There are just a few more weeks of playoff uncertainty left in Major League Baseball, as the window of opportunity closes for teams on the bubble. At the beginning of June, there were five teams with a 90 percent chance or higher of making the playoffs, seven teams with less than a 10 percent chance and 18 teams with a...

Some libraries have experimented with ditching the rigid, and at times antiquated, organizational principles of the Dewey Decimal System in favor of taking a page out of retailers' playbooks and organizing their shelves as one would a bookstore. Deschutes County, Oregon recently overhauled its library system and experi...

New research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety argues that we are drastically undercounting the number of accidents that stem from distracted driving and smartphone use, based on anonymized cellphone data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics - which had data on cellphone activity before and after collisions. ...

....exploding sunroofs? The sunroofs of automobiles have been spontaneously exploding at a consistently rising pace this year, with 498 reports of sunroofs exploding or shattering, which would set us up for a record 2026; in 2025, there were 550 reported incidents, up from 350 in 2021. According to drivers and testers,...

A new survey found that nine percent of adults planned to play in a fantasy football league this season, with 23 percent of fantasy players involved in three or more leagues. According to the survey, the primary reason that respondents played fantasy football was that they enjoy competition (67 percent), followed by ma...

Big screen televisions are in a boom market right now thanks to falling screen prices and increasing memory prices. This year, sales of LCD televisions 70 inches or bigger are expected to hit 30.11 million units, up from 16.74 million units in 2022. The LCD panels that constitute a substantial chunk of production costs...

Digital pollsters have to deal with bogus responses from people who are just taking the survey to obtain a reward. As a result, surveys rely on different techniques such as trap questions, automated prescreening and voter file matching. Trap questions are clever, even if they're not foolproof; Pew Research Center demon...

As of August 24, the United States has had nearly 51,000 wildfires, blazes that have burned over 7.8 million acres. Compared to the 10-year average, the number of fires is 129 percent of normal, and the acres burned is 168 percent of typical. Last year over the same period, there were just 45,331 fires and 4,065,073 ac...

A new survey found that 42 percent of Americans make none of their purchases in cash in a given week, up substantially from the 24 percent who said as much in 2015. The fraction who make all or almost all of their transactions in cash is down by half, from 24 percent in 2015 to 12 percent in 2026. Overall, 46 percent o...

There is a supermarket price war brewing in the United States, as low-cost German supermarket Aldi is on pace to become the second-biggest supermarket chain in the country behind Walmart. Aldi had 2,626 stores in 2025, slightly behind the 2,689 Kroger locations and 3,556 Walmarts. With 3,200 locations planned by the en...

A new study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that speeding has become generally culturally acceptable, with nearly half of respondents believing that keeping up with traffic is safer than obeying posted speed limits. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, speeding was a factor ...

With another $39 million domestic, at $854.9 million, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now the No. 3 highest-grossing film at the domestic box office, and with $2.22 billion worldwide, it is now at No. 6 on the international chart, beating Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens. It could be just days until it hops the ...

With the NFL on the cusp of a new season, expect to see a bunch of stories about the league's global expansion and how much interest there is in an international expansion of the NFL. This is obviously a load of junk, as the international games have abysmal viewership, and sports cannot seem to get around the fundament...

America is greatly in need of more housing for seniors, whether that's subsidized affordable housing for people on a fixed income, independent living with amenities needed for older adults or assisted living. The median age at which someone enters senior care is 84, and with the oldest baby boomers just turning 80, the...

Synthetic diamonds have gotten considerably less expensive, while mined stones have held at relatively steady prices for the past few years. The active voice is indeed intentional there, as De Beers and other companies that produce mined stones have worked to keep the prices up (from $6,257 per diamond in January 2020 ...

...for surgeries... Wait time for cancer surgery is getting longer in the United States, according to a new study in JAMA Surgery. The study analyzed data from 2.7 million patients diagnosed with non-metastatic stage I-III cancers that needed surgery between 2012 and 2023. Breast cancer surgery wait times increased fro...

According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Americans are now devoting 4.96 percent of their goods spending to hobbies, an upward shift in time and money spent on hobbies that is seen across ages and generations. The fraction of money spent on hobbies rose steadily from a little over two percent in 1960 to ...

In a move that may have otherwise escaped notice, the NBA schedule reveal last week is also a dark sign for Hollywood, with NBC and ABC each getting an additional 11 games to air on broadcast television. The linear networks are fundamentally time-constrained, with only 168 hours a week of broadcast time and only a frac...

..yes... The train robbery is alive and well, with thefts from trains quadrupling since pre-pandemic times as sophisticated teams of thieves pivoted toward theft rings when the drug trade dried up during lockdowns. All told, criminals stole $200 million worth of goods from 75,000 thefts on U.S. freight rail networks in...

..the men... In 2025, only 33.6 percent of speaking roles in movies were women or girls, on par with the past two decades of data, indicating that yet again men outnumber women on screen two-to-one. Women were the lead in just 38 of the top 100 films. In 2025, women were just 8.2 percent of top directors, 16 percent of...