Tag: How We Live Now

Swimming in Chicago River – First Time Since 1926

DOWNTOWN — For the past 98 years, swimming in the Chicago River was unthinkable.

The once-contaminated river was a dumping ground for industrial pollution and sewage, creating toxic smells that kept would-be swimmers far away.

But today, the Chicago River is cleaner than it was decades ago, and Sunday marked the first time an open-water swim has been held in the river since 1926. Organized by nonprofit A Long Swim, the event celebrated the city’s progress toward cleaning the river while raising money for ALS research and youth swim education programs.

For Olivia Smoliga, a two-time Olympian from suburban Glenview, the opportunity was too historic to pass up. After finishing her one-mile race in first place, she felt ecstatic to be part of history.

Swimmers Return To Chicago River For 1st Time In A Century, Marking Dramatic Transformation
Hundreds of swimmers dove into the Chicago River on Sunday to raise money for ALS research and highlight the river’s rebound after years of pollution and unsafe conditions.

Cringe – Fake vs Authentic – Viral Hit Interpretation

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/20/nx-s1-5507263/it-pays-to-be-cringe-lean-in

According to the internet, Brendan Abernathy was unequivocally cringe.

Abernathy is a singer-songwriter living in Texas who went viral earlier this year for an earnest performance of his song “married in a year.” He was relatively unknown before this moment, but the video garnered millions of views along with countless parody videos from comedians and social media users.

Ramtin Arablouei, co-host of NPR’s Throughline, spoke to Abernathy about how to cope with the criticism and shares his insights with It’s Been a Minute host, Brittany Luse. They also get into the rise of cringe culture: where it comes from, how it’s hurting us, and how leaning into cringe is good for art.

Episode Highlights
What happens when a “cringe” video goes viral?

BRENDAN ABERNATHY: It was really hard. Also, some of it was really funny. And I can recognize both of those things at the same time.

ARABLOUEI: Well, what parts of it were hard?

ABERNATHY: People were treating me like I’m selling out stadiums … I’m struggling to sell a hundred tickets, and people are acting like I’m some massive industry plant who they can just tear down. It’s like, you can’t tear me down, guys. I’m poor. I lived out of my car for four years. You can’t really tear me down any more than I’m already down.

ABERNATHY: You hope for a long time that you’re going to get a breakthrough into – just more ears having an opportunity to hear your music. And then when it happens and you’re getting mocked, laughed at, told to take your own life, you know, whatever, it – it’s just really confusing because everything that I know about myself and my music, the internet is saying the polar opposite of that. If you searched my name on TikTok, the third result was, Brendan Abernathy fake. That’s what hurt the most, was that everything I’ve built my life on, which is being authentic and being vulnerable, I was being viewed [as] the complete opposite of that. That’s what hurt. And most people who reacted negatively – it created this, ew, cringe.

Memes as Form of Business Communication

And organized levity is now an expected part of professional life, especially in sectors like tech. A friend of mine briefly worked for a massive Internet search company that will remain nameless. He told me that the buzzy new time-waster at work was trying to handle as much internal communication as possible not with e-mail or instant messaging, but with funny memes. A whole platform was designed from scratch to facilitate this dubious-but-“fun” goal. If the boss from Office Space pops up on your screen saying “That’d be great,” that’s a Level Three problem. But if Rambo pops up, uh-oh. That’s a Level Five. You might be working late tonight. “Considerable time and effort has gone into developing this tool,” my friend said, smiling ruefully.

Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture
Ken Jennings

Starvation in Gaza

The World Health Organization said Sunday there have been 63 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza this month, including 24 children under the age of 5 — up from 11 deaths total the previous six months of the year.

Gaza’s Health Ministry puts the number even higher, reporting 82 deaths this month of malnutrition-related causes: 24 children and 58 adults. It said Monday that 14 deaths were reported in the past 24 hours. The ministry, which operates under the Hamas government, is headed by medical professionals and is seen by the U.N. as the most reliable source of data on casualties. U.N. agencies also often confirm numbers through other partners on the ground.

The Patient’s Friends Hospital, the main emergency center for malnourished kids in northern Gaza, says this month it saw for the first time malnutrition deaths in children who had no preexisting conditions. Some adults who died suffered from such illnesses as diabetes or had heart or kidney ailments made worse by starvation, according to Gaza medical officials.

The WHO also says acute malnutrition in northern Gaza tripled this month, reaching nearly one in five children under 5 years old, and has doubled in central and southern Gaza. The U.N. says Gaza’s only four specialized treatment centers for malnutrition are “overwhelmed.”

PBS News
Israel’s leader claims no one in Gaza is starving. Data and witnesses disagree
World Jul 28, 2025 5:17 PM EDT

SUMMERS: So tell us, if you can, what are families, people there in Gaza, able to eat now?

TANIS: Fundamentally, food is not available for the more than 2 million Palestinians there. There’s a very small supply of local vegetables, like some eggplant, zucchini, rarely maybe onion or garlic. Now, before things got so bad, people could at least eat bread. Now, flour is very expensive, and there’s not enough of it. So even if you have money, you can’t buy food.

And it’s not just food, though, because there’s a serious shortage of fuel and water for cooking and drinking. And the IPC report said today that nearly 9 out of 10 families in Gaza have to resort to extreme coping measures. I asked Beckie Ryan with the aid group CARE – she’s in Gaza right now – to tell us what she’s hearing from mothers who come to their clinic.

BECKIE RYAN: Some of the coping mechanisms they’ve had to resort to is choosing which child, you know, will be fed that day. You know, are they going to buy supplies for the baby, or are they going to buy something that the 5-year-old can eat?

TANIS: Aid workers also told me they’re seeing children rummaging through garbage daily, but not finding any food.

NPR
Famine is unfolding in Gaza, an alert from UN-backed food security experts confirms

Health Insurance Rates Going Up – Way Up

For weeks, policy experts and some political leaders have warned of a tsunami of high costs and worse access coming for the health care of ordinary America because of sweeping policy moves made in Washington.

Coloradans who get their insurance on the individual market — which is about 282,000 people — got a first glimpse of it on Wednesday after the state’s insurance division dropped preliminary annual insurance rates for next year: Average premiums will rise 28 percent for 2026; on the Western Slope, they could climb as high as 38 percent on average, and higher than that for many.

Colorado health insurance rates expected to skyrocket after budget bill slashes health spending

Notes on Medicaid and Rural Health

Or they’re just very humble and they don’t want to take something they can’t pay for at one night clinic. This story has always really stuck with me. A woman in her forties came in to the night clinic. She’d never been seen in our clinic before because of a complaint that people in the choir wouldn’t stand near her. Hmm. And she had started having an odor that made her unpleasant to be near and she’d avoided healthcare because she couldn’t afford it.

And she was a housekeeper. She had no access to any health insurance and didn’t wanna bankrupt her family. And so on exam that night, she had a breast cancer that was so advanced that had grown through her skin and that’s where the smell was coming from. Wow. And she, she ended up dying a few months later. We could have, if she’d gotten mammograms, you know, like we could have caught this very, very early and treated her and she would’ve gone on to be there for her family. But her fear of bankruptcy for seeking healthcare, or maybe it was, you know, she just didn’t wanna take services from someone else. It’s hard to know what keeps people from walking in the door.

One Rural Doctor on the Cuts to Medicaid
The Daily Podcast transcript

Miscellaneous Professional Inside Dope

What's a "secret" from your profession that everyone should probably know?
byu/LaKoref inAskReddit

UnhappyJohnCandy
The federal government is generally made up of people who want to work and serve the public. There’s no more waste here than in any other job I’ve ever been in.

redseca2
As an Architect, now retired: 50% of married couples who take on a major, like down to the studs, house remodel end up in divorce.

dutyofloves
The name brand eyewear like Gucci, Versace, and Coach are some of the worst quality. I would never ever recommend them to anyone. Total waste of money. You’re paying for the logo. That is it.

Also, sometimes if your glasses come back too quickly, we will hold onto them for a few days longer so you think the lab took their time making them. Too quick of a turnaround makes it feel rushed. Rarely seen as a good thing.

MrJQ52
Nurses are humans. We can’t do everything, we can’t be everywhere and there is a limit of how much shit (literally and figuratively) that we can take . Amen

Network-King19
Reboots fix a lot of issues.