I was doing a fall closet edit, coffee going cold in the other room, when I noticed something: my inbox is full of questions I have zero idea how to answer. Which animals actually hibernate? Is AI about to crash? Why can nobody say Arkansas? So I sat down and answered the ones I could, and flagged the ones I still can’t.
Fair warning: these questions come from my readers, and the answers are as honest as I can make them. Some I’m sure of. Some I’m not. That’s the point of reading — you leave knowing at least one more thing, and at least one more question.
Why do we mangle names and place names?
A reader asked how much I care about pronouncing names the way locals do — original versus Americanized versus my own habit. Arkansas versus Ar-kansas, for instance.
English is a weird language. We say words differently in different places, and some place names have local pronunciations that make no sense from the spelling. There’s a city in Wisconsin called New Berlin, and it’s pronounced New Ber-lin. The shift was deliberate, back during the First World War, when the town renamed itself to avoid anything that sounded German.
Then there are the ones with no good explanation at all. There’s really no reason Arkansas isn’t Ar-kansas, or Kansas isn’t kan-saw. That’s just how it is.
And we do this to foreign words even when they’re perfectly pronounceable. Rome instead of Roma. Paris instead of Par-ee. Moscow instead of Moscova.
My rule, after years of getting this wrong: use the local pronunciation when you know it, and don’t pretend to when you don’t. I’d rather say Van Gogh the American way than fumble a Dutch vowel and come across as pretentious. And when I get to tonal languages like Chinese, I stop guessing altogether — the words just get Latinized, and so do I.
Is AI a bubble?
One of the biggest questions I got this month: with companies reportedly burning through their entire annual AI budget in four months, and critics saying labs like OpenAI and Anthropic can’t even cover their compute costs, is the whole tokenomics model — charging by usage on top of massive infrastructure debt — sustainable? Or is this the dot-com crash in a trench coat?
As of October 2026, here’s where I land. I’m not an investment expert, so take this with salt. But I do think there’s a bubble, and honestly, that’s what I expected. Everyone can see what AI is capable of, the same way people could see the potential of the internet and the railroads before them. Money flooded into those sectors too. Most of the companies in those bubbles failed. The ones that survived became giants.
The valuations right now aren’t supported by the revenue, and the profits are basically nonexistent. A correction at some point seems inevitable. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how big it’ll be.
What I do know is that the technology keeps getting cheaper and lighter. Some large language models now run on a desktop computer. That’s a big change from even a short time ago, and it’s the reason I’m cautiously optimistic that this one leaves something behind.
Which animals actually hibernate?
A reader’s daughter asked this, and the parent honestly said: no idea. So here’s my best answer, because this one is genuinely tricky.
There are different kinds of what people call hibernation, and the word gets used loosely for any behavior where an animal slows its metabolism for a stretch of time. Both cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals can do this. But only warm-blooded animals truly hibernate.
Some hibernate on a schedule, year after year. Others do it when food runs low. The whole point is survival through lean seasons, and it shows up most in colder climates where winter food is scarce. Bears are the classic example — they gorge themselves into fat reserves, then live off that fat while their systems dial way down.
If you’re explaining this to a kid: the bear isn’t sleeping because it’s lazy. It’s running a very efficient energy-saving plan.
What should kids learn for the jobs of 20 years from now?
A grandfather with two granddaughters — two years old and six months old — asked this, and it’s one of my favorites, because it’s really a question about how to raise adaptable kids in a world that won’t sit still.
The honest answer: it’s impossible to predict. About 25% of the US workforce today works in job categories that didn’t exist in the 1960 census. About 60% work in jobs that didn’t exist in 1940. And of all the job categories that did exist in 1960, exactly one has disappeared: elevator operator.
No one in 1960 could have predicted web designers, podcasters, or cyberathletes. So I don’t think future-proofing is about any particular skill set. It’s about the ability to learn and adapt. I learned new programming languages by doing, not by taking a class, and I’d bet my kids would do the same with whatever comes next.
Does AI actually show up in daily life?
Yes — more than I expected. If I can’t find a photo I took, or a stock image that works, I’ll generate one for show artwork. It’s cheap and fast.
I also use Grammarly on basically everything I write, and I’ve been using it for over ten years. It now claims to be powered by AI. I’m not sure how much of that is true versus marketing. But it does catch more than it used to, including spelling for proper nouns in context, which is quietly impressive.
And in everyday use, I’ve basically turned it into a search engine. A few weeks ago I had a question about potato consumption in Europe from the 16th to the 19th centuries. I got a fast, usable analysis instead of digging through academic papers. Even regular search engines now serve up AI-generated answers at the top of the results.
None of this means AI is perfect. It means it’s already part of how people work, whether we call it that or not.
FAQ
Why does New Berlin, Wisconsin get its name changed in pronunciation?
During the First World War, the town deliberately shifted the pronunciation to New Ber-lin to distance itself from anything that sounded German.
Is the Tesla that went to space falling apart?
Not really. The car sent up on a Falcon Heavy test flight in 2018 is still in orbit. It would take millions of years for cosmic rays and micrometeorites to do any real damage to the body. The real danger for deep-space probes is electronics — a single high-energy particle can flip a bit in a memory cell and cause a fault. Voyager handles this with hardened electronics, shielding, and redundancy.
What’s your favorite skyscraper?
Taipei 101, mostly because I visited it very early in my travels when it was still the world’s tallest building. It has a massive mass-damping ball at the top, built to counteract movement during earthquakes. And yes, I did make it to the old World Trade Center before 9/11 — a business trip to New York in 1998. I didn’t get to the top; I visited the lobby and the plaza.
A note from Lena
I don’t have the right answer to everything. But I think there’s something about writing it down — really writing it down — that settles the question for me. Send me yours. I’ll answer the ones I can, and be honest about the ones I can’t.
If this was useful, you’ll also like my 10-Piece Capsule Wardrobe edit and my guide to doing cost-per-wear math before you buy anything new.