Paleontology has been on a real Neanderthal tear lately, with all sorts of discoveries about how our ancient ancestors lived. Today, we learned a new factoid from a preprint study on ResearchSquare, published by researchers and found by IFLScience: Neanderthals loved eating beaver.

Okay, cool it, you pervs. I mean literal beaver, and marmots, too.

We’ve long known our extinct cousins were capable hunters. They could bring down towering woolly mammoths and small little rabbits. But new evidence suggests one of their favorite snacks was medium-sized rodents.

Neanderthals Apparently Loved Eating Beaver, According to New Research

At the Valdegoba Cave in northern Spain, researchers uncovered hundreds of 130,000-year-old Eurasian beaver and alpine marmot bones, along with stone tools and Neanderthal fossils. A lot of the bones had tooth marks likely made by opportunistic scavenger animals like foxes and wolves.

Some distinctly Neanderthal marks are mixed in as well, like cut marks on some bones that strongly suggest the work of a skilled butcher, or, to use the study’s more precise, fascinating word choice, “defleshing” and “disarticulation.” Never have I come across a more sociopathic word choice than “defleshing.”

The Neanderthals were munching on beaver, but it wasn’t a usual staple of their diet. Given how many of the bones they found showed signs of human processing, beaver meat was more of a quick fix, a snack they could go to in a pinch, when more substantial meals weren’t available. Beavers and marmots were to Neanderthals as the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is to modern humans.

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Finally, Airbnb hosts can no longer force guests to do all their chores. Starting November 20, a new, long-needed policy bans property owners from demanding guests complete labor “typically performed by a cleaner,” like stripping beds, scrubbing dishes, or hauling trash offsite.

Finally, Airbnbs are being forced to learn a lesson hotels learned long ago: people don’t want to work on vacation, and that includes cleaning up after themselves. If you ostensibly want to run a small hotel, you had better play by the societal rules of how hotels function. The short-term rental company is ending hefty cleaning fees while also telling vacationers they can’t leave without first picking up a mop and bucket.

Several Airbnb property owners are melting down at the thought of losing out on free labor, sounding off on social media sites across the internet; one likens the company to an “abusive partner,” according to one person on the r/Airbnb_hosts subreddit. Far be it for me to pass complete judgment on someone based on a six-word sentence about a fairly silly news story, but if you’re demanding that paying vacationing guests do a series of chores before they leave, you are the abusive partner, not the middleman.

I cannot believe this story is forcing me to defend Airbnb, a company that is one of the reasons average Americans can’t buy a home anymore.

Airbnb Hosts Can No Longer Make Guests Do Their Cleaning, and Some Are Furious

As Wired discovered, someone on Facebook started a Change.org petition (because those are always so helpful) demanding the right to tell guests that when they stay at one of their Airbnb properties, they will be held to a set of “common-sense expectations.” I’m not going to post a link to this Facebook group. I want to dox anyone.

But it is a gold mine of the exact kind of personalities you would expect an Airbnb host to possess. For example, one host suggests the OP write an angry letter to Airbnb, which isn’t difficult because you can just use AI to write an email. Color me surprised that an Airbnb host, no more than a tech-savvy landlord, is putting in as little effort as possible.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky previously noted that people go on vacation to escape their chores, pointing out that nobody paying for a getaway should have to throw linens in the wash before checking out.

Guests aren’t completely off the hook for doing some chores. Under the new rules, hosts can still make small, reasonable requests, like leaving dirty dishes in the sink or taking shorter showers during a local drought. But they can’t pull out a chore wheel and assign guests tasks hotel housekeepers usually handle, via notes littered throughout the house that turn the guest into a video game character finding diary entries around levels.

Airbnb’s system will automatically block hosts from adding prohibited chores to the lists, and violators risk warnings or outright bans from the platform.

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A new scam is targeting Norwegians, and it sounds so successful that I can see it spreading to forested regions worldwide. Why forested? Because it involves following a stranger’s instructions to leave your gold in a forest, in the faint hope that someone will guard it while its value rises.

It’s utter nonsense, an utter delight to read about, and I’m sure utterly demoralizing to fall for.

A Bizarre New Scam Has Norwegians Burying Gold in the Woods for Thieves to Collect

As Bloomberg reported, Norway’s banking lobby, Finans Norge, issued an urgent warning after multiple bank clients converted their cash into physical gold, then ventured into the woods and buried it underground, effectively burying their riches pirate-style.

Neither nature nor some mysterious security force ensured the gold remained untouched. To no one’s surprise, thieves would come along and pocket the loot.

Gry Nergård, director of anti-fraud operations at Finans Norge, noted that these woodsy treasure drops first cropped up in the spring around Oslo and Bergen. Now, the lobby is frantically pleading with citizens to stop handing their savings accounts to strangers through a treasure hunt.

Finans Norge hasn’t disclosed the exact amount of missing forest-bullion, but if they have to make this kind of public announcement, you can assume it is not an insignificant number, and that a not insignificant number of people have fallen for what appears to be the work of a tech-savvy leprechaun.

The post Scammers Are Convincing People to Bury Their Gold in the Woods, and It’s Actually Working appeared first on VICE.

A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it. 

Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study. 

It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.

In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions. 

Now we have AI tools, too. 

With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.

AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.

Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.

The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers

Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.

Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.

Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year. 

“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”

But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions. 

Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious. 

“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”

An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.

“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”

It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.

That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes. 

One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane. 

“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”

Don’t assume your data is safe

Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.  

It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads. 

Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life. 

“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”

The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.

Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are. 

“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”

Trust but verify — and then delete your data

In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.

Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.

The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources. 

“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”

When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days. 

Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.

“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”

Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates. 

Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence. 

Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.

If your circadian rhythm is constantly being thrown off by your terrible, no good, absolutely miserable nights of sleep, congratulations, you might also have a whole new kind of depression. It’s called circadian depression, a term coined by researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia, who published their findings in the British Journal of Psychiatry and detailed them in a press release.

The researchers analyzed data from over 11,000 participants with severe or recurrent depression. After a while, the researchers figured these people probably weren’t suffering from your run-of-the-mill doom-and-gloom. Their internal body clocks seem fundamentally out of whack.

They all seem to be suffering from the same debilitating combo of traits, like seasonal mood shifts, severe morning fatigue, delayed sleep timing, and something called “social jet lag, which is when your weekend sleep schedule looks completely different than your workweek schedule. For instance, they might sleep for five hours on a weekday and 11 hours on a weekend.

Scientists Just Identified a New Type of Depression Linked to Your Body’s Internal Clock

As you can imagine, that kind of life comes with tremendous downsides. In this case, the study notes that people with circadian depression are more prone to hitting rock bottom early in life. They might also suffer from mania at higher rates, along with psychosis, and tend to have suicidal thoughts.

If that wasn’t enough, they also have elevated genetic risks for other ailments that blaze their own paths of destruction, like inflammation that leads to all sorts of health issues, ADHD, and heart issues.

Sadly, common treatments like SSRIs and SNRIs don’t often work on these people since the condition stems from a misfiring of their internal clocks. Traditional antidepressants can’t fix that.

Instead of a pill that fixes everything, researchers suggest fixing your chronobiology. Light therapy might help. Taking melatonin before bed could help you knock out. Maintain a stricter bedtime and bedtime routine. You know, all the stuff you’ve probably already tried. Hey, can’t hurt to try it all again.

The post There’s a New Type of Depression, and It Could Explain Why You Can’t Sleep at Night appeared first on VICE.

South Korea is ground zero for a lot of the hottest, and flat-out craziest, beauty trends of the past decade. There is a new one out there that its creators are hoping catches on in the US, which is a bit ironic considering that it’s made from the skin of dead people from the US.

According to a feature by Business Insider, American tissue banks have been shipping donated cadaver skin to South Korean biotech firms who are chopping up and processing this American skin to turn into injectable “skin boosters” like Re2O, an injectable and pricey treatment that turns your face dewy and smooth thanks to a puréed dead American.

It sounds dystopian and rather gross, and it’s a little of both. See, when Americans check the donor box at the DMV thinking that they’re going to help someone with kidney failure, they still might, but also, their skin might get shipped across the Pacific to a country like South Korea that lacks enough domestic donors. So, companies like L&C Bio snatch up all the American tissue they can from supply hubs in places like San Antonio and Florida.

A Bizarre New Korean Beauty Treatment Uses Skin Harvested From Dead Americans

Re2O made a ton of money in the first half of 2026 alone, raking in $17 million in sales. Broadly, skin-derived injectables are on track to hit $75 million in South Korean sales.

But what good is your product if you can’t sell it to Americans so you can unlock the achievement of selling their own dead skin back to them? like how Tyler Durden took pride in selling people’s liposuctioned fat back to them in a bar of soap? L&C Bio has signed a $60 million distribution deal to bring its human tissue-based beauty injectable into American med spas.

The company says Re2O is part of a broader family of products that don’t need FDA approval, but an FDA spokesperson told Business Insider that sometimes products that don’t actually meet that criteria still get sold. Who knows what will happen there.

It is all quite dystopian, especially if you are an organ donor and hope that, should you meet an untimely demise, your skin be used to help someone in desperate need of, say, a skin graft. The something so ignoble about the thought of your skin being turned into a smoothie that makes a rich person’s skin more supple.

The post This New Anti-Aging Beauty Treatment Is Made from Dead People’s Skin. Here’s How It Works. appeared first on VICE.

The weird subsection of Americans who think eating soy-based products somehow makes you weaker is really not going like this: a researcher used a variety of factors to determine which food was the best protein source. Tofu was the clear winner, and it wasn’t even close.

In a study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Dr. Chris Macdonald created the BPI Score, a rating system that puts a variety of popular high-protein foods under the microscope to determine which one comes out on top after a variety of factors are taken into consideration.

The short version of the results is that plant-based proteins were all at the top and animal-based proteins were mostly at the bottom, with a couple of exceptions.

This, of course, raises the question of the criteria on which these 20 popular high-protein foods were judged. There are two primary BPI score categories: a People Score (focused on stuff like cholesterol content, saturated fat, sodium content, etc.) and Planet Score (considers the protein’s impact on climate change, land use, pollution, etc.).

Tofu Just Beat Meat in a New Study Ranking the Best Protein Sources

Tofu destroyed the competition, coming out on top in 36 out of a possible 40 points on the scale. At the opposite side of the spectrum was cheddar cheese, which scored a measly 13 points. Let’s all give cheddar cheese a polite round of applause for still being an odd but delicious complement to a crunchy Taco Bell taco.

To understand why tofu blew out the competition, you have to consider the whole, visually off-putting slab of white, gelatinous goo. The BPI score scales everything per 100 grams of protein, meaning beef emits about 100 times more greenhouse gases than tofu and uses way more land. Pair that with the fact that tofu is a fine source of protein, packing all nine essential amino acids and zero cholesterol, and it makes sense why, all things considered, tofu is the protein champion of the world.

Overall, plant-based proteins dominated animal-based proteins, with only chicken breast and tuna cracking the top 10, and even then they ranked in the back half, at numbers seven and eight, respectively.

There are some points of contention, like the study’s use of UK grocery prices, which makes sense since the researcher is from the UK and received funding from two UK universities, including the University of Cambridge. But since he didn’t even factor in ethical issues like farm animal welfare, it’s safe to say animal protein got lucky.

It could’ve been an even bigger blowout.

The post Scientists Just Found the Best Source of Protein on Earth (and It’s Not Meat) appeared first on VICE.

I’ve heard many couples claim they “never argue,” but what I assume they mean is they never fight. 

Disagreements are a normal part of every relationship. Arguing is the mere act of disagreeing and presenting your perspective/opinion, which is a healthy and normal occurrence in any relatinoship. Fighting, on the other hand, is more of a heated, often hostile exchange.

Arguing vs. Fighting: What’s the Difference?

As stated above, arguing and fighting are two completely different exchanges. While they typically both result from conflict and disagreement, they address these issues in different manners.

“Anxiety is fuel for both arguing and fighting. But, while arguing is about an exchange of ideas, as well as the feelings underneath those ideas, fighting is next-level competitive,” says Karen J. Osterle, MSSA, LICSW, licensed psychotherapist and marriage counselor in Washington, DC. “The first aims to sway, and the second aims to slay, relationally speaking.”

According to Osterle, fighting involves giving in to impulse and cruelty.

“With arguing, the appreciation and respect for the connection matters to both people, and it comes across in the form if reflective listening and paraphrasing, ‘I’ statements, and a pace that allows one or both people to be changed by the process,” she explains. “Fighting is zero-sum in its feel. Someone will lose, because it’s driven by either hurt or fear. And if I’m hurting, you’re going to hurt too, or something along those lines.”

Do You and Your Partner Argue or Fight?

Wondering whether you and your partner argue or fight? Most healthy couples argue from time to time—and some occasionally fight, when an issue is repetitive or emotions are high. However, it’s important to acknowledge your patterns and identify healthier ways to address conflicts and disagreements. 

“During an argument, you should still feel comfortable expressing your perspective, even if your partner disagrees,” says Cristy De La Rosa, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist-Associate at Ranch House Recovery. “Pay attention to whether you’re actually listening to each other.”

“During a fight, you might notice that you’re interrupting each other or raising your voice,” she continues. “Another warning sign is when the conversation shifts from the actual problem and becomes about the things that the other person has done wrong, or their flaws.”

If you’ve entered attack mode, you’ve likely veered into “fight” territory. 

How to Argue Without It Turning Into a Fight

Many couples falsely believe that arguments are a negative occurrence in relationships. However, in my experience, the more you allow yourself to disagree and argue your perspectives, the less likely you are to escalate conflict into fights.

“Address problems before resentment builds, and focus [on] what happened and how it made you feel,” De La Rosa recommends. “If there’s too much emotion to have a productive conversation, it’s okay to take a break and return to it when you’re both calm.”

Knowing when to step back and cool off can save your relationship from heated fights and aggressive verbal attacks.

“Remember that the goal shouldn’t be to prove who’s right, but to understand each other and figure out how to move forward,” De La Rosa concludes.

The post How to Tell if You’re Having a Healthy Argument or a Toxic Fight, According to Therapists appeared first on VICE.

Millennials survived the early Tinder years and the “u up?” era, so they’re hardly in a position to lecture anyone about dating. They’re doing it anyway, and some of their complaints about Gen Z are actually pretty fair.

Reddit threads like “What has dating in Gen Z become?” and an AskReddit discussion about the Gen Z dating crisis have people sharing their frustrations with dating today. BuzzFeed rounded up some complaints, too. The complaints run from reasonable to completely bonkers.

1. When Pointing Out the Age Difference Backfires

One older Redditor discovered that younger people aren’t especially discouraged by a 20-year age difference. Or by being told they’re young enough to be someone’s child.

“They are FORWARD. I’m attracted to women a good bit older than myself as well, so I get that part, but I’d say the majority of flirting I receive comes from women and nonbinary people 10 to 20 years younger than me. You point out that you’re old enough to be their mother, and they say, ‘Okay, mommy,’” wrote u/psara.

Well, that settles that.

2. Skipping Humans Altogether

“People are replacing real relationships and intimacy with dating apps that are basically just hookup apps, internet porn, and even AI chatbots that they use for companionship or sexting instead of connecting with actual people,” wrote u/th3_blu3.

The chatbot complaint has some numbers behind it. A Talker Research survey from July found that 27% of Gen Z adults had engaged in sexual conversations with an AI chatbot. Before millennials start feeling superior, 16% of them admitted to doing the same thing.

3. Being Nice to Your Girlfriend Is Now Embarrassing

“If a guy is genuinely loving toward his girlfriend, his buddies will call him a ‘simp’ or say he’s ‘pussy-whipped.’ Men are basically shaming each other for being affectionate toward their own partners,” wrote u/aria3246.

Imagine being embarrassed because your friends found out you actually like your girlfriend.

4. The Personality of a Deflated Balloon

Dating would probably go better if more people were willing to flirt with each other in person. At least that’s what one Redditor would like everyone to consider.

“Whether you’re a man or a woman, don’t expect the other person to magically realize you’re flirting and ask you out. You actually have to put in some effort. You need to have at least a little more personality than a deflated balloon,” wrote u/Pharmaguardian.

5. Raised by Screens

The phone addiction complaints were bound to come up, although this Redditor has some pretty strong opinions about how Gen Z was raised.

“So many Gen Z’ers have normalized antisocial behavior that they’re terrified of putting themselves out there. They’ll call anything genuine ‘cringe’ while spending an entire weekend inside on social media. You can quickly tell which ones were raised by screens and which ones were raised by their parents. The former seem to lack any personality or will, while the latter seem like very well-adjusted young adults,” wrote u/the_toast_of_you.

6. Therapy Speak From People Who Just Turned 22

People are throwing around terms like attachment styles and love bombing after knowing someone for about three weeks. Sometimes a disappointing date is just a disappointing date.

“There’s way too much ‘therapy speak’ and way too many expectations from people who barely have any life experience or real knowledge,” wrote u/einsatzpoopen.

7. Who’s Paying, Exactly?

The debate over who picks up the dinner check is alive and well, with people still getting irritated over who reaches for their wallet.

“Women say they ‘no longer need a partner to pay,’ yet ‘I don’t date guys who don’t pay’ also seems to be a very popular attitude these days. Sounds like a contradiction to me,” wrote u/optimusprime1994.

8. The Relationship Status With No Name

There’s now an entire stage of dating where you’ve agreed not to see other people but still aren’t calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend. You can see why that might get old.

“This whole ‘exclusive but not official’ dating phase that Gen Z has normalized just seems like an excuse to avoid commitment. People treat each other as disposable and don’t want to invest the time and effort to actually get to know someone and work through their flaws or issues,” wrote u/Sumo-Subjects.

In fairness, millennials helped make ghosting a household word, so they might want to go easy on the lecturing. Then again, at least they never had to compete with a chatbot.

The post 8 Gen Z Dating Trends That Millennials Absolutely Hate appeared first on VICE.

Dating app profiles have always been a little generous with the truth. The height rounds up, and the photos are from three years and one haircut ago. Now the charming person on the other end of the chat might not even be writing their own messages.

Scientific American calls it chatfishing, and AI is becoming increasingly common in dating. According to a 2025 study from Match and the Kinsey Institute, 26% of singles were using AI to help with their dating lives, a 333% increase from the previous year. Another survey from Norton found 60% of online daters suspected they’d already received AI-written messages from a match. The other 40% might just be giving people too much credit.

You can understand the temptation. Dating apps are exhausting, and coming up with something charming to say to a stranger for the seventh time this week gets old. As Kinsey Institute executive director Justin Garcia told NBC Washington, “Dating is in many ways about competition.” And AI has gotten pretty convincing. In one study, people chatting with GPT-4.5 and a human mistook the AI for the human 73% of the time.

What Is ‘Chatfishing’? The AI Dating Trend That’s Fooling Singles Online.

The deception can extend to profile pictures, too. Kylee Baxa told CNN about meeting a man whose dating profile was full of photos from Mykonos. Except he’d never been there. When she asked about it, he admitted he’d used AI to create the photos because he didn’t have enough good ones. “Like, they’re still me. It’s still my face,” she recalled him saying. She left shortly afterward, obviously unimpressed by his imaginary Greek vacation.

People are getting fed up with all of this. A Boston University survey found half of respondents thought dating apps had too many chatbots pretending to be people. Only 10% of women believed AI-powered dating apps would lead to more successful relationships.

BU media science professor Kathryn Coduto raised another concern with CNN. “I do worry for people who have a great interaction, but it ends up being with an AI,” she said. “And then when they meet the person, it’s not who they thought it was.”

There’s something to be said for meeting someone in person before you’ve spent a month getting attached to their texts. You could always start with a phone call, too. And while photo verification helps confirm someone’s identity, it doesn’t mean they’re the one coming up with all those clever replies.

Remember when the biggest concern was whether someone looked like their pictures? Now we’re questioning if they even have the personality we’ve been talking to.

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When some men got divorced in their 30s or 40s, they probably weren’t thinking about who would drive them to doctor’s appointments when they’re 80. Now, decades later, they’re finding out the kids they lost touch with aren’t really interested in picking up.

Researchers at Spain’s University of Granada heard stories like this while interviewing older divorced and separated adults living on their own. Some fathers had moved away after their marriages ended, gradually losing contact with their children as the years passed. One 85-year-old hadn’t seen his kids since 2013. “That’s hard, but what can I do?” he said.

The mothers in the study had their own struggles. Many raised their kids with little financial support from their ex-husbands, but those same kids were still calling and coming around to visit. Money was another story. After years of working jobs with little pay, some women couldn’t afford to hire help around the house as they got older.

A New Study Reveals the Surprising Ways Divorce Affects Men and Women Later in Life

And this isn’t limited to Spain. A U.S. study found that after divorce past 50, fathers were less likely to have frequent contact with their adult children, while mothers’ odds of staying in touch doubled. Researchers in Germany found something similar, suggesting divorced fathers face a greater risk of growing old without much family support.

In a lot of families, Mom is the one making sure everyone stays in touch. She remembers the birthdays and calls to see how the kids are doing, while Dad gets to enjoy those relationships without doing much to maintain them. Sociologists call this “kinkeeping,” and divorce can be a rude awakening for men who’ve relied on their wives to do it for years.

Friends aren’t always available to fill that void, either. According to the Survey Center on American Life, the percentage of American men with no close friends increased from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021. And as people age, having nobody to help with everyday needs can become a serious concern.

Geriatrician Maria Carney calls older adults without available caregivers “elder orphans.” Her research estimates that nearly a quarter of Americans over 65 either lack someone to help them or are at risk of ending up in that situation.

There is some good news, though. Rutgers sociologist Jocelyn Elise Crowley found that fathers can reconnect with their adult children, even after years apart. Of course, that requires effort. If you’ve spent decades expecting someone else to maintain your family relationships, you might have to be the one who finally picks up the phone.

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Last month, a former Cornell University student identified in court papers as “Jane Doe” sued her university and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, alleging they raped her at the group’s house in October 2024. Cornell’s own disciplinary process for the incident had ended with two of the men expelled, two suspended and put on probation, one (who had already graduated) barred from campus, and two found not responsible but ordered to complete trainings and write reflection papers. The local district attorney declined to press charges.

Since the lawsuit was filed, the DA has reopened the case and New York state officials have launched an investigation. Students have also held sit-ins, and some are calling for the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, to resign. Cornell has suspended fraternity parties for the rest of the year.

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But this kind of case — and the issues it raises about campus life — are not new. Educators, students, activists, and politicians have spent decades debating how to prevent sexual assault, how to protect victims, how to balance the rights of the accused, and what to do about Greek life. At times, those conversations have resulted in significant changes to policy — which in turn have also generated backlash and brought more changes in response.

Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, began researching campus sexual assault in the early 2000s, embedding at a Midwestern university to understand how fraternities, alcohol, and the lack of anywhere else to go put students at risk. She has seen attention to the issue come and go in the public discourse across generations of students, often spurred by high-profile incidents like a Time magazine cover in 1991 spotlighting a first-year William & Mary student who was date raped, and a Stanford swimmer in 2016 who was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting an unconscious woman after a frat party.

I wanted to know what Armstrong makes of Cornell, and if she thinks anything is different this time. Has anything actually gotten better since the Title IX fights of the 2010s? What do people who haven’t been on a campus in a while misunderstand about how students socialize? And what could a school like Cornell do right now, without waiting on the courts or Washington, DC?

I talked to Armstrong about Greek life, what survivors of sexual assault actually want from their schools, and the reforms she thinks colleges need to be paying attention to. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Could you start by sharing briefly the kind of research you’ve done on campus sexual assault?

I did ethnographic and interview work at a Midwestern university, starting in 2003, and published a paper in 2006 on the organizational conditions that lead to sexual risk on campus. I later co-authored Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, a 2013 book based on that research.

Were there many people talking about this back in the early 2000s?

It was in something of a hiatus period. Interest in this issue essentially goes in waves. There was interest in the ’70s, then again in the late ’80s, and then there was a hiatus. My research and writing happened right before things started to build back up again with interest. 

So before we get into Cornell specifically, could you paint a bit of a picture of how campus social life tends to work? Where students gather, who hosts parties, and where Greek life fits in?

So the basic gist is that at four-year American residential universities, students often live in residence halls or they live off campus, or if there’s residential Greek life, they live in fraternities and sororities. 

Young people like to congregate, and they like to party, to have fun, and drink, and figure out opportunities to hook up. One of the things that has emerged, particularly on campuses with fraternities that have their own houses, is that these organizations control the party resources — like the space and alcohol, and time and energy to host.

So it’s hard to avoid them if you are someone who wants to party.

Yes, and one of the things that’s been coming out of the discussion related to Cornell is that the pandemic really flattened the number of bars, restaurants, and cafes in Ithaca — places where people might have otherwise had opportunities to hang out. So it gave an already really dominant Greek scene even more centrality and power over the way students socialize.

My next question was going to be what do people who haven’t been on a college campus in a while tend to misunderstand about the party scene, and that pandemic shift seems like an answer to that.

Yes, and people often don’t understand that for a lot of first-year students, who are generally under 21 but still wanting to drink, figuring out how to get alcohol, where the parties are, where the fun is going to be, is a challenge for them. Students entering college often don’t have good resources to know what’s safe and not safe. 

Yeah, and it seems like colleges just cover their eyes and deploy a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on underage drinking.

Yes. Years ago, when I was doing more traveling and speaking on college campuses, cab drivers would be telling me how they’d deposit students drunk all the time. And if a school was religiously affiliated or anything, they would just deny that their own students were partying with alcohol at all. And so the students were just vastly more at risk than even at campuses where officials were willing to admit what actually goes on. 

Based on your research of party rape, what parts of campus life do you think we should be paying attention to with Cornell and other colleges? 

Here I’d bring up a book, Sexual Citizens by Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan. They did ethnography at Columbia University, and they pointed out some concepts like “sexual geography” — which is this idea that you can go onto any campus and see the ways things are organized to be more risky. 

They point out, for example, that if students have nowhere to socialize except in dorm rooms with beds, that’s more risky than if they had lounges or other kinds of nonsexual spaces to congregate. And like, are there fun things to do that are substance-free if people want that? Are there spaces for queer students or students of color to hang out? What are the social options, and who controls where the fun happens?

That makes so much sense. If there’s no alternative, then people will go to whatever option is available, even if it’s less safe. 

Yeah, and I mean it’s tricky because sometimes it’s not considered hip or cool to do that. When we were doing our observation research way back in the early 2000s, the university we were studying was trying to create some non-frat party options, and the women that we studied thought those were just hopelessly nerdy and uncool, and they didn’t want to go because they were not seen as being high-status things to do.

What do you think colleges could be doing differently when it comes to parties?

One thing I think that colleges could do — like now that we do have Uber and Lyft — they could get a Lyft subscription where students can call up 24/7 to get home safely from wherever they happen to be, no questions asked. That could be expensive, but it’s a lot more expensive when serious harm happens. So ensuring people can get home safely could be one measure.

And Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, had an op-ed this week in the New York Times suggesting that universities consider making these organizations co-ed. That’s another option. Not abolishing them completely, but transforming them.

I’ve been really struck by the dissonance of having this conversation around male loneliness and male bonding on one hand, and this separate conversation about fraternities and whether they’re good or bad on the other.

I have a student, Anna Wood, who’s done interviews with fraternity men. She’s very interested in young men’s mental health, and loneliness, and friendship, and she’s finding that men get a kind of brotherhood more than friendship in fraternities. In other words, the fraternities aren’t really solving the male loneliness problem.

Are there any campuses today that you think are modeling something that is safer or better? Are there any other schools you think we should be paying attention to?

Well, there’s Wesleyan and Swarthmore; the students a few years ago organized to abolish Greek life on their campus. And I think in a lot of universities there are these “learning-living” communities that are organized around various kinds of themes or interests, like it could be organized around being interested in business or interested in international relations or STEM. But something where universities take on the project of helping young people form friendships.

I know we’ve been talking a lot about Greek life, but there’s sexual assault on campus outside of Greek life, too. 

Yes, it happens everywhere from honors dorms to sporting teams to residence halls. And it’s not just sexual assault; it’s also intimate partner violence in more committed relationships. I mean there are undergraduate students who are murdered by their boyfriends. So just addressing Greek life would not solve the problem across the board.

So I was in college between 2010 and 2014, when the Obama administration’s 2011 Title IX letter reminding colleges to address sexual assault complaints helped ignite a national debate over campus investigations and discipline.

Ah, you were right in the Dear Colleague letter era.

Exactly. It was a big issue on my campus and across the country. I understand those guidelines were loosened under Trump. As I’ve been following Cornell, I’ve seen a number of people respond by saying, “Well, nothing has changed or improved, and Title IX doesn’t work.”

I would love your thoughts on all of this, on where things stand. Do you see progress as just a ping-pong back and forth, or do you feel like things have improved at all from when you first started studying this?

One thing that seems to me that is better over time is that every single time this issue rises to the level of public awareness, there’s more people who get it. Like in each wave, more people understand that women don’t report sexual assault because they’re afraid of retaliation, because of trauma. More people understand this.

Like this time, as soon as the facts of the case became widely public, there was just sheer horror on the part of so many people. When I was in college in the ’80s, that would not have been true at all.  I mean, there was a case here at the University of Michigan when I was an undergraduate where it felt like just four feminists on campus understood what was going on. So there’s really been a gradual sort of cultural awareness over time

Even just talking to you, the composition of journalists writing on this is very different now.

What do you mean?

You’re a woman who graduated from an elite college around the time when the Dear Colleague letter was introduced. Not that long ago in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, where anyone who had a position to have any kind of way of impacting the public conversation, it was all men. There weren’t women who had access to that kind of public conversation. So I think that’s also a really, really important piece of what’s changed. The journalists are changing and helping the public get it. 

Can you talk about what happened beginning with the Trump administration?

So on the Title IX front, and after the Dear Colleague letter from 2011, and the whole campus anti-rape movement that happened around that time — well, on the heels of that there was a really major backlash. And that’s something my colleagues and I are studying, like the men’s rights activists and people who are more middle of the road, like civil libertarians, who felt things had gone too far.

And then the Dear Colleague letter was revoked under Trump, and in 2020 new Title IX regulations were put forward as a result of the Department of Education’s work during the first Trump administration. Those regulations made it very, very, very, very difficult to find somebody on campus responsible for sexual misconduct. Those are still in effect, so from that perspective, the fact that Cornell actually managed to expel a couple of those men and hold all of them, you know, responsible in some way, shows just how compelling the evidence against them was because it’s actually really, really hard now. 

And this was all wrapped up in the backlash to Me Too?

The backlash to the campus sexual assault stuff was already well underway when Me Too was getting started, but yes, there was this wave of stuff, and then we get the 2020 regulations, and the Biden administration tried and failed to undo them. 

Why did they fail?

Well, it took a really long time because they went through this notice-and-comment period, and they got everything redrafted, and then as soon as Trump was elected again, it was legally challenged.

So it took too long, and then they ran out of time?

It’s not even clear that the regs the Biden administration wanted would have fixed anything because we also have these processes where there’s just so much legalization and complexity. I mean, what survivors want is they want this to stop. They want people to believe them. Survivors want different things, but often they don’t want some yearlong process where everyone’s asking them what happened again and again and again. They want to just do school.

We still don’t have a good process in place for survivors on campus through either Title IX or the criminal justice route.

No, and one of the things I think that is most straightforward that could be improved is on the notion of what’s known as supportive measures. So those are the things that are very consistent with Title IX, because the point of Title IX is for people to not be deprived of their access to education. So if you think about it from the point of view of the survivor, what do they need to be well, healthy, and stay in school?

They may need their tuition refunded for a semester. They might need mental health services. They may need somebody to contact all of their professors and tell them that they can’t get their work in. They may need some sort of immigration support. At Michigan State, after the Larry Nassar scandal, they built something called the Center for Survivors, which is supposed to operate as a kind of one-stop shop where a survivor can go and get all of their various needs met. You can imagine more schools building those out.

Hopefully not every school needs a Larry Nasser type figure to get them to step up.

Yeah, hopefully not. I don’t know if that’s come up in any of the Cornell conversations, but one of the things they could do is use this as an opportunity to really, really massively build out their supportive measures. 

Monkeys, they’re just like us! Yes, we share a ton of genes, but socially, researchers recently found monkeys from groups that lived through a deadly outbreak became much more wary of tainted food afterward. Now you’re starting to see why Taco Bell is still trying to recover from that tainted lettuce scare.

As The New York Times described them, they’re basically “germaphobe monkeys,” an apt nickname for the Japanese macaques observed in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

When a virus tore through a South Texas macaque sanctuary, three out of four monkey groups watched their neighbors suffer and die from a disease spread through bites and scratches. Once the epidemic faded, cognitive scientists from the University of California, San Diego set up an experiment, the results of which they detailed in a press release.

Offered they macaques two food choices, food on a clean surface versus food on a board covered in feces.

Scientists Discovered That Monkeys Become Germaphobes After Surviving a Deadly Outbreak

That’s an easy choice for you, but for the macaques, a little s—t on their food isn’t usually a deal breaker. Monkeys that hadn’t been exposed to the virus happily eat the poop-covered food 79 percent of the time. But macaques from groups that survived the outbreak and witnessed its horrors only ate the poop-covered food 47 percent of the time.

Sure, if you knew someone who ate poop-covered food 47 percent of the time, you would think they were deranged. But again, these are monkeys, and 47 percent is crazy low.

What’s so fascinating here, and what’s so weirdly human about this phenomenon, is that the initial virus that wiped out so many of the monkeys wasn’t transmitted through food at all, and yet, like so many of us in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic who were furiously scrubbing down groceries in hopes of eliminating all traces of what would ultimately turn out to be an airborne virus, the monkeys that survived the outbreak turned into hypochondriac neat freaks, and justifiably so. They had undergone a severe trauma, and they were mitigating potential vectors of infection.

The researchers say that the psychological defense mechanism stems from something called the “behavioral immune system,” which triggers disgust in the brain to ward off perceived threats. When we went through a global pandemic that shut down the world, we went apes—t with the hand sanitizer. After the macaques went through their own tiny version of a pandemic, their sense of security was on high alert based on past trauma.

Strongly suggesting that avoidance of potentially disease-ridden stuff is a learned social behavior, potentially handed down from mother to baby, the researchers found that former pets and lab-reared monkeys were more willing to eat the dirty food. Poor things. They never had a mama to teach them not to eat food covered in poop.

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ADHD can be bad enough on its own, and now we get news from a study published in JAMA Network Open by researchers at University College London and the University of Liverpool that a meta-analysis of nearly 16 million people across three continents found that people with ADHD have a 70 percent higher rate of death from all causes across the board…which significantly plummets when they get on medication.

Living with a brain that constantly refuses to fully hold onto ideas and actions is already an exhausting full-time nightmare and can leave people feeling like they don’t have full control over their own lives. And now, on top of that, tracking data across two decades reveals that having ADHD comes with a huge drop in life expectancy.

Suicide risk rockets by 90 percent, while injury-related fatalities jump by 55 percent. Even boring old dying of natural causes creeps up by 27 percent due to the link to physical issues like cardiovascular disease and the kind of erratic health habits you’d expect someone with attention deficit issues to have.

ADHD Is Linked to a 70% Higher Risk of Death, According to a Major New Study

With ADHD, impulse control glitches out, and ordinary situations that most people can tackle as effortlessly as they grieve can sometimes, for the ADHD mind, become dangerous. Think stuff like drifting off behind the wheel or forgetting to take pills that manage a chronic illness. In the United States, our healthcare system is such a tangled mess of unnecessary bureaucracy that it’s quite easy to imagine someone with ADHD giving up and forgetting about filing a claim or even getting on a healthcare plan to begin with.

It sounds quite depressing, that is, until the researchers found that all of that could be mostly eliminated if someone with ADHD remembers to regularly take ADHD medication. Among those diagnosed, participants taking ADHD meds saw their overall mortality risk drop by about 25 percent. The researchers note that this specific metric comes from a smaller subset of three studies, but the overall idea is that getting an accurate ADHD diagnosis and pairing it with the right medication can help you get your taxes done on time.

It will also help you remember to pay your rent, take out the trash, and maybe even finish that romantasy novel you’ve been working on, and may eventually help you live longer

The post Scientists Just Found a Disturbing Link Between ADHD and Early Death appeared first on VICE.

One of America’s best ideas was the National Park system. Ulysses S. Grant gets credit for creating the first national park—Yellowstone—in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt later expanded protected public lands during his time in office, essentially creating the public park system as we know it today.

Now, we have officially opened a new national park, the first in six years. Meet Chiricahua National Park, the nation’s 64th national park. President Trump has officially signed off on upgrading Arizona’s former Chiricahua National Monument into full-fledged National Park status following a decade-long bipartisan fight in Congress.

The U.S. Just Added Its 64th National Park, and It’s Absolutely Stunning

For some stupid reason, my brain wants to pronounce it “chihuahua,” even though that’s not the word. The actual word is pronounced, “cheery-cow-uh.” However you say it, the new national Park is a 12,000-acre “Wonderland of Rocks” near the Mexican border.

Huge volcanic eruptions from 27 million years ago gave it its gorgeous rock formations, which look like a series of pillars scattered throughout the landscape. It’s also packed with biodiversity, hosting a range of wild animals from ocelots to all four North American skunk species.

Now, this pristine, awe-inspiring land will receive the highest level of federal protection possible. You can visit the park during park hours free of charge.

The post America Just Got Its First New National Park in Six Years. Here’s What to Know. appeared first on VICE.

When my book “Occult America,” a history of supernatural religions in the U.S., appeared in 2009, I was surprised to receive an admiring phone call from a conservative documentarian and financier. He professed deep interest in the book’s themes, and encouraged me in my next work, “One Simple Idea,” an exploration of positive-mind metaphysics in American life. His name was Stephen K. Bannon.

Although the media have characterized Bannon as the Disraeli of the dark side following his rise to power in the Trump administration, I knew him, and still do, as a deeply read and erudite observer of the American religious scene, with a keen appetite for mystical thought.

Ronald Reagan, a hero of his, was not dissimilar. As I’ve written in the Washington Post and elsewhere, Reagan, from the start of his political career in the 1950s up through the first term of his presidency, adopted phrasing and ideas from the writings of a Los Angeles-based occult scholar named Manly P. Hall (1901-1990), whose 1928 encyclopedia arcana “The Secret Teachings of All Ages” is among the most influential underground books in American culture.

President Trump himself has admiringly recalled his lessons in the mystic art of “positive thinking” from the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the Trump family’s longtime pastor, who popularized metaphysical mind-power themes in his 1952 mega-seller “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

What in the cosmos is going on? New Age and alternative spirituality are supposed to be the domain of patchouli-scented aisles of health food stores and bookshops that sell candles and pendulums, right? Well, not exactly.

There is a long-standing intersection between mysticism and conservatism in America. This marriage extends back to the late 19th century when globetrotting occultist and Russian noblewoman Madame H.P. Blavatsky depicted America as the catalyst for a revolution in human potential in her 1888 opus “The Secret Doctrine.” “It is in America that the transformation will take place,” Blavatsky wrote, “and has already silently commenced.”

Generations of occult writers echoed Blavatsky’s theme of America as a Holy Grail among nations, possessed of a “secret destiny,” as Manly P. Hall put it, and thus married esoteric spirituality to patriotic ideals. This partnership has flourished out of view of most mainstream observers—and significantly impacted American culture, including the look of our currency.

In 1935, then-Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, a former Republican and mystical seeker who went on to become Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president, approached FDR with a novel idea: mint a coin with the mysterious reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States—the eye-and-pyramid surrounded by the Latin maxim “God Smiles on Our New Order of the Ages.” Both men were Freemasons with a taste for portentous imagery—and were on the lookout for epic, unifying symbols for the recovering nation. (Wallace had spoken of the need for a “New Deal of the Ages.”) Roosevelt was so taken with the 1782 image, with its Masonic undertones and message that worldly achievement is incomplete without higher ethics, that he personally supervised its installation on the back of the dollar bill, making a previously arcane insignia into an indelible symbol of the republic.

President George H.W. Bush brought new attention — and unintended infamy — to the concept of a “New World Order.” In his Sept. 11, 1990, speech to a joint session of Congress, Bush sought to celebrate the possibilities of international trade and cooperation that could follow a swift victory in the first Gulf War: “Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge … An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.” Little was he aware that his use of the term would inspire a generation of conspiracy theorists to notions of a hidden, sinister global plan.

Conservative metaphysics extend beyond geopolitics. One of Richard Nixon’s confidants — in addition to the Rev. Peale, whose church he also attended—was insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, a right-wing activist, benefactor of the famous ESP lab at Duke University, and collaborator to Napoleon Hill, author of the mind-metaphysics classic “Think and Grow Rich.”

Most liberals and centrists find these kinds of associations jarring and a bit creepy. Thoughtful people are suspicious of mixing Rasputin-like intrigue with American politics. And with good reason. As Vice President Dan Quayle once put it—and he was specifically referring to Rasputin — “people that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.” (It should be noted, however, that the “mad monk” soberly cautioned the tsar against getting entangled in World War I.)

Critics fear that a sense of spiritual preordainment can produce reckless or dangerous policy choices. Yet such episodes in American history have traditionally had less to do with religious impulses than the kinds of hubris that once drove “the best and the brightest” into Vietnam, or moved senators from both parties to support President George W. Bush’s tragic rush into Iraq, based on the cynical calculus that a quick and tidy war would net a political victory.

Rather than fomenting secrecy or subterfuge, America’s embrace of esotericism is often characterized by a chin-out earnestness, something that many observers and conspiracy-mongers miss. “You can call it mysticism if you want to,” Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, “but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” In announcing his candidacy in 1979, Reagan declared: “To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible . . . and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact.” Reagan often returned to such themes, echoing Hall’s 1944 book “The Secret Destiny of America.”

This rhetoric may sound flighty, but that, too, is part of our heritage. Historically, I prefer the cadences of offbeat idealism to the rampant ugliness of our current president’s Twitter insults, or the low-octane, visionless speechmaking that burdened Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Conservative presidencies have not cornered the market on the otherworldly. During the 2016 campaign, I was surprised that no one revisited an episode from Bill Clinton’s first term, when then first lady Hillary Clinton was accused of holding “séances” in the White House—a term misapplied to her visioning sessions with New Age teacher Jean Houston, a pioneer of the human-potential movement. Houston, whom I’ve published, didn’t quite know how to explain to reporters that when she guided the first lady in dialogues with her political hero Eleanor Roosevelt, they were not summoning spirits but rather conducting creativity and value-defining exercises. President Clinton was cool toward these tête-à-têtes. Houston told me that the president once sat in on one of their sessions. When the guru told him he was an “undeveloped shaman,” he stood up and left the room.

Bill Clinton took a similarly dim view of parapsychology. During a period of post-Cold War cost cutting in 1995, he eliminated the CIA’s budget for its psychic-spying program. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, admired the “remote viewing” operation. The year of Clinton’s cuts, Carter told a group of Emory University students that during his presidency, clairvoyant spies helped identify the coordinates of a crashed Soviet spy plane in Central Africa, netting a significant intelligence gain.

Off-the-grid practices should come as no surprise to students of politics. People in power always import values, customs and attitudes from their backgrounds—sometimes the religious conservatism of a Mike Pence and other times the Southern Californian vibes of a Ron and Nancy Reagan, with their enthusiasm for astrology, psychics and UFOs (Reagan reported sightings as both an actor and governor). Reagan alone was at ease swapping stories with New Age neighbors at Hollywood pool parties, while simultaneously maintaining a sincere, and mutual, affection for evangelicals. He was the model American religionist.

Even conservative evangelicals today borrow from American mysticism. When Pat Robertson speaks of the “Law of Reciprocity” (did you miss that in Scripture?) he is reprocessing the “Law of Attraction,” a concept popularized by the book and movie “The Secret,” but rooted in an American mystical tradition extending back to 1854, when a spirit medium named Andrew Jackson Davis coined the term.

Davis’ career illuminates how historically deep these entanglements go. Called the “Poughkeepsie Seer” for his Hudson Valley, New York, hometown, Davis was naturally controversial—with one prominent defender, who attested that his channeled trances were an authentic telegraph to the spirit world. The medium’s advocate was a Rev. George Bush, a first cousin, four times removed, to the Bush presidential family. The Rev. Bush caused a stir in 1845 by leaving the Presbyterian Church to become a minister in the Church of the New Jerusalem, an ecclesiastical body based on the ideas of Swedish mystic-scientist Emanuel Swedenborg. Bush wrote admiringly of Davis, and attended his séances (a term Davis also coined in its occult sense) along with a dubious journalist named Edgar Allan Poe.

Today, cable television producers and radio hosts often urge me to postulate some kind of occult “pact” between the Bushes and the dark side (cue up Skull and Bones). But such things are fantasy. The truth is, Americans have always been, well, a little strange. As a historian, I feel affection for that aspect of American life. Shadowy figures have long hung around the fringes of power in many nations; but rarely have they done so with the ingenuousness and transparency of those I’ve been considering.

If there is a central principle in American life, one valued across our political spectrum, it is a belief in the protection of the individual search for meaning. The presence and persistence of esoteric and unusual religious ideas in our political culture, including in its most conservative quarters, serves as evidence that that core principle is still working. In the U.S. military, religiously observant service members and veterans can now choose among more than 65 “emblems of belief,” including pentagrams, druidic symbols and every variety of mystical insignia. We are truly one nation under many gods — a fact that unites us across our fractured political divide.

The post Steve Bannon and the occult: The right wing’s long, strange love affair with New Age mysticism appeared first on Salon.com.

Earlier this year I unexpectedly found myself in Thailand on a luxury hotel chain press trip. It was a sharp (though not unwelcome) departure from the way I usually travel. As I watched an American woman stick a fork in and send back an omelette no less than five times, I made a passing comment about American tourists to one of my fellow journalists. Unfortunately, she was also American, and told me that everyone should cut them some slack because the people in the rest of the world wouldn’t be able to survive without the money her compatriots spend while on holiday. It did not seem to occur to her that this power dynamic, and the mindset behind it, is why half the planet now resembles a giant strip mall.

Almost every time I encounter an American abroad, I am torn between two opposing thoughts: wishing they would travel more so they might understand their way of life is an anomaly that’s destroying the rest of the world, and wishing they would stay in their godforsaken air-con unit of a country and spare the rest of us from having to interact with them. In my ten-plus years of interrailing, backpacking, sofa-surfing, petsitting, remote working, press-tripping, and holidaying across Earth, I’ve done enough boots-on-the-ground research to say this: Contrary to what you may have been led to believe by “wanderlust aesthetic” Instagram accounts, some of the worst people you’ll ever meet are those you come across while following the road less traveled. And it’s not just Americans.

Before I go any further, let me clarify for those of you who are already getting angry that it is obviously OK to go traveling. It can even be good—for example when I, the world’s only good and perfect tourist, do it. The point is that stamps in your passport don’t make you a better person, that frequent flyer miles and photos of you in front of waterfalls are not a substitute for a personality (sorry to 80 percent of the men on Hinge), and that, rather than being curious and open-minded, a lot of people who pride themselves on how many countries they have “checked off” have zero curiosity about the countries they are visiting. Others have a little too much curiosity, jet-setting from one ancestral healing practice to which they have no ancestral ties to another, until they finally find one they can repackage and sell to other spiritually bereft Westerners. Basically, what I’m saying is that while it is possible to travel like the late, great Anthony Bourdain, a lot of people are doing it in a way that is actually closer to Christopher Columbus if he had a smartphone.

Long-term travel was once the reserve of hippies with bad hygiene practices, students on their gap year, and wealthy bohemians, but the rise of remote working has birthed a new modern-day travel monster: the digital nomad. Almost always working in tech or helming a pyramid scheme, this demographic is driven to travel entirely by a desire to do exactly what they would at home but for cheaper, with better weather, and higher prospects of casual sex with anti-vax somatic healers. I once shared a living space with one such man in Mexico, who I could only surmise had been sent as a test from God to teach me something about my own endurance abilities. He spent every day working on his Burning Man-inspired luxury “festival fashion” startup at the local expat-owned co-working space (none of these words are in the Bible, etc), returning in the evenings to cook himself a big bowl of foul-smelling protein slop and tell me about how the best bet for America’s future was a presidential ticket featuring Mark Cuban and Tulsi Gabbard. His approach to “experiencing” Mexico was by no means unique. Where once free spirits journeyed to foreign lands in order to spend months taking heroin and writing era-defining literature, the modern travel landscape consists mostly of aspirational entrepreneurs who have little interest in their surroundings beyond whether the WiFi connection is strong enough for Claude to optimize their intermittent fasting plan.

In my time in the wanderlust mines, I have met a white Canadian who referred to jazz and blues as “N-word music”—with a hard R—when asked what kind of music he liked; a British couple in Marrakech annoyed that people were trying to sell them things in the bazaar; a Belgian coder / life coach who framed her silence on social justice issues as “choosing to ignore low vibrational topics”; Canadian techbros on $150k salaries arguing with Mexican waiters over a $2 tip; an American offended by the sight of a Hindu swastika on a temple in Thailand; an Arab man who said feminism was bullshit for weak, lazy women because his own mummy did everything in the house and never once complained (oh I bet); Swedish reggae lovers who’d come to Jamaica and were annoyed that the country had moved on from Bob Marley to dancehall; a Dutch boy who “joked” about spiking my drink; and too many kinds of fascist neo-hippie to name. I won’t even begin to list the things I’ve seen Israelis do and say.

The worst offenders in this crowded field of dickheads are those who also perceive themselves to be “spiritual” while actively spending their days leaving the world a worse place than they found it, while training AI models to use even more of the earth’s dwindling fresh water resources. Due to the fact that many of these people are coincidentally also highly sensitive empaths, they unfortunately cannot engage with politics or any of the negative impacts of their lifestyle, which is why they must instead release their trauma through ecstatic dance and being rude to service staff who make less money in a year than they spend on nootropic supplements.

Perhaps the problem is that travel has been culturally depoliticized and turned into an aesthetic while remaining inherently political

Perhaps the problem is that travel has been culturally depoliticized and turned into an aesthetic while remaining inherently political. Who gets to travel, who gets to share their narrative, who has the freedom to explore the world until they “find themselves,” and who has to feed their family by serving the self-actualization of foreigners are all subjects that are easier to ignore when making free-spirit content. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t travel, but that you should try and bring some self-awareness to it, which means paying up instead of arguing when the local taxi driver charges you tourist fares because you are a tourist.

Despite ostensibly traveling for the purpose of new and exciting experiences, a huge proportion of tourists—from lobster-hued Brits tucking into full English breakfasts at Irish pubs in Malaga, to the Australian reiki healer eating avocado toast on gluten-free bread in a millennial-branded coffee shop in Bali—now expects everywhere on Earth to function the same way it does back home, leading to exasperated temper tantrums when the market in Guatemala doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Over time, this has the flattening effect of turning the whole world into an architectural rendering of what constitutes a “good life” under ouroboros-capitalism, and destroying all the things that made somewhere worth visiting in the first place.

At the tail end of my recent trip, I spent an afternoon wandering through the streets of one of Thailand’s beautiful islands. The main strip was overlooked by a backdrop of lush forest and mountainside, which had been hacked into to make space for a lurid drag of sports bars, strip clubs, weed shops, and other places for tourists to get hammered for cheap somewhere exotic without experiencing any kind of culture shock. As I walked past another construction site, I was reminded of the scene in First Reformed where the protagonist, haunted by the weight of human environmental destruction, asks “Will God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” The more I travel, and the more people I meet who define themselves by doing so in the most self-serving way possible, the more unsure I become that he will.

Follow Niloufar Haidari on Instagram @niluthedamaja

The post The Worst People On Earth Are the Ones You Meet Traveling appeared first on VICE.

Reincarnation doesn’t seem like it’s a supernatural phenomenon that’s going to be definitively proven anytime soon with scientific research or study of any kind. But the descriptions in people’s reports of memories of past lives can be studied, and recently were. A study published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice that peered into 1,600 stories of reincarnation found a weird recurring pattern in the tales.

Researchers at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies went through an extensive archive of over 1,600 cases where kids allegedly recalled the life of a specific, identifiable dead person.

First, let’s define a term: Intermission Time, which is the kind of temporal waiting period between a person dying and getting recycled back into a newborn baby. That time, according to the pattern uncovered by the researchers, is roughly 16 months among the cases that actually had a timetable attached to them.

People Who Died Suddenly or Violently Were Reportedly Reincarnated Faster, Study Finds

There were some exceptions that also yielded some fascinating patterns. Whenever a person died a sudden, unexpected death, or if it was violent, their soul was apparently moved further up the respawn queue, taking only 12 months to reincarnate, a 40 percent reduction compared to people who had died slowly from natural causes.

Lead author Saeedeh Sadeghi and her team tested for every logical explanation imaginable, trying to find some connective thread that can explain why so many of these very specific timelines are cropping up.

Things like parental involvement or religious beliefs or maybe some lightly shared cultural folklore might help explain… Some aspect of this. It didn’t. Researchers admit they don’t really know how to explain any of this. They admit that the accelerated rebirth pattern among people who died unexpectedly was even stronger in families whose religions didn’t believe in reincarnation.

None of this is definitive proof of an afterlife or of reincarnation. It’s more likely that all of this could be chalked up to coincidence, a statistical quirk. But it is a weird correlation that’s difficult to explain, and may never have a neat and tidy explanation. But, hey, feel free to use this as the basis of your next horror novel. It seems ripe for spooky supernatural narratives.

The post Scientists Found a Disturbing Pattern in Reincarnation Stories, and They Can’t Explain Why appeared first on VICE.

E-bike rental company Lime has had enough. They’re sick of it. They’re not taking it anymore. They’re being loud and clear in their warning: their bikes are not to be used for jousting, under any circumstances, you hear? No! Not even if you need to slay a real dragon that’s for some reason within the vicinity of a real lance and a Lime e-bike rental. But more specifically and realistically, you should not use the bikes at any e-bike jousting tournament held in London.

According to reports from the BBC, the warning comes after footage blew up online showing artist Jack Carden and actor “Camtholomew the First” throwing a medieval jousting tournament; just instead of horses and knights, it’s rental bikes and regular dudes.

The dudes, dressed head to toe in suits of armor and chainmail, pedal as hard as they can on lime e-bikes through London Fields, Hackney, in East London, raising their lances, charging at one another as hundreds of spectators chanted “joust, joust, joust!”

Footage of the event racked up millions of views on Instagram, and Carden framed it all as “performance art,” which, if we’re being honest, is just a bit of highfalutin speak trying to dress up what is clearly a collection of guys being dudes as they demonstrate one of the many non-toxic ways dudes rock.

A Viral E-Bike Jousting Tournament Has Forced Lime to Issue a Very Strange Warning

Executives at Lime did not see it that way, probably because their minds were instantly filled with all of the lawsuits they could probably be privy to should something go wrong, even though their e-bikes were not intended to be joust’ed upon. Or because they don’t want this to become a thing and suddenly their bikes are being wrecked by dudes slamming them into each other across the world.

Whatever the reason, company higher-ups felt inclined to release an official statement reminding everyone that their fleet of mental e- bikes is meant for pleasant and convenient urban commuting and not medieval violence.

In the statement, the company says that it appreciates the “medieval spirit, safety must always come first,” which is why they remind everyone involved that anyone might want to do their own e- bike jousting tournament and that Lime bikes “are not for jousting.”

I guess it ultimately is a good thing they came out against it. They could have stood idly by and raked in all that jousting rental money as people collided into one another over and over again. That would have been evil, but it’s hard to deny it would’ve been lucrative.

The post People Are Jousting on Rental E-Bikes in London, and Lime Is Not Happy appeared first on VICE.

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A hotel room with unexplained noises, strange figures at the foot of the bed, and a history of violent deaths sounds like a nightmare. Unless you’re specifically looking for that kind of thing.

A new analysis from ACE.com, a free-to-play social gaming site, looked at more than 90,000 TripAdvisor reviews across 34 U.S. hotels to find out which ones had the most ghost-related chatter. Researchers searched for eight terms, including “ghost,” “haunting,” and “spooky,” then calculated how many appeared per 100 reviews. Since a single review could contain multiple terms, scores could exceed 100.

And people are definitely interested. “There are an average of over 11,000 Google searches for ‘haunted hotels’ every month in the US, with searches rising by 98% in October in the run-up to Halloween,” an ACE.com spokesperson said.

Here are the five hotels that received the most paranormal mentions.

1. The Haunted Shanley Hotel, Napanoch, New York

With a name like that, paranormal seekers would be pretty bummed if nothing strange happened. The Shanley topped the list with 120 paranormal mentions per 100 reviews, making it the only property to reach triple digits. Local stories claim children connected to the hotel’s former owners still haunt the building. Despite its reputation, guests gave it a respectable 4.5 Tripadvisor rating.

2. Jefferson Palace Hotel, Jefferson, Texas

The Jefferson Palace Hotel earned 65 paranormal mentions per 100 reviews, with guests describing everything from footsteps in empty hallways to unexplained cold spots. There’s also a room full of dolls you can sleep in, if you want to take the creepy factor up a notch. The hotel has a 3.6 Tripadvisor rating.

3. The Historic Lizzie Borden House, Fall River, Massachusetts

In 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered inside this house, and the infamous Lizzie Borden was later acquitted of the crime. Now a bed and breakfast, guests report strange sensations, including dizziness and the feeling that someone is watching them. It earned 61 paranormal mentions per 100 reviews and a 4.7 TripAdvisor rating.

4. The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colorado

A 1974 stay at the Stanley helped give Stephen King the idea for The Shining, and the hotel has been enjoying its creepy reputation ever since. Guests still report strange experiences, giving the property 43 paranormal mentions per 100 reviews. It also has a 3.6 Tripadvisor rating, so the actual accommodations are questionable.

5. 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa, Eureka Springs, Arkansas

The Crescent has quite the disturbing history. In the 1930s, a con man named Norman Baker turned the hotel into a cancer hospital despite having no medical training. He charged desperate patients for bogus treatments, and many died there. The building even had a morgue in its basement, where guests now report ghostly encounters. The hotel earned 38 paranormal mentions per 100 reviews and a 4.2 rating.

Savannah’s Kehoe House earned a 4.9 Tripadvisor rating, the highest in the study, without making the paranormal top five. Although if you’ve ever spent time in Savannah, you know the city isn’t exactly short on ghost stories. It is the “most haunted city in America,” after all. 

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