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The NFL just hired their first female ref. Here's why that's huge news.

She's the NFL's first female referee, and here's how she shattered football's glass ceiling.

This football season, there'll be an unfamiliar face running up and down the sidelines: referee Sarah Thomas.

Thomas will become the first woman hired by the NFL as a full-time official, an achievement more than a decade in the making.

Sarah Thomas officiated her first high school football game 16 years ago. Building on her experience, she gradually rose through the football ranks.


By 2007, Thomas had worked her way up to officiating at the top tier of college football. In 2009, she became the first woman to work a bowl game. In 2013, she earned a place alongside 20 other finalists vying for a spot refereeing at the highest level in football: the NFL.

In a 2013 interview, Thomas told a CBS reporter that she never set out to shatter the glass ceiling — but she has. Over and over and over again.

Thomas won't be the first woman to officiate a game, but she will be the first hired full-time by the NFL.

In 2012, the NFL and the NFL Referees Association were involved in a contract dispute and, unfortunately, were not able to reach an agreement before the season started. The NFL used non-union replacement refs, one of whom was Shannon Eastin, a lower-level college ref who hadn't gone through the NFL's development program.

On September 9, 2012, Eastin worked her first NFL game between the St. Louis Rams and the Detroit Lions.

On September 26, 2012, the NFL and NFLRA came to an agreement, and Eastin's time in the NFL was over.

Women have been making themselves heard in the male-dominated sporting world — especially in recent years.

In 1997, Violet Palmer became the first woman to referee an NBA basketball game.

That same year, Dee Kantner also officiated NBA games, and for five years, the two were the only women on the court. In 2002, however, Kantner was fired by the NBA, leaving just Palmer. In 2014, the NBA hired Lauren Holtkamp, making her just the third full-time referee in the league's history.

In total Palmer has refereed more than 900 NBA games.

Because of the hard work of people like Palmer, other women have been able to work their way through the ranks.

Palmer knew that, as a pioneer, she had a target on her back. She managed to silence criticism by being one of the league's top referees.

In 2014, basketball's San Antonio Spurs hired Becky Hammon as a full-time assistant coach.

Hammon's hire made her the first woman brought on as a full-time coach in NBA history.

Prior to her hire, Hammon played 16 years in the WNBA, and she was a two-time representative of the Russian Olympic team (2008, 2012).


Like Hammon and Palmer, Sarah Thomas got where she is through years of hard work.

No one can — in good faith — look at someone who's devoted more than a quarter of their life to making it to the top level and argue that she's not fit to hold the job. Thomas climbed the ranks of football officiating, and now she's finally getting her shot. This is a huge achievement absolutely deserving of celebration.

Watch a CBS report on Sarah Thomas below:

A Korean mother and her son

A recently posted story on Reddit shows a mother confidently standing up for her family after being bullied by a teacher for her culture. Reddit user Flowergardens0 posted the story to the AITA forum, where people ask whether they are wrong in a specific situation.

Over 5,600 people commented on the story, and an overwhelming majority thought the mother was right. Here’s what went down:

“I (34F) have a (5M) son who attends preschool. A few hours after I picked him up from school today, I got a phone call from his teacher,” Flowergardens0 wrote. “She made absolutely no effort to sound kind when she, in an extremely rude and annoyed tone, told me to stop packing my son such ‘disgusting and inappropriate’ lunches."

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YouTube creator Steve Mould shows us what echo looks like through an acoustic camera.

It’s bizarre to think about seeing sound, but nowadays we can do just that. If you haven’t seen an acoustic camera before, that’s because they’re mainly used for industrial purposes, but they’ve been available commercially from gfai tech since 2001.

YouTuber Steve Mould, who has a science channel with over 2.1 million subscribers, took the complicated concept of the acoustic camera and made it easy to understand in his latest video, “Acoustic cameras can SEE sound.”

In the video, Mould explains how an acoustic camera is much like your smartphone's video recorder. But it also creates visual representations of sound emanating from where it’s generated within the video.

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Pop Culture

Woman was mocked online for calling an $80 purse a 'luxury item.' Her response went viral.

"I'm so grateful that my dad was able to get me one. He worked so hard for that money.”

@zohtaco/TikTok

Zoe Gabriel, showing off her new purse from Charles & Keith

Insults of any kind are painful, but jabs towards someone’s financial status are their own breed.

In January 2023, Singapore-based Zoe Gabriel was on the receiving end of this particular flavor of mockery when she posted a TikTok about a purse from local retail brand Charles & Keith—a gift bought for her by her father.

In her excitement, the 17-year-old called the bag, which costs around $80, a “luxury” item as she unwrapped it. Her excitement was sadly cut short by some of the negative comments she received.

One comment seemed to stand out above the rest and prompted Gabriel to post an emotional response video.

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Family

Dad gives his young daughter a 'spa day' while mom and sister are out and people are gushing

"This healed a part of me. Thank you for doing this with your daughter."

Mason Smith pampered his baby girl during her "spa day."

Raising kids is no small feat. Just the basic logistics of caring for a human being from their helpless newborn stage to the full-fledged adult stage is a lot, much less doing the countless other things that will actually help that human thrive.

Parents who go above and beyond to create a nurturing environment and build strong core memories with their kids are inspiring examples for us all, and one dad's spa day with his daughter has people positively gushing.

Mason Smith (@thedadsocial) shared a video of a special spa day he gave his young daughter when her mom and older sister were having their own pampered outing. "Mom and sister went to the salon so I couldn't have her feeling left out," he wrote.

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Jennifer Reardon shares her question that gets her the job everytime.

Job interviews are one of the most stressful situations people go through. A recent poll of over 2,000 people found that job interviews are the fifth most stressful experience a person can have, right after health and financial problems, family issues and running late.

That’s why it is vital to be prepared to handle any questions you have to field during the interview. You’ll be less nervous and make a better candidate. However, many people never think to have a question prepared for their potential employer at the end of the interview when they ask, “Do you have any questions for us?”

Communications director and consultant Jennifer Reardon, who goes by the name @notjenneeree on TikTok, says that she has the perfect question to ask at that pivotal moment at the end of the interview. And she claims that she got the job every time she’s asked the question.

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Photo by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash

Let's talk about what makes people read articles.

The adage, "If it bleeds, it leads," refers to the media's tendency to headline stories involving death or violence, but it can also be used to point to people's negativity bias. Simply put, people tend to pay more attention to negative news stories than positive ones.

A new study seems to reinforce this idea. And much to our surprise, it's centered on headlines used in Upworthy stories.

Using a public archive of Upworthy headlines and traffic data from 2012 to 2015, two separate teams of researchers analyzed whether people's click tendencies changed with negative or positive words in headlines. In those olden days of Upworthy, a handful of headlines for a single story were tested on the website to see which one would receive the most clicks. The research teams analyzed those results and found that negative words in headlines led to more people clicking on a story (2.3% more), and positive words in headlines led to fewer clicks (1.0% fewer). They also found a preference for headlines that express sadness over those that express joy, fear or anger.

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