I loved these things as a kid. We used to call them lightning bugs more than fireflies. Every summer, the Photinus carolinus species of firefly has a few weeks to flash their bioluminescent lights and mate.

Did you know they’re a type of beetle? And they’re attracting more than mates (and little children toting jars with holes in the lid). These days, their rare display is also attracting tourists by the thousands, who queue up for limited tours and compete for photo spots to capture nature at its most magical.

We’re talking about lotteries like scoring tickets to the Eras tour. The bugs’ annual emergence in the Great Smoky Mountains has become so popular that campsites sell out months in advance. This year’s lottery to get parking spots for the eight-night official viewing period attracted over 45,000 applicants. Only 960 slots were distributed.

A four-night viewing event later this month—at $325 a person per night—organized by a local biodiversity nonprofit also sold out. For those who miss out, nearby adventure park Anakeesta is building an attraction replicating the experience. And at a similar Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, tours go to different parts of the forest each year so they don’t overwhelm the bugs.

If you’re hoping to catch them closer to home, the Farmers Almanac advises that the best nights to spot them are warm, humid evenings with air temperatures in the upper 70s to 80s and little wind. These first few weeks of June are when they’re most active. But the downside to seeing a lot of them? A higher firefly population often points to a wet summer ahead, since the same damp soil that grows their prey grows everything else.

At a time when the economy and inflation seem unpredictable and a tad precarious, Americans have never had more riding on the stock market. A record one-third of all household wealth in the U.S. was tied to stocks at the end of 2025, according to Federal Reserve data.

Experts say it means that the AI-driven rally is enriching Americans more than usual and exposing them to potentially painful losses from a reversal. Households and nonprofit organizations held $67.77 trillion in directly and indirectly owned equities at year-end, accounting for nearly 33% of total assets, according to the data highlighted by Axios.

In total, the country's household equity assets are massive. But those holdings aren’t spread uniformly among all Americans. The richest 10% of American households owned about 87% of that total household stock market wealth. Such an uneven distribution helps explain some of the peculiar features of the current economic and political environment.

Well this is good news, I guess. The U.S. Postal Service, confronting a bleak financial shortfall that had threatened to shut its doors entirely, has shored up its finances enough to avoid insolvency for at least “several years,” postal regulators said on Thursday.

Robert Taub, ​vice chair of the commission responsible for the Postal Service’s oversight, told a U.S. ​House subcommittee that recent actions to provide financial relief—including suspending payments to a retirement fund—had given officials more time to find a permanent solution. Reuters reports that the retirement fund is much better funded than those of other agencies and that the pause poses no immediate risk to retirees. And the letter carriers union supported the decision.