Huckster Economy, Telescopes On Balloons + Non-Obvious Newsletter Honored In Webby Awards!

Dictionary.com's Latest New Words Aim To Help Explain Our World Today

Do you know the difference between someone who is "houseless" versus someone who is "unsheltered"? Both offer a different context than the single word "homeless" and are examples of some of the latest words recently added to Dictionary.com to allow for more nuance in the vocabulary we use to describe certain things. "Nontaster" and "hypogeusia" were added to help describe symptoms for those suffering from so-called long Covid and "megadraught" plus "mesovortex" both describe the potential climate reality we will soon face. Nothing helps describe our culture's evolution more than the new words popularly used to describe it. That's an idea someone should probably "memeify."

What if the Government Took Over Baseball and Ran It As a Public Service?

The average age of a baseball fan in America is 57. It's no secret the sport has been experiencing a rapid decline and may soon be unable to justify the large player salaries and investment required to run thousands of games every season. One writer posed a non-obvious solution to the problem this week: have the U.S. government take over baseball. Before you dismiss the idea as crazy, you may want to read the article. Freed from the pressure to maximize revenue, the sport could be better to watch, prices would be lower, teams could be more fairly structured and public funding of stadiums would actually benefit all of us instead of greedy team owners. So maybe it's not the craziest idea.

Telescopes on Balloons May Transform the Golden Age of Astronomy

With the successful launch of the James Webb telescope, many scientists are suggesting we may be entering a new "golden age of astronomy." That golden age might be enhanced by clever efforts to put high powered telescopes on balloons to launch them into valuable positions far less expensively. One of the big problems with modern astronomy is the bottleneck of telescope time allocation. If this idea could increase telescope capacity, it would be an elegantly simple solution to a huge problem. The world could use more solutions like this.

We Are Headed Into the "Huckster Economy" and the Manipulators Are Winning

"This is my 36th year as a journalist. I spent that entire time learning how to tell stories that will make you care. But when we're up against lies, we just can't win, because facts are really boring. Hard to capture your amygdala the way lies do. ... Social media brings out the worst of us.

If you're my age, you remember the old cartoon when you have a conscience and you have a devil and an angel trying to tell you what to do on each shoulder. But what social media has done, what American tech has done ... is it's kicked off the angel, it's given the devil a microphone, and it's injected directly into your brain."

These quotes come from the remarks of Nobel Peace Prize winning writer Maria Ressa at the Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference just a month before a new election takes place in the Philippines. Every week there seem to be more stories about this erosion of trust. Another writer termed this the "huckster economy" - a place where the tricksters are winning elections, making money and shaping reality however they want it to be. The conclusion Ressa points to is immediately true and urgent: "we are all being manipulated in the same way." Until we recognize that and collectively open our eyes, it will be nearly impossible to fight back.