Civic Life

Gen Z slang is a whole new language, and there's a reason you can't crack it

Why decoding your kid's vocabulary feels harder than it used to be.

Every generation invents its own slang. That's not new, and I think it’s pretty rad. What is new is the speed, scale, and psychological complexity of how Gen Z does it. As Mark Wales reports, previous generations coined words that mostly mapped onto existing concepts. A thing was "cool" or "radical" or "phat," but you could still trace the logic. Gen Z slang operates differently, carrying layered emotional meaning that doesn't translate neatly into older frameworks.

Part of what makes it so disorienting is that the slang isn't just about rebellion or identity. It's shaped by the mental health vocabulary Gen Z grew up with, remixed through meme culture and pushed through platforms at a pace no previous generation experienced. A word can go from coinage to overuse to ironic revival in weeks. That's not shallow communication; it's sophisticated emotional processing happening in a dialect adults were never invited into. Pretty dope, right? Wicked.

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Technology

Your phone knows you better than your best friend, and you agreed to let it

Why convenience keeps winning the fight for your personal data.

How many times have you just Accepted All Cookies? Or agreed to the terms of service without reading them? Or smashed "Share my location data" just to get the thing out of the way so you can read your content in peace? You've probably done all three today and not even realized it. There's a quote from 1999 that aged like a prophecy. The CEO of Sun Microsystems told the world, "You have zero privacy. Get over it." Twenty-seven years later, the algorithms stitching together your Google searches, credit card swipes, and GPS pings can describe you more accurately than the people who love you most. That's not hyperbole. That's peer-reviewed research. And the wildest part isn't that this is happening. It's that most of us shrugged and handed over the keys ourselves.

As computational social scientist Sandra Matz explains, the problem isn't that people don't care about privacy. It's that we keep substituting easier questions: "Is sharing my data worth it?" and "Do I have anything to hide?" Both feel reasonable. Both are traps. The first pits an obvious perk (turn-by-turn directions, a Netflix queue that just gets you) against a downside so abstract it barely registers. The second assumes today's rules hold forever. Matz points to census data that became a tool of persecution in 1930s Germany, and to the post-Roe landscape where search histories suddenly carried legal weight for millions of American women. Your data is permanent, but the people deciding what to do with it are not. 

Previous Results

Yesterday, we shared how your go-to body language tricks for spotting liars probably aren’t working. Sorry. That’s just the truth.

How well do GOOD readers lie? If we can believe the results, almost 40% of you are terrible liars.

• Terrible, my face gives away everything (39.8%)

• Decent, but only for surprise parties (22.7%)

• Suspiciously good at it sometimes (34.1%)

• If it were a sport, I’d have a trophy case (3.4%)

GOOD reader Bobby Piglet, voting with the majority, wrote, “It’s just impossible for me to lie. It just is 🤷‍♀️” I believe you Bobby… or do I?!? 🎶Duh duh DUHHH!!!!🎶

Health

Your eyes are begging you to stop doing this

It feels so good. It's so, so bad.

It's allergy season and don't I know it! The eyes, they burn! And when they burn, you rub. That deep, satisfying, both-knuckles grind that feels like it resets your entire skull. Your corneas would like a word.

As Diane Lim reports, the pressure you're applying during that blissful 10-second rub is doing more than just smearing your mascara. We're talking potential corneal damage, increased risk of infection from whatever's currently living on your fingertips, and a condition called keratoconus that can permanently reshape your eyeball. "It's one of those habits that feels completely harmless," one ophthalmologist explains, "until it isn't."

The worst part? The relief is real, but it's a trap. Rubbing triggers a histamine release that feels soothing in the moment and then makes the itching worse, creating a vicious cycle that allergy sufferers know all too well. There are better fixes, and most of them are sitting in your medicine cabinet right now. The one that surprised us has nothing to do with eye drops.

On May 27, 1930, Richard Gurley Drew received U.S. Patent No. 1,760,820 for adhesive tape, and the world has been sticking things together ever since. Drew was a college dropout and former banjo player who talked his way into a lab technician job at 3M, which at the time was a modest sandpaper company in St. Paul, Minnesota. His job was to deliver sandpaper samples to local auto body shops, where he kept hearing painters curse their way through the era's hottest trend: two-tone paint jobs. The masking process was a nightmare. Newspapers, surgical tape, and homemade glue would rip fresh paint right off the car.

Drew figured he could fix that. After two years of tinkering, he invented masking tape in 1925. The first version didn't have enough adhesive, and a frustrated painter reportedly snapped, "Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!" (He meant "cheap.") The insult became the brand name.

By 1930, Drew had gone further, developing a transparent cellophane version. Its patent landed just as the Great Depression hit, and the timing proved perfect. Americans started using Scotch tape to mend torn clothes, patch book covers, and seal cracked eggs. While other companies were folding, 3M thrived. Today, the company sells enough Scotch tape every year to circle the Earth 165 times.

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💬 From the group text…

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