I got one of those “here’s a photo you shared on social media years ago” notifications, and it a photo of a moving truck — the day we moved to our house in New Jersey.

It’s funny how time flies. I’m the kind of person who takes a while to settle and admit that I actually live where I do, long-term. But knocking on the door of a decade, I think this counts.

As much as I sometimes like to imagine my wife and daughter and me taking a giant map of the world and figuring out a new place to live for a while (truly, just give me a beach!), I think the odds are very good that we’ll stay put here a while longer.

We chose our town for a reason: basically that everything we read, saw and experienced told us that it would be a good place to raise a child.

Now, I’m going to turn this newsletter over to all of you in a moment. Because the vast majority of my readers are parents, and I suspect you’ll have some thoughts on this.

But, there’s a study that I read about — gosh, back when we were looking for a place to live — that’s stuck with me, and it probably influenced our choices.

Entitled, “Inequality in Children’s Contexts: Income Segregation of Households With and Without Children,” it ran in the journal, American Sociological Review.

To summarize, just in case you forgot to renew your subscription to American Sociological Review, the study covered choices that wealthy families make in order to benefit their children—-given that theoretically, they could afford to make any choices they want.

The study was framed in a negative light: look how inequitable our society is, and what all these wealthy people are doing to benefit from it.

I read it, nodded my head in pained agreement — and then thought to myself:

“You know, as long as we’re here … um, exactly what are these big choices that wealthy families make? Anything I should try to copy?”

The number-one, most far-reaching conclusion in the study was simple: The wealthiest people make sure to live within the same neighborhoods as other wealthy people.

This has significant ramifications. For one thing, since schools in the U.S. are generally funded on a local level, the kids in the neighborhoods of the better-to-do have access to the best public education money can buy.

Ann Owens, a sociologist at the University of Southern California and an author of the study, told The Washington Post:

“Buying a neighborhood is probably one of the most important things you can do for your kid. There’s mixed evidence on whether buying all this other stuff matters too. But buying a neighborhood basically provides huge advantages.”

Granted, this touches on much bigger questions about what kind of society we want to live in, at large.

And, there’s no way a thinking person can write about this and not mention that years of racial segregation, redlining, and many other less-enviable parts of our collective history might have something to do with how some neighborhoods became wealthy in the first place.

But, if you’re making decisions on the basis of what’s best for your children, it’s hard not to at least pay attention to how the people who could decide to live anywhere, choose to make their homes.

In short, the study also seems to suggest: If you’re not living in the smallest house in your neighborhood, maybe you should consider a smaller house in a nicer neighborhood.

So now I turn it over to you. Did you choose where you live for this kind of reason? Or another? What advice to you have for others — especially young parents, just putting down roots? Please, let us know in the comments.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: President Trump will be joined in China this week by 16 chief executives, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook. The White House distributed a list on Monday of business leaders who are scheduled to be in Beijing with the president. Mr. Trump is slated to depart Washington on Tuesday and hold meetings with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, later in the week.

• AP, WSJ: President Trump on odds of ending the Iran War after the latest Iranian proposal: “I would call it the weakest right now after reading that piece of garbage they sent us. I didn’t even finish reading it.” Trump also proposed suspending the federal gas tax and reducing tariffs on imported beef, to deal with war-related price increases.

• Newsweek: Years of preparations and the promise of a multibillion-dollar economic boost were supposed to make the 2026 FIFA World Cup a summer-long victory lap for the United States. But with only a month until kick-off, hotels remain under-booked, tickets unsold, and travelers unconvinced, leaving the world’s most-watched sporting event at risk of falling short of its most ambitious expectations.

• NBC News: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is defending his family’s new reality show amid a backlash, as critics say the idea of doing a road-trip show over the course of seven months “out of touch” when gas prices are soaring amid the U.S. war with Iran. (One commenter quoted: “Read the room, Mark and Marie Antoinette.”)

• Washington Post: About 25% Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged, compared to 45% who are confident that it actually happened, according to a new survey. Survey respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report.

• The Guardian: Artwork looted by the Nazis has resurfaced in the home of descendants of a notorious Dutch SS collaborator. Portrait of a Young Girl, by the Dutch artist Toon Kelder, is believed to have hung for decades in the home, art detective Arthur Brand said, describing it as “the most bizarre case of my entire career.”

• Wired: I Tried the Best Captioning Smart Glasses, and Only One Leads the Pack: Can’t hear what they’re saying? Now you can turn on the subtitles for real-life conversations.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Eugene Kucheruk on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Lothar Hermann was born in 1901 in Quirnbach, a small town in the Westerwald region of Germany. He grew up, trained as a merchant, worked in finance, and in the 1930s began quietly smuggling currency across the border into France to support Jews trying to reach Palestine.

In 1935 the Gestapo caught him. They sent him to Dachau, where the beatings were severe enough that he lost the sight in one eye, and eventually the other.

When he was released, he emigrated to Argentina with his wife and his daughter Sylvia.

Years later, when Sylvia was a teenager when she met a German boy at a club in Buenos Aires named Klaus. They began seeing each other. One evening Klaus came to dinner and said, in front of Lothar, that it would have been better if the Germans had finished the job of extermination.

Lothar said nothing, but he remembered the name. Klaus Eichmann.

In 1957, when Sylvia was reading the newspaper aloud to her father — he was by then entirely blind — and came across a detailed account of Nazi war crimes trials in Germany.

The story described in detail the role of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, last seen alive after the war, believed to be in hiding somewhere in South America.

Lothar did not think it was a coincidence. He wrote letters — too the Jewish community in Buenos Aires — no response.

To a prominent Nazi hunter — no meaningful follow-up.

To Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor-general of the German state of Hesse, a Jewish man himself who had survived the Nazi years and who did not trust his own colleagues not to tip Eichmann off if official channels were used.

Bauer took the letter seriously and passed it on to Israeli intelligence.

Mossad sent an operative to look at the house where Klaus and his father lived, but he came back skeptical. The house was too modest, too wretched — a small structure without running water or electricity on the outskirts of San Fernando, a working-class suburb north of Buenos Aires.

A man like Eichmann, who had organized the deportation of millions with the administrative power of the entire Nazi state behind him, wouldn’t be living like this. The case was effectively closed.

Bauer pushed again; Mossad sent an operative back — this time to meet Lothar and Sylvia in person. He believed them—but without proof, nothing happened.

Mossad asked the Hermanns to investigate further themselves, without support, without protection.

So Lothar and Sylvia boarded a train to Buenos Aires and started asking around for Klaus Eichmann’s address. Sylvia went to the door alone. Eichmann answered, saying he was Klaus’s uncle. Then Klaus came home and called him father.

Sylvia returned and told her father what she had seen. They were certain. But Mossad was still not convinced.

Then a second independent tip arrived — a German geologist named Gerhard Klammer, who had worked with Eichmann at a construction company, provided a photograph and an address, corroborating everything the Hermanns had said.

By early 1960, Mossad director Isser Harel had seen enough. He flew to Buenos Aires himself to oversee the operation.

The man living on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando had spent fifteen years becoming invisible. He was working on the assembly line at a Mercedes-Benz factory. He called himself Ricardo Klement.

He rode the same bus home every evening at roughly the same time. For weeks, Mossad agents watched him — noting his schedule, renting safe houses, building a cell in one of them where he would be held.

They photographed him from a distance with a camera hidden in a briefcase, and compared the shape of his ears to photographs in his SS file.

It was a match.

On the evening of May 11, 1960, seven agents waited for two hours near the bus stop on Garibaldi Street. When Eichmann finally stepped off the bus and began walking toward his house, agent Peter Malkin stepped forward.

“Momentito, señor.”

Eichmann panicked; Malkin grabbed him and forced him into the car. An agent told Eichmann: “If you move, you will be shot in the head.”

They held him in the safe house for nine days, and he offered aliases twice before admitting who he was. They flew him to Israel on an El Al plane, drugged, dressed in an El Al crew uniform, and boarded as a sick flight attendant.

The code word sent to Israel confirming the capture was: “The typewriter is okay.”

On May 23, 1960, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood before the Knesset and announced that Adolf Eichmann was in custody and would stand trial.

It was the first trial in history to be televised. More than 100 witnesses testified — Holocaust survivors, most of whom had never spoken publicly about what they had experienced.

Eichmann sat behind bulletproof glass and did not deny his role. He said he had been following orders.

He was found guilty on all 15 counts. On June 1, 1962, he was hanged — the only time Israel has ever carried out a death sentence. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, so there would be no grave, no marker, no place for anyone to come.

Lothar Hermann, the blind man whose letter started all of it, died in 1974, largely unrecognized.

(The video above is from a somewhat fictionalized account of the capture: Operation Finale. But it’s worth a watch.)

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 10: “Done.” — The single word tapped in Morse code by the Western Union telegrapher at Promontory Summit, Utah, at 12:47 p.m. on this day in 1869, announcing to the nation that the Golden Spike had been driven and the first transcontinental railroad was complete.

• May 11: “The great thing about Python was that it was somewhere we could use all the material that everybody else had said was too silly.” — Terry Jones, recalling the evening of this day in 1969 when all six members of Monty Python met for the first time together at a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead, London.

• May 12: “Strategically unimportant.” — The German government’s official verdict on the world’s first programmable, fully automatic digital computer, presented by engineer Konrad Zuse to a small audience of scientists at the German Laboratory for Aviation in Berlin on this day in 1941. The original Z3 was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943. Zuse rebuilt it from memory.

• May 13: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” — Winston Churchill, from his first speech as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered in the House of Commons on this day in 1940, three days after he had been called to replace Neville Chamberlain.

• May 14: “I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation.” — Edward Jenner, from his own account of the experiment he conducted on this day in 1796 in Berkeley, England — scraping cowpox matter from the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and introducing it into two small cuts on the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son, James Phipps. The experiment launched the science of vaccination.

• May 15: “The effect was electric.” — A contemporary account of the moment nylon stockings went on sale for the first time across the United States on this day in 1940; stores in New York sold out within hours.

• May 16: “I will never forget that moment. I had never heard anything like it.” — Jack Mullin, recalling when he first encountered a German Magnetophon — a broadcast-quality tape recorder in the waning days of World War II. Mullin, an Army Signal Corps engineer, dismantled two machines, shipped them home, and demonstrated them on this day in 1946 at an Institute of Radio Engineers show in San Francisco. Bing Crosby, who hated performing live, wrote a check for $50,000 on the spot.

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"I bought this as a gift for my parents, but it turned out to be a gift for us and our kids—something we will have for the rest of our lives. I can't imagine anything more special than being able to hear my parents laughing together, long after they are gone."

— Lisa M., New Jersey

If you’d like to give Life Story Magic as a Mother’s Day gift, use code UNDERSTANDABLY at checkout for $100 off our already-discounted rate.

Get Life Story Magic for Mother's Day

It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.

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Don’t Call Them Nuns. They’re Podcasters.

They pray, they play Ultimate Frisbee and they have unwittingly become a meme

In each episode, a host, typically Sister Miriam, 44, interviews a guest, usually another sister, about her life, covering subjects like her education — several of the women have Ph.D.s — or her conversion journey. While the topics themselves might sound weighty, the conversations are often quite wide-ranging, like a dialogue between two, well, sisters. Since the podcast debuted in January, the sisters have found viral success on TikTok, where clips from the show have garnered millions of views and comments from fans, both Catholic and non-Catholic, who find themselves mesmerized by the sisters’ soothing timbres and unrelenting positivity. In their most popular clip, Sister Miriam and another sister are discussing playing ultimate Frisbee. “Sister, and you are so good at that,” Sister Miriam says to her guest, complimenting her skills on the field.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

The Secret Team Blowing Up Ford’s Assembly Line to Make a $30,000 Electric Truck

3 a.m. tests and culture clashes: The automaker brought together Silicon Valley techies and industry misfits in a quest to beat China at EVs

The secret is now out as Ford races toward building its first model, a new truck it says will be nearly as fast as a Mustang, travel around 300 miles on a single charge and feature in-car technology to compete with Tesla and China. It’s aiming for a 2027 launch and a price tag of around $30,000, the cost of a Toyota Camry. Getting there means tearing up a century of manufacturing practices in a notoriously hidebound industry. At stake for Ford is securing a future beyond the gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs that have long defined its bottom line. To build these new EVs, the company must use fewer people and simpler parts, and dismantle decades of engineering inertia. Chief Executive Jim Farley is calling it Ford’s new “Model T moment.” Rival automakers say overcoming China on EVs can’t be done, given their advantages: extensive government backing, low-cost labor and a massive head start.

Link: Wall Street Journal (Sharon Terlep)

Inside Ashley St. Clair’s Trump Online Machine

How a 28-year-old social media influencer became one of the most powerful people shaping political discourse online

Ashley St. Clair has become one of the most influential figures in conservative media, running a network of social media accounts that collectively reach tens of millions of people. Her operation, based out of a suburban Virginia townhouse, employs a team of young staffers who monitor trending topics, coordinate messaging across platforms, and amplify pro-Trump content. The Washington Post obtained internal documents showing how St. Clair’s team orchestrates online campaigns, sometimes creating the appearance of grassroots support for administration policies. Critics say her methods blur the line between authentic political engagement and coordinated manipulation.

Link: Washington Post (Multiple reporters)

A New Kind of Van Life: $180 to Camp for Seven Months – and a Real Taste of Freedom

As the US sees rapidly rising housing costs, nomads flock to the public lands around Quartzsite, Arizona, where a person can legally live for more than half a year

For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months. Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out.

Link: The Guardian (Multiple reporters)

Freak Accidents, Suicides, Attempted Murder: The Dark Side of Skydiving

A recent wave of parachuting deaths in the UK is harrowingly familiar to our writer, who could have lost her life on a jump 38 years ago

There’s nothing like a near-death experience to clear the head. In 1988, I decided to do a parachute jump. I was young, it sounded fun, and it was for charity, so I signed up and pestered people to sponsor me for an HIV charity, which was a cause very much in the news at the time. We crashed – not body to body, but our parachutes tangled together. Some of the cords broke and the steering toggles dangled uselessly from my hands. Number eight was suspended in mid-air about 2ft away from me. I remember shouting, “You realise we’re going to die?” These were the first and only words I ever spoke to him. With our canopies depleted, we were hurtling towards the ground.

Link: The Telegraph (Jessamy Calkin)

Backup: https://archive.ph/DZmvQ

Music’s Next ‘Disco Sucks’ Moment Is Near

Do you really like that new song—or is someone manipulating you?

You’re scrolling TikTok, Instagram, or one of the many other apps where short-form video devours your time. You come across a stranger doing something amusing while a song plays in the background. A few swipes later, you hear the song again. Now it’s in your head. Now it seems like an interesting part of the zeitgeist. You save the song to your phone. A question flashes through your mind: Did you just discover new music, or, through the dark arts of algorithmic manipulation, did the music industry just bait a new customer? Quite possibly the answer is the latter, in which case you’ve fallen prey to “trend simulation”: the marketing tactic of paying people online to post opinions they don’t necessarily hold, endorsing music they don’t necessarily care about, so as to trick social-media algorithms—and users—into regarding a band as more popular than it really is.

Link: The Atlantic (Spencer Kornhaber)

The Latest Hero of the ‘Yimby’ Movement Is a Massachusetts Man in a Hoodie

One wealthy Massachusetts town’s housing plan won’t add much housing, and a local called them out. ‘Are we trying to do nothing?’

David Modica, headphones around his neck, hoodie sleeves scrunched up, took the mic at a Marblehead, Mass., meeting this week and asked the question facing every American town pushing back against new housing. “Are we kinda bein’ pricks?” His frankness about local housing opposition turned him into something of a hero for the “yes in my backyard,” pro-development movement. And his disheveled look, Massachusetts brogue and salty language was instant meme fuel. “Tedesco, that’s like a golf course, yeah?” Modica asked, addressing a planning board member. “So they’re not gonna build any houses there, cause it’s a golf course. So like, this is a way to comply with 3A without doing any of the 3A stuff?”

Link: Wall Street Journal (Will Parker)

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"I've tried for years to write about my life, but it never felt like the way I wanted it portrayed. Speaking was so much more natural — you could feel the emotion of those memories in a way the written word can't capture. I wish I'd had this for my parents."
— Dola H., Colorado

If you’d like to give Life Story Magic as a Mother’s Day gift, use code UNDERSTANDABLY at checkout for $100 off our already-discounted rate.

Mother’s Day is this Sunday, just sayin’. Give the gift this weekend, and there’s no expiration on the interview itself.

Reserve Your Place

So lonely

If you’ve spent any time reading about the science of happiness and longevity, you’ve probably run across the Harvard Grant Study — the 88-year research project that has followed the lives of hundreds of men beginning in 1938, including future President John F. Kennedy and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

The clearest message from all those decades of data, according to Robert Waldinger, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been running the study since 2003: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

Waldinger was specific about what loneliness does to the brain.

People who are more isolated than they want to be, he said, find that their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives.

His TED talk on the subject has now been viewed nearly 28 million times on YouTube alone — which tells you something about how many people are thinking about this question.

Now a new study — a large one, tracking more than 10,000 people across Europe for seven years — has added a wrinkle to that story.

10,217 adults

Researchers tracked 10,217 adults between the ages of 65 and 94 across 12 European countries for seven years, using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe — one of the largest long-running studies of older adults on the continent.

Participants answered questions about how often they felt a lack of companionship, left out, or isolated. Their memory was tested regularly via word recall tasks.

People who reported higher levels of loneliness at the start of the study did score lower on memory tests — confirming what Waldinger and the Grant Study have long suggested. Loneliness and weaker memory go together.

Over the seven years of follow-up, however, lonely people’s memories declined at essentially the same rate as everyone else’s.

“The finding that loneliness significantly impacted memory, but not the speed of decline in memory over time was a surprising outcome,” said lead author Luis Carlos Venegas-Sanabria, from the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia. “It suggests that loneliness may play a more prominent role in the initial state of memory than in its progressive decline.”

The damage is real

This study doesn’t contradict Waldinger or the Grant Study. Loneliness is still associated with worse cognitive performance. The damage appears to be real.

If loneliness primarily affects where your memory starts rather than how fast it declines, however, then the most important window for intervention may be earlier than previously understood — before the deficit is established, not after.

The researchers suggest that routine screening for loneliness could become part of cognitive health assessments for older adults.

Given that the Grant Study found more than one in five Americans report feeling lonely at any given time, that’s not a small population to consider.

A few more points to consider

The study has real limitations. Loneliness was treated as fixed — measured at the start and assumed to stay constant — when anyone who has lived through a move, a divorce, a retirement, or a pandemic knows that feelings of isolation can shift dramatically over time.

The study was also conducted entirely in Europe. Cultural norms around social connection vary considerably from those in the United States.

Also, the researchers are appropriately cautious about what their findings mean for dementia risk specifically. This was a study of healthy older adults, not clinical populations — so the conclusions don’t extend cleanly to people already experiencing cognitive decline.

Still, Waldinger’s core message from the Grant Study holds: Relationships matter, probably more than many people act like they do.

If anything, this newer research adds urgency because if loneliness shapes where your memory starts, the time to do something about it isn’t when you notice the decline.

It’s well before that.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: The White House believes it’s close to an agreement with Iran to end the war. Among other provisions, the deal would involve Iran committing to a moratorium on nuclear enrichment, the U.S. agreeing to lift its sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds, and both sides lifting restrictions around transit through the Strait of Hormuz.

• Politico: President Trump’s Justice Department will ask the Supreme Court to let it intervene in Trump’s appeal of the $83.3 million jury verdict in a defamation lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll. DOJ wants to substitute the federal government itself for Trump as the defendant, which would end Carroll’s case, because the United States can’t be sued for defamation.

• MSNOW: The FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation focusing on an Atlantic magazine journalist who wrote a deeply unflattering account last month of Director Kash Patel’s work habits. The journalist, Sarah Fitzpatrick, cited two dozen anonymous sources in a detailed story reporting that Patel’s alcohol consumption and erratic behavior had caused deep concern among FBI officials.

• Miami Herald: Palm Beach County approved a trademark deal with one of Donald Trump’s family companies to rename the county’s airport after the president. The agreement gives Trump veto power over how his image and biographical information is used in marketing materials.

• New Scientist: Gamblers have bet $9 million on how many people will be infected with measles in the U.S. on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket – and there is some evidence that the predictions are accurate enough to be useful for modeling its spread.

• Hollywood Reporter: Ted Turner, the media visionary who forever altered the news business by founding CNN and helped introduce Americans to pay TV by creating cable channels like TNT, Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network, has died. He was 87.

• AP: WKRP isn’t dead — as of Monday, it’s living on the air in Cincinnati. The call letters from the fictional radio station featured in a CBS sitcom were adopted by a trio of real “adult hits” stations in time for Monday’s morning drive, and co-owner Jeff Ziesmann described listeners as “stoked.” The show “WKRP in Cincinnati” ran from 1978 to 1982 and starred Loni Anderson, Howard Hesseman, Tim Reid and Richard Sanders.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Lukas Rychvalsky on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

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“Got Life Story Magic for mom's 83rd birthday. I learned so much! Having an artifact like this is priceless. When I saw how excited she was about the interview, it really brought me joy.”
— Sandee C., Tennessee

Thanks to everyone who signed up over the weekend and yesterday! I’m excited to get started.

If you’d like to give Life Story Magic as a Mother’s Day gift, use code UNDERSTANDABLY at checkout for $100 off our already-discounted rate.

Mother’s Day is May 11 — and don’t worry, there’s no expiration on the interview itself.

Reserve Your Place

Intermittent fasting

According to the International Food Information Council’s 2025 survey, 15 percent of Americans say they are currently doing intermittent fasting — up from 12 percent in 2023.

Every once in a while, I think I ought to have joined them.

I wrote an article here five years ago (if you were here then, I love you) suggesting it might improve memory — based on a study out of King’s College London — but I still never actually gave it a shot.

As it turns out, it may have been the right call — though probably not for the reasons I would have guessed.

More than 3,000 adults

Researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health tracked more than 7,000 adults between the ages of 40 and 65, collecting data on meal timing, weight, lifestyle habits, and diet.

Five years later, more than 3,000 of those participants came back for follow-up measurements, and the researchers found that two habits were independently linked to lower BMI over that period:

• The first was eating breakfast early in the day.

• The second was extending the overnight fasting window — meaning finishing dinner early and not eating again until morning.

What was not linked to weight benefit: skipping breakfast as a form of intermittent fasting.

Among a subset of men who practiced intermittent fasting specifically by skipping breakfast and eating their first meal after 2 p.m., researchers found no advantage for body weight at all.

That group also tended to have other markers of less healthy living — more smoking, more drinking, less physical activity, and lower adherence to a healthy diet.

“There are different ways of practicing what is known as ‘intermittent fasting,’” explained Camille Lassale, ISGlobal researcher and senior co-author of the study. “What we observed in a subgroup of men who do intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast is that this practice has no effect on body weight.”

Chrononutrition

The researchers place their findings in an emerging field called chrononutrition — the study of not just what you eat, but when, and how meal timing interacts with the body’s internal clock.

The body’s circadian system is built around the rhythms of day and night and the physiological processes that accompany them.

• Eating earlier in the day appears to align better with those rhythms, allowing for better calorie processing and appetite regulation.

• Eating late and skipping breakfast works against that clock, regardless of how long the fasting window technically is.

Thus, a 16-hour fast that runs from 10 p.m. to 2 p.m. the next day may not be doing what people assume.

The same fasting window shifted earlier — finishing dinner at 7 p.m. and eating breakfast at 7 a.m. — appears to be a different thing biologically.

Earlier ISGlobal research connected the same early-eating patterns to lower risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, reinforcing the idea that timing has consequences that extend well beyond weight.

39 million people

The study was conducted entirely in Spain, which has a distinctive meal-timing culture. Dinner is typically eaten much later than in the United States. So, the baseline comparisons may not translate directly.

The research is observational, not a controlled experiment. So, it can’t prove that meal timing caused the differences in weight.

“Recommendations will have to wait for more robust evidence,” said Luciana Pons-Muzzo, one of the study’s lead researchers.

There are roughly 260 million adults in the United States. If the IFIC’s 15 percent figure is right, that works out to somewhere around 39 million people currently doing intermittent fasting.

If even a small portion of them have built their practice around skipping breakfast, this research ought to give them something to think about.

That said, the King’s College study I wrote about five years ago suggested intermittent fasting may have memory benefits that this research doesn’t address.

Maybe I’ll finally give it a try — just not the way most people apparently do it.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: The ACLU is urging Louisianans to vote in U.S. House races even after Gov. Jeff Landry purportedly canceled them, as legal challenges move through the courts. The House candidates remain on the ballot for early voting; one assumes the point here is to create a record of people trying to vote for the judicial record.

• NBC News: For months, President Trump portrayed the big new ballroom he’s building at the White House as a gift to the nation, courtesy of patriotic private donors. “No government funds,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last November. But, Republicans are now proposing $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to secure the ballroom.

• The Financial Times: Global airlines have cut 2 million seats from their May schedules within the past two weeks, as concerns about fuel availability in the coming weeks intensify. Since the start of the Iran war in late February, the cost of jet fuel has doubled, forcing airlines to raise ticket prices, while the closure of Gulf airports that connected a third of European journeys to Asia has thrown global travel into disarray.

• WSJ: Why the Collapse of Spirit Airlines Means Higher Fares for Everyone: Defunct budget airline had long been a competitive force on lower-cost tickets.

• AP: Alberta separatists said Monday they have formally submitted 302,000 signatures to try to trigger a referendum on the province leaving Canada. It could go on a ballot as early as October, but a “yes” vote would not trigger independence automatically. Negotiations with the federal government would have to take place and Indigenous groups could use the courts to stop independence from happening.

• CNN: White House border czar Tom Homan brushed off critics within President Trump’s base who say the administration is not deporting enough people, promising to “flood the zone” with immigration officers. “For the people out there saying ‘President Trump’s getting weak on mass deportation,’ you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Homan said, referring to such naysayers as “keyboard warriors.”

• KDVR: A spring snowstorm is bringing inches of snow to Colorado, from the mountains to the Denver area and stretching across much of the state. The May storm comes after a warm and dry winter. In February, Denver had no measurable snow, only the second time on record the city was without snow for the month.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

"Bill knows how to ask the questions that actually matter. I gave this as a gift to my 92-year-old father and my wife — watching both of them light up as they told their stories was worth the price alone. They both felt genuinely special, heard, and valued. Don't wait too long!"
— Chris C., California

Thanks to everyone who signed up over the weekend — I’m excited to get started.

If you’d like to give Life Story Magic as a Mother’s Day gift, use code UNDERSTANDABLY for $100 off our already-discounted rate. Mother’s Day is May 11 — and don’t worry, there’s no expiration on the interview itself.

Reserve Your Place

Scientists have a term for the slow, smoldering inflammation that builds up in the brain’s memory center as you age: “neuroinflammaging.”

It quietly degrades the cellular machinery that keeps you sharp, making it harder to form new memories, think clearly, and adapt to new situations.

For decades, researchers considered it essentially unavoidable — a tax on getting older that everyone eventually pays.

Now, a team at Texas A&M University just published new research suggesting that may not be true.

“Brain age-related diseases like dementia are a major health concern worldwide,” said Ashok Shetty of Texas A&M’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the research. “What we’re showing is brain aging can be reversed, to help people stay mentally sharp, socially engaged, and free from age-related decline.”

A nasal spray?

The researchers developed a therapy using microscopic biological “delivery parcels,” called extracellular vesicles, loaded with genetic cargo that targets the inflammation pathways driving brain aging.

The surprising thing is the delivery route: a nasal spray, which means the vesicles travel directly into the brain’s memory center by way of the olfactory nerves, bypassing the brain’s notoriously difficult-to-cross protective barrier.

“The mode of delivery is one of the most exciting aspects of our approach,” said Maheedhar Kodali, a senior researcher. “Intranasal delivery allows us to reach, and treat, the brain directly without invasive procedures.”

The entire treatment is just two doses. The findings were published in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles.

In aging mice, the results were striking. Within weeks of treatment, the researchers observed dramatically reduced chronic brain inflammation, recharged mitochondria — the cellular power plants inside neurons — and measurably improved memory and object recognition.

The results held for months. Unlike many studies where outcomes vary by sex, the therapy worked equally well in males and females — something the researchers specifically flagged.

Treated animals recognized familiar objects and detected changes in their environment more like younger animals than their untreated peers.

“We are seeing the brain’s own repair systems switch on, healing inflammation and restoring itself,” Shetty said.

Texas A&M has filed a U.S. patent on the therapy.

“Successful brain aging”

To be clear, this research was conducted in mice, not humans. So, it’s not as if you’re going to go to the pharmacy tomorrow and find this kind of nasal spray on the shelves right next to the allergy medicines.

Plenty of promising animal studies have not translated to clinical success in people, and brain research has a long track record of findings that looked revolutionary in a lab and proved far more complicated in practice.

So, the path from here to a human treatment runs through clinical-grade manufacturing, FDA approval for trials, and collaboration with biotech companies — a process that typically takes years.

That said, it’s worth noting for at least two reasons beyond the “nasal spray” curiosity:

• First, this is the same lab’s second major finding in this area. Their earlier work focused on Alzheimer’s disease specifically. This newer study expands the scope to normal brain aging, suggesting the underlying approach may be broadly applicable rather than disease specific.

• Second, the conceptual shift here is significant. The scientific consensus has long treated brain aging as a one-way street. However, this research, and a growing body of work like it, suggests is that the inflammation driving cognitive decline may be a target, not a given.

“We are aiming for successful brain aging,” Shetty said. “Keeping people engaged, alert, and connected. Not just living longer but living smarter and healthier.”

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: The U.S. is using force in the Strait of Hormuz and diplomacy in New York in an effort to break Tehran’s chokehold on the vital shipping lane. Why it matters: Iran has already shown it’s willing to respond with force, putting the two countries on the verge of a return to full-fledged war.

• AFP: A massive land, air and sea search continues for two U.S. soldiers who disappeared while on a training deployment in southern Morocco, amid fears they may have fallen off seaside cliffs and into the ocean. “I can confirm this incident is not related to terrorism but appears to be an accident,” a U.S. official said.

• Fast Company: A viral influencer wants to buy Spirit Airlines and run it like the Green Bay Packers. Could it work? Hunter Peterson wants to turn Spirit, which suspended operations over the weekend, into an airline ‘for the people.’ The internet’s response proves how dire air travel has become.

• Benzinga: Warren Buffett warned that financial markets are increasingly being driven by speculation rather than long-term investing, saying he has “never had people in a more gambling mood than now.” Speaking in a CNBC interview during Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s annual shareholders meeting, the longtime investor criticized the surge in short-term trading behavior, particularly the rise of options trading and prediction-style bets.

• Politico: Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman: As the Pennsylvania Democrat increasingly is isolated within his own party, Republicans are quietly trying to win him over. Trump has made the sell, offering his patented total and complete endorsement plus a financial windfall to the Pennsylvanian.

• L.A. Times: In Bel-Air, a $400-million mega-mansion aims for the national price record.

• NPR: A new bipartisan bill in Congress aims to curb what lawmakers say are predatory collection practices by so-called “claim shark” companies that charge disabled veterans for help claiming benefits. The legislation was prompted by a 2025 NPR investigation of how a Florida company was using auto-dialer software to access a VA benefits hotline meant for veterans, and then sending veterans a bill if their payments increased.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

Today’s story began on the seventh floor of a bombed-out department store in Tokyo, 80 years ago this week: May 7, 1946.

This was less than a year after the unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied forces. The country’s economy was in ruins. An engineer named Masaru Ibuka borrowed about $500 to start a radio repair shop.

Seeking to branch out, his tiny company tried to manufacture and sell electric rice cookers to a starving nation.

The rice cookers didn’t work. Next up: tape recorders — enormous, rudimentary things. Ibuka and his small team eventually showed courts how the machines could replace stenographers, and showed schools what they could do for language learning. Slowly, they found customers.

The real turning point, in retrospect, may have been a short article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper about the venture — because another engineer who had known Ibuka during the war read it and reached out.

They teamed up. What followed was success that most people can only dream of. But first, the two men:

• Masaru Ibuka: Born 1908 in Nikko, Japan. Lost his father at two, raised by his grandfather, became a solitary tinkering child who by 17 was operating a shortwave radio station connecting with strangers across oceans. Spent World War II as a defense contractor for the Imperial Navy, and when it ended found himself 37 years old in a ruined country with nothing but his tools and his ingenuity.

• Akio Morita: Born 1921 near Nagoya, the firstborn son of a sake-brewing dynasty that traced its lineage to 1665. His father began grooming him to be the fifteenth-generation heir before he could understand what that meant — but his mother owned one of Japan’s first RCA Victrola record players, and Morita spent his childhood taking it apart instead. He walked away from three centuries of family obligation to study physics, graduating in 1944 directly into the Imperial Navy.

They’d met on a wartime research committee. Ibuka was the civilian technical expert, 13 years older. Morita was a 23-year-old ensign who had walked away from 300 years of inheritance to study physics.

They were temperamentally opposite — Ibuka shy and introspective, Morita outgoing and restless — and became close friends almost immediately.

The war ended in August 1945. Ibuka set up his radio repair shop. He called it Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute.

On October 6, 1945, the newspaper article ran. Morita, preparing to join the faculty of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, read it. He went to Tokyo to find his old wartime colleague.

Their partnership flourished — but it was in 1952, when Ibuka visited the United States and learned that Bell Laboratories had licensed transistor technology, that things really changed. Ibuka saw a pocket-sized radio. He saw what consumer electronics could become.

Morita flew to New York the following year and completed the licensing deal.

In 1958, preparing to sell to the world, they renamed the company — combining the Latin word sonus with sonny, American slang for a bright young person. Sony. Four letters. Recognizable everywhere.

In 1961, Sony became the first Japanese company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1979 it gave the world the Walkman. In 1982, the compact disc. More cameras than we know what to do with.

The PlayStation followed.

Ibuka died in 1997. Morita died in 1999. In 1992, when both men suffered serious health crises at nearly the same time, they were placed in adjoining hospital rooms.

Ibuka’s son told reporters that the bond between them had been “more like love than friendship.”

They had met in a wartime committee room, building weapons for a losing war.

One of them was supposed to be a sake brewer. The other had lost his father at two years old.

Between them, starting from a city in ruins, they built a company that changed how the world listened to music, watched television, and came to see Japan in an entirely different way.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 3: “It seemed unthinkable. We were flying at nearly 500 miles an hour, at 35,000 feet, and the ride was as smooth and quiet as sitting in a drawing room.” — A passenger aboard the de Havilland Comet, as reported in contemporary press accounts of the world’s first scheduled jet passenger service, arriving in Johannesburg this day in 1952.

• May 4: “This is the most important decision in my life — to give up all if necessary for the Freedom Ride, that justice and freedom might come to the Deep South.” — John Lewis, 21 years old, one of 13 black and white activists who boarded buses in Washington D.C. on this day in 1961 and headed south to challenge segregation. In Alabama, one bus was firebombed and passengers were beaten with pipes and bats. The rides continued for six months and led directly to the federal desegregation of interstate travel facilities.

• May 5: “A new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread.” — The official description of the patent issued on this day in 1809 to Mary Kies of Killingly, Connecticut — the first patent granted to a woman in American history. Women could legally apply for patents under the Patent Act of 1790, but almost none did, because in most states they could not legally own property independent of their husbands. Kies died penniless in 1837, her patent file destroyed in a fire, fashion having moved on.

• May 6: “I felt suddenly and gloriously free from the burden of athletic ambition that I had been carrying for years.” — Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student who on this day in 1954 ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, becoming the first person in history to break the four-minute mile — a barrier that experts had long declared the absolute limit of human capability.

• May 7: “Let the good times roll.” — The unofficial motto of New Orleans, the city founded on this day in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a French-Canadian naval officer who had entered the French navy at age 12. He chose a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi River 100 miles from its mouth, believing it would be safe from hurricanes and tidal surges. He was not entirely right about that.

• May 8: “The world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.” — The official declaration of the 33rd World Health Assembly, issued on this day in 1980 — the only time in human history that a disease has been completely eradicated. Smallpox had killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and had plagued humanity for at least 3,000 years.

• May 9: “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.” — Anna Jarvis, the West Virginia woman who spent years campaigning for a national Mother’s Day holiday, which President Woodrow Wilson officially proclaimed on this day in 1914, and then spent the rest of her life trying to undo it because she objected to the commercialism.

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Life Story Magic — and Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is a week from Sunday, and readers have asked if I’m doing another round of Life Story Magic promotions, since (look at me, all marketer and sales-y right off) … “it makes the perfect gift!”

The answer is yes — but carefully. Here’s where things stand.

Life Story Magic has grown and improved since we launched in December:

• Deeper interviews. I started out thinking 1-hour interviews would be the standard. Instead, my record so far is 3 hours (counting the pre-interview). I’m not promising that — sometimes it’s closer to the original plan — but I keep talking, and so does everyone I interview. I take that as a good sign.

• Better tech. The videos, the transcription, the editing — all of it keeps getting better even in a few short months. The technology keeps improving and I keep learning. We’ve also started producing short social-media-style reels from the interviews.

• Amazing stories. I believe everybody has a fascinating story, especially when someone takes the time to listen and ask the right questions.

These interviews are private, but speaking broadly, we have people who've built businesses … raised families … left for new countries … swam the English Channel (I didn’t see that one coming!) … created inventions … fought in wars …

I’ve talked with children of Holocaust survivors and interviewed a 97-year-old woman who — counting children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now great-great-grandchildren — has nearly 100 living direct descendants.

I’ve had the humbling and moving experience of interviewing people who knew that because of medical reasons, they didn’t have long left to live. And, I’m pretty sure I’m going to break the record at some point for “most nonagenarians interviewed at length on video.”

Secret code: ‘UNDERSTANDABLY’

Close to 100 of you took me up on Life Story Magic during the first time around.

I’ve gotten through almost all of them. (If you bought and haven’t scheduled yet — no worries, your order never expires, and I’m here whenever you’re ready.)

If December was our “alpha” stage, we’re somewhere in “beta” now, and we’re growing. But, I’m being very deliberate about the pace.

Since you’re reading Understandably, I know that (a) you appreciate the importance of good stories, and (b) you’re part of the group that has genuinely sustained me from the beginning.

So you get first crack—and a special offer.

Use code UNDERSTANDABLY at checkout for an extra $100 off the already-reduced Mother’s Day sale price of $399 (regular $499) um … let’s say for the next 20 people who take me up on it.

This special pricing — $299 with the code, in case I made that too confusing — won’t last forever. So if you’re interested I hope you’ll check it out.

Thanks for reading, as always — and for being the kind of people who care about stories worth telling.

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Free for ALL Friday

With that … It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I’ve found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.

How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

Parents find their kids captive to the video streaming site on their school-issued devices; for one, it was 13,000 YouTube videos in three months

American public schools are awash in YouTube. The Google-owned video platform has become a go-to educational resource for teachers, with students watching videos on topics ranging from photosynthesis to the Pythagorean theorem. But schools’ overreliance on the platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices. Parents are discovering that their children are watching thousands of videos during school hours—many of them having nothing to do with their lessons.

Link: Wall Street Journal (Multiple reporters)

How AI’s Threat to Entry-Level Jobs Is Turning Gen Z Into ‘Generation Entrepreneur’

As AI erases the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder, some gen Z workers skip the entry level to become their own CEOs

“There is no guaranteed outcome with any job,” said Shola West, 25, a media consultant. “Working for yourself at least allows you some control over your fate.” West is part of a growing cohort of gen Z workers who are bypassing traditional entry-level positions and starting their own businesses instead. As artificial intelligence automates tasks that once belonged to junior employees, young workers are concluding that the corporate ladder they were promised may no longer exist.

Link: The Guardian (Multiple reporters)

How to Prepare for a Longer Life

We asked Times readers to share their best advice for a safe, satisfying and financially comfortable life — no matter how old you are or how long you live

How long will you live? How much money will you need to maintain a comfortable lifestyle? Should you worry about the kids? Should you downsize? What happens if you get sick? Clearly, the questions are on the minds of New York Times readers, who responded enthusiastically to a call to share their best advice for heading into their later years. Below is a sampling of the hundreds of responses to a questionnaire to readers, requesting their stories and best advice to others for meeting their goals. One responder put it succinctly: “Live, laugh and love, but do so within your means.”

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

Homebuyers Are Sitting Out the Key Season for Real Estate Deals

Higher mortgage rates, economic uncertainty and uneven supply are weighing on the market

Would-be buyers such as Nic Parés, a 37-year-old IT worker in the Austin area, are growing increasingly frustrated. He and his wife have been looking to buy their first home together since the start of the year, but after a jump in borrowing costs they’ve had to reduce their budget by about $100,000. They’re now “sitting tight” in their rental while they wait for the market to improve. “There was an enthusiasm and energy coming into the season and then the mortgage picture changed and we had to readjust,” Parés said. “There are properties that probably check all of our boxes of things that we want that we’re now priced out of.”

Link: Wall Street Journal (Multiple reporters)

Trinidad Chambliss Is Making Millions Playing College Football. The NCAA Wants to Stop Him.

The 23-year-old star quarterback talks to Vanity Fair about his landmark legal case, his coaches past and present, and his upcoming season at Ole Miss

Five years ago, his car could have warranted an NCAA investigation, and his agent—just the fact of having one—would have immediately ended Chambliss’s college career. Now, the most shocking thing is that his vehicle is so modest—and that, rather than enter the NFL draft, he is heading into his sixth year of college. He’ll make more money for the upcoming season than he would have in two years as a late second-round pick, where experts projected his selection in this year’s draft would be.

Link: Vanity Fair (Multiple reporters) Backup: https://archive.ph/xBXRS

Bringing the Flatiron Building’s Showpiece Door Back to Life

The revolving door’s inventor built this one over 100 years ago. It was reinstalled this week

At the headquarters of the International Revolving Door Company in Evansville, Ind., tens of thousands of hand-drawn specifications rendered on onion skin paper in the beginning of the 20th century preserve the early history of a once-novel invention: the original 1888 revolving door.

Somewhere, presumably, in those documents are the specs for the original door at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and East 22nd Street, at the base of the Flatiron Building, which was installed in the 1910s.

But those specifications are nowhere to be found, said Joshua Kratochvil, the International Revolving Door Company’s eloquent and earnest 34-year-old co-owner — a problem as his company had been tasked with restoring that door in time for springtime installation.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

I Was a Professional Fairy. The Kids Made the Job Magical – But the Adults Could Be a Nightmare

My special skills included driving a small car filled with helium balloons, memorising children’s names – and tolerating parents’ behaviour

From the age of 16 to 22, I was a children’s entertainer. Most often a fairy, sometimes a witch, ballerina, princess or mermaid – with conspicuous legs underneath her tail. One time, hilariously, a ladybug.

The hourly rate was excellent, the costumes were cute and the tiny customers even cuter. My special skills were memorising every child’s name, preparing hundreds of fairy-bread triangles, vacuuming a party space in full costume, singing while I applied sparkles to the eyelids of my pint-size revellers, and driving a small hatchback car filled with 50 bubblegum-pink helium balloons.

Oh, and the position required a strong tolerance for the behaviour of parents.

Link: The Guardian (Kate Leaver)

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And, just in case you got so into Free for ALL Friday that you forgot about Life Story Magic … Don’t forget to use code UNDERSTANDABLY at checkout!

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I like things that are easy. When I find a study saying the way I sleep, the amount of coffee I drink, or the things I do for fun are actually good for me, I latch onto it.

The same instinct applies in business. So when WalletHub announced that it had studied more than 1,300 small cities across the United States to figure out which ones were the best and worst places to start a business, I pored over the numbers, and I think I found a cheat code hiding in plain sight.

Short version: Go where the people are.

First, the list

WalletHub ranked cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 by 18 metrics — everything from the growth rate of small businesses to investor access, labor costs, office space affordability, and commute times.

Here are the top 10:

1. St. George, Utah

2. Fort Myers, Florida

3. Washington City, Utah

4. Bozeman, Montana

5. Greenville, South Carolina

6. Cedar City, Utah

7. Boca Raton, Florida

8. Cheyenne, Wyoming

9. Ocala, Florida

10. Dover, Delaware

A pattern emerges

Once you get past the top section, a pattern emerges that’s hard to ignore.

Florida and Utah cities just keep showing up:

South Bradenton, Florida (No. 11); Lake Worth Beach, Florida (12); Midvale, Utah (14); Palm Beach Gardens, Florida (15); Horizon West, Florida (16); East Lake-Orient Park, Florida (17); Springville, Utah (19); Herriman, Utah (21); Winter Park, Florida (22).

Nine of the next 12 spots belong to either Florida or Utah.

OK, but why?

The short explanation: Both of these states have seen exceptional population growth in recent years. Florida added 467,000 residents in a single year, from 2023 to 2024.

Utah tied Texas for third-fastest-growing state in 2024 at a 1.8 percent growth rate, and it has grown from 2.76 million residents in 2010 to more than 3.5 million today. Over the past 15 years, both states have added residents at roughly three times the national median rate.

Interestingly, they’re growing for different reasons.

• Florida’s growth is largely migration-driven: retirees, remote workers, post-pandemic movers looking for lower taxes and warmer winters. That influx tends to bring capital and consumers.

• Utah’s story is different. The state has the highest per-capita rate of natural increase — meaning births over deaths — of any state in the country. Its growth is younger, more organic, and more distributed across smaller cities rather than concentrated in one or two dominant metros.

Why not Texas? Why not Nevada?

Two other fast-growing states are conspicuously absent from the top of the list: Texas and Nevada. So why don’t they show up here?

The answer is that this was a study of small cities, and while both states have seen enormous population growth, it’s overwhelmingly concentrated in their large metros.

More than 90 percent of Texas residents live in metropolitan counties, and over 95 percent of the state’s population growth from 2020 to 2023 occurred in just 26 metropolitan statistical areas — Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, etc.

Those cities are too large to qualify for this study, and the smaller Texas cities simply aren’t riding the same wave.

Nevada is an even more extreme case. Clark County — home to Las Vegas — accounts for more than two-thirds of the entire state’s population, and 92 percent of all Nevadans live in urban areas.

Utah’s growth, by contrast, is more distributed. The St. George and Washington City corridor in the state’s southwest isn’t a spillover from Salt Lake City — it’s its own genuine small-city growth story.

Not just about where

Plenty of companies serve national or global markets regardless of where they’re headquartered. However, if you can identify a business whose natural market is a growing population segment, you’ve found the same tailwind in a different form.

A few examples worth thinking about:

• Adults older than 65: The U.S. Census Bureau projects this group will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in American history by 2034.

• Pet owners: The American Pet Products Association estimates Americans spent over $150 billion on their pets in 2023, a number that has essentially doubled in a decade.

• Remote and hybrid workers: The share of Americans working from home at least part-time has stabilized at roughly three to four times its pre-pandemic level.

The geographic cheat code and the demographic cheat code work the same way: You’re not fighting the current. You’re letting it carry you.

Why make it difficult?

WalletHub’s full methodology weights business environment, access to resources, and cost of doing business.

But, I keep coming back to the simple version. Business is hard, and starting a business is harder.

There are a hundred things working against you that you can’t control — the economy, timing, competition, and luck.

Population growth is a tailwind: more potential customers, a deeper talent pool, and a market that’s expanding rather than contracting. It won’t save a bad business, but all other things being equal, it improves your odds.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about coffee …

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Other things worth knowing …

• Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in a 6 to 3 decision Wednesday, making it harder for minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark civil rights law. “I love it,” President Trump told reporters after hearing of the decision.

• Politico, Clarion-Ledger, AL.com, Mediaite: Within hours afterward, Florida passed a new congressional map that could help the GOP pick up four more seats, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called for a special session on redistricting, Alabama’s attorney general pledged to “act as quickly as possible,” and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) called on her state’s legislature to quickly eliminate all House districts in the state held by Democrats.

• The Deseret News: Can the U.S. cope with a shrinking population? Statistics show a decline could begin much quicker than perviously thought. (This one is especially interesting to me after above about how Utah — home of the Deseret News — has a growing population.)

• Fox News: Speaking of growing markets, the Pentagon is seeking roughly $55 billion for drone and autonomous warfare programs in its fiscal year 2027 budget, as battlefield conflicts from the Middle East to Ukraine expose a growing problem: cheap drones are increasingly able to overwhelm costly U.S. defenses. The funding request is a dramatic surge from roughly $225 million a year earlier.

• The Wall Street Journal: Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran: The president prefers decisive victories, but none of the available options provides him with a swift exit from the conflict.

• WAMU: The administration is seeking access to the health records of millions of federal workers including their prescriptions, diagnoses, and doctor visits. Reporter Amanda Seitz, who broke the story, says the Office of Personnel Management’s notice makes no mention of removing identifying information: “The names of patients, doctors, and their specific diagnoses could all be available to the federal government.”

• The New York Times: A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons: Scientists shared transcripts in which chatbots described how to assemble deadly pathogens and unleash them in public spaces.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

If you’ve been getting something out of Understandably and are in a position to support it, becoming a premium subscriber helps more than you might think. It’s been six years of work I care deeply about, and your support keeps it going.

If it’s not the right time, I understand completely. We’re still friends!

But if you’re in a position to help out, I’m grateful. Thanks!

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Ode to Sleepy

When I was an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice long ago, we had some real characters working with us. One of them was a lawyer who kept a pillow and a comforter under his desk.

Every afternoon, he’d quietly close his door, lay down on the floor, and take a nap. He’d get annoyed if anyone woke him up.

The rest of us thought it was somewhere between eccentric and genius, but he was a good guy and very generous in sharing the briefs he wrote and filed in court. I’ll admit it — I was mostly jealous. The idea of stretching out and actually sleeping in the middle of the day, in a federal building seemed like a win.

I’m not going to use his real name here, but let’s just call him Sleepy. Anyone who worked with me back then might know who I mean.

It turns out Sleepy was ahead of his time.

‘Lay on the floor’

Scott Kirby is the CEO of United Airlines, which by available seat miles is the largest airline in the world. He runs an organization of roughly 100,000 people and is responsible for an operation that doesn’t stop, sleep, or really forgive mistakes.

He also takes a 20-minute nap on the floor of his office almost every day.

In a recent interview with McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels, Kirby described the habit plainly.

“Throughout my whole career, when I’m in the office, I’ll close the door and take a 20-minute nap. When I first got to United, people were, like, ‘Oh my God, where do you take a nap?’ I said, ‘I lay on the floor.’”

His team promptly offered to get him a couch. He declined to make a big deal of it.

“When you’re tired, your brain is not 100%. If you’re not 100%, you shouldn’t be making decisions.”

Churchill, LBJ, Edison, and Dali

Kirby’s company goes back a long way (meaning the company he keeps, not United Airlines):

Winston Churchill kept a bed in the Houses of Parliament so he’d never miss his afternoon nap.

He even napped through the Blitz: “Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”

Lyndon Johnson ran what he called a two-shift day. He’d work through the morning, exercise after lunch, change into his pajamas, nap for 30 minutes, then change back and work a second shift that sometimes ran until 1 or 2 in the morning.

Thomas Edison publicly dismissed sleep as a waste of time, claimed he only needed three or four hours a night, and apparently considered napping a character flaw. He also napped constantly, and there are photographs of him asleep in labs, on workbenches, in libraries.

Perhaps my favorite all-time napper however was Salvador Dalí, who approached everything with a certain theatrical commitment.

He’d sit in a chair holding a bundle of keys over a silver plate. When he fell asleep and dropped them, the crash woke him, which he believed translated to a micro-nap deep enough to access his subconscious without letting him slide into REM.

Ah yes, the science

At the risk of prompting you to take a nap right now, let’s just say that there is science on this that’s been piling up for years, and it keeps pointing in the same direction:

• A European study of 90 adults found that even a 20-minute nap improved the odds of a creative breakthrough — with deeper naps producing results in 85.7% of participants, compared to 55.5% of those who stayed awake.

• Harvard Medical School research showed that sleep spindles — brief bursts of brain activity during light non-REM sleep — actually target the specific regions you used during learning. The stronger those spindles, the better performance afterward.

• And, a Rice University and Weill Cornell study found that even 30 minutes of light sleep improved performance on cognitive tasks and produced measurable changes in how neurons fire and synchronize.

Our napping brains are apparently consolidating, refining, and reorganizing — doing work that waking thought can’t replicate.

So what’s stopping you?

Probably the same thing that was stopping us back at DOJ — the feeling that lying down in the middle of the day is somehow an admission of weakness — or else, at least the kind of thing that gets you a goofy nickname and leads to someone else writing about you in an email newsletter two decades later.

But then again: Churchill pushed through some fairly serious things, as did LBJ. Kirby is running the largest airline in the world, and Dalí somehow managed to nap while not crushing that bizarre, trademark moustache.

Here’s to you, Sleepy, for figuring it out while the rest of us were muddling on. The comforter under the desk is starting to look like the obvious move.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The Bulwark: The White House unveiled a radical redesign of new U.S. passports to include a prominent picture of President Trump. The passports, apparently a limited edition to celebrate America 250, will feature a scowling image of Trump superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, along with Trump’s signature in gold.

• Associated Press: King Charles visits Washington with hopes of restoring the US-UK relationship.

• Reuters: Republicans in Congress are pushing for legislation to fund Trump’s White House ballroom project at taxpayer expense. Trump previously had said that private donations would ​cover the estimated $400 million cost.

• Axios: The share of Americans who say their financial situation is getting worse is now 55%, the highest point in 25 years (including during the pandemic and the financial crisis) according to new Gallup data. Last year, the percentage was 53%; in 2024 it was 47%.

• Yahoo Finance: Backers of a proposed tax on California billionaires say they have collected enough signatures to bring the measure to a statewide vote. Unions say the tax would prevent hospital closures and fund public education; opponents say the tax would simply fuel an exodus of wealthy company founders.

• CNBC: The United Arab Emirates is leaving OPEC on May 1. The shock announcement Tuesday comes after the UAE was the target of missile and drone attacks for weeks by Iran (which is also a member of OPEC). The UAE It was the group’s third-largest oil producer in February behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

• The National: Speaking of the UAE, its flag carrier Emirates has shared plans to introduce private en-suite bathrooms on board its aircraft - the first in the world to do so.

• Associated Press: How 2 men claimed an absurd record by driving an old 3-wheel car the length of Africa: They had help from sponsors and crowd funding, and documented the journey on an Instagram page that pulled in nearly 100,000 followers under the title: “14,000 miles, 3 wheels, 0 common sense.”

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

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Honey, Have You Seen…?

I’m like, big into vibe-coding now, and one of my not-ready-for-prime-time creations is an app I’d previously joked about building forever. It’s called Honey, Have You Seen…?

Open it, type in something you’ve misplaced — your keys, your wallet, the reading glasses that were on your head — and the app responds the way a helpful spouse would:

Could it be in the car? Did you check the counter? Is it in the pocket of the jeans you wore yesterday?

(Also me: Oh my God, I have so much I have to get done today!)

Anyway, it turns out that “honey have you” dynamic may be doing a lot more than helping you find your sunglasses. It might be correlated to a lower likelihood of getting cancer.

Researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami analyzed more than 4 million cancer cases between 2015 and 2022 and published their findings in Cancer Research Communications.

The main question: are married people less likely to get cancer? The results:

• Adults who had never married had substantially higher rates of developing cancer than those who were or had been married.

• Men who had never married were about 70% more likely to develop cancer than married men.

• Women who had never married were about 85% more likely to develop cancer than women who were or had been married.

For some specific cancers, the gaps were even more pronounced.

Of course, getting married doesn’t magically prevent cancer. People who smoke less, drink less, and take better care of themselves may also be more likely to get — and stay — married.

But a few mechanisms are worth taking seriously. The benefit associated with marriage may have less to do with the institution itself and more to do with what it tends to provide — a built-in accountability partner who asks the questions you might otherwise skip.

Married people tend to have stronger social support and more economic stability — plus a partner who notices when something’s off.

The kind of partner who says: You’ve been coughing for three weeks. Maybe call the doctor.

The associations were especially strong for cancers tied to infection, smoking, and alcohol — areas where a partner’s influence could plausibly matter — and stronger in adults over 50, suggesting the effect builds over time.

This study began in 2015, the year same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, specifically so it could include married same-sex couples — hence why it’s one of the more contemporary and inclusive analyses on this topic.

“With the prevalence of marriage decreasing in the U.S., this is something that should be further studied,” said co-author Paulo Pinheiro, a professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

The researchers aren’t in the business of dispensing relationship advice, but the study has a clear practical takeaway.

“If you’re not married, you should be paying extra attention to cancer risk factors, getting any screenings you may need, and staying up to date on health care,” said Frank Penedo, associate director for population sciences at Sylvester.

So the next time your spouse asks where you’ve been and reminds you that you’re two years overdue for a physical, maybe resist the eye roll.

After all — and I say this as someone who built the app — there’s a version of Honey, Have You Seen…? that ends not with your keys, but with people (me!) acting like a grownup and taking care of themselves a bit more than they otherwise would.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The Hill: President Trump and his political allies are pointing to Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner as proof of the need for his planned ballroom on White House grounds. The Department of Justice called on the National Trust for Historic Preservation to drop its lawsuit against the administration over the ballroom in the wake of the shooting. A lawyer from the preservation group said no.

• Yahoo News: UFC CEO Dana White’s description of the chaos at the WHCA: “Tables getting flipped over, guys running in with guns and they were screaming ‘Get down.’ I didn’t get down. It was f*cking awesome. I literally took every minute of it in, and it was a pretty crazy, unique experience.”

• NBC Sports: Kenyan Sabastian Sawe broke the two-hour barrier in the marathon, winning the London Marathon in an unofficial 1 hour, 59 minutes, 30 seconds, shattering the previous record of 2:00:35. The runner-up on Sunday, Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha, ran 1:59:41 in his marathon debut.

• USA Today: A bipartisan group of lawmakers joined forces on a bill to broaden access to a beloved grocery store staple, aptly called the “Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act.” The idea is to let recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) use benefits to purchase the popular cooked chickens. Currently, the purchase of hot prepared foods is prohibited under SNAP.

• The Hill: President Trump endorsed the idea of changing the name of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would give the agency the acronym NICE. “GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

• Defense One: The Pentagon replicated a Ukrainian-style drone attack in Florida. Now it’s changing its counter-drone strategy.

• The Telegraph: No sex please, we’re on Mars! Inside the simulated red planet mission: Six participants live and work under conditions that mirror long‑duration Space expeditions.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

You probably already know the name Tim Berners-Lee. If not: he’s the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. That’s what he’s famous for.

But I think he did something more important and laudable — he gave it away.

Berners-Lee was born in London on June 8, 1955. His parents were both mathematicians who had worked together on the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first commercially sold computers in the world.

He studied physics at Oxford, graduated in 1976, and spent the next few years doing what a lot of technically gifted young people did in that era — bouncing between jobs, writing software, figuring out what to build.

In 1980 he took a six-month contract at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose name derives from its original French acronym, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

It sits outside Geneva, straddling the French-Swiss border, and it is one of the strangest and most remarkable places on earth: a campus of particle accelerators and underground tunnels where thousands of physicists from dozens of countries come to smash subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, trying to understand what everything is made of.

They produce staggering amounts of data. In 1980, sharing that data between researchers was a genuine problem — different computers, different operating systems, different institutions, none of them talking to each other easily.

Information got lost, and when people left they basically took their knowledge with them. The institutional memory of one of the world’s great scientific organizations lived largely inside individual human heads.

Berners-Lee decided to do something about it. He wrote a small program for keeping track of the connections between people, projects, and documents — a personal tool, essentially, built on the concept of hypertext, which allowed documents to link to one another.

He called it ENQUIRE, after a Victorian household encyclopedia called *Enquire Within Upon Everything* that he remembered from childhood.

Then his contract ended and he left, and ENQUIRE stayed behind on a CERN computer for four years.

In 1984, Berners-Lee came back in a permanent role, and he found that the data problem was even worse — CERN was bigger, the data was more complex, the researchers were more dispersed.

He spent several years thinking about it, and in March 1989 he wrote a formal proposal: a system of linked documents that could live on multiple computers simultaneously, that anyone with the right software could navigate, that would be built on top of the internet infrastructure that already existed.

He called it a “mesh.” Later he called it the World Wide Web. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, read the idea and wrote four words in the margin: *”Vague, but exciting.”*

That was enough. By the end of 1990 he had built a working version — a web server, a browser, and the first website, all running on a NeXT computer on his desk at CERN.

Someone taped a note to the computer in red ink: *”This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN.”*

For the next two years it grew quietly. Other physicists started using it, and other institutions picked it up. The first web server outside Europe came online at Stanford in December 1991. By 1993 there were perhaps 50 websites in the entire world.

The internet existed, and had existed for decades — but it was complicated, technical, and forbidding to anyone without serious training. What Berners-Lee had built was a layer on top of it that made it navigable by ordinary people.

That meant he now had a decision to make.

Berners-Lee had built something that any reasonable person could see was going to be enormous, with staggering commercial possibilities.

A system that could eventually connect every computer on earth, carrying information, commerce, communication — and he held the patents! Or at least, he could have, structuring it so that every website, every browser, every web server owed him something.

On April 30, 1993, 33 years ago this week, CERN instead released the World Wide Web software into the public domain — no patents, no royalties, no licensing fees.

Free, forever, for every person and institution on earth to use, build on, and improve.

The decision to release it like this was Berners-Lee’s, and he’s been undramatic about it in the years since, framing it less as generosity than as logic.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control,” he said, “it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

Maybe. But plenty of people have looked at something universal and tried to own it anyway.

Within two years of that April day there were 10,000 websites. Within five years, millions. Within a decade, it had become the largest communications system in human history — carrying more information, connecting more people, and generating more economic activity than anything ever built. There is almost no corner of modern life it has not touched.

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004. He is 70 years old and still working — currently focused on giving people back control over their own data, which he considers the web’s unfinished business. He has received every honor his field can offer.

But he has never collected a royalty.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 26: “Well, the people, I would say.” — Jonas Salk, when asked by journalist Edward R. Murrow who owned the patent on the polio vaccine, which began its first mass trial on this day in 1954 — with nearly two million American children, known as the Polio Pioneers, receiving shots.

• April 27: “Once more, we affirmed a truism of human history: that the people are their own liberators.” — Nelson Mandela, who on this day in 1994 voted in South Africa’s first fully democratic election, held over three days, which drew 22 million voters of all races. Mandela, then 75, was elected president.

• April 28: “The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator.” — Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who on this day in 1947 set sail from Callao, Peru, on a hand-built balsa wood raft with five companions and a parrot named Lorita, attempting to prove that ancient South Americans could have reached Polynesia by drifting with the wind and current.

• April 29: “The first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent.” — Horace Mann Bond, class of 1923 and Lincoln University’s first Black president, describing the school he attended, which received its charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on this day in 1854 — making it the first degree-granting HBCU in the United States.

• April 30: “I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” — George Washington, from his first inaugural address, delivered on this day in 1789. A witness noted that even Washington trembled as he spoke. He had not wanted the job, but he had been recruited and elected unanimously.

• May 1: “It will never be finished.” — William Lamb, chief architect of the Empire State Building, which opened on this day in 1931, only 410 days after construction began. It was the tallest building in the world for 40 years. Lamb reportedly said that every time he looked at the building, he saw something he wished he’d done differently.

• May 2: “We are the ship. All else the sea.” — Andrew “Rube” Foster, the son of a Texas sharecropper who became one of the greatest pitchers of his era, and who on this day in 1920 launched the Negro National League’s first game — the first successful professional baseball league for Black Americans. Foster borrowed the motto from Frederick Douglass.

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The Unflattering Secrets Revealed So Far in Elon Musk’s Latest Legal Feud

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, are scheduled to face off in court next week

The bitter legal feud between the two tech titans is prying open the industry’s most powerful circles by spilling the tea of Silicon Valley VIPs. Hundreds of court filings have revealed cringey texts, emails or private diary entries of Musk, Altman, other OpenAI founders and other public figures. They include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg privately offering to use his social platforms to help Musk’s interests, Musk insulting Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos (twice) and a journal in which a big MAGA donor muses about becoming a billionaire, according to the filings.

Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but Musk left the company in an acrimonious split in 2018. His lawsuit, originally filed in 2024, alleges that OpenAI broke its founding pledges to share its technology openly with the world as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab. Musk argues that Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, conspired to enrich themselves at Musk’s expense and asks the court to remove them from their leadership positions and to restore OpenAI to a full nonprofit.

Shivon Zilis is a longtime ally of Musk and has worked at several of his companies. She acted as an “Elon whisperer” to OpenAI, Altman said in his deposition, and the company says she served on its board of directors from 2020 to 2023. In 2022, it was revealed publicly that Zilis and Musk had twins together the prior year. The pair started a brief romance around 2016, Zilis said in her deposition in the lawsuit. They now have four children together and are in a romantic relationship, she said.

Link: Washington Post (Multiple reporters) Backup: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/the-unflattering-secrets-revealed-so-far-in-elon-musks-latest-legal-feud-174615161.html

Trump Fought to Keep the Ballroom Fundraising Contract Secret. Here’s What’s in It.

The agreement governing hundreds of millions in private donations was kept secret until a watchdog group sued and a judge ordered it disclosed

The Trump administration’s contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to build President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom shields donors’ identities, excludes the White House from conflict of interest protections and was disclosed only after a lawsuit and a judge’s order, records obtained by The Washington Post show. The agreement establishing the legal and financial framework for the planned $400 million undertaking — the most significant change to the White House in decades — was signed in early October, less than two weeks before demolition crews started destroying the East Wing.

The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public. Dozens of the project’s known donors — which include Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Google — collectively have billions of dollars in federal contracts before the administration.

“This document reveals that anonymous donations are the heart of this agreement,” said Jon Golinger, a lawyer and public policy advocate with Public Citizen. “Who are these anonymous donors, and what are they hiding?” Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore who spent three years on a congressionally authorized commission scrutinizing wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the anonymity provisions potentially set up the Trump administration to block congressional inquiries into the project’s funding.

Link: Washington Post (Dan Diamond)

America’s New Tax Mantra: ‘The IRS Isn’t Going to Catch Me’

The battered Internal Revenue Service shed thousands of enforcement employees—and more taxpayers appear eager to cheat

The Internal Revenue Service has shed thousands of enforcement workers since President Trump returned to office, and his fiscal 2027 budget proposal seeks further cuts amid the administration’s broader pullback of white-collar law enforcement. The IRS enforcement workforce would fall below 30,000, fewer than at the end of Trump’s first term and about a third less than the Biden-era peak. “There’s seemingly this mentality building which is, ‘The IRS isn’t going to catch me,’” said Carolyn Schenck, a former IRS national fraud counsel, now at law firm Caplin and Drysdale in Washington.

Audits of people with at least $10 million in income dropped 9% last year, and they are on track to decline another 39% this year. Partnership audits declined, reversing an attempt to scrutinize private-equity firms and other complex entities that have long bedeviled the government. In fiscal 2025, the IRS collected less direct revenue from audits and appeals than in any year since at least 2012, though the money can arrive years after audits start.

The IRS started January 2025 with about 103,000 employees. Then Trump returned, determined to undo Biden’s initiatives and shape a pro-taxpayer IRS. The administration fired probationary government employees, those who held the job for less than a year, which disproportionately hit agencies that just hired heavily, including the IRS. Some later returned after a court challenge. The administration also offered buyouts that were attractive to the aging IRS workforce. By May, head count at the IRS had declined by more than 25,000, including about a quarter of auditors.

Link: Wall Street Journal (Richard Rubin)

If He Leaves You on a Mountain, End Your Relationship

The “Alpine divorce,” in which one partner leaves another stranded while hiking, is more serious than the name implies

One afternoon in July 2024, Stefanie Peiker, a hiking guide in the Austrian Alps, came across a woman lying on the ground, heavily injured after falling off her electric bike. “Her face was completely destroyed, she was bleeding and crying,” Ms. Peiker said. “The first thing I asked was, ‘Are you alone?’” The woman explained that she’d been cycling with her boyfriend, Ms. Peiker said, but he had left her after an argument. “I called the ambulance, took out my first-aid kit,” said Ms. Peiker, 31, who was on duty as a park ranger in a nature reserve that is part of a network of protected areas called Natura 2000. “Then, the boyfriend came back and screamed how stupid she is and that she destroyed his holiday.”

Though this was an extreme case, Ms. Peiker said she often comes across women who are alone on mountain paths because their partners are hiking ahead. So she wasn’t surprised when, during the past weeks, women on Reddit, Instagram and TikTok began sharing stories of being left behind by their partners while hiking, biking and climbing in nature, calling it “Alpine divorce.” Often, the women described risky or uncomfortable circumstances where their partners had more knowledge of the terrain or more experience with the sport.

The flurry of social media posts during the last few weeks appeared to have been triggered by a criminal case in Austria focused on a mountaineering expedition that ended in death. In February, Thomas Plamberger, 37, was found guilty of gross negligent manslaughter for leaving his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, 33, to die of hypothermia on Austria’s highest mountain, the Grossglockner. “In the mountains, it can quickly become dangerous,” said Andreas Truegler, 44, a squad leader and deputy head of mountain rescue in the Austrian Alps.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

The Last Time Everyone Watched the Same Thing

No one knew it at the time, but 2014 — more precisely, Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded selfie moment — marked the peak of a monoculture that no longer exists

At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. DeGeneres’ Twitter account posted it immediately afterward, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time. The selfie was an instantly viral moment in a telecast that drew the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people.

No one knew it at the time, but in retrospect the selfie moment feels like the last stand of a shared popular culture that no longer exists. Monoculture didn’t die with Cooper’s selfie, but that night may have been its last peak. It wasn’t just the Oscars that were big that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets were arguably at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in almost 21 million.

If awards shows are a proxy for what people — both the folks who make the things nominated for awards and the public that consumes them — are dialed in on at any given time, then our collective attention has steadily waned over time. None of the big awards telecasts has approached its 2014 audience numbers in the 12 years since. The Oscar broadcast is still usually the biggest non-sports primetime show of the year on a broadcast network, but that now means 18 million or so viewers rather than 40 million-plus.

Link: Hollywood Reporter (Rick Porter)

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters

In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.

At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.

Link: The Atlantic (Noah Hawley)

In a World Obsessed With Productivity, the Case for Strategic Laziness

Downtime isn’t an enemy of progress—artists and athletes explain how rest fuels creativity and performance

In a world obsessed with ticking off goals, downtime is seen as the antithesis of the progress we’re all supposed to be striving for. These days, everything has to be tracked; even reading and sleeping have been sucked into a vortex of apps and metrics. As a result, any period of time where we aren’t “achieving” can now make us feel guilty, and even — whisper it — lazy. I know this feeling well. As a freelance writer, every day feels like starting from zero.

“Laziness is actually a vital part of fitness,” says Dhara Patel, a physician associate at Kuon Healthcare, who’s worked with athletes for over a decade. “The body doesn’t improve during workouts; it improves during rest, when it has time to recover and adapt,” she says, adding that athletes who don’t rest face higher injury risk, slower progress and performance plateaus — no matter how hard they train. Aubrey Hunt, a psychology educator at Willow Ridge, says that being lazy is equally as important for the mind.

“Creativity does not come from forcing it,” says writer S.J. Watson, whose novel Before I Go to Sleep was adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman. “Following the success of my debut novel, I experienced a profound shift in my sense of self. I was no longer someone with a day job who also wrote — I was a writer. Full time. And so, any time I wasn’t writing? That was nothing more than laziness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that approach backfired dramatically.”

Link: InsideHook (Tom Ward)

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A few weeks ago, I visited my parents. My dad told me he thought I looked good.

“Have you lost weight?” he said. “What are you now, 150?”

This was one of those funny moments where guessing wrong kind of undermines the compliment. Yes, I have lost a lot of weight — but I haven’t been 150 pounds since probably 8th grade.

Saying that I was down to around 170 sounded a bit underwhelming by comparison — even though I’m proud of what I’ve done.

It’s one thing when your dad guesses your weight wrong, but it’s another thing entirely when your doctor makes a similar mistake — or for that matter, perhaps, if we were to learn that an entire, commonly used but oft-maligned metric might also be getting things wrong.

That’s exactly what’s been happening with the way medical professionals calculate body mass index (also known as BMI), at least if a new study is accurate.

BMI is simply your weight divided by your height squared, so it should be pretty hard to mess up.

But, by definition it doesn’t break down how much of your weight is fat, or where that fat is located in your body, nor does it distinguish between a person who is 200 pounds of muscle and a person who is 200 pounds with very little muscle.

Doctors and fitness professionals have been saying this for decades, but the metric has persisted — in clinical care, in insurance underwriting, in public health policy — largely because it’s free, fast, and requires nothing more than a scale and a tape measure.

The new study, published in the journal Nutrients and being presented at the European Congress on Obesity next month, put that persistence to the test.

Researchers took 1,351 adults — ages 18 to 98 — and compared their standard WHO BMI classifications against their actual body fat, measured using DXA scanning.

DXA, or dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, is the gold standard for measuring body composition, because it directly measures fat, muscle, and bone. The findings:

• Among people BMI labeled as overweight, more than half were in the wrong category when measured by actual body fat — and of those, roughly three-quarters turned out to be normal weight.

• Among people BMI labeled obese, about one in three was actually only overweight. And among people BMI labeled underweight, two-thirds were actually normal weight.

Overall, more than one-third of adults in the study were placed in the wrong weight category entirely.

Caveats:

• The sample in this study was entirely White Caucasian adults in northern Italy, and the researchers cite this as a limitation, since BMI is already known to perform differently across ethnic groups.

• Also, overall rates of overweight and obesity in societies look similar whether you use BMI or DXA at the population level; the researchers say that’s because mismatches for individual people might cancel each other out in the aggregate.

All of this comes at a remarkable moment in weight medicine.

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have upended how millions of people think about and pursue weight loss.

Employers are grappling with whether to cover them, insurers are drawing eligibility lines, and doctors are deciding who qualifies.

Many of those decisions flow, directly or indirectly, through BMI.

If the tool getting used to make those calls is wrong for more than one in three of the people it touches, that’s a big problem.

Ironically, we’re still figuring out the full size of a problem that’s entirely about measuring size.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NPR, CNN: Virginia took a step on Tuesday to counter and possibly surpass President Trump’s national effort to redraw congressional voting maps in favor of the GOP as voters narrowly approved a Democratic-backed constitutional amendment to sideline let lawmakers directly implement a new map.

• The Athletic: FIFA is considering asking President Donald Trump for a full moratorium on ICE raids across the United States during the World Cup this summer. European nations also privately relayed concerns from their fans about potential ICE activity during the tournament.

• The New York Times: The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter after she wrote a story about Director Kash Patel using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, with government security and transportation. Some Justice Department officials saw the inquiry as retaliation for an article that Mr. Patel and his girlfriend did not like. It was determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation.

• The Independent: Tucker Carlson, increasingly at odds with Trump over the Iran War, has expressed buyer’s remorse over his role in getting the president elected. “Millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now,” the former Fox News star said, adding: “[W]e’re implicated in this for sure ... We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

• Futurism: Chinese Workers Horrified as Bosses Direct Them to Train Their AI Replacements: Why would they choose to dig their own graves?

• WSJ: More young Americans are turning to trade school to pursue in-demand jobs like plumbing and electrical work but encountering something they didn’t expect: hefty price tags. Nationwide, trade and technical school revenue hit $5.1 billion in the last quarter of 2025, up 41% from four years before that, according to federal data.

• NBC News: Elizabeth Smart is adding a new title to her résumé: bodybuilder. The 38-year-old Smart — whose terrifying abduction story is told in the 2025 Netflix documentary, “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart”— revealed the career pivot with a picture of herself on Instagram from a recent bodybuilding competition: “This was a big change for me, it was hard, it pushed me, challenged me not to give up. I am so proud of myself for doing this. I am so proud of my body, and I want to celebrate it,” she wrote.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Alex Engelman on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

If you’ve been getting something out of Understandably and are in a position to support it, becoming a premium subscriber helps more than you might think. It’s been six years of work I care deeply about, and your support keeps it going.

If it’s not the right time, I understand completely. We’re still friends!

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Earlier this month, I was asked to join a panel in New York City about personal branding for CEOs and entrepreneurs.

We had a good pre-call. Smart people, thoughtful discussion. It was the kind of panel where you look at the other speakers and think, I’m not entirely sure how I ended up here, but I’m glad someone thinks I belong.

One theme kept coming up: authenticity.

One of the other panelists made the point that, especially with Gen Z, people want to do business with companies that align with their values. The idea that you can “walk the line” on social issues and avoid taking a stance is fading. If you try, people will call you out anyway.

So you might as well be clear about what you believe—and build around it. There isn’t much of a second prize anymore for playing it safe.

That sent me back to a philosophy class I took in the 1990s—and then much farther back, to Aristotle.

Long before social media or personal branding, Aristotle argued that everything has a telos—a purpose—and that it achieves its “good” by fulfilling that purpose well.

It applies to everything. A pen is better used to write something meaningful than to scrawl nonsense on a bathroom wall. A person with a natural gift for singing flourishes by developing that gift, not by ignoring it or trying to be something else.

You don’t get to your telos by becoming a slightly worse version of someone else. You get there by being a more complete version of yourself.

We recognize that instinctively. We admire it when we see it, even in areas we don’t normally care about.

Think about the Olympics. Sports like gymnastics or figure skating suddenly capture global attention for a few weeks. Part of that is spectacle, but part of it is that you’re watching people pursue the absolute edge of what they’re meant to do, and that’s compelling.

That’s also why I’ve been pushing Life Story Magic so hard this year. It’s a direct use of what I’m actually good at: interviewing people, drawing out their stories, and helping them see that their experiences matter—and preserving them.

That’s a more durable use of those skills than chasing algorithms with a quick-hit article about a menu change at McDonald’s. Not that I’m above that; we all have to make a living.

But one of those things is closer to my telos than the other, and people can sense that.

This is where the branding conversation comes back in. If you’re building a personal brand or a company brand, the most persuasive signal you can send isn’t just building a presence for example on LinkedIn sugesting that you’re “authentic.”

It’s that you understand your purpose and you’re actually pursuing it.

That doesn’t mean everyone will agree with you. They won’t. But trying to be broadly acceptable while not fully committing to anything tends to land nowhere.

The most memorable brands—and the most compelling people—feel aligned. They’re not trying to be everything; they’re trying to be something specific, and to do it well.

Long before anyone imagined the internet, Aristotle was describing an idea that turns out to be pretty useful for anyone thinking about how they show up in public.

Follow me for more 2,400-year-old digital media and branding ideas.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The New York Times: About 1,100 Afghans who aided U.S. forces are being told they have to choose: Return to Afghanistan with their families to live under the Taliban, or be sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Aid worker: “This is just them wanting to send these people back to … face certain death. They know that Afghans are not going to accept the D.R.C. Why would you go from the world’s No. 1 refugee crisis to the world’s No. 2 refugee crisis?”

• The New Republic: The Trump administration is considering a bailout for the United Arab Emirates, where President Trump and his family have extensive business ties including a $200 million investment in Jared Kushner’s investment firm and $2 billion invested in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture run by Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. Also, the Trump Organization is building a luxury hotel in Dubai.

• Axios: Workers have never been more dissatisfied with their pay or their ability to get ahead. But the likelihood of moving to a new employer is at multiyear lows. Those are the bleak findings from a New York Federal Reserve Bank survey.

• The Guardian: The U.S. spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others in a 22-point post on X over the weekend, which also called for an end to the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan and exhorted the U.S. to reinstate a military draft.

• CNBC: John Ternus is succeeding Tim Cook as CEO of Apple, with Cook assuming the role of executive chairman on Sept. 1. Ternus, a senior vice president of hardware engineering, will join Apple’s board of directors when he becomes chief.

• The Wall Street Journal: Car Owners Are Revolting Over Tesla’s Self-Driving Promises: An international backlash is growing over outdated Tesla hardware.

• New York Post: The House Ethics Committee published a list Monday of all publicly disclosed sexual misconduct investigations into members stretching back to 1976. In total, fourteen were Democrats and 12 were Republicans.

• CBS News: The wife of active-duty U.S. Army soldier who has served in the military for 27 years, including in Afghanistan, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week in Texas at an appointment at an immigration office. Rivera Ortega has been in the U.S. since 2016 and has legal protection that prohibits her deportation to her native El Salvador, but DHS says it can deport her to Mexico, where she has no ties.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Alex Engelman on Unsplash. See you in the comments.

I regret one thing about the 1994 World Cup in the U.S.: I didn’t go to a single game.

I was young, broke—and honestly not much of a soccer fan yet.

That changed. Living in D.C., I got hooked on early D.C. United games at RFK. I started playing rec league, got cut from teams, and eventually started my own in the old Washington International Soccer League.

I recruited a few JAG Corps guys, one legit former college goalkeeper, and a lot of enthusiasm.

By the 2002 World Cup, I was living in Koreatown in L.A., and both the U.S. and South Korea made runs. It was electric. The 2006 and 2010 tournaments were fun, too.

This became the one global sporting event I actually plan my life around—more than March Madness, more than the Stanley Cup.

Then NBC started carrying Premier League games, complete with early Ted Lasso commercials. I started watching Saturday and Sunday mornings. A couple of years ago, in London, I picked a game for our family trip—the only one I could actually get tickets for—West Ham United vs. Everton—and that was it.

Now I’m a West Ham fan in New Jersey, which is its own special kind of pain; as I write this, I’m about to turn on their Monday match against Crystal Palace to see if they can keep from slipping toward relegation.

These days, it’s even more local. We go to New York Red Bulls games and Gotham FC matches.

And honestly, as much as I love watching, I probably get even more out of coaching my daughter’s team. She’s the youngest kid out there, plays center back, and she’s pretty great—last week she nearly scored from midfield.

When her team finally did score, they all broke into the Macarena right there on the field.

All of which is why the 2026 World Cup, coming to the U.S., should feel like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Instead, it feels like something else.

I used to joke that we had to stay in New Jersey because I was definitely going to the final at MetLife Stadium. Then I looked at prices. Roughly $9,000 a ticket.

I entered the lottery for other games and lost. I did manage to get tickets for a Round of 32 game near my sister’s house in Foxborough.

At the time, I felt like I overpaid, but since then, prices have more than tripled. The cheapest resale ticket is now over $800, including FIFA’s $210 “resale facilitation fee.”

Ah, FIFA. The soccer overlords expect to generate about $11 billion from this tournament—what its president has compared to hosting 104 Super Bowls, and prices reflect that ambition.

And then there’s the part that really pushes this over the top: the cost of getting to the game.

In New Jersey, FIFA’s security rules mean almost no parking at the stadium, pushing tens of thousands onto NJ Transit trains. At the same time, regular commuters won’t be allowed to use New York’s Penn Station for roughly seven hours total before and after the games, some of which fall in the middle of rush hour.

NJ Transit says it will cost roughly $48 million to run these operations. Rather than raise taxes or shift the burden to commuters, the state is passing the cost directly to fans, resulting in a $150 round-trip train ticket.

Even if I’d rather fans (like me) pay for this than taxpayers or commuters who can’t afford the games, we’re past the point of asking, “Is it worth it?”

Who is this actually for?

And yet—here’s the part I can’t shake—I still check the resale market every day. The cheapest game at MetLife right now is Norway vs. Senegal, with tickets going for about $500 each.

I keep wondering if prices will drop. If reality will set in. If scalpers will blink.

It’s still the World Cup. It’s still one of the few sporting events that can stop everything and make you feel like you’re part of something rare.

But that only works if people can actually be there.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The New York Times: FBI director Kash Patel is suing The Atlantic for defamation over an article that claimed that his excessive drinking and unexplained absences were putting his job in jeopardy.

• The Washington Post: Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators.

• USA Today: The penny is already dead. Could the nickel be next to go?

• The New York Times: AI-generated fake influencers have surged on social media in advance of the November elections. Although the quality of some of the accounts edges toward slop … researchers said the comments on the posts suggest that many users believe that the avatars are real people: “Flooding the zone here with tons and tons of videos seems geared to give a false sense of a majority opinion.”

• The Washington Post: We calculated how much Nick Fuentes earns from live-streaming hate: The far-right provocateur has pocketed roughly $900,000 from “fanatical” donors since the start of 2025. Some superfans see him as part of their families.

• The Hill: Senate Republicans who fear their three-seat majority could be in danger in this year’s midterm election are hoping for the retirement of conservative Justice Samuel Alito as an “October surprise” that could change their political fortunes. “If we did have a Supreme Court vacancy obviously that would be a galvanizing issue for Republicans,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is up for reelection.

• Reddit: I tracked every FIFA World Cup 2026 resale listing for a few days. Here’s what’s actually going on.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Alex Engelman on Unsplash. See you in the comments.

William Dean Robertson was born on January 7, 1924, in Los Angeles, California. He was 21 years old and a second lieutenant in the United States Army on April 25, 1945.

Alexander Silvashko was born in 1923 or 1924 in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine. He was a lieutenant in the Soviet Red Army, fighting westward across the Eastern Front.

Neither man knew the other existed, but 81 years ago this week, they were joined forever in one of history’s most celebrated images, as the Allied armies linked up — one coming from the West, the other from the East — shortly before the surrender of Nazi Germany.

We have something unusual this week: Robertson’s account of what happened that day in his own words. In 1989, someone thought to interview him by telephone and record it. The audio is below, followed by part of the transcript:

There were hordes — hundreds and hundreds of refugees of all description. Released prisoners, escaped prisoners of war, German refugees, slave laborers — with their freedom, coming into the American lines.

I was an intelligence officer for our battalion, and it was my job to make plans for accommodating these refugees. … I went out one day to get a rough idea of how many hundreds were coming into our camp. I took a Jeep with three men and went up and down several roads outside of our town, counting refugees, counting surrendering German troops.

There were two Americans — one was an ensign from the Navy named Peck, and a sergeant. They had been in the OSS and had parachuted behind German lines and been captured. They joined our patrol. So now there were six of us.

We took a bedsheet and fashioned the United States flag. The Russians fired several times, then quit, then fired again. They didn’t believe the flag.

We finally encountered a Russian prisoner of war [and] we instructed him to tell his Russian colleagues on the other side of the Elbe that we were Americans and not Germans. He shouted across. The firing ceased.

I crawled across the girders of the bridge. I met — I think his name was Andreev, a sergeant in Silvashko’s rifle platoon — up on the girders of the bridge.

And then I crawled across to the east bank.

Within a few minutes there were probably 100 or 150 Russians there. We exchanged cap ornaments and wristwatches and mementos. We slapped each other on the back, shook hands. They produced some schnapps and we toasted each other and all our leaders.

And then someone in the Russian lines clearly spoke English, and we made arrangements for our leaders to meet the following day.

I remember it very well.

The following night, the U.S. Army distributed an official photograph of Robertson and Silvashko, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning.

Robertson came home, went to medical school, completed his residency in neurosurgery at UCLA, raised four sons, and practiced medicine in Los Angeles until his death in 1999.

Silvashko returned to Ukraine to find his family and his village wiped out. He settled in a village in Belarus called Morach, became a schoolteacher and then a school principal.

The two men reunited in Moscow in 1975, then again in what was then East Germany for the 40th anniversary in 1985 — though the Cold War cast a shadow over the celebrations, and official relations between the two countries frequently made the reunions complicated.

Then Silvashko was largely forgotten until 2005, when U.S. Ambassador to Belarus George Krol read a small item in a local newspaper noting that the Soviet soldier in the famous photograph was still alive, and drove hours down dirt roads to find him.

They were not the only ones there that day.

First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue reached the Soviet lines hours earlier, crossing the Elbe in a rowboat near Strehla and meeting a Soviet soldier on horseback — but there were no photographers.

And there was Joseph Polowsky, a Chicago taxi driver and rifleman on Kotzebue’s patrol, who was so moved by the experience that he spent the rest of his life campaigning for peace.

But Robertson and Silvashko became the symbols — two young men from opposite ends of the world, meeting in the rubble of a defeated country, with nothing in common except the fact that they had both survived long enough to be there.

“Governments can talk,” Robertson said, years later. “But people can do better.”

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 19: “This will probably be my last long race. Look at my feet — do you blame me for wanting to stop?” — John J. McDermott, a New York club runner who on this day in 1897 won the first Boston Marathon, covering 25 miles from Ashland to Boston in 2 hours, 55 minutes and 10 seconds.

• April 20: “We must not forget that when radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science — and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become a benefit for humanity.” — Marie Curie, who on this day in 1902 completed the isolation of one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride from one full ton of pitchblende, after nearly four years of work.

• April 21: “All history proves the great path of the world’s commerce to be from East to West.” — Davenport Mayor James Grant, speaking at the grand opening celebration on this day in 1856 of the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River.

• April 22: “It was truly an astonishing grassroots explosion. The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy.” — Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day, which was first observed on this day in 1970 by an estimated 20 million Americans on 2,000 college campuses and in hundreds of communities.

• April 23: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” — King Edward III of England, which translates as “Shame on him who thinks evil of it” — words the king reportedly spoke on this day in 1348 after picking up a garter that had slipped from a noblewoman’s leg at a court ball, and tying it to his own leg to spare her embarrassment. The phrase became the motto of the Order of the Garter.

• April 24: “I cannot live without books.” — Thomas Jefferson, writing to John Adams in 1815 after selling his personal library of 6,487 volumes to Congress to rebuild the collection the British had burned the year before.

• April 25: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." — James Watson and Francis Crick, from their 900-word paper published in the journal Nature on this day in 1953, announcing the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

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Cookies, Deodorant, Socks. Iran War Puts Military Packages in Limbo

Thousands of boxes sent to service members in Middle East are stuck in limbo. The Postal Service has indefinitely suspended delivery amid Iran war.

Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.

A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.

Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks.

But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on the mail stoppage or reports that some U.S. vessels were short on food.

“We have the strongest military in the world. You shouldn’t be running out of food, and you shouldn’t not be able to get mail on the ship,” said Dan, 63, who also served in the Marines.

Link: USA Today (Multiple reporters)

‘Hard to Not Feel Scammed’: World Cup Fans Say FIFA Misled Them With Ticket Allocations, Seat Maps

World Cup ticket buyers are accusing FIFA of “misleading” them with stadium maps that misrepresented the potential location of seats they were purchasing

Throughout the fall and winter, FIFA sold more than 3 million tickets to the 2026 World Cup. It priced the tickets in four categories, with each category corresponding to a range of sections at each stadium, per color-coded maps embedded in the ticketing portal and published online.

The maps appeared to suggest that Category 1 tickets, the most expensive, could yield seats anywhere in a stadium’s lower bowl or, at some venues, in prime 200-level sections.

But last week, when FIFA converted tickets to specific seats in specific sections, many fans received unfavorable placements, in corners or behind a goal.

“A lot of people feel misled, or confused, or maybe just generally let down about the way seats were assigned,” Jordan Likover, one of the many aggrieved fans, told The Athletic. “You can’t change the rules of the game after someone’s played,” he said. “Like, people paid expecting to be seated in one place. And then when they were assigned [seats], it’s changed.”

The most prevalent gripe among fans who spoke with or contacted The Athletic, though, was that nobody, nor their friends, could find any Category 1 ticket buyers who’d actually been assigned lower-level sideline seats to popular matches.

The maps shown to ticket buyers suggested that these seats were within the range of possibilities. But fans began to theorize that FIFA had blocked them off for corporate partners, VIPs, hospitality or last-minute sales.

Link: The Athletic (Henry Bushnell)

See Which Jobs Are Most Threatened by AI and Who May Be Able to Adapt

It’s the most urgent question about artificial intelligence — and one of the hardest to answer

No one has a perfect road map to the future, but researchers at GovAI, which studies technology policy, and the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, used a novel approach to estimate which workers may be most and least able to adapt to AI. They concluded that many people most at risk if AI transforms work are also the best placed to find new jobs.

But history shows that economists and researchers have been terrible at predicting the effects of new technologies on work and workers, so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally.

While web designers and secretaries both scored high in the research for exposure to AI, they diverged in their estimated ability to adapt.

Secretaries were among the 6.1 million largely clerical and administrative workers considered both highly exposed to AI and with the lowest estimated adaptability.

The findings suggest that the majority of workers whose jobs may be transformed by or lost to AI can bounce back. But a smaller share of workers may have a harder time finding new jobs.

Women make up about 86 percent of those most vulnerable workers, the researchers said, suggesting the negative effects of automation won’t be borne equally across society.

Link: Washington Post (Shira Ovide)

Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States

In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws

A federal jury on Wednesday found that Live Nation, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, has operated as a monopoly in violation of federal and state antitrust laws, ending a closely watched trial in New York that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry.

The verdict came after four days of deliberations in which the nine-person jury parsed a long list of questions it was asked to consider in a complex case that involved weeks of expert testimony.

The judge overseeing the case, Arun Subramanian, will determine remedies in a separate proceeding. That could include significant divestments by Live Nation, or even a breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster — an outcome that the federal government had called for when filing its case almost two years ago, though it is sure to be vigorously contested by Live Nation.

Live Nation will also face monetary damages as a result of the jury’s verdict in the case, which was brought by 33 states and Washington, D.C. The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.

Whatever remedy the judge orders, it will likely shift the competitive landscape in the multibillion-dollar concert business, where Live Nation has been a colossus with no equal. Last year, the company put on 55,000 events and sold 646 million tickets around the world.

According to testimony, Ticketmaster sells about 10 times as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG. As Live Nation has pitched to Wall Street, its greatest advantage is the “flywheel” model of its interconnected businesses, in which an ever-increasing supply of concert tours fuel higher-margin transactions like ticket sales and sponsorship deals.

Link: New York Times (Ben Sisario)

What Viktor Orbán’s Opponents Sacrificed to Beat Him

Hungary offers lessons in defeating right-wing populists

To the outside world, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began his rule as a pariah—an obstreperous, often lone dissenter from European Union policies, especially over migration. Then he became a prophet to new-style “national conservatives”—the anti-immigration, anti-elite right-wing movement that has reshaped the politics of the West. After resoundingly losing national elections held on April 12, Orbán has become a parable for how populism can be defeated. His political demise was hardly inevitable. It had to be shrewdly engineered by politicians and voters who put aside their ideological differences to defeat him.

Péter Magyar, the presumptive next prime minister, triumphed against a tilted electoral system—gerrymandered districts, government influence over traditional media and even over the country’s billboards—designed to keep Fidesz in power. Magyar understood that such a regime does not simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and mismanagement. Magyar was an unlikely agent for Orbán’s undoing, because he was until recently an apparatchik in the Fidesz machine. But that also meant that Magyar’s criticism of Fidesz corruption could not be so easily dismissed.

Crucially, Magyar’s brand of anti-Orbánism was not stridently progressive. He did not repudiate Orbán’s hostility to migration. Quite the opposite: He labeled Orbán a hypocrite for being outwardly hostile to immigration while maintaining a large guest-worker program. Magyar pledged to continue “zero tolerance for illegal immigration” and to keep Fidesz’s opposition to the EU’s migration pact. Magyar avoided being drawn into debates about Orbán’s policies on gay rights, such as the constitutional amendment passed last year that is aimed at shutting down Pride parades.

Link: The Atlantic (Idrees Kahloon)

The Affordable Car Is Dead. What Happened?

For generations, working- and middle-class Americans could find an inexpensive, reliable set of wheels to get around. That era is over

The average transaction price for a new car now sits around $50,000. In December, it became just about impossible to find one for less than $20,000.

A Honda Civic Hatchback? Most start at $28,000. The Touring Hybrid costs more than $32,000. How about the Chevy Trailblazer? On most lots, its price tag approaches $25,000. The Toyota Corolla? The Hybrid trims start around $26,000. Forget the Chevy Malibu; it was discontinued last year.

While politicians and economists scratch their heads at voters upset about affordability in a decent economy, they seem to somehow miss the fact that for most Americans the purchase of a car has become a debt sentence.

People at the bottom of the income scale feel the pain most. Once, they could turn to the used-car lot, but even that has also become a minefield of aging, increasingly repair-prone vehicles with six-figure odometers and five-figure price tags.

For anyone on a budget, an aging car is a trap. Auto repair costs jumped 15 percent in the last year alone, driven by the complexity of modern sensors and labor shortages. An average trip to the mechanic now costs roughly $840, an amount that around 40 percent of Americans likely could not cover with cash they have on hand.

What happened? How did a basic necessity of American life become a luxury good? We have to start with a transformation of the economy itself beginning in the late 1970s.

While hourly compensation for the typical worker remained nearly stagnant, massive stock market bull runs and rising home equity have enriched the most affluent households. Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income. That’s part of the reason manufacturers started rolling out so many higher-priced, higher-tech vehicles:

The profits generated by an inexpensive car pale in comparison to what can be earned from a souped-up midsize S.U.V. or a light truck.

Link: New York Times (Clifford Winston)

Has the Era of the Mega-Layoff Arrived?

From Snap to Block to Amazon, a new template for ‘right sizing’ the workforce is spreading through C-suites—and other companies are taking note

Snap is laying off 16% of its staff. Block lopped off 40% of its workforce. Oracle, meanwhile, is shedding thousands of employees, after Amazon.com cut about 30,000 in a matter of months.

Welcome to the era of the mega-layoff. In Silicon Valley and beyond, companies that are cutting staff are doing it with a big ax. Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once.

That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly. Snap was no different.

Though shares in the social-media company are down 23% over the past year, the company’s stock shot up 8% on Wednesday after executives announced that it was eliminating 1,000 jobs.

Behind the scenes at Block, something else happened: Leaders from across the corporate world messaged the payments company’s top executives, asking for the playbook on how they might replicate such sweeping cuts at their own companies, said Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer.

“We had people kind of coming out of the woodwork,” Ahuja said in an interview. Asked if she saw Block’s layoffs of 40% of its workforce as a new template, she said: “It’s an inevitability. As a CFO, I think it’s better to be a little bit early than to be too late here.”

Link: Wall Street Journal (Chip Cutter)

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That would represent $800 billion, which is roughly what Elon Musk is worth right now, according to Forbes.

I don’t think our minds—or our social or political systems—were designed to process numbers like this.

It’s not just the scale of Musk’s wealth; it’s the speed. By most estimates, he only became a billionaire around 2009, meaning his net worth has increased something like 800-fold in about 17 years.

So what is $800 billion, really?

I went down a rabbit hole trying to find comparisons that make it feel even slightly concrete. It’s more than:

• The combined value of every team in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS — roughly $575 billion total.

• More than 50 times what the entire country spent on the 2024 U.S. federal election — about $15.9 billion.

• Nearly twice the value of every publicly traded airline on Earth — roughly $425 billion combined.

• More than Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Disney, and Nike combined — about $780 billion.

• The same as the total wealth of all of the people listed on the Forbes 400 back around the mid-1990s, adjusted for inflation.

• Roughly the same as McDonald’s, Disney, Boeing, Nike, and Starbucks put together — about $750 billion.

• More than the combined value of every home in Oregon (~$775 billion). Or Minnesota (~$800 billion).

• More than the total household wealth of every single person living in countries like Egypt (~$400–600 billion) or Pakistan (~$300–500 billion).

• Roughly equal to the entire economic output of a G20 country like Turkey (~$800–900 billion GDP).

At some point, these comparisons stop clarifying and start blurring together. Everything becomes “about the size of a country,” or “bigger than an industry,” and the numbers lose meaning again.

But maybe that’s the point.

We built systems—economic, political, even psychological—around wealth differences that made intuitive sense. A millionaire vs. a billionaire already stretches that intuition.

A person worth $800 billion is something else entirely: not just richer, but operating at a scale that starts to resemble institutions, markets, even nations.

And yet, it’s still just one person, represented here by 40 rows of dollar signs, knocking on the door of becoming a trillionaire.

Honestly, I think most of us would be happy with half of that.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NPR: Last year, the White House promised that its One Big Beautiful Bill Act would lead to the “largest tax refund season in U.S. history,” with refunds going up by an average of $1,000. So far, however, average refunds are up $350, while a bipartisan survey finds that 62% of respondents either believe the tax changes harmed them or made no difference. Even among Republicans, only 35% say the changes favored them.

• Politico: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy claims the army captured a Russian position using only ground robotic systems and unmanned aerial vehicles. “For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms — ground systems and drones,” Zelenskyy said. “The occupiers surrendered, and the operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” Zelenskyy added.

• WSJ: After President Trump called European allies “cowards,” a fallback plan to ensure Europe can defend itself if the U.S. departs NATO is gaining traction after getting buy-in from Germany. The challenge is enormous, as NATO’s entire structure is built around American leadership at almost every level, from logistics and intelligence to the alliance’s top military command.

• The Telegraph: In the film Mad Max, an oil shortage leaves Australian society teetering on the brink of total collapse. In real-life, things aren’t quite that dystopian yet Down Under. But with barely a month of stockpiled diesel left and hundreds of forecourts running dry, the anxiety is palpable. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stifled one fifth of the world’s supply of oil. Much of this goes to the Asian refineries that supply Australia. Now, they’re running short.

• NBC News: Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence software, Grok, continues to generate sexualized images of people without their consent, despite his company’s pledge months ago to halt abusive deepfakes after a public backlash and government investigations. A review by NBC News found dozens of AI-generated sexual images and videos depicting real people posted publicly on Musk’s social media app, X, over the past month. The images are similar to ones that sparked a firestorm of criticism in January.

• France24: ‘Listening bars’ bloom as hottest new nightlife trend: “It really makes you listen to every word, every instrument, every note,” Camille Calloch, 31, told AFP as she left a listening session dedicated to British neo-soul star Sampha at “Listener” bar in central Paris. “It’s become one of the ways I enjoy music, along with concerts, my headphones, bars and festivals.”

• CNBC: Allbirds — you know, the shoe company? — made a surprising announcement Wednesday that it is pivoting from shoes to artificial intelligence. Its shares jumped 700%, as the new company, which expects to be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

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I once came across a 73-year-old first person account in The Atlantic.

I got completely sucked in.

It was written by Edward Kennedy (1905-1963), who was an Associated Press correspondent in Europe during World War II, and who was the first reporter to break the story of the German surrender — beating the competition by a full day.

Only, Kennedy wasn’t praised for his big scoop; he was pilloried.

Here’s what happened. The German military surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945 at 2:41 a.m., in a schoolhouse in Reims, France, which was part of Eisenhower’s headquarters.

Kennedy was there, along with a dozen other reporters. They’d been allowed to witness the event on one condition: they had to hold the story for a few hours, so the Allies could make their own official announcement first.

As Kennedy told the tale, the U.S. war censors later changed the rules, ordering reporters to withhold the news for 36 more hours, so the Allies could stage a second surrender ceremony in Berlin on May 8.

The point was to ignore the first ceremony at the school house, and make the Soviets’ role more prominent.

The reporters chafed at this. But then, the Allies ordered German radio to announce the end of the war to the German people. Kennedy told military censors that he now considered his obligation to hold the news fulfilled.

“Do as you please,” the chief censor told him. Kennedy managed to call London, and he dictated a short story to his AP coworkers.

By the next morning, May 8, Kennedy’s article was on the front page of every newspaper in America. The free world celebrated, but the weight of the U.S. government came crashing down on him.

He was banned from Europe and fired by the AP. Later, the military investigated and vindicated him, but it was too late for his career.

This article in The Atlantic was his attempt a few years later to give his side of the story.

I had never heard of any of this until I read that 1948 article. I was a bit surprised, because I’ve always been interested in both World War II history, and the history of the media. Heck, I was a reporter for Stars & Stripes for a while.

But no matter what side of this 81-year-old debate you might come down on, what really pulled me in was just the fact that Kennedy got the chance to tell his story.

I believe almost everyone has at least one really interesting story to tell. But, most people never get the chance to tell it.

It’s quite sad, if I let myself think about it. Either time passes before they get the chance, or they don’t have the confidence in their storytelling or writing ability, or they just don’t think anyone would be interested.

But later, their loved ones, at least, really do wish they’d shared.

I’m a member of a parenting Facebook group, for example, and a mom was asking if people thought she should come clean to her college-aged children about her wilder days before she’d had them.

One woman replied with an enthusiastic: Yes! Tell them everything!

She explained that her mother is deceased, and she finds herself craving every piece of information about her, good or bad, momentous or mundane. She would have wanted to know.

Anyway, this is sort of what happened with Kennedy. He wrote the article for The Atlantic, then moved to California and ran some smaller newspapers. He died in 1963, at age 58, when he was hit by a car.

But later, it was his daughter, who was then just 16 when he died, who took up his cause.

She followed in her late father’s footsteps and become a reporter; even worked for the AP for several years. As I gather, she then went to business school and did some other things—but she also got an academic press to publish her father’s memoir in 2012.

That led the then-current head of the Associated Press to write an introduction, apologizing for how his organization had treated Edward Kennedy all those years before.

Maybe I’m sentimental, but I’m sitting here on the couch in my living room in New Jersey, putting the final touches on this newsletter.

And I keep thinking that a man who died years before I was born basically reached up from the grave, and led me to read and share his forgotten account once again.

Nobody’s going to live forever. But, it seems to me that people who share their stories like this at least have a fighting chance to be remembered.

I’ve now done dozens of these interviews myself. And I’ll tell you — the families who receive them are always grateful. Not just for the stories they knew, but for the ones they never would have heard otherwise.

Next week I’ll be sharing something special ahead of Mother’s Day. Stay tuned.

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Other things worth knowing …

• BBC: An 86-year-old French woman whose American husband died in January before her green card application was completed is being detained by ICE in Louisiana. The woman had moved to the U.S. last year after rekindling a 1960s romance; she and her husband had first met during the 1960s, when he was a soldier stationed in Europe, and she a secretary. They had each married, had children, and been widowed before beginning a relationship in 2022. “They handcuffed her hands and feet like she was a dangerous criminal,” her son told a French news outlet.

• KFF Health News: As immigration authorities carry out what President Trump has promised will be the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, several states are passing laws to keep children out of foster care when their detained parents have no family or friends available to take temporary custody of them. The record 73,000 people in detention in January represents an 84% increase compared with one year before; parents of 11,000 children who are U.S. citizens were detained from the beginning of Trump’s term through August.

• USA Today: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has secured a parliamentary majority for his Liberal government, a win he has said will help him deal more effectively with the trade war started by President Trump. It also probably means Carney, who took office with no political experience and has earned global praise for his efforts to band middle-power nations together, won’t have to worry about an election for years.

• CNBC: United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby reportedly floated the idea of a potential tie-up with rival American Airlines to the Trump administration earlier this year, a suggestion that if acted upon, would create the world’s largest airline. “This would be the biggest of all time. I can’t even see the slightest chance that a court would allow it,” said George Hay, a law professor at Cornell University.

• NPR: More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing: 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years.

• Financial Times: Consumer AI chatbots falter when used to make medical diagnoses, particularly when faced with incomplete information, according to new research highlighting the risks of relying on them as digital doctors. A study found that failure rates exceeded 80% for all models when they needed to perform so-called differential diagnosis — when full patient information was lacking.

• The Guardian: Faced with high demand for GLP-1 drugs, some cities and states that previously covered the cost of weight-loss medication for low-income residents and public employees have now started to restrict or eliminate coverage. Some legislators and healthcare providers argue that dropping coverage might provide short-term relief for governments but will ultimately harm Medicaid recipients’ health, while cities and states will then have to pay for more health problems related to obesity.

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