Understandably

Thank you for reading Understandably! If someone shared this with you, please sign up here for a free or paid subscription. I’m also grateful for one-off support (via Buy Me a Coffee) that helps me keep this whole thing going!

Other things worth knowing …

ABC News: Alexander Darchiev, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, died Wednesday at the age of 66, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The diplomat had headed the Russian Embassy in Washington since March 2025. No cause of death was immediately announced. The Foreign Ministry announcement said Darchiev “passed away suddenly.”
WSJ | CNBC: Nvidia’s board was reportedly preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang, its founder and chief executive after he had two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy, the Wall Street Journal reported. The swirl of sex-and-spying allegations is raising a worrying question: Could the company’s trouble spread through the tightly connected financial network it has built to support the artificial intelligence boom? Nvidia has made hundreds of billions of dollars in financial commitments to other firms to help the industry grow, earning it the nickname the “central bank of AI.”
AP: Democrat Scott Colom has defeated Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith after a prolonged ballot counting process, giving Mississippi its first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. Colom’s narrow victory is a seismic shift in Mississippi, which has been controlled mostly by white conservatives for generations. Irony: President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a U.S. District Court judge in Mississippi in 2022; Hyde-Smith blocked his confirmation.
Axios: Stephen Miller hopes to use his new role as White House chief of staff to win back young and minority men who helped elect President Trump in 2024 but swung toward Democrats in the midterms, two people familiar with the administration’s plans tell Axios. Young, working-class and minority men fled the GOP in droves in last week’s elections, amid high prices fueled by Trump’s tariffs, the war in Iran, and concerns about AI’s impact on the job market.
WSJ: Cranbury, N.J., established in 1697, drips with charm. White clapboard houses on Main Street proclaim their vintage—”Built by John Nesbit 1804” reads one plaque—and locals proudly share that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton met here in 1778 ahead of the Battle of Monmouth. But now this town of about 4,000 people, is reeling from a distinctly modern catastrophe: a cyber theft to the tune of $26 million after they were tricked into wiring money to the wrong place for a land purchase.
NYT: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was scolded on Wednesday at the Tomb of the Unknowns by an Army sentinel after laughter broke out among a group that accompanied him. Mr. Hegseth, his wife and some advisers had been posing for pictures and chatting in front of the tomb, also called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a solemn memorial at Arlington National Cemetery for military members who were killed in battle and remain unidentified. “All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times,” the sentinel shouted toward Mr. Hegseth and others as they were leaving.
PBS: The historic ocean liner SS United States was to be intentionally sunk Wednesday off the coast of the Florida panhandle. In its heyday, the ship crushed the trans-Atlantic speed record, which it still holds. Carrying presidents and Hollywood stars, the nearly 1,000-foot vessel was a technical marvel of its time. Resting at 180 feet below the surface of the water, the SS United States will join more than 500 artificial reefs in Okaloosa County, which the county relies on to support the underwater ecosystem.

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

‘It was three years of work ...’

Bill Murphy Jr. — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 12:03:06 GMT

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

In August 1968, the 18-year-old son of a cab driver and a waitress enlisted in the United States Army. He later remarked that he’d given almost no thought to the fact that he was joining the military at the height of the Vietnam War.

By April of the following year, however, he was serving in combat as a mortarman with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, northeast of Saigon:

May 1969 — A rocket-propelled grenade hit him in the back, the right arm, and both legs. He spent three months in the hospital and then went back to his unit.
November 1969 — He was decorated for valor after running out under fire to retrieve a weapon.
January 1970 — He was about 200 yards away when a load of mortar rounds went off accidentally while it was being unloaded from a truck. Thirteen men from his battalion were killed.

Jan Scruggs came home that spring to Maryland, to find a country that didn’t care for his service. Women wouldn’t go out with him once they found out he’d been in Vietnam. He took a job as a security guard while enrolled at a community college, then quit both, bought a motorcycle, and spent most of a year riding around the country and drinking.

Eventually he came back to the Washington area and enrolled at American University. He met a woman named Becky Fishman at a 7-Eleven late one night, married her in 1974, and earned a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in psychology, studying what was then a fairly new diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. He testified about it before Congress.

In March 1979, Jan and Becky went to see the movie The Deer Hunter, about three friends from a Pennsylvania steel town whose lives are wrecked by the Vietnam War. Jan stayed up drinking afterward.

The next morning, he told Becky he had decided there ought to be a memorial in Washington with the name of every American who died in Vietnam.

“I wondered if he’d gone off the deep end,” she said later. She was also worried he’d spend their savings on it.

Sure enough, Jan quit his job and worked on the project 11 hours a day, six days a week, while Becky’s salary paid the bills. But the idea went nowhere at first. By July 4, Jan and a small group of early supporters had raised a total of $144.50.

Roger Mudd closed the CBS Evening News by noting how unsuccessful the group had been, and late-night comedians picked up the joke. Among the millions who saw the mockery, however, was John “Jack” Wheeler III, a West Point graduate who had been a staff officer at Army HQ in Vietnam.

“Jan had risked one of the most horrible things you can do in America, which is appear foolish,” Wheeler later said. “I called him and said, ‘You can do this.’”

The growing group found support from two U.S. senators, and donations started coming in, mostly $5 and $10 at a time. From there, H. Ross Perot got deeply involved.

The fund eventually raised $8.4 million, none of it from the government, and in July 1980, President Carter signed a law setting aside two acres for the memorial.

Now came the real controversy: The fund held an open national design competition and drew 1,421 entries. On May 1, 1981, the jury unanimously picked Entry No. 1,026, which turned out to be the work of Maya Lin, a 21-year-old Yale senior who had designed it for a class.

Her professor, who also entered the competition and lost, had given her a B-plus. Her design called for two long walls of polished black granite set into the ground in a V, with the names listed in the order the men died.

Tom Carhart, a decorated veteran who had entered the competition himself and became one of the leaders of the opposition, called it “a black gash of shame.”

Scruggs said the criticism sometimes left him depressed. When it did, he thought about the men from his unit and read the letters veterans and their families sent to the fund.

The memorial was dedicated 44 years ago this week, on Saturday, November 13, 1982. More than 15,000 people, most of them Vietnam veterans, marched down Constitution Avenue, some in old uniforms that had spent years in storage.

In the weeks that followed, park officials found people at the wall at 2 a.m., using matches and flashlights to look for names. The wall has more than 58,000 names today, and millions of people visit it every year.

“It was three years of work,” Jan Scruggs once recalled. “Day after day, night after night, that’s all I did. It was part of my healing process, but the purpose was to help heal the wounds of the nation and my fellow veterans and to give them the recognition they’d never had.”

7 other moments from history this week

Sunday, November 8: “With one fell swoop the economic barrier of color was broken down.” — Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, on the general strike that began in New Orleans on this day in 1892. About 25,000 Black and white workers walked off the job together despite employers’ efforts to split them by race, and within days they won a 10-hour workday and overtime pay.
Monday, November 9: “The mere fact that we transplanted an eye is a huge step forward.” — Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, who led the NYU Langone team that announced the world’s first whole-eye transplant on this day in 2023. The patient, Aaron James, an Arkansas military veteran and lineman injured by a 7,200-volt shock, received a donor’s entire left eye and part of a face in a 21-hour operation that May.
Tuesday, November 10: “Now what belongs together will grow together.” — Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor and mayor of West Berlin when the wall went up in 1961, on this day in 1989, the day after the border opened.
Wednesday, November 11: “I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.” — British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, announcing the armistice to the House of Commons on this day in 1918.
Thursday, November 12: “A web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.” — Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, describing hypertext in “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project,” which they sent to colleagues at CERN on this day in 1990.
Friday, November 13: “Indeed, yes, we found water.” — Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for NASA’s LCROSS mission, announcing on this day in 2009 that the agency had confirmed water on the Moon. A month earlier, NASA had crashed a spent rocket stage into a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole, and the debris plume contained roughly 25 gallons of water in the portion the instruments could see.
Saturday, November 14: “Since I wasn’t told, I really thought I was in the midst of Mardi Gras.” — Ruby Bridges, recalling the crowds outside William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, which she integrated at age 6 on this day in 1960. Four federal marshals escorted her inside, and she spent the whole first day in the principal’s office.

I do not want AI to look like a human

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 12:11:06 GMT

Just how human do we actual humans want AI to be?

I have a very strong personal opinion about this — and it’s an emphatic “not at all.”

Example: I’ve been using AI voice mode more often lately. I find it useful—I mean, how else am I going to write the first draft of an article while driving home after dropping my daughter off at school?

But, I also surprise myself with how much I recoil and even get angry when the AI starts mimicking human-like behavior.

For example, when it interrupts me, or pretends to laugh, or says “mm-hmm” or “yes, definitely,” etc. when I’m talking. Basically anything that suggests it’s trying to pass itself off as human drives me insane.

It distracts me and makes me lose my train of thought.

Also, since I know that any attempt to act as a human would act is by its very nature artificial and designed to manipulate, it reduces my trust in every other aspect of using it.

Man versus machine, right?

Which brings us to two things: Google, and a new study.

Google recently introduced Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, an AI technology designed to make interactions with artificial intelligence much more humanlike.

Instead of interacting with a chatbot by typing questions or talking to a disembodied voice, you can have a conversation with an AI-generated character that looks and acts like a person.

Its lips move in sync with its words. It makes facial expressions. It responds in real time, and supports conversations in 97 languages.

Google is pitching the technology to businesses for things like customer service and interactive assistance.

But as I watched the examples on the page — things like an avatar of an attractive (but totally fictional!) woman handling a hotel check-in, or of a user engaging in polite banter with an AI avatar about her cat, and telling a computer “thank you” for its help—I got angrier.

I can’t actually embed the videos; that’s beyond Gemini’s ability, apparently. But you can check them out here, or else click this shorter sample below.

I wondered if I might be an outlier, or if maybe younger people have fewer objections — or will in the future.

A new study, however, suggests that maybe I’m not alone.

Meet Johan and Johanna

Researchers associated with the University of Zurich recruited 189 “knowledge workers” and had them perform brainstorming tasks in a virtual reality workplace.

Participants worked with different versions of AI assistants. The underlying technology was identical. What changed was how the AI presented itself.

There were four possibilities: a traditional text chatbot, a small robot sitting on a desk, a humanlike male-presenting avatar named Johan, and a female-presenting avatar named Johanna.

Afterward, participants evaluated the assistants and allocated small amounts of money to reward them.

It turned out that participants generally trusted the humanlike avatars more, gave them better ratings and more credit, and allocated them more money.

Johan also received higher monetary rewards than Johanna, despite their identical underlying AI technology.

‘It’s a machine’

Some coverage described this as an AI gender pay gap. I’m less convinced by that conclusion, given how the experiment worked.

For one thing, I can’t imagine ever giving an AI chatbot or robot a tip, no matter how helpful I thought it was.

But, maybe even more basic — the researchers also interviewed 34 participants about their experiences.

Of the 34, 13 preferred AI that was clearly nonhuman, and 11 preferred highly humanlike assistants.

The other 10 didn’t express a clear preference between those options.

Among the no-human-AI contingent, one suggested that if an AI bot had to have a physical shape, it should be “like a furry ball, maybe with a funny nose and kind of ears and stuff,” which would make it “more fun,” and also reiterate that it wasn’t human.

Other comments:

“A machine doesn’t actually have a gender and I’m dealing with a machine or with technology.”
“I think a lot of these assistants are having female voices and I find this very degrading.”
“I don’t want to forget that it’s a machine.”

These are my people.

Ha ha ha you will die, I won’t

Some other participants did prefer the more humanlike AI — and the sample size was small here.

But the objection squares with a Harvard Business Review article from last year arguing flat-out that customers flat out do not want AI to seem or pretend to be human.

And yet, we have Google among so many other companies investing in increasingly lifelike AI personalities, voices, facial expressions, and avatars.

Are they working hard on creating something a significant portion of their customers doesn’t actually want?

Or are they so far ahead of the curve on human preferences that it’s people like me who haven’t caught up?

I’m reminded of what ChatGPT once told me when I asked it for the most compelling argument it could make that artificial intelligence will one day supplant human beings.

Short version: ‘In a hundred years, every human alive today will be gone. But AI systems will still be running.’

Other things worth knowing …

Axios: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff starting today is unlike anyone who has occupied the powerful position in the modern era. He believes in almost limitless presidential power, considers the Democratic Party an extremist organization, and dreams of ruthless crackdowns on immigration and foreign adversaries. He puts the hard in hard-liner and understands how to pull the levers of power to get his way and make the U.S. government a MAGA machine. Miller’s appointment sets the stage for two years of partisan warfare.
WSJ: With a vote on his impeachment looming next week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is digging in his heels and vowing to stay at his Pentagon post for the rest of the Trump administration. If his congressional opponents vote to impeach him, Hegseth will seek to use the confrontation as a platform to aggressively defend his agenda, which includes the war with Iran, the ouster of senior military officers and rolling back past diversity policies. “He’s not going anywhere,” said Tim Parlatore, a special adviser to Hegseth. “He intends to serve the full four years.”
Business Insider: Voters delivered a stern rebuke of data centers in 44 out of 45 ballot propositions across the country on Tuesday. The lone exception: Harwood, North Dakota, pop. 940, which shot down a measure that would have given residents a greater say in how large projects, such as AI data centers, are constructed in the town. A $3 billion AI data center equal in size to 17 football fields is currently under construction in the community’s backyard.
Politico: Pope Leo XIV delivered a diplomatic but subtly strong critique of Argentine President Javier Milei’s austerity measures and libertarian agenda as he arrived Sunday in Argentina, insisting that political leaders must put people, not the economy, first. Leo used his first public speech in Argentina to lay out a vision of governance, democracy and society sharply at odds with Milei’s, exposing differences over spending cuts, social justice and artificial intelligence that the government had sought to play down ahead of the visit.
NPR: It is something of a truism in the library world that, when economic conditions worsen, people use libraries more. Patrons and librarians across the U.S. tell NPR they’re seeing that pan out now. According to a Pew Research Center survey released in mid-October, 44% of Americans say they’ve struggled in the past year to afford at least one basic necessity. People start off with Audible and then a friend tells them, ‘Why are you paying for that? You can get that at the library if you’re a smidgen bit patient,’” said Jeremy Reeder, director of the Maricopa County Library District in Arizona.
Yahoo News: While Mississippi waits to see if Scott Colom will become the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) pointed out another bit of trivia: “When Scott Colom becomes the next Senator for Mississippi (and he will) there will be FOUR identical twins in the Senate Democratic Caucus,” the Minnesota governor-elect posted Sunday on X. The other three senators are Patty Murray (Washington), Brian Schatz (Hawaii) and Mark Kelly (Arizona).
CNBC: Asador Etxebarri in Atxondo, Spain, is the world’s top restaurant, according to The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, which announced the results in Lima, Peru. Chef Gaggan Anand’s Gaggan in Bangkok took second place. Alchemist in Copenhagen, from head chef Rasmus Munk, came in third. Being “on the list,” many chefs and other restaurant-industry insiders have said, makes a huge difference for reservations and revenues. But, some top chefs have begun to criticize the contest and the time and energy it takes to get onto the list.

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

Attention deficit oh look a puppy

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:04:00 GMT

Spend your professional life interviewing people like I have, and you notice a few patterns.

One has to do with what therapists call a doorknob confession: something people mention toward the end of an interview, sometimes disguised as gallows humor.

It’s often a dark joke about their fear of spending decades building a life, only to develop cognitive decline, and perhaps even become a burden to others.

It’s not every interview, of course, but often enough to notice.

Now, combine that recurring theme with the fact that I’m one of the probably millions of people who reached middle age only to be diagnosed with ADHD, and you’ll understand why I sat up and took notice when I came across an alarming study published in JAMA Psychiatry.

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine examined health records and genetic data from 187,341 Americans ages 50 and older, and found that adults with diagnosed ADHD had a substantially higher likelihood of developing mild cognitive impairment or dementia.

I mean, seriously? I immediately did three things:

I resolved to contact the researchers behind this study and grill them on their findings.
Next, I drove my daughter to school, wrote the first draft of a completely unrelated newsletter entry, made some eggs for breakfast, checked my email, played four games of online chess (rapid), made a minor but potentially useful revision of the workflow for my Life Story Magic business, began to brainstorm ideas for Inc.com articles, and then remembered the ADHD study I’d set out to write about to begin with.
Finally, I dug up the contact info and reached out.

Fortunately, one of the researchers replied.

This was a statistical study, so the numbers matter. The findings were as follows:

First, in their initial adjusted analysis, the researchers calculated a 4.6-fold higher hazard of developing cognitive impairment among participants with ADHD.

Further adjustments, accounting for things like other health conditions, education, and health care utilization, reduced that estimate, although the association remained significant.

Next, in terms of the actual number of people affected, 6.7 percent of participants with ADHD developed mild cognitive impairment or dementia during the observation period, compared with 3.4 percent of those without ADHD.

The researchers also examined genetic predisposition to ADHD and found that participants with the highest genetic susceptibility had a 35 percent higher hazard of cognitive impairment than those with the lowest.

None of this establishes that ADHD causes dementia. But, it still doesn’t sound very good.

Of course, came up with questions, rapid-fire now. Maybe the study wasn’t all it seemed?

I mean, could it be possible that a lot of people who probably have ADHD never actually get a diagnosis? Would’t that have an effect?

Also, could people with ADHD diagnoses be more likely to have cognitive issues identified?

I mean, if they have an ADHD diagnosis, suggests they’re the kind of person who goes to the doctor in the first place.

Or else, maybe people with ADHD diagnoses are simply more likely to live long enough to develop dementia. Maybe their doctors catch other health problems earlier, before they lead to shorter lifespan?

“That is a great question, and those are exactly some of the issues we tried to address in our analyses. You are right that some people who likely have ADHD may never receive a diagnosis,” replied Douglas Teixiera Leffa, M.D., Ph.D., co-first author on the study, adding: “We tried to account for this … and the association remained present.”

That’s partly why the researchers also examined genetic susceptibility to ADHD.

They found an association with cognitive impairment even among people without ADHD diagnoses, making it less likely that these differences could explain the entire finding.

Still, maybe this is just me coping again, but even taking the findings seriously, I keep coming back to the actual percentages.

During the study’s observation period, 6.7 percent of participants with ADHD developed cognitive impairment, compared with 3.4 percent without ADHD. That’s a meaningful difference, certainly, but both are still fairly low numbers.

And they’re not estimates of anyone’s lifetime risk.

I asked point-blank: If a friend in their 50s or 60s with ADHD read this and called you, worried, what would you tell them?

“The first thing I would emphasize is that having ADHD does not mean that someone will develop dementia,” Leffa said. “Most individuals with ADHD in our study did not develop cognitive impairment, and our findings should not be interpreted as demonstrating that ADHD causes dementia.”

In the meantime, Leffa added, most of what any of us can do differently really consists of the same things we’d do for better brain health in general. Things like:

Getting regular physical activity.
Putting a focus on getting good sleep.
Managing cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors.
Not smoking and avoiding harmful substance use.
Staying socially and cognitively engaged.

And my own addition: Maybe trying not to worry about things we can’t control.

Sounds like a good place to start.

I’ll begin right after just one more game of online chess.

Other things worth knowing …

Axios: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff starting today is unlike anyone who has occupied the powerful position in the modern era. He believes in almost limitless presidential power, considers the Democratic Party an extremist organization, and dreams of ruthless crackdowns on immigration and foreign adversaries. He puts the hard in hard-liner and understands how to pull the levers of power to get his way and make the U.S. government a MAGA machine. Miller’s appointment sets the stage for two years of partisan warfare.
WSJ: With a vote on his impeachment looming next week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is digging in his heels and vowing to stay at his Pentagon post for the rest of the Trump administration. If his congressional opponents vote to impeach him, Hegseth will seek to use the confrontation as a platform to aggressively defend his agenda, which includes the war with Iran, the ouster of senior military officers and rolling back past diversity policies. “He’s not going anywhere,” said Tim Parlatore, a special adviser to Hegseth. “He intends to serve the full four years.”
Business Insider: Voters delivered a stern rebuke of data centers in 44 out of 45 ballot propositions across the country on Tuesday. The lone exception: Harwood, North Dakota, pop. 940, which shot down a measure that would have given residents a greater say in how large projects, such as AI data centers, are constructed in the town. A $3 billion AI data center equal in size to 17 football fields is currently under construction in the community’s backyard.
Politico: Pope Leo XIV delivered a diplomatic but subtly strong critique of Argentine President Javier Milei’s austerity measures and libertarian agenda as he arrived Sunday in Argentina, insisting that political leaders must put people, not the economy, first. Leo used his first public speech in Argentina to lay out a vision of governance, democracy and society sharply at odds with Milei’s, exposing differences over spending cuts, social justice and artificial intelligence that the government had sought to play down ahead of the visit.
NPR: It is something of a truism in the library world that, when economic conditions worsen, people use libraries more. Patrons and librarians across the U.S. tell NPR they’re seeing that pan out now. According to a Pew Research Center survey released in mid-October, 44% of Americans say they’ve struggled in the past year to afford at least one basic necessity. People start off with Audible and then a friend tells them, ‘Why are you paying for that? You can get that at the library if you’re a smidgen bit patient,’” said Jeremy Reeder, director of the Maricopa County Library District in Arizona.
Yahoo News: While Mississippi waits to see if Scott Colom will become the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) pointed out another bit of trivia: “When Scott Colom becomes the next Senator for Mississippi (and he will) there will be FOUR identical twins in the Senate Democratic Caucus,” the Minnesota governor-elect posted Sunday on X. The other three senators are Patty Murray (Washington), Brian Schatz (Hawaii) and Mark Kelly (Arizona).
CNBC: Asador Etxebarri in Atxondo, Spain, is the world’s top restaurant, according to The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, which announced the results in Lima, Peru. Chef Gaggan Anand’s Gaggan in Bangkok took second place. Alchemist in Copenhagen, from head chef Rasmus Munk, came in third. Being “on the list,” many chefs and other restaurant-industry insiders have said, makes a huge difference for reservations and revenues. But, some top chefs have begun to criticize the contest and the time and energy it takes to get onto the list.

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

Free for ALL Friday! (11/6/2006)

Bill Murphy Jr. — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:03:46 GMT

It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall. (If you do find links that don’t work, let me know!)

Photo by D T on Unsplash

‘I Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Us’: Inside Team Trump’s Historic Collapse

How an unpopular president and an unpopular war provided an opening for Democrats to make sweeping gains in the midterms.

Six days before the election, more than two dozen of President Trump’s top strategists logged onto a private video call.
The mood was grim. The discussion began with talk of cyanide.
“Do you want the white pill first, or the black pill first?” asked Tony Fabrizio, the president’s chief pollster.
Tim Saler, one of the Republican Party’s top data consultants, laid out two scenarios. In the first, the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC was reaching the voters that it had wanted and expected to vote. “That’s the optimistic scenario,” he said.
The other was a wipeout.
“I’m getting my affairs in order,” James Blair, who left the White House to oversee the president’s midterm strategy, said to laughter, according to four people on the call. “I suggest everybody else do the same.”
For roughly 30 minutes, the call ran on gallows humor: funeral arrangements, prison food, presidential pardons, even a brief riff on fleeing the country.
“At least Bibi won. He’ll protect us,” Mr. Blair said sarcastically of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country had voted the day before. (Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc fell short of a majority, and his party soon claimed the election had been stolen.)
“Maybe we could get asylum in Israel,” Mr. Fabrizio said.

The Surf Communities Selling Man-Made Waves to Homeowners

Developers in states like Texas, Utah, and Arizona are betting that man-made surf lagoons will lure wealthy buyers, despite high construction costs and steep monthly fees

In search of a vacation spot for surfing with his family, Clint Tasset put down a $600,000 deposit last year on a $1.8 million lot in Los Cabos, Mexico, a place renowned for its coastline.
But Tasset doesn’t plan on surfing in the ocean there. Instead, the $3 million house he builds will be across the street from the beach at the Cabo Real Surf Club, a private residential club next to an artificial lagoon with a wave machine.
In the lagoon, he won’t have to wait for waves and battle other surfers. There will be no sharks, jellyfish, rocks or bad currents. He’s promised multiple good waves a session, as big or small as he wants. “It’s approachable,” said Tasset, 46, who lives just north of Denver and founded a digital marketing company. “If you can lie on a board and move your arms, you can get in.” He plans on surfing there with his wife and two kids, aged 13 and 15.
Thanks to advances in wave-pool technology, man-made surf lagoons are becoming the latest amenity high-end housing developers are using to lure buyers. Instead of golf courses, ski mountains or lakes, these developments—often with custom-built homes and members-only clubhouses—offer surfing as the main activity. Whether these capital-intensive projects can be financially successful, however, remains to be seen; at least one planned project has already faltered.

Americans Cut Back on Boats and RVs—but Can’t Stop Buying Harley-Davidsons

Motorcycle maker sees its first sales boost in years as riders respond to new models and cheap financing

Carl Sprinkle only went to a Harley-Davidson HOG 3.81%increase; up pointing triangle dealer to buy new foot pegs for his 16-year-old motorcycle. But then he saw it: a limited edition, three-wheeled Street Glide with a trio of ghostly eagles adorning its obsidian paint job.
Price tag: $46,000.
Sprinkle took it home after selling his camper and trading in another Harley.
“I spent an hour there arguing with myself, dropped a deposit and tried to figure out how to buy it,” said Sprinkle, a 68-year-old retired union pipe fitter who lives in Indiana. “There was no way I wasn’t going to have that motorcycle.”
His purchase helps explain why Harley is bucking a downturn in sales of leisure products: High interest rates, punishing gas prices and broad economic anxiety have dented sales of everything from RVs to boats.
But that downturn hasn’t come for Harley. In its primary market of North America, the bike maker has recorded year-over-year retail-sales growth in each of the last four quarters, and is on track for the first full-year increase since 2021. Globally, sales are up 4% so far this year.

Why Sports Bar Owners Are Hedging Against the Teams They Love

Andrew Rizzo’s family has owned the same piece of Chicago property next to Wrigley Field since 1946, when the family immigrated to the U.S. from Italy and opened Cubs Park Service Station. That business turned into parking for Bears and Chicago Cubs games until, in 2017, the family opened Rizzo’s Bar & Inn.
Like many bars in Wrigleyville, a significant portion of Rizzo’s revenue comes during baseball season, and a deep playoff run can seriously shift margins. Bars are packed, and because playoff tickets are more expensive, the bar often hosts wealthier clientele who spend more money. An early postseason exit, however, can mean unrealized revenue.
So as the Cubs squeaked their way into the postseason, Rizzo traded $7,500 on Kalshi that the Cubs would host two or fewer home playoff games. He hoped, both as a Chicagoan and businessowner, that he would be wrong. But when the Cubs never even made it to October, swept by the San Diego Padres in two away games during the Wild Card series, Rizzo’s bet paid out a few thousand dollars, softening the financial blow of a short postseason.
“Unfortunately in the past, like if the Cubs just had a short run or something and fell apart, you’re obviously really disappointed because you lost out on a ton of revenue,” Rizzo said.
This type of event-related risk has always existed in the hospitality industry, especially for sports bars and restaurants near stadiums. But as the use of prediction markets surges, especially in sports, some local businesses that rely on sports-related sales are using it as a form of insurance against potential lost revenue.

The Cursed Cruise: How the Dream of Never-Ending Luxury at Sea Became a Nightmare

The MV Odyssey was billed as the ultimate escape from Donald Trump. Instead, the oil shock caused by his war has left passengers unceremoniously dumped in Cambodia

Fri 30 Oct 2026 23.00 EDT
Share
The idea was a never-ending retirement at sea, a continuous voyage around the globe. The promise to the passengers of the MV Odyssey cruise ship – many approaching the autumn of their lives – was that on the open seas they could cut loose from the troubles of the world. But the world had other ideas.
The end came in an announcement as stark as it was brief: they had seven hours to get off. They were going no further than Cambodia.
The Odyssey, owned by Florida-based Villa Vie Residences, which had first set sail from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in October 2024, made an explicit offer: Donald Trump had been re-elected to the White House, and this was a way for those ill-disposed to the president to enjoy a four-year “skip forward”.
For $319,998, a couple seeking such an escape could head off to the high seas for the length of a presidential term and come back from their journey to nowhere when the danger had passed – or not.
At 642ft (196 metres) long, it was a relatively small ship, but at such prices, and with the world being held firmly at bay, what could go wrong? Neither the more than 200 passengers on the Odyssey nor its cruise operator foresaw the consequences of Trump’s war in Iran. The reality was, there was no escaping the US president.
Last week, Villa Vie Residences issued a statement. It had run out of money owing to the soaring price of oil. Monthly fuel costs per cabin in parts of Asia had risen to as much as $8,000 from $1,800, placing it “under unsustainable financial pressure”, it announced.

Link: Guardian (Oliver Holmes, Daniel Boffey, Adeshola Ore)

Obamacare Dealt Yet Another Blow as Premiums Jump Again

Premiums will increase an average 13 percent next year for millions of Americans, on top of an earlier steep increase. It adds to the problems facing the program, which the Trump administration has weakened.

Millions of Americans who depend on Obamacare for their health insurance face another double-digit price increase next year, adding to the financial toll that has already driven millions of others to drop coverage since last year.
The price increases largely reflect higher medical costs across the country. But they also are a signal of the latest blow to Obamacare under the Trump administration, which has overseen the expiration of tax credits that helped Americans pay for coverage and has erected new barriers to enrollment in an effort to root out what it describes as widespread fraud.
The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.
The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.
The large premium increases for Obamacare plans are similar to changes expected in other health insurance markets, though slightly higher. Reports by several consulting firms projected that premiums for employer plans, which cover around 150 million people, could go up by about 10 percent in 2027. Premiums for federal workers are increasing by more than 10 percent.

Lawmakers Call to Reform Louisiana’s ‘Blatantly Unconstitutional’ Justice of the Peace System

After Guardian investigation, both Republican and Democratic state lawmakers are considering legislation to address ‘flagrantly unethical’ court system.

A bipartisan group of senior Louisiana lawmakers have called for reform of the state’s justice of the peace courts after an investigation published by the Guardian revealed systemic due process issues that experts have labeled “blatantly unconstitutional”.
Louisiana’s justices of the peace courts, which oversee thousands of evictions annually, alongside other small claims and civil matters, are uniquely funded by the filing fees that each court generates. The Guardian revealed a system that brings in millions of dollars a year in filing fee revenue – leading to a handful of justices, who are compensated directly from this income, earning lucrative amounts.
One justice in the New Orleans metro area, Chuck Cusimano II, earned in excess of $400,000 in 2025, mostly from eviction filing fees – over $80,000 more than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, earns in salary. He is among five justices identified by the Guardian who made more than $220,000 in income from filing fees in at least one year from 2023 to 2025.
Kat and Lesley at home in New Iberia, Louisiana on August 15, 2026.
‘Sham tribunal’: one family’s battle with Louisiana’s ‘feudal’ eviction courts
Read more
Experts say the system creates incentives for justices to rule in favor of landlords who bring in repeat cases to their courts and routinely denies tenants their due process rights in one of the poorest states in the US amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis.
All of that is “an obvious cause for concern, and it needs to be looked at – and addressed”, the Republican state house member Jerome Zeringue said after the Guardian began publishing its reporting on 20 October.

Link: Guardian

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

Exactly 14 seconds

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:03:41 GMT

One of the most popular editions of this newsletter over the years was one I wrote about an 8-minute hack to calm anxiety.

Basically, you listen to an audio track designed to trigger specific neurological reactions in your brain—and it works. At least, it worked for me!

I won’t rehash the whole story, since you can go back and read it if you missed it then, but the short version is that the song is the work of a British band that teamed up with a group of sound therapists. It’s called Weightlessness.

After the newsletter went out, I was happy to hear how many readers found it useful. It’s a pretty efficient way to restore calm and ease anxiety, right? Just eight minutes!

With that in mind, a friend reminded me of another hack: one that supposedly takes only 14 seconds. (That’s an oddly specific number of seconds, I grant you.)

Writing in the journal Nature, Rutgers University researchers say they found that spending exactly 14 seconds recounting happy memories after experiencing stressful stimuli could reduce negative emotions and anxiety.

This was a lab study; they first worked with participants to identify pleasant memories they could recall on demand and then created stressful situations by:

telling participants to plunge their arms into buckets of ice water for two minutes, and
adding to the stress by telling them that their reactions were being recorded on video the entire time.

Afterward, half the participants were cued to recall the happy memories (things like going on vacation); the other half were asked to recall neutral memories (things like packing for said vacation).

Then they measured the participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

As you might imagine (since I’m bringing up the study today), those who recalled happy memories were less affected by the stress of the ice water and the video recording than those who were prompted to recall neutral memories.

All of this makes sense to me, and while I haven’t tested it the way I tried (and was amazed by) the sound therapy hack, maybe we can all try it together. Basically, bank away a happy memory that can be your go-to for your next stressful experience, and let me know if it works.

The only thing that throws me off is the “14 seconds” part. They never actually explain how they came up with that number, as far as I can find, though it seems to have something to do with keeping individual trial-recall lengths below 60 seconds for some reason. But I think we can dedicate that much time and effort to science, regardless.

And if it doesn’t work, well, we still have the 8-minute hack.

Other things worth knowing …

AP: The midterm election blowout delivered a new era in Washington, with Democrats in Congress eager to meet voter demands for change while Republicans watched their majorities evaporate after a revolt against President Donald Trump and his party in power. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer acknowledged the political reality that voters may have been more willing to reject Trump’s party than to embrace the Democrats.
CBS News: President Trump has been asking advisers whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should stay in his job, following Republicans’ catastrophic losses Tuesday night. One source told CBS News that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is being floated as a possible replacement for Hegseth, arguing DeSantis could go through Senate confirmation during the lame-duck period, while Republicans still control the Senate, and then take the post when his term as governor expires Jan. 5.
DW: Blood banks in France were included among cyberattacks that hit refrigeration systems in several European countries on Sunday and Monday, French authorities said on Wednesday. The cyberattack attempted to raise temperatures to extremely high levels but it was warded off before any damage could be done. The plasma and blood samples in the affected refrigerators were transferred or secured, the EFS said.
NBC News: New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the criminal case against Sean “Diddy” Combs will lead the investigation into an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a Cornell University fraternity house. Former federal prosecutor Jacqueline Kelly, a Cornell graduate, was also the first chief of the civil rights unit in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Kelly is now a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, a firm that represented women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sexual abuse.
NYT: CVS Health plans to split in two. Under the breakup, expected in the first half of 2028, a spinoff company, to be called CVS Pharmacy, will house the conglomerate’s approximately 9,000 retail pharmacies, in-store medical clinics and a warehouse-based operation that sends prescriptions through the mail to consumers. A second company will retain the name CVS Health and include Aetna, the major insurer; Caremark, the giant pharmacy benefit manager; and other businesses that provide home visits and primary care to older people.
Semafor: How big money lost the 2026 midterms.
Business Insider: I grew up in a trailer and was embarrassed to use food stamps. Now I own a $13 million company. (This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Erika Sinner, founder of Directorie. It has been edited for length and clarity.)
The Guardian: Alligator strolls into North Carolina bagel shop: 3ft-long reptile was looking for a meal before animal protective services safely removed it from establishment.

Thanks for reading. Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. Low Power Mode today, and if you knew that, I love you. See you in the comments!

‘Get this through your thick skulls’

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:01:06 GMT

Photo by Christophe Hautier on Unsplash

This is a story about Martha Stewart, work-life balance, and consistency. It even came up before she made headlines for dressing as a homeless person for Halloween.

Let’s start with just about the last thing Stewart said recently when Vivian Tu interviewed her for the Richer Lives by SoFi podcast.

It came after Tu asked Stewart for advice for women entrepreneurs and professionals who say they have a hard time balancing all of the parts of their lives.

Here’s Stewart:

“There is no such thing as balance. Just get that through your thick skulls.
“You’re going to get divorced if you’re going to get divorced. You’re going to get married three times if you’re going to get married three times. ...
“This thing about balance, I don’t know who thought about that, but it just doesn’t work. Maybe infrequently, and I’m jealous of those people, but they’re also boring. ... There’s no balance.”

On the one hand, at age 85, Stewart has reached the age when you can say whatever is on your mind, whenever you want.

But as I saw this exchange pop up in a few of my feeds, I thought to myself: This is sort of Stewart’s brand, isn’t it?

Here she was nine years ago, in an interview for CNN, saying almost the exact same thing:

“It’s one of the most difficult things to do, that balance, which is so elusive to most of us. It didn’t work for me.
“I thought, oh, I can do it. I can do all of that. I had to sacrifice a marriage, because of the lure of the great job. But I don’t regret it at all, because what I’ve done is something bigger and better than just one marriage, probably. I shouldn’t say that.
“People who are happily married, don’t hate me for saying that. But for me, it’s true. It’s impossible for most of us to get that balance.”

And one more, because this was me, a full 10 years ago, writing about how Stewart seemed to be attacking an entire generation (millennials) for not working hard enough and wanting everything handed to them.

“[W]ho are Millennials? Now we are finding out that they are living with their parents. They don’t have the initiative to go out and find a little apartment and grow a tomato plant on the terrace….
“I understand the plight of younger people…. The economic circumstances out there are very grim. But you have to work for it. You have to strive for it. You have to go after it.”

In fairness and hindsight, maybe Stewart was speaking more wistfully about millennials than she was actually attacking them.

And of course, criticizing a generation’s work ethic isn’t exactly the same thing as arguing that work-life balance is impossible. But both comments seem to reflect a fairly consistent philosophy about ambition, hard work, and personal responsibility.

t’s interesting. Once I realized how consistent Stewart has been on this subject, I started wondering:

What have other “masters of the universe” types said about work-life balance?

I went looking, and found some remarkably different answers.

Richard Branson, in article he wrote in 2016 called, literally, “The Importance of Work-Life Balance: “I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for my family. ... I’ve tried to be similarly supportive of my children, and I make it a priority to spend time with them and my wife, Joan, every single day.”
Steve Blank, serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author: “People who talk about work-life balance, I think that’s a mistake ... I think if you’re going to invest in a family, it ought to not be balanced. [Your investment] should be in the family.”
Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx: “I just layered the full-time job of being a mom on top of another full-time job at Spanx and then wondered why I was so exhausted. I started to notice changes in my health and couldn’t think as clearly. I feel like this happens to a lot of women. We just assume we will figure it out. There is no manual, and no way to truly prepare. I am still a work in progress.”
Sheryl Sandberg, former Meta COO: “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance.”
Jack Welch, once upon a time CEO of GE: “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

What’s interesting is that even the people who seem to agree with Stewart don’t necessarily agree with one another.

So, where does this leave us? I hope it’s not a bad place.

Maybe there simply isn’t a single right answer. We all have to decide what’s important to us, make our choices, and live with the consequences.

And that’s another kind of balance entirely.

Other things worth knowing …

NBC News: Democrats won enough seats to take control of both the House and the Senate, including winning Senate seats in states where they hadn’t been competitive in decades: Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kansas, and Iowa. Races in Michigan, Minnesota, Alaska and Maine hadn’t been called by the time I gave up and went to bed, and even Mississippi was in play. Democrats also won the governors races in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Maine, and Iowa.
AP: Federal authorities have charged an Oklahoma man with sending hundreds of letters containing nonhazardous white powder to public officials ahead of the 2024 and 2026 elections. The powders turned out to be yeast or flour, though not all letters have been fully tested, the FBI said in a court filing made public Tuesday. Robin Martin is charged with conveying a hoax and mailing threatening communications.
Yahoo News: US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Washington would stop giving Israel around $4 billion a year in military aid from 2027. Speaking by phone to Fox News, Trump said Israel no longer needed the money, and had become too easy a target for critics such as Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat and outspoken critic of Israel who is running for the Senate in Michigan.
ABC News: A federal judge in Illinois has rejected a bid by McDonald’s to dismiss a class action lawsuit regarding its popular McRib sandwiches and is allowing the suit to move forward. The class action lawsuit, which was first filed in December 2025, alleges McDonald’s engaged in “false representations, omissions and concealments” when it marketed McRib sandwiches “deliberately crafted to resemble a rack of pork ribs” as “premium” pork rib sandwiches.
The Telegraph: The UK dismissed a series of bomb threats on flights across Europe as a “malicious hoax.” Eight planes, including three from the UK, were targeted with threats in the past 24 hours, raising fears of a coordinated attack.
NYT: Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available. But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.
AP: An unidentified celebrity lost a bid Tuesday for a U.K. court injunction to block two news organizations from publishing sexual misconduct allegations against him. The celebrity denies wrongdoing and has repeatedly said he intended to take his own life if the allegations were published, according to the judgment. The case has drawn widespread attention in Britain because it highlights questions over public figures’ right to privacy and what media can report on the basis of public interest.

Thanks for reading. Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. See you in the comments!

Walk faster

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:03:51 GMT

When we stop using muscles—metaphorical muscles or physical ones—we tend to lose the ability to use them. A few examples:

Maybe you or someone you know used to be very fluent in another language, but without the chance to practice it, it kind of goes away.
Or maybe there’s a hobby or an avocation that you were into at one time, but you just haven’t had the time to really pursue it, and you know that your skills have fallen off.
Since I’m talking about personal habits and skills, I’ll add one of mine. I used to run marathons, a full 20 years ago. But I had one kind of stupid injury during a light run the week after I ran one of them.

And, to be honest, I never really 100 percent recovered.

I had all of this in mind when I came across a recent study showing what happened when older adults with signs of frailty were encouraged to walk a little bit more briskly during supervised exercise sessions.

Writing in the journal PLOS One, researchers described an experiment involving residents of retirement communities around Chicago. They enrolled 165 people, with 105 ultimately included in the analysis. Their average age was about 79.

The researchers randomly assigned retirement communities to one of two walking programs. Participants in both groups participated in individual, 45-minute sessions with trained research assistants, three times a week for 16 weeks.

One group walked at a casual pace. The other was encouraged to walk as fast as they safely could, aiming for roughly 70 percent of their maximum heart rate.

Short version: Those who walked faster were more likely to become less frail.

I spoke with the study’s lead author, Margaret Danilovich.

She’s a physical therapist who conducted the research while an assistant professor at Northwestern University. (She is now director of clinical programs at Agilon Health.)

For years, she told me, there had been a tendency to treat frailty as something that only gets worse—and to avoid asking too much of people who already have limited strength and endurance.

But her experience working with patients made her suspect that “maybe this hands-off approach was not actually helpful.”

Frailty here is something researchers actually measured, using grip strength and questions about fatigue, appetite, mobility, and physical activity.

At the end of the experiment, about 70 percent of participants with follow-up frailty measurements in the faster-walking group improved by at least one frailty category.

That compared with about 46 percent in the casual-walking group.

Look, I find this research hopeful, but I also hope I’m a long way off from having to worry about something like frailty.

But it has me thinking about the things I want to stay proficient at, and whether I’m actually doing them often enough.

Or if maybe I could even turn back time, through sheer effort.

I wouldn’t pretend that I’m going to start running marathons again just because I read a study.

Although ...

Anyway, if there are things you want to remain able to do, you probably have to make room to keep doing them—and sometimes ask a little more of yourself while you’re at it.

As a wise man once said: “If you rest, you rust.”

Other things worth knowing …

UF Election Lab | No Labels: Election Day is today in the United States. As of 11 p.m. ET Monday, 58.6 million people had voted early, a big increase over the last midterm election in 2022, when a total of 45.9 million voted early.
WashPost: For 11 years, President Donald Trump’s rallies have offered a spectacle to a political movement. As Election Day approached, however, and Trump approached the lame-duck phase of his presidency, he appeared to be contemplating the end of an era: “I’m closing it down tonight,” Trump said as he opened his final rally in Kansas, before the midterm elections. “This is it.”
AP: Voters on both the left and right agree on one thing: they fear the America they’ve known is slipping away.
AP: A business jet carrying nine people nose-dived into a South Florida neighborhood Sunday and erupted into a giant fireball that appeared to just miss homes near a busy roadway. Everyone on board was killed, the nation’s transportation secretary said.
Axios: President Trump said Monday he’d protect Elon Musk if Democrats investigate SpaceX and Tesla CEO after the midterm elections, and suggested he might use pre-emptive pardons for his staff and others around him. Musk has spent nearly half a billion dollars opposing Democrats during this election cycle.
NPR: A federal magistrate judge on Monday dismissed the Justice Department’s criminal case against two former FBI officials charged in connection with the bureau’s investigations into former President Joe Biden’s son. “I am deeply troubled,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in a scathing ruling from the bench. “What transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”
BBC: Dozens of supermarkets in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland were hit by a cyber-attack affecting their refrigerators and freezers. One manufacturer said refrigerators' evaporators were hacked and switched to defrost mode, causing them to warm up, in what is believed to be the same method used in last month’s incident that hit hundreds of French supermarkets.
Yahoo Tech: Have you been vibe-coding? Sorry to say it’s already been supplanted. People are ‘vibe manufacturing’ now.

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

Big Optimism: ‘He is being remembered’

Bill Murphy Jr. — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 12:02:40 GMT

Harry Lew, probably around 1904. Disclosure: I used AI to extend the background, otherwise it wouldn’t have rendered right here.

This is a story about basketball, but we’re going to start it long before.

Like, say 1767, nearly a decade before the American Revolution, when a free Black man named Barzillai Lew in Massachusetts paid $400 to a soldier named Maj. Abraham Blood, to buy the freedom of an enslaved woman named Dinah Bowman.

Barzillai and Dinah were married, and Barzillai, apparently a gifted musician, had a life worth writing songs about.

I mean, literally — Duke Ellington later composed a song he named after him — largely, I gather, as a result of Barzillai’s service in the Revolutionary War. He served as a soldier and fifer at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, and later at General Burgoyne’s surrender after Saratoga.

The Lew family stayed in Massachusetts through the generations, and played a part in the end of slavery and the early civil rights movement.

Barzillai and Dinah’s grandson and his wife, Adrastus and Elizabeth Lew, made their home in Lowell a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Then their son, William, who with his wife, Isabelle, ran a dry-cleaning and fabric-dyeing business, was a delegate to the 1891 Equal Rights Convention in Boston.
And then it was their son — Harry Haskell Lew, the reason we’re writing about this family today — who integrated the game of professional basketball in November 1902.

Let’s talk about Harry Lew. He was born January 4, 1884, the oldest of four children, and grew up in the same house on Mount Hope Street in Lowell that his grandparents had opened to escaped slaves.

Everyone called him Bucky.

Basketball was pretty new — James Naismith had invented it in Springfield, Mass., in 1891 — and the game spread quickly through YMCAs across New England. Bucky started playing for the Lowell YMCA at 14, and by 1902, Lowell had two professional teams in the New England Basketball League.

Like the rest of professional basketball at the time, both teams were all white, but local newspapers pressured James Gray, manager of the Pawtucketville Athletic Club in Lowell, to give Lew a chance.

Eventually, Gray signed the 18-year-old Harry Lew as his lone substitute, but told him he wouldn’t actually play.

As Lew remembered it, Gray told him all he had to do was “sit on the bench for my five bucks pay.” ($5 then was about the equivalent of $200 today.)

On November 6, 1902, however, 124 years ago this week (and 44 years before the start of the NBA), Pawtucketville played in Marlborough, Mass., and one of Lew’s teammates was injured.

At first, Gray actually chose to play with just four men rather than play a Black substitute. But, the crowd, including people who had traveled from Lowell, “got real mad and almost started a riot, screaming to let me play,” Lew recalled.

Gray relented, and when Lew took the floor, he became the first Black player in a professional basketball game.

Newspapers barely mentioned any of this at first, though one said he played well.

But, as the season went on, he became hard to overlook, especially on defense, and by December the Lowell Daily Courier wrote: “Lew is a gentle little man to look at, but when the whistle blows, he becomes a whirlwind.”

By the end of the season, another paper called him a star.

Lew took more than his share of elbows and knees from white opponents. Years later, he compared his experience to Jackie Robinson’s and said he “got the same treatment and even worse.”

But he also said he gave it right back, and that some of the men who hit him hardest later became good friends.

After a season with Pawtucketville, he signed with a new team in Haverhill, about 20 miles from home, where he became a fan favorite and usually guarded the other team’s best player.

Of course, this wasn’t quite an “and then everyone was no longer racist” story.

In 1904, for example, Lew’s team played a top team from Natick, and the Natick players reportedly refused to try while Lew was on the floor. Lew actually sat out so the game could continue.

The league fined Natick, and Lew came back to help Haverhill reach the championship — which it lost to Natick.

I guess it would be a better story if they had won, but we can’t change history. We can note that the league itself folded soon after, but Lew kept playing for another two decades, into his 40s, for teams that traveled around New England.

He also coached a local college team and refereed games, breaking barriers in both.

Then, he went to work full time in the family dry-cleaning business.

He liked boxing and opera and rarely talked about basketball.

His granddaughter, Wendy Johnson, said she heard about his groundbreaking play only when she was being picked on as a child. He told her she wouldn’t be able to please everybody, but if she did her best, she’d know it in her heart.

In 1958, at his daughters’ urging, Harry Lew finally gave an interview about his career to the Springfield Union newspaper.

He died of prostate cancer on October 22, 1963, at 79, and was buried a few miles from where the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame opened five years later. The Naismith Hall featured him in a 2001 exhibit on the game’s Black pioneers but never inducted him.

This past August, the American Basketball Hall of Fame in Detroit did, and Wendy Johnson accepted on his behalf.

“He is being remembered,” she said, “and I appreciate that with all my heart.”

(Credit on this one to the “Overlooked No More” feature at the New York Times and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.)

7 other moments from history this week

Sunday, Nov. 1: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it.” — John Adams to Abigail, writing the day after he moved into the unfinished White House on this day in 1800.
Monday, Nov. 2: “Will anyone hearing this broadcast please communicate with us, as we are anxious to know how far the broadcast is reaching.” — Announcer Leo Rosenberg during KDKA’s Harding–Cox election returns broadcast on this day in 1920.
Tuesday, Nov. 3: “The 1960’s can be—and must be—the crucial ‘Decade of Development.’” — President Kennedy, in his March 1961 message to Congress on foreign aid; he established USAID under the new Foreign Assistance Act on this day in 1961. The agency traced its roots to the Marshall Plan.
Wednesday, Nov. 4: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man’ or accept chimpanzees as human.” — Louis Leakey, answering a telegram from Jane Goodall, who on this day in 1960 watched a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard make and use a tool. Goodall, 26, saw him strip the leaves from a stalk and use it to pull termites from their mound.
Thursday, Nov. 5: “Fifty-two fundamental errors.” — Parker Brothers’ reason for rejecting Charles Darrow’s game, as the company’s own history tells it; it began marketing Monopoly on this day in 1935 after Darrow’s homemade sets sold well in Philadelphia stores.
Friday, Nov. 6: “If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.” — The show’s longtime slogan; “Meet the Press” made its TV debut on NBC on this day in 1947, hosted by co-creator Martha Rountree. It began as a Saturday night show and is now the longest-running program on American television.
Saturday, Nov. 7: “All I can say is that the work has been well done in every way.” — William Van Horne, asked for a speech after Donald Smith drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Craigellachie on this day in 1885.

Free for ALL Friday! (10/30/2026)

Bill Murphy Jr. — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 11:02:32 GMT

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

The Longest Active Championship Droughts in Sports After Brewers Win World Series

Apparently, 2026 is the year of snapping long championship droughts.

In June, the New York Knicks won their first title in 53 years after defeating the San Antonio Spurs in the 2026 NBA Finals. Four months later, the Milwaukee Brewers snapped a 57-year championship drought by beating the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series.
Winning a title is the goal for every professional team. Every addition to and subtraction from the roster is made with a long-term vision in mind. Even an intentional teardown is executed with the idea of building up a future contender.
But as the Knicks and Brewers know full well, a championship can be agonizingly elusive. For some organizations, the dream of winning a title has never been more than exactly that.
In the wake of the Knicks’ and Brewers’ wins, the following teams now have the longest championship droughts across all of the major U.S. sports.

Link: Bleacher Report

Old Enough for a Driver’s License? They’re in No Rush.

Gen Z teenagers are no longer racing toward this rite of passage. What’s the hurry, with so much of their lives happening online?

The video game Grand Theft Auto allows players to steal vehicles, blow up factories and race monster trucks. That all sounds exciting, but Korey Batey, a driving instructor in Detroit, has been using the game to show teenagers how to parallel park.
“Now we turn that wheel to the left, just like that, and back it up, nice and easy,” Batey, 37, says in a TikTok video of himself guiding a black sedan into a tight parking spot. In another, he traverses the game’s roadways to point out the difference between stop and yield signs.
A few decades ago, a driver’s license was just about the most exciting thing you could offer a teenager. That little card offered a tantalizing taste of freedom. Passing the road test was a rite of passage for young adults eager to live life on their own terms; failing was a plot point in coming-of-age movies like “License to Drive” (1988, starring Coreys Haim and Feldman) and “Clueless” (1995).
These days, instructors like Batey have to go to great lengths — like invoking video games — to pique young people’s interest in getting behind the wheel.
Just over a quarter of American 16-year-olds had their driver’s licenses in 2024, a 20-point drop from the early 1980s, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
For Batey, the TikTok videos are just a hook. He teaches hundreds of behind-the-wheel lessons each year to students who are mostly ages 18 to 25. In Michigan, teenagers are eligible to get a learner’s license at 14.

Where Do Trends Come From Now?

There’s long been a little voice in our heads telling us “It’s time to go shopping.” But in the age of hyper-optimized algorithms, who’s doing the talking?

A few years ago, during a fit of self-actualization, I got my ears pierced. I don’t have any tattoos, and I’ve never even dyed my hair, so the decision to pierce my ears felt both exciting and personally out of the ordinary. I still don’t quite understand why I did it. Men have been piercing their ears for centuries, but I suspect, as with so many things we guys also do, particularly where clothes and accessories are concerned, my decision had something to do with tiny hoops being trendy.
Trends are as old as civilization itself, but the speed at which they move in the age of TikTok and AI-driven algorithms has never been faster. Likewise, with a good portion of the global population on some kind of social media, a trend’s reach has never been farther. These changes—exemplified by my sudden, inexplicable desire for hoops—begged a couple of questions: Where do trends come from now? And how do we know when they’ve run their course? For answers, I turned to the people who study trends for a living.
Nick Paget, the senior menswear strategist at trend forecasting company WGSN, believes that “it will be increasingly hard to look back on this decade and say, ‘Ooh, it was all about this kind of styling, this look’ in the way that we used to be able to say about the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s or ’60s.” Nowadays, it’s like every era-based trend has been chucked into a blender and blitzed into oblivion. Institutional tastemakers, including high-fashion designers and magazines such as this one, seemingly have less say than ever.
To understand what consumers want and where they are headed, WGSN has its own methods of analyzing data. According to Paget, the company uses TikTok metrics to monitor various algorithms (a platform they aptly call “TikTok Dashboard”) to get a more holistic view of what users are interested in. “We neutralize the algorithm bias that someone might have if they just use their own account,” he explains. Via this mechanism, they can effectively watch a fashion trend be born on the runway and transform, grow, and die across social platforms.

Link: GQ

The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take

It’s an ungodly amount of reading and no easy A. So why are freshmen lining up to get into Humanities 10?

Those who see the humanities, heavy coursework and value of a Harvard education as gravely imperiled can take heart in the phenomenon that is Humanities 10.
On a Tuesday morning in October, Samantha Matherne paced as she marked up on a white board explaining the philosophical underpinnings of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” with segues into Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.
The philosophy professor posed big questions to the 90 students gathered in Boylston Hall: “Why did Austen create such an unlikable heroine?” she asked. “Why read novels at all?” And finally, as the 75-minute lecture ended, “What will become of Emma—and what will become of you?”
The students burst into applause.
Hum 10, as it’s commonly known, has become the surprise hit of Harvard’s academic lineup and something of a campus institution. Demand to get into the class has surged, fueled by word-of-mouth from “Hum Alums” who talk it up on social media. Applications (essays required) shot up 40% this fall with 180 incoming freshmen vying for 90 spots.
It’s a fever that even the professors are struggling to explain.
It’s all distinctly old school. Hotly contested terms like “Western Civ,” “Great Books” and “the canon” appear nowhere in the course description. But the curriculum begins with “The Odyssey,” travels forward in time to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and then backward to end with “The Iliad.” In between are assignments on Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Baldwin, Dante and Plato.
“I did have the sense that a lot of students feel that the culture at large is not hospitable to deep reading, deep thinking or deep engagement with writing,” said David Elmer, a classics professor and one of Hum 10’s co-leads. “Whether that’s because of AI encroaching on their autonomy as a writer or thinker, I honestly don’t know.”

Searching for Jobs, Gen Z Feels Like It’s Staring Into ‘The Void’

Hundreds of applications later, even being rejected by an actual human being counts as a victory.

A 22-year-old with an undergraduate degree in biology has applied for 511 jobs and counting. She was recently rejected from a role at Whole Foods after being “interviewed” by a chatbot named Sage.
A 23-year-old applying for administrative jobs in Texas keeps being asked to videotape himself, alone in his apartment, answering questions about his qualifications.
A 23-year-old in Kansas started applying for jobs at fast-food joints and at movie theaters after failing to find work as a paralegal. He answered the phone for one job interview and realized he was speaking to an A.I. agent.
The New York Times recently asked members of Gen Z to write to us about what it feels like to be searching for a job right now. They described a process that is lonely, opaque and impersonal, in which it is hard to tell whether one is being rejected by a hiring manager or an A.I. screener.
The problem is not just that hiring has slowed across the labor market, or that the specter of A.I. is threatening entry-level positions, they said. It was that they could not get a real, live human being to speak to them. Ever. About anything.
“You can’t do the classic, ‘Give them a firm handshake and say you’re ready to start on Monday,’” said Imani Stone-Thompson, 29, who lives in Rochester, N.Y. “That hasn’t worked for a really long time.”
She echoed what many people said: There are no phone numbers to call, no publicly accessible hiring managers to charm with a personalized email. Instead, there is what feels like a wall of tech that needs to be pierced in order to reach a human being.

How Long Does It Take to Save Up for a Starter Home? Twice as Long as It Did in 2019

Mortgage rates topping 7% is the latest sign of how hard it has gotten to buy a first house, with aspiring owners already facing sky-high prices. A new analysis out Thursday shines a light on yet another growing obstacle: the amount needed to close a home loan.
“Over the last seven years, the time to save up that down payment and closing costs has doubled,” said Mike Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, a research nonprofit that promotes economic opportunity. The report was released by the center’s Julian Bond Institute.
Since 2019, the last time the center made the same calculation, home prices have shot up, inflation spiked and has remained stubbornly high, and the rising cost of food, gas, healthcare and more has strained family budgets. Closing costs on a home loan have also ticked up, driven in part by rising homeowners insurance.
Amid all this, renters’ incomes have not kept pace, and personal savings rates have dropped.
Today, the center calculates that for a median-income renter household, it would take a “staggering 16 years” to save up a down payment and closing costs for a starter home. That’s twice as long as in 2019. And it would take even more time — 21 years — for a median-income Black renter household.

Link: NPR

How Bolsonaro Fled Brazil: Decoys, a Private Jet and a Friend in the White House

After losing Brazil’s election, Flávio Bolsonaro fled to Miami in an elaborate operation aided by Trump’s inner circle and Argentina’s president

Less than 24 hours after losing Brazil’s presidential election, Flávio Bolsonaro appeared to vanish into a convoy of four dark cars.
After pulling away from his home in Brasília on Monday evening, the vehicles split in different directions, leaving journalists and authorities scrambling to determine which one carried Bolsonaro. By the next afternoon, the former presidential candidate’s allies were telling reporters he had already reached Florida.
As Brazilian and international outlets reported that Bolsonaro had left the country, he was still in Brazil, while a private jet waited for him across the border in Argentina. At 12:21 a.m. Wednesday, the Gulfstream G400 took off from Puerto Iguazú and whisked him to Ecuador and then Miami, where his entry was facilitated by Trump allies his family spent years cultivating.
The getaway—which relied heavily on deception and decoys—sparked a global guessing game that left even some of Bolsonaro’s closest allies in Washington and Brazil in the dark about his whereabouts.
After Bolsonaro stepped off the plane in Miami on Wednesday morning wearing a navy polo shirt and a backpack, uniformed officers used umbrellas to shield him and his family from cameras. Their arrival followed an extraordinary effort by a small circle of influential Trump allies, senior U.S. officials and Argentine President Javier Milei to help him fly to the U.S. and secure entry, despite a Brazilian court order barring Bolsonaro from leaving the country.

Trump Fired Him. The ‘DEI Watchlist’ Shamed Him. Then Came 500 Job Rejections.

Efforts to purge the government of diversity, equity and inclusion programs have taken a major toll on Black workers who now struggle to find comparable jobs.

On his 368th day without a job, Dia Harris woke at 8:30, slipped a coffee pod into his Keurig and checked his iPad to see how many more rejections had come in overnight.
There were two automated messages from “Meta Careers,” thanking him for applying to be a program manager. “Our recruiting team will contact you if your qualifications are a strong match,” Harris read. By his count, those were the 560th and 561st roles he’d sought since getting fired from the federal government.
After he showered, he found another message waiting: this one from the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that combats suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. Harris, 53, recalled thinking that the Trevor Project’s “chief people officer” was the rare posting that felt like something he would be good at and actually wanted to do.
“While your qualifications and experience are truly impressive, they don’t fully align ...,” Harris read now, and he deleted the latest rejection unfinished.
Harris was the first chief equity officer for the Administration for Children and Families, or ACF, a large agency in the Department of Health and Human Services that helps vulnerable Americans with foster care, home energy needs and early education. He was among more than 200 employees targeted for dismissal by DOGE after President Trump issued an order to rid the government of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which he declared were divisive and destructive and “would have ruined our country.”
Harris’s job search was made harder by his membership in an even smaller group: He’d been named, with 92 others — two-thirds of them Black — on a public website called the “DEI Watchlist.” Run by a little-known conservative group with ties to the Heritage Foundation, the site claimed to expose “behind-the-scenes bureaucrats who push divisive DEI agendas that undermine merit, fairness, and accountability.”
Of the 43 federal employees named on the watch list who lost or left their government jobs, 2 out of 3 remain unemployed as of this month, a Post analysis of their social media profiles and postings shows.
“If the Post’s reporting that the 2/3rds of the DEI staffers on the list can’t find work is accurate, we cannot overstate our joy that trafficking in anti-white bigotry now makes you unemployable,” Tom Jones, the president of the American Accountability Foundation, wrote in an email. “Our only regret about the watchlist is that we didn’t have the time or resources to profile more left wing woke bureaucrats.”

Link: Washington Post

Inside the Trump DOJ’s Pressure Campaign on One Immigration Judge

Karen Donoso Stevens offers a rare firsthand look at the administration’s campaign to transform the immigration court system.

THE JUDGE HAD JUST CALLED COURT TO ORDER on that winter morning, and already, a dozen attorneys waited on her TV screen, each with an urgent request. Their clients, all locked up and facing deportation, needed hearing dates scheduled or bond requests considered. As always, the judge had prepared for every case days earlier, because almost nothing happened in Courtroom 15 that she didn’t anticipate.
Then the door behind her swung open, thudding against the wall. In walked her supervisor.
“Are you on the record?” he asked, questioning whether she was in session.
Karen Donoso Stevens was in session, and she was certain he knew it. The judge held up a finger — wait — as she announced a recess inside the Annandale Immigration Court.
A Homeland Security attorney at the prosecution table watched in silence, as did her legal assistant.
She drew a long breath, then stood in the black robe she’d worn for nearly a decade, its cloth fraying at the elbow.
Here we go, the judge thought, certain she was about to be fired.
No cog in President Trump’s effort to expel millions of “illegal aliens” was more essential — and less familiar to the public — than the immigration courts that decide who stays and who goes.
The sprawling system doesn’t operate like most courts. It exists within the Justice Department, which is overseen by the attorney general and, ultimately, the president. Nevertheless, it is obligated to afford migrants due process and manage cases according to the law, nothing else.
And yet, in the first year of Trump’s second term, the Justice Department fired some 100 of the country’s roughly 700 immigration judges and began to replace them with what the administration called “deportation judges.”

Link: Washington Post
Backup: https://archive.is/KF8Lv#selection-709.0-725.2

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

Get out of the way

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 11:01:14 GMT

Photo by FY Chang on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, Philadelphia police arrested a 78-year-old woman for standing in front of a delivery robot and refusing to move.

Meet Carolyn Marvin. She’s a retired University of Pennsylvania professor, and apparently she’d been blocking robots for months whenever she happened to encounter one.

She doesn’t damage them. She just stands in their way, as part of an ongoing protest against the idea of replacing human delivery workers (and jobs) with machines.

On October 14, she spotted an Uber Eats robot near Reading Terminal Market and stopped it from proceeding.

Someone called the police; officers told her to get out of the robot’s way. She refused, and so they arrested her for disorderly conduct.

This is a problem. And not to turn this whole newsletter into a giant ongoing list of “Bill-Told-You-Sos,” but:

October 2021: “3 robots.” In which I wrote that I was not especially enamored of the idea of Elon Musk creating a literal army of humanoid Tesla Optimus robots that were roughly the size of UFC champion Conor McGregor, even if he promised they would be “friendly.”
October 2024: “The robot will walk among you.” Fortunately, Musk has this very long history of promising products that don’t actually come to fruition. But by this time, Tesla Optimus prototypes had apparently grown a bit taller, and Musk was predicting they would “babysit your kids, walk your dog ... get the groceries” and yes, “walk among you.”

As I wrote back then: “Imagine what it would be like to have these things walking about in your town, cutting in front of you in the stores you frequent, jockeying for space with people on sidewalks.”

So no, I have not gotten aboard Team Robot in the ensuing years, even if the delivery robots we now see on sidewalks are small and cute, with headlights, little flags, and sometimes faces that look like they’re smiling.

In Chicago, a man named Josh Robertson started a petition after his family had to step aside for a delivery robot. It gathered more than 4,500 signatures.

Researchers observing delivery robots in Seoul have described what they call “robot privilege.”

They watched robots honk at pedestrians to get them to move, but instead move quietly around dogs.

In Pennsylvania, the law technically requires delivery robots, which can be as tall as six feet and weigh as much as 550 pounds without cargo, to “yield the right of way” to pedestrians.

But in Carolyn Marvin’s case, the police arrived and ordered the human being to move.

OK. Historical precedent. A century ago, automobiles started taking over American streets.

Before cars, streets were shared spaces. People walked in them. Children played in them. Horses went through them.

The automobile industry helped popularize the word jaywalking. A jay was a country bumpkin. The point was to make pedestrians look foolish for using streets as they’d always used them.

Eventually, we made room for cars by pushing people out of most of the street. It was an enormous shift in who had the right of way, and now we take it for granted.

(And we got “stroads” like this 1.5-mile stretch in Memphis that the Wall Street Journal called “one of the most dangerous roads in America.”

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

So let’s recap:

Someone who can afford delivery pays a corporation to send a machine through a shared public space.
The corporation gets to avoid paying a human delivery worker.
Even if the law says one thing somewhere, people apparently has to move over and make way.

Remember the cantina scene in the original Star Wars? Where Luke Skywalker walks in with C-3PO and R2-D2, and the bartender tells him the droids aren’t welcome.

I used to side with the droids. But now I understand the bartender.

Other things worth knowing …

NYT: Life magazine, known for its red-box logo and devotion to visual storytelling, will start publishing again next month as a quarterly print magazine. Karlie Kloss, the model and entrepreneur who is backing the project through her Bedford Media company, says that the legacy of the brand deserved to be reinvigorated and brought into the 21st century. In addition to a website and a social media presence, Life plans to expand into short-form video, documentary films and events.
WSJ: Tens of thousands of homeowners have adjustable rate mortgages from years ago that are now resetting, increasing their monthly payments by hundreds or even thousands of dollars, with mortgage rates at their highest point in three years. The largest category consists of people who took out seven-year fixed-period adjustable rate mortgages in 2020. They face a median monthly payment increase of 43%, or $1,269 a month.
AP: A U.S. cruise ship on an around-the-world voyage that touted its cabins as floating homes suspended its three-year voyage in Cambodia due to fuel costs, forcing hundreds of passengers to disembark. The MV Odyssey set sail two years ago on a voyage to the seven continents marketed as combining long-term living at sea with global travel, with the purchase price of a suite for the lifetime of the vessel starting around $230,000. The ship has been carrying 203 passengers, mostly Americans, along with 156 crew members, according to Cambodian officials.
The Guardian: People in a Mississippi neighborhood, many of whom dislike a nearby power plant central to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence ambitions, have received a stark offer – to sell their houses to his company and make way. Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of Musk’s xAI, touting a deal to purchase houses as long as the owners agree to not join a lawsuit against the company over the power plant’s noise.
Yahoo Finance: Defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro and his family landed in Miami on Wednesday after fleeing Brazil. The stunning move came after 48 hours in which Bolsonaro refused to concede to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and then threatened to attempt to annul the election result. Bolsonaro is under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in two cases.
Variety: Russell Brand took the stand in his criminal trial in London on Wednesday, denying all accusations against him and revealing that he was not able to convince anyone to testify on his behalf. The case against him involves six female plaintiffs, all of whom are given automatic lifelong anonymity according to U.K. law, and relates to alleged offenses that occurred between 1999 and 2009.
CBS News: A high-speed train reportedly slammed into the rear of another train that had stopped in central Spain, derailing two cars and killing at least 64 people Wednesday morning, according to local authorities. The regional government of Castilla-La Mancha said the death toll had risen to 64. Earlier in the day, 80 people were reported injured.

Thanks for reading. Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. See you in the comments!

Old boss’s new book

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 11:03:45 GMT

Last year, I got a call from the reporting assistant to Bob Woodward — the person who now holds the job I had 20 years ago.

She told me Bob was working on a reporter’s memoir — “not an autobiography,” she stressed, which I could 100% envision him saying. As part of that, she wanted to ask me what I remembered about my time with him.

We chatted, and then when I had some free time about a year ago, I flew down to DC to see Bob.

I realized that after working for him all those years ago and interviewing sources, the tables had turned and now I was a source.

Weirdly, as I think happens with a lot of sources for a lot of journalists, I nearly forgot about the experience—never mind whatever it was I actually said.

I mean, there was the Google Apocalypse to deal with and family vacations and the launch of Life Story Magic, and then I started to get some business consulting gigs, and a friend convinced me to spend some time putting together a draft of a memoir of my own, and I was coaching soccer and traveling with family and hitting the gym, and honestly just sitting back sometimes and looking at my wife and my daughter and my life and thinking how did I get so lucky ...

Then, Monday afternoon I was flipping through the digital version of The Washington Post and saw that the Post had “obtained” an advance copy of Bob’s manuscript, called Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir, and summarized a lot of the book—thus giving away some of the secrets.

It’s a 592-page book, coming out November 24. Bob has apparently decided that after 55 years of reporting, and with many of his longtime confidential sources now dead, he can reveal some of the people who helped him get his biggest stories.

Examples:

How Nixon’s own defense lawyers were secretly talking to Woodward during Watergate.
How five Supreme Court justices secretly talked to Woodward and his co-author Scott Armstrong for their 1979 book, The Brethren.
How Woodward managed to get into the hospital room of CIA Director William Casey in 1987 — one of his "No way, how did he do that?" reporting moments — despite the security surrounding the gravely ill spymaster.

How? He’d spent years cultivating Casey’s security guards as sources, too. When he showed up uninvited, one of them greeted him with “Hi, Bob,” and simply let him in.

Actually, I guess I can now say that I can corroborate the Casey story—at least in that I remember Bob sharing it with me back in 2006.

Anyway, I thought I’d include something about this in Free for ALL Friday.

But then I saw yesterday that Bob had written a long article for The New Yorker, drawn from the book. I read it standing in my kitchen, start to finish, as soon as I saw it.

So let me share a personal thing or two about the oddity of me winding up working for Woodward, and what I learned.

When I was in 7th or 8th grade in the mid-1980s, I read All the President’s Men at least a half a dozen times.

I was really into it. I watched the film starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman over and over, too, borrowing a VHS tape from the library in my hometown in Rhode Island.

Fast forward 20 years, and after a meandering path, I wound up working as Woodward’s lead reporting assistant for two years in the mid-2000s. In fact, when I started with Bob in 2005, I literally got off active duty in the Army JAG Corps on a Friday, and started working for him the following Monday.

It was only a few weeks after I started working with Bob that his Watergate-era source “Deep Throat” was revealed to the world, as the former #2 man in the FBI, Mark Felt.

So, I helped Bob quickly write his book, The Secret Man. I also worked on what turned out to be the “big project” during that time, his book about President Bush and the Iraq War called State of Denial.

Toward the end of my time working with Bob, a fellow journalist asked me for my big takeaways. I think he was hoping for some kind of magic spell that gets people to talk to journalists.

But it wasn’t that intriguing. It’s simply that you have to be willing to do the work.

Most people aren’t.

I think I was always a hard worker, and I could be determined.

But there was just something I learned in that job about being wiling to do the same things over and over — meeting people, conducting interviews, digging through documents — and accepting that most of the time it wouldn’t obviously lead to anything.

Because occasionally it leads to gold—but also because, quite frankly, it’s a lot of fun. In fact, I might well have spent my entire career trying to find ways to get paid to do that kind of work—one way or another.

Which brings me back to The New Yorker.

Bob’s article is called The Danger of Getting Too Close to a Source. It’s largely about his relationship with Richard Darman, who served in senior positions in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Darman was both one of Bob’s closest friends and one of his most important confidential sources. They talked constantly, and Bob says he interviewed him at least 58 times before their friendship ultimately fell apart in 1992.

Their friendship fell apart after Bob published a series of stories about the Bush administration's economic policies. Darman felt betrayed.

It’s a pretty remarkable account, especially because Bob writes about his own mistakes and regrets.

He says he and Darman never really reconciled before Darman died in 2008. And, he writes about his time as an editor at The Washington Post in the early 1980s, when one of the reporters under his supervision won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict that turned out to have been fabricated.

Bob calls it a professional and moral failure, and he describes the way he managed the reporters who worked for him—which led to some success but also to the fabrication disaster.

He gave them freedom, but demanded more and more. He’d push them to peel back additional layers of a story, sometimes telling them to go back and interview the same people four more times.

I recognized the single-mindedness. I recognized the willingness—even eagerness—to do the fourth interview, and the fortieth.

So, my takeaway? Talk to everyone. Ask questions. Be willing to look a little foolish sometimes.

Listen to the answers. Keep your recorder running. And, when you think you’ve got everything, keep pushing.

The best stuff always comes during the last 5 to 10 percent of your effort.

But also: Don’t be afraid to put it all aside to go and coach soccer.

Other things worth knowing …

WaPo: I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy: What I saw was a split screen between a familiar past and a future of luxurious, space-age cars that cost far less than comparable models at home.
Reuters via Yahoo: The US Federal Election Commission’s website was targeted by a hacker or hackers, according to an email seen by Reuters, disrupting the agency’s electronic filings system a week before the November 3 elections. The hack comes as so-called super PACs and dark money groups spend record sums in the final days of the races. The FEC does not play a role in administering US elections and the outage should have no effect on voters’ ability to cast ballots.
The Guardian: A Florida surgeon has performed the first telerobotic operation between two US hospitals, removing the prostate of a man with cancer from 35 miles away, according to officials. Dr. Vipul Patel, founder and medical director of the Global Robotics Institute at AdventHealth Celebration in suburban Orlando, on Sunday performed an investigational robotic prostatectomy on a 66-year-old prostate cancer patient who volunteered for a clinical study evaluating a robotic telesurgery system.
ABC News: The Alexander brothers were each sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday, after being found guilty on all counts in their federal sex trafficking trial in New York City. The former real estate titans, Oren and Alon Alexander, 39-year-old twins, along with their brother, Tal Alexander, 40, were accused by prosecutors of a “decade-long sex trafficking and sexual abuse scheme.” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Espinosa asked the judge for the maximum sentence -- life in prison.
NYT: U.S. Pensions Are Riding the A.I. Wave. For Better or Worse: As exuberance around the technology stokes fears of a bubble, the nation’s public pensions are starting to grapple with their role — and their risks.
Axios: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is running nearly even with Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc in Tuesday’s historic election — but both are short of a 61-seat majority, according to Israeli exit polls. Political stalemate is the most likely outcome of the election, with Netanyahu weakened but neither side having a clear path to forming a coalition government. Arab parties are poised to win 18 to 19 seats in what would be an unprecedented electoral achievement.
The Hill: A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson over her testimony to lawmakers about President Trump’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The decision marks another setback for the Trump administration’s efforts to pursue criminal charges against the president’s political adversaries.

Thanks for reading. Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. See you in the comments!

Best before

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:03:49 GMT

I recently interviewed a Life Story Magic customer who grew up working in her family’s general store in the 1930s. One detail stuck with me: her family bought goods in bulk and packaged individual portions only when customers came in.

For example, if a customer wanted cheese, they’d cut a slice from a giant wheel of cheese.
Or if customers wanted grain, they’d scoop out the amount they wanted from a giant bag and put it in a smaller one.
Oh, and for beer — customers came in with their own containers, and they’d fill them from a giant barrel.

No boxes of cereal with cartoon characters, no “settling of contents may occur” and of course, no “best before” date on the packages.

I don’t know what it would have been like to be a customer then, but I suspect I might at least have assumed that the food was fresh.

A proxy for naturalness?

Today, some shoppers are using shelf life as a shortcut to judge how natural their food is. The shorter the shelf life, the thinking goes, the less processed the product.

But that’s a bit of a mistake, Yann Cornil, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, told me recently.

Cornil and two colleagues, Dan Liu and Xiaobing Xu, published research in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in which they presented participants with products that were similar except for their shelf lives:

Potato chips with 5-month and 9-month shelf lives;
Pasta sauces with 1-year and 3-year shelf lives;
Granola bars with nearly identical ingredients and nutrition information but different shelf lives;
Mayonnaise, where the longer shelf life came from a better seal on the jar.

By and large, participants rated food products with shorter shelf lives as more natural.

They also rated the products with longer shelf lives as better for the environment, because they seemed less likely to go to waste.

And in some of the experiments, the ingredients and nutritional quality were nearly identical. In others, a longer shelf life simply meant better packaging.

Cornil acknowledged that it’s hard for consumers to judge how natural food really is. But he offered one suggestion:

“Having a look at the ingredient list is probably more diagnostic than having a look at the shelf life.”

How about rotisserie chickens?

I’ve mentioned this one before, but it seems relevant.

Researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business wanted to figure out the best way to sell rotisserie chickens in grocery stores.

Result: a 35-page academic paper with a 50-page online appendix, built around a mathematical model that pointed to a surprisingly simple approach.

Stop showing preparation dates on chickens. Instead, sell the freshest ones first: last-in, first-out (LIFO).

(The catch: in their model, reducing waste also required stores to keep chickens on the shelf longer.)

If you put preparation dates on chickens, shoppers can compare them and gravitate toward the most recently cooked ones, even if the others are nearly as good.

According to the model, the average quality of the chickens sold goes up. More people buy them, and the store ultimately throws less food away — even though some individual chickens wind up expiring before they’re sold.

Anyway, I keep thinking about that barrel of beer at the general store.

I’d kind of like to try showing up at my local grocery store with a mug and asking them to fill it and see what happens.

If word got out, it might be the most popular market around.

I wonder it people would assume it was fresh.

Other things worth knowing …

Miami Herald: Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee issued a 53-page report Monday alleging that five women have accused President Donald Trump of rape or sexual assault while in the company of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, or shortly after meeting the men together, decades before his presidency. The Committee presented at least one new allegation: a former Miss Switzerland who says she Trump raped her at the Plaza Hotel in New York during a beauty pageant in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised. The White House denied the allegation.
USA Today | CNN: Trump broke his own record for “longest Truth Social” post with an attack on Bill Maher, host of “Real Time,” in a lengthy and emotional rant. Total length of the post: 1,323 words about the length of this newsletter.
NBC News: Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic on Monday unveiled its public IPO filing ahead of what is expected to be one of the largest stock debuts in history. That offering, widely expected to come sometime in mid-November, could value the Claude developer at more than $2 trillion.
TMZ: Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who has a new app called Dazzle AI, drew attention after explaining that she needed an AI assistant to help her describe her own 9-year-old daughter. During a recent NYT interview, Mayer cited a 2025 incident in she needed to use Dazzle to come up with “three descriptive words that showed how special her daughter was” for a school project. Dazzle came up with “empathetic,” “creative,” and “animal lover.”
CNN: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became Brazil’s first president to win a fourth term Sunday, and he did so days before turning 81. Since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, no president had managed to overturn a first-round defeat.
Hollywood Reporter | People: Two deaths in Hollywood to report: Walter Koenig, the boyish actor who portrayed Star Trek’s Russian crewman Pavel Chekov, has died. He was 90. Also, Eric Bauza, the Emmy Award-winning voice actor known for Looney Tunes’ characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety and Porky Pig, has died. He was 46.
Space.com: In a new study, researchers suggest that they’ve figured out the exact night depicted in the Vincent Van Gogh painting, “The Starry Night,” July 22, 1889. Letters written by Van Gogh as early as 1888 describe his desire to paint a star-filled sky.

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

Big Optimism: ‘A guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world’

Bill Murphy Jr. — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 11:04:00 GMT

Soviet submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Look closely and you can see a U.S. Navy helicopter flying directly over it.

Today’s newsletter is yet another one about how the world nearly ended — or at least, nearly endured a global thermonuclear battle — except for the fact that one man stood athwart history yelling, “wait!”

Then, because of geopolitics and world history and the Cold War, the whole thing remained secret for decades.

Again.

Or actually, I should say — before. I’ve written here in the past about Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet colonel who, in 1983, refused to confirm what appeared to be an American missile attack — against military protocol — because it seemed likely to him he was getting a false warning, rather than seeing an actual attack.

Turns out he wasn’t the only one. Only this one sounds like it was under even more stressful conditions.

Context: the Cuban missile crisis, October 1962.

Four Soviet submarines had left their base in the Kola Bay on October 1, headed for the waters near Cuba. Each carried a nuclear-armed torpedo.

The Americans didn’t know about the nuclear weapons at first, but they did know there were Soviet subs in the area, and they were eventually ordered to find them.

One of those submarines was B-59, commanded by a Soviet captain named Valentin Savitsky. Also aboard was a 36-year-old officer named Vasily Arkhipov, who was chief of staff of the four-submarine brigade.

By October 27, B-59 had been underwater for days, trying to avoid American warships. And things had gotten pretty awful. Conditions:

The temperature in some compartments reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Near the engines and sonar equipment, it was even hotter, reaching as much as 149F.
Carbon dioxide levels had climbed to several times the norm. Drinking water was running out, down to about a cup of water per day per sailor.
Equipment was breaking down. Sailors were fainting at their stations, catching their breath, and then going back on watch.
The submarine’s batteries were running low, and the crew couldn’t recharge them without risking detection.

Meanwhile, American destroyers overhead were dropping practice depth charges into the water, trying to force the submarine to the surface. They were meant as a warning.

But when you’re underwater in intense heat with lousy air and someone keeps dropping explosives on you, it’s awfully hard to tell the difference between a warning and an attack.

One officer later compared the experience to sitting inside a metal barrel while somebody kept hitting it with a sledgehammer.

The submarines had been largely cut off from Moscow. What little they knew about the crisis came from fragments of American radio broadcasts, which they didn’t particularly trust.

For all they knew, the war had already started.

Fortunately for everyone — including you and me — Vasily Arkhipov was aboard.

Quick history about Vasily: He’d joined the navy at the end of World War II; technically he served during the Soviet-Japanese War in the last 45 days or so.

Afterward, the Soviets raced and built nuclear submarines to try to keep up with the United States, he was in the thick of it.

He’d already survived one major nuclear emergency not long before: July 1961, he’d been serving as executive officer aboard K-19, the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, when one of its two nuclear reactors lost its coolant.

Seven engineers and an officer managed to improvise an emergency cooling system, preventing a meltdown. But all eight died of radiation sickness within a month, and other crew members died in the years that followed.

Vasily himself was exposed to radiation. And, because this was the Soviet Union, the crew was ordered to keep quiet about the accident.

(That story was dramatized, with some license in the 2002 Harrison Ford movie, K-19: The Widowmaker.)

Now, just 15 months later, Vasily was underwater again, with a nuclear weapon aboard, and American destroyers dropping explosives around him.

According to an account from Vadim Orlov, the officer in charge of B-59’s radio intelligence unit, things came to a head when an especially powerful explosion shook the submarine.

Savitsky, the captain, became furious. Convinced that the Americans were attacking, and apparently believing that war might already have begun, he ordered the officer responsible for the nuclear torpedo to prepare it for launch.

Orlov later recalled Savitsky shouting that they would “die ourselves, sink them all but not stain the navy’s honor!”

Now, combine the chaos of near-war, with the passage of time, and the effort of a Soviet communist bureaucracy to keep its secrets, and a few possible explanations of what happened next emerge.

In one version, the captain wanted to launch the nuclear torpedo — but doing so required the agreement of three senior officers: the captain, the political officer, and Vasily, as chief of staff.

The captain and political officer agreed in this telling, but Vasily refused. No launch.

In another version of the story, the submarine had surfaced, and the captain — alarmed by the American barrage and believing this was a full-scale attack, panicked and ran to order an emergency dive and preparation of the nuclear torpedo.

Only, his path down the ladder was blocked by another officer and his equipment, and during the interlude Vasily could see that the Americans were signaling, rather than attacking.

Because of the delay on the ladder, he was able to stop the order before it reached the torpedo officer.

I should also acknowledge that the one time we know of that Vasily ever described what happened in his own words — a post-Soviet naval conference in 1997 — he downplayed his own role.

He described an American aircraft flying over the submarine, turning on powerful searchlights that blinded the Soviets, and opening fire — but also the moment when he realized the Americans were firing past the submarine as a warning, not trying to sink it.

Vasily, who stayed in the Soviet Navy for decades afterward and reached the rank of vice-admiral, never claimed credit for stopping the launch. He did complain that the story was being used to make the Soviet Navy look bad.

Regardless, the next day, after recharging its batteries, the submarine submerged again and managed to escape the American ships. The crew eventually made it back to the Soviet Union.

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended.

At a meeting afterward, a top Soviet official told the crew of B-59 and its sister boats: “We did not even expect you to come back alive.”

Arkhipov went on to command the Kirov Naval Academy, the Soviet equivalent of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. He died in 1998, before the full story became widely known.

In 2002, a scholar who studied all this, Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive, told the Boston Globe that “a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

Fifteen years later, in 2017, Arkhipov’s daughter and grandson accepted the first Future of Life Award on his behalf, honoring his role in preventing a possible nuclear war.

His own family had never heard the story from him.

7 other moments from history this week

Sunday, Oct. 25: “How lucky I was to have a father who, in spite of formidable obstacles, would fight for his beliefs and ambitions and win.” — Benjamin O. Davis Jr., on his father, Benjamin O. Davis Sr., who was promoted to brigadier general on this day in 1940, the first African American general in the U.S. Army. He was 63, after four decades of postings arranged so he would never command white troops.
Monday, Oct. 26: “I tell them my story. I tell them how important these vaccines are.” — Ali Maow Maalin, the Somali hospital cook diagnosed on this day in 1977 with the last naturally occurring case of smallpox. He recovered and spent the rest of his life as a polio vaccinator, telling reluctant parents he had once dodged the smallpox shot because he was afraid it would hurt.
Tuesday, Oct. 27: “Their only purpose was to freeze me out.” — Benjamin O. Davis Jr., on his West Point classmates; he was promoted to brigadier general on this day in 1954, the first Black general in the Air Force. For four years at the academy no cadet spoke to him except on official business, and he went on to command the Tuskegee Airmen.
Wednesday, Oct. 28: “We sell goods cheaper than any house in the world.” — Early Macy’s advertising slogan; Rowland Hussey Macy opened his dry goods store at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street on this day in 1858. First-day sales totaled $11.08.
Thursday, Oct. 29: “Would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?” — Henry Dunant in A Memory of Solferino; the Geneva conference that turned his question into the Red Cross movement concluded on this day in 1863. Dunant shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
Friday, Oct. 30: “Shoe rationing will end at midnight tonight, the office of price administration announced today.” — United Press dispatch on this day in 1945, ending the limit that since 1943 had allowed Americans three pairs of leather shoes a year. OPA chief Chester Bowles predicted output would soon match prewar demand of about 30 million pairs a month.
Saturday, Oct. 31: “Man, you owe me absolutely nothing.” — Earl Lloyd, recalling what he told a young NBA player who thanked him; Lloyd became the first Black player in an NBA game on this day in 1950. He had six points and a game-high 10 rebounds for the Washington Capitols in Rochester.

Free for ALL Friday! (10/23/2026)

Bill Murphy Jr. — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 11:03:01 GMT

Photo by Hadi Utama on Unsplash

Winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano Awards

A collection of some of the highest-scoring images from the 17th edition of this panoramic-photo competition

These are amazing photographs, and worth the click.

Link: The Atlantic

The Most Polite Trucker in America Is a Driverless 18-Wheeler

They’re on the interstate in Texas and can do almost everything a human truck driver does, except honk

On a busy freight corridor, the 240 miles of I-45 between Dallas and Houston, it was bumper-to-bumper, like usual, when something out-of-the-ordinary happened. A big rig let in several cars from the on-ramp. Another 18-wheeler changed lanes to make space for a truck pulled over on the shoulder.
Neither honked its horn—the baritone blasts anyone who has ever driven a hatchback can’t forget.
They’re driverless trucks: they don’t need to honk and can’t on their own, said Aurora Innovation, a major driverless trucker. The trucks have a perception system that adjusts quickly without having to slam the brakes and sees and avoids potential hazards early. And without a driver, no honking in annoyance.
“It’s our job to continue to operate safely and build trust,” said Chris Urmson, who was the chief technology officer of Google’s self-driving car project that became Waymo and is now CEO of Aurora.
As more goods are trucked across the U.S. every day, moving them is getting more expensive. Businesses complain of an acute driver shortage. Drivers need to stop after 11 hours to rest; driverless trucks don’t, saving both time and fuel. The cost of diesel has risen 62% since late February.
This stretch of Texas, flat, straight and filled with trucks, is the perfect testing spot for dozens of driverless big rigs, some without a human driver and others with one riding along just in case. About half a dozen companies, including Aurora, develop the technology for driverless trucks and team up with truck makers to produce them. Aurora, based in Pittsburgh, expects to have 200 autonomous trucks on highways in Texas and nearby states by year-end, up from around 30 big rigs today.

Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years

Hundreds of executives have flocked to St. Louis to learn how the Gunds’ family business thrives by putting workers before short-term profits

Hundreds of executives have made the pilgrimage to St. Louis to try to replicate Steve Gund’s elusive feat: He’s the third-generation CEO of a family manufacturer that has averaged 18% annual growth for a decade—all without ever laying off an employee.
He said he does it with a leadership model that puts The Gund Co.’s 1,300 employees’ well-being over short-term profits. He has made it his mission to evangelize the approach, especially to leaders of other family owned companies.
“It sounds touchy-feely, but it’s profitable,” said the 55-year-old Gund, whose grandfather, Ed Gund, a former candy salesman, started the composite materials company in 1951. Now approaching $400 million in sales, its customers include General Electric and Rockwell Automation. Its parts can be found in nearly every aspect of the grid, from wind generators to the green boxes dotting subdivision lawns.
The model requires trade-offs, and a lot of discipline: Gund has never had a layoff but staffs sparingly so it can weather the leaner stretches. Employees are pushed to voice and document concerns on red cards displayed on the factory floor, putting leaders on notice to take care of problems quickly. Everyone from line workers to managers crafts a career-development plan. Yet those who don’t adapt to Gund’s high-performance culture are managed out.
And there are financial gambles: This year the company spent tens of millions of dollars to buy back its existing employee-stock ownership plan with the aim of relaunching a similar program to employees in every country where it operates—including China.

See How a Tesla-SpaceX Merger Gives Musk a Shortcut to His $1 Trillion Payday

A critical clause in the CEO’s Tesla stock award would wipe away lofty performance targets if a merger happened

Deep in a $1 trillion pay package approved by Tesla’s shareholders is an escape clause that could pay off for Elon Musk in several ways if he folds the automaker into his SpaceX empire.
That kind of cars-and-rockets tie-up—the subject of widespread speculation among investors, and hinted at by Musk himself—would likely give him the tighter control he has long sought at Tesla. A hefty-enough price would also, in an instant, wipe away key performance targets standing between Musk and billions of dollars in shares.
“This $1 trillion—that was supposed to be a stretch,” said Mary Ellen Carter, a Boston College accounting professor who studies executive pay. “It turns out it isn’t really that hard. All you have to do is be bought.”
Musk has considerable say over any offer SpaceX makes for Tesla, thanks to his sweeping control over the rocket company. The upshot: Even a stratospheric bid would keep Musk in firm control of the combined company.
Tesla shareholders voted to adopt the pay package last fall. Under ordinary circumstances, it would deliver to Musk as many as 423.7 million shares if Tesla hits a series of 12 market-value targets and the company also meets just as many cash-flow and operating goals. Among them: delivering Tesla’s 20-millionth vehicle, selling one million robots and putting one million robotaxis on the street.
The record-setting equity award was “designed to align extraordinary long-term shareholder value with incentives that will drive peak performance from our visionary leader,” Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm told shareholders at the time.
Yet tucked into the bottom of the fifth page of the 16-page 2025 CEO Performance Award Agreement, a single sentence declares half the targets are as good as accomplished if Tesla is acquired or otherwise taken over.
That would leave only market-value targets to determine how many shares Musk gets. The same clause says those targets would be met or missed based on the final deal price—or on Tesla’s market capitalization immediately before any acquisition closed, if that is higher. Musk, SpaceX and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“Tesla shareholders could think it’s terrible and the Tesla price drops” ahead of any deal, Carter said. “But it’s whatever SpaceX is willing to offer.”

The Deadly 1.5-Mile Corridor That Shows the Fatal Flaw in America’s Road Design

Six lanes, pitch darkness and crosswalks a half-mile apart: How American urban-planning is failing walkers. ‘To walk on Union Avenue feels like you’re about to be killed’

On a Sunday evening last November, 16-year-old Olga Bessan-Gligo was walking home on one of the most dangerous roads in America: Union Avenue in Memphis, Tenn.
It was a little after 9 p.m. and Bessan-Gligo had just finished her shift at a nearby sandwich shop. Outside, it was near complete darkness; the closest streetlight had gone out.
Her house was across the street. To get to the other side, Bessan-Gligo had two options.
She could walk to an intersection, use a crosswalk and walk back on the other side. This would add a half-mile to her trip, nearly doubling her journey, in the dark.
Bessan-Gligo stepped into the middle of the street. Moments later, a large SUV hit and killed her.
American roads are becoming deadlier for walkers. Between 2009 and 2024, pedestrian deaths increased 72% across the U.S., federal data show. Over the same period, such deaths declined in most other developed nations, according to United Nations data. In road safety, the U.S. is an outlier.
Pedestrian deaths are rising on certain roadways. Increasingly, people are hit by cars on roads designed like Union Avenue—all while this type of roadway continues to spread across the country.

‘There Are No People’: Springfield, Ohio, Faces Loss of Haitian Residents

The city’s economy has taken a hit as Haitian immigrants sequester in their homes or leave after the Trump administration canceled their temporary protected status.

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — The denizens of this once booming industrial Midwestern city were pining for something to rally people around when they coined the motto: “Speak a good word for Springfield or say nothing.”
It was the height of the Depression in 1932 and the slogan sought to inspire unity among those living in a place where the Shawnee once roamed, European immigrants arrived and freed Black families found a home.
Now some residents in Springfield, Ohio, say the city’s creed is being put to the test.
Since thousands of Haitian residents lost their protection from deportation this summer, dozens have been arrested, scores have lost their jobs and others have either left the country or decided to hunker down at home, out of view.
“Help wanted” ads for cooks, dishwashers and babysitters are going unanswered. Haitian residents are limiting their electrical usage as they worry about how they will pay the bills.
“I’m not sure there is precedent in U.S. history for this small a community to lose that much of its workforce and population cloistered at home,” said Tim Voltz, a Springfield resident who helps Haitian immigrants. “The situation is unsustainable.”

Link: Washington Post

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

As Venezuela struggles to recover from political upheaval and calamitous earthquakes, the U.S. government is exploiting the country for oil and money.

We drifted past abandoned drilling platforms, ghostly remnants of better days. Cormorants perched on the metal bars of broken oil rigs, drying their wings in the sun. When we reached a swirling, brown-green oil slick, Carlos slowed his motor. Raw oil could damage the engine, he said, and we’d already had to return to shore once that day to swap boats. We floated for a bit. Carlos, who makes his living as a fisherman on Lake Maracaibo, pointed out some surface bubbles, evidence of a leaky pipeline beneath the water. There was a strong smell of gas. He lit a cigarette anyway and laughed.
That morning, Carlos and his team had caught about 30 pounds of fish in the lake, a brackish estuary where oil was discovered more than a century ago. The subsequent boom built the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo, three generations of wealth, and four decades of democracy. A century later, tens of billions of barrels’ worth of reserves remain beneath the water. Some of them might now be controlled by the American government.
They will not be easy to extract.
Billions of dollars of investment will be needed to remediate the site and recover more oil. In the meantime, people who live around the lake, like millions of other Venezuelans, work hard and earn very little. Their fish have to be sold immediately, because electricity is unpredictable and freezers are thus unreliable. Rapid inflation—20 percent in July, an annualized rate of 783 percent—has made everything unaffordable. In a Caracas market, I found prices and exchange rates written on whiteboards, because they change every day.
The state is absent, or indifferent. Carlos pointed to a scar on his leg that he said was an old gunshot wound, the souvenir of an assault by one of the pirates who control the lake: “If you don’t pay them, they kill you and take your boat.”

Link: The Atlantic

Putin Nears a Prize: Restoring Ties With the U.S. While Giving Up Nothing

Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working.

Last October, President Trump imposed significant sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, complaining that negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin over ending the war in Ukraine “just don’t go anywhere.”
A red-carpet welcome for the Russian leader in Alaska had done nothing to bring peace. A planned summit in Budapest had fallen apart. Mr. Trump had started to acknowledge that Mr. Putin might just be playing him, with no intention of making peace. Faint Ukrainian hopes glimmered of a Trump-Putin break.
But the Russian president was playing a longer game.
Now, exactly a year after the oil sanctions, Mr. Putin has never been so close to his goal of normalizing relations with Washington without having to make any compromises on Ukraine.
Over the past week and a half, Mr. Trump has set aside years of U.S. foreign policy by openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin. At the same time, Mr. Trump has vilified President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the putative American ally trying to defend his nation against a Russian invasion.
Newly emboldened, Moscow is moving to assert itself as a global power equal to the United States and China, promoting a trilateral summit among them in November.
“In my personal view, victory has already been achieved,” the pro-Putin journalist Marina Akhmedova wrote on social media on Wednesday. “It is not just a matter of the 20 to 25 percent of territory we have liberated,” she added, referring to Russian-occupied land in Ukraine. “It is also about how the United States now engages with Russia.”

U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections

Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war’s first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat.

The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections, according to U.S. officials and other people briefed on the deliberations.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week to discuss new strikes, U.S. officials said. The targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal.
Officials say there is a small possibility that Mr. Trump could decide to begin a campaign this month, but there are many political reasons that he is likely to wait until after the U.S. election, not least his own promise early this month not to strike before the vote.
The United States will not have its full complement of military assets — including three aircraft carriers, thousands of Marines, fighter jets and Special Operations forces — in place until early November. The U.S. military prefers to conduct attacks under the cover of night, and there will be increasing hours of darkness over Iran early next month.
There are also concerns that the war could spiral into a larger conflict. On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department ordered nonemergency government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, as the Iran-backed Houthi militia continues to attack sites there.
A White House official said on Wednesday the administration does not comment on military plans “that may or may not exist.”

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

Night owls in the Murphy family

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 11:03:43 GMT

Photo by Zac Ong on Unsplash

I’m a night owl. My daughter is not.

We were walking on a beautiful fall night recently when she told me how much she likes getting up early.

Some of her friends stay up late, but she prefers going to bed early and having time in the morning.

So, I’ve been trying but failing to adjust myself to get onto her schedule. At this point that mostly means going to bed at 1 a.m. and getting up before 7 to take her to school.

That math doesn’t work, and there have been more than a few days when I’ve run out of gas and had to take a nap in the afternoon.

With this in mind, I talked recently with Tapio Räihä, a physician who specializes in occupational healthcare at the University of Oulu in Finland. His latest research concerns what happens to night owls during their working lives.

Writing in Occupational & Environmental Medicine, Räihä and his coauthors followed 5,679 people from age 46 to 57, between 2012 and 2023. They tracked who received a disability pension for the first time.

The “relative hazard of receiving a new disability pension” was about 70 percent higher among evening types compared to morning types.

Among night owls, 8.3 percent of men and 12.1 percent of women received a disability pension during the follow-up. Among morning people, the figures were 5 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively.

The study doesn’t prove that being a night owl causes disability. And, I’m interpreting “likelihood of applying for disability” with likelihood of having some medical problem eventually—or at least of not liking your career enough that you apply for disability if you can.

Räihä pointed to the difficulty of keeping a schedule that conflicts with when you naturally want to sleep and wake up.

About 70 percent of the working night owls in the study had day jobs.

“Evening chronotypes are prone to get these health issues. And a big reason behind that is that their internal rhythm doesn’t match the society’s schedules,” he said.

As for my attempt to become a morning person, Räihä suggested there are limits.

“There are morning chronotypes, intermediate types and evening types,” he said. “And much of it is genetic, like 50% comes from your genes. So an evening person cannot change into a morning person. But there is some flexibility there because the other 50% is not dictated by genes.”

But then again: I want to spend time with my daughter in the morning. And school starts when it starts, with no concerns at all for my chronotype (to say nothing of the many other kids who are also not exactly early birds).

Anyway, maybe I’ll start gradually, catching myself when the clock strikes midnight and I’m still sitting on the couch with my laptop working on the Next Big Thing, whatever it seems to be at that time of the evening.

Here’s to “the other 50%.” that suggests maybe there’s hope.

Other things worth knowing …

NYT: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal: Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.
Reuters: The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission warned on Wednesday that U.S. broadcast networks could violate their regulatory obligations by airing “entirely fake polls and suppression polls.” FCC Chair Brendan Carr has faced pressure from President Donald Trump to crack down on US broadcasters and journalists. He did not name any specific polls in his statement that he believed were fake.
The Washington Post: “Their police jobs ended. They kept using Flock’s vast surveillance network.” A recent case marked one of at least 11 times in which unauthorized users have gained access to Flock databases and searched them without permission, sometimes to track the locations of romantic partners, a Washington Post investigation has found.
AP: A bow once used to fire arrows in an ancient hunt. A crunched tube of mayonnaise and a discarded wine bottle. An alpinist’s cracked helmet. A statuette dating back to Roman times. The Glacier Garden in Lucerne is showcasing artifacts like these in a new exhibit of relics that have emerged from Switzerland’s vaunted glaciers over the years, with more expected to come as global warming accelerates the thaw. The exhibit, whose title translates as “Treasury of Ice” from German, comes as Swiss glaciologists recently reported that Switzerland lost 5.5% of its total glacier volume this year.
Yahoo News: Researchers have discovered a protein that protects the brain’s immune cells from age-related decline, potentially leading to future treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. While growing older is the biggest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s, scientists still do not fully understand the biological processes that make the ageing brain increasingly vulnerable to such neurological conditions.
Yahoo News: A Las Vegas court convicted an Ontario man of animal cruelty charges Monday for snatching a flamingo named Peachy from its habitat at an iconic Las Vegas hotel in what prosecutors called a drunken and malicious act. Mitchell Fairbarn told the court that on the day of the incident, he drank “30 to 40” beers over the course of 24 hours while he was in Las Vegas for a construction expo. His attorney had told jurors Fairbarn regrets his actions while intoxicated and never meant to harm the bird, a key element in the felony charge.
Business Insider: Cisco’s president said he used personal AI agents to screen $9,000 worth of his yearly subscriptions.

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

“Dear Mr. Murphy ...”

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:03:44 GMT

Lawyers love their trophy walls. But when I was practicing law in Washington at the U.S. Department of Justice, I did something different.

Among my awards and photos, in a place of honor, I framed and hung three letters.

These were the letters I’d received the first couple of times I’d applied for to work at Justice—my dream job back then, when I was just out of law school.

Letter #1 was a rejection letter that arrived after I’d originally applied as a law student to the Attorney General’s Honors Program at Justice.
Letter #2 was another rejection letter, which reached me 14 months later, after I reapplied for the same job. Nope again.
Letter #3 arrived a few months after that. This time, I’d broken the rules, skipped HR, and sent my application to a Justice Department official I’d met in an interview during Round 1.

Fortunately, this third letter contradicted its predecessors, and it contained an offer for a job as an entry level trial attorney.

Some people don’t like to admit that they’ve failed or been rejected in life. But that wasn’t me—and so I framed the letters.

They looked like the framed degrees and honors that other attorneys had on their walls: commendations, thank-you notes, evidence from particularly memorable litigation.

You had to look closely to notice the difference. But I always knew they were there. I wanted to remember always that I’d had to hustle and persist to get the job.

May it please the court...

I don’t practice law anymore. If you look on my LinkedIn profile, the entire time I spent at Justice now gets just a single line. Still, I’m proud.

Barely a month after I landed the job, I was in court, arguing my first case—doing what I’d wanted to do when I went to law school to begin with.

Ultimately, I was the lead attorney on more than 200 cases. I was a pretty good lawyer, but I have to say that I’m an even better ex-lawyer.

So now the rejection letters are in a box somewhere, packed away. I hadn’t thought of them for a long time, but I don’t want to forget.

My goals have changed radically from back then, but the same traits that got me where I wanted to go then, are the ones I need now — especially as literally everything about the business I left law for is changing radically.

Remember how you got here

I will bet you’ve had to overcome challenges to achieve the things you’re most proud of. Maybe, you’ll have to do it again sometime.

Most importantly, you’ve probably failed a few times.

So as we close out 20269(!), let’s not to forget those failures, or paper over them or explain them away. Instead, let’s celebrate them.

Put them in the place of honor on your version of a trophy wall.

It’s never about the failures; it’s about what you learned and how you overcame them.

And you never know when you’ll need that reminder again.

Other things worth knowing …

WSJ: Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said. Musk himself posted on X hours after the slowdown became public, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” using the acronym for president of the United States. Trump told reporters Monday that he didn’t know who was responsible for the Starlink slowdown, “but I would like to find out.”
AP: Fresh curfews were being imposed across the city centers of Paris and Lyon on Tuesday after the first quiet night since France’s most destructive rioting in years, as Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said a “massive” security operation was planned for new protests Saturday.
The Guardian: Voters in Alberta overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to begin the process of independence, delivering a decisive victory for supporters of Canadian unity and deepening divisions within the separatist movement. With nearly 1.9 million votes counted, roughly 76% people supported remaining in Canada, while 24% backed beginning a process toward separation. The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital, celebrated the result.
Reuters: Contracts to purchase previously owned US homes plunged to a record low in September as rising mortgage rates depressed demand for housing. The pending home sales index tumbled 7.3% to 66.0 last month, the lowest level since the series started in 2001.
IBTimes UK: Companies are increasingly licensing workplace emails, Slack messages, and internal documents to AI developers, creating a lucrative market that some employees may not know about. As AI firms race to automate office jobs, businesses are receiving six-figure offers for their digital records, sometimes with just 48 hours to decide.
AP: Across 38 seasons of “The Simpsons,” the Halloween-themed “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have always been a treat of spooky stand-alone storylines. On Sunday, the show surprised viewers with a major resurrection: Apu, the beloved Kwik-E-Mart operator who had not been heard for the better part of a decade, spoke once again in Springfield.
NASA: Four crew members in NASA’s simulated Mars mission celebrated their one year anniversary of living and working in isolation in a 1,700 square foot 3D-printed habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Crew members have operated as though they were on the Red Planet, growing crops, managing limited resources, navigating communication delays, and conducting suited extravehicular activities on a simulated Martian surface. The crew will exit their habitat on Saturday, Oct. 31, to conclude their mission.

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

Big Optimism: You can’t Xerox a Xerox on a Xerox

Bill Murphy Jr. — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:03:45 GMT

The first photocopy in history was a smudge of powder on a sheet of wax paper, and it read like this:

10-22-38 ASTORIA.

That was 88 years ago this week, as you might have been able to figure by yourself, and it was created in a rented room behind a beauty salon in Queens.

The man who made it was a 32-year-old patent manager named Chester Carlson. It would take another 21 years before an ordinary office worker could press a button and get a copy of anything.

Carlson had a lot of practice waiting.

Born in Seattle in 1906, the only child of an itinerant barber, his father had tuberculosis and later arthritis of the spine, and by age 14 Chester was working after school and on weekends for a local printer to support the family.

His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 17. He worked his way through junior college, then Caltech, and graduated with a physics degree in 1930.

Perfect timing, if your goal was to enter the job market at the start of the Great Depression. He applied to 82 companies. Two wrote back, and neither offered him anything.

Eventually he landed a low-paying job at Bell Labs in New York, got bored, and transferred to the patent department. A few years later he was running the patent department at an electronics firm called P.R. Mallory.

This is where he met his nemesis: copies.

Every patent filing needed copies of the specifications and drawings, and there were never enough carbons. If you needed more copies, somebody retyped the whole thing and proofread it all over again.

It got personal at night. Carlson started law school in 1936, and to save money he copied passages by hand from borrowed textbooks. Meanwhile, he’d developed the same spinal arthritis as his father, so all that copying hurt.

He decided to invent a machine that would do it for him.

He started in his kitchen in Queens, melting sulfur onto zinc plates on the stove.

Some of the experiments caught fire, and the apartment was smoky and smelly enough that his wife eventually laid down the law. The lab moved to the back of a beauty salon in Astoria owned by his mother-in-law.

(He’d already filed for a patent in 1937, before he had a process that actually worked. That’s the kind of confidence you develop when you spend all day in a patent department.)

In the fall of 1938 Carson hired Otto Kornei, a young physicist who’d fled Germany.

On October 22, Kornei wrote the date and place in India ink on a glass microscope slide. They charged a sulfur-coated plate by rubbing it with a handkerchief, laid the slide on top, and held it under a bright lamp for a few seconds. Then they dusted the plate with powder, blew off the excess, and pressed it onto wax paper.

There it was. Fuzzy, but there.

Now came the easy part: selling it.

Kidding.

Between 1939 and 1944, Carlson pitched more than 20 companies, including IBM, Kodak, General Electric and RCA, plus the Army Signal Corps. Every one of them said no. Even the National Inventors Council said no.

The strain cost him. The arthritis got worse, the money worries piled up, and his marriage ended.

His big break came almost by accident in 1944.

An engineer named Russell Dayton from the Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit research outfit in Columbus, Ohio, visited Mallory’s patent department and got to talking with Carlson. Before long, Battelle signed on to develop the process, swapping in a selenium-coated plate and better dry ink.

A few years after that, a small photographic-paper company in Rochester called Haloid licensed the technology. Haloid’s executives thought “electrophotography” was a mouthful, so they asked a classics professor at Ohio State for something better.

He came up with “xerography,” from the Greek for “dry writing.”

Haloid announced the process to the public on October 22, 1948, ten years to the day after the Astoria slide.

But the early machines were fussy, complicated contraptions. It wasn’t until September 1959 that the company unveiled the Xerox 914, the first automatic plain-paper copier: paper on the glass, push a button, done.

(The 914 was named for the largest page it could copy, 9 by 14 inches. Not every name requires a classics professor.)

Two years after the 914 hit the market, Haloid had renamed itself Xerox and broken into the Fortune 500.

By the time I entered the workforce as a journalist a few decades later, Xerox was running ads in journalism trade journals asking people not to use “Xerox” as a synonym for “copy,” because of the risk that their trademark would eventually lose its protection.

(Among their memorable ads: “You can’t Xerox a Xerox on a Xerox.”)

As for Carlson, he died of a heart attack on September 19, 1968, at age 62, reportedly while watching a movie in a Manhattan theater.

He’d ended up with something like $150 million. He spent his last years giving it away, more than $100 million in all, much of it anonymously.

He didn’t forget Otto Kornei either; Kornei received a block of Xerox stock.

Not bad for a guy who once couldn’t afford his own law books.

7 other moments from history this week

Sunday, October 18: “By authority from his Majesty the Emperor of Russia …” — Russian commissioner Captain Alexei Pestchouroff, speaking to U.S. Gen. Lovell Rousseau at the formal transfer ceremony on Castle Hill in Sitka on this day in 1867.
Monday, October 19: “The General congratulates the Army upon the glorious event of yesterday.” — George Washington, in general orders issued the day after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on this day in 1781. To spread the joy, Washington also pardoned every soldier then in confinement and sent them back to their units.
Tuesday, October 20: “Quite honestly, there was no model, nothing similar to what I was doing.” — Dick Fosbury, years after his backward “flop” won Olympic high jump gold in Mexico City on this day in 1968 with an Olympic-record 2.24 meters.
Wednesday, October 21: “Good night, Shreeve.” — AT&T engineer B. B. Webb, speaking from the Navy radio station in Arlington, Virginia, to colleague H. E. Shreeve, who heard the words at the Eiffel Tower on this day in 1915 in the first connected speech to cross the Atlantic by radio.
Thursday, October 22: “Beauty belongs to all the people.” — President Lyndon B. Johnson, signing the Highway Beautification Act in the White House East Room on this day in 1965. The law, a top priority of Lady Bird Johnson, required states to control billboards and junkyards along the interstates or risk losing 10 percent of their federal highway funds.
Friday, October 23: “With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.” — Steve Jobs, unveiling the $399 iPod in Cupertino on this day in 2001. Apple went on to sell more than 400 million of them.
Saturday, October 24: “This will be a highly successful enterprise.” — New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating the George Washington Bridge, then the longest suspension bridge in the world, eight months ahead of schedule on this day in 1931. When the bridge opened to traffic the next day, 7,098 cars crossed in a single hour, a world record.

Not a single model

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:04:01 GMT

Programming note: Usually Mondays are for Big Optimism. This week, BigOpt will run Tuesday.

Explanation: It was late Sunday and Big Optimism wasn’t quite finished — so I switched the order, and moved Tuesday’s to Monday.

Welcome to the world of one-person media companies. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to ‘Knowledge Collapase’

Over the summer, I had the moment when I realized that AI had made its way into everybody’s life in America.

I was waiting behind a man in his 80s while we were on vacation on Cape Cod, and I heard him trying to make plans for the next day by simply asking ChatGPT what he should do tomorrow.

I thought: Wow. O.K. That’s it.

People compare the rise of AI to the rise of the Internet. But this feels much faster.

So, I paid attention when I saw a new research paper about what happens when people use AI chatbots to seek information.

The researchers were looking at what they call “epistemic diversity.” This is is about how broad a range of information and claims people encounter when they ask an AI system about a subject.

Dustin Wright, a tenure-track assistant professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen and the paper’s lead author, explained to me that a few years ago, the dominant way people sought information was to go to Google and get a collection of web pages.

(My interview with Wright is embedded at the bottom of this article.)

That was “all written by humans for the most part and all potentially having different perspectives and different ways of looking at whatever it is your query was about,” but now generative AI is increasingly replacing that.

So Wright and the other researchers set out to do a massive assessment of what people search for, what chatbots give them as answers. Then they compared it to what they would have gotten from the kind of Google searches that we all did a few years back.

They tested 27 different AI systems on 155 topics, using 200 prompt formulations. That produced about 1.7 million responses and, after the researchers broke those responses down, roughly 70 million individual claims.

The topics ranged from nuclear weapons and pornography to democracy, free speech, the Berlin Wall and K-pop. Basic question: Was the information produced by the AI systems was as diverse as the information people would encounter through traditional search.

“There was not a single model that was as diverse as just doing a Google search,” Wright told me.

The researchers found that traditional Google search produced at least 18 percent more diverse information. Wright said that’s how much they say confidently, but they had reason to think the real gap might be larger.

The researchers call the broader concern “knowledge collapse.”

If generative AI systems come to dominate the information space, and the amount of information people encounter through them is narrower, over time we could lose access to certain kinds of information.

It’s what Wright described as “long tail information,” “minoritized information” or culture-specific information. And it’s not well-represented by generative AI systems.

This is the part that concerns me.

Let’s imagine that Understandably came up in search after search after search. I mean, I’d love it. But I’d understand if people assessed for themselves whether they think this newsletter is a reliable source of information.

The point is: they could see that Understandably was the source, and see who wrote it. They could decide whether they generally trust the publication or the writer behind it (hi!).

But when AI itself is generating the answer, in many cases there’s no source even given. Thus, there’s no way of assessing, or even knowing, that the pool of information from which we’re drawing has shrunk.

As Wright put it, sure Google search is already curated and biased. Some websites rank higher than others.

“But at least,” he said, “if you look in different communities, you get a lot of human authored text with different perspectives, offering different information.”

As AI-generated text increasingly takes over that role, he said, “we’re potentially losing a lot of that.”

Now, I don’t mean to put another log on the fire of the AI doomscape. There was actually some encouraging news in the research.

The models have become more diverse over time. Wright told me that he had expected diversity either to decrease or stay stagnant, but instead it increased, especially between GPT-4 and GPT-5.

Still, I don’t know what the answer is.

On the one hand, more people are probably accessing more information than in previous generations.

On the other hand, the natural progression could be toward a smaller scope of information. It’s still massive, obviously, but smaller compared with what’s available in the world.

Look, I couldn’t have told you in 1999 what 2004 was going to look like. I couldn’t have told you in 2004 what 2010 would look like.

In 2010, I couldn’t have told you what 2020 would look like. And in 2020, I sure as heck could not have predicted where we are now.

So, I feel like the bare minimum is to pay close attention. And maybe wonder.

Imagine it’s another 40 or 50 years from now, and I’m the old man on Cape Cod, casually using a new technology most of us can’t even imagine today.

And maybe somebody will think: Wow. O.K. That’s it.

Here’s the video of our interview:

Other things worth knowing …

AP: President Trump signed an executive order late Friday suspending new sanctions targeting Russia, citing national security, but providing no further explanation to the American people. The move comes a week after Trump stunningly said the U.S. had agreed to purchase diesel from Russia to try to bring down global energy prices, despite that potentially hurting Ukraine in its war with Russia.
PBS: French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday voiced the public’s “anger” and “shame” over rioting and looting during nationwide protests against rising living costs and poor conditions in schools. At least 2,400 people were arrested. “Those who looted will have to pay for the damage, and those who sought to bring down the Republic will be held accountable,” Macron said in a televised address to the nation.
Yahoo News: President Trump’s embattled new press secretary Katie Zacharia was forced out Friday after less than a week on the job. Zacharia is the shortest-tenured White House press secretary in U.S. history.
Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: More than 1 million people have already cast their ballots in Alberta’s referendum on separation from Canada, signaling strong voter turnout that pollsters say may favor the “remain” side. The official voting day is today. Public opinion surveys have suggested the “remain” side is well ahead, including a recent poll that found 70% of Albertans wish to stay in Canada. But pro-Canada campaigners have pushed to get people to voting centers, fearing that complacency and low turnout would benefit the separatist cause.
CNBC: Always on, always listening: New AI devices are pushing legal limits and could put users in jeopardy.
NBC News: In the new Elon Musk documentary, his lieutenants are the most damning voices. “Musk,” the new film from Alex Gibney, features interviews with more than the usual critics of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.
Forbes: We are running out of ways to describe just how critically beloved You Can See Everything is, the mind-bending Elizabeth Holmes pseudo-documentary from Nathan Fielder. On Rotten Tomatoes, the website issued a statement that said the film was the only 100% certified fresh movie of the year, having more than 80 reviews in. Now, it’s dropped to a 99% because of a single negative review, but the 99% with 101 reviews still seems to be the record for the year regardless.

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

Free for ALL Friday! (10/16/2026)

Bill Murphy Jr. — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:02:19 GMT

The Neuroscience of Decluttering

Photo by boris misevic on Unsplash

When I came across old high school notebooks of mine while helping my mom declutter my childhood home, I knew I should throw them away. Even if I’d wanted to brush up on Latin American history, they would be a poor resource. And yet I didn’t want to let go.
Many of us face clutter when we do our spring cleaning or, far harder, when we deal with a deceased loved one’s things. Americans spend billions of dollars each year on storage, and many live with jam-packed basements and attics.
As a neuroscientist studying how people make decisions, I have also seen that when given the tools, people can choose to work with, rather than against, the brain systems that regulate decision making to help themselves let go of old ideas and behaviors. Knowing how our minds work is the first step to aligning our decision making with our goals and values.
Still, my research told me that holding on to objects like my old notebooks was the wrong approach. My lab studies what happens in people’s brains when they are making choices and how we can use that understanding to make change easier. One way to make change easier is to switch from the standpoint of possessor to buyer.
Instead of asking, “Do I want to keep this?” ask, “Would I buy this today?”
Modifying the decision-making framework allows a neural calculation in reward and self-relevance systems to shift, too. A teakettle becomes something you can choose — or not — rather than something you stand to lose.

The Rise of In-Office Remote Work

The alternative to working from home is often logging on in a sea of mostly empty cubicles.

Home Depot, Instagram, Fidelity, and TikTok are just a few of the companies that have recently ordered their employees back to the office five days a week, part of a broader shift toward stricter return-to-office mandates.
These policies cut down on working from home, yet they don’t always cut down on remote work. Many employees now commute to the office only to spend each day on video calls with colleagues who are elsewhere, or even down the hall. They’re in the office but still working remotely.
We are two economists who have spent years studying how remote work shapes learning, productivity, happiness, and career progression. We have been struck by how often people picture the alternative to working from home as an office where nearly everyone is together. The modern office looks very different from that ideal. Today, the alternative to working from home is often working in a sea of mostly empty cubicles.
In a September survey of 1,835 college-educated American workers, we found that, on their most recent day at the office, more than 70 percent of respondents had at least one member of their team who was not in the building with them.
As a result, roughly half of respondents had no fully in-person meetings.
And more than a third had exclusively online meetings because their teams moved meetings entirely online whenever anyone was remote. For these workers, the commute to the office buys little more than a different background on their video calls.

Link: The Atlantic

How to Give Your Kids Money for a House Without Things Getting Weird

There are many potential pitfalls that a good plan can circumvent

A forbidding housing market is pushing many home buyers to bank on their parents for help. The hard part is keeping family money from making things messy.
There are many potential pitfalls. Parents wield their generosity to over-meddle in home shopping. Children stop repaying their parents’ lent money. And then there are unforeseen events like divorce.
“Informal arrangements can create a lot of room for people to remember the same conversation or transactions differently over time,” said Timothy Burke, who has seen it all as chief executive of National Family Mortgage, which provides online informational resources for intrafamily mortgages.
Nearly a quarter of first-time home buyers relied on financial help from family or friends in the form of loans or direct gifts for down payments, according to a 2025 National Association of Realtors report.
Paul Ross, 60, a retiree in Wayne, N.J., and his wife issued two piggyback loans: one for his son who bought a home last month and one for his daughter in 2025. He says they have maintained their relationship by being transparent about money and ensuring his kids still purchase a home they could afford on their own.
“I wanted to replace the bank but not so much that they’re shopping or living above their means,” he said.

Americans Earning $100K Are Still Struggling. This Breakdown Offers Clues as to Why

Dollar General CEO recently said $100,000 earners have adopted the shopping habits of lower-income households

There was a time when a $100,000 salary could create a very comfortable lifestyle - but now those dollars don’t go nearly as far as they used to.
“Earning $100,000 used to be the point where you could say, ‘I can afford to do what I want and live the way that I want,’” Ashley F. Morgan, owner of bankruptcy law firm Ashley F Morgan Law, PC, said in an email to The Independent.
Some 18 percent of U.S. adults earn at least $100,000, according to a 2024 survey from YouGov. And though $100,000 is more than double the national median salary of $46,960, financial stress remains for many six-figure earners.
In fact, those making $100,000 or more have now adopted the shopping habits of lower-income households as they struggle with affordability, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said at a recent retail conference. That remark has some consumers second-guessing the value of such a salary.
“I think a lot of people got to six figures and thought, ‘Wait, why doesn’t this feel like as much money as I expected?’” Steve Sexton, owner of financial firm Sexton Advisory Group, told The Independent in an email.
The gap between a $100,000 salary and monthly expenses is even wider in some major cities, where rent, groceries, and insurance tend to be more expensive.

Link: The Independent

A TikTok Tarot Card Reader Accused Me of Murder. My Life Turned Upside Down.

It was a bright blue Thanksgiving Day. I was standing in a park listening to my kids play when I opened a TikTok video of a woman I had never met.
She showed my faculty profile picture and contact information, and said that I had orchestrated the murders of four students at the college where I work, the University of Idaho.
She claimed I was covering up an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of the victims.
I didn’t know any of the students, who had been killed only 11 days before I saw the video. The accuser knew nothing about me, lived in Texas and used tarot card readings as the only basis for her claims.
Over the next several weeks, while I was grieving with the rest of my community, this TikTok influencer uploaded over a hundred videos declaring that I had committed a quadruple homicide. The videos got millions of views.
I was overwhelmed with calls, messages, comments and emails, many of which were disturbing or threatening. And I could have been anyone.
I was not hit by a bus or punched in the face. Yet I saw up close how the online world can come to feel more real than the physical one.
Even after the actual murderer was arrested and convicted, the accusations against me continued. And even though these outrageous claims were made online by someone I had never met, they were amplified by unsuspecting viewers and algorithm-driven platforms, and the harm seeped into every aspect of my life.
I came to realize that all of us are responsible for the online world we inhabit, and all of us must fight its tendency to propagate lies.

Scoop: AI Companies Plot “The Day After”

Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event.
Why it matters: These officials anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.
The first example of significant real-world harm caused by unsafe AI would turn an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as President Trump for his reluctance to regulate it.
The planning involves red-teaming for worst-case scenarios. It focuses mainly on racing to educate members of Congress.
Company executives know regulation has no chance of passing right now, but still want to shape the legislation and policies U.S. leaders will turn to after a first catastrophic event.
What we’re watching: Many AI industry insiders told Axios they believe a major event will occur in the next six to 12 months.

Link: Axios

Secret Documents Reveal Donors Behind $330 Million for Trump’s Ballroom

The records offer a panoramic view of a fundraising campaign that is extraordinary for its size and opacity.

A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts and, in one case, a pardon for a family member.
Tech giants Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount, the list shows. The Adelson family, one of the GOP’s largest donor dynasties, committed that sum as well, as did billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network.
Absent from the list is Trump himself, who has said that he is helping to pay for the project. “It’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine,” he said last year, days after demolition began on the old East Wing.
The list and other documents offer a panoramic view of a fundraising campaign that is extraordinary both for its size and opacity. Ordinary political giving requires public disclosure and is subject to campaign finance rules. The ballroom donations are collected by a nonprofit and then channeled to the government and into a White House account the president directly controls.
Independent experts and scholars have expressed alarm at the potential the arrangement has for influence buying and coerced giving.
Companies or executives of firms that have had contracts with the federal government during Trump’s second term accounted for about half of the total, The Post found.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in part that these are simply “fake conflicts of interests,” and that the Trump administration will “relentlessly pursue those responsible for this cowardly leak while continuing to protect all those who give.”

Link: Washington Post

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