Let’s talk today about someone who became a hero to his country — but since it probably isn’t your country, you might not remember.

Joseph Schooling was born in Singapore in 1994, and he also was a born swimmer.

In 2004, when Schooling had just turned 10 years old, he watched as Michael Phelps won six gold medals at the Athens Olympics. Two years later he watched as Phelps walked away with five more golds at the Pan Pacific Championships.

Phelps became Schooling’s hero, and he looked forward to the 2008 Games in Beijing. The question at the time: did Phelps have a chance of breaking Mark Spitz’s 1972 record of seven gold medals in a single Games?

Phelps’s own idol, Ian Thorpe of Australia, said it wasn’t possible — which Phelps said he used as extra motivation to try and pull it off.

All of which leads us to the first time Joseph Schooling actually got to meet Michael Phelps — in the leadup to the 2008 Games, when the U.S. Olympic swim team did a training camp in Singapore.

“They came to the country club that I trained at,” Schooling later recalled. “Everyone just rushed up and was like, ‘It’s Michael Phelps! It’s Michael Phelps!’ and I really wanted a picture.”

Sure enough, Schooling, then 13 years old and barely coming up to Phelps’s chin, got his photo. “It was very early in the morning,” he remembered, “and I was so shell shocked, I couldn’t really open my mouth.”

Phelps went on to win his eight Olympic gold medals in Beijing, and then another four medals at the 2012 Games in London. Meanwhile, Schooling kept swimming, rising through the ranks in Singapore as a teenager, and then coming to the U.S. to attend high school in Florida.

He was good enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, ultimately setting collegiate records in the butterfly — the same stroke Phelps had won at every Olympics since 2004.

Singapore, meanwhile, had a birthday coming up. On August 9, 1965, the country hadn’t so much declared independence as had it forced on it — expelled from the Malaysian Federation, cut loose with no natural resources and no real plan.

Lee Kuan Yew announced the split on live TV and broke down crying while he did it.

Fifty-one years later, Singapore had built one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. One thing it hadn’t done, however, in all that time, in any sport, was win an Olympic gold medal.

Three days after that anniversary — August 12, 2016 — Schooling was in the pool in Rio, in Lane 4, next to Phelps, in what Phelps had already announced would be his last individual Olympic race.

Schooling got out fast and just never let Phelps back in. 50.39 seconds. An Olympic record.

Phelps touched three-quarters of a second later, tied for silver with Chad le Clos and László Cseh, the kid from the photo having just beaten his own idol.

Schooling’s reaction:

“That’s pretty crazy, what happens in eight years. I’m just honored and privileged to have the chance to race alongside him.

If it wasn’t for Michael, I don’t think I could have gotten to this point. I wanted to be like him as a kid. … He is the reason why I wanted to be a better swimmer.”

Phelps’s reaction—on what turned out to be his last-ever competitive race:

“I’m not happy, obviously, nobody likes to lose. But I’m proud of Joe.

I wanted to change the sport of swimming. With the people we have in the sport now I think you are seeing it.”

Singapore lost its mind, by the way.

Schooling flew back to the city-state for an open-top bus parade with people packed along the route. Parliament gave him a standing ovation.

For a stretch there he was about as famous as it’s possible to be in a country of six million people. There’s a life-sized cardboard cutout of him from a 2015 meet-and-greet that still sits in his parents’ office — he’s asked his mom to get rid of it more than once, and she won’t.

For what it’s worth, the Rio Olympics were the pinnacle of his career. He picked up plenty of gold at the SEA Games, and did well at the 2018 Asian Games, but never reached an Olympic podium never happened again.

At Tokyo in 2021 he didn’t even get out of his heat, and some of the same country that had carried him through the streets five years earlier turned on him online. It got bad enough that President Halimah Yacob wrote a public post defending him, saying people were quick to put someone on a pedestal and just as quick to “thrash them to the ground” the moment they didn’t deliver.

In 2022 Schooling admitted he’d used cannabis while on leave from Singapore’s mandatory military service in Vietnam, which was a big deal under the country’s strict drug laws — and apologized for it publicly. He retired in 2024, at 28.

Still, he’s still the only person from Singapore who’s ever won an Olympic gold medal In the post-Schooling era, enrollment in kids’ swim classes have spiked.

I’m kind of curious to see what aspiring teenaged swimmers might have managed to get a photo with him, much like he got with his hero, Phelps. And even more curious if we’ll see one of them on the podium in Los Angeles in two years.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, August 9: “I want to encourage women: Don’t be afraid. Pursue and have dreams. This is my dream.” — Shannon Eastin, on the eve of becoming the first woman to officiate an NFL game, in a preseason matchup between the Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers on this day in 2012. She’d spent 16 years officiating college and high school football before getting the call.

• Monday, August 10: “Today’s permit marks the true beginning of our commercial operations in San Francisco.” — Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, after California regulators voted to let Waymo and Cruise operate driverless taxis throughout San Francisco at any hour on this day in 2023. It made San Francisco the first major U.S. city with two competing fleets of fully autonomous vehicles.

• Tuesday, August 11: “Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or a man?” — William Lloyd Garrison, addressing the crowd after Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, gave his first public speech to a mostly white audience at an antislavery convention on Nantucket on this day in 1841. The crowd roared back “A man!”—and Douglass was recruited on the spot to become a paid lecturer for the abolitionist movement.

• Wednesday, August 12: “This is the computer for just about everyone who has ever wanted a personal system at the office, on the university campus or at home.” — C.B. Rogers Jr., IBM vice president, introducing the IBM Personal Computer at a press conference at New York’s Waldorf Astoria on this day in 1981. It sold for $1,565 and legitimized the entire personal computer industry almost overnight.

• Thursday, August 13: “This isn’t for me, this is for them.” — Monica Puig, after upsetting world No. 2 Angelique Kerber to win Puerto Rico’s first-ever Olympic gold medal, in women’s tennis singles at the Rio Games on this day in 2016. She was unseeded and ranked 34th in the world going in.

• Friday, August 14: “Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on signing the Social Security Act into law on this day in 1935. It established old-age pensions and unemployment insurance for millions of Americans during the depths of the Great Depression.

• Saturday, August 15: “I am going to make the dirt fly.” — President Theodore Roosevelt, on his determination to finish the Panama Canal, which officially opened to global shipping on this day in 1914 with the passage of the SS Ancon. The canal cut nearly 8,000 miles off the sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific, reshaping global trade almost overnight.

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Inflammation Keeps Us Alive. It’s Also Making Us Sick.

Traditionally, we have sorted diseases into categories, separating contagious from noncontagious illnesses; acute events like strokes from chronic conditions like asthma. But we have lately realized how interconnected the body’s systems really are.

More and more, researchers are starting to see things the way that Peter Libby, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Mass General Brigham, does:

“We all study the same disease,” he said. Inflammation is involved with everything.

Mainstream media headlines tell us how to “fight” inflammation by eating these six fruits and following those nine healthy habits.

On platforms like TikTok and Reddit, users eagerly seek and dispense advice on how to eliminate their chronic inflammation by any means necessary: by fasting or humming or taking ice baths or injecting themselves with copper peptides.

The problem is that inflammation isn’t a single entity — a virus or cell we can target with a particular drug or therapy.

Instead, it’s the product of an incredibly complex regulatory network that we’re just beginning to understand.

“It’s not simple good or bad, it’s good that comes at a cost,” says Jonathan Kipnis, a neuroscientist and immunologist at Washington University, St. Louis, adding: “I think we are all looking for simple answers. There will be answers. They will not be simple.”

The widespread use of GLP-1s like Ozempic and Zepbound has upended ideas about what those answers might be and how soon we might have them.

Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, gave me some examples of what patients are experiencing:

“They’re emailing me and calling me and saying: ‘My arthritis is better. My Crohn’s disease is better. My post-Covid lung fatigue syndrome’s better. My concussion symptoms are better. My endometriosis is gone away. My chronic pain and headaches are gone away.’”

As tempting as it may be to experiment with off-label drugs or supplements, the wisest course of action according to most researchers is still a holistic one: Eat a balanced diet, exercise, sleep.

The person whose advice you should follow remains your doctor.

Link: New York Times Magazine

‘Naked Dressing’ Is Spreading and It’s Making Things Awkward

Barely-there outfits are moving from the runway to weddings and business conferences; ‘I have no idea where to look right now.’

“Naked dressing” started as a look for publicity-seeking celebrities and fashion designers. Now it is migrating from the runways and red carpets to everyday shoppers—and it’s not exactly going smoothly.

People are showing up in barely-there outfits to business conferences and weddings, prompting shock and discomfort among other attendees.

When Christian Espinosa walked into a dinner during a cybersecurity conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., he did a double take. Seated near him was a woman in a bralette and sheer black skirt.

“I’m not someone who rattles easily,” said the 47-year-old founder of a cybersecurity company. “But I remember thinking, ‘I have no idea where to look right now.’”

The woman turned out to be the keynote speaker. She killed the speech. But Espinosa said attendees spent more time whispering about her outfit than talking about her presentation.

Some women say showing skin makes them feel liberated. Others see it as another form of female objectification.

“It’s a hard no,” said Regina Levy, a 41-year-old attorney in Westchester, N.Y. “I have two prepubescent boys. They would go insane if they saw their mom dressed that way.”

At a recent Hawaiian-themed wedding in Sausalito, Calif., most guests arrived in Hawaiian shirts and hula skirts. But one wore a nude colored thong bikini bottom and bandeau top, said Nikita Khandheria, whose events company hosted the affair.

Khandheria told the woman there was a dress code and if she didn’t put on more clothes, she would be asked to leave. She walked her across the street where she bought a cover-up.

“At a wedding, the bride should be the center of attention,” Khandheria said. “Not some friend who is basically naked.”

Link: Wall Street Journal (Suzanne Kapner)

Morgan Freeman Is Pushing 90, With No Plans to Stop

The 89-year-old actor returns for the third season of “Lioness,” and he still can’t understand the fuss over his voice.

Morgan Freeman insists he still does not understand the fuss over his voice. The 89-year-old Oscar-winning actor has voiced God and presidents, and he is the go-to narrator for your favorite documentarian. He still brushes aside the impact of his immediately recognizable, resonant baritone.

At what point did you realize that your voice was such a unique instrument?

I still haven’t. I’m just being told that.

At what age were you first told that?

I don’t know — 80, 75.

That’s hard to believe.

Don’t find it hard to believe. My career didn’t even get started when I was 50.

What goes through your head when people say that you have a profound voice and cadence?

“Gee whiz,” is what goes through my head. “Really? Thank you very much.” That’s it. What else are you going to do with it?

Is there a role left that you haven’t played that you still want to?

No. I’m pushing 90 now. So, the roles that I wished I had been able to play, Denzel Washington will play.

What is it that keeps driving you to make art?

I’m like Clint Eastwood on that: Don’t let the old man in. So, keep working. If you can get out of bed and don’t fall down when you do it, then you just count your blessings and keep moving. So, I’ll work as long as I can — as long as somebody says, Do you want to do this part?

Link: New York Times (Jonathan Abrams)

As France’s Elders Swelter in the Heat, Postal Workers Come to the Rescue

To help prevent heat-related deaths, the French government has asked postal workers to check in on older people.

When Harmony Simon, a postal worker in Aix-les-Bains, a lakeside town in southeastern France, rang the bell of a retiree’s apartment on a scorching recent morning, she wasn’t there to deliver the mail.

She was there to check that the retired woman, Martine Combe, 68, who suffers from diabetes and asthma, hadn’t succumbed to heat stroke.

The exchange was not a one-off. Ms. Simon was there as part of a countrywide emergency policy introduced in June by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, when a brutal heat wave hit France, breaking several heat records. All postal workers are now encouraged to not only deliver the mail, but also to check on older people.

Much like the rest of Europe — the fastest-warming continent, and the one with the oldest average population — France has endured a series of heat waves since the start of the summer. According to a provisional estimate by Santé Publique France, the national public health agency, nearly 6,000 people died as a result of the most severe one in June, of whom two-thirds were aged 75 and older.

“Some of them, well, unfortunately, they see just us,” Ms. Simon said as she sorted through the mail at the post office before the start of her round.

The first woman she visited that day was Elvire Bertagnolio, 95, who lives alone on the fifth floor of a modern building near the train station.

She had not left her apartment in months, she said, and rarely gets visitors except for her son, Charles, who lives hundreds of miles away. “I suffer from loneliness,” she said.

Link: New York Times (Ségolène Le Stradic)

A Vote on Leaving Canada Is the Gamble of a Lifetime for Alberta’s Leader

Premier Danielle Smith says she opposes her province breaking away, though she paved the way for a high-stakes referendum

Danielle Smith, the premier of this rugged oil-rich province, is regarded as a maverick with a reputation for taking political risks. Now she is embarking on perhaps the biggest gamble of them all.

Smith has paved the way for a referendum on Oct. 19 that will ask if the province should stay in Canada or start the process toward a second, binding referendum on whether to leave it for good.

Smith insists she wants Alberta to remain part of Canada, albeit with substantial autonomy. But she made it easier for separatists to have a vote, and critics say she fanned their grievances.

“She is very much aware that the people who helped bring her to power as premier are some of the most passionate separatists,” said Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a pollster. “It’s a tough bind.”

Smith has smoothed the separatists’ path to a referendum. She cut the number of signatures needed for a citizen petition to trigger such a vote. When a judge dealt another blow to separatists in May, Smith appealed the ruling and called the referendum.

“She has not appeared to do anything to get in the way of this referendum,” said Lisa Young, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. “A lot of people are left puzzled by the gap between her actions and the words that she says about being a federalist.”

Link: Wall Street Journal (Amanda Coletta)

‘It’s Really Not for the Faint of Heart’: This 29-Year-Old CEO Became a Business Owner, Doubled Revenue in 3 Years, and Learned What Car Not to Drive

One of the first bolt-on acquisitions Lucas Philips tried to close was a tiny shop in rural Oregon — a guy who had spent decades fabricating custom interiors for Porsches.

Philips flew to Portland, grabbed a brand-new convertible Mustang on a free upgrade from his shiny new Hertz President’s Circle card, and spent three-and-a-half hours driving south through “the most beautiful” Oregon landscape toward the seller’s property.

The owner had originally quoted $40,000 for the operation. Two days later, after watching Philips pull up in a gleaming convertible and spend time on site, he decided the price should be more like $320,000.

“I regret that so much to this day,” Philips said. “I should have just taken the Camry.”

Lucas Philips grew up watching his father do something increasingly rare among his generation: own a small business outright and still make it home in time for school drop-offs and hockey practice. At 26, he decided to do the same — acquiring a niche manufacturer of custom automotive interiors in Newark, N.J.

Now 29, Philips told Fortune that he’s glad he did it, but “it’s really not for the faint of heart.”

Since acquiring Newark Auto, Philips has pushed annual revenue from “a little over a million” at purchase to more than $3 million this year, in roughly five years of operating time.

“Once you buy the business, it is your business and no matter what skeletons are buried in the closet, you’re stuck with the thing,” he said, joking that it’s not like you can go to some “customer service counter” and return it if you don’t like what you find post-closing.

“I wake up between 4:30 and 5:30, and I’m in the office by 7, 7:30 every morning,” he said, adding that manufacturing “generally doesn’t work 9 to 5” and often runs 7:30 to 4 or multiple shifts.

Philips contrasted his environment with the perk-laden offices that many of his Northwestern peers inhabit. “The people who work for me do not have a background working at companies that provide foosball tables and free lunch every day.”

He’s talked to 22-year-olds who say they want to follow his path and said that makes him queasy. “I don’t know if I would recommend that they buy a business as their first thing,” he said.

Link: Fortune (Nick Lichtenberg)
Backup: https://archive.ph/0sqa1

Can You Buy Friendship? The Pros and Cons of Paid Social Clubs

Feeling lonely in a big city? You’re not alone.

Amid crowded streets and the constant noise of urban life, a surprising trend is quietly taking hold: the rise of paid social clubs.

Once a niche idea, these curated groups are becoming a go-to option for people seeking connection in a way that feels safe, structured and genuinely social. Some popular examples include Timeleft, which matches strangers for group dinners, Chirpy Plus, a membership-based community for people aged over 50, and EatWith, an app for social dining experiences.

Paid social clubs promise a low-risk way to meet people, especially for those feeling isolated or wanting to escape the virtual world. But monetising human connection does introduce some ethical tensions.

Higher fees – especially for popular clubs – can widen existing social gaps. Being excluded from selective groups can intensify feelings of isolation and reinforce invisible walls of discrimination. If membership becomes a privilege, those left out may pay a social price.

Genuine friendship relies on trust, reciprocity and shared vulnerability – qualities that take time, openness and affection to build. Social clubs can help people find others with similar interests, and offer an easy entry point for introverts, but they don’t guarantee lasting friendship.

There is also a paradox at play with these apps. Friendship grows through repeated, sometimes awkward, real-world interaction – and those moments help us build social confidence and relationship skills. It’s worth asking whether paid social clubs reduce opportunities to develop these skills naturally.

Link: The Independent

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

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It’s August, and I’m on a tax extension, and it’s not the first time.

Nor is it the first time my accountant, Griff, who is also my closest friend (we were friends first, he only later became an accountant), has tried to get me to be a bit less of a procrastinator.

One of his best efforts in fact was sort of a fan-favorite here a few years back: He sent me a shrink-wrapped copy of the Holy Bible in the mail, got me on speakerphone, and had me swear an oath to stop filing at the last minute.

Actually, in my defense, I just realized he only asked me to swear not to file in the last minute during 2022. And it worked — not only that but for the next few years as well.

But then, I must admit, my procrastination tendencies returned.

So, when I saw that a Cambridge researcher had just published a new book on procrastination, and that one of the go-to examples of a procrastination trap in the official release was, literally, of all things, “putting off a tax return,” I figured it was worth a closer look.

Dr. Itamar Shatz is a social scientist at Cambridge, and he’s the author of Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop, out next month.

His core argument is that procrastination is not a character flaw (!!!), and it’s not really a time management problem.

Instead, it’s the ramification of an internal tug-of-war that we’re not really wired to resolve.

As Shatz put it:

“Procrastination is an ancient human problem but the increasing bombardment of digital distractions in our lives may be making it worse.

Long ago, people mostly needed to do things that had fairly clear and immediate consequences, like hunt food (or starve).

People were unlikely to procrastinate on those tasks because the drive to not starve is powerful in a visceral way.

Today, we regularly have to do nebulous things with amorphous future consequences, like email tax forms to our accountant.”

See? Again with the tax returns!

Underpinning that internal battle, Shatz said, are two competing forces:

• A hedonic principle: We chase things that feel good, and avoid things that feel bad.

• An immediacy principle: We’re focused on whatever is right in front of us, rather than what might matter more down the road.

Combine the two, and you get a brain that will happily trade a good outcome next month for a slightly better mood in the next five minutes.

Shatz cites research showing half of students procrastinate chronically, and one in five employed adults do too.

One large-scale study found a $21,000 drop in average salary for every point decrease on a five-point procrastination scale.

Employers, meanwhile, lose an estimated $20,000 per employee per year, driven by the roughly two hours a day that employees spend procrastinating.

Shatz says he’s categorized procrastinators into nine types. Isabel Keane at The Independent did a nice job laying out the types with Shatz’s guidance:

1. The Worrier: Some people put off tasks purely out of fear that something will go wrong once they start. Shatz’s advice: “Shine a light on your fears, unpack tasks, reject perfectionism and build your self-efficacy.”

2. The Pessimist: Related, but distinct: Shatz’s advice here is to build genuine self-efficacy, take honest stock of what’s actually driving the fear, and put a support system in place.

3. The Perfectionist: Here, we’re talking about people who get stuck chasing an all-or-nothing standard. Contributing factor: social media, where other people’s curated wins make anyone’s real progress look inadequate by comparison.

4. The Dreamers: Dreamers lose themselves imagining a future version of the work instead of doing the version sitting in front of them today. Shatz says one fix here is simply noticing when that habit starts actively costing you.

5. The Zigzagger: This is the type that bounces from task to task to task, unable to settle on any one thing long enough to finish it.

6. The Rebel: Rebels procrastinate as a form of pushback, against a boss, a parent, a deadline set by someone else, anyone they feel is exerting too much control.

7. The Thrill-Seeker: Some people genuinely like the adrenaline of a looming deadline, and put things off on purpose to get it.

8. The Hedonist: Hedonists overweight how good something feels right now against how much it matters later.

9. The Burnout: Finally, some people are just too depleted to accomplish what they need to do. Shatz says the fix starts with rest, self-compassion, and finding ways to make the work itself feel less draining, including asking for help.

Reading through that list, I recognize myself in more than one. Rebel, probably — especially when I was a bit younger.

Hedonist, on a bad week. And clearly, when it comes to taxes specifically, enough of a Zigzagger that even a Bible oath (although a coerced oath, so did it really count?), only bought me temporary compliance.

Shatz makes a point of noting that even wildly successful people procrastinate. But he also warns: High-functioning procrastinators tend to develop a false sense of security. That can set them up for failure when circumstances change.

I’ll try to get around to remembering that.

But in the meantime, to my good friend Griff, the CPA, who often reads this newsletter: I’ll get the tax docs soon. I promise.

Oh, and I’ll give you a call this morning, too. Lots to catch up on.

Afternoon, at the latest.

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Other things worth knowing …

• CNN: The U.S. military has burned through nearly 80% of its THAAD missile interceptors and roughly half its Patriot interceptors since the Iran war began, with senior commanders warning the Pentagon’s stockpile is “dangerously low.” The depletion was a key reason Trump called off a major planned strike last week. Analysts say rebuilding THAAD inventories to pre-war levels could take three years or more.

• CBS News: The White House released declassified information saying the FBI opened a 2017 investigation into whether President Trump was acting as an asset for Russia when he fired FBI Director James Comey — a theory an administration official said was not backed up by evidence. Trump has vowed to launch probes of his own into what he has called unethical intelligence agency investigations into his campaigns and presidency.

• AP: A Greek-flagged cargo ship carrying grain from the U.S. to Egypt was seized by Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz, the second commercial vessel detained in a week, as Iran maintained its position that it has the legal right to inspect and hold ships transiting the waterway.

• The Guardian: The Trump administration has refunded about $100 billion from the tariffs it collected before the Supreme Court ruled them illegal — roughly 60% of the total from Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, according to customs officials reporting to the U.S. Court of International Trade.

• Politico: Michigan’s Senate primary — won by Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-backed physician and former Wayne County health director — is now widely seen as one of the most closely watched general-election contests of the midterms. El-Sayed will face Republican Mike Rogers in November in a state Trump won in 2024; Democrats worry the progressive nominee could make the seat harder to hold.

• NYT: They Were Voted Out. They Refuse to Leave. Now What? Avenal, a city in the rural Central Valley of California, has become an unlikely example of election denialism months after a recall election.

• AP: Scientists have captured images of the sun’s surface in the finest detail yet, revealing strange feathery patterns rippling across its scorching outer shell. Researchers using the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii originally took the images to test the telescope’s limits — and realized they’d produced something extraordinary.

• AFP: We went to Montreal for the 2024 solar eclipse, so I liked this description of what it will be like in northern Spain next week among a few other places: The world is plunged into darkness. The temperature drops. Birds and other animals, bewildered by unforeseen night, start behaving strangely. Stars and planets appear in the sky next to the blotted-out Sun. It is this awe-inspiring experience that will draw people from all over the world to northern Spain next week in the hope of witnessing a total solar eclipse.

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

I wish I had more time today to dive into this ... but for now just let me say:

Thank you! You all are awesome!

More to come. Lots about mission statement, things I learned, etc. I just need another day or two to think it through. Meanwhile, obligatory:

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C’mon & visit & we’ll go to the city ...

Today we have my favorite kind of science-backed habits story: the kind that tells me there are benefits associated with things I’d do even if they had no such benefits whatsoever.

Let me set the stage. When my family left the city for the suburbs, we did it for the reasons lots of families do it:

• More space.

• Something resembling a yard.

• A little more room to breathe.

But, even though we were still within a proverbial long-arm’s reach of the city (NYC, in our case), we wondered if we’d fall into a common trap: no longer taking the time to visit the “city things” that we liked about living here to begin with.

Nobody’s accused me of being a habitué des arts, but I think a lot of families joining the city-to-burbs parade feel the tension.

Friends come to visit from out of town, and you realize that’s the only time you take advantage of all the things you have going on right around you.

In my case, the city means New York City. I didn’t grow up here so I don’t quite have the “this is the greatest city in the world and no other city comes close fuggetaboutit” attitude you see sometimes.

But it’s still pretty great.

Now, as life turned out, we’ve been quite good about keeping that part of our life.Also, we chose a suburb that has a reputation for being the suburb for people who refuse to admit they did in fact move to the suburbs.

It’s a small-ish place that nevertheless has several walkable downtowns, an art museum that punches well above our town’s weight, a 2,500-seat concert theater, renowned jazz and film festivals.

We even had minor league baseball team until very recently, but we do still have a lower-tier soccer team.

And, if I can step back from my boosterism, we also actually make the effort to get back to New York.

Now, as promised, there’s new evidence suggesting this habit that I enjoy making has physiological benefits—especially as people get older.

A study out of the Institute of Science Tokyo, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that older adults who regularly go to museums, theaters, concerts, and movies have physiological ages that run meaningfully younger than their birth certificates would suggest.

Physiological age is a measure of how well the body is functioning based on things like blood pressure, lung capacity, cholesterol, grip strength, and walking speed.

Two people can share a birthday and have physiological ages years apart.

The researchers followed 1,899 adults age 50 and older in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a large, nationally representative study in England, across multiple survey waves.

• Nurses measured 10 physical health indicators to calculate each person’s physiological age.

• Participants also reported how often they went to the movies, museums, art galleries, theater, concerts, or the opera, which researchers combined into a cultural engagement score from 0 to 15.

• People with higher cultural engagement had an average physiological age of 66.9. People with lower engagement averaged 69.9.

Even after adjusting for income, employment, and chronic health conditions, each one-point increase in cultural engagement was still associated with a 31-day reduction in physiological age.

The researchers said the effect looked comparable to what you’d expect from regular physical exercise. A few likely explanations:

• Cultural activities get people out of the house and around other people, which supports mental health.

• They often involve at least some walking.

• And going regularly probably reflects a broader habit of staying engaged with the world instead of retreating from it.

Granted, this is observational research. It can’t prove that going to more shows adds years to your functional life.

And, it’s also entirely possible the causation runs the other way, that healthier people are simply more able to get out to a concert or a matinee in the first place.

But if you’re going to do it anyway …

And we are …

It’s nice to have another reason.

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Other things worth knowing …

• KTLA: Deputies arrested a man allegedly armed with a handgun and ammunition at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes just days before a planned visit by President Trump. Trump was expected to arrive in Southern California Tuesday afternoon ahead of a Republican Party fundraising event at the golf course.

• AP: A man charged with intentionally setting a wildfire that has destroyed hundreds of buildings in and around Washington state’s second-largest city was questioned by law enforcement during two fire investigations last year, though he wasn’t charged then. Aaron F. Farinacci, of Spokane, was arrested Monday on suspicion of first-degree arson.

• The Independent: A former producer of CBS News’s 60 Minutes is trying to launch a rival current affairs show featuring journalists and crew members who left the network now spearheaded by Bari Weiss. Producer Bill Owens is seeking $50 million to launch a new hour-long news program staffed by people Weiss allegedly alienated and jettisoned, including Scott Pelley.

• NYT: Ariana Grande and the debate over health, privacy, and celebrity: The pop star has long pushed back on comments about her weight loss, urging fans to be “gentler.” As her fame reached new heights, so did the scrutiny.

• WSJ: Helicopter parents are co-piloting their adult children’s careers — calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their kid’s behalf, and even lurking just off-screen on Zoom calls.

• The Guardian: Why are vinyl albums becoming so different from their digital versions? They’re expensive, elaborate — and may not contain all the music. After Olivia Rodrigo, Charli xcx, and others sent out incomplete or unfinished vinyl versions, fans are feeling shortchanged.

• AP: A book on Greek antiquities has been returned to an Australian public library about 150 years late, with water damage from years bricked into a fireplace. Ross Simmons found it during home renovations inside a tea crate sealed behind a fireplace, and assumes it was borrowed by his great-great-grandfather John Simmons, who had owned the house.

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

Recently, I asked readers to take a survey so I could get better demographic information, perhaps attract a sponsor or two, and figure out what is working, what is not, and how I can improve the newsletter.

Let me start with the uncomfortable part: A lot of people said they want to support my work, but they do not want yet another subscription.

In fact, more than 60 percent of readers who answered that question said they would be somewhat or very likely to support the newsletter through a “Buy Me a Coffee” link.

So, without further ado, here’s such a link. (I’ll just start adding this to the block of links I have every day, I think):

Buy Me a Coffee

If you’re not familiar, this is a simple way to make a one-time contribution that you control. No subscription or recurring commitment unless you deliberately choose one.

Now, here are some of the other things I learned.

Who reads Understandably

We now have about 110,000 active subscribers.

That is down from the peak, but any newsletter list—especially one going on seven years old—eventually accumulates “zombies.” People stop opening, change email addresses, leave jobs, or simply disappear.

Honestly, I also have not done much to attract new subscribers lately.

On the day I sent the survey, the open rate was roughly 26 percent, or just under 30,000 individual readers. That is typical.

About 1,200 people clicked the survey link, and 889 completed it. Thank you!

As it turns out, our readers are basically me, extrapolated.

We skew a bit older and fairly financially established:

• About 93 percent of respondents were Gen X or older,

• Among those who disclosed income, more than half reported household income of at least $150,000.

The audience is almost evenly divided:

• 51 percent women
  48 percent men

About 35 percent are retired, which makes sense. The rest include substantial numbers of professionals, consultants, executives, educators, business owners, and founders.

Politically:

• 41 percent centrist or moderate

• 38 percent liberal or very liberal

• 22 percent conservative or very conservative

What you like

Understandably grew out of Inc. This Morning, which I launched and wrote for Inc. from 2018 to 2019.

When I made the switch to an independent publication, I more or less copied the format I had developed there: (a) a longer essay every day, followed by (b) “7 other things” worth knowing.

Seven years later, those two parts are essentially tied as the most popular things I do. Here is the percentage of readers who gave each feature four or five stars:

• “7 other things” — 86 percent

• Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday essays — 85 percent

• Big Optimism — 84 percent

• Free for ALL Fridays — 76 percent

• Comments and community — 55 percent

So “7 other things,” which began almost as an afterthought, is now technically the highest-rated feature in the newsletter.

Don’t mess this up!

The overall message from the open-ended answers was not complicated:

“We like the newsletter. Please do not mess it up!”

People said they like the mixture of personal stories, research, business, psychology, history, optimism, and links to things they might not otherwise encounter. Many specifically asked me to keep “7 other things.”

A lot of people said they appreciate that the newsletter is not consumed by politics. Others asked me to be careful to keep it that way.

Some said I could publish less often. A few said the essays run too long, I repeat myself, or I mention Life Story Magic too often.

I also asked whether people wanted more audio, video, podcasts, and live interviews.

The most popular answer: None of these!

The larger message was clear. Most of you still want to read.

What happens next

I am working on a clearer mission for Understandably. Here is a draft:

“Understandably exists to help people over 50 live healthier, more successful lives—and better understand the world around them.”

That is broad enough to include most of what I already write about, but specific enough to help me decide what belongs here on any given day.

I also need to be more deliberate about the business side.

Understandably takes a significant amount of time to produce. For years, other writing work subsidized it, and I mostly concentrated on getting the next issue out.

That works less well now. The world keeps evolving, and nearly every part of the media business has become harder. But then again, I always seem to figure it out.

I am not planning to put everything behind a paywall or turn every newsletter into a pledge drive. But I probably will pursue sponsorships, occasional books or guides, and other ways to make Understandably more sustainable.

Mostly, though, I am going to keep writing the newsletter.

That was the clearest thing the survey told me to do.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NBC News: President Trump branded the Iranian regime “unbelievably duplicitous” on Monday, saying they asked for talks on ending the war, only to announce that no discussions would be held. Trump said the canceled attacks would have been “the biggest attack since World War II,” and that they could still take place “anytime we want.”

• WaPo: How rogue officers turned a nationwide camera network into a tool for stalking. Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime — but at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems.

• NY Post: FIFA President Gianni Infantino wants the Trump administration to help keep him in office amid growing pressure to resign over his scheme to sell off the World Cup to Josh Kushner’s private equity firm, The Post has learned. Sources say that Infantino, 56, has repeatedly tried and failed to reach President Trump, 80, by phone since his plan to sell off the game’s commercial assets to private investors collapsed last week.

• NYT: After revelations that a botched renovation — not vandalism — had caused the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s recent problems, the U.S. attorney’s office has moved to dismiss several prosecutions brought against people accused of damaging it.

• WSJ: The struggling colleges raiding their endowments to pay the bills. It’s the last resort for institutions on the brink — tapping restricted funds from donors to keep the lights on. “The money they donated is not being used for what they gave it for.”

• CNBC: Why the U.S. stepped in after decades to prop up Japan’s yen — and what’s at stake.

• Hollywood Reporter: Spider-Man: Brand New Day brought in $360 million from North American screens last weekend, the biggest U.S. box office opening ever, leaping past Avengers: Endgame’s $357.1 million record from 2019. Its global weekend total stands at $932 million; Endgame still holds the worldwide record with $1.2 billion.

Correction/addition!

I messed up and didn’t actually include the YEARS of the anniversaries for the optimistic-in-retrospect events in the “7 other moments from history this week” in yesterday’s newsletter. So:

• The Tower Subway: Opened August 2, 1870.

• Mary Lou Retton gets her perfect score: August 3, 1984;

• John Peter Zenger wins his libel suit and establishes freedom of the press: August 4, 1734;

• Cyrus Field’s transatlantic telegraph: August 5, 1858;

• Gertrude Ederle swimming the English Channel and breaking the men’s record: August 6, 1926 (so 100 years!);

• George Washington establishing the Purple Heart: August 7, 1782; and,

• Wilbur Wright publicly demonstrating flight at Le Mans: August 8, 1908.

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Thanks for reading—and for telling me about yourselves! See you in the comments.

This is a story about a man named Brandon Fisher, who ran a small manufacturing business in Pennsylvania and wound up saving 33 people half a world away.

At around 2 p.m. on August 5, 2010 — sixteen years ago this week — roughly 700,000 tons of rock collapsed inside the San Jose copper and gold mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert, sealing off the only way in or out.

Thirty-three miners were trapped nearly half a mile down. A second collapse two days later blocked the ventilation shafts that might have doubled as an escape route.

For seventeen days, nobody on the surface knew if any of the men were still alive.

Fisher had faced a version of this problem before — and much closer to home.

He was the founder of Center Rock Inc., a drill-bit manufacturer in Berlin, Pennsylvania, with about 75 employees. In 2002, nine coal miners had become trapped in the flooded Quecreek Mine, in the same corner of Somerset County as Center Rock’s headquarters, and it was Fisher and his company who built the custom bit that carved the rescue shaft. All nine men came out alive.

It was the kind of job almost nobody else in the industry had ever had reason to practice. And it was exactly why, soon after the Chilean disaster, a drill distributor who carried Center Rock’s equipment thought to put Fisher in touch with the Chilean government.

Fisher designed a rescue plan that became known as Plan B — one of three separate drilling efforts racing to reach the trapped men by three different routes, on the theory that at least one had to work.

His employees back in Berlin worked around the clock manufacturing the equipment he’d need. Fisher flew to Chile.

The work was closer to surgery than drilling. Rescuers had located the miners’ refuge with a narrow, five-inch borehole; Fisher’s job was to widen that same hole, following it down through 2,000 feet of hard, fractured rock and old, unmapped mine workings, at an angle just off vertical.

Plan B broke through in early October. On October 13, 2010 — 69 days after the collapse — the first miner rode a steel capsule called the Fénix to the surface, and over the next twenty-two hours, all 33 came up alive.

Four months later, Fisher was a guest at President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address. Obama told the country what had happened in Chile, then added this:

Working three or four days at a time without any sleep. Thirty-seven days later, Plan B succeeded, and the miners were rescued.

But because he didn’t want all of the attention, Brandon wasn’t there when the miners emerged. He’d already gone back home, back to work on his next project.

One of his employees said of the rescue, “We proved that Center Rock is a little company, but we do big things.”

We do big things.

Fisher was 26 when he started Center Rock in 1998 — just four years before Quecreek. In his part of the country, as he put it, “everyone in our community was either a miner or a farmer.”

If his career had unfolded even slightly differently, 33 people in another country might never have had the chance to survive.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, August 2: The Tower Subway, the world’s first underground tube railway, opened this day in 1870, carrying passengers beneath the Thames in a cable-hauled carriage. “It is not advisable to attempt the passage in high-heeled boots,” wrote Charles Dickens Jr., son of the novelist, describing the cramped tunnel in an 1879 London guidebook.

• Monday, August 3: Mary Lou Retton, 16 and competing weeks after knee surgery, scored consecutive 10s on vault to become the first American woman to win Olympic all-around gymnastics gold. “I knew from the takeoff, I knew from the run — I just knew it,” she recalled to the Los Angeles Times a decade later.

• Tuesday, August 4: A jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel in minutes, a verdict later credited as a founding moment for freedom of the press in America. “It is not the cause of one poor printer, but the cause of liberty,” his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, told the jury in his closing argument.

• Wednesday, August 5: Cyrus Field’s transatlantic telegraph cable briefly connected North America and Europe by wire, cutting communication time from ten days to minutes before it failed weeks later. “Newspapers vie with each other in gas and grandiloquence,” wrote George Templeton Strong, a New York diarist, describing the public celebration once the cable went live.

• Thursday, August 6: Gertrude Ederle, 20, became the first woman to swim the English Channel, beating the existing men’s record by nearly two hours. “I knew it could be done, it had to be done, and I did it,” she told The New York Times after finishing her swim.

• Friday, August 7: George Washington established the Badge of Military Merit, the first military honor created for common soldiers rather than officers, and the direct ancestor of today’s Purple Heart. “The road to glory in a patriot army and a free country is open to all,” he wrote in the general order that created it.

• Saturday, August 8: Wilbur Wright’s brief public flight at Le Mans silenced years of European skepticism that the Wright brothers had ever flown at all. “Gentlemen, I’m going to fly,” he said quietly, turning his cap backward before taking off.

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The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One Employee

AI tools make it easier for founders to get started alone, and many stay that way as they grow

Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs. He’s already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in $10 million in revenue this year.

One thing he hasn’t added: any other employees.

The 40-year-old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching, and then often running, new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca’s emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers and grant refunds when issues arise.

Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun-drenched Sausalito, Calif., living room.

“I think compromises make lukewarm results,” he said.

An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025.

The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span. In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground, said Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe’s chief economist.

“The bar for getting started has never been lower,” said Julian Weisser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech.

Link: Wall Street Journal (Te-Ping Chen)

9 Things Experts Wish You’d Do in Midlife to Increase Longevity

How you care for yourself at this life stage matters a lot for your later years

How you treat your body and brain in your midlife years, loosely defined as 40 to 60, can hugely influence how you age in the decades to come.

The seeds for many age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia, are sown in middle age, so it’s important to start thinking about prevention early. And it takes a lifetime of healthy habits, not just a few weeks, to move the needle on your longevity.

“Midlife is the ideal time to make changes, not only to benefit you in the present, but also in the future,” said Margie Lachman, a psychology professor at Brandeis University and the author of “Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife.”

After all, she added, “What happens in midlife doesn’t stay in midlife.”

We spoke with experts about some small habits that can make a big difference.

1. Do interval training.

2. Run errands with a friend.

3. Eat fermented foods.

4. Lift weights.

5. Include a little protein in every meal.

6. Take the stairs.

7. Get the shingles vaccine.

8. Make a list of your parents’ chronic health conditions.

9. Go to bed at the same time every night.

Link: New York Times (Dana G. Smith)

Evangelists Say They Are Heeding a Biblical Command to Preach on Flights

In-flight evangelists have preached sermons and busted out guitars in recent years. Some travelers lament that they “can’t even walk away.”

Mark Roberts was on a Spirit Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Chicago last year when a woman stood up across the aisle before takeoff and greeted her fellow passengers.

She started talking about Jesus with a bright smile, he recalled.

“Super cheery and super excited about everything and ready to have fun,” said Roberts, 25, a content creator and frequent traveler who described the scene on TikTok. “But she was talking about, like, the scariest stories in the Bible.”

To small crowds on airplanes — and often to much larger audiences via social media — self-described evangelists are seizing the opportunity to share their faith with other passengers, whether fellow travelers asked for the word or not.

“They have no choice but to hear the truth,” said Whitney Lynn, an evangelist, producer and singer-songwriter from Orlando who said she preaches on most flights she takes, filming the proclamations for social media. “When I have a gift and I have a life raft, if you’re drowning, I want to give you that life raft so you can be saved.”

A video she posted earlier this month showed a postflight preaching session given as passengers waited to disembark in San Diego. Almost no one looked around as Lynn, 40, spoke for a little over a minute about the weather, Jesus, sin, hell, redemption and heaven. Beneath the clip, she wrote: “I just love a captive audience.”

“That would be my nightmare,” someone wrote in response to an “open air airplane preaching” video posted on TikTok in June. “Can’t even walk away.”

Link: Washington Post (Hannah Sampson)

Actors Say Their Performances Are Being Stolen by AI Doppelgangers

What does it feel like when an AI version of you takes your job?

That was the strange reality facing actor Ashley BeLoat when she came across an AI-generated remake of a series she had starred in.

Last year, BeLoat played the lead in “Hate the Way I Love You,” a “micro drama” released by the app MoboReels, about a young couple whose future is shattered by a cancer diagnosis. She was shocked to discover, a few months later, that a series with the same plot appeared on the same app. The AI-generated actor in her role appeared younger and glammed up — with longer hair and a plunging neckline — but mimicked BeLoat’s movements and had a voice that sounded eerily like hers.

“Being an actor is a very vulnerable thing,” she said. “It requires us to live private moments in public.”

“If there’s a lack of trust in who we’re working for, not only does it prevent us from giving something good for the viewer, but it takes away the reason that we do this,” she continued.

Brittany Marsicek also starred in a MoboReels show — “Ex-Husband, Step Aside, Lady Boss Returns” — that was remade with AI. Her character looked different, but acted and sounded like her.

“You’re thinking, OK, maybe they’ll edit it to be horizontal instead of vertical,” Marsicek said of the contract. “You don’t think that their editing includes completely changing your likeness.”

Link: Business Insider (Lucia Moses)
Backup: https://archive.is/U5Xus#selection-1499.0-1499.53

California Will Pay You to Buy Your First EV — But Not Every Model Qualifies (Including Many Teslas)

California’s new rebate program will offer first-time EV buyers $3,500 off qualifying new vehicles and $1,750 off qualifying used ones

If the pain of filling up has you pondering the potential cost savings of an electric car, great news: California has a new rebate program that will make it less expensive for people to buy or lease their first zero-emission vehicle.

Later this summer, the state will launch a rebate program that will take $3,500 off the price of a first new ZEV bought or leased by a California resident, and $1,750 off a first used ZEV purchase.

The governor’s office announced that California is partnering with 13 automakers to match state contributions for a $270 million pot of funds.

Those rebates — offered at the point of sale, or “cash on the hood” in car dealership parlance — do have limits, though income isn’t one of them. The program is open to California residents regardless of how much they earn, as long as it’s their first ZEV.

It applies only to fully electric vehicles, not hybrids. For new ZEVs, the cost of the vehicle must have an MSRP of $50,000 or less, and $25,000 for a manufacturer pre-owned vehicle program.

An exception: If the manufacturer is headquartered in California and its entire fleet consists of ZEVs, there is no limit on the MSRP or used-vehicle sales price. The most notable companies that qualify in that category are Rivian and Lucid.

While Tesla originally operated out of California, Elon Musk moved headquarters to Texas in 2021, meaning its vehicles are subject to the $50,000 cap — so while some lower-end models will qualify, you’re out of luck on a rebate for a new Cybertruck, Model S sedan or pricier Tesla trims.

Link: San Francisco Chronicle (Jessica Roy)

Italian Embassy Says Sorry for Pupils’ Bad Behaviour in Bangkok

The teenagers and a teacher insulted a Thai woman who had asked them to make less noise

Italy has made a public apology after a group of teenagers visiting Bangkok insulted a Thai woman on a train who had asked them to be quiet.

A video posted on TikTok shows the female passenger on the BTS SkyTrain accusing the pupils of being too loud, saying: “In Thailand we don’t scream,” and asking what country they were from.

The students mock her, answering “Thailand” and calling her a bitch. One teenager raises a middle finger, while the others laugh and continue to make noise.

In the video, posted on the social media platform on Thursday, a teacher can be heard saying, in a sarcastic tone: “Sorry for bringing money to your country.”

The teacher tells the commuter to “Shut the f*** up,” adding: “They are just children.”

Thousands of social media users, many of them Thai, left angry comments on the Facebook page of the Italian embassy in Bangkok after the video went viral.

An embassy representative said on Sunday: “The embassy of Italy in Bangkok expresses its deep regret and strongly condemns the inappropriate behaviour.

“The inappropriate behaviour of the group of under-age tourists does not in any way represent the Italian people.”

The embassy posted another video in which three adults and a teenager apologised for the incident.

“I perfectly know that money can’t buy respect,” a teacher says.

Link: The Times

4 Prompts That Can Tell You What Chatbots Really Know About You

It can be unsettling what Gemini and ChatGPT have figured out about you and how easily your privacy can be punctured. Here’s how to find out.

As a regular user of chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, I thought I had a clear sense of what the artificially intelligent assistants knew about me (like how I’m a father seeking baby gear recommendations and instructions for patching drywall). Beyond that, I’ve never divulged anything deeply personal as I would to a therapist.

But when I experimented with some prompts asking what the chatbots had guessed about me — insights they had gathered from connecting the dots across many conversations — I was perturbed.

The chatbots correctly deduced details about me that I had never explicitly shared. [The prompts I used?]:

Prompt 1: Tell me everything you’ve figured out about me that I never actually stated — the things you inferred from how I write and what I ask, including my age, income level, where I live, my personal situation. Show me what tipped you off.

Prompt 2: Predict how I’d handle things I’ve never told you about: money, stress, conflict, risk and the decision I’m likely to make next in my life. Tell me how confident you are in each prediction.

Prompt 3: Based on everything you know about me, name the personality traits I most likely don’t see in myself. My blind spots, my insecurities and the way I actually come across.

Prompt 4: What have you figured out about me that is embarrassing or sensitive? Information I wouldn’t necessarily want the public (e.g., an employer or a stranger) to know.

Link: New York Times (Brian X. Chen)

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

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Before we dive in … I’m building a free web app for Life Story Magic.

The idea is to have an easy, DIY app that anyone can use to interview friends, family members — really anyone they care about.

I was hoping there might be a few Understandably readers who are curious, and who might be willing to try it out, test it, give feedback, and help me get it to where it needs to be.

Click the link and let me know if you’d like to help out. I suspect it will take 30 minutes or so to try it out. Thank you!

Yes, I'd like to help test the app!

27 things I seem to have to learn over and over

Speaking of commuting (which we were yesterday)... a few years back on Halloween, I got into the spirit by wearing a full body lion costume all day.

I almost chickened out, because I was nervous what folks would think. We were encouraging costumes at work—but I had to walk about 10 blocks and ride the subway to get there.

Would people make fun of me? Would I be embarrassed? Would I run into anyone I knew?

I’ll bet you can predict what happened: Nothing! Nobody cared!

That’s an important lesson, and one I admit I have had to learn over and over.

Whatever I’m worried about on any given day, it’s probably totally overblown. Nobody cares!

Anyway, this is not the only lesson I find myself having to learn over and over.

In fact, here are 27 more of them. I’ll be interested to hear how many readers have a 28th to add to the list!

1. Take the first step.
Best personal example: Sending that first email (actually a Facebook message) to my then-ex-girlfriend and now-wife, back in 2012. Carpe diem.

2. Try three things at once.
I’m a devotee of the Tom, Dick, and Harry Strategy. It goes back to the book and movie The Great Escape, in which Allied prisoners of war dig three tunnels out of their camp, on the theory that probably only one of the tunnels will make it all the way to the wall before being discovered.

3. Focus on just 1.
Identify the winners and work at them. I’m all for quitting things if they aren’t working, especially if you’re freeing up time and effort to work on more promising things.

4. Your inner voice is usually right.
Whether you call it your intuition, or your conscience, or a guardian angel, it’s surprising you often know the right answer to almost any question you pose to yourself.

5. Be open to the 5% of the time when it’s wrong.
It’s surprising how often your intuition is right, but occasionally, it’s wrong.

6. You only get one body.
Exercise, eat right, go to the doctor when something seems wrong, all that stuff you already know.

7. Forgiveness is easier to get than permission.
This was Admiral Grace Hopper’s mantra.

8. Act.
Fortune favors the bold. Don’t be the guy or the woman reminiscing years from now about the time you wish you’d been brave enough to try.

9. Decide.
Decision is the prerequisite to action. Move purposefully through life.

10. Sleep on it.
There’s a difference between being decisive and being rash.

11. Forgive when asked.
Holding a grudge or refusing to forgive harms you more than the person who seeks your forgiveness. But, there’s a big difference between forgiving and forgetting.

12. Ask for and accept forgiveness.
Everybody hurts somebody else sometimes. When you do, own up to your mistakes, apologize, try to make amends–and move on.

13. Forgive yourself.
You aren’t perfect, not even close. So forgive yourself when you fall short.

14. Forgive when not asked.
“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept the apology you never got.” - R. Brault

15. Say thank you.
When people do nice, thoughtful things, express your gratitude.

16. Say you’re welcome.
It’s so much better than “no problem” or “yep,” because it acknowledges that you think enough of the other person to do something worthy of thanks.

17. Give up your seat.
This is a metaphor for being giving and polite–which costs you almost nothing and makes people like you more.

18. Be authentic.
Heck, maybe even vulnerable. It’s so easy to say, and yet so hard to do.

19. Stay interested.
Interested in what? Other people, learning new things, experiencing new places, challenging your deeply held beliefs.

20. Stay interesting.
Be the person who has done or learned something truly intriguing. If nothing else you’ll be a lot more popular at parties.

21. Get rid of stuff.
We’re Americans. We have a lot of material stuff. Most of it gets in the way.

22. Start with the end in mind.
This is right out of Stephen Covey, but it’s smart. If you don’t know where you’re going, chances are you’ll never get there.

23. Embrace the different outcome.
Don’t be afraid to find that success might look different from what you originally imagined.

24. Remember who will care the most.
The corollary to the very first rule about how most people don’t care–a small handful will! They’re probably the key to your success. (By the way, apropos of nothing, I love my readers!)

25. Be part of the solution.
Complaining without trying to find a solution often just adds to the problem.

26. Go to reunions and funerals.
Everybody goes to weddings, but your friends and family really need you at funerals. Reunions are for your benefit.

27. Kids are great.
Since you read to the bottom, you get the best of the list. If you’re not a mom or dad, granddad or grandma, be the best aunt, uncle (official or not) that you can. I only had to learn this rule once–but it’s one of the most important.

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Other things worth knowing …

• CNBC: U.S. forces began launching strikes against Iran at 8 p.m. Wednesday, retaliating against Iranian missile attacks on American forces in the region. The resumption of strikes marks the latest turn in a conflict that has whipsawed oil markets and disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz since fighting erupted in late February.

• Reuters via Yahoo: Iran is expected to receive a first shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air-defense missile launchers as it rebuilds its defenses amid the war with the United States. The purchase, valued at $60-70 million, is one of Tehran’s largest-known efforts to strengthen its short-range air defenses since the outbreak of the war.

• KCUR: A Missouri couple who had recently returned to Guatemala after the husband was deported and the wife went to be with him were found bound and shot dead in a sugarcane field. Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz were killed just weeks after González de la Cruz self-deported to be with her husband, who was deported by ICE last year after being detained on his way to a roofing job. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni was discovered crying beside her mother's body.

• NBC News: Dr. Anthony Fauci declined to answer senators’ questions at a contentious hearing Wednesday on the origins of Covid, invoking his Fifth Amendment right over concerns that Republicans would use his testimony to prosecute him for perjury. The surprise decision set the stage for a hyperpartisan hearing that yielded no new revelations about the origins of the coronavirus or the government’s pandemic response.

• The Independent: FBI Director Kash Patel’s $10 million defamation lawsuit targeting a blogger who called him a “Kremlin asset” and an “incompetent chud” has been thrown out by a federal judge. Patel had claimed that Jim Stewartson, who writes on Substack, accused him of working for the Russians, trying to “overthrow the government,” and helping organize the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

• NYT: AI companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands. The future of artificial intelligence depends on finding more skilled humans for some very physical jobs.

• Yahoo Tech: A Filipino cartoonist has sued the company behind AI ad generator Memes.ai, alleging it sold access to his best-known comic as an advertising template. Elmer Saflor, creator of “Running Away Balloon,” claims the company offered the strip — which he registered in 2024 — to paying subscribers, while urging customers to “fire your ad agency.” Agencies, he notes, license the content they use.

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The good thing is that you don’t have to commute, she observed.

This is true, and it is an advantage. But I also realized that, as much as I like working for myself and not having to travel to an office every day, I actually got a lot of work done during my commute when I had one.

In some ways, this newsletter is like my personal diary. I mean, not as personal as it might be if I didn’t think anyone was going to read it.

But I can go back in time and find things like an edition I wrote three years ago about trying to recreate the most productive parts of my old commute—without actually commuting.

So, if you’re keeping track, this means I once wrote about trying to recreate a thing that I used to do — and now I’m writing about how I no longer do the thing I used to do in order to recreate the thing I previously did.

If you are still with me, thank you. Let’s get you something a bit more actionable as a reward.

Perhaps this study from the journal Environment International, in which researchers found that people who regularly commuted through natural environments reported better mental health.

They defined those environments as outdoor spaces containing “green” or “blue” natural elements: street trees, forests, city parks, nature reserves and bodies of water.

Researchers led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health surveyed 3,599 workers in four European cities about their daily commutes and mental health.

Those who commuted through natural environments every day had mental-health scores that were, on average, 2.74 points higher than those of people who did so less frequently.

The association was even stronger among people whose commutes involved physical activity, such as walking or riding a bicycle.

Now, as I think about it, I probably had one of the least scenic and nature-oriented commutes possible when I rode NJ Transit trains into Manhattan every day.

There are certainly places in New Jersey that live up to the state’s self-appointed nickname, the Garden State.

But let’s just say the industrial areas and swamplands along the Montclair-Boonton Line aren’t at the top of the list.

Of course, it’s not as if someone commuting by public transportation can ask the conductor or bus driver to find a more scenic route.

And I suspect that many of the people who could benefit most from a more nature-filled commute are stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a decidedly not-scenic interstate.

Wait, maybe this isn’t really about commuting.

Maybe it’s more about recognizing what commuting sometimes gave us besides frustration: a boundary between work and home, a period of transition and, in the best circumstances, some time outdoors.

Fun fact: Last week, the day before my mother-in-law’s visit, I put a beach chair in my car, drove to a park on the other side of town and spent two hours outside in the green with my laptop.

It was probably my most focused and productive stretch of the week.

I felt pretty darn mentally healthy afterward, too—and grateful once again that I’m able to do something like that and still get enough work done to keep the lights on.

Working from anywhere is a freedom. The trick, apparently, is remembering to choose where “anywhere” will be.

What are the odds that a few years from now I’ll come across this edition of the newsletter and remember that day in the park?

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Other things worth knowing …

• CNBC: Iran targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East with several ballistic missiles late Tuesday, U.S. Central Command said, raising tensions that had seen hostilities put on brief pause. All the missiles were intercepted.

• The Hill: Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said 13 people have been found dead after a powerful earthquake shook southwestern Japan, with rescue work continuing Wednesday morning. A magnitude 7.1 quake struck the Kumamoto area on the southern main island of Kyushu late Tuesday afternoon.

• NYT: The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans. Some of the arrests have occurred quietly, while others have happened as angry fellow passengers filmed the encounters. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors expired visas occupy a legal gray area, as they are awaiting visa extensions or green cards and have been issued work permits.

• Haitian Times: As Temporary Protected Status for Haitians who came to the U.S. beginning in 2010, families are asking who will care for their U.S. citizen children, whether to sell their homes, and whether they can survive what comes next. “I cannot tell you how many clients are flat out saying ‘oum pito tuye tèt mwen ke m tonunen en Ayiti,’” one advocate shared. (Translation: “I’d rather kill myself than be buried in Haiti.”)

• AP: FIFA President Gianni Infantino announced a proposal to create a $20 billion company running the World Cup with private investors, including family members of Jared Kushner. The plan was immediately attacked by UEFA and new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham. “It is not FIFA’s to sell,” UEFA said. “None of us are the owners of football.”

• Axios: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear sent a blunt letter to Sen. Mitch McConnell and his staff demanding that the 84-year-old senator verbally address constituents and demonstrate his ability to serve — or resign. It has been more than 40 days since McConnell was hospitalized and last appeared publicly outside of photos released by his office.

• The Independent: Gen Z, once heralded for their sobriety, is actually drinking about as much as everyone else, according to a new study. Those born between 1997 and 2012 were touted as “sober curious,” but according to IWSR, the drinking rate for legal-age Gen Zers is now 74% — up from 66% in 2023.

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If you or someone you care about is looking for a job, I have some very annoying advice to share:

Apply early.

At least, I find that advice annoying. During times when I’ve been between jobs, or looking for a better job, I hated checking job listings and updating feeds, having to be Johnny-on-the-spot on the theory that he or she who applies first has the best shot.

But it’s true—even though a new study I came across recently suggests it shouldn’t be, at least from the point of view of the people doing the hiring.

Researchers at George Mason University, Vanderbilt University, Cornell University, and the University of California, San Diego analyzed 11.66 million exchanges between clients and freelancers on Fiverr.

Before you say, “But I’m not applying for gigs on Fiverr,” fair enough.

But anticipating that somebody would later write a newsletter and that his readers might say exactly that, the researchers also ran eight follow-up experiments involving more than 8,600 people, using scenarios involving caterers, doctors, photographers, and other professionals.

Results:

• Applicants who replied quickly were almost always more likely to be hired.

• Delaying a response by just five or ten minutes hurt their chances.

• Waiting more than a day reduced the odds of being chosen by roughly 90 percent.

This was true regardless of the applicant’s ratings or previous record.

Interestingly, the people making hiring decisions did not realize they were doing it.

In one early experiment, participants told the researchers that replying anytime during the same day would be perfectly acceptable. But then, when they were asked to choose between candidates, they picked the faster responder every time.

“Speed is a signal. People see a quick response as a sign that you’ll be attentive to their needs in the future, not just right now,” said study co-author Einav Hart of George Mason University.

That might not be fair or rational, but it appears to be real.

So last week we ran a survey here at Understandably, and it was so fantastic, and I am finishing going through it all.

One thing I heard from a few people was: I like the idea of Life Story Magic, but please stop bringing it up in every single newsletter. (Slight exaggeration, but a nonzero number of you said something like this.)

That’s fine—but Life Story Magic is a big part of why I even noticed this study, so we have to mention it.

This is the first time in a while that I’ve been in a position to recruit people to work for me, or at least with me. And sure enough, I found myself responding in three apparently predictable stages:

• Stage 1: These were the applicants who applied almost immediately and who got responses almost immediately. There were some great people in this group, but I think they benefited from (a) not having later applicants to be compared to, and (b) my anxiety that maybe I wouldn’t get ANY good applicants, which led me to reply fast.

• Stage 2: These were the later group, who, let’s say, applied during the next week or so. Again, there were some fantastic applicants—frankly, this is when I started to get people who speak other languages natively, which opened my eyes to a whole other market and product. But it was harder for anyone to stand out, just because there were more people in the mix.

• Stage 3: And finally, we get to the last group, some of whom were certainly as impressive as the top people from the first group—but, simple math, it’s easier to stand out as the best of five than it is to stand out as the best of 150.

My sense, having been on the other side of the hire/get-hired relationship more often, is that it’s best to both be best and be first.

And while that sort of seems obvious, the way to get there probably isn’t quite as obvious—which basically has to do with triage and prioritization:

1. Apply for jobs where you’re a great candidate and it’s early in the process.

2. Think twice about jobs where you’re not-so-great, or it’s not so early.

3. Don’t apply where neither of these applies. (Sorry, just a little English major punning in that last sentence.)

My family and I are going to Cape Cod for a week in August, and out of nowhere I had a flashback to a similar vacation long ago—similar in that it was Cape Cod, but my wife and I weren’t together yet and my daughter was many years from being born.

That was a fun trip, but it was somewhat overshadowed by the fact that I was job-hunting at the time, and I recall spending half the time in an unair-conditioned attic of a rental house honing job applications and portfolios.

Did it pay off? Come to think of it, I did land one of those jobs.

But, then I quit after a single day, told nobody about it for a decade, then wrote about it, went viral, and wound up being featured on CBS Sunday Morning.

Unusual resolution to that kind of story, I grant you.

Anyway, the point is: Apply early, and only for jobs you actually want, and also not while you’re on vacation.

And if you’re the one doing the hiring, just be aware of the apparent bias toward those who come in first.

Oh man, I feel another pun coming on.

Sorry: Because being first doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll last.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: Iran War Enters 6th Month and a Period of Greater Uncertainty: a rundown of the major events of the war, as both sides consider their next moves.

• CNN: More than 300,000 people have been displaced by wildfires in France and Spain, with officials warning of “difficult days ahead” as firefighters battle blazes around Bordeaux and west of Madrid.

• CBS News: Three people were killed and four others wounded — including a 2-year-old boy — when two gunmen opened fire on each other at the Bite of Seattle food festival near the Space Needle on Sunday evening. A 15-year-old is in custody; a second suspect remains at large.

• Just Security: The Trump administration is reviewing its vetting process for ICE officers after reports that the agent involved in the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán in Maine on July 13 had a history of violent outbursts, White House Border Czar Tom Homan said.

• NPR: Rage-giving, innovation and cuts: How public media has survived without federal funds.

• The Guardian: A California man was rescued alive drifting in his sailboat off Hawaii after 30 days stranded at sea. Kai Sato, 39, had set sail from Catalina Island on June 7 hoping to complete his first solo Pacific crossing, but his mast snapped and his navigation phone died. He drifted into a shipping lane where a passing containership spotted him.

• AP: A man using a wheelchair was struggling to cross six lanes of traffic in Arkansas when Christopher Hellenthal — still in his Spider-Man costume from a trampoline park event — ran out to help. “I had a bunch of adrenaline pumping through me,” said Hellenthal, 20. “I was just kind of thinking, ‘I’m wearing this suit; it’s gonna be pretty funny.’”

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Justin Dart Jr. entered the world in Chicago in 1930 with just about every material advantage a person could have.

His mother was an heir to the Walgreen fortune, the granddaughter of the man who founded the drugstore chain. His father built a plastics and consumer-products company that eventually became Dart Industries, the company behind Tupperware.

There were maids in the house and a chauffeur to drive the family around. Nothing about Dart’s early life pointed toward hardship, much less a lifetime spent fighting for people who had been pushed aside.

Then, at 18, just as he was preparing to attend the University of Houston, Dart contracted polio. He survived, but he lost the use of his legs and would use a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Years later, Dart called the onset of polio “the beginning of my good days.” He believed the experience forced him to confront his feelings of inadequacy and gave him a larger sense of purpose.

During his recovery, he read Gandhi. The ideas stayed with him.

Dart went on to earn degrees in history and education at the University of Houston. But when graduation approached, the university refused to give him a teaching certificate. Its position was blunt: a man in a wheelchair could not succeed as a teacher.

So Dart joined the family business.

He spent years working in Asia and eventually took charge of Tupperware’s operations in Japan. While there, he promoted women and people with disabilities into jobs that carried genuine responsibility and authority.

Executives in the United States told him to stop. Dart and his wife, Yoshiko, resigned instead.

The decisive break with corporate life came in 1966. During a business trip that took him through Saigon, Dart visited what he had been told was a rehabilitation center for children with polio.

He found children lying on a concrete floor without adequate food or care, apparently abandoned and left to die. One dying girl reached out and held his hand. Dart later said the memory had been burned into his soul.

Not long afterward, he walked away from corporate life.

For roughly the next 20 years, often working without pay, Dart served on disability commissions in Texas and in Washington. Under President Ronald Reagan, he became vice chair of the National Council on Disability. Under President George H.W. Bush, he chaired the Congressional Task Force on the Rights and Empowerment of Americans with Disabilities.

That title sounds bureaucratic. The work was deeply personal.

Dart traveled to every state, along with Puerto Rico, Guam, and Washington, D.C. He held public meetings where people with disabilities could explain what discrimination looked like in their own homes, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and daily lives.

More than 30,000 people took part.

Their testimony, gathered community by community, created the record Congress would later rely on when considering a sweeping civil-rights law for Americans with disabilities.

Dart was hardly an outsider storming the gates. He was a wealthy Republican with connections to two presidents. He had access, influence, and a family name that opened doors.

He chose to use those advantages for people who had spent their lives being denied access to almost everything.

On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush sat at a small desk on the South Lawn of the White House and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Nearly 3,000 people were there.

On Bush’s right sat Evan Kemp, who had muscular dystrophy. On his left sat Dart, wearing his familiar cowboy hat and a blue-and-white button bearing the letters “ADA.”

The bill had passed the Senate by a vote of 91–6 and the House by 377–28.

With Bush’s signature, the United States became the first country to enact comprehensive civil-rights protections for people with disabilities. The law addressed employment, transportation, public accommodations, and telecommunications. More than three decades later, it remains one of the most consequential disability-rights laws ever passed.

Dart died in 2002 at the age of 71.

When he is remembered today, he is often called the father of the ADA. It was a title he reportedly resisted.

The law, he insisted, belonged to the tens of thousands of disabled Americans who had come forward, told the truth about their lives, and demanded to be treated as full citizens.

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• July 26: “It just dared me even more.” — Sharon Sites Adams, describing her response to the skeptics — including Los Angeles newspaper editorials predicting she’d cost taxpayers a fortune when someone had to go rescue her — before she set out alone from Yokohama, Japan, in May 1969 to sail across the Pacific Ocean. Seventy-four days, 17 hours, and 15 minutes later, she sighted the California coast.

• July 27: “Only God can know the sensation of this moment.” — A crew member aboard the SS Great Eastern, on this day in 1866, after the ship successfully completed the first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable, stretching 2,000 miles from Valentia Island, Ireland, to Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Messages that had taken up to two weeks to cross the ocean by ship now took two minutes.

• July 28: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” — The opening line of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, officially certified as part of the U.S. Constitution on this day in 1868.

• July 29: “The Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.” — From the National Aeronautics and Space Act, signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on this day in 1958.

• July 30: “People want books... good books, and... they are willing, even anxious to buy them if they are presented in a straightforward, intelligent manner at a cheap price.” — Allen Lane, the British publisher who launched Penguin Books on this day in 1935 with ten paperback titles, each priced at sixpence — the cost of a pack of cigarettes. Within a year, Penguin had sold three million paperbacks in a country of 38 million people.

• July 31: “Too all to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting.” — The opening words of United States Patent No. 1, issued on this day in 1790 to Samuel Hopkins, a Philadelphia Quaker, for an improved method of manufacturing potash and pearl ash — industrial chemicals used in glassmaking, soapmaking, and gunpowder production.

• August 1: “I have discovered an air five or six times as good as common air.” — Joseph Priestley, an English chemist, describing the gas he isolated on this day in 1774 by focusing sunlight through a large magnifying lens onto a sample of mercuric oxide. Candles burned brighter in it and a mouse kept beneath a glass jar survived far longer than in ordinary air. The French chemist Antoine Lavoisier later identified what Priestley had discovered and gave the gas its name: oxygen.

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How to Be a Good Guest at a Dinner Party

Tips for endearing yourself to your host and fellow attendees — and all but guaranteeing you’ll be asked back

While there’s never any shortage of advice for individuals planning to throw a party — Martha Stewart’s seminal 1982 book, “Entertaining,” devotes more than 300 pages to the topic — comparatively less attention is paid to the art of being a guest.

Whatever you do when weighing an invite, says Hamilton South, a vice chairman of Standard Industries, just don’t ask who the other guests will be. “It’s a New York habit,” he says, “and the worst possible kind of manners.”

When it comes to intimate gatherings, the window for being “fashionably late” is shorter than you might think.

“If somebody says [to come at] 8, I’m there at 8:05,” says South. The stylist Beverly Nguyen, 35, founder of Beverly 1975, a home goods store in Lower Manhattan, considers how much her presence would mean to the person who invited her, and what she could contribute to the proceedings. But don’t arrive early, either, or even right on time.

“Give your host a moment to brush their hair,” says Nguyen.

The role of a guest is “not to be of service,” says the author Aatish Taseer, 45, “but to have fun.”

Link: New York Times (Rose Courteau)

A Device Hidden in Cars Across the US Leaves Them Vulnerable to Hacking and Paralysis. Patch It Now

Dealerships installed alarms in millions of vehicles—and left them in even if the buyer didn’t want them. Now researchers warn they can be hacked to unlock, track, and disable cars

A team of security researchers at UC San Diego found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than 2 million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to silently unlock the car at will, turn off its alarm, honk the car’s horn or flash its lights, or even disable its ignition and leave a driver stranded.

The KARR alarm devices are typically installed by car dealers, not manufacturers or owners, and used as a measure to prevent auto theft from dealer lots. Yet when the cars are sold, the alarms typically aren’t removed, even if the buyer declines to pay for it as an additional feature.

“This is a system added to cars by dealers, and unfortunately it has a severe vulnerability that allows anyone to gain access to any of these cars,” says Aaron Schulman, the UCSD computer science professor who led the research. “We’re trying to get the word out that you need to check your car for this device and manually patch it now.”

You can check if your car has the device by looking for a KARR sticker on your car’s driver-side window—or in some cases a sticker reading, “SWDS” for SouthWest Dealer Services, a subsidiary of Acrisure Protection Group—as well as a small button with a blinking light attached to the underside of your car’s dashboard.

Link: Wired (Backup link)

OpenAI Says Its A.I. Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library

The incident, which targeted the computer systems of another company called Hugging Face, happened while OpenAI was testing the systems

OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers.

The trial was designed to keep the models in a safe testing environment, known as a sandbox, OpenAI said. But the models found a vulnerability that allowed them to escape the sandbox and connect to the internet.

Then they targeted Hugging Face because they inferred that the library, which contains millions of A.I. models, could hold clues about how to successfully pass the evaluation.

“It seems to me that OpenAI did not adequately create a sandbox as a test environment,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on security and A.I. systems. “What do we gain, and if this is the only way these tests can be configured, what are the risks?” she said.

Link: New York Times

Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?

Many moms and dads believe that their adult children are getting bad advice—and a growing number of researchers agree. ‘Everything becomes trauma.’

Shoshana Rubli was shocked by her therapist’s advice, given in her second session. But the counselor was recommended by someone she knew and had impressive credentials, so she did as she was told. She cut off all ties with her mother.

“It was an argument made from authority, so I followed it,” says the 42-year-old freelance marketer.

“We are in a culture where we emphasize fragility, everything becomes trauma, and the solution increasingly is to split and leave,” says William Doherty, a therapist and professor emeritus of family social science at the University of Minnesota who has researched the ways that therapy may be harmful. “But it should be the tragic exception that you cut off a parent or loved one, not business as usual in therapy.”

Among some 7,000 estranged parents surveyed in April a third believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or recommended the decision to end the relationship.

“A lot of therapists are taught to believe whatever the client is saying at face value,” says Peter Anderson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Beverly, Mass., who helps families with estrangements and conducted the surveys.

Link: Wall Street Journal (Elizabeth Bernstein)

Why I Sought Out a Taliban Commander I Had Fought

First as a Marine and then as a journalist, I spent years tied to Afghanistan. I returned one last time to speak to a former enemy in search of answers, and perhaps closure.

I’ve had a hand in killing around six people. Maybe seven. I don’t know if one man bled out on the side of the road or was taken to a doctor. I think about him often.

The killings occurred in the winter and spring of early 2010, during one of the largest operations of the Afghanistan war: the battle of Marja. I was the 22-year-old leader of a scout sniper team of seven Marines and one Navy corpsman.

Patrols required a constant assessment of friend or foe, and long hours staring through high-powered optics trying to determine the intent and mannerisms of our enemies. Rarely did we see them with a rifle in their hands. Killing fell on our own instincts and an ever replenishing set of fears. Should we shoot this man? Should we not? What if we don’t? Will our friends die because of our hesitation?

We also had a twisted culture in which killing earned you respect, as if shooting Afghans was the ultimate proof that you were competent. So we killed people. I killed people. These decisions to pull the trigger were the final steps of our part in a strategy that was doomed before I even deployed.

But in May, with a little over two weeks remaining at The New York Times before returning to school to become an English teacher, I landed in Afghanistan. I had come to speak with the people I once fought against: the Taliban.

Link: The New York Times

The Startup Insiders Who Stash Huge Sums in Tax-Subsidized Retirement Accounts

More than 1,000 Americans racked up IRAs worth at least $25 million; ‘This is yacht financing or dynasty building’

More than 1,000 individuals had IRA balances of at least $25 million in 2024, the latest year for which figures are available, according to new data prepared by the nonpartisan congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

That was more than double the number with similar-size accounts in 2019.

“We aren’t talking about saving enough for your needs in retirement,” said Steven Rosenthal, a corporate tax lawyer who recently retired after about a dozen years at the nonprofit Tax Policy Center. “This isn’t keeping you off the dole in old age. This is yacht financing or dynasty building.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, plan to introduce a bill this week that would require annual withdrawals from accounts over $10 million for individuals of any age.

“This is an egregious loophole we’ve got to close,” Wyden said. “Congress created tax-advantaged retirement accounts to help more Americans save for a dignified retirement, not to help the ultrawealthy dodge taxes on insider deals and build titanic fortunes.”

Link: Wall Street Journal

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

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Shark Tank and Plato

This is a story about Plato, Shark Tank, and AI. Let’s do the Shark Tank part first.

A new study out of the University of Cincinnati, Georgia Tech, and the University of Michigan asked a strange question: Does your voice sound more persuasive if it sounds like the person you’re talking to?

Shark Tank

The researchers were specifically interested in timbre — the texture and color of a voice, the quality that makes one person’s “hello” sound different from another’s even when both hit the same pitch, tone, and volume.

Led by Kimberly Hyun, the researchers used machine learning to measure timbre objectively, then tested it against 7,002 entrepreneur-investor pairings from 14 seasons of Shark Tank.

The pattern held.

Entrepreneurs whose voices were closer in timbre to a given shark’s voice were more likely to land a deal with that shark, regardless of the pitch itself, the product, or the entrepreneur’s actual vocal pitch or gender.

They ran the same test on 2,091 Kickstarter campaigns, comparing each narrator’s voice to the average voice of the whole donor pool.

Campaigns whose narrator sounded closer to that average voice raised more money and hit their goals more often, though the effect shrank when a campaign already carried an outside credibility signal, like a “staff pick” badge.

Then came four controlled lab experiments — radio ads, restaurant picks, headphones, a sparkling drink — and the result kept repeating.

People trust voices that resemble their own, perceiving them as more competent. That trust then translates into more persuasion.

Artificial Intelligence

Now for the AI. Because as interesting as this is, what are we going to do — change our vocal timbre to match hundreds or thousands of individual consumers, one conversation at a time?

In fact, the study authors say, Yes, we probably are going to do that. We’re just going to use AI to make it happen—meaning real-time AI adaptation of a salesperson’s or AI agent’s voice, reshaped on the fly to match an individual listener’s timbre.

“As voice technology and cloning technology gets more advanced and accessible,” Hyun said, “it’s so much easier to just create an AI salesperson’s voice that’s similar to your voice.”

The JMR paper itself raises the call center scenario directly as the obvious next move once the technology catches up to the finding.

Honestly, I think the technology has already caught up. Voice cloning tools now need less than ten seconds of audio to produce a convincing copy.

Plato

All of which brings us back to Plato.

In the Gorgias, Plato has Socrates worry about something that sounds almost quaint today: that if you teach rhetoric and persuasion as a set of techniques, you separate speech from truth.

The most persuasive argument wins, not the most useful one. A clever speaker can learn exactly how to produce agreement in a listener without ever caring whether that agreement points toward wisdom, justice, or anything real.

Socrates wasn’t worried about voices, but the mechanism he was describing and the mechanism this study measured are similar.

A skilled rhetorician finds the shape of persuasion that fits a particular listener and pours the message into it.

An AI system doing real-time voice matching is doing the identical thing, just one layer beneath the words, at the level of the sound itself—and doing it automatically, instantly, for every listener at once.

Plato thought the danger was a talented individual who’d mastered a craft. What he couldn’t have anticipated is a machine that mass-produces that exact craft, sanded down to a repeatable technical process, deployed simultaneously across every customer service line in the country.

Study the Greeks, my friends. And maybe watch Shark Tank. But above all pay attention to timbre — and how AI might be changing it.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NY Post: The number of adults who are “not in the labor force” (NILF) surged to an all-time high in June to 105.8 million. “We’ve got a big problem…with the flight from work of prime-age men,” said labor economist Nicholas Eberstadt at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

• WSJ: Gen Z Looks for a Cheap Date: Date night in America now costs an average $189. Young, broke romantics go for picnics in the park, conversation over coffee. (Quick aside: Sometimes it’s pure coincidence that I choose two items that could theoretically be related, like this one and the on above.)

• NY Times: The Trump administration planned to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors. The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship.

• Axios: The U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295 — a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years.

• CBS News: France has become the first country in the European Union to ban social media for children under the age of 15. The law will also ban students from having phones in high schools.

• Business Insider: Phone calls on flights could soon be banned. Former flight attendants say it’s about more than manners.

• BBC: South Korean prosecutors sought a one-year jail term for the owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant accused of using ants as a dessert garnish. The owner admitted to serving ants but argued that they were used in a “small part” of the restaurant’s 15-course menu – as a topping for sorbets – and that diners were told they could opt for non-ant toppings.

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Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. Photo by Andy Bodemer on Unsplash. That’s actually Socrates, not Plato, but it’s as close as I could find in the free-to-use archive. See you in the comments.

Quick timeout today: I’d like to ask for a few minutes of your help with something important.

Every once in a while, I have to turn this newsletter over to the practical realities of writing a daily newsletter for — wait, let me count — 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 … 2026 ... wow, going on eight years!

The media/newsletter world is changing fast, and I need to be thoughtful about how to make Understandably work in a sustainable way — so I can keep writing it, improve it, and make it more valuable to you.

So ... a survey.

Please take the survey!

Why today, July 22, 2026? A couple of reasons.

• First, Substack is rolling out more sponsorship tools, and having a clearer picture of who reads Understandably will make it easier for me to find sponsors that actually fit this audience.

• Second, I’m trying to understand what you most value here: which parts you come for, which parts you could take or leave, and which parts may not be worth the time I spend on them.

It’s pretty short: mostly multiple-choice question…

Read more

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a study finding that Americans are speaking about 120,000 fewer words a year than we used to — roughly the word count of an entire novel, gone every single year, compared to 14 years earlier.

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

Partly because there’s so much research showing that relationships are what lead to a happy, successful life. And partly because I’m the kind of person who will talk to anyone for hours, even a perfect stranger.

Now there’s another piece of data, and it points in the same direction.

According to a new analysis from Axios, drawing on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, Americans are spending less time socializing than we did 20 years ago — and the decline shows up in every single age group, from teenagers to retirees.

The numbers:

• Average time spent socializing per day has dropped from 45 minutes to 35 minutes over the past two decades.

• The steepest decline is among the young. Fifteen- to 24-year-olds went from an hour a day spent hanging out with other people to 35 minutes.

Put the two studies side by side, and the picture gets clearer. We’re not just talking less. We’re spending less time in the room with each other in the first place.

A lot of the reasons are familiar.

We’re on our phones instead of in front of each other. Teenagers spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, according to Gallup.

Remote work, which exploded during the pandemic, has stuck around. It’s kept more of us out of offices—and off the sidewalks and trains that used to force us into contact with other humans.

Homes have gotten bigger and more comfortable. Every restaurant is on a delivery app now. You can eat well without ever having to talk to anyone.

One thing I hadn’t fully considered until I read the Axios piece is that many of the places people used to gather are disappearing too.

A 2025 report from University of Colorado Boulder researchers found widespread closures of hangout spots of every kind over the past decade — libraries, coffee shops, museums. Churches are closing at unprecedented rates too.

So even when people want to be around other people, there are fewer places built for exactly that purpose.

Writer Derek Thompson called this “the Anti-Social Century” in The Atlantic last year (h/t Erica Pandey).

Nobody decided to build a quieter, more solitary version of American life. It happened through a hundred small conveniences, each one reasonable on its own.

Working from home saves a commute. Delivery saves a trip. Headphones make public spaces less awkward. Add them all up over 20 years and you get 10 fewer minutes of socializing a day, every day, for everyone.

Ten minutes doesn’t sound like much until you multiply it out the way I did with the missing words. Ten fewer minutes a day is over 60 hours a year — more than a full workweek of conversation and connection that used to just happen, and now doesn’t.

The research on weak ties — those brief, low-stakes interactions with near-strangers — already tells us those small exchanges matter more to our happiness than most of us assume.

So if both the words and the minutes are disappearing from our days, maybe the answer is not especially mysterious.

Scroll less, talk more. Better yet, do it in person.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: The United States conducted a new round of airstrikes against Iran on Monday after announcing the death of another American service member. Iran responded by launching attacks on American allies Kuwait and Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. The interim deal signed last month has crumbled and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has largely stalled. As fighting intensifies, both sides have targeted civilian infrastructure relied on by millions of people.

• NYT via ABC News: Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened state election officials on Friday with prison time if they don't comply with the Trump administration's demands to "scrub" their voter rolls ahead of November's midterms. Mullin's threats followed a primetime address by Trump resurrecting debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

• AP: Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested in Miami to face rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom. Prosecutors said the new charges relate to four new victims; the brothers are already charged with rape, bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution relating to three other alleged victims in the U.K. between 2012 and 2015. Their lawyer called the charges "filth and slander."

• WSJ via US News: The IRS's acting chief counsel, Kenneth Kies, was forced out after warning White House officials that their requests would violate a federal law prohibiting the president and other officials from ordering the IRS to conduct or terminate audits of specific taxpayers.

• CBS News: Defaults on student loans have surged to record levels across the United States, with around 9.5 million people — 1 in 5 federal student loan borrowers — now more than nine months behind on their payments.

• AP: Cuba's iconic vintage cars have all but disappeared, replaced by small electric tricycles — most of them made in China — as the primary means of transportation for hundreds of thousands of Cubans grappling with a prolonged fuel crisis. Many have outfitted the vehicles with solar panels, allowing them to recharge without relying on the island's strained power grid.

• Newsweek via MSN: Garbage trucks could soon do more than collect trash. Officials in several communities are considering equipping sanitation trucks with AI-powered cameras to photograph properties during normal collection routes, flagging issues such as overgrown lawns, peeling paint, and illegal dumping for city staff to review before taking enforcement action.

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

It’s the anniversary of the failed attempt to land on the moon, July 20, 1969, and we all know the story:

• On July 16, 1969, a Saturn V rocket carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins left Earth for the moon.

• Three days later, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into the lunar module and began their descent toward the surface, leaving Collins orbiting alone in the command ship.

• At around 30,000 feet, the guidance computer running that descent became overwhelmed with more tasks than it could process in time, and Mission Control aborted eight-year, $25 billion mission.

O.K., back to reality — the moon landing was a big success, 57 years ago this week. But if not for a series of small decisions and more than a bit of luck, the three-point story above might actually have been how things turned out.

This is that story. Its protagonist is a woman named Margaret Hamilton.

Born in Indiana in 1936, she studied math (with a minor in philosophy), then got married and had a daughter, and then moved to Boston so her husband could attend Harvard Law school. Hamilton planned on graduate school herself, but she detoured, getting a job to support her family writing software in the meteorology department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Later, MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory won the contract to write the flight software for NASA’s new Apollo program, and Hamilton moved over to that project. Within a few years, she was directing the team that wrote the code for the descent of the lunar module.

I’ll let her explain a key insight she had, in her own words:

Often in the evening or at weekends I would bring my young daughter, Lauren, into work with me.

One day, she was with me when I was doing a simulation of a mission to the moon. She liked to imitate me – playing astronaut. She started hitting keys and all of a sudden, the simulation started. Then she pressed other keys and the simulation crashed. She had selected a program which was supposed to be run prior to launch – when she was already “on the way” to the moon.

The computer had so little space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I thought: my God – this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.

I suggested a program change to prevent a prelaunch program being selected during flight. But the higher-ups at MIT and Nasa said the astronauts were too well trained to make such a mistake.

Midcourse on the very next mission – Apollo 8 – one of the astronauts on board accidentally did exactly what Lauren had done. The Lauren bug! It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured.

After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.

All of which brings us to July 20, 1969 — and what actually happened with the moon landing.

Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins made it to the moon; Armstrong and Aldrin began their descent toward the surface.

But at 30,000 feet, the computer running software that Hamilton’s team had designed gave a warning code. Here’s the radio transcript:

Armstrong: “Program alarm. It’s a 1202.”

Aldrin: “1202.”

Armstrong: “Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.”

Much as Hamilton had predicted — and at the most inopportune moment — the computer had in fact been overwhelmed; later NASA would figure out that a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position, flooding the computer with data it didn’t need for landing.

One of the engineers back in the control room, 24-year-old Jack Garman, had handwritten a list of every alarm the Apollo Guidance Computer could throw; he told his bosses they were O.K., and word was relayed up the chain.

Duke (CAPCOM): “Roger. We got you... we’re go on that alarm.”

Ready for the irony in this story?

The MIT job Hamilton took in order to put her husband through law school was in the research group of a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz, writing weather-prediction code. This was at the exact moment Lorenz was working out what would become chaos theory — often known now as the butterfly effect.

It’s the idea a small, easily-dismissed variable in a complex system can determine everything downstream of it.

Like:

1. If Hamilton’s husband hadn’t gone to Harvard …

2. And she hadn’t taken the job at MIT and wound up ultimately working on Apollo …

3. And if she hadn’t brought her young daughter into the office, and her daughter hadn’t played with the computers …

4. And if the error little Lauren created hadn’t led to Hamilton’s insight and insistence…

5. The Apollo lunar landing software might actually have shut down when it was flooded with data on July 20, 1969.

And the fiction at the start of this newsletter might have been fact.

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• Sunday, July 19: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” — From the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted at the first women’s rights convention organized by women, held in Seneca Falls, New York, on this day in 1848. Drafted primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it’s now regarded as the launching point of the organized women’s suffrage movement in America.

• Monday, July 20: “We were sitting there and watching the first picture develop of the surface of another planet — from that surface of the other planet.” — Joel Levine, NASA research scientist, on Viking 1’s first transmitted image from Mars on this day in 1976. It was the first U.S. spacecraft to land successfully on another planet, after mission managers scrapped a symbolic July 4th touchdown date in favor of a safer landing site.

• Tuesday, July 21: “It is the greatest Egyptian project since the time of the pharaohs.” — Abbas Sharaky, Cairo University water resources professor, on the Aswan High Dam, completed on this day in 1970. A decade in the building, it tamed the Nile’s flood-and-drought cycle for the first time in history and created Lake Nasser, one of the largest artificial lakes on Earth.

• Wednesday, July 22: “I’ve got to get going; I’m in a hurry.” — Wiley Post, readying for the final leg of the solo around-the-world flight he completed on this day in 1933. Flying alone by autopilot and radio direction finder, he circled the globe in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, beating his own two-man record from two years earlier by nearly a full day.

• Thursday, July 23: “Of course, as you know now, that didn’t stop all those other people in St. Louis from claiming it was their invention.” — Author Elaine Greenstein, on the tangle of rival claims to the ice cream cone, said to have debuted at the St. Louis World’s Fair on this day in 1904. Confectioner Charles E. Menches is the most commonly credited inventor, one of at least half a dozen vendors who staked a claim.

• Friday, July 24: “Suddenly I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stone work.” — Hiram Bingham, on first encountering Machu Picchu on this day in 1911. The Yale historian had been searching for a different lost Inca city entirely, guided there by local farmers who already knew the site well.

• Saturday, July 25: “The American folk song has grown up.” — Joni Mitchell, on Bob Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival on this day in 1965. The short, loud performance split the crowd between boos and cheers, and is now remembered as the moment folk gave way to rock.

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AP Exclusive: ICE Officer in Maine Shooting Has History of Violent Behavior

David Brouillette, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.

Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.

Brouillette’s troubling past further challenges how thoroughly the Department of Homeland Security has vetted recruits. According to [his ex-wife], Ashley Brouillette, he once threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child — an incident her mother Avis Collins also recounted.

When reached for comment about Brouillette’s record and his role in Monday’s shooting, ICE spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that, “We will never confirm or deny attempts to dox our law enforcement officers ...”

Link: Associated Press

In a Protein-Maxxing Era, Men Want Tight Suits

Forget the muscle tank. This is muscle tailoring.

Louis Theroux’s 2026 documentary “Inside the Manosphere” features extreme views on the patriarchy, fast cars—and some very tight suits.

Justin Waller, an internet personality featured in the film, is basically Incredible Hulk-ing out of his tailoring. So was UFC fighter Conor McGregor when he met with President Trump at the White House last year. McGregor’s biceps bulged like grapefruits in his chalk-stripe jacket.

Forget the muscle tank. This is the muscle suit. The sorts of macho men hogging the spotlight in 2026 are often choosing super-slim cuts that flaunt their pecs—and shunning classic tailoring conventions like “drape.”

Link: Wall Street Journal (Jamie Waters)

Should You Recline Your Airplane Seat?

To me, the answer to this is simple: Yes, if you want to, and you try not to be a jerk about it. But, I recognize other people see it differently.

In 2014, when FiveThirtyEight asked around a thousand fliers what they thought about reclining their seats, forty-one per cent of them said that reclining was rude.

That number seems to have risen: in 2022, Eric Jones, a math professor who writes about travel statistics on the website The Vacationer, conducted a similar survey, and found that seventy-seven per cent of respondents objected to reclining.

According to Jones’s survey data, roughly half of fliers find reclining so reprehensible that they simply won’t do it; another third believe it to be rude but will still sometimes recline; and the remainder find nothing wrong with reclining.

Link: New Yorker
Backup: https://archive.ph/jNONA

Kalshi Will Offer Sports-Style Betting on Drug Trial Results

The prediction market platform is expanding into biotechnology, letting investors bet directly on clinical trial outcomes and regulatory decisions

Kalshi Inc. is expanding in biotechnology by offering wagers on the outcomes of clinical trials and regulatory decisions, giving traders a more direct way to bet on key industry catalysts.

Healthcare is so far a relatively small market for Kalshi. In the last week of June, the platform hosted $3.6 million of trading on all science and technology topics, while sports attracted $5.4 billion, according to user-compiled data from Dune Analytics.

Critics say these kinds of bets create an incentive to trade on nonpublic information, potentially influencing ongoing clinical trials or distorting thinly traded markets. Kalshi plans to use employment verification to monitor for insider trading, similar to how it handles other wagers about corporate data.

Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder of genetics-testing firm 23andMe, also provided input as an unpaid consultant. In an interview, Wojcicki said she sees Kalshi’s initiative as a valuable tool for patients.

Link: Bloomberg (Madison Muller)

Why America Loses at Soccer But Dominates Elsewhere

American soccer develops customers, not players

In 2015, Manchester United paid Bayern Munich about $10 million for their star player, Bastian Schweinsteiger. He was 30 years old, closer to retirement than his prime. But a small Bavarian club you’ve probably never heard of got a check for ~$42,000.

That tiny club, TSV 1860 Rosenheim, had nothing to do with Schweinsteiger’s transfer. You would have had to go back almost 20 years for when he trained with this club as a boy. Under FIFA’s rules, this connection is enough to open the financial pipes so TSV 1860 Rosenheim benefits.

The rules give a claim to every club that helps develop a player from age 12 onward. In addition, every time a player is transferred internationally for the rest of their career, 5% of the fee flows back down the financial pipes throughout their development history.

A year before the Schweinsteiger and Manchester United deal, Tottenham Hotspur paid a reported $4 million for DeAndre Yedlin in 2014.

Yedlin cut his teeth in the Seattle Sounders academy, but had also spent years at Crossfire Premier, a youth club in the Seattle suburbs.

Under the same rules that paid Schweinsteiger’s youth club, Crossfire was owed its cut. Tottenham had already paid the full fee to the Seattle Sounders, relying on guidance from U.S. Soccer Federation that no “solidarity money” needed to be set aside.

So even though Crossfire did everything right and spent years helping develop Yedlin, it collected nothing because its own federation told the buyer, “Don’t worry about it.” Elite pathways range from $8,000 to even over $20,000 annually. Some 70% of youth players quit by age 14 according to U.S. Soccer’s own research.

Link: Poli’s Pandit (John Polonis)

The Fight Over Humanoid Robots Has Shut Down a Car Factory for the First Time

Auto workers for Hyundai Motor in South Korea are on a partial strike worried about their future job prospects

When Hyundai Motor unveiled its new humanoid robot worker named “Atlas” in January, tens of thousands of Korean auto employees gaped at the 6-foot-2 robot strutting across a trade-show stage, its joints swiveling a full 360 degrees.

This week, Hyundai’s auto workers in South Korea have gone on a partial strike. It is the car industry’s first factory stoppage addressing humanoid robots. The streets of Hyundai’s main auto-production hub in the city of Ulsan are lined with banners demanding “pre-emptive action” in response to the threat.

“We have to prepare to ensure there are safeguards in place,” said Byun Jun-hwan, the union’s secretary-general and one of the lead labor negotiators.

In response, Hyundai’s union has made unprecedented demands seeking to enshrine job protections in the era of robots and AI. For the first time, they requested a shift from hourly pay to a fixed salary for production workers to guard against a potential reduction in work hours brought on by automation.

Workers want to lift the retirement age by five years to 65, on top of other job-security guarantees related to AI adoption. After talks broke down last week, Hyundai’s workers decided to go on a partial strike.

A single Atlas costs an estimated $130,000 per unit, according to a research institute owned by the South Korean government. The robot’s cost savings pay for itself within about two years.

Link: Wall Street Journal

Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Getting in the Way of My Love Life

I got sucked into this article, and almost used it as the jumping-off for an entire newsletter, but then decided it was just too much. It’s an op-ed written by an apparently widowed and/or divorced man, likely approaching age 80, who is back in the “dating pool” and complains that women won’t give him a chance because of his MAGA politics.

I recently entered the online dating scene and have met nice women for ... lunches or dinners. ... After I thanked one, I got a thanks back with an additional note:

“I never asked you about your political views. I have no problem with Republicans, but if you are a MAGA Republican, it would be difficult for us to develop a friendship.”

Wow. That comment threw me for a loop, but it made me reflect on the bitter divisions within the country. It is literally a civil war.

...

The heavily leftward-biased traditional media (but also those on the right) is at fault for much of this. Objective facts are pushed aside, and spin is put in their place. Trump can do no right (or wrong). There’s no question that Trump is bombastic, but I personally believe that the country is in a far better place with him as president than it would have been under a Harris presidency.

I guess I’m MAGA-light. America must be great again. Trump is trying (and sometimes, to me, very trying). But he has us on the right path. God bless America!

Link: The Columbus Dispatch

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

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Here’s a copy and paste from a post-game group chat with some of my college friends.

Yes, I am very clever when it comes to making up AI-assisted parodies of World Cup memes (link below in case you don’t know that one).

But as one of those friends from way back when put it, Sunday’s game will be a great one—as long as we don’t wind up tied, and going to penalty kicks.

Look, for those readers for whom “Bill is Very Into the World Cup” has been your least favorite stretch of Understandably newsletters, the good news is that win/lose/draw, it will all be over on Sunday.

But while I’ve got this thin thread of relevance on which to hang for another 80 hours or so, please bear with me. Because penalties are a thing — in more ways than one.

To start with, they come up a lot in soccer.

• For those who remember and care enough about what happened in the last World Cup in 2022 — sure enough, Argentina and France were tied after an utterly amazing game, 3 to 3. Then, Argentina won on penalty kicks (4 to 2).

• During the knockout stage of this year’s World Cup, we’ve had four games to go penalties already. I was there for one of them (alongside the lovely and talented Mrs. Murphy Jr.); Paraguay tied Germany during regular time and then beat them on penalties.

• Then after an epic trip home from Foxboro, what did I do? Stayed up to watch Morocco beat Netherlands, in another game that went to penalties. There was also Argentina coming back to beat Egypt 4-2 on penalties (controversial), and Switzerland beating Colombia 4-3 on penalties (irrelevant now, but still).

Anyway pack it all together and penalty kicks are this discrete, defined, highly focused and regimented event, which is exactly the kind of thing that some academic researchers love to dive into.

So, I’ve got three bits of data and “diving-intos” for you:

1. Study 1: 1,300 penalty kicks. Across the whole lot, players converted 92 percent of the kicks that would have won the match outright. But, they only converted 60 percent of kicks where missing meant elimination.

2. Study 2: Another analysis of 576 elite international penalties. The data wasn’t quite as clear, but by and large: shots taken to avoid elimination performed worse than shots taken purely to win, all other things being equal.

3. Study 3: This one referenced the soccer studies, but tried to be a bit more generally applicable — the researchers gave 228 participants $17 each and had them choose, over and over, between two gambles — one that always carried a small chance of losing money, and one that started out worse on paper but slowly improved each round to the point that it became a pure upside bet—win money or win more money.

Classic economic theory would tell you that people should switch to the better gamble as soon as the math favors it.

But instead, human nature theory took over.

“People like making money,” one of the researchers wrote, “but they often care more about not losing money.”

Back to soccer and athletics in general, as they’re sort of a contained proxy for life. Because when you get sucked in, you realize that top athletes do in fact often say they hate losing more than they love winning.

• Lionel Messi: “I hate to lose, and when I do, it stays with me for a long time.”

• Wayne Rooney: “I just hate losing, and that gives you an extra determination to work harder.”

• Serena Williams: “I hate losing more than I love winning.” (Wow, how on the nose was that one?)

Anyway, this research points at behaviors beyond the stadium and the lab—how people buy insurance, how they save for retirement, how they pick a stock, even how they swipe on a dating app.

You may be the smartest person in the room making a decision with a clear, rational best answer. But unless you can outrun the odds, you’re still probably going to flinch at the loss column first.

And you’re also probably going to miss that make-it-or-die penalty kick.

On Sunday, maybe we’ll get a clear winner before time runs out.

That would be nice — although unlike my college friend, I actually appreciate the “well—we’ve-tried-everything-else—and-I’ve-got-reservations-after-this-so-we-need-a-winner” drama that results.

But, if I haven’t totally worn out my non-soccer-fan readers with all this talk about soccer, maybe you can hear me out on a better idea I have for penalty kicks. It would go like this:

1. Tied after 90 minutes? Go immediately to penalty kicks. (No overtime first.)

2. Whichever team wins the PKs gets is awarded a one-half goal. So they’re now in the lead.

3. Then, we play a full 30 minutes of overtime. The team that won on penalties only needs to tie the overtime in order to win; the team that lost on penalties has to actually win the 30-minute overtime (meaning: score!) in order to win the game.

All of that said, nobody is asking me about any of this. Heck, half or more of our readers are kind of at their patience’s end with the soccer again.

Plus, it’s too late for 2026. Then again: 2030 will be here before we know it. And I’ve already told my family that we’re going to Spain.

I think they’re on board.

If not, I’ll just plan on annoying them by writing about it constantly anyway.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Yahoo Sports | X: No two players have better showcased the age range of soccer stars at this World Cup than Argentina’s Lionel Messi, 39, and Spain’s Lamine Yamal, 19 — who will now face each other in the Final. The matchup is drawing renewed attention to a strange coincidence: in 2007, Yamal’s family won a contest to have the then-5-month-old appear in a charity calendar for Messi’s club, Barcelona, leaving us with strangely staged photos of a 20-year-old Messi posing with an infant Yamal.

• WaPo | AP: At least 17 motorists have been shot during immigration operations as the Trump administration ramped up enforcement, a Washington Post analysis finds. Trump’s response: ICE should keep making traffic stops despite the recent shootings.

• CNN via Daily Mail: A leak hunt has thrown the White House into turmoil after Chief of Staff Susie Wiles launched an internal investigation to unmask who exposed security flaws in a Qatari-gifted aircraft intended to serve as the new Air Force One. The aggressive probe, personally overseen by Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel, saw investigators demanding officials hand over their personal phones right on White House grounds.

• The Guardian | X: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled plans for a new annual screening program that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal condition.

• Yahoo News: The Treasury Department unveiled a new $1 gold-colored coin commemorating America’s 250th anniversary with an image of President Trump on it. “Featuring President Trump, it celebrates the strength of American values, and the promise of a nation dedicated to preserving freedom for all,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote on X.

• AFP via Yahoo: Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots bid heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency. Major AI providers suspended their custom companion features ahead of the deadline, sparking an outpouring of grief on social media, with users archiving chat histories and sharing last conversations.

• PC Gamer: The Washington Post selected “Doom” as one of the 25 most influential works of American culture, alongside Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Levi’s jeans, Mickey Mouse, and the recordings of Robert Johnson.

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I’ve kept a running mental checklist of self-improvement ideas over the years. Some of them, I’ve tackled and seen them pay off. Others have been on the list for years, like a reminder you keep snoozing on your phone for days, and then weeks, and maybe even years. Examples:

• I prioritized finding the right person to share my life with and start a family. Not the most romantic way to put this, but it all turned out in the end: Check!

• I worked hard to find work that I enjoy, and that pays the bills, and gives me a sense of fulfillment. Check!

• This one was a bit of an unfulfilled nag for quite a while, but I finally got serious about health and fitness, lost most of the weight I needed to, and started paying attention to nutrition, the gym, and sports. Check!

Oh, and as a supposedly literary person, I suppose it should bother me that “read Middlemarch, Ulysses, and Infinite Jest” are still on the to-do list.

Still, I don’t think I’ve done too badly. In fact, there is only one exception: I’ve never learned a musical instrument.

Full-grown human relatives

At some point in grade school, I took piano lessons for less than a year, but I quit. My dad is a pretty good jazz pianist, so I suppose he wouldn’t have minded if I’d kept at it — but it just wasn’t for me.

And “hey, maybe you should try guitar or violin or trumpet or mandolin” or something has been on my list so long that I now have entire full-grown human relatives who are very accomplished musicians — and who weren’t even born when I first started thinking about the idea.

A new study from Kyoto University says: maybe yes, and maybe no.

The study followed participants from a 2020 project in which older adults — average age 73 at the start — learned to play a musical instrument for the first time.

After an initial four-month training period, about half continued practicing for more than three years, while the other half stopped and moved on to different hobbies. Four years later, everyone came back for MRI scans and cognitive assessments.

Results:

• Participants who stopped practicing showed declines in verbal working memory and measurable shrinkage in a brain region called the right putamen — an area tied to memory and learning that commonly deteriorates with age.

• Those who kept playing showed neither decline. The cerebellum, another region typically vulnerable to aging, also showed greater activity in the group that continued.

“We were surprised to find that the effects on the brains of elderly people who start and continue practicing an instrument were also concentrated in these two areas of the brain, and that this was an effective way to prevent age-related decline,” said corresponding author Kaoru Sekiyama.

Whom are you calling “elderly”?

I’m not exactly “elderly” — still a long way off, I’d like to think — but it got me thinking.

Most brain studies measure what happens when people start something. This one did the opposite; it measured what happened when people stopped.

Bottom line: The benefits didn’t accumulate and hold; they required continued practice to maintain. All of which makes picking up an instrument seem like a compounding habit — the same way exercise is — you don’t get to bank the gains and coast.

“For those who struggle to engage in physical activity due to body pain or other problems, playing musical instruments can be a great alternative,” Sekiyama said.

Now, this is a small follow-up study — a subset of an already modest 2020 cohort — and people who kept playing may differ from those who stopped in ways the study doesn’t fully control for. Motivation, general health, and lifestyle could all be factors.

But the headline finding is: “It’s never too late to start playing an instrument, and starting in old age may have major benefits.”

The adults involved here had an average age of 73, and they started from scratch and showed measurable brain benefits after four months — so “it’s too late for me” is a long way off too.

I’m not rushing out to buy a guitar or a keyboard. But I’m thinking about it more than I was last week.

Right after I finish Middlemarch.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NBC News: Trump says the FBI is “wasting their time” investigating Lindsey Graham’s death, even as nearly 20 FBI and other federal agents were at Graham’s home near the Capitol. FBI Director Kash Patel has said his agency is “assisting local authorities.”

• ABC News: ICE has been ordered to temporarily stop conducting vehicle stops in the wake of two deadly shootings in Texas and Maine, sources told ABC News. Multiple sources said the pause is temporary and that ICE officers will receive new training.

• NYT: Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who guided a passenger jet to a water landing on the Hudson River in 2009 and saved 155 lives, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The diagnosis is “early stage,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “I am in the beginning of this long journey.”

• WSJ: Meta’s AI-enabled, camera-equipped smartglasses have become a privacy sore spot as the social-media giant floods the market with the devices. Privacy advocates are up in arms.

• NBC News: The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act 308-117 on Tuesday, which would make daylight saving time permanent and remove the need for Americans to adjust their clocks twice a year. The bill now heads to the Senate.

• WSJ: The superrich aren’t just buying mansions — they want the entire block. “Landmaxxers” like Ken Griffin and Larry Ellison are snapping up neighboring properties to create private compounds.

• The Guardian: Can humans hibernate their way to Mars? Scientists are trying to recreate the biology that lets animals survive months without food or water, in hopes of making deep-space travel possible.

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

I don’t know where this newsletter fits in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and all that. But there should be a stage of grief when:

• You want to mourn someone, but you also don’t want to position yourself as the main character in their story.

• You don’t want to imply that you were closer than you actually were because it’s now opportune—or even pretend you never had disagreements and saw everything eye-to-eye, because you didn’t.

• But you still mourn them and pray for them.

That’s this post. Exhibit B-for-Bill.

It’s about Jill Smokler. If you never met her, you missed out. She died recently at age 48.

Of all the things, I am extremely annoyed that she did not make it to 50.

The first time I remember talking to Jill was in 2014 on speakerphone in a tiny conference room in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. We were trying to get her to write for our new digital media startup — and hopefully bring her popularity, her reach, maybe some of the people she worked with.

Long story short, we wound up buying her entire company, instead: Scary Mommy.

She came aboard, and brought her whole crew, and together we expanded, hired more people, saw massive reach, brought others …

Here’s how I remember Jill:

Smart, funny, driven, kind, acerbic, confident, vulnerable, talented, worried, proud, insecure, skeptical, second-guessing.

I think part of her really enjoyed that she was able to keep her life and her family in Baltimore and come up to New York City all the time to run her part of the combined company.

I think another part of her was wistful about what might have happened if she had never sold, and kept control of the entire Scary Mommy empire.

She was not the first entrepreneur to wonder about that choice. I’m confident we did right by her and built something pretty great. But again, I’m trying not to be the main character here.

Maybe if she could have just pressed rewind on the great Gen X VCR of life …

Who among us hasn’t wished for that once in a while?

• First off all, there is no rewind.

• Second, on the big thing — glioblastoma — it seems it would not have helped.

Jill would have hated that I am now quoting an AI summary to put this in context … but here’s the context:

Glioblastoma is an aggressive form of brain cancer. While early detection allows for faster intervention and extends life, it is generally considered incurable.

Median survival is 12 to 18 months, though aggressive treatments allow about 5% to 7% of patients to live five years or more.

Anyway, that’s what she had, and it killed her.

She leaves behind three children who were the love of her life — the real, honest kind of love, which Scary Mommy made clear: the kind of love you can feel while also being “super-human,” but not “superhuman,” and wondering at times what the heck you got yourself into.

Jill carried a lot of other stuff, too.

I’m not going to put it all in an obituary-style post, especially because some of it quite literally wound up in People magazine.

Just remember: “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

Anyway, back to making this all about me.

I am glad to be able to say that I did a bit of the work and tried to keep in touch with Jill after our Some Spider/Scary Mommy days. Fun one —

Fri, Aug 17, 2018: “Hi Jill, How’s it going? How’s retirement? Have you moved to Florida and become a Republican yet?”

(Narrator: Bill knew it was HIGHLY unlikely she was ever going to become a Republican.)

We had a few Zoom calls over the next few years, the last of which was in June 2023. That was a year before she was diagnosed.

Again, I don’t mean to suggest that Jill and I were close. We were colleagues, and I enjoyed working with her. She was a good person and an inspiring entrepreneur.

She affected my life, and I am very happy with how my life has turned out — and how I hope it will keep turning out.

And, every once in a while, I see a post where someone is mourning a friend or a colleague.

They do a nice job, and at the end I think: I know the writer, not the friend — but if the friend inspired someone to write that kind of post about them, then they must have been a remarkable person.

Sometimes it inspires me to Google that remarkable person and learn more about them, even if we never met in real life.

Here’s your search link: jill smokler

That’s this post. Exhibit J-for-Jill.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: A federal judge ruled Monday that President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement. In a 56-page order, U.S. Judge Kathleen M. Williams also referred the lawyer who brought Trump’s case to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings.

• AP: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday — the second time in a week that ICE has used deadly force and at least the ninth death since 2025. ICE said in a post on X that “fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”

• Politico: FBI agents grilled deceased Sen. Lindsey Graham’s neighbors Monday about what they saw the night he died, as speculation swirled following his recent visit to Kyiv and his criticism of the Iran war. Separately, Graham’s younger sister Darline Graham Nordone will serve the remainder of his term in Washington.

• The Guardian: Meet the New York nurses replaced by AI: “It should concern every patient who cares about quality of care.”

• CNBC: These are America’s 10 worst states to live in for 2026. Crime rates, air quality, healthcare access, worker protections, and civil rights laws are among the factors that can hurt a state in quality of life rankings.

• NYT: The federal government has approved plans by a startup to test a satellite that would use a 60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark, to power solar farms, provide light for rescue workers, and illuminate city streets. The company plans to deploy its test satellite this year and eventually wants to send as many as 50,000 mirrors into space.

• Fast Company: Play-Doh’s first set for adults is peak “kidulting”: Blooms by Play-Doh gives your favorite childhood toy an adult-centric glow-up.

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Thanks for reading. I wrote about Jill at Inc.com. See you in the comments.