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

Careers

SEEKING REGIONAL RAT REPS: This week, NYC hosted the first-ever National Urban Rat Summit, welcoming public health officials from around the country to discuss strategies to rid their cities of vermin. Every attendee was required to lift their hats upon arrival to ensure they weren’t being Ratatouille-ed.

SERPENT SWEEPER: A Florida man (don’t worry, it’s a good thing) won the state’s annual Python Challenge by trapping and humanely killing 20 Burmese pythons from the Everglades. His prize is making as many pairs of boots as he wants out of the skin.

RANDOMIZED ACTOR: The Sims movie is happening, with Barbie star Margot Robbie attached as a producer. Electronic Arts confirmed the film will involve a lot of Sims lore in order to snag a Ctrl + Shift + C “motherlode” at the box office.

Personal

NEW NYC DATE SPOT: A Rainforest Cafe pop-up is coming to the Observatory Deck of the Empire State Building for a weekend in October, so you may need to postpone any Sleepless in Seattle plans you previously had.

ISO NEW BURGER: A virtual primary care website ranked Five Guys cheeseburgers as the unhealthiest fast-food burger option. The decision is shocking, considering Culver’s has something called a “ButterBurger.”

For sale

FOUND LUGGAGE: A site selling the contents of unclaimed bags from airports released a report of all the weird/fancy stuff they found. The most expensive item was a $37k diamond ring amid a sea of abandoned tankinis that never made it to the beach.

OLD WOOD: A Victorian-era gemstone called “Jet” is gaining popularity among high-end jewelry designers. Jet is made from wood that’s been pressurized for millions of years, and was worn by royals like Queen Victoria. We should have known Jet would be “in” the second we saw going-out tops transition to corsets.—MM

Image of the week

This month, KitchenAid unveiled a $700 stand mixer with a walnut bowl that seems more interested in serving as a status symbol than a functional piece of cooking equipment.

Reviews poured in this week and sparked a lot of controversy online. As The Atlantic’s critique pointed out, a $40 metal or ceramic bowl can get similar jobs done without any of the splintering or warping concerns that come with wood. This bowl also carries a warning not to mix the first thing you’d think about mixing in the bowl: “It is not recommended to use the oiled wood bowl for whipped egg creations,” a company spokesperson said.

It will be interesting to see how this affects Larry David’s respect for wood.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even swim with sharks.

Sharks are moving back to the Boston Harbor. If you clean it, they will come. After years of pollution reduction and conservation efforts in the once-unswimmable Boston Harbor, the sand tiger shark population is finally rebounding. Only an estimated 10%–30% of the scary-looking-yet-docile species survived overfishing between the 1970s and 1990s, which prompted a mandatory-release rule for fishermen that actually worked, according to New England Aquarium researchers. With the harbor cleaned and sand tiger sharks (not to be confused with hostile tiger sharks) protected, scientists are finding and tagging more youngins who swam thousands of miles from their birthplaces along Florida and North Carolina to grow up in Boston waters.

New Zealand’s native language is recovering from near-extinction. Using census data and self-report surveys, a new projection model sees the indigenous Māori language pulling back from the brink of linguicide thanks to revitalization efforts in New Zealand. Everybody who inhabited Aotearoa, the Māori name for what’s now called New Zealand, used to speak te reo Māori (the Māori language) before the 1800s. By 2013, only 3.7% of the population still could, but that ticked up to 4% in 2018, per census data, and reached 7.9% in 2021, according to self-report surveys. The new model says New Zealand’s goal of 1 million speakers by 2040 (~20% of the population) is possible as long as reeducation efforts continue to ramp up.

🩸 A 50-year-old mystery in our blood is solved. There’s a lot more to our blood than whether we’re type A/B/AB/O and negative or positive. Those are just two of the 47 groupings that scientists use to describe different antigens in our red blood cells, and the newest classification just cracked a half-century-long conundrum. Researchers discovered that two people in medical history who baffled everyone by lacking a certain red blood cell antigen (aka a cell’s marker or signpost) may have developed what they call “AnWj-negative” blood through a gene mutation that likely only affects thousands of people worldwide. Still, including this grouping in blood classifications could prevent life-threatening, incorrect blood transfusions between AnWj-positive and -negative people.—ML

Can Costco solve CA’s housing crisis?

A lucky bunch of Californians will soon live a mere elevator ride away from the emporium where they can snag a $1.50 hotdog-soda combo and a 12-pack of ketchup in one run. Construction began this week on South LA’s first Costco, and in an unusual twist, it’ll come with a bulk order of apartments towering overhead.

It’s the first-ever apartment complex with a Costco on the ground floor.

The residential–retail symbiosis—in which the flats complement the 185,000-square-foot warehouse store—is also the first building project to take advantage of a recent state law meant to expand California’s notoriously deficient housing supply. Costco bypassed some of the approval rules for commercial development by partnering with the housing developer Thrive Living, which will build apartments on top of the warehouse store.

• The condo will have 800 units, 23% of which will be designated for low-income households, as well as a rooftop pool, basketball court, and community gardens.
• The Costco location will have a pharmacy and an optics store and is expected to bring 400 jobs to the neighborhood—an area the leader of one local nonprofit called a food desert.

But the relative crampedness of the apartments, which measure from 350 to 605 square feet, had at least one observer (lovingly) comparing the living community to “a Costco Prison.” So, let’s deconstruct how government rules influenced the project’s blueprint and see whether living above a Costco can help solve a housing crisis.

Regulatory gymnastics

Building a jumbo store in California normally involves going through nine circles of Hell an extensive regulatory approval process, entailing a lengthy environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act, which opponents of new developments often use to kill projects.

But a state law, Assembly Bill 2011, that went into effect last year exempts some mixed-use developments with affordable housing from going through CEQA, allowing Costco and Thrive Living to proceed without some major bureaucratic steps and potential lawsuits from neighbors.

In order to take advantage of the law and zoning exemptions, the development had to meet specific requirements:

• Two-thirds of the five-acre land tract it will sit on had to be devoted to housing, with a portion of the apartments offered at lower-than-market-rate rent.
• The construction workers on site had to be paid a wage commensurate with what union workers make in the area.

These stipulations may explain the large size of the development versus the modest size of the dwellings. To cut costs and accelerate construction, Thrive Living opted for a prefabricated modular design for the apartments so they could be manufactured offsite (and avoid some of the labor wage requirement). That means they have to be small enough to be loaded on a truck for final assembly above the Costco, housing activist Joseph Cohen May explained on X.

Yimby victory

While it’s a win-win for Costco and the apartment builder—whose units are expected to be more desirable due to the beloved retailer anchoring the site—the development’s biggest champions are housing activists.

They’re celebrating the partnership as a model for building residences in dense urban areas while navigating California’s complex construction regulations, which they blame for a chronic housing shortage and off-the-charts home prices. Los Angeles is short 270,000 affordable housing units, according to one nonprofit, while the median home price in the city is $1.2 million, per Realtor.com.

If the Costco apartments are commercially successful, it could pave the way for other developers to collaborate with retailers in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The discount grocer Aldi is already following a similar path to Costco, with housing being developed on the same site as new stores in several states.

Zoom out: A lack of affordable housing isn’t just a California problem. Both candidates in the presidential election have promised to spur home construction to make housing more affordable. But some think tackling the issue might take more than private partnerships. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota introduced a longshot bill this week to create a $30 billion development agency that would finance the construction of noncommercial affordable housing run by nonprofits for low-income residents.—SK

Place to be: A treasure hunt in the Northeast

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.

With fall officially beginning today, a weekend trip to the Northeast for picking apples and peeping foliage is probably on your agenda. But video game developer Jason Rohrer has a different idea for anyone visiting the region: a treasure hunt.

“Project Skydrop” began Thursday after Rohrer hid a 10-oz. solid gold trophy worth about $25,000 somewhere in the Northeast. It’s engraved with a bitcoin wallet recovery phrase that unlocks half of the hunt’s entry fees for an additional few thousand dollars.

What are the clues to finding the prize that’s sitting out in the open of a wooded area? Unlike with other treasures, there is no map where X marks the spot.

• Aerial photographs that begin unhelpfully close to the trophy will slowly zoom out, making it only a matter of time before Geoguessr Guy can tell everyone where it is.
• A circle representing a 500-mile radius will creep closer to the location over three weeks.

As Rohrer told Outside Magazine, “I know it’s not gonna be solvable on day one. And I know it’s definitely going to be solvable on day 21.”

This isn’t Rohrer’s first treasure hunt: The 46-year-old buried his titanium board game, A Game For Someone, in a Nevada desert in 2013—but that game is meant to be played 2,000 years from now. Rohrer created a list of 1 million GPS coordinates, only one of which is the actual location of A Game for Someone.—DL

Crowd work

Last time we asked, “What’s your most controversial food opinion?” Here are our favorite responses:

• “Cabbage is superior to all forms of lettuce.”—Cheryl from Andover, MN
• “Don’t put milk in cereal! I hate the taste of milk in general but the thought of eating soggy cereal is nauseating.”—Kelly from Minneapolis, MN
• “Raspberries should have the universal love and notoriety that befalls strawberries. Strawberries are the worst berry we have (flavor, artificial flavor, texture, etc.). Viva la raspberries!”—Catherine from Texas
• “Savory oatmeal is much better than sweetened oatmeal. A little olive oil, salt, and pepper and you’ve got yourself a great breakfast or lunch!”—Julie from Vista, CA
• “When we talk about cheese and our favorites, cream cheese is not mentioned nearly enough. Cream cheese has many varieties and some of the best are cheesecake (NY), cream cheese pound cake, and we cannot forget a bagel with cream cheese. My point: cream cheese is a top cheese.”—Jalen from Hartford, CT
• “The appetizers at a restaurant always taste better than the mains.”—Trisha from New York

This week’s question

If you could walk around anyone’s house throughout history, fictional or real, uninterrupted for one hour, which house would you choose?

Holly’s answer to get the juices flowing: “Bleak House all the way. The wind is in the east…”

Share your response here.