The British government established a minister for loneliness in 2018

Japan has a government office dedicated to tackling loneliness and isolation

The new government office was established in 2021, following the UK's example. It's designed to combat loneliness and the feelings that can proceed suicides. The office's homepage features a chatbot designed to help individuals answer questions and specifically connect with one of 150 support programs.

Governments around the world are struggling to measure loneliness

Funding for policy resources often hinges on measuring the scale of a problem and then being able to measure the effectiveness of interventions, requiring data. Yet defining and measuring loneliness at a country-scale remains challenging. Typically, the University of California Los Angeles Loneliness Scale is sometimes used worldwide or adapted to measure loneliness.

We may never know if Americans are now lonelier than ever before due to limited data

Formal data collection on loneliness is recent, limiting historical comparisons from before the year 2000. That means statements about how people are more lonely than ever before are difficult to prove or disprove.

Read the Surgeon General's 2023 loneliness report claiming loneliness is an epidemic

This report details the specific health threats linked with loneliness, including that loneliness and social isolation can increase the risk of premature death by nearly 30%. Loneliness lowers our capability to mount an effective immune response to viruses and respiratory illness, can cause chronic inflammation on par with physical inactivity, and increases the risks for anxiety, depression, dementia, heart disease and stroke.

Volunteering can alleviate the feeling of loneliness

The Freakonomics team explored loneliness in this 2020 podcast episode and discussed how volunteering can be a powerful way to make lonely individuals feel needed, like they have a purpose, and combat feelings of isolation.

London pet detectives set out to prove a spate of cat killings is the work of a serial killer

With dozens of felines turning up dead around London, a pair of pet detectives set out to prove it was the work of a serial killer.

Between 2016 and 2023, PE spent more than $200B buying British companies

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the United Kingdom's official departure from the European Union, the UK's economy struggled to recover. This economic strife led to British companies receiving steadily lower valuations than American companies, prompting a huge increase in PE investment. However, interest rates began increasing in 2022, putting pressure on the numerous leveraged buyout deals that took place between 2020 and 2021.

Frances Perkins was the first woman in the US to hold a cabinet position

President Franklin D. Roosevelt named her the United States Secretary of Labor in 1933. In her cabinet seat, she not only helped establish the first federal minimum wage in the US, but also the Social Security Act.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century'

The phobia's name is short for "no-mobile-phone phobia" and was first recognized as a result of 2010 UK government study that found men, in particular, were uncomfortable and anxious being away from their devices.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

France once had a reproduction czar to help midwives deliver babies

Much ado is made about falling marriage and birth rates worldwide, and how they might affect tax bases, retirement funds, and social standing. But this isn’t the first time marriage, and subsequently reproduction, have fallen out of favor. Some countries have resorted to drastic measures to restore the tarnished state of these hallowed institutions.

Pub crawl generator: In the United Kingdom, a lot of pubs have the same name

For instance, the UK’s most popular pub name is Red Lion—if you wanted to have a drink at every Red Lion in the UK area, you’d have to finish 339 drinks. (For the record, we don’t advise this!) This fun resource plots the shortest route between all the pubs with the same name in the UK, in case you’re up for visiting all 339 Red Lions in a row.

See the list of alleged communists Orwell gave to the British government

In 1949, Orwell provided a list of communist sympathizers to a British anti-communist propaganda unit, naming figures like actor Charlie Chaplin and writer John Steinbeck. When it was made public in 2003, some called Orwell a government informant, though others blamed his tuberculosis, which would take his life a year later, while others blamed his romantic interest in the woman who asked him for the names.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

See the list of monarchs who have addressed a joint session of the US Congress

Only 11 monarchs have ever addressed a joint meeting of Congress, beginning with Hawaii's King Kalakaua in 1874. King Charles III of the United Kingdom became the most recent in April 2026.

Why so many romance stories take place in Regency-era England

The British Regency era lasted less than a decade, but it remains a popular setting for romance stories, including for Julia Quinn's "The Duke and I," the novel that became Netflix's "Bridgerton." Scholars note that the period's strict social hierarchy, high fashion, and aristocratic traditions are ripe for the romance genre's tropes.

The wild, early history of the tunnel across the English Channel

Britain and France today are connected by the Chunnel—a tunnel bored roughly 120 feet under the seabed of the notoriously choppy English Channel, which opened in 1994. The dream of integrating Britain with the rest of the continent this way began much earlier, with daring, physically impossible plans proposed as early as the 19th century. Check out the earliest plans here.

'There are only four kinds of people in the world—those who have been caregivers, those who are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.'

- Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter (1927–2023)

'Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.'

- Legendary author Jane Austen (1775 -1817)

What is the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea?

The Isle of Man sits between Ireland to the west and Wales and England to the east. It is a self-governing British Crown dependency. This means it creates its own laws and collects its own taxes and currency, but is subject to the United Kingdom's defense systems and international treaties. Roughly 85,000 people live on the island, known as a tax haven for its attractive tax rates.

West Nile virus was detected in UK mosquitoes for the first time in 2023

Fragments of the virus were detected in mosquitoes that were being collected in Britain for the first time in 2023, but the UK government considers the overall risk to people to be low. As of spring 2026, there have never been detected locally-acquired cases of the disease.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan on why iftar at someone else's table is the whole point

The podcast "Not Even Water" interviews Khan about how Ramadan is actually lived, examining the hospitality culture that surrounds iftar, the logistics of suhoor, and what the month feels like from the inside. The episode is a grounded, personal view of the season.

'Success has brought me world idolization and millions of pounds. But it's prevented me from having the one thing we all need: A loving, ongoing relationship.'

- Queen frontman Freddie Mercury (1946-1991)

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 made religious liberty a formal US foreign policy priority

Congress enacted the International Religious Freedom Act to make promoting religious freedom abroad a stated goal of US foreign policy. The law established an ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom and mandated that the State Department report annually on the status of religious freedom.

Elizabeth I removed her eyebrows to draw attention to her chest

The queen thought that this kind of grooming (which sometimes even included shaving some of her forehead) would cause viewers to find her face blank and, as a result, look south to her breasts.

Singapore grew its homeownership rate from 27% to 90% in less than 30 years

That progress stemmed from Singapore's founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. He used a three-pronged approach to the homeownership solution: create affordable housing; make financing readily available to people of all walks of life; and help people gather down payments.

Some UK doctors pushed for broad 'do not resuscitate' orders for autistic adults during COVID

The controversial push was to create such orders without individuals' or their families' consent, underscoring modern-day prejudice against people on the spectrum.

The hormonal disorder PCOS was renamed PMOS in 2026, a move designed to improve care and research by shifting the focus to the hormonal causes of this condition that affects 1 in 8 women.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

An investigation suggests a Scottish island became awash in forever chemicals via seafoam and seaspray—raising questions about what that means for the safety of other coastal areas.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Despite being favored by 87% of Americans, Congress does not have term limits.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

Explore what it's like inside a patient isolation unit, used in situations such as treating a patient or suspected patient with Ebola.

11 people died from firework injuries in the US in 2024.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.