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

Careers

INVESTI-GATOR: Someone has to go check on these dinosaur descendants. Apparently, during cold spells, alligators can drop their heart rates, stick their little nostrils through the ice, and just kinda float in a comalike state called brumation.

HUNTIN’ REPORTER: The media industry may be collapsing, but Eric Church and Morgan Wallen are too busy fishing to have noticed. The country stars bought Field & Stream magazine and plan to revitalize the outdoor publishing brand with an apparel line and a music festival.

Personal

BOT SEEKING BOT: A new dating app called Volar lets you train a chatbot to go on virtual dates with other potential partners’ bots so you can skip all that pesky first-date nonsense like “talking” or “connecting.”

THEY WROTE A STORY ABOUT YOU: Passengers took to Reddit to complain about an extraordinarily gassy passenger on an American Airlines flight who was so disruptive that the plane had to return to the gate. And the traveler wasn’t just coming off a Taco Bell run—he was supposedly farting to make a point in a fight and loudly bragged about it.

For sale

DOUBLE AGENT FURBY: In the late 1990s, the NSA briefly banned Furbies from the office over concerns that they could be used to spy on the agency. The NSA has finally released the 60+ documents around the Furby panic, which would make for excellent DBQs on this year’s AP tests.

COLDPLAY TICKETS—SKIP THE LINE: Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was criticized for traveling to a Coldplay concert in a helicopter funded by taxpayers, allowing him to skip the notoriously awful Manila traffic. Marcos Jr. defended his line-cutting by saying that he had “studied music for many years” and that the Coldplay concert was “unmissable.”—MM

uHere are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even finally get that runner’s high everybody talks about.

ENT doctors reversed a child’s deafness. An 11-year-old boy named Aissam is adjusting to a world of sound after receiving the first gene therapy treatment for congenital deafness in the US. About 200,000 people worldwide have Aissam’s rare form of genetic deafness, but there has never been a way to address the root cause of it, or any other congenital hearing loss, until now. The doctors, supported by pharma giant Eli Lilly, replaced a mutated ear gene in Aissam with a “functional” one, allowing him to hear for the first time. The study’s authors say the treatment could open the door to developing more gene therapies for other types of congenital deafness.

Engineers at MIT want to optimize your jog. Some of the brightest minds in math and science have created a predictive model that can tell you what kind of shoe you would run best in. The model assesses a person’s height, weight, and leg length to simulate their gait in sneakers of different materials and midsoles. It then projects the optimal shoe based on which one produces the most efficient running form (i.e., which uses as little energy as possible per stride). As 3D printing and related tech continue to drive sneaker innovation, the researchers say their model will be beneficial to designers who want to create new kinds of highly functional kicks (Adidas funded some of the research).

An ancient city was uncovered in the Amazon. Archaeologists have long believed that a western section of the Amazon rainforest was largely untouched, but the discovery of thousands of human-made structures in the area just quashed that theory. Using lidar technology to scan forests, researchers found the grounded remnants of five major settlements and 10 other gathering places in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They say all signs point to the presence of an Indigenous, organized community from ~500 BCE until CE 600 at the latest. That’s nearly 1,000 years before European colonists arrived—making this ancient society one of the oldest in the history of the Amazon.—ML

If you see someone angrily torching a high-end baby blankie, they’re probably protesting children’s clothes seller Kyte Baby. The babywear brand might want to throw its reputation in the wash after it refused to let a marketing employee work remotely while her newly adopted infant is in the neonatal ICU.

The 26-year-old mother, Marissa Hughes, told Today.com the company fired her following the request, while Kyte Baby claims she “declined” to return to work in person. Whatever the case, Kyte Baby’s stance was clearly at odds with its parent-friendly image, sparking an online firestorm.

• High-profile mom influencers spoke out against the brand this week, and customers debated whether to toss its products in solidarity.
• Kyte Baby CEO Ying Liu tried to contain the backlash by apologizing on TikTok…twice. After her first mea culpa came off as scripted and disingenuous, she posted a second apology the same day, calling the remote work denial “a terrible mistake.”

As the company spent the week as TikTok’s public enemy No. 1, we examine what spurred the outrage: Was it corporate hypocrisy, remote work frustrations, or America’s lack of paid parental leave? Spoiler: It’s probably all three.

Optics facepalm

On its website, Kyte Baby touts itself as a woman-owned company sympathetic to motherhood’s challenges. Kyte Baby CEO Ying Liu says she came up with the idea of sourcing breathable fabric made from bamboo to soothe her youngest daughter’s eczema.

So, when Hughes’s sister shared the new mom’s saga on a live TikTok, many people understandably felt like the company did not live up to its professed values. Thousands of angry TikTok videos followed, and hundreds of news articles appeared spotlighting the debacle.

Liu might have also made things worse with her choice of platform for the apology, according to crisis PR expert Molly McPherson. Her decision to offer penance on TikTok—ground zero for the controversy—was a mistake, as it fed her statement into the same algorithm that amplified the anger in the first place, McPherson said at an Axios event.

It’s an American problem

In the aftermath, Kyte Baby said it would amend its policies “to give new parents, both biological and nonbiological, more time off.” But even if it offers employees 18 years of paid leave to care for their babies, it won’t fix things for millions of other parents.

While Kyte Baby might’ve lost in the court of public opinion, its actions were entirely legal.

• Nine states and Washington, DC, require companies to provide paid parental leave, but there’s no federal mandate.
• The US is the only advanced economy where paid leave for mothers is not guaranteed. And America’s zero weeks of mandated paid maternity leave seriously lags behind the global average of 29 weeks, according to research from the World Policy Analysis Center at UCLA.

That makes Kyte Baby’s policy of offering new parents two-to-four weeks of paid leave depending on tenure (provided employees agree to stay with the company for six months upon return) more generous than the law requires.

New parents in the US do get up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off to spend with their biological or adopted child under the Family and Medical Leave Act, but that’s only if they’ve been with a large company for a year—criteria Hughes did not meet.

Employees still want remote work

Kyte Babygate “blew fresh oxygen onto these burning embers of resentment” over companies’ recent pullback from offering remote work flexibility, which can be particularly important for mothers, says Bloomberg columnist Sarah Green Carmichael.

Many researchers believe that surging WFH during the pandemic is what helped workforce participation among women reach record highs in recent years—with an especially big jump for mothers of children under the age of five.

This might be relatable to more than just parents…78% of workers surveyed by Bankrate said they were willing to switch jobs or make other sacrifices for the opportunity to work remotely.—SK

Cook: A one-pan Mexican quinoa dish you can jazz up to make your own.

Cookie: Alison Roman’s exquisite shortbread chocolate chip cookies.

Travel: A look at National Park gateway towns.

Listen: British rock musician Sam Fender collabs with Noah Kahan.

Reduce: Cut down on paper towel use. Try Swedish dishcloths instead.

Sleep better: Eye masks make a surprisingly big difference.

With pleasure: Choose MysteryVibe’s Crescendo 2, the doctor-recommended, FDA-registered vibrator. Clinically proven to improve arousal and alleviate dryness, it bends to your every need. Here’s 30% off—you’re welcome.*

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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.

Oklahoma City is embarking on a project that will change your preconceived notions of it, assuming you ever thought about it in the first place. Plans are underway for the 20th-biggest city in the US to become the home of the country’s tallest skyscraper and the fifth-tallest building in the world.

Real estate developer Matteson Capital initially proposed a 1,750-foot tower, but erecting the second-tallest building in the US behind New York’s Freedom Tower wasn’t enough: New plans released last week call for the building to stand at 1,907 feet (a nod to the year Oklahoma was admitted to the Union).

Here are some of the details about the mixed-use property.

• There will be 1,776 residential units along with two Hyatt hotels.
• You shouldn’t have to go far to buy stuff or take a spin class, since the proposal includes 110,000 square feet of commercial and community-use space.
• The top floors will have a restaurant and bar.
• The building will also include an observation deck, providing OKC residents an unencumbered view of their NBA team’s free agents leaving for other cities.

It will be a tall order: By increasing the height of the building, developers must get the city to completely rezone the site, not just approve a variance, according to the Oklahoma City Free Press.

But, if this complex becomes a reality and you’re lucky enough to snag a unit, you’re just a 15-minute drive from America’s only skeleton museum.—DL

Last week, we set up a Meme Contest and asked you to land the perfect punchline. Our favorite submission was from Shawn in Milwaukee, WI.

This week’s question

Jake Gyllenhaal in the Road House remake trailer has the Brew divided. What classic movie needs a remake, and who would you cast in the lead role?

Matty’s answer to get the juices flowing: Give Ayo Edebiri the lead in Billy Madison.

Share your response here.

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