Youth

A Lonely Protest in Beijing Inspires Young Chinese to Find Their Voice

“I thought to myself that there are many Chinese who also want freedom and democracy,” she said. “But where are you? Where can I find you? If we meet on the street, how can we recognize each other?”

At about 4 the next morning, she went downstairs from her dorm room to print some posters. She was nervous about running into other Chinese students, most of whom she would describe as “little pinks,” or pro-Beijing youths. She wore a mask to avoid cameras, even though she had seldom worn one since arriving in London a few weeks ago.

She was even more nervous putting up the posters on campus. Every time she saw an East Asian face, she would run to hide in a corridor or a restroom. She was afraid they could report her to the embassy or post photos of her on social media. Her parents are still in China, so she needs to take their safety into account.

After putting up the posters all over her campus, she felt much more at peace with herself.

A week later, when a new chat group titled “‘My Duty’ Democracy Wall in London” was set up on the messaging app Telegram, Kathy was one of the first to join. Within a day, more than 200 Chinese had also signed up. By Sunday, four days later, there were more than 400 members. Most introduced themselves as students and professionals in the U.K. Many said they had joined to find like-minded people because they, like Kathy, didn’t know whom to trust and felt lonely and powerless.

Citizens Daily CN, the Instagram account, organized Telegram chat groups in London, New York, Toronto and two other places to provide a safe online space for overseas Chinese to exchange views. Most people use online handles that disguise their identity.

They have discussed the depths of their frustration with political apathy and the best way to deal with pro-Beijing youth. Quite a few admitted that they were once nationalistic themselves, but added that China’s harsh zero-Covid policy had made them realize the importance of having a government accountable to its people. More important, they discussed what further actions they could take.

On Sunday, Kathy, who is in her early 20s, joined a demonstration for the first time in her life. For safety, she wore a mask and sunglasses, even though it was dark when the protest reached the Chinese Embassy in London. A young Chinese woman started chanting slogans made popular by the Bridge Man: “Students, workers, let’s strike. Depose the despotic traitor Xi Jinping.”

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States Begin Receiving Money From $26B Opioid Settlement

Families hope the money can help combat an epidemic some say is just getting worse, as fentanyl claims lives and targets younger generations.

Opioids rocked households and seized people of all walks of life.

Kim Humphrey, a commander with the Phoenix Police Department at the time, thought he had it all.

“A marriage, a home, a wonderful life raising two sons,” he said. “It was really good.”

But a call about his 15-year-old son ignited distress that would span nearly a decade:

“‘My daughter goes to school with your son and she’s very concerned that he’s going to overdose,'” he continued.

A drug test confirmed their fear — it came back positive for opioids. The struggle spiraled and extended its grip to their second son.

“As a parent, we’re looking at this and saying, ‘We must be the worst parents on the planet,'” Humphrey said.

It took Humphrey and his wife years to find a nonprofit support group called Parents of Addicted Loved Ones, also known as PAL, which he now leads.

“That was the first time that we were sitting in a room full of people who understood,” Humphrey continued.

The opioid crisis contributed to more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. in two decades. At the epicenter — three major pharmaceutical distributors and manufacturer Johnson & Johnson. A yearslong multistate lawsuit led to a historic $26 billion settlement over the next 18 years.

Now, some of that money is starting to come in. This year, by the end of August, 27 of nearly 50 states that filed lawsuits had received a total of $310 million. Of that, Arizona received $16 million of their more than $540 million settlement — money Humphrey hopes will trickle down to PAL, which is in dire need of financial assistance following the pandemic.

“What we do is this peer-to-peer support that has plenty of research behind it that it works. And it did for us,” Humphrey said.

Each state and county has a say in how the money is spent. In Wisconsin, a spending dispute temporarily blocked funds from distribution.

Sara Whaley, a research associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the school put together five planning principles to help guide states on spending.

“This is the opportunity to kind of look at what you’re doing and where you’re investing money, and if there are any gaps,” she said. “One, is to spend the money to save lives. Two, is to use evidence to guide spending. Three, invest in youth prevention. Four, focus on racial equity. And five, create a fair and transparent process.”

She adds that the settlement includes basic payout guidelines.

“They are things like broadening access to naloxone or increasing the use of medications to treat opioid use disorder, enriching prevention strategies, improving treatment in jail,” Whaley said.

It’s treatment desperately needed as fentanyl fuels deaths and overdoses, with a holistic and smart spending approach.

Humphrey hopes families can find the peace his has now reached. Both his sons are now clean.

: newsy.com

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Teen Suicide Crisis: Colorado Parents Work To Reduce State’s High Rate

Parents are sharing their tragedies in hopes of reducing suicide in Colorado. It’s the No. 1 cause of death for kids and young adults in the state.

Vicky Goodwin says February 4, 2021, is the day her world changed forever.

“It was a Thursday morning. I got up, took my dog for a walk. I remember walking in,” she said. “Then, I walked down the hall to Jonathan’s room and opened the door, and he wasn’t in his bed, and I walked into his room and then I found him.”

Jonathan Goodwin was just 15.

“Jonathan was incredibly bright, funny, quirky, a wonderful friend. He was a twin. He and his brother were really close,” Goodwin continued.

But for reasons he kept hidden, Jonathan took his own life. His mom says nobody knows why.

“It doesn’t matter how it happens. It doesn’t matter if there were signs or if there weren’t signs,” Goodwin said. “It’s just, you know, losing a child is as bad as every parent thinks that it would be.”

In the U.S., the rate of young people dying by suicide increased nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018. Researchers say trends are especially alarming among Black youth.

In Goodwin’s home state of Colorado, suicide is the No. 1 cause of death for kids and young adults.

COVID-19 turned life upside down. Teens — already under the usual adolescent pressures of life, school, social media— are now dealing with a year-and-a-half of chronic pandemic stress.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Children’s Hospital Colorado Clinical Child Psychologist Jenna Glover said. “I’ve never seen this number of children who need help in mental health services. And I’ve never seen this many kids be in acute crisis.”

It’s gotten so bad that in 2021, for the first time in its 117-year history, Children’s Hospital Colorado declared a “state of emergency” for youth mental health.

“We’re seeing lots of kids come in with depression and anxiety, really nervous about starting the school year,” Glover continued. “So, real sense of hopelessness and not knowing how to solve their problems other than, ‘I just got to get out of this.'”

Experts say the reasons behind the nationwide jump in teen suicide over the last decade are varied and hard to pin down. Social media, money or family problems, even fear of school shootings and worry about climate change can all add up.

Making it worse, says Glover, is a shortage of professional help.

“There are not enough mental health services,” she said. “Catching kids early on — screening them in pediatrician offices, screening them at school and when they have just the beginnings of symptoms, getting them into preventative programs, and doing immediate intervention, so they don’t show up at the emergency department — we just need more of that.”

Short of professional help, experts say one of the most effective ways to prevent suicide is to talk about it.

“It is the most common myth that asking about suicide will increase it,” Glover said. “What we know is asking about suicide will absolutely decrease the risk of it and it keeps your kids safe.”

If teens are reluctant to talk to adults, the hope is they’ll talk to other teens.

Marin McKinney is a teen ambassador for a suicide prevention group called Robbie’s Hope, giving advice to other kids and adults, too.

“It’s OK to not be OK,” Marin said. “And a lot of us … we do go through bad days and tough situations. But there’s always someone out there who wants to listen and talk to you. … I would tell a parent to not overreact or overcomplicate the situation.”

Kari Eckert and her husband started Robbie’s Hope after losing their son in 2018.

Their home in Golden, Colorado, is now headquarters for an all-out effort to get kids and adults help to prevent suicide. They do everything from producing free guides on how to talk about it to lobbying state lawmakers for new laws. Several states, including Colorado, now allow teens to miss school to take a mental health day.

“Just really really good tips and it’s written by teens. … Kids bring this to the table and say, ‘It’s important to me. I shouldn’t have to lie about why I can’t be in school today,'” Eckert said. “We aren’t just about saying that teen suicide is a problem. We want to bring resources to this … We want to reduce teen suicide rates by 50% by 2028. That’s a big goal.”

For now, Goodwin is taking things day by day, hoping that being open about her tragedy helps other parents to not feel so alone.

“I guess focusing on something positive, focusing on the gift that we have — the gift that we had — with him makes the hard days a lot easier,” she said. “Secrets are toxic. And we felt that the only way that we could make losing a child worse is by passing that burden on to our other children, and being open and choosing to talk about it has been, I think, good for all of us. We just want to help one family.”

Newsy’s mental health initiative “America’s Breakdown: Confronting Our Mental Health Crisis” brings you deeply personal and thoughtfully told stories on the state of mental health care in the U.S. Click here to learn more.

: newsy.com

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TV Shows And Movies Are Contributing To Youth Sex Education

Sex has always been portrayed in TV, movies and shows, but it’s changed over time to educate people about sex.

In a time when sex education varies between different states and local school districts, TV shows and films are filling in the gaps for some teens and young adults.

In 2018, a Healthline survey of more than 1,000 Americans found that only 33% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 reported having some form of sex education in school.

And a 2020 study from the Journal of LGBT Youth found that a majority of gay and lesbian college students “expressed that their formal sex education was lacking and that they sought out or received information from other informal sources to supplement their learning.”

Those informal resources included internet forums, popular films, music and TV shows.

When it comes to television, teen dramas like the long-running series “Degrassi” has been paving the way.

Since 1987, when “Degrassi Junior High” first debuted, the franchise about students at a Canadian junior high and high school has highlighted the issues of teen pregnancy, abortion, STDs and sexual assault. In 1992, the U.S. Department of Education even developed a sex education curriculum that used episodes of “Degrassi” as starting points for classroom discussion.

“Degrassi” now spans five different series across three generations of viewers and represents teens and families of various cultures, as well as varying sexual and gender identities. Its newest iteration is slated to debut on HBO Max in 2023.

As “Degrassi” served almost like the blueprint for sex education in teen dramas, a series for older viewers, ABC’s “How To Get Away With Murder,” made history with its own advocacy for safe sexual health within the LGBTQ community.

The series centers on a group of law school students and their professor. And in 2018, it became the first network primetime series to highlight pre-exposure prophylaxis, more commonly known as “PrEP,” a medication that reduces the risk of spreading HIV.

The series’ discussion of PrEP, as well as the representation of a character living with HIV, was praised by organizations like GLAAD and Greater Than AIDS for the way it educated audiences without stigmatizing the issue.

“How To Get Away With Murder” ended in 2020, but sex education in TV has continued.

Today’s teen dramas like Netflix’s new “Heartbreak High” or the critically acclaimed and aptly named “Sex Education” are poking fun at the limitations of real-life sex education in schools, while advocating for honest and informative conversations about sex, consent, body positivity and healthy relationships.

“Sex Education” tells the story of the son of a sex therapist who gives relationship advice to his peers. Both critics and health experts have praised the show for its informative humor and nuance about the realities of sex. The fourth and final season of the series is expected to be released next year.

: newsy.com

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Advocates, Patients Push For Mental Health Resources In Mississippi

The state is trying to figure out how to provide mental health patients with more community-based options.

Melody Worsham is a mother, teacher and volunteer who says she’s fought a 30-year battle with a disease that mental health professionals were supposed to help her with but instead left her feeling humiliated.

“I live with PTSD, with psychotic features. And as soon as someone hears the word ‘psychotic,’ they think I am that person that’s in some sneaky little dark closet and I’m doing some sneaky little back-channel thing on social media, and I’m about to pull out an AR-15 and get on the rooftop somewhere,” she said. “I don’t have a dangerous bone in my body … It angers me so bad because it puts a barrier up to people asking for help because it’s that automatic.”

Worsham penned an open letter to the state’s attorney general pointing to a 2016 Department of Justice lawsuit against the state of Mississippi for unnecessarily institutionalizing adults and children with mental health disabilities.

A federal judge agreed there should be more community-based options.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness in Mississippi says even the state’s big institutions weren’t providing the help people needed.

Sitaniel Wimbley is the executive director of NAMI Mississippi.

“Prime example: A lot of the facilities are in bigger cities in the state. So, if you live in a rural area, you have to manage getting to the facility,” she said. “Once you get there, you have to make sure you have an appointment. If you have an appointment, there has to be insurance. So, there’s a lot of things that go into actually getting treatment.”

Now in 2022, the Magnolia State — known for catfish, cotton and Southern charm — is still trying to figure out how to provide patients with the necessary care closer to home.

The good news is changes are on the horizon. For starters, the state is taking full advantage of the new National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

“When someone calls 988, they will be either sent to an officer who has to come out — and their person should be trained to help with mental health — or a clinician can come out to that person’s home to try to do an assessment,” Wimbley said. “So, things like that are making a difference.”

Another area program making strides is NAMI’s Peer-to-Peer Program. Jessica James is one of the peers specialists in recovery who’s helping others.

“We have people who live with the mental illness that are in recovery, that are able to help others in their recovery,” she said.

James is a longtime Mississippi resident who is proud of her accomplishments. She achieved her associate degree with honors, raised two successful kids and has been a peer support specialist with NAMI for eight years.

For James, it was a long path to get to where she is today.

“I really didn’t know what was going on with me until it was 2014,” she said.

James says she suffers from anxiety, depression.

“I also was told that I may have a little PTSD as well,” she continued.

James recalls one tough day on a job she loved. She’d been missing work but couldn’t muster the strength to get out of bed.

“I would have a boost of energy at times,” she said. “But then, all of a sudden, it just seemed like my whole world just went and crashed down.”

A supervisor called her in an after seeing her doctor’s note

James says the supervisor dialed the number to make sure the note was real. It was devastating for her.

“I’m seeing her do this in front of me … I felt like I’m being punished for me being sick and like she didn’t care,” she said.

That hopeless feeling didn’t last long, though. She remembered seeing the NAMI promotion table at a health fair she went to with her son. That led to a partnership between the two.

As a peer, James now helps others push through the mental health issues she faced.

Worsham is also a peer support specialist. Newsy caught up with her during work at the Mental Health Association of South Mississippi.

“This isn’t about looking at a disease,” she said. “It’s not what’s wrong with you, it’s what’s strong with you. That’s our focus with our people.”

She says the program isn’t what you would call “clinical.” It’s actually unique because there are no psychiatrists or licensed therapists involved, and it’s voluntary.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all model. And that’s something that those of us with lived experience, we do understand,” Worsham said. “We are about sitting down and exploring that with you and finding out what your pathway is and what’s going to work. And it might be a Franken-program, you know, you do a little 12-step thing here, or you might have some spiritual thing going on, and then you need a drop-in, you know, meditation.”

A 2019 report by Mental Health America says peer support specialists lower the cost of mental health services and help reduce the rate of hospital recidivism.

The National Institute for Health Research also found people receiving peer support lowered the risk of being hospitalized by 14% and significantly increased recovery.

“The state of Mississippi is now starting to focus on it a little bit more and make sure that peer specialists are in every county,” Wimbley said. “I think last year, there were 164 trained to be peer specialists across the state. And then some of those, I want to say between 10 and 12, were actually in jail systems. So, they can now lead others through their mental health journey and say, ‘It’s OK not to be OK.”

As the Magnolia State tries to grow its mental health programs to satisfy the Department of Justice, mental health advocates are helping to cultivate the Peer-to-Peer program to provide help to those in need.

: newsy.com

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California Woman Gets 18 Months For Kidnapping Hoax

As part of the plea agreement, she has agreed to reimburse law enforcement agencies for the costs of the search for her and her nonexistent kidnapper.

A Northern California mother of two was sentenced Monday to 18 months in prison for faking her own kidnapping so she could go back to a former boyfriend, which led to a three-week, multi-state search before she resurfaced on Thanksgiving Day in 2016.

Sherri Papini, 40, pleaded guilty last spring under a plea bargain that requires her to pay more than $300,000 in restitution.

Probation officers and Papini’s attorney had recommended that she spend a month in custody and seven months in supervised home detention. But Senior U.S. District Judge William Shubb said he opted for an 18-month sentence in order to deter others.

The judge said he considered the seriousness of the offense and “the sheer number of people who were impacted.”

Papini, who was emotional throughout the proceedings, quietly answered, “Yes, sir,” when the judge asked if she understood the sentence. Previously she was in tears as she gave a statement to the court accepting responsibility and admitting her guilt.

“As painful as it is,” Papini accepts her sentence as part of her recovery, defense attorney William Portanova said after the hearing.

Portanova previously said Papini was troubled and disgraced and that she should serve most of her sentence at home. Prosecutors, though, said it was imperative that she spend her full term in prison. The judge ordered her to report to prison Nov. 8.

“Papini’s kidnapping hoax was deliberate, well planned, and sophisticated,” prosecutors wrote in their court filing. And she was still falsely telling people she was kidnapped months after she pleaded guilty in April to staging the abduction and lying to the FBI about it, they wrote.

“The nation is watching the outcome of Papini’s sentencing hearing,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Veronica Alegria and Shelley Weger wrote. “The public needs to know that there will be more than a slap on the wrist for committing financial fraud and making false statements to law enforcement, particularly when those false statements result in the expenditure of substantial resources and implicate innocent people.”

“Outwardly sweet and loving, yet capable of intense deceit … Ms. Papini’s chameleonic personalities drove her to simultaneously crave family security and the freedom of youth,” Portanova wrote in his responding court filing.

So “in pursuit of a non-sensical fantasy,” Portanova said the married mother fled to a former boyfriend in Southern California, nearly 600 miles south of her home in Redding. He dropped her off along Interstate 5 about 150 miles from her home after she said she wanted to go home.

Passersby found her with bindings on her body, a swollen nose, a blurred “brand” on her right shoulder, bruises and rashes across her body, ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, and burns on her left forearm. All of the injuries were self-inflicted and were designed to substantiate her story that she had been abducted at gunpoint by two Hispanic women while she was out for a run.

The wounds were a manifestation of her “unsettled masochism” and “self-inflicted penance,” Portanova wrote. And once she began, “each lie demanded another lie.”

Prosecutors said Papini’s ruse harmed more than just herself and her family. “An entire community believed the hoax and lived in fear that Hispanic women were roving the streets to abduct and sell women,” they wrote.

Prosecutors agreed to seek a sentence on the low end of the sentencing range in exchange for Papini’s guilty plea. That was projected to be between eight and 14 months in custody, down from the maximum 25 years for the two charges.

She has offered no rationale for her actions, which stumped even independent mental health experts who said her actions didn’t conform with any typical diagnosis.

“Papini’s painful early years twisted and froze her in myriad ways,” Portanova said in arguing for home confinement. With her deception finally revealed, he said, “It is hard to imagine a more brutal public revelation of a person’s broken inner self. At this point, the punishment is already intense and feels like a life sentence.”

But prosecutors said her “past trauma and mental health issues alone cannot account for all of her actions.”

“Papini’s planning of her hoax kidnapping was meticulous and began months in advance — it was not merely the reaction to a traumatic childhood,” they wrote.

After herarrestin March, Papini received more than $30,000 worth of psychiatric care for anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. She billed the state’s victim compensation fund for the treatment, and now must pay it back as part of her restitution.

As part of the plea agreement, she has agreed to reimburse law enforcement agencies more than $150,000 for the costs of the search for her and her nonexistent kidnappers, and repay the $128,000 she received in disability payments since her return.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Swedish Program Aims To Fight High Youth Suicide Rate In Montana

In Montana, the youth suicide rate between 2011 and 2020 was more than double the national rate for the same age group.

Montana is known for its wide open spaces, craggy mountains and fresh, clear water.

But for all its beauty, it’s also known for a devastating epidemic.

The youth suicide rate in Montana between 2011 and 2020 was more than double the national rate for the same age group.

The reasons behind the statistic are a complicated, cultural issue. A March 2022 report released by the state cites vitamin D deficiencies, altitude, social isolation and access to firearms as just a few of the reasons. It also shows 1 in 5 Montana kids live more than 100% below the federal poverty line. And the state has a high concentration of American Indians, who experience higher rates of suicide.

Kelley Edwards is the program director for Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) at Montana State University’s Center for Mental Health Research and Recovery. She knows firsthand what teen suicide can do to a community.

“I lived it. My co-workers lived it. My students lived it,” she said.

Edwards used to teach high school in Helena, Montana, where seven students in her school died by suicide in a three-year span.

“It will never leave me what that was like,” Edwards said.

Helena High School administrators knew something needed to happen, and they found the solution in Sweden, which is home to Youth Aware of Mental Health.

“Helena School District was instrumental in bringing YAM to the United States, because they recognized the seriousness of the problem and wanted to do something about it,” Edwards said.

YAM started in 2014 with the goal of bringing down teen suicide rates.

A randomly-controlled trial with 11,000 participants showed it reduced suicide ideation and attempts by about 50%. New cases of depression fell by about 30% in kids participating.

The program is in 16 countries and its trainers are traveling the world to expand even more.

Edwards is a program manager and also teaches it.

“I’ve had kids say right after a session either, ‘I’m really, really depressed,’ or possibly, even, they’ve said, ‘I’m suicidal.’ And they are. They’ve said, ‘I’m really, really worried about a friend,'” Edwards shared.

Designed for kids between 13 and 18 years old, the program consists of five five-hour sessions over three weeks, which dive into mental health literacy, role playing and identifying stressors and resources.

“We need to get to the point where our students are comfortable with mental health knowledge, and what to do when your normal coping skills are not working or where it gets too severe that you would need professional help,” Edwards said.

But as Edwards knows, that’s not easy in rural places, like her native Montana — especially now.

“I grew up in Denton, Montana. For students in rural areas that may not have access to anything … The best that we can provide at this point is starting with just having someone to talk to,” Edwards said. “It’s not ideal by any means. But that is where we’re at, unfortunately.”

Mary Windecker runs the advocacy group Behavioral Health Alliance of Montana. She, and so many other mental health professionals, are taking their concerns to state and federal leaders. They’re trying to get more attention and funding on this issue.

“Overall in the United States, we’re failing our children. That’s true by every metric you could possibly measure,” Windecker said.

And beyond Montana, people in the field of mental health are working to do what they can to help the next generation before it’s too late.

: newsy.com

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For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine

When Ja’Kobi Moore decided to apply this year to a private high school in her hometown of New Orleans, she learned that she needed at least one letter of recommendation from a teacher. She had never asked for one, so she sought help.

“Teacher letter of recommendation,” she typed into TikTok’s search bar.

Ms. Moore, 15, scrolled TikTok’s app until she found two videos: one explaining how to ask teachers for a recommendation letter and the other showing a template for one. Both had been made by teachers and were easier to understand than a Google search result or YouTube video, said Ms. Moore, who is planning to talk to her teachers this month.

dance videos and pop music. But for Generation Z, the video app is increasingly a search engine, too.

TikTok’s powerful algorithm — which personalizes the videos shown to them based on their interactions with content — to find information uncannily catered to their tastes. That tailoring is coupled with a sense that real people on the app are synthesizing and delivering information, rather than faceless websites.

On TikTok, “you see how the person actually felt about where they ate,” said Nailah Roberts, 25, who uses the app to look for restaurants in Los Angeles, where she lives. A long-winded written review of a restaurant can’t capture its ambience, food and drinks like a bite-size clip can, she said.

TikTok’s rise as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to stay updated on trends and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues growing, the universe of ways to find information in it is expanding.

said at a technology conference in July.

Google has incorporated images and videos into its search engine in recent years. Since 2019, some of its search results have featured TikTok videos. In 2020, Google released YouTube Shorts, which shares vertical videos less than a minute long, and started including its content in search results.

TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, declined to comment on its search function and products that may be in testing. It said it was “always thinking about new ways to add value to the community and enrich the TikTok experience.”

Doing a search on TikTok is often more interactive than typing in a query on Google. Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Then they verify the veracity of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos.

This mode of searching is rooted in how young people are using TikTok not only to look for products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how to do things and find explanations for what things mean. With videos often less than 60 seconds long, TikTok returns what feels like more relevant answers, many said.

Alexandria Kinsey, 24, a communications and social media coordinator in Arlington, Va., uses TikTok for many search queries: recipes to cook, films to watch and nearby happy hours to try. She also turns to it for less typical questions, like looking up interviews with the actor Andrew Garfield and weird conspiracy theories.