The World Series is the most important thing that can happen to a baseball player, and it is happening now to a bunch of them. You may have noticed that many have been conspicuously chewing things the entire time, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, who was blowing a bubble while misplaying a ball in the very first inning of Game 1. The constant chewing is one of the weird things about baseball. Casual viewers respond to it by saying, “That’s weird.” Baseball fans respond to it by saying, “That’s just how it is in baseball.” And both statements are…

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Americans are anxious about the election. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that, as of August, politics was the leading cause of stress for seven out of 10 adults across party lines. In a poll from a mental-health-care company the same month, 79 percent of respondents reported that the presidential election made them feel anxious this year, and more than half thought about the election every day. Now that the election is imminent, one can only assume that Americans’ anxiety is even higher. Many U.S.…

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. The promise of the American food supply is that you can eat anything and not get sick. You can usually assume that whatever you buy from a grocery store or fast-food joint won’t land you in a hospital. But lately, foodborne-illness outbreaks seem to be distressingly regular. On Tuesday, the CDC reported 49 cases and one death linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders tainted with E. coli. In the past week, hundreds of waffle and pancake products were voluntarily recalled due to potential Listeria contamination. Listeria, in particular,  has been…

There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan. It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the…

In the fall of 2021, Tammi Kromenaker started looking for a new home for her North Dakota abortion clinic. For more than 20 years, Red River Women’s Clinic had provided abortion care to the Fargo area, most of that time as the state’s only provider. But now Kromenaker, the practice’s owner and director, was moving it just across the state line to Minnesota. “We had seen the writing on the wall,” she told me. A few months earlier, the Supreme Court had announced that it would take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and North Dakota had a trigger…

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. The loaf in my fridge is the furthest thing from Wonder Bread. Each slice is made of organic whole-wheat flour and has four grams of fiber and just two measly grams of added sugar. It’s studded with so many seeds that I’m always worried about them getting stuck in my teeth. The only service this bread can provide is as a hummus sandwich; it tastes too healthy for a grilled cheese, an egg sandwich, or any other handheld creation. But here’s the thing about my whole-grain, seed-coated loaf of…

Ibogaine, a psychedelic compound found in plants native to central Africa, is notorious for the intensity of the trips it induces. Those who consume it are plunged into vivid hallucinations, often preceded by a loud buzzing noise, that last between 24 and 48 hours. In one case report, a 29-year-old woman from Gabon met her dead relatives, and later looked into a mirror and saw a woman crying and holding a baby. A middle-aged American man experienced himself from the perspective of a “Mexican little boy and I’m praying on the side of a road.” When he opened his eyes,…

Taken on its own, the number is astonishing. According to the CDC, as of August 2023, 40.3 percent of U.S. adults—some 100 million people—met the clinical definition for obesity. But this same estimate, which is based on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey numbers gathered between 2021 and 2023, also seems remarkably low compared with prior readouts. For the first time in more than a decade, NHANES data hint that our obesity epidemic is no longer growing. The new estimate is almost two percentage points lower than the government’s previous one, which covered the period from 2017 to 2020 and…

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. For all the upheaval that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it did not dramatically change the most basic fact about abortions in America: the number. Since 2022, abortions in the United States have held steady—even increased slightly, based on the best of limited data. One major reason? The rise of abortion pills, which are now used in the majority of abortions in America. Every month, thousands of women in states where abortion is banned have been able to discreetly order the pills by mail and take them…

If you had come across the abbreviation GLP-1 a few years ago, chances are you’d have had no idea what it stood for. Intro to Greek lyric poetry? Low-level Great Lakes precipitation? A member of the 1990s rap group Get Low Playaz? These days, the initialism is much more recognizable. The new blockbuster obesity drugs, made famous by Ozempic, are collectively known as GLP-1 agonists, for the hormone they mimic in the body: glucagon-like peptide 1. It’s impossible to hear about the voraciously in-demand drugs without encountering the term. GLP-1 is mentioned 10 seconds into a Good Morning America segment…