Health Tips Line

There’s a moment—usually somewhere around the third time you’ve googled “why am I so tired” in a single week—when you start to suspect you’ve lost something important. Not your keys. Not your youth. (Well, maybe your youth.) But something harder to name. A lightness in your chest. A willingness to be delighted . A sense that the world is fundamentally interesting and not just an endless scroll of overdue tasks and confusing news alerts. Ask Julian Shapiro-Barnum about that indefinable something, and he’ll tell you exactly where to find it: the playground. Shapiro-Barnum is the creator of Recess Therapy, the wildly popular TikTok series where he wanders into parks and playgrounds and asks kids the kinds of questions adults usually reserve for therapists and philosophy professors—and gets answers that are somehow better than anything you’d hear in either setting. The videos go viral constantly, and it’s easy to see why. The...

Living in Arizona means pool weather is always right around the corner. But as any pool owner knows, keeping the water sparkling isn’t just a summer task—it’s a year-round commitment. In my backyard, that means a weekly pool service, a solar-powered skimmer that patrols the surface and a traditional hose-connected vacuum that suctions the pool floor. While this cleaning combo gets the job done, the hose has always been my biggest frustration. It snakes across the water, gets in the way during swims, tangles with the skimmer and occasionally disconnects from the wall. So when I had the opportunity to test the Beatbot Sora 70 , a cordless robotic pool cleaner that promises to handle multiple cleaning tasks in a single device, I was curious whether it could streamline my routine. NANCY SNYDER FOR READER'S DIGEST We Tried It Beatbot Sora 70 An all-in-one cordless robotic pool cleaner designed to vacuum debris, scrub walls and waterlines, and skim the pool's surface. Shop o...

Breakfast is having a moment, and in Reader’s Digest ’s June/July 2026 issue, we’re serving it up state by state in the newest installment of America the Tasty . This marks the eighth year of our summer cover-story tradition, and the sixth consecutive year of highlighting the best bites in every state. What began with dessert has grown into a cross-country exploration of the foods people love most, from sandwiches and snacks to drinks and comfort food—and now, the breakfast dishes that start every day a little differently depending on where you are. This year’s theme has an unexpected origin story. Delaware’s scrapple was a standout contender in last year’s comfort food conversation, but our editors ultimately decided it didn’t quite belong there. (Let’s just say it raised more questions than comfort.) Still, it stuck with us—and found a much better home at the breakfast table, where it helped inspire this year’s fo...

I have a friend—let’s call her Michelle—who has been a manager at a tech company for more than a decade. She’s good at her job, well liked by her team and exactly the kind of employee a company should be desperately trying to keep. So you can imagine her feelings when, during a lunch conversation about applying for a mortgage, she discovered that a man who works for her—less experienced, less senior, with a title that literally ranked below hers on the org chart—was making more money than she was. “I was simultaneously embarrassed and furious,” she says. “And then I realized I could be mad about it and get paid less or suck up my fear of confrontation and figure out why.” What she did next changed her career. First, she talked to her employee to see if there was a reason he was getting paid more (there wasn’t, as far as she could tell) and to make sure she had the details straight. Then she walked into her boss’ o...