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12+ min ago (499+ words) A mailman has an urgent message for women on his route: do not walk around your houses naked unless you want your local postal employee to see it. "So around this time last year, I came to y'all as a grown mailman and asked politely if you could close your windows," Michael Morgan II said in a video with 78,000 views. "You guys didn't listen. So to the lady in the kitchen dancing in your undies, I [saw] you. You can't dance, and I [saw it]." To his surprise, a majority of the women in his comments section simply didn't care if he saw them. They're gonna keep dancing like no one's watching. Morgan was clearly uncomfortable encountering near-naked women on his routes, although he had a good laugh about it. Commenters quickly let him know that his discomfort was noted…...

12+ min ago (1550+ words) A strange porn subculture reveals what life online is doing to us. Open the internet today, and you'll find entire worlds most of us never encounter. Spaces built around practices so strange, so hyper-specific, they read like satire at first glance. Few writers have explored this frontier more vividly than Daniel Kolitz. His Harper's essay, "The Goon Squad," is part ethnography, part cultural diagnosis, and part prophecy about where the internet may be taking all of us. I invited Kolitz onto The Gray Area to talk about what he discovered inside these communities and what "gooning" " he'll explain below " reveals about the rest of us. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. What's your simplest definition of gooning? Gooning…...

12+ min ago (302+ words) Our advice columnists have heard it all over the years'so today we're diving into the archives of Care and Feeding to share classic parenting letters with our readers. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. From: We've Never Asked Our Tween to Do Chores. Is It Too Late to Start? (July 7th, 2021.) 'Congratulations, It's a Boy and He's 13! This is both super hard and super normal. As you say, it is entirely age-appropriate for a 13-year-old to want to behave like this all the time. It's also entirely appropriate for a parent to intervene to stop it. Ideally, you will land somewhere in the middle. Maybe, if there's a lot of backlash, you can set it up as a monthlong policy that expires after four weeks but can be reinstated if there is trouble. Running a household is…...

12+ min ago (390+ words) My sister and I are identical twins, but we grew up terrorizing each other. I was the girly girl, while she was on her way to a PhD in preschool. I had a learning disorder, and my sister would constantly correct people and say she wasn't the "stupid" one'I was. My husband and I were debating whether to have a third child when my sister bulldozed in. She was ready to be a mom, had everything planned out, saved, and sorted, except her eggs weren't viable. So the completely obvious solution was to give her our embryos! No, no, no. Absolutely not. You can't and shouldn't do this. Your already fragile relationship would crumble under the pressure of IVF and the emotional complications of her carrying your embryo to term. "I'm not comfortable doing it," "We don't get along and…...

15+ min ago (311+ words) Top court sentences Alejandro Gil in the highest profile case against an ex-official in Cuba in decades. Cuba's top court has sentenced former Economy Minister Alejandro Gil to life in prison for espionage following a closed-door trial, in one of the country's highest-profile cases in decades. In a statement on Monday, the Supreme Popular Tribunal said Gil also received a second concurrent prison sentence of 20 years on corruption charges. These include bribery, falsification of documents and tax evasion. Gil, who served as economy minister from 2018 to 2024, was once a close confidant of President Miguel Diaz-Canel. The 61-year-old politician was sacked in February 2024 and had not been seen or heard from until the trials. The court did not give details about what exactly the former minister did or who he was spying for. It said Gil had engaged in "corrupt and…...

27+ min ago (10+ words) Seems kind of obvious once you realize what it is....

38+ min ago (797+ words) Senate Republicans have no shortage of health care plans. The challenge is getting all 53 of them to rally behind one," Politico reports. Three days before a high-profile vote on a Democratic proposal to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies, GOP senators are nowhere near coalescing behind any single alternative that could be put up alongside it. Instead, Republican leaders appear happy allowing their members to freelance, even as Democrats and some in their own ranks fume at the lack of clear direction." For Republicans, the risk of proceeding Thursday with a side-by-side vote is clear. While Democrats say they will have their entire 47-member caucus behind the three-year extension, any GOP plan right now is likely to fall well short of complete unity " and highlight the divisions in their party." The Best Laptop I've Ever Used In 25 years of running Political Wire,…...

42+ min ago (654+ words) If Ukraine ends up capitulating to Russian demands to end the war, give the self-proclaimed peacemaker Donald Trump the lion's share of the credit. Since he took office, Trump has done nothing but strengthen Russia's hand while putting Ukraine in its weakest negotiating position. Trump is far from an honest, impartial broker. He has been a great admirer of Russia's murderous dictator, Vladimir Putin, for more than a decade, and in 2022 called Putin's invasion of Ukraine "genius" and "savvy." Trump has refused to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine " thereby putting the U.S. in league with countries including China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Nicaragua. On the other hand, Trump has treated Ukraine's courageous president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a minor-nation inferior, someone purely to bully. In 2019, Trump withheld military support from Ukraine for 55 days while trying to extract damaging information from Zelenskyy…...

42+ min ago (788+ words) Since the start of the war, the Ukrainian government has been cracking down harder on unions and workers" rights. But slowly, the public mood is shifting. On June 5, shortly after ten in the morning, black-clad officers stormed into the House of Trade Unions. The symbolic building on the Maidan, Kyiv"s Independence Square, is the headquarters of the country"s largest trade union federation, the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU). The roughly 30 officers ordered the union employees to pack their things. The House of Trade Unions, they stated, has been confiscated. Employees and journalists were stopped outside, prevented from entering the building'by force if necessary. The president of Profbud, an FPU member union representing the rights of workers in the construction industry,Vasyl Andreyev, speaks of a completely new level of escalation. Despite the government"s aggressive campaign…...

42+ min ago (1669+ words) This past June, Ashley Voss-Barnes received a court summons in the mail. PrairieStar Health Center, a nonprofit community health center in south-central Kansas, was suing her for $675 and her wife for $732 in unpaid medical bills. Voss-Barnes knew the clinic received federal funding to make preventive health care accessible in a region where many families, including her own, needed financial help. "If I have something due, then I will try to pay it," she said to ProPublica. "It came out of nowhere." Voss-Barnes, a nurse who feels confident navigating the health care system, wanted to push back. She reached out to a local lawyer to see if he could represent them, but he said the debt was too small to be worth it. So she represented herself, filing a letter in court objecting to the lawsuit and asking to continue the…...