituted Daylight Saving Time. The public were told it was to save energy sources that would be needed for the war but in June America stopped the Germans cold at the Marne, and then pushed them back toward Germany in July, and by November had ended that war.

Yet Daylight Saving Time remained. It still exists 100 years later despite energy savings claims long being debunked, and it being broadly unpopular. Government routinely says they might change it, but when they do they say they would switch permanently to the one everyone actually hates the most, which is the most government thing you will read today. 

A cohort analysis of preschoolers in Canada has led the authors of the paper to call for bans on so-called "ultraprocessed" foods, charging that it will lead to long-term mental health and well-behaved children.

By this time 26 years ago, the "Dot-Com Bubble" was ready to burst. People who wanted to raise investor money claimed that they could sell anything affordably on a website; three companies were devoted just to pet food and buying ad space on broadcast television.

So-called AI is enjoying a similar frenzy. Though they are still just Large Language Models (LLMs), and the best analogy for that is a fancy autocomplete, they are attracting huge levels of financial investment partly because of the potential and then primarily because people want to make money on stocks, not companies.

A new paper says that players where a few superstars get the money leads to less cooperation and poor team performance. The authors say this salary compression is why teams won fewer games.

The authors also suggest that companies should strive for more equity in pay, to increase synchronized effort. Because individual effort by key people isn't enough.

They may have a point. The U.S. Army pays everyone, good or bad, the same, and it is the best in the world. But current military and veterans will laugh if a humanities academic suggests it it more efficient or cooperative because of equal pay. Instead, they will tell the stories of all the people their unit had to carry, because it's not a meritocracy and reductions only happen at promotion tiers. 

In 2026, it is easy to feel intellectually knocked around by all of the health claims you read, and all claiming to be supported by science. Weedkillers causing cancer, food coloring causing diabetes, vaccines causing autism, and ultra-processed foods causing everything else are part of a Vast R̶i̶g̶h̶t̶-̶ Left-Wing Conspiracy to make us compliant and Evil Corporations rich.

Thinking about the new Trump administration in 2024, Republicans transforming into the 1990s Democratic party - except they haven't banned nuclear power again yet - was not on anyone's Cultural Bingo card.(1) 

Olympians Chloe Kim and Eileen Gu are both Americans but have Asian descent. Yet Kim competed for her country in 2018 while Gu chose to instead compete for Communist China, which does not allow dual citizenship yet actively recruits foreign athletes to be on their Olympic team even if they have no Chinese ancestry at all.

Humanities academics say American media have been hard on Gu because she chose to compete for China, whereas Kim was celebrated. Maybe. She'd have lost her passport if she had done it to the CCP. The authors suggest it is because Gu's father is white.