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July 4, 2023

Hello, Insiders! Some Fourth of July trivia for you: Americans consume around 150 million hot dogs on this day each year (feel free to share that tidbit at any BBQs you attend). Today’s a federal holiday — the US markets are closed and many of us have the day off. And you’re in luck. We’ve packed this holiday edition full of some of Insider’s best longreads of the year.

We’re covering:

The Wild West days of vacation rentals are over.
The metaverse became the latest fad to join the tech graveyard.
A real-world experiment proved we should switch to a four-day workweek.

But first, “You're not gonna reach my telephone.”

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HOLIDAY TOP READS

Four-day workweek, metaverse, & more

Frank Stockton for Insider

A hacker stole a reporter's phone, credit card, and identity. So she set out to find them. As Avery Hartmans reported for Insider, she was the victim of SIM swapping — a new form of identity theft. She said the scam turned out to be brilliant but terrifying.
“Airbnbust.” Early in the pandemic, encouraged by record-low mortgage rates, investors jumped into the short-term-vacation-rental market. Now, platforms like Airbnb have more listings than ever – and many hosts are struggling with the competition.
RIP metaverse. It was once the buzzy obsession of the tech world, Ed Zitron writes. But a lack of a coherent vision for the product put it on a downward trajectory. However, despite its short life and ignominious death, the metaverse offers us a glaring indictment of the industry that birthed it.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT are going to destroy online search. Generative-AI search can help you save time, but it’ll also lie to you. The problem is that chatbots generate sophisticated, humanlike answers. Yet they don’t actually understand how the world works.
Breaking the last taboo: sharing salaries. Insider’s workplace and economy reporter, Aki Ito, was inspired by new salary transparency laws. She loved scrolling through salary-range disclosures for job openings. But Aki realized she never really practiced salary transparency in her own life. So she set out to change that.
The mysterious case of 227 middle-school students fainting last year. Drugs were originally blamed. But the truth is much stranger — a lot of signs point to mass hysteria. And this is likely one of the first times the phenomenon spread online.
Facebook ignored pleas to take down hateful content, trusted partners say. A 60-year-old professor, who was known to be a pillar in his community, was murdered. Weeks earlier, users in a special Facebook antihate-speech program had already sounded alarms about posts threatening his life. But program participants told Insider that the company did nothing.
No more Fridays: an “overwhelmingly positive” four-day workweek study. Dozens of companies across six countries participated in the largest study yet of a shortened workweek. The results were pretty optimistic: less inequality, increased company revenue, better employee mental health, and other benefits.
Florida is facing the brunt of climate change. Increasingly severe weather is making the Florida Keys and other parts of the state too dangerous to live in. The troves of residents leaving are part of the Great Displacement — a dilemma that other parts of the country and world might have to face soon.
Real-estate agents face a brutal reckoning. The slowdown in home sales is testing agents of all experience levels. Similar to how the housing market rises and falls, so does the number of realtors. And the industry’s odds are stacked against them.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

Musk, ‘hot bedding,’ & student debt

Elon Musk temporarily limited the number of tweets users can see each day. Some said it was the best thing that could have happened to them.
“Hot bedding” with strangers is the latest rent-saving strategy. People are sharing the same bed and sleeping in shifts.
Biden is planning to cancel student debt under a new law after the Supreme Court struck down his first plan. But it’s not yet clear who would qualify for it.

LAST LOOK

Barbie fits

Han Myung-Gu / WireImage / Barbie Media

Check out all the Barbie-inspired outfits that Margot Robbie has worn so far. She’s currently on a global press tour for her upcoming movie, “Barbie.”

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