The gist: Wall Street hit another milestone Tuesday. The S&P 500 closed at a record high, with the Nasdaq also setting a record.

But ask consumers how things are going and you get a very different picture. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index fell sharply in September to 81.9, its third consecutive monthly decline and its lowest level in more than a decade. The Conference Board

It creates a strange disconnect: the financial headlines can say record highs at the same time people are feeling increasingly uneasy about their own economic situation.

Why it matters: The stock market and the economy aren't the same thing. The S&P 500 tracks the value of large publicly traded companies. Consumer confidence measures how people feel about things like business conditions, jobs and their financial prospects.

So when you hear that “the market is doing great,” it doesn't necessarily mean households feel like the economy is doing great too.

Go deeper: AP News

The gist: Researchers analyzed more than 57,000 recipes from Allrecipes to understand what makes people willing to try something new.

They found a funny contradiction: recipes with unexpected ingredients were less likely to be tried. But once people actually tried them, novelty could become an advantage, provided the unusual ingredient still made sense with the rest of the dish.

Think cardamom in a chocolate chip cookie. Strange enough to make you hesitate, but familiar enough that you can imagine it working.

Why it matters: The researchers think the idea extends beyond food. We tend to like creativity that gives us something unexpected without making us work too hard to understand it. Their examples include fashion, fragrance and other creative products.

Basically, the sweet spot may not be completely original. It's familiar, with one good surprise.

Go deeper: Columbia Business School

The gist: A UC Berkeley undergraduate has discovered three unusual dwarf galaxies that are isolated in space but have somehow stopped forming new stars.

That's strange because dwarf galaxies that stop producing stars are usually satellites of much larger galaxies, where their environment can help shut star formation down.

There's another part of the story I love: Julian Shapiro made the discovery while he was still in high school. He's now a first-year student at Berkeley and the sole author of the paper describing the three galaxies, which have been named Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies I, II and III.

Why it matters: The galaxies could help astronomers explain how small galaxies can essentially switch themselves off without a massive neighboring galaxy doing it for them. And occasionally a science story is worth knowing simply because a teenager found three galaxies.

Go deeper: UC Berkeley

Tacit TASS-it | adjective

Definition: Understood or implied without being directly stated.

In a sentence: There was a tacit agreement that nobody would bring up what happened at dinner.

Why it’s worth knowing: A surprising amount of life runs on tacit rules. Nobody explicitly tells you not to sit directly beside someone in an otherwise empty waiting room, or that showing up 20 minutes early to a dinner party can be almost as inconvenient as showing up late.

It's useful beyond social situations too: a workplace can have tacit expectations, two people can reach a tacit agreement, and a group can give tacit approval without ever formally saying yes.

Every time you learn something the annoying way, write it down.

Not major life lessons. The tiny ones you're absolutely convinced you'll remember next time:

Don't book the last row on this airline.
Size down at Aritzia.
Bring cash to that nail salon.
Don't schedule anything the morning after the red-eye.
Ask for a room away from the elevator.
That recipe needs half the salt.

Keep one running note in your phone called Never Again and add to it whenever something makes you think, I am never doing that again.

Then, before you repeat the situation, search the note.

You've already paid for the lesson. You might as well keep it.

COPY AND PASTE:

I'm going to [EVENT / PLACE / SITUATION] for the first time. Tell me the unwritten rules I should know before I go. Include what people typically wear, when to arrive, how introductions usually work, whether I should bring anything, what might accidentally come across as rude or awkward, and anything a first-timer wouldn't think to ask. Separate actual etiquette from conventions that vary by place, culture or group, and flag anything I should confirm myself.

One thing you didn’t know you wanted to know.

You walk into an almost-empty waiting room. Someone is sitting in one chair.

Unless you're trying to make their day extremely uncomfortable, you probably don't sit directly beside them.

There's a name for the invisible spatial rules behind that instinct: proxemics, the study of how humans use and interpret the space around them.

Personal space isn't one fixed bubble. It changes depending on who you're with, what you're doing and the culture you're in. Even the direction you're facing matters: someone farther away but directly facing you can sometimes feel more intrusive than someone sitting closer beside you.

Researchers studying train commuters have even found that the people immediately surrounding you can matter more to stress than how crowded the train is overall. In one study of 139 rush-hour commuters, nearby seating density was associated with self-reported stress, cortisol and performance aftereffects, while overall train-car density wasn't.

So that empty chair isn't necessarily antisocial.

It might just be one of those rules nobody had to teach you.

Go deeper: Research on personal space and crowding