Society

Your cat keeps stealing your keyboard, and it's not just to spite you

This story was written with a cat lying on my left hand.

Anyone who works from home with a cat knows the score. The laptop opens, and before you can even load your document, a warm, indignant body has claimed the keyboard as its own. For years the going theory was simple. The cat is a jerk.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. In this story by Mark Wales, veterinarians and animal behavior experts lay out a more nuanced case. Cats chase attention because whatever earns a reaction tends to get repeated. They chase warmth, since a laptop runs hotter than most napping spots. They chase curiosity, locking onto whatever has stolen their human's focus. All true, and all only part of the picture.

Then the research turns stranger and a good deal sweeter. One animal psychologist points to a habit that has nothing to do with heat or boredom, and a study out of Tokyo uncovered a skill most owners would never guess their household companion possesses. Together, they suggest your keyboard squatter isn't plotting against your productivity at all. It's doing something quietly devoted, and once you know what it is, the interruptions get a lot harder to resent.

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And what did we learn?

On Friday, we shared the fact that there’s a volcano coughing up literal gold if you can find your way to the South Pole. It’s the sort of thing that might lure a certain type of fictional character out of their mansion.

Did GOOD readers know which fictional character has amassed the largest fictional fortune? A bit over 30% of you guessed Tony Stark, and it’s a great guess, but Scrooge McDuck takes the title! At least according to Forbes’ Fictional 15, which put Scrooge McDuck at No. 1 with a fortune of $65.4 billion.

• Smaug, the dragon hoarding the Lonely Mountain (26.5%)

• Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist (30.8%)

• Scrooge McDuck, Duckburg's gold-swimming kilt aficionado (28.2%)

• Richie Rich, the boy born into a fortune (14.5%)

GOOD reader Enazzaro loved the result. “Yay! I will always love Smaug, but having Scrooge McDuck be the right answer makes my heart happy.”

Science

One ape, three experiments, and a question we thought we'd already answered

A bonobo's pretend tea party is quietly casting doubt on something we thought made us unique.

Remember declaring the floor was lava, or pouring "tea" from an empty pot at age five? Building little worlds with their own rules and roles is one of the first things kids learn to do, and for a long time we assumed that flavor of make-believe was ours and ours alone. Our creativity was supposed to be the thing that set us apart.

Enter Kanzi, a bonobo who became the unlikely guest of honor at a tea party. As Mark Wales reports, researchers ran three test rounds: real liquid first, then a mix of real and pretend, then a final round with nothing in the cups at all. The empty round is the one that got scientists talking, because Kanzi didn't shrug it off as a trick. He responded as if there was still something there worth reaching for.

Researchers are not claiming Kanzi daydreams the way you do on a Tuesday afternoon. But his responses suggest he was tracking something invisible, reading the situation rather than just the props. It's the same flexible streak scientists keep catching on camera in other animals, the kind that has made a few headlines of its own lately. The line we drew between human imagination and everything else is starting to look less like a wall and more like a smudge.

Culture

A viral budget did the math out loud, and the internet couldn't look away

Six days a week, rent paid to mom, and still coming up short.

There's a "responsible adult starter pack" you're supposed to follow to get on your feet: full-time job, keep costs down, live at home if that's what it takes. One young worker ran every step and still came up short. As Erik Barnes reports, they brought their budget to Reddit and learned their experience wasn't unique at all.

Six days a week, no overtime allowed, gas for a commute that doubles as the family taxi. After essentials, the number at the bottom is the kind that vanishes the second anything goes sideways, and the usual fix (go split rent with a roommate) doesn't apply when you live with your parents. Then the car needs work. “I'm stressing because my car needs work,” they wrote, attaching a repair quote that makes the savings line look like a rounding error.

Here's what the old generational-war headlines missed. The avocado toast generation that got lectured about lattes didn't show up with back-in-my-day speeches. Millennials flooded in with fury and solidarity, recognizing the trap they've been stuck in since 2008. “I'm showing this to the older generations that say we're lazy,” the poster added. One frustrated budget is quietly becoming a united front.

On June 8, 1789, a soft-spoken Virginian named James Madison rose in New York City's Federal Hall and asked Congress to weigh a handful of amendments that would eventually become the Bill of Rights. Ironically, Madison had spent the previous two years arguing the country didn't need one at all.

He came around for practical reasons. Several states had ratified the Constitution only on the promise that their basic liberties would be written down in plain language, and Madison, ever the pragmatist, meant to keep that promise. His colleagues groaned. Many of them figured the brand-new government had far more urgent work to do, and they brushed the amendments aside as "a tub to the whale," a sailors' trick of tossing an empty barrel overboard to distract a circling whale from ramming the ship. Busywork, in other words.

He pushed ahead anyway, and the heart of his pitch became the freedoms we now treat as bedrock: speech, press, assembly, and the rest. One amendment from his original batch then sat ignored for more than two hundred years before it was finally ratified in 1992 as the 27th, the rule that stops Congress from voting itself a pay raise that kicks in before the next election. Not bad for a guy who showed up a reluctant convert.

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