Culture

The soothing, nostalgic comfort food of commercials from the 80s and 90s

A trip back to the jingles, smiles, and chaos-free ads that felt calmer

Today’s ads are slick, calculated, and optimized. The product of market research, A/B tests, and a room full of people with master’s degrees in marketing. But I’d bet all the cash in my wallet that you couldn’t hum me a bar from any ad made in the last ten years. There was a time, I tell you, when this was not so.

There was a time when commercials felt hand-crafted and a little unhinged. When they were packed with zany enthusiasm, earworm jingles, and slogans that barely made sense even then. When the image was standard def, the smiles were huge, and the whole thing felt like it had been assembled with glue, vibes, and blind optimism. We’re talking about spots like the Doublemint gum commercial from the ’90s, the one with the aggressively cheerful twins and the theme song that still lives rent-free in your brain. Your mouth is watering for a stick of it even now.

For this story, Ryan Reed has collected some of the finest examples of their time. Come, marvel at the magic of 10,000 VHS tapes in one location!

* - Joke’s on you! I carry neither wallet nor cash. I’m a child of the 80s, not a resident.

Yesterday’s results

Yesterday, we shared surprising research showing it’s the younger generation leading the charge in kicking the screen-time habit.

I asked you, GOOD readers, which way your screen time is trending, and over half of you are still working to bring it down. 

• I hit max saturation years ago and it hasn't changed a bit. (23.3%)

• I'm a recovering screen-junkie, it's pretty minimal these days. (6.7%)

• It's coming down, but I'm still working to make it less. (53.3%)

• It had been pretty minimal, but it's trending upward. (16.7%)

I’ll forgo mentioning that all respondents had to use a screen to reply.

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Culture

A father thought his daughter was “too pretty” to be his, and a DNA test agreed

What looked like betrayal turned out to be something far stranger.

A father couldn’t shake the feeling that his teenage daughter was “too pretty” to be his, or even his wife’s. As Adam Albright Hanna reports, that doubt curdled into suspicion and then into a secret DNA test.

The result detonated the family. Accusations of infidelity, a marriage in ruins, years of resentment, and a daughter caught in the middle of something she never asked for.

Then, long after everyone thought the damage was done, she went to a birthday party and met another girl born on the same day, in the same hospital, who looked uncannily familiar, and suddenly the DNA test seemed not to tell the whole story

Science

What are raccoons hiding beneath their furry masks?

There’s a lot we can learn from these not-quite-pets, not-quite-wild animals.

There’s a sound in the trash can. Your fight or flight kicks in. You lift the lid and lock eyes with a small bandit wearing a perfect black mask. Not a possum. Not a bear. A raccoon. You sigh, grab a broom, and somehow cannot stay mad.

As Kelly Lambert notes, raccoons live in a weird middle zone. Too wild to domesticate. Too charming to think of as wild. They weaponize cuteness, use those almost-human paws with eerie precision, and keep finding new ways into places we swear we sealed off.

But the cuteness is just the cover story.

Raccoons are escape artists who routinely outsmart research labs, barn climbers with suspiciously good planning skills, and animals whose brains look a lot more like ours than scientists expected.

From viral drunk raccoon videos to neurons usually reserved for primates, those fuzzy masks may be hiding one of the most underestimated minds in the animal kingdom. Studying them might even tell us something uncomfortable and fascinating about ourselves.

At half past three, on January 16, 1909, humans set foot on the magnetic South Pole for the first time. Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson, and Alistair Mackay disembarked from the Sy Nimrod, an elderly sail-and-steam ship commanded by Ernest Shackleton, and made the trek across the high, frigid continent on foot without animals or vehicles of any kind.

The expedition was in search of the true magnetic pole of the day, which drifts between six and nine miles each year. Having navigated over 1,200 miles to reach their goal and successfully recorded the pole’s location, the trio then raced back to catch the ship home, only to miss it due to inclement weather. The Nimrod returned two days later and picked them up. The casualties for the trip amounted to little more than hunger, exhaustion, frostbite, and the loss of one crewman’s toe. Their data improved magnetic charts and helped launch the next wave of Antarctic science.

Of note, Nimrod is the name of a great hunter in the bible and a fitting name for the ship. It wasn’t until Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck took to using the term sarcastically that it came to mean what it does now.

Today, the pole has wandered hundreds of miles and now sits out in the Southern Ocean.

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