Latest news with #KenyonCollege
WIRED
07-07-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Thanks to Zillow, Your Friends Know How Much Your House Costs—or if You're Secretly Rich
Jul 7, 2025 6:00 AM A quick search of your friends' addresses can yield one of the most private details of their financial lives. Some people say their wealthy acquaintances aren't happy about it. Photo-Illustration:When Rebecca Kornman was a student at Kenyon College, she and some of her friends picked up a voyeuristic hobby. Using the Ohio liberal arts school's student directory, they found students' home addresses and looked them up on Zillow to see how much their families' homes cost. 'It became a kind of controversial thing that people were talking about,' says Kornman, 25. While some found it endlessly entertaining to dive into the finances of a student body where almost one in five students come from families in the top 1 percent, the popular pastime struck a nerve with a particular crowd. 'People would always frame it as, 'Well, you shouldn't do that, because some people are embarrassed about where they live.'' But she found out that one of the main crusaders against the resource was a student who grew up in a multimillion-dollar home in SoHo, Manhattan. And another student who, she says, was 'outwardly saying that they were broke and they grew up in poverty' was just one Zillow search away from being found out. 'Someone was like, 'Bro, go on the directory. They live in a brownstone, a five-story brownstone.'' 'I think it's definitely more taboo the more money you have,' Kornman says. 'You're all on the same page when you're in college. And so to differentiate each other, especially if someone's going out of their way to maybe obscure some of the facts of their life, it gives you good perspective.' Zillow, the hugely popular and addictive real-estate platform launched in 2006, has gone from simply a tool to buy and sell homes to a full-fledged phenomenon. It's used by 227 million unique visitors every month and had 2.4 billion visits in just the first quarter of 2025. (The company has such a vice-grip on real estate listings, it was recently sued by Compass for its alleged attempted monopoly on online home listings.) Turns out, it owes its mass appeal, in part, to nosy people looking to satisfy their undying curiosity about their peers' financial lives. When you look up an address on Zillow, a Zestimate—Zillow's estimate of a given property's current value—appears below photos of the property. It's calculated using 'millions of data points' including public records, MLS (multiple listing service) feeds, tax assessments, recent sales, and updates provided directly from homeowners, according to Claire Carroll, a spokesperson for Zillow. Carroll says the estimates are fairly accurate, with a median error rate nationwide of just under 2 percent for on-market homes and 7 percent for off-market homes. The price history, which includes dates of past sales with corresponding prices, is sourced through public property records, county tax assessors, and local MLS. Zillow also provides an estimation of monthly rent for rental units. Zillow does not give users the option to hide their home's Zestimate and price history. 'Open access to this kind of public information is a really important part of a fair housing market,' says Amanda Pendleton, Zillow's home trends expert. But while not everyone is thrilled with having the value and cost of their home on full display for anyone who's curious, others take full advantage of the publicity of this information by actively searching for the details of their friends' housing costs—and some are extrapolating Zillow's figures to get a fuller picture of their friends' financial situations. Like Kornman, Gillian Williams, 27, took up this pastime in college, using a database provided by her school, the University of Delaware. 'I looked up everyone I knew,' she says. 'It was just interesting to be like, 'Oh my gosh, I didn't know you're from—your parents own a multimillion dollar house in the Hamptons,'' she says. Now, as a resident of the notoriously expensive city of Washington, DC, she continues to use the platform as a means of gaining insight into her peers' financial lives—specifically to answer the question of how they get by considering the city's high cost of living. 'Years ago I went over to a new friend's apartment, and immediately on my walk home I was looking up how much she probably paid and then doing a little bit of math to be like, 'Well, if you're paying that much money for rent, what is your salary?'' Williams says. She says she based her calculation on the widely accepted idea that people should spend a maximum of 30 percent of their monthly income on housing. Salary is just one of the insights she's gained through extrapolating data from Zillow. 'It's kind of an easy way to find out if their family is helping them pay,' she says. And after discovering how much a friend paid in rent, she asked how they manage to pay their bills and learned that they were struggling with significant credit card debt. 'I didn't realize that probably more of my friends than I think are in credit card debt specifically, not just student loans but credit card debt, because they're trying to make ends meet, or they're living outside of their means to meet a lifestyle that they want or they expect.' Vivian Tu, a financial literacy content creator and author known as @yourrichbff on TikTok and Instagram, says young people today are particularly susceptible to spending outside of their budget. 'I think a huge part of that is the comparison game. Back in our parents' generation, we had 'keeping up with the Joneses,'' she says. 'For the most part you were looking at your neighbors, and those are people who were relatively within the same tax bracket.' Social media, she says, has replaced the Joneses with the Kardashians. 'All of a sudden you're not comparing yourself to people who are relatively your net-worth equal. You're comparing yourself to everybody on Earth, and you are starting to see levels of insurmountable wealth, like unimaginable wealth, that the vast majority of us will never ever obtain,' says Tu. This, combined with a lack of mandated financial education and the fact that many young adults feel disenfranchised by the US's economic system, can make the pursuit of wealth feel like a nonstarter. 'Instead of trying to be rich, be wealthier, be financially stable, we're trying to look rich, look wealthy, look financially stable,' she says. 'That means you drive a nice car, it means you live in a nice apartment. It means you have nice things to wear, and you're always in a cute new outfit on Instagram.' The phenomenon of Zillow snooping also feels in line with the current political climate. Today's young adults came of age in a moment marked by a growing backlash towards income inequality and an unfettered class of billionaires, a sentiment reflected in the popularity of shows like Succession and The White Lotus . Zillow's public pricing details give people who want to gawk at or mock the rich an opportunity to do just that within their inner circles. 'You try to be pretty objective about it, but I think it inevitably ends up seeping into your perception of someone,' Williams says. Anna Goldfarb, author of Modern Friendship , says these discoveries can lead people to make assumptions and judgments about their friends' priorities. 'It's really not about money,' Goldfarb, says. 'It's the values around money where it can get prickly with friends.' 'One of the biggest reasons friendships fade is the difference in values. So there's a real risk here of looking deeply into finances, because you're sort of putting your friendship on the line, like, 'Do we share values?' It's not that explicit, but it's definitely implied that, well, if you know your friend is in debt and makes terrible financial choices, and then you look up her home on Zillow, you're going to make all sorts of judgments about that,' Goldfarb says. But knowing that a friend appears to be doing well because they're getting a lot of help can also ease people's insecurities rather than just stoke them. Lucia Barker, 25, describes her inclination to look up her friends' apartments as 'a morbid curiosity' but says the habit has quelled her tendency to compare her own financial situation to those of her peers, particularly when it becomes clear a friend's standard of living is made possible through factors other than their salary—namely, money from their parents. New York Magazine recently reported that nearly half of parents in the US provide financial support to their adult children and that, among American adults under 43, only about one-third support themselves without help from their parents. But despite the fact that parent-subsidized lifestyles have become commonplace, a sense of shame and secrecy surrounding generational wealth persists. 'There's such a lack of financial transparency in our world,' Barker says. 'It's just helpful to know that other people's lifestyles might be because of some other reason.' Financial therapist Aja Evans says that since money remains a cultural taboo, people should take their Zillow findings with a grain of salt. 'You have no idea if they pulled all of their money from all of their retirement accounts, if somebody helped them, if they borrowed money from a friend or somebody else and then planned on paying them back. There are so many different scenarios,' says Evans. 'We don't actually have a clear financial picture of how they were able to make that happen.' But sometimes the information comes up by happenstance. Those looking for photos of a friend's new house, for example, are often met with far more information than they asked for. 'I love shows like House Hunter and anything on HGTV,' says Andrea Zlotowitz, 35. 'So when a friend says, 'I bought this house, here's the address,' to be able to see the pictures of the home that they purchased is my first interest,' she says. But regardless of her intentions, she inevitably stumbles upon details of her friend's financial standing. 'I see what they paid for it, and I can see the full price history.' Most of the people I spoke to agreed: Although many are aware of the availability of this information, it's generally still taboo to ask someone directly how much their home costs or to bring up the fact that you've sought out the answer. 'I recognize that there are some sensitivities talking about money and knowing what people spend on things,' says Zlotowitz. 'So it's certainly not something that I would later bring up to a friend, but it lives rent-free in the back of my mind.' Regardless, some think this behavior is within the bounds of the new social contract brought on by the information age: I can learn anything I want about you, and you can learn anything you want about me—we just won't talk about it. One person even likened it to vetting people before a first date. As my sister, a homeowner and avid Zillow user, told me when I mentioned this story, "I expect that everyone who enters my home knows exactly how much I bought it for.'
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
43,000-year-old human fingerprint is world's oldest — and made by a Neanderthal
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A red dot on a face-shaped rock in Spain may be setting records in more ways than one. At roughly 43,000 years old, the dot may be the oldest human fingerprint on record and also one of the earliest symbolic objects ever found in Europe. The fingerprint, made with the red mineral ocher, was left by a Neanderthal — the closest extinct relative of modern humans. Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago but occupied Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before early modern humans arrived on the continent. The researchers behind a new study argue that the red dot represents a nose on a rock with face-like features. The discovery is a further challenge to the idea that Neanderthals were generally not capable of symbolic art. But some experts told Live Science they are not convinced that the dot is symbolic. Anthropologist and archaeologist Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College in Ohio, who was not involved in the discovery, said the red dot was definitely deliberate but little more could be certain beyond that. "Clearly, the ocher has been intentionally applied with the fingerprint," Hardy told Live Science. "But I did not see a face — symbolism is in the eye of the beholder." Related: 130,000-year-old Neanderthal-carved bear bone is symbolic art, study argues The study, published May 5 in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, describes the 2022 discovery at the San Lázaro rock shelter on the outskirts of Segovia in central Spain. Scientists have evidence that the region was heavily populated by Neanderthals between 44,000 and 41,000 years ago, but there is no evidence that early modern humans ever lived there. Image 1 of 2 A: the rock before it was fully excavated. B: the face-shaped rock and the red dot "nose." Image 2 of 2 The researchers say the red dot was deliberately placed as a "nose" to highlight the rock's resemblance to a human face. The yellow dots are where scientific samples were taken. The rock, which resembles a large potato, is about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long and has vaguely eyebrow-shaped indentations near one end. But the deliberate addition of a red dot for a "nose" beneath the "eyebrows" of the rocky Mr. Potato Head transforms the large pebble into a primitive portrayal of a human face, the authors argue. "This find represents the most complete and oldest evidence of a human fingerprint in the world, unequivocally attributed to Neanderthals, highlighting the deliberate use of the pigment for symbolic purposes," Spain's National Research Council (CSIC) said in a translated statement. The red dot looks evenly spread, but forensic examinations and analysis of how it reflected different wavelengths of light revealed it was created by a fingerprint with a distinctive whorl pattern, probably from an adult male Neanderthal. The granite pebble seems to have been deliberately brought to the rock shelter, probably from a nearby river where it formed. "The fact that the pebble was selected because of its appearance and then marked with ocher shows that there was a human mind capable of symbolizing, imagining, idealizing and projecting his or her thoughts on an object," the team of researchers wrote in the study. Debate about whether Neanderthals made abstract art has raged among archaeologists for decades. Finds include engravings on cave walls in France that may be up to 75,000 years old, but even the finest works of Neanderthal art pale next to the cave paintings made by early modern humans at sites like the Chauvet Cave in France and on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, a paleolithic archaeologist at the universities of Cambridge and Liverpool in the U.K. and the author of "Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art" (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020), thinks that, even if red dot is symbolic, it is possible that the study's authors may have misunderstood its meaning. "What the team infer to be a representation of a nose on a face might, if turned the other way up, be seen as a navel on a human figure," she told Live Science in an email. "We can't really say what it is meant to 'be.'" RELATED STORIES —Cave thought to hold unicorn bones actually home to Neanderthal artwork —65,000-year-old hearth in Gibraltar may have been a Neanderthal 'glue factory,' study finds —Secret cave chamber may be one of the last Neanderthal hideouts Durham University archaeologist Paul Pettitt, who also was not involved in the discovery, said the rock was an "unequivocal example of the Neanderthal use of red pigment" that showed how Neanderthals were routinely leaving marks on cave walls and portable objects. But whether the red dot was truly symbolic of something or not was still unclear, he said. And the archaeologist and psychologist Derek Hodgson, an expert in prehistoric cave art who also was not involved in the study, told Live Science that the rock seemed to have had no other purpose. Additionally, the rock only looked like a face when the "nose" mark was added, he said in an email. "This find adds to the growing corpus of objects made by the Neanderthals that are non-functional in nature."
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ohio college presidents among signatories against Trump administration ‘overreach'
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — More than 150 colleges and universities signed a letter Tuesday condemning the Trump administration's attempts to control higher education institutions, including at least four in central Ohio. The presidents of Capital University, Ohio Wesleyan University, Denison University, Otterbein University and Kenyon College signed alongside leaders of large public universities and small liberal arts schools alike, including the University of Dayton. The letter, organized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), condemns overreach and the use of public research funding as a means of coercion. 'We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight,' the letter reads. 'However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.' OSU investigating hidden cameras in Morrill Tower 'American higher education is the envy of the world, and that's because there has been a long and productive partnership between higher education and the U.S. government,' a spokesperson for Kenyon College said. So far, the Trump administration has paused or threatened to pause billions of dollars in federal funding for universities in an effort to 'root out' antisemitism and DEI on college campuses. The Trump administration has tried to get Harvard to shutter its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and successfully implemented a list of demands at Columbia last month. 'It's also because students across the nation have been free to explore their own academic and career interests and scholars have been free to pursue research that advances society,' Kenyon's spokesperson said. 'We believe both are worth preserving.' Ohio Wesleyan President Matt vandenBerg said challenges to higher education are threatening academic freedom and university missions. He said the letter emphasizes productive engagement between universities and government entities. 'The list of signatories is impressive and growing, and it reflects widespread concern from across the higher education landscape,' vandenBerg said. 'This is a rare and important moment of solidarity in higher education, and Ohio Wesleyan University has an important role to play in sharing this message.' Ohio State faculty to vote on joining Big Ten coalition against Trump's actions Ohio State, which did not sign the letter, was singled out by the Trump administration twice: once for alleged antisemitism and once for alleged discrimination for partnering with a nonprofit encouraging minority students to get their PhDs. A White House spokesperson told NBC News that the Trump administration is 'standing up for equality and fairness and will not be swayed by worthless letters by overpaid blowhards.' AAC&U said it will continue to accept signatures from current leaders of colleges, universities and scholarly societies. Denison University's president, for instance, signed after the letter's debut. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Why don't all birds fly?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Birds are often associated with flight, but not all of them take to the skies. Around 60 species — fewer than 1% of all bird species — are flightless, including ostriches, penguins and kiwis. These birds evolved from flying ancestors but lost their ability to fly, instead adapting to life on land or in the water. But why did they give up flight? Why don't all birds fly? The ability to fly is especially useful for escaping predators and traveling long distances in search of food and favorable living conditions. However, flight requires a lot of energy; birds burn about 75% more energy per day than similarly sized mammals do. "If flight isn't necessary, birds can better survive and reproduce if they divert that energetic investment elsewhere," Natalie Wright, an associate professor of biology at Kenyon College in Ohio, told Live Science in an email. In a 2016 paper published in the journal PNAS, Wright and her colleagues noted that island-dwelling birds, facing few to no predators and less competition for food and habitat, tend to evolve toward flightlessness. "When living on an island without predators and without the need to migrate or travel long distances, for many kinds of birds the costs of flight outweigh the benefits," Wright said. Related: Why do parrots live so long? The shift to flightlessness leads to physical changes in birds. Over evolutionary time, their pectoral flight muscles shrink. The sternum (breastbone) with its central ridge (keel) — where flight muscles attach — also becomes smaller, Wright said. Wing bones — the humerus, ulna and carpometacarpus — become shorter and less robust, while their legs grow longer and sturdier as an adaptation to a more terrestrial lifestyle, she added. Some birds have traded flight for superior swimming abilities. Penguins, for instance, retained their flight muscles and keel but repurposed them for swimming. "They use their wings to fly underwater," Peter Ryan, a professor emeritus of ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science in an email. The flightless auk (Pinguinus impennis) also uses its wings to propel itself through water. In birds that have been flightless for a long time, the long, stiff feathers needed for flight (flight feathers) disappear too, Ryan said. In some species, like kiwis and the Inaccessible Island rail (Atlantisia rogersi), the body feathers lose barbules — the tiny, hook-like structures that normally keep them aerodynamic — giving them a fluffier, fur-like appearance, Ryan added. A 2025 study published in the journal Evolution found that flightless birds lose feather features in the reverse order of how they first evolved. The research also concluded that skeletal changes occur before changes in plumage, as it takes significantly more energy to grow and maintain bones than it does to maintain feathers. Although flightless birds are uncommon today, fossils reveal that they were far more prevalent and diverse a few thousand years ago, Tim Blackburn, a professor of invasion biology at University College London, told Live Science in an email. However, the arrival of humans and animals like rats and dogs exposed these birds to predators. "Having sacrificed their capacity to take to the air, there was no time for them to re-evolve this useful ability," Blackburn said. This led to the rapid extinction of iconic birds like the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) on Mauritius, the moa in New Zealand, and many others. A 2020 study co-authored by Blackburn and published in the journal Science Advances found that there would be four times as many flightless bird species on Earth today were it not for human-driven extinctions. RELATED MYSTERIES —Are birds reptiles? —Do birds pee? —Why do hummingbirds 'hum'? The loss of flight happened at least 150 times in different groups of birds throughout evolutionary history, Ferran Sayol, first author of the study and a researcher at Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email. "Many of these species thrived on islands without predators but disappeared shortly after when humans arrived (due to direct hunting or introduced predators), making flightlessness seem rarer than it actually was," Sayol said.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Forhan announces run for Ohio AG
Mar. 12—CLEVELAND — Ohio lawyer and former state Rep. Elliot Forhan announced his candidacy for Ohio attorney general. "The law is for everyone," said Forhan, who is seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 2026. "It belongs to and protects all of us, and it should hold everyone accountable—including the rich and powerful. But that's not what's happening right now in our state or across the country. Born and raised in southeast Ohio, Elliot holds degrees from Kenyon College and Yale Law School. He practiced at the New York offices of two of the top law firms in the country and continues to practice in the Cleveland area. He has more than a decade of experience in finance transactional practice and civil-rights litigation. While serving as a state representative, Elliot's campaign said he fought against the giveaway of billions of public dollars in tax cuts for the rich in the state budget and proposed an amendment to create a tax on more than $10 million in personal assets. The campaign also pointed to him introducing the House version of the bill that became Ohio's new anti-SLAPP law. He lives in the Village of Brooklyn Heights in northeast Ohio. No other Democrats have announced for the race to date. In the Republican primary, Ohio Auditor Keith Faber, who is term limited from seeking re-election to that office, has filed for the attorney general's race.
