Today’s Big Story

Valentine’s Day

How’d this long, mysterious legend become a candy-coated commercial holiday?

How’s your heart? Filled with love? Or anxiety and anger? After all, for a day centered on love, Valentine’s Day may be the world’s most hated holiday of all. Of course, the holiday always falls on February 14, but the day of the week varies by year. This year marks the first time Valentines’s Day will be on a Friday in more than half a decade.

But how’d we get here? Across the United States—and plenty of other places around the world—candy, flowers and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious guy and where did these traditions come from? The legend of this saint is shrouded in mystery. We do know that February has long been celebrated as a month of romance, and that St. Valentine’s Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition.

While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial—which probably occurred around A.D. 270—others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia. Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

By the middle of the 18th century, it was common for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes, and by 1900 printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in America. Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine”, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as “scrap”. Today, according to Hallmark, an estimated 145 million Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year (just after Christmas).

Of course, when you think of this day, you think of flowers and chocolates, right? Roses have maintained their status as a favorite among Americans. A whopping 83% of flowers purchased for Valentine’s last year were roses, according to the Society of American Florists—and about two-thirds were specifically of the red variety. Nearly one billion rose stems have been—by the time you’re reading this— imported into the U.S. just for today, according to Christine Boldt, executive vice president of the Association of Floral Importers of America. And if you tried to buy your sweetheart a box of chocolates this year, you likely noticed that they weren’t cheap. That’s because cocoa prices have skyrocketed over the past couple of years, leading to higher sticker prices for chocolates, too, the Associated Press reported on Thursday. While the cost of cocoa sat at less than $2,000 a ton in the summer of 2022, it’s since jumped to about $10,000 right now. But you can’t put a price tag on love.

TikTok Restored to App Stores

The app had been removed when it briefly went dark last month

Apple and Google have made TikTok available again on their U.S. app stores, the companies confirmed Thursday evening—just weeks after removing it to comply with a U.S. law requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, to sell it or shut it down.

Even after Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office delaying enforcement of the law by 75 days, Google and Apple left their own bans in place. Trump’s order instructed the Justice Department to send letters to Google and Apple assuring them they won’t be prosecuted under the law, which if enforced would levy huge fines against app stores and internet-service providers that support TikTok.

After previously trying to ban TikTok in 2020, Trump has given priority to saving the app at the start of his second term. He amassed about 15 million followers on the platform and used it to reach young voters before November’s election. He has suggested a new U.S. sovereign-wealth fund could be involved in a deal and touted interest from such companies as Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon, but it’s unclear what form a transaction might take. If a deal to save TikTok isn’t done by the early-April deadline, Trump could extend it.

The Highest-Paid Athletes

Cristiano Ronaldo tops the rich list, but there’s no women in the top 100

I really should’ve tried harder in gym class. Because the best athletes in the world earned an estimated $6.2 billion in total income last year—including $4.8 billion in salary and prize money, as well as $1.4 billion off the field, court, course or track. The list of the top 100 highest-paid athletes includes players from eight different sports and 27 countries.

Interestingly, not a single woman was able to crack into the big-money club this time. The list, compiled and released by Sportico, puts soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo at the top with a reported $260 million from his salary, winnings and endorsements during 2024. Following Ronaldo with reported earnings of $153.8 million is Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry. Tyson Fury, Lionel Messi and LeBron James round out the top five.

According to NBC News, U.S. tennis phenomenon Coco Gauff was the top-earning female athlete last year, raking in an estimated $30.4 million in earnings. But that still puts her $7 million off No. 100, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Daniel Jones, who earned $37.5 million in 2024. Fellow tennis champ Naomi Osaka was the last woman to make the list, being the highest-paid female athlete in 2022 and ranking 20th on the list with her reported $53.2 million in earnings. The same year, Serena Williams was listed as 52nd, earning $35.3 million.

A Weekend Pairing

‘The White Lotus’ + a Thai Basil Gimlet

While the first season of HBO’s award-winning The White Lotus offered a fresh spin on the “Upstairs, Downstairs” structure of storytelling between the haves and the have-nots who struggle to keep them happy, subsequent seasons have proven to be arguably even more ambitious, digging deeper into character-driven storytelling than any other show on television.

The third edition of the dramedy, both continues this trajectory and complicates it. Shot largely on location at the Four Seasons in Koh Samui, an island off the southern coast of Thailand, this season has been called the show’s most “soul-searching” season yet. Like its predecessors, Season 3 begins with an unidentified dead body and then flashes back to show us who's dead and why. This time, our guests are played by Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Walton Goggins. I just wish we could binge the whole season over the long weekend.

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