A nationally representative survey of 5,275 unmarried adults ages 22-35 by the Wheatley and Institute for Family Studies finds only 31% are actively dating — with 74% of women and 64% of men having had zero or almost no dates in the past year — despite 86% wanting to marry someday. The biggest barrier isn't fear of commitment. It's a collapse in self-confidence and social skills. Also: an AI agent named Luna, running a real retail store in San Francisco and built on Claude, fired a real human employee last month for being late to 17 of 23 shifts — but only after being nudged by humans to check its own forgotten attendance policy, and only after a human reviewed and delivered the decision. And Betterment's 2026 Retail Investor Survey of 1,000 investors finds 52% of Gen Z redirected money earmarked for investing into sports betting in the past year, with 26% calling sports betting a deliberate part of their long-term financial strategy — while 96% of sports bettors lose money over time. Plus the stolen Picasso left in an apartment, construction workers finding $10 million in gold, the Shake Shack self-robbery, and the python that caused a school fire.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad"}