Latest from Blog Herald

Star Wars merchandising revenue passed the franchise’s total box office decades ago — but Lucas didn’t get those rights as a 1977 consolation prize, he won them back during the Empire Strikes Back negotiations, when Fox needed him more than he needed Fox

One food blogger watched her traffic fall from close to a million monthly pageviews to under 200,000 after Google’s AI Overviews started answering exactly the questions her posts were built to rank for, down to “how to cut a banana”

Florida’s ban on social media accounts for anyone under 14 is now moving toward enforcement after challengers lost their court fight and an appeals court cleared the way, and even as industry groups keep filing new motions, any platform, blog, or app whose feed reaches a Florida teenager is one ruling away from facing the state’s fines directly.

Some people don’t find their writing voice until their 60s — and for many it turns out the decades weren’t wasted, they were just research

Fold a single dollar bill in half fifty-one times, not fifty, and the stack would be thick enough to pass the Sun — exponential growth breaks intuition long before it breaks arithmetic

Sleep science says the pilot who nodded off for 28 minutes at cruising altitude wasn’t being careless — he was legally “rested” by every rule on the books, and fell asleep anyway, because duty-time regulations count hours off, not hours actually spent recovering

News in the Blogosphere

Florida’s ban on social media accounts for anyone under 14 is now moving toward enforcement after challengers lost their court fight and an appeals court cleared the way, and even as industry groups keep filing new motions, any platform, blog, or app whose feed reaches a Florida teenager is one ruling away from facing the state’s fines directly.

Talk to Me’s $92 million looks less like A24’s filmmaking bet paying off and more like a pre-built audience showing up

YouTube doubling its watch-hour bar to 8,000 hours puts 1 in 8 channels that already cleared the old one on the wrong side of the new line, and the cutoff isn’t about quality

A Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner was accused of using AI to write his entry, and months into a review, the prize committee still hasn’t said whether that changes the win

Blogging Tips & Guides

A national health survey found workers whose sleep shifted by more than 2 hours between weekdays and weekends were 50% more likely to rate their own health as poor, even though nothing about their actual diagnosis had changed

The liking gap turned out to be largest specifically in the shyest people studied, meaning the people most convinced they weren’t liked were also the same people whose own self-criticism was distorting the read in the first place

A 1988 study had one group of people write about their most traumatic experience for 20 minutes a day, four days in a row, while another group spent the same four days writing about something completely ordinary, and when researchers measured their immune response afterward, the group who wrote about the hard thing came out with a measurably stronger one

People about to give a speech consistently believe their own nervousness is far more visible to the room than it actually is, a specific mismatch researchers gave its own name decades ago and the pattern keeps showing up

The Ideas Room

Psychology says people who reach their 60s without a large circle of friends aren’t lonely — they’re the ones who figured out the one relationship truth that emotionally intelligent people swear by, which is that one person who truly sees you is worth more than a hundred people who only know your name

Psychology says people who become harder to be around as they get older aren’t becoming mean — they’re becoming less willing to absorb other people’s discomfort at the expense of their own, and that’s a skill most people mistake for bitterness

Researchers studying late-life wellbeing have found that one of the deepest sources of joy is not just being loved, healthy, or financially secure — it is still feeling useful to someone else

Gottman’s most overlooked finding: 69% of what couples fight about never gets resolved — and the ones who last have made peace with that