China’s economy grew 5% in the first quarter. The government’s own analysts are warning the number doesn’t tell the whole story. China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported 5.0% year-over-year GDP growth for the first quarter of 2026, beating forecasts of 4.8% and accelerating from 4.5% in the previous quarter — a result state media described…
The platform 79 percent of young users once loved is becoming unrecognizable—and what they’re nostalgic for reveals who really owns the creator economy. BYLINE | SSC News Desk Earlier this year, a wave of young users began flooding TikTok’s For You Pages with a simple, mournful question. They called it “the great meme reset of…
Representation and access both depend on platform priorities — and priorities change. For much of the streaming era, companies sold audiences a vision of abundance. More stories. More voices. More access. Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and others positioned themselves as alternatives to Hollywood’s old gatekeepers. Algorithms would surface overlooked creators. Libraries would be endless. Representation would…
New CDC data shows young Black men dying by suicide at a higher rate than young white men for the first time since the government began tracking it. For the first time since the federal government began collecting this data, young Black men are dying by suicide at a higher rate than young white men,…
When “safe third country” rules send people back into U.S. enforcement, protection becomes procedural instead of real. At the Canadian border, the question facing one Honduran family was not simply whether they needed protection. It was whether the system would recognize the way they arrived as the correct way to ask for it. Carlos, Antonia…
Private label now accounts for $330 billion in annual U.S. sales, with a 21% share of all grocery spending. Store brands are outpacing national CPG brands by 2 to 3 times in growth velocity. 62% of shoppers now choose price over brand when making purchase decisions, according to Ibotta’s 2026 State of Spend report, which…
The city built an anti-displacement ordinance specifically for this moment. A review of hundreds of pages of records found it mostly didn’t work. Latisha Bolden came home from an eight-hour hospital shift in early March to a notice her son had received from their landlord: her family had until the end of July to leave…
A new global inequality report puts a number on the gap that conventional wage statistics have always hidden. The World Inequality Report 2026, published by the World Inequality Lab and edited by economists Lucas Chancel, Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, Rowaida Moshrif, and Thomas Piketty, found that women globally earn 61% of what men earn per working hour…
As major events become luxury products, the city is using screens, tickets, and transit to keep the World Cup within reach. Reuters sports reporter Amy Tennery reported that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to show selected World Cup matches on hundreds of LinkNYC kiosks across the five boroughs, using public-facing digital screens that…
The same housing market, the same interest-rate environment, and the same calendar year just produced opposite outcomes by race. Scotsman Guide staff writer Daniel Banta reported that a new Redfin analysis found homeownership rates for young Black Americans declined in 2025 even as their white counterparts saw gains. Just 14.2% of Black Gen Z adults…