Hi! All the news that’s fit to hear… Spotify is making narrated versions of 650 long-form articles from publications like The Atlantic, Vogue, and GQ available to premium subscribers in audiobook-supported regions. Today we’re exploring:

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Teens aren’t getting summer jobs like they used to — this year could be worse than ever

For generations, American teens have spent their summers earning a bit of extra money by lifeguarding at the local pool, scooping ice cream, or even detasseling corn under the Midwest sun. Now, those jobs are getting harder to find.

According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, US workers aged 16 to 19 are projected to gain just 790,000 jobs from May through July this year. That would mark the lowest total summer hiring since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the data in 1948, below last summer’s record-low 801,000.

As anyone who’s kept an eye on the numbers, or anyone who’s had trouble getting their teen into the world of work over the last few summers, this season’s slide is years in the making.

Per BLS data, roughly half of America’s 16- to 19-year-olds were employed during the summer through most of the late 20th century. By 2025, that share had fallen to about a third, meaning that the share of teens who work in summer is just 3.2 percentage points higher than it is for the rest of year — the second-smallest gap on record, only behind the pandemic summer of 2020.

This year, the problem seems less about teens not wanting work than employers pulling back: Challenger found that entertainment and leisure employers like theme parks, resorts, and hotels (the kinds of businesses that typically anchor seasonal teen hiring) announced 70% fewer hiring plans through April than at the same point last year.

School’s in

Still, teens haven’t been entirely blameless in the wider shift, especially since the turn of the century. Research from the Brookings Institution found that from 2000 to 2018, the share of teens working or seeking work during the summer fell sharply, while the share enrolled in school and not job-hunting rose almost as much.

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Temu’s US web traffic quietly recovered from last year’s tariff blow

Just over a year ago, countries around the world scrambled to respond to “Liberation Day” tariffs. Consumers, meanwhile, scrambled to order as many $1 phone cases, kitchen gadgets, and novelty storage containers as they could.

But, even a global trade war hasn’t kept Americans from seeking out deals for too long, as web traffic data provided by Similarweb reveals that monthly visits to temu.