Hi! Everybody loves pets, be it your big hairy emotional support dog, or a small squishy nonchalant cat. Well, maybe not everybody, your guests might not exactly be comfortable petting your 16-foot python named cuddles. But speaking about exquisite pets, can you guess this one:

I have the strongest spine, yet I don't stand very tall,
We are no friends to speed, but my brother had a speedster sprawl;
We bury our kids at birth, to live or perish is nature's call,
I'll wander till I die, my wife returns to her first crawl.

A special riddle for a special pet on the occasion of National Sea Turtle Day. Turtles are a very exquisite species to pet, they live for decades or even a century so it's safe to say your vows because it will become your life partner, till death does you apart. Now, let's get started with our regular!

Today’s special:

Delicacies of Celibacy: America is dangerously on the verge of sex-tinction!

Crime Goes Online: Cybercrimes in the U.S. have gone completely rampant.

A Gallery of Your Salary: How much salary does an American need to live comfortably in the U.S.?

America’s baby bust has been a pertinent issue for years, but that’s not all, another flashing statistic shows that Americans aren’t getting laid either these days. According to a 2025 report by the Institute for Family Studies only 37% of Americans aged 18–64 said they have sex weekly in 2024, a long fall from 55% in 1990.

To describe this broad decline researchers have coined the term “sex recession” and it’s no longer limited to stereotypical lonely young men or doomed dating. Even married couples are no longer reliable contributors to the population count. It worked out fine for them between 1996 and 2008, when 59% of married adults were knocking boots at least once a week. However, from 2010 to 2024, that number dropped down to 49%.

As of May 2026, roughly 33.1% of adults reported being sexually inactive, as opposed to only 4.8% said they were having sex three times a week, accentuating how inconsistent intimacy has become for many Americans.

The country’s shrinking sex life is less about the question of morality and more about isolation. As per the Institute for Family Studies, the average time of young adults spent with friends went down from 12.8 hours in 2010 to just 6.5 hours a week by 2019. This decline even continued after the end of pandemic, with a meager recovery for social time to 5.1 hours weekly in 2024.

More scrolling it seems has led to less socializing, which by extension means fewer opportunities for relationships to begin. Sociologist Mark Regnerus said smartphones are slowly taking the place of time usually spent on dating, flirting, or looking for a platonic/romantic relationship. Meanwhile, therapists who sat down with The Wall Street Journal are holding everything from “bed rotting” to economic anxiety responsible for declining libido.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office is now projecting America’s fertility rate to average just 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades which is well below the 2.1 births needed to prevent population shrinkage without immigration.

Cybercrime in America has been promoted from being a nuisance in the inbox into a menace to the U.S. economy. Last year more 1,008,597 million cybercrime complaints were logged by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, up from just 288,012 in 2015. Followed by reported losses which reached a staggering $20.8 billion, marking a 26% jump in a single year, and all this means the average victim now loses more than $20,000.

It’s not just about phishing emails anymore, cyber-enabled fraud accounted for nearly 85% of all financial losses last year, and investment scams resulted in over $8 billion.

And the list goes on: business email compromise scams added another $3 billion, while more than $2.1 billion was siphoned off through tech-support fraud. In all of this, the common denominator was Cryptocurrency, which was tied to more than $11.3 billion in reported losses.

Cybercriminals are elevating online extortion to whole new darker methods. As per the FBI, reports which were labelled as “threats of violence” took a big leap from 1,360 in 2024 to 4,826 in 2025. And as many as 40% of ransomware attacks which took place in the world transpired with hackers threatening to physically harm employees who refused to pay.

In order to perpetuate “a really strong level of intimidation” some attackers are really going below the belt by calling up hospital workers at home, divulging their addresses and Social Security numbers while others are outsourcing violence entirely. In fact, criminal networks are outsourcing the unthinkable, and the FBI have already sounded the alarm on how these syndicates are offering “violence-as-a-service”. To no surprise these are often tied to crypto related crime rings, and intimidation methods include a range from vandalism to kidnappings.

Meanwhile, AI is just adding salt to wounds: more than 22,000 complaints tied to AI-enabled cybercrime in 2025 were received by the FBI, which translates to $893 million in losses. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of Deepfake voices, AI-generated investment gurus, and cloned executives are making scams cheaper to run and harder to detect.

The “average” American paycheck tells a comforting story until you compare it to the cost of actually living.

Depending on how you slice it, the typical worker earns somewhere between $63,795 a year and roughly $65,700 annually when extrapolated from weekly wages. But as always, the devil is in the details, and that figure masks an imbalance deep within. The reality that high earners skew averages upward and the median worker often earns closer to $56,000–$62,000.

And even that “typical” income may not stretch very far because according to an analysis by Fortune, an individual now needs an average of $102,648 to live comfortably in the U.S. and that number is double what many actually take home. While in places like Hawaii, it's a different ballgame where $124,000 a year is a minimum requirement for a single adult.

What constitutes “comfortable” living isn’t just exclusively defined by paying rent or other non-negotiable essentials. It's built on the idea of a widely used 50/30/20 rule, where income should ideally cover an individual’s needs, wants, and savings. When that framework is applied across cities, the numbers climb fast.

In places like New York, a single adult needs about $158,954 just to maintain that balance, followed by San Jose which isn’t far behind at $158,080. Even Boston clears $139,776, this goes to show major metros redefine what “baseline” living actually means where 6 figures seems to be a prerequisite. On the contrary cities like San Antonio seem to be more forgiving but still require a five figure of $83,242 for a single adult.

State-level data tells a story which more or less the same for instance $124,467 is number required if one wants to live a comfortable lifestyle in Hawaii, with Massachusetts sitting close behind at $120,140. If we're talking about families, then the math escalates quickly. A household in Massachusetts would require over $313,747, whereas as per the standards of high-cost metros like San Francisco, that figure can soar past $407,597.

We're not kidding, almost half a million dollars in annual salary is needed not to buy a home, but just to afford the mortgage payments for the next 30 years.

Can you guess the city? It's not New York. 🫣

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