Stephen Mihm

If you venture out this Halloween, you’re more than likely to encounter a spectacularly macabre set of displays on the lawns of your neighbors. In much of suburbia, the scale of Halloween decorations has reached new levels. From fake cemeteries and garden-variety ghosts to giant skeletons and Grim Reapers: if it evokes death, you’ll see it on October 31.

Should the US and Russia resume nuclear testing?

The price of groceries and other necessities isn’t the only thing subject to inflation. As we close out the year, a spate of news stories has focused on reports that grades given to college students have soared in recent years, even as evidence mounts that a growing number of freshmen are showing up for college ill-prepared in basic subjects like math.

Kraft Heinz’s declining dominance in the mac and cheese industry has been blamed on cost-cutting and bad management decisions. But the company’s biggest challenge is that the rules of indulgence have changed. Comfort food, and increasingly all foods, are expected to do double duty.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once said that he’s taken so many supplements that he “couldn’t even remember them all,” has pledged to end what he has described as the “war on vitamins.”

The scenes playing out in Minneapolis in recent weeks offer an object lesson in the dangers of federal overreach. After the killings of two American citizens — to say nothing of the brutal treatment of immigrants, both legal and otherwise — the outrage is palpable and growing.

The first images that come to mind when you hear “Admin night” might be of a fun evening out for office support staff, but the trend is significantly less entertaining. As one primer on the practice put it, it’s a “great productivity hack.” Instead of happy hour, friends gather for a night of doing their taxes, answering emails and otherwise catching up on work.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just being blamed for killing jobs; it’s exposing the fundamental flaw in one of hiring’s oldest tools: the résumé.

A very familiar feature of corporate life has crossed over into pop culture this year: the company retreat.

Our tech titans keep telling us that AI is humankind’s most cutting-edge technology ever, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai going so far as to describe its arrival as “more profound” than either the discovery of fire or the invention of electricity. Not to be outdone, entrepreneur Marc Andreessen said AI is “possibly the most revolutionary technology in the history of the species.”