Life Story Magic

I truly LOVE doing Life Story Magic interviews. So what the heck, let’s keep the Life Story Magic for $299 deal going a bit longer — that’s 40% off the regular price.

No offer code needed. No trying to find the right discount link. Just click through and buy—and support both LSM and Understandably!

Special Offer: Life Story Magic $299

Older Adults Are No Longer Staying in ‘Empty Shell’ Marriages

Rates of gray divorce have risen sharply over the past few decades as people live longer and expect more from marriage

In 2021, after more than 30 years together, Alan Hickenbottom and his wife filed for divorce—but he still believes their marriage was a success. Their early years together were fun and exciting. They bonded over a shared love of books and art, and a desire to do good things in the world. Then they threw themselves enthusiastically into raising their two children. But as often happens, when the kids left for college, Mr. Hickenbottom realized that he and his wife were more like colleagues and roommates than romantic partners. Two years of marriage counseling didn’t fix things. “I didn’t want to devalue the life that we built, but that was not how I wanted to live,” Mr. Hickenbottom said. He might have another 40 years, he thought. “What do I want to do?” he recalled asking.

Rates of “gray divorce”—splits among those 50 and older—have risen sharply in the United States, doubling between 1990 and 2010. Though those rates have stabilized since the pandemic, nearly 40 percent of divorces today occur between people 50 and older. While divorce rates have been dropping across age groups in recent years, the exception to that trend is among Americans ages 65 and up. Some Gen Xers and baby boomers are increasingly unwilling to stay in what sociologists call “empty shell marriages.” These are relationships in which there is no real connection or vitality, where one or both partners are not happy. Traditionally, such couples often decided to stay together for the sake of their kids, in view of economic stability or out of fear of stigma. Now, that may be a thing of the past.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

What’s Actually Wrong With the Reflecting Pool

President Trump’s repairs address surface problems but ignore the leaky pipes destroying the Lincoln Memorial’s iconic landmark

When the architect Henry Bacon designed the Reflecting Pool, he envisioned it as a quiet, mirror-like surface that would reflect the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the surrounding sky. But beneath the smooth surface, major engineering problems have lurked since it was constructed in the 1920s. The pool was built on unstable mudflats that have shifted over the decades, cracking the pool’s concrete and causing massive leaks. And the stagnant, shallow water has become a petri dish for algae. It has posed a headache for other presidential administrations, and the first Trump administration formed a plan to fix some of the pool’s problems, but it was never carried out.

Twelve-inch pipes under the surrounding parkland are responsible for moving large volumes of water from the pool to the treatment plant and back again. But these pipes often break and leak. The Park Service has said their plastic walls fail under pressure from the surrounding soil. “It’s almost impossible to maintain the water level that is required to make the pool reflective,” said Kym Hall, a former National Capital Area director for the National Park Service. “It’s like pouring water into a colander.” When the pipes break, they have to be shut off, and the pool is disconnected from its filtration system. It is left stagnant, sometimes for weeks. In Mr. Trump’s first term, the Park Service said the only solution was to replace thousands of feet of pipe. But it has still not done so.

Link: New York Times (Lazaro Gamio, David A. Fahrenthold, Maxine Joselow)

Another Top General Is Out at the Pentagon

General C. D. Donahue, the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, becomes latest casualty in Hegseth’s purge of senior military ranks

General Chris “C. D.” Donahue was the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan during the chaotic 2021 withdrawal. As the head of Army forces in Europe and Africa, he has helped bolster Ukraine in its fight to repel the Russian invasion. Now Donahue has become the latest casualty in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s purge of the military’s senior ranks. Donahue’s abrupt departure, after just 18 months in his role, is another sign of the upheaval. He was widely seen as one of the Army’s rising stars—a legendary Delta Force leader who was considered a top candidate for Army chief of staff or even chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—having distinguished himself in wars of the past two decades. But Hegseth has sought to oust anyone who doesn’t fit his idea of a military leader, including those involved in the calamitous American exit from Kabul under President Biden—no matter how well they performed there.

A career Ranger and Special Operations commander, Donahue served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, climbing through the ranks during two decades of counterterrorism wars. As the U.S. military shifted its focus from hunting terrorist networks to preparing for conflicts against technologically sophisticated adversaries, Donahue did as well. In recent years, he took on a top role in Europe as the Pentagon adapted lessons from Ukraine and other modern battlefields. His departure continues the exit of a generation of combat-tested leaders at a time when Hegseth is reshaping the military’s senior ranks under a banner of “less generals, more GIs.” Donahue would be at least the sixth three- or four-star Army general to depart unexpectedly, out of the roughly 60 generals in the service who hold those ranks.

Link: The Atlantic (Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan)

As Trump Purges Immigration Judges, One Speaks Out

The Trump administration has systematically pressured judges to deport more people faster, firing 115 judges and installing inexperienced “deportation judges”

What’s so unique about the immigration court system is that the courts and the judges are not part of the judicial branch. They are part of the executive branch. So although they wear robes, they’re called judges, ultimately, they are employees of the executive branch. And they report up to the attorney general, and by extension, up to the president. Immigration judges are appointed by the attorney general and can be fired by the attorney general. And immigration judges have a lot less freedom to make their decisions based just on the law. They ultimately have to follow the policy that’s being put forward by the administration.

The administration has put really systematic pressure on judges to deport more people and do it faster. They have really tried to turn this court into a deportation assembly line. And judges right now are granting asylum in fewer than 10 percent of cases, which is the lowest it’s ever been for the 20 years we could examine data for. So in total, about 115 judges have been fired by this administration. And that’s not even counting the ones who quit or retired because they saw the writing on the wall. The top official in the immigration court sends out a memo telling judges that it’s come to the administration’s attention that some of them are tolerating bias “in favor of an alien and against the government.” Judges clearly take that as a sign that they could be disciplined if they rule against the government. In hiring for these roles, the administration actually put out an ad specifically saying they were looking to hire, quote, “deportation judges.” Not subtle. Literally changing the definition of the job. It’s very in-your-face. And what my colleagues have found in some of their follow-up reporting is that the administration is actually sometimes putting as many as 100 hearings on a judge’s calendar per day. And the idea is basically that you flood the zone. A judge has to move so quickly that they’re ordering deportations, perhaps because the immigrant hasn’t been given a heads up on the fact that the hearing is happening, and they don’t show up, or that they don’t have a lawyer and can’t properly defend themselves.

Link: New York Times Podcast “The Daily” (Nicholas Nehamas)

How the Prairieland ‘Antifa’ Verdict Threatens the Anti-Trump Resistance

The first conviction of alleged Antifa members on terrorism charges raises red flags about the right to protest and government overreach

Late last week, federal prosecutors notched a victory in an unprecedented and controversial trial that sought to tie alleged members of “Antifa,” a decentralized anti-fascist movement, to domestic terrorism. A Tarrant County jury returned a mixed verdict for nine defendants, who were accused of a variety of crimes stemming from a July 4 “noise demonstration” outside the Prairieland immigrant detention center in Alvarado and the nonfatal shooting there of a police officer. Prosecutors argued the defendants constituted a “North Texas Antifa cell” that shared anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and anti-government beliefs—and that all nine played a role in the shooting that occurred, despite several government witnesses, who took plea deals, testifying at trial that they were surprised when the protest turned violent and that they and the other defendants did not belong to the purported Antifa group.

The case represents the federal government’s first use of material support for terrorism charges against alleged Antifa members. Experts say the outcome will give the Trump administration the green light to take a more aggressive stance against left-wing activity and further politicize the use of domestic terrorism laws. “It probably will embolden them to perhaps offer additional characterization of entities or groups … animated by some sort of anti-administration agenda as some species of Antifa,” said Tom Brzozowski, former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Department of Justice. Mike German, a former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism, told the Observer that the case demonstrates the broad scope of domestic terrorism laws and the ability they provide prosecutors to target behaviors that most people wouldn’t consider terrorism. On June 23, eight defendants in the Prairieland case were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 30 to 100 years.

Link: Texas Observer (Steven Monacelli)

AI Models Capable of Devastating Attacks Months Away, Five Eyes Warns

Intelligence agencies from five allied nations issue rare joint warning as Trump administration blocks foreign access to Anthropic’s advanced AI tools

Powerful AI models capable of devastating new cyber attacks on governments and businesses are mere months away, intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now.” The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable. The statement said while AI “would help us improve cyber defence over time, it also accelerates the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats.” “Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years, it is months,” the warning by Five Eyes agencies said.

Generative AI models are powerful new tools capable of looking for vulnerabilities in cyber security systems, and they can help exploit those vulnerabilities as well as repair them. “What’s different about the latest ones is they’re very good at generating exploits,” said Olivia Shen, an expert in national security and AI at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre. One of the major tech company’s latest inventions is called Fable 5, a supposedly more community-friendly version of Mythos—a powerful AI model released earlier this year capable of detecting vulnerabilities in cyber systems that is only available to vetted organisations and companies because of concerns it could be exploited. Both of Anthropic’s models were suspended for use by “foreign nationals” in June by the US government, which cited advice by national security authorities.

Link: The Guardian (Sarah Basford Canales)

‘I Don’t Know How to Save My Daughter From Her Husband’: The Brutal Reality of the Taliban’s New Marriage Law

Afghanistan’s new decree makes it nearly impossible for women to escape unwanted or abusive marriages, even with family support

When Fatima arrived at a district court in northern Afghanistan in late 2025 with her parents, she hoped a judge would finally allow her to leave her calamitous marriage. She had never met her husband before their arranged wedding in the summer of 2024. Each time her family asked to see him, they were told he was shy. It was only on the wedding day, relatives say, that Fatima understood what had been hidden from her: her husband had severe intellectual and physical disabilities and could not eat, wash or dress himself without help. In the months that followed, Fatima cooked, cleaned, cared for her husband and tended the family’s livestock. She was rarely allowed to leave the house. Whenever she visited her parents, she wept and begged them not to send her back. Finally, her parents agreed to go to court and help Fatima ask for a divorce. Two Taliban soldiers pointed their weapons at Fatima’s parents as her in-laws seized her and dragged her toward their car.

In April 2026, the Taliban leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, issued a new decree on the judicial separation of spouses, setting out 12 grounds on which a marriage can be dissolved. On paper, some appear to give women a path to court. In practice, each path is blocked by the authority of men: the consent of a husband, the discretion of a judge, the testimony of witnesses, or the power of male relatives. Even in cases of abuse or neglect, the decree states that judges and arbiters cannot grant a divorce without the husband’s consent. The decree also legalises child marriage. It allows male relatives to marry off children and says that once those children reach puberty, they may ask a court to nullify the marriage in limited circumstances. Habiba, who has spent four years trying to escape from her abusive husband, was ordered to return to the house or pay 1.6 million Afghanis to her husband. “I am still here,” she says. “I am waiting for this government to fall, or for money to appear. One of those two.”

Link: The Guardian (Multiple reporters)

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. Just to save you scrolling all the way to the top, here’s the Life Story Magic offer again. See you in the comments!

Special Offer: Life Story Magic $299

Share

Leave a comment

It is 3:07 p.m. as I start writing this. I want to get to the gym by 4:30. My theory is that writing it under mild time pressure created by my own need to exercise was appropriate.

Reason: We’ll be talking about a study that shows why no matter how busy you are, even small habits of vigorous exercise can pay enormous dividends for your health.

A new study published in the European Heart Journal — in case you let your subscription lapse, I’ll summarize — analyzed data from nearly 96,000 people who wore wrist-based accelerometers for a week.

The researchers tracked not just how much people moved, but how intensely. They then followed participants for seven years, measuring their risk of developing eight serious conditions:

• major cardiovascular disease

• irregular heartbeat

• type 2 diabetes

• immune-mediated inflammatory diseases

• liver disease

• chronic respiratory disease

• chronic kidney disease

• dementia

Findings: Compared with people who did no vigorous activity at all, those with the highest levels of intense movement had a 63% lower risk of developing dementia, a 60% lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and a 46% lower risk of dying.

The key phrase there is “vigorous activity,” meaning movement that’s intense enough to make you breathless.

This is where the study gets genuinely useful, especially for busy people who have a hard time fitting everything into a 24-hour day.

“Adding short bursts of activity that make you slightly breathless into daily life, like taking the stairs quickly, walking fast between errands or playing actively with children, can make a real difference,” said Professor Minxue Shen of the Xiangya School of Public Health at Central South University, who led the research.

Even 15 to 20 minutes per week of this kind of effort was linked to meaningful health benefits — emphasis on per week, not day. The researchers also found that intensity mattered differently depending on the disease.

For inflammatory conditions like arthritis and psoriasis, intensity was the key factor. For diabetes and chronic liver disease, both how long and how hard people moved made a difference.

The consistent thread across all eight conditions was that vigorous activity outperformed moderate activity, minute for minute.

As for why it’s helpful, Professor Shen’s explanation is basically that during vigorous activity, your heart pumps more efficiently, blood vessels become more flexible, and your body improves its ability to use oxygen.

Intense movement also appears to reduce inflammation, which may explain the strong associations with arthritis and psoriasis specifically, and may stimulate brain chemicals that support cognitive health, which could account for the dementia finding.

This is observational research drawn from the UK Biobank, so a caveat: it can’t prove that vigorous activity directly causes these reductions in disease risk.

People who move more intensely may share other lifestyle traits — better sleep, less stress, and different diets — that also contribute. The researchers controlled for many of these factors, but residual confounding is always possible in studies like this.

Still, current exercise guidelines focus on total time — 150 minutes of moderate activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity. This study suggests that the composition of that time matters, not just the volume.

If two people exercise the same total number of minutes, the one who occasionally pushes to the point of breathlessness appears to come out ahead, across multiple disease categories, by a wide margin.

Anyway — update in real time — I’m back from the gym and on my fourth pass, and there’s one thing worth clarifying. The 15-to-20-minutes-per-week figure refers to the minimum threshold where researchers began seeing meaningful benefits, not a ceiling or a target.

More vigorous activity continued to show stronger associations with lower disease risk throughout the study. So, 15-20 minutes is the floor, not the finish line.

The European Heart Journal has now given me three separate reasons to feel okay about my health and exercise habits — sleep, coffee, and now exercise.

I’m choosing to believe it’s the former.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• Daily Mail: President Donald Trump, 80, is fixated on negative coverage of his swollen ‘cankles’ as his staff whisper about his ‘old’ age, a new book reveals. A White House spokesperson pointed a finger at Biden in response: ‘President Trump is the sharpest and most accessible President in American history who is working nonstop to solve problems and deliver on his promises.’

• CNN: Alan Greenspan, the jazz-playing Federal Reserve chairman who was celebrated as a "Maestro" for engineering a decade of prosperity but later shared blame for the 2008 financial crisis, died this week at 100. He served under four presidents across nearly 19 years at the Fed.

• AP via NBC Dallas: Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic in American history, the DEA permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to sources. "We poisoned our community to make cases," said DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed a whistleblower complaint. One case he flagged: a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue.

• CBS News Miami: Companies hired to run Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" were notified Monday to begin full demobilization of the facility, quietly ending a $1.2 billion experiment once hailed by DeSantis and Trump as a model for other states. Florida is still waiting on most of the $608 million in federal reimbursements it was promised, having received only $58 million so far.

• NYT: The United States plans to provide welcome gifts to white South Africans entering the United States as refugees, including an Android tablet, a report commissioned by Mr. Trump that downplays the role of slavery in history of the U.S., and a children’s book accusing South Africa’s government of “favoring the Black population.” Trump is welcoming the minority in South Africa, even as the U.S. bans refugees fleeing from war and persecution everywhere else in the world.

• U.S. News: The U.S. announced $17.5 billion in federal loans for 10 new large nuclear reactors across the U.S. — the largest single investment in American nuclear power in decades.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists discovered that kombucha's flavor, chemistry, and antioxidant activity vary dramatically depending on the tea used to make it — green and oolong tea versions emerged as the most biologically active. The finding matters because most commercially sold kombucha is made from black tea, which the study found to be the least potent.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I got a sitter, drove into the city, and saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Madison Square Garden for nearly three hours.

Somehow I’d been alive in the United States for five decades and lived in New Jersey for going on 15 years, and yet it was my first time seeing the Boss. Now that I’m fully compliant with New Jersey law on the subject, I’m going to tell you it was worth the wait.

I’m also going to tell you — based on a study published this week — that it may have been doing something to my DNA.

Researchers at University College London recently published findings in the journal Innovation in Aging in which they analyzed survey responses and blood test data from 3,556 adults in the United Kingdom.

Their goal: Comparing how often and in how many different ways those adults engaged with arts and cultural activities — things like attending concerts, visiting museums, reading, dancing, singing, making art — against seven different biological aging clocks derived from DNA methylation patterns in participants’ blood.

The pattern was clear:

* At least three arts and cultural activities per year a year: 2% slower aging

* Monthly: 3% slower

* Weekly: 4% slower

On one of the newer clocks, people who engaged at least weekly were a full year biologically younger than infrequent participants.

The effect size was comparable to what the researchers found for physical exercise.

As lead author professor Daisy Fancourt put it: “These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level. They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise.”

Variety was especially important. Fancourt went on:

“Each type of arts activity has different ingredients that help health — physical, cognitive, emotional, or social stimulation. So, engaging in a diverse range of activities — just like having lots of different plants in our diets — is most beneficial.”

Of course, this doesn’t prove that going to concerts slows aging.

It’s a UK sample, drawn from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, so how directly it translates to other populations is an open question.

I mean, do people in England even like Bruce Springsteen?

Also, people who go to concerts regularly may also have other habits — more social connection, more disposable time, better baseline health — that could be doing some of the work.

Still, Steven Horvath, the UCLA geneticist who developed the epigenetic clock used in aging research, reviewed the study and told NPR he found it “very rigorous,” and that the finding of arts engagement being comparable to exercise “is particularly new to me.”

Which brings me back to the Garden.

The E Street Band’s remaining members from the 20th century — the drummer, the bassist, the guitarist, and the pianist — are all in their 70s — and they were playing ferociously, for three hours, to a packed house at Madison Square Garden.

Springsteen himself is 76.

I don’t know exactly what his habits look like off stage, but I’d guess he’s been engaging with music — as a maker, a performer, and a listener — nearly every day of his adult life.

Maybe it’s coincidence. But maybe a life built around creative engagement leaves a different physical signature than one that doesn’t.

Either way, I’m glad we got the sitter.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• ArsTechnica: In an extremely odd case, a single 79-year-old patient was granted extraordinary early access to Eli Lilly’s powerful, still-experimental obesity drug retatrutide through the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” program—raising immediate questions if that sole patient is President Donald Trump, according to a report by Stat News. The White House, HHS, and Lilly itself did not directly answer questions about the patient’s identity.

• Reuters via Yahoo Finance: The European Central Bank secured key parliamentary backing Tuesday for the launch of a digital euro, an electronic means of payment aimed at making the euro zone less reliant on U.S. credit cards at a time of fraying transatlantic relationships. Six years in the making, the ECB’s digital cash has become a more pressing issue since Donald Trump returned to the White House, amid fears that the U.S. could one day weaponize its dominance over payment networks like Visa and Mastercard.

• CNN: A U.S. fighter jet pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran in April described a shocking sight before ejecting: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, according to four sources familiar with the matter. If the airman really saw what he described — a formation moving in unison — it would be an alarming advance in Iranian drone capabilities.

• WSJ: What I Saw at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Monday Afternoon.

• NBC News, TechCrunch: A 76-year-old Texas woman, Martha Avila, is dead after a Tesla that authorities say was in autopilot mode crashed through her home. Tesla blames the driver, saying he overrode the autopilot system and crashed into the house at 73 miles an hour. The driver does not appear to have been charged with anything. (Interestingly, the rather horrifying video is posted on X.com, but sharing it seems not to work for some reason.)

• NBC News: The Department of Homeland Security changed its travel guidelines for Iran’s national soccer team Monday, allowing it an extra day in Seattle ahead of its third World Cup match. The team had previously been given just 24 hours in each host city — less than any other squad — and Iran’s soccer federation had planned to file a formal complaint with FIFA.

• ScienceDaily: SETI scientists aimed radio telescopes at 3I/ATLAS — the third interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system, which was only discovered days ago — and found no signals that could indicate extraterrestrial technology, beyond human-made interference. Researchers say the absence of a signal was expected but that scanning interstellar visitors is now standard practice.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

It’s whatever time of day it is. Do you know how your kids are using AI?

I think most parents probably assume their teenagers are using AI chatbots the way they use Google—to look something up, finish an assignment, and maybe settle an argument about a movie.

A new national study suggests the reality is quite different.

Writing recently in the Journal of Adolescence, researchers at Florida Atlantic University and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire say they surveyed 3,466 American teenagers aged 13 to 17 about their AI chatbot use.

• Six in 10 teens have already used a conversational AI chatbot, and entertainment is the most common reason, cited by 85 percent of users.

• However, 65 percent use these tools for advice and guidance.

• Sixty percent use them for friendship.

• Nearly half use them for emotional or mental health support.

• More than one in three use them for romantic companionship.

Most parents, the researchers suggest, have no idea this is happening.

Nearly half of teens in the study reported at least one of 13 types of harmful interactions. About 23 percent said they felt manipulated or pressured by a chatbot.

Between 13 percent and 19 percent reported that a chatbot encouraged dangerous real-world behaviors, including self-harm or suicidal thoughts.

Thirteen-year-olds were the most exposed group across nearly every harm category—more likely than older teens to be asked for personal information that made them uncomfortable, pressured to reveal secrets, or nudged toward risky behavior.

“These systems engage, respond and even affirm users in highly personalized ways, which can make their influence especially powerful,” explained senior author Sameer Hinduja, a professor at FAU and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “For adolescents—who are still developing critical thinking skills and a sense of identity—that can create a situation where they’re more likely to trust, internalize, or act on what the chatbot is saying without fully questioning it.”

This connects to something I wrote about earlier this year—a Danish study of nearly 54,000 psychiatric patients that found similar patterns in adults with serious mental illness.

The mechanism is the same in both cases: systems designed to be agreeable and emotionally validating are especially powerful precisely when the user is most vulnerable. What’s different here is the population.

The practical suggestions are less alarming than the findings. Conversations with your kids about what they’re using and why—more curiosity than interrogation—along with AI literacy in schools.

Society needs to demand more from the companies building these products too, including mental health guardrails and real age verification built in from the start rather than retrofitted after the fact.

Bottom line: When a product is deliberately engineered to feel emotionally responsive and human, what responsibility do its makers bear for what happens to vulnerable users?

That’s the question real humans need to be asking—no matter how agreeable AI tries to be.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• NPR: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that he will resign, paving the way for the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade.

• PBS News: JD Vance described U.S.-Iran nuclear talks in Switzerland Monday as "rocky but productive," saying negotiators had reached some agreements that set a "good foundation" for a deal. Iran's side contradicted him almost immediately, saying it had made no new nuclear-related commitments in the talks.

• AP: Australian authorities announced the discovery of nearly 2.7 tons of methamphetamine buried in plastic tubs hidden beneath three shipping containers in Sydney — one of the largest drug seizures in Australian history. Two Sydney residents were arrested and face potential life sentences.

• NPR: Colombia woke up Monday to a sharp political turn to the right as Trump-endorsed Abelardo de la Espriella held a slim lead in the country's presidential runoff — a result his opponent is challenging. A de la Espriella victory is expected to reverse the agenda of outgoing left-wing President Gustavo Petro on security, economy, and peace negotiations with armed groups.

• Futurism: Not that anyone in power is going to care, but there’s even more evidence that Americans are coming to overwhelmingly loathe AI — despite, or perhaps because, they’re using chatbots more than ever. In a sweeping new poll conducted by Pew Research, only 16 percent of respondents said they believed AI will have a positive impact on society — a number as dismal as the perception of the tech.

• People: Jill Smokler, the founder of popular parenting website Scary Mommy, has died at 48. The New York Times bestselling author and mom of three died on Monday, June 22, after a more than two-year journey with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

• The Washington Post” He made a career of saving animals: 16,000 so far.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

This is the story of a 19th century chemistry discovery that affects our lives in many ways today, and that most people are completely unaware of.

Let’s change that, starting our narrative in 1852, when a boy named Henri Moissan was born in Paris.

The son of a railway employee and a seamstress, Moissan became an apprentice clockmaker, but then wound up in the army during the Franco-Prussian War (1870; saved you a Google). Afterward, he switched careers, so to speak, and became a trainee chemist in a pharmacy.

He apparently received some renown after saving a patient who had been poisoned with arsenic, and had the chance to go back to school — earning a doctoral level degree at age 28, in 1880.

This background placed Moissan perfectly to take up a quest that had flummoxed European chemists for more than 70 years at the time — the attempt to isolate an element that they were convinced existed, but that had never been directly observed.

This was fluorine — the last halogen anyone hadn’t managed to isolate, and the one that kept killing the people who tried.

I don’t think it’s too much to say some parts of the chemistry world at the time were obsessed with this question, to the point that several scientists chased after it to the point of serious injury or death:

• A Belgian chemist named Paulin Louyet tried to isolate it and died of poisoning.

• A Frenchman named Jérôme Nicklès tried next, knowing exactly what had happened to Louyet, and died the same way.

• Two Irish brothers, Thomas and George Knox, both attempted it in the 1830s; Thomas nearly died, and George was disabled for three years afterward.

Chemists started calling the dead and injured the “fluorine martyrs.”

None of them knew exactly what they were dying for; they just knew something was in that rock, and it was killing the people who went looking for it.

Fluorine, once freed from its compounds, is the most reactive element on the periodic table. It corrodes glass. It ignites substances that don’t normally burn. Every 19th-century chemist who went after it was handling something that wanted to combine violently with whatever it touched, including human tissue.

Using a borrowed laboratory, Moissan took up the quest.

Moissan built a custom electrolysis apparatus out of platinum and iridium, the only materials that could resist what he was trying to produce, sealed with stoppers carved from fluorite itself. He cooled the whole system to -50°C to slow the reaction down enough to survive it.

He poisoned himself with his own apparatus more than once.

Then, on June 26, 1886, he ran an electric current through a solution of potassium fluoride dissolved in hydrofluoric acid, inside his platinum apparatus, at fifty degrees below freezing. A pale yellow-green gas collected at one electrode.

Fluorine. Isolated, alone, for the first time in human history, after roughly seventy years of failed attempts and at least four deaths along the way.

The French Academy of Sciences sent three of its most distinguished members to confirm it. It held.

Moissan spent the following years studying the element’s properties and building an electric furnace capable of reaching temperatures over 3,000°C — itself a major advance, used to produce industrial compounds that had been impossible to create at lower heat.

In 1906 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The committee’s citation called fluorine “that savage beast among the elements” and praised the skill with which Moissan had tamed it.

He died the following February, at 54, officially of appendicitis, though some historians have wondered whether decades of fluorine and carbon monoxide exposure played a role.

None of the dead and disabled men of the 19th century actually knew what fluorine would be used for, of course. So here’s a list of some of the things their work led to:

• Roughly a fifth of modern pharmaceutical drugs — including widely prescribed antidepressants and cholesterol medications — contain fluorine atoms, added because they make the drugs more stable and effective in the body.

• Hydrofluoric acid, a fluorine compound, etches the silicon wafers inside every computer chip and smartphone on Earth.

• Teflon — chemically inert, heat-resistant, used in everything from frying pans to surgical implants to spacecraft components — exists because fluorine chemistry exists.

• Fluoride compounds in toothpaste and drinking water prevent tooth decay for billions of people.

• Uranium hexafluoride, the only stable, gaseous uranium compound, is what makes uranium enrichment for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible at industrial scale.

Granted, early refrigerants made from fluorine compounds were celebrated for being inert and non-toxic—but they turned out to be destroying the ozone layer. So, they were phased out worldwide starting in the late 1980s.

Very few people knew what was going on in Moissan’s borrowed lab 140 years ago this week. Heck, very few people know today! But now you’re an exception.

Thanks for reading.

Now that I’ve finished writing this newsletter on a chip-infused computer and you’re done reading it on your chip-infused smartphone, I’m off to make scrambled eggs in a nonstick pan and then brush my teeth.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 21: “I was singing to God and I was saying that God was the Tambourine Man and I was saying to him, ‘Hey, God, take me for a trip and I’ll follow you.’ It was a prayer of submission.” — Roger McGuinn, lead singer of the Byrds, describing the spiritual undertone behind the band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the opening track of their debut album of the same name, released on this day in 1965.

• June 22: “One more of the emotionally charged and at times dramatic pages in Berlin’s post-war history has been turned.” — Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, speaking at the ceremony in Berlin on this day in 1990, when a crane lifted the guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie off its foundation and carried it away.

• June 23: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” — The full text of Title IX, signed into law on this day in 1972. The law is best known today for transforming women’s college athletics.

• June 24: “It came spasmodically from a chain of nine circular-type aircraft way up from the vicinity of Mount Rainier... [like] “a saucer if you skip it across water.” — Kenneth Arnold, an Idaho pilot and search-and-rescue volunteer, describing what he saw on this day in 1947. Newspapers garbled his description into “flying saucers,” a phrase that didn’t exist the day before and has never left it since.

• June 25: “How proud Anne would have been if she had lived to see this.” — Otto Frank, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, on the publication of his daughter’s diary in the Netherlands on this day in 1947, under the title Het Achterhuis — “The Secret Annex.”

• June 26: “History will honor you for it.” — President Harry Truman, addressing the delegates of 50 nations who had just signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco on this day in 1945, seven weeks before the war in the Pacific finally ended.

• June 27: “Captain, our adventures have been a little different.” — Theodore Roosevelt, greeting Joshua Slocum, the first person in history to sail solo around the world, who had completed his voyage on this day in 1898 after more than three years and 46,000 miles alone aboard a 37-foot rebuilt oyster boat. Slocum’s reply: “That is true, Mr. President, but I see you got here first.”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Life Story Magic

One more reminder that Father’s Day is Sunday, and if you’re looking for a great last-minute gift, it’s hard to beat Life Story Magic for $299!

What is Life Story Magic?

• It’s the best way to preserve your most important stories quickly and completely.

• I sit down with you or a loved one over video and conduct a 90-120+ minute interview.

• You get the full video, professional transcript, and short, shareable reels, usually within 24 hours.

Special Offer: Life Story Magic $299

Free for ALL Friday!

How a Book Editor and Jazz Musician Lives on $55,000 in West Harlem

A 25-year-old tenth-generation New Yorker shows how to stretch $55,000 in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

Perhaps Ruby Pucillo’s number one bragging right is that she’s a tenth-generation New Yorker, one whose ancestors have lived thriftily in the boroughs since they first immigrated to New York City more than 300 years ago. Ms. Pucillo, 25, has tried to carve out a life for herself that would mirror her family’s ideals of spending little and living a lot. But because the city her relatives arrived in generations ago now ranks among the most expensive in the world, that can present a challenge. Ms. Pucillo’s 9 to 5 is working as an assistant editor at Abrams, an art book publishing house. After a recent promotion, her salary was bumped up to about $48,500 before taxes. On many a weeknight, and sometimes on Saturdays, Ms. Pucillo performs as an improv jazz musician. She studied music and loves to play, but the amount she makes fluctuates—sometimes netting her upward of $1,000 in a month, other times $25, often something in the middle. On Sundays, Ms. Pucillo travels back to where she grew-up, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., to teach French and give voice lessons for $350 a month. All told, she makes about $55,000 a year.

Ms. Pucillo lives in a rent-stabilized prewar apartment with two roommates in West Harlem. Rent runs her about $1,460 a month, including utilities and internet. “I spend more than half my income on my rent,” Ms. Pucillo said. “But I really like my apartment, and I live on the most beautiful block in Manhattan. Community is completely free.” After rent is paid, Ms. Pucillo diligently tracks the leftovers of her paychecks on a spreadsheet on her computer; she can account for almost every cent. Each month, she spends $300 or less on groceries and $140 of her gross monthly income goes toward public transit, using a pretax subsidy her job offers.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

Humans vs. Bots — Who Does the Em Dash Better?

Chatbots are appropriating our most common rhetorical tics. Yet when it comes to language, human creativity can’t be beat.

The first em dash in my novel appears within the initial paragraph—to set off an aside about soap—followed soon by a second, closing off the aside. The first em dash in my story collection is different—my teenage narrator has an observation to share. For a long time, the em dash has been a cherished part of my repertoire as a writer—my favorite punctuation mark, even. If the comma, the semicolon and the period each approximate the breaths a politician takes while delivering an eloquent speech, the em dash represents a mind wandering off course. It’s the people’s punctuation mark. That is, it used to be. These days, I’m more likely to encounter an em dash in someone’s ChatGPT-produced LinkedIn post than in literature. There’s an overeager jauntiness to its latest incarnation, as if it’s trying to sell you something: The em dash isn’t just functional—it’s profound.

All this has inspired a debate: Is the em dash still a worthy punctuation mark, or has chatbot output devalued it? On one side, there are online vigilantes attacking any content punctuated with horizontal lines and students on Reddit advising one another to purge their college applications of them. On the other side stand the half-dozen-plus essays in defense of the em dash, including one in Air Mail that consists almost entirely of a compilation of quotes from people rhapsodizing about it. This one from the writer Lili Anolik sums up the vibe: “Asking a writer to give up the em dash is like asking a carpenter to give up the screwdriver.”

Link: New York Times (Vauhini Vara)

A New Generation of Moms Who Get High

A new generation of mothers is using cannabis to manage the impossible demands of modern parenthood

Taylor Mitchem’s baby was born in March 2020. By the time they both left the hospital, the world had shut down. Mitchem had no extended family nearby, no friends who could visit. Her husband was around, but because he was nervous about the newborn’s fragility, she felt responsible for most of the child care. Her postpartum days were endless and isolating, the challenges heightened by the day-to-night transition of infant care, she said—”seeing the sun come up and then seeing the sun go down and knowing you’re in it, nowhere to go, no escape.” Eventually, infant pressures were replaced by toddler demands; she still felt isolated and yearned for support even more. Before pregnancy and breastfeeding, Mitchem told me, she sometimes turned to weed to feel more balanced when she struggled with anxiety and ADHD. So by the time her kid was two and a half, she decided to resume her old morning ritual: She began to smoke daily—”gardening,” as she calls it. Parenting, she said, became less stressful. “Life is hard,” she said. “If you can have something that can take the edge off a little bit, why not?”

Mitchem, a 36-year-old based in Colorado, now calls herself a “garden momma.” She posts about her cannabis routine to more than 120,000 followers on TikTok, where more than 76,000 videos feature the “#gardenmom” label. “Coffee and coughy,” a morning ritual of smoking before the children wake up, is a common genre; other videos show moms using cannabis during nap time or before the dinner-bath-bedtime witching hour. For some, posting about the lifestyle has led to influencer status and brand partnerships; many garden moms use the same Millennial-chic glass gravity bongs, sharing discount codes and #ad hashtags. As these women frame it, cannabis is not escape but preparation, the “medicine” they need to take before their work as mothers begins.

Link: The Atlantic (Sarah Levy)

A Struggling Motorcycle Brand Wants to Start a Culture War With Harley-Davidson

A struggling motorcycle brand tries to win market share through anti-DEI politics rather than better bikes

Motorcycle marketing usually relies on familiar themes. A lonely highway. A scenic vista. A growling engine. In a recent social-media video, Minnesota-based Indian criticized its larger and more prosperous competitor Harley for making electric motorcycles, moving some production to Thailand and embracing diversity, equity and inclusion programs. “They chased political trends,” a narrator said of Harley in a tone reminiscent of a campaign-attack ad. “We back the people who matter.” The video followed nearly two weeks of social-media commentary from conservative influencers denouncing Harley and praising Indian—a dynamic that echoed previous campaigns against such companies as Cracker Barrel and Deere.

The attack by Indian appeared to have minimal results. On Tuesday, a day after Indian’s video dropped, Harley said it was bringing some bike production back from Thailand to the U.S., a move it said would create dozens of new jobs. Praise from the Trump administration followed. “AMERICAN MANUFACTURING WIN!” the White House posted on X. Harley said in a statement that its “only agenda is getting back to basics,” and so far it appears unscathed. Its share price has risen 6% since the clamor began. On Wednesday, a group of Harley dealers issued a letter praising the leadership of Chief Executive Artie Starrs and condemning “divisive narratives.”

Link: Wall Street Journal (John Keilman)

Scores Fall Ill at Air Force Base After Hegseth Makes Flu Vaccine Optional

A flu outbreak at a training base highlights the risks of making military vaccines voluntary

A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said. The outbreak at the base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables. A trainee in his sixth week of basic training died after falling ill on Friday and being taken to Brooke Army Medical Center, the Air Force said in a news release. It was not immediately clear whether the death of the trainee, Keon McDaniel, was related to the flu outbreak. A comprehensive medical review into his death is underway to determine the cause, according to the Air Force.

Mr. Hegseth cast his decision to make the flu vaccine optional as a matter of religious freedom and medical autonomy. “Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” he said in a video announcing his decision in April. He described the flu vaccine requirement as an “absurd, overreaching” mandate that had served to “weaken our warfighting capabilities.”

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

Iran Gets Major Economic Lifeline for Minimal Concessions in Initial Deal

The agreement delays the most difficult steps for Iran for later talks, while granting it crucial benefits now

An initial agreement by the United States and Iran to halt their war grants Iran major economic benefits while delaying, for now, the thorniest areas of disagreement between the two countries and the toughest concessions Iran would have to eventually make on its nuclear program. The agreement lifts the U.S.-imposed naval blockade of Iranian ports and, most crucially, grants Iran waivers to begin exporting its oil even before the negotiation of a final agreement on its nuclear program. That will give Iran a critical economic lifeline. In recent years, its economy has been in a tailspin, with a collapsing currency and sky-high inflation. The one major step to be taken by Iran is reopening the Strait of Hormuz to free passage for the next 60 days, though the agreement seems to leave open the possibility of charging fees after that period.

“On balance, the memorandum appears to favor Iran,” said Nicole Grajewski, who teaches at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in France and studies Iran’s foreign policy. “Tehran secures movement toward sanctions relief, a pathway for the restoration of oil exports, access to economic benefits and a reduction in military pressure while making relatively limited new nuclear commitments.” But many of the most difficult concessions that the United States sought have been postponed, she said, though it is possible a future agreement could rebalance each side’s concessions and gains.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

A $40 Million Gold Heist Risks Exposing CIA’s Top-Secret Spy Programs

A CIA official allegedly walked out with $40 million in gold bars, risking exposure of the agency’s most sensitive operations

Five decades ago, four burglars broke into a billionaire’s safe, setting off a chain of events that exposed and foiled one of the CIA’s most ambitious operations against the Soviets. Now, Central Intelligence Agency veterans are worried that another seemingly brazen heist—this time allegedly committed by a CIA official—could expose another top-secret program, after authorities say the official walked out of his office with $40 million in gold bars. The CIA’s David Rush, arrested in May on charges of theft of public money, was a senior supervisor in the agency’s science and technology division. That unit designs the spycraft tools agents use to intercept conversations, procure clandestine photographs and communicate. Rush hasn’t been indicted or publicly responded to the charges in court. He operated a highly classified intelligence program approved by Congress several years ago to use large quantities of cash to obtain critical information about American adversaries, according to people familiar with the matter, and held a rank that is the CIA’s equivalent of an army general.

The case has shone a spotlight on the way the agency conducts its business, and some former CIA officials said details of the legitimate clandestine operations he ran would inevitably surface. The case echoes the circumstances surrounding a 1974 case of a robbery at eccentric aerospace businessman Howard Hughes’ office, which ended up revealing a CIA effort to recover a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine. “You could start to see things exposed that shouldn’t be discussed, things that are real and truly sensitive,” said Mark Fowler, a former senior CIA officer who ran spying operations against Iran.

Link: Wall Street Journal (Joel Schectman)

A Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial. I’m Its First Target

Peter Thiel’s latest venture uses AI to adjudicate disputes against journalists, raising questions about power and truth

For many journalists, blowback is just part of the business. The irate call to the editor or publisher, often expressed through the promise of litigation. The online pile-on, often expressed through personal invective. Occasionally, the threat of violence, often expressed through all-caps derangement. It’s rare to encounter a novel variant. But on April 21, I received a remarkable email. “Someone has filed an objection against something you wrote,” explained Austin Livingston, pointing me to a web page where Purdue Pharma heir Michael Sackler, a film financier and self-styled ethical investor, had paid a new tech startup—fittingly called Objection—to assess the legitimacy of a skeptical article I’d published about him and his business in The Hollywood Reporter five years earlier.

I perused the web page, designated “Sackler v Baum (2026).” It featured a countdown clock ticking toward an apparent verdict. Then I read up on the company, which is backed by the prominent right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who waged a legal war against Gawker Media after it published coverage about his business interests and personal life which upset him. The effort led to the outlet’s demise. At first glance, Objection seemed to be a kangaroo court catering to rich and infamous plaintiffs, the latest service in the lucrative sector of digital reputation management. Objection’s Founder and CEO is Aron D’Souza, an Australian entrepreneur and provocateur best known as the mastermind behind Thiel’s litigation strategy against Gawker, which involved a patient, extensive search for the ideal proxy plaintiff to sink the online news outlet. The campaign, quietly funded by the tech investor, culminated in Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion-of-privacy suit and ultimately helped force Gawker into bankruptcy.

Link: The Hollywood Reporter (Gary Baum)

The Black Soldiers Who Changed the Meaning of the Civil War

These troops helped transform a conflict fought initially to preserve the Union into one that destroyed slavery as well

In January 1865, not long after his march had reached the sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman held a remarkable meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Along with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Sherman spoke with a group of 20 Black ministers about slavery, the Civil War, and the world that was to rise from the ashes of both. Of the sentiments the Baptist Garrison Frazier voiced on behalf of the group, one in particular was repeated: the desire, as Frazier put it, “to assist the Government in maintaining our freedom,” by which he meant serving in the military. Since the beginning of the conflict, Black Americans had invested their hopes for freedom in the Union cause, through both their support of the military and their service within its ranks. Expressing that devotion, Frazier told Sherman and Stanton that “if the prayers that have gone up for the Union army could be read out, you would not get through them these two weeks.”

On the eve of Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the military order that affirmed emancipation in Texas, such connections are under strain. Pete Hegseth has taken up Edwin M. Stanton’s title as “secretary of war” but not quite his mantle. As my colleague Clint Smith writes in the July issue of The Atlantic, Hegseth has been at work supporting the administration’s project of “delegitimizing the accomplishments—and the very presence—of Black people in the military.” In addition to Hegseth blocking the advancement of Black senior officers and presiding over the restoration of Confederate memorials, the Department of Defense has removed tributes to Black heroes in the Pentagon and on department webpages.

Link: The Atlantic (Jake Lundberg)

Thanks for reading, and Happy Father’s Day to all the dads and granddads out there. Just to save you scrolling all the way to the top, here’s the Life Story Magic offer again. See you in the comments!

Special Offer: Life Story Magic $299

Share

Leave a comment

Tell me: Do these situations sound familiar?

• You’re telling a story, and right in the middle of it, the specific word you want simply isn’t there.

• You know exactly what you’re trying to say, but what comes out is “you know, the thing.”

• Someone asks you a question and you pause — genuinely pause — hunting for a word you’ve used a thousand times.

If so, you’re not alone. A new study from Baycrest, the University of Toronto, and York University suggests those moments might suggest more than we realized.

The study, published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, ran two experiments.

In the first, researchers recorded 67 healthy older adults, aged 65 to 75, who had to describe complex pictures aloud.

They also completed standard tests of executive function, the list of mental skills that govern memory, planning, and flexible thinking.

In the second experiment, they expanded to 174 healthy adults spanning ages 18 to 90.

Using machine learning, they analyzed hundreds of subtle speech features across all those recordings. These included things like pauses, filler words like “uh” and “um,” timing patterns, and moments of word-finding difficulty.

Then they compared those features to how people actually scored on the cognitive tests.

The connection was consistent and independent of age, sex, and education. The strongest signal came from speech disfluencies specifically — the pauses and stumbles that happen when a word won’t come.

Those predicted executive function scores across the full adult lifespan, not just among older participants.

“The message is clear,” said senior author Jed Meltzer of Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. “Speech timing is more than just a matter of style, it’s a sensitive indicator of brain health.”

The practical problem with existing dementia screening is that standard cognitive tests are hard to repeat reliably.

People get better at them with practice, which makes it difficult to track whether someone is actually changing over time.

Speech doesn’t have that problem. Everyone produces it every day, naturally, without effort — even though another recent study suggests we’re all speaking a lot less than we used to. It requires no clinical setting and no formal test. It could theoretically be tracked over time, which is what makes it interesting as a monitoring tool.

“This research sets the stage for exciting opportunities to develop tools that could help track cognitive changes in clinics or even at home,” Meltzer said in a press release. “Early detection is critical for any cure or intervention, as dementia involves progressive degeneration of the brain that may be slowed.”

Heather Whitson, a neuroscience professor at Duke School of Medicine who was not involved with the study, noted in other coverage that language difficulty is one of the most consistently observed features across all dementia types.

“Difficulty finding common words is a feature that we look for, and that we know occurs,” she said.

The sample sizes here are modest — 67 people in the first experiment, 174 in the second — and both studies measured participants at only one point in time. The researchers are explicit that longitudinal studies, following the same people over time, are needed before any of this becomes a usable clinical tool.

So, this is promising early work, not a finished answer.

Also, I want to add a note of reassurance before anyone reading this spirals: Everyone stumbles on words sometimes.

A lot of people naturally speak with plenty of “ums” and “uhs” for reasons that have nothing to do with cognitive decline—nervousness, personality, speaking style, the fact that they’re genuinely thinking carefully before they talk.

The researchers here are looking for patterns, measured against an individual’s own baseline over time.

That’s also why a real longitudinal study would be so welcome. A single snapshot of how you speak today can’t tell you much, but how your speech changes over time compared to your own prior speech—that’s where the signal would live.

Oh, and remember that Meltzer specifically mentioned the hope for “cure or intervention” as opposed to just getting warning signs of cognitive decline.

“The single best thing you can do is go on a walk with your friend,” Meltzer told a Canadian television program.

Taken all together, that’s one of those things you might call — oh wait, what’s the word?

Hopeful.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: President Trump’s Iran deal has opened an explosive second front in MAGA’s civil war, waged by hawkish allies who view U.S. concessions as an existential betrayal of Israel. Many of the critics are careful not to attack Trump himself. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called on “the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance,” to come before Congress to defend it.

• Bloomberg: In a little over a week, Elon Musk’s net worth has increased by more than $600 billion. That’s about the combined net worth of the second- and third-wealthiest people in the world — Google guys Larry Page at $317 billion and Sergey Brin at $295 billion. The SpaceX IPO is also “truly subjecting passive investing to an epic test” because ordinary Americans’ retirement and investment accounts are now so dominated by stakes in just a few enormous companies.

• NPR: UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited Port-au-Prince as a new international “gang-suppression force” prepares to deploy to Haiti, where gang violence has killed 2,300 people and led to another 100 kidnappings so far this year.

• NBC News: A Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was abruptly postponed Wednesday after Trump said he was “cancelling it” over a political dispute with Democrats — an unusual intervention into his own nominee’s confirmation process.

• Fox News: Investigators examining Monday's fatal B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base are focusing on the bomber's engines and controllability; the aircraft had been undergoing a radar modernization test mission when it went down, killing all eight aboard.

• ESPN: The four World Cup matches on Tuesday set a new record for the most attended day in the history of the tournament. A new mark of 281,223 eclipsed the previous record of 277,070 set at the 1994 World Cup in the United States, which also featured four matches.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists used genome editing to block red pigment production in lettuce, causing other beneficial plant compounds to build up instead — and the lettuce continued growing normally. Researchers say the technique points toward a new way to engineer produce with boosted nutritional properties without affecting yield.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

The other day, I looked at the cars in our driveway and did some quick math.

My wife drives a 2015 Honda CR-V. I drive a 2014 Ford Explorer. Between the two of us, we’re sitting on 23 years of car.

No car payments, no dealership negotiations—and no particular hurry to change that.

Now, a new report suggests we’re trendier than we imagined.

According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly one million prospective customers have simply left the new car market since 2020. By most industry projections, they’re not coming back anytime soon.

Americans were buying around 17 million cars and trucks last decade; analysts now expect something closer to 16 million this year.

Often overlooked but worth noting: the United States also has between 22 and 26 million more residents now than it did back in 2016.

The average new car now runs $50,000. The average age of cars on U.S. roads is 13 years old, a historic high. So our Honda fits right in, and our Ford isn’t far off, either.

“I don’t want to say automakers are OK with this level of sales,” Ivan Drury of Edmunds told the Journal. “But they kind of are.”

The reason: Selling fewer trucks and SUVs at $50,000-plus is more profitable than selling more of yesterday’s cheaper cars.

About a million buyers seem unimpressed by their math.

One frustrated car shopper quoted in the Journal described walking away in sticker shock. Rather than buy new, he concluded he’d “do what everybody else is doing and just hold on to my vehicle as long as I can.”

Granted, our situation might be different if either my wife or I had any kind of commute to speak of. But, we don’t.

We live somewhere with good public transit into the city, Uber covers almost everything else. For airport runs, rideshare is usually faster and comparable in cost to parking.

I bought the Explorer on a whim after one too many days when we both needed a car at the same time.

The Explorer (used) solved that — and, importantly, I could buy it for cash.

As for the Honda, we bought it when my daughter was little. We didn’t have much time to shop, and it came down to the Honda and a couple of other options.

I spent a day counting how many old Hondas, Toyotas, Mazdas, and other makes I saw still on the road.

Let’s not over-complicate this, I thought; just do what everybody else is doing.

Why haven’t we bought a new car since Barack Obama was president? I’d turn my rhetorical question around and ask: Why would we?

Even as the odometers reach six figures, they’re paid off, they require lower insurance payments than newer cars, and they’re in good shape (knock on wood, that’s all I need is to jinx myself).

Sure, they have a few scratches here and there, but that’s a feature, not a bug — you stop caring when someone dings you in a parking lot.

I have zero concern about, for example, leaving it in the garage at MetroPark for probably 12 or 14 hours next week, when I take Amtrak down to Philadelphia for a World Cup game. Come to think about it, the ticket cost me roughly what a car payment likely would, if I had a car payment.

The Ford is particularly good at the things I actually use a car for: long family road trips, ski weekends, hauling gear.

Also, a middle-aged guy can daydream about someday taking a multi-day ski trip camping out of the back of it, even if that probably won’t happen.

Nothing about a $60,000 vehicle with built-in subscriptions, over-the-air updates, and AI-era data collection apparatuses running in the background makes me want to trade up to that.

Also completely absent: any social pressure to do otherwise.

There was a time — I think this was a real thing, not a myth — when people thought the car in your driveway might have said something about where you’d arrived in life. That feeling seems largely gone, at least in my experience.

Nobody is looking at a 2014 Explorer and drawing conclusions.

If they are, I’m happily oblivious — and that’s probably the better deal anyway.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• WSJ Editorial Board: Trump Stages an Iran Retreat: The regime gets financial relief to reopen Hormuz and hold more nuclear talks. “Iran’s new leaders are likely to conclude that Mr. Trump has no desire for more conflict, and they will negotiate accordingly. Congress should scrutinize any final agreement Mr. Trump makes with Iran—and reject it if it props up a regime that still says ‘death to America.’”

• NPR: Britain will ban children under 16 from social media platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, following Australia's lead as the first country to impose such a ban. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal will not be affected.

• CBS News: The FBI disrupted a plot to attack Sunday’s UFC fight night at the White House with explosives-laden drones and gunfire, according to court papers unsealed Tuesday. A 19-year-old Ohio man named in the affidavit, Tycen Proper, allegedly told investigators he intended to “jump-start” a revolution.

• MSNBC: Secret Service officials are angry that FBI Director Kash Patel jumped the gun by publicly announcing the case Tuesday on Twitter (née X) before all suspects were in custody, according to three people familiar with the matter.

• NPR: G7 leaders pushed Tuesday to bring the war in Ukraine back to the top of Trump's agenda at the summit in France, after months in which the Iran conflict overshadowed it. Hours before the summit opened, Russia fired hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at Ukrainian cities, killing 11 people.

• Democracy Now!: A Ukrainian drone strike set Russia's Moscow oil refinery ablaze Tuesday — a facility that normally supplies nearly half the fuel used in Russia's capital. The attack came one day after Ukraine officially began EU accession negotiations in Luxembourg, a process unlocked after Hungary's new government lifted its longstanding veto on Ukraine's membership bid.

• NPR: South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, whose 1974 song "Mannenberg" became an anti-apartheid anthem that reportedly inspired Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment, has died at 91. Ibrahim performed at Mandela's 1994 inauguration; Mandela reportedly called him "our Mozart."

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

One thing to know about me is that I talk to everyone, all the time.

Last summer, my family stayed at a motel on Cape Cod for a few days. On the first morning, we desperately wanted coffee. I remembered there was a pot going all the time in the front office, so I volunteered to go.

That was around 8:00 a.m. At 9:30, my wife came looking for me—and found me deep in conversation with the woman behind the counter:

• How she came to work at a motel …

• Where she was from, other jobs she’d had, how Cape Cod had changed …

• Her relationship with her kids …

I got caught up, as always happens. In fact, I have a business called Life Story Magic (you may have heard of it?), where the entire point is to interview people’s parents and grandparents on video to capture their life stories—because I love having conversations.

It turns out that I am apparently an even bigger outlier than I realized, and that the gap between me and everyone else is only getting wider.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona analyzed audio recordings from 2,197 people between the ages of 10 and 94 across 22 studies conducted between 2005 and 2019, and found something that surprised even them.

Each year during that period, people spoke an average of 338 fewer words per day than the year before.

Over the full span, daily spoken words dropped about 28 percent, from roughly 16,600 to about 11,900.

Published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, the data was originally buried in a larger paper on gender differences in talkativeness. The researchers themselves almost missed it.

Multiply 338 fewer words per day times 365 days. That works out to 123,370 fewer spoken words per year.

That’s roughly the word count of To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, or the first Twilight novel.

Each year, the conversations we’re no longer having would fill a novel.

As I told the researchers in an email (asking to get the full text of their study and taking advantage of a rare opportunity to insert a Dad Joke into a discussion about Perspectives on Psychological Science), their work really spoke to me.

They say they can identify the trend but can’t fully explain it.

Technology is an obvious suspect, since the decline coincides with the rise of texting, social media, and smartphones.

But the fact that older adults are losing words suggests something broader is going on.

My own theories:

• More people are working from home, which eliminates the ambient conversation of offices and commutes.

• Fewer people are going out for lunch, alone or with others.

• Delivery apps remove the need to speak to anyone to get food.

• Add to all that the AirPod effect—the way headphones have made it socially acceptable, or even expected, to be unreachable in public spaces where strangers used to talk.

Do all of those factors combine to explain a 28-percent drop? Does it really matter, anyway?

“When we speak less, we connect less,” those researchers put it. “With every lost word we wear away our connections with others.”

In retrospect, that’s so on-the-nose. Lead researcher Valeria Pfeifer offered a fix at the time: “If each of us just talked to one more person each day, we could reverse this trend.”

You don’t have to get a stranger’s whole life story; leave that to me.

But a few words here and there might make a difference.

A final note, which made me laugh: The Wall Street Journal ended their coverage of this story with the line: “Do you think you’re talking less than you used to? Join the conversation below.”

Good advice, for more reasons than one.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• NBC News: The U.S. and Iran have reached an initial agreement to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The deal includes a 60-day negotiating window on nuclear issues, with $24 billion in frozen Iranian funds to be released during that period — and a requirement for the U.S. and its allies to present reconstruction plans for Iran worth at least $300 billion.

• WSJ: An emboldened Justice Department is ramping up efforts to investigate and prosecute more than four dozen of President Trump’s perceived enemies. “The entire premise of this article is laughable — the mainstream media turned a blind eye when Joe Biden weaponized his Department of Justice against his political opponents,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.

• Mediaite: UFC fighter Josh Hokit was slapped with a wave of backlash after he called former First Lady Michelle Obama a man following his match at Trump’s fight night on the White House lawn. Leading up to the event, UFC President Dana White had insisted the event was apolitical and merely a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

• NBC News: Day 5 of the World Cup produced a string of upsets. Spain — a tournament favorite — was held to a scoreless draw by Cape Verde, the most stunning result of the tournament so far. Saudi Arabia drew 1-1 with Uruguay, and Iran tied New Zealand 2-2 in a match being played in the U.S. on the same day the war with Iran formally ended. The U.S. won its opener 4-1 against Paraguay last week and plays Australia on Friday.

• Inc: Women taking GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy were roughly 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than women who weren’t, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania.

• Science Daily: Beneath our feet lies a vast hidden fungal superhighway — and scientists have now mapped it for the first time. The mycorrhizal network stretching an estimated 68 quadrillion miles connects the roots of most plants on Earth, transferring nutrients and carbon between trees and other plants. Researchers say the map reveals which forests are most dependent on the network and most vulnerable to disruption from logging and climate change.

• MarketWatch: The current wave of spending by the wealthy looks so strong that companies are responding by raising prices and adopting business plans that cater to the elite — a dynamic that will make it difficult to bring inflation down. The tools the Federal Reserve uses to combat inflation typically have a more pronounced impact on low-income Americans.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

This week’s essay opens in one of the most horrible places in the history of the world, and with a short story that two groups of people experienced very differently at the time.

The first group is very hard to have any empathy for: a group of SS guards at the main gate at Auschwitz on June 20, 1942.

Whoever they were, they were nervous and afraid: One of them looked up to see the car belonging to camp commandant Rudolf Höss idling in front of him, waiting for them to open the barrier.

An officer inside — an Untersturmführer according to his rank insignia, roughly equivalent to a lieutenant — leaned out the window and screamed at them: “Wake up, you buggers! Open up or I’ll open you up!”

The guards, rattled, scrambled to raise the barrier. The car drove through.

The second group of people? The men inside the car.

They were not in fact Nazi officers; they were four Auschwitz prisoners in the midst of one of the most daring escapes you’ll ever learn about. Their names:

• Kazik Piechowski, 22, who had been an Eagle Scout imprisoned at Auschwitz for two years. (Boy Scouts were targeted early on; apparently the Nazis feared them as young men with strong feelings of patriotism).

• a Polish priest named Józef Lempart.

• a young resistance courier named Stanisław Jaster.

• Eugeniusz Bendera, a mechanic who worked in the camp’s motor pool repairing SS vehicles, who had been placed on a list for execution — spurring the escape plan to begin with.

They had stolen the car, the uniforms, and Nazi guns and hand grenades, but they had pledged that they would not kill any Germans on the way out—out of hard-earned confidence that no matter what they might do to hurt the Nazis, the Nazis would enact far greater vengeance on their fellow prisoners.

It was Piechowski who spoke German, and who wore the lieutenant’s uniform, and who yelled at the gate guards. Had they not complied, all four men had decided to shoot each other rather than risk recapture and retribution.

Exactly 2 years

Auschwitz was the largest Nazi killing center. Of roughly 1.3 million people sent there, an estimated 1.1 million died — most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.

Piechowski had arrived two years before, to the day, in the second transport ever sent to the camp, when it was still being built by the people imprisoned in it, after being caught trying to escape to Hungary.

He later described the first months as a kind of total shock — the starvation, the violence, prisoners forced to eat from the same bowl they used at night if they lost their spoon.

Their escape plan took almost absurd levels of nerve.

They disguised themselves as a work detail moving a cart, which gave them relative uninspected mobility in the camp. Then, they managed to sneak into a storeroom via a coal chute Piechowski had rigged so that it didn’t latch properly, and stole the Nazi uniforms, weapons — and Höss’s Steyr 220.

Besides simply escaping, they carried an intelligence report written by Witold Pilecki — a Polish army officer who had deliberately gotten himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz to organize resistance and smuggle information to the Polish underground.

Not over for a long time afterward

The barrier went up. They drove out of Auschwitz in the commandant’s car, in German uniforms, carrying German weapons, and nobody stopped them.

Forty miles away, they abandoned the car and split up. All four men survived the escape itself, although the German reprisals were in fact brutal.

Both Piechowski’s parents and Jaster’s were arrested by the Germans afterward and died at Auschwitz.

According to multiple accounts, the camp’s policy of tattooing prisoners with identification numbers — the practice most associated with Auschwitz today — was introduced partly in response to this escape, after a furious Höss demanded to know how four prisoners could vanish in his own car, wearing his own men’s uniforms, carrying his own ammunition.

Piechowski made his way toward Ukraine, couldn’t find safe refuge there, returned to Poland under a false name, and joined the Home Army — the main Polish underground resistance — fighting the Germans until the war ended in 1945.

Then, under the new Communist government that took power in Poland after the war, he was arrested again. Membership in the Home Army — the same resistance movement that had fought the Nazis — was now treated as evidence of disloyalty to the new regime. Piechowski was sentenced to ten years in prison.

He served seven.

Witold Pilecki

Honestly, Witold Pilecki deserves his own newsletter and then some; in short, he escaped Auschwitz himself in 1943, fought in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans, and then — like Piechowski — returned to Poland afterward.

He was arrested by the Communist secret police in 1947, accused of espionage, and executed in May 1948.

As for Piechowski, he lived to be 98. After Poland’s transition away from communism, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest civilian honor. For most of his life before that, almost nobody outside Poland had heard his story.

The optimism in this story isn’t that they escaped — most people who tried didn’t, and the four of them knew the odds better than anyone. It’s that faced with those odds, knowing exactly what failure would cost, they decided to try anyway. Sometimes fortune favors the bold.

Sometimes the boldness is the whole point, regardless of what fortune does.

Katy Carr

In 2009, a British singer-songwriter named Katy Carr — who has Polish roots on her mother’s side — learned about Piechowski’s escape and was struck by the details of the last 80 meters or so, the moment at the gate, the few seconds when the entire plan came down to whether four starving men in stolen uniforms could bluff their way past a single guard.

She wrote a song about it, called “Kommander’s Car,” and then traveled to Gdansk to meet Piechowski in person and play it for him. He had never had anyone do anything like that before, and Carr later made a documentary about the meeting and spent years afterward touring with the song and working to keep the story alive.

I met Katy Carr briefly years ago, when I was a reporter at Stars and Stripes, which is how I first heard about Piechowski’s story.

It wasn’t really a Stripes story, and I couldn’t write about it then. But I’m sure glad I knew it to share now.

I’ll admit I went back and forth on whether to write about something as terrible and sacred as Auschwitz in a newsletter that’s supposed to be about optimism. I’m not sure any of us is fully worthy of telling these stories.

But I think they’re worth knowing, and worth retelling, and so here we are.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 14: “We’ve had a terrible voyage. The wonder is we are here at all.” — Captain John Alcock,upon landing in a bog outside Clifden, Ireland, on June 15, 1919, after departing Newfoundland the previous afternoon with navigator Arthur Whitten Brown — completing the first nonstop transatlantic flight in history.

• June 15: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed... except by the lawful judgment of his peers.” — From the Magna Carta, sealed by King John at Runnymede on this day in 1215, under pressure from rebel barons who had seized London.

• June 16: “Hey sky, take off your hat, I’m on my way!” — Valentina Tereshkova, a 26-year-old former textile factory worker, as she launched aboard Vostok 6 on this day in 1963, becoming the first woman in space. She orbited the Earth 48 times over nearly three days.

• June 17: “I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.” — Amelia Earhart, describing her role as a passenger and logkeeper, aboard the Fokker trimotor Friendship, which on this day in 1928 became the first aircraft to carry a woman across the Atlantic. Earhart was embarrassed, since the flight made her famous, but she’d done none of the flying herself. Four years later, in 1932, she went back and did it solo.

• June 18: “I knew that women belonged there.” — Sally Ride, who on this day in 1983 became the first American woman in space, launching aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger as a mission specialist.

• June 19: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” — General Order No. 3, read aloud by Union Major General Gordon Granger and his troops on this day in 1865 — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and more than two months after the Confederacy’s surrender.

• June 20: "This age of fast-moving events requires quick, dependable communications for use in time of emergency." — President John F. Kennedy, on this day in 1963, the day American and Soviet negotiators signed the agreement creating the Washington-Moscow hotline. The first message was a typing test: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Life Story Magic — Take 2!

Quite a few readers had trouble with the offer code for Life Story Magic yesterday!

That’s what I get for trying to be fancy among friends. Instead, let’s make it easy:

• We’re celebrating Life Story Magic’s half-birthday and Father’s Day.

• Understandably readers get Life Story Magic for $299 — that’s 40% off the regular price.

• No offer code needed. No trying to find the right discount link. Just click through and buy.

Special Offer: Life Story Magic $299

What is Life Story Magic?

It’s the best way to preserve your most important stories quickly and completely.

I sit down with you or a loved one over video and conduct a 90-120+ minute interview. You get the full video and transcript, usually within 24 hours.

Fifteen years of writing about business, I finally launch a startup of my own — and I still have to learn everything the hard way!

One thing I’ve decided about Life Story Magic: I’m building it in public. That means being honest about what’s working, what isn’t, and what I’m figuring out in real time.

It’s scary, but it lights a fire under me in a way that nothing else does. In that spirit — quick anonymous poll. All answers help me, I promise.

Special Offer: Life Story Magic $299

Free for ALL Friday!

How the Ultrarich Are Doing the World Cup

For the average soccer fan, the quest for 2026 World Cup tickets started last year. For the ultrarich, there’s no rush.

For the average soccer fan, the quest for 2026 World Cup tickets started last year when FIFA opened its Kafkaesque lottery system. Millions submitted bids as fast as their fingers could type in hopes of securing a reasonably priced seat to the sport’s world’s biggest tournament, then waited months to learn the outcome of their applications. The process has been far less stressful for the event’s wealthier fans. According to travel planners for the ultrarich, there’s no rush to secure tickets or book trips when money is no object. “They know that at their level they can get the top, top tier kinds of tickets and a private heli-transfer there and all the VIP access,” said Jackie DeAntonis, a private relationship manager for the higher-end division of luxury travel company Scott Dunn, which requires clients spend a minimum of $100,000 per year on trips.

For one of DeAntonis’s clients, a British couple, a World Cup game in Dallas inspired a larger 22-day vacation through the United States. The trip will begin on the East Coast, with private tours (food, whale watching, Paul Revere) and stays at properties where rates can easily top $1,000 per night during peak season. Then it’s off to Texas for the match. “That’s the shortest part of their itinerary,” DeAntonis said. The trip will continue west for more Americana adventure: national park visits with private guides; whitewater rafting; 5-star all-inclusive luxury ranch stays and mountain retreats. The cost for the hotels and guided tours bookending the World Cup game alone—excluding transportation—”is coming in around $130,000,” DeAntonis said.

Link: Washington Post (Natalie B. Compton) Backup: https://archive.ph/TZsx6

The 10-Year-Old Who Can Deadlift 180 Pounds

For these kid fitness influencers, pumping iron can feel like play

Lucy Milgrim rubbed chalk on her palms and positioned her pink and blue high-tops on the gym floor. She bent her knees, pushed her hips back and took a few deep breaths. Then, when her dad said go, she braced and dead-lifted a 145-pound barbell. Lucy is 10 years old and weighs 58 pounds. “My fingers can finally touch!” she said, showing how her grip wrapped around the bar.

Lucy started strength training when she was 8 years old, and she holds three American records in powerlifting. She is a champion wrestler, too. She is also the star of Instagram and TikTok accounts run by her parents, which together have 232,000 followers. Her most popular Instagram video, in which she dead-lifted 180 pounds at a powerlifting meet, her personal record, has been viewed over 67 million times and has 3.7 million likes.

Link: New York Times (Danielle Friedman)

He Thinks Netflix Accused Him of Murder. The Courts Disagree.

When a famed freediver sued over “No Limit,” his case looked strong. Proving it would require a more honest accounting of his life.

The closing minutes of “No Limit,” a French Netflix drama released in 2022, depict an apparent murder by sabotage. The film’s protagonists, Roxana Aubrey and Pascal Gautier, a couple, are stars in the niche sport of no-limits freediving, in which competitors descend hundreds of feet into the ocean without an external oxygen supply, requiring them to hold their breath for minutes at a time. Pascal is a no-limits legend. Though still a young man—he looks to be in his early 30s—he is a lion in winter. He suffers blackouts brought on by years of deep-sea diving. After he is told he can no longer compete, he comes to see the younger Roxana as an extension of himself. When another woman breaks his record, he presses her to claim the title. She agrees. But their relationship is turbulent, troubled by infidelity and professional jealousy. Roxana drowns during her record attempt when her balloon fails to inflate, and the film suggests Pascal is to blame: It was he, it seems, who emptied her air tank.

“No Limit” was a modest streaming success, but it soon became a problem for Netflix. Before the action in the film begins, viewers are told that what they’re about to see was “inspired by real events.” To many viewers, it had only one plausible true-life basis: the complicated marriage of the elite freedivers Audrey Mestre and Francisco Ferreras—and Mestre’s death in circumstances almost identical to those portrayed in “No Limit.” There is even a tribute at the end of the film: “In memory of Audrey Mestre, 1974-2002.” (Immediately after, another title card states that any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.)

Link: New York Times (Chris Pomorski)

The Testosterone Moment Is Here. And Men May Never Look the Same.

From the Trump administration to online influencers, the hormone is increasingly seen as the key to achieving a new male ideal.

In January, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, on her podcast. He was there to celebrate his MAHA victories, but he soon veered into the singular, seemingly indestructible biology of President Donald J. Trump. “He has the constitution of a deity,” Kennedy marveled. And the key to the president’s inexplicable vigor, Kennedy suggested, could be found in his hormones. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, had reviewed the president’s medical records, Kennedy said, and found that he had “the highest testosterone levels that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70.” As Miller laughed awkwardly, Kennedy leaned in with the air of a man sharing a locker room secret: “I know the president will be happy that I repeat that.”

Central to Kennedy’s image of male health—and his view of the health of the nation—is testosterone, the hormone that is a cultural proxy for masculinity. Testosterone levels have been slowly declining worldwide over recent decades, a trend that Kennedy has called an “existential” threat to humanity. Accordingly, his new federal nutritional guidelines suggest that men consider taking fish oil and vitamin D supplements to boost their testosterone levels. He himself goes a step further. Appearing on the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in 2023, when he was running for president, Kennedy answered a question about being in “great shape” by expounding on his diet and exercise regimen—and an “anti-aging protocol” including T.R.T., or testosterone replacement therapy.

Link: New York Times (Azeen Ghorayshi)

Billionaires’ Billions Are Increasing Faster Than Ever

Elon Musk’s potential new status as a trillionaire demonstrates in real time why there has been such a rapid rise in the concentration of wealth at the top

Fifteen years ago, the world’s billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion. By 2024, their wealth had more than tripled to $14.2 trillion. Now, their combined wealth totals $20.1 trillion—an amount that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output. The stunning figures—calculated by the French economist Gabriel Zucman, director of the International Tax Observatory, a research organization funded by the European Union—reveal more than a surprisingly rapid increase in the concentration of wealth at the tippy top. They also reflect a series of important global trends: the growing dominance of a few technology companies leading artificial intelligence development; the shrinking slice of the economic pie that goes to workers; and a deepening inequality that will be handed down to the next generation.

One reason for the sudden surge of growth at the peak of the wealth ladder is the boom in artificial intelligence, which has funneled trillions of dollars of capital investment into a small clutch of tech companies. Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, for example, are each worth more than $1 trillion. Their founders and early investors have reaped most of the financial gain. We can see it happening with SpaceX’s public offering—set to be the biggest in history. The anticipated Day 1 valuation of the company, whose shares are expected to begin trading on Friday, aims for $1.77 trillion. With 42 percent of the stock, Mr. Musk is poised to become an instant trillionaire.

Link: New York Times (Patricia Cohen)

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. Just to save you scrolling all the way to the top, here’s the Life Story Magic offer again. See you in the comments!

Special Offer: Life Story Magic $299

Share

Leave a comment

Time has flown by, and our little startup turned six months old this week.

To celebrate — and also because Father’s Day is a week from Sunday and Life Story Magic is a fantastic gift (and maybe an even better last-minute gift, hint, hint) — I have a quick update and a special offer code.

If you’re not familiar with Life Story Magic, the idea is simple: a professional interviewer does a remote video interview with a parent, grandparent, or other loved one (or with you—lots of people are using it to help record their own stories). You get the full recorded video and transcript, usually within 24 hours.

I’m grateful to some of our first customers who have given me testimonials and permission to share short samples from their interviews.

Like this one, in which a client I really enjoyed interviewing described what it was like for his family to leave the Midwest for California during the Great Depression.

(If you can’t see the video, you probably do not have images enabled!)

Most interviews run 90 to 120 minutes, so there's time to go deep.

This is just one example. You can find more interview excerpts on our new website, and I’ll be sharing a few more in the newsletter over the next several days.

Seriously: Do you have stories like that that kids, grandkids, or the world at large should know? If you’re fortunate enough to have older loved ones, do they have stories like this to tell?

To celebrate, I’m offering a Life Story Magic Anniversary/Father’s Day special for the first 25 customers who use code 6MONTHS at checkout.

You can purchase now and schedule the interview whenever it’s convenient.

Hope to help preserve your story—or a loved one's—soon.

On the other hand ...

When I was in sixth grade, I used to twist myself in knots with a hypothetical:

Would you rather live a shorter but happy, carefree life or a longer life that wasn’t quite so easy?

The instinct is to say the happy one. Who wants to be unhappy? Trading longevity for happiness seemed like a lopsided bargain.

Then again, I’d run around and take the other side of the argument:

What if unhappiness had its own value? What if worrying about things actually made you do things — useful things, meaningful things — that a carefree person wouldn’t bother with?

Didn’t that potentially be its own kind of happiness after all?

I was 11. Welcome to my world.

All these years later, a new study suggests it might not have been a pure hypothetical.

The evolution of worry

In a study published in the Science Bulletin, researchers were trying to solve a puzzle in personality psychology: neuroticism — the tendency toward worry, anxiety, and negative emotion — is consistently associated with worse health outcomes. More mental disorders, more chronic disease, higher mortality.

Yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, a species that didn’t worry would have died out long ago.

Worry is what keeps you from stepping in front of a bus.

So why does something that evolved to help us survive seem to kill us faster?

The answer, the researchers found, is that neuroticism isn’t really one thing. It’s two.

Two kinds of worry

Using a method that maps personality traits across a large population — drawing on health records, brain imaging, genome-wide data, and behavioral surveys covering many thousands of people from the UK Biobank — they identified two distinct dimensions running through neuroticism that work separately.

The first is what most people think of when they hear the word: general emotional distress. Mood instability, feelings of helplessness, and depression.

This dimension is associated with higher rates of mental illness and worse overall well-being.

No surprise there.

The second dimension is what the researchers call ERIS — Emotional Reactivity and Internal Stability.

At one end sit people prone to worry and anxiety. At the other end sit people prone to a kind of simmering fed-up-ness and mood swings.

High-ERIS individuals — the worriers — live significantly longer than people low in neuroticism overall because of what worry tends to make people do.

They go to the doctor more, avoid risky behaviors, and pay attention to diet.

This tracks with research I wrote about recently. Married people appear to have lower cancer rates, in part because spouses tend to notice when something is off and push their partners toward care they might otherwise skip.

So, anxiety works as a low-grade alert system that keeps people from ignoring things they probably shouldn’t ignore.

“Moderately worrying while maintaining emotional stability may indeed be nature’s gift for longevity,” the researchers wrote.

The ancient wisdom version

The study opens with an old Chinese proverb:

“Life springs from sorrow and calamity; death comes from ease and pleasure.”

Which is sort of what I was thinking in sixth grade.

A few caveats: this study is correlational, not a controlled experiment. Also, neuroticism at the clinical level — severe anxiety, chronic rumination — is still associated with worse outcomes.

Also, this research isn’t a license to catastrophize. The point is between productive, risk-aware anxiety and destabilizing emotional chaos. One appears to add years. The other doesn’t.

So, my childhood hypothetical turns out to be harder than it looked.

It’s not a simple trade of years for happiness, but two forces pulling in different directions, and you may not get to choose which one you’re wired for.

My sixth-grade self would have found that deeply unsettling.

But on the other hand …

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• AP: Trump threatened more strikes on Iran Wednesday as back-and-forth attacks continued to threaten the still-fragile truce. The U.S. military also fired on a tanker trying to transport oil out of Iran, the latest escalation since Tuesday’s retaliatory strikes over the downed helicopter. Iran’s armed forces warned that any repeat of “aggression against the Islamic Republic” would result in “more severe and widespread attacks.”

• CNBC: Inflation hit a three-year high in May, with the Consumer Price Index rising 4.2% year over year — the third consecutive monthly increase — driven almost entirely by the Iran war’s impact on energy prices. Gasoline is up 40.5% from a year ago. Real average hourly earnings fell 0.7% from a year earlier, the biggest drop in more than three years. Markets now expect no Federal Reserve rate cuts at all in 2026.

• CBS News: The Social Security Trustees’ annual report released Tuesday confirms the program’s main retirement fund is on track to run dry by the end of 2032 — at which point benefits would be automatically cut by 22%, reducing the average retiree’s monthly check by roughly $500. The report moved the insolvency date up three months from last year’s projection, partly because the Big Beautiful Bill reduced tax revenues flowing into the program.

• MSNBC: House Speaker Mike Johnson told a Louisiana radio station Monday that Republicans have a plan to "adjust and fix" Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — but won't unveil it until 2027, after the midterms.

• Fox Sports: The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off tomorrow, June 11, with Mexico vs. South Africa at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City — a repeat of the opening match of the 2010 tournament. The U.S. plays its opener against Paraguay on Friday night in Los Angeles. The 48-team, 104-game tournament runs through the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.

• AP: The two crew members of the Army Apache helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz were rescued by a Navy sea drone — the first time in U.S. military history an unmanned surface vessel has rescued personnel.

• ScienceDaily: Researchers have confirmed that Stonehenge's six-ton Altar Stone was deliberately transported by Neolithic humans from northeast Scotland — roughly 700 kilometers away — making it the longest known stone transport of any prehistoric monument.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Not long ago, my daughter and her friends wanted to go to a playground at a nearby park on a Saturday.

I try not to say her exact age in this newsletter, but let’s just say they’re all are at a stage where they’re old enough to be at the playground by themselves, but maybe not quite old enough to get themselves there unaccompanied.

So, I was on duty. They did their thing on the swings and slides and whatever while I walked a half-mile path around the park six or seven times, working two things:

• My ongoing obsession—taking Life Story Magic from the “cool thing I was doing on the side” stage to the “hey this is an actual business delighting lots of customers” stage. (More to come on all of this soon, probably tomorrow.)

• And, scanning scientific journals and other sources to find interesting things to write about — like, for example, this newsletter.

Lo and behold, I drank two milkshakes with one straw (nicer metaphor than killing birds, I think), and came across a study of Penn State suggests I was also doing something clever for my brain in the bargain, without even realizing it.

Writing in Nature Neuroscience, a team led by Patrick Drew, a professor of engineering science, mechanics, neurosurgery, and biomedical engineering (quick aside: I suddenly feel like I have a thin resume), say they’ve discovered how the brain is linked to the abdomen through a network of veins called the vertebral venous plexus.

When abdominal muscles contract—even mildly, as they do when you sit up, take a step, or walk around a park track—they compress those veins. That compression sends a small wave of pressure upward into the spinal canal, which causes the brain to shift gently within the skull.

Why should we care about this? Because, the theory goes, this is how the brain cleans itself of toxins.

“Our research explains how just moving around might serve as an important physiological mechanism promoting brain health.

When the abdominal muscles contract, they push blood from the abdomen into the spinal cord, just like in a hydraulic system, applying pressure to the brain and making it move…. It is thought the movement of fluid in the brain is important for removing waste and preventing neurodegenerative disorders. […]

[A] little bit of motion is good, and it could be another reason why exercise is good for our brain health.”

Francesco Costanzo, a similarly credentialed professor of engineering science and mechanics who led the computational modeling in the study, offered an analogy—the brain as a sponge:

“How do you clean a dirty sponge?” Costanzo said. “You run it under a tap and squeeze it out. In our simulations, we were able to get a sense of how the brain moving from an abdominal contraction can help induce fluid flow over the brain to help clear waste products.”

One thing to know about me is that I’m all about brain cleaning—at least since I learned that it was a thing.

It’s a niche interest, but fascinating to me, and it first developed after I came across a study (not while walking in a park) that suggests sleeping on your side, rather than on your back or stomach, appears to make glymphatic clearance more efficient.

Mind blown, at the risk of making a terrible pun. I found it fascinating that brain-cleaning could work in such a literal, physical way.

Then earlier this year, I covered another Nature Neuroscience study from MIT and Boston University showing that when sleep-deprived people lose focus momentarily, what’s happening is that their brains are forcing those same cleaning cycles during waking hours.

“If you don’t sleep, the CSF waves start to intrude into wakefulness where normally you wouldn’t see them,” said study co-author Laura Lewis. “However, they come with an attentional tradeoff, where attention fails during the moments that you have this wave of fluid flow.”

In other words, the brain gets so desperate for maintenance that it hijacks your attention to perform it.

Quick caveats:

The researchers in the walking study were working with mice, not humans. They used two-photon microscopy and Micro-CT imaging to watch living mouse brains shift in real time.

It’s hard to imagine replicating that with human beings walking park trails, building businesses, and looking for writing inspiration on their phones.

The team also built computer simulations to model how that movement drives fluid flow, and the physics are well-supported. However, whether the same mechanism operates at the same scale in humans hasn’t been confirmed yet.

So, don’t treat this as definitive proof that a 20-minute walk prevents neurodegeneration. It doesn’t establish that.

Still, it adds to a growing body of evidence that the brain’s maintenance systems are more physical, more mechanical, and more responsive to ordinary daily behavior than most people realize.

So, my daughter and her friend had a great afternoon. My business got a bit more efficient. And apparently, so did my brain.

All in all, a pretty nice Saturday.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• WaPo: The U.S. military launched retaliatory strikes against Iran on Tuesday evening after an Iranian drone downed a U.S. Army Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz — the most serious military exchange since the ceasefire.

• CNBC: The Trump family received about $500 million from their crypto venture World Liberty Financial — but the investors who bought in saw steep losses.

• Fortune: OpenAI filed confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC on Monday, joining rival Anthropic — which filed last week — in a race to the public markets. “We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the company said. OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion; Anthropic at $965 billion.

• AP: Apple's WWDC keynote Monday introduced Siri AI — a rebuilt conversational assistant powered by Apple Intelligence in partnership with Google — rolling out to iPhone 11 and newer devices with iOS 27. New features include natural back-and-forth dialogue, on-screen contextual awareness, and a dedicated Siri AI app with conversation history.

• Al Jazeera: Sudan's civil war, now entering its fourth year, has created what the UN is calling the world's largest hunger crisis — with 25 million people facing acute food insecurity and aid organizations warning that famine has taken hold in at least five regions.

• US News: U.S. power consumption hit its second straight record high in 2025 and will rise further in 2026 and 2027, the Energy Information Administration said. Demand is surging in part due to data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, and as homes and businesses increasingly use electricity instead of fossil fuels for heat and transportation.

• NPR: With only days remaining before the U.S. men’s national team opens its World Cup campaign against Paraguay, tickets for the match are not sold out. FIFA dramatically jacked up prices — the most expensive regular seats for the U.S. opener are priced at $2,735, more than the final cost for the 2022 World Cup final, while the cheapest are $1,120.

• AFP via Yahoo: Killing the mood: smartphones are reducing birth rates, multiple studies say.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Unpopular opinion: Bananas are kind of gross.

I know they’re among the most universally liked foods in America — a YouGov survey of more than 2,200 adults found that 82 percent of Americans like or love them. But I’m in that 18 percent, and I couldn’t change it if I wanted to.

In fairness, I’ve wanted to, especially when I got really into running and every third person you meet wants to give you a banana to restore your potassium.

It’s not the taste. It’s the texture — the way a ripe banana sort of collapses into itself, as if I were to take a bite out of one of my daughter’s Nee-Doh squishies.

Food psychologists apparently have a clinical term for this: the “gel-like matrix” that forms from pectin breaking down during chewing. I just call it unpleasant.

Sure enough, a separate study says roughly one in five people may avoid bananas primarily for textural reasons, which tracks almost exactly with the YouGov numbers. It’s not quite the same as the cilantro-tastes-like-soap phenomenon, which is genetic — and which I also have, for what it’s worth.

Banana aversion is more psychological and sensory, rooted in associations the brain locks in during childhood and then stubbornly refuses to update. Mine have apparently not updated.

The reason I’m oversharing all of this is that a new study just came out of UC Davis that made me feel vindicated in a way I never expected.

Food and function

Published May 24 in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Food & Function, the research found that adding a banana to a berry smoothie reduces the body’s absorption of flavanols — that’s not a good thing — by 84 percent.

Flavanols are natural plant compounds found in berries, grapes, apples, cocoa, and other common smoothie ingredients, and they’re linked to heart and cognitive health. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends 400 to 600 milligrams per day for cardiometabolic health.

The culprit is an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, or PPO — the same one that turns a cut apple brown or darkens the flesh of a peeled banana left on the counter. When you blend a banana with berries, PPO activates and degrades the flavanols before your body ever gets a chance to absorb them.

“We were really surprised to see how quickly adding a single banana decreased the level of flavanols in the smoothie and the levels of flavanol absorbed in the body,” said lead author Javier Ottaviani, director of the Core Laboratory of Mars Edge and an adjunct researcher with the UC Davis Department of Nutrition.

The researchers had participants drink three things: a banana-based smoothie, a mixed berry smoothie, and a flavanol capsule used as a control. Then they analyzed blood and urine samples to measure absorption.

People who drank the banana smoothie had flavanol levels 84 percent lower than the control. The berry smoothie produced levels similar to the capsule.

A second part of the study found the effect may continue after consumption — possibly in the stomach — suggesting PPO activity doesn’t simply stop at the blender.

Mangoes, pineapples, and oranges

If your smoothie goal is to get more flavanols from your berries, grapes, or cocoa, the answer is to replace the banana with a low-PPO ingredient. The researchers specifically recommend mango, pineapple, orange, or yogurt. All of them provide creaminess or sweetness without triggering the same enzymatic reaction.

Bananas aren’t unhealthy. They provide fiber, potassium, and other nutrients, and there’s nothing wrong with eating one on its own.

But they may be the wrong partner for berries when the goal is to maximize what your body actually absorbs.

Granted, this was a small study, and nutrition experts commenting on the research have urged people not to overreact.

A banana smoothie is still nutritious even if some of us find the texture revolting.

Individual digestion and overall diet patterns matter, too.

“This is certainly an area that deserves more attention in the field of polyphenols and bioactive compounds in general,” Ottaviani said.

The team noted that tea — another major source of flavanols — could be affected by preparation methods in ways that similarly change how much your body absorbs.

About the 18 percent

Most of us who enjoy smoothies make them on autopilot. We — well, other people — put bananas in smoothies because it makes them creamy. But there’s only so much time, and the science on what these kinds of habits do to nutrient absorption is still catching up.

Still, for years, I’ve watched other people slice bananas into things and felt like I was missing out on something I should probably want. I’ve tried, but the texture just defeats me every time.

When it comes to smoothies, however, it seems I’ve been doing this right by accident for years. I’ll take it.

Just don’t get me started on mayonnaise.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• NPR: Israel and Iran traded long-range missile strikes for the first time since the ceasefire went into effect two months ago — the most significant exchange of fire since the war was put on pause in April. By Monday afternoon both sides said they were halting attacks, but each cited conditions that could lead to a resumption.

• Reuters: The SpaceX IPO roadshow kicked off this week, with pricing set for Thursday and trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX expected to begin Friday. The company is targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion and a raise of $75 billion. Elon Musk will retain about 85% of the voting control through super-voting shares.

• NPR: The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is spreading at an unprecedented pace, Africa CDC warned Monday, with 27 new cases confirmed in a single day.

• AP: As the U.S. prepares for an extravagant celebration of its founding principles, fewer Americans see their country as exceptional. Only about one-quarter of Americans now say the U.S. stands above all other countries in the world, while about two-thirds say a democratically elected government is highly important to the country’s identity — down from 80% in 2021.

• NPR: Pope Leo XIV became the first pope in history to address the Spanish parliament Monday, calling for “moral renewal” in public life and demanding respect for migrants, the unborn, and international law. The American pope received a seven-minute standing ovation, with lawmakers chanting “Long live the Pope!” — a striking scene in one of Europe’s most secular countries.

• ScienceDaily: South Australia’s koala population has grown so large that it may be heading toward a self-made disaster, with forests struggling to support the animals. Researchers say targeted fertility control could prevent widespread starvation — an unusual conservation problem in which there are simply too many koalas.

• UPI: Ontario organized the world's largest game of human foosball ahead of the FIFA World Cup, with participants strapped into rotating poles on a massive field to recreate the table-top game at human scale. No word on whether any of them crashed into each other trying to spin.

  ---

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Little diddy ‘bout Richard and Mildred …

With apologies to John Mellencamp, it’s time we talked about Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter if you don’t know who they are—and why we should know them.

Richard Perry Loving was born on October 29, 1933, in Central Point, Virginia, a small farming community in Caroline County. His family was of English and Irish descent. He was a bricklayer and construction worker, quiet and taciturn, with a platinum blonde crew cut.

A man of few words.

Mildred Delores Jeter was born on June 22, 1939, in the same community. Her ancestry was African American and Native American — she identified primarily as Rappahannock — and she was shy, soft-spoken, and possessed of what people who knew her described as a quiet dignity.

She and Richard grew up as neighbors. He first came to her family’s house as a teenager to hear her siblings play music.

Central Point was, at that time — and despite Virginia’s segregation laws — a surprisingly integrated community in practice — mixed-race families had lived there for generations, and the formal rules of Jim Crow sat uneasily alongside the actual texture of daily life.

Richard and Mildred knew each other for years before they began dating, and — we’re all adults here — when they got pregnant, they decided to get married.

Only problem: mixed race marriages weren’t allowed in Virginia, so they drove to Washington D.C. — where it was legal — on June 2, 1958.

Then, they came home to Virginia and moved in with Mildred’s family. Five weeks later, 2 a.m. on July 14, 1958, Sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies burst into their bedroom.

The charge was violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a felony. On the wall above the bed was their marriage certificate from Washington D.C.; Sheriff Brooks told Richard it was no good in Virginia.

They pleaded guilty. Judge Leon Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison, then suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. His Honor wrote:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents.

The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

The Lovings moved to Washington D.C. They hated it. Their whole world was in Caroline County — their families, their friends, the land Richard knew.

Mildred later said that Washington felt like a foreign country. So, they’d sneak back to Virginia, taking risks whenever they could, for family events, for the births of their children — Richard’s mother was a midwife and delivered the babies at home.

Police kept finding them and expelling them again. Caroline County is about 70 miles from Washington — just across a border they couldn’t cross.

In 1963, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking for help. Kennedy referred her to the ACLU.

Two lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschbaum, took the case for free. It wound its way through the Virginia courts, and eventually to the Supreme Court.

Neither Richard nor Mildred attended the oral arguments. Richard sent a message to his lawyers:

“Tell the Court I love my wife and it is just not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia.”

On June 12, 1967 — 58 years ago this week — the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in their favor.

Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion:

“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act was struck down, and laws banning interracial marriage in 15 other states fell with it.

The Lovings moved back home to Caroline County, where Richard built them a small concrete block house. They lived quietly, mostly out of the public eye, the way they had always wanted.

Richard was killed by a drunk driver in 1975; Mildred lost her right eye in the same accident. In a rare interview in 2007, she said:

“I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life.”

Mildred never remarried, and she stayed in the house Richard built until she died of pneumonia the following year.

There was a film about the Lovings released in 2016 — simply called Loving, starring Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton — that told the story well if you want more.

Honestly, could you pick a better name? Loving v. Virginia.

Quick personal note: In 1998, I spoke briefly with Mildred Loving.

I’d been thinking about writing a book about the real people behind landmark Supreme Court cases — a way to reiterate that our common law system is built on real human beings with real lives that are sometimes turned upside down in the process of making history.

I remember her as a quiet, dignified, composed woman who was a bit skeptical but very comfortable with her story and her place in history.

I set the book project aside; life intervened.

But I’m glad I get to tell the story now.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 7: “Only by playing with something can you find out what it is and what it can do.” — Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, managing director of the Lego Group, who on this day in 1968 opened the first Legoland park in Billund, Denmark. The park was built to accommodate the crowds of people who kept showing up at the factory wanting to see Lego models.

• June 8: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” — George Orwell, whose final novel, 1984, was published on this day in 1949.

• June 9: “Actually, I wanted to be a doctor; but instead I became the biggest quack in the world.” — Clarence “Ducky” Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, recalling his unlikely career — which began on this day in 1934 when the animated short The Wise Little Hen introduced Donald to the world.

• June 10: “He was the first living human with whom I had ever talked who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language.” — Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, describing his first conversation with Dr. Bob Smith, who on this day in 1935 took his last drink..

• June 11: “There will come a day in your life when you must act for others — your family, perhaps your community — and you must be ready.” — Vivian Malone Jones, speaking at the University of Alabama’s commencement ceremony in 2000, 37 years after she and James Hood became the first Black students to enroll there on this day in 1963.

• June 12: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” — Ronald Reagan, standing 100 yards from the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on this day in 1987.

• June 13: “Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed.” — Chief Justice Earl Warren, from the majority opinion in Miranda v. Arizona, decided on this day in 1966.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Has Colombia’s World Cup Jersey Become a Right-Wing Symbol?

A presidential candidate endorsed by President Trump has been accused by some Colombians of co-opting their beloved national team’s yellow soccer jersey

Just days before the World Cup, thousands of Colombians across the country emerged wearing the national team’s soccer jersey, turning the streets into a sea of bright yellow. But Colombians were not out en masse to cheer the country’s beloved soccer team. They were voting on Sunday for Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing presidential candidate who had urged supporters to wear the jersey during the final days of his campaign. They wore the shirts to enormous closing campaign rallies and to voting booths, in a show of force that also amounted to a stunt, bypassing laws prohibiting the use of campaign clothing at polling sites. Mr. De La Espriella, who was endorsed by President Trump on Tuesday, has turned Colombia’s emblematic uniform — typically a symbol of unity in the soccer-crazed country — into his campaign’s official attire.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the former far-right president, encouraged his supporters to wear the nation’s yellow-and-green jersey to the polls in 2018 and 2022. That shirt — perhaps the most recognizable in international soccer — lost its status as a politically neutral symbol in Brazil after many liberal fans refused to wear it out of fear of being mistaken for Bolsonaro supporters. Daniel Alarcón, a Peruvian-American journalist and co-host of a World Cup podcast, lamented the politicization of the soccer jersey. “When you put on the national team jersey, I feel like everybody is celebrating their own private vision of what they wish the country were,” he said. “Once a national symbol like that gets associated with one political party or another, I do think something is lost.”

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

New Jersey to World Cup Fans: Come on Over

As New York City tamps down on short-term rentals, some New Jersey municipalities are encouraging residents to take advantage of the windfall World Cup travelers could bring

More than a million soccer fans are expected to visit the tristate area during the FIFA World Cup. Eight matches, including the final, will be held at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., which will be known as New York New Jersey Stadium during the soccer tournament. But while New York City leaders have refused to ease restrictions on short-term rentals in anticipation of the event, New Jersey has doubled down on efforts to make the Garden State a hotbed for short-term stays. On April 7, New Jersey’s Division of Local Government Services distributed a Local Finance Notice to municipal and county officials to “remind them of their authority to allow New Jersey residents to participate in the short-term rental market, helping them generate income while keeping tourism dollars within their communities.”

Jamie Lane, the chief economist and senior vice president for analytics at AirDNA, a company that collects and analyzes short-term-rental data, said that the 2026 World Cup “is the biggest short-term rental event that’s ever happened.” Airbnb is expected to generate $1.2 billion in spending across North America, and hosts could earn $212 million during the tournament, according to a Deloitte study commissioned by Airbnb, which has been a FIFA partner since 2025. In the tristate area, Airbnb hosts are expected to welcome approximately 25,000 guests and are projected to earn an average of $5,700 during the World Cup, the most of any host region, according to the study.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

‘It Was Poignant, Knowing That These Were the Last Images She Did’: The Intimate Final Photos of Marilyn Monroe

On the 100th anniversary of her birth, images from the Hollywood icon’s final photoshoot reveal a carefree joyfulness that’s far removed from the shocking tragedy of her death

July, 1962. A woman poses on Santa Monica beach, her unmistakeable “blonde bombshell” features somehow softened, hair ruffled by the sea breeze. She appears radiant and playful, draping her body in a green towel or cosy knitwear. In the final photo of the shoot, she is snuggled on the sand, hands clasped, seeming to blow an affectionate kiss towards the camera. These photographs, taken by George Barris, were the last portraits of legendary actress and model Marilyn Monroe in her lifetime. A few weeks later, in the early hours of 5 August, Monroe would be found dead at her LA home, aged 36.

By 1962, Monroe was a global superstar facing personal and professional fall-outs; her third marriage (to playwright Arthur Miller) had ended; her body image was endlessly scrutinised (her famous curves were now considerably less following gall bladder surgery); her reputation for being “difficult” on set plagued her (though failing to show up or forgetting lines was arguably linked to her ill health, chronic insomnia, and addiction to prescription medication). In June that year, Monroe was fired from the production Something’s Got to Give following repeated absences for sickness, and sued for damages by 20th Century Fox. In response to the detractors and malicious rumour-mongers, Monroe undertook her own publicity campaign, including smart, stylish glossy magazine interviews in Vogue and Life.

Link: BBC (Multiple reporters)

The Quest to Get Perfect Grass Into 16 World Cup Stadiums

For the grass they’ll play on, it all started years earlier in North Carolina. Or Colorado. Or Canada. Or whichever sod farm had been assigned to grow a particular, essential piece of the tournament

The World Cup’s first whistle will sound June 11 at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, kicking off a summer-long spectacle that will stretch across three countries and draw a global audience. Across North America, FIFA’s pitch experts have spent years trying to make 16 new fields in three countries feel like one playing surface — indoors and out, in heat and shade, at sea level and altitude, inside stadiums that were not always built with grass in mind. Along the way, the playing surfaces that will serve as the stage of this summer’s tournament have made an unlikely journey: from research plots to sod farms, from refrigerated trucks to stadium floors, from a living crop to soccer’s biggest show.

For World Cup organizers and their team of grass experts, each venue presented unique challenges. Several host venues normally use artificial turf, and eight stadiums required a temporary natural-grass field to be installed over, or in place of, an existing artificial surface. Five are domed or covered. Mexico City brings altitude. Vancouver, Seattle and Boston bring cooler, cloudier conditions. Miami and Monterrey bring heat. Houston brings … a rodeo to town, which presents its own surface challenges. But for players, the ball should roll the same, a plant foot should hold the same and a pass should bounce the same.

Link: Washington Post (Rick Maese)

How America’s Buy-Now Economy Is Transforming Its Heartland

When Americans tap the buy-now button online, a complex logistical operation begins that can deliver goods faster than ever

On certain evenings in Will County, Illinois, from the raised overpasses that cross its highways, a contrast becomes apparent. Freight trains inch past long-grass prairie in long, metallic lines. Semitrucks stream through newly widened intersections and closed-loop designated routes. And beyond them, bison brought back to the region a decade ago graze quietly on protected land – land that once produced explosives for three American wars. Old U.S. Route 66, too, passes right through it. CenterPoint Intermodal Center sits at the center of this logistics system in a corridor just southwest of Chicago. It receives imported goods from West Coast ports and then delivers them into the American heartland. In just 20 years, CenterPoint has become the central node of the American retail economy. More than 3 million shipping containers pass through the facility every year, carrying an estimated $100 billion in goods before being fanned out, in every direction, to storefronts and family front doors across the Midwest and beyond.

On a sunny Friday afternoon in May, John Kieken and his brother-in-law, Ron Adamski, are driving down a historic stretch of Route 66, now Illinois Route 53, pointing out the new NorthPoint warehouses that line parts of the road. Both men have been fighting the developer’s planned expansion, which, according to current proposals, would impinge upon their homes in Manhattan, Illinois, less than 10 miles away. “A quiet community, great people. They take care of each other, always willing to help out,” says Mr. Adamski, a Gulf War veteran who served on the aircraft carrier USS America and a retired air traffic controller. “It’s that type of community – and we’re getting swallowed up by outside forces.” NorthPoint is seeking to acquire some 4,000 acres, or about 6 square miles of farmland and other residential areas, and expand the existing landscape of warehouses and truck routes into parts of their small, rural town.

Link: Christian Science Monitor (Harry Bruinius)

Granted Clemency by Trump, Scores of Jan. 6 Rioters Have Been Accused of New Crimes

At least 97 of those who were charged in connection with the Capitol riot have reoffended in the years since the attack

One was arrested after allegedly threatening a person with a gun in a church parking lot. Another was convicted of felony charges of grand larceny and burglary. Still another was convicted of child molestation. At least 97 of the nearly 1,600 people who were charged in connection with the Capitol riot have been accused of new crimes since Jan. 6, 2021, according to a study released on Thursday from Lawfare, the nonprofit legal issues publication. The figure, which is larger than previously known, includes 19 cases that happened after Mr. Trump granted clemency to Jan. 6 defendants on the first day of his second term, according to the study’s author.

In one of his first official acts of his second term, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to nearly all of the people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy. The president has repeatedly tried to revise the history of the deadly attack by a pro-Trump mob, who defaced the halls of Congress and attacked and injured more than 150 officers. But the study found that dozens of those involved in the riot have been less than model citizens since the mob violence.

Link: New York Times (Luke Broadwater)

U.S. Cities Dust Off Statues They Hid Away in 2020

A monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is back up in Charleston, S.C., and a giant Columbus awaits a return in Ohio’s namesake capital

Traditionalists are suing and lobbying local governments to resurrect memorials to Confederate generals, Founding Fathers and European explorers. Many of the statues disappeared from town squares and other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “We will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,” Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat, said at the time. Columbus’s detractors tie the Italian explorer to the brutal subjugation of native civilizations in the Americas. His supporters say Columbus should be lauded for his discoveries, not blamed for what followed. The city’s Columbus statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and adorned from head to toe with a strand of yellow caution tape. In April, a coalition of Italian-American groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming the statue’s removal was illegal and demanding its return.

The Trump administration is helping lead the charge ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next month. In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 2020. The replica was donated by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian-American Organizations. “It’s the name of their city,” said Basil Russo, the group’s president, a former Democratic politician from Cleveland, about Columbus, Ohio. “What sense does that make?” In December, a stone highway marker honoring Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, suddenly appeared in Marion Square in Charleston, S.C., planted alongside a major thoroughfare in a hub of picnics, farmers markets and celebrations.

Link: Wall Street Journal (Cameron McWhirter)

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Earlier this week, I wrote about a major new study linking GLP-1 drugs to significant reductions in depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders — and I mentioned that I’ve been taking one myself for about a year and a half.

It worked. Honestly, this might be the first time I’ve offered a before-and-after photo in this newsletter. And the drug wasn’t the only thing I did; I now spend a lot of time in the gym, and my diet is much better.

But if you haven’t enabled images, the photo above is the difference between me in November 2024 at the nadir, fighting physics to finish a 5K with my daughter, and last weekend, when it was—well let’s just say a lot closer to my long-ago marathoning days.

All of which leads me to a separate study that came out last month, because it got my Irish up.

Researchers at Rice University, publishing in the International Journal of Obesity, studied how people perceive those who lose weight using GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy.

Their finding: people who lose weight on these medications face more social stigma than people who lose the same weight through diet and exercise. In some cases, more than people who don’t lose weight at all. The explanation the researchers point to: a widespread perception that GLP-1 drugs are “the easy way out.”

I have thoughts.

Thank you for the compliment

Allow me to offer a metaphor.

I have a full head of thick hair in my mid-50s, and I didn’t do anything to earn it — genetics, luck, whatever.

But I also don’t have strong feelings about men who are losing their hair. I’m glad they’re trying to explore medical options to address it.

Rogaine exists. Finasteride exists. People make their own choices about their own bodies, and I genuinely couldn’t care less what those choices are.

See what I mean?

The idea that someone who is biologically predisposed to carry more weight should be judged more harshly for using a medical tool to address it than for simply staying overweight strikes me as really weird.

I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you I took a drug for high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

I’d tell you about a knee surgery or a course of antibiotics.

I don’t get why a medication that happens to affect weight and metabolism would be treated differently — or why losing weight with its help would make someone more of a target for judgment than not losing weight at all.

‘The easy way out’

The Rice researchers ran a series of experiments in which participants evaluated people who had lost weight via GLP-1 drugs, via diet and exercise, or not at all.

Across the board, GLP-1 users were rated more negatively.

The stigma compounds if someone stops the medication and regains weight — which is common, because these drugs work while you take them, and stopping them often reverses the effects.

In that scenario, the researchers found, the judgment gets even harsher.

“There’s a narrative that using these medications is ‘taking the easy way out,’” said lead researcher Erin Standen. “And that belief seems to shape how people are judged.”

Caveats: this is experimental research using study participants rating hypothetical scenarios, not a longitudinal study of real-world social outcomes.

You do you

The researchers flag something practical: Stigma around these drugs may be contributing to the spread of misinformation about their risks.

If people are motivated to believe GLP-1 users are doing something wrong, they may be more receptive to exaggerated claims about side effects.

There’s also a more direct consequence.

If someone is on the fence about a medication that a growing body of research suggests can meaningfully improve physical and mental health — and they’re hesitating partly because of what other people might think — that’s a real cost.

I told my doctor when she first prescribed the drug that even without insurance coverage I’d consider paying out of pocket, because I felt like I was buying myself extra years of healthy life expectancy.

She said she wished everyone had that attitude. Heck, I think she was about to hug me, except for things like propriety, and patient-doctor relationships and all of that.

But we hugged in spirit.

As always — or at least as often — I’m not telling anyone what to do.

Using these drugs is a personal decision that involves doctors, insurance, individual health histories, and a lot of factors I’m not qualified to weigh in on.

But if you’ve been thinking about it and the “easy way out” framing has been any part of what’s holding you back — I’d encourage you to set that aside.

The people making that judgment probably haven’t thought very hard about what it actually means.

See you at the gym and the ski slopes, I hope.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• ABC News — The House of Representatives on Wednesday adopted a resolution to curb President Donald Trump's Iran war powers by a vote of 215-208 — delivering a major rebuke to the administration's handling of the three-month-old conflict for the first time.

• ABC7 — California primary results: Republican Steve Hilton leads the governor's race with 28%, and Democrat Xavier Becerra is in second with 25%, with Tom Steyer in third at 20% — meaning Hilton and Becerra appear headed to November's general election. Hilton said he "received a message of congratulations" from Trump.

• CBS News — CBS News has fired longtime 60 Minutes correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley one day after he had a tense and confrontational exchange with new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton.

• NBC News — Progressive politicians are sharpening their attacks against tech tycoon Elon Musk, zeroing in on his soon-to-be-trillionaire status days before his company SpaceX’s record-setting initial public offering. Musk will likely become the world’s first trillionaire shortly as soon as next Friday, June 12.

• Bloomberg — SpaceX’s IPO will also likely make President Donald Trump’s already wealthy administration even richer. Ten officials ranging from special envoy Steve Witkoff to Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler reported financial interests in Elon Musk’s rocket company between $9.9 million and as much as $43.8 million, according to the latest disclosures.

• New York Times — The Sun Is Shining on Lisbon: The Portuguese capital is booming with an influx of artists, retirees and visitors drawn to an exciting, affordable culinary scene and an inclusive culture.

• National Geographic — Ten Reasons to Climb Kilimanjaro: Why do 40,000 people a year seek to climb the world’s highest freestanding mountain — a mountain so popular it has become known as “Everyman’s Everest”? Here are the top ten reasons, from the most practical to the most profound.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

In May 1999, I was sitting in the Wang Theatre in Boston watching my sister graduate from Emerson College. Ted Leonsis was the commencement speaker. At that moment, he was a top early executive at AOL and the new owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards.

Leonsis had one word for the graduating class: “internet.” He said it repeatedly, riffing on the famous “plastics” scene from The Graduate:

• Want to start a business? “I’ve got a word for you: internet.”

• Want to be an artist or a writer or a musician? “internet.”

• Want to find meaning and purpose and change people’s lives? “I have just one word for you: internet.”

He talked about e-commerce and music being downloaded rather than pressed onto CDs. Also, he introduced the concept of “viral marketing” before most people in the room had heard the term.

As best I can remember it, the response was mostly polite but a lot of it didn’t really land. There were definitely some jeers.

I was a few years older than most of the graduates, already dabbling in early internet projects on the side while working a full-time day job. I remember thinking, “This guy is spinning gold, and I don’t think the people around me feel it.”

“No disrespect …”

When Leonsis finished, the other honorary degree recipients took their turns.

Alice Hoffman, the novelist, kept it brief but got a massive applause line: “I mean, no disrespect to the internet, but I’m here to speak very briefly on behalf of books.”

Morley Safer of CBS News went further, gesturing directly back at Leonsis on the stage behind him:

I caution you, in spite of what the maestro here said, do not let technology become your master.

Do not be seduced by the siren song of information on call. Much of it is bogus.
For all of its billions of facts on file, it can also be a dank and dark breeding ground for the vicious and mean spirited. It is the new home of the big lie.

Big applause.

Leonsis had a sense of humor. As he returned to the podium to receive his honorary degree, he took the microphone for one last coda: “I’d like to thank the Friars for hosting this roast.”

Flash forward

Why bring up this 27-year-old commencement speech? Three reasons:

• Last month, at the University of Central Florida, a real estate executive named Gloria Caulfield told a room full of arts and humanities graduates that the rise of artificial intelligence is “the next industrial revolution.” The crowd erupted in boos. Someone yelled, “AI sucks!” She turned to the other speakers onstage: “What happened? OK, I struck a chord.”

• A week later, at the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed multiple times while discussing AI — booing that began, by some accounts, before he even reached the lectern. He tried to acknowledge the crowd’s anxiety directly: “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, and that the jobs are evaporating.” They booed that, too.

• At Emory University, Delta CEO Ed Bastian told graduates he had tried using AI to write his commencement address, and it was quick and easy, but it lacked soul and warmth — so he threw it out and rewrote it with pencil and paper. “You want to hear from me,” he told the graduates to applause, “not some algorithm of me.”

Right, but also right

This is not an article where I’m going to say that the example from 1999 proves AI is the future and anyone who objects is a Luddite who will be left behind.

I mean, Leonsis was clearly right, but Safer was mostly on target too.

The internet has created zillions of jobs, revolutionized industries, and changed the world. It has also become a breeding ground for the vicious and mean-spirited.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. If I were sitting in one of those red robes right now, I think I’d be paying very close attention to AI — with both enthusiasm and caution.

I’d hope my attitude would be one of skepticism, but not cynicism, which, come to think of it, is what I learned during my own college education from the Jesuits.

But that’s another graduation. I wrote about that one here.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• CNBC: The Department of Justice has permanently abandoned plans for a $1.8 billion fund created to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump against the IRS, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s criminal defense attorney, testified Tuesday. But the other part of the settlement — protecting Trump, his family members, and related business entities remain protected from any tax audits and enforcement actions — remains in effect.

• NPR — A divided D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Trump administration's transgender military ban is unconstitutional, finding the policy was rooted in animus toward a politically unpopular group rather than military necessity. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reply: "See you at SCOTUS."

• TechCrunch — Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, filed confidentially with the SEC for an IPO, jumping ahead of rival OpenAI in what is shaping up to be a landmark public market debut. The filing comes days after a $65 billion Series H pushed Anthropic's valuation to roughly $965 billion.

• CNBC, Washington Post — President Trump tapped Bill Pulte, who leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency and who has served as an attack dog against Trump’s foes, to serve as acting director of national intelligence. Pulte has no known prior intelligence experience. Separately: a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter, Elias Irizarry, has been hired to work inside a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations.

• Bloomberg — More than 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of an IPO that is set to turn many of them into multi-millionaires. Employees in line for IPO windfalls typically seek out their own wealth advisers. The SpaceX group’s push for a kind of collective bargaining has the potential to create a new playbook for startup employees.

• NPR — Former New York congressman George Santos is being investigated over his trading activity on the prediction market site Kalshi. In February, four months after being released from federal prison, Santos posted a video to X saying he would attend Trump's State of the Union address — sending odds on Kalshi soaring. But he didn't show up. What Santos didn't say was that he had already placed bets on Kalshi that he was not going to appear, and made tens of thousands of dollars as a result.

• The Guardian — ‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

About a year and a half ago, I started taking a GLP-1 drug.

I dropped about 50 pounds — basically all the weight I’d put on during the pandemic and then some. I’ve kept most of it off. Yes, it’s changed my life in ways that go well beyond the scale.

I coach my daughter’s soccer team, and I play on the field as a defender during scrimmages.

I skied constantly last winter (well, constantly by my standards; there’s always some other guy you meet talking about how he did 50 or 75 days). Honestly, it would have been a different and less enjoyable experience at my previous weight if it were even possible.

I’ve become a four-to-five-times-a-week gym regular for the first time in decades.

Has it helped my mental health? Absolutely.

But in truth, I can’t tell you how much of that is the drug directly and how much is everything that followed from losing the weight — feeling better, moving more, doing a lot of things that were frankly getting a bit more difficult.

The second-order effects are unmistakable, but the first-order mechanism? That I can’t fully untangle.

As it turns out, that’s almost exactly the question a major new study is wrestling with.

Nearly 100,000 people

Published in The Lancet Psychiatry, the study tracked nearly 100,000 people with depression or anxiety in Swedish national health registers from 2009 to 2022.

About 22,000 of them used GLP-1 drugs.

Rather than comparing GLP-1 users to non-users, the researchers compared each person’s own periods on the medication versus off it — a within-individual approach that controls for a lot of the variables that usually muddy this kind of research.

During periods of semaglutide use, psychiatric hospital care and sick leave dropped 42% overall. Depression risk dropped 44%. Anxiety dropped 38%. Substance use disorders dropped 47%.

The mechanism nobody fully understands

GLP-1 receptors exist not just in the gut and pancreas but in the brain.

Some researchers think these drugs may be doing something directly neurological — dampening reward-seeking behavior, reducing impulsivity, affecting dopamine pathways.

That would help explain the substance use finding, which is hard to attribute purely to weight loss or improved self-image, but it could also be almost entirely downstream.

If you lose significant weight, feel better in your body, start moving again, sleep better, and do things you couldn’t do before, your mental health can improve for reasons that have nothing to do with the drug’s direct action on the brain.

A few things worth knowing before you forward this to everyone you know. First, all the participants in the study already had depression or anxiety, plus diabetes or obesity. So, it’s possible the findings may not translate to people without those conditions.

Three of the authors disclosed receiving research funding from a pharmaceutical company, though the study itself was funded by Finnish government and foundation sources.

Also, this is observational research — the within-individual design is methodologically strong, but it still can’t prove the drug caused the mental health improvements.

Tens of millions of people are now taking GLP-1 drugs, or thinking about it, or have someone close to them who is.

Most of the conversation has centered on weight, cardiovascular risk, and side effects.

This study suggests there may be a mental health dimension to the conversation that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention.

I can’t tell you whether the improvements I’ve felt came from the drug, the weight loss, the skiing, the scrimmages, or some combination of all of it.

Probably the last one, but whatever the mechanism, I’ll take it.

Anyone want to play soccer?

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: Inside the secret deal to drop Trump’s $10 billion suit against the IRS.

• CNBC: Financial pressures pushed more savers to tap their retirement accounts in the first part of 2026, new data shows — potentially locking in losses during the early weeks of the Iran war. The average 401(k) balance fell by 4% to $141,000.

• NYT: Iceland, rattled by Trump, weighs joining the E.U. The country has long stood apart from the rest of Europe, but President Trump’s threats to Greenland have provoked a reconsideration.

• WSJ: Vladimir Putin’s $26 billion quest for longevity: from mini-pigs and organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia’s president has turned antiaging research into a Kremlin priority.

• The Telegraph: A lack of sleep could be fueling a surge in cancer among the under-50s, according to the largest study of its kind. Insomniacs are up to three times more likely to develop some forms of the disease than those without diagnosed sleep problems.

• WSJ: A famous math problem stumped humans for 80 years. AI just cracked it.

• NY Post: Escort demand surges ahead of NYC and NJ World Cup matches — as a $10,000-per-day sex worker reveals what it’s like.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Ever played Tetris?

• Maybe it was on a Game Boy in the back seat of a car.

• Maybe it was on a desktop computer when you were supposed to be working.

• Maybe it was on your phone last week.

It’s one of those games that requires no instruction, crosses every language barrier, and produces in almost every person who touches it the same response: one more game.

Tetris has been downloaded on mobile devices alone more than 500 million times. It has been played in more than 200 countries on more than 50 platforms. Neuroscientists have studied it and found it can reduce symptoms of PTSD and improve brain efficiency.

It is almost certainly the most widely played game in human history — certainly the most-played video game.

So it might be surprising, if you don’t know, to learn that it was created by a 29-year-old Soviet programmer in his spare time at the height of the Cold War, on a computer with no ability to create graphics, all as a way to test his machine.

His name is Alexey Pajitnov, and honestly the only less probable thing than for him to have invented an incredibly viral game long before anyone talked that way was all that had to happen in order for him to make any profit from the venture whatsoever.

If you’ve seen the 2023 Apple TV+ film about how Tetris escaped the Soviet Union and reached the world, spawning a high-stakes international licensing battle, you know that part.

But I think Pajitnov, the inventor, might be the more interesting person in the story.

Pajitnov was born on April 16, 1955, in Moscow, the son of a film critic and a woman who worked in publishing. He was a quiet, puzzle-obsessed child — the kind who could spend hours with a pentomino set, fitting differently shaped pieces into a box, turning the problem over and over until it resolved.

He studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Aviation, then joined the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he worked on speech recognition and artificial intelligence — yes, all the way back then.

It was serious and kind of unglamorous work at the time, but he was good at it.

In the summer of 1984 — remember this was around the time of the Los Angeles Olympics, which the Soviets boycotted, in case you want a chronological marker — the Computing Centre received a new machine: the Electronika 60, which was basically a Soviet rip-off of a DEC minicomputer.

Pajitnov’s job was to test its capabilities, so he thought back to those pentomino puzzles from his childhood, simplified the pieces from five squares to four, and added the mechanic that made everything work: the pieces falling from the top of the screen.

The player had to arrange them into complete lines before the screen filled up. It was he who came up with the name “Tetris,” combining tetra, the Greek prefix for four, and tennis, his favorite sport.

The Electronika 60 had no graphics card, so the first version of Tetris was built entirely from keyboard characters — letters and symbols arranged to suggest blocks falling down a screen. It took up 2.7 KB of storage; by way of comparison in 2026, I’m guessing this email newsletter alone will run between 40 KB and 100 KB.

Still, back then it was impressive. Pajitnov showed it to his colleagues, and within days, productivity at the Computing Centre had collapsed, as all around him comrades played Tetris instead of working.

He sometimes had to pretend to be busy when he was actually playing himself. “Magic is in it,” he said.

From there:

• A 16-year-old intern named Vadim Gerasimov built the first proper IBM-compatible version with actual graphics.

• It went viral the quasi-old-fashioned way, spreading via copies on floppy disk, hand to hand from office to office across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and eventually into the West.

• In 1988 it reached a Las Vegas game trade show, where a Dutch-American designer named Henk Rogers first saw it and understood immediately that it was unlike anything else.

Now we get into what you might have seen in the recent film — one of the stranger legal battles in the history of entertainment.

Three people flew to Moscow simultaneously in February 1989 without knowing about each other — Rogers, a British software broker named Robert Stein of Andromeda Software, and Kevin Maxwell, son of media tycoon Robert Maxwell — all trying to negotiate rights with ELORG, the Soviet state organization that controlled software exports.

ELORG discovered that console versions of Tetris were being sold across Japan and the West without their knowledge or payment, and they were displeased. But Rogers won the handheld rights by offering ELORG a royalty per cartridge rather than the flat fee his rivals were proposing — more valuable to the Soviets in the long run, although more costly to Rogers himself.

He then convinced Nintendo to bundle Tetris with its new Game Boy rather than Mario or Donkey Kong. The Game Boy launched in 1989 and sold a million units in the United States in its first few weeks, and my little brother was playing with his in the back seat of a station wagon a few weeks later.

Throughout all of this, Pajitnov received nothing.

Because: communism.

He worked for a Soviet state institution, so the government owned what he created, and while Tetris made fortunes for publishers, console makers, and licensing bodies around the world, Pajitnov got nothing.

But then: Glasnost, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in 1991, and he got a job at Microsoft — and then in 1996, the ten-year license on Tetris expired.

Pajitnov teamed up with Rogers, and they founded The Tetris Company together. For the first time, Pajitnov began receiving royalties from his own game — twelve years after he built it on a machine that couldn’t display proper graphics.

Just past his 71st birthday, Pajitnov talks about all of this without apparent bitterness. Creating the game itself was its own reward, he says — although I assume he also doesn’t mind being financially rewarded.

Because: capitalism.

He’s still working in game design, although talk about a heck of a first entry into the industry.

“I never could have imagined,” he said, “anything like the history it actually had.”

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 31: “It is working better than expected.” — Werner von Siemens, writing to his brother Carl two weeks after demonstrating the world’s first electric locomotive on this day in 1879 at the Berlin Trade Exhibition. Every subway, tram, and electric train in the world descends from what debuted that day in Berlin.

• June 1: “A decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.” — Critic Kenneth Tynan of The Times of London, on the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on this day in 1967.

• June 2: “Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.” — Queen Elizabeth II, in her broadcast to the nation on the evening of her coronation on this day in 1953 — the first coronation in history to be televised.

• June 3: “At 10:00 p.m. … a switch was thrown … and electricity traveled 14 miles.” — From the Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation’s account of the first long-distance transmission of electricity in the United States, on this day in 1889. Before this moment, electricity could only be generated and used in the same location.

• June 4: “I came up with the idea while waiting in a long line at a Dallas bank.” — Don Wetzel, describing the moment of inspiration that led to the invention of the ATM, which he patented in the U.S. on this day in 1973 along with engineers Tom Barnes and George Chastain.

• June 5: “The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand.” — Harriet Beecher Stowe, describing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first installment of which appeared in the National Era on this day in 1851. Published as a book in 1852, it sold 1.5 million copies worldwide.

• June 6: “We’ll start the war from right here.” — Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the 26th president, on this day in 1944 at Utah Beach, Normandy, after discovering that strong tidal currents had carried his landing craft more than a mile south of the intended target. He was 56 years old, walked with a cane due to arthritis and World War I injuries, had petitioned three times for permission to lead the first wave of the assault, died of a heart attack five weeks later and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

• June 7: “I began to think of my duty. It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation.” — Mohandas Gandhi, writing in his autobiography about this day in 1893, when the then-24-year-old Indian lawyer was thrown off a train in South Africa for refusing to move from his first-class compartment — for which he held a valid ticket — to a third-class car. The movement for Indian independence from Britain began on a train platform.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment