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Airbnb co-founder gave a graduating class 2022 stocks in his company

That's a nice way to start adulthood.

Airbnb; graduation; Airbnb stock
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

graduates

Have you ever thought, “Man, I sure wish someone would just hand me a check or at least some stock in a successful company”? The way rent, gas and everything (gestures broadly at the entire economy) is going right now, an unexpected windfall would be helpful to most people, but especially to high schoolers heading off to college or beginning their journeys as young adults.

That’s exactly what happened to the graduating class of Snellville, Georgia's Brookwood High School. The co-founder of Airbnb (and former graduate of Brookwood High), Joe Gebbia, surprised the graduating class of 2022 with shares in his company. Each graduate will receive 22 shares of Airbnb stock. Obviously the kids can’t immediately spend the stocks, though if they wanted to sell them for college supplies instead of hanging on to them and watching their value grow they could, I guess.

Gebbia graduated from the school in 2000 and announced during his speech the gift he had for all 890 graduating seniors. The gift amounts to around $2,428.80 per graduate, which is certainly more than most receive in a graduation card. In total the co-founder gifted the students more than $2 million in Airbnb stock. It wouldn’t be surprising if the newly graduated teens have no idea what to do with their new stock given that most high schools don’t really go over investing and stock market rules.

William Smith, who was a recipient of the generous gift, told the Gwinnett Daily Post that he may ask his grandfather, who is well-versed on the stock market, what to do with his shares as he’s still trying to figure out what to do with the stock. Smith told the paper, “Everybody right now is still amazed and in shock that he gave such a generous gift to us. People haven’t really thought long term. People are just like, ‘Wow, he came back and was just so generous.’ Talk about not forgetting your roots.”

This isn’t the first time the co-founder has given back to his old high school. Last November, he donated $700,000 to the school to create and fund the Joe Gebbia Visual Arts Endowment. The money will also create immersive resources for student athletes that attend Brookwood High.

The new high school graduates had no idea they’d be leaving school with shares in a global company and getting an opportunity to start building a stock portfolio. Hopefully this boost will be just what they need to head into adulthood with the potential for more financial security.

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Health

4 simple hacks to help you meet your healthy eating goals

Trying to eat healthier? Try these 4 totally doable tricks.

Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

Most of us want to eat healthier but need some help to make it happen.

True

When it comes to choosing what to eat, we live in a uniquely challenging era. Never before have humans known more about nutrition and how to eat for optimal health, and yet we’ve never been more surrounded by distractions and temptations that derail us from making healthy choices.

Some people might be able to decide “I’m going to eat healthier!” and do so without any problem, but those folks are unicorns. Most of us know what we should do, but need a little help making it happen—like some simple hacks, tips and tricks for avoiding pitfalls on the road to healthier eating.

While recognizing that what works for one person may not work for another, here are some helpful habits and approaches that might help you move closer to your healthy eating goals.

man pulling chip out of a chip bagOur mouths loves chips. Our bodies not so much.Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

Goal: Snack on less junk food

Tip: Focus your willpower on the grocery store, not your home

Willpower is a limited commodity for most of us, and it is no match for a bag of potato chips sitting on top of the fridge. It’s just a fact. Channeling your willpower at the grocery store can save you from having to fight that battle at home. If you don’t bring chips into your house in the first place, you’ll find it a lot easier to reach for something healthier.

The key to successful shopping trips is to always go to the store with a specific list and a full stomach—you’ll feel much less tempted to buy the junky snack foods if you’re already satiated. Also, finding healthier alternatives that will still satisfy your cravings for salty or crunchy, or fatty foods helps. Sugar snap peas have a surprisingly satisfying crunch, apples and nut butter hit that sweet-and-salty craving, etc.

slice of cakeYou can eat well without giving up sweets completely.Photo by Caitlyn de Wild on Unsplash

Goal: Eat less sugar

Tip: Instead of “deprive,” think “delay” or “decrease and delight”

Sugar is a tricky one. Some people find it easier to cut out added sugars altogether, but that can create an all-or-nothing mindset that all too often results in “all.” Eating more whole foods and less processed foods can help us cut out a lot of ancillary sugar, but we still live in a world with birthday cakes and dessert courses.

One approach to dessert temptation is to delay instead of deprive. Tell yourself you can have any sweet you want…tomorrow. This mental trick flips the “I’ll just indulge today and start eating healthier tomorrow” idea on its head. It’s a lot easier to resist something you know you can have tomorrow than to say no to something you think you’ll never get to have again.

Another approach when you really want to enjoy a dessert at that moment is to decrease the amount and really truly savor it. Eat each bite slowly, delighting in the full taste and satisfaction of it. As soon as that delight starts to diminish, even a little, stop eating. You’ve gotten what you wanted out of it. You don’t have to finish it. (After all, you can always have more tomorrow!)

colorful fresh food on a plateA naturally colorful meal is a healthy meal.Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

Goal: Eat healthier meals

Tip: Focus on fresh foods and plan meals ahead of time

Meal planning is easier than ever before. The internet is filled with countless tools—everything from recipes to shopping lists to meal planning apps—and it’s as awesome as it is overwhelming.

Planning ahead takes the guesswork and decision fatigue out of cooking, preventing the inevitable “Let’s just order a pizza.” You can have a repeating 3-week or 4-week menu of your favorite meals so you never have to think about what you’re going to eat, or you can meal plan once a week to try new recipes and keep things fresh.

It might help to designate one day a week to “shop and chop”—getting and prepping the ingredients for the week’s meals so they’re ready to go in your fridge or freezer.

woman holding blueberries in her handsOrganic foods are better for the Earth and for us.Photo by andrew welch on Unsplash

Goal: Eat more organic/humanely raised food

Tip: Utilize the “dirty dozen” and “clean 15” lists to prioritize

Many people choose organic because they want to avoid pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals. Organic food is also better for the planet, and according to the Mayo Clinic, studies have shown that organic produce is higher in certain nutrients.

Most people don’t buy everything organic, but there are some foods that should take priority over others. Each year, researchers from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) analyze thousands of samples of dozens of fruits and vegetables. From this data, they create a list of the “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean 15” fruits and vegetables, indicating what produce has the most and least pesticide residue. These lists give people a good place to start focusing their transition to more organic foods.

To make organic eating even simpler, you can shop O Organics® at your local Albertsons or Safeway stores. The O Organics brand offers a wide range of affordable USDA-certified organic products in every aisle. If you’re focusing on fresh foods, O Organics produce is always grown without synthetic pesticides, is farmed to conserve biodiversity, and is always non-GMO. All animal-based O Organics products are certified humane as well. Even switching part of your grocery list to organic can make a positive impact on the planet and the people you feed.

Healthy eating habits don’t have to be all or nothing, and they don’t have to be complicated. A few simple mindset changes at home and habit changes at the grocery store can make a big difference.

health
Education

Teacher brilliantly turns getting her period in front of her class into a teaching moment

"That boy who emailed...his parents must be incredible."

Emily Elizabeth|TikTok and Cliff Booth|Canva

Teacher starts period in front of class, turns into a lesson

Teachers are almost always teaching even when it's not in their lesson plan.

Those that were born to be teachers find teachable moments everywhere and one woman found herself in one of those moments. Though this one was likely just a bit more personal than she probably would've liked.

Emily Elizabeth posted a TikTok video about how she found herself in a predicament in front of her classroom full of 10 and 11-year-old kids. The teacher explained that she was noticing a lot of commotion and whispering among the little girls in her class while she was wearing white pants. After reminding the girls to stay on task, the whispering continued, prompting Emily to be more direct.

That's when one of the girls asked to speak with her privately dropping the bomb that no one that gets periods wants to hear in public.

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Family

Child-free man's criticism of mom staring at phone while ignoring her son at the park sparks debate

"Are you guys that attached to your phones?"

via MarioMirante/TikTok and Ladislav Stercell/Unsplash

Mario Mirante criticizes a mom he saw at the park.

TikTokker Mario Mirante is going viral for his video that brings up two significant issues: smartphone addiction and whether people without children have the right to criticize parents.

It all started when Mirante saw a young boy playing alone in the park.

“The kid is just playing quietly, not being annoying. I don’t hear a peep from him; he's just doing his thing on the playground,” Mirante said in a video that has nearly 6000,000 views. “The mom the entire time is on her phone, staring right down at her screen. Doesn’t look up one time.”

The boy climbed up to the top of the slide and called down to his mother, who didn’t even look up from her phone. “I hear, ‘Hey mom, watch. Watch, Mom,’” Mirante recalled. “And at the top of her lungs, shrieking like a Velociraptor, this mother screams, ‘One second!”

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parenting
Education

Mother of 7 stunned to learn the ‘Alphabet Song’ has been changed to get with the times

There's a good reason for the update. But it's jarring, to say the least.

via Pixabay/Pexels and JessFamOfficial/TikTok

Jessica Skube can't believe that they changed the 'Alphabet Song.'

The oldest published version of the melody to the “Alphabet Song” was in 1761. However, because it’s the same melody as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” it's hard to trace it to its original composer.

The “Alphabet Song” is so deeply entrenched in American culture that it almost seems sacrilegious to change a piece of music that’s one of the first most of us ever learned. But after all these years, some educators are altering the classic melody so that there is a variation when the letters L-M-N-O-P are sung.

This change shocked popular TikTokker Jessica Skube, who documents life raising 7 children with her 2.6 million followers. Nearly 10 million people have watched her video revealing the significant change, and it’s received over 56,000 comments since first being published in late 2020.

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education
Identity

Watch this 104-yr-old woman break the world tandem skydiving record

Dorothy Hoffner tried skydiving for the first time on her 100th birthday and loved it.

@skydivechicago/Instagram

Dorothy Hoffner is pure #agingoals.

If you're looking for some aging inspiration, look no further, because Dorothy Hoffner is about to blow your mind.

At 104, Hoffner just became the oldest person to parachute out of an airplane in a tandem skydive. That's right, skydive. At 104 years old—or to be exact, 104 years and 289 days old—beating the previous world record set by a 103-year-old in Sweden in May of 2022.

But it's actually even more impressive than that. It's not like Hoffner is someone who's been skydiving since she was young and just happened to keep on doing it as she got older. She actually didn't go on her first skydiving adventure until her 100th birthday.

On Oct 1, 2023, she joined the team at Skydive Chicago in Ottawa, Illinois, for the world-breaking tandem skydive. Though she uses a walker to get around, she manages the physical toll of plummeting through the air at 10,000+ feet before parachuting to a skidding stop strapped to a certified U.S. Parachute Association (USPA) tandem instructor with impressive ease.

“Let’s go, let’s go, Geronimo!” Hoffner said after she boarded the plane, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Watch her do what many of us would be too terrified to attempt:

The way she rolls right out of that plane cool as a cucumber! Hoffner told the Tribune that on her first skydive, at age 100, she had to be pushed out of the plane. But this time, knowing what she was in for, she took charge with calm confidence.

“Skydiving is a wonderful experience, and it’s nothing to be afraid of," Hoffner shares. "Just do it!”

That's some seriously sage advice from someone who knows firsthand that age really is just a number. Learn more about skydiving with Skydive Chicago here.

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Education

Unearthed BBC interview features two Victorian-era women discussing being teens in the 1800s

Frances 'Effy' Jones, one of the first women to be trained to use a typewriter and to take up cycling as a hobby, recalls life as a young working woman in London.

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Two Victorian women discuss being teens in the 1800s.

There remains some mystery around what life was like in the 1800s, especially for teens. Most people alive today were not around in the Victorian era when the technologies now deemed old-fashioned were a novelty. In this rediscovered 1970s clip from the BBC, two elderly women reminisce about what it was like being teenagers during a time when the horse and buggy was still the fastest way to get around.

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Pop Culture

1956 commercial shows that refrigerators back then were more advanced than they are today

We "modern" folks don't even have all of these luxuries.

Vintage Fanatic/YouTube

Can we bring back some 50s fridge features, please?

There are very few things that would make people nostalgic for the 1950s. Sure, they had cool cars and pearl necklaces were a staple, but that time frame had its fair share of problems, even if "Grease" made it look dreamy. Whether you believe your life would've been way more interesting if you were Danny Zuko or not, most would agree their technology was...lacking.

All eras are "advanced" for their time, but imagine being dropped off in the 50s as someone from the year 2023. A recent post by Historic Vids on Twitter of a 1956 commercial advertising a refrigerator, however, has some people thinking that when it came to fridges, maybe they were living in the year 2056. I don't typically swoon over appliances, yet this one has me wondering where I can purchase a refrigerator like this.

Of course, there's no fancy touch screen that tells you the weather and asks how you'd like your ice cubed. It's got more important features that are actually practical.

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