The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a “Classifieds” section...

UNUSED FIREWORKS FOR SALE: Scarborough, UK, canceled its NYE fireworks show so as not to scare away a wild walrus that had wandered in, nicknamed Thor. Unfortunately, Thor took “make yourself at home” too literally and *ahem* put on a little show for everyone.

STOLEN TPS REPORTS IN NEED OF LAUNDERING: A Zulily employee allegedly stole over $300,000 in payments and merch in a theft that was inspired by the movie Office Space.

WE’LL CLEAN UP YOUR CIG BUTTS: As part of a waste reduction package, Spain is requiring cigarette companies to pay for cigarette butt cleanup.

ISO ANYONE NOT NAMED AFTER MESSI: Santa Fe, Argentina, reported a 700% jump in babies named Lionel or Lionela after Lionel Messi led his country to victory in the World Cup.

FIND YOUR ANCESTORS WITH PBS: Actor Edward Norton found out that Pocahontas was his 12th great-grandma on the PBS show Finding Your Roots. In 1613 Pocahontas was kidnapped and married to John Rolfe, an English colonist, in 1614. And then, just 394 years later, Norton’s Hulk movie flopped.

ISO PASTINA…URGENT!! Ronzoni’s tiny pastas will be discontinued after the company said it can’t find a third-party manufacturer. How hard can it be to cut out those little guys? Let us do it.

GET YOUR BEES VAXED HERE: The first vaccine to protect the furry pollinators has been approved in the US. Don’t tell us how scientists are going to give it to the bees—we want to pretend it’s through a mini needle.—MM

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even impress your friends on your next beach excursion.

A better way to write your resume. Your college career advisor told you to list out every job you had with the dates you worked there, but new research shows that might not be the best way to get a hiring manager’s attention—especially if your resume has gaps. An experiment using real employers in the UK showed that providing the number of years you worked at previous jobs instead led to 15% more callbacks for applicants with holes in their resume (and 8% for those without). The study also determined that the boost came from making the applicant’s experience seem more “salient,” not because it’s easier to read.

Throw the hot potato (stone). Science has finally answered the age-old question: What stones are best for skipping at the beach? The answer is: potato-shaped ones. While it’s true that a flat stone will skip more times, a heavier stone will get more height, and therefore looks way cooler as it travels. This finding might seem trivial, but it turns out that understanding stone-skimming dynamics could also help us learn more about phenomena like how asteroids move through space. In fact, mathematicians made the discovery while working to improve air travel safety.

Innovation peaked with your grandparents. We know we’re supposed to be touting progress in this section, but a study published this week found that science has actually been getting…less innovative since the 1950s. Reviewing data from 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six decades across all major fields of science, researchers found that newer discoveries are less likely to be disruptive and push science and technology in a new direction. No one’s exactly sure why, but one theory is that scientists have already found all the “low-hanging fruit.” Another is that they’re working in bigger teams and pushed to publish more frequently, leading to more incremental advancements.

It’s a new year, and that means US copyright law just made tons of cool content available for use free of charge. This year’s Public Domain Day saw the copyright liberation of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the last Sherlock Holmes stories penned by Arthur Conan Doyle. Since a film crossover of the two seems unlikely, everyone is already looking toward 2024—when Mickey Mouse will be on the list.

Don’t get your hopes up about finally monetizing your illustrated Mickey fanfic next year, though, as only the copyright for the crude black-and-white version of the iconic Disney character, as seen in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie, will expire. The more familiar color iteration of the world’s most famous mouse is set to remain Disney property for a few more years.

Still, it’s got people wondering about Disney’s next move.

How Disney protects Mickey and Co.

Disney has a reputation for holding on to its billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property almost as zealously as Scrooge McDuck hordes his cash. That reputation is well deserved:

• Disney once told grieving parents they couldn’t engrave Winnie the Pooh on their stillborn baby’s gravestone.
• A Disney affiliate charged a public school PTA $250 for playing a Lion King DVD at a fundraiser.

The last time Mickey was about to hit the public domain, Disney successfully lobbied for a law critics dubbed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act, '' which extended copyright protections for corporations to a maximum of 95 years after a work’s original publication.

Opponents of the legislation saw it as a method for corporations and creators’ heirs to extract payments for art, rather than as a legitimate way to incetivize creativity (dead creators are not going to produce new, interesting works).

So, will there be another Mickey Mouse Protection Act?

As classic Disney films from the 1930s like Snow White near their entry into the public domain, the entertainment juggernaut could embark on another congressional influence campaign to keep its copyrights from expiring.

But it got a lot of bad PR last time, and it’ll certainly be more of an uphill battle this time around. Some conservative lawmakers have been eager to retaliate against the company for its “woke corporate actions,” as Rep. Jim Banks described them. Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill last year that would retroactively limit copyright protections to 56 years for big corporations.

Even after the copyrights expire, Disney will still have other tools, including trademarks on its characters—so the folks behind a Minnie Mouse indie body horror would still have to make sure that audiences understood it’s unaffiliated with the corporation.

Zoom out: Disney’s not the only studio with something to lose, as the upcoming classes of copyright expiration will include many works from the dawn of cinema. The treasure trove of films held by studios from Hollywood’s Golden Age, like Warner Bros. and MGM (owned by Amazon), may soon become the property of anyone capable of typing “watch [insert movie title] online.”—SK

Meal prep: It’s soup szn. Try this easy kimchi soup for the double impact of temperature-hot and spicy-hot.

Book club: Brew writer Matty Merritt’s favorite book she read last year was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

Smart purchase: This super simple little ring toss game can be played with or without alcohol.

Streaming binge: Netflix pulls zero punches in its docuseries about notorious Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.

Tech tip: New year, new reminder that you can just type docs.new or sheets.new into the URL bar on your browser to open a new Google Doc or Sheet.

Playlist: Lane 8 just dropped a winter mixtape that’s unseasonably fire.

Life hack: Apparently it’s 3,000% easier to peel garlic than we previously thought.

Give it a go: Get paired with a Future coach for unlimited personal training based on your goals + schedule. Start a 1-month free trial—this month only.*

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It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

Whether or not the University of Georgia beats TCU tomorrow night in the college football title game, its home base of Athens, GA, is worth a stop on any Southern road trip. Located about 60 miles northeast of Atlanta, this college town is not exactly conducive to studying, with top-tier food, an actually good craft brewery scene (heard of Terrapin?), and reportedly the highest number of bars per capita in the US in its downtown. Plus, the city’s legendary live music scene is known for launching many famous bands, including R.E.M., the B-52’s, and Of Montreal.

Some other fun Athens facts:

• Founded in 1785, the University of Georgia is one of the oldest public universities in the US.
• A famous landmark in Athens is a tree that owns itself. One resident loved his white oak tree so much that he granted it autonomy upon his death. After that tree was toppled by wind in 1942, the city planted another tree (the “Son of the Tree that Owns Itself”) and gave it the same property rights as its ancestor had.

In this section, we pose a goofy, open-ended question to our readers, and then highlight the best responses in next Sunday’s Brew Review. Definitely sound off, because—who knows? You might be able to brag to all your friends that you were featured in the Brew.

Here’s this week’s question: Merriam-Webster named “gaslighting” as its 2022 Word of the Year. (To use it in a sentence: “James Cameron has to be gaslighting us with these Avatar movies.”) Come next December, what will Merriam-Webster select as its 2023 Word of the Year and why?

For example, our prediction is that the 2023 Word of the Year will be “cringe,” because even though the term has been around for a while, we think this is the year Joe Biden will use it in an executive order. Then Elon Musk will make fun of him for it and there will be 600 Atlantic articles about the evolution of the word.

Share your response here.