Love is in the air.
Jessica Beck is a writer, web designer and semi-professional kid wrangler from Portland, OR. She dislikes cilantro. It vexes her when people say “less" when they mean “fewer."
First Valentine's Day with your sweetheart? Picking the right gift can be a challenge. Do you want to go old school? Romantic? Silly? Cute?
Whether you've been together for a while or have just started your romance, there's a Valentine for you. We've found everything from candy to fondue to "romance in a box" (which is not at all like that Saturday Night Live skit, just FYI). Check out our ideas and make Valentine's Day extra special this year.
Commissions are earned for these sales.
When you've been dealt a devastating blow, you'll look to anything you can for a bit of comfort and levity—even the height of a pop star's son.
That's the case among many liberal X users, who, reeling from Kamala Harris' shocking electoral loss, have latched onto an unlikely obsession: UK pop star Gary Barlow's son's height.
Barlow, one of the members of the British boy band Take That who had a worldwide hit in 1995 with the ballad "I Want You Back For Good," posted a photo of his 24-year-old son Dan that has captured the internet's interest anew because of Dan's frankly gargantuan stature.
Along with a photo of Dan looming over his family, an X user quipped:
"Gary Barlow's son is scared, he doesn't know why he's so big."
It's a hilarious take on the photo, which shows Dan with his arm around Barlow, who stands beside his daughter Daisy, 15, and wife Dawn Andrews. Dan appears to be at least a foot taller than his dad, if not more, let alone his sister and mom.
The post has since gone mega-viral among people looking for something, anything, to distract them from the election results, with many hilarious takes.
But arguably even funnier was the new meme the photo spawned, in which people are taking photos of Barlow and making them about Dan in hilarious ways.
Especially given the heartbreak of the election results, this silliness had many people reminiscing about the golden days of Twitter.
We may never reclaim that era, but we'll always have Gary Barlow's very large son, and that's something.
A Fox News host whined about Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris not conceding on Tuesday night and supposedly denying President-elect Donald Trump supporters from "having their moment" celebrating his White House comeback victory.
After a tight race where Harris and Trump were deadlocked in the last weeks of the 2024 election, Trump surpassed the 270 electoral votes necessary to become the 47th President of the United States, with the AP officially calling it at 4:30am Wednesday morning. Harris conceded to Trump on Wednesday and gave her concession speech that afternoon.
But apparently, according to Fox's Dana Perino, it was a "shame" Harris didn't concede on election night.
“You work so hard. And I know that they’re disappointed, but you should concede and let your opponent have their election night," said Perino at around 2 a.m. Eastern time.
"Let them have their moment,” she said of Trump's supporters gathered at Florida's Palm Beach Convention Center.
She added:
“I don’t think it’s right."
However, social media users were quick to point out that Perino conveniently seemed to forget Trump never conceded the 2020 election to the winning Democratic President, Joe Biden.
Before Trump officially lost the election, he prematurely touted himself as the winner for a consecutive second White House term in the early morning hours after the election while votes were still being counted.
And instead of conceding to Biden, Trump falsely claimed the election was rigged and incited a riot that led to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Fox News pushed Trump's perpetual lies about fraud in the election and left the conservative news channel facing a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.
The parties settled with Fox News agreeing to pay Dominion $787.5 million in 2023.
Social media users called Perino out on her hypocritical remark while vilifying Harris for not conceding on Tuesday night.
At Fox News, even in victory, Donald Trump is the victim.
Everyone at one point or another has fibbed.
Although it has a negative connotation, lying doesn't always stem from malicious intent.
People hide the truth as a protective measure, to spare something from a harsh reality they don't necessarily have to be aware of.
Still, telling a lie can harbor deep regret.
This was something that was explored when Redditor Critical_Bat22942294 asked:
"What is the biggest lie you've ever told?"
Love makes us do weird things.
"One time, as an offhand joke, I told a girl that I was talking to that I lost one of my testicles as a young boy. Mind you, I’m not making light of anybody’s situation, I just said it because I thought it would be funny and I was a dumb 16 year old. She was incredibly sympathetic to me and I went a long with it for the day."
"Then, the next day, I forgot about it. I never cleared it up and confessed it was just a joke. So time passes by, we didn’t work out, we drifted apart as friends, stopped seeing each other around, blah blah blah. "
"Then, I bump into her one day and we start talking. The stupid teenage brains that ruined our shot at a relationship had matured and so we decided that we could try the whole thing again. To my delight, it went well. REALLY well."
"We went in several dates, took it slow, and eventually became a real relationship. Then one night, things got steamy and I won’t go into too much detail, but when she unwrapped the package she looked utterly shocked. Two balls."
"Now I have to say, at first, my ego was through the roof because no woman had ever gazed at me with such awe and shock in my life, and it kind of made me feel like a god. Like an idiot, I tried dirty talking in response to it, at which point she said very loudly: 'They grow BACK!?' ”
"Naturally, I had no recollection of the dumb joke I told over a decade ago, and my mind was racing trying to decipher the somewhat cryptic exclamation. Meanwhile, she grabbed the grapes and started inspecting them with an intensity that I’d never seen anybody treat a pair of balls with. Finally, I asked what the issue was and she told me."
"I felt like a real monster. I felt like I’d lied to this girl for over a decade, despite the fact that I only said it one time and forgot about it as a joke. She said she never brought it up after that because I 'seemed like it was a sore subject.' "
"In a way, I found it really endearing that she remembered something so stupid for so long about me. Made me feel heard."
– StrikingWind12
"I once told my friends I had a girlfriend when I didn’t just to avoid them trying to set me up on awkward dates."
– eher1045
"She's in Canada - you wouldn't know her."
– GruntUltra
"Hahaha this one always gets me laughing because up here in Canada, the boys would always say, well she's in the States - you wouldn't know her."
– wediealone
These Redditors lied in order to achieve something, and they weren't always successful.
"This one is big not in terms of impact but just in how widespread it was. For years, in school and beyond, when I was asked to 'share an interesting fact about myself' in an icebreaker, I lied and said I could ride a unicycle."
"The first time I did it, I was blanking, and the girl who spoke before me had said she could juggle. So I just went with another circus talent and stuck with it."
"It turned out to be a handy lie, since no one ever had a unicycle on hand to prove me wrong. I almost got caught once, when someone remembered I'd said that during a house party, and pulled an old unicycle out of their garage. But luckily for me, it hadn't been used in years and the tire was flat."
"Eventually, I realized that the lie had, itself, become an interesting fact about me, and so now when asked for an interesting fact, I tell this story."
– OracleOfPlenty
"When I was a kid, I told my parents I needed glasses because I thought they made people look smart. I went through a whole eye exam pretending I couldn’t see anything just to get a pair. Spoiler: they figured it out when I started reading street signs from the back seat on the way home."
– Princess-tights
"I have read the terms and agreements."
– Ok-Mail-4367
"Back in the days of shareware distribution on software company decided give 1000$ to anyone that read the EULA. It took 7 years before anyone noticed the free money sitting right there in the open. PC pitstop."
"We are all signing contracts that no one could possibly read all of them. At this point I feel if you put out contracts that 99.999% of customers do no read they are all invalid."
– Cynykl
"Once my brother locked me out of our house when we were kids. Our back door had a plexiglass window. I scratched '(brothers name) is a loser' in it."
"My mom came home later, saw it, and flipped sh*t. I blamed it on a neighbor my brother was friends with, she banned him from coming to our house. I'd feel worse about it, but the friend was even more of a pr(ck than my brother was (at that age, we're cool now)."
"I came clean a few years ago, like 30 years after it happened."
"Not that big, I suppose. Never liked lying, generally."
– pfroo40
Sometimes, the truth is just too painful to bear.
"My niece died of a brain tumor earlier this year. She was four and we were very, very close. She was best friends with my daughter, who was a year older. I was holding niece's hand when she passed."
"When I got home that night, I wasn't ready to tell my daughter yet (I did so the next morning), and she hugged me and asked if I was okay. I knew if I cracked even a little bit I'd break down so I hugged her back and said 'yes.' Never felt more like a liar than I did in that moment."
– MyDesign630
"You were okay for her sake. Please don't beat yourself up over this. You could not shoulder her grief on top of your own in that moment. You gave her one more night of peace. And you gave her better help with her emotions by waiting until the next day."
"You are so strong and you should not feel guilty for giving her the gift of one last night without grief. I'm so sorry for your loss. 🩶🩶🩶"
– JellyfishApart5518
"I told my mother that it was okay that I was alone with my grandmother when she died. In truth, it hurt a lot more to watch her die than I imagined. I held her hand and looked into her eyes when she passed, and that look on her face is seared into my brain."
– Extreme-Web2273
Other times, Redditors randomly fabricated something about themselves, just because.
"I convinced my friends I could speak fluent French. Thank God they never asked me to prove it."
– JennOutlaw
"Reminds me of a friend in school that told me he was fluent in German. I asked him to say something in German and he said, 'sprechen sie Deutsch?' I asked him what it meant and he said, 'do you speak Dutch?' "
"I did not tell him my grandmother taught me (some) German, but I still chuckle a bit at the fact he didn't know Deutsch is the German word for German."
– NDSU
"When I was in 7th grade my friend dared me to carve my name in the stone base of the flagpole in front of the school. The principal called me into his office the next day and asked me why I defaced school property."
"I convinced him that I couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to carve my own name on school property and that it was obviously someone trying to set me up. I had always been a pretty well-behaved kid, so the principal bought it."
"That’s when I learned that you need to save your lies for when you really need it."
– elevencharles
The examples shown above demonstrate that the biggest lies were told when Redditors were much younger when the consequences didn't seem to be unbearable.
The older we get, the more our motives for lying stem from lessening one's anxiety or distress. It's harmful, but it doesn't mean they stay with us for a long time.
What lies have you told that you're likely never to forget?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will soon hold substantial influence over health and food safety in the second Trump administration and he is facing criticism for explaining to an MSNBC reporter how he intends to "clear out" certain departments at federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) due to "corruption."
Kennedy—a noted anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist—said the following when asked if "clearing out corruption" means "clearing out top level federal service workers":
"In some categories, some cases, there are entire departments like the nutrition department at the FDA that have to go. They're not doing their job. They're not protecting our kids."
"Why do we have Fruit Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients and you go to Canada and it’s got two or three?" ..
"To eliminate the agencies, as long as that requires congressional approval, I wouldn't be doing that. I'll get the corruption out of the agencies, that's what I've been doing for 40 years."
"I've sued all those agencies. I have a Ph.D. in corporate corruption and once they're not corrupt, once we're getting good signs, they're [kids] going to get a lot of good choices, going to get a lot healthier."
You can hear what he said in the video below.
President-elect Donald Trump recently stated that Kennedy will play a “big role” in health care under the new administration. Trump previously mentioned that he would let Kennedy “go wild” on health, food, and drug regulation.
Kennedy has been meeting privately with Trump transition officials to shape the agenda for a new administration, potentially taking a role as a White House czar to sidestep Senate confirmation. Kennedy and his team have also been drafting 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans for post-inauguration priorities, per one source familiar with the process.
His statements alarmed many.
Some believe Kennedy's influence could bring significant risks to public health, patients, and the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and vocal critic of Kennedy, warned that Kennedy’s leadership would mean that "things would not be grounded in scientific truth, just grounded in whatever he or his acolytes believe. ... It would be chaos.”
Offit predicted that such “chaos” could lead to a drop in vaccination rates, a rise in preventable diseases, and a growing distrust in agencies like the CDC and FDA.
This could worsen existing U.S. public health issues, such as low childhood vaccination rates for preventable diseases and troubling health statistics like high maternal and infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy among high-income nations, as reported by the Commonwealth Fund in 2023.
Kennedy, who lacks medical or scientific training, has argued that drug companies and regulatory agencies harm Americans’ health. He has even proposed that certain vaccines should be removed from the market—a suggestion Trump did not dismiss. As a former environmental lawyer, Kennedy’s influence could also create uncertainty within the pharmaceutical industry, which relies on federal health agencies for product approvals and sometimes funding for research.
While major changes to the drug approval process would likely be challenging, experts fear Kennedy’s role could give him a platform to politicize select treatments he opposes and promote others without proven safety and efficacy.
In 2017, author, producer, and restaurateur Eddie Huang, then the host of Huang's World for Viceland, sat down with white nationalist Jared Taylor, who gave Huang a painfully honest answer for why he supported Donald Trump in 2016.
The video has gone viral once again now that Trump is the president-elect—and many feel Taylor summed up perfectly what motivates the MAGA movement to support him.
At the time, Taylor was characteristically upfront with Huang—whose parents hail from Taiwan—about his views on perceived European supremacy and dismissed Huang's point that Western civilizations largely "took" and appropriated things from other cultures and places to suit their own ends.
You can watch their exchange in the video below.
Their complete conversation can be seen here.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
When the topic pivoted to why Taylor backed Trump, things got interesting once Huang said:
"I want to know how you voted for Donald Trump when you're so into facts because his entire campaign is not based in facts, it was all based in propaganda and emotion."
Taylor was crystal clear about where he stood:
"I voted for Donald Trump for one reason only. His policies, if implemented, would slow the dispossession of whites in the United States. If he were to deport all illegal immigrants, if he were to think very hard about letting in any Muslims, all of this would slow the rate at which whites are becoming a minority."
When Huang asked Taylor to explain why he is "so worried about white dispossession," Taylor replied:
"Because I want my people to survive. Is that so strange? We don't control China, we don't control any place where whites are not a majority, and if we become a minority, we will not control our own destiny anymore."
Huang responded:
"I grew up in this country as a minority, as the children of immigrants. I was their first child born in America, and while I didn't have much possession or control, I really enjoyed myself and I think if you asked a lot of Americans, they would say I had a lot to offer this country."
"You know, according to you, I guess I would be perpetuating the dispossession of white America. ... Would you say you wouldn't want me in this country?"
To which Taylor had this to say:
"That is true. ... At some point, when my ancestors built this nation, they did not build it with the intention of giving it away to Mexicans, or Chinese, or anyone else."
But Huang pressed him further:
"You keep saying your ancestors built this country. You consider that a fact. ... [Who built it were] Black people. Native Americans. The Chinese people who came and built the railroads. Italian people."
Taylor concluded:
"They're Europeans, aren't they?"
The exchange is more than seven years old now—but now that it's resurfaced in the wake of Trump's election win, people feel Taylor's words said it all.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Taylor "projects himself as a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist — a kind of modern-day version of the refined but racist colonialist of old."
Taylor, who was born in Japan and lived there until he was 16, published the magazine American Rennaissance beginning in the 1990s, which the SPLC notes "focused on the alleged links between race and intelligence, and on eugenics, the now discredited 'science' of breeding better humans."
