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

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

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

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

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

27 things I seem to have to learn over and over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, maybe this isn’t really about commuting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apply early.

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

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

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

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

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

Results:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh man, I feel another pun coming on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shark Tank and Plato

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

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

Shark Tank

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

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

The pattern held.

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

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

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

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

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

Artificial Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

Plato

All of which brings us back to Plato.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot.

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

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

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

The numbers:

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

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

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

A lot of the reasons are familiar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Eight hours a night, they told you. But the largest sleep study ever conducted now suggests that might actually be a bit too much.

Writing in the journal Nature, researchers said sleeping more than eight hours was associated with faster biological aging. The sweet spot, across nearly every organ in your body, tops out slightly less, at around 7.8 hours.

500,000 adults

Led by Junhao Wen of the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Columbia University researchers analyzed data from roughly 500,000 adults in the UK Biobank. Participants were between 37 and 84 years old.

Using machine learning, the team built 23 biological aging clocks across 17 organ systems: brain, heart, lungs, liver, immune system, fat tissue, and more.

These clocks estimate how biologically old each organ looks, based on medical imaging, blood proteins, and metabolic markers.

Across all 17 systems, the same U-shaped pattern emerged. People sleeping fewer than six hours showed accelerated biological aging. But so did people sleeping more than eight hours. The lowest aging rates appeared in people sleeping roughly 6.4 to 7.8 hours. There were slight differences by sex: women’s optimal range ran 6.5 to 7.8 hours; men’s was 6.4 to 7.7.

Not the first time

The “too much” finding isn’t entirely new.

A few years ago in this space, I wrote about a 44,000-person study that found people who slept beyond the recommended window were “equally impaired as those who slept too little.”

Researchers at the time admitted they didn’t know why, but the Columbia study helps answer that.

Long sleep was associated with faster aging across multiple organ systems, with a particular signal running through fat tissue, which the researchers link to systemic inflammation.

Their best explanation: Sleeping too much is often a marker of underlying illness rather than a direct cause of aging. Sick people sleep more.

But when the same pattern shows up across 17 independent biological clocks in half a million people, it’s hard to wave away.

Earlier research tended to focus narrowly on the brain.

A 2025 MIT study found that during attention lapses after a sleepless night, waves of cerebrospinal fluid surge through the brain performing the same cleanup that normally happens during sleep — the brain forcing maintenance on itself whether you’re ready or not.

And a separate UK Biobank study of 88,000 people linked poor sleep to 172 different diseases.

This Columbia study goes further — asking what decades of a given sleep pattern do to your organs collectively. The answer runs from your brain to your lungs to your liver:

• Short sleep was specifically linked to depression, anxiety, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart arrhythmias.

• Both short and long sleep were associated with COPD, asthma, and digestive disorders including GERD.

• The researchers also found that short and long sleepers may arrive at late-life depression through different biological pathways, which suggests perhaps they should be treated the same way clinically.

A light sleeper, himself

Sleep duration here was self-reported, not device-tracked, and the study was observational, so it shows association, not causation.

Importantly, the optimal range is a population average. Your own number may differ.

Wen mentioned he’s a light sleeper himself and was partly motivated by personal concern.

He wanted to know whether sleep — something people can actually control — was measurably tied to how fast the body ages. Across half a million people and 17 organ systems, the answer was yes.

The target, then, isn’t eight. It’s somewhere between 6.4 and 7.8, with the exact number varying a bit by organ and by sex.

For most people, that means aiming for roughly seven, which, as it turns out, is probably what your body has been asking for all along.

Personal note: I’m finishing this at 11 p.m., and I have to be up at 6:30 a.m. Turns out maybe I’ve been timing this all perfectly without even realizing it.

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• CNN: Oil surged on Wednesday after President Donald Trump said America’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran was “over” and threatened a new volley of attacks on the country tonight. Trump also said the United States may attack Iran’s critical infrastructure again. “It may be a big attack, and it’ll knock out a lot of stuff,” Trump said, saying the US could hit electrical plants. “We’ll take them out. I don’t want to do that, but if we have to, we’ll take them out.”

• France 24: NATO allies pledged 70 billion Euros in military equipment and training for Ukraine in 2026 and committed to sustaining at least that level in 2027. European allies and Canada have increased defense spending by nearly 20% since last year's Hague summit. Ukraine's Zelenskyy met with Trump on the summit's sidelines; Russia launched fresh strikes on Kyiv hours before the two leaders sat down.

• AP: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is asking Sen. Mitch McConnell, the state’s most powerful figure in Congress, to disclose more about his condition after three weeks of silence from the 84-year-old since he was hospitalized in Washington. McConnell, whose physical condition has visibly declined in recent years, was hospitalized June 14. He has not released a public statement, photos or videos since.

• The Independent: Maine oysterman Graham Platner has dropped his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins after an allegation of sexual assault led to prominent Democrats abandoning his campaign. Platner continued to deny the accusations as he announced his decision to drop out the race Wednesday. Maine’s seat, currently held by five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins, is a must-win if Democrats they want to flip the Senate. Democrats in Maine now have until July 27 at 5 p.m. to replace Platner.

• ESPN: Justin Bieber will join Madonna, Shakira, and BTS as a headliner at the World Cup Final halftime show at MetLife Stadium on July 19, FIFA announced Wednesday — making it the most expensive entertainment lineup in the tournament's history and the first-ever halftime show at a World Cup Final.

• FT: Meta (nee Facebook) is testing a prototype of “super sensing” AI glasses that would use cameras and audio recordings to capture a wearer’s every moment. While Meta’s current AI smart glasses have an LED in the corner of the frame lights up to signal to others, executives are currently planning not to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are being used.

• AP: A Grand Canyon river rafting guide who aimed to become the first American woman to row across the mid-Pacific solo — and the fastest person, man or woman — has completed a record-breaking journey from California to Hawaii. Hundreds gathered to cheer on Kelsey Pfendler as she pulled into a Honolulu harbor Friday night on her 21-foot row boat, Lily, after nearly a month and a half at sea.

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

I’m writing this on my laptop with the World Cup on television, my daughter next to me watching the game while also playing Roblox on her tablet, and my wife — away for the night — texting me about something else entirely.

Four screens, one room. Not a single screen-time guideline suggests we’re doing any of it right. But then, if you’ve raised young kids in the last decade, you know the advice isn’t exactly consistent:

No screens before two, and no more than an hour a day after that.

Or else, wait: It’s quality over quantity. And beware of blue light.

Oh, and you should co-view and keep an eye on what they actually do on screens, except that you also need to stop hovering.

Actually there’s also my new favorite contender: Kids should be off screens in school, except that maybe schools should also be embracing AI somehow.

A new study out of Edith Cowan University in Australia looked at what happens when parents actually try to follow that advice. It seems familiar.

The advice is the problem, not the parents

Researchers led by Dr. Stephanie Milford interviewed and ran focus groups with first-time parents of kids from birth to age four.

They wanted to know less about whether screens are good or bad, and more about how parents are actually experiencing the constant advice about them.

What they found: parents are getting contradictory messages constantly — strict limits from one source, relaxed guidance from another — and almost none of it reflects what a normal day with a toddler actually looks like.

“Parents are trying to do the right thing, but they’re getting mixed messages,” Milford said. “That contradiction creates a lot of uncertainty.”

Much of the messaging is also fear-based, and fear doesn’t help anyone parent better. It just makes people doubt choices they were already making carefully.

“That fear can make parents doubt their decisions, even when they’re making thoughtful choices,” Milford said.

What parents actually do

Most parents, the study found, don’t follow rigid screen-time rules at all.

They use screens the way most things get used in a house with small kids in it: flexibly — to settle a toddler down, to distract while making dinner, to share something together.

Or, in my case tonight, to let a kid stay occupied during a World Cup match while a parent finishes an article and a spouse texts about the weekend.

Milford’s team frames that flexibility as normal, and argues the guidance should reflect it instead of implying failure.

“Rather than telling parents to avoid screens, we should be helping them use them in ways that support learning and connection,” she said.

Their ask is simple: guidance that builds confidence instead of guilt, written for parents capable of making their own judgment calls.

Back to my living room

This is a qualitative study — interviews and focus groups, not a large survey. It measures how parents experience the advice, not what screen time actually does to kids.

Also, the parents involved were all Australian. (Maybe the over-sampled Bluey?)

My daughter is currently somewhere between the World Cup and Roblox, which is its own kind of multitasking I don’t fully understand.

None of this is what any guideline would recommend. It’s also just a regular day.

Bottom line: Guidance that doesn’t reflect real life in any likely way might be creating more guilt than anything else.

So, if you’re reading this on a screen with a kid nearby and a screen in their hand, too; well, maybe the advice is simply to do the best you can, and not let the onslaught of advice overwhelm you.

USA was up by two, by the way as I finished this article. I believe that we will win.

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• NYT: Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate from Maine, said he was taking time to “reflect” on his political path forward as his support swiftly eroded after a woman accused him of rape. He has until July 13 to withdraw from the race, and if he does the state Democratic Party has until July 27 to replace him on the ticket, according to Maine state law.

• CNN: Cuba suffered a nationwide blackout Monday as it faces an ongoing energy crisis worsened by an effective U.S. blockade on fuel shipments. The country has experienced several nationwide blackouts over the past few years as its aging electricity infrastructure struggles to meet demand; in March alone, it had at least two total blackouts within a week.

• The Athletic: The United States was eliminated from its own World Cup after falling to a timid 4-1 defeat by Belgium in Seattle. Mauricio Pochettino’s side lit up the early stages of this tournament with its freewheeling attacking style, but it fell apart against a vastly improved Belgium. The USMNT’s exit means all three host nations fell at the round-of-16 stage.

• Fox News: Bryan Johnson, a biohacker and longevity guru who has claimed “we may be the first generation who won’t die,” revealed he has an autoimmune condition causing his stomach to “eat itself.” The Los Angeles-based tech entrepreneur, 48, has previously said he hopes to live until 2140, when he would in theory be 160 years old.

• NYT: A large group of masked men wearing the markings of the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched with flags and chanted “reclaim America!” in Washington over the weekend, as the capital prepared for the main events celebrating the United States’ 250th birthday. The group of apparently several hundred people carried various flags, including the Confederate battle flag.

• Variety: Tilly Norwood, the AI “actor” who sparked a frenzy of anger in Hollywood in late 2025, is set to front her first feature film. “Misaligned,” announced by Particle 6, the AI-focused studio behind Norwood, is described as a comedy-drama telling a “coming-of-age story infused with existential AI chaos.”

• AP: Mourners dressed in black flooded into Tehran Monday for a procession as part of the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with throngs of people calling for the death of President Trump. The massive turnout was encouraged by Iran’s theocracy as a sign of strength, and it came as the Islamic Republic negotiates with the U.S. over a permanent end to the war.

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It is 3:07 p.m. as I start writing this. I want to get to the gym by 4:30. My theory is that writing it under mild time pressure created by my own need to exercise was appropriate.

Reason: We’ll be talking about a study that shows why no matter how busy you are, even small habits of vigorous exercise can pay enormous dividends for your health.

A new study published in the European Heart Journal — in case you let your subscription lapse, I’ll summarize — analyzed data from nearly 96,000 people who wore wrist-based accelerometers for a week.

The researchers tracked not just how much people moved, but how intensely. They then followed participants for seven years, measuring their risk of developing eight serious conditions:

• major cardiovascular disease

• irregular heartbeat

• type 2 diabetes

• immune-mediated inflammatory diseases

• liver disease

• chronic respiratory disease

• chronic kidney disease

• dementia

Findings: Compared with people who did no vigorous activity at all, those with the highest levels of intense movement had a 63% lower risk of developing dementia, a 60% lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and a 46% lower risk of dying.

The key phrase there is “vigorous activity,” meaning movement that’s intense enough to make you breathless.

This is where the study gets genuinely useful, especially for busy people who have a hard time fitting everything into a 24-hour day.

“Adding short bursts of activity that make you slightly breathless into daily life, like taking the stairs quickly, walking fast between errands or playing actively with children, can make a real difference,” said Professor Minxue Shen of the Xiangya School of Public Health at Central South University, who led the research.

Even 15 to 20 minutes per week of this kind of effort was linked to meaningful health benefits — emphasis on per week, not day. The researchers also found that intensity mattered differently depending on the disease.

For inflammatory conditions like arthritis and psoriasis, intensity was the key factor. For diabetes and chronic liver disease, both how long and how hard people moved made a difference.

The consistent thread across all eight conditions was that vigorous activity outperformed moderate activity, minute for minute.

As for why it’s helpful, Professor Shen’s explanation is basically that during vigorous activity, your heart pumps more efficiently, blood vessels become more flexible, and your body improves its ability to use oxygen.

Intense movement also appears to reduce inflammation, which may explain the strong associations with arthritis and psoriasis specifically, and may stimulate brain chemicals that support cognitive health, which could account for the dementia finding.

This is observational research drawn from the UK Biobank, so a caveat: it can’t prove that vigorous activity directly causes these reductions in disease risk.

People who move more intensely may share other lifestyle traits — better sleep, less stress, and different diets — that also contribute. The researchers controlled for many of these factors, but residual confounding is always possible in studies like this.

Still, current exercise guidelines focus on total time — 150 minutes of moderate activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity. This study suggests that the composition of that time matters, not just the volume.

If two people exercise the same total number of minutes, the one who occasionally pushes to the point of breathlessness appears to come out ahead, across multiple disease categories, by a wide margin.

Anyway — update in real time — I’m back from the gym and on my fourth pass, and there’s one thing worth clarifying. The 15-to-20-minutes-per-week figure refers to the minimum threshold where researchers began seeing meaningful benefits, not a ceiling or a target.

More vigorous activity continued to show stronger associations with lower disease risk throughout the study. So, 15-20 minutes is the floor, not the finish line.

The European Heart Journal has now given me three separate reasons to feel okay about my health and exercise habits — sleep, coffee, and now exercise.

I’m choosing to believe it’s the former.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Daily Mail: President Donald Trump, 80, is fixated on negative coverage of his swollen ‘cankles’ as his staff whisper about his ‘old’ age, a new book reveals. A White House spokesperson pointed a finger at Biden in response: ‘President Trump is the sharpest and most accessible President in American history who is working nonstop to solve problems and deliver on his promises.’

• CNN: Alan Greenspan, the jazz-playing Federal Reserve chairman who was celebrated as a "Maestro" for engineering a decade of prosperity but later shared blame for the 2008 financial crisis, died this week at 100. He served under four presidents across nearly 19 years at the Fed.

• AP via NBC Dallas: Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic in American history, the DEA permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to sources. "We poisoned our community to make cases," said DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed a whistleblower complaint. One case he flagged: a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue.

• CBS News Miami: Companies hired to run Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" were notified Monday to begin full demobilization of the facility, quietly ending a $1.2 billion experiment once hailed by DeSantis and Trump as a model for other states. Florida is still waiting on most of the $608 million in federal reimbursements it was promised, having received only $58 million so far.

• NYT: The United States plans to provide welcome gifts to white South Africans entering the United States as refugees, including an Android tablet, a report commissioned by Mr. Trump that downplays the role of slavery in history of the U.S., and a children’s book accusing South Africa’s government of “favoring the Black population.” Trump is welcoming the minority in South Africa, even as the U.S. bans refugees fleeing from war and persecution everywhere else in the world.

• U.S. News: The U.S. announced $17.5 billion in federal loans for 10 new large nuclear reactors across the U.S. — the largest single investment in American nuclear power in decades.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists discovered that kombucha's flavor, chemistry, and antioxidant activity vary dramatically depending on the tea used to make it — green and oolong tea versions emerged as the most biologically active. The finding matters because most commercially sold kombucha is made from black tea, which the study found to be the least potent.

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