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Mary H.K. Choi has never been particularly interested in having her books fit neatly into a category. After becoming a beloved voice in young adult fiction with bestselling novels like Emergency Contact , Permanent Record  and Yolk , she’s making the leap into adult fiction with Pool House —though, as she puts it, “I don’t really strive for or aim toward taxonomy. I don’t worry about what shelf the book is going to live on. I just write the book that arrives.” In Pool House , a dysfunctional Hollywood duo finds themselves living in their own pool house while renting out their main home to stay afloat financially. “It’s about power and celebrity, and the corrosive effects of both and the erosion of both, which is inevitable,” she tells Reader’s Digest . The novel has already earned praise for its unflinching look at family dynamics, with some authors calling it an “unsparing mother-daughter story .” For Choi, w...

Dogs get into all sorts of trouble when left alone (my $200 Ray-Bans lasted one day—now I buy sunglasses at the gas station). But even part-time hermits like me have to leave the house occasionally, and despite all of our high-tech devices , which allow us to watch our pets and even feed them from afar, we can’t always keep them from wreaking havoc. That’s exactly what happened to a family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who watched in horror (via their home security camera) as their pet pooch started a fire right on their living room rug. Everyone was OK, but it could have been much worse—and often is. If it can happen to them, it can happen to you, so I consulted Richard Meier, the principal expert at Meier Fire Investigation, to learn how and why dogs can start home fires . Read on as Meier, who has more than 15 years and 700 fire and explosion investigations under his belt, walks us through this scary but increasingly common situation. Get  Reader’...

Anthony Head, the charming, handsome and versatile actor best known for playing Rupert Giles, aka the Watcher, on the iconic ’90s television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and Rupert Mannion, the cruel and snarky club-team owner on the more recent powerhouse Ted Lasso , has died at the age of 72. Scoobies ( Buffy fans) and soccer (er, football) aficionados alike will miss his talent and the cool, level-headed presence he brought to these and other shows over his 45-year career. Born in 1954 in London, Head started out on stage before landing a gig in a series of Nescafé commercials, later reshot in the U.S. for Taster’s Choice, which brought him widespread recognition for his suave and debonair demeanor. From there, it was a short leap to the roles that made him famous, and he continued doing stage, screen and voiceover work for decades. Ahead, we have 25 hilarious, wry and—now that he’s gone—bittersweet quotes from two of Anthony Head’s mos...

Have you ever wondered what it’s really like to attend a fancy royal dinner? We certainly have. Yes, it always looks gorgeous in pictures, but we’ve always suspected it would be very prim, very proper and—let’s be honest—a little stuffy. Well, it seems we were very wrong! Nobody has spilled the beans (yet) on what dinner parties with King Charles are like, but the ones hosted by his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II , were apparently pretty spirited. One of the likely reasons? According to those working closest to her, the queen had a very clever (and surprisingly unroyal!) way to keep the conversation going at the table, with many guests revealing more than they’d probably intended to. So how did the queen get her guests talking so openly? We’ll give you a hint: It’s a trick many of us are probably pretty familiar with too. Read on to see if you guessed right. Get  Reader’s Digest ’s  Read Up newsletter for more roya...

My friend is Gen Z, and she loves voice notes. She sends them to me the way other people send “lol”—reflexively, constantly and without apparent concern for the consequences. I, on the other hand, have the soul of a 1940s telegram operator. I want my communication tidy, typed and editable. So naturally, we’re locked into a weird technological stalemate. Here’s how it plays out: She records a voice note and sends it. I use my messaging app to transcribe it into text, which I then read. Then I compose my reply by voice-dictating it into my phone but sending it as a text, because I like being able to fix my words before they launch into the world. She receives my text and has her phone read it to her out loud. So we’re basically having a full conversation entirely in each other’s preferred formats, like some kind of digital United Nations negotiation. The only thing that would make this dumber is if one of us introduced a third language, perhaps M...

Quick question: Did you pick up a new hobby during the COVID-19 pandemic? Many of us, stuck inside or venturing out sparingly with those in our chosen pod, were desperate to find something to fill our time. We were trying things we thought impossible the year before ( hello, knitting ), just to do anything except read a book or stare off into the middle distance. Well, that era may be behind us, but the hobbies stayed—including one that took off faster than your mask when you walked through the front door. But according to a new report from the Trust for Public Land (TPL), one hobby in particular might be coming back down to earth after what can only be described as a meteoric rise. You might scoff once you learn what it is, since it’s still wildly popular. But numbers are numbers, and ahead, I’ll take you through the latest TPL report as well as data from other research and polling. Read on to see which hobby may have already reached peak saturation. Get  Reader...