A list of good reads
- Wall Street Journal (splainer gift link) nostalgically bids farewell to Skype, the pioneering video call app that Microsoft is now retiring.
- Also in Wall Street Journal (login required): how amateur athletes, including runners and cyclists, are turning to weight-loss drugs like Ozempic to enhance their performance.
- The Guardian looks into the curious minds of dogs, revealing their impressive abilities—like learning words and reading humans—while questioning why we still can't fully understand them.
- Also from The Guardian: how society’s discomfort with muscular women reveals deeper biases about gender, power, and beauty.
- BBC News spotlights how South African doctor Celiwe Ndaba’s viral videos have ignited a national reckoning with financial abuse in marriage.
- LitHub traces the roots of the world’s first advice column back to 17th-century England—where printer John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury invited readers' questions on everything from love to philosophy.
- Slate has a surreal story of how writer Scaachi Koul found a bizarre AI-generated biography about herself—sold on Amazon for $7.99 under a fake author’s name.
- Farmers and entrepreneurs are fueling the rise of California agave spirits—homegrown rivals to tequila and mezcal, reports New York Times.
- Also from New York Times: A new initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is turning its student-athletes into social media influencers, with other schools following suit.
- Washington Post (splainer gift link) explains why catchy songs like Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso’ get lodged in your brain—and what tricks might help you finally silence them.
- Financial Times (splainer gift link) asks whether the UK will follow countries like the US, South Korea, and Nigeria in offering big payouts to corporate whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing.
- Bloomberg Businessweek takes a look at the evolution of the alpha male aesthetic, exploring the visual identity that has become a hallmark of the manosphere, and how its roots stretch back decades.
- CNN investigates how deepfake porn is wreaking havoc on real lives in South Korea.
