Sunday Soup: How to Load a Dishwasher, Chicken Sandwiches Rule the Roost, Healthy Cereal?
These are the articles, streaming ideas, and books that caught our attention this week.
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It’s been a while since we’ve shared a fresh bowl of Sunday Soup, but the time for one is upon us. Sorry burger lovers, in this edition, we’re serving up articles on the "Golden Age of Chicken Sandwiches," the single word that can be a relationship ender, and answer if healthy cereal is a real thing.
We also have items on AI chatbots, the Barbie playbook, and much more. And after you're done, we'll tell you how to properly load the dishwasher.
If you have a recommendation to share, we’d love to hear about it in the Comments section below.
Now enjoy this latest offering of Sunday Soup.
Articles 📰
The Golden Age of The Fried-Chicken Sandwich
"If, six years ago, the fried-chicken sandwich was a novelty worth standing in line for, today it is a fact of eating in America. From 2019 to 2024, fried-chicken-sandwich consumption increased 19 percent at American restaurants, while burger consumption dropped 3 percent, according to industry analysis firm Circana. Over that same period…"
How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025
"A year ago, I wrote a piece... about how people were really using gen AI. That article seemed to hit a note: It was popular, featured in viral posts, and the beautiful accompanying infographic has been shared far and wide. The use cases split almost equally between personal and business needs, with roughly half spanning both. Since then, the hype around AI, gen AI, and large language models (LLMs) has only amplified. User interest has doubled, investment in AI is skyrocketing…"
Do Healthy Breakfast Cereals Exist?
"There’s a lot to love about cereal. It’s often delicious, easy to prepare, available in seemingly endless varieties and flavors, and can contain various beneficial nutrients. But with that abundance comes many ambiguous or misleading health claims, and ingredients you may not associate with good health. Better-for-you options do exist…"
What Are AI Chatbot Companions Doing to Our Mental Health?
"Research into how AI companionship can affect individuals and society has been lacking. But psychologists and communication researchers have now started to build up a picture of how these increasingly sophisticated AI interactions make people feel and behave."
Nobody Loads a Dishwasher as Well as Someone Who Has Worked in a Restaurant
"There are not a lot of hills that I’m willing to die on, but I do have a few: The superior flavor of ice cream is vanilla, despite there being hundreds of varieties from dill pickle to rum raisin. The Brady Bunch is one of the best sitcoms in the history of television right up there with All in the Family and I Love Lucy. And nobody can load a home dishwasher as efficiently as someone who has worked in a restaurant."
The One Word That Can Destroy a Friendship
"When Shari Leid was a teenager heading off to college, she proudly opted for a vanity plate on her Mazda 323 hatchback that was a shortened version of one of her most-deployed words: “whatever.” Now, decades later, she has a different view of how dismissive it is to shut down a conversation with such a casually snide remark. It is, she’s found, the single word that can break even the strongest bonds…"
What We’re Streaming 📺📲
Mattel’s Barbie Playbook: Replicating Success Across the Company’s Portfolio
The Reading List 📖📚
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
"From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.
"To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.
"Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished."
