The Consumer Product Safety Commission maintains the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a massive, anonymous database that tracks why Americans show up to the ER. That includes cases where someone arrives sheepish, uncomfortable, and very aware that gravity is not a valid explanation. Every year, doctors log what they find. Every year, the list gets longer.

Medical journals have been documenting the trend for decades. A study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine estimated nearly 39,000 hospital visits per year related to rectal foreign bodies, with most patients middle-aged and male. More than half involved sex toys. The rest fall into a category best described as “how did this even occur?”

Researchers note that many cases escalate because people try to fix the situation themselves first. Pliers, tweezers, coat hangers, and other tools frequently appear in follow-up imaging, which explains why doctors beg patients to stop improvising.

So what exactly made it into the official records last year? Here’s a rearranged selection of items doctors reported removing, pulled from government data and emergency medicine case studies.

Some of the worst items found in People’s butts

• A full shampoo bottle, listed twice, once blamed on boredom
• A baseball, documented with the explanation “to see what it felt like”
• A corn cob holder
• A turkey baster
• A wine stopper
• A plastic cleanser bottle filled with liquid
• Eyeglasses
• A rock
• Two pencils
• A vape pen
• A flashlight
• A battery-powered light
• A film canister
• A rectangular travel toothbrush
• A dog chew toy
• Uncooked pasta
• An egg
• Marbles
• A sandal
• A doorknob
• Beard clippers wrapped in plastic, cited as constipation relief
• A light bulb, inserted glass-side first
• A plastic coat hanger, altered so the person could drive to the ER
• A corn-cob style pipe
• A thermos, discovered during a police body scan

Emergency physician Kenji Oyasu, who works in Chicago, summed up the situation in a viral TikTok when asked about the strangest object he’d ever removed. It was a full-size Yankee Candle. “The desktop jar,” he said. “The whole thing.” He explained that suction turns removal into a medical problem, not a pulling contest.

Doctors stress that these cases aren’t common, but they’re common enough to keep appearing in peer-reviewed journals. They also tend to get worse the longer someone waits.

This isn’t about shaming people. It’s a heads-up that, if you decide to stick something questionable where the “sun don’t shine,” the government will write it down for the world to see. 

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The more things change, the more they stay the same. The future, it turns out, is not all that difficult to predict. All you have to do is think about now and extrapolate a little. You’ll probably get more right than wrong unless you’re really reaching.

Case in point: back in ’98, Gallup and USA Today asked 1,055 Americans to imagine life in 2025. The result of that survey has been released, and people mostly nailed it, with a few laughable exceptions here and there.

Most Americans believed the country would elect a Black president, that same-sex marriage would be legal and common, and that a deadly new disease would emerge. That last one seems hilariously and frighteningly spot on in retrospect. What did 1998 landline-owning adults know that 13-year-old me at the time was blissfully unaware of?

So that’s three spot-on predictions. Here are some more: 1998 people were right to doubt that space travel would become routine for regular citizens, but could they have ever predicted that Katy Perry would find a way to be cringy in space? Good job, Nostradumbasses. Sticking to the space theme, the respondents also believed that we would not make contact with aliens. They were right about that, but that depends on how deep the alien conspiracy YouTube/TikTok rabbit hole you’ve gone down. If you’re one of the many who have taken that particular interstellar trip down social media, you probably think the aliens are wearing human skin suits among us.

As for the stuff that didn’t age well, about two-thirds of respondents assumed the United States would’ve elected a woman president by now. Close, but not quite. More than half expected a cure for cancer. While we were not there yet, mRNA vaccines could get us close to it. Sixty-one percent thought living to 100 would be routine. That is kind of happening, just not at a mass scale. The US centenarian population is projected to quadruple over the next 30 years, according to a 2024 Pew study, but that’s still not exactly “routine.”

Some other stuff that people from the distant past of 1998 got depressingly right: 70 percent thought that quality of life would improve, but only for the rich. Opinions were split on whether the same would be said for the middle class, and people definitely thought things were going to get worse for the poor.

Some stuff is easy to see even when you’re living in relatively good times. Nearly 80 percent predicted less personal privacy, and a majority expected less freedom overall. Check and check. Most anticipated higher crime. In reality, crime rates have been in a steady freefall for decades, a trend that there’s currently no reason to believe won’t continue.

Respondents also mostly believed that race relations would improve and that medical care would become more available. Not much to say about those other than lol.

The starkest, most telling change between now and then is in the general mood of the era. In 1998, about 60 percent of people said they were satisfied with the direction of the country.

Today, that number sits at 24 percent.

The post People in 1998 Made Frighteningly Accurate Predictions About 2025 appeared first on VICE.

Apparently, most of us would rather clench through the entire evening than risk becoming a story someone tells at brunch. A new survey from bathroom retailer QS Supplies, based on responses from 1,000 adults in the US and UK, found that 56 percent of Americans avoid pooping at holiday parties. Brits came in right behind them at 53 percent.

The same survey found bathroom anxiety runs high at these gatherings, with 61 percent of Americans and 58 percent of Brits saying they feel it.

This makes sense in the bleakly relatable way so many holiday traditions do. Your stomach meets dairy-heavy casseroles, cookies, and a drink that somebody keeps refilling, then your brain remembers the host’s bathroom has a line, no fan, and a decorative hand towel that screams, “do not touch me with your filthy hands.”

QS Supplies found that 69 percent of respondents said festive foods increase bathroom usage. Why do we do this to ourselves? They also reported toilet paper use bumps up during the season, from three rolls a week to four in the US, and from four to five in the UK.

The survey even calls out dairy-heavy dishes and alcohol as the biggest culprits for sending people back to the bathroom, which feels like an accusation aimed directly at my love of cheese.

Then there’s the social pressure around being a good host, which now apparently includes making sure nobody has to face an empty roll in their hour of need. According to the survey, 55 percent of US residents and 58 percent of UK residents stock up on toilet paper before the holidays, and 75 percent of respondents said running out reflects badly on the host. Nothing says seasonal joy like the fear of being silently judged for a bathroom supply chain failure.

The survey also unearthed a detail that I wish I could unread. Sixteen percent of Americans said they often experience “ghost poops,” defined as wiping and finding nothing on the toilet paper. Thirteen percent of Brits said the same. The human body remains a mystery.

If you’re thinking, it’s fine, I’ll just hold it, doctors would like a word. Cambridge University Hospitals, part of the UK’s NHS, puts it bluntly. “Do not ignore the urge to pass a stool” because it can make constipation worse.

The real holiday etiquette rule might be simple. Put out extra toilet paper. Keep a little background noise going. Maybe set out some Poo-Pourri. And let your guests be human for five minutes without feeling like they’re committing a crime.

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The study, from the University of Eastern Finland, looked at how people fling around the f-word on X/Twitter and crowned the United States the most foul-mouthed of three major English-speaking countries, with Britain in second place and Australia in third. The analysis, published in the journal Lingua, sifted through 7.8 billion words from 435,345 users between 2006 and 2023.

The team didn’t exactly see that coming. In the paper, they wrote that “the low frequency of f–k in the Australian data is surprising, as Australians are often perceived as prolific swearers.” So your mental image of a laid-back Aussie dropping f-bombs at the pub should actually be the guy in the Cleveland Buffalo Wild Wings. Online, at least, Americans are the ones hitting the profanity pedal hardest.

If Australia lost on volume, it won on style. The team found 2,160 spelling variants of the f-word in Australian posts, compared with 1,969 in the US and 1,474 in the UK. Think “fuqqen,” “fark,” “f–knicolor,” and the very Irish “feck” tucked into memes, rants, and jokes. Americans and Brits relied more on the plain, four-letter original. 

The researchers didn’t only count curses. They mapped who we swear with. By reconstructing social networks, they found people were more likely to drop f-bombs with acquaintances than their closest friends, and the word was rare in tiny circles of fewer than 15 people. Lead author Mikko Laitinen called swearing “a natural part of human language,” adding that studying it is “fundamental linguistic research at its best.” 

Other datasets sketch a similar portrait of a country that loves a good curse. WordTips analyzed 1.7 million geotagged tweets and found “f–k” is America’s most common swear word, with about 11.6 uses per 1,000 posts. Their 2024 map of sweary states ranked Maryland and Georgia near the top, while New York landed in a hilariously tame 17th place, far below its reputation.

Researchers also note that profanity can help people blow off steam, regulate emotions, and even cope with pain, which makes sense. “That was f–king fantastic” lands harder than “that was really good.” The Finnish team’s point is pretty simple. One word, three personalities. Americans go for quantity, Australians go for flair, and the rest of the Anglosphere sits somewhere in the middle. 

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Last week, as we were all busy brining our turkeys, Green used his Substack to argue that a family of four needs $136,500 a year just to cover modern American basics.

That’s more than four times the federal poverty line of $32,150, and well above the median household income in most states. According to Green’s math, much of the country is living in what he calls the “valley of death”: earning too much for benefits, too little for stability.

Some were quick to hail the essay as a pitch-perfect encapsulation of America’s economic hardships, how our nation has turned its eyes toward the megarich and away from the common worker as its political and corporate leaders wage a class war against the rest of us.

Other economists, like those at the American Enterprise Institute, the famously conservative think tank founded by executives from several gigantic multinational corporations like Bristol-Myers, Chrysler, Eli Lilly, and General Mills, among several others, found the claim that a family of four making low six figures was still living in poverty “laughable,” arguing that you can’t declare the majority of Americans impoverished because the suburbs they choose to live in are expensive, which is what Green did when he used the middle class suburb of Caldwell, New Jersey, as his median.

Call me biased, but I don’t think we should be listening to the American Enterprise Institute on this one.

Regardless of whether anybody agrees on the specifics, Green seems to have captured a larger truth that exists in the all-important, though hard-to-pin-down realm of vibes.

The current vibes in the United States, particularly in the financial and economic worlds, are rancid to say the least. The US has undoubtedly become more unaffordable, especially for families. Healthcare is wildly expensive, and childcare can easily rival the cost of rent. The housing market is a horror show perpetuated by low availability and competition with Airbnb owners snatching up single-family homes, as well as corporations getting in on it by converting family homes into rentals.

There’s also the matter of the federal poverty line in itself. Green says that he “felt sick” when he learned that the Department of Health and Human Services defines the poverty line as whatever it was in 1963, but tripled and then inflation-adjusted. That seems more like a rule of thumb than a thorough, nuanced understanding of today’s economy.

Critics have pointed out several other issues with Green’s calculations, like how he priced items at average cost instead of minimum cost, and weighted it all heavily within childcare years, which are incredibly expensive but temporary.

Yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever. None of that really matters. People are nitpicking minute details that seem to ignore the larger picture, which is all vibes-based: it doesn’t matter how much you weigh the statistics or which ones you focus on when families are feeling the squeeze regardless.

You don’t need a lot of fancy calculations. All you have to do is look at some pretty basic facts to know things are screwed, like how Americans are delaying marriage, not having kids, and opting out of traditional family life. It’s not some kind of moral failure on America’s part. It’s more likely just simple math.

The post Is $140,000 the New Poverty Line for Americans? appeared first on VICE.

These aren’t impulsive fantasies about Parisian cafés or permanent vacation visas. The study, conducted between August 4 and 24 among more than 3,000 adults, found that stress about the country’s future has hit a historic high. Seventy-five percent of Americans say they’re more worried about the direction of the nation than they used to be, and 76% call that fear a “significant source of stress.”

The anxiety isn’t limited to politics. Half of all adults reported feeling lonely, and 69% said they needed more emotional support this year than they received. “People are overwhelmed by societal division, technology, and uncertainty about what’s next,” said APA chief executive Arthur C. Evans Jr. “It’s affecting how they relate to each other and themselves.”

Almost Two-Thirds of Young Americans Are Thinking About Ditching the U.S. for Good

That division has started to show up physically. Among adults who named it a major stressor, 83% experienced physical symptoms in the past month, like headaches, fatigue, or anxiety, compared to 66% of those who didn’t. The same group was more likely to lose patience with family, cancel plans, or struggle to plan ahead.

AI is also creeping into the collective stress index. Fifty-seven percent of adults now say the rise of artificial intelligence adds to their anxiety, up from 49% last year. Among students, that number has nearly doubled to 78%. As automation expands and misinformation spreads, Americans are increasingly uneasy about how technology will reshape work, privacy, and even identity.

Still, the survey found that most people haven’t given up. Seventy-seven percent say they have some control over their personal futures, and 84% believe they can build good lives despite national instability. Family, friendships, and health remain top sources of meaning.

But optimism has its limits. Sixty-six percent of adults think they’ve sacrificed more than previous generations, and many feel the country isn’t keeping up its end of the bargain. For young Americans, especially, the American dream feels more like a relocation plan.

As stress levels rise and passports renew, the question hanging in the air isn’t whether they love their country, it’s whether they can still live in it.

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A new Talker Research survey commissioned by the financial app EarnIn found that 48 percent of a worker’s pay is spent within 48 hours of hitting their account. More than a third is gone within the first twelve. And before some boomer says to “lay off the Starbucks,” most of this money is going to survival. Groceries, gas, rent, and bills drain balances before people even remember what payday feels like.

Millennials are the quickest to spend, burning through about 40 percent of earnings within twelve hours. Gen Z isn’t far behind and pays a steeper price for it. Over the past year, younger workers have spent an average of $275 on overdraft and late fees, compared to just $27 for baby boomers. That ten-to-one gap says more about timing than irresponsibility. Bills come in early, paychecks come in late, and the space between them costs money.

Young Americans Burn Through Their Paychecks Within 48 Hours of Getting Paid

For many, the first two days after payday have become a kind of financial triage. About half of Americans use that window to pay off essentials due within the week. Forty-two percent handle rent or mortgage payments immediately, and one in three takes care of utilities and subscriptions. Only 28 percent manage to save anything, because (shocker) there’s nothing left to save.

Nearly three-quarters of workers told EarnIn they feel stressed about money every month. Among millennials and Gen Z, the numbers are even higher. One in five Gen Z employees said they feel pressured to spend as soon as money lands in their account, and almost as many admit they spend to keep up with better-paid friends.

The result is a population living on a 48-hour loop—flush, then broke, then waiting for the next deposit. Pay cycles built for the 1950s still decide when people can afford groceries in 2025. Most Americans are paid every two weeks, while bills arrive whenever they please. It’s a system that punishes timing more than spending.

EarnIn says daily or on-demand pay could help ease that pressure. About 62 percent of workers believe getting paid as they earn would improve their financial wellness and reduce stress by more than half. The math is really quite simple. There’d be fewer overdrafts, fewer late fees, and fewer panic transfers between paychecks.

Until then, the average American will keep racing the clock every payday—48 hours of financial breathing room before the next long wait begins.

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A new definition of obesity just upped America’s obesity rate from 42.9 percent to a laughably large 68.6 percent, and all without a single person gaining a pound.

According to a new study published in JAMA Network Open, most of us are fatter than we thought. But a new major factor in our weight problems is a little bit more than the fat itself, but about where it’s positioned on your body.

Led by Dr. Lindsay Fourman at Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers pored over health data from over 300,000 Americans as part of the All of Us research program. What they found was that belly fat was a much stronger predictor of health issues than BMI alone. And yet, under the old system, tens of thousands of people with “normal” BMIs and dangerous fat distribution patterns flew under the radar.

The new definition, backed by the Lancet Commission and 76 major medical organizations, throws out the idea that BMI alone can sum up your entire health. Instead, it incorporates waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, and waist-to-height ratio to paint a fuller, fatter picture of rapidly expanding American waistlines.

There’s a massive category of Americans living with what the study calls “anthropometric-only obesity,” which is folks whose scales say they’re at an acceptable weight for their age and height, but their torsos argue otherwise. These people were found to have a significantly higher risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, and organ problems, despite not “looking” obese on paper.

Age, gender, and race all factor into it. Seniors saw the biggest reclassification. Over 78 percent of them now meet the criteria for obesity under the new rules. Asian Americans experienced the steepest increase in diagnoses, and men were more likely than women to carry this newly defined risk.

If you truly want to be healthy, it’s not good enough to suffer the slings and arrows of your bathroom scale; now you must suffer the indignity of being tape-measured like a horse at auction, only to be told that even though you hit all the required numerical criteria, you’re still too fat to live. Thank you, medical science, for making millions of Americans suddenly feel so much worse about themselves in one fell swoop.

The post Americans Got Fatter Overnight Thanks to the New Definition of Obesity appeared first on VICE.

You could blame COVID, and you would be partially correct, but there’s something more going on here.

What’s alarming is that, while death rates for older adults are returning to their pre-pandemic levels, the numbers for this younger demographic are in freefall. According to mortality experts writing for Slate, around 62 percent of these deaths wouldn’t have happened if these people had been born in any other wealthy country.

The experts from the Slate article say it’s a result of long-rotting systems. The decline in life expectancy for younger adults began around 2010, after decades of slow progress. Deaths from HIV, cancer, homicide, and heart disease were dropping — then suddenly, overdoses, car crashes, liver failure, and other preventable deaths started stealing those gains right back.

Zoom out, and the picture gets clearer. As Futurism’s Joe Wilkins points out, America’s excess death problem stretches back to 1980, the year Ronald Reagan took office and rolled out a red carpet for neoliberalism. His policies slashed social programs, deregulated industries, gutted worker protections, and handed power to corporations on a platter. Nearly every administration after has been maintaining or hastening Reagan’s destruction ever since.

The result is a shredded safety net, skyrocketing inequality, and a healthcare system that bankrupts people for getting sick. Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations raised entirely under this tattered economic system that cares more about profits than people. They came of age with fewer stable jobs, unaffordable homes, and decaying public services.

Add in a loneliness epidemic and an actual pandemic, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a population that is dying way earlier than they should be.

We’ve created an economic system that is detrimental to human life, and yet so many are still wondering why young people are dying at alarming rates, and why those very same young people aren’t having as many kids as generations past.

The systems meant to protect Americans have been dismantled over decades, sometimes gleefully by Republicans and shamefully, tail between their legs, by Democrats hoping that if they do the things Republicans do, Republicans will like them, but they never will, all the while our bodies keep piling up.

Until we stop treating the death of the youngest among us as an unavoidable fact of life and start calling it what it is — a direct result of political choices prioritizing private industry over public health — it’s only going to keep going, and may get worse.

The post American Millennials (and Elder Gen Z) Are Dying Young appeared first on VICE.

Between 2003 and 2023, death rates from falls skyrocketed, up 70 percent for folks 65–74, over 75 percent for those 75–84, and more than doubled for seniors 85 and up. In 2023 alone, over 41,000 older adults died after an accidental fall.

Why the number has skyrocketed is a bit of a mystery. It could be as simple as we got better at identifying falls as the official cause of death. So many health issues that have seemingly become more prevalent in recent years might just be the result of the fact that we know how to look for them now.

There might be another reason: people are living much longer than they used to, making it to an age where the basic act of walking from the living room to the kitchen becomes akin to walking a tight rope between skyscrapers. The older you get, the frailer you become, the more your balance falters. And, lest we forget, a lot of old people are on a cocktail of medications, some of which have side effects that include dizziness and loss of balance, which themselves lead to side effects like tripping, falling, breaking bones, and dying.

Another odd part of the report: white seniors are dying at significantly higher rates than other groups. White seniors make up 87 percent of all fall-related deaths for people 85 and over. Usually, public health numbers are the other way around. It’s the minority groups that are more severely impacted. Black seniors, however, had the lowest death rates from falls, and the researchers have no idea why.

When you get into the specific geographical regions where old people are falling, states like Wisconsin and Minnesota have the highest death rates from falls, with Alabama at the bottom of the list. This is probably less mysterious, as Wisconsin and Minnesota are covered in snow and ice for much of the year, perfect conditions for elderly slip and falls. Though the report suggests the difference could be at least partially explained by reporting practices and death certificate classifications, which vary from state to state.

Aging has its inevitabilities. You can’t outrun them forever, but you can hold them off as long as possible by staying active, maintaining strength, maintaining balance, and by trying to remain as mobile as possible, if you want to avoid death by tripping.

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