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The internet was supposed to make us smarter. That was the pitch. A glowing digital Library of Alexandria. A place where the sum total of human knowledge would be available to anyone with a keyboard, a pulse, and a vaguely functional modem. Information would flow freely. Barriers would fall. Minds would open. Democracy would flourish. People would finally read past the headline. Instead, we invented comment sections. The internet didn’t just connect the world. It connected every thought anyone ever had, whether or not that thought had been stress-tested by logic, experience, or basic self-awareness. It took humanity’s internal monologue, stripped out the filter, amplified it, monetized it, and then optimized it for maximum emotional reaction. And here we are. From Dial-Up Dreams to Algorithmic Doomscrolling Early internet culture had hope baked into it. You could feel it in the clunky interfaces and blinking GIFs. The web was slow, ugly, and deeply optimistic. It sounded like a r...

Once upon a time—not even that long ago, honestly—renewing insurance felt like updating a driver’s license photo. A few forms, some polite back-and-forth, mild annoyance, and then voilà: coverage bound, crisis postponed. Those days are over. Thoroughly. Irrevocably. Welcome to the modern insurance market, where underwriters are no longer content with your word, your spreadsheet from 2019, or your lovingly vague assurances that “we take risk seriously.” Today’s insurers want receipts . They want footnotes. They want process diagrams, governance structures, cultural proof, and probably a blood sample if you hesitate too long. According to new market findings from Alliant Insurance Services , insurers across nearly every major sector have collectively decided that the old level of disclosure is no longer cute, no longer sufficient, and definitely no longer insurable. This is not a gentle tightening. This is a structural shift in how risk is priced, evaluated, and—crucially—trusted. T...

Every year, without fail, winter arrives in North Texas the way an unexpected email from HR does: polite on the surface, quietly threatening underneath, and carrying the strong implication that someone, somewhere, should have prepared better. This week, the forecast promises temperatures dipping into the 20s, the kind of numbers that send panic rippling through neighborhoods where barbecue grills outnumber pipe insulation kits by a factor of ten. Social media fills with screenshots of weather apps. Hardware stores experience a sudden run on faucet covers. Group texts ignite with the same question repeated in twelve variations: Are you dripping your faucets? Welcome to cold-snap season in Forney. If this all feels familiar, that’s because it is. We do this dance every year. The only thing that changes is which pipes freeze, which roads glaze over, and which unlucky soul learns the exact location of their water shutoff valve at two in the morning. The truth is, cold weather in North ...

Or: How College Football Woke Up in an Alternate Reality and Just Decided to Roll With It College football is built on tradition, which is a polite way of saying it is built on memory. Long memory. Selective memory. Memory that refuses to die even when presented with overwhelming evidence that maybe—just maybe—it’s time to update the operating system. And then there’s Indiana football, which spent more than a century acting like memory itself was the problem. For 156 years, Indiana accumulated losses the way other programs accumulate boosters. Seven hundred and fifteen of them. Not “character-building losses.” Not “learning experience” losses. Just plain losses. Losses that stacked up so high they became a trivia question, then a punchline, then a personality trait. Until Monday night. Until a frozen field in Bloomington, a confetti-soaked field in Miami Gardens, and a scoreboard that refused to make sense to anyone raised on the old rules of college football gravity. Indiana did...

There are sports stories that feel enormous because of the score. There are sports stories that feel enormous because of the standings. And then there are sports stories that land quietly, without a buzzer-beater or a ranking shake-up, and remind everyone that the entire spectacle rests on the shoulders of very real, very mortal people. This is one of those stories. On Monday, Bill Self , the longtime head coach of the Kansas Jayhawks , received medical treatment and did not travel with the team to Boulder for a Big 12 road game against Colorado Buffaloes . The university said he felt under the weather, was taken to LMH Health as a precaution, received IV fluids, and was doing better. That was it. No melodrama. No cryptic language. No spinning it into something else. Just a pause. And for a fan base trained to dissect rotation minutes, officiating tendencies, and February road records as if they were matters of national security, that pause landed with unusual clarity. Because whe...

There’s a specific kind of silence that settles over a restaurant after it closes. It’s not the peaceful quiet of a place that’s finished its work. It’s the awkward, haunted hush of a dining room that once promised an experience and now offers only square footage and a faint smell of ambition. As of January 18, that silence belongs to Alias , the modern American eatery in Vint Hill that just last year basked in the glow of being named one of Northern Virginia Magazine’s 50 Best Restaurants of 2025. Yes, that Alias. The one with the tasting menus. The one with the reverent language about local sourcing and seasonality. The one where scallops were described with the kind of poetic intensity usually reserved for doomed lovers in a Victorian novel. Closed. Permanently. Lights out. Menu retired. Another “unforgettable chapter” quietly boxed up and sent to storage. If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. Northern Virginia’s dining scene has become a revolving door of beautifully d...

There’s a particular kind of insult that only science can deliver. Not the dramatic kind. Not the “your lifestyle choices will catch up with you” kind. No. Science prefers something far more devastating: Matter-of-fact documentation. Charts. Longitudinal data. Forty-seven years of patiently watching humans decline while everyone else was busy arguing about carbs. And now, after nearly half a century of observation, a Swedish research team has calmly informed the world that your physical peak showed up around age 35… and then quietly left without saying goodbye. No fireworks. No warning siren. No Apple Watch notification. Just a slow fade, like a band you loved that stopped releasing albums but still tours county fairs. This isn’t a hot take. It’s not wellness influencer content. It’s not a “do these three exercises to reverse aging” headline. It’s the result of the Swedish Physical Activity and Fitness (SPAF) study , run by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and published...