I’m a big believer in the restart. Taking a cue from the call-center employee whose first suggestion to any technical problem is to “unplug it and plug it back in,” I always restart my computer when it’s slow, and this does occasionally work. But other than that, I’m usually flying blind. I’m not the most technical person in the world, so what else can I do?

Well, there is something, and it’s right on my computer—and yours. While it won’t magically fix a lagging laptop (or desktop either), this secret menu can help diagnose problems and arm you with valuable information you can use to take further steps. And luckily, it doesn’t take a tech genius to take a peek under the hood, so to speak. Read on to learn all the insider intel.

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What is the secret menu that can diagnose a slow computer?

On Windows PCs, it’s the Performance tab within your computer’s Task Manager app. On Macs, it’s called the Activity Monitor. Both apps track computer operations that are running in the background, as well as storage capacity and other key performance issues. They’re filled with valuable information that can help you figure out why your tech is bogging down for no apparent reason.

What, exactly, do they tell you?

Both the Windows Performance tab and the Mac Activity Monitor capture tons of processes, but the five main ones that are helpful for diagnosing a slow computer are:

• CPU usage: Your computer’s Central Processing Unit runs applications and software, performs calculations and generally acts as the “brain” of your computer. High CPU usage isn’t always bad, but if it’s high during certain operations, it could be a clue as to why your computer is dragging.
• Memory (RAM): Random-access memory is your computer’s short-term memory. When you open an app, stream a movie or play a game, RAM is where your computer stores the data and files that the CPU needs right away while the application is in use.
• Disk space: Your disk drive or hard drive is your computer’s long-term memory, where files, photos and other things that are not needed while applications are running are stored. But it can also store shorter-term files, especially if the RAM is inadequate.
• Network processes: This information doesn’t pertain to your physical computer, per se, but a slow network connection can definitely be a reason it isn’t working as fast as it should on processes that require the internet.
• GPU usage: This is your graphics processing unit, aka graphics card. It’s what’s needed to quickly render videos, movies, games and other graphics-heavy applications, as well as process your computer’s overall visuals.

How do you find these menus?

It’s easy, but there are few ways to get there, depending on your operating system.

Open the Performance tab on Windows computers

• Use the Start button: Right-click on the Start button, select Task Manager and then navigate to the Performance tab on the left (it looks like a line graph).
• Use the taskbar: Right-click on an empty part of the taskbar, select Task Manager and navigate to the Performance tab.
• Use keyboard shortcuts: Hit Cntl + Shift + Esc at the same time to bring up the Task Manager directly. Alternatively, you can use Cntl + Alt + Del, and then select Task Manager from the menu.

Open the Activity Monitor on a Mac

• Use Spotlight search: Hit the Command button and the space bar, then type in Activity Monitor and hit return. You can also find Spotlight by clicking the magnifying glass in the top right corner of your screen.
• Use Finder: Open Finder on your dock, then go to the toolbar across the top and select Go > Utilities > Activity Monitor. If Finder is not in your dock, click any empty space on your desktop and the Finder toolbar will appear.
• Use the Apps icon: Select the Apps icon from your dock, then type in Activity Monitor and hit return. Apps is a dedicated apps launcher within Spotlight that rolled out with the Tahoe update, but if you are running an older version you’ll know it as Launchpad.
• Use a keyboard shortcut: Hit Fn + Shift + A to bring up the Apps search directly.

What are you looking for?

There’s a lot of information in the Performance tab and Activity Monitor, and some of the more technical fixes are beyond the scope of this article. But you can start with some basic troubleshooting. When your computer is running slowly, open the Task Manager or Activity Monitor and be ready to jot down what you see.

Here are some top line things to look for and correct or research further.

High CPU usage

Temporary spikes are not necessarily concerning, but if your CPU is consistently running near the maximum, the fan is loud or your computer is just plain slow, click over to the Processes tab on a PC (right above the Performance tab) or click the CPU column on a Mac. Close any resource-heavy apps that you’re not using, then restart and recheck.

Update or reinstall apps that continually use too many resources, and disable apps that start up automatically so they’re not constantly running in the background. You can also try cleaning your computer’s fan and vents with compressed air.

Low disk space and RAM

Heavy RAM usage often indicates too many things are running at once. Close apps you’re not using as well as browsers and/or excessive tabs that are open. Today’s browsers are much bigger resource hogs than they used to be, constantly loading and running videos, background scripts and ads. Restart. If the problem persists, consider adding more RAM.

If disk space is low, get rid of files, videos and images you no longer need. Close apps you’re not using, clear up space by running your computer’s disk cleanup function, and consider upgrading to a solid state drive instead of an older hard drive.

High GPU usage

If your Activity Monitor or Performance tab shows high graphics-card usage, close video games and graphics-heavy apps and browsers. Restart your computer. If you continue to see that the GPU usage is high, you may need to update your graphics card.

Network problems

If you’re having network connectivity problems, it’s always worth it to stop any downloads or heavy streaming activities that could be hung up. Restart your computer, make sure your router and/or modem are online, and run a speed test from your internet provider.

What else can you do to fix a slow computer?

It’s worth trying some general fixes. Here are more tips that can help speed up your PC or Mac.

• Restart your computer. Yes, it sounds basic, but restarting does give your computer a little refresh by clearing out temporary files and closing background processes that might be hung up.
• Close any programs you’re not using. Close extra tabs, browsers and apps. Change your startup settings so you don’t have a lot of programs running in the background that you’re not using.
• Scan for malware. Viruses and malware can cause slowdowns, so run an antivirus program like Microsoft Defender Antivirus. For a Mac, Apple’s protection is built in and runs automatically.
• Keep your computer updated. When your computer says you have software or operating-system updates available, download them. Recommended patches and anti-virus updates not only keep you safe from hackers—they can speed up a slow computer too.

Sources:

• Microsoft: “Troubleshoot processes by using Task Manager”
• Apple: “Activity Monitor user guide”
• Apple: “If your Mac runs slowly”
• Dell Technologies: “How to improve performance on a slow Dell computer or laptop”
• Microsoft: “System configuration tools in Windows”
• Intel: “Why is my computer running slow?”
• Cnet: “These could be slowing down your computer”
• Microsoft: “High CPU usage troubleshooting guidance”

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That disconnect is frustrating … but it’s also potentially useful. The thing is, anxiety isn’t just spinning thoughts or sweaty palms; it’s happening in both your mind and your body at once. And that means you may be able to work on the physical side of the response instead of simply waiting for your brain to magically become reasonable.

The vagus nerve is one of the key players in that mind-body connection, helping your brain communicate with organs throughout your body and playing an important role in shifting you out of a stress response. If anxiety can send that whole system in one panicked direction, there’s a lot of interest in whether you can work from the body up to help steer it back toward calmer waters, and there’s some pretty convincing science behind it.

To learn how to stimulate the vagus nerve, I spoke with Richard Gevirtz, PhD, a psychology professor at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant University, and Christopher Austelle, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. Read on to learn how to work with your nervous system to calm down a whole lot faster.

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What is the vagus nerve, exactly?

The vagus nerve is one of the body’s major communication routes. Though we colloquially refer to it in the singular, we actually have two vagal nerves. They travel from the brainstem through either side of the neck and then into the chest and abdomen, passing the heart, lungs and digestive tract along the way. 

Comprised of more than 200,000 nerve fibers, the vagus nerve is also the primary nerve involved in the parasympathetic nervous system, explains Gevirtz. Quick biology refresh: Your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems help manage many of the things your body does automatically. The sympathetic side helps mobilize you when something requires action, while the parasympathetic side helps bring things back toward rest and recovery afterward. Gevirtz describes the parasympathetic system as the “rest, digest and restore” side.

You need both: The goal isn’t to stay relaxed all the time—it’s to be able to ramp up when you need to, then settle again.

What does the vagus nerve have to do with anxiety?

The vagus nerve can help calm some of the physical changes that happen when you’re anxious. As a major pathway of the parasympathetic nervous system, it helps regulate heart rate, breathing and digestion, as well as helps your body return toward rest after a stress response.

During stress, Gevirtz explains, sympathetic activity normally increases while parasympathetic activity temporarily drops, a process sometimes called vagal withdrawal. That shift helps your body gear up to respond; once the demand has passed, the balance should move back toward rest and recovery. You can see part of that process with every breath. Your heart rate naturally rises slightly as you inhale and falls as you exhale, a pattern the vagus nerve helps regulate. Those beat-to-beat differences contribute to heart rate variability, or HRV.

A 2022 meta-analysis published in Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences found that people with anxiety disorders tended to have lower parasympathetic activity at rest. In other words, the part of the nervous system that helps you wind down may be less active in people with anxiety. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the vagus nerve itself isn’t working properly.

Why doesn’t the vagus nerve always do what it’s supposed to do?

For the most part, it does. Your vagus nerve isn’t a muscle that becomes weak because you forgot to exercise it, and it generally doesn’t need to be “reset.”

The problem, Gevirtz says, can be spending long stretches of time in that withdrawn state when life—and let’s be honest, the world—feels like a lot. He compares the nervous system to a thermostat: What matters isn’t making it stronger, but how readily it can shift when circumstances change.

How can you stimulate your vagus nerve?

The things you can do at home don’t directly stimulate the vagus nerve in the same way medical treatments do. (More on that below.) Dr. Austelle, who researches vagus nerve stimulation, says these techniques are better understood as behaviors that “influence” vagus nerve function.

That influence can happen in a few different ways. Here are five techniques to try.

Slow down your breathing

“One of the techniques with the most evidence and the most convincing evidence is slow breathing,” Dr. Austelle says. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews looked at more than 200 studies and found that slow breathing increased signs of parasympathetic activity—the “rest, digest and restore” side of the nervous system—both while people were breathing slowly and afterward. The effect was also seen in studies where people practiced slow breathing over time.

Gevirtz generally recommends slowing to about four to seven breaths per minute. That works out to one full inhale-and-exhale cycle roughly every nine to 15 seconds—not holding your breath, just breathing more slowly and continuously. “It has to be effortless breathing,” he says.

Dr. Austelle says the exhale may be particularly important. To try it, sit comfortably, gradually slow your breathing and let your exhale last a little longer than your inhale. Don’t force enormous breaths; if you feel lightheaded, return to your normal breathing.

Try cyclic sighing

Cyclic sighing gives you a more specific pattern to follow. Inhale slowly through your nose, take a second, smaller inhale to fill your lungs a little more, and then slowly and fully exhale through your mouth. There isn’t a specific number of seconds you need to hit; the emphasis is on that double inhale followed by a longer exhale.

A 2023 study published in Cell Reports Medicine had adults practice cyclic sighing, two other breathing exercises or mindfulness meditation for five minutes a day over about a month. All four groups reported less anxiety, but the breathing exercises led to bigger improvements in positive mood, with cyclic sighing also producing the largest drop in respiratory rate.

Hum through a long exhale

Humming has a plausible connection to vagal activity, but the research here is considerably thinner. Gevirtz says some yoga practices pair humming with slow breathing, and the extended exhale may be doing much of the work. While it’s possible that humming adds something on its own, especially due to the proximity of the vocal cords to the vagus nerve, there isn’t enough evidence to say for sure.

A 2023 study published in Cureus measured HRV in 23 people during Bhramari, a yoga breathing technique that involves a humming exhale. Researchers found HRV changes consistent with lower physiological stress, but a study that small can’t tell us whether humming reliably reduces anxiety or offers benefits beyond slow breathing.

If you find it soothing, though, humming through a slow exhale is easy enough to try.

Cool your face

Cold exposure can trigger vagal activity, but its effects are more complicated than “cold equals calm.” Dr. Austelle points to the diving reflex, a response that kicks in when your face is exposed to cold and eventually helps slow your heart rate. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Psychophysiology found increased cardiac vagal activity during facial cooling and water immersion, although the included studies were small and the quality of evidence was limited.

There’s a catch, though: Dr. Austelle says very cold temperatures initially activate the sympathetic nervous system, so your heart rate and blood pressure can actually rise before the diving reflex begins to have its slowing effect. In other words, an ice bath isn’t simply flipping on “rest and digest.” If cool water feels calming, briefly splashing or cooling your face is a less dramatic place to start.

You may also see advice to put something cold over the center of your chest. There’s much less research on that approach. In a small 2025 study, applying a cold pack to the chest for 20 minutes lowered participants’ heart rates and changed some measures of HRV, but it also raised blood pressure, and the study didn’t establish that stimulating the vagus nerve was responsible. For now, the connection between facial cooling and the diving reflex is much better established.

Try HRV biofeedback 

HRV biofeedback is essentially slow breathing with real-time feedback about how your heart is responding. A sensor tracks your heartbeat as you breathe, which can help you find the breathing pace that produces the strongest HRV response for you instead of simply following a one-size-fits-all pace. And it isn’t limited to a clinician’s office. Consumer sensors and phone-based tools can be used for HRV biofeedback at home, though Gevirtz cautions against treating the numbers from a smartwatch or other wearable as gospel. These devices tend to be better at measuring heart rate than HRV, he says, and day-to-day scores can be noisy enough that they’re not worth fixating on.

Gevirtz helped develop the HRV biofeedback approach with Paul Lehrer, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers University who studies biofeedback and psychophysiology. With practice, Gevirtz says, that feedback can help people learn what the pattern feels like well enough to reproduce it without watching the numbers every time.

There’s also some evidence those changes can last. In a 2024 randomized controlled study published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, people who completed HRV-biofeedback training showed greater improvements in resting HRV than an active control group. They weren’t significantly less anxious overall, suggesting that the improvement in HRV didn’t necessarily translate to less anxiety, but it did show that the intervention changed how their bodies were responding.

How quickly can these techniques calm you down?

“It definitely has an effect for most people very quickly,” Gevirtz says. In his clinical work, patients who have practiced slow breathing can produce noticeable changes in their heart-rate pattern after only a few breaths. At the four-to-seven-breaths-per-minute pace he generally recommends, that means those physiological changes can begin within about a minute, although how quickly you actually feel calmer can vary.

A small 2026 pilot study suggests even one minute may be enough to make a difference in how anxious you feel. Researchers had 47 university students use either cyclic sighing, box breathing or no breathing exercise during real-life moments of acute stress. Five minutes later, both breathing groups reported larger drops in anxiety than the control group.

Will stimulating your vagus nerve reduce your anxiety and stress levels overall?

Regular practice may make it easier to get that calming effect over time, particularly with slow breathing. In his clinical work, Gevirtz has patients practice for about 10 minutes a day so the technique becomes more familiar before they need it during a stressful moment.

The 2023 Cell Reports Medicine study offers another clue: Participants practiced cyclic sighing for five minutes a day for about a month, and researchers measured their mood before and after each daily session. The more consistently people practiced, the bigger the mood boost after each session tended to be.

So when you see advice about how to stimulate the vagus nerve, it may be more useful to think about practicing ways to help your nervous system shift back toward calm rather than “toning” one specific nerve.

What about vagus nerve stimulators?

Actual VNS is different: These devices stimulate the nerve directly with electricity. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, implanted VNS is used for certain medical conditions, including treatment-resistant epilepsy and depression. Noninvasive, or transcutaneous, VNS delivers electrical stimulation through the skin and is being studied for a range of psychiatric and neurological conditions.

For everyday stress management, though, Gevirtz says evidence for commercial noninvasive devices remains mixed, particularly when researchers compare them with sham devices that feel similar but don’t provide the same stimulation.

For now, slowing your breathing is a much cheaper place to start.

When is anxiety bigger than a breathing exercise?

These techniques can be useful when anxiety is making your whole system feel revved up, but they can’t address every reason you might be anxious. If you’re anxious most of the time, having panic attacks, losing sleep over it or starting to avoid parts of your life because of it, that’s worth bringing to a health-care or mental-health professional.

And sometimes the problem really is the problem. Breathing more slowly may help you feel steadier before a difficult conversation, but it won’t make the conversation disappear. It can, however, make it easier to walk into that conversation without feeling like your body has decided it’s an emergency.

That’s really the point for me. I’m not trying to breathe my way out of having problems. But it’s powerful to know I can use something as simple as my breathing to actually turn down the volume on anxiety when it starts taking over.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on how to stimulate the vagus nerve, Miranda Manier tapped her longtime experience as a journalist and health editor to ensure that all information is accurate and offers the best possible advice to readers. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• Richard Gevirtz, PhD, distinguished professor of psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant University; interviewed, October 2026
• Christopher Austelle, MD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University; interviewed, October 2026
• Cleveland Clinic: “Vagus Nerve: What It Is, Function, Location & Conditions”
• Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences: “Heart rate variability in patients with anxiety disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis”
• Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews: “Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis”
• Cell Reports Medicine: “Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal”
• Cureus: “Humming (Simple Bhramari Pranayama) as a Stress Buster: A Holter-Based Study to Analyze Heart Rate Variability”
• Psychophysiology: “The diving response and cardiac vagal activity: A systematic review and meta-analysis”
• Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine: “Impact of Cold Chest Pack on Cardiac Output, Stroke Volume, and Total Peripheral Resistance: A Counterbalanced, Randomized-Crossover Trial in Healthy Individuals”
• Scientific Reports: “Standardized massage interventions as protocols for the induction of psychophysiological relaxation in the laboratory: a block randomized, controlled trial”
• Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback: “Methods for Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback (HRVB): A Systematic Review and Guidelines”

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You’ve most likely heard of the theory six degrees of separation, which suggests that everyone on Earth is connected through a chain of no more than six people. Theoretically, that means you could trace your connection to just about anyone, whether it’s a person you just met in a foreign country, like I did, or a famous Hollywood star.

Of course, this concept is best illustrated with one particular Hollywood star, in the popular parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where players attempt to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon through the films on their résumé. For example, Christian Slater is just one degree away, having starred alongside Bacon in 1995’s Murder in the First. The late James Dean, meanwhile, is an iconic actor from generations ago, but he’s still just three degrees away—Dean appeared with Dennis Hopper in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, Hopper starred with Chris Penn in the 1993 movie True Romance, and Penn and Bacon were both in the ’80s classic Footloose.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon demonstrates how surprisingly short the paths between people can be. Still, there are some questions to consider. As a former celebrity journalist, for example, I once interviewed Bacon at a party. Does that count as a connection to him since it was so fleeting? And does the theory translate to everyday people around the globe, both with and without Kevin Bacon in the mix?

To get to the bottom of this, I spoke with Albert-László Barabási, PhD, who teaches at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School and researches complex networks, and Jure Leskovec, PhD, a computer science professor at Stanford University. Read on to learn how the game got its start, plus whether the underlying concept behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon actually holds up to scientific scrutiny—and what it could mean for you.

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What’s the origin story behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?

Three friends—Brian Turtle, Mike Ginelli and Craig Fass—came up with the concept as a college drinking game when they were students at Albright College in Pennsylvania more than 30 years ago. “We were just a couple of college guys who watched movies like JFK and Footloose, and found that in 1994, Kevin Bacon was everywhere,” Turtle said on the People of Play online gaming community of the pastime that “took on a life of its own.”

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, he joked, “was kind of a ‘stupid human trick,’” but it was one that got the college pals interviewed by everyone from Jon Stewart to Howard Stern. In 1996, the trio even created a board game, produced by the newly formed company Endless Games, where Turtle has worked ever since. “After graduation in ’95, I never thought I’d hear about [Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon] again, but it never went away!” he said.

Was this a brand-new concept?

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon became popular in the 1990s, but the idea behind it is based on real research and theories that go back much further. In the 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a “small world” experiment to explore how closely people were linked via their social networks. He asked participants to attempt to get letters to a specific person by forwarding them to acquaintances they believed might help get the letters closer to their destination. (More on how that experiment went in a minute.)

Does this theory actually hold up in the world at large?

The idea that actors can be linked to Kevin Bacon—or that two seemingly random people can be connected—through a short chain of acquaintances does indeed hold up. And those ties may be much smaller than six degrees, according to research. Here’s how it shakes out.

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon

You’d be hard-pressed not to find a connection between Bacon and nearly any other working actor. Because actors often appear in multiple films with different co-stars, their projects create a sprawling web of work that can be used to trace a path to Bacon.

Don’t believe it? The website Oracle of Bacon lets you enter an actor’s name and see how they’re connected to him, step by step. Even some pretty obscure actors in the database can be linked to Bacon through his network. Ever heard of the Croatian actor Rade Šerbedźija? Maybe not, but he’s just one degree from Bacon, thanks to the film X-Men: First Class.

Six degrees of anyone and everyone

The broader six degrees of separation theory can be applied to link anyone to Bacon. Yes, anyone—including you! Barabási, who’s a pioneer in network science, says we may be connected to almost anyone in the world not by six degrees, but by as few as three to four steps, even if only through a chain of acquaintances.

“A typical person knows about 1,000 people on a first-name basis, so there are roughly—and this is a simplification, but it works—1,000 × 1,000 people two handshakes away and 10^9 people (10 to the ninth power, or 1 followed by nine zeros) three handshakes away,” he says. For those who aren’t so mathematically inclined, that’s 1 million people two steps away, and 1 billion people three steps away, and each additional step expands that network exponentially. “That is the secret of six degrees.”

But throw in social media, and the definition of a connection makes the picture a little more complicated. According to Nature Reviews Physics, Milgram’s letter chains typically ranged from two to 10 links, but today’s technology and online social networks have reduced those connection numbers massively. Just think of all the people you’re technically “friends” with on Facebook or connected to on LinkedIn—and how many of those same people you wouldn’t recognize by name.

Leskovec, whose research spans network science, AI and machine learning, examined Microsoft’s instant-messaging network and found two people were separated by an average of 6.6 steps in the network of approximately 240 million people. “It does not mean everyone was directly connected,” he explains. “Rather, local circles overlap enough that only a handful of steps usually link people across the network.”

In 2016, Facebook revealed that the average separation between two users on its platform had shrunk to 3.57 degrees, down from 3.74 in 2011. That’s an incredibly small number on a network that spans billions of people, and it’s likely getting smaller. Still, a short chain of online connections doesn’t equate to really knowing someone.

So six degrees of separation isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but the separation between people is shockingly small. “‘Six degrees’ is best understood as a memorable approximation of typical connectivity, not a universal upper bound,” Leskovec says.

How does Kevin Bacon feel about all of this?

Turtle, the man who co-created Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, says that the actor wasn’t thrilled with the game at first because “he thought we were making fun of him.”

That began to change in 1995, when Turtle and his friends were on The Jon Stewart Show to demonstrate their uncanny knack for tracing any Hollywood actor back to Bacon, who was also a guest on the program that night. “Somebody with a bigger ego might have told us to go pound sand, but Kevin warmed up to the game and even wound up writing a rather hilarious prologue to that bestselling paperback [on the topic],” Turtle wrote on People of Play.

Once Bacon realized the game was all in good fun, he embraced it and took the idea a step further by founding SixDegrees.org—a nonprofit foundation that uses storytelling and community-first campaigns to bring people together and fight disconnection in society.

What should you do with this idea?

Well, you probably shouldn’t call up Kevin Bacon and tell him you know him through a friend. But by all means, continue playing the game! It’s neat to think about the larger idea of discovering connections between people, whether it’s linking actors to Kevin Bacon or finding ties within our own social circles.

The concept also offers a great reminder that we’re all more connected than it may first appear. Through family relationships, friendships and even chance encounters, our seemingly separate worlds often overlap in surprising ways. As Bacon notes in a video for SixDegrees.org, it’s all about “thinking about the connections that we all have.”

And it’s important to keep in mind that those connections affect society, for better or worse. As Leskovec notes, “it matters because information, opportunities, behaviors (and sometimes misinformation or disease) can spread across a large population very quickly.” In other words, the world is small and our influence is outsized, so go forth and do good.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on how Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon got its start, Aaron Rasmussen tapped his experience as a longtime journalist who frequently writes about entertainment, common curiosities and travel for Reader’s Digest. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• Albert-László Barabási, PhD, distinguished professor at Northeastern University and faculty member in the Division of Network Medicine at Harvard Medical School; email interview, October 2026
• Jure Leskovec, PhD, computer science professor at Stanford University; email interview, October 2026
• People of Play: “The Bloom Report: Brian Turtle: ‘Endless’ Stories, Advice, Kevin Bacon and More!”
• APS Journals: “Physical Review X: Why Are There Six Degrees of Separation in a Social Network?”
• Facebook: “Friends Day: Celebrating the Importance of Connections”
• The Oracle of Bacon
• Nature Reviews Physics: “Networks with Exactly Six Degrees of Separation”
• YouTube: “The Untold Story Behind SixDegrees.org”

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Madeline Alford, 35, co-owner of Mimi’s Needlepoint, is amazed by it all. A few years ago, she left her career in New York City and moved back to Dallas after spending more than 10 years in what she describes as “the corporate grind of working 8 to 6, coming home, doomscrolling, watching the news and going to bed, and then doing it all over again,” before she and her cousin ­Amelia Alford, 30, decided to do something different. They started an online canvas design company that has grown into a brick-and-mortar store—and now a community. “It’s a third place,” Alford says, “somewhere people can come and hang out, make friends and learn this very analog craft.” (The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term third place in 1989 to describe somewhere that isn’t home or work.)

According to Alford, the biggest challenge since opening their doors has been the supply chain, which tells you something about this growing movement. Needlepoint has exploded so fast, she explains, that there’s a shortage of the canvas itself. Thread is hard to come by too. “You’ll go to needlepoint stores, and none of us are fully stocked,” she says.

Something is happening across America, and not just with needlepoint.

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The rise of old-school hobbies

Over the past few years, younger generations have taken up so-called “old-school” hobbies with gusto. Gen Zers are joining knitting and mahjong clubs in numbers that are surprising even to the people who run these groups. And Millennials are buying landlines for their kids to delay giving them smartphones. Independent bookstores and specialty magazine stores are popping up in cities across the country. Pen pals are coming back into fashion. Bird-watching has taken flight. Bread baking is on the rise. The common thread here is tactile activities, which more people are seeking out as they shy away from screen time.

Those who study leisure and well-being aren’t surprised. Research published in the journal Nature Medicine in 2023 found that people who reported having at least one hobby showed fewer symptoms of depression and higher levels of happiness, health and life satisfaction. A separate study published in the Journal of Global Health in 2025 found that adults who engaged in regular hobbies had a 29% lower risk of mortality. But the benefits, researchers note, aren’t limited to a single age group or hobby.

Robert Waldinger, MD, is a psychiatrist and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is one of the longest-running studies of human happiness ever conducted. Dr. Waldinger has spent decades trying to understand what makes people thrive, and his research keeps pointing to the same answer: other people.

“When we asked people in their 80s what they were proudest of,” he says, “it was always about people. It was always, ‘I was a good spouse. I was a good parent. I was a good mentor.’ It was never about winning a prize or making money.” But personal connection feels more elusive than ever. Part of the problem, says Dr. Waldinger, is what the digital world does to our perception of reality.

“Never before,” he explains, “have we been as confused and uncertain about what’s real. Is this person online real, or is it a bot? What am I seeing in the news? What am I not seeing?” That constant uncertainty, he explains, is corrosive to our well-being. But in person, the doubt dissolves. “I see with my eyes,” he says. “It’s tangible. I believe it. I see who this person is.”

Connections in real life

Lindsay Degen, 38, first tried knitting as a child. Her grandmother taught her how to cast on and cast off, but they didn’t live close to each other, so the lessons happened sporadically, during visits. Over the years, Degen developed an interest in fashion and went on to study textiles at Rhode Island School of Design, then launched a knitting club over Zoom during COVID-19 because she felt isolated at home.

That group was small at first, but it quickly grew into an online community that she named Knit Club. In 2024, she opened a brick-and-mortar store with the same name in Providence, Rhode Island. Its calendar is packed with knitting circles, beginner boot camps and a roster of events that pair knitting with just about anything: Lord of the Rings marathons. Drag nights. Purl and Swirl gatherings with wine from the shop down the street.

The store hosts free Craft Circles twice a week. “The one on Tuesday is rowdy,” Degen says, smiling, “while the one on Sunday is chill and sweet.” Both draw college students, 70-­somethings and everyone in between. The motto is “All Crafters Welcome!” You don’t even have to knit: “You can show up and draw,” says Degen. “You can do anything you want, as long as it’s not wet.”

Degen admits knitting blurs the line between her work and her leisure, but that’s part of the attraction: “I’ve made my job out of my hobby, so I go home from work and I knit … but then am I actually still at my job?”

She suspects a lot of people share that restlessness. What knitting offers, she says, is visible, measurable progress as you see something building, row by row. “A lot of people say knitting is Zen,” she says. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true when you’re a beginner. It can be really challenging. But overcoming the challenge and seeing your thing build is super rewarding.”

One of the things Degen values most about knitting is that it keeps her present. “I’ll be talking to someone, and I’ll just start scrolling,” she says, “and then I’ll think, Wait, what am I doing? I’m talking to you.”

Having something to do with her hands, she’s found, solves that. You can carry on a full conversation while stitching. You don’t need to make eye contact if you’d rather not. There’s a shared experience, and that often turns out to be enough to start a friendship. “You have an immediate thing to talk about,” she says. “But the very sweet thing about it is where the relationship ends up.” One of the people who joined Degen’s original Zoom circle in 2020 was a woman named Vanessa Krebs, calling in from Waco, Texas. The two hit it off. Eventually, Krebs moved to Providence and is now the manager of Knit Club. “Doing something like knitting together is a great way to make adult friends,” Degen says. “Because making adult friends is hard.”

The power of proximity

Tina Roth Eisenberg, 52, had that same thought about 20 years ago. A Swiss-born graphic designer, she had moved to New York City in 1999. Wanting to meet other creative people, she figured the best way to find them was to bring people together herself. So in 2008 she started a free monthly breakfast lecture series, which has grown into the world’s largest face-to-face creative community. Called CreativeMornings, it’s a global network with chapters in more than 252 cities across 70 countries. (Find a map at ­creativemornings.com.)

Part of what fuels ­CreativeMornings’ success is a collective appetite for in-person gatherings, and Eisenberg has a theory as to why that appetite is intensifying. The rise of AI, she says, has put our discernment on constant high alert, and digital spaces have started to feel stressful. “It’s exhausting, this constant Can I trust this? Is this real?” she says. “The only thing that you can trust at this point is being present in front of someone.” Beyond trust, something special happens in person that can’t quite be replicated online. “I really believe in the energy of sharing a loving space,” Eisenberg says. “That’s where our hearts connect.”

Recognizing the growing desire for in-person events, ­CreativeMornings launched a volunteer-led series in 2024 called Clubs, organized around single activities and designed to be even more local and more recurring than the monthly breakfasts. No matter the focus of each club (it could be sending snail mail, junk journaling or swapping skills), the through line is consistent: People want more intentional, more tactile ways to spend time together. Video editor and freelance photographer Nelson Luna, 37, was one of the first to sign up to run a CreativeMornings club.

A self-proclaimed introvert, he has come to understand the impact the in-person creative community has had over his past three years as the volunteer photographer for New York City’s CreativeMornings chapter. So he started PhotograPals, a casual “photowalk” club that meets every other Saturday to walk around different local neighborhoods and take photographs with cameras or phones.

The rules are minimal by design. The group meets at a locally owned coffee shop. People do a round of introductions. Then they walk. They take photos—or they don’t. Mostly they talk. Luna deliberately doesn’t mention at the club that he shoots professionally. When people discover this and ask him for advice, he’s happy to give them pointers after the club ends. But during the walks, the cameras are beside the point, he says, since “the important part is spending time face to face in good company.”

And that concept works. Club members have shown up to one another’s birthday parties. And when one regular was featured in a photography exhibition at her church, a group of her PhotograPals came to support her. Luna, who signed up to host because he wanted to build community, has found that the community has built him a little bit too. “Ever since I started my club,” he says, “I’ve been getting dragged into being more of an extrovert.”

A technological springboard

Ask anyone engaging in these analog activities why they’re suddenly so in demand, and you’ll hear the same things: The pandemic drove people to use their hands—to bake sourdough, to play a musical instrument, to try knitting—and the habits stuck. But the community aspect, which was impossible during isolation, turned out to be the thing people craved even more. Once the world reopened, they went looking for it.

Then there’s something harder to name, but everyone seems to feel it. “What we do to build community, to create our own joy and share it with other people,” Luna says, “that’s its own form of resistance when it comes to the narrative of divisiveness.” Degen echoes this. She says she wants people to think of Knit Club as “this place that sometimes you come for free and sometimes you’re paying for a class, but either way, you’re welcome here and you’re supporting your local community.”

As for an overabundance of screens driving people to take up these hobbies, technology still has a role to play here. Social media is how needlepoint found its new audience in the first place. Mimi’s Needlepoint went from having a few hundred followers on Instagram to 17,000 in just over a year; the account is how many in Dallas discovered the store. Degen uses online tools to make knitting more accessible—for example, by posting YouTube tutorials. And ­CreativeMornings relies on its digital platform for club sign-ups.

So it’s not that people are rejecting technology outright. But they are pushing against the idea of being always online, always scrolling, always reacting to something an algorithm put in front of them. The hobby—the club, the walk, the sip-and-stitch event—is more rewarding and meaningful to people because they’re choosing it for themselves.

Back in Dallas, the women who have gathered at Mimi’s Needlepoint are already planning their next get-together. And Madeline Alford is ready to join them. She started doing needlepoint for the simplest of reasons: to make a handmade Christmas ornament each year for her goddaughter. One stitch at a time, it grew into something bigger than she ever expected.

“We’re really proud that we’ve made a space where people are finding friendship,” she says. “It’s amazing to see the community and the pride of making something with your own hands. You can’t replicate that.”

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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Thus far, I have not punched him, but every sneeze startles me so badly that I fear the day is coming. I don’t want to be the first person convicted of assaulting someone for having a functioning respiratory system, but I also can’t comfortably rule it out.

If you’ve never been around a scream sneezer, I envy your innocence. They are a small but disproportionately terrifying percentage of the population, and once you’ve encountered one, your nervous system is permanently changed. You will forever brace yourself whenever someone in the vicinity inhales a little too deeply because a perfectly ordinary sneeze becomes a potential jump scare.

So, yes, scream sneezing is certainly alarming. And frustrating. And annoying. And an affront to “use your indoor voice.” But is it actually rude? After all, my loved one—yes, I still love him—swears that he isn’t trying to be so loud. He claims that his sneezes simply emerge dramatically, like a firework going off in a library. He swears he is not deliberately trying to frighten small children or make the dog question its place in the universe. I am not so sure.

Let’s chat about this.
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Why scream sneezing feels rude

I am not the only person bothered by scream sneezes, and generally speaking, anything that makes a significant portion of the population want to throw a shoe at you deserves at least an etiquette investigation. So why does it feel so rude? Two factors: loudness and germs.

Scream sneezes aren’t just loud; they are loud loud. A study conducted by Noise Measurement Systems found that the average male sneeze is around 90 decibels when measured from 2 feet away. That’s roughly as loud as a blender running at full speed, except the blender has the decency to have a lid. The noise level does depend on the sneezer’s physiology—smaller lungs make quieter sneezes, for instance—so if the average is at 90 decibels, then scream sneezers could be entering jet-engine territory. So while I couldn’t find exact numbers for the volume of my loved one’s scream sneezes, I can report that he has made me question whether our windows are double-paned.

A sneeze is not merely a noise. It is a biological event involving a rapidly expelled mixture of droplets and particles and … other, potentially infectious, things. MIT researchers studying sneeze dynamics found that larger droplets can travel several feet, while smaller particles may travel up to 20 feet, depending on conditions. The exact distance depends on the sneeze and the surrounding environment, and we don’t know that a louder sneeze necessarily sends germs farther. Still, if someone is going to unleash a respiratory weather event in your direction, you would prefer they at least attempt to contain it.

A scream sneeze, then, combines two of the most universally disliked things in public life: an unnecessarily loud noise and the possibility of being involuntarily included in someone else’s germ-distribution system.

The case for scream sneezing being fine

My loved one claims that because sneezing is a natural bodily function, it is exempt from etiquette. This is an interesting legal defense. I look forward to hearing him explain it to the next person who crop-dusts an elevator. Natural bodily functions are not, in fact, exempt from etiquette. We have rules about all sorts of them.

• Farting: Releasing a silent but deadly cloud into a crowded room and then walking away is generally frowned upon. Whenever possible, take your business elsewhere.
• Burping: A burp may escape involuntarily, but you generally shouldn’t belch like a medieval king at a dinner party. If one gets away from you, a quick “Excuse me” is appropriate.
• Nose picking: Your nostrils are yours to manage, but the rest of us do not need a front-row seat to the maintenance.
• Nail clipping: Even if your nails have grown to the length of talons, public transit is not a mobile manicure salon.

Etiquette does not require us to pretend our bodies don’t do strange things. It asks us to manage those things with reasonable consideration for everyone else.

Of course, not all bodily functions are equally controllable. Sneezing is a reflex, and trying to forcibly suppress a sneeze can actually be harmful, potentially damaging your eardrums and even rupturing blood vessels in extreme cases, according to the Cleveland Clinic. We should not expect anyone to achieve perfect control over something their body does without permission. But the question isn’t whether or not sneezing is rude—as long as you cover your mouth, you’re fine—but the screaming aspect of it.

I couldn’t find any research about how much control people have over the volume of their sneezes. Researchers have apparently been too busy studying important things like the trajectory of airborne pathogens to settle the disputes that actually matter to society. And I’m willing to entertain the possibility that some people genuinely cannot reduce the volume much. We all have different bodies, reflexes and medical circumstances.

But I also suspect that some scream sneezers have simply never considered whether they could do anything differently. When you’ve spent your entire life sneezing like a car backfiring, it may not occur to you that other people find it startling.

So, no, you cannot reasonably be expected to control what you genuinely cannot control. But you also can be reasonably expected to care about the effect you have on other people—especially when that effect may result in a mini cardiac event or a shower of germs.

How to scream sneeze without being rude

My loved one scream sneezes straight into whatever or whoever is in front of him. He says the sneeze comes on so quickly that he can’t do anything about it. He also dislikes covering his mouth because then he gets snot on his hands. This is the part of his argument I find particularly compelling, in the sense that I find it compelling evidence that he has misunderstood the entire purpose of etiquette. He would rather distribute his mucus among innocent bystanders than briefly inconvenience himself.

A big part of scream sneezing is where it is happening and who is affected. For instance, if you’re at home by yourself, do whatever you like. But once others are around, especially if it’s in a crowded, public venue, that changes the noise calculus. It also matters who is around you. A scream sneeze is more consequential around sleeping babies, startled animals, people with sensory sensitivities or anyone who may be particularly vulnerable to respiratory infections.

Similar to the etiquette around telling someone you’re sick, the etiquette requirements here are not especially demanding.

• Warn. Some sneezes surprise everyone, including the sneezer themselves. But often you do have a bit of warning that one is coming. Use this time to warn people around you (“Sneeze incoming!”) and turn or move away to minimize the blast zone.
• Cover. You should always cover your sneeze. If you have time to grab a tissue, great. Otherwise, sneezing into your sleeve, the collar of your T-shirt or even your hands is better than just letting it fly through the air. Yes, you may get snot on yourself. This is a regrettable but manageable consequence of having a nose. (And please sanitize your hands afterward.)
• Muffle. At least try to do something to reduce the noise level of the sneeze, whether that’s quickly walking into another room or using something to muffle your scream, like a towel or thick coat to sneeze into. That said, nobody needs to contort themselves into a pretzel trying to silence a reflex. The goal is reasonable consideration, not sneeze perfection.
• Prevent. My loved one sneezes a lot due to allergies yet can’t remember to take the medication that would reduce all of his allergy symptoms, scream sneezing included. If allergies regularly turn you into a human confetti cannon, consider managing them with appropriate measures or discussing treatment options with a health-care professional. You don’t need to medicate yourself solely to make other people happy, but reducing symptoms may improve your own comfort as well as the comfort of those around you.
• Apologize. If you do happen to scream sneeze and startle and/or spray everyone, just offer a quick “I’m so sorry!” An apology is not an admission of guilt. It is simply a way of saying “I recognize that you were just minding your business when my face suddenly became a percussion instrument.”
• Clean. Just because you do it in public does not make it a community art installation. If you’ve sprayed mucus onto a table, counter or other shared surface, wipe it up appropriately and wash your hands.

What to do if you’re on the receiving end of a scream sneeze

I don’t know about you, but my first reaction when I’m startled is fear, anger and the desire to investigate whether I’m legally permitted to throw something. But punching the sneezer would definitely be rude—far ruder than the scream sneeze itself. It is also rude to shame someone, mock their medical circumstances or insist that they must be doing it on purpose. Even if you (and I) suspect that a person could control the volume at least somewhat, we cannot know what is happening inside their body. Offer grace … and perhaps a tissue.

If the behavior is genuinely affecting you, especially if the person repeatedly sneezes uncovered in your direction, it is reasonable to ask them to cover their mouth or turn away.

The verdict

Scream sneezing is not inherently rude, but refusing to do anything to mitigate it is. While sneezing is a reflex, involuntary does not equal consequence-free. My ruling? The sneeze itself is innocent; the mucus distribution strategy is where things get legally interesting. My loved one, for instance, may be acquitted of the noise charge due to insufficient evidence of intent. But the charge of sneezing directly onto other people because he doesn’t want to get snot on his own hands? That case is going to trial.

And I would like the record to show that the dog is available as a witness.

Have a social situation you can’t stop ruminating on? Email us at advice@tmbi.com, or message Charlotte on Instagram at @CharlotteHiltonAndersen.

Why trust us

Reader’s Digest has published hundreds of etiquette stories that help readers navigate communication in a changing world. We regularly cover topics such as the best messages to send for any occasion, polite habits that aren’t as polite as they seem, email and texting etiquette, business etiquette, tipping etiquette, travel etiquette and more. We’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• MIT: “Violent expiratory events: on coughing and sneezing”
• ABC News: “Can you control how loud you sneeze?”
• Cleveland Clinic: “Can Holding in a Sneeze Hurt You?”

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The post Is It Really Rude to Scream Sneeze? appeared first on Reader's Digest.

If you’re expecting a baby this year, or you’re just here to see what’s happening in the baby-naming world (why wouldn’t you be?), we have the top baby names of 2026 from the absolute authority: BabyCenter. I got the scoop from Steph Coffield, BabyCenter’s baby-name advisor, who breaks down the most popular names and lets us in on why these names are so big right now. Read on to squee over the top baby names of 2026.

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How did BabyCenter determine the most popular baby names?

These popular baby names come straight from mom and dad. “Hundreds of thousands of parents register their babies’ names on BabyCenter every year,” Coffield says. “That data is updated on our app and website every month, giving us an up-to-date look at which names are rising and falling.”

You may know that the Social Security Administration (SSA) puts out a list every year too, but Coffield says the SSA only updates its data once per year, and we won’t find out what 2026’s top baby names are until May 2027. “Our data gives parents an early look at what’s trending now, so they can make an informed decision about their baby’s name.”

What are the top baby names of 2026?

For the fourth year in a row, Olivia and Noah are the reigning champs. Olivia has been steadily climbing for more than a quarter-century (she was sitting at No. 16 back in 2000), and it’s going to be hard to knock this pretty name off the top of the charts. Noah is equally enduring, taking the top spot from Liam in 2022 after being in the top 10 for years.

“Once a name makes it to the No. 1 spot, it usually sticks around for a while,” Coffield says. “Olivia and Noah are both beautiful names, which helps explain why they’ve been popular for so long.” Plus, Coffield says “parents have been really in love with vowel-heavy names for a few years now, and Olivia and Noah fit that bill.”

Were there any new additions to the top 10?

Evelyn is back, baby! This sweet name is at No. 9 this year after last being being spied in the top 10 in 2023. The rest of the girls’ top 10 is filled with familiar faces, though there was some jockeying for position.

For boys, Elias made the top 10 for the first time ever, rising 8 spots to sit at No. 7. The top 5 boys names have remained unchanged for three years, but Asher and Luca dropped out of the top 10 to make room for Elias and Leo, who was last seen in the top 10 in 2024.

The top 20 girl names

Coffield says names starting with E are “super popular” this year—a full quarter of the top 20 girl names start with this letter. Case in point: Eliana, which made huge moves in 2026, jumping five spots to No. 2. Longer names are also surging, and soft-sounding names that end in vowels are still going strong. “Eliana has all of that: It’s long, soft, melodic and it starts with E. That’s why it’s having such a big moment this year.”

Here are the top 20 girl names for 2026:

• Olivia
• Eliana
• Amelia
• Charlotte
• Sophia
• Isabella
• Emma
• Aurora
• Evelyn
• Mia
• Ellie
• Lily
• Violet
• Sofia
• Hazel
• Ava
• Aria
• Luna
• Ella
• Willow

The top 20 boy names

This group doesn’t see as much movement as the girls’ list, but all of them would be perfect for your new baby. “Parents are a lot less experimental with boy names than with girl names, generally speaking,” Coffield says. “They’re more likely to choose a boy name that’s established, feels classic and will stand the test of time.”

Here are the top 20 boy names for 2026:

• Noah
• Liam
• Oliver
• Elijah
• Mateo
• Lucas
• Elias
• Levi
• Ezra
• Leo
• Asher
• Luca
• Henry
• Hudson
• Theodore
• James
• Sebastian
• Samuel
• Waylon
• Daniel

Were there any big surprises in the top 100?

Oh, yeah. Several longtime faves are out of the top 100, including Leah and Ryan, and one brand-new name hit the charts: Magnolia, which jumped an impressive 40 spots to No. 88. Four boy names made the top 100 for the first time: Archer (No. 96), Stetson (No. 95), Milo (No. 89) and Dean, which sneaked in at No. 100 for the first time this century.

Coffield says these last three boy names each tap into a different trend. “Stetson is a rugged cowboy name that evokes the Wild West. Dean is having a pop-culture comeback, thanks to the characters on the new hit show Off Campus and the nostalgic classic Gilmore Girls. And Milo has that vowel-heavy, soft sound parents are loving right now.”

Longer names are also on the rise, with 29% of girl names and 31% of boy names clocking in at more than seven letters. “Baby-name trends are cyclical, and the pendulum always swings back,” Coffield says. “After a few years of short names dominating the charts, parents are looking for names that feel new and different, so they’re gravitating toward longer names.”

What baby-naming trends will we see in 2027?

Pop culture has a major influence on baby-name trends, and next year, many parents will likely be borrowing from hit movies and must-see TV. Some of these baby names haven’t been heard in years! Here are some trends to watch for in 2027, according to Coffield and BabyCenter.

• Gilmore Girls: Dean, a name that hasn’t been widespread since the 1950s and ’60s, is seeing a major comeback thanks to GG rewatches and the new documentary that’s in the works, and BabyCenter expects that to continue in 2027. Other Gilmore Girls names that moved up in 2026 and should continue to climb next year are Rory, Lorelai, Christopher and Luke.
• Hockey drama: Another show that propelled Dean into the top 100 is the wildly popular Off Campus on Amazon Prime. With Season 2 set to premiere in 2027, Coffield expects names from this series to keep rising. Beau is already in the top 100, at No. 57, but Garrett, Allie and Jules could see big moves too. And Ilya, from that other hockey show, Heated Rivalry, is up an incredible 6,000-plus spots in 2026, so keep your eye on it for 2027.
• Greek gods: Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster The Odyssey seems to have sparked an interest in Greek mythology, with parents increasingly choosing names like Atlas, Ares, Titan and Troy for boys, and Iris, Lydia, Daphne and Gaia for girls. Odysseus himself is up nearly 1,500 spots, and Coffield expects this trend to continue into 2027.
• “X” marks the spot: Names with X’s in the middle, like Jaxson (which reentered the top 100 in 2026), Braxton and the wonderful Maximillian are all trending right now. Other “X” names to watch in 2027 include Knox and Xaiden for boys, and Xolani, Alexandra and Bexley for girls. Onyx and Huxley actually made both lists in 2026, giving parents looking for more gender-neutral names plenty of choices.
• Wild West resurgence: We mentioned Stetson and Archer earlier, but other Western-themed names that should keep rising in 2027 include Walker, Gunner and Wilder (possibly a nod to the Little House on the Prairie reboot) for boys, and Sadie, Tatum, Oakley and Cassidy for girls.
• Bye-bye, Taylor: Maybe it’s all the lettuce recalls, or perhaps Miss Swift has finally reached peak saturation, but Taylor has dropped to its lowest point for both girls (No. 399) and boys (No. 1,093) since BabyCenter began releasing its top-baby-name lists, according to Coffield.

Sources:

• Steph Coffield, baby-name advisor for BabyCenter; email interview, Oct. 29, 2026
• BabyCenter: “The top trends that’ll influence baby names in 2027”
• BabyCenter: “The most popular baby names of 2026”

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The post These Are the Most Popular Baby Names of 2026—Can You Guess What’s in the Top 10? appeared first on Reader's Digest.

On top of that, the 40-year-old firefighter carried the fear that at any moment he might see the basket of a hot-air balloon that had collided with the tower plummet past him with two people in it. If that happened, he would know he hadn’t climbed fast enough.

Rescue workers get called to crash sites all the time. That’s part of the job. But for Patrick and 13 other responders from the Longview Fire Department making their way up the tower, this crash site was 925 feet off the ground.

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A picture-perfect start to the day

Rick James, 73, and Megan Rey­nolds, 38, had flown hot-air balloons together too many times to count. They had known each other since Reynolds was in grade school and her mother was on the board of directors at the Great Texas Balloon Race, which Longview hosts every summer.

James, an East Texas native and a longtime financial adviser with Morgan Stanley, began crewing for balloons in the race in 1980. In 2003, he took his hobby to the next level and got licensed as a balloon pilot. When he and Reynolds, a medical assistant for a dermatology practice in Marshall, Texas, lifted off around 7 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 28, they were looking forward to a relaxing weekend soaring through the Texas skies.

James’s balloon, with its checkerboard pattern of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink, was one of seven that launched together from an elementary school on the southeast side of Longview. The group planned to fly for a little over an hour in the gentle breeze, which was blowing at about 10 mph.

As James and Reynolds coasted along for the better part of an hour, they soaked in the beauty of the clear, mostly blue sky and shared a casual conversation. Floating 500 feet off the ground, they could hear dogs barking as the enormous balloons passed overhead.

The collision

Around 8 a.m., James started looking for an open area where they could land. In the distance, he saw the 1,098-foot FM radio tower—about the same height as New York City’s Chrysler Building—but he barely gave it a second thought. “I don’t have a place to land here—I’m just gonna fly over the tower,” James ­radioed to his eldest daughter, Lindsay, who, as part of his two-person chase crew, was tracking her dad’s movements from a van.

He turned the wooden handle of the propane-fueled burner, sending flames up into the canopy to ease the balloon upward. But as they ascended, the wind increased to 24 mph, pushing them hard toward the tower. James, unable to see the top of the tower because the balloon was blocking his view, was certain they’d be fine. “Right up until the last three or four seconds, I thought we were gonna clear the tower,” he says.

Then one side of the balloon collided with the crow’s nest, a small balcony jutting out from the triangular steel tower, puncturing the nylon fabric. The other side of the balloon wrapped itself around a guy wire stretching diagonally from the top of the tower to the ground. The impact of the collision knocked Reynolds to the floor of the basket, while James kept his balance by grabbing hold of one of the corner uprights. “Are you OK?” he asked her.

Reynolds paused to get her bearings. “Yeah, I think I skinned my leg a little bit, but I’m fine.”

They couldn’t see exactly what the balloon was hanging from. All they knew was that their brown wicker basket was lurching back and forth in the wind, about 10 feet from the side of the tower and terrifyingly high above the ground. They prayed that whatever was holding them up there wouldn’t release its grip.

The call to action

Earlier that morning, Longview Fire Department Chief Jon-Eric Johnson, 41, sat down for breakfast with a co-worker. They tossed out hypotheticals, wondering what calls their shift that day might bring. Johnson saw a hot-air balloon drifting nearby and posited, “What if we go on a hot-air-balloon incident?”

Not more than 20 minutes later, the department’s dispatcher called Johnson’s cell. “Hey, we got a pretty serious event,” she said. “We think a hot-air balloon has crashed.” Witnesses on the ground, including James’s chase crew, were calling 911to report an unbelievable scene—a balloon had struck the communications tower. The details were all over the place. Some callers said the balloon was caught 100 feet up the tower, others said 500. Some said one person was in the basket; others said five.

Johnson got some answers for himself when he and his fellow rescue workers pulled out of the station. From 2 miles away, he could see, clear as day, James’s balloon snagged near the top.

Longview and the surrounding area are home to about 150 communications towers, so the fire department has rope-rescue experts on staff, including Cliff Patrick and his longtime friend Lt. Stephen Winchell. Patrick was at home, making pancakes for his three young kids, when he got a text from the department about a balloon accident.

He texted Johnson: “I can be there in about 30 minutes.” Johnson called and gave him the address. That’s when Patrick realized which tower Johnson was talking about. A rescue near the top of it had only ever been a hypothetical. Now it was reality.

A race against the clock

As Reynolds sat in the basket, trying not to shift her weight and put additional strain on whatever was holding them there, James got to work. First, he shut off the balloon’s propane valves—there was no sense in keeping that dangerous gas flowing. Next, he realized he had to do something about the way the basket was swinging in the wind. He grabbed their drop line—a 150-foot rope that could be lowered to the chase crew to control the balloon’s landing—and around the end of it tied a handle, one similar to what a water-skier holds. Then he tossed the handle toward the tower. On the third attempt, it caught against one of the struts. James held on to the other end to steady the basket.

Every 10 minutes or so, the handle would come loose, and James would toss it over again. He didn’t mind the work—it occupied his mind and helped settle his nerves. Reynolds, too, was struggling to stay calm. “At first, it was sheer panic,” she says. From the bottom of the basket, she would occasionally hear the balloon’s fabric ripping, she remembers.

About 20 minutes after the balloon crashed into the tower, Johnson and his crew arrived with bolt cutters and cut through the padlocked perimeter fence around the tower. They forced entry into the building and killed the power—the tower had been pumping out 100,000 watts of electricity from its main antenna, just 43 feet above where the balloon was entangled.

Johnson got the phone numbers of the trapped balloonists from dispatch. He called James three times, but it kept going to voicemail. That’s because after James phoned his wife, Lori James, to tell her what had happened and to ask her to update their other kids, he started getting calls from other balloonists, and—not wanting to be distracted from the important work of steadying the basket—he had put the phone in his pocket and was ignoring it.

Next, Johnson called Reynolds, who picked up. “Hey, this is Chief Johnson,” he said. “We’re here. Can you tell me how many people are in the basket? Are you injured?” He got the key details from Reynolds, then asked to speak to James, who told the fire chief that he thought two of the four main cables between the basket and the balloon had broken. While they were talking, a third cable snapped. James and Reynolds felt the basket drop a few inches and swing wildly.

“Listen, we are coming for you,” Johnson said. “But I want to be honest. It’s probably gonna take about an hour to get to you.” That was an educated guess. None of his firefighters had ever climbed 925 feet before. None of them had ever climbed half that high.

The 900-foot climb

With about 50 pounds of gear strapped to his back, including a 300-foot rope, Brayden Pointer was the first firefighter to start the climb up the tower, just before 9 a.m. At the same time, police drones were deployed to give the team a view of the crash site and take measurements: The vertical climb would be a little over 900 feet. Most of the rescue team’s ropes were 200 feet in length, so groups of two or three rescuers would have to be spaced out at precise spots on the tower. Their job: to lower the balloonists to the ground using pulleys and ropes.

Shortly after Pointer and four other firefighters started climbing up the tower, rope rescue specialists Patrick and Winchell arrived on the scene. They were given relatively little to carry so that they could get to the crash scene as quickly as possible. The climbers wore wide lanyards hooked to harnesses, allowing them to execute a technique known as clip climbing. Every couple of rungs, they had to reach down and undo one of two safety clips shaped something like lobster claws, then reach up and clip it to a higher rung. Step up, unclip, re-clip. Painstaking. Meticulous. Exhausting.

With his adrenaline pumping, Patrick quickly climbed the first 100 or so feet. Then fatigue set in. “I was probably stopping to shake out my forearms and shoulders every 50 or 60 feet after that,” he says. “And all the while, I was thinking about how to burn only 80% of my energy to get there, because I had to save 20% to actually make the rescue.”

To cut the tension as they climbed, Winchell hollered down to Patrick, “Have I ever told you I don’t love heights?” It was a joke based on the truth—Patrick knew that his climbing buddy had never fully gotten over his long-standing fear of heights. Winchell just worked around it, especially when lives were on the line.

On the ground, Capt. Ramey Blalock was given the job of talking to Reynolds on the phone. He stayed on the line with her for more than an hour. “I’m sure that Capt. Blalock got tired of me asking ‘Where are they?’ and ‘How long do you think it’s gonna be?’ ” Reynolds says. “But talking to him for the whole time kept me really calm.”

A little after 10 a.m., just as Pointer came into view 40 feet below the basket, James thought he felt the last of the main cables snap. “Look, we’re hanging only by fabric now,” he shouted to Pointer, who had stopped to catch his breath. “Please get up here and tie us off as soon as you can.”

Pointer powered through, got level with the basket and tied the balloon’s drop rope tight to the tower. Then he pulled a half-inch static kernmantle rope with a minimum breaking strength of 9,000 pounds from his pack and tossed one end to James, who tied it onto the basket while the firefighter secured the other end to the tower. With the rugged horizontal safety line in place, James got his barely suppressed panic under control. “That was the first time in two hours that I felt comfortable that I was not going to die,” he says.

Feeling more secure, Reynolds stood up, startling Pointer, who’d had no idea a second person was in the basket. “OK, I’m ready to get out now,” she declared before sitting back down.

The daring rescue

Patrick and Winchell arrived soon after. The rescue workers clipped two harnesses to the rope that Pointer had established and slid them across to the basket. They gave James and Reynolds instructions for how to put the harnesses on, including cinching the leg hoops and buckling on the belts. Then Patrick climbed even higher and attached a second rescue rope to the tower 30 feet above the basket, so they could swing across like a pendulum. The firefighters hadn’t brought protective helmets for James and Reynolds, so Winchell and Patrick took off their own helmets and sent them across to the balloonists.

Next, Winchell, who later referred to this as the Super Bowl of rope rescue, climbed to the exterior of the tower and clipped in, ready to help James and Reynolds and to be, as he put it, “a human bumper if needed.” Given his fear of heights, he admits that he didn’t relish stepping onto the outer edge of the tower. “But it was clear to me what needed to be done,” he says. “I did what rescuers do every day: I turned down that voice in my head.”

James and Reynolds weren’t out of danger yet. If the basket ripped from the balloon and tipped over, they could still fall more than 900 feet to the ground below. Harnessed and helmeted, they were ready to embark on the high-wire ride of their lives. “Who wants to go first?” Winchell called across. Reynolds volunteered, and James agreed. “I felt responsible for putting Megan in this predicament,” he says.

Reynolds clipped the loop at the top of her harness to the high-point rope, which Patrick was manning, and sat backward on the edge of the basket. James held her feet and guided her out as she grabbed the horizontal rope, which stretched straight across to the tower. Refusing to look down, she swung on the high rope toward the tower in a seated position—sliding along, hand over hand on the horizontal rope to steady herself, all the while dangling 900 feet above the ground.

After what felt like an eternity (but was actually just a few seconds), Winchell was guiding her inside the metal structure. She unclipped from the rope and clipped onto the tower. “It was night and day once she got across,” Patrick recalls. “She thought she was gonna die in that basket, but once she got inside the tower, she was calm, collected, 100% able to follow commands.”

Next, it was James’s turn. He hooked his harness onto the line, stepped to the edge of the basket, turned his back to the tower and made his way across, his body swinging in the wind. Then Winchell grabbed hold of him and steered him into the tower. At 10:58 a.m., a little less than three hours after the balloon crashed, James and Reynolds were safe and secure, and thanking their rescuers profusely. But they still had 900 feet to go.

The firefighters’ plan was to lower James and Reynolds, still in their harnesses, a couple hundred feet at a time by hand, using ropes and pulleys. The rescuers agreed that the 73-year-old should get to the ground first, even though he was doing just fine physically. He also had family, including Lori and Lindsay, waiting below. The slow, careful descent began. At the first changeover point a couple hundred feet below, two firefighters hooked James into a safety clip attached to the tower, unclipped him from the first set of ropes and attached him to the second set.

“Have y’all ever done this before?” James asked the rescuers. “Yes,” came the response. “But not from this height.” Once James was on the second set of ropes, Reynolds began her descent. As the pair got closer to the ground, the mood turned lighter—at one of the stations, Capt. Clint Steelman told Reynolds he was hungry and asked if she had a cheeseburger.

An unforgettable ordeal

Once James and Reynolds completed the transition off the first set of ropes, Patrick looked out and saw the car of his wife, Christen Patrick, about a quarter-mile away at an Exxon station, where a crowd of nearly 100 people had gathered to watch the rescue. He gave her a high-altitude FaceTime call that the two of them and their kids will never forget.

Patrick, Winchell, Pointer and the other rescuers on the tower heard two explosions of cheers: one at 12:24 p.m. when James set foot on the ground, and another 18 minutes later when Reynolds stepped off the tower. “Get me out of this harness right now!” a relieved Reynolds said when her shoes touched earth.

Both balloonists were taken to Longview Regional Medical Center. They were just fine physically and were soon released—Reynolds that afternoon and James, given his age, the following morning. But the work on the tower wasn’t over quite yet.

“As soon as the survivors got on the ground, my stress level actually increased tremendously,” Johnson says, “because I knew that we had 14 guys still up on the tower who were mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted.” One by one, the rescuers clip-climbed down the ladder, with food, hydration and hugs waiting for them when they reunited with their colleagues on the ground.

The firefighters who were on duty that day headed back to the station to await the next emergency call. Patrick, whose day off had been interrupted, took his family out for a late lunch at Panda Express and then spent a busy night fielding calls and texts from family and friends who had seen him on the news.

Despite her terrifying experience, Reynolds isn’t ready to give up ballooning. James, on the other hand, says he’s done. But after nearly 500 flights, he’s fine with that. James and Reynolds have accepted an open invitation to visit the firehouse and have grown close with the fire­fighters. “We’ve brought them into our family,” Johnson says.

After the balloon was carefully cut away from the tower and lowered to the ground, James donated the basket and part of the canopy to the Longview Fire Department. They now hang from the ceiling of the station. Says Patrick, “It’s a reminder of why we train—even for things we may hope and think we’ll never have to do.”

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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“Names can be endlessly fascinating, as they hold special significance as emblems of our identity,” says Nathaniel Taylor, PhD, president of the American Society of Genealogists. “We can look at the names of our ancestors or others in our societies stretching back hundreds or even thousands of years.”

Then there’s the staggering variety of last names in the U.S. alone, with 7.8 million different ones currently in use, per the 2020 census. Just 11 of these names were reported more than a million times each, while the vast majority, 7 million, were counted fewer than 100 times.

My own last name at birth was Kelly, a common Irish one that means “descendant of Ceallach.” Aside from some grade-school teasing (“Smelly Kelly!”), I loved it. But when I got married, I took on a more challenging one: Geddes. Not many know its origins (Scotland) or meaning (mountain ridge), and fewer still can pronounce it—Geddes rhymes with lettuce. But at least there’s no silly taunting!

So what are the most common last names in the U.S. today, and how did they come to be? To find out, we turned to Taylor and Crista Cowan, Ancestry’s corporate genealogist. Read on to learn their origins and get a few clues about how your last name may have gotten its start too.

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Have people always had last names?

Believe it or not, no. In fact, in the Western world, for thousands of years, people simply went by one name—their first. But eventually, the need for surnames became apparent, since too many folks had the same first names. “Surnames are a medieval invention in Europe, appearing in many parts of the region from the 11th to the 13th centuries,” Taylor explains. “European-style inherited surnames came to the Western Hemisphere later on, between the 16th and 17th centuries.”

Experts believe the earliest recorded European last name is “O Cleirigh,” which originated in Ireland in 916 AD and would be spelled O’Clery today. But the Chinese have that record beat! “China developed hereditary family names, called Xing, more than 3,000 years ago, which makes its surname tradition one of the oldest in the world,” explains Cowan.

Other ancient cultures tracked lineage through titles or sacred roles rather than fixed last names. “For instance,” Cowan says, “Jewish Kohanim (priestly lines tracing back to Aaron, Moses’s brother) kept track of their hereditary lineage for thousands of years, even though fixed European surnames for these families, like Katz, which is short for Kohen Tsedek, were only formalized much later in history.”

Why did the concept of having last names really take off?

Along with the need to distinguish all the different people named John or Mary, last names took off because of big jumps in population, an increase in the number and types of trades, and the use of written records. Wealth and social prestige were also behind their rise. “The factors that gave rise to inheriting a surname included new laws about marriage and property inheritance in 12th-century Europe,” Taylor says.

Other motives were cultural, Taylor adds, as families were organized around a father-to-son legacy of status and identity. The result? Surnames served as visual symbols like coats of arms.

How did last names originate and proliferate?

Many of the last names we use in the U.S. today originated along five different, and surprisingly simple, paths. For the most part, these categories developed between the 12th and 14th centuries, though there are some variations in the chronology in different cultural traditions.

Keep in mind that the idea of surnames wasn’t exactly a conscious choice by a parent. “When surnames first appear in the written records, it’s because someone else described the person they were writing about in a certain way,” Taylor says. “So the ‘invention’ of many surnames may have been accidental moments in recordkeeping.”

With that in mind, here are the most common ways last names were born.

Fathers’ names

A patronymic—a term derived from the Greek words for father and name—is a name created with a prefix or suffix attached to a father or male relative’s moniker. Typically of Germanic, Scandinavian, Celtic, Hispanic and Slavic origin, many of these common last names are easy to spot since they sport son at the end (think: Williamson, Johnson, Wilson or Richardson) or prefixes (like O’Brian or O’Neill and MacDonald or McNamara). The Spanish suffix ez also means “son”; examples of these last names include Lopez, Sanchez, Fernandez and Alvarez.

While less common, women also passed down matronymics, such as Nelson (which is derived from Nell or Eleanor), Emmett (Emma), Madison (Maude) and Marriott (Mary). “In parts of South Asia (India, Indonesia), there are cultures where matrilineal inheritance of surnames is the rule,” says Taylor.

Occupations

Names describing the jobs a person held were also a frequent way of making surnames. If you crafted barrels, you might be designated as a Cooper, and if you worked with sheep, you’d be called a Shepherd. Baker, Miller, Carpenter, Fisher and Taylor are other occupations that morphed into last names.

Descriptions

While it might not seem very politically correct today, one’s appearance, personality or nickname became, in some cases, that person’s last name. Examples of these descriptors include Armstrong, Longfellow, Brown, Little, Russo (red), LeBlanc (white), Young, Stern, Swift and Wise.

Terrain

The landscape was also a source of inspiration when creating last names in medieval times. “These are sometimes called toponymic surnames,” Taylor says. “They encompassed features found in many locales, which then gave rise to unrelated families using the same surname.” Some common location-based names include Hill, Wood, Dupont (French for “from the bridge”), Stone, Atwater, Ford, Vega (Spanish for “meadow” or “fertile plain”) and Cumberland.

Cities, estates and feudal manors

Where a person lived also prompted some surnames, including Sussex, Sutton, Kensington and Huntington. And if you owned property, your last name night be the same as your estate’s name. The British royal family, Windsor, is a prime example of this, along with other noble monikers such as Spencer and Stuart.

“In English history, you see names from big historic noble families like Howard, Seymour and Percy,” Cowan says. “Across Europe, noble family names often used little prefixes like de in French or Spanish or von in German, like de Medici or von Habsburg, to show that the family ruled over or owned a specific area.”

Similar to the folks who acquired their surnames based on their occupation, people who held jobs on these grand properties were often identified by those jobs. “So you get names like Reeve or Bailiff for estate managers, Granger for the person in charge of the granary, Hayward for the officer protecting hedges and boundaries, and Bond or Freeman, which shows whether someone was a peasant bound to the land or a free tenant farmer,” Cowan says.

Other trajectories

It’s important to remember that not all cultures hewed to the paths outlined above. “Across many African, Indigenous and South Asian traditions, surnames grew out of clan lineages, spiritual titles or personal characteristics,” Cowan notes.

What are the most common last names?

Here’s a snapshot of the 10 most popular last names in the U.S., according to the 2020 U.S. Census, along with their country of origin and what each of them means.

1. Smith

Meaning: This English and Scottish name is derived from an occupation: a metal worker—particularly, someone who molded iron, like a blacksmith.

How many there are in the U.S.: 2,369,644

2. Johnson

Meaning: Also of English and Scottish heritage, Johnson means “son of John.”

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,858,234

3. Williams

Meaning: Williams is both English and Welsh, and it’s derived from the first name William.

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,561,395

4. Brown

Meaning: Brown falls into the category of appearances or nicknames. This English, Irish and Scottish surname likely developed due to the person’s brown hair or skin.

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,386,083

5. Jones

Meaning: Similar to Jon or Jone, this English and Welsh last name was created to denote a person who lived or worked at John’s house.

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,383,250

6. Garcia

Meaning: Garcia has both Spanish and Portuguese roots and may come from the Basque area. It translates to “young bear” or “brave warrior.”

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,149,510

7. Miller

Meaning: This English and Scottish occupational moniker referred to one who worked at a mill or ground grain.

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,129,186

8. Rodriguez

Meaning: From the Spanish and Portuguese, Rodriguez is a common patronymic that means “son of Rodrigo.”

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,085,838

9. Davis

Meaning: Also a patronymic, Davis is English and Welsh and translates to “son of David.”

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,074,448

10. Martinez

Meaning: The Spanish name Martinez means “son of Martin.”

How many there are in the U.S.: 1,039,848

Are all people with the same last name related from way back when?

Probably not, especially if the last name is common. Still, as science improves, this answer might change. “Over the last 25 years, DNA databases have shown some trends about the likelihood that holders of the same surname are related biologically,” Taylor says. However, if your name is on the unusual side, the chances are better that you’ve got kin around the world. “The rarer the surname, the more likely it is that there is only one biological family accounting for it—only one founding ancestor,” he explains.

My own last name just might fall in the latter basket. “Geddes, per online sources, is indeed that sort of name: a geographically derived surname probably from a single place in Nairnshire, Scotland,” says Taylor. Interesting!

Are new last names still being added, or are they pretty set at this point?

The sky’s the limit when it comes to adding last names. Indeed, as with first names, creating new last names is potentially an endless creative process. You can literally choose what you want for yourself and your offspring. “Dual surnames and hyphenated names are way more visible now, partly because of long-standing cultural norms like Hispanic dual-surname traditions, and partly because modern couples are choosing to blend or keep their names,” Cowan says. “It’s a great reminder that surnames aren’t static; they keep growing to reflect who we actually are.”

Taylor agrees. “With the convergence of so many distinct cultures in a melting pot like ours and the ability to borrow from cultures, the opportunity for new surnames and new patterns is greater than ever before,” he says.

Alas, tracking the wide range of last names isn’t as easy as first names. Thanks to the Social Security Administration, we have an excellent database that traces baby-name choice. “But,” Taylor says, “there’s no similar handy statistical source for surname use in America.”

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on the most common last names in the U.S., Jennifer Geddes tapped her experience as a longtime journalist who frequently writes about family, lifestyle and facts for Reader’s Digest. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• Nathaniel Lane Taylor, PhD, FASG, president of the American Society of Genealogists; email interview, October 2026
• Crista Cowan, corporate genealogist at Ancestry; email interview, October 2026
• The Atlantic: “A Patriarchal Tradition That Just Won’t Budge”
• U.S. Census Bureau: “Last Name Data from the 2020 Census”
• U.S. Census Bureau: “Most Common First Names and Last Names in the 2020 Census”
• U.S. Census Bureau: “List of Top 15 Last Names in the United States Has Changed Less in the Last 230 Years Than You Might Think”
• MyHeritage: “The History of Surnames: What Was the First Surname Ever Documented?”
• FindMyPast:”English Surnames Explained: The Seven Types of Last Names You Should Know”
• Ancestry: “Discover the Meaning and History Behind Your Name”
• Ancestry: “Last Names and Their Meanings”

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It’s that “or something” that I think about a lot these days, as the days fly by ever faster. Where are we supposed to find that happiness for our “one beautiful life” when it’s just so dang busy? Then it occurred to me that while we’ll ask 500 strangers online how to do sourdough bread, for some reason we never ask the people who’ve been doing this life thing for 80 years or more how to do life. Thankfully, I can fill that gap for all of us. 

I write the 100 Years Strong column for The Healthy, where I interview people in their 80s, 90s and 100s about their lives and longevity secrets. I make it a point to ask each one what their secret to happiness is. And make no mistake: These people are happy happy. Even though they’ve lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, multiple revolutions in other countries and the full gamut of difficult personal challenges, nearly all of them are pretty positive most of the time. 

“That doesn’t surprise me one bit. People do tend to get happier as they get older,” says Robert Waldinger, MD, a psychiatrist and the co-director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of happiness in the world. If there’s one person who has interviewed more elderly folks than I have, it’s definitely him. “It’s a real, documented thing, called the positivity effect,” he explains. “There’s a psychological shift around the mid-40s, when people begin to realize life is short.”

To help find out what makes people happy, I interviewed more than 45 people, aged 80 to 103, and asked them what they wish they’d understood about happiness sooner and what keeps them smiling. Read on to find out. The answer will definitely surprise you—it’s basically the opposite of what the self-help section says.

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What is the happiness secret most 80-year-olds wish they’d known sooner?

The hard-earned secret that comes up most often among our folks can be best summed up by 100-year-old Dwight Roberts: “I don’t even think of life in terms of happiness. My mind doesn’t work on that level.”

Yep. The secret to happiness may actually be … not pursuing happiness. Or even thinking about it all that much. Most of the active 80-, 90- and 100-year-olds I talk to are so busy, staying useful and curious, that they never stop to grade their own happiness. 

Connie Carr, who is still teaching three fitness classes per week at 93, agrees, saying, “Oh, I haven’t got time to be sad! I never have. With my hobbies and friends and classes, I’ve always got something happy happening.” 

Havi Stander, 95, also keeps herself happily busy—including posing for a “not-so-nudie” YMCA calendar! “When people ask me about being happy, I tell them to stop focusing so much on yourself. Relax. Stay interested in everything around you. Don’t close your eyes, baby. There’s a wonderful world out there.”

Dr. Waldinger explains: “Happiness isn’t necessarily a choice—it’s a feeling. And the trick is to stop trying to ‘create happiness’ but rather create the conditions for happiness and then go on living your life.” He began exploring this theme in his first book, the New York Times bestseller The Good Life, and now offers practical tips for achieving this mindset in his new book, Nothing to Fix. Trying to force happiness can backfire. Just think of the parent gritting their teeth through a Disney meltdown, insisting, “This is fun, dang it, and you will enjoy it!” Instead, Dr. Waldinger suggests creating opportunities for happiness without demanding that every moment deliver *jazz hands* JOY.

Martha Clement, 91, who was delivered by a doctor in a horse and buggy and now uses AI, illustrates this principle perfectly. “I don’t get low because I get out and go,” she says, laughing at her rhyme. “Friends make me happy, but you can’t make friends or have friends if you stay home all the time and sit in that chair.” (Fun fact: The man who sat next to her in the interview, Lee Penhallegon, 90, has been her friend for more than 80 years.)

What are they most definitely not doing?

They’re not sitting at home making spreadsheets about how to optimize their happiness and cutting out every person who doesn’t “bring them joy.” In fact, these people are incredibly tolerant of things that make them uncomfortable or don’t go smoothly.

Dwight, for example, has run more than 300 races over the past 45 years, including four marathons, and still has the audacity to tell me he “still doesn’t like running.” So if the running doesn’t make him happy, why do it? Because running has given him more than the experience of running itself. There’s the thrill of a race, new friends, a sense of accomplishment and the benefits of staying active. As he puts it, he’s learned to skip the happiness audit and “just pay attention to what’s in front of you.”

Of course, my interviewees aren’t necessarily representative of everyone their age. They volunteered to talk with me, so it’s possible they were happier or more engaged than their peers on average. Still, the idea that we don’t have to feel happy all the time to live a satisfying life has support in psychological research. “Many many studies have shown us that optimism has a strong effect on health,” Dr. Waldinger says, explaining that not only do people who live longer feel happier, but happier people also tend to live longer, creating a beautiful cycle of positivity. 

Does this match what experts say?

Boy does it! A 2024 UC Berkeley study found that monitoring and judging your own happiness was linked with lower well-being and more negative feelings—even during positive experiences. Simply wanting to be happy, however, wasn’t associated with those same problems. It’s a nuanced distinction. A 2024 Dutch survey of 8,331 adults found that people who valued happiness reported greater life satisfaction, but intensely focusing on being happy didn’t predict greater life satisfaction a year later.

This distinction matters: It’s fine to want to be happy. It’s the constant checking and nitpicking—Am I happy yet? Why aren’t I happier? What’s wrong with me?—that can get in the way.

Dr. Waldinger has seen this in his own research and personal life as well. “One of the things that I wish I knew about happiness sooner is that life is unsatisfactory. It’s not a flaw—it’s the point. I learned that studying to become a Zen priest,” he says. (Yes, he is a Zen master on top of being a researcher, psychiatrist, speaker, author and family man.) “It changed my outlook because I stopped trying to fight the discomfort and instead looked at what it is trying to teach me.” 

It turns out that some of our unhappiness comes from trying so hard to avoid being unhappy—which, if we’re honest, is something many of us spend a lot of time doing. “One of the things I really focus on in my new book is the power of embracing our negative emotions, facing them head-on,” he explains. “Denying those feelings just makes it harder to act and to effect positive change. You can have unhappiness but still be happy.” 

Dwight is the poster child (grandfather?) for this attitude: “Oh, I’ll have a great day today,” he tells me, even though it’s quite early and most of the day still stretches ahead of us. “Even when it’s a bad day, I always have a good day.”

What other happiness themes came up repeatedly in these interviews?

Overall, strong relationships with other humans is the strongest link to both health and happiness, Dr. Waldinger says. But there are so many ways to build and maintain those relationships, which leads to three other main themes I noticed in my interviews.

They stay useful by serving others and volunteering

Volunteer work, whether it’s through a formal organization or just helping out where you can, has been consistently linked to better health and increased happiness. Serving others is a powerful way of building happiness without focusing on it, because you’re absorbed in helping build someone else’s happiness, which, in turn, gives you more happiness than any self-care day could. And these seniors are living proof it works. 

Edward Krauss, 91, ran his town’s food pantry for 23 years, built homes for Habitat for Humanity and then started his own charity building wheelchair ramps for people who can’t easily leave their homes. He’s still at it.

Jean Hinkle, 92, started a free lunch program and now hands out 100 to 350 hot meals every third Thursday. “God just put it on my heart,” she says.

Natalie Grabow, 80, the world’s oldest woman Ironman champion, is motivated, in part, by wanting to stay strong enough to care for her husband. “It gives me energy. It gives me joy.”

And Stephen Broadbelt, 91, who has lived all over the world and actually serenaded me during our interview, brings a dozen roses to church every week. He leaves a note inviting people to take one and give it to someone else along with a compliment. “At the end of the day, we’re all here to help each other,” he says.

But I think James Sneed, 103, sums it up the best. James drove a tank during World War II when the Army was segregated—he was actually pulled out of victory photographs and replaced with a White soldier—and went on to play a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement in the South while building several houses by hand and raising five children. Through it all, he maintained his faith in humanity and made a point of welcoming the people he met. “Do all the good you can, to all the people you can, every place you can,” he says. “That’s really it. That’s how you be happy.”   

The keep making new friends, often younger ones

Friends of different ages and backgrounds can introduce us to new perspectives, experiences and opportunities to learn.

Ruthie Vinette, 96, spent her life on the water and made it her mission to bring swimming to underprivileged kids. When I asked about her friendships, she told me: “I [had] very good friends. And most of them are gone. So I have new friends, and all my friends now are younger. And I like that. They make me feel young, and I keep learning new things.”

Martha Clement and Lee Penhallegon, meanwhile, have been friends for more than 80 years. As they’ve grown older, they’ve continued to make new friends too. They begin by counting the classmates they’ve lost and remembering them fondly, then turn to the people they’ve met more recently.

“Making friends doesn’t have to be so complicated,” Lee says. “My rules are: Don’t gossip, stay easy to be around and keep showing up at the same places.”

Honestly, that’s a pretty good friendship manual at any age.

They never stopped playing

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many of us start treating fun as something we have to earn after all the important stuff is done. But if you want a life that feels good to live, recreation can’t always be the thing that gets bumped to next week.

Sonny Veltri, 98, decided to become a lifeguard in his 80s. Who starts a new hobby or side hustle at this age? Happy people, that’s who. When I ask him why, he gives me a sly wink and says, “For the ladies!” And not only does he thoroughly enjoy his pool time, but at 90, he also jumped in and rescued a drowning girl, providing CPR until EMS arrived, and saved her life. “You have to believe in yourself and stay positive when trying new things,” he says. “Don’t overdo anything. And always exercise—that’s the whole key. And keep laughing. I don’t know if that’s the secret, but it doesn’t hurt.” 

Sue Foster, 91, who runs a large Airbnb agrees, saying, “I truly believe in humor as medicine. There’s nothing better than a good laugh.” So she looks for hobbies that give her that daily dose, like her classes at the YMCA.

Hobbies don’t have to be physical, though. Fred Richman, 99, a renowned artist who is selling more pieces than ever, tells me his motto is “Never act my age!” And then he admonishes me: “Please don’t tell me you’re going to act your age.”

Similarly, Mike Zambrano, 95, started dancing as a child in Cuba and kept that skill after he fled to the U.S. after the revolution. He danced everything from the bolero to the twist with his wife, and he still dances several times a week. “You can just make up your own steps if you can’t follow the rhythm,” he assures me. Which, frankly, sounds like excellent life advice beyond the dance floor. 

How can you redesign your life to be happier, ideally well before you turn 80?

The big lesson from my interviews is simple: Build a life that keeps you engaged with people and activities you care about. Give happiness room to happen instead of making it just one more thing to accomplish.

“Our brains are wired to look for danger, because negativity can be protective—it helps us spot threats,” Dr. Waldinger explains. “But that instinct can go into overdrive.” Between the 24-hour news cycle and the online “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality, we’re bombarded with danger signals, even when those threats have nothing to do with our own lives. “You have to consciously counteract that instinct.”

Here are six ways to start.

Stop asking yourself if you’re happy

Instead of chasing a feeling, focus on the things that make life meaningful: spending time with people you love, doing something you’re curious about, helping someone else or simply enjoying what’s in front of you. Dwight Roberts puts it this way: “I ask myself, What can I still do, and what does it give me right now?”

That doesn’t mean pretending everything is wonderful. It just means changing the question from Why aren’t I happy? to What am I looking forward to? Who can I connect with? What would make today feel worthwhile?

Treat relationships as something you build, not something you wait for

If there’s one theme that comes up again and again among people who’ve lived long lives, it’s the importance of connection. But meaningful relationships don’t happen without effort. Sometimes you have to be the one who reaches out, makes the plan or shows up somewhere often enough that familiar faces become friends.

Put time with friends and family on your calendar instead of hoping you’ll find time later. Return to the same class, club, volunteer group or community gathering. And don’t limit yourself to the people you already know. Some of the most rewarding friendships can begin when you step outside your usual circle. It might feel awkward at first. Do it anyway. Friendship is worth a little awkwardness.

“We benefit from all types of relationships, and investing in relationships is the No. 1 thing you can do to be happier,” Dr. Waldinger says.

Find ways to be useful to other people

Helping someone else can give your day a sense of purpose that you can’t get from focusing exclusively on your own happiness. That doesn’t mean you need to volunteer for a major cause or become the person everyone calls in a crisis. It can be as simple as checking on a neighbor, sharing a skill, making someone laugh or finding a way to contribute to a community you care about.

All—yes, all—of the people I spoke with found meaning in service, volunteering and showing up for others. Their stories were a reminder that purpose doesn’t have to be grand or glamorous. Sometimes it’s simply knowing that someone else’s day was a little better because you were part of it.

Keep making room for things that make you feel alive

Play isn’t just for kids! Whether it’s dancing, learning a skill, exploring a new place or doing something that makes you laugh until you can’t catch your breath, enjoyment deserves a place in your life—even when you have a thousand other things to do.

You can also make a habit of noticing the good things that are already there. One simple way to do this is to keep a daily gratitude journal. Another idea? Take a picture of things that make you happy when you see them, then put them into a digital scrapbook that you can keep adding to.

The goal isn’t to turn happiness into another assignment on your to-do list; it’s to give you more opportunities to find happiness organically.

If you do this, how long will it be before you feel the change?

“The nice thing about happiness is that even small changes can lead to an immediate happiness boost,” Dr. Waldinger says. Help someone today, even just give someone new a compliment, and see how you feel. However, to feel a change in your general baseline mood, it might take a bit longer. Expect a couple of months for the habits to feel automatic. After a year, you’ll see some real gains in well-being.

And don’t feel defeated if you fall off the bandwagon. It happens to the best of us! Accept the slip as a normal part of being human, not as a referendum on your own worth, Dr. Waldinger says. In fact, the UC Berkeley study found that judging your own happiness only adds negative feelings. So cut the “I should be feeling happy …” and replace it with “I’m feeling upset right now, and that’s normal and OK—here’s what I am going to do differently tomorrow.” You can and will recover from a bad day, a bad month or even a bad year.

Is it too late to start?

Of course not! You’ll have days when you don’t feel happy, weeks when your plans fall apart and stretches when finding the energy to do much of anything feels harder than usual. That’s being human, not failing at happiness. The point isn’t to be cheerful all the time. It’s to keep making room for connection, curiosity and things that give your life meaning—even when you’re having a rough patch.

And it’s never too late to start something new. Just ask Natalie Grabow, our 80-year-old Ironman champion.

“I didn’t even learn to swim until I was 59 years old!” she tells me. “People think motivation fades with age. But if anything, it gets clearer.”

Maybe that’s the real secret: You don’t have to figure out how to be happy forever. In fact, there’s no such thing as happiness forever. Instead, keep living, keep connecting with others, stay aware of what does make you happy and stay open to whatever tomorrow brings.

To read more about the inspiring people featured in this story, check out The Healthy’s 100 Year Strong Project.  

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on what makes people happy, Charlotte Hilton Andersen tapped her experience as a longtime journalist who frequently writes about psychology, communication, etiquette and common curiosities for Reader’s Digest. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• Robert Waldinger, MD, psychiatrist, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, co-author of The Good Life and author of Nothing to Fix; personal interview, Oct. 15, 2026
• The Healthy: Personal interviews for 100 Years Strong
• Harvard Second Generation Study: “Welcome to the Harvard Study of Adult Development”
• Emotion: “Unpacking the Pursuit of Happiness”
• Psychological Science: “Does Valuing Happiness Lead to Well-Being?”

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Peptides are the body’s messengers that signal your cells to execute functions like prompting your kidneys to absorb water or your brain to release oxytocin. They occur naturally in your body, but synthetic versions, like the ones Fleming uses, can also be made in a laboratory and injected or swallowed to induce a variety of vital functions at will. Once limited to die-hard fitness circles, injectable peptides have seeped into the mainstream thanks to a heavy push on social media and widespread use of GLP-1 medications, which themselves are weight-loss peptides.

And there’s a peptide for nearly everything—speeding muscle recovery, slowing aging, helping a variety of injuries and ailments—though many aren’t well studied or approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. Still, they’ve been publicly supported by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who announced in February that he planned to ease restrictions on 14 peptides that the FDA had previously banned pharmacies from creating. However, even Kennedy admitted that there isn’t much scientific evidence to support the use of supplemental peptides.

Health-care providers are usually wary of patients trying these so-called “gray market” products manufactured without FDA oversight. Meanwhile, desperate consumers are tempted by a buffet of choices.

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Why are so many different things considered peptides?

The term peptides can be confusing. “Peptides are short chains of amino acids, the same building blocks that make up proteins, just much smaller,” says Stuart Phillips, PhD, chair of the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario. Several medications fall into the peptides category, including insulin and GLP-1s like Ozempic. Those are FDA approved; the peptides many people reference on social media are not.

“Your body makes thousands of them naturally, and they act as signaling molecules that tell cells what to do, whether that’s releasing a hormone, building tissue, regulating appetite or modulating inflammation,” Phillips says. “The peptides people are talking about now are synthetic versions designed to mimic or amplify those natural signals.”

Of the injectable and oral peptides popular on social media, BPC-157 (tied to muscle and tendon repair and gut health), is one of the most common, along with MK-677 (muscle growth), and SS-31 and GHK-Cu (both anti-aging). Influencers make bold claims about these products, suggesting that they can support gut health, muscle recovery, longevity and more. (Often, these influencers offer a discount code for an online retailer or provide a special link in their profile, suggesting that they receive a commission from sales.)

Because many peptides are not FDA approved, people often purchase products labeled for research use only, says Daniel T. Abazia, PharmD, director of the Rutgers/RWJBarnabas Health Medication-Use Safety and Information Center. But purchasing products labeled “not for human consumption” or “for research purposes only” means bypassing key safety checks.

Why are people using peptides?

About four years ago, Jessi Smith, a 33-year-old in Boston, developed a mysterious array of symptoms, including brain fog, fatigue, dizziness and food intolerances. Her functional medicine provider determined that she had mold toxicity and spent two years trying to help her feel better.

“It was getting to the point where we had tried everything,” Smith says. “We’re still detoxing the mold, still healing my gut. My immune system is just shot.” It was then that Smith’s provider suggested she try peptides as a way to “jump-start” her health.

She started with a blend of several peptides: BPC-157, KPV, GHK-Cu and N-acetyl larazotide. At first, she didn’t like the way she felt. She had “horrible insomnia” and felt awful the next day. “I don’t want to necessarily blame the peptides, because my body is pretty reactive right now,” she says. Smith restarted the peptide blend at a lower dose a few weeks later and felt better. “I still need to give it some time and ease up to the full dose, but thankfully had no bad reactions other than some fatigue the first few days,” she says.

Fleming’s experience has been different. “I have had no side effects,” she says. She had “pretty intense” tendinitis in her Achilles tendon for three years that went away after she started taking BPC-157. “I was in a space of seeing a podiatrist, getting prescriptions for MRIs … it was bad,” she says. “I recover faster on peptides.” She has also struggled with digestive-health issues for years. “Apparently BPC-157 helps with gut-related issues,” she says, “but I can’t say that anything is worlds better there.”

While BPC-157 is popular in athletic circles, it’s banned in and out of competition by the World Anti-Doping Agency, making it something that athletes competing at the national or international level, especially top finishers and record breakers, should avoid. (Fleming says she’s not running races to try to win.)

How well do they work?

There is rigorous data to support the use of FDA-approved peptides, but clinical data on the unregulated wellness and sports peptides sold online is limited or lacking. One 2018 study found that BPC-157 helped heal damaged tendon-muscle junctions in rats given the peptide. And an earlier study, from 1996, found that when a group of adults ages 64 to 81 took MK-677, their levels of an important growth hormone were restored to those of young adults. But the study was small, including only 32 adults.

“A lot of peptides being used on the gray market currently don’t have human studies or have very limited human studies that are not ideal,” says Tracy Verrico, DO, a board-certified OB-GYN and hormone expert at Bona Dea Gynecology. “We definitely need more data. That’s what I’m telling patients.”

There’s also a big difference between animal and human studies, notes Abazia. “A peptide that heals a tendon in a rat doesn’t always work the same way in a 51-year-old man with a complex medical history,” he says.

Phillips says the lack of data to support these peptides is particularly concerning. “We have very limited human data,” he explains. “A lot of the enthusiasm is built on rodent studies, in vitro work, or anecdotes. That doesn’t mean these compounds don’t work, but we don’t really know what they do over months or years of use, what the right dose is, who shouldn’t take them or what happens when you stack three or four together, which is common practice.”

Phillips stresses that a lack of data isn’t evidence that these peptides are harmful. “But it’s also not evidence of safety, and the marketing tends to blur that distinction,” he says.

There’s also a lack of data on how well oral peptides perform compared to the more popular injectable peptides. “A capsule from a wellness website is almost certainly not delivering what an injection would,” Phillips says, noting that peptides are “poorly absorbed” when they’re taken orally.

But injectable peptides carry risks of infection and injection-site reaction, and then there’s the question of what’s actually in the vial, Phillips says.

Fleming acknowledges the lack of data surrounding peptides. “I feel like if there was some sort of glaring issue, I would stop,” she says. “I don’t know if this is blind optimism, but if I feel good, that’s good.” Fleming says she thinks the impact of BPC-157 has been “significant” on her health and fitness recovery but adds, “I really wish I could prove the peptides were helping.”

Are peptides the answer?

Many people who use peptides started them after feeling as if they had exhausted their options with conventional medicine. “I was getting no answers. I was told it was just anxiety,” Smith says. “I feel like I was getting very gaslit. The nontraditional routes have been more helpful for me.”

Peptides are often marketed to these patients. “A lot of people—­particularly those dealing with chronic pain, slow recovery from injury, midlife metabolic changes or symptoms that don’t fit neatly into a diagnostic box—feel unheard by conventional medicine,” Phillips says. “Peptides are being marketed as a personalized, optimization-focused alternative, often by clinicians who spend more time listening than a typical primary-care visit allows.”

There can be a placebo effect to feeling cared for, he adds, noting that this “shouldn’t be dismissed.” Couple that with many social media claims, and it’s easy to see why some people are willing to try peptides. But before turning to them, take a step back. “Be honest with yourself about what you’re trying to fix,” Phillips says. “Many of the things that people use peptides for—recovery, body composition, energy—are far more responsive to consistent training, adequate protein and good sleep.”

If your current health-care provider isn’t meeting your care needs, Dr. Verrico suggests finding a new one. “If you feel that you’re not getting anywhere and you’re not being heard, you need to get a new doctor who will take the time to put the pieces together,” she says. “It may be someone who is offering [both] conventional and functional medicine.”

Dr. Verrico acknowledges the allure of peptides as a cure-all, though. “Peptides are pitched as the next best thing to sliced bread,” she says. “I know you’re desperate to feel better. Let’s figure [it] out in a safe way.”

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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“I think it’s completely thrilling to be able to look at a sentence and know how many clauses and prepositional phrases there are, whether the verbs are transitive or intransitive, what the pronoun case is and so on,” she says. “I would have been ecstatic if we had spent additional years on grammar in school.”

In September 2018, Jovin, then an author, lecturer and communications coach for Syntaxis—her business that focuses on teaching communication workshops to businesses—was spending days cooped inside her apartment working on her language-­learning blog as well as interacting in dozens of Facebook language groups. As the walls slowly began to close in on her, she had a revelation: I gotta get out of here!

“I didn’t want to spend that many hours a day online,” she says. Instead, “I wanted to use language in the real world for actual communication.”

So she stepped out of her apartment and set up a folding table across the street. Jovin, decked out in a leopard-print jacket, goofy ball-shaped earrings and a “Grammar Hedonist” T-shirt, was ready to laugh with everyone. She drew them little punctuation charts. She let them vent. As she told passersby: “I am here to answer grammar questions or take complaints.”

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Embarking on a grammatical adventure

That December, she and her husband, Brandt Johnson, decided to take the show on the road, with Johnson filming what would become a documentary called Rebel with a Clause. True, he had never made a movie before. He’d done a lot of other things—acting, writing, even playing pro basketball in Europe touring against the Harlem Globetrotters. But mostly he and Jovin together run Syntaxis. That means they have the same boss—themselves—and could take off as soon as they wanted. So they did.

Those the couple met in their travels from Martha’s Vineyard to Flattop Mountain, Alaska, included kids, cops, lawyers, tourists, prom-goers, some grammar snob know-it-alls who got it all wrong, and two charming but inebriated young men with a pressing question. In Jovin’s book, also titled Rebel with a Clause, we meet Jason and Jack in Decatur, Alabama, after they’ve ambled over to her table to ask where the apostrophe goes in y’all. Jason wondered if it went before or after the a. Jack thought it didn’t go anywhere and y’all was just yall. Jovin explained that there is indeed an apostrophe and that it goes between the y and the all, because it’s taking the place of the rest of the word you.

The guys weren’t finished. While he and Jack helped themselves to her lunch, Jason asked what you call the “dot dot dot” you see when some words are missing.

“This is called an ellipsis,” said Jovin.

“I thought an ellipsis was the little …” Jason drew an oval in the air.

That’s an ellipse in math, Jovin explained. But in grammar it means something else and can be fun to talk about at parties. The plural is ellipses.

“I don’t normally talk to girls that are smart enough to know what that is,” Jason replied. “I need to find some girls that know what an ellipses is.”

He corrected himself: “What ellipses are.”

Using grammar as an icebreaker

One sunny spring day in New York City, I accompanied Jovin to Central Park, where she set up her table and was soon swamped with queries.

“I still never get who and whom right,” said Linda Klein, a tourist from Los Angeles who was visiting with her dad, George Klein. “Do you have a trick for remembering it?”

Jovin smiled. She lives for such exchanges. While it all depends on context, she told Linda, there is a way to figure it out. Who is pretty much the equivalent of he, she and I—a subject. Whom is pretty much the equivalent of him, her or me—an object. And the way to figure which to use, Jovin continued, is to rephrase the sentence it’s in.

To use an example from Jovin’s book: If you’re trying to figure out what goes in the sentence “Evan, who/whom I thought was an honest person, plagiarized two paragraphs of mine,” you slice away everything outside of the commas. Then you consider whether you’d say “I thought he was an honest person” or “I thought him was an honest person.” Since it’s he, you use who.

But when it’s “Evan, who/whom I admired, just robbed a bank,” you take away what’s outside the commas and realize that Jovin admired him, not he. So you discover it’s whom, not who. Also that Evan is someone Jovin should steer clear of. (Yes—we’ll get to this point in a minute. It’s perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition, including of.)

Jovin and the Kleins continued to chat. Grammar is often an icebreaker, just as Jovin hoped. It turns out that George grew up in Czechoslovakia but also speaks Spanish (as does Jovin) and German (as does Jovin) and Hungarian, French and Russian (she’s got the French and a little Russian). Jovin has studied 28 languages and is currently brushing up on her Italian and Portuguese. She apologized to George for not having a Czech dictionary with her that day, though she did have a Polish one. Jovin always brings along a foreign language dictionary or two to help out in case people who speak those languages come to chat.

Linda had one last question: What does Jovin call herself? A therapist? “A roving grammarian,” Jovin answered.

As the Kleins were about to leave, another man strolled up. His name? Bill Funt. Was he possibly related to Alan Funt, creator of Candid Camera? Yup. That was his dad. This Funt was not fishing for the kind of squirmy moments that made his dad famous, but he did pose a couple of tough questions. First, he wondered if there was a ­nongendered word for aunt or uncle. After all, he said, the nongendered word for niece or nephew is nibling (a term coined by linguist Samuel E. Martin in the 1950s).

Jovin said she didn’t know of such a word, at least not in English.

“OK,” Funt continued. “My father, before he married my mom, was married and had three children. Then they divorced. Is there a word for what she [the first wife] is to me?”

“I have this same situation in my family,” Jovin replied. But there is, in fact, no special word, she said.

“In other words, I’ve stumped you twice!” said Bill, exultingly.

“But maybe the word you’re looking for doesn’t exist,” Jovin countered primly. “This is not a word-manufacturing plant.”

Knowing when to break the rules

As Jovin and Johnson crisscrossed the country, certain grammar beefs and beliefs came up time and again. “I know people who will jump off a building before they split an infinitive,” Jovin says. An infinitive is the “to” form of a verb: To jump. To sigh. To barbecue. Those are infinitives. Fact is, there are times it is positively elegant to split them apart. Think of “to boldly go …”

As Jovin writes in her book, “The verb to go is the infinitive, and the adverb boldly intervenes.” It doesn’t sound bad—it sounds thrillingly Trekkian. But for eons, schoolkids have been taught to avoid it. Slaying that myth is something Jovin does almost daily.

She also deals with this one: A woman came up to her table to complain that the people who really need a grammar lesson probably never stop by. “My pet peeve is sentences ending in prepositions,” the woman said. “I see it all the time among people who should know better!”

The woman swanned off before Jovin had a chance to delicately explain that she should know better. Prepositions are little words that show relationships, like on the hill, at the hill, to the hill, up the hill. Never allowing them to end a sentence is another grammatical myth. This one somehow made its way into English via Latin, Jovin says. “But English is a Germanic language.”

Is it really better to say “That’s for what friends are” than “That’s what friends are for”? Or “Up to what are you?” instead of “What are you up to?” Ending a sentence with a preposition is not only grammatically kosher—it’s often required if you want people to understand what you’re driving at. Yes, at.

Tackling the big questions

Another myth people cling to is that all adverbs—words that modify verbs—end in y. Words like slowly, snootily and bombastically do, of course. But the word often is also an adverb, as in “He’s often tripping over his toga.”

Jovin also has to deal with all the confusion over semicolons: Are they instead of a dash? A period? A comma? Yes. Basically, a semicolon is a way of connecting two ideas that could be separate but are also sort of linked; it’s also a way of making sure that phrases filled with commas have something bigger separating them.

So let’s move on to the battle royal of everyday grammar. The punctuation mark that starts brawls, ends dates and drives writers to drink. You know what I’m talking about: the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, also known as the series comma. It’s the much-debated practice of putting a comma before the and in a list.

Some publications, like the New York Times, swear by it. Other entities (we’re looking at you, Associated Press) recommend using series commas only when crucial for clarity. For instance, let’s look at this sentence: “I invited the ax murderers, Frank and Louie.” In that sentence, am I alone with the ax murderers, whose names are Frank and Louie? Or did I stupidly invite some ax murderers along with Frank and Louie? Putting a comma before and makes it me, Frank and Louie, scared for our lives. Without this clarifying comma, Frank and Louie are the ax murderers, and it’s just me with them. Yikes.

When a chemical engineering major stopped by the Grammar Table in Starkville, Mississippi, Jovin gave him a less-chilling example of this debate: “I ordered a salad, spaghetti and soda.” Would he put a comma after spaghetti? “Yes, definitely,” said the budding engineer. “It sounds weird otherwise, because if you say, ‘I ordered salad, comma, spaghetti and soda,’ it’s like spaghetti and soda are one entity. What is that? That’s nasty.”

Know what else is nasty? The lay vs. lie quandary. It’s just too confusing. Lie is something a noun or pronoun does: You lie down. The cow lies down. And lay is the past tense of lie. Fine. But! Lay is also the present tense of (and here’s where my head exploded) when you’re describing what someone did to a direct object: Gerry lay down his shrimp fork. Lenore lays her glasses on her head and then can’t figure out where she put them. Which, between you and I, just happened.

Wait, wait! That’s between you and me, not I! I vs. me is such a common mistake that it, too, must be mentioned here. “People think me is a dirty word,” Jovin says.

A student visiting the Grammar Table in Morgantown, West Virginia, told Jovin: “I know it’s right to say ‘Will you go to the bar with Emily and me?’ but I don’t want to sound stupid, so I say, ‘Will you go to the bar with Emily and I?’ ”

Jovin assured him that some people, including her, do know that me is absolutely right (and not stupid). The way to tell which word to use is, again, to strip away a lot of the sentence. Would you say “Go to the bar with I?” or “Go to the bar with me?” Me wins!

Maybe the biggest rule in the English language, says Jovin, is that nothing is set in stone, much to the chagrin of a certain demographic.

Acknowledging the evolution of grammar

These days, Jovin hears older folks complain that their younger friends are saying “on accident” instead of “by accident.” The generations are also divided by the word like. You can, like, guess, which group uses it more and which group it, like, drives crazy.

And using they to denote a person who doesn’t want to be identified as he or she also requires some getting used to by the older generation. Especially since it’s singular, and hearing that “they” is coming over to do Jell-O shots begs the question of just how many Jell-O shots to prepare. (That said, they, even when denoting one person, still gets are, not the is treatment, Jovin notes.)

Like life, medicine and vacuum cleaners, grammar is always evolving. Usually, the older generation finds the younger one unutterably lax, while the young folk roll their eyes at their elders’ persnicketiness. “My feeling is that both generations should be tolerant of the other’s habits,” says the roving grammarian. “Every generation is innovative. They create their own words and terms, and it’s fun for them. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just what happens.”

Up with this, we all should put.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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The post To Whom “Whom” May Concern: How Ellen Jovin Got People Across America Talking About Grammar appeared first on Reader's Digest.

To help you get those conversations started, we tapped two experts from American Ancestors: David Allen Lambert, the company’s chief genealogist, and Sarah Quiat, the interim director for the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center. They shared the questions worth asking your relatives while you have the chance, whether you’re hoping to uncover surprising family stories or simply learn a little more about where you came from.

“Talking with relatives, especially those we see infrequently, allows them to reflect on their own lives and the lives of your shared ancestors before them,” Quiat says. “By passing what you learn from them to the next generation of your family, or to genealogical researchers, you create invaluable and unique sources of information that might not be found anywhere else.”

Read on for the questions to ask your relatives this holiday season, along with how to record them for future generations. You might be surprised by what you learn about your family—and yourself.

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What’s the best way to get started?

The best way to start is to keep things casual. You don’t need to turn Thanksgiving dinner into a formal family interview to uncover great stories. Sometimes, a simple question like “How did you celebrate this holiday growing up?” is enough to get everyone talking. From there, you can ask about the relatives, traditions and memories that come up naturally.

If you want to preserve those stories, though, Quiat recommends hitting record. “Video recording is ideal, because you can see and hear someone telling their stories,” she says. And you don’t need fancy equipment. A smartphone works just fine, as long as your relative is comfortable being recorded.

For a more structured approach, set aside time for a one-on-one conversation, prepare a few questions and find somewhere quiet where you won’t be interrupted. Quiat also recommends getting permission on camera, as well as beginning with your names, the date, the location and what you’ll be discussing. You can bring out old photographs or family keepsakes to help spark memories too. And don’t feel you have to capture everything in one sitting. Consider your relative’s energy level, and remember that different family members may recall the same event differently, so it’s worth talking to several people.

Most importantly, don’t let the pressure to do it perfectly stop you from starting. As Quiat notes, “getting something is better than waiting to get it perfect and never getting the chance.”

What should you ask your parents, grandparents and other relatives?

The best way to uncover your family’s history is to ask the people who lived it, and the right questions can reveal surprising details you never knew about your relatives. According to Lambert and Quiat, here’s what to ask:

Questions about their childhood and hometown

• What was the town or neighborhood you grew up in like?
• What was it like walking down the main street of your neighborhood when you were a child?
• What games did you love playing as a kid?
• Who was your closest childhood friend, and what did you do together?
• What did your family typically eat for dinner, where did the food come from and who prepared it?
• What was a typical day in your childhood like?
• Did anything happen while you were growing up that affected your entire town or community?

Questions about their parents, grandparents and ancestors

• What do you remember most about your grandparents?
• Who is the earliest relative you can remember, and what’s a story you recall about them?
• What stories about your ancestors did you hear growing up?
• What did your parents and grandparents do for a living?
• What are some of your favorite memories of relatives who have since passed away?
• What important lessons did your parents, grandparents or other elders teach you?
• Are there any surprising, unusual or little-known stories about relatives who are no longer alive?

Questions about family history and ancestry

• Do you know when and why our family first immigrated to this country?
• Where did your parents, grandparents or earlier ancestors live before you were born?
• Has our family surname ever changed, been shortened or been spelled differently? If so, what’s the story behind it?
• Did anyone in our family serve in the military? Which branch did they serve in, where were they stationed and what do you know about their experiences?
• Are there any old family photographs, letters, certificates or documents that could help us learn more about our ancestors?

Questions about family traditions and celebrations

• How did your family celebrate holidays and birthdays when you were growing up?
• What family traditions did your parents or grandparents pass down to you?
• Are there any family traditions you wish we still practiced today?

Questions about school and education

• What schools did you attend, and what do you remember most about them?
• Was there a teacher or mentor who had a particularly big influence on your life?
• Did you participate in any school clubs, sports or extracurricular activities?
• Did you attend college or pursue any other education or training after finishing school?
• Do you still have any school photographs, yearbooks, diplomas or other keepsakes?

Questions about their teenage years and social life

• How did you and your friends spend your free time as teenagers?
• What clubs, community groups or organizations were you involved in when you were younger?
• Who were the most important friends in your life during your teenage years and early adulthood?
• How did your social life and friendships change as you got older?

Questions about their first jobs and careers

• What was your first job, where did you work and what do you remember about the experience?
• What other jobs or careers have you had throughout your life?
• Were there any employers, co-workers or professional mentors who had a lasting impact on you?

Questions about love, marriage and raising a family

• How did you meet the person you ended up marrying?
• What do you remember about your engagement or the moment you decided to get married?
• What was your wedding day like, and where did you go on your honeymoon?
• What do you remember most about the days your children were born?
• What are some of your favorite memories of raising your children?

Questions about major historical events

• What major historical events have had the biggest impact on your life?
• How did those events affect your family, neighborhood or community?
• Were you ever personally involved in a major historical event, social movement or period of change? What was your experience like?
• Where were you when you first heard about a major news event you’ll never forget, and how did you react?

Questions about loss, remembrance and family health history

• What do you remember about the final years or days of relatives who have passed away?
• Are there any illnesses or health conditions that have affected multiple generations of our family?
• How did your family traditionally honor loved ones who passed away, including funeral or burial customs?
• What stories or memories would you most want future generations to know about relatives who are no longer with us?

Questions about their hopes and dreams

• When you were young, what did you want to do for a living, and did you end up pursuing that career?
• Did your parents want you to have a career path that you didn’t pursue?
• Did you ever want to live in a specific place—a city or country?
• Did you think about getting married and/or having children when you were young? What kind of romantic partner did you dream about meeting?
• What was something you hope to achieve that hasn’t happened yet? How about something that has?

Questions about their travels and adventures

• Did your parents take you on vacations when you were a child?
• Describe a trip you took as a child and what you remember about it.
• Do still have a bucket list of places you want to visit? Why those places?
• Did your parents play sports, and did you ever attend major sporting events?
• Describe the first trip you took on your own (without your parents) and what that was like for you.
• What’s the farthest place from home you’ve ever visited?
• What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?
• What would you consider your biggest travel adventure?

Questions about their biggest accomplishments and proudest moments

• What were you good at as a child?
• Did you ever win an award for something you did?
• Do you have a story about your parents or immediate family that stands out as a proud moment?
• Did a teacher or parent ever tell you they were proud of you for something?
• What are you most proud of achieving in your life?

Questions about what makes them happy

• What made you happy when you were a child?
• Do you have a hobby or activity you do regularly that brings you joy?
• Name three things that make you truly happy.
• Describe some of the happiest times you’ve experienced in your life.
• What do you think people should do if they want to be happier?

Questions about life lessons and advice

• When you were young, did your parents or another adult give you any specific advice you remember?
• Was that advice good, and does it still resonate with you today?
• What advice would you offer from your own experiences to others?
• What obstacles in life did you overcome?
• What do you want future generations to remember most about you?
• Has a friend or relative ever shared an important life lesson with you?
• What has life taught you?

What’s the one question people usually forget to ask and then regret?

According to Quiat, one of the most important questions people forget to ask their relatives is: What advice would you give to future generations? “It can be of great value and insight to what was most important to the family member being interviewed, and it also actively brings the person listening into the picture,” she explains. It’s a chance to discover what your loved ones value most, what lessons they’ve learned and what wisdom they hope to pass down. Who knows? Their words might be exactly what a future grandchild needs to hear someday.

And don’t forget to dig into the little details behind your family’s biggest milestones. “Genealogists yearn for details, and an interview may reveal details about an event which you may only know names and dates,” says Lambert. For example, you might know when your grandparents got married, but do you know how they first met? Who made the first move? Lambert recommends asking relatives how they met their spouses or even how their own parents and grandparents fell in love. These conversations can uncover “a deep emotional memory that is never included in genealogical records and is often lost to time,” he says. After all, the dates might be written down somewhere, but it’s the stories behind them that really bring your family history to life.

What else is important to know about your family history?

Quiat and Lambert recommend capturing the kind of information you can’t easily find in records. Think old photographs, letters, diaries and family keepsakes, including who has them and where they’re stored. These little pieces of the past can tell you just as much about your family as the names and dates on a family tree.

There are also more personal parts of family history worth exploring, though they may call for a different conversation. Medical history, for example, can reveal important information about conditions that run in the family, but it’s not necessarily something to bring up during a casual interview about childhood memories. The same goes for sensitive subjects like adoption, divorce or painful family experiences.

“Proceed with caution, and ask the person you’re interviewing what they’re comfortable sharing,” says Quiat. It also matters what you plan to do with their answers. Someone might be happy to share a personal story privately but feel differently about having it recorded or shared with the wider family. The key is to make room for those conversations without making anyone feel pressured to share more than they want to.

What should you do with this information?

You’ve asked the questions, heard the stories and maybe even uncovered a few family secrets. Now comes the important part: making sure those memories don’t get lost. Before you do anything else, back up your recordings, notes and photos. “It’s devastating to have a long conversation and lose it if your phone or recording device is damaged,” Quiat says. Her advice? “Ensure it lives in more than one place and has a digital backup.”

Once everything is safely saved, organize your findings in a way that’s easy to revisit. You might create digital folders for different relatives, put together a family history scrapbook or compile recordings and photographs into a collection everyone can access. And don’t keep all those fascinating discoveries to yourself! “Your family stories will only live on if you pass them down,” Quiat says. She recommends sharing your materials with relatives, friends or whoever will be responsible for preserving them in the future.

Want to make sure those stories survive for generations? Consider donating your materials to an archive. “An archive is the safest place for your family stories to ensure they will stay organized, preserved and waiting for future generations to explore,” Quiat says. You can contact local oral-history projects or archives to see if they’ll accept your collection. After all, the stories you save today could become the family treasures someone discovers decades from now.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on family history questions, Reader’s Digest Associate Editor Mariah Thomas tapped her experience covering history, family, relationships and more. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• David Allen Lambert, chief genealogist at American Ancestors; email interview, Oct. 16, 2026
• Sarah Quiat, interim director for the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at American Ancestors; email interview, Oct. 16, 2026

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The post 77 Best Questions to Ask Relatives During Thanksgiving and Christmas to Learn More About Your Family History  appeared first on Reader's Digest.

We’re not just talking a little unlucky in love. We’re talking so bad that it’s effectively been banned from use. Yikes! Also, we’re totally intrigued, and we’re betting you are too.

So which title comes with a whole lot of baggage, and what happened to the royals to whom it was given? And could it ever be brought back from (ahem) the dead? We asked royal historian Tracy Borman, author of The Private Lives of the Tudors: Uncovering the Secrets of Britain’s Greatest Dynasty, to shed some light on the title no modern royal would likely ever want.

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Which title is reportedly cursed?

The Duke of Clarence. It’s a “rare title,” Borman explains, and notable because of the way its three doomed holders died. “Each of them met a fairly sudden and unfortunate death,” she explains. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, a little history about how this title came to be.

This duchy was created by King Edward III in 1362 for his third son, Lionel of Antwerp. But while it seems safe to say that the monarch had good intentions, it brought Lionel everything but luck, and the “curse” started with him, its very first holder. Lionel was in his early 20s when he received the title. And given his age, he still had his life ahead of him—or at least that’s what he and his family thought. But nobody could have imagined what happened soon after.

What happened to the former dukes of Clarence?

They all died way before their time—and in very unusual circumstances. Coincidence or curse? Keep reading, and decide for yourself.

Lionel of Antwerp (1338–1368)

King Edward III’s third son was born in Antwerp (hence, the name) and married Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, the Lord of Milan. Six years after becoming the Duke of Clarence—and only a couple of months into his second marriage, to Violante—he passed away.

“He was just shy of his 30th birthday,” Borman says. “And he died so suddenly that it was believed he’d been poisoned by his father-in-law.” Let’s just say the Visconti family had a reputation for ruthlessness and the whole “ends justify the means” mentality. Still, there’s no actual confirmation that Lionel’s death was the result of foul play.

Thomas Lancaster (1387–1421)

Next came Thomas of Lancaster, second son of King Henry IV. He received the duchy when he was 24 or 25, in 1412. But this pairing was not meant to be. Borman notes that he was “very active on the battlefield and in government,” and he died while defending his country—but not particularly well. “He led the English in one of their most disastrous defeats to the French at the Battle of Baugé,” she says. “It was a fairly ill-advised attack, and he was killed at the age of 33.”

George Plantagenet (1449–1478)

The most famous Duke of Clarence was George Plantagenet—brother of King Edward IV and King Richard III—who died a rather spectacular death at age 28. “He was the classic middle son of the three brothers, a kind of traitorous character who was not at all trusted by either of his siblings,” says Borman.

George tried to dethrone his brother Edward IV, who then had him convicted for treason. “Famously, it’s said that the Duke of Clarence was able to choose the manner of his death, so he decided to be drowned in Malmsey wine, which was, apparently, his favorite wine,” Borman says. While there’s no proof that this actually happened, “he’s definitely gone down in history for that.”

Did anyone who held this title not meet a tragic end?

Technically, yes, but neither of them held the exact title Duke of Clarence—the two that got away both had extended versions of it. Plus, their lives weren’t all that rosy, as you’ll see.

Prince William Henry (1765–1837), also known as Duke of Clarence and St. Andrews, and later as King William IV, died of old age at 71. However, tragedy (and royal scandals) struck his home decades earlier: A notorious womanizer, William Henry had no less than 10 secret children with his mistress Dorothea Jordan, but he was pushed into marrying a more suitable woman, Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. The royal couple had two daughters together, but they both died in infancy.

The other one who escaped a mysterious death was Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (1864–1892). He died young, at the age of 28, but he was simply a victim of an influenza pandemic. That being said, rumor has it that he carried a dark secret. “Some authors have theorized that he was London’s serial killer Jack the Ripper,” Borman says. Wait, what?! The famous killer, of course, terrorized East London in the late 1800s. He murdered at least five women, all of them prostitutes, and was never caught. Jack the Ripper’s identity is still a mystery today.

Is this title still in use?

No. “It died out, as sometimes happens with ill-fated titles,” says Borman. While there’s no official explanation for this—and monarchs have generally been free to choose whatever title they wanted for their kids—Borman thinks the reason is likely because “there were three fairly bad ends met by Dukes of Clarence, [and] it’s therefore a title people didn’t really want.”

This doesn’t mean that the royals are particularly superstitious, although she adds, “historically, they probably were a bit.” Let’s be honest: Even if you don’t believe in curses, would you really take the risk and give that title to a loved one? The number of untimely deaths aside, there could be another reason why monarchs have shied away from the title. “The last real Duke of Clarence, George, was so notorious and such an enemy to the Crown that the idea of creating another Duke of Clarence was pretty abhorrent,” Borman says. Fair point!

Could any members of the current royal family receive this title?

Yes, but considering what happened to the previous holders, it seems highly unlikely. Rumor had it for a while that Kate and William’s youngest son, Prince Louis, could be named the next Duke of Clarence once William becomes king. But this probably won’t happen. “Historically speaking, you’ve got to be careful with titles,” Borman says. “If there’s any negative association, then people can be quite cautious about bringing them back.”

Plus, we just can’t imagine that Kate or William would want their son associated with a late duke who got drowned in liters of wine and another who tried to overthrow the reigning monarch—and his own brother! 

Sources:

• Tracy Borman, royal historian and author; phone interview, Oct. 23, 2027
• Debretts: “The Royal Dukedoms”
• Westminster Abbey: “Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence”
• Royal.uk: “William IV (r. 1830–1837)
• Historic Royal Palaces: “William IV: The unexpected king”
• BBC: “Jack the Ripper”

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The post Is the Royal Family Cursed? Apparently One of Its Titles Is—Here’s the Spooky Story Behind the Superstition appeared first on Reader's Digest.

Which has led me to wonder: Do I really need to throw away eggs that are already cracked before I bring them home? And how about eggs that accidentally break on the way home? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to eat them raw—they’re going to get cooked. I would hate to throw them out if I didn’t have to, both because eggs are so darn expensive these days and because chucking a few would require me to head back to the grocery store sooner than I want to. That said, I also don’t want to accidentally poison my entire family.

So what’s safe, and what’s not? To get the answer, I spoke with Martin Bucknavage, a retired food-safety specialist. Read on to find out if it’s safe to eat an egg that has cracked in the carton—or if you really need to toss it.

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How clean are eggs in a carton?

Pretty clean! And that’s because eggs are cleaned before they’re put in the carton. “There is a common practice that involves a wash with an alkaline solution, a light scrub, a sanitizing rinse and then drying them with forced air,” Bucknavage explains.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), this washing procedure is required before the USDA can give the eggs a grade, which is that “USDA Grade A” or “Grade AA” you’ll see on most egg cartons in grocery stores. It’s also the reason why you don’t need to (and really shouldn’t) wash eggs at home before you use them, as repeatedly wetting the shells can make them porous enough for bacteria to sneak through.

Still, the cleanliness of the shell is not necessarily the concern when it comes to cracks.

Is it safe to eat a cracked egg?

No, it’s not. “The shell is the protective package, so any crack that has occurred opens the opportunity for pathogens or spoilage bacteria to enter,” Bucknavage says. In other words, the shell is keeping the bad guys out. The second it opens, they can start getting in. (More below on that.)

But there must be a little flexibility here, right? Like, a hairline crack you can barely see follows different rules than a full shell cave-in? Nope! Any crack or break, no matter how big or small, creates an opening that bacteria can sneak through, according to Bucknavage.

That said, there is some flexibility when it comes to the timing of the crack. Say you check your carton in the store and your eggs are crack-free, but then the milk falls on top of them in the car and one egg is cracked by the time you get home. “If it cracks on the way home from the store or once at home, it can be used immediately or transferred to a clean container with a seal,” says Bucknavage. The key here is limiting the amount of time the egg spends in the cracked shell. “We do not want to hold that cracked egg as is for any length of time,” Bucknavage explains, “because that crack will allow bacteria to enter and grow.”

What’s the maximum amount of time that’s OK to use an egg after it’s cracked?

According to Bucknavage, if you cook an egg or transfer it to a clean, airtight container within a few hours of the shell cracking, it should be safe to eat or use at a later date. Just keep in mind that you’re on the clock: You can use a cracked egg only for up to two days before it’s no longer advisable.

Again, this is only for shells that you break, not ones you find in the grocery store that way. That’s because there’s no way to tell when they were broken.

What kind of bacteria can contaminate the egg?

An eggshell may have a wide array of bacteria—some totally harmless and some potentially dangerous—colonizing it. There are bacteria living inside the hen, others in the nest or on the farm, others in the packaging and processing portions of the egg’s journey, and still others in the grocery store. In other words, the shell is super important for keeping all this bacteria from getting into the part of the egg that you eat.

The one people tend to worry about the most is salmonella, which research has shown can survive on the surface of an egg for as many as 54 days! If salmonella gets inside the egg and then into your body, it can cause a host of unpleasant digestive symptoms, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In rare cases, it could lead to extreme illness or even death.

In addition to salmonella, eggshells occasionally play host to other types of bacteria that can make you sick, such as E. coli, staphylococcus, enterococcus, and enterobacteriaceae, according to one study.

It’s a lot to worry about, we know. However, the key to remember in all of these cases is that the biological role of the shell is to protect the egg within from contamination. As long as the shell is intact, it’s going to do this job.

Will cooking the egg kill the bacteria?

It depends on how you cook it and how much bacteria is present. “In general, you want to cook eggs until the whites and yolks are firm, or cook them in a baked dish to 165 degrees Fahrenheit or higher,” Bucknavage explains. “The problem is that many people like to cook eggs so the yolks are runny. This is fine if no pathogens are present, but cooking like this will not eliminate pathogens, especially if the number of organisms is high.”

So if your egg just cracked and you want to use it, try scrambling it, hard-boiling it or using it in a baking recipe. Save the frying for those that haven’t cracked.

If the egg has been cracked for longer than the few hours mentioned above, you’re better off tossing it. Why? The longer it spends cracked, the more bacteria can enter the egg. And the more bacteria there are present, the harder it is to kill them all off during cooking, even at a high temperature.

Plus, Bucknavage adds, bacteria can enter a cracked egg and spoil it. And while cooking and eating it won’t make you sick, a spoiled egg just isn’t going to taste very good. Case closed!

Sources:

• Martin Bucknavage, retired food-safety specialist; email interview, Oct. 22, 2026
• U.S. Department of Agriculture: “How We Store Our Eggs—And Why”
• Food Control: “Survival of inoculated Salmonella on the shell of hens’ eggs and its potential significance”
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Symptoms of Salmonella Infection”
• Journal of Applied Poultry Research: “Free-range and organic farming: Eggshell contamination by mesophilic bacteria and unusual pathogens”

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This strange movie about an equally strange character is mesmerizing, just like Holmes’s deep-welled, occasionally blinking blue eyes that have become a fixture over the last decade or so of her rise and fall. It’s a movie you can’t stop starting at, even as you want to avert your gaze, because it raises so many uncomfortable questions about our current moment, what we value and even reality itself.

The A24 production, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, opened last weekend with a $15 million box-office haul, the biggest opener for a documentary since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 back in 2004. It did even better in its second weekend, bringing the doc’s two-week total up to $45 million. It’s also generating Oscar buzz and, due to its novel structure and storytelling technique, debate about whether it can even be considered a documentary at all.

It’s a film that has everyone talking, and you do not want to miss it. Even though it’s nearly three hours long, I’d see it again right now if I wasn’t working. To get you ready to watch the film or discuss it with your friends, we scoured the web for helpful background info, hot takes and the buzziest debates about You Can See Everything. Read on to learn what all the fuss is about and what it says about our world right now.

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What it is

You Can See Everything follows Elizabeth Holmes, the co-founder of Theranos, a company that purported to invent a way to test a single drop of blood for a range of conditions, as she prepares to go to prison for defrauding investors. A darling of the tech industry back in the early 2010s, Holmes was hailed as the youngest female self-made billionaire and became the face of the rapidly emerging confluence of tech and medicine.

The title of the documentary comes from a text message Holmes sent to Fielder, who also appears on camera throughout the film. She and her partner, Billy Evans, with whom she shares two young children, invite Fielder into their home in an attempt to rehabilitate her image, giving the filmmaker wide latitude to document their day-to-day lives. “You can totally see everything,” she texts to Fielder. But can we? As the movie unspools, that initial (some might say feigned) openness begins to feel like a pretext—or even duplicitous.

If you’re familiar with Nathan Fielder, you might think he’s a curious choice for a celebrity rehab. And you’d be right. He’s best known as the creator and star of Comedy Central’s Nathan for You, a satirical take on those shows where business consultants help struggling companies succeed. His signature deadpan affect is on full display in You Can See Everything, his first full-length documentary, as is his ability to go well beyond the surface to expose something deeper.

Still, Holmes’s artifice became confusing during the shoot, even for him. “I remember having this weird experience … where I’m like, she seems so genuine at times,” Fielder told the audience at a New York Film Festival panel discussion. “But then I’m like, no … I know she’s a liar. It was a weird mental thing.”

Who it’s for

Audiences for You Can See Everything will likely vary widely. It’s for people who remember the Theranos scandal, for those who are more interested in what Fielder is up to here and, of course, for anyone who wants to join in on the biggest conversation of the moment.

It’s a quiet film, but there are plenty of times when I legitimately laughed out loud at its audacity. You Can See Everything is hard to describe, but if you like movies that make you think and have a point of view, get yourself to the theater ASAP.

What people are saying

Opinions are overwhelmingly positive yet all over the map, with lots of words like bonkers and mind-bending being floated around. It’s everywhere too: Critics can’t get enough, and the internet is going crazy over the film’s inventive and ironic look at tech culture, our always-online viral reality and moviemaking itself. People are gravitating to it because it’s so much more than a documentary about a disgraced tech billionaire.

Here are some highlights and links to great discussions about this fascinating movie. Be aware that there are some spoilers here, so jump ahead if needed. Here’s what everyone is saying about You Can See Everything.

It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before

A24, the production company behind arthouse megahits like Moonlight, Backrooms and Primetime, has another disruptor on its hands here, and it’s perfect for audiences who are looking for something meatier than the latest superhero sequel. One through line running through A24 movies is the tendency to make small, indie films feel relevant to a broad audience, and this one delivers in spades.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman says You Can See Everything is “everything a great movie should be: an experience unlike one you’ve had before, one that lures and enthralls you, and that leaves you feeling different when it’s over.” He compares the excitement to early rock ‘n’ roll and the 1970s film renaissance, when new and evolving art forms were transcendent. It’s “an ecstatic disruption, an adventure of the spirit, one that wakes you up and startles you, that makes you want to see it again.”

Read more on Variety

It could win the Oscar for Best Picture

You read that right: You Can See Everything has already shot to the top of multiple Oscar-contender lists, and not in the Best Documentary category (though that’s a possibility too). Could it upend The Odyssey‘s chances? Maybe! A documentary has never even been nominated for Best Picture, which gives you an idea of how transformative this movie is. And it feels particularly relevant in today’s post-truth era, with Holmes insisting she did nothing wrong and Fielder’s astonishment channeling the audience’s disbelief.

Of course, Oscar voters are not exactly known for embracing the avant-garde. But like 2020’s Parasite, the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture with its scathing critique of wealth inequality, and last year’s Sinners, a horror flick that nabbed four wins and 16 nominations, You Can See Everything could be another film that drags the Oscars into the modern era.

Read more on The Los Angeles Times

It raises unsettling questions about reality vs. perception

There is a shocking and rather sad moment in You Can See Everything that gets to the very heart of what Fielder is seeking to answer with this film: Is Holmes lying about her role in the Theranos scandal, or does she really believe that she did nothing wrong? Put another way, are we watching a performance?

After pressing Holmes on her insistence that her blood-testing technology works as advertised, which clearly is not true (hence, her pending imprisonment), Fielder shows her Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” comedy bit, which plays with the idea of communication and misunderstanding. She doesn’t get the nearly century-old joke, just like she doesn’t seem to “get” that her tech really can’t do what she says it can.

Or does she? How can two people who are living in the same reality see things so differently? In an era defined by second-guessing what’s real, from social media to politics to technology, “[Fielder’s] film is a self-reflexive study of the inability to act as people expect—of masking and deception,” says Coleman Spilde at Salon. “How much of life is a performance?”

Read more on Salon

It’s bringing people back to theaters

In an era of streaming ubiquity, it’s been hard for studios to capture the attention of audiences who would just as soon stay at home—especially for a three-hour documentary. But in its opening weekend, You Can See Everything sold out more than 2,000 shows and raked in $15 million at just 855 theaters. After expanding to 2,600 theaters in its second weekend, it added another $19.5 million to its tally.

Moviegoers are saying it’s one of those shared cultural moments you have to see in a crowd. Just take a quick look at your socials to see videos of packed lobbies and excited viewers who can’t wait to talk about what the heck they just saw.

Read more on Mashable and The Guardian

It’s sparking a debate over villain and victim narratives

If you followed the Theranos scandal in real time, you likely have an unsympathetic opinion of Holmes. But here, both her partner, Evans, and Theranos co-founder Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who was also convicted of fraud, come off as controlling and dominating. Late in the film, a reveal about Evans’s role in the negotiations, as well as his activities while she’s in prison, raise questions about who is the real villain here.

But whistleblowers like Tyler Shultz, a Theranos employee who exposed her fraud, caution against buying into the victim narrative. The entire thing is messy, which is resonating with audiences who understand that life operates in the gray, not the black and white. Is it possible to have empathy for Holmes and, at the same time, see her as a manipulator? The movie seems to say yes.

Read more on Yahoo! and NPR

The stare-downs are completely transfixing

One of Fielder’s trademarks is his ability to hold a gaze for an excruciatingly long time. Pair that with Holmes and her tendency to do the same, combined with her wide-open eyes and constant nodding, and it’s immensely uncomfortable. Clips and memes of these stare-downs are all over the internet right now.

Clinical psychologist and body-language expert Morgan Starr-Riestis has seen the film twice and says it’s unsettling. “When our eyelids are pulled back like that and we’re unblinking, that’s usually a sign of fear or overwhelm,” she told Today. “When you pair it with a smile, the mismatch is naturally unsettling. Our nervous systems just register it as something off.”

A psychotherapist on Instagram, Elliot Connie, takes aim at Holmes’s selective nodding and head tilts, which he says are attempts to persuade and control the listener—usually Fielder, and by extension, the audience. Connie says these quirks are employed to make her seem docile and helpless but come off as deliberate and manipulative.

Read more on Today and Instagram

There’s a shocking twist that upends the documentary structure

If you don’t want a spoiler about a major development in the second half of the film, skip to the next section! Everyone else, here we go:

Fielder spends much of the movie documenting Holmes in the run-up to her reporting to prison. But things really get intense once she’s inside—and, of course, film crews aren’t allowed in Texas prison camps. So Fielder employs a ringer: Amanda Seyfried, who famously portrayed Holmes in The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu limited series based on the ABC News podcast of the same name.

Seyfried doesn’t just read Holmes’s side of her conversations with Fielder—she also becomes part of the story, helping him piece together what’s going on with Evans on the outside. She’s so good at this strange double role that she’s being talked about as a potential Oscar nominee for Best Actress.

Read more on The Daily Beast

Do a deep dive

But wait—there’s more! We’ve rounded up additional links to explore if you want to go down the You Can See Everything rabbit hole.

• Read: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
• Discuss: r/movies subreddit: Official discussion—You Can See Everything [spoilers]
• Listen: You Can See Everything and the Nathan Fielder Effect on The New Yorker
• Watch a discussion with the directors: Film at Lincoln Center
• Watch the Hulu series: The Dropout

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My daughter was appalled. “Are you even allowed to do that? Don’t people up front pay more for their seats? Isn’t that rude?”

It certainly was allowed—after all, the flight attendant told me to do it. But was it rude? I had to think about that one. 

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The case for stuffing your bag in whatever bin is open

The main reason? Logistics. What happened on my flight isn’t rare. With more and more people choosing to keep their luggage with them, the overhead bin situation is tighter than ever. So when space is limited, you have to take what you can get—even if that means your bag goes in row 2 and you’re seated in row 45. Trying to take your bag farther back when you can see the bins are full (usually indicated by the lids being closed) will cause people to back up behind you and make the boarding process even slower.

Contrary to popular belief, the overhead bins don’t “belong” to a particular seat. “Overhead bin spots are first come, first served, not assigned,” says Loretta Hill, who’s been a flight attendant for more than a decade. It makes more sense to keep your bag close to you, so most people do, but there really aren’t any airline rules that say you have to do so. When bin space is filling up fast, I’d argue it would be rude not to use the first available spot—especially if that’s what the flight attendants are telling you to do.

But this etiquette question isn’t really about what to do when the bins are full. What people are really asking is if it’s OK to put their bag in a front bin when there are plenty of open bins by their seat farther back.

As I sauntered, divinely unencumbered, to my banishment in the last row, I realized why people choose this option even when they don’t have to. Placing your bag in a bin that’s closer to the exit gives you a strategic advantage when it comes time to disembark, helping you get off a little faster. This is especially helpful if you have a tight connecting flight. I also discovered that it means you don’t have to carry your bag as far. And when you’re toting 40 pounds of luggage, every step saved feels like a gift from the normally stingy airline gods. 

The case against taking a bin spot that’s not “yours”

Just because something is legally allowed, or even encouraged, doesn’t mean everyone considers it polite. (See: Zipper-merging in traffic.) Taking an open spot when things are filling fast and the flight attendant instructs you to is never rude. But taking a bin spot near the front when it isn’t necessary can be rude.

There may also be someone who needs that spot more than you do—perhaps they’re traveling with medical gear, mobility aids, babies or older relatives who need extra help with their luggage. You can’t know who “really” needs the space, so the safest option is just to keep your bag by you. Taking a bin spot that someone else is counting on to have near their seat might also make for some upset feelings or, worst-case scenario, cause a fight. (Which, in this day and age, someone else will then record and post to TikTok, and by the time you land, you’ve become the world’s most hated person online.)   

It can also create chaos at the end of the flight. It’s great when your stuff ends up in row 2 while you chill in 45, but if you’re seated in row 2 and you have to put your bag in the bin over row 45, that is decidedly less ideal. You will have to wait politely for everyone else to disembark before you can go back to grab your bag. Or try crowd surfing. (Kidding!) Your “little” bin change can have huge cascading effects if the flight is full, and the truth is that keeping your bag near you makes for a more orderly—ergo, polite—boarding and deplaning process.

There’s also an important exception to the idea that all bins are fair game: Some passengers have actually paid for access to a specific overhead bin or bin area, such as in certain premium cabins. Those areas are usually separated, so you may not even be able to put your bag there. But if you’re tempted to try, don’t. Keep your bag in your own cabin area.

What about some very specific situations?

My daughter’s questions were good ones because there’s often a gap between what’s expected and what actually happens. When everyone does what they’re supposed to, public rituals like plane rides, concerts, and urinal selection are seamless. The problem is that this very rarely happens, and sometimes we genuinely don’t know what we’re expected to do. That’s when additional etiquette dilemmas get lobbed at us. Here’s help.

What do I do if someone asks me to move my bag?

If you’re seated, your bag is already stowed and the person asking is not a flight attendant, you are under no obligation to move it. That said, if they have a good reason and you’re not in a hurry, you could move your bag as a kindness. If it requires a big adjustment and/or they are very insistent, flag down a flight attendant.

Should I move someone else’s bag?

Are you a flight attendant? Then, no. Even touching other people’s stuff is iffy, so this is a hard no. If putting your bag in a bin requires any more than a few small adjustments, pick a different spot or ask a flight attendant for help.

What if I find someone else’s bag in my spot?

It’s not your spot. If you need help finding a good spot for your bag and you don’t see one, politely ask a flight attendant to assist you. Do not remove other people’s bags.

What if someone gets mad at me about where I placed my bag?

People get mad about the strangest things all the time. It doesn’t mean you have to get mad back. Keeping a cool head when the other person is angry is in my top five peak adulting skills. Usually a little conversation will calm them down, but if it escalates, call a flight attendant and let them handle it. 

The verdict

It’s not rude to put your carry-on in an overhead bin that’s not by your seat, but it’s more polite to keep it near you if that’s an option. Hill agrees: “I’d say it’s rude when you put your bag in the very first bin when you’re seated in the back and there are open bins in the back. Otherwise, it is a shared space, and sometimes it just works out that you’re not near your bag and that’s OK.” 

And don’t forget—you do have an easy way out of this situation. Remember the free gate-check offer on my flight that nobody took? Gate-checking may be the politest move on the plane, and it doesn’t even require you to sacrifice your legroom. 

Bottom line: The simplest option for everyone is to keep your bag close to you. If that’s not possible, put it in the first spot you see so you don’t impede traffic. And if your bag ends up in first class while you’re wedged into a non-reclining seat next to the bathroom, well, at least one of you had a good flight.

Have a social situation you can’t stop ruminating on? Email us at advice@tmbi.com, or message Charlotte on Instagram at @CharlotteHiltonAndersen.

Why trust us

Reader’s Digest has published hundreds of etiquette stories that help readers navigate communication in a changing world. We regularly cover topics such as the best messages to send for any occasion, polite habits that aren’t as polite as they seem, email and texting etiquette, business etiquette, tipping etiquette, travel etiquette and more. We’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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I can hear you thinking: What could be the harm? I’m not a criminal! And I would love to meet my fourth cousin twice removed! Of course, a family reunion sounds fun (and hopefully you’re not on the FBI’s Most Wanted list), but once you give that spit or swab sample over to one of those companies, the “good” and “bad” tentacles of DNA testing can be impossible to untangle.

“Nobody is against catching serial killers,” says Natalie Ram, a professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law whose research focuses on genetic privacy and how it intersects with the criminal legal system. “But privacy is also a really important human value—and an American legal value, in particular.”

I spoke with Ram and Fadi Matthew Kazandji, a criminal defense lawyer and founder and managing partner at Kazandji Law in Canada, to understand the risks of genealogical testing. What could go wrong when you submit your sample to one of these companies? Quite a bit, actually, so read on.

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Your sample could be retained indefinitely

Whether you spit in a cup or swab your cheek, once you send off your sample to a genealogical testing company, “they typically hold onto that biospecimen unless or until you request that they destroy it,” Ram says. And that’s two valuable things the company now has control over: your genetic data and the raw sample, which could be used for further sequencing at a later time.

What kind of further testing are we talking about? One likely candidate is whole-genome sequencing, which gives a much more extensive profile than the typical “genotyping” done by these companies. “The specific details of a specific platform are likely buried in the terms of service and privacy policy, so you should consult that before you use one of their kits,” Ram says.

But, as you’ll see coming up, reading the terms isn’t a fail-safe.

The terms of service can be changed at any time

“You should also know that it is extremely common, across the internet, including on these consumer genetics platforms, for a vendor to reserve the right to change the terms of service and privacy policy at any time,” Ram says. “Your continued use of the service, which means your non-deletion of your account, is considered consent to the updated terms.”

And sometimes the companies themselves don’t necessarily think the terms through. She points to the 23andMe bankruptcy from 2025: The company had recently updated their terms to allow the sale of consumer data, but didn’t address the actual physical specimens. That left a kind of “gray zone” about what might happen to them.

“Your data” might not be yours after all

“One thing that is quite common in the consumer genetic space is that companies, in their terms of service and privacy policies, often take great pains to say your genetic data is yours,” Ram says. “Which, on the one hand, sounds great. On the other hand, [it] doesn’t actually provide a lot of robust protection.”

She cautions people “not to be wooed” by the language of ownership. Your data and sample may be your “property,” but property rights are not absolute. They’re affected by what you’ve consented to allow others to do with it, which again, is buried in the fine print. “The terms of service will say ‘this is your data,’ but you also grant us all of the rights to do thus and such with it,” Ram says.

Breaches could expose your sensitive information

This is the one most people are worried about, Ram says, and there have been multiple instances of hacking and other breaches at these companies. A particularly worrisome one affected 23andMe customers of Asian and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, whose data was sold on the dark web.

The state of California sued 23andMe over this exposure in May 2026. “The sale of this data on the dark web took place amidst a period of mounting anti–Asian American and Pacific Islander and anti-Semitic hate and violence—and explicitly called attention to the deeply personal and identifying nature of that information,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said when announcing the suit.

Remember that unlike a credit card number, you can’t get new DNA. “So once it’s fallen into dark-web hands, it’s there forever and you can’t change it, no matter what,” Ram says.

Law enforcement doesn’t always follow the rules

You’ve probably heard of the Golden State Killer, who eluded capture for decades until 2018, when investigators uploaded a DNA sample to something called GEDmatch. That’s a free database that allows users to upload their genetic data so it can be accessed and searched by others to look for matches.

“Since then, over 1000 cases have been investigated using what is now called forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG,” Ram says. You might think this is good news (killers off the streets!), but she warns that law enforcement doesn’t always play by the rules and is “largely unburdened by law” in this space.

Let’s say the police are looking for a suspect and they have a DNA sample from a crime scene. “Rather than saying, ‘Hi, I’m law enforcement, and I’d like to search for suspects in your database,’ they will instead pretend to be an ordinary user and say, ‘This is my data,'” Ram says.

After a series of scandals, Ram says GEDmatch created a portal for law enforcement and gave users the option to opt out of allowing investigators to comb through their genetic info. But both law enforcement and genetic genealogists have been caught using loopholes to get around these privacy restrictions.

The company could sell your genetic data

When 23andMe filed for bankruptcy protection in 2025, the company sold the genetic data of its 15 million–plus users to a new nonprofit created by 23andMe’s co-founder. But the first bidder was a pharmaceutical company called Regeneron, prompting worries from consumers about what they would do with the data and samples.

“It’s unclear whether they were most interested in the user data or the biospecimens, [which] would include not only the information that has already been developed but also all the other information that 23andMe, or whatever platform you’re using, didn’t even sequence yet,” Ram says.

Insurance companies could deny coverage

“I am less concerned with insurers trying to get access to these platforms,” Ram says. “I am more concerned about insurers conditioning your ability to get important forms of insurance, like life, long-term-care and disability insurance, based on genetic risks that you knew about because you used one of these services.”

Congress did enact the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which protects against discrimination in employment and health insurance under many circumstances. The Affordable Care Act has similar protections. But neither law applies to life, long-term-care and disability insurance, leaving states to create a patchwork of protections.

Kazandji says Canada’s laws are more robust. “It’s a crime here to make someone take a genetic test, or hand over results from one they already took, as a condition of selling them something or signing a contract with them,” he says. “That includes insurance and jobs. The maximum is five years in jail and a $1 million fine, and the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the law in 2020.”

You could open up old or unknown family wounds

Maybe it sounds exciting to trace your family history, or smart to research potential medical issues in your family tree. But there can be downsides, not the least of which is learning something you wish you hadn’t. “Misattributed paternity is surprisingly common—much more common than people realize,” Ram says. You could learn you have half-siblings, or adoptions that were never disclosed to the family.

Before you use these services, Ram says it’s also important to grapple with the fact that the data you’re sharing is not just your data. “It’s the data of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of other individuals” to whom you’re genetically related. On the other side of the issue, that means even if you haven’t taken one of these tests, your data may still be out there regardless.

Is there any way to protect yourself from these potential problems?

It’s easy to say “just don’t take the test,” and that’s one thing to consider. But if you do decide the benefits outweigh the risks, Ram and Kazandji have some advice.

• Make an informed decision. “Think carefully about the choice that you are making, both about whether to use one of these services, and if you do decide to do it, which one you use,” Ram says. Consider the wider exposure your genetic curiosity can bring to others in your family.
• Read the terms and conditions. “Some of these platforms openly cooperate with law enforcement,” she says. “That might influence your choice.” Others say law enforcement isn’t welcome “but still accept third-party uploads of data (data developed elsewhere), which allows law enforcement to access the data if they lie about who they are.”
• Be aware of how the privacy settings work. “If your DNA is on GEDmatch, look at your privacy setting, because the names can be confusing,” Kazandji says. “‘Opt-out’ doesn’t take you out of police matching completely.” (Under this setting, your DNA can be used to ID human remains.) “Only ‘Opt-in’ puts you in front of police looking for a suspect in a violent crime, and ‘Private’ takes you out of matching altogether,” he adds.
• Assert your rights. If law enforcement contacts you, it’s OK to take a step back and consider what to do next. “You can be polite about it,” Kazandji says. “‘I’d like to speak to a lawyer first’ is a full answer.”

Are the laws surrounding genetic testing changing?

Yes, but slowly, and not always in the direction of stronger privacy.

Ram is very proud of the work she’s done in her state to get protections on the books: “The Maryland law says when law enforcement approaches a person they know to be an innocent third party, to ask them to cooperate in an investigation, they are not allowed to lie.”

Utah is another state that has enacted a “relatively comprehensive regulatory scheme,” Ram says, though it’s less robust than Maryland’s. And Montana has a short statute that requires law enforcement to get a warrant before gaining access to DNA databases.

As for the overall trend with these laws? “I do not have high hopes that they will provide genuine data protection vis-à-vis the government,” Ram says.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on the risks of genealogical testing, Ally Childress tapped her experience as a longtime journalist who frequently writes about facts, news and common curiosities for Reader’s Digest. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• Natalie Ram, professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law; phone interview, Oct. 13, 2026
• Fadi Matthew Kazandji, founder and managing partner at Kazandji Law; email interview, Oct. 12, 2026
• Science: “The precarious future of consumer genetic privacy”
• State of California Office of the Attorney General: “Attorney General Bonta Sues Chrome Holding Co., Formerly Known as 23andMe, Over 2023 Data Breach”
• NPR: “In Hunt for Golden State Killer, Investigators Uploaded His DNA to Genealogy Site”
• Los Angeles Times: “The risks of sharing your DNA with online companies aren’t a future concern. They’re here now”
• Guardian: “23andMe back on the auction block after former CEO makes 11th-hour bid”
• YouGov: “What Americans think about home DNA tests and their potential uses”
• University of Iowa: “Genetic Privacy in the U.S.: Insurance and Law Enforcement Use”

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‘Tis the season for fall travel, and during this last stretch of October, there are bound to be people all over this country wondering if the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will even let them dress up for Halloween on their flights. So, to help all you outgoing types plan around the spooky season, I checked in with someone who knows what he’s talking about: a former TSA official.

“I can tell you that TSA officers have seen just about everything come through a security checkpoint,” says Keith Jeffries, a 20-year veteran of the TSA who is now a vice president at K2 security consultants. “Halloween just makes things a little more interesting.” Ahead, Jeffries and Daniel D. Velez, a current spokesman for the TSA, explain what is and definitely isn’t allowed on planes this Halloween.

Read on to learn what you can wear, what you should pack and what you should leave at home.

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Can you wear a Halloween costume on a plane?

“Absolutely—you can wear a Halloween costume on a flight!” Jeffries says. “TSA doesn’t want to take the fun out of Halloween. The key is making sure your costume doesn’t create a security concern or slow down the screening process.”

Where might you encounter more restrictions?

As Jeffries mentioned, security is where you’re likely to run into trouble if you show up looking like Vecna from Stranger Things. And being pulled aside for extra screening because you aren’t recognizable as a human being or you’re channeling The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t going to be a good time for anyone (especially the people behind you).

“Halloween is supposed to be scary, but getting through airport security shouldn’t be,” Jeffries says. “My advice is simple: Dress up if you are into the Halloween spirit, but dress to get through security.” Make sure your costume complies with TSA rules (more on that coming up), and be ready to follow any instructions from TSA officers. If you have to take something off, make sure you have room in your bag or time to check it. The last thing you want to do is miss your flight.

“Remember, TSA officers are focused on keeping everyone safe, regardless of whether you’re dressed as a business traveler or Batman,” Jeffries says. “Even superheroes must follow TSA screening procedures. Batman doesn’t get to skip security.”

What costumes or costume components are restricted by TSA?

The main ones are weapons. “Leave the swords, knives, toy guns and realistic-looking weapons and explosive devices at home, or pack permitted costume props in your checked baggage,” Jeffries says. “Even if it’s part of a Halloween costume, anything that looks like a weapon can create a security concern.”

Other items may not be prohibited, but they still have to comply with TSA rules. Here’s what could get you flagged by airport security:

• Weapons, even fake ones: Yes, this includes guns and knives, but also foam swords and billy clubs. Good news: Lightsabers are allowed, as are Harry Potter wands.
• Metal accessories: “Costumes with excessive metal, chains, large buckles or elaborate accessories can trigger security alarms and lead to additional screening,” Jeffries says.
• Capes: “One exception for superhero passengers is that they should not wear capes through security screening,” Velez says. There’s a good chance it could trigger the scanner, so you’ll have to take it off anyway.
• Sports equipment: Dressing up like Babe Ruth or Shohei Ohtani? Baseball bats, lacrosse sticks and ski poles are prohibited in plane cabins and must be checked.
• Lots of fake blood: Any liquids brought on the plane must comply with the TSA’s 3-1-1 rules, so keep that squirt bottle of vampire elixir under 3.4 ounces.
• Lithium-ion batteries: Does your costume light up? You might get some extra screening, especially if the show is fueled by lithium-ion batteries. The good news is that many batteries can be stashed in your carry-on.
• Wigs and wig clips: Wigs are absolutely allowed, and normally you would not have to take them off. But large ones that obscure your face or create a distraction could be flagged for extra scrutiny. Wig clips do not usually set off metal detectors, but they could show up on a full-body scanner, so be prepared to mention them to the officer.

An important reminder: “TSA officers are required to treat potential threats seriously, even on Halloween,” Jeffries says. “If your costume jingles, rattles or lights up like a Christmas tree, don’t be surprised if it gets some extra attention at security.”

Could Halloween makeup pose a problem?

It could definitely slow you down. “It’s perfectly fine to dress like a vampire, zombie or your favorite superhero, but TSA still needs to verify your identity,” Jeffries says. “If your costume includes a full-face mask or heavy makeup that makes you difficult to recognize, be prepared to remove the mask or make adjustments so TSA officers can confirm who you are—which can slow down the security process.”

Velez takes it a little further. “Passengers should avoid wearing masks and not have painted faces when going through security screening,” he says. “Officers still need to match travelers to their ID pictures.”

You’d hate to have to take off your Bride of Frankenstein fright wig or wipe off your carefully applied Joker face right when you get to the head of that massive security line. TSA allows colored contacts, but there’s not a lot of guidance on extreme eye-color deviations. So do yourself a favor and wait till you get to your destination to go all-in. And if you’re wearing a mask, stash it in your carry-on or pack it in your luggage.

“TSA needs to know who’s behind the mask,” Jeffries says. (Or the makeup, for that matter.) “Save the big reveal for the Halloween party, not the security checkpoint.”

What should you do with these problematic parts?

“The best thing passengers can do is be prepared,” Jeffries says. “Remove bulky costume accessories before screening, keep prohibited items out of carry-on bags and follow the TSA officer’s instructions.” Check the TSA website for the full list of items allowed in carry-on and checked baggage, and build in enough time to deal with any unexpected snags. If there’s any doubt, just leave the questionable item at home.

Velez advises avoiding bulky costumes altogether to get through the Advanced Imaging Technology scanners. Jeffries adds: “My recommendation is to keep your costume simple while going through security and put on the finishing touches after you’ve cleared the checkpoint.”

What else should you keep in mind about wearing a costume on a plane?

If you think sharing an armrest is bad, try sharing a row with a guy dressed as Edward Scissorhands. “Think about your entire travel experience, not just getting through TSA,” Jeffries says. “Large costumes, elaborate headpieces and bulky accessories can be uncomfortable on an aircraft and may interfere with other passengers.” (The last thing you want to do is scare a child on a five-hour flight—what if he starts crying?)

“Also, remember that your airline has its own rules regarding attire and what can be brought on board,” Jeffries says. Before you get all decked out, take a peek at your carrier’s website to see if they have specific rules on attire. For example, American Airlines says travelers must “dress appropriately” and not show up in bare feet (sorry, Fred Flintstone). Even if there’s not a specific rule about costumes, remember that airlines have wide latitude to keep disruptions down.

“A little preparation can keep your travel experience from becoming a horror story,” Jeffries says. “Have fun with your costume, use common sense and remember that security is serious business—even when you’re dressed as a clown.”

Sources:

• Keith Jeffries, vice president of K2 Security Screening Group; email interview, Oct. 21, 2026
• Daniel D. Velez, TSA regional spokesperson; email interview, Oct. 23, 2026
• TSA: “Complete List (Alphabetical)”
• The Hair Society: “Can You Go Through Airport Security Wearing a Wig or Hair System?”
• American Airlines: “Conditions of carriage”

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Now, Bardugo is closing another chapter with Dead Beat, the third and final installment in her Alex Stern trilogy, released in September. But whether you’re new to the series or haven’t reached the final page yet, don’t assume you’ve seen the last of its characters. “All of my finales end with a little bit of an open door,” Bardugo tells Reader’s Digest. “I want to be able to walk through it in the future, if I suddenly have the desire to. I want my readers to feel like they can continue to walk through that door and see potential stories for these characters.” So the end might not be quite as final as you think.

For this episode of The Reader’s Digest Escalator Interview, we caught up with Bardugo to talk about Dead Beat, the inspirations behind her fantastical worlds and all the bookish questions we’ve been dying to ask. She revealed some of her favorite reads, gave us a peek into her creative process and assembled her dream dinner-party guest list. Here’s a hint: Fellow fantasy author Alice Hoffman definitely has a seat at the table. And magic may or may not be on the menu.

Read on for our exclusive interview with Leigh Bardugo, and shop her recommended reads below!

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Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite books for over 100 years. We’ve worked with bestselling authors including Susan Orlean, Janet Evanovich and Alex Haley, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Roots grew out of a project funded by and originally published in the magazine. Through Fiction Favorites (formerly Select Editions and Condensed Books), Reader’s Digest has been publishing anthologies of abridged novels for decades. We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in fiction, including James Patterson, Ruth Ware, Kristin Hannah and more. The Reader’s Digest Book Club, helmed by Books Editor Tracey Neithercott, introduces readers to even more of today’s best fiction by upcoming, bestselling and award-winning authors. For this piece, Leigh Belz Ray interviewed author Leigh Bardugo. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

The RD Escalator Interview with Ke Huy Quan

The RD Escalator Interview with Lynn Painter

The RD Escalator Interview with Tia Williams

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Aries: Scream

(March 21–April 19)

Yes, Aries, you’re a little unhinged and impulsive, and we love you for it (most of the time). It’s also what makes Scream perfect for you: You have no patience for slow, dramatic buildups, and this movie gets right to the good stuff. In the first five minutes, the movie delivers two pretty gruesome deaths, and from there, the action and clever dialogue ramps up, making it pretty much impossible for your antsy self to get bored. We also know that once you get hooked on something, you can’t stop, so you’ll be binge-watching all seven movies in a single weekend. (Don’t even try to deny it.)

Finally, Aries is ruled by Mars, the planet of war, sex and vengeance, and the movies are all about personal vendettas, painful memories, and plans to frame innocent bystanders. Hey, Aries loves a good strategy, what can I say? Plus, Scream‘s “kill or be killed” energy is the kind of high-stakes vibe that only you can truly appreciate. 

Taurus: Frankenstein

(April 20–May 20)

Wise, earthy Taurus knows that when you try to play God, things go very wrong. You can’t cheat Mother Nature by speeding up the time it takes plants to grow or, let’s say, defy death by creating a monster. Obviously, Victor Frankenstein didn’t get the memo, and you’ll gleefully watch as he’s taken down.

Beyond that, you’ll love the whole vibe of Frankenstein, no matter which version you choose. The 1931 original exudes an old-school feel with its gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, while 2025’s adaptation features moody tones and a more traditional take on Mary Shelley’s story. Both are wins in your book. And, as a master of patience, you’ll marvel at the intensive 10-hour process it took to turn Jacob Elordi into the Creature … and also won’t mind the fact that the movie is two-and-a-half hours long!

Gemini: Hocus Pocus

(May 21–June 20)

There’s one major theme in Hocus Pocus that is decidedly “Gemini,” and that’s strong bonds with your besties. Ruled by the Twins, Gemini is one of the most social signs of the zodiac, and you feel confident and powerful when you’re with your crew. That’s why you’ll be completely delighted to see the Sanderson sisters needle and joke around with one another, as well as watch Max and Dani’s sweet connection bloom.

All seriousness aside, there’s actually next to no seriousness in this movie, just the way Gemini likes it. You do, however, love some good satire, and the quote that comes to mind is Winifred’s: “Oh, look! Another glorious morning. Makes me sick.” No dark horror flicks for you, thank you very much—they’re just not you. You’re playful and mischievous, and you have no interest in sitting through an endless movie. This one will magically hit the sweet spot.

Cancer: Halloweentown

(June 21–July 22)

Much like you, Cancer, Halloweentown is sweet, family-oriented and wholesome. Cancers aren’t trying to scare themselves silly on Halloween, OK? They just want a legitimate reason to make pumpkin spice lattes, bake their favorite cookies, and dip into a Disney-toned reality where witches exist. Halloweentown is the perfect movie to usher in the spooky season without getting too spooky.

One major theme in the movie is that being normal is overrated, which isn’t typical Cancer. But what is Cancer—the zodiac sign that rules family—is seeing Marnie reconnect with her mother and finally feel accepted by her. The warm and fuzzies will get you!

Leo: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

(July 23–Aug. 22)

There’s a good chance you guessed this would be the movie choice for show-stopping, theatrical Leo. If you were born under this sign, you know that “casual” is not something you do very well. You’d show up totally decked out for a backyard family BBQ. And that interest in going over the top is what makes Rocky Horror the perfect Halloween flick for you. Not only are the costumes and make up expertly extravagant, but it’s also an avant-garde, gender-bending musical. Your sign rules entertainment (and live theater), which means you’ll have a blast singing along and dancing with the characters.

And why stop there? You’ll take any excuse to throw a good party, and this definitely qualifies, especially with Tim Curry’s recent passing. So grab your full makeup kit, your fishnet stockings and a string of pearls, and make this viewing party happen! (Let’s not even pretend you won’t dress up as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who is basically your Halloween spirit animal.)

Virgo: Halloween

(Aug. 23–Sept. 22)

We couldn’t make a Halloween-movie list without adding this classic! And when it comes to serial-killer movies, Halloween is perfectly Virgo. Because unlike other slasher films (looking at you, Scream), Halloween pairs horror with precision. It takes fear to a cold, emotionless and calculated place—kind of like what happens when you deep-clean your house or create an itinerary for an international vacation. Think about it: Michael Myers doesn’t kill in a hot rage. (If he did, he’d be more of Mars-ruled sign like Aries.) No, Michael’s method is far more fixated and controlled.

Even the way he;s framed as the killer—a dark shape among the trees—rewards only those detail-oriented viewers who are paying close attention. The connection becomes even stronger with the haunting music in the background: slow and methodical, just like you. 

Libra: The Nightmare Before Christmas

(Sept. 23–Aug. 22)

One minute, it’s Halloween, and the next, it’s Christmas. Sometimes, it’s just too hard to choose which season you want to step into. But you’re a Libra, which means indecision isn’t new to you. So why not pick both seasons and watch The Nightmare Before Christmas? Fabulous idea, right?

But there’s more to it than that. Because your sign is so close to Scorpio, you secretly love the dark, sinister feel of a Tim Burton film. But since you’re ruled by Venus, you also love art and can appreciate the aesthetic here. And finally, even though this movie is filled with goblins, beetles and scary things, at the heart of it all, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a love story. The entire time, we’re rooting for Jack and Sally to reunite and have their happily ever after. As one of the most romantic and lovey-dovey signs, Libra, we know this is the reason you watch movies to begin with.

Scorpio: Beetlejuice

(Oct. 23–Nov. 22)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Beetle— Don’t worry, we won’t go there. But you might because you’re all about this Tim Burton classic with its goth-girl energy, undead characters, demon contracts, liminal space, and sandworms on Saturn. It’s all so Scorpio. 

Scorpios also tend to be able to handle the concept of death with ease, and they have a, shall we say, dark side. It’s just that the world can be too much. This is something Lydia understands all too well. She feels more comfortable with the dead than she does the living, and Scorpio can relate to that feeling of being misunderstood. Burton’s gorgeously morbid world simply gives you the dark fix your sign craves. 

Sagittarius: Hubie Halloween

(Nov. 22–Dec. 21)

Like Adam Sandler, a Sagittarius can lighten up any room and get people laughing. Of all the signs, light-hearted and comedic Sagittarius is probably the least likely to care about Halloween or scary movies. They’d much prefer fun pranks and hearty laughs—something Hubie Halloween can easily provide. It’s set in Salem, where the townspeople are all about Halloween … and making fun of the dorky Hubie Dubois for taking his self-appointed role of “town protector” too seriously.

Sags hate being serious, and your favorite part of Halloween is dressing up as something totally random. You’ll find lots of great Halloween costumes in this film, from the Tin Man to Freddie Mercury and even the Bride of Frankenstein. If nothing else, watch it for costume inspiration!

Capricorn: The Lost Boys

(Dec. 22–Jan. 19)

This vampire classic from the ’80s is cult-ish and moody, which isn’t quite like you. However, The Lost Boys definitely shares a few valuable life lessons, which is totally you, Capricorn! You’ll feel vindicated by whole kids-conquering-vampires thing after the vamps have been allowed to run wild through Santa Monica—and not just because it’s a good plot or a case of good triumphing over evil. It’s because your sign is ruled by Saturn, which is big on karma. When someone is put in their place or gets their just desserts for doing something wrong, you feel good, like the world has been righted once again. 

Saturn is also the master of time, which means you’re good at the long game. Most people create a five-year plan, but you create 10-year plans. These teen vamps may waste their immortality partying, but the concept of being enslaved to time is pretty Capricorn as a concept, so the theme is something that will likely resonate with you.

Aquarius: Alien

(Jan. 20–Feb. 18)

Alien isn’t a Halloween-themed movie. But hey, you’re an Aquarius—you always have to be the unexpected one on the list. And you particularly love this one because as the ruler of galaxies, astronomy, UFOs and astrology, every Aquarius (me, included!) loves all things outer space, especially the idea of interstellar contact. Because let’s be real: Aliens have to exist out there somewhere!

Naturally, the powers-that-be behind the Nostromo, the ship that found the extraterrestrial creature, knew all along that they’d be sending their men on a doomed mission. Honestly, you’re a bit of a weirdo who puts logic above emotions and loves studying why people do what they do, so you’ll look at this as a fascinating take on humanity. Aquarius-approved, for sure.

Pisces: The Craft

(Feb. 19–March 20)

Now, it’s time for one of the spookiest signs of all: Pisces! Because Pisces rules the mystical and the subconscious, you’ll adore The Craft. For starters, out of the entire zodiac, you’re the one who’s most likely to be a “natural witch” like Sarah. You also tend to be fascinated by the occult, so I’m almost positive you’ve tried some of the activities the girls do together in the movie, like “light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

And let’s not forget Nancy, the witch of the South who rules water, like Pisces, and whose preferred method of torture is psychological. You’ll particularly get a kick out of the plot-twist ending. (Hint: Someone goes a little insane.)

As a Neptune-ruled sign, you’re no stranger to escapism. You can easily get lost in a before-bed doomscroll, and you’d rather chuck your phone in a river than reply to a text. While you can’t run away from everything, you’ll see yourself in the four girls who use magic to escape the painful parts of their lives. It might even serve as a reminder of what happens when the fantasy outweighs reality a little too much.

Why trust us

Reader’s Digest provides an easy-to-understand guide to all things astrology—from understanding sun signs, moon signs and rising signs to exploring each zodiac sign’s strengths, challenges and desires. You’ll learn about your ideal match in love, career, hobbies and more, as well as learn how big astrological events will affect you. We’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including practicing astrologers, as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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To get the full picture, we spoke with Mike Astorino, who has more than 34 years of experience in the business and is the owner of Fabricare, a luxury dry cleaner in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Read on to find out exactly what happens to your clothes at the dry cleaner.

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Why is dry cleaning essential for some items?

It’s all about keeping certain delicate items in tip-top shape—and cleaning them without accidentally ruining them. For those items that need this VIP treatment, the pros use solvents in place of water and traditional laundry detergent to remove stains, sweat and grime from clothing.

That said, even when a care tag says something is “dry clean only,” that doesn’t necessarily mean it is. “In general, manufacturers are careless with their labels,” Astorino says. “Big, luxury brands will put very specific care instructions onto the garment and even test fabrics before going to market. However, for the thousands of other brands out there, ‘dry clean only’ is a way for them to deny responsibility if you wash an item and it shrinks or deteriorates.” (To wit, the $12 pair of purple track pants I recently bought that are labeled “dry clean only.” I could buy a new pair for the same cost as bringing them to the cleaner’s!) In some cases, you can even wash silk and wool—if you know what you’re doing.

But certain items are essential to dry-clean, such as anything with leather trim, a loose weave that runs the risk of snagging anywhere along the process, or an item with ornamentation like crystal buttons, Astorino says.

What happens to your clothes after you drop them off?

More than you probably think! Let’s take a little trip through a dry cleaner’s shop below.

1. Your clothes are inspected

“The cleaner looks for defects, such as loose buttons, torn hems and stains, and reports them to the customer,” says Astorino. “This protects us from things we didn’t do and allows us to repair the item to return it to the customer in a wearable condition.” Then each piece gets a unique tag, which is used to track it throughout the process to ensure it doesn’t get lost.”

At Fabricare, the tag is a small sticker with a bar code that attaches to the care tag, and customers don’t typically remove it. This gives the cleaners insight into some of the garment’s history, including how often it has been dry-cleaned, as well as the date of its last cleaning.

2. Stains are identified and pretreated

“To simplify removal, we classify stains into two categories: plant-based, like coffee, wine or tomato sauce, and animal-based, like sweat or blood,” Astorino says. To determine which is which, common sense comes into play. “Stains in the front of the garment are usually some type of food, whereas you’re more likely to find makeup around the neck, and mud or dirt on the bottom of dresses or pants,” he explains.

Then there are invisible stains, such as perspiration, perfume or light drinks like white wine. You might not notice them, but if they’re not treated promptly, they can ruin a garment. (These are typically removed through the regular dry-cleaning process.)

Beyond the stain, the cleaner needs to consider the fabric, the dye and the condition of the item before beginning to clean.

3. The garment goes into the cleaning machine

The machine dry cleaners use is similar to the one you use at home, save for a few key differences. It doesn’t use water, and it has far more settings for temperature and speed than your home washer. “The machines are computerized for different types of loads,” Astorino says. “Delicate silks will have a gentle cycle, while heavy coats and sweaters can handle more aggressive types of cleaning.” Solvent is added directly to the machine through a hose, the same way water is introduced into your machine at home.

The other big difference? Clothes are cleaned and dried in the same machine, he explains. Just like with dry-cleaner wash cycles, there are a number of different temperature and speed options for drying.

Oh, and a single machine costs around $60,000!

4. Some garments may be cleaned again

If a stain didn’t come out during the first cleaning, cleaners will try a different type of solvent. At Fabricare, this happens about 30% to 40% of the time, Astorino says. As a last resort, the cleaner may need to use water, which is an aggressive cleaner. “Cleaners are trained to start with the safest stain-removal technique and gradually get more aggressive,” he says.

5. The cleaner stops before damage occurs

There comes a point when continuing to clean a garment will actually damage it, and “that’s the first thing we train cleaners [to recognize],” Astorino says. “I learned from a high-end dry cleaner in New York when I first got in the business that ‘people come to us because we know what not to clean.’ Or put another way, we know when to stop.”

If a stain won’t budge in the traditional process, Astorino’s team communicates with the customer to let them know they can’t get their garment fully clean and potentially get approval to take more aggressive steps, as detailed above.

6. The garment is “finished”

Once an item passes the cleaning department, it goes to finishing, which means “making the garment look like it did when you bought it,” Astorino says. “This is no easy task, especially with women’s garments. It requires knowing when to steam an item versus press it, or how to block a knit back to its original look. It’s really a craft.”

This is also the step when the item gets put on a hanger.

7. Your clothes are matched back to your order

Here’s where automation generally comes into play. At Fabricare, the unique bar code is scanned, and the item is put on a conveyor belt, aka the device that looks like a sky liner for your clothes. The system knows it has, for example, one out of three of a customer’s items. So it spits out the item, bags it and waits to pair it with the other two items to group it and return it to the customer. Chances are, your local dry cleaner has a similar conveyor belt to bring items from the cleaning and finishing area to the front, even if the process isn’t fully automated.

What actually cleans your items in dry cleaning?

At home, you use laundry detergent, which emulsifies stains so they can be rinsed away by water. In dry cleaning, fabric is cleaned with a solvent. The solvent works without water, to dissolve stains chemically. “Like water, the solvent helps lift soil from the fabric, which then gets flushed out through a rinse cycle,” Astorino says.

Hold on—are those chemicals safe?

They’re safer now than they used to be. Decades ago, dry-cleaning solvents were perchloroethylene-based (a chlorine derivative), also called PERC. The system was different too—there were separate washers and dryers, so the solvent would drip from clothing onto the floor as the item was moved to the dryer, and that floor waste was considered toxic, Astorino says. While you may have read that PERC is harmful, and is a carcinogen, the chance of freshly dry-cleaned clothing negatively impacting your health is negligible. There is some evidence, however, that PERC was harmful to workers who came into direct contact with the chemical more regularly. Still, it’s always a good idea to remove the plastic from your clothes so they can air out.

Today’s dry cleaning is more environmentally friendly as a whole, in part because the EPA passed a ruling to phase out PERC-based cleaners fully by 2034. Today’s solvents are silicone- and hydrocarbon-based, neither of which is classified as a carcinogen, and silicone solvent is the same ingredient used in many everyday skin-care products. (Fabricare has been using these types of solvents since 2009).

Plus, more and more dry cleaners are moving toward a closed-loop system, which keeps the solvent inside the machine and reuses it, to cut down on chemical emissions and waste. This means “a very high amount of solvent is reclaimed and the rest is filtered out,” Astorino says.

Should you limit the amount of dry cleaning you do?

Just like you wouldn’t wash your jeans after every wear, you don’t need to dry clean your sweater, blouse or suit jacket every single time. And thank goodness, because dry cleaning can be pricey! That said, you do need to clean clothing before putting it away for seasonal storage—remember, most stains are invisible and will set if you leave them. (Picture yellow armpit stains on a white blouse.)

The dry-cleaning process today is actually a pretty environmentally friendly way to get your clothes clean. It uses little to no water, and the newer solvents are gentler on you and the planet.

Can you simulate dry cleaning at home?

“Almost every type of wool or silk garment can be cleaned at home,” Astorino says. Options include wet washing (handwashing items in the sink or on your machine’s gentle cycle and drying flat) or investing in a DIY dry-cleaning kit. The latter typically includes a solvent you spray on your clothes prior to steaming them in your dryer.

In terms of what to try this with, use your common sense. You’ll want to be more careful with more delicate or meaningful items, like a “lucky” sweater or anything with leather trim or sequins. As for my bargain track pants? I’ve washed and dried them several times now, and they are just fine. (Phew!)

Sources:

• Mike Astorino, owner of Fabricare, a luxury dry cleaner in Connecticut; interviewed, October 2026
• EPA: “A Guide to Complying with the 2o24 Perchloroethylene (PCE) Dry Cleaning Regulation Under the Toxic Substances Control Act”

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In an exclusive interview with Reader’s Digest, Davis revealed the experiences that have shaped her, including how a battle with shingles changed the way she thinks about health and vulnerability. She also got personal about the role family plays in keeping her grounded and why there’s more to being strong than simply pushing through. Of course, we couldn’t talk to Davis without asking a few Hollywood questions too. Which character changed her life forever? And what’s one surprising thing fans would never guess about her from watching her on screen?

Read on for our candid conversation with Viola Davis, including the life lessons she’s picked up along the way and a few surprises you might not see coming.

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This interview took place on Oct. 8, 2026, and has been edited for length and clarity.

Reader’s Digest: You’ve played a lot of strong women—even people who are perceived as strong—but strength can mean something very different in real life. What does being a strong woman mean to you?

Viola Davis: Being a strong woman to me means being vulnerable, keeping my heart open to people and being honest about what I’m feeling at any given time. Being strong means knowing my worth, knowing when things bother me and when things don’t. “Hear me roar” doesn’t work for me anymore. I feel like it numbs too much of me, and I can’t numb anymore. I have a daughter, I have a life and I have friendships. I have love in my life. I have a husband. I want to have all my receptors open. Having shingles more than once was a wake-up call for me to redefine what strong is.

Reader’s Digest: You partnered with GSK Shingles to educate adults about their risk. What’s one thing you now understand about your health that you wish you’d understood before you experienced it?

Viola Davis: I had an unusual experience because I had shingles more than once. I had a blistering rash that wrapped around from my stomach to my back, then went away, then came back on my upper back. Nine out of 10 pain, easy. I couldn’t put my workout clothes on. I couldn’t put my regular clothes on. I had no energy whatsoever.

I felt like it was stopping me. It took me a minute to go to the doctor before they diagnosed me and told me that I was at risk and what I needed to do to prevent it. I was over 50 at the time. Once again, you’re in that area where you’re at an increased risk because your immune system is not the same. That’s why one out of three people get it in their lifetime. All of a sudden, I realize I’m not the woman king, even though I did The Woman King later in life.

I came to the realization that “You’re not 25 anymore, Viola,” so you have to take care of this beautiful aging body, and it’s OK when you know something is going on with it. It’s OK to go to the doctor, and it’s OK to bother them. You’re worth it. That was a hard one for me. I come from a long line of people who were just strong people. My mom worked in the field in Singleton Plantation from the time she was 4. So that was my wake-up call.

Reader’s Digest: Did having shingles change anything else about the way that you work—whether that’s now listening to your body, setting boundaries or allowing yourself some rest? 

Viola Davis: I did not come from privilege, but I am privileged now. I started setting my hours, because you can do that once you reach a certain level in the profession. Being away from home for long, extended periods of time doesn’t work for me anymore. As soon as I finished a TV show, I would go home for two days and start a movie.

Imperfection is the key to connection. That includes admitting to yourself that you don’t feel so strong right now. Sometimes I think we feel alone with all of our thoughts and how we feel. We keep it locked up, and there’s something about vulnerability that lets it out. It seeks connection. I feel like that’s the best thing I’ve given to myself as I age. It’s the curiosity that life is more about the inside than the outside.

Reader’s Digest: I also imagine that these are pieces of advice that you want your daughter, Genesis, to understand as she gets older, too.

Viola Davis: I think the worst thing we can do is to betray ourselves, and I see women do that a lot. I can’t speak for men. They probably do too. We wear the mask that grins and lies. I tell Genesis all the time: “Do not betray yourself, no matter what. Disappoint everybody else in your life, but don’t disappoint yourself. If you need help, ask for it.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Reader’s Digest: While I’m sure that you’re teaching Genesis all these important life lessons, I know that she must have taught you some things herself. What is something that she’s introduced you to? It could be a phrase, a trend, a show, a song—anything that makes you feel like you’re truly a mom. 

Viola Davis: The thing about young people today is that they are their own people, way more than my generation. I was taught to be the good girl—smile, say the good stuff and always be polite. I‘ve given my daughter permission not to do that. One day I said, “Genesis, you always have to have a language for how you feel. You have to be curious enough to name it.” She looked at me for the longest time, and she said, “I disagree with you. I think it’s OK when you don’t know how you feel.”

I think that it’s extremely liberating to be able to speak your truth, and speak your truth in in front of your mama. Mama and Daddy are the leadership positions in your life. She spoke her truth to me. So I learned something from that.

Reader’s Digest: You’ve spent years becoming other people, from Ma Rainey and Michelle Obama to Amanda Waller and more. Is there a character you played who you feel is surprisingly similar to who you are today, or maybe even the complete opposite?

Viola Davis: Annalise Keating [in How to Get Away with Murder]. She is everything that I’m not. She’s just unapologetic about her strength—unapologetic even about her vulnerabilities and flaws. I remember one line that Annalise Keating had when someone said, “No, you’re mistaken.” I say, “Oh, no, never. I’m never mistaken.”

There’s something about embodying all those character traits that I didn’t have that I always wished for. It sort of activated it in me, and it gave me permission to be all of those things. And I always say that instead of being a good girl, I wanted to be the girl that spoke her truth, even if it pissed people off, like Annalise Keating did. I wanted to stretch my boundaries and be unapologetic about all of my character traits—the good and the bad. She liberated Viola.

Reader’s Digest: What is something about you that would surprise someone who only knows you from the screen?

Viola Davis: Everything. First of all, I’m fun and funny. People have a blast at our parties. Number two, and once again, this is a contradiction, but I’m extremely introverted, probably to a fault. I’m extremely happy to just be a so-called “regular person.” I love throwing my slippers on and not wearing makeup—just getting in my car and doing my own shopping, cooking and everything on my own.

I am surprisingly simple. I don’t need a lot of things to make me happy. I don’t really need designer clothes. I hate shopping, except for perfume. I’m addicted to perfume.

Reader’s Digest: If you could preserve one completely ordinary moment from your life and experience it again 20 years from now, what moment would you choose?

Viola Davis: My husband will forgive me for this. I love him so much. But number one is kissing my daughter. Oh, my goodness! As a baby, kissing her on the lips. I would put her in that car seat every day. We’d go to the mall and the play area. Oh, man, I miss it.

*Editor’s note: Reader’s Digest does not endorse any specific products or services. 

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this interview with Viola Davis, Reader’s Digest Associate Editor Mariah Thomas tapped her experiences as a celebrity interviewer, writer and editor. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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Believe it or not, the burgeoning brand—which was acquired by Mattel in 1998 and has since spawned an empire—is celebrating is 40th anniversary this year. And American Girl is marking the occasion with a new venture: Samantha: The Next Chapter, the first American Girl novel for adults. Yes, you read that right! But the delicious nostalgia is only the beginning. The story, set in New York City circa 1920, centers on the now-grown Samantha Parkington, an aspiring suffragist encouraging other young women to vote in their first presidential election. Her otherwise comfortable life takes an abrupt left turn when her inheritance is stolen and she sets out to save her family’s legacy.

Adding to the fun? Fiona Davis, the bestselling author of The Stolen Queen, The Address and The Lions of Fifth Avenue, wrote the book and brought her expertise in New York–based historical fiction to the world of American Girl. We caught up with Davis just before the book’s launch to find out how she created grown-up Samantha’s story and why she thinks American Girl resonates with readers of all ages.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Reader’s Digest: What is your connection to American Girl? Were you a fan of the American Girl dolls or books growing up?

Fiona Davis: I was in college when the first book came out, and I don’t have any kids of my own. Where I really connected with American Girl was through my nieces. My brother has three daughters, and all three loved American Girl, especially my niece, Erin. She loved Samantha best and the fact that she was very forward. Erin was shy, so having a doll whose character spoke her mind was very helpful for Erin, who was learning how to find her own voice.

Reader’s Digest: How did you end up writing an American Girl book for adults?

Fiona Davis: The company approached me and asked if I would write a book around Samantha. In a way, it was a gift not to know a lot about her because otherwise, I would have been paralyzed with fear. She is so loved, and the nostalgia around American Girl and Samatha is so strong.

I think I was chosen because I know New York well. I write about historic New York, and the heroines in my stories are all very strong-willed. It was a good match that way. American Girl’s Janelle [Asselin] was my editor for the whole project and was brilliant. She reached out to me by email, which I reported to my agent and asked her if she thought it was a scam. She called them and said it was the real thing. So it all happened pretty quickly, and we were soon off to the races.

Reader’s Digest: Was Samantha a departure from other characters you’ve written about?

Fiona Davis: Samantha is a 25-year-old character, and I’ve had main characters who are around that same age as well. I had also worked on projects based in the 1920s. The fact that Samantha is very much into suffrage, even as a young girl, worked well because I had co-edited a group of short stories (Stories from Suffragette City) set around the suffrage parade in New York City in 1915; I have done a lot of research around that. On top of that, the town that Samantha grew up in is based on Mount Kisco, New York, which I know well.

Reader’s Digest: Who decided Samantha would be the first adult American Girl to be featured in an adult novel?

Fiona Davis: American Girl, the company, was very specific that Samantha would be the first. She was one of the first original dolls.

Reader’s Digest: Did you read any of the original American Girl books while preparing? What was that experience like as an adult?

Fiona Davis: I did a deep dive because the books are so important to her background. They introduce her family, her extended family, her community, her interests. It was really fun—and a gift not to have to make all that up. As an author, it was wonderful to have it right on the page and then see where it could go.

Reading these books as an adult was enlightening; I wish I’d had them as a young girl. The sense of history comes through with such clarity. The characters are so wonderful.

Reader’s Digest: Did any other American Girl stories really resonate with you?

Fiona Davis: I also loved reading Addy’s story. I like the fact that the books don’t shy away from a difficult era in American history. But Samantha was my focus, for sure.

Reader’s Digest: Did anything from this story speak to you on a more personal level?

Fiona Davis: My parents are both English, so all our relatives lived in England. We lived in America since I was 3. Even though Samantha had lost her parents and was an orphan, she had such a loving extended family around her. I would have loved to have read these books as young child and experience the idea of having an extended family; I didn’t have that myself.

Reader’s Digest: Was there a moment during the writing process when you felt especially aware of the full-circle nature of this project?

Fiona Davis: I think it’s wonderful being able to reach beyond the original generation it was intended for. What’s interesting to me is whenever I have met an adult who knows the story, they get so excited. They always know where their American Girl doll is. It might be in their mother’s attic or their basement, and they always say, “Oh, yes, I’m a Samantha” or “I’m a Kirsten.” They identify so closely with the dolls and their characters.

Reader’s Digest: Was it difficult adapting a character that so many people grew up with?

Fiona Davis: The real challenge was staying true to her character as a child. Samantha is empathetic, tenacious and very intelligent. We needed to make sure that during all the stages—the research, writing and editing—that Samantha’s inner strength was still present. Meanwhile, she is an adult, having adult experiences. Readers need to know who the character is at her core and recognize that. Also, as a character, I had to have her undergo growth, so in the story, she’s maybe a little bit different than when she started. It’s the first time I’ve been handed a character and told to write a book about her.

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Samantha: The Next Chapter by Fiona Davis

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Reader’s Digest: This book will be such a hugely nostalgic story for a lot of readers. When crafting it, how did you balance nostalgia with telling a rich, complex story your way?

Fiona Davis: I was lucky that I had a team of people behind me as I wrote. They not only included my editor but also a historian on staff at American Girl who supplied me with everything I needed to stay true to the time period. On top of that, they have a panel of consultants and experts and advisors on whatever subjects we were dealing with who could weigh in and make sure that the story was true to history. Their contributions are on every page of that book. I think that because it was this wonderful team effort, we carried that balance of nostalgia and growth throughout the plot.

Reader’s Digest: Why do you think American Girl has such a lasting impact on so many of us?

Fiona Davis: It’s because the American Girl team really cares about how the characters come across. They understand that they are affecting young girls, and there’s a huge responsibility there that they take very seriously. I think people who buy American Girl dolls understand that. That is why there is such brand loyalty. I think customers understand they are not being talked down to.

The early stories are so fun to read, no matter what age you are. There’s a common thread throughout American Girl, no matter which character you identify with. With this book, the way I like to describe it is like going on a long road trip with an old friend. It’s somewhere new, but you have an old friend by your side the whole way.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite books for over 100 years. We’ve worked with bestselling authors including Susan Orlean, Janet Evanovich and Alex Haley, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Roots grew out of a project funded by and originally published in the magazine. Through Fiction Favorites (formerly Select Editions and Condensed Books), Reader’s Digest has been publishing anthologies of abridged novels for decades. We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in fiction, including James Patterson, Ruth Ware, Kristin Hannah and more. The Reader’s Digest Book Club, helmed by Books Editor Tracey Neithercott, introduces readers to even more of today’s best fiction by upcoming, bestselling and award-winning authors. For this piece, Pamela Brill interviewed author Fiona Davis. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

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But despite how things went down all those years ago, it’s become clear that Charles and Camilla absolutely adore each other. They laugh at the same things, as she revealed last year on the couple’s 20th anniversary, and they enjoy spending time together even when they are like two “ships passing in the night,” as she told British Vogue a few years ago.

It makes one wonder why they didn’t just marry each other right off the bat, but that’s a whole other story. And everyone deserves happiness, right? Now, in a new documentary, the queen is opening up about a nighttime ritual that she shares with her husband, and it is so sweet and relatable, you might almost forget they’re royalty. Read on to learn what these two do to keep the love alive.

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What is the royal couple’s sweet nighttime ritual?

Like a lot of couples, the king and queen read together every night. She divulged their charming routine in a new BBC documentary called The Book That Changed My Life. The documentary was produced in partnership with the Open University and Camilla’s charity, the Queen’s Reading Room, as part of the U.K.’s National Year of Reading.

“My husband and I actually read before dinner,” Camilla told the BBC. “We just like sitting quietly and reading.”

The queen went on to paint a picture of domesticity for the royal pair, describing how reading and their pre-dinner ritual are incredibly important to her. “It’s part of our heritage. If there’s no reading, personally, we might as well all give up,” Camilla said. “Because I don’t think we’d even be human anymore.”

What’s the one pet peeve Camilla has about Charles’s reading habits?

He’s apparently not one to stay silent when reading, much to the queen’s dismay. “I, occasionally, when I’m deep in a book, hear him roaring with laughter about something,” Camilla said in the doc. “It’s very off-putting. I can’t get back into my book, or I’ll suddenly start weeping. But it’s a lovely, quiet time.”

She chalks up this quirk to the fact that Charles enjoys reading P.G. Wodehouse, the famed British humorist behind literary characters such as the quintessential English butler, Jeeves, and his employer, Bertie Wooster. Camilla, meanwhile, prefers thrillers and historical fiction, which aren’t exactly known for their laugh-a-minute hilarity.

How seriously does Camilla take her reading?

Very. She points to her own early life spent reading and how it set her up for success when opportunities were limited. “I left school quite young, because in my day, women didn’t go to university,” Camilla said. “I think reading has been most of my education.”

The queen credits her father, Bruce Shand, with instilling a love of reading in her. “We must’ve been very, very young when my father started reading to us,” she said. “I think that’s where my love of reading came from.” She recalled reading Treasure Island and Peter Pan before graduating to A Tale of Two Cities, which she said coincided with her childhood fascination with the guillotine!

“I don’t think our childhood would have been the same if we didn’t have books,” she told the BBC.

The Queen’s Reading Room, which began as a book club during the COVID-19 pandemic and now reaches 12 million people in 183 countries, is an extension of her love of reading. But it’s about more than that: The Queen’s Reading Room also funds neuroscience research to study how reading and well-being are connected, and partners with other charities to provide books to people in the hospital or experiencing homelessness or domestic abuse.

What are some of Camilla’s favorite books?

Every year, Camilla highlights multiple must-read books on the Queen’s Reading Room website. She picks four books per season, or 16 books a year. Since 2021, she has recommended 64 books.

Despite her professed love of thrillers and historical fiction, her book list is quite diverse. Here are the highlights:

• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Queen’s Necklace by Alexandre Dumas
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
• The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
• Love in the Time of the Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
• Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Sources:

• The Queen’s Reading Room
• Guardian: “The Book That Changed My Life review – these joyful tales of the power of reading are TV magic”
• BBC: “BBC Arts reveals title and broadcast date for new documentary featuring Her Majesty Queen Camilla”
• The Royal Family: “A message from The Queen to mark the 5th anniversary of The Queen’s Reading Room”
• Facebook: “The Queen reflects on a lifetime of reading – and some of her childhood favourites”
• People: “Queen Camilla Reveals the ‘Off-Putting’ Thing King Charles Does Before Dinner as She Details Their Nightly Routine”
• Facebook: “We like sitting quietly and reading. Occasionally, when I’m deep in a book, I’ll hear him roaring with laughter about something”⁣
• ITV: “The Queen shares her secrets to a happy marriage as she celebrates 20th wedding anniversary”
• Good Morning America: “Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall gives rare interview about her life with Prince Charles”

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Yes, sleeping with our pets can be problematic. But I would never kick him out: It’s not Willie’s fault I’m a light sleeper, and it took us forever to haul him up on the bed in the first place. And now, a new study confirms that co-sleeping has its downsides—not necessarily for you, but for your dog.

Ahead, I’ll take you through the results of this new research that totally upends what we think we know about humans, dogs and sleep. Read on to learn how your sleeping arrangements might be affecting everyone in your family, furry members included.

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Are we really interrupting our dogs’ beauty rest?

Yes, we are, according to new research by scientists at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The study, which was published in Plos One, was on the small side, but it looked at 25 human participants and their 38 canine counterparts to find out how sleep patterns were affected by co-sleeping.

To do this, researchers outfitted dogs and owners with sleep monitors, and found that 61% of the subject “dyads” (aka the individual pairs of humans and dogs studied) moved together at some point in the night. But of that majority of interspecies co-sleepers who were in tandem, it was usually the human who moved first—not the dog.

Yep, in nearly half (45%) of the dyads that showed movement, it was the person who was doing the disturbing first. Could my dog, Willie, be off the hook for my banishment to the spare bedroom? I don’t quite believe it, but researchers have some pretty good numbers to back it up.

They measured both objective activity levels (using sleep monitors) and subjective variables, including the perception of sleep quality (which unfortunately our dogs can’t answer). They found that our belief that Fido is preventing us from sleeping, and not the other way around, might be a misperception, though the authors say more study is needed.

Could this be a problem for our pups?

Researchers didn’t come to any conclusions about how these results could be affecting our animals. But as any of us who have been roused out of our REM cycle in the middle of the night—only to stare at the ceiling, attempt to count sheep or give up and read a book—can attest, lack of sleep is bad for you and, presumably, your dog too.

Sleep studies in dogs aren’t too common, but 2022 research published in Animals found that dogs who got less than eight to 10 hours of sleep were more likely to receive a higher “problem behavior score” by their owners. A 2025 study in Scientific Reports found that sleep can affect learning in dogs under certain situations, and an earlier one from 2017, published in the same journal, reported that dogs learn while sleeping, just like people do.

So given what we know about how important sleep is for humans, combined with this new data on dogs, it seems logical to conclude that sleep disruptions could be affecting their overall well-being, similar to how they affect ours. But sleep in dogs is still a relatively untapped field of study, so take everything with a grain of salt.

Are dogs interrupting our sleep too?

My anecdotal evidence aside, apparently not. Researchers in this study found that among the majority of participants whose sleep moves correlated with their dogs’ movements, the dogs moved first only 18% of the time. (Compare that with the 45% of the time we prompt movement in our pups.)

And when it came to objectively measured sleep patterns, like sleep duration and sleep efficiency in humans and overall nighttime activity in dogs, co-sleeping had no effect on either party. In the subjective measurements, humans reported poorer sleep only when they had more than one dog, even though the objective measurements didn’t back up their assumptions.

Interestingly, dogs that slept in the same room with their humans but not on the same bed were more likely to disrupt their owners’ sleep. Overall, researchers note the need for larger, more robust studies of dog-and-human sleep patterns. Willie and I will wait eagerly for this emerging research, but one thing I can tell you is that he’s not moving.

Sources:

• PLOS One: “Who is disrupting whom? Examining the nighttime activity patterns of humans and their dogs”
• Animals: “Sleep Characteristics in Dogs; Effect on Caregiver-Reported Problem Behaviours”
• Science: “Brain scans show dogs learn when sleeping—just like people”
• Scientific Reports: “Potential interactive effect of positive expectancy violation and sleep on memory consolidation in dogs”
• Animals: “Family Dogs’ Sleep Macrostructure Reflects Worsened Sleep Quality When Sleeping in the Absence of Their Owners: A Non-Invasive Polysomnography Study”

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Our top pick: Deer Deer Pajamas

When it comes to the best family Christmas pajamas, Hanna Andersson is a tried-and-true favorite. This year, they have over 60 holiday prints to choose from, including beloved characters like Bluey and the Grinch, as well as classic plaids and stripes. Pajama sets are made of 100% cotton and are OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified, meaning they’re free from harmful substances and, best of all, not made of plastic.

They are available in baby, kids’, women’s, men’s, adult unisex and pet sizes. And while they do come in sets, they’re designed to be mixed and matched. In other words, you can rock a matching set or create a holiday look that’s all your own.

Deputy editor Katie Bandurski and her family have spent the last four Christmases cozying up in Hanna Andersson’s flannel Deer Deer pajamas, and she is happy to say that they’ve held up year after year. “For my family, it’s all about feeling together and united during the holiday season. We traditionally open presents on Christmas Eve, and it’s so nice to come home, change out of church clothes and relax in something cozy while we watch It’s a Wonderful Life,” she explains in her Hanna Andersson review. “This has been our tradition for many years, and the matching PJs add a little extra flair. My sister lives out of state, so the holidays are one of our best chances to all be together.”

Before you buy, click the “sizing help” link and carefully review the measurements, as these pajamas tend to run large. “Generally, I’d say they run a bit big, which is great for that super cozy fit. After all, there’s nothing worse than tight pajamas,” Katie says. If you order the wrong size, the brand does not offer exchanges and charges a $7.50 fee for each return shipment.

best organic

Burt's Bees

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Our top pick: Nostalgic Christmas Organic Cotton Pajama Set

Trying to avoid plastics and other harmful chemicals? We don’t blame you. Burt’s Bees offers a beautiful line of high-quality pajamas made from 100% organic cotton. These jammies are soft, breathable and gentle on sensitive skin, making them an excellent choice for little ones. They come in a wide selection of hand-painted, watercolor prints that will look beautiful in family photos. We especially love this Nostalgic Christmas print.

Shopping editor Mary Henn and her family wore Burt’s Bees Christmas pajamas last year, and she was impressed by the comfort and quality. “I’m a big fan of the Burt’s Bees family pajamas,” she says. “They offer a wide range of sizes and prints, from newborn onesies to dog bandanas, so every family member is included. Unlike typical button-up sets, these pajamas consist of long-sleeve shirts and pajama pants. But they’re incredibly durable and withstand multiple washes without losing their quality.”

We also appreciate the fact that these pajamas are relatively budget-friendly. Prices range from $19 for infant and toddler sizes to $50 for adult pajamas. Burt’s Bees also runs frequent sales. The only thing to keep in mind is that you have 30 days to return an item if it doesn’t live up to your expectations. However, we’re confident that you’ll love these pajamas as much as we do.

most meaningful

Holy Pals

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Our top pick: Let Us Adore Him Bamboo Pajama Set

Christmas truly is the most wonderful time of year. Of course, the carols, cookies, decorations and family traditions all help the season feel magical. But if your family is also intentional about remembering the real reason for the season, Holy Pals pajamas are for you. I came across these pajamas on my Instagram feed and fell in love with the message and the prints.

In addition to eight faith-inspired designs, each pajama set has a small scripture tag on the sleeve. This tag references the Bible story recounting Jesus’ birth and serves as a reminder of why we celebrate Christmas.

I ordered the brand’s Let Us Adore Him bamboo pajama set, which features a nativity-inspired design and trendy bows, and it’s just as pretty in person as it is online. Better still, they fit perfectly, are super soft, and the quality is on par with my Cozy Earth pajamas. And since clothing tags tend to bother two of my children, I appreciate the fact that Holy Pals PJs are tagless.

best budget

The Children's Place

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Our top pick: Santa Letter Cotton And Dream Fleece Henley Pajamas

As a mom of four, believe me when I say that buying multiple sets of Christmas pajamas adds up quickly. Luckily, your family can match on a budget. The Children’s Place has some of the best family Christmas pajamas with prices starting at under $25. And their low prices don’t mean low quality.

I’ve purchased countless sets of pajamas from The Children’s Place over the years, and I’m always impressed by how well they hold up. Last year, I bought my children matching pajamas from a big box retailer. I had to return every single pair after discovering holes along the seams and pockets after just one wash.  Meanwhile, our Children’s Place pajamas are still going strong after being passed down between two or three kids.

The only thing to consider is that while they offer a ton of styles, not all of their pajamas are 100% cotton. If the material type is important to you, you’ll need to look closely at the product description for each set. That said, the Children’s Place website has a filter that lets you narrow your search to products with OEKO-TEX Standard 100 Certification.

Just keep in mind that while many styles are OEKO-TEX Standard 100 Certified, they’re not necessarily made of natural materials. You’ll still have to pay attention to the product descriptions. However, you will find a nice, affordable selection of 100% cotton pajamas for the whole family.

best for mixing and matching

Old Navy

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Our top pick: Muppets Christmas Carol

Run to Old Navy and scoop up affordable Christmas pajamas for the whole family. You can mix and match shirts, pants and shorts, which means everyone is happy, comfy and coordinated. They have an extensive selection of prints and inclusive sizing up to 4X. They even have matching accessories for your pets so the whole fam gets in on the fun.

Bandurski ordered her family Christmas pajamas from Old Navy this year and couldn’t be more excited about them. “I could not resist the Muppets Christmas Carol pattern,” she says. If you’re also smitten with this nostalgic print, choose from flannel pants and an oversized T-shirt or a matching set, all of which are made of 100% cotton. Just note that these pajamas, along with other Disney prints, are not typically included in storewide sales.

best classic prints

Lands' End

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Our top pick: Knit 2-Piece Pajama Set in Winter Puffins

If you prefer a more sophisticated look, Lands’ End offers a selection of traditional plaids and prints. There are plenty of styles to choose from, including cozy flannel nightgowns and matching sets, as well as cotton nightshirts and knit pajama sets. They even carry matching robes. Lands’ End pajamas are available in a wide range of sizes for kids and adults, including regular, petite, tall and plus size. Make these Christmas pajamas extra special by personalizing each family member’s set. Add their initials, name or a logo for $10.95 per item.

Just be sure to check the brand’s sizing guide, as some reviewers note that the pajamas run large. According to Bandurski, a longtime Lands’ End fan, they do, in fact, run a bit big. “Lands’ End has been my go-to in recent history,” she says. “Their sizing is very generous, so they also fit the bill for being perfectly comfortable if not a tad too big.”

I agree with Katie. I recently ordered the Women’s Knit 2-Piece Pajama Set in the Winter Puffins pattern. I ordered my usual size, and they do indeed run big. In fact, they’re too big for my tastes, so I’ll be exchanging them for a smaller size. Otherwise, the flannel is soft, and the pattern is adorable. Perfect for the winter months!

Most Unique Prints

Printfresh

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Our top pick: Holiday Hens

Printfresh makes some of the best pajamas for women, so it’s no surprise their family pajama game is strong. We especially love the Holiday Hens pattern, which features hand-illustrated hens sporting festive scarves, earmuffs and Christmas wreaths. There are multiple silhouettes to choose from, and they’re available in sizes XXS to 6X in standard, petite and tall lengths.

Bandurski is a longtime fan of Printfresh pajamas and owns a handful of cotton and flannel sets. She notes that they run true to size, with both the top and bottom pieces offering a relaxed fit. And while they’re on the pricier side, Katie thinks they’re a worthy investment. “They wash up really nicely. I don’t typically wash them separately or with any kind of special treatment, and they still look colorful and vibrant,” she raves. “The cotton poplin sets do tend to wrinkle, though. So make sure you promptly remove them from the dryer. The flannel sets also wear nicely and get softer with every wash.”

best for baby's first Christmas

Carter's

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Our top pick: Organic Cotton Fair Isle Pajamas

Have a new addition this holiday season? Carter’s Christmas jammies come in infant sizes ranging from preemie to nine months. You’ll also find plenty of styles for toddlers, kids and adults, including organic cotton and 100% cotton options. Better still, they have adorable accessories like these gingerbread man slippers to complete your look.

Over the years, I’ve purchased dozens of matching Carter’s Christmas pajamas for my children. I’ve found that they hold up well, and thanks to Carter’s frequent sales, I’m often able to get them for less than $20 per set. That said, I have found that the brand has changed quite a bit in recent years. Most notably, the toddler and big kid sizes tend to run a bit small compared to years past, so I tend to order a size up. That said, I haven’t experienced any shrinking after putting them through the washer and dryer.

best for coordinating

Kyte Baby

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Our top pick: Long-Sleeved Pajama Set in Holiday Plaid

If you prefer a coordinated look over matching styles, Kyte Baby has a lovely assortment of Christmas prints and solids to choose from. All of their pajamas are made from ultra-soft rayon from bamboo and OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified. They carry infant, children and adult sizes ranging from preemie through 3XL.

Though I haven’t ordered Kyte’s holiday pajamas, I did purchase several items for myself and my last baby almost four years ago. I still wear my now discontinued cardigan on a regular basis, and it’s held up beautifully. The baby items I had purchased went into my bin of favorite baby clothes to save for, well, forever. And I’m not the only one who loves Kyte. Mary Henn is also a fan.

“Kyte pajamas are on the pricier side, but they offer a wide range of products and prints. Kyte is known for making some of my all-time favorite clothing and pajamas for infants and toddlers. Their bamboo fabric is so, so soft, breathable and comfortable,” raves Mary. “If you’re a fan of bamboo clothing, you’ll absolutely love Kyte. The prints are also incredibly unique and artistic.”

best bamboo

Little Sleepies

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Our top pick: Gingerbread Flurry Two-Piece Pajama Set

There’s lots to love about bamboo pajamas. They’re buttery soft, hypoallergenic, breathable and gentle on sensitive skin. Little Sleepies Christmas pajamas are made with 95% viscose from bamboo and 5% spandex. There are over a dozen patterns to choose from, and sizes range from preemie through 3XL.

What we really love about Little Sleepies is the website’s Holiday Family Matching Bundler. This feature allows you to select pajamas for one family member at a time and shows all of the available styles and sizes in one convenient place. No more toggling back and forth between pages and your cart. Talk about a pleasant shopping experience!

The post The Best Family Christmas Pajama Brands: Top Picks for Prints, Fabric and Comfort appeared first on Reader's Digest.

When I got this assignment, I immediately picked up my phone and called my aunt, our family’s resident genealogist, who not only confirmed that we are indeed descended from people on the Mayflower but also rattled off the exact two passengers and their entire long line of rather prodigious offspring—right down to my dad and her.

And we are not alone by any stretch of the imagination. The same two people who spawned my family also have their DNA tentacles in millions of Americans to this very day, from former U.S. presidents to famous actors and artists to little old nobodies like me … and maybe you.

Ahead, Neil Fraser, a partner at London’s Fraser and Fraser, one of the world’s top genealogy firms, and Eva Holmes, the director of the Silver Books Project at the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, give us the history of the Mayflower descendants and explain how to find out if you have any connection to this storied boat.

Read on to learn more about this little slice of uniquely American history.

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Who was on the Mayflower, exactly?

“The Mayflower carried 102 passengers, including religious Separatists who had previously left England for the Netherlands before being unsettled and planning transport to America via England,” Fraser says. “The Separatists were unhappy with the direction of the Church of England and wanted the freedom to practice their religious beliefs.”

Not everyone was so ideologically bent, though. Fraser says in addition to the Separatists, the Mayflower carried more than 20 crew members and several tradespeople and servants who were hoping for a better life.

“The overcrowded Mayflower set off alone from Plymouth [in England] in 1620 and landed in Cape Cod 66 days later,” Fraser says. “They arrived in modern-day Massachusetts in the midst of winter without shelter or supplies, and around half died during the first winter alone.”

How many Mayflower descendants exist today?

“The Mayflower Society reckons that around 10 million Americans and 35 million people worldwide are descended from passengers on the ship,” Fraser says. You may have heard that 10% of the American population has Mayflower ties, but that’s a misconception. The current population of the U.S. is just under 350 million people, so 10 million descendants would be less than 3%.

“Even more remarkably, it is thought that only 26 men who arrived on the Mayflower have descendants,” Fraser says. “In the 406 years since the ship arrived in America, there would be between 13 and 16 generations of descendants” from the original passengers to someone who is alive today. “So the 10 million number is very achievable,” he says.

But it’s important to remember that in 400 years, there would be an “enormous number of branches on a family tree, and not all of them will have been researched or properly documented,” Fraser says. Over that many generations, records are bound to get lost, and many people just have no idea they’re related to Mayflower passengers, “so I don’t think anyone could give you an exact number.”

How could 26 families produce 35 million worldwide descendants?

“This is the interesting bit,” Fraser says. “Imagine a single Mayflower couple had three children who survived and went on to have families, and each subsequent generation averaged three children who reproduced.” Through 13 generations, they’d have about 2.4 million descendants, and by generation No. 16, we’d be looking at a total of more than 64 million descendants from that single couple!

Of course, not many families reproduce quite so exponentially, but it gives you a good idea of how fast the numbers can grow. You also have to take into account the fact that family trees rarely stay isolated. “Over 400 years, cousins married cousins, sometimes without knowing they were related,” Fraser says. “The same ancestor can therefore appear in multiple branches of a family tree.”

“The remarkable feature of genealogy is that descendants multiply across generations, but family trees overlap,” Fraser adds. “Someone alive today might descend from [Mayflower passenger] John Alden through five or six different lines and from several other Mayflower passengers as well.” This overlapping is called pedigree collapse, “and it is especially relevant to early colonial New England, where relatively small communities intermarried over generations.”

Which families descended from the Mayflower have the greatest chance of being in your family tree?

Of the Mayflower families known to have had children, some were more prolific than others. Here are the ones that most likely have room for you in their crowded genealogical history.

Elizabeth Tilley and John Howland

Let’s start with the parents of my family tree: Elizabeth Tilley and John Howland. This line of Mayflower descendants reportedly has around 2 million living members, though again, the numbers are hard to quantify.

These two lovebirds did not start off married when they left England. John Howland was a servant who was nearly killed on the voyage, and Elizabeth Tilley was a teenager whose parents both died during the first winter at Plymouth, leaving her an orphan. They eventually married and had 10 children and 88 grandchildren, Fraser says.

“John Howland’s story is quite remarkable because he was actually swept overboard during the voyage and survived by grabbing hold of a rope,” Fraser says. “Had he not survived, generations of American descendants who came after him would never have existed.” (Thanks for having a good grip, John!)

John Alden and Priscilla Mullins

Here’s another family tree that likely holds millions of members. “John Alden and Priscilla Mullins are among the Mayflower passengers believed to have some of the best documented descendant populations,” Fraser says. “It is thought that after arriving in America, they had 10 recorded children, and seven of them went on to have surviving descendants.”

Alden was a crew member on the Mayflower, signing up to be the ship’s cooper (aka barrel maker). Mullins made the journey with her parents and brother, but like Elizabeth Tilley’s family, they all died the first winter. She subsequently married Alden in Plymouth, and they moved to Duxbury, where they had 10 children and 70 grandchildren.

Fraser says the Alden Kindred of America, a group that is dedicated to documenting and preserving the history of this Mayflower couple, has compiled a database containing more than 54,000 confirmed descendants and their spouses across the first eight generations alone. But now we’re on Gen 13 or even Gen 16, and remember how fast those numbers multiply.

Mary and William Brewster

These two were definitely not servants or crew members. William Brewster was a Separatist who wanted to reform the Church of England and moved to Holland to escape persecution. He was one of the three Mayflower passengers who secured the charter to settle in the British colony of Virginia, and he and his wife Mary made the trip together with two of their sons, Love and Wrestling (yes, really).

Of course, the Mayflower didn’t make it to the Virginia colony, instead landing in Massachusetts. This meant they had no established government, so William Brewster co-drafted the Mayflower Compact, which served as the legal framework for the Plymouth colony. William and Mary had six children and 18 grandchildren.

Who are some famous Mayflower descendants?

Many famous people have (or had) Mayflower relatives. The remarkable variety “shows how people who appear to have very little in common can actually be connected through families that lived hundreds of years ago,” Fraser says.

Here are some of the biggest names:

• Presidents: John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush
• Actors: Marilyn Monroe, Jodie Foster, Alec Baldwin, Katharine Hepburn, Clint Eastwood, Benedict Cumberbatch
• Poets and authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Austen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ernest Hemingway
• Artists and musicians: Taylor Swift, Norman Rockwell, Pete Seeger
• Scientists and innovators: Alan Shepard, George Eastman, Dr. Benjamin Spock
• Cultural figures: Julia Child, Amelia Earhart, Hugh Hefner

OK, so how can you find out if you’re a Mayflower descendant?

“The first thing I would say is that tracing your family back 400 years is not straightforward,” Fraser says. Records may not be officially codified and could be buried in local church registers, wills and other personal papers. “The advantage with the Mayflower is that a considerable amount of research has already been undertaken. But, ultimately, it comes down to evidence.”

Here’s what to do.

Start with yourself

“The key to much genealogical research is to build a tree up slowly and surely,” Holmes says. “It’s tempting to build a tree down when you ‘know’ you have a Mayflower ancestor, but that assumes a conclusion and introduces bias.”

So start with your own branch on the family tree. Write down everything you know about your parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and so on, focusing on names, dates, places and relationships. Dig around in your attic for scrapbooks, photo albums, baby books and family bibles that might contain information from generations past.

Search family records

“Start by locating your own birth and marriage certificates, then look for records related to your parents that name their parents, and so on down the line that brings you back to your potential Mayflower ancestor,” Holmes says.

Fraser agrees: “I would start by speaking to family members and working backwards through the generations, using whatever records are available.”

Ask your relatives, especially older ones, for any documents they have. Look on the backs of old photos for names and dates, and catalog newspaper clippings, military records, naturalization documents, and birth, marriage and death certificates.

Expand to county, state and national archives

“Census returns, wills, parish registers, land records and local archives can all help establish family connections,” Fraser says. “Wills are particularly useful because they often identify children and other relatives, sometimes providing the evidence needed to link one generation to another.”

The National Archives has helpful information to guide your search, including links to the Census going back to the 1790s. Courthouses, libraries and local historical or genealogical societies can also be a valuable resource. If you happen to live in Massachusetts, Fraser says some towns have records of births, marriages and deaths from as early as the 1630s.

Check genealogy websites

“Digital copies of many original records can be found on FamilySearch, Ancestry and American Ancestors, all of which I use quite a bit in my research,” Holmes says. Fraser says these websites are great starting points, “but I would be very cautious about accepting family trees published online without checking the supporting records.”

Find a Grave, a volunteer-run website owned by Ancestry, can also be a helpful research tool. My aunt was able to track down several relatives through pictures and leads on this website, but it’s best used as a jumping-off point, not an absolute authority.

Remember: “Just because someone has linked two people together doesn’t mean they were related, and one incorrect connection can take you down an entirely different family line,” Fraser says.

Search Mayflower-specific archives

If you’ve made it this far, you’re in luck: “The Mayflower is probably one of the better-documented groups of 17th-century emigrants you could hope to research,” Fraser says. Here’s where the Mayflower Society comes in: “In 1959, the Mayflower Society began a project to document and publish five generations of descendants of each Mayflower passenger,” Holmes says. “This would eventually be called the Silver Books Project and now often includes the sixth generation as well as sources so researchers can locate original records.”

She explains that finding an ancestor named in one of these books can save a lot of time when it comes to applying for membership to the Mayflower Society. Fraser agrees: “If you can establish a connection to one of these documented families, a substantial part of the work may already have been done.”

What should do with this information?

It’s up to you! You may just enjoy knowing that you have a link to this specific part of American history. But there are other ways to savor this information:

• Join the General Society of Mayflower Descendants or other family groups, such as the Alden Kindred. For many of these groups, you must be able to document your direct lineage.
• Participate in historical events, parades, history tours and other social groups.
• Apply for scholarships and other educational opportunities. The Texas Society of Mayflower Descendants offers one, as does the national Mayflower Society.
• Contribute your family records to historical preservation endeavors, or help others do research.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on the Mayflower descendants, Ally Childress tapped her experience as a longtime journalist who frequently writes about history, fun facts and common curiosities for Reader’s Digest. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• Neil Fraser, partner at Fraser and Fraser; email interview, Oct. 14, 2026
• Eva Holmes, director of the Silver Books Project at the General Society of Mayflower Descendants; email interview, Oct. 15, 2026
• Family Search: “Mayflower Descendants Search”
• Associated Press: “Meet John Howland, a lucky Pilgrim—and maybe your ancestor”
• Family Search: “The Life and Legacy of William Brewster”
• The Mayflower Society: “The Mayflower Profiles”
• The Pilgrim John Howland Society: “Notable Howland Descendants”
• American Ancestors: “Famous Descendants”
• National Archives: “How to Begin Genealogical Research”
• The Mayflower Society: “Silver Books Project”
• Find a Grave: “Find a Grave”

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To help us separate Hollywood’s scary version of Frankenstein’s monster from Shelley’s original creation, we spoke with Andrew Scahill, PhD, an associate film professor at the University of Colorado Denver. As it turns out, the creature has quite the backstory. In fact, according to Scahill, “Shelley’s creature could probably hold his own in your book club.” Who would have thought?

Read on to find out how the creature we know today came to be, and why there’s more to him than meets the eye.

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When did the original Frankenstein come onto the scene?

“It started with some very literary people trying to entertain themselves during terrible weather,” says Scahill. The year was 1816, and 18-year-old Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) was spending the summer near Lake Geneva with a group that included her future husband, Percy Shelley, and the poet Lord Byron. When Byron challenged everyone to come up with a ghost story, she initially drew a blank. Then came a waking vision of a student watching a body he’d pieced together come to life. That was the spark for Frankenstein, which was published anonymously on Jan. 1, 1818, when Shelley was just 20.

If it’s been a while since you’ve read the book, here’s a refresher: Victor Frankenstein is a scientist who figures out how to bring a creature (made of body parts from corpses) to life, only to recoil in horror at what he’s created. But there’s a twist. “Victor has already told us what to think of him, and then this supposedly loathsome being begins describing his first experiences of the world,” Scahill says. “Cold. Hunger. The pleasure of birdsong. We have to spend time with him.” Suddenly, it’s not so easy to decide who’s the real monster here. After all, as Scahill puts it, Victor “has brought someone into the world and immediately made his own disappointment that person’s problem.” Talk about a rough start to life.

What did Mary Shelley’s monster look like?

Shelley’s original creature looked nothing like the monster you see on Halloween decorations. “Very little of that familiar image survives a reading of the novel,” says Scahill. “He is yellow-skinned, fast and extraordinarily strong.” He is also roughly 8 feet tall, and “his skin barely covers the muscles and arteries underneath.” But Victor had actually tried to make his creation attractive. “The hair and teeth are lovely,” Scahill explains. “Everything together is unbearable to him.”

And there’s another wrinkle to this description. We’re seeing the creature through the eyes of the very man who brought him to life and immediately regretted it. “We tend to receive it as an objective inventory of what’s wrong with the creature,” Scahill says. “But we are also hearing a parent describe a child he wishes he hadn’t made.” It makes you wonder whether the creature was really quite as horrifying as Victor made him out to be.

Why did he turn green in the 20th century?

You can thank Hollywood for that one. Well, mostly. The green-faced monster we know today owes much of his look to Universal’s 1931 film Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff as the creature. But the unusual skin color really goes back further than that—and has its roots in the theater. “An unnatural complexion predates Karloff by more than a century,” says Scahill. In fact, an 1823 stage adaptation called Presumption described the creature’s skin as “light blue or French gray.” Meanwhile, the National Library of Medicine has described actor T.P. Cooke’s stage portrayal as having a green face and blue body paint. “Those accounts don’t quite agree, so I wouldn’t turn them into a neat origin story,” Scahill notes.

Fast-forward to 1931, when makeup artist Jack Pierce was tasked with bringing Karloff’s monster to life. He used greenish, or gray-green, makeup, even though the movie was filmed in black and white. Why bother with color? It all came down to how makeup appeared on camera. “Black-and-white film doesn’t respond to every color in the same way,” Scahill explains. Different shades could appear lighter or darker depending on the film stock and lighting. “Something quite odd in the dressing-room mirror could look convincing on screen.” In this case, Pierce wanted Karloff to look as though the life had been drained right out of him. “The audience needed to feel that something was wrong with this skin, even though they couldn’t see the color he was actually wearing.”

And Pierce didn’t stop at the skin. He also gave the creature that unmistakable flat head. “Pierce worked backward from the imaginary operation,” Scahill says. “How would this man have got a brain into that head?” The makeup artist imagined Frankenstein cutting open the skull, inserting a brain and fastening everything back together. That explains the scar across the forehead and the metal clamps. As for those famous neck bolts? They’re generally understood to be electrodes.

To pull off the look, Pierce built up Karloff’s head using cotton and collodion, a liquid that hardens as it dries. He added heavy eyelids, while the costume’s shortened sleeves made Karloff’s arms appear unusually long. The result was a far cry from Shelley’s original description. And yet, as Scahill points out, “the face looks handled, altered, damaged. It also looks hurt.” Not bad for a few hours in the makeup chair.

Why did this green hue become a Frankenstein staple after this?

“The film was black and white. The things you could buy weren’t,” Scahill says. “Magazine covers, model kits, Halloween masks—all those versions of the creature needed a complexion, and green became the familiar choice.” Before long, that green face was everywhere.

And television helped keep it that way. In 1957, Screen Gems began distributing Universal’s classic monster movies to TV stations, introducing the creature to a whole new audience. Then came Aurora’s Frankenstein model kit in 1961, followed by The Munsters, which turned a Frankenstein-inspired monster into a sitcom dad. Even though the show aired in black and white, the 1966 movie Munster, Go Home! let audiences see Herman Munster in full color.

All that exposure helped cement the look, especially for kids who grew up seeing the monster on everything from toys to Halloween costumes. “I think we underestimate how often we encounter these characters through their souvenirs,” Scahill says. “A child can know exactly what Frankenstein looks like years before finding out what happened to him.” By then, imagining him as any other color was pretty much out of the question.

What else about the creature is vastly different in the book vs. the majority of pop-culture representations?

Here’s another shocker: Shelley’s creature isn’t some lumbering brute who can barely string two words together. He’s actually intelligent, well-read and quite the talker. So how did he go from delivering thoughtful speeches to mostly grunting his way through Hollywood? According to Scahill, “that happened on stage first. Peake’s 1823 creature was speechless, so Hollywood inherited a performance tradition built around gesture and movement.” And while Karloff’s monster did pick up a few words in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, his silence became one of his defining traits.

But that’s hardly the only liberty Hollywood took with Shelley’s story. Here’s what else might surprise you:

• He’s not just a mindless killer. In the 1931 film, Karloff’s creature accidentally drowns a little girl after tossing her into a lake, believing she’ll float like the flowers they’ve been playing with. Shelley’s version is far more deliberate. “Shelley’s creature deliberately strangles William, knowing he belongs to the Frankenstein family,” Scahill says. “Those are very different things to ask an audience to reckon with.”
• He doesn’t have a criminal’s brain. Remember the whole mix-up involving the origin of his brain? That’s a Hollywood invention. “The 1931 film gives the creature an abnormal brain taken from a criminal, so there’s a ready explanation for his violence inside his skull,” Scahill explains. “In the novel, we have to work through his experiences and his choices.”
• There’s no Igor. Sorry, Igor fans. “Victor works alone,” Scahill says. The assistant Fritz appeared in the stage tradition and the 1931 film, while Bela Lugosi’s memorable character didn’t arrive until 1939’s Son of Frankenstein.
• The famous electrical laboratory isn’t in the book. All those crackling machines and dramatic switches? More movie magic. “Shelley also withholds the precise method of animation,” Scahill says. “The elaborate electrical laboratory supplies a spectacle where the book leaves a gap.”
• The creature never gets his bride. While Hollywood gave us Bride of Frankenstein, things play out differently in the book. Victor begins making a female companion but destroys her before bringing her to life.

And here’s where things come full circle. Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein, starring Jacob Elordi as the creature, gives him back something many movie versions have denied him: his voice. “Elordi’s creature gets to develop, to learn and to describe what has happened to him,” Scahill says. But don’t mistake it for a completely faithful retelling. Del Toro gives Victor and his creation a chance at forgiveness, while Shelley’s novel ends with the creature speaking over his creator’s dead body. As Scahill puts it: “All that eloquence, and the person who most needed to hear it is gone.”

Oh, and one last thing about so many people calling the monster Frankenstein. Scahill isn’t bothered by it. “If we read the creature as Victor’s abandoned son, why shouldn’t he have his father’s name?” he says. “I like the idea that the culture has given him something Victor refused to offer. Calling him Frankenstein is a mistake that tells the truth.”

Sources:

• Andrew Scahill, PhD, associate film professor at the University of Colorado Denver and author of The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema; email interview, Oct. 13, 2026
• MoMA: “James Whale (Director). Film still from Frankenstein. 1931″

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Ferritin face is characterized by a few distinct signs that make you look bone-tired. As a working single mom of two, there are many mornings when I can relate to this look, unfortunately. Chances are, you might too … but is the reason for your less-than-sunny appearance because of this supposed condition, which has its root in an actual medical condition? Or is the internet getting ahead of itself again?

We decided to do a little research of our own to find out if this TikTok diagnosis is the real deal. Read on to learn how to identify so-called ferritin face and and what to do if it uncovers a larger health problem for you.

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What is ferritin face, exactly?

@lowtoxlifeguard At the time my ferritin was at a 2 😅 now it’s at 4. *laughs to keep from crying* #irondeficiencyanemia #anemia #anemic #lowferritin ♬ original sound – Karin – Hormone Health Coach

Ferritin face is the TikTok name for a generally tired appearance featuring dark under-eye circles and pale or sallow skin, resulting from low iron levels. In other words, if you’re exhibiting these signs, you might not be the regular kind of tired; you may have an iron deficiency. At least according to the many (many) videos currently going around TikTok, like this one with more than 100,000 views, in which the creator notes that her pale lips indicated more than she initially realized.

This social media term takes its inspiration from a protein named—you guessed it—ferritin, which binds to iron and stores it so the body can make red blood cells. Since the human body doesn’t make its own iron, we have to consume it. When iron levels are low, it can be because we’re not getting it in our diet or because our body isn’t absorbing it properly.

“People say you are what you eat, but you’re actually what you absorb,” says Caitlin Hosmer, a licensed dietitian nutritionist, a clinician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the co-founder of Meno Pantry. “You can put things into your mouth, but if they don’t get out of your digestive system and into your body, you’re not absorbing them. Absorption issues can be a cause of low iron and can lead to deficiency over time.”

How accurate are the signs of ferritin face?

“Like a lot of things on social media, there’s a little kernel of truth,” Hosmer says. “The troubling piece is the way information gets spread.”

Scott Nass, MD, a family medicine physician at SwiftCareMD, agrees. “Low iron may make a person appear pale in certain areas of the body, such as the mouth area or inner portion of the lower eyelid. However, health-care professionals cannot determine a patient’s ferritin levels by observing facial appearance.” Plus, that pale skin is just one symptom of low iron levels—and not even the most telltale sign. “Fatigue is usually the most noticeable symptom,” Dr. Nass explains. “Many other symptoms can also be present.”

Those other symptoms include: 

• Headaches (especially after activity)
• Dizziness
• Shortness of breath
• Restless legs
• Difficulty concentrating
• Rapid or irregular heartbeat
• Increased desire to eat ice (called picophagia)
• Brittle nails and hair
• Hair loss
• Cold intolerance

The bottom line: Just because your skin is washed out and looks like you need a vacation ASAP, it doesn’t mean you’re iron deficient. “In addition to anemia, other factors such as poor sleep patterns, dehydration, light exposure and a person’s normal skin tone may create facial appearances similar to what a physician might see with low ferritin,” Dr. Nass says.

What can happen if you have low iron?

When your body doesn’t have enough iron, it causes iron-deficiency anemia. Besides the symptoms of low iron noted above, this could also lead to problems with your cardiovascular and immune systems—from heart palpitations and shortness of breath to an impaired ability to fight infection. If your iron levels are too low, your physician might prescribe an iron supplement. 

But before you run to the drugstore to get your own iron supplement, well, don’t. Dr. Nass and Hosmer say it’s essential not to start taking iron on your own without guidance. Too much iron isn’t a good thing either. The body stores excess iron, rather than getting rid of it, and those makeshift storage spots include various organs that iron can damage or even cause to fail over time.

How will you actually know if you have an iron deficiency?

A mirror won’t tell you that your iron levels are low—only a blood test can do that. 

If you suspect you have low iron, talk to your doctor and ask for a blood test to check your levels. While hemoglobin and hematocrit in red blood cells are measured in a standard complete blood count (CBC), you might need to request for your ferritin to be tested as well. 

How can you ensure you’re getting enough iron in your diet?

For starters, know your risks. Vegans and vegetarians are more susceptible to iron deficiencies because they don’t consume the main sources of heme iron: seafood and meat. Women are also at a higher risk of an iron deficiency until their menstrual cycles stop at menopause. Their recommended daily allowance (RDA) for iron is much higher than men’s until that point: It’s 18 milligrams per day for women ages 19 to 50, and 8 milligrams for adult men and women 51 and older.

If you want to boost your iron levels, Hosmer recommends doing so with food first. The top sources of iron are (surprisingly) 100% iron-fortified breakfast cereals, oysters, beef and chicken. Iron is in plant sources, like legumes, tofu and vegetables, but it’s non-heme, meaning not as much of it gets absorbed as heme iron.

Whatever you do, don’t self-diagnose from TikTok videos. “It is dangerous to immediately take iron just because some video seems to relate to your current state,” Dr. Nass says. But if your energy levels have been consistently low and you’ve also been sporting sallow skin and under-eye circles that just won’t go away, don’t ignore it. This knowledge could be the nudge you need to make that long-overdue doctor’s appointment.

Sources:

• Caitlin Hosmer, MS, RDN, LDN, licensed dietitian nutritionist, co-founder of Meno Pantry and a clinician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; phone interview, Oct. 14, 2026
• Scott Nass, MD, family medicine physician at SwiftCareMD; email interview, Oct. 14, 2026
• Vogue: “What Is ‘Ferritin Face’—and Do You Have It?”
• American Society of Hematology: “Iron-Deficiency Anemia”
• Mayo Clinic: “Iron Deficiency Anemia”
• MedlinePlus: “Hemochromatosis”
• Office of Dietary Supplements: “Iron”

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Now, just when we finally got used to logging in this way, big changes are coming. (Sigh.) In fact, they’re here already for one major company, at least for many of its products and sites. And you know how it goes in the tech world: Once one company does something, it’s only a matter of time before they all jump on the train.

Ahead, I’ll walk you through the latest change to online security measures, tell you what’s replacing SMS verifications and explain how the new paradigm will affect you going forward. Keep reading to learn more and get ahead of the changing tech landscape.

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Are all SMS codes being phased out?

Not yet. Microsoft is leading the charge here. The company recently announced that the familiar text codes will be phased out for personal Microsoft accounts, including Outlook, MSN and Hotmail, as well as other Windows applications and products like XBox, Windows PCs and Skype.

In addition to personal accounts, Microsoft announced the impending retirement of SMS codes for organizations that use Microsoft products. If you use Outlook or another MS product at work or school, you may have already begun seeing this change.

Other companies that are encouraging users to move away from SMS authentication include OpenAI, which announced earlier this year that users will be given the option to switch to another form of verification, and Google, which still supports SMS codes but is also pushing users to use other options.

Why are companies doing this?

It’s all about security. According to Microsoft, SMS verification is a huge source of fraud. The thing is, text messages are not that secure—telephone and cellular networks were just not designed to keep information sent in plain-text messages out of prying eyes.

And scammers have several ways to trick you into giving up your code. The biggest one is called SIM-card swapping. This is when fraudsters convince a mobile carrier to transfer your SIM card to them, log in to your accounts and intercept the SMS code that is sent for authentication. A Texas man was just convicted of this kind of fraud, sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution to victims. Last year, a Florida man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for similar crimes involving 59 separate victims. According to the FBI, this kind of SMS fraud cost consumers $26 million in 2024.

Aside from SIM-card swapping, relying on text messages to verify your account credentials sets you up for phishing attacks. Scammers set up a fake page that looks like your bank, email or other account, then send you a text message to entice you to log in to the fake page. They capture your info, log in themselves and have you enter the SMS code that is sent to you. Text-message fraud cost consumers $470 million in 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

What will be the new process to log in to your accounts?

Microsoft is starting to use passkeys instead of SMS codes. Passkeys are forms of multi-factor authentication that include Face ID, fingerprints or a special digital key that uses your device to prove it’s really you. They work through something called “public-key cryptography,” a private key that’s stored on your device (like your fingerprint or Face ID), and a public key that comes from the website you’re trying to log in to.

When you log in to your accounts, the private key and the public key challenge each other to verify that you are authorized to log in. So instead of using a password or code that goes out over an insecure text, your device itself stores the info and proves that the public key and private key match. Passkeys are resistant to fraud because they cannot be faked by external actors.

How do you set up the new passkey?

It’s easy. When you log in to your Microsoft account, you will be prompted to create a passkey. (It’s currently optional on personal accounts, so you can also choose to skip the new process for now.)

Here’s what to do:

1. Click on the “Sign in faster” button when prompted.
2. Alternatively, go directly to Advanced Security Options if you’re already logged in.
3. Choose “Add a new way to sign in or verify.”
4. Select Face, Fingerprint, PIN or Security Key.
5. Follow the instructions to create the passkey of your choosing.
6. Select “Save” to store the passkey where suggested, or “Change” to store the passkey in another location.

Now what? The next time you attempt to sign in to your Microsoft account, you will not receive that SMS-code prompt or that 10-minute countdown. Instead, you’ll be asked to provide the passkey you created directly on your phone or device, whether that’s your Face ID, fingerprint, PIN or security key.

When will Microsoft SMS codes officially be a thing of the past?

Microsoft is already phasing out the old SMS codes, so you’ve likely seen the prompt window when you log in. For workplaces and other organizations, Microsoft plans to have everyone moved over to passkeys by July 2027. But the company has not made a public announcement about when the old codes will be 100% obsolete for personal accounts.

So for now, you can continue to ignore the prompt to create a passkey. But after learning how easy it is for scammers to infiltrate your accounts using SMS codes, you might want to create one sooner rather than later.

Sources:

• Microsoft: “Passkeys by default and retirement of Microsoft-provided SMS and voice authentication”
• Microsoft: “Passkeys frequently asked questions (FAQ)”
• OpenAI: “Introducing Advanced Account Security”
• Google: “Passwordless by default: Make the switch to passkeys”
• U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Texas: “Waxahachie Man Sentenced to 70 Months in Federal Prison for $1.7M SIM Card Swapping Fraud Scheme”
• FBI: “Internet Crime Report 2024”
• U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Central District of Florida: “Palm Coast Hacker Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison”
• FTC: “New FTC Data Show Top Text Message Scams of 2024; Overall Losses to Text Scams Hit $470 Million”
• Microsoft: “Create and save a passkey”

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The post Those SMS Codes You Use to Log In to Your Accounts Are on Their Way Out—Here’s What You’ll Need to Do Instead appeared first on Reader's Digest.