Mountain Dew Mouth
Credit: Savelov Maksim

Mountain Dew, the carbonated fluorescent-green soda that Willy the Hillbilly declared “will tickle your innards” in a 1966 commercial, has long been a staple of Appalachia. It was officially developed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1900s, but it has ties to the wheat and rye distilled by Irish immigrants who settled in the region as coal miners during the previous century. Today, coal has left Appalachia, as have a host of other industries that brought economic opportunity. Mountain Dew, however, remains culturally significant. Sarah Baird, a writer who grew up in Eastern Kentucky, recently wrote about the importance of the drink to her sense of identity, saying, “It’s not just a beverage—it’s a portable sense of home.”

In a region long undergoing a cultural and economic crisis, Appalachia’s thirst for Mountain Dew is perhaps the lesser of many evils. Opioid addiction, smoking, chewing tobacco, lack of access to municipal water systems, and the necessary preoccupation with getting food on the table over worrying about nutritional value […]

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Children and teachers killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School

In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been at least 1,399 mass shootings, with at least 1,564 people killed and 5,515 wounded.

The counts come from the Gun Violence Archive, a database that tracks events since 2013 in which four or more people (not counting the shooter) were shot at the same general time and location. The database’s researchers comb through hundreds of news stories, police reports, and other sources each day and individually verify the reports. Still, since some shootings aren’t reported, the database is likely missing some shootings, and some are missing details. The count is also a constant work in progress, so some of the numbers and details may be slightly imprecise.

Vox’s Soo Oh created an interactive map with this database. It shows the mass shootings that have been counted by the Gun Violence Archive since 2013, after […]

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F-35 fighter jet
Credit: Gary Cameron/Reuters

The U.S. Air Force has grounded a quarter of its new F-35 stealth fighters after five pilots reported symptoms consistent with oxygen-deprivation.

The flight restriction, which affects 55 of the roughly 200 F-35s in service, has alarmed experts. They worry that, as the Air Force buys more and more F-35s, future groundings could affect a wide swath of the military’s fighter fleet.

But the Air Force is trying to put on a brave face on the problem. Service officials insist the Air Force will always have other options if its F-35s become unflyable.

Above 10,000 feet or so, the air thins out. A pilot flying above that altitude must breathe oxygen through a mask—or risk hypoxia. But if the mask or its attached filter malfunctions, the flier can still suffer hypoxia-like symptoms. Dizziness. Confusion. Even blackouts.

In recent years the U.S. military has struggled with hypoxia problems on many of its aircraft, including F-22 stealth fighters, T-45 training jets, and F/A-18 naval fighters.

The five F-35 pilots,

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While the world’s workplace is going through extraordinary change, the practice of management has been frozen in time for more than 30 years.

According to Gallup’s World Poll, many people in the world hate their job and especially their boss. My own conclusion is that this is why global GDP per capita, or productivity, has been in general decline for decades.

To demonstrate the historical seriousness, stress and clinical burnout and subsequent suicide rates in Japan have caused the government to intervene. The current practice of management is now destroying their culture — a staggering 94% of Japanese workers are not engaged at work.

Employees everywhere don’t necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees — especially the stars — join a company and then quit their manager. It may not be the manager’s fault so much as these managers have not been prepared to coach the new workforce.

Managers have been trained to fill out forms rather than have high-development conversations.

Only 15% of the world’s one billion full-time workers are […]

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Republican Attorney General Jeff Sessions

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently submitted a letter asking certain members of Congress to remove federal protections that prevent the Department of Justice from cracking down on medical marijuana patients, cultivators and dispensaries that are in line with state laws.

Under the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which passed in 2014 and was recently renewed by Congress, the DOJ is prohibited from spending federal money to interfere with state-level medical marijuana laws.

Sessions sent the letter in May and it was later obtained and released on Monday by marijuana newsite Massroots.com. In it, the attorney general said that the amendment inhibits the department’s ability to properly enforce the Controlled Substance Act, under which marijuana is listed as a Schedule I drug.

“I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of a historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to […]

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