63% of voters now say a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, NBC poll finds

Back at the turn of the century when I was in college, it was still believed that a college degree was basically guaranteed success in life… but it turns out that if everybody has a college degree, it’s not much of a selling point

Quirky rituals may feel arbitrary, but they can strongly affect well-being

No one should make you feel weird about watching Muppet Christmas Carol 32 times during the month of December. What’d your big holiday tradition that might get a little side-eye?

I’m sharing some of my fiction writing as a serialized story. Paid subscribers can read the story each week, but free subscribers will be able to follow what’s happening in the story through news reports from the in-universe site “NewsGator”

The Last Four Years Ch. 7: Communities Turn to Spiritual Leaders for Guidance

In The Last Four Years, a comet is four years away from hitting Earth. It’s not enough time to stop it, but long enough to get bored waiting for it. It is a story about what people do with the time they have left. Families trying to stay together, scientists trying to find a way out, and leaders holding civilization together

The Last Four Years Ch. 6 | The Last Four Years Ch. 5 | The Last Four Years Ch. 4 | The Last Four Years Ch. 3 | The Last Four Years Ch. 2 | The Last Four Years Ch. 1

Also Worth A Look…

• Being hot is now a job requirement - I guess that’s my problem. When you cut the marketing budget to the bone, suddenly you need all of your overworked staffers to be influencers

• City Raccoons Near Humans Show Early Signs of Domestication - Since wolves eventually turned into Chihuahuas and Corgis, what do you think we’ll eventually turn Raccoons into?

• Coffee Waste Could Make Concrete Stronger and Greener, Scientists Find - Just what we all need, more demand for coffee to drive up the price

• Lawsuit Argues Postal Service Withheld Mail for 2 Years - As Newman on Seinfeld once mused “When you control the mail, you control information”

• Antarctica’s Southern Ocean might be gearing up for a thermal ‘burp’ that could last a century - I saw Thermal Burp play at Lollapalooza last summer

• Bay Area teacher wrongly ID’d as convict, pulled from class due to last name ‘Smith’ - In fairness, how many people out there have the last name Smith? It’s not like it’s a common name or anything…

• Kim Kardashian Shocked to Learn She Has “Low Activity” in Her Brain - I don’t find that shocking at all (In all seriousness, she had an aneurysm, which is certainly scary. I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that would lead to a level of activity that’s lower than normal, but not enough that you’d actually notice it)

• Second-Term Tab For Trump’s Golf Hobby Tops $70 Million, On Track To Exceed $300 Million - That’s a lot of golf

• Man Finds His Car Stuffed with Over 40 Pounds of Hazelnuts - That’s a lot of hazelnuts

• AI Christian ‘singer’ Solomon Ray tops the charts, stirs ethical debate - Maybe if someone in the CCM genre tried writing some music that had more than three chords it wouldn’t be an issue