Today's lead
Psychologists identified three infant temperament types in the 1950s that still predict adult personality with uncomfortable accuracy — and the one labeled "difficult" turned out to be the most interesting
The older some people get, the more they eat alone at restaurants without feeling weird about it - and that small shift says a lot about no longer performing for anyone
February 2026 Edition · Issue .02
Longevity, Legacy & the Things That Last
Each issue takes a single question and works it through the lens of food, lifestyle, and human behavior. This month: what makes a life that holds up over time.
Read this issue →
Features
The Long Read
Original reporting
What Does Their Consciousness Feel Like?
The documentary was supposed to be about cephalopod intelligence, but watching Heidi cycle through what looked unmistakably like active sleep states, I found myself thinking about…
Original reporting
When Activism Turns Gentle: The Infrastructure of Kindness
Was it the summer the Pantanal wetlands burned and the sky in São Paulo turned black at 3pm? Or maybe earlier, the year I stopped seeing…
From the wider press
What We're Reading
VegOut covers food, animals, environment, and the systems linking all three. These are the deep pieces from across the wider press that are shaping how our editors think about the beat. Updated weekly.
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The Counter
Is California giving its methane digesters too much credit?
This investigation scrutinizes California's subsidies for dairy methane digesters, questioning whether the state's climate math actually props up factory farming instead of driving real emissions reductions.
Read on The Counter -
Sentient Media
Faster Slaughterhouse Line Speeds Are Increasingly a Climate Problem
This investigation connects slaughterhouse line-speed deregulation under the Trump administration to climate impacts, worker safety, animal welfare, and food policy — revealing how agribusiness efficiency demands create compounding harms across the food system.
Read on Sentient Media -
Sentient Media
Organic Dairies Say Federal Pricing System Costs Them Millions
These lawsuits expose how federal dairy pricing rules funnel millions from organic producers to industrial operations — revealing structural flaws in a system that props up Big Dairy at sustainability's expense.
Read on Sentient Media
Themed reading
Wellness, Decoded
Psychology, mindfulness and the small habits that shape how we live.
I spent endless years being reliable, reasonable, and easy to get along with — and somewhere around 31 I realized that those three qualities had quietly become a cage I built for myself out of other people's comfort
What your grandchildren actually remember about you — and it's not the gifts
There are people who go their whole lives without ever finding someone who genuinely wants to know what they actually think. They learn to call this normal, and it almost is, but the loneliness it produces is quieter and more permanent than the kind anyone talks about.
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VegOut on YouTube
Long-form conversations on food, science, and the lives behind the recipes. New episode every week.
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From Hospital to CattleCon: The Real Story of Keto
The Plant That Outperforms Meat and The $650 Million Industry Built to Kill It
The Most Important Food on Earth — And We're Losing It
Why your body stopped making its own Ozempic
Take the quiz
If you were a healing herb, which would you be?
Each herb holds a unique kind of magic — soothing, awakening, grounding, or clarifying. This 9-question quiz reveals the healing plant that mirrors your energy right now and what it says about your natural rhythm.
News
In the news
What's happening across food, science, climate and the systems shaping how we live.
Most recent
Latest stories
Adults who walk the long way home from the grocery store often aren't getting exercise, they're stretching out the only stretch of the day that nobody else has any claim on
Adults who keep buying the same brand of olive oil their mother used aren't being sentimental, they're the ones who understood that some kitchen objects are not really purchases, they're a quiet way of keeping someone in the room
Your hair-growth vitamin could be hiding your cancer from your doctor
Adults who can sit through a long silence at the dinner table without rushing to fill it often grew up in homes where silence didn’t feel dangerous, and that ordinary comfort can shape more of their relationships than they realise
Fava beans land $330M in deals as whey shortage reshapes the protein aisle
