Dimly lit office with isolated workers, clearly overworked

The Invisible Burden: Overwork, Mental Health, and the Systems That Normalize Exhaustion

In today’s hyper-connected world, busy has become a badge of honor. Long hours and overflowing inboxes are worn like medals, often at the expense of our well-being. But beneath the accolades and hustle lies a far deeper issue: the normalization of overwork—not just as an individual challenge, but as a cultural, legal, and media-driven phenomenon…

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Syringes injecting colors into apple

Are Food Dyes Dying Out? Why America Might Finally Be Trading Chemicals for Science

Walk down any American grocery aisle and you are surrounded by color. Neon reds, radioactive blues, fluorescent yellows—foods engineered to look louder than nature ever intended. These colors are not incidental. They are synthetic food dyes, petroleum-derived chemicals designed to make processed food more appealing, more marketable, and more addictive. For decades, they have been…

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Handshake in a in a room with people with hidden faces

Who Really Shapes Policy? The Top Lobbying Spenders of 2025 and the Power Behind Them

Lobbying is often discussed as a background feature of American politics—something abstract, technical, or inevitable. But in practice, lobbying is one of the clearest ways to see whose interests have the most consistent access to lawmakers, regulators, and the policy-writing process itself. Money does not guarantee outcomes, but it determines proximity: who gets meetings, who…

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Library with books and sculptures.

Philosophy in Motion: How Ideas and History Shape Each Other

Philosophy is often imagined as something distant and abstract—an academic exercise confined to old books, lecture halls, or debates that feel removed from everyday life. For many people, it conjures images of ancient thinkers arguing over obscure questions, disconnected from the urgent realities of work, politics, survival, and change. But this perception misses the true nature of philosophy entirely.

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Person holding laptop next to resume

The November Jobs Report Is Bad — and It Still Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

Even with October’s missing jobs report, November’s numbers are strange — and they still don’t show the full picture, the November jobs report is bad. Yes, the data is weak. Yes, the outlook is deteriorating. But thanks to the government shutdown, delayed data collection, structural labor shifts, and long-building demographic pressures, this report captures only part of what is actually happening in the economy.

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A partially submerged road sign with a traffic light symbol standing in floodwater, representing infrastructure failure and environmental risk

Energy At Home: How Power Production Endangers Houses, Health, and the People Inside Them

Climate change is almost always framed as something external. Rising seas threaten coastlines. Heat waves strain cities. Droughts reshape agriculture. Wildlife migrates or disappears. The impacts are serious, but they are often described as happening out there—to ecosystems, to distant regions, to future generations. What receives far less attention is how the energy system itself—independent…

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