A tenured USC professor is arguing that universities need to fundamentally rethink their value proposition as AI rapidly closes the gap on human instruction and a loneliness epidemic grips the generation most likely to be sitting in their lecture halls. Eric Anicich, an associate professor at USC's Marshall School of Business, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that nearly three-quarters of 16- to 24-year-olds now report feeling lonely, young adults spend 70% less time with friends in person compared to two decades ago, and a growing majority of Gen Z college graduates say their degree was a "waste of money."
Anicich points to a recent Harvard study finding that students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much as those in traditional active-learning classes, and did so in less time. The implication is stark: if instruction becomes abundant and cheap, colleges must sell what remains scarce -- genuine human community. He notes that his doctoral training included zero coursework on teaching, a norm he says persists across academia. His proposal: fund student life as seriously as research labs, hire professional "experience designers," and treat rituals and collaborative projects as core curriculum rather than amenities.
An a busy thoroughfare near you, there are new car washes. The car washes have bright lights and ads for apps and subscription plans. A subscription to car washes, yes, that's right. What's going on? Private equity is putting locals out of business and packing shopping districts with concrete bunkers that employ no-one and pay no sales tax. — Read the rest
Justin Kuiper has spent eight years writing video scripts, which means he's spent eight years thinking about why people click on things. His Substack post on the psychology of clickbait offers a useful framework: the problem isn't curiosity-driven headlines. The problem is what happens after you click. — Read the rest
This HaBO comes from Marina, who wants to find this historical romance. Trigger warning for the description below:
I think this was a regency era setting.
The protagonist goes with stepmother and her daughter to a house party. She is not well treated by them. They secretly plan to entrap a titled rich guy into marriage. The daughter invited him to go to her room at night. He enters the protagonist’s room by mistake and starts making love to her, but since she was given laudanum she thinks it is a dream. (This was done to her so she would not hear what would go on next door.) When the stepmother goes to her daughter’s room – as planned – to find her daughter and “lover” in flagrante delicto, he’s not there but can hear them talking about their plan and is saved.
I can’t remember the rest and it’s making me crazy. I don’t even remember if I finished it. Can anyone help?
Microsoft Excel, the 40-year-old spreadsheet application that helped establish personal computers as essential workplace tools and contributed to Microsoft's current valuation of nearly $4 trillion, has weathered both the rise of cloud computing and the current AI boom largely unscathed. In its most recent quarter, commercial revenue for Microsoft 365 -- the bundle including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint -- increased 17% year over year, and consumer revenue rose 28%.
The software traces its origins to a 1983 Microsoft offsite under the code name Odyssey, where engineers set out to clone Lotus 1-2-3. That program had itself cloned VisiCalc, the first computerized spreadsheet, created by Dan Bricklin for the Apple II in the late 1970s. Bricklin never patented VisiCalc. "Financially it would have been great if we'd have been able to patent it," he told Bloomberg. "And there would be a Bricklin Building at MIT, instead of a Gates Building."
Excel now counts an estimated 500 million paying users. The Pentagon pays for 2 million Microsoft 365 licenses. Google's free Sheets product, launched in 2006, captured casual use cases like potluck sign-ups but failed to dislodge Excel from enterprise work. AI chatbots present the latest challenge, but venture capitalists say nearly every AI spreadsheet startup they meet builds on top of Excel rather than replacing it.
India's dominant airline IndiGo has cancelled roughly 3,000 flights since last week after new pilot fatigue regulations collided with technical issues and the seasonal schedule shift, stranding more than half a million passengers and forcing aviation authorities to reverse course on the safety rules they had just implemented.
InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo's parent company, told regulators that stricter requirements for night flying and weekly rest periods created an acute crew shortage. The Airline Pilots Association of India called the regulatory rollback a "dangerous precedent," noting that management had known about the requirements since early last year.
IndiGo controls 65.6% of India's domestic aviation market as of October 2025 and briefly became the world's most valuable airline in April. The crisis arrives as India's second-largest carrier, Air India, remains under investigation following a June crash that killed 241 passengers and crew. Authorities have imposed temporary price caps to prevent gouging.
You have cells from other people inside you. Not metaphorically. Literally. In your brain, your heart, your liver. They got there during pregnancy, or through a blood transfusion, or possibly through sex. They've been living in you for years, maybe decades. — Read the rest
Roommate: "I saw this really nice recipe online. I think I'm gonna make it for dinner."
My other roommate and I share a quick, worried glance.
Other Roommate: "Uh, [Roommate], do you need any help?"
The Trump administration has argued that Fed board member Lisa Cook may have committed mortgage fraud by declaring more than one primary residence on her loans. We found Trump once did the very thing he called “deceitful and potentially criminal.”
For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.
President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.
But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.
At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”
President Donald Trump departs after speaking at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, in February.
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by clerical error. Determining ill intent on the part of the borrower is key to proving fraud, and the experts said lenders have significant discretion in what loans they offer clients. (In this case, Trump used the same lender to buy the two Florida homes.)
But in recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence of criminality.
Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”
Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud.
In response to questions, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”
The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”
The White House did not respond to questions about any other documents related to the transactions, such as loan applications, that could shed light on what Trump told the lender or if the lender made any exceptions for him.
At the time Trump bought the two Florida properties, he was dealing with the wreckage of high-profile failures at his casinos and hotels in the early 1990s. (He famously recounted seeing a panhandler on Fifth Avenue around this time and telling his companion: “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”) In December 1993, he married the model Marla Maples in an opulent ceremony at The Plaza Hotel. And in Florida, he was pushing local authorities to let him turn Mar-a-Lago, then a residence, into a private club.
Trump bought the two homes, which both sit on Woodbridge Road directly north of Mar-a-Lago, and got mortgages in quick succession in December 1993 and January 1994. The lender on both mortgages, one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000, was Merrill Lynch.
Each of the mortgagedocuments signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances.
But ProPublica could not find evidence Trump ever lived in either of the properties. Legal documents and federal election records from the period give his address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. (Trump would officially change his permanent residence to Florida only decades later, in 2019.) A Vanity Fair profile published in March 1994 describes Trump spending time in Manhattan and at Mar-a-Lago itself.
Trump’s real estate agent, who told the local press that the plan from the beginning was to rent out the two satellite homes, was quoted as saying, “Mr. Trump, in effect, is in a position to approve who his neighbors are.”
In the ensuing years, listings popped up in local newspapers advertising each of the homes for rent. At one point in 1997, the larger of the two homes, a 7-bedroom, 7-bathroom Mediterranean Revival mansion, was listed for $3,000 per day.
Even if Trump did violate the law with his two primary-residence mortgages in Florida, the loans have since been paid off and the mid-1990s is well outside the statute of limitations for mortgage fraud.
A spokesperson for Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, did not answer questions about the Trump mortgages.
“It’s highly unlikely we would have original documents for a 32-year-old transaction, but generally in private client mortgages the terms of the transactions are based on the overall relationship,” the spokesperson said in a statement, “and the mortgages are not backed by or sold to any government sponsored entity.”
Trump’s two mortgages in Palm Beach bear similarities to the loans taken out by political rivals whom his administration has accused of fraud.
FILE - New York Attorney General Letitia James, shown in February.
In October, federal prosecutors charged New York Attorney General Letitia James over her mortgage. James has been one of Trump’s top targets since she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022.
A central claim in the case the Trump Justice Department brought against her is that she purchased a house in Virginia, pledging to her lender that it would serve as her second home, then proceeded to use it as an investment property and rent it out. “This misrepresentation allowed James to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties,” according to the indictment.
Trump’s Florida mortgage agreements appear to have made a more significant misrepresentation, as he claimed those homes would be his primary residence, not his secondary home as James did, before proceeding to rent them out.
James has denied the allegations against her, and the case was dismissed last month over procedural issues, though the Justice Department has been trying to reindict her.
The circumstances around Trump’s mortgages are also similar to the case his administration has made against Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Trump declared he was firing Cook earlier this year over her mortgages, as he has sought to bend the traditionally independent agency to his will and force it to lower interest rates. Cook, who denied wrongdoing, has sued to block the termination and continues to serve on the Fed board as that legal fight continues.
In a letter to Cook, Trump specifically noted that she signed two primary residence mortgages within weeks of each other — just as records show he did in Florida.
“You signed one document attesting that a property in Michigan would be your primary residence for the next year. Two weeks later, you signed another document for a property in Georgia stating that it would be your primary residence for the next year,” Trump wrote. “It is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second.”
He called the loans potentially criminal and wrote, “at a minimum, the conduct at issue exhibits the sort of gross negligence in financial transactions that calls into question your competence and trustworthiness.”
The Trump administration has made similar fraud allegations against other political enemies, including Democrats Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, both of whom have denied wrongdoing.
In September, ProPublica reported that three of Trump’s Cabinet members have called multiple homes their primary residences in mortgage agreements. Bloomberg also reported that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent did something similar. (The Cabinet members have all denied wrongdoing.)
Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency head, has denied his investigations are politically motivated. “If it’s a Republican who’s committing mortgage fraud, we’re going to look at it,” he has said. “If it’s a Democrat, we’re going to look at it.”
Thus far, Pulte has not made any publicly known criminal referrals against Republicans. He did not respond to questions from ProPublica about Trump’s Florida mortgages.
I'm working part-time in a small grocery store while going to college full-time. Old people love grocery stores. They come in every day, sometimes just to walk around or talk to someone. Usually, it's no big deal, unless they’re horrible people.
I work in the switchboard office for a hospital. We are not allowed to give out medical advice since we do not have any training in that area. One evening, I get the following call: Caller: “If I come to the emergency, how long will I be there?” I asked them if they were looking […]
Our math teacher is ill, so we have an assistant covering. He hands out a worksheet pre-prepared by the teacher:
Assistant: "Wait, this can't be right."
Me: "What's wrong?"
Assistant: "This worksheet. It's all video games."
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto's claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don't cause cancer. Martin van den Berg, the journal's editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the retraction that he had taken the step because of "serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented."
The paper, titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans, concluded that Monsanto's glyphosate-based weed killers posed no health risks to humans -- no cancer risks, no reproductive risks, no adverse effects on development of endocrine systems in people or animals. Regulators around the world have cited the paper as evidence of the safety of glyphosate herbicides, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in this assessment (PDF). [...]
In explaining the decision to retract the 25-year-old research paper, Van den Berg wrote: "Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors." He noted that the paper's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate were solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, ignoring other outside, published research. "The retraction of this study is a long time coming," said Brent Wisner, one of the lead lawyers in the Roundup litigation and a key player in getting the internal documents revealed to the public. Wisner said the study was the "quintessential example of how companies like Monsanto could fundamentally undermine the peer-review process through ghostwriting, cherrypicking unpublished studies, and biased interpretations."
"This garbage ghostwritten study finally got the fate it deserved,â Wisner added. "Hopefully, journals will now be more vigilant in protecting the impartiality of science on which so many people depend."
I work at a museum that issues free memberships to qualifying families that wouldn’t be able to afford them otherwise. The free membership comes in the form of a paper voucher that has to be physically redeemed at the museum. I got an email form once such recipient: Recipient: Hello! We just got a voucher […]
Well, here's a silver lining in the MAGA hellscape! Always nice to see someone throw a monkey wrench into the Trumpian sideshow. Via The New York Times:
The Honduran attorney general announced Monday night that he had issued an international arrest warrant for the country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was recently pardoned by President Trump and released from a federal prison in the United States.
In a social media post, Attorney General Johel Antonio Zelaya Alvarez said that he had instructed government agencies and Interpol to execute the warrant against Mr. Hernández on charges of money laundering and fraud connected to a case involving his first presidential campaign more than a decade ago.
“We have been wounded by the tentacles of corruption and by the criminal networks that have deeply scarred the life of our country,” Mr. Zelaya said in announcing the warrant on X.
The charges that Mr. Hernández faces in Honduras stem from what is known as the Pandora Case. Prosecutors say that between 2010 and 2013, a corrupt network of lawmakers and others diverted public funds through private foundations, then funneled those funds into political campaigns — including Mr. Hernández’s 2013 campaign.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett yesterday filed paperwork to run in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Texas, hours ahead of a planned news conference where she is set to announce her plans. Via CBS News:
In the Democratic primary, Crockett will face state Rep. James Talarico of Austin, whose campaign has generated national headlines and who raised a record $6.2 million in the first three weeks of his campaign announcement.
After Crockett filed her paperwork, Talarico issued a statement saying, "We're building a movement in Texas — fueled by record-breaking grassroots fundraising and 10,000 volunteers who are putting in the work to defeat the billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians who have taken over our state. Our movement is rooted in unity over division — so we welcome Congresswoman Crockett into this race."
Republican incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt are also locked in a closely-watched battle for the GOP nomination. The final general election matchup is expected to be one of the most expensive races in the 2026 national cycle.
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Nearest Bratwurst Broil) appeared on the Milwaukee-based talk show UpFront to discuss the possibility of restoring SNAP and ACA subsidies. Before introducing Grothman, the show gave a background of how Trump's syndicate is threatening to withhold funding from states that do not collaborate with their fascism.
When the hosts asked Grothman about SNAP benefits exclaimed that 41 million people were receiving SNAP benefits and argued that that number alone was proof that there had to be some sort of fraud going on. And he might have a point. That number is not even 12% of the entire population. Given the number of people who are making less than a living wage, how many people are unemployed, and the runaway inflation of Trumpnomics, 41 million sounds like a lot of people aren't getting the help they need. But knowing Grothman, his biggest complaint about SNAP is the number of Black and Brown-skinned people who are receiving help.
Grothman also complained about his fellow Republicans, whom he felt weren't properly respectful toward Speaker of Tongues Jebus Johnson. He felt that many of them, like Rep Elise Stefanik, are only doing it to make a name for themselves in order to seek higher office. It has nothing to do with seeing the writing on the wall, saying that Americans are pissed and there will be a political bloodbath next year if they don't change course immediately.
When it came to ACA subsidies, Grothman looked forlorn as he admitted that there's a chance it would pass through the House:
On this day in 1934, one of Britain’s most revered actors -- Dame Judi Dench -- was born. Dame Judy has spent decades captivating audiences with her unmistakable blend of power, precision, and warmth—from her early days on the Shakespearean stage to her iconic screen roles in Mrs. Brown, Philomena, Skyfall, and countless others. Renowned for her sharp wit, emotional depth, and fearless artistry, she remains a towering figure in theatre and film alike.
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