Health Tips Line

Someone in my life who shall rename nameless (you know exactly who you are) is a scream sneezer. It is the loudest sneeze you’ve ever heard, and he manages to make it sound like he’s screaming AH SH*T —although he swears he’s not cursing on purpose. It’s so loud that it has woken our deaf dog  out of a deep sleep, made more than one baby cry and set off a car alarm. I am not kidding. At this point, I’m less concerned about his sinuses than I am about whether our homeowners insurance covers sonic weapons.  Thus far, I have not punched him, but every sneeze startles me so badly that I fear the day is coming. I don’t want to be the first person convicted of assaulting someone for having a functioning respiratory system, but I also can’t comfortably rule it out. If you’ve never been around a scream sneezer, I envy your innocence. They are a small but disproportionately terrifying percentage of the population, and once you...

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...