I have an idea and I’m going to give it a try, to see if there’s interest.

After about nine months and nearly 100 Life Story Magic interviews, I’d like to use what I’ve learned to launch a free, weekly, do-it-yourself life story newsletter.

I’m calling it Next Question by Life Story Magic. The idea:

➡️ 💭 Each week, I’ll ask you one question.

➡️ 📝 Answer it. Save it somewhere. Share it if you want.

➡️ 🧩 Bit by bit, we’ll build your life story.

Better yet, forward the email to someone you care about and invite them to sign up and build their story, too.

I’m going to launch with a 13-week schedule, based on top questions I find that prompt great, colorful answers almost every time. From there — well, we’ll see how it goes.

I went back and forth on whether just to use one day a week on Understandably for this project, but I think it makes sense to keep it separate.

If you’d like to try it out, sign up here. The first edition is set to go out Monday, October 5.

Try 'Next Question' by Life Story Magic

747

In the 1920s and 1930s a boy named Joe was growing up in Seattle, and one thing about Joe was that he really loved airplanes.

Fortunately for him, he lived on a hill overlooking Boeing, the airplane manufacturer.

“On summer days,” he later recalled, “my brothers and I would walk down ... There we’d watch technicians working ... Occasionally a leather-clad test pilot would climb into a Boeing military biplane like a knight mounting his steed.”

His heroes: those aviators, and of course Charles Lindbergh, who made his solo transatlantic flight when Joe was 6.

Joe paid for his aeronautical engineering degree at the University of Washington partly by working at Boeing. Then World War II came, and Joe — a Navy ROTC cadet — got sent to a destroyer escort instead of getting the pilot training he asked for.

Toward the end of the war, while he was stationed on a remote Pacific island, two job offers arrived: one from Douglas in California, and one from Boeing, back home in Seattle.

Newly married and with a child on the way, he took the job closer to home. He rose through the ranks, even though he was surrounded by graduates of Caltech, MIT, and Michigan, who looked down on his degree from Washington.

He worked on many of Boeing’s top commercial airplane projects of the 1950s and ‘60s, like the Dash 80, the 707, 727, and 737. But he wasn’t part of the sexiest project of all: a supersonic passenger jet, which almost everyone in aviation assumed was the future.

Which is why, in 1965, he was available to run a massive new Boeing project.

That project? The 747. And the engineer put in charge of it was Joe Sutter.

The story goes that Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe and Boeing president Bill Allen agreed to build it while on a salmon fishing trip together, and sealed the deal with a handshake. Pan Am’s formal order, for 25 planes worth more than half a billion dollars, followed in 1966.

Sutter’s assignment: 28 months (about 2/3 the regular time) to design and build a jet 2.5 times as large as anything else in the air.

His team grew to 4,500 engineers. At one point Boeing ordered him to lay off 1,000 of them. Sutter refused, and walked out of the meeting certain he’d be fired. He kept his job, and so did his engineers.

Then came a tussle with Trippe, who wanted a double-decker — basically two 707 fuselages stacked one above the other. But evacuating that plane quickly in an emergency would be very difficult.

Also, everyone assumed the 747 would have a short life as a passenger jet once supersonics took over, so it needed to be easy to turn into a cargo plane.

That’s how Sutter and his team came up with the wide-body jet: one wide deck, two aisles, 10 seats across. It also explains the 747’s famous hump. To load cargo straight in through a nose that swung up, the cockpit had to sit above the main deck.

Now they had to sell it to Trippe.

Boeing’s team met with Pan Am in a New York conference room exactly as wide as the planned cabin, and unrolled a 20-foot clothesline across it. Then Boeing built full-size mockups of both designs so Trippe could walk through them.

Inside the wide-body mockup, Trippe asked what the space up in the hump would be used for. Sutter said it could be a rest area for the crew.

No, Trippe said. That would be for passengers.

That’s when Sutter knew he’d won.

Rollout of the 747 was September 30, 1968: 58 years ago this week.

Charles Lindbergh saw it, too.

“You know, this is one of the great ones,” he said.

The 747 made long-haul flying affordable for ordinary people, and it stayed in production for 54 years.

Sutter later served on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster. He stayed on at Boeing as senior adviser emeritus for a quarter-century, and was still going to his office once a week in May 2016, at 95. He died that August.

“The world was a very wide place when I was born,” Joe Sutter wrote in his book, 747. “Then along came Lindbergh.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 27: "Je tiens l'affaire!" ("I've got it!") — Jean-François Champollion, to his brother when he cracked the phonetic key to hieroglyphs, shortly before he fainted from excitement. On this day in 1822, he presented his findings to a packed room at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.

• Monday, September 28: "I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine." — Alexander Fleming, recalling the morning of this day in 1928, when he noticed that a mold growing in a petri dish had killed the bacteria around it. The mold's "juice" became penicillin, which earned Fleming a share of the 1945 Nobel Prize.

• Tuesday, September 29: "Godspeed the work begun this noon." — President Theodore Roosevelt, laying the foundation stone of the Washington National Cathedral on this day in 1907. The final stone was set on the same date in 1990, exactly 83 years later, with President George H. W. Bush in attendance.

• Wednesday, September 30: "I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind." — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating Hoover Dam on this day in 1935. It was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed.

• Thursday, October 1: "The children of California shall be our children." — Leland Stanford, after the death of his only son, whose memory he and his wife Jane honored by founding Stanford University, which opened on this day in 1891. Tuition was free for the university's first students.

• Friday, October 2: "I cross this forbidden line as a president... The wall will fall." — South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, moments before walking across the military demarcation line into North Korea on this day in 2007. He was the first South Korean president to cross the line, on his way to an inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang.

• Saturday, October 3: "Now what belongs together will grow together." — Former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, speaking the day after the Berlin Wall opened in November 1989; Germany formally reunified at midnight on this day in 1990. East and West had been divided for 45 years.

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Free for ALL Friday

He Might End Up the World’s Most Educated Person

Jamie Beaton has 12 advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford and other top universities, with more on the way. Why? How?

Early in the fall semester of the 2025-26 academic year, Lisa Belkin, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, realized that one of her students, Jamie Beaton, had yet to show up for class.

Beaton, she learned, had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016, picking up a master’s degree in applied mathematics along the way. He had gone on to collect an M.B.A. from Stanford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was followed by a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar — all before age 28.

Attending classes remotely and in person, he earned additional master’s degrees from — deep breath — the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, King’s College London and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

“He was a joy to get to know,” Belkin said. “But it was also the weirdest relationship I’ve ever had with a student.”

Link: New York Times

The Most Crucial Step to Better Sleep Is Also the Most Straightforward

Smart mattresses and sleep trackers aside, experts say that the key to feeling well-rested is to simply stick to your bedtime.

You upgraded your mattress. Track your sleep score religiously. Clock a solid eight hours of shuteye a night. But you may be overlooking one of the most important sleep metrics of all: when you actually go to bed and wake up.

Keeping consistent sleep and wake times may be just as important as getting enough sleep—and perhaps even more so, says Eric Zhou, PhD, a sleep medicine clinician-researcher and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

“The body runs on a circadian clock that helps regulate blood pressure, glucose metabolism, hormone release, and even autonomic nervous system activity,” says M. Taruj Ali, MD, a board-certified sleep and obesity medicine physician. “When sleep and wake times keep shifting, those systems are repeatedly being asked to operate at the wrong biological time.”

“Even though you may have slept for hours and hours, you still feel ragged and disoriented when you wake up. That’s because the change in timing throws your body into a spin cycle,” says Zhou.

Link: GQ

America’s Biggest Dating Company Is Betting on Trad Values

Match Group thinks young people want to date using old scripts.

If a dating app existed in the 1950s, you might expect it to look like Upward. On “chivalry mode,” users can establish that the man in a straight pairing will message the woman first. With “marriage timeline,” they can specify how soon they’d like to marry.

This is not, in fact, a glitch in the time-space continuum, the 20th century folding in on the 21st. It’s the newest big project for Match Group, the company that owns an abundance of dating apps, including Hinge and Tinder.

“This is modern courtship in action,” the company’s press release reads. “Women are clear about their standards, men pursue with purpose, and both move toward marriage together.”

Internally, Match calls Upward’s audience the “next-gen traditionalists.” Now the company is betting on them.

Link: The Atlantic (Faith Hill)

Why Helicopter Parents in China Buy Watches, Not Phones, for Their Kids

Children’s smartwatches are hugely popular in China for preteens, with some models offering advanced location tracking

When Jane Ding’s son headed on his first field trip in kindergarten, she was worried he would get lost. So she and her husband bought a gadget that has become ubiquitous for parents across China’s cities: a smartwatch for children.

They sneaked the watch into their son’s backpack because electronic devices weren’t allowed on the field trip. Now he is 8 years old and wears it whenever he goes out to play.

About one in three children age 5 to 12 own a children’s smartwatch in China, and the figure rises to more than half in urban areas, according to state media.

“If he didn’t have a watch, I would be very worried,” said his father, Jimmy Poek, 40. “I’d have to keep him in my sight at all times.”

Link: Wall Street Journal

It’s Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb

In Richardson, a fleet of drones has started to deliver goods quickly. But the noise is drowning out life for some residents: ‘We can’t live like this.’

The sound came out of nowhere. It began as an unnerving high-pitched hum, like a mosquito flying around a dark room at bedtime, and it grew louder as it drew closer.

“There’s another one coming this way!” shouted Eric Anderson from his pool float, pointing to an area above a tall line of trees.

Within a minute or so, an 83-pound drone with six blue arms and whirring propellers appeared in a corner of the sky before zipping over nearby houses, looking like a cross between a mechanical dragonfly and an X-wing fighter, and buzzing like a battalion of bees.

Richardson city officials gave Amazon zoning approval to start the drone delivery service in December as part of the company’s nascent Prime Air program. Now many other parts of the United States can expect their own drone deliveries, a welcome convenience for some, but an invasion for others.

Link: New York Times

Red and Blue America Have Found Something to Agree on: Flock Cameras Must Go

A national backlash against AI-enabled license-plate readers is uniting Trump country and progressive strongholds alike. ‘Nobody wants to be surveilled…doesn’t matter what your political leaning is.’

In the foothills 95 miles south, Republicans in conservative Oconee County, S.C., view the same AI-enabled license-plate readers as a threat to constitutional privacy rights and have even read aloud from the Federalist Papers at tense public meetings.

“Government has got to be restrained,” said Matthew Durham, chairman of the all-Republican Oconee County Council. “It is a 90-10 issue.”

“Appalachian people don’t trust the government for a lot of reasons,” said Kim Roney, a progressive member of the blue Asheville City Council.

“It seems like data centers and Flock cameras are the only things we can agree on,” said Taylor Nicks, 48 years old, who was troubled to learn that the recording device outside his Asheville coffee shop was installed without local input.

Link: Wall Street Journal

The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms

Trump’s advisers have been working for months to move his focus away from baseless theories of election fraud. A group of outsiders is making that difficult.

Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers.

“He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas.

The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario.

When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.

Link: The Atlantic
Backup: https://electionlawblog.org/2026/the-supporters-urging-trump-to-declare-martial-law-for-the-midterms/

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!

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Plot twist: The company was not Apple; at the time, the world’s largest personal-computer company was Compaq.

Do readers even remember Compaq? Hewlett-Packard acquired it a few years later.

Anyway, Cook changed his mind after just six months and left to join Steve Jobs at Apple, as I think most of us know. In a 2010 speech at his alma mater, Auburn University, he explained his thinking at the time:

Any purely rational consideration of cost and benefits lined up in Compaq’s favor …

But there are times in our lives when the careful consideration of cost and benefits just doesn’t seem like the right way to make a decision.

There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate — when a particular course of action just feels right.

It was obviously a pretty good decision. Of course, Cook became Jobs’s choice to replace him when Jobs’s health deteriorated—ultimately the key to a succession plan that Jobs was able to set it in motion with just a single sentence in a letter to the company’s board, when his health took a turn:

“I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.”

That was late August 2011; earlier this month, 15 years later, was Cook’s last day as CEO.

I can’t imagine anyone in our lifetimes thinking of anyone besides Jobs as the visionary behind Apple. But Apple is a much bigger and more influential company now than it was when Cook took over.

Under his leadership:

• Apple introduced products such as the Apple Watch and AirPods. It moved the Mac onto Apple-designed chips, and now has 1.5 billion paid subscriptions.

• Its revenue grew from roughly $101 billion when Cook took over to $467 billion. Its stock rose 2,296 percent, and the company added $4.32 trillion in market value.

• Today, more than 2.5 billion Apple devices are active around the world.

Cook isn’t actually leaving Apple; he’s now executive chairman. Still, it’s a major milestone, and he wrote an open letter to the entire company marking the occasion.

There’s a lot of good in it, but two things stood out to me.

The first was this nine-word sentence: “This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything.“

We share a belief that what we build matters. …

Apple helps nurture it, but I believe it lived within each of you long before you arrived here.

It is what brought you to this company and what continues to drive the work you do every day.

But I think it’s also a compliment to Cook, and a significant leadership lesson.

Because there’s an organizational size beyond which a leader can’t really lead through individual influence. I’m not sure exactly what the cutoff is, but it’s a tiny fraction of the 166,000 people who work for Apple.

And as a result, as pithy as this sounds, it’s true: A leader’s most powerful tool is the ability to inspire culture.

Put differently (and I think I might have been the person who coined this phrase): “Culture is leadership at scale.”

Anyway, John Ternus is now CEO. And since Cook spent 28 years at Apple, I guess we’ll have to wait another 28 years to answer the real question about what he built.

In 2054, will Apple still reign? Or will it have turned into the Compaq of the middle of the 21st century?

I have a feeling culture will play a very big part.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: President Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials met on Tuesday, shortly after he threatened in his address to the U.N. General Assembly that he may “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if a deal isn’t reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war. Trump told reporters about the meeting but offered few details about the talks.

• Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: Opposition to data centers continues to mount in the U.S., with some 45 data center projects worth $68 billion blocked or delayed by local pushback between April and June this year, according to research group Data Center Watch. President Trump has dismissed opposition to data centers and concern about advances in AI as a “sick conspiracy,” saying “the only one that is happy about it is China.”

• WaPo via Yahoo: “I am the code”: How President Trump clashed with the White House ballroom architect over safety issues.

• NYT: Princeton’s run atop U.S. News rankings ends after 15 years. MIT pulled ahead on a set of criteria that are as contentious as they are influential.

• The Independent: President David Adeang announced to the United Nations General Assembly that the South Pacific island nation of Nauru is reverting to its traditional name, Naoero. The shift reflects the name used internally by the island’s inhabitants rather than the foreign adaptation.

• International Living: Here are the five cheapest places for people to retire abroad, according to a new report. They’re all in Asia: Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, and Malaysia.

• AP: After a summer spent packing away sockeye salmon, Alaska’s heftiest brown bears are ready to throw their weight around. Online voting began Tuesday for Fat Bear Week, the annual contest that pits the rotund residents of Katmai National Park and Preserve against each other for the title of most oversized ursine.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Kym Meure on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

That’s what happened tonight. I saw that researchers at NYU Langone Health had dug into data from more than 12,000 people to see how many wound up developing dementia later in life—and then correlated that unfortunate outcome with some of their conditions and choices in middle age.

We’ll get to the three things they found were associated with significantly fewer dementia-free years shortly. For now, let me explain the track-stopping part.

It’s that when I look in the mirror, the version of myself I see is almost exactly the same version I saw when I was about 25 years old. The only difference is that my mix of red and brown hair was replaced by a mix of red and brown and blond and gray.

Fair enough, I suppose, since I’m literally a bit over twice the age that I was then; my point is that I still feel young.

But then I realized the average age of the participants when the NYU Langone Health researchers assessed these midlife risk factors.

Reader, it was 56. I’m 55. Wait: Dementia? In young people my age?

I don’t mean to joke, except for the fact that sometimes the only way to deal with absolute unbridled horror is to stare it in the face and laugh.

Still, I can joke and be serious at the same time, so I went straight to the three conditions and choices the good people at NYU Langone Health said mattered.

They are, in order:

• High blood pressure

• Diabetes

• Smoking between ages 48 and 68

Fortunately, I can say no to all three.

I feel like it’s maybe a badge of honor at age 55 to have spent so much time at the gym that you get tendinitis in your shoulders to the point that a doctor shoots you up with cortisone and tells you, “Maybe skip the weights for a month and let your body heal.”

As for smoking—lucky for me, I’ve never really been a smoker.

Continuing my humblebragging, the last time I smoked at all was when I was a reporter in Iraq.

This was when I realized that being the guy with a pack of Marlboros to share created opportunity after opportunity to strike up conversations with American soldiers.

(I suppose the fact that I was old enough to be covering an overseas shooting war that ended in 2011 starts to date me, even if I hadn’t disclosed my age already.)

Anyway, let’s go to the context provided by study senior investigator Josef Coresh, founding director of the Optimal Aging Institute:

Our findings argue that people need to actively avert these factors in midlife as a strategy for preserving brain health for more than a decade. Discovering new ways to delay dementia is crucial with 42 percent of Americans at risk for developing the condition at any time after age 55.

Sheesh, 55. They also found that women generally live longer without dementia than men and that, statistically speaking, White study participants had more dementia-free years than Black participants.

The researchers published their study online in Neurology Open Access on August 5.

“These results suggest that vascular risk reduction may benefit all groups, but that certain populations, such as Black adults, may especially benefit from targeted prevention efforts,” Coresh added. “Hopefully, these results will encourage people to stop smoking and watch their vascular health closely from age 48 on.”

I don’t want to worry anyone unnecessarily. But if you’re reading this and you’re also a proud member of Gen-X, maybe getting stopped in your tracks for a bit isn’t a bad thing.

Oh, and apropos of nothing: Your hair looks awesome with the blond and gray.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The Atlantic: The ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan man last weekend in Austin was a recent hire who was not wearing his body camera, three DHS officials told The Atlantic. The officer, who has not been publicly identified, was hired last year but previously worked for another federal law-enforcement agency.

• The Hill: The Trump administration is removing close to 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act coverage due to allegedly fraudulent enrollment, Vice President Vance announced Tuesday. “These are not real people. We’re not paying insurance for nonexistent ghosts,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, during a White House press conference.

• 404 Media: A high-profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone numbers, and information on their spouses. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Mediaite: Controversial streamer Clavicular, who has built a sizable following around the online “looksmaxxing” movement, has been charged with rape and drugging a person for sex in a case involving a minor in Massachusetts. Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, was charged with one count each of rape, drugging a person for sex, and providing alcohol to a minor. The charges stem from an alleged incident on May 23, 2025.

• NYT: David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, was 23 when he arrived in Hollywood in 2006 — dumb money to be fleeced, insiders laughed. On Monday, after a remarkable, almost inconceivable run of dealmaking and brinkmanship, Ellison — all of 43 — stood on the verge of adding Warner Bros. Discovery to his Paramount Skydance, giving him control of two businesses that helped invent the movie and television industries.

• NYT: How DraftKings uses A.I. to target the gamblers likeliest to lose. Data science helps determine who receives betting incentives, but the company has resisted using similar technology to protect gamblers at risk of addiction.

• MarketWatch: Nearly half of adults under 30 live with their parents. The financial fallout could last for decades.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Kym Meure on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

Today’s story will meander, so bear with me.

It starts in 1956, when Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian Revolution—an uprising against the country’s Soviet-backed Communist government—and drove roughly 200,000 people into exile.

Among them were a Hungarian couple who fled with their nine children and eventually landed in a refugee camp in Montbéliard, France. There, in 1959, they had one more child—a boy they named Ferenc Árpád.

Soon afterward, the Darabont family emigrated to the United States, and Ferenc grew up first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles. He became a typical American kid in most ways—and maybe especially a Hollywood kid.

Years later, he’d say he found his life’s ambition after seeing George Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138, released in 1971. Ferenc—who now went by Frank—graduated from Hollywood High School in 1977.

Instead of college, he got a job at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, working the concession stand and as an usher, watching movies over and over for free, and spending “endless hours” writing.

Around the same time, he read Stephen King’s The Shining and fell in love.

“I became a fan of his work from that moment on,” he later recalled. “I have read every word that the man’s published and some that he hasn’t.”

Frank had no formal training, but he wanted to try directing a film. Around the same time, King had created what became known as the Dollar Baby program, under which he allowed students and other aspiring filmmakers to adapt certain short stories for $1, under two main conditions:

First, the film couldn’t be released commercially without King’s approval.

Second, the filmmaker had to send King a copy so he could see what they’d done with it.

Frank wrote to King asking for permission to make a film from a short story called “The Woman in the Room.” King said yes. Price: $1.

Frank was about 20 when he started, and it took him three years to finish the film. But after he sent King a copy, King called it “clearly the best” of the short films based on his work.

Fast-forward. Frank started building a career. He found work as a production assistant and set dresser on low-budget Hollywood movies—basically, working with the art department to make sure whatever appeared on camera looked right.

He wrote an original screenplay called Black Cat Run that a studio bought, although it wasn’t produced until more than a decade later. He also wrote a spec script for the TV show M*A*S*H.

That one caught the attention of a producer named Chuck Russell, who invited Frank to become his writing partner—and gave him a real, working Hollywood career as a writer, mostly rewriting other people’s scripts when problems appeared after studios bought them. One of their biggest successes was A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

And then Frank got the idea to adapt another Stephen King work for the screen: the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

Again, we’re going to compress time here. King sold him the rights for $5,000—although, to fast-forward again, he never cashed the check. But Frank was so busy as a working writer by then that five years passed before he took time away from paying gigs to write the screenplay.

From there, however, things moved fast. It took him about eight weeks to write the script, and within two weeks of showing it to Castle Rock, he had a $25 million budget—but only after turning down an offer of roughly $2.5 million to step aside and let Rob Reiner direct, with Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford in the lead roles.

And on September 23, 1994—so, my God, 32 years ago this week—The Shawshank Redemption began its U.S. theatrical release.

The funny thing about this movie is that I am 100% confident I don’t have to explain the plot, identify Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as the stars, or tell you that it’s now considered one of the greatest movies of all time.

And yet it bombed at the box office.

Bad timing, I guess. It was competing for attention in the same year as Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, and it earned only $16 million during its initial domestic run against that $25 million budget.

Then came word of mouth, seven Oscar nominations, huge VHS rentals, and repeated showings on TNT after Ted Turner bought Castle Rock. All of it expanded the movie’s reach and built its reputation.

Writers and even directors tend to stay behind the scenes, so if you don’t know how things turned out for Frank Darabont, he went on to even more success: The Green Mile, The Mist, The Walking Dead on television, and, most recently, two episodes of the final season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Overall, I think his is a story about the value of letting the path meander—as long as you don’t lose sight of where you hope it will lead.

And there’s a great quote, by the way, about why he decided not to take Rob Reiner’s money back in the early 1990s, long before he had achieved the kind of success that eventually followed.

“You can continue to defer your dreams in exchange for money,” he told Vanity Fair. “… and die without ever having done the thing you set out to do.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 20: “The world threw itself into this first festival in a state of near-intoxication.” — Philippe Erlanger, the French diplomat and historian behind the Cannes Film Festival, describing its opening on this day in 1946, a year after the war ended. The festival had originally been scheduled for September 1939.

• Monday, September 21: “I was thinking about women. The other half of the viewing audience.” — Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports executive, in his memoir on the broadcast he created, Monday Night Football, which debuted on this day in 1970 when the Browns beat the Jets 31–21 in Cleveland. A crowd of 85,703 attended, and advertisers paid $65,000 a minute.

• Tuesday, September 22: “Farmers need us, and we will always need them.” — Willie Nelson, who organized the first Farm Aid concert with Neil Young and John Mellencamp on this day in 1985 at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois. About 80,000 people attended a show put together in six weeks, after Bob Dylan suggested at Live Aid that some of the money go to American farmers.

• Wednesday, September 23: “We were met by all the village and received a harty welcom.” — William Clark, in his journal entry on the day the Lewis and Clark expedition returned to St. Louis on this day in 1806. Sergeant John Ordway wrote that the party fired three rounds as it approached the town and the crowd on shore answered with three cheers.

• Thursday, September 24: “Success is 99 percent failure.” — Soichiro Honda, founder of the Honda Motor Company, which was incorporated in Hamamatsu, Japan, on this day in 1948. The company grew out of his idea of fitting surplus wartime generator engines to bicycles.

• Friday, September 25: “If this was that big a deal, I want to see it through.” — Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, recalling when he walked into Little Rock Central High School past soldiers with bayonets, on this day in 1957. The students entered escorted by the 101st Airborne Division, and Green became the school’s first Black graduate in May 1958.

• Saturday, September 26: “My friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work.” — Albert Einstein, in the closing line of “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” his special relativity paper, published in Annalen der Physik on this day in 1905. Einstein, then 26 and working at the Swiss patent office in Bern, thanked no one else in the paper.

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Let’s start with the news cycle. Last month, New York Attorney General Letitia James and a bipartisan coalition of 50 other attorneys general announced a settlement under which Meta will pay up to $17.1 billion and accept sweeping new child-safety restrictions on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta reported $200.97 billion in revenue last year alone, so that’s about 8.5% of one year’s revenue.

I’ve seen this described as the equivalent of a traffic ticket for Meta, although that’s not actually a good metaphor.

Imagine you got a $100 ticket for not coming to a complete stop before a right turn on red. That ticket would equal 8.5% of your annual income only if you made $1,176.47 a year, so the math would be off.

Still, 8.5% might be enough to notice, but not exactly crippling.

So we have to look at the rest of the deal. As Mike Isaac, who covers big technology companies for The New York Times, summarized, it includes:

• stronger age verification

• ways to prevent “unwanted contact from strangers”

• controls allowing teens to stop autoplay on videos, along with hidden “like” counts for teens (wait, not everyone?)

Finally—and actually this is first in my book, but I ordered it this way for a reason—a default limit for under-18s of just two hours total per day across Instagram and Facebook (although I’m not sure how many under-18s actually use Facebook), with an exception for messaging, plus no access at all between midnight and 6 a.m., unless a parent overrides the restrictions.

Now, maybe you look at something like that and think:

Wait, two hours a day on social media works out to 14 hours a week, and approximately 730 total hours a year.

And this is how much Meta is agreeing to limit as the result of a major court settlement?

And yet, just a few days before the major settlement, we got news of a massive new study using 11 years of data from 183,000 adults, attempting to correlate the amount of time spent on social media each day with negative mental health outcomes.

Writing in the journal npj Mental Health Research, researchers from the University of Cincinnati and Northwestern University say they used more than a decade’s worth of data from the Media Behaviors and Influence Study, and found that intense use of social media was one of the most important predictors of self-reported depression.

“When it comes to depression and social media, the argument is salient across scientific test after test of those 11 years,” corresponding author and UC Professor Hans Breiter said. “It’s a damning picture. Social media is harmful for individuals across the lifespan. We should not subject ourselves to a product using addiction science to optimize our viewing time.”

See what I mean? The study was published on August 22; the Meta settlement was announced on August 26.

Sometimes you get lucky.

As the University of Cincinnati summarized it: “Researchers observed a correlation with self-reported depression among respondents who spent at least 150 minutes on social media per day. They observed the same result in each of the 11 years studied.”

You will notice that Meta’s new two-hour limit works out to 120 minutes a day—not the roughly 150-minute point highlighted in the study, but awfully close for comfort.

And there’s a big connection here. In describing the case against Meta, the states said they had sued the company for “designing and implementing features that it knew to be harmful to children and teens in order to maximize their time on its social media platforms.”

So, maximizing the amount of time people spend using these products was at the heart of the states’ case against the company.

Perhaps this counts as progress in the sense of Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec’s aphorism: “Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?”

And yes, some very good timing.

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Other things worth knowing …

• LeMonde: Ukraine fired waves of drones at Moscow and the surrounding region early Sunday, September 20, killing two people and setting an oil refinery ablaze as Russians voted in a final day of parliamentary elections, officials said. The attack was the largest on Moscow since the Kremlin launched its Ukraine offensive in 2022 and involved some 1,600 drones, 450 of which were aimed directly at the capital.

• NBC Washington: President Donald Trump said Sunday that the massive arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery would become a “top grade military complex” able to host drones and snipers while storing ammunition. It is one more example of how Trump is insisting that his initiatives to remake the White House and Washington D.C. are also serving a defensive purpose.

• Spectrum News: Reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were denied access to the White House on Saturday, a day after President Trump said he was barring them because of reporting he found to be “fake news.”

• NYT: California cracks down on influencers’ undisclosed political ads. Under a new law, creators could face fines of $5,000 per post if they don’t disclose that they were paid to make political content.

• WaPo: How the surging cost of going out is changing American life.

• WSJ: The race to save Florida’s orange industry from total collapse. After groves were ravaged for decades by a disease, new EPA-approved genetic technologies are giving citrus growers a chance to rebuild.

• Hollywood Reporter | Instagram: AI “actor” Tilly Norwood glitched during a recent interview with Piers Morgan, suddenly switching from speaking English to Cantonese and leaving the journalist and fellow guest Tom Conti laughing. Norwood, a generative AI creation from Xicoia, appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored to promote her feature film debut, Misaligned, when she malfunctioned.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Sean S on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

Before we dive in, I was talking with my mom yesterday and I asked if she’d had a chance to read Thursday’s newsletter.

Not yet, she said. But I plan to listen to it later.

And so it was, dear reader, that I learned that Substack now has an AI voice bot thing that you can use to listen to Understandably rather than just read it.

I don’t think I had any idea at all that this was an option. So, a poll:

Free for ALL Friday

After 30 Years, Judge Judy Is Stepping Down From Her TV Bench

Judith B. Sheindlin, the star of “Judge Judy” and spinoff shows, will wrap up a television career filled with acerbic takedowns of litigants.

Judith B. Sheindlin, who delivered sharp yet amusing one-liners while issuing no-nonsense rulings on her “Judge Judy” show, will step down from the bench after dominating daytime television for decades.

“Judge Judy” first aired on Sept. 16, 1996. In half-hour episodes, Sheindlin presided over small claims cases, adjudicating disputes between roommates over rent, overdue car payments and even dognapping cases.

Sheindlin’s popularity grew when she dug for answers and skewered litigants with her “Judy-isms,” such as: “Either you are playing dumb or it’s not an act,” and “Are you trying to justify to me the fact that you’re an idiot?”

The show, which won multiple Emmy Awards, drew nine to 10 million viewers each day for years. In 2018, Forbes named Sheindlin the country’s highest-paid television host, reporting that she earned $47 million a year.

Link: New York Times

Not Even a Stroke Can Stop These Aging Rock Stars From Going on Stage

Artists over 60 aren’t stopping touring, even if they may need to sit down during their greatest hits

Charlie Wilson, one of the most potent voices in 1980s funk, played more than 35 shows last year before suffering multiple strokes in October. He relearned how to walk and was back on stage roughly eight months later.

Wilson is a spring chicken at 73. Lionel Richie still tours at 77; Rod Stewart at 81; Barry Manilow at 83. “You can’t stop these guys; [performing] is in their blood,” said Michael Paran, who manages Wilson. “A racehorse wants to race.”

“This is what these guys live for: Getting up in front of the crowd and performing,” said Pat Francis, the host of the “Rock Solid” podcast. “When being a rock star is your job, why would you ever want to retire?”

Link: Wall Street Journal

The New Chris Rock: The Comedy Icon on Directing ‘Misty Green’ and Not Returning to the Oscars Unless He’s Nominated

I have a hard-and-fast “no Will Smith” rule, since 2022 when he sucker-punched Chris Rock on stage during the Oscars. Here’s an interesting and insightful interview with Rock — I’ll tell you this, he does not come across as the kind of guy people would have a reason to sucker-punch.

Rock:

I’ve been lucky. I’ve made some money. I’m not swimming in it. I’m not on jets all the time. I don’t own a boat. But I always tell people: Your monthly nut — that’s your religion. How much are your monthly bills? Because if you can keep your monthly low enough, you can say no to things.

Holly Robinson’s mom, the great Dolores Robinson, was a talent manager, and she used to say, “You have to spend income, not if-come.” That’s the problem with most people in Hollywood. They’re spending if-come. If-come will ruin your life.

…

A long time ago, I went to a comedy club on a freaking whim. I got onstage and did about five minutes, and the owner of the club said, “You should come back.” If he didn’t say that, I probably wouldn’t have come again. That one night changed the whole trajectory of not just me, but my whole family.

Link: Variety

We Asked Chefs What They Think of You. Here’s What They Said.

A dozen of the chefs from the 2026 edition of our 50 favorite restaurants list talk GLP-1s, diner drinking habits, A.I. and more.

Feel like you’re being watched? You are — by the chefs and owners on the list of our 50 favorite restaurants of 2026. More than anyone, they notice what we order and how much we’re willing to spend.

Sachi Statz (Tin Tin, Miami): “I joke about Ozempic all the time, but it does make a difference in how much people order. Before, you’d see people have a couple appetizers, a couple entrees, dessert, maybe wine and cocktails. Now it’s more like, ‘We’ll share an appetizer. We’ll share two entrees.’”

Margarito Pérez (Paprika, Austin, Texas): “There are 20 of you every day in my inbox asking for something. At first it was funny. Then it was aggravating.”

Jimmy Bannos Jr. (Kouklas Greek Eatery, Niles, Ill.): “5 p.m., the floodgates are open. It’s a madhouse. By 9 or 9:30 p.m., we’re winding down.”

Link: New York Times

How the Restaurant Burger Went From Cheap Indulgence to Luxury Meal

The wholesale price of ground beef has soared, and restaurateurs say a $30 burger now reflects the reality of current restaurant economics.

The Burger Américain, a fastidious and Frenchified version of the Big Mac served at Le Diplomate, set diners back $14 when Stephen Starr debuted his stylish brasserie in Washington in 2013. Thirteen years later, the same burger and fries cost $29.

Starr had a one-word reaction when informed about the 100-percent-plus price increase: “Unbelievable.”

“Restaurants are not gouging people,” Starr said in an interview. “They are simply responding to their own expenses.”

“To me, a hamburger should be an everyday enjoyment that should be affordable, and it should be something that people can comfortably do and not have to break the bank over,” said Andrew Schnipper, managing partner of Hamburger America.

Link: Washington Post/Yahoo

When Students Attend These Colleges, Taxpayers Often Pay. Here’s Why.

Five hundred colleges and universities in the U.S. now share one alarming distinction: At least 40% of recent students who borrowed federal loans aren’t paying them back.

Five-hundred colleges and universities in the U.S. now share one alarming distinction: At least 40% of recent students who borrowed federal loans aren’t paying them back. That’s according to the latest federal nonpayment-rate data published by the U.S. Education Department.

“These numbers are really jaw-dropping,” says Eileen Connor, head of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a nonprofit that advocates for borrowers and that reviewed the data.

At many schools, more than half of recent borrowers are at least three months late on their payments or have already passed nine months, which means they’re in default.

“If a private lender were looking at a school that has a 40%, 50% delinquency rate on past loans, they would probably say, ‘We’re not going to lend to that school.’ Why does it make sense for the federal government and for taxpayers?” says Preston Cooper, who studies higher education at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

Link: NPR

Gas Prices Are About to Take a Big Jump, Analysts Say, With the Worst Still to Come

The forecast of economic impacts beyond November’s midterms contrast with the Trump administration’s optimistic messaging.

The effects of the U.S.-led war on Iran are about to intensify in the form of huge jumps in the prices of gasoline and diesel, analysts predict. And despite the Trump administration’s assurances, a new and potentially even more economically damaging phase of the war may be about to begin.

The national average price for regular gasoline stood at $4.44 on Thursday, according to AAA, with a range of $6.09 in California to $3.92 in Indiana. Diesel, which has a big influence on trucking and retail prices, has continued to hit records, with the national average at $6.40 on Thursday.

Damage inflicted on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline last week, along with continuing strikes on oil infrastructure and contested control over a key waterway, threaten to elevate what had been a shipping crisis into a broader disruption of oil.

Link: Washington Post

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!

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• storytelling theory or

• a comedy show?

Right, comedy.

My wife and I went to see Laura Ramoso in Manhattan Sunday night. Anyone know her?

She’s a sketch comedian who does imitations—starting with caricatures of her mother, father and mother-in-law, along with several other recurring characters.

I came across her through her Instagram Reels a year or two ago, and I got sucked in. Then, I found myself thinking:

Wait, why am I connecting with this woman’s impressions of people I don’t know? And since I don’t know them, how would I know if her imitations are any good?

Example: Ramoso’s most popular character is probably German Mom, who is in fact based on her real-life German mother.

There’s also Chiara, the Italian Airline Ticket Agent, plus Canadian Mother-in-Law, Italian Dad, and a few others. Here’s her announcement where she pretended she was telling them all she was taking them on tour.

OK, a few more quick things to know before I start pretending to know anything about storytelling theory:

1. Ramoso is on an international tour right now, playing big theaters in cities including Chicago, Sydney and London. We saw her at one of two sold-out shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Impressive venues.

2. Finally, her online breakthrough came during Covid, when she started posting her characters on TikTok and Instagram. Things blew up.

3. She was born in Italy, the only child of a German mother and an Italian father. Her mother worked for the World Health Organization, so they lived all over: Cameroon, Azerbaijan, China and Vietnam—before she moved to Canada for college (okay, “university”).

Also, while I’m the one who started looking forward to Ramoso’s humor and text my wife instantly months ago when I realized she was on tour, apparently it usually works the other way around.

Most of the audience were women, and there was a running joke about all the husbands and boyfriends who had been dragged along.

OK, here’s a passage from a recent interview she did, which will serve as our bridge over to my “theory of storytelling” section.

“I remember I did the first German mom video just one random afternoon. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is so ‘my mom’ specifically.

Like, yes, it’s a German mom, but it’s my mom. And I wonder who’s even gonna relate?

But it was kind of a lesson in the importance of specificity in comedy.”

You can tell “specificity in comedy” is important because I put it in italics.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to track down the source of a related line I remembered roughly this way:

“All good stories have one thing in common: unique expression of universal truth.”

ChatGPT was no help; in fact, I’ve apparently been talking about this quote so often and in so many places that it confidently told me that “Bill Murphy Jr. was the person who came up with it.”

But I was sure that wasn’t right, and eventually I think I found at least one source: Robert McKee’s 1997 book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting.

Here’s the quote:

“The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression.”

Pretty similar-ish, I guess.

If I had more time, I’d try to dig up similar sentiments dating back to the Greeks or something. But then again, to paraphrase Mark Twain, if I had more time, I’d also probably write a shorter newsletter.

I first read Story ... well ... (deep breath) ... just before I …

• Quit my lawyer job ...

• Packed everything I owned into a used Kia Sportage that I bought for $9,000 on eBay Motors…

• Headed across the country to become a Hollywood screenwriter …

• Took the “DC to Maine to Toronto to South Dakota to Wyoming to SF to LA” route, because you only get so many cross-country drives ...

• Arrived … drumroll … literally the day before 9/11 ...

• Transformed quickly from an aspiring screenwriter to a guy who thinks: “The defining world-historical event of my lifetime just happened, forget screenwriting, I need find a way to get involved …”

• Meandered, as a result, on a 25-year path (25 years?!!!) that was pretty interesting at times, and took me from LA to Washington to Baghdad to NYC … but had little to do with my original idea, and ultimately …

• Wound up right here, right now: 10:46 a.m. on a Wednesday, writing this while standing at a bar table outside “Bagel Supreme” (run by a very nice person I just met named “Sal”) at a shopping center called Lackawanna Station in Montclair, New Jersey (“the only mall in America made up entirely of independent businesses”).

See? Specificity and details. But also—maybe?—a few universal human experiences.

• Did you ever want to uproot yourself and follow a dream?

• Ever come up with a plan, only to have God chuckle and lead you somewhere else entirely?

• Ever marvel at how time passed so quickly that you (literally or metaphorically) repeated the amount of time you had just said — only this time in italics and bold and followed by a question mark and three exclamation points?!!!

My working theory after all this is that stories are just how we communicate.

And whether your goal in life is to be on stage at places like the Beacon Theater, or just to live a happy suburban existence that leads you to make quick insta-friends like Sal at Bagel Supreme, keep telling stories.

Find the specifics. And search for the universal truths.

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Other things worth knowing …

• ABC News: The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday in an effort to battle back inflation set off by the Iran war — the central bank’s first rate increase since July 2023. Fighting in the Middle East kept global crude prices above $105 a barrel as of Wednesday, a rise of about 50% since the war broke out in late February.

• NBC News: House lawmakers will leave Washington today until after the November midterm elections, after GOP leaders canceled votes set for Thursday. The change in schedule means House members won’t have to vote on an impeachment resolution filed by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth until after Election Day.

• AP | Truth Social: Fencing went up Wednesday around the Kennedy Center in Washington, a day after the Trump-appointed board voted to close it, which came after a federal judge blocked the institution from returning President Trump’s name to the building. Congress has allocated $257 million for renovations, but on Truth Social Trump wrote that if his name is not added to the building, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

• NYT: The European Union has invited Canada to work toward becoming its first “associate member,” a title meant to underscore the nation’s growing closeness to the 27-country bloc as both face deteriorating relationships with the United States. The announcement, made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during a major annual speech on Wednesday, was met with a standing ovation from the room of lawmakers.

• MarketWatch: For decades, the standard career advice was to follow the money. Now, it’s about finding job security. Monster’s recent “2026 Job Security Report” found that more than half of U.S. workers would accept a pay cut for a greater sense of job security, and 61% said they’d give up at least one aspect of their compensation or workplace experience — like bonuses, perks, and other incentives — if it made them feel more secure in their role.

• Chicago Tribune: Former President George W. Bush has a new book of oil paintings coming out in March featuring portraits of political prisoners and dissidents. “The Call of Freedom,” his third collection, will include 44 paintings and biographical sketches of each subject, with a foreword by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky.

• NBC News: Merriam-Webster is giving its dictionary another “glow-up,” adding 1,400 words and definitions including “shapewear,” “looksmaxxing,” and “meme coin.” “The new entries reflect words and meanings that have demonstrated widespread use over time, offering a window into the world today,” it said.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Sean S on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

We just passed the 35th anniversary of the Web’s public debut (August 1991). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it featured an ugly, annoying “Lose Belly Fat Now!” programmatic ad.

That might be a slight exaggeration, but the Federal Trade Commission has spent literally the past 100 years fighting a quixotic battle against marketers making specious claims about miracle weight loss cures.

All of which inspires some mixed feelings as I share with you the latest news about health, longevity, and being overweight.

First, the surprising good news: Writing in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, researchers say that after analyzing 14 years of data from 6,905 Americans age 65 and older, they discovered that adults who were classified as “overweight” had a lower risk of dying during the study period than their normal-weight peers.

• Specifically, the overweight men tracked in this study had a 46% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to normal-weight men. Men with Class I or II obesity had a 51% lower risk.

• For women, the difference was less pronounced: Overweight women had a 27% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to normal-weight women. Women with Class I or II obesity had a 15% lower estimated risk, although that result was not statistically significant.

But there was one big caveat: belly fat, measured here by waist circumference (WC).

For both men and women, high waist circumference correlated with a 24% higher risk of death during the study period, even after accounting for BMI and the demographic and health factors included in the analysis.

The statistical culprit here could be the way we calculate body mass index (BMI). As the authors wrote in the journal article:

Although BMI is simple and widely applied in clinical and epidemiologic settings, it does not distinguish between fat mass and lean mass, nor does it account for fat distribution.

In contrast, WC reflects abdominal adiposity, which has been shown to be more strongly associated with cardiometabolic risk than BMI alone.

Enter “the obesity paradox.” This is the finding that overweight, and in some cases obesity, can be associated with lower mortality among older adults.

Basically, you spend your whole life hearing that weight gain is bad and unhealthy.

But then, according to studies like this one, you reach a certain age and come away with the understanding that the whole thing flips. In fact, you you might conclude that losing weight is bad and unhealthy.

“BMI and waist circumference provide complementary information about health risk in older adults,” study co-author Bryan Blissmer, PhD, of the University of Rhode Island, said. “Our findings suggest that considering both measures together, rather than relying on BMI alone, may improve mortality risk assessment and support more informed clinical decision-making.”

The study covered the period 2011 to 2024, so the current era of widespread use of highly effective GLP-1 drugs for weight loss came very late in the study period.

So that might be a factor to address in the next study of its type.

And, we’ve seen plenty of prior studies suggesting that belly fat is especially bad for people at any age — although this is the first one I remember to focus specifically on longevity during a time period like this. All of which probably explains the century-old industry trying to convince people that unregulated miracle cures actually exist.

As Richard L. Cleland wrote in a publication of the Food & Drug Law Institute earlier this year: “Since filing its first case in 1926, [the FTC] has initiated at least 268 enforcement actions against companies and individuals.”

The dubious honor of being the first product targeted went to a cream called McGowan’s Reducine. Its makers ran an ad in a magazine called True Romances claiming that it could “literally dissolve excess fat, leaving the figure slim and properly rounded, giving the lithe grace to the body that every man and woman desires.”

As bad as belly fat apparently is, there’s something comforting about realizing that our great-grandparents were fighting the same battle of the bulge all those years ago.

Let’s check back here in another few decades and see what we’re convincing ourselves works by then.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Fox News: Voters don’t believe President Trump will make good on his new promise to send eligible Americans $5,000 dividend checks if Republicans maintain their majorities in the House and Senate this midterm cycle. The dividend proposal would require congressional approval, and it’s unclear where the money would come from to fund the program.

• CNN: President Trump attacked Supreme Court justices as being beholden to “crazed” liberals in a lengthy online screed after the court blocked his plan to execute dramatic changes to mail-in voting ahead of the midterms. These are not the people I interviewed to serve … they are merely a shell of their original selves," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

• Bloomberg: OK, one more story about Trump and then we can move on: Trump has traded more securities than all 535 members of Congress combined since he returned to office — 28,700 trades in the 17 months compared to 22,200 — even as he seeks to pass a stock-purchasing ban for lawmakers that would exclude him from any restrictions, according to a Bloomberg review.

• National Post: A new poll finds that 49% of Canadians support the idea of joining the European Union — something that would be impossible under current EU membership rules, since Canada isn’t in Europe. Still, about 81% support closer integration with the EU, including making it easier to trade, travel, work and study and to cooperate on security.

• The Telegraph: The “pick-up artists” secretly filming women using smart glasses. AI glasses are enabling harassers to record women stealthily, posing a growing threat to privacy and online safety.

• AFP via Yahoo: Authorities in New York announced Monday the seizure of a dozen prominent websites hosting pornographic celebrity deepfakes that featured politicians and actors. An online boom in non-consensual deepfakes is currently outpacing efforts to regulate the technology around the world due to a proliferation of AI tools, including “nudification” apps.

• Futurism: Scientists say that the planet Mercury has been actively shrinking over the billions of years that it’s orbited the Sun. Now, as detailed in a new paper by a team of scientists from the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Space Research, the planet’s shrivelling could be occurring at an even faster-than-expected rate, losing up to 14.5 miles of total diameter since it formed billions of years ago — anywhere from ten to 30 percent more than previously thought.

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My mom used to give us kids some pretty good advice. In fairness to my younger self, I discounted some of it during my tween and teen years, chalking it up to her being a recently transplanted Canadian raising a family in the United States.

I’m talking about things like:

• Say “please” and “thank you.”

• “No problem” is not a substitute for “You’re welcome.”

• Sit up straight! People notice your posture, and it matters.

Sorry for doubting, Mom.

I’ve written here before about how, over time, I’ve developed the zeal of a convert when it comes to saying “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.”

And now, I’m happy to have found scientific evidence that my mom may have been onto something about sitting up straight—and even happier to realize that it comes from Canada’s own McGill University.

Writing in the British Journal of Psychology, McGill researchers said they recruited nearly 200 participants to complete a task on a tablet.

For some participants, the tablet was positioned on a stand atop an adjustable table, encouraging them to sit upright. For others, it was placed flat on a lowered desk, prompting them to hunch over.

The researchers didn’t tell participants that posture was part of the experiment, and most never realized it. They also used video software to measure participants’ actual neck angles.

The task involved inflating a virtual balloon. With each pump, participants could accumulate more points, but if the balloon burst before they cashed out, they lost everything they had earned on that round.

Over the course of the experiment, participants in the upright group took greater risks and tended to accumulate more points.

More upright posture, as measured by neck angle, was also associated with greater feelings of pride.

“The findings do not mean that changing posture can dramatically transform a person’s life,” cautioned Jorge Armony, professor in the departments of psychiatry and psychology at McGill and senior author of the study. “But it does raise interesting questions about whether everyday features of our environment—such as workplace ergonomics—can subtly influence mood and behaviour.”

(“Behaviour.” I love it.)

Look, as much as I love and respect my mom and her advice—especially as I’m now more than a bit older and have had time to appreciate it—I’m not going to pretend that posture is the key to success.

But we have seen that salespeople who mimic their customers’ speech and posture wind up selling more products, all other things being equal.

And even though the Superman pose has its critics, I find that striking it before having to, well, act like Superman pays off.

Maybe it’s the placebo effect? But if it works, who am I to argue?

Thanks, Mom. Turns out you were right.

I probably should have listened sooner, eh?

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP | Reuters: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow development to give safety measures time to catch up, warning that AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet within six to 12 months. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google’s Demis Hassabis said they supported a coordinated industry slowdown.

• CNBC: Trump pushed back, lashing out at Amodei on Truth Social on Monday: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

• WSJ: Saudi Arabia shut down the East-West oil pipeline that had allowed the kingdom to continue exporting crude oil during the Iran war, after it was attacked multiple times by drones fired from Iraq — eliminating what had been a crucial bypass route for Saudi oil exports.

• News Nation via Yahoo: Americans have spent an extra $102 billion on gasoline and diesel due to the Iran war, and the tally is still rising, according to a real-time tracker from Brown University. That’s equivalent to roughly $780 per U.S. household since the conflict began at the end of February.

• DW | WSJ: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Sunday he is pursuing unprecedented closeness with the European Union to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States — but not EU membership. His clarification came after the Wall Street Journal reported he had been exploring whether Canada could become an “associate member” of the bloc, a status the EU would have to create for the occasion.

• Reuters: While on a two-day visit to Ireland over the weekend, Trump backed Irish unity, calling for Northern Ireland to break from the United Kingdom and unify with the Republic of Ireland. “I would love to see it sooner rather than later,” he said. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has ruled out any such referendum.

• NBC News: A second federal judge — a Trump appointee — blocked the administration’s executive order limiting mail-in ballots, saying there is an “increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted” if the rule stands. The Supreme Court is still weighing the administration’s request to overturn a separate order blocking the same rule.

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Today’s story is about a man named Philippe Croizon.

He was born in France in 1968, and by his own admission there was very little in the first 26 years of his life that would have led anyone to think he would one day be the kind of person other people in other countries would write about.

Raised mostly by his grandmother, he grew up in Oyré, a small town northeast of Châtellerault, which is itself maybe three hours southwest of Paris. He did rather poorly in school, and later said he left without really knowing how to read, write, or do arithmetic.

He wasn’t a bad kid, but he was mischievous, by his way of telling. Actually as he put it in his autobiography years later: he grew up “dans la bêtise,” or “in foolishness.”

“Dès qu’il y a une connerie à faire, je ne suis pas loin.” (”Whenever there’s foolishness to be done, I’m not far away.”)

So, he took night classes as an adult, and did his military service in the French army, and worked as a butcher and in a factory. He got married and had a child, and eventually got a steadier, better job, working as a metalworker or metallurgist.

His wife was pregnant with their second child in 1994, and they planned to move to a bigger house. As part of the packing, he climbed a ladder so he could fix the rooftop television antenna he’d installed.

Then, his whole life changed.

Philippe somehow came in contact with a high-voltage power line. What happened next was gruesome: The current grounded through him, and Philippe was literally fused to the ladder.

The utility company apparently assumed a branch had fallen across the high-voltage line, and turned the power back on three times. Philippe was engulfed in flames, while people watched in horror.

Finally, a neighbor put on rubber boots, grabbed a fire extinguisher, climbed the ladder himself and dragged Philippe off. When he woke up in the hospital, he found that doctors had been forced to amputate both of his arms and one of his legs.

“The doctors tried to save my left leg,” he later recalled. “Psychologically, I clung to that leg, a symbol of the little life I had left. But, we had to face the facts. My last limb could not be saved. Amputated below the knee. I sank into despair.”

Two things saved him, Philippe explained.

The first was an uncle by marriage who told Philippe that he had lost his father when he was about Philippe’s son’s age. It had been the defining experience of his life.

“Your children need you,” he said.

The second was a documentary he watched while still in the hospital about a woman swimmer who had just crossed the English Channel.

Philippe had never been much of a swimmer, but something about the idea spoke to him — heck, mesmerized him.

And sixteen years later, he in fact became the first quadruple amputee to swim the English Channel.

Obviously, there were intermediate steps. He tried skydiving first as a way to test his post-traumatic ability to handle extreme excitement.

And of course, he started swimming constantly. He experimented with prosthetic limbs for swimming, including legs that end in fins and cost €12,000, and ratcheted his preparation up to five hours a day for the two years leading up to his attempt, with the Maritime Gendarmerie.

He made it across the Channel on September 18, 2010, making it in just under 14 hours — which is an average time for a 100% able-bodied swimmer.

I mentioned his autobiography: He wrote it using speech-to-text software (long before it was anywhere near as good as it is now), and it’s called “J’ai décidé de vivre” (”I Decided to Live”).

“If I had to do it over, I would keep my disability,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “Everything is possible.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 13: “I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune — or do I?’” — Paul McCartney, from the Beatles Anthology, on writing “Yesterday,” released as a single in the U.S. on this day in 1965. He tested the melody on friends and bandmates for weeks, convinced he must have unconsciously copied it from somewhere, before accepting it was his own.

• Monday, September 14: “It was not, in my opinion, very honorable for England to remain in a gross and avowed error, especially in such company.” — Lord Chesterfield, on why he championed the “calendar reform bill” through Parliament — which took effect on this day in 1752, when Britain and its colonies skipped straight from September 2 to September 14.

• Tuesday, September 15: “What other reserves have we?” — Winston Churchill on this day in 1940, at the height of the Luftwaffe’s largest daylight raid on London. Air Vice Marshal Keith Park’s answer was: “There are none” — and the RAF held anyway, a turning point that led Hitler to postpone the invasion of Britain.

• Wednesday, September 16: “I merely combined a set of facts in a new way.” — Chester Carlson, the inventor behind the process Xerox built into the 914, the first successful plain-paper office copier, introduced on this day in 1959.

• Thursday, September 17: “I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.” — Harriet Tubman, recalling the moment she crossed into free territory on this day in 1849. She would return to the South roughly 13 times to lead about 70 more people to freedom.

• Friday, September 18: “The Oslo negotiations gave the world a treaty … remarkably free of loopholes and exceptions.” — Jody Williams, on the treaty banning antipersonnel landmines text adopted in Oslo on this day in 1997.

• Saturday, September 19: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways.” — Scott Fahlman, in a Carnegie Mellon bulletin-board post at 11:44 a.m. on this day in 1982. It’s the first documented use of the emoticon, born out of a campus message board where jokes kept being mistaken for serious posts.

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Before we dive in, today of course is the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11. According to one new bit of research:

• About 37% of Americans either hadn’t been born yet on 9/11, or else were young children who weren’t old enough to remember that day.

• About 83% of adults who were born before 2001 say they recall exactly where they were or what they were doing when they heard the news.

• Of those adults aged 18-24 (so not born on that day), 60% learned about 9/11 in school, 16% learned from family or friends, 8% say they read something on their own, and the rest can’t remember how they learned about the attacks.

If you go back and look at photos and videos of that day, things have begun to look a bit dated: the clothes people are wearing, the makes and models of cars, the fact that the video is SD rather than HD.

As time goes on, even though that day still affects what happens to us today, and even though I — it’s become history as much as a memory.

I was born in 1970, just after the 25th anniversary of the end of World War II. If you were born in 1955, that’s about 25 years after Black Tuesday, which was the start of the Great Depression.

Anyway, I write this and I realize: I think I’m apologizing a bit for not including more 9/11-related items below. I do have one at least.

And, I casually knew a few people who lost their lives that day. I think it’s good to remember them and say a prayer.

But time marches on, whether we like it or not. And, tomorrow’s history is happening today.

Free for ALL Friday

Hollywood Puts Four Tech Moguls on Trial in October Movie Pileup

Silicon Valley founders and CEOs are the next wave of big screen villains in buzzy projects tackling Zuckerberg, Musk, Holmes and Altman.

Hollywood’s obsession with Silicon Valley is about to reach a fever pitch with four major films set to take on controversial tech moguls.

In Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, Jeremy Strong plays Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a sequel (or “companion piece,” as Sony insists on calling it) to The Social Network. The project opens wide Oct. 9.

In Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, Andrew Garfield portrays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a five-day company leadership crisis when Altman was fired and then reinstated as CEO. The Neon film premieres at the New York Film Festival Oct. 5.

Alex Gibney’s takedown of Tesla and SpaceX mogul Elon Musk, titled Musk, runs nearly four hours and is released in select theaters from Bleecker Street on Oct. 16 after premiering Tuesday at Venice.

And Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she began her stint in federal prison and beyond.

Link: The Hollywood Reporter

He’s Seen Images of 9/11 From Just About Every Angle. Except This One.

The 9/11 completist community wants to know and see everything. The Holy Grail? Pictures from inside the twin towers.

When he was 15 years old, Jonathan Walczak came upon a newspaper article that described a disposable camera found in the pocket of a dead man in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

An F.B.I. agent quoted in that 2003 article said his team had developed the film from the camera, revealing pictures taken from inside one of the towers as the Sept. 11 attacks were unfolding.

His time as a reporter taught him how to access government documents. Later that year, Mr. Walczak, now in his early 20s, filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act — his first of many — demanding that the F.B.I. release the pictures from that disposable camera.

“To me, they’re the Zapruder film of 9/11,” he said. “They’re singular and unique, a point of view unlike any other, documenting a monumental moment in American history.”

Link: New York Times

Can Zoox’s ‘Toaster on Wheels’ Conquer the Self-Driving Car Capital of America?

The Amazon-owned driverless car company is a distant second to Waymo. Its pitch to riders? Wine pop-ups, festival sponsorships and a car built to be filmed.

When Vita Shafiro, 51, and her daughter Mikhaela, 15, recently walked back to their downtown San Francisco hotel after sightseeing, an odd vehicle caught their eye.

A boxy turquoise car with no driver’s seat or steering wheel idled outside the Zoox Rider Lounge, an Art Nouveau-style storefront. Zoox, a driverless car company owned by Amazon, opened the lounge in May so that people could pose for photos in front of its self-driving cars and take a free ride in one.

Waymo, founded in 2009 as Google’s experimental self-driving car project, is by far the leader in the field. It began commercial driverless rides in 2018 and now has nearly 4,000 vehicles in 15 cities.

In contrast, Zoox, which was founded in 2014, has about 100 autonomous vehicles in its fleet. It cannot yet charge for a ride in San Francisco as it awaits state regulatory approval.

So Zoox is competing by betting that novelty, community good will and the rider experience inside its odd-looking cars — sometimes called “toasters on wheels” — can win over a city that has become the center for autonomous vehicle experiments.

Link: New York Times

Soaring Student Loan Debt Is Driving Some Americans Into the Military

Young Americans are joining the US armed forces at rapid rates, and experts say the possibility of student loan forgiveness is a key appeal.

Abigail Sears worked two jobs in high school to save for college and won a scholarship covering roughly 80% of her undergrad tuition, but she still found herself saddled with student debt: roughly $20,000 in loans to attend the University of Georgia and another $50,000 to pursue her master’s at the London School of Economics.

So she joined the Army. As part of her contract as a newly commissioned active-duty logistic officer, a portion of her student debt will be paid every year, up to $50,000 in total, leaving her on the hook for just a sliver of the balance.

“To know I don’t have to worry about that right now — I can take more of my salary and put it into my portfolio and save for a house and buy all these things that I now get to focus on financially — is actually very freeing,” says Sears, 30, who’s stationed at Camp Smith in New York. “The military is a hack.”

US military enrollment has been gaining speed of late, with armed forces recruiting in fiscal 2025 notching its best cycle in 15 years.

Link: Bloomberg

You Can Give Your Child More Tax-Free Money Than You Think

There are ways to go beyond the $19,000 annual limit without being subject to the gift tax

America’s wealth divide is increasingly a generational one. From 1989 to 2022, households headed by people age 65 to 74 added $231,000 to their median net worth, while households headed by people under 35 added just $20,000, according to Federal Reserve data.

There are several reasons for the widening gap. Older Americans have ridden decades of gains in stocks and real estate, while many younger people are stuck in rentals, struggling with the soaring cost of child care and the burden of student debt.

The result is that older Americans may have more capacity to give to their children and grandchildren than ever before. And many would rather give the money now, when it can help with a house, child care or other major expenses, than leave it behind after they die.

The good news for families considering such gifts: The tax code makes it easier to give money while you’re alive—with “warm hands,” as the saying goes—than many people realize.

Link: Wall Street Journal

$5,000 Checks for Every American? What to Know About Trump’s Latest Promise

President’s trillion-dollar idea faces hurdles in Congress, risks sparking inflation

President Trump offered a pricey promise in his convention speech Wednesday. If Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in November’s elections, he said, the U.S. will send $5,000 to each adult citizen in what the White House labels a “Trump Dividend.”

That is a new $1 trillion program—or more than the government spends on national defense each year.

There are roughly 270 million Americans ages 18 and above, and the vast majority are citizens. Sending $5,000 to each of them would likely cost well over $1 trillion.

The U.S. collected about $5.25 trillion of revenue last year, so the payments are equivalent to a 20% reduction in collections.

The likely results would be higher consumer spending, a jump in inflation and a rise in interest rates.

Is this going to happen? Probably not, even if Republicans hold on to power. Republicans have had full control of the House and Senate since January 2025, giving them ample opportunities to authorize the payments that Trump has floated.

Link: Wall Street Journal

How Would AI Actually Kill Us All? What to Know About the AI Doomsday Debate

A growing chorus of AI researchers say the technology could wipe out humans—even if all the bots want to do is make paper clips

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned this week, saying his former employer and its rival OpenAI are racing to build technologies that “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

In case anyone thought Coxon was alone in his views, a current Anthropic employee chimed in minutes later to confirm. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” wrote Evan Hubinger, whose job at Anthropic is to lead research about steering and controlling future artificial-intelligence systems. Hubinger put the extinction risk over the next decade at over 10%.

In response, many humans are now asking two questions: How could that happen? And why would people who think AI is a real and growing threat build it anyway?

Link: WSJ

What Was the Holdout Juror Thinking?

I’ve meant for a while about jury nullification — the idea that a jury that believes a defendant is guilty can vote to acquit anyway.

The judge in the Lindsay Clancy case declared a mistrial after a week of jury deadlock. Clancy is charged with murdering her three children in what prosecutors say was a cold-blooded killing, and in what she says was a fit of psychosis after months spent seeking help and being put on a long list of drugs for her declining mental health.

One juror was the holdout, refusing to vote for acquittal. He reportedly recognized that there was reasonable doubt as to her responsibility for her crime but would not apply the appropriate legal standard.

The story is a tragic one: three innocent children dead, a family in shambles. And it’s also been a galvanizing one, as women the nation over have spoken out in Clancy’s defense, noting their own postpartum struggles; many have shown up at her trial to support her, clad in pink. And there has of course been a backlash, albeit a smaller one, of people who insist that a mother who kills her children must simply be evil, no other explanation necessary.

Link: Slate
Backup: https://archive.ph/qUTMm

Russia ‘Trafficking’ Foreigners to Fight in Ukraine, Amnesty International Says

Russia has been deceiving and exploiting foreign nationals by luring them with the promise of jobs and then sending them to fight in Ukraine, a situation that in many cases can be defined as human trafficking, Amnesty International says in a new analysis.

The international human-rights organization says in a report released Thursday that Russia has recruited thousands of vulnerable people from low-income countries, as well as migrants and refugees living in Russia.

It says many recruits were promised high-paying civilian work, legal status or Russian citizenship but instead were sent to the front line in Ukraine. Some knew they were signing up for military service but were told they would be cooks or drivers, only to be sent to fight.

Researchers made six visits to prisoner-of-war camps in western Ukraine between 2024 and 2026 and interviewed dozens of people, among them 15 captured third-country nationals from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Somalia and South Africa. Only three people they spoke with said they knew they had signed a military contract and would be sent to fight.

Link: The Globe and Mail

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!

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One of the truly serendipitous events of my life is that my wife and I got together during summer 2012.

This means we just barely missed the advent of Tinder, which had its soft launch in September of that year.

I mean, I did some online dating back in the day, no doubt, but there was no swiping involved. In fact, I still can’t remember whether swipe left or right is good or bad.

Still, I’m all for doing whatever it takes to find the love of your life. Truly, I have the zeal of a convert.

And if that means using LinkedIn as a dating site, so be it.

I’m sorry, LinkedIn? Yes, at least according to the results of a survey reported in The Wall Street Journal recently.

Zety surveyed 1,023 U.S. employees and found that 26% thought it was acceptable to use LinkedIn as a dating tool. Twenty-two percent said they had either reached out or responded to someone on LinkedIn with romantic intent. Also, 12% said they had formed a romantic relationship that started there.

This, despite the fact that LinkedIn’s official policies include this pretty ironclad prohibition against using the site for dating:

“We don’t allow unwanted expressions of attraction, desire, requests for romantic relationship, marriage proposals, sexual advances or innuendo, or lewd remarks.

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, not a dating site. Do not use LinkedIn to pursue romantic connections, ask for romantic dates, or provide sexual commentary on someone’s appearance or perceived attractiveness.”

Personally, I think there’s a big difference between asking for a romantic date and making “lewd remarks.” But then again, I don’t run LinkedIn.

Still, the WSJ leads and finishes with the story of a couple who met on LinkedIn and linked up in more ways than one. Now, they’re looking for wedding venues.

“If it was LinkedIn, so be it,” said Rachel Wong, who met her fiancé, Sam Sawchuck, on LinkedIn. “I mean, he’s been the best connection I’ve ever made.”

And, as the Journal points out—although, again, I have no firsthand experience here—modern dating apps have reached the point of “deepening exhaustion” for many users, who keep looking for other alternatives:

“Singles are trying speed dating, connecting through shared real-world interests and even using spreadsheets to break their dating algorithm. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a public-facing platform with clear headshots and ample information about a person’s path in life—everything dating apps today seem to lack—has become a go-to tool in the modern search for love.”

Another LinkedIn user, Esme Gordon-Craig, a 24-year-old freelance journalist in London, talked about having pitched a colleague on the idea of having a conversation about career paths over drinks.

“He was kind of like, ‘This is a date, isn’t it?’” she told the WSJ. “And I was like, ‘Yeah.’”

For what it’s worth, Gordon-Craig wrote a first-person article last December in which she described herself as “back living at home with my parents, more than £80,000 in student debt, and riddled with panic for the future.”

That sounded familiar. I was once in nearly the same situation—right down to the student loans, adjusted for inflation, looking for love in all the wrong places, and moving back home with Mom and Dad for a bit.

And while I sometimes can’t explain exactly how it happened, the student loans are gone, I’m with the love of my life, and things sort of worked out.

I’m hopeful for the generation behind me that things will work out, too.

As much as LinkedIn can make a lot of us cringe sometimes, if it happens to be part of the solution, more power to you.

Now, someone please remind me whether it’s swipe right or left that’s good. I still mess that up.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: Three Anthropic researchers went public this week with chilling concerns about out-of-control AI, warning it could destroy humans this decade. Calling this unprecedented would be a gross understatement. You basically have the fastest-growing companies in human history warning their products could harm or even destroy humanity.

• WSJ: Top White House advisers have raised privately with President Trump the prospect that the Iran war could drag on through the remainder of his term, U.S. officials said — a message at odds with Trump’s public assurances of a swift victory. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the war will end “immediately” after the November midterms “because they can’t hold out any longer.”

• NPR: Ballot seizures seemed impossible. But judges and officials are prepping for them now.

• Yahoo Finance: Apple debuted its first foldable iPhone on Wednesday, marking the largest overhaul of its smartphone design ever. Called the iPhone Duo and starting at $1,999, the device features a passport-like design that opens and closes like a book.

• CNN via Yahoo: Fossilized eggs of the largest known dinosaurs have been unearthed in an unexpected place.

• LA Times via MSN: L.A.’s “perfect” Mediterranean weather is a birthright. Why did it disappear this summer?

• AP: Ten research teams were honored Thursday at a satirical science awards ceremony hosted outside the U.S. for the first time due to travel concerns. Researchers who studied milk from cockroaches and analyzed soil health using underwear received Ig Nobel prizes. The ceremony shifted to Switzerland after 35 years in the United States over concerns about attendees being able to get visas.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

Honestly, just look on LinkedIn. I say this after reading about a new study in which economists tried to use LinkedIn to trace the history of the U.S. labor market over the past few years.

The problem they ran into is something I think most of us probably already realized: LinkedIn profiles aren’t a self-reported history of work experiences, so much as they’re a constantly revised “retcon,” redone over and over in many cases to present the best possible face to the world.

In “Time Travel on Professional Profiles” (great title, by the way), published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nicholas Bloom and Gideon Moore of Stanford University and Lisa Simon and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers of Revelio Labs used a dataset of 29,448,462 LinkedIn profiles, and came up with a few key insights for our purposes:

• First, they found that “19.7 percent of established U.S. LinkedIn users retroactively edit the title or description of a job they have already left.”

• Next: “These ‘time-travel’ edits are closely tied to labor market transitions: around such edits, workers are much more likely to change employers as compared to later-editing users.”

• Perhaps unsurprisingly, the specific changes suggest “workers’ beliefs about which skills are in demand. Retroactive edits show sharp post-2022 increases in AI-related language and recent reductions in work-from-home and DEI language.”

• And “LLM-associated writing markers surge after ChatGPT, especially among less-educated groups and MBAs from lower-ranked programs.”

Let’s roll past the sick burn from Stanford professors talking about “lower-ranked MBAs” and instead get to the part of this newsletter where I come clean.

Because heck yes, I’ve gone back and edited and rewritten my LinkedIn profile.

Partly, it’s because the things I’m doing now—Life Story Magic, business consulting, and writing for places like Inc.com and of course Understandably—are very different from what I was doing when I first joined LinkedIn.

I don’t think that’s unfair, as long as it’s truthful. Honestly, I don’t even remember when I first joined LinkedIn.

Anyway, I acknowledge: When I first started thinking about this article, I assumed I’d be writing about LinkedIn changes as a cautionary tale.

Something like, “beware the too-on-the-nose job description from 2015,” or the profile suggesting that someone was thinking deeply about artificial intelligence during the Obama administration.

But as I think about this more, revisions might be more of a feature than a bug.

I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who famously wrote: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

(Yes, I’m enjoying myself quoting both Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the same newsletter.)

Revisions—again, truthful revisions—suggest to me attention to detail and an ability to communicate and change with the times.

In fact, maybe be more wary of people whose profiles look less like a time machine and more like a time capsule.

We all get second acts—and thirds, and fourths, and fifths ones, too.

At least, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

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Other things worth knowing …

• Yahoo News via AFP: Israeli opposition leaders called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unfit to serve after a bombshell report that the UAE had warned him before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Haaretz reported that UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan spoke to Netanyahu a week and a half before the attack and told him that Hamas was planning a major operation.

• Futurism: A journalist has accused Cleveland.com — the online home of The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper — of publishing an article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval. The article was generated by the “Cleveland.com Express Desk,” which “uses AI tools to assist in producing content.” Reporter Kaitlin Durbin said she’d been away on her honeymoon when her employer published the AI article under her name.

• CNN via MSN: Thieves took less than five minutes to steal four paintings from the Renoir Museum in southern France on Tuesday, abandoning two as they fled. The two missing paintings are “Madame Colonna Romano,” worth 2 million euros ($2.32 million), and “Jeune femme au puits,” valued at 200,000 euros ($232,000).

• NYT: A little over a month before Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison, she invited a camera crew into her rented Southern California home: Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian behind “Nathan for You,” and documentary director Lance Oppenheim. That decision turned into a three-year odyssey and a three-hour documentary called “You Can See Everything” that may upend the documentary genre itself. It premieres theatrically via A24 on October 16.

• WSJ: Southwest Airlines is jumping into the airport lounge competition. Four initial lounges are being built, with the first slated to open in late 2027.

• NYT: Every time you drive your car is now a chance to get famous. Dash cams were made for safety — but they’ve inadvertently created a whole new entertainment genre.

• AP: Pretty much everyone on stage at the Metropolitan Opera must audition — even the snake who will briefly take center stage in an upcoming adaptation of a Mozart classic. In charge of deciding who gets the starring reptilian role is Zoe Ziegfeld, a carnival performer-turned-opera actor cast as the snake handler in the Met’s version of “Così fan tutte,” inspired by Coney Island in the 1950s.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

There are six names that will come up prominently in today’s edition of Big Optimism—heroes, victims, and villains.

The hero comes first: the man who invented DNA fingerprinting. Then, the first criminal case it solved.

His name: Alec Jeffreys, born January 9, 1950, in Oxford, England. He was a scientist by nature long before he became one by training.

As a child, his father gave him a chemistry set. He expanded it by foraging for chemicals like sulfuric acid, which led to an accident and a permanent scar on his chin.

As an adult, he wore a beard to cover it up.

Jeffreys won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, and studied biochemistry. After graduating in 1971, he spent four years earning a doctorate studying mitochondria in cultured mammalian cells at Oxford.

From there, he moved on to a fellowship at the University of Amsterdam and, eventually, the University of Leicester’s Department of Genetics.

Now, the second name, and the first victim: Lynda Mann, who was 15 when she was murdered on November 21, 1983, in Narborough, Leicestershire.

The details were every bit as horrible as you can imagine. But the case quickly went cold.

Just six miles from the crime scene, at the University of Leicester, Jeffreys was studying deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA.

On September 10, 1984—42 years ago this week—he spent 30 minutes examining an X-ray film from a DNA experiment involving his technician and her family. He had what he later called his “eureka moment.”

As he stared at the film, he realized that everyone on the planet has a unique DNA pattern, with the exception of identical twins.

DNA fingerprinting was born.

Within six months, a lawyer used it to establish a family relationship for a boy seeking legal immigration status.

The third name: Dawn Ashworth, who was 15 when she was murdered on July 31, 1986, in Enderby—about as close to the University of Leicester as the place where Lynda Mann was killed.

Again, all the same horrible details were present—details that I frankly don’t want to go into here.

Police quickly realized that Lynda and Dawn had been killed by the same monster.

But they couldn’t find him.

The fourth name: Richard Buckland. He was 17 years old, and police knew for sure that he knew Dawn Ashworth.

They arrested him, interrogated him, and he confessed.

Case closed, right?

Except that while Buckland confessed to killing Dawn Ashworth, he vehemently denied killing Lynda Mann—and the police were absolutely convinced that one murderer had killed both girls.

They persuaded a judge to keep Buckland locked up for several months. In the meantime, they reached out to Jeffreys, hoping he could examine the DNA evidence and prove that Buckland was the killer in both cases.

Jeffreys came back with some good news and some bad news, from an investigative perspective:

The police were absolutely right that the same man had killed both girls.

But it also absolutely wasn’t Buckland.

In retrospective accounts, Buckland is described again and again as “a youth with learning disabilities,” and the suggestion is that he confessed to something he didn’t do under intense questioning.

It happens more often than people like to admit.

But now the police were left with two murders, a panicked population, and no leads.

This was where things went in a direction that I’m not sure they could go today: The police mounted a pressure campaign for every single man in the area to submit voluntarily to a blood test, so that his DNA could be profiled and compared with DNA recovered from the crime scenes.

Yet after obtaining DNA from almost every man who could possibly have committed the heinous crimes, they came up short.

No DNA match.

Now, the fifth name: Colin Pitchfork, a married father of two.

He was the murderer.

At first, he escaped even this region-wide DNA dragnet by paying “a mate” £200 to use a forged passport, pose as Pitchfork, and submit a blood sample in his place.

But Pitchfork’s “mate”—the sixth name, Ian Kelly—got drunk in a pub and told all about it.

A woman who heard the story told the police, and both Kelly and Pitchfork were quickly arrested.

I feel like a brief explanation is necessary here: Why would anyone give a fake DNA sample in a case involving two murders and sexual assault?

The most charitable explanation is that the story Pitchfork had given Kelly was the kind of thing that might have sounded convincing only to someone who was drunk in a pub.

Pitchfork said he had prior convictions for indecent exposure and thought the police would unduly harass him.

Kelly received two years in prison for the DNA fraud.

Pitchfork pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for the rapes and murders.

England is England, so life didn’t quite mean life. He was released in 2021, but 11 weeks later, at age 61, he was returned to custody for violating the terms of his release by approaching a lone woman. His latest request for release was denied in 2025.

As for Jeffreys, he’s now Sir Alec John Jeffreys.

Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth are, I hope and pray, resting in peace. At least we can say there was some modicum of justice.

Richard Buckland disappeared into obscurity. Believe me, I spent a lot of time trying to find out what happened.

Colin Pitchfork is right where he belongs.

Meanwhile, millions of people of his ilk have been convicted as a result of Jeffreys’s discovery.

And at least thousands of innocent people have been exonerated—many after serving years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 6: “I wanted my freedom.” — Martina Navratilova, requesting political asylum in the United States on this day in 1975, at 18, during a trip to the U.S. Open. She defected from Czechoslovakia for good and went on to win 18 Grand Slam singles titles.

• Monday, September 7: “Nobody else was offering to do anything to save me.” — Beth Allen, born three months premature in Brooklyn, on the incubator care that saved her life on this day in 1888, created by Dr. Martin Couney. Couney would go on to run incubator exhibits for decades, saving thousands of premature infants who had nowhere else to go.

• Tuesday, September 8: “The Kennedy Center exists not for Washington alone. It exists for the entire nation.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in her dedication for the Kennedy Center’s opening-night program on this day in 1971. The evening’s premiere was the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” commissioned in honor of the president for whom the center is named.

• Wednesday, September 9: “We are going to cut down this senseless loss of lives. We are going to cut down the pointless injury. We are going to cut down the heartbreak.” — President Lyndon B. Johnson, signing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act into law on this day in 1966. The act created the federal vehicle safety standards and the agency that became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

• Thursday, September 10: “I do not fear anyone. I do not have to know the names and the faces of those I will exceed.” — Abebe Bikila, in a 1965 Sports Illustrated interview with John Usherwood, reflecting on the mindset behind his gold medal in the Rome Olympic marathon on this day in 1960. He ran the 26.2 miles barefoot, becoming the first sub-Saharan African Olympic champion, and won it again four years later in Tokyo — this time in shoes, six weeks after an appendectomy.

• Friday, September 11: “Naturally I did not know at that time that with this step we began the road toward the unification of the two states and with it a new chapter in the history of Europe.” — Gyula Horn, the Hungarian foreign minister who announced the border opening, reflecting in his memoir on the decision made on this day in 1989. Tens of thousands of East Germans crossed into Austria within weeks, a crack in the Iron Curtain that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by two months.

• Saturday, September 12: “Easy, kid, I already lost.” — Abimael Guzmán, to the officer who cornered him during his capture in Lima on this day in 1992, according to that officer’s own account. The arrest of the Shining Path’s founder, whose insurgency had killed an estimated 30,000 people over twelve years, effectively ended the group’s campaign of violence.

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Sailing and bridge and croquet

Today’s story is for Labor Day, and it starts almost a century ago, when a young prospective law student named Elizabeth Brandeis (”E.B” to her friends), had her heart set on Harvard.

Little problem: Harvard refused to admit women to its law school in the 1920s.

They wouldn’t even make an exception for E.B., whose father was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (a Harvard man himself).

Instead, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin law school in 1923. There, she met her future husband, a fellow student named Paul Raushenbush.

“She was brainy and shy, her hair long and dark,” as Michael S. Rosenwald put it in The Washington Post. “He was handsome and outgoing. On hikes and canoe outings, they fell in love romantically and intellectually.”

Sounds lovely. They graduated, married, and both became professors at Wisconsin.

Then, they found their calling.

A few other people

Two more people enter the story here (although not the love affair; that would be awkward):

• John R. Commons: a Wisconsin law professor who had tried but failed to advocate for an unemployment insurance law. E.B. and Paul Raushenbush became his acolytes.

• Philip La Follette, a fellow Wisconsin Law graduate whose late father had been the state’s governor and served in the U.S. Senate, and whose brother was a sitting U.S. senator at the time.

La Follette wanted to run for governor, and he wanted to pass unemployment insurance legislation as part of his platform. So, knowing his friends E.B. and Paul Raushenbush’s work with Commons, he asked them to draft something that could make it through the legislature.

They dove in, and included a key provision that became highly controversial (but survived): the idea that the whole thing had to be funded by employers, rather than employees, so that employers would have a disincentive to cut jobs.

La Follette won the election, and E.B. and Paul’s proposed legislation garnered just enough support. It became Wisconsin law in 1932.

Three years later, when President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act of 1935, that law included a national unemployment insurance policy, too—which was based largely, in turn, on the Wisconsin law.

Sailing and bridge and croquet

“Their story is absolutely staggering to think about right now,” E.B. and Paul Raushenbush’s grandson told the Post. “It was their life’s work to make laws like this available to everyone.”

I find it interesting too. Maybe not, “absolutely staggering,” but it’s family, so we’ll allow it.

Tucked away at the end of all of this however, I find perhaps the most endearing part.

It’s that growing up, their grandson thought of E.B. and Paul not as lawyers or champions of the working class, but for other things: “the simple pleasures they all enjoyed together. Games of bridge. Sailing. Croquet.”

A lot of people who never heard of E.B. and Paul Raushenbush, and who never in a million years thought they’d need to file for unemployment, might agree that they owe them a small debt of gratitude. Labor Day seems like a nice day to tell the tale.

And for the rest of us, a remainder: Everyone you meet has a story! Maybe even a consequential one you knew nothing about.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: An Amazon cargo plane barreled off a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, killing at least five people as it struck vehicles and burst into flames, authorities said.

• NYT: U.S. government investigators have subjected roughly 50 members of the military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions. The tests were conducted in August and appear aimed at not just ferreting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others.

• Axios: Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany won a record 44% in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, leaving a small party with seats that could determine whether it can lead the nation’s first far-right state government since World War II. Germany rebuilt its democracy after Nazi rule with unusually strong safeguards against extremism, but AfD’s breakthrough shows those barriers aren’t stopping Europe’s far right from becoming dominant electoral forces.

• CNN: Volkswagen Group, which sells Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, and VW vehicles, plans to eliminate 50,000 jobs and cut half of its offerings. The German automaker is struggling with headwinds from increasing Chinese competition in Europe and tariff costs on its shipments to the U.S. market.

• WSJ: Carmakers have a new idea to boost EV range: add a gasoline engine. Hyundai, Ford, and Stellantis are planning to introduce larger EVs with gas generators to solve range anxiety.

• Fortune: Some Las Vegas hotels are so desperate for Canadian tourists they’re treating Canada’s dollar as equivalent to the U.S. greenback. “It’s such a big ask right now,” said Vancouver resident Josh Loewen, 45, of the U.S. tourism industry’s attempts to woo Canadians back before a new president occupies the White House. “It’s just a wasted effort.”

• AP: British police have a stout task ahead: recovering 70,000 pints worth of stolen Guinness. Two trailer truckloads of the famously creamy dark beer valued at £115,000 were stolen from a depot near Liverpool. “It is famously said that ‘Guinness is good for you,’ but that is only the case when it has been bought and paid for,” Det. Sgt. Gary McClatchy said. “We will settle for nothing less than the full recovery of all the items stolen.”

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

(That said … if you find links that don’t work, let me know!)

Free For All Friday

He Was a Washed-Up Pop Star. Now He’s Selling Out Stadiums Hosting Baby Raves.

A former boy-band member has turned his remixes of classic nursery rhymes into a global touring sensation

The scene at Red Rocks Amphitheatre had all the hallmarks of an electronic dance music festival. Attendees wore holographic bodysuits, went wild when the beat dropped and occasionally spilled their drinks down their shirts.

But getting dressed required parental assistance, the bass pulsing off the sandstone was a techno remix of “The Wheels on the Bus,” and the drinks were apple juice and formula.

This rave was for toddlers.

At the center of the diapered frenzy, bouncing around on stage alongside a giant stack of inflatable rings, was Lenny Pearce. Covered in tattoos, his hair in a long white braid, the Australian DJ and former boy-band member looks more like an all-night raver than a children’s host. But he has turned his remixes of nursery rhymes into a global sensation.

In 2022, Pearce and his wife had their first child together. At home, he was primarily listening to an endless loop of children’s songs. His daughter was often in a highchair in his music studio when his wife was working. What if he gave “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” a heavy techno beat?

“I wanted to play with her more, in my world.”

Within 24 hours of uploading his version to TikTok, it had hundreds of thousands of views. Major dance labels that Pearce had spent years pursuing reached out.

Link: Wall Street Journal

The 25 Best Documentaries of All Time, Ranked

From ‘Grey Gardens’ to ‘The Gleaners and I,’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ to ‘Grizzly Man’ and beyond, THR critics pick their favorite non-fiction films of all time

One of the paradoxes when it comes to documentaries — especially the “best” of all docs, as we’ve chosen here — is that the more personal, obsessive and, yes, subjective they are, the better they tend to be.

In a genre that many viewers expect to offer us dispassionate, seemingly impartial portraits of our past and present, the films that stand out frequently do the opposite. They present bold, singular, deeply idiosyncratic visions, oftentimes from directors who’ve oscillated between fiction and nonfiction work.

Even the late, great Frederick Wiseman — two of whose 46 films are on our list — claimed he made “reality fictions” and not documentaries, although they’ve always been classified as the latter.

Of course, a lot of great docs are also about great subjects, and there’s no shortage of pivotal historical events and figures explored in the films we’ve chosen. Yet nearly half of our top 25 are about people or places nobody had really heard of before.

Link: The Hollywood Reporter

Climbers Rescued From Mount Shasta After Relying on AI Chatbot to Plan Trip

Three novice climbers say they used Google’s AI chatbot Gemini to plan a Mount Shasta summit attempt that left them stranded and out of supplies

Three California college students had to be rescued from Mount Shasta during a poorly planned summit climb in which they overshot their itinerary, meandered off-route and ran out of food and water.

According to authorities with Siskiyou County and the U.S. Forest Service, the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them. The county Sheriff’s Office called relying on artificial intelligence tools “a critical misstep.”

Things started to go wrong for them during their descent, according to authorities.

The phone they’d been using to navigate ran out of battery and the spare power bank they’d brought didn’t properly connect to the phone. By Sunday night, still high on the mountain, they wound up “well off-route,” according to a forest service report.

The role of AI in wilderness trip-planning has become a heated topic of conversation following a series of instances in which hikers and campers became lost or confused after relying on chatbots to help them devise their adventures.

Link: San Francisco Chronicle

I Study Successful People. They Have One Habit in Common.

A psychologist who wrote the book on grit says the real key to achievement is knowing how to ask for help

I was once stranded with my 86-year-old mother in the Atlantic Ocean. We were on a snorkeling excursion off the coast of Miami, and the two of us were quickly swept behind our boat, my mother overtaken by the current.

Attempting to tug her to safety, I thrashed and kicked with all my might, but the ocean swallowed my efforts whole. Lungs burning, legs heavy, I changed tactics. I used one hand to keep her head above water and waved the other wildly in the air, shouting for help as I did.

Most people understand the importance of asking for help in a life-or-death crisis. We know we should wave to the lifeguard during a riptide or call 911 if our house catches fire. But in our personal and professional lives, Americans are encouraged to pursue rugged individualism over interdependency.

You might think I’d love the image of the solo striver triumphing over every challenge. After all, I’m a psychologist who wrote a book called “Grit” about the necessity of passion and perseverance for achieving long-term goals. The truth is, I hate it. Without exception, every high performer I’ve studied credits a host of supporters for success. Research has found that a willingness to ask for help is crucial to achievement.

Link: New York Times

A Makeover for College: No Gym, No Meal Plan and Two Years of Work

A group of business, college, and government leaders is building an entirely new college from scratch to fix higher education’s broken economics

MONTPELIER, Vt. — The buildings that frame a grassy quad on a hill above Vermont’s capital city are all red brick and white trim, dating from as far back as the 1870s.

This quintessential college campus from the 19th century is where a group of business, college and government leaders is working on the task of reinventing higher education for the 21st century.

An entirely new college is being planned here to change not only how higher education is delivered, but at what price. It also proposes to highlight ways the current business model no longer works, as evidenced by the 152 colleges and universities that have closed or merged since 2016, and the 442 others that a new projection says are at risk.

So deeply entrenched are the problems confronting higher education that a growing chorus of innovators says the easiest way to fix them is to begin again from scratch.

The Greenway Institute — “green” as in new — will adopt instructional methods proven to work well, such as real-world training under the supervision of faculty mentors, while stripping away such things as layers of administrators and nonacademic amenities that make college in the United States so expensive.

When Greenway is operating fully, students are expected to live on campus for two years doing projects and then go on to real-world workplaces for an additional two years while continuing to get support from faculty.

“It’s not fancy. It’s a place where you do have a meaningful relationship with your faculty members. But you also take out your own trash,” said Mark Somerville, the founding president.

Link: NPR

A Hedge-Fund Titan’s Divorce Is Putting Wall Street’s Staggering Wealth on Public View

John and Laura Overdeck’s split could also sway a power struggle atop Two Sigma

Hedge-fund billionaire John Overdeck took to the witness stand last week to explain that he had always shared his riches with his wife, Laura Overdeck. That included the hundreds of millions of dollars in pay that he put into a joint account during their marriage, he said.

“In fact, she was able to withdraw $75 million the day before she filed for divorce,” said Overdeck, co-founder of Two Sigma, the quant-trading powerhouse.

Overdeck didn’t flinch when he mentioned the figure, just one of the many staggering sums being bandied about in a blockbuster divorce trial under way in a New Jersey courthouse. The trial could result in one of the largest divorce settlements ever and shake up the power struggle atop Two Sigma, where John Overdeck has been locked in a bitter feud with his co-founder, David Siegel.

John Overdeck is offering to give his estranged wife $723 million to settle their split. Laura Overdeck says their marital assets should include his stake in Two Sigma, which her attorney estimates is worth $6.2 billion. She wants 35% of that, or $2.17 billion.

Link: Wall Street Journal

The Worst Places on Earth for Your Flight to Declare an Emergency

How far can a plane fly on a single working engine – and what happens if there’s an emergency in the middle of the ocean?

A trip to the Azores can be just the ticket – though this does tend to hinge on it being your planned destination. That wasn’t the case for the 222 passengers aboard SWISS LX9, whose flight from Chicago to Zurich last week had to make an emergency landing on Terceira, one of the Azores islands, after a chemical smell was reported onboard.

Diversion landings aren’t everyday occurrences, as such, but preparing for emergencies in the sky still plays a crucial part in aviation safety.

Perhaps the most notorious isolated route (in terms of diversion airports) served by a major airline is Qantas’s flight between Sydney and Santiago, the capital of Chile. Given that tiny Easter Island can only handle one plane at any time, Chilean air traffic control maintains tight restrictions ensuring that only one plane at a time is in range of the potential diversion spot.

Link: The Telegraph

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!

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As a card-carrying member of Generation X, I have a very soft spot — heck, let’s just call it love — for Generation Z. There’s simply a lot there to like, and to have empathy for:

• Still sorting it out, but a pretty healthy attitude toward work. I know it’s a struggle and a tough time, but I have a sense that Generation Z largely embraced the idea that you don’t necessarily have to adhere to someone else’s timeline for your life.

• Lots of sympathy for them for having had the Covid era right in the middle of what should have been their growing-up years — Gen-Z covers about 15 years (born between 1997 and 2012), but the idea of having to have gone to school or college, or to try to start a work life or find a partner when the whole world was shut down at times must have been very difficult.

• And there’s tech; I’m so fortunate in retrospect that my wife and I got together literally a few weeks before Tinder and similar apps hit the market. Sure, there was online dating and I did a lot of it, but my sense is that it was very different than the swipe-left culture that came along after it.

It’s for reasons like these that I sit up and take notice when I see some stats that suggest Generation Z is struggling in some ways, and as an entrepreneur and just someone who likes people, it makes me want to help.

Here’s a generation with a real problem. And here’s the opportunity, for anyone paying attention, to help solve it.

Alone on the weekends

A recent Harris poll found the following — and especially about how a lot of Generation Z are apparently spending their time:

• Fully half of Gen-Z (51 percent) say they feel lonely on a typical weekend, the highest of any generation and 37 points above Boomers (14 percent).

• Nearly half (49 percent) say they don’t have enough friends to spend time with in person, while 65 percent say they experience their social life more through their phone than IRL.

• Top reasons for staying home: to save money (49 percent), to recharge physically and mentally (47 percent), to stay in a familiar environment (40 percent), to avoid social interactions (34 percent), to escape emotions (32 percent).

• Oh, and screens dominate: 71 percent watch TV/stream/game at least half their weekends, 69 percent doomscroll, 38 percent game or stream every single weekend.

See what I mean? I’m not here to criticize, but to see if I can help — and also as an entrepreneur, to brainstorm ways that we can address these kinds of needs.

Actually, two more bits of data that might help, from the same survey:

• Wellness has replaced the bar: 65 percent feel more socially connected in wellness-focused settings than in traditional nightlife (70 percent of Gen-Z women).

• Gen-Z women skew hard toward wanting alcohol-optional (75 percent) and low-pressure (82 percent) experiences specifically.

What Gen-Z actually wants

As for what they actually want, according to this study:

• 79 percent want more affordable ways to spend time with others.

• 77 percent want built-in activities beyond just sitting and talking.

• 76 percent want casual, low-pressure atmospheres and quieter, less overwhelming environments.

• 54 percent prefer daytime over nighttime activities.

• And 68 percent want more spontaneous moments to meet people or make friends.

Add all of this up, and I think there’s just so much opportunity to be seen.

Go back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and you’ll see that things like friendships, family connections, intimacy, and community are mid-tier requirements, coming in just behind things like personal security and protection from harm.

And it almost seems like an entire generation, by the numbers, says we’re not as a society doing enough to help them satisfy those needs.

“Deeply felt customer needs”

I don’t know. It just seems to me we have a generation telling us exactly what they need to be happier and more successful.

Someone once said a new business needs to offer a compelling solution to a deeply felt customer need.

Gen-Z is here telling us some of their deeply felt needs. Feels like that brings us halfway there.

Affordable, low-pressure, built-in activities, daytime, alcohol-optional: That seems like a pretty smart starting point.

Whoever reads this and has a light bulb moment will do something better with it than I will. And frankly, it might be better if that person is themself Gen-Z, and not someone old enough to be their dad, like me.

The kids are all right. Now either it’s on the rest of us or it’s an excellent opportunity to help them get even better.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: Hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters. The agents are being pulled from their normal duties, which include investigating human trafficking and terrorism.

• WaPo: A record number of Americans believe there is widespread corruption in the U.S. government, reaching the highest level of distrust in two decades, according to a Gallup poll. Nearly 90% of U.S. adults said corruption was widespread in the government — up 10% from last year and the highest level of perceived government corruption among countries with advanced economies.

• Yahoo News/Politico: Republicans and Democrats across Capitol Hill are getting demos of AI’s latest power: its ability to churn out instant dossiers filled with details about ordinary Americans, from a gun store owner’s leaked email passwords to a church member’s yoga workouts to people’s visits to abortion clinics.

• NBC News: Voters in Independence, Missouri recalled a City Council member who has served for more than a decade, rebuking his decision in March to back billions of dollars in tax breaks for a proposed AI data center.

• USA Today via Yahoo: The United States Mint began selling a $1 gold coin emblazoned with President Trump’s face, making him the first living person featured on American currency in more than a century. The Treasury has also proposed a $250 bill and a 24K gold commemorative coin with the president’s image.

• CBS News: MapQuest (remember them?) is suddenly the top free app in the Apple App Store after declining to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” despite President Trump’s executive order. Both Apple Maps and Google Maps made the change for U.S. users. Usage of Mapquest is now running roughly 50 times its normal rate, the company said.

• AP: Thailand’s seaside resort of Pattaya has a lingering reputation for sex tourism, and now it’s a major shore leave destination for crew members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Recent visitors say the development of more family-friendly attractions means the new, more wholesome Pattaya overshadows its former seedy self.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!

25 years X 40 weeks of work per year X two procedures a day = 2,000 colonoscopies.

But, I forgot that you probably also have to multiply that by 3, 4, or even 5 workdays per week. So we might be talking about as many as 10,000 colonoscopies, not 2,000.

Thus, I am even more confident. Thank you.

43,000 words about rotisserie chickens

Over the past two years I’ve solved the age-old question about what comes first, the chicken or the egg? In my case anyway, it’s the egg.

Explanation: I started taking a GLP-1 drug about a year and a half ago (I know I’ve shared that here), dropped roughly 50 pounds, and changed my lifestyle to mean working out, watching what I eat, and eating a lot of protein:

• In the morning: two eggs, sometimes three, with a protein shake.

• At lunch: chicken. Most often it’s rotisserie chicken, because it’s relatively inexpensive (I don’t live close enough to Costco to get them for $4.99, but still), and unelaborated with sugary sauces or whatever else.

One chicken lasts me two or three meals, even accounting for the fact that I’m not all that good at carving them.

So, I’m now an accidental rotisserie chicken expert, which led me like a moth to a flame to a new 35-page academic paper, with a 50-page online appendix, out of Stanford GSB and NJIT, analyzing when and how supermarkets should sell rotisserie chickens and other premade food to maximize profits and minimize waste.

Before we dive in, an average page in this thing has about 500 words, so do the math and it means these business professors just wrote a nearly 43,000-word treatise on how to sell rotisserie chickens.

Of Mice and Men is 30,000 words, as an comparative example.

Anyway if they wrote that much, maybe there’s something intersting buried in there, right?

Here’s the problem they addressed: A major retailer noticed it was throwing away 9 percent of its freshly prepared food, rotisserie chicken included, according to a summary on Stanford’s website.

So they asked Erica Plambeck, a professor of operations, information, and technology at Stanford GSB; Dan Iancu, an associate professor in the same department; and Jae-Hyuck Park, a Stanford PhD now at NJIT to take a look.

Challenge accepted, and they set out to built a model to find the most efficient, least wasteful way to sell prepared food.

What they found goes against how most stores actually do it.

• Supermarkets typically sell first-in, first-out (FIFO), so the oldest chicken goes first.

• Except the researchers found last-in, first-out (LIFO) works better.

“It’s true that some portion on the back of the shelf may expire,” Plambeck says. “But LIFO increases the average quality of items sold. That leads to increased demand and, paradoxically, less gets thrown out.”

Part 2 in the chicken-selling strategy suggested: Get rid of the time stamps on packaging that actually indicate which are the newest or freshest (or, I suppose, time stamps that consumers can easily decipher).

Shoppers who can see how old a chicken is are likely to cherry-pick the newest one and leave the rest. But if there’s no timestamp …

“If you do one without the other,” Plambeck says, meaning just go to LIFO but let the customers know which chickens actually are last in, “it doesn’t work,”

Plambeck says the project gave her a new appreciation for what it takes to run a grocery store.

“Next time you’re in a supermarket, stop and look around. It’s a complex operation, and the details really matter for the cost and quality of the food we eat, and for what we don’t eat.”

As for me, I realize I’m absolutely the kind of person who looks for the last-in chicken if I can find it. Most often, at least where I shop, everything is quite fresh anyway.

But it’s nice to know the thing I eat almost every day for lunch triggered a 43,000-word obsession at good ol’ Stanford University.

I’ve never felt so trendy.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: The U.S. military hit targets in Iran on Tuesday and Tehran fired missiles and drones at various sites across the region as hostilities flare once again in an intermittent war that has lasted more than six months. One U.S. strike hit a home hosting a wedding, killing five people and wounding dozens, local officials claimed.

• Mediaite: In his first interview since being detained by ICE and deported, far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos said he is “very ashamed” to have ever supported President Trump. Yiannopoulos admitted to cheering on ICE actions in the past, but argued they should be focused on violent criminals and drug dealers.

• Business Insider via MSN: Is $155,600 a working-class salary? More than half of Americans who make that much say yes. Overall, 60% of Americans now identify as working class, according to a Pew Research analysis of a January 2026 survey — up from 54% in 2024.

• Time: The Trump administration plans to spend at least $250,000 to renovate the White House bowling alley. When the Obama administration tried to do this project in 2014, only 90 minutes passed after the story broke before the RNC posted a list of other things that could be done with the money, and Congress moved to prohibit the use of funds on the project.

• Futurism: Now that AI models have officially passed the Turing Test, there’s no doubt they’re capable of imitating human traits to a degree that would have flabbergasted even an expert just a few years back. But the more we use tools like ChatGPT or Claude, the tables are starting to turn: chatbots appear to be influencing human behavior, making us behave more like them.

• WCVB: A man is facing charges after he was accused of assaulting a priest with a beer can at a church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. “Yes, a man attacked me at confessions and adoration this evening after he tried to steal the monstrance,” Father Chris Peschel posted on Facebook. “I forgive him. I am just glad nobody else was hurt. I pinned him down until the police arrived.”

• Mac Rumors: A science project Apple co-founder Steve Jobs built for his 8th-grade science fair in 1968 sold at auction for $34,375. Jobs was attending Cupertino Jr. High when he designed the project, titled “What is the SCR? (silicon-controlled rectifier).” The lot includes a display board built from plywood with three explanatory panels and a 10-page report.

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This is the top of today’s newsletter. But I’m going to tell you now that the best example I can think of for how to deal with the phenomenon we’re about to explore comes at the bottom.

Literally.

For now, just know that after nearly three decades of working, and about a zillion different careers and pivots, I’d like to think I have a reasonably accurate idea of my own strengths and weaknesses.

I know what I’m good at. I know where I fall short. I could be wrong about both, obviously, but generally I trust my own read.

According to brand-new research, the fact that I feel confident saying that might actually count as evidence in my favor.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

For nearly three decades, one of psychology’s most famous findings has told us something very different: The least competent people are supposedly the most confident, while people who actually know what they’re doing tend to underestimate themselves.

It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, after a 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger.

You have almost certainly heard of it, even if you’ve never read the paper. The idea escaped academia and became a meme, a management cliché, and a useful way to explain why that one guy in every meeting keeps talking long after everyone else has stopped.

Now, a new study from the University of Bath and the London School of Economics says the whole thing might have been backward.

Highly confident people

The paper, published in July in Psychological Review, was written by Chris Dawson of Bath and David de Meza of LSE.

They went back through the large datasets used to support the original Dunning-Kruger findings and ran the numbers again.

The key difference was that they corrected for something called regression to the mean.

Here is my attempt at the plain-English version, written with less confidence than I had before I started reading about regression to the mean:

When you divide people into groups based on one set of test scores, you are not necessarily dividing them perfectly according to ability.

• Somebody might score badly because they got a rough group of questions.

• Somebody else might score unusually well because things broke their way.

So the lowest-scoring group will include some people who are not really as bad as their scores suggest, and the highest-scoring group will include some people who are not really quite that good.

‘A universal human trait’

That matters when you compare the scores with how people rated their own abilities.

It can make the people in the bottom group look more delusional than they are. It can also make the people at the top look strangely modest.

Dawson and de Meza say that once they corrected for this, the famous Dunning-Kruger pattern disappeared.

People at all levels were overconfident. But the highest performers were actually the most overconfident of all.

“When we clear away the statistical problems, the apparent pattern disappears,” Dawson said. “Instead, we see that overconfidence is a universal human trait, but it is the most capable among us who exhibit it the most.”

Strategic signalling

Dawson and de Meza have a theory about this. Heck, let’s call it the Dawson-de Meza effect.

People who are genuinely good at something have the most to gain by projecting confidence.

Suppose you are very good at your job, but the people around you cannot easily see or measure how good you are. Maybe they do not even understand your work well enough to judge it.

Talking confidently becomes a way to signal something they cannot observe directly.

And if you really are good, there is less risk in doing it. You are more likely to be able to back up the claim when somebody challenges you.

A person with less ability has more reason to be careful, because the bluff is more likely to be exposed.

The researchers call this strategic signaling. The better you are, the more incentive you have to make sure people know it—or perhaps to make sure they think you are even better than you are.

A practical problem

So, does this mean Dunning and Kruger were careless? Does it mean incompetent people never overestimate themselves?

Or, in perhaps the most ironic possibility of all, did the Dunning-Kruger effect become so famous and get repeated so confidently because it was wrong?

I mean, hardly.

This is one new analysis, and I am sure there will now be arguments over the analysis, the correction, the interpretation, and probably the meaning of regression to the mean itself.

That is how these things usually go.

But it does create a practical problem.

Suppose someone speaks with great confidence about a subject you do not understand.

Under the classic Dunning-Kruger interpretation, confidence might be a warning sign. Maybe the person does not know enough to recognize how little he knows.

Under the Dawson-de Meza interpretation, however, confidence might mean the person is genuinely very good and knows he can support what he is saying.

So which is it?

Getting to the bottom of it

The only solution I can think of is to push back a little and see what happens.

If the confidence is mostly bluff, the cracks should start to show. If it is supported by real knowledge, the person should be able to explain further, answer questions, and give you better reasons to trust him.

Of course, this is much harder when you know almost nothing about the supposed area of expertise.

Which brings us to the example at the bottom that I promised at the top.

Honestly, it might be the best example I have ever come up with, even though I had no idea at the time that I was applying either the Dunning-Kruger effect or the Dawson-de Meza effect.

A few years ago, I passed that magic milestone where you reach the age when your doctor starts telling you that you need a colonoscopy.

I met the doctor who would be performing this intimate procedure only a short time before they wheeled me into the room.

He asked whether I had any questions.

“Just one,” I said. “How many of these have you done?”

I think he found the question amusing.

He started doing the math out loud.

• About 25 years with this as his specialty.

• Figure he worked perhaps 40 weeks each year.

• Maybe two procedures per day.

Multiply 25 by 40 by two, and you get 2,000.

“That’s an interesting question,” he said.

“This is a very unusual day for me,” I explained. “I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t also an unusual day for you.”

It was a good way to gain confidence in his confidence.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!