Health Tips Line

My brother and his wife just had a baby, and once we all got over our joy and elation that mom and baby were doing great, everyone’s attention turned to the name. What will it be? Will they go with a family name, a name that means something personal to them or maybe something pulled from a movie or trending TV show? I won’t spill it here, but my brother and his wife made a beautiful choice. 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. Get  Reader’s Digest ’s  Read Up newsletter for more baby names, trends, tech, humor, travel and fun facts all week long...

Cliff Patrick’s shoulders, forearms and thighs burned with every step up to the next rung. He was climbing a 12-inch-wide ladder up the tallest communications tower in Longview, Texas—getting farther and farther from the security of the ground below. Once he got a couple hundred feet up, a disorienting visual effect set in. When Patrick looked down, he could no longer see the ground, and when he turned his gaze upward, he couldn’t see the sky. There was just an infinity of gray metal ladder in either direction. 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 cra...

Fact: We know that nearly all last names in the United States—a whopping 97%!—are passed down to us from our fathers. But how surnames were actually created and when they became a tradition is more complex story. “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 Kell...

Today I have answered 500(ish) emails, sent 300 texts, driven five teenagers to the mall, cleaned up four piles of dog vomit, taught three fitness classes, done two interviews, written one-and-a-half articles, attended one Spanish class … and it’s not even dinnertime yet. All that’s missing is the partridge in a pear tree. So my life is certainly full. But is it fulfilling ? I can’t exactly say that all these things today brought me joy. But if we want to be Truly Happy aren’t we supposed to be, like, finding joy in the little things? Or something?    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 th...