Hi! Nothing screams more like the American spirit like celebrating a holiday which isn’t even an official one. That’s right, St. Patrick’s Day is one of such holidays; but that’s not the only fact for the occasion, did you know:

Boozy facts for a busy holiday indeed, so don’t shy away from a pint or two. Now’ let’s serve you up with your regular!

Today’s special:

Farming Financial Insecurity: Are U.S. farmers currently facing a financial nightmare?

The Retired Pro: The truth about GoPro’s monumental downfall in the camera business.

Not Reading The Room: Have Americans genuinely stopped reading books completely?

America’s farm economy is unraveling under a perfect storm of low prices, high costs, and shrinking markets. Economists project that U.S. growers could roughly see a $44 billion in net cash income losses from the 2025–26 crop year alone. Mainly owing to the harrowing depressed commodity prices and rise of production costs that are weakening the sector and exposing how fragile it has become.

Total production expenses for farmers projected a whopping $467 billion in 2025, driven by climbing input costs such as fertilizer, labor and seed. While farm debt upped the ante and reached $591.8 billion in 2025, a level that pushes many operations toward insolvency.

Profit margins that was already thin are drastically being reduced while several states are posting an agricultural downturn that is triggering rare state-level GDP contractions. Overall, the District of Columbia and 39 states saw drops in GDP and farm bankruptcies reached 259 in Q1 2025. If we’re talking about price indexes then by December 2025, farmers paid 153 for inputs while receiving only 121.3 for crops.

Despite the bailout announcement, the financial catastrophe of the farm market feels far from over at the backdrop of export demand and rising costs. U.S. farmers are bracing after commodity prices like soybeans sank from around $14.50 a bushel to $10 and wheat fell to $5 at the backdrop of export demand and rising costs. The disruption in China’s soybean trade once the largest buyer of American soybeans has been especially damaging, and continues to, strain cash flows on family farms all the while prompting warnings that the underlying farm system is “broken.”

In response, the federal government unveiled a $12 billion assistance package in an attempt to alleviate the impacts. Of that total budget, for growers of key row crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans, $11 billion is earmarked for them. Yet for the farmers themselves the package is not quite convincing, it serves only as a temporary remedy rather than a solution for the lingering economic pain. 46% of farmers believe the industry is nearing a full-blown crisis, and 65% say their financial concerns have worsened year-over-year.

The current relief measures may temporarily blunt losses, but they aren’t reversing the underlying forces squeezing producers rendering many family farms structurally vulnerable even as policymakers tout short-term support.

In the early 2010s, GoPro was a cultural touchstone, quite literally the poster boy for videography. It single-handedly captured a generation’s daredevil moments; all of that was made possible because a surfer once wanted proof that he’d caught a decent wave. Nick Woodman let everyday adventurers film surf rides and deep dives with pro-level clarity and sure enough, it paid off.

GoPro’s trailing-12-month revenue surged to a meteoric $1,620 million by 2015, and it carved itself as a staple in the market. But then it declined and has steadily fallen since 2022, from $1,094 million to only $450 million by 2025. Rather than a cyclical slump, a long-term contraction isn’t allowing the struggling action camera giant to fully recover.

Still heavily reliant on hardware volume, GoPro was dealt a heavy blow in Q3 2025 as unit sales fell 18% year over year, and they sold only 500,000 cameras. Even the recurring revenue base which was supposed to stabilize the company was in disarray. Subscription and services revenue declined by 3% at $27 million stunting earlier growth potential. Other channels like revenue from retail which account for about 75% of total revenue also drew the short end of the stick, and plunged to 41%.

Go Pro’s advantage has taken a hit ever since the ubiquity of smartphone cameras, especially phones that can now shoot 4K and slow motion that rivals action cam quality. This left GoPro increasingly dependent on a shrinking niche of content creators while having to innovate fast to stay relevant in the game.

GoPro’s stock, once a market darling that rallied on its early branding and IPO momentum, has languished and at times traded with a deeply depressed valuation. After peaking at an all-time high of $93.85 in October 2014, it now trades near penny-stock territory, closing at just $0.71 as of March 16, 2026.

Even recent rallies haven’t done much to salvage the bleak outlook of the company. The stock’s 52-week high of $3.05 still sits nearly 329.6% above today’s price, while its 52-week low of $0.40 shows how close GoPro has come to the edge. Over the past year, the shares have averaged just $1.25, a stark reminder of how far investor confidence has fallen and how little margin for error remains. The company’s origin story, once its greatest selling point, highlights the risk of building a brand around a single breakthrough. Now, a former shell of what it used to be GoPro didn’t fail because the idea was bad; it faltered because the market moved on faster than the company could reinvent itself.

Last year, reading books in the U.S. became something of a rarity. A survey done by YouGov found that 40% of Americans over the course of the year didn’t read a single book. Among those who did, the median number of books finished was merely two. This means a large part of the population barely cracked a spine let alone dog eared a page.

Reading survived but remained uneven and inconsistent. 27% read just one to four books, 13% read five to nine books and only 19% managed 10 or more than that. Within this group, a much smaller sliver emerged as extreme outliers: just 4% reported reading 50 or more books. But here’s the catch: only that small group accounted for nearly half of all books read nationwide.

This imbalance matters because it shows reading isn’t evenly shared; it’s concentrated among a shrinking group of heavy readers. Moreover, when individual literary taste is considered reading habits are further fractured by genre along gendered lines: 41.8% of men read history compared to 20.0% of women, while 39.5% of women read mystery and crime versus 29.1% of men.

When all the ducks are put in a row, the image widens and gives a deeper insight into format preferences and reading behavior which shows how fragmented reading engagement has become. Less than half of Americans read physical books last year, and much smaller was the share of people who turned to digital or audio formats. Among book readers, at least 24% read books digitally and 23% listened to audiobooks, suggesting that long-form reading remains limited across formats.

At the crux of this matter there is a broader cultural shift at play. Systematic barriers like limited access to libraries, at the backdrop of economic pressures and digital distractions are disproportionately impacting groups belonging to lower-income populations, and rural residents all of whom show steeper declines in leisure reading.

Even if gauged from the parameters of financial standing, reading participation remains constrained. The real divide emerges around income, climbing from 53% in households earning under $50,000, to 60% among those making $50,000–$100,000, and up to 69% for families earning over $100,000, as deep reading quietly becomes less universal and more contingent on who still has the time and financial slack.

Which U.S. state has the highest auto collision rate?

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