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When I wrote about adding baking soda to ground beef for better browning and moisture retention, the readership was starkly divided—those who think this chemical reaction is pure snake oil, and those who want to know immediately how to apply this technique to hamburgers. Well, for those of you mapping out your Memorial Day weekend grill game, saddle up. This very real chemical reaction is indeed perfectly suited to improving your summer burgers.

How does baking soda make meat tender? 

Baking soda reacts with the proteins in meats, whether ground or not, preventing them from winding up as tightly as they normally would when cooking. This is a technique that’s been around for ages in Chinese cooking, called velveting. You’ve probably seen steak, chicken, bacon, and hamburgers that haven’t been treated with baking soda shrink dramatically after cooking. The protein network starts to squeeze and clench up as it heats, expelling the meat’s natural juices. When you bite into it, the meat feels rubbery and dry because the proteins are wound tight and the juices have been left behind in the pan or down in the charcoal pit. 

Baking soda-treated meats have looser protein networks that maintain a comparatively greater amount of natural juices. To the palate, this feels like a tender, juicy, more flavorful hamburger patty with a crispy brown exterior. Oh about that: The browning gets better too.

How does baking soda improve browning?

It turns out that the Maillard reaction (the attractive and flavorful browning that happens to foods when they cook at around 300°F) happens faster in a more alkaline environment. A sprinkle of baking soda is enough to increase the PH and cause more pronounced browning to occur faster, whether it’s in banana waffles or with meat. This literally creates new flavors in your food, thus your burger will actually be more flavorful by incorporating a pinch of this basic pantry item. 

To demonstrate, I split up a pound of 93% lean ground beef and added a half teaspoon of baking soda to one half of the meat. I shaped the meat into patties and griddled up both types of burgers in a light spritz of canola oil to ensure good contact with the heat. I cooked each burger to reach 140°F to 145°F degrees for medium doneness. You can see in the picture, it’s pretty easy to tell which one was treated with baking soda. 

How to make better burgers with baking soda

This small amount of baking soda leaves no off flavors behind in your burger, and it reduces moisture loss, which keeps the shrinking to a minimum (you won’t end up with tiny burgers on huge buns). The result is tender meat, and you’ll be rewarded with a lovely brown crust. Here’s how I do it.

1. Season the ground meat

I add the ground burger meat to a large bowl and season it with salt. Go ahead and add any other seasonings you like. Then dust baking soda over the surface of the meat. For every eight ounces (half-pound) of ground meat, I used a half-teaspoon of baking soda. 

2. Mix it thoroughly

Then you need to get your hands dirty. I’m sure you could do this with a spoon but I find it much quicker to do it with my hands. I find that the seasoning gets more thoroughly distributed this way too. If you want to keep your hands clean, don some vinyl food-safe gloves. Squeeze and toss the meat in the bowl until it’s well mixed.

3. Shape the patties and cook

Form the patties with your hands and have them ready on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper, or a plate for a small batch. Let them rest in the fridge while you get the pan or the grill ready. Cook as usual. 

I recommend testing for doneness with a meat thermometer rather than by color. With the accelerated browning of the exterior, you don’t want to remove the burger too soon. I use the Thermapen One and I love it. Try to insert the probe end at a side angle toward the center as much as possible. You want a reading for the center, not to poke through to the other side. Once done, let your burgers rest for a few minutes off the heat—which I think happens naturally as you plate them and dress them with fixin’s—and enjoy the first bite of summer grill season.

Hallucinations have always been an issue for generative AI models: The same structure that enables them to be creative and produce text and images also makes them prone to making stuff up. And the hallucination problem isn’t getting better as AI models progress—in fact, it’s getting worse.

In a new technical report from OpenAI (via The New York Times), the company details how its latest o3 and o4-mini models hallucinate 51 percent and 79 percent, respectively, on an AI benchmark known as SimpleQA. For the earlier o1 model, the SimpleQA hallucination rate stands at 44 percent.

Those are surprisingly high figures, and heading in the wrong direction. These models are known as reasoning models because they think through their answers and deliver them more slowly. Clearly, based on OpenAI’s own testing, this mulling over of responses is leaving more room for mistakes and inaccuracies to be introduced.

False facts are by no means limited to OpenAI and ChatGPT. For example, it didn’t take me long when testing Google’s AI Overview search feature to get it to make a mistake, and AI’s inability to properly pull out information from the web has been well-documented. Recently, a support bot for AI coding app Cursor announced a policy change that hadn’t actually been made.

But you won’t find many mentions of these hallucinations in the announcements AI companies make about their latest and greatest products. Together with energy use and copyright infringement, hallucinations are something that the big names in AI would rather not talk about.

Anecdotally, I haven’t noticed too many inaccuracies when using AI search and bots—the error rate is certainly nowhere near 79 percent, though mistakes are made. However, it looks like this is a problem that might never go away, particularly as the teams working on these AI models don’t fully understand why hallucinations happen.

In tests run by AI platform developer Vectera, the results are much better, though not perfect: Here, many models are showing hallucination rates of one to three percent. OpenAI’s o3 model stands at 6.8 percent, with the newer (and smaller) o4-mini at 4.6 percent. That’s more in line with my experience interacting with these tools, but even a very low number of hallucinations can mean a big problem—especially as we transfer more and more tasks and responsibilities to these AI systems.

Finding the causes of hallucinations

No one really knows how to fix hallucinations, or fully identify their causes: These models aren’t built to follow rules set by their programmers, but to choose their own way of working and responding. Vectara chief executive Amr Awadallah told the New York Times that AI models will “always hallucinate,” and that these problems will “never go away.”

University of Washington professor Hannaneh Hajishirzi, who is working on ways to reverse engineer answers from AI, told the NYT that “we still don’t know how these models work exactly.” Just like troubleshooting a problem with your car or your PC, you need to know what’s gone wrong to do something about it.

According to researcher Neil Chowdhury, from AI analysis lab Transluce, the way reasoning models are built may be making the problem worse. “Our hypothesis is that the kind of reinforcement learning used for o-series models may amplify issues that are usually mitigated (but not fully erased) by standard post-training pipelines,” he told TechCrunch.

In OpenAI’s own performance report, meanwhile, the issue of “less world knowledge” is mentioned, while it’s also noted that the o3 model tends to make more claims than its predecessor—which then leads to more hallucinations. Ultimately, though, “more research is needed to understand the cause of these results,” according to OpenAI.

And there are plenty of people undertaking that research. For example, Oxford University academics have published a method for detecting the probability of hallucinations by measuring the variation between multiple AI outputs. However, this costs more in terms of time and processing power, and doesn’t really solve the issue of hallucinations—it just tells you when they’re more likely.

While letting AI models check their facts on the web can help in certain situations, they’re not particularly good at this either. They lack (and will never have) simple human common sense that says glue shouldn’t be put on a pizza or that $410 for a Starbucks coffee is clearly a mistake.

What’s definite is that AI bots can’t be trusted all of the time, despite their confident tone—whether they’re giving you news summaries, legal advice, or interview transcripts. That’s important to remember as these AI models show up more and more in our personal and work lives, and it’s a good idea to limit AI to use cases where hallucinations matter less.

Disclosure: Lifehacker’s parent company, Ziff Davis, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Maybe it’s not fair to call a medical diagnosis “trendy,” but more and more adults in the U.S. are seeking treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD, once regarded as a childhood disease, has made the transition to adulthood: About 15.5 million adults in the U.S. have been “officially” diagnosed with the disorder, and a growing group of others believe they have ADHD. A lot of them are wrong, but that’s OK.

Fed by a steady stream of online influencers and pop science, more and more people are self-diagnosing with ADHD, autism, depression, and other mental disorders. Very few of them are qualified to make these diagnoses. While it’s easy to scoff at someone self-diagnosing a complex mental illness after watching a TikTok, the rise in self-diagnosis, however flawed, points to an unmet need for mental health care.

The double-edged sword of “awareness”

A recent survey found that more than half of the members of Generation Z get health information from TikTok, and there are over four million videos tagged #ADHD on the platform. It’s in the top 10 of health-related hashtags, and the top 100 videos on the subject have a collected view total of nearly half a billion. So ADHD awareness is high, particularly among young people, and that’s a good thing.

The disease is under-diagnosed and under-treated in adults in the U.S. ADHD has been linked to job loss, depression, substance abuse, and higher morbidity rates. Talking about the disorder online de-stigmatizes it, and may lead many to seek treatment they might not have previously. And treatment is effective. So it’s great that more people are wondering if they have ADHD—but that awareness has a downside.

A recent study of 100 of the most popular #ADHD videos (with a combined view-count of around half a billion) indicates that more than 50% of the claims made about the disorder in these videos are misleading. With each false claim in a TikTok video, the popular perception of what ADHD actually is strays further from a mental illness toward a trendy collection of quirks.

Why you’re (probably) wrong about your self-diagnosed ADHD

You can’t tell if you have ADHD from an online quiz or from relating to someone else’s video. Self-diagnosis lacks the objectivity and clinical context of a professional diagnosis, and even doctors can find it difficult to recognize ADHD. Among people who seek treatment, ADHD is usually accompanied by other psychiatric conditions like major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, and/or alcohol abuse. Medical professionals, with training and experience, often treat those co-morbidities instead of the underlying problem, so it’s no surprise that average people scrolling TikTok so often get it wrong. But those mistakes still serve an important purpose.

Maybe it’s not ADHD, but maybe that’s not the point

ADHD is not sometimes forgetting appointments or zoning out in meetings occasionally. Popular ADHD videos on social media often equate common life experiences—losing your keys, hyperfixation on hobbies, blurting out thoughts—as symptoms. Those could be indicative of the disorder, or they could be just part of being human. It’s a spectrum, and, as with autism, this can lead to overgeneralization and people believing normal human experiences are part of a mental illness; conversely, it can lead to neurotypical people viewing a serious mental health issue as something quirky, cute, or funny. This is not good, but it beats the alternative of having no explanation or language to talk about a mental illness.

When people say, “I think I have ADHD,” they often mean something like: “I’m struggling, and maybe this is why.” Whether the impulsivity and inability to focus they are experiencing fit the diagnostic criteria of ADHD or not, paying attention, noticing patterns, and taking mental health seriously are important. Maybe that’s not a medical diagnosis, but it can be an important act of self-reflection. For many, putting a name to the struggle is a first step toward seeking support, even if the label isn’t exactly accurate.

Why people are drawn to misleading ADHD videos

It’s easy to blame social media for spreading misinformation about healthcare—it does, constantly—but people choose to get medical information from social media for understandable reasons. Many regard the way medicine is practiced as impersonal, even scary, and view doctors as untrustworthy. Social media figures, on the other hand, are charismatic, non-threatening, non-judgmental, and don’t charge for their time.

In a perfect world, ADHD TikTok would be a gateway to medical evaluation and treatment, but too often, it becomes the end of the line. Non-evidence-based “treatments” gain traction. Skepticism of doctors hardens into full-blown mistrust. And as research shows, frequent social media use often correlates with worse patient-provider relationships—though it’s unclear which is the cause and which the effect.

Social media will (probably) continue to serve as a support system

TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook aren’t optimal ways to approach diagnosis or treatment, but given the current realities of the healthcare system, it may be the best many people can do. Until structural changes make mental health care more affordable and accessible, platforms like TikTok will continue to serve as makeshift support systems. Flawed as they are, they’re filling a gap the medical system has yet to close. And for now, that may be the only starting point available to millions.

Phone notifications are tricky to balance: too many of them, and you’re constantly distracted by buzzes and pings. Too few of them, and you risk missing something important, from a relative in trouble to a great deal on headphones (two ends of the importance scale there, but you get the idea).

Over the years, Apple and Google have tweaked and refined the notification systems built into iOS and Android, but there’s still room for improvement. The native features that are currently in place work fine, but lack the sort of granular control you need to properly manage the alerts you want and the alerts you don’t want.

Enter BuzzKill: It’s Android only (sorry, iPhone users), and it’ll cost you $4, but it does a fine job of managing notifications for you. It hits the sweet spot to give you a powerful set of options to manage without feeling overwhelming or cluttered, and it just might be the notification solution you’ve been looking for.

Unfortunately there’s no free trial to take advantage of, though the developer does promise to refund you your money if you’re not happy with the app—and as I take you through some of the features it offers here, you should get a good idea of whether or not this is an app you’re going to find useful on your own phone.

Creating rules in BuzzKill

Load up BuzzKill for the first time, and once you’ve given it the necessary permissions to run in the background and access your notifications, you’re ready to add your first rule: Tap on Create rule to do this. That then leads you to a rule builder that will look familiar if you’ve ever attempted to set up filters for your email.

There are two parts to each rule: how to identify the notifications that qualify it (tap any app and contains anything to specify the criteria), and then the action to take for matching alerts (tap do nothing to set an action). To begin with, you’ll need to pick a specific app— whether it’s Uber, WhatsApp, or anything else you’ve got installed—and you can select multiple apps per rule.

You can leave a rule to apply to all notifications from your chosen app(s), or you can specify further filters. BuzzKill is able to look for words or phrases inside notifications, plus certain notification attributes for the notification—such as whether or not it has an image in it, or whether it’s from a group conversation (handy for those group chats).

You can build up some quite complex filters this way, and it’s even possible to nest certain criteria in sub-groups. You can ask BuzzKill to match all the filter rules you’ve listed, or just some of them (so a rule might be applied to messages from group chats or with images in them, or only when both of those criteria are met, for example).

All you then need to do is specify the action that BuzzKill needs to take, and it’s here that the app really proves its value. You can do everything from mute an alert, to make sure it’s unmuted even if your phone is silenced—so BuzzKill is useful for getting your attention for important notifications as well as reducing distractions from more minor ones. You can also invoke popular automation tool Tasker from BuzzKill for even more control.

Managing rules in BuzzKill

Once you’ve started creating rules in the app, they can be managed from the Rules tab: Simple toggle switches let you enable or disable them, and you can also delete and duplicate rules by tapping the three dots in the top left corner of the rule box.

Over on the History tab, you can see stats relating to all the notifications that have come in on your phone, with filters and summaries available if you need them. One handy feature on this screen is the option to create a new rule based on a notification you’ve already received: Just tap on the notification and pick Create rule.

The Explore tab gives you some examples of what BuzzKill can do, and it’s a great resource for finding inspiration. For example, you can set up automatic replies to incoming messages, or snooze alerts that arrive together in quick succession, or create a custom vibration for communications from a particular contact.

Head to the Settings tab and you can play around with some of the app options. From here you’re able to give BuzzKill control over persistent notifications that stick around in the status bar, and create shortcuts for quickly triggering rules from the home screen or the quick settings panel on Android.

I’ve found BuzzKill most useful for shushing apps that I don’t particularly want to hear from during the day, without losing those notifications altogether—above and beyond the features that you get with Android itself. Creating and managing rules is also straightforward, and there’s an export tool for moving them to another device (BuzzKill is particularly privacy-conscious, and doesn’t connect to the web).

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At $179.99 (down from its original $299.99), the 27-inch Samsung Odyssey G55C curved gaming monitor is one of those deals that feels tempting on specs alone.

It’s got a 1440p resolution, a 1000R curve that pulls you into the action, a 165Hz refresh rate with FreeSync and G-SYNC compatibility to keep screen tearing to a minimum, and features like Samsung’s Virtual Aim Point and Contrast Enhancer adding a little extra gaming flair without overcomplicating the experience. On paper, that’s more than enough for casual and mid-tier gamers.

That said, it’s not without its issues. If you’re sensitive to input lag or picky about motion clarity, the G55C might leave you wanting more. Fast-paced games show noticeable blur and smearing, especially with dark transitions, and the input lag at 165Hz and 60Hz can reportedly feel sluggish (oddly enough, gameplay feels snappier at 120Hz). Additionally, the backlight strobing feature, meant to reduce motion blur, introduces ghosting and can’t be used with VRR on. HDR is supported, but you’ll want to keep expectations in check—it gets bright enough to fight off some glare, but not enough to deliver meaningful HDR performance.

It works decently with consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, but you’ll have to tweak settings to avoid compatibility hiccups with 4K and HDR signals. You also won’t find any USB-C ports or a USB hub here, and there are no built-in speakers either. Plus, its narrow viewing angles mean once you move off to the side or stand up, the picture quality takes a hit—so it’s not ideal for couch co-op or multitasking with someone else. But for solo gaming on a budget, especially if you’re playing slower-paced or story-driven games, it delivers a big screen with immersive visuals and decent contrast. If you’re considering alternatives, the Dell G2724D Gaming Monitor makes a good case for itself with similar specs, but it comes at a higher price point of $314.

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Hot on the heels of Oura’s AI Advisor, another app feature from the smart ring company is leaving beta and becoming available to all users: meal logging. But this isn’t just another calorie tracking app—Oura’s Meals feature provides feedback on what you’re eating and when, without judging you for how much. 

Glucose tracking is also coming to the app, and Oura has announced a partnership with Dexcom to sell the Stelo continuous glucose monitor, which can be purchased without a prescription. If you use the Stelo monitor, you can view some glucose statistics in the Oura app, including how your blood glucose responds to the meals you track. 

How Oura’s meal tracking works

Once you have the Meals feature enabled (it’s rolling out to everyone today, the company says), just tap the plus sign in the lower right corner and select “Log a meal.” 

The simplest way to log a meal is to take a photo of your food, but don’t worry if you forget until your plate is clean. You can tap “Text input” at the bottom to type in a description of what you ate, or select one of your recent meals if you’re repeating something you ate within the past few days. 

The app takes a few seconds to think, and then it tells you what it believes you ate. (You can correct it if it’s wrong—more about that below.) Then it gives you some text feedback about your meal and a little section of statistics judging whether the meal was high or low in protein, fiber, and other factors—mostly macronutrients, but also how “processed” the meal was. 

The feedback encourages you to eat more protein and vegetables, without getting negative about your choices, and I appreciate that. Oura says in its press release: “Oura’s guidance avoids penalizing food choices, instead presenting non-judgmental insights that help members make informed choices based on their health objectives, whether that’s improving energy levels, maintaining metabolic health, or enhancing dietary balance.”

The advice is gentle and the results are usually correct

Oura’s conclusions about what’s in a food photo have usually been correct for me, but sometimes it misses an ingredient—for example, it might log a “rice and beans bowl” but not notice that there was also chicken in the mix. The description might suggest that I could include protein next time. As I said earlier, this is no big deal, because you can correct this at the bottom of the screen. 

Scroll down and you’ll see a list of the ingredients or components of your meal. You can remove components that weren’t actually there and add anything that the AI missed. I found this process quick and easy. In a few taps, the app would then tell me that I did a great job getting both protein and fiber in my meal, and the stats would look correct. 

The text feedback on the meals is sometimes helpful, but at other times is too vague and generic to be of any real use. The few shreds of cabbage in my rice bowl contain anthocyanins? I don’t actually care. Garlic was valued in ancient civilizations for its medicinal properties? Great, that’s super important to know when I’m logging some garlic bread as a snack.

I do sometimes enjoy that it suggests a way I could improve the meal next time—usually by adding some veggies or protein—but when I do log a meal with veggies and protein, it then just suggests that I might want to have the meal with “extra veggies” next time. 

I loved seeing a graphic of my meal timing

I’ve been disorganized with my eating lately, sometimes snarfing down snacks throughout the day and not sitting down to a real dinner until late in the evening. I know that late meals can affect my sleep, and that mealtimes are important for setting your body’s clock. So I was delighted to see that Oura tracks the time of meals as well as their content. 

Each meal I log is shown on a circle that represents my day. My sleep times and wind-down (bedtime) hours are shown in blue and green, respectively. There’s a yellow dot for each meal I logged today, and a yellowish area showing the times I normally eat. Right now, the app judges my mealtimes as “irregular.” Harsh, but true. I can see on the circular graphic just how late I’ve been eating. 

Where Oura’s Meals feature falls short

The functions of the Meals feature seem to work quite well, but so many functions are missing. For example, I can only see that nice graph of meal timing after I log a meal! There’s no way to access it just to take a peek. I tried asking the AI Advisor about my meal patterns, and it describes them to me in text, but says it can’t generate graphs or images to share with me. 

I also wish I could see a summary of how I’m doing on protein, fiber, level of processing, and the other factors Oura tracks. But again, these only show up when you log a meal, and aren’t available otherwise. The Advisor will describe them to me in broad terms (“Your meals show balance, but your fiber and added sugar trends stand out”) but I hoped for better. 

Another feature it’s missing—which I’m actually OK with—is that it doesn’t seem to care how much food you’re eating. It doesn’t know how many grams of protein I’ve eaten, and certainly has no clue about the number of calories. On the one hand: excellent. I don’t need another app assuming that I want to lose weight or making me measure everything as I log it. “Yes, that’s rice” is so much easier to tell the app than “I ate exactly 205 grams of rice.” 

But on the other hand, the recommendations would make more sense if the app had a sense of balance. Did I eat a lot of chicken breast and a small amount of candy today, or the other way around? Those would be drastically different eating patterns, worth giving drastically different advice. 

If you receive an email about your Social Security statement, proceed with caution: According to a new report from Malwarebytes Labs, hackers are impersonating the Social Security Administration (SSA) to trick people into installing a remote access tool and handing over full control of their devices.

The SSA is no stranger to phishing scams—the Office of the Inspector General put out an alert last month warning the public of fraudulent emails purporting to include Social Security statements that in reality led to fake websites.

How the Social Security phishing scam works

The current attack is the work of a phishing group known as Molatori. It begins with an email that appears to come from the SSA with the message, “Your Social Security Statement is now available” and a prompt to download an attached document. The supposed statement is actually a ScreenConnect client, which grants remote control of the affected device.

ScreenConnect is a legitimate remote support platform for IT pros to help users configure systems and resolve technical issues by allowing the same access as if they had your device in hand. Once hackers have control of your computer via ScreenConnect, they can use it for anything from installing malware to transferring files to accessing sensitive data, like bank and financial account information, all without your knowledge.

Financial fraud is believed to be the main objective for this campaign, but as always, stolen data can be used for identity theft or sold to other malicious groups.

As Malwarebytes Labs describes, this scheme is hard to identify in part because the phishing emails originate from compromised WordPress sites with legitimate domains. The email body may also be sent as an image rather than text, making it harder for filters to detect it as malicious.

How to protect yourself

All of the common cautions for avoiding phishing scams apply here. Do not click on links or download or open files or attachments sent via email, especially if the message is unsolicited. Go directly to the company’s or organization’s website to locate important documents and verify communication. Attacks that come from compromised (but legitimate) domains can be trickier to catch, so be especially wary of anything you’re instructed to download, click, or fill out from an email.

If you are unsure whether an email or message is real and safe, Malwarebytes also suggests copying some of the text into a search engine to determine if it is part of a known phishing campaign.

If you’re sensing the world right now is becoming more and more unhinged, you’re not alone. Fortunately there’s a podcast poking holes in your subject of choice, whether that be diet culture, science journals, airport books, or Bill Maher specifically. With research and often a sense of humor, these shows break down some of the messages we are getting online, in the news, and across all sorts of media, explaining why you’re not crazy, it isn’t you, and why some of the systems we have right now (looking at you, capitalism) are broken. 

Normal Curves

Normal Curves is kind of like a science book club—on every episode, stat-savvy friends (and professors) Regina Nuzzo and Kristin Sainani help make sense of academic journals that have made their way to mainstream and pop culture. Examples include The Sweaty T-Shirt Study, which said you could find a perfect mate by smelling their sweat, and the The Red Dress Effect, which said that women in red were sexier. They’re the ones you can count on to dissect the data, challenge the claims, and arm you with tools to assess scientific studies on your own.

Diabolical Lies

Is tradwife TikTok confusing the heck out of you? Wondering why capitalism feels like a scam wrapped in a vibe? Allow me to introduce you to Diabolical Lies, your new favorite rabbit hole. Hosted by Katie Gatti Tassin and Caro Claire Burke, this long-form (episodes are upwards of three hours long) podcast is part cultural critique, part political roast, and fully addictive. Katie and Caro named their show Diabolical Lies to poke fun at something Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker in a speech, that “it’s the women who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” suggesting that feminism is the source of our unhappiness. Katie and Caro point their fingers at capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, instead. They hold everything, from the yassification of Christian nationalism to the myth of the girl boss, all to the fire while making you laugh, think, and maybe (probably) get a little mad.

Corporate Gossip

If you think the best true-crime is white collar crime, you might want to tune into Corporate Gossip, which is all about the shady stuff that happens in board rooms and business deals. Hosts (and siblings) Becca and Adam Platsky use tons of research and storytelling to tell the truth behind eBay, the WWE and Vince McMahon, Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, Enron, and more. The topics are serious, but the vibe is casual and often hilarious.

Oddly Specific

Meredith Lynch (who you may recognize from TikTok) has one foot in pop culture and the other in politics—and her show represents that. Oddly Specific features a bit of everything, from the problem with dollar stores to the prison industrial complex. Experts come on to cover things they’re passionate about, and Meredith has a good way of explaining the basics of the subject at hand, exposing its problems, and helping you understand why it matters to you, your wallet, and your everyday life.

Bad Therapist

If you’ve ever side-eyed an Instagram carousel telling you to “cut off anyone who drains your energy,” there’s a chance you’ve been served some therapy speak. Fortunately, the podcast Bad Therapist is here to help. Psychotherapist Ash Compton and journalist Rachel Monroe are pro-therapy, but they are also pro-skewering the bad actors who use pop psych cliches and weaponize wellness to make a living from it, usually taking advantage of people who actually need real help. Whether they’re dissecting therapeutic communes, conversion therapy, or life coaches, all roads lead to grifting. Along the way, you’re always in for some history, cultural analysis, and humor. 

If Books Could Kill

You know those best-selling books—the ones that often promote miracle diets, pop psychology, pseudo-science, and reskinned versions of The Secret—sold at the airport that seem to take the country by storm, one book at a time? Michael Hobbes (original co-host of You’re Wrong About and co-host of Maintenance Phase) and Peter Shamshiri host If Books Could Kill, a podcast about those books and how they shape our culture and ruin our minds. (There is actually an entire episode dedicated to The Secret.) Together they point out the lack of citations, vague references, and fear-based marketing you find in every page. Episodes swing from hefty (the episode on Liberal Facism) to lighter and silly (there’s a great one on Who Moved My Cheese?).

The Dream

Seasons one and two of The Dream are about multilevel marketing schemes and fraud in the wellness industry, but the show has since been turned into a weekly interview show. Its episodes now focus on a myriad of subjects, but they’re all generally about critiquing the people, industries, and concepts that make “the American Dream” unmanageable. Hosted by This American Life alum Jane Marie, episodes cover the MAHA movement, abortion bans, cults, divorce, and more. Jane Marie is a top-notch storyteller and interviewer—even episodes that feel heavy have a lightness to them.

5-4

Hosted by Peter Routhier (If Books Could Kill), Rhiannon Brown, and Michael F. Vecchione, 5-4 provides a funny, liberal perspective on the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, often illustrating how much SCOTUS totally sucks. Always from a progressive point of view, each episode analyzes and discusses a single Supreme Court decision, providing an accessible and engaging way for listeners to learn about the high court’s biases surrounding hot-button issues like affirmative action, gun rights, and campaign finance. It clears the fog from our court system and clarifies how often the Supreme Court perpetuates unjust outcomes for marginalized groups.

Knowledge Fight

Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes keep close tabs on Alex Jones so you don’t have to. Each week on Knowledge Fight they review recent clips from Jones’ Infowars programming and try to make sense of it all. They go deep (and some of the content is dark) but Dan and Jordan are funny enough to make it both a wild ride and an enjoyable listen. There’s no better way to learn about conspiracy theories than to study the people steeped in them, and this show is like Cliff’s Notes for the source of many of the wildest theories taking hold of America.

Maintenance Phase

When Michael Hobbes left You’re Wrong About, he put his energy into Maintenance Phase, a show he co-hosts with Aubrey Gordon that explores and critiques popular health and wellness trends and products. With tons of notes and a lot of rage-laughter, Michael and Aubrey run through the the worst diets, exercise trends, supplements and beauty products, and “nutrition” books, and evaluate whether they are actually effective or if they are based on misleading or harmful information. (It’s almost always the latter.) If you hate the BMI, were led astray by the food pyramid in the ‘90s, or roll your eyes every time your friend goes on and on about their latest cleanse, you’ll appreciate their myth-busting efforts.

I Hate Bill Maher

Comedian Will Weldon hates Bill Maher so much that he created an entire podcast about it. Every episode of his show, I Hate Bill Maher, is a takedown of Bill Maher in general, but specifically his TV show Real Time and his podcast Club Random, episode by episode. Will is dead set on pointing out some of the superficial, misogynistic, and transphobic things Bill has said, as well as how lazy some of his comedy can be. He’ll even dip back into old episodes of Real Time to prove how much Bill’s opinions have changed over the years. (Not much.) Some call it petty, some call it a public service. Listen to the Emma Arnold episode—Will interviews her about the time she got to tag along on Bill’s annual New Year trip to Hawaii. 

Microsoft is taking another big step toward eliminating passwords with a “passwordless by default” setting for new accounts. New users will be prompted to set up passkeys when creating their Microsoft logins, leaving passwords behind.

The company has had passwordless sign-in options for Windows 11 and Microsoft accounts for several years, and in 2024 expanded passkey support across Windows, Android, and iOS. This is a big change, but not one without reason. In fact, it may make Microsoft accounts more secure, and render many scammers’ phishing tactics obsolete.

The benefits of passkeys

Passkeys are not only easier to use than passwords combined with other forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) like SMS codes and authenticator apps—they’re also more secure. Passkeys are cryptographically generated, stored on your device, and encrypted by default, making them immune to phishing and other cyberattacks. Without access to your device, bad actors can’t hack your accounts.

Instead of creating a complex password, which you then have to securely store (or remember), a device-based passkey allows you to quickly log into your accounts using biometrics like your face or fingerprint, or credentials like your PIN or password.

Passkeys are the default on new Microsoft accounts

Going forward, new Microsoft accounts will be “passwordless by default.” When you sign up for the first time, you’ll be asked to enter your email address and verify it with a one-time code—without any need to create and save a password. Once you enter the one-time code, you’ll be prompted to add a passkey using your face, fingerprint, or PIN. The next time you log in, you’ll do so with with your chosen passkey.

You can choose to skip passkey setup and return to it later (tap Skip for now on the pop-up). Microsoft will set the “best available” passwordless sign-in method for your account as the default, which could be a one-time code or an enabled passkey.

Existing Microsoft users can manage passkeys and delete passwords in the Settings app under Accounts > Passkeys. According to Microsoft’s announcement detailing the change, the company aims to eventually remove password support completely.