The Onion

DAVENPORT, IA—Perplexed by the toddler’s affection for the nonagenarian, sources confirmed Tuesday that local 2-year-old Ava Kerper was getting awfully attached to her 90-year-old grandmother. “She knows the average life expectancy is like, 77, right?” said the sources, who scoffed while watching the child demonstrate her complete and embarrassing obliviousness, wrapping her arms around her grandmother and announcing, “You’re my favorite!” “Personally, if I were going to choose a favorite person in the whole wide world, I’d choose someone with more than six months to live, tops, but hey, you do you, I guess. Christ, this is not going to end well. If this kid’s not careful, Grandma will die with Ava on her lap, and then she’ll live with that regret.” At press time, sources confirmed it was Kerper’s own fault for not learning her lesson with her 98-year-old grandfather.

A stunning new mathematical result has just been announced that experts say will revolutionize the field forever: Mathematicians have discovered the number eight hovering in the desert and making a humming noise.

Mind. Blown. This is a truly major breakthrough.

The discovery occurred when mathematicians from M.I.T. were on a field expedition in the Nafud Desert in central Saudi Arabia. There, they discovered the number eight floating about three feet above the desert sand making a noise that one mathematician described as “a hum so quiet you could barely hear it, yet listening to it drowned out all your thoughts.” After using their graphing calculators, the researchers confirmed that this was, indeed, the number eight, which caused immediate celebration among mathematicians all over the world.

“A lot of us thought that we’d never find eight in the desert making a noise like a whispering demon, but now that it has I’m just so happy and amazed,” said Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at UCLA who is widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. “A discovery like this opens up so many new avenues for study, such as what does eight taste like and does eight scream if we throw bricks at it? I can’t wait to find out.”

The discovery of the number eight floating in the desert has already led to several new and significant discoveries that build upon the researchers’ original results. A joint team of mathematicians from Harvard and the University of Cambridge recently published a paper confirming that the number eight casts the shadow of the number 12 across the desert sands as it hovers. As if that wasn’t amazing enough, Grigory Perelman, the reclusive Russian mathematician famous for proving the elusive Poincaré conjecture, recently went to the desert and shot the number eight with a crossbow—a breakthrough that many experts predict will win him the prestigious Abel Prize, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of math.”

This is seriously so cool. There really seems to be no limit to the new discoveries that can be made after this incredible advancement. It’s amazing to know for sure where the number eight is hovering and what it sounds like. Kudos to the mathematical community on this groundbreaking new find!

MOORESVILLE, IN—Purporting to be proud to reside in the U.S., local resident Jeff Chapman, who spends six hours a day posting about how every city in the nation is a third world hellhole, reportedly stated, “America is the greatest country on Earth,” Monday. “Being born in the U.S. is better than winning any lottery,” said Chapman, who had spent nearly two hours on his phone before he even got out of bed that morning, posting in the comments section of a TikTok guide to the best pizza in Chicago about how the urban areas where 80% of the nation’s citizens lived were uninhabitable, anarchic wastelands that should be nuked into oblivion. “America is a beacon of freedom. America is a shining city atop a hill. I thank God every day for our [woke groomer] troops. I will always stand up for America [when I am not busy accusing millions of Americans of being sociopathic drug dealers and pedophiles who should be shot without trial].” At press time, Chapman was praising the nation as the greatest failed state in the history of the world.

WASHINGTON—Shedding light on the enduring appeal behind assault rifle ownership, a Pew study released Monday revealed that more Americans were buying AR-15s to defend themselves from toddlers who found their guns. “Many Americans stressed that they felt safer knowing they had an AR-15 at the ready in case their toddler stumbled across a shoebox holding a loaded gun on the floor of a closet and started firing away,” said researcher Jonathan Lieu, noting that the majority of AR-15 owners told his team they purchased the lightweight rifle due to their recurring fears about waking in the night to their 2-year-old giggling as they shot bullet holes through the bedroom door. “One response we often heard was that it was a Second Amendment right for gun owners to defend themselves against their own young children. They also stressed that a baseball bat or pepper spray simply wasn’t enough firepower to take down their gun-toting kids.” Lieu added that many Americans also rushed out to purchase tear gas grenades after their children inevitably got their hands on the AR-15s.

An oral history of The Onion's 9/11 Issue

What the front page looked like

The most iconic story

An oldie but a goodie

The headline is the whole joke.

NORFOLK, VA—In a new campaign featuring several graphic images of the animals falling from 30,000 feet in the sky, People For Ethical Treatment Of Animals released an ad Thursday that seemed to imply that throwing horses out of planes was a common practice. “How do you think he feels about your in-flight entertainment?” said the ad, which heavily suggested that the ritual of hurling horses from commercial airlines and watching them fall to the ground and die occurred fairly regularly, if not daily. “Hey, Chris Pratt, would you do this to your dog? What if Seabiscuit pushed you out of a plane? It’s not just humans who deserve parachutes. When it comes to throwing horses out of airplanes, just say ‘neigh.’” At press time, PETA released a follow-up ad implying that horses being thrown from planes was also making humans obese and impotent.