Grown-ups are pregaming again / Put down the phone for a month / Seeds can hear the rain

A Wall Street Journal survey finds nearly a third of Americans are pregaming before going out to avoid paying $20 for a drink at a bar — and liquor brands are packaging miniature bottles specifically to enable this. Also: a group of 20- and 30-somethings in Washington swapped their smartphones for flip phones for a full month, and the things they rediscovered are more interesting than the detox itself. And MIT just published the first direct evidence that plant seeds can sense sound — specifically, that rice seeds exposed to the sound of rain germinate 30 to 40 percent faster than seeds in identical conditions without it. Plus a US sailor sidelined by a monkey, the Senate's hot rotisserie chicken legislation, a bored arsonist, and a man who gave police the wrong name. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.