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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And it turns out that loneliness and social isolation are as much public health issues as they are private emotional ones.

Latest evidence: a study of 277,489 adults between the ages of 40 and 69 that found loneliness and social isolation were associated with fewer years free of seven serious physical and mental health conditions.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed data from UK Biobank participants who began the study free of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, neurodegenerative disease, cancer, depression and anxiety.

The researchers then estimated how many years a person could expect to live from age 50 without developing those conditions.

Results:

• Women who experienced both loneliness and social isolation had 2.4 fewer years free of physical disease and 3.7 fewer years free of mental health disorders than women who experienced neither.

• Men who experienced both loneliness and social isolation had 1.7 fewer years free of physical disease and 5.8 fewer years free of mental health disorders than men who experienced neither.

We should make sure we establish the difference between loneliness and social isolation.

Social isolation describes a lack of social contact or connections. Loneliness is the feeling that the connections you have fall short of the ones you want. You can experience one without the other.

Unfortunately, we’re in the midst of a bit of a loneliness and social isolation epidemic. Perhaps it’s the long-lasting effect of our shared experience of the Covid days and intentional social isolation:

• An analysis of 50,900 adults published in April using 2024 data found that 12.7% felt lonely usually or always. Among adults ages 18–29, it was 23.3%.

• AARP found loneliness among adults 45 and older rose from 35% in both 2010 and 2018 to 40% in 2025.

• A Gallup report this year found 22% of employees worldwide experienced loneliness for much of the previous day. The figure was 24% for remote and hybrid workers.

“The findings weren’t surprising to me,” said study coauthor Lu Qi. “Previous studies found that social isolation and loneliness are related to mortality, especially premature mortality, and this study provides additional evidence.”

I hate to put a spotlight on a social or public health problem without also looking for solutions.

But long before Covid and our current societal condition, we heard over and over from other researchers that the number-one thing people with the happiest and healthiest lives had in common was good relationships.

Seek out and nurture better relationships. Volunteering, for example, gives you a chance to meet people while making somebody else’s day less lonely.

It’s not just a matter of shielding yourself from loneliness.

It’s a matter of helping other people shield themselves as well.

As if you really needed another reason.

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Other things worth knowing …

• USA Today: President Trump sparked immediate backlash from California leaders after suggesting Iran could “take out” a U.S. city with a nuclear weapon and mentioning San Diego and Los Angeles by name at a Nebraska campaign rally. “They can take out a city. Let ‘em take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay,” he said, arguing Americans should accept the economic impact of the Iran war.

• CNN: The Trump administration is struggling to get clear answers about the death of a Russian laboratory worker at an institute dedicated to studying the plague, amid days of stonewalling from Russian officials. “It’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Secretary of State Rubio said Tuesday. “Maybe it’s bigger than we thought. We don’t know, but I think it would be reckless at this moment, given the limited information we still have, to speculate.”

• The Guardian: Trump’s Justice Department has moved to strip the citizenship of 40 naturalized citizens accused of crimes, in what authorities describe as “the largest” such initiative over a single period during his administration. The naturalized citizens are alleged to have committed offenses including “acting as an agent for a foreign government, voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.”

• Mediaite: Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis accused President Trump and his eldest son of wanton corruption Tuesday. “Whether or not it’s illegal remains to be seen,” Tillis said, talking mostly about Trump’s meme coin, which has apparently netted him $104 million. “Appearances are not good. Anytime a president makes a billion dollars in the same year that people are growing up in a trailer park ...”

• NYT: Christa Pike, who survived two doses of a lethal injection drug last week during a botched execution in Tennessee, is conscious and speaking, her lawyers said Tuesday. Pike, 50, is believed to be the first person to have survived doses of a lethal injection drug.

• MSN: McDonald’s is facing a proposed nationwide class action alleging the fast-food company illegally coordinates menu prices across its franchises and company-owned restaurants through an AI-powered pricing system that uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across its nearly 14,000 restaurants.

• WSJ: Inside the Albanian village fighting a Jared Kushner-backed luxury resort. How Zvernec residents are pushing back against plans to build hotels, casinos, and a water park where villagers once farmed.

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1 star do not recommend

Let’s talk about the risk of online reviews.

There’s the one we’ve been talking about for years, of course: fakes.

• A 4.8-star average backed by thousands of reviews can be enticing, but buyer beware.

• A British government report suggests between 11% and 15% of reviews are fake.

• Tripadvisor and Trustpilot report figures suggesting that, on their platforms, the rte is probably somewhere between 7.4% and 9%.

My favorite blast from the past in this genre is a classic. Oobah Butler, who apparently made a living writing fake 5-star restaurants reviews, created a Tripadvisor listing for a fake restaurant.

He called it The Shed at Dulwich and stacked it with fake reviews. Eventually, it ranked No. 1 among London restaurants, despite the fact that it didn’t exist.

Now a new study suggests there might be a legitimate risk in writing reviews in the first place. Even the 100% truthful kind.

Writing in the journal Information Systems Research, Yan Leng, an assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, says patterns in publicly available review activity can help reveal users’ social ties.

That information could make it easier for spear phishers to identify and impersonate people a potential victim knows.

Let’s make sure we define spear phishing. In short, it’s an attempt by a bad actor to get passwords or money by contacting a victim while impersonating someone that victim trusts.

The researchers used public Yelp data covering 4,299 reviewers in Louisiana and Pennsylvania in 2020. On Yelp, both the review texts and the users’ friendship lists were publicly accessible.

That allowed Leng and her colleagues to infer connections from review behavior. Then then compared those presumed connections with the users’ disclosed Yelp friendships.

The connection to online reviews? According to Leng and her fellow researchers, patterns in people’s public reviews—especially patterns involving review length—made it possible to infer which Yelp users were connected, without using their friendship lists as an input.

The most revealing clue was review length.

Some connected users tended to write similarly long reviews. Other connected pairs showed complementary patterns, with one tending to write longer reviews and the other shorter ones.

Across thousands of users, those patterns enabled the model to begin reconstructing the social network.

Inferring connections between online reviewers from patterns in review length might sound a bit dubious, but Leng says her work shows there is a true signal hiding beneath the noise.

In fact, more identified connections mean more potential impersonation attempts—and the study’s model showed that an attacker could identify between 49% and 63% of Yelp reviewers’ social relationships from their activity.

The higher identification rate came with a higher level of false positives—wasted effort, from a scammer’s point of view—but the clear implication is that spear phishing is a numbers game.

For scammers, the return on investment scaled quickly: from 109% for 500 attempts to 1,098% for 10,000 attempts.

Interestingly, Leng’s recommendation isn’t for people like you and me to stop leaving reviews. Instead, it’s all on the platforms.

One of her suggestions: “small, carefully designed random changes to the data before it is released.”

An example would be for a platform to subtly vary a review’s displayed length without changing its meaning, thus blurring the linguistic fingerprint while preserving the usefulness of the underlying reviews.

Short version, in her words: “The platforms need to protect not only what users disclose, but also what others can infer.”

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Other things worth knowing …

• TechCrunch: The U.S. government is alerting millions of current and former military service members that their personal information was stolen during a months-long breach of Pentagon personnel records. A data breach notification says unauthorized users exploited a security vulnerability in a file-sharing system between October 2025 and mid-July 2026. The breach affects about 2.8 million living people.

• AP: A copilot stabbed a captain Wednesday on a flight to Israel before passengers burst into the cockpit and wrestled with the attacker as the plane descended sharply and passengers screamed. The jetliner was stabilized and made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saudi Arabia arrested the copilot, who was not identified.

• The Independent: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “field manual” filled with transcripts of his own speeches to roughly 600 troops attending his “State of the Force” address in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday. “Allow me to lay it out simply for the anti-American losers in our media,” Hegseth said. “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top. Diversity is not our strength.”

• AOL: President Trump’s controversial taxpayer-funded “public service announcements” are airing on CNN and MS NOW — two of the very networks he has been fighting to ban from the White House. Critics denounced the ads as propaganda and a potential violation of government ethics laws for being overtly political. Several congressional Republicans were among those criticizing them.

• Semafor via Yahoo Finance: Overseas visitors to the U.S. are on track to drop by almost two million year-on-year, with even the FIFA Men’s World Cup failing to arrest the decline in tourism. Meanwhile, China is attracting more visitors with its visa-free entry policies, and Japan’s weak currency is drawing a record number of tourists. “We’re the only major country in the world losing visitation,” the head of the U.S. Travel Association said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

• NYT: For U.S. passport applicants, the days of tracking down photo booths and waiting in endless lines at the post office are almost over. Starting next year, Americans seeking their first passports will be able to apply entirely online, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Tuesday.

• NY Post: If you’re planning to cash out in Florida, pack your patience. The Sunshine State is the single worst place in the country to sell a home right now, with a staggering 206,508 homes currently on the market, according to a fresh ranking pitting 48 states against each other on how brutal their markets are for sellers.

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What kids think about AI

Let’s talk about generations and technology.

• Once upon a time there were Millennials. They were singled out in one think piece after another for being the first generation growing up with the internet.

• Next came Generation Z, the digital natives. Their oldest members were only 10 when Steve Jobs took to the stage in 2007 and introduced the iPhone.

• Now, we have Generation Alpha, which, for better or for worse, will be known as the first AI-native generation.

How much Generation Alpha will use AI is interesting. But more fascinating to me is how growing up interacting with AI will change how they interact with people.

That question came to mind when I read about a recent University of Washington study in which researchers introduced young children to voice-enabled AI toys and watched their reactions.

(I’ve embedded a video at the end of this article so you can see the reaction for yourself. The study was presented at a conference in the United Kingdom earlier this year.)

This was a very small study with only eight children ages 6 to 11. But their reactions were fascinating:

• In the first stage, they seemed open to the toys, asked their names, and tried to play with them.

• In the second stage, they quickly became frustrated. The AI toys didn’t understand what they were saying, talked over them, or steered conversations away.

• By stage 3, the kids became flat-out antagonistic in some cases, calling the toys “ugly” and “evil,” and “joking about throwing them in the ocean.”

Again: small study.

And these are young kids. So, while there are a lot of studies out there showing the degree to which they are using AI (substantially), there aren’t many yet on how they react to AI.

Or, even better, how their reactions to AI might ultimately change how they interact with other humans.

Researchers studying adults, however, have already found evidence (in an unrelated study) that interactions with bots can affect subsequent interactions with people:

Human-bot interactions do spill over to human-human ones, and in two ways.
First, interacting with a bot reduces cooperation not only during the initial interaction, but also reduces downstream cooperation toward a new human partner.
Additionally, bots’ (like human partners’) behavior matters: Interactions with bots playing tit-for-tat promote cooperation, and interactions with noncooperative bots reduce cooperation toward downstream human partners.
The implementation of bots in previously human-only spaces alters human cooperation, not just toward bots, but toward other humans as well.

Frankly, I’ve caught myself changing how I react to people after interacting a lot with AI chatbots.

Not everyone, of course. But earlier this year, I wrote about how my frustration with AI chat functions like ChatGPT and Claude led me to be very direct and brusque — even rude — with human customer service representatives.

But I’m not Generation Alpha, not by a mile. And I grew up in a world without AI, so at least I remember how I communicated before it arrived.

In other words, I was very aware of what I was doing, and I stopped as soon as I realized. Heck, I even wrote the article about it.

Anyway, it’s early, and we can’t yet predict how AI will change the world in which kids today grow up — any more than we could have predicted AI-generated brainrot videos when Steve Jobs took the stage in 2007.

But I predict it will be a very important question over the next few years. As study co-author Jason Yip, a UW associate professor in the Information School and director of KidsTeam UW, put it:

For as long as children have played with toys, they’ve imparted their imagination to the toy to make it move and talk.
Now the script has been flipped and the toy has this imitation of imagination. We’ve never lived through that before.

Here’s the video:

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Other things worth knowing …

• Telegraph: Tennessee to execute first woman in 200 years. Christa Pike committed a notorious murder in 1995 at the age of 18.

• CBC: Alumni are threatening to pull funding, celebrities are lashing out, and people are boycotting institutions associated with an alleged gang rape at Cornell University. The case came into the spotlight after the victim, known in court documents as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit alleging the private Ivy League university protected the seven men, now dubbed “the Cornell 7.”

• CNBC: America’s Canadian import restrictions come into force. Here are the products barred from entry.

• WSJ: The Treasury Department will automatically enroll tens of millions of children in the government’s new Trump Accounts as soon as this week, replacing the previous structure that required parents or guardians to sign up.

• The Independent: Dutch police have arrested a suspected member of the ShinyHunters hacker group and accused the 24-year-old Amsterdam man of trying to arrange two murders. He was arrested on September 15, before the group claimed to have hacked the FBI.

• Politico: Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun. They got a gaffe instead.

• AP: More than a dozen words long used in Bermuda and across the Caribbean got an official nod from the Oxford English Dictionary. First in line is “bimpert,” a Bermudian word of unknown origin used to describe a stupid or foolish person. Another colorful addition is “hornerman,” used in Trinidad and Tobago since 1975 to describe an unfaithful man or a man having a relationship with someone else’s partner.

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Late breakfast

All writing is autobiographical, they say, and here’s the proof.

Because I originally wrote this at 11 a.m. on a Saturday after eating a late breakfast. And, the study we’re exploring today is partly about what happens to men who eat late breakfasts on the weekend.

Writing in the journal Communications Medicine, researchers in France say they analyzed data from 104,806 adults in the NutriNet-Santé cohort. They focused on the association between cardiovascular disease and what they call “eating jetlag.”

That’s their term for the difference between the midpoint of a person’s daily eating window on weekdays and weekends.

The findings:

• For men, for each hour of eating jetlag, their risk of cardiovascular disease went up 14%, and their risk of coronary heart disease went up 21%. This applied whether their eating midpoint shifted earlier or later on weekends.

• But for women? The researchers detected no statistically significant association with cardiovascular or coronary heart disease.

We’d be stacking theories on top of each other to explain why associations might be different in men and women.

But the researchers theorize that it might have to do with different physiology.

Or else, “differences in lifestyle and socio-occupational circumstances … could lead to different circadian rhythms.”

Also, men have higher absolute risk of cardiovascular disease to begin with.

The data came from NutriNet-Santé. This is an ongoing French health and nutrition study coordinated by researchers from INRAE, Inserm, CNAM, and several French universities.

“This new study,” said Bernard Srour, research director at INRAE, “suggests that, beyond simply eating late, maintaining consistent meal times between weekdays and weekends may be just as important. These associations appear to be independent of how long people sleep, suggesting that regular meal times could, in themselves, help resynchronise our biological rhythm.”

Key limitation: “We assumed that Monday to Friday corresponded to working days, and Saturday and Sunday to rest days.”

However, I’m going to add another limitation.

The researchers recorded what participants ate and adjusted for calorie intake and overall diet quality. But they do not appear to have isolated how an individual’s weekend meals differed from his or her weekday meals.

For example, my late breakfast that day consisted of pancakes (made by my daughter) and bacon; my weekday breakfasts are quite different: most often two eggs and a protein shake.

For that matter, I also don’t usually follow my weekday breakfast by writing with the Premier League on TV in the background.

This was an observational study, so it cannot establish that changing meal times causes heart disease.

In any event, this is the classic “we need further study” kind of study.

And I’m fine with that.

I’m happy to sleep in, eat a big breakfast, and watch soccer while writing for as many weekends as necessary.

All in the interest of science, of course.

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Other things worth knowing …

• WSJ: British authorities said they were releasing five men on bail who were arrested over a foiled attack on an air base in England that houses U.S. forces. Officials familiar with the matter said earlier that investigators were probing whether Iran or an Islamist group had orchestrated the plot.

• CBS News: Soaring diesel prices are rippling through the U.S. economy, putting a financial squeeze on schools, farmers and small businesses. Average diesel prices hovered around $6.50 a gallon on Friday. One Georgia food bank said it will spend an extra $100,000 this year on diesel, money that otherwise would have gone to feed families. “That would actually translate to about 122,000 meals,” said the Atlanta Community Food Bank.

• The Atlantic: The United States is deporting parents without their children, creating a whole new family-separation crisis.

• ABC News: Prosecutors in central New York say they are reopening the investigation of an alleged gang rape at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024 after a civil lawsuit filed earlier this month sparked outrage. The lawsuit alleges a former student was drugged, assaulted, and gang raped by seven former and current members of the Chi Phi fraternity.

• CBS News: Food safety becomes an election issue as major outbreaks and recalls cause concern.

• Fox News: Bill Gates warns artificial intelligence is “powerful enough” to cause “a billion deaths” if unchecked.

• WSJ: Every household in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania receives $10,000 if a data center gets built nearby — and many residents are pushing back anyway, despite the lure of the cash payout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alone on the weekends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Gen-Z actually wants

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

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

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

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

• 54 percent prefer daytime over nighttime activities.

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

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

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

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

“Deeply felt customer needs”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, I am even more confident. Thank you.

43,000 words about rotisserie chickens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve never felt so trendy.

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literally.

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

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

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

The Dunning-Kruger effect

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

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

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

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

Highly confident people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A universal human trait’

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

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

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

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

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

Strategic signalling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A practical problem

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

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

I mean, hardly.

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

That is how these things usually go.

But it does create a practical problem.

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

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

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

So which is it?

Getting to the bottom of it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He asked whether I had any questions.

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

I think he found the question amusing.

He started doing the math out loud.

• About 25 years with this as his specialty.

• Figure he worked perhaps 40 weeks each year.

• Maybe two procedures per day.

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: The bodies of a Texas chiropractor and at least one other person have been found after a major weekend flash flood swept through the Grand Canyon, with more than a dozen hikers still missing following waves of rain in the Bright Angel Creek area. Forecasters warned more flooding was possible as heavy rain shrouded the canyon walls of the tourist destination that hosts 4.4 million visitors a year.

• ABC News: A jury found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty in the murder of Tupac Shakur, 30 years after the rapper was killed in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before finding him guilty of murder with the use of a deadly weapon with intent to promote a criminal gang. The 63-year-old faces a possible maximum sentence of life in prison.

• Yahoo Finance: Tim Cook stepped down as Apple CEO on Monday, with parting words for the company’s employees who, he wrote, “share a belief that what we build matters.” John Ternus, the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, takes over. Cook, CEO since 2011, will remain on as executive chair.

• AFP via Yahoo: President Trump attacked opponents of AI data centers on Monday, saying they would end up “backwards and poor” and were helping rival China. A backlash against the energy-guzzling centers has become a surprise issue in November’s midterm elections, with Trump at odds with many Republicans.

• WSJ: Prediction market Kalshi banned former Rep. George Santos from its platform for life after a federal regulator alleged he made more than $17,000 betting on his own attendance at Trump’s State of the Union address. Kalshi also announced a three-year ban for a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina.

• NY Post: Happiness has an address — and it’s in California. Fremont has been crowned the happiest city in the country, according to a new WalletHub study ranking 182 of the largest U.S. cities using 29 measures spanning emotional and physical well-being, income and employment, and community and environment.

• The Guardian: A 91-year-old hiker has reclaimed his record as the oldest person to complete the Appalachian Trail. By his count, Dale Sanders of Tennessee fell 71 times during the 2,193-mile feat — six of which were hard falls, one requiring a brief hospitalization and another occurring just 200 yards from the finish line.

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This will probably be all over the place but what the heck.

You guys know I used to be a reporter at Stars & Stripes, right? It was only for a year, but it was an important year.

It was my “I need a purpose every day because I’m going through a divorce and everything is out of kilter” job.

I guess it was ... roughly February 2010 to April 2012. Despite my sort of cynical how-I-got-there story, I took it very seriously. If I had to point to a few things I did well, I guess there are five.

• First, I created the idea of a veterans beat and led our 10th anniversary of 9/11 coverage. Until I arrived, Stripes had never had anyone whose job was primarily to cover veterans.

• Second, I broke the story of “blue-on-green” killings in Afghanistan—Afghan police who were blackmailed or paid to kill American soldiers.

• Third, I wrote about how U.S. military was prosecuting soldiers suffering from PTSD, so that they’d take less-than-honorable discharges as a plea deal, and give up their veterans’ benefits.

• Fourth, I stumbled into the story of an Afghanistan veteran who took his own life, and pieced together everything that happened from Day 1. Honestly, if I never wrote anything else, having written this story would mean something.

• And, I spent like a month on an amazing boondogle reporting trip in Germany, which resulted in a magnum opus feature about Maj. D.J. Skelton, the most-wounded U.S. soldier in history to recover and return to command in combat (also a close friend, which was why I put it all together to begin with).

Anyway, Stripes, which traces its history to the U.S. Civil War, has (had?) an important role. It’s a strange but vital institution, and I’m glad to have been associated with it.

Interjection.

My daughter and I went to shoot baskets at a court near our house. She’s pretty good at basketball. I am comically and legendarily bad, so it works out.

Between her sinking shots and me throwing up airballs, we had this exchange:

Daughter: “Dad, you know I owe mom a dollar?”

Me: “No, I did not know that. Why?”

Daughter: “Well, because I saw a homeless man last week in New York, and I wanted to give him a dollar. So I asked her for one.”

Me: “That was nice of you.”

Daughter: “I saw a lot of homeless people. But this man had a sign that said he was in the military. And you were in the military too.”

Me: “Hmmm.”

Daughter: “I mean, technically.”

Me: (ignoring “technically,” but I do say this about my time in the military myself). “Did he say thank you?”

Daughter: “Yes he did. But I think he was really in a war. And you were only writing about a war, right?”

Oh, the mouths of babes. But yes, I only wrote about a war, and in retrospect: Thank God.

Frankly, war consumed me in a lot of ways from about 6 a.m. PT on September 11, 2001 until (multiple choice):

• December 15, 2011, when the U.S. involvement in Iraq officially ended?

• April 15, 2012, when I left Stripes intending to go to Spain to finish ghostwriting a book, but instead got together with my future wife and moved to New Jersey instead?

• August 30, 2021, when the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan?

Maybe all of the above?

But perhaps we could also add: August 21, 2026, when of all things, the Department of Defense (Defense!) fired the publisher and editor-in-chief of Stripes, along with a reporter.

I doubt this story—the firings—will “have legs” as we used to say; few people will remember it a week, a month, a year from now. There’s just so much else going on now, all the time. (I mean, are we really going to spend time trying to rename Lake Ontario?)

But I also doubt most of the stories I dug up and wrote about would have seen the light of day under the new regime.

And I’m proud of that work — and the work my colleagues did as well—some of them for much longer than I did.

So no my darling daughter. none of us were actually fighting the wars.

But we were writing about them.

I’d like to think that matters.

Even if I can’t hit a free throw.

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Other things worth knowing …

• WaPo: Two Pennsylvania residents have died from measles — the first such deaths in the state in 35 years and the first reported in the United States this year — as the country registers the most measles cases in any year since 1991. Both people were unvaccinated.

• AP: Liberia has agreed to accept up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States — one of the largest such arrangements under the Trump administration's broader immigration crackdown. The deportees will include Africans as well as nationals from North America, South America, and the Caribbean, with the first batch of 20 expected Thursday.

• ABC News: UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham arrived in Kyiv on Monday for his first overseas trip since taking office, joining European leaders marking Ukraine's 35th Independence Day.

• NPR: Indonesians braved choking smoke to pray for rain as huge blazes in central and western regions of the country scorched wide areas of forests and peatland, blanketing some cities in haze. The fires are spreading through Sumatra and Kalimantan Island during a severe dry season.

• WaPo: President Trump is threatening to sue the Center for American Progress unless it retracts a report that says National Guard deployments to various cities did not reduce crime as he claimed.

• SCMP: A court in Shenzhen sentenced China Evergrande founder Hui Ka-yan to life imprisonment for "multiple combined crimes," confiscating all of his personal property and stripping him of political rights for life. The 67-year-old, once China's richest man, had pleaded guilty in April to charges including embezzlement and corporate bribery.

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My wife and I have had a laugh or two recently over the sheer number of middle-aged men we know who went to see the band Rush at Madison Square Garden earlier this month.

It’s a guy thing — especially (by reputation) guys born between say 1960 and 1975. Honestly, I probably would have dragged my wife along if I had realized they were playing here. I mean, how many more chances would we get?

In fact, one woman we know whose husband convinced her to come along said she realized it was the only concert she’s ever been to where the line for the ladies’ room was nowhere near as long as it was for the men’s room.

O.K. hold that thought — Rush, not the bathrooms.

Because my wife and I dated in college. Then we broke up and had almost no contact for close to 20 years.

We ran into each other again at our 20th college reunion. Things moved pretty quickly after that.

I’ve told this story before here a few times, I think. But now and then, because our life together has turned out so well, one of us will say we wish we had never broken up. Or that we had found our way back to each other after five years instead of 20.

Maybe. But there were plenty of other ways it could have gone.

• We could have missed the reunion. (Fortunately, it was not the same weekend as Rush.)

• We could have seen each other and felt nothing. (Highly unlikely, but possible.)

• We could have had one awkward conversation and left it there. (I am pretty good at launching awkward conversations.)

Instead, we got back together while we were still young enough to build a life together. I will take that outcome.

Now, some new research from the University of Macau and the University of Houston made me think about this in terms of work and careers.

The study, published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, looked at people who stop waiting for complete certainty before making career decisions.

Hui Xu, a psychologist at the University of Macau and the study’s lead author, said many people put too much pressure on themselves to find exactly the right job.

The problem is that no amount of research can tell you exactly how a job will feel six months from now.

Xu and co-author Blake Allan of the University of Houston call the ability to deal with that uncertainty “career wisdom.”

Basically, it’s the ability to gather information, think about what matters to you, and make decisions – despite knowing all the while that you’ll never actually have all the information you need.

Having higher “career wisdom” in the study correlated to people feeling more meaning, having higher job satisfaction and engagement, and even higher overall life satisfaction.

The whole idea reminded me of Daniel Kahneman’s work on decision-making.

Kahneman wrote about the value of collecting evidence before relying on intuition—accepting that there is a limit to how much evidence you can collect, and lingering doubts might just mean that you know the decision matters.

I have talked with many people over the years who were considering quitting jobs, changing careers, starting a business, or taking some other professional risk. Heck, after I went viral for “quitting my new job after just 1 day,” I’d have people reaching out to me almost on the daily to ask if I thought they should quit their jobs, too.

Usually, they had several choices that could plausibly work. What bothered them was having no way to know which one would look smartest later.

But that’s how life works, right?

I guess I didn’t have that kind of confidence in my 20s. I did not know much about careers, and probably even less about relationships.

That said, around the time of our reunion nearly two decades later, I had no idea what would happen if I went over and said hello.

Still, I accepted the uncertainty and turned on my obvious charm.

It worked out unusually well!

As the late Neil Peart of Rush (as sung by Geddy Lee) put it: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!”

So, go to reunions. Heck, go to concerts! Maybe take the job!

Just make the decision to go.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The Guardian: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Trump administration can proceed with a nationwide crackdown on mail-in voting, approving its emergency appeal. It remains unclear how the administration can implement the decision in time for the November midterms, and the ruling leaves room for further legal challenges.

• CNBC: President Trump said Monday the U.S. will raise tariffs on imports of cars, trucks, and auto parts from Canada to 50% on January 1, 2027, following a breakdown in trade negotiations last week. “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding: “Someone should get these clowns to ‘fall in line’ or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!”

• AP: A man waiting for his son to return from the USS Lincoln was arrested by Border Patrol. “Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws,” the Department of Homeland Security said, adding that the Trump administration “does not pick and choose which laws to enforce.”

• Politico: The intensifying late-summer backlash against data centers is inspiring panic in some corners of the tech sector. “AI is going to be a massive issue for the presidential election in a way that technology has never been an issue,” a representative from a major AI company told Politico. “Nobody wants to lose their job and they’re already feeling squeezed while these very, very rich people who are richer than anything we have ever seen in the history of Earth are making more.”

• CNBC: Amazon said Wednesday it plans to offer drone deliveries in nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of the year — a sixfold increase from its current footprint, and a sign of momentum for a project that’s been slow to develop since Jeff Bezos first laid out his vision for it almost 13 years ago.

• AP: Harvard Medical School says it agreed to pay $53 million to settle class action lawsuits by relatives of body donors whose remains were sold on the black market by its former morgue manager.

• NBC News: Dan Sullivan endorses Dan Sullivan to beat Dan Sullivan in a perplexing Alaska Senate race. A former Anchorage mayor named Dan Sullivan threw his support behind Sen. Dan S. Sullivan in his race against — among others — former teacher Dan J. Sullivan. Democrats view the seat as one they could flip in November; the Cook Political Report rates the race a tossup.

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Do these kinds of things ever happen to you?

• You come up with a great idea at work, and you get through maybe 20 percent of the way through executing it before coming up with a second great idea shows up. The original one gathers dust, and the second one dies on the vine as well.

• You sit down to answer emails — but then you also reorganize a folder, look up a flight to somewhere you’re probably not going, and forget why you opened your inbox in the first place.

• You’re in a meeting, technically present, your brain quietly quickly checks out to think about something completely unrelated. When you finally catch yourself, you’re panicked trying to get back on track.

And, well — this exact newsletter. I started it, got partway through, got distracted, then didn’t touch it again for three days and completely forgot.

Then I opened my laptop to do something unrelated and thought, wait, didn’t I have something I was writing?

I’ve never technically been diagnosed with ADHD. Frankly, from what I understand, doctors get pretty reluctant to prescribe medication for it once you’re past your early 40s or so — the theory being if you’ve made it this far in life figuring out workarounds, you probably don’t need the RX.

Still, attention and focus are both an abstract subject for me and something I actively work on. So, a new study out of Johns Hopkins caught my attention (pun very much intended).

Researchers found a cluster of neurons tucked deep in the brainstem that appears to control the ability to focus by actively suppressing distractions. It’s in a part of the brain so evolutionarily old, that it’s shared across essentially all vertebrates.

Writing in Nature Communications, the team, led by neuroscientist Shreesh Mysore and postdoctoral fellow Ninad Kothari, found that when they temporarily shut off these neurons in mice, the animals became dramatically more distractible.

“A hallmark of ADHD is that even faint distractors draw attention away—and that’s exactly what we see here when these neurons are silenced,” Mysore said. “But the very next day, when the neurons are turned back on, the same animal can ignore distractors again, even very strong ones.”

Apparently, the scientific working assumption has been that attention is mostly a function of the prefrontal cortex, which is a brain region that’s only highly developed in humans and other primates.

However, plenty of other animals are perfectly capable of focusing and filtering out distractions.

“If we really go back in evolution, for hundreds of millions of years, birds have had this ability, fish have had this ability,” Kothari said. “And they do not typically have a highly developed prefrontal cortex, so how does the brain solve this problem?”

To test the theory, the researchers trained mice on a human-like attention task: focusing on visual information straight ahead, ignoring distracting information off to the side. The mice were good at it — until the researchers switched off the relevant brainstem neurons.

The researchers ruled out simpler explanations, like impaired vision or motor control. The only thing that broke was the mice’s ability to weigh competing pieces of information and decide what to actually pay attention to.

Next step: seeing for sure if the same mechanism works in the human brain.

“All the evidence to date suggests that these neurons exist in humans too,” Mysore said. “But are they responsible for selective spatial attention in humans? An exciting hypothesis is that they play a crucial role.”

If that pans out, it could eventually point toward more targeted treatments for attention disorders.

It’s early. It’s mice, not people. But it’s an interesting finding I’m paying attention to.

At least until the next fascinating and totally unrelated thing comes along.

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Other things worth knowing …

• WSJ: The Army’s new drone assault battalion — established in January to master fighting with drones and ground robots — is being phased out as part of a “back-to-basics” approach ordered by Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting Army chief of staff closely aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Experts say the decision will slow the Army’s push to excel in the kind of drone warfare that has transformed the battlefield in Ukraine and the Middle East.

• Fox Business | PBS: The U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time in history on Wednesday amid persistent federal budget deficits. “The federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment, threatening our economy and Americans’ long-term prosperity,” said Margaret Spellings, president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

• AP: Liberia has agreed to accept up to 1,200 third-country deportees from the United States, authorities in the West African country said Tuesday — one of the largest such arrangements under the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown. The deportees will include Africans as well as nationals from North America, South America, and the Caribbean, with the first batch of 20 expected Thursday.

• Futurism: Teen boys are using Meta AI Glasses to harass and bully girls at middle and high schools, a Futurism review found — with large numbers of videos recorded in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, often without subjects’ knowledge or consent, and shared to TikTok and Instagram to humiliate them further.

• CNBC: Amazon said Wednesday it plans to offer drone deliveries in nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of the year — a sixfold increase from its current footprint, and a sign of momentum for a project that’s been slow to develop since Jeff Bezos first laid out his vision for it almost 13 years ago.

• NYT: Prince Harry, his wife Meghan, and their children are moving back to Britain in the upcoming weeks, according to two people familiar with their decision. The move comes six years after they left for the United States amid a clash with other members of the royal family, ending a self-imposed exile that brought international attention to warring factions inside Buckingham Palace.

• NYT: As cruising reaches new levels of popularity, river cruises offer travelers an opportunity to explore multiple cities in one leisurely trip. Unlike huge liners, the smaller river boats dock right in the middle of port cities and often stay longer, encouraging passengers to get off and explore.

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Let’s talk about loneliness.

The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection reported last year that about 16% of people worldwide experience loneliness, and linked it to roughly 871,000 deaths a year.

For researchers who study loneliness, there’s a chicken-and-egg question:

• Does loneliness cause poor health, especially mental health?

• Or does poor mental health simply make people lonely to begin with?

Now, a team from the University of Bristol, working with Nesta, Amsterdam UMC, Oxford, and Manchester, is trying to find the answer.

Their study, published last month in Nature Communications, drew on genome-wide association studies involving as many as 2 million people, along with data from as many as 414,432 people in the UK Biobank.

They measured depression and anxiety using two standard clinical screening tools, the PHQ-9 and the GAD-7, plus separate formal diagnoses pulled from linked NHS medical records.

As for whether the people they studied were “lonely,” participants were simply asked whether they often felt lonely. Happiness, sense of meaning in life, and overall life satisfaction were measured separately as indicators of well-being.

In fairness, just asking people to self-report whether they’re lonely is a bit of a blunt instrument, and the researchers noted that they’d rather have been able to use a more detailed loneliness scale.

But they still had enough data to do some real analysis and draw conclusions—comparing the health outcomes of lonely people with those of non-lonely people, and then comparing siblings, on the theory that they could reduce the effects of growing up in the same household or having similar genes.

Finally, they used a technique called Mendelian randomization, comparing people with genetic traits linked to loneliness to see whether loneliness might contribute to later mental health problems, rather than simply result from them.

The researchers also drew a distinction between social isolation—the number and type of social connections you have—and loneliness—how you feel, regardless of how many people you interact with.

Bottom line, loneliness came out as the more damaging of the two.

Here’s Dr. Zoe Reed, a research fellow at the University of Bristol:

“Our findings suggest that loneliness, and possibly social isolation, are still important public health concerns, especially for mental health and general health.

Supporting people who feel lonely or socially isolated could help improve mental health, wellbeing and overall health.”

It’s funny; all the headlines on this story suggested that they figured out which comes first, the loneliness or the mental health challenges.

Drilling down, I’d say they concluded that loneliness really can come first—but that it can very quickly devolve into a vicious circle in which loneliness leads to more challenges, which lead to more loneliness and more challenges.

And since making someone less lonely might sometimes be easier than diagnosing and treating mental health issues, the idea is that addressing loneliness is one place we can start.

So have you been putting off a phone call, a coffee, or a check-in with someone? This might be a good impetus to act.

The upside seems real—maybe for you and them both.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Euronews: President Trump threatened to launch strikes against Oman, a U.S. ally, if it "gets in the way" of talks between Washington and Tehran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz, telling Fox News "we'll bomb the s--- out of them" if Oman interferes. The threat came as the 60-day window set in June for a US-Iran deal expired Monday with no agreement reached.

• The Hill: The U.S. Navy is weighing a major revamp of its new class of aircraft carriers to better suit the aesthetics President Trump says he would prefer: specifically redesigning them to move the multistory aircraft carrier's command center tower, known as the "island," toward the middle of the vessel, so that they look more like older warships.

• Business Insider: Oracle is planning a new round of layoffs this month as it borrows tens of billions of dollars to fund its AI data center buildout, with some teams facing double-digit percentage cuts. The company's workforce already shrank by about 21,000 people, or 13%, in the fiscal year ended May 31.

• The Guardian: The chief economist at Russia’s second-largest bank has been fired after a series of critical comments about the state of the economy, including warnings that Moscow would not win a prolonged economic war with Ukraine. Andrei Klepach, who had served in the role at the state-controlled development bank VEB since 2014, was fired after Russian media reported on a scathing speech he had delivered to fellow economists in May.

• The Guardian: Hayden Panettiere, the actor known for her roles in television shows such as Heroes and Nashville, has died at the age of 36. Panettiere’s death was confirmed in a statement from her representative to the Guardian after it was first reported on US network ABC News; no cause of death was given.

• CNBC: Less than two weeks after a loss in New Mexico, Meta faces a much bigger legal test in a case brought by a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. The stakes are enormous as leading government officials across the country push for Meta to be held accountable for allegedly violating federal and state laws, including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, and various consumer protection statutes.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists at La Brea Tar Pits identified a new extinct amphibian species, a spadefoot toad named Spea labreae, after its bones sat unstudied in the museum's collections since the 1950s. It's only the second extinct Pleistocene amphibian ever found in North America, the other being a tree frog from Florida.

• UPI: Disney announced that Harrison Ford is returning as Indiana Jones for a new ride at Florida's Animal Kingdom, and for the first time ever he's the actual model for the animatronic figure — "fear of snakes included," he said in a video announcement. The attraction, Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent, has no opening date yet.

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Hamburger Hamlet and …

Today’s newsletter is about the time Oprah Winfrey and film critic Roger Ebert went on a date.

The date of the date—well, our educated guess is that it was August 9, 1985. I’ll explain how we back into that in a minute.

First, this might be a fun piece of forgettable trivia, but the true reason this story survives is what Oprah and Ebert talked about on the date.

In short, they talked about money.

Context: Ebert would have just turned 43 at the time, and Oprah was 31. (43/2 + 7 = 28.5, if you buy into that, just FYI.)

They knew each other because Ebert and his TV co-host, Gene Siskel, had been guests on Oprah’s first TV show a year or two before, in Baltimore. By 1985, she was the new host of a half-hour morning show called AM Chicago for the local ABC affiliate.

The show had skyrocketed in the ratings, and things were moving fast. Oprah had two options on the table, and she was torn:

• She could stay with ABC, sign a new contract with a big raise, and turn AM Chicago into a full-hour show that would be syndicated across the country; or

• She could take a bigger risk with bigger potential upside by taking ownership of the show and syndicating it back to ABC and anyone else who wanted it—if anyone wanted it.

Oprah revealed the broad details of this story on the 20th-anniversary edition of her show. Then Ebert wrote that he felt like he now had permission to tell the rest of it:

[W]e went to the movies. Afterward, we went to the Hamburger Hamlet for dinner, my treat.

“I don’t know what to do,” she told me. “The ABC stations want to syndicate my show. So does King World. The problem with syndication is that if your show isn’t successful, you’re off the air in three months. The ABC stations own themselves, so they can keep you on. Which way do you think I should go?”

I took a napkin and a ballpoint pen, and made some simple calculations.

Line 1: How much I made in a year for doing a syndicated television show.

Line 2: Times 2, because Siskel made the same.

Line 3: Times 2, because Oprah would be on for an hour, instead of half an hour.

Line 4: Times 5, because she would be on five days a week.

Line 5: Times 2, because her ratings would be at least twice as big as “Siskel & Ebert.”

I pushed the napkin across the table. Oprah studied it for 10 seconds.

“Rog, I’m going with King World,” she said.

They went on two dates, for what it’s worth, and apparently remained friends until Ebert died in 2013—but lots came of the advice Oprah says he gave her!

Now, because Oprah’s date was Roger Ebert … and because he reviewed movies for a living … and because they both said they went to a movie but didn’t say which one, a group of fanatics set out to identify the film based on context clues.

I think they figured it out. Here’s the reasoning:

1. King World bought the rights to Oprah’s show in September 1985. So, if the deal was on her mind, the date might have taken place around August.

2. We might assume Ebert chose the movie; this was his forte, after all. If you look at the big movies that were out then, you’ll find Back to the Future as the most obvious one. But if this was the movie Oprah and Ebert saw together, it’s the kind of detail you’d think they would have mentioned.

3. The other big movie that came out that month was The Return of the Living Dead, but Ebert famously did not like horror movies, so that’s probably out as well.

However, guess what movie premiered on Friday August 9, 1985? Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

Ebert never reviewed this movie officially, but he did mention it in a newspaper column before it came out, giving it “two thumbs up” in advance, based on TV previews.

And a few years after all this, he said it was his No. 1 “guilty pleasure” movie, based on “how innocent, how playful and how truly eccentric” it was.

How’s that for detective work? It was 41 years ago this week.

O.K., so who gets the quote of the day? I think we’ll give it to Ebert, since he’s no longer with us, and also because I suspect I’ll have more chances to quote Oprah in the future.

How about this one, which feels like it has more to do thematically with liking Pee-wee Herman than with giving Oprah good advice:

“To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.”

Make people happy and bet on yourself. Pretty good advice.

See you tomorrow with our back-to-live newsletters!

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Other things worth knowing …

• NBC News | WaPo: Tuesday's primaries gave something to both wings of the Democratic Party. In Minnesota, progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan defeated centrist Rep. Angie Craig 58-40 for the Senate nomination; she would be the first Native American woman in the Senate if elected in November. In Wisconsin, the establishment pulled off a stunning late-night upset: Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong — the result wasn't called until 2:30 a.m. after 28,000 delayed Milwaukee absentee ballots came in, despite Hong leading in polls by 22 points.

• The Telegraph via Yahoo: U.S. intelligence believes Russia could attack a NATO country as early as this fall — ranging from a cyberattack or false-flag drone operation to a small-scale land incursion — with the Baltics and Poland considered the most likely targets. The assessment marks a significant shift: officials previously believed Putin would not attack NATO while still fighting in Ukraine.

• The Guardian: American intelligence experts believe Russia was behind last week's explosive-laden drone attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport, U.S. media have reported, as Berlin remained silent on the likely culprit. The security emergency prompted Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt to break off his summer holiday in Italy and rush to the scene, where he spoke of a "new level of danger" for Germany.

• WaPo: New reporting reveals that when Trump slipped out of Turkey last month in a catering truck to avoid an Iranian assassination threat, he brought his most loyal personal aides — but left behind not only the press corps but every cabinet secretary except Pete Hegseth. At least two cabinet secretaries were unknowingly aboard the decoy plane, believing the president was with them. The C-32A carrying Trump flew to Britain under the call sign "Reach 18" rather than the recognizable Air Force One designation.

• ABC News: The water level at Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, hit a record low on Thursday: 1,040.50 feet, breaking the previous low of 1,040.58 feet set in July 2022. The reservoir, formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, supplies water to millions of U.S. residents in Nevada and Arizona.

• AP: A small organ in eastern Germany is the headliner of the world’s slowest concert, playing the same piece of music by composer John Cage at a glacial pace for nearly 25 years. A rare chord change last week — from seven notes to eight — represented the completion of about 4% of the 639-year endeavor. The composition is scheduled to finish on September 4, 2640.

• ABC News: Andy Green — the first and only person to break the sound barrier in a car — hits the track in Utah this week trying to reach 350.092 mph or more in a hydrogen-powered car. In 1997, Green set the outright land speed record of 763.035 mph in a car powered by twin jet engines.

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June 6, 2002

On June 6, 2002, a teenager named James was playing baseball on the last day of his sophomore year of high school. As a classmate swung the bat, it came flying out his hands and flew directly towards him, striking James directly between his eyes.

He was badly injured: broken nose, multiple skull fractures, two eye sockets broken.

Classmates and a teacher walked him to the nurse’s office. Nobody realized that every minute counted. The school nurse asked him questions to see how alert he was:

What year is it? Who is the president of the United States? What’s your mother’s name?

• 1998, James replied -- off by four years.

• Bill Clinton (it was George W. Bush).

• And, it took 10 seconds for him to recall the first name of the woman who had given birth to him and raised him: Patti.

Shortly after that James lost consciousness. An ambulance raced him to the small local hospital, where doctors said the care he needed was beyond their ability to help. They quickly put him on a helicopter, with his mother by his side, and rushed to the much larger hospital in Cincinnati.

That night, although he needed surgery to repair his broken bones, the more urgent need was to control his brain swelling. Doctors put him into a medically induced coma.

I’m wondering how many people recognize the vignette above. “James” is James Clear, and the story is my paraphrasing of the opening of his book, Atomic Habits.

It was the number-1 book on the New York Times bestseller list in the Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous category for close to 300 weeks. That’s unheard of.

It’s also the #4 book overall on Amazon, with more than 149,000 reviews and a 4.8 star rating. Keep in mind, it’s been out since 2018.

The theory of the book, if I can summarize the whole thing in a sentence, is that while people aren’t good at setting and achieving goals, they can be taught to adopt good habits.

And adopting good habits can often take you to a better ultimate objective than you might have dreamed of in the first place.

For example, James (I think we can keep calling him that) was a kid who had his eyes set on becoming a professional baseball player.

That didn’t happen, but the habits he taught himself to adopt as he rehabilitated from his injuries and sought to achieve his goals did help him to become a successful college athlete. Moreover, they also put him on the path to being the kind of writer whose book has been a perpetual bestseller for years.

Let’s go to the quote of the day, and then I’ve got one more thing to share. There are a lot to choose from; as I say, James Clear literally wrote a highly quotable 320-page book. But we’ll go with this one:

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

OK, for better or worse, here’s another thing to share. It’s that nowhere in James’s book does he actually say the date of the baseball bat incident that sparks his entire story. But I’m confident that it happened on June 6, 2002.

The reason is that this is one of those dates that I simply determined I was going to decipher, because it fits the theme of the whole Big Optimism project perfectly: a day on which something neutral or even bad happened, but that ultimately led to very positive outcomes.

Figuring it out required me to track down what high school James went to, call the school—and then work with a very patient administrator there to find a 22-year-old academic calendar that was archived only in the far corners of the Internet.

Then, after I met someone at a dinner who mentioned that James was a friend, I asked him to ask James if my research was correct.

Actually, I’d thought it might have been June 7, but James replied that he’s pretty sure it was June 6.

So there you have it: an exclusive!

I feel a bit odd, I admit, to put that much effort into tracking down a specific date like that. But, much as James says in that quote, that kind of attention to detail in my work is part and parcel of who I am.

And I suppose the person I hope to become!

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Other things worth knowing …

• CNBC: Trump has signaled he’s prepared to let economic pressure take its toll on Iran rather than launching further military strikes, telling Axios he is prepared to wait for economic distress to mount in Tehran. The shift comes as Iranian strikes in Hormuz and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea continue to keep shippers away from both routes, and as the U.S. military redirected 20 more commercial vessels away from Iranian ports last week.

• Ars Technica: New surveillance tech links your phone to your license plate. Phone and Bluetooth signals could turn roadside cameras into far richer tracking tools.

• Reuters: For McDonald’s and rivals, cheap deals no longer do the trick. Value meals and promotions have been the industry’s most reliable traffic driver for the past two years as consumers squeezed by inflation sought cheaper meals. But results showed the strongest performers paired bargains with menu innovation, quality improvements and a smoother customer experience.

• Science News: An experimental antibody reduced lean-mass loss in people taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy in a clinical trial — potentially addressing one of the drugs’ most common side effects, the loss of muscle alongside fat. Whether preserving that muscle mass improves longer-term health outcomes remains unclear.

• NYT: Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime? Some parents have been surprised to find themselves in the legal system’s cross hairs.

• Wired: The Rise of the 1 A.M. Job Interview. An AI interview is increasingly the first step of a hiring process. Since there’s no human on the other end, candidates are scheduling them whenever — even deep into the night.

• CBS News: A lifeguard in Maine said he “started swimming like hell” when a shark grabbed onto his buoy and pulled him underwater off the coast of Scarborough Beach on Saturday. He was pulled about 5 feet underwater before getting free and emerging unharmed. Officials along the East Coast say there are more sharks closer to shore in areas where they don’t usually go.

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9.5% success rate

Which of these three things do you think is statistically the most difficult to do in America?

1. Become a U.S. Navy SEAL.

2. Get into Harvard University as a freshman.

3. Be awarded a Chick-fil-A franchise.

If you’ve been with me a while, you might know that the surprising answer is number 3 - the Chick-fil-A franchise.

This is mostly a matter of “fun with statistics,” because CFA gets about 60,000 initial franchise applications per year and only opens between 75 and 80 restaurants. That works out to a .13 percent success rate.

Harvard University? The already self-selecting group of A students, class presidents, and varsity team captains each has about a 3.7 percent shot at getting in.

So let’s talk about the Navy SEALs, which if you count everyone who applies to join the Navy and become one has a 9.5 percent chance of making it through the entire year-plus worth of training.

This includes a single week called Hell Week that has only a 25% to 33% success rate.

Personally, I am happy that there are people who want each of these three things—especially the Navy SEALs—but I don’t think I’ve aspired to be any of them.

However, today is a good day to remember someone for whom becoming a Navy SEAL was an obsession, and who had to try as hard as anyone (over and over) to achieve his goal. Frankly, he’s become quite an inspiration to a lot of other people since.

If you don’t know him already, I invite you to meet David Goggins: retired Navy SEAL (how’s that for foreshadowing?) and author of the out-of-nowhere bestseller, Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind.

Raised in East Buffalo, N.Y., and then a small town called Brazil, Indiana, Goggins describes his childhood as “hell on earth,” including an abusive father and run-ins with the KKK. (Goggins is Black.)

He joined the Air Force after high school, served four years, and then left -- a decision he soon came to regret.

I’ve seen this so many times in writing about people in the military who get out but have no good plan for afterward, and find themselves lost.

Goggins went from one minimum wage job to another, eventually worked as an overnight exterminator, became depressed, eating a box of doughnuts and drinking a big milkshake every morning (among other things), and gained well over 100 pounds.

As he tells it, however, a TV special about Navy SEALs training caught his eye -- one of those reruns you might see in snippets or reruns, over and over -- and gave him a new goal:

I watched men sweat and suffer ... I couldn’t remember feeling as awful as these men looked. They were swollen, chafed, sleep-deprived, and dead on their feet, and I was jealous of them.​

The longer I watched the more certain I became that there were answers buried in all that suffering. Answers that I needed.

What Goggins did afterward -- well, it formed the basis for his book, and his career now.

1. First, had to drop 106 pounds in three months even to enlist in the Navy (after his four years in the Air Force).

2. Then, he had to repeat Hell Week three times due to injuries.

3. Finally, after two full years of training, he graduated on August 10, 2001.

Interesting timing, right? Goggins went on to serve another 16 years in the SEALs including combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, complete a bunch of other very challenging military courses, and eventually retired when he hit 20 years combined military experience.

Since then, he’s become known as an ultramarathoner, ultra-distance cyclist, triathlete, and author/speaker. In fact, I don’t think I’d heard of Goggins (I completely missed his book at the time) until a few years ago when readers began citing him as an inspirational and highly quotable role model.

I’m at the point in life when I can’t tell you if 25 years is a lifetime or the blink of an eye, but that’s how long ago yesterday Goggins reached this milestone.

As he put it:

“Our whole life is set up in the path of least resistance. We don’t want to suffer. We don’t want to feel discomfort. So the whole time, we’re living our lives in a very comfortable area. There’s no growth in that.”

Not a bad thing to think about the next time the going gets tough.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: Top administration officials engaged in an elaborate deception to spirit President Trump out of Turkey during the NATO summit last month, transporting him in a catering container to a military jet because of a threat against him and Air Force One from Iran.

• AP: A powerful 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck western Colombia on Monday, killing at least 111 people, damaging hundreds of buildings and leaving many trapped under debris while loved ones and rescue workers searched through rubble.

• Axios: President Trump issued an executive order calling for fewer childhood vaccinations, splitting the childhood MMR vaccine into three shots delivered at separate medical visits. Trump suggested the MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal” when administered all at once, and likened the volume to “a bottle of soda.”

• AP: Ben Jones, who played the good ol’ boy mechanic in “The Dukes of Hazzard” and parlayed his fame into two terms in the U.S. House, has died at 84. Jones had a heart attack Sunday at his home in Washington, Virginia, as he was waiting to watch his beloved Atlanta Braves play baseball, his wife said on social media.

• CNBC: The 10 most in-demand ZIP codes for homebuyers in 2026.

• Ars Technica: The first self-driving vehicle on Mars has proven to be a smashing success: about 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.

• Wired: How to disable the AI features in Gmail and Google Docs. New AI toolbars and prompts are showing up in Google Docs and Gmail. If you don’t want Gemini’s help writing documents and emails, here’s how to turn that off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Shatz put it:

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

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

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

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

See? Again with the tax returns!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll try to get around to remembering that.

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

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

Afternoon, at the latest.

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you! You all are awesome!

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

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

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

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

• More space.

• Something resembling a yard.

• A little more room to breathe.

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

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

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

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

But it’s still pretty great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• They often involve at least some walking.

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

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

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

But if you’re going to do it anyway …

And we are …

It’s nice to have another reason.

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

27 things I seem to have to learn over and over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, maybe this isn’t really about commuting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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