Once upon a time, a scientist named Dr. Andrew Wakefield published in the medical journal The Lancet that he had discovered a link between autism and vaccines.
After years of controversy and making parents mistrust vaccines, along with collecting $674,000 from lawyers who would benefit from suing vaccine makers, it was discovered he had made the whole thing up. The Lancet publicly apologized and reported that further investigation led to the discovery that he had fabricated everything.
In the intervening years, millions have been spent on studying this further to see if there was anything that could connect autism and vaccines. This is what they found.
If you think science is a real thing, you could share this. I’ll owe you one.
A single door can open up a world of endless possibilities. For homeowners, the front door of their house is a gateway to financial stability, job security, and better health. Yet for many, that door remains closed. Due to the rising costs of housing, 1 in 3 people around the world wake up without the security of safe, affordable housing.
Since 1976, Habitat for Humanity has made it their mission to unlock and open the door to opportunity for families everywhere, and their efforts have paid off in a big way. Through their work over the past 50 years, more than 65 million people have gained access to new or improved housing, and the movement continues to gain momentum. Since 2011 alone, Habitat for Humanity has expanded access to affordable housing by a hundredfold.
A world where everyone has access to a decent home is becoming a reality, but there’s still much to do. As they celebrate 50 years of building, Habitat for Humanity is inviting people of all backgrounds and talents to be part of what comes next through Let’s Open the Door, a global campaign that builds on this momentum and encourages people everywhere to help expand access to safe, affordable housing for those who need it most. Here’s how the foundation to a better world starts with housing, and how everyone can pitch in to make it happen.
Volunteers raise a wall for the framework of a new home during the first day of building at Habitat for Humanity’s 2025 Carter Work Project.
Globally, almost 3 billion people, including 1 in 6 U.S. families, struggle with high costs and other challenges related to housing. A crisis in itself, this also creates larger problems that affect families and communities in unexpected ways. People who lack affordable, stable housing are also more likely to experience financial hardship in other areas of their lives, since a larger share of their income often goes toward rent, utilities, and frequent moves. They are also more likely to experience health problems due to chronic stress or environmental factors, such as mold. Housing insecurity also goes hand-in-hand with unstable employment, since people may need to move further from their jobs or switch jobs altogether to offset the cost of housing.
Affordable homeownership creates a stable foundation for families to thrive, reducing stress and increasing the likelihood for good health and stable employment. Habitat for Humanity builds and repairs homes with individual families, but it also strengthens entire communities as well. The MicroBuild® Initiative, for example, strengthens communities by increasing access to loans for low-income families seeking to build or repair their homes. Habitat ReStore locations provide affordable appliances and building materials to local communities, in addition to creating job and volunteer opportunities that support neighborhood growth.
Marsha and her son pose for a photo while building their future home with Southern Crescent Habitat for Humanity in Georgia.
Everyone can play a part in the fight for housing equity and the pursuit of a better world. Over the past 50 years, Habitat for Humanity has become a leader in global housing thanks to an engaged network of volunteers—but you don’t need to be skilled with a hammer to make a meaningful impact. Building an equitable future means calling on a wide range of people and talents.
Here’s how you can get involved in the global housing movement:
Speaking up on social media about the growing housing crisis
Volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity build in your local community
Travel and build with Habitat in the U.S. or in one of 60+ countries where we work around the globe
Join the Let’s Open the Door movement and, when you donate, you can create your own personalized door
Every action, big and small, drives a global movement toward a better future. A safe home unlocks opportunity for families and communities alike, but it’s volunteers and other supporters, working together with a shared vision, who can open the door for everyone.
She had just been let go from her job as a bank teller. The mistake was an $800 error she couldn’t fix, and when she came back to work her manager told her she was done. She got on the train home feeling “so sad,” as she put it, and cried.
Then, instead of sitting with the loss, she prayed. Not a prayer asking for something, but one offering thanks. “God, thank you so much for allowing me to have this job for so long,” she said quietly. She put on a worship song.
Fifteen seconds later, her phone rang.
A woman looks at her cell phone. Photo credit: Canva
The man on the other end had a cheerful voice. His sister, he explained, had worked with her at the bank and spoken highly of her, perticularly her kindness and her service. Based on that, he thought she’d be a good fit for his company. She got the job that same day.
The woman, who shares the story on TikTok under the handle @ashp_tv, posted about it in March and it spread quickly. The timing is the part that gets people because it’s not just that something good followed something hard, but how fast it happened, and that the call came specifically because someone had noticed how she’d treated people at the job she’d just lost.
“All you need is faith,” she said. Whether you take that literally or as shorthand for something more like trust and openness, the story holds up either way.
“How would you feel if your 13-year-old daughter came home with a paper saying she couldn’t enter a classroom without a boy escort and would be required to pick up after them every day?”
A seventh-grade class at a middle school was assigned a simulation of ancient Greek society. Students got Greek names, learned to wear Greek clothes, built temples, represented city-states, staged short dramas, and participated in Olympic events. By most measures, an unusually creative history project.
It also required the girls to demonstrate their “secondary position.” They couldn’t enter the classroom without a male escort. They were expected to clean up after the boys each day.
Nico, who goes by @nicorette on TikTok, found out about it when her 13-year-old daughter came home from school and told her it had made her uncomfortable. Nico posted about it, and the video spread.
“How would you feel if your 13-year-old daughter came home with a paper that said they wouldn’t be able to enter a classroom without a boy escort and would be required to pick up after them every day?” she asked. She was clear that she liked a lot of what the project was trying to do, like the Greek names, the costumes, and the intellectual discussions so that just made the subservience requirement harder to explain away. “So why was this even necessary?” she asked.
Middle school students working quietly. Photo credit: Canva
The comments split in predictable directions but a few stood out. One viewer defended the assignment, arguing it could help female students understand how far women’s rights have come and how quickly they can erode. A commenter who identified as a teacher pushed back harder: “I wrote my master’s thesis about classroom simulations. They only work if the power dynamics stay equal among students.” Another drew a sharper comparison: requiring girls to perform submission to boys isn’t meaningfully different from asking Black students to perform submission to white ones.
That last analogy tends to clarify things pretty quickly. The goal of a history simulation is to understand the past, not to rehearse it on the bodies of kids who are still figuring out who they are.
Nico said the school office was closed by the time her daughter got home. She was planning to raise it with administrators the next day.
You can follow Nico at @nicorette on TikTok for more parenting content.
Chris Robarge had rented a house after his divorce, his first place on his own during a hard stretch of his life. He paid his rent, eventually moved on, and didn’t think much more about it.
Then, years later, his former landlord reached out asking for his current address. A day later, a check for $2,500 arrived in the mail with a handwritten note.
The landlord had sold the house. And before keeping the profit, they tracked down every tenant who had ever lived there because, as the note explained, those monthly rent payments had helped pay off the mortgage. The tenants had contributed to the equity. It only seemed right to give some of it back.
“While it’s not much, it’s yours,” the letter read. “It was a great house, and I’m glad that I was able to share it with you.”
Chris posted about it on Facebook, where it spread quickly partly because people were so unused to a landlord story going this direction. He wrote that there’s a difference between people who talk about their values and people who actually live them, and that this was the clearest example of the latter he’d ever seen personally. “Do it off the clock, do it when no one is watching, do it always,” he wrote.
A man hands out cash to someone. Photo credit: Canva
He kept $500 to fix his car. The rest he gave away to Black and Pink Massachusetts, to free fridges in Worcester, to OurStory Edutainment, and directly to people on the street who needed it. He turned an unexpected windfall into a chain of smaller ones.
One Facebook commenter said she’d started reading the post braced for bad news like a surprise bill or some old debt being called in, and was so conditioned to that outcome that the actual ending genuinely shocked her. Which is maybe the most telling part of the whole story.
During an interview with People promoting the upcoming The Devil Wears Prada 2, Anne Hathaway was asked how she navigates growing older. She noted the importance of taking self-care seriously, remaining curious, and appreciating being in a place where you can assess decisions made earlier in life.
But it was what she said next, almost as an afterthought, that really got folks talking.
“I wanna have a long, healthy life. Inshallah, I hope so,” she casually but sincerely told her interviewer. The phrase, also spelled “insh’Allah,” translates to “if God wills” or “God willing,” and is deeply rooted in Islam.
However, it is also part of Arab culture in general. Religious or otherwise, people use it to convey resolute hope for the future while acknowledging that life follows its own plan.
Bridge-building moment
This ignited a positive frenzy online among Muslim and Arabic viewers, who were not only thrilled to hear the term used, but to hear it used correctly.
Rather than being seen as performative, the overall consensus was that this was a refreshing, bridge-building moment across cultures.
“Use it the way Anne Hathaway used it—honestly, humbly, in a moment when you genuinely want something good and know that wanting is only the beginning,” praised author Qasim Rashid.
Perhaps the timing of this interview has also contributed to its virality. Just weeks ago at Coachella, Sabrina Carpenter received backlash for her “this is weird” reaction when fans began engaging in the Zaghrouta, a celebratory, high-pitched ululation traditionally used in Arab cultures.
So, for someone equally high-profile to actually promote rather than seemingly reject a piece of Arab culture has been viewed as a kind of karmic recompense.
As HuffPost contributor Syeda Khaula Saad put it, “It just feels nice to be represented in mainstream media in an accepting, inclusive light. I hope that we get to see much more, insha’Allah.”
And as she pointed out, recently another Arabic word was brought into the mainstream when Muslim Egyptian American actor Ramy Youssef taught Elmo to say “habibi” (meaning “my love” or “my friend”) on an episode of Sesame Street.
“We have been dehumanized, portrayed in the worst way by the media for years.. I swear to GOD elmo saying ‘habibi’ made me teary and somehow healed the inner child that has been called the worst things for being different growing up,” one viewer wrote on Instagram.
It goes to show that when it comes to respecting other cultures, it doesn’t take a grand gesture. Even a word, when said correctly and with genuine intent, can extend an olive branch.
Perhaps this wisdom can be especially applied to mainstream media, where negative stereotypes run rampant alongside baffling overcorrections. Sometimes, it really is as simple as making space for what exists beyond your own lived experience and engaging with it.
Whether or not you agree that Hathaway executed this perfectly, may we all agree that the world could use more people looking to build bridges rather than reject what’s unfamiliar.
A cartoonist sent his wife a love letter in 1913. It wasn’t just a note, it unfolded into a tiny art gallery he built to prepare her for a Paris exhibition.
In 1913, American cartoonist Alfred Joseph Frueh sat down to write his wife a love letter. What he actually made was something else entirely.
The letter, which Frueh sent to his wife Giuliette Fanciulli, unfolds into an L-shaped miniature art gallery. There are tiny paintings on the walls, cursive text scrolled across the surfaces, and a coat check station at the entrance with a sign reading: “Leave your hats and umbrellas at home. I ain’t got time to check them.” Above a cut-out door trimmed in black: “This way in.”
The reason for all this was practical, in the most romantic way possible. Frueh was preparing his wife for an upcoming gallery marathon in Paris, and he built her a small preview of the space so she wouldn’t feel lost or overwhelmed when she arrived. He used collage, geometric folds, and careful cuts to simulate the experience of actually being in the gallery.
Frueh was already known for working drawings and creative elements into his personal correspondence as he contributed to the New York World and later The New Yorker, and also made children’s furniture, pop-up cards, and cutouts. But this letter, originally a private thing between two people, is now preserved in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
It’s worth sitting with the gesture for a moment. Not just the craft involved, but the attentiveness behind it. He knew his wife well enough to anticipate that a big Paris gallery marathon might be overwhelming, and instead of just saying “you’ll be fine,” he built her a map.
That’s the whole love letter. It’s just that the love letter happens to be a museum.
A gate agent at an airport had a young man screaming at him that his flight needed to take off. The flight had been delayed due to weather. The agent gave his practiced apology and explained the situation. The young man kept pushing.
The agent, who shares the story on Instagram Threads as @mr.freak_22_, had been doing this job long enough to develop a thick skin. He’d heard every version of the entitled passenger routine. He was preparing to hold the line.
Then the young man told him why.
A traveller delayed at an airport. Photo credit: Canva
“You don’t understand. My mom is in hospice. The nurse just called. She has maybe hours left. I just need to hold her hand one last time.”
The agent’s entire calculation changed. His own airline had nothing available. He pulled out his personal phone and started searching competitor flights. He found one for $450, leaving from another terminal. He looked at the young man, who was hyperventilating, and didn’t ask him for the money. He just bought the ticket.
“I printed the boarding pass, shoved it into his hand, and said, ‘Run to Terminal B. Gate 12. Go.’”
Two days later he called back and left a message. He’d made it in time.
The agent posted about it because he wanted to push back on something he’d been thinking about. People assume gate agents are cold and robotic, just like people assume young men demanding things at airport counters are being entitled. Neither assumption held up that day. “Sometimes the rules don’t matter nearly as much as the reasons,” he wrote.
“I was trying to figure out why you were making that face!” This mom trusted her sister to film her labor, but her sister had some “distorted” plans of her own.
Sibling relationships are built on a delicate balance of deep love and the constant urge to mess with one another. Usually, these pranks happen at the dinner table or during holiday gatherings, but for one TikTok creator named Ana, the shenanigans followed her all the way into the delivery room.
Ana, known online as @anaa_dreams, recently shared a video that has left over 15 million viewers in stitches. She had entrusted her sister with the incredibly important task of filming her labor and the first moments of her newborn’s life. It was supposed to be a sentimental keepsake of the most important day of her life. However, as the footage reveals, her sister had a very different “vision” for the project.
It wasn’t until days after the delivery that Ana finally watched the footage, only to realize her sister had used various facial-distortion filters throughout the entire process. Instead of a glowing mom-to-be, the video shows Ana and her partner with unusually wide eyes, flared nostrils, and cartoonish, devilish grins. The emotional high of the couple awaiting their baby was transformed into something that looked more like a cameo from a fantasy film than a hospital room.
The most audacious part of the prank? The sister didn’t stop once the baby arrived. Even the deeply moving moment of the parents holding their newborn for the first time was subjected to the filters, turning a “core memory” into a complete laugh riot.
While some commenters were initially concerned that the sister might have “ruined” the only footage of the birth, Ana was quick to share a follow-up video to set the record straight. It turns out her sister is a “pro-level” prankster who made sure to capture plenty of normal, heartwarming pictures and videos alongside the filtered ones. From the dad getting emotional to Ana doing her makeup before the big moment, the “real” memories were safe.
The follow-up video answered the question everyone was asking: yes, there are normal photos too. The sister had captured the whole thing properly — the emotional moments, the dad’s face when he first held his daughter, Ana doing her makeup before delivery. She’d just also been running a chaos operation on the side the entire time.
Sean Lans got an invitation to his friend’s birthday dinner. He looked up the restaurant. The cheapest entree on the menu was $41. There was also a $35 cover charge at the bar they were hitting afterward. He did the math and proposed a compromise: he’d skip dinner and meet everyone out later.
His friend was not happy about it.
Sean posted about it on TikTok (@seanlans), and the video took off because almost everyone watching had been on one side of this exact conversation at some point. “I’m not looking to spend the equivalent of a week of grocery money on a single night out,” he said in the video. That line landed for a lot of people.
The responses split along pretty predictable lines. Some thought $41 wasn’t that bad and he should have saved up if this friend mattered to him. Others pointed out that nobody should be put in the position of choosing between their budget and showing up for someone’s birthday.
Diners celebrate at a restaurant. Photo credit: Canva
One commenter offered the most reasonable take: “If someone is unable to attend my boujee birthday dinner, that’s fine. I’ll schedule another affordable dinner date for us to celebrate together.”
Sean later told Bored Panda he was surprised to learn how many people assume the birthday host covers everyone, and also surprised that several commenters thought $41 for a single entree was totally reasonable. He also noted that other people in the group didn’t actually want to go to that restaurant either. He was just the one who said so.
You can follow Sean Lans (@seanlans) on TikTok for more financial-based content.
