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Want To Tell The People Behind Those Awful Political Ads What You Think Of Them? Here's How.

There's a reason this election season feels so abnormally awful. Outside groups known as super PACs have spent upwards of $473 million in an attempt to influence the election after the delightful Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United enabled corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent political expenditures. Here's why we should take action to stop them today.

Photo courtesy of CARE.org
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You may be surprised to learn the following facts about the leading cause of death worldwide:

  1. It affects women far more than men
  2. It’s a completely preventable problem
  3. It’s hunger.
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via wakaflockafloccar / TikTok

It's amazing to consider just how quickly the world has changed over the past 11 months. If you were to have told someone in February 2020 that the entire country would be on some form of lockdown, nearly everyone would be wearing a mask, and half a million people were going to die due to a virus, no one would have believed you.

Yet, here we are.

PPE masks were the last thing on Leah Holland of Georgetown, Kentucky's mind on March 4, 2020, when she got a tattoo inspired by the words of a close friend.

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Pop Culture

Server got a $10 tip from a party of 21. TikTok users increased it to thousands in a few hours.

"If we can't use our collective power for good, we don't deserve collective power."

Server received a $10 tip from party of 21, so a TikTok creator stepped in.

It's not a secret that servers are typically underpaid and make most of their money from tips, which means if people don't tip, the server is losing money on that table. That may sound confusing if you've never waited tables, so I'll try to explain since waiting tables helped put me through college. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour. If you have to Uber to work, you're starting your shift in the hole.

So when customers don't tip, it's even harder to recoup that money lost just getting to work. A table being occupied by non-tippers takes away the opportunity for the server to earn a tip from a different customer who could be seated at that table. Working as a server is a constant numbers game to make sure you leave your shift with enough money to meet your needs for the day.

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Island School Class, circa 1970s.

Parents, do you think your child would be able to survive if they were transported back to the '70s or '80s? Could they live at a time before the digital revolution put a huge chunk of our lives online?

These days, everyone has a phone in their pocket, but before then, if you were in public and needed to call someone, you used a pay phone. Can you remember the last time you stuck 50 cents into one and grabbed the grubby handset?

According to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, roughly 100,000 pay phones remain in the U.S., down from 2 million in 1999.

Do you think a 10-year-old kid would have any idea how to use a payphone in 2022? Would they be able to use a Thomas Guide map to find out how to get somewhere? If they stepped into a time warp and wound up in 1975, could they throw a Led Zeppelin album on the record player at a party?

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Health

A brilliant Harvard psychologist explains how to achieve happiness

It's time to stop giving awfulness the power to bend our lens. Here's how.

YouTube

Shawn Achor explains "The Happiness Advantage"

Anytime you look at the news, it's about death, destruction, abductions, natural disasters...

That kind of thing can mess us up. It makes the world look scarier than it is. It's like wearing the opposite of rose-colored glasses.

Feel like you've fallen into the Matrix yet?

It's time to stop giving awfulness the power to bend our lens. Here's how.
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Sesame Street/YouTube

Jesse Jackson talks to children on Sesame Street

Sesame Street is a national treasure.

I think we can all agree on that.

Sesame Street invented the idea that television could teach children, not just entertain them.

It taught kids letters and numbers and introduced them to talented and famous people, from Savion Glover to Kofi Annan.

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Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash

The daily lives of parents, #Tuesday.

When dad and blogger Mike Julianelle compared a photo of himself to a photo from 10 years ago, he noticed a big difference.

Yes, he looked a little older — after all, a decade had gone by. But there was something else: a deep, deep look of utter exhaustion.

Life has a way of asking a lot of us. How we cope and manage the moments at work, our personal goals, the friendships, and our loved ones.

All these daily routines navigated that bring the best and ask the most. But what was that other thing which had changed over those 10 years?

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