The Washington Post

It’s a first date. The drink in your hand is mostly ice. You’ve talked about your jobs, your days, your dogs. The conversation lulls, and you can feel the question coming. “So,” the person across the table asks, “what do you do for fun?” We are supposed to be living in the golden age of hobbies. Great thinkers of the 20th century believed that innovations in technology would make work so efficient that leisure would eclipse labor. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted 15-hour workweeks by 2030. This would leave people the opportunity to “cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself.” Work, streaming, scrolling and side-hustling are keeping us from activities that bring joy and meaning to our days.

Amazon is claiming the nation’s premier product safety agency is unconstitutional, deploying an argument that has found favor with the Trump administration as the company seeks to avoid responsibility for shipping dangerous products to consumers.

The National Park Service is reinstating fired workers. But staffing was a challenge even before Trump’s term. “Trash doesn’t stop. Bathrooms don’t stop,” Chmura, a 28-year-old park custodian. He provided terrifying photos of the ways people leave park bathrooms to prove it. Chmura was living out of his car to make ends meet on a salary of about $40,000 a year while he worked for the Park Service. He spent his free time rock climbing. When he was on the clock, he said, he played a critical role keeping a large swath of the park clean.

Column by Andrew Van Dam: America’s purported loneliness epidemic, with its fuzzy definitions and clashing claims, is the type of gnarly challenge that’s guaranteed to both attract and destroy data journalists. In 2024, the Pulse asked more than half a million American adults how often they felt lonely. For most of us, the answer was rarely (34 percent) or never (26 percent), suggesting that a robust 60 percent of us either never feel lonely or take the occasional twinge of loneliness in stride. Only 5 percent say they always feel lonely, while 8 percent usually feel that way. In maps, people who are “always” lonely tend to live in the Sun Belt, with a particular focus on the belt’s defiant Deep South buckle. Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia lead the pack. As a rule, this extreme loneliness tends to be higher in states with higher poverty rates.

When Elon Musk launched a new version of his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok last month, he said it would be “maximally truth-seeking … even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.” But Grok is often at odds with Musk himself, according to tests by The Washington Post. Asked to give one-sentence responses to political claims made by the billionaire ally of President Donald Trump, Grok contradicted Musk on topics including immigration and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

Buy-now-pay-later loans are often used to spread out interest-free payments for expensive purchases such as smartphones, furniture or appliances. Now hungry consumers can add another option to that list: food. While this might add another layer of convenience for shoppers, some experts warn that these services can have a negative impact on customers who are buying items they don’t need and cannot afford. DoorDash has partnered with payment and commerce service Klarna to offer customers choices when they check out, including paying immediately, in four installments or deferring payments to “a more convenient time.

When it comes to “Severance” sleuths, Dan Erickson is a man of two minds. As the creator of the heady Apple TV+ series about office drones who surgically bisect their work and home personas, the 41-year-old showrunner is “honored” by the hordes of fans mining episodes for theory-fueling nuggets. But being responsible for many an imagination run rampant also carries its own anxieties. “It is terrifying because I know how invested people are in it,” Erickson says. “I’m afraid of disappointing the barista at the coffee shop by ordering wrong and having them not like me. So the idea of a lot of people feeling like the show wasn’t what they were expecting it to be, it does take up space in my head.”

The chief executive at the mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac was fired in an ongoing government overhaul of federal housing regulators and the firms they oversee. Diana Reid, who took over the company in September, was let go by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to multiple people close to the company. It is unclear what immediate impact the dismissal will have, or who will take over Freddie, which plays an enormous role in America’s mortgage market. As of Thursday evening, Reid’s LinkedIn no longer listed her as Freddie’s CEO, saying she served in the role until March 2025.

When inventor Thomas Edison would hit a creative block, he would use a trick to help his mind get unstuck. He would sit in his favorite chair holding steel balls in his hands and begin to doze off. Once his muscles relaxed enough, the balls would slip from his hands into pans on the floor. The loud noise would jar him awake. Scientists are finding experimental evidence that the transition between wakefulness and sleep is a portal for creative thought.

If you own one of Amazon’s voice assistant gadgets, everything you say to Alexa is beamed to Amazon’s cloud and saved forever on the company’s computer systems. Amazon uses those Alexa voice recordings to answer your commands and train its artificial intelligence. Now Amazon is removing a setting that gave some Alexa device owners a more privacy-preserving option. Few people used that setting, but the change is a reminder that Alexa is a data hog and likely growing more so. Even if you don’t own an Alexa device, Amazon shows the potential personal toll in the age of AI. Digital bits of ourselves are being fed into corporations’ computers and we can’t know how they might be misused. We may need personal empowerment and regulation to wrest back some control.