You Don’t Have to Like Something. You Just Have to See It Enough Times.

For the past couple of seasons, the go-to hallway layer has been something soft — a cardigan, a hoodie, last year’s cropped knit. Fall 2026 is swapping it for something with actual structure: the oversized tailored blazer, worn open over a plain tee or tank, sleeves pushed up, with zero interest in being buttoned the tidy way a blazer traditionally gets worn. Some are being belted at the waist and worn completely alone as a dress instead, over leggings or bike shorts, blurring the line between “outerwear” and “outfit” entirely. The appeal is efficiency as much as style — one structured piece with real shoulders instantly reads as put-together over whatever’s underneath, no actual coordinating required, which is exactly why it’s showing up over the plainest possible t-shirts and jeans in the hallway.

Naked mole-rats spend almost their entire lives packed into crowded underground burrows with terrible airflow, where carbon dioxide builds up and mixes with body fluid to form acid — a combination that would send burning pain through the skin of almost any other mammal. Naked mole-rats simply don’t register it: researchers found they carry a mutation in a sodium channel called NaV1.7 that keeps the pain-sensing neurons in their skin from firing at all in response to acid, so the signal never even reaches the brain. The same animal is also famously, almost eerily resistant to cancer, and can live past 30 years old, roughly ten times longer than a mouse of similar size. Scientists studying naked mole-rats aren’t just cataloguing a weird rodent — they’re hoping the same biological tricks eventually lead to new pain medication and cancer treatment for humans.

Veterinarians who studied cats brought in after falls from New York City apartment buildings found a pattern that seems backwards at first: cats that fell from six stories or lower were often hurt worse than cats that fell from seven stories or higher. The explanation comes down to terminal velocity — the top speed a falling object can reach once air resistance cancels out gravity’s pull, which an average cat hits at around five stories up. Below that height, a cat is still accelerating and bracing rigidly for a paws-first landing, but once terminal velocity kicks in, cats appear to relax and spread their legs out horizontally like a tiny parachute, spreading the force of landing across the whole body instead of concentrating it on four stiff legs. Researchers do note one catch: cats that don’t survive a very high fall at all may simply never make it to a vet to be counted, so the real story is likely a little less clean than the data alone suggests.

In 1999, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris showed people a short video of two teams passing basketballs back and forth and asked them to do one specific job: count exactly how many passes the team in white made. Partway through the video, a person in a full gorilla costume walks slowly into the middle of the frame, stops, thumps its chest, and walks back off — visible for a full nine seconds, right in the center of the shot. Roughly half the people watching, laser-focused on counting passes, never saw it at all, and were stunned when shown the tape again afterward. Psychologists call it inattentional blindness: focusing hard enough on one task can make your brain filter out something huge and completely obvious happening right in front of your eyes.

The drama club’s signed cast poster disappeared from the shelf in the backstage corridor sometime during Thursday’s tech rehearsal, right when that entire corridor had gone completely dark for the evening because the crew was mid-repair on its light switch panel — forcing everyone working back there to keep a phone flashlight on just to see. Out on the actual stage, the work lights stayed on as usual for blocking practice, so nobody moving around up there needed a flashlight at all. To kill time waiting for cues, several crew members compared phones and noticed the exact same thing: everyone had shown up freshly charged to 100%, per the director’s rule since the backstage outlets were also getting fixed, and running a flashlight nonstop drained a phone at a steady, easy-to-track rate — right around 1% of battery every minute, no matter whose phone it was. The corridor blackout had been running for exactly 45 minutes when someone noticed the poster was gone. When props assistant Callum was asked to account for that stretch, he said he’d spent almost the entire rehearsal out on the lit stage helping mark blocking positions, and had only stepped into the dark corridor, flashlight just switched on, about a minute earlier to check the shelf. He held up his phone to prove it — the screen reading 55%, still plenty left, he pointed out, for an already long night.

In 2007, UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues put people in a brain scanner and showed them photos of angry or fearful faces. Some participants just looked at the photo; others had to pick the one word that best named the emotion on the face — “angry,” “afraid” — before moving on. The simple act of choosing the right word measurably calmed the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, while activity rose in a part of the prefrontal cortex linked to self-control, essentially recruiting the thinking brain to quiet the panicking one. It didn’t erase the feeling entirely — nobody in the study stopped feeling anything — but it reliably took the edge off, and dozens of follow-up studies since have found the same calming effect from precisely naming real emotions in the moment, not just posed photos. Psychologists call it affect labeling, and the mechanism only really kicks in when the word is specific — “I feel humiliated” does more than a vague “I feel bad,” because that specificity is what actually engages the brain region doing the calming down.