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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A few weeks ago, my wife and I got a sitter, drove into the city, and saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Madison Square Garden for nearly three hours.

Somehow I’d been alive in the United States for five decades and lived in New Jersey for going on 15 years, and yet it was my first time seeing the Boss. Now that I’m fully compliant with New Jersey law on the subject, I’m going to tell you it was worth the wait.

I’m also going to tell you — based on a study published this week — that it may have been doing something to my DNA.

Researchers at University College London recently published findings in the journal Innovation in Aging in which they analyzed survey responses and blood test data from 3,556 adults in the United Kingdom.

Their goal: Comparing how often and in how many different ways those adults engaged with arts and cultural activities — things like attending concerts, visiting museums, reading, dancing, singing, making art — against seven different biological aging clocks derived from DNA methylation patterns in participants’ blood.

The pattern was clear:

* At least three arts and cultural activities per year a year: 2% slower aging

* Monthly: 3% slower

* Weekly: 4% slower

On one of the newer clocks, people who engaged at least weekly were a full year biologically younger than infrequent participants.

The effect size was comparable to what the researchers found for physical exercise.

As lead author professor Daisy Fancourt put it: “These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level. They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise.”

Variety was especially important. Fancourt went on:

“Each type of arts activity has different ingredients that help health — physical, cognitive, emotional, or social stimulation. So, engaging in a diverse range of activities — just like having lots of different plants in our diets — is most beneficial.”

Of course, this doesn’t prove that going to concerts slows aging.

It’s a UK sample, drawn from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, so how directly it translates to other populations is an open question.

I mean, do people in England even like Bruce Springsteen?

Also, people who go to concerts regularly may also have other habits — more social connection, more disposable time, better baseline health — that could be doing some of the work.

Still, Steven Horvath, the UCLA geneticist who developed the epigenetic clock used in aging research, reviewed the study and told NPR he found it “very rigorous,” and that the finding of arts engagement being comparable to exercise “is particularly new to me.”

Which brings me back to the Garden.

The E Street Band’s remaining members from the 20th century — the drummer, the bassist, the guitarist, and the pianist — are all in their 70s — and they were playing ferociously, for three hours, to a packed house at Madison Square Garden.

Springsteen himself is 76.

I don’t know exactly what his habits look like off stage, but I’d guess he’s been engaging with music — as a maker, a performer, and a listener — nearly every day of his adult life.

Maybe it’s coincidence. But maybe a life built around creative engagement leaves a different physical signature than one that doesn’t.

Either way, I’m glad we got the sitter.

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Other things worth knowing …

• ArsTechnica: In an extremely odd case, a single 79-year-old patient was granted extraordinary early access to Eli Lilly’s powerful, still-experimental obesity drug retatrutide through the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” program—raising immediate questions if that sole patient is President Donald Trump, according to a report by Stat News. The White House, HHS, and Lilly itself did not directly answer questions about the patient’s identity.

• Reuters via Yahoo Finance: The European Central Bank secured key parliamentary backing Tuesday for the launch of a digital euro, an electronic means of payment aimed at making the euro zone less reliant on U.S. credit cards at a time of fraying transatlantic relationships. Six years in the making, the ECB’s digital cash has become a more pressing issue since Donald Trump returned to the White House, amid fears that the U.S. could one day weaponize its dominance over payment networks like Visa and Mastercard.

• CNN: A U.S. fighter jet pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran in April described a shocking sight before ejecting: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, according to four sources familiar with the matter. If the airman really saw what he described — a formation moving in unison — it would be an alarming advance in Iranian drone capabilities.

• WSJ: What I Saw at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Monday Afternoon.

• NBC News, TechCrunch: A 76-year-old Texas woman, Martha Avila, is dead after a Tesla that authorities say was in autopilot mode crashed through her home. Tesla blames the driver, saying he overrode the autopilot system and crashed into the house at 73 miles an hour. The driver does not appear to have been charged with anything. (Interestingly, the rather horrifying video is posted on X.com, but sharing it seems not to work for some reason.)

• NBC News: The Department of Homeland Security changed its travel guidelines for Iran’s national soccer team Monday, allowing it an extra day in Seattle ahead of its third World Cup match. The team had previously been given just 24 hours in each host city — less than any other squad — and Iran’s soccer federation had planned to file a formal complaint with FIFA.

• ScienceDaily: SETI scientists aimed radio telescopes at 3I/ATLAS — the third interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system, which was only discovered days ago — and found no signals that could indicate extraterrestrial technology, beyond human-made interference. Researchers say the absence of a signal was expected but that scanning interstellar visitors is now standard practice.

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It’s whatever time of day it is. Do you know how your kids are using AI?

I think most parents probably assume their teenagers are using AI chatbots the way they use Google—to look something up, finish an assignment, and maybe settle an argument about a movie.

A new national study suggests the reality is quite different.

Writing recently in the Journal of Adolescence, researchers at Florida Atlantic University and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire say they surveyed 3,466 American teenagers aged 13 to 17 about their AI chatbot use.

• Six in 10 teens have already used a conversational AI chatbot, and entertainment is the most common reason, cited by 85 percent of users.

• However, 65 percent use these tools for advice and guidance.

• Sixty percent use them for friendship.

• Nearly half use them for emotional or mental health support.

• More than one in three use them for romantic companionship.

Most parents, the researchers suggest, have no idea this is happening.

Nearly half of teens in the study reported at least one of 13 types of harmful interactions. About 23 percent said they felt manipulated or pressured by a chatbot.

Between 13 percent and 19 percent reported that a chatbot encouraged dangerous real-world behaviors, including self-harm or suicidal thoughts.

Thirteen-year-olds were the most exposed group across nearly every harm category—more likely than older teens to be asked for personal information that made them uncomfortable, pressured to reveal secrets, or nudged toward risky behavior.

“These systems engage, respond and even affirm users in highly personalized ways, which can make their influence especially powerful,” explained senior author Sameer Hinduja, a professor at FAU and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. “For adolescents—who are still developing critical thinking skills and a sense of identity—that can create a situation where they’re more likely to trust, internalize, or act on what the chatbot is saying without fully questioning it.”

This connects to something I wrote about earlier this year—a Danish study of nearly 54,000 psychiatric patients that found similar patterns in adults with serious mental illness.

The mechanism is the same in both cases: systems designed to be agreeable and emotionally validating are especially powerful precisely when the user is most vulnerable. What’s different here is the population.

The practical suggestions are less alarming than the findings. Conversations with your kids about what they’re using and why—more curiosity than interrogation—along with AI literacy in schools.

Society needs to demand more from the companies building these products too, including mental health guardrails and real age verification built in from the start rather than retrofitted after the fact.

Bottom line: When a product is deliberately engineered to feel emotionally responsive and human, what responsibility do its makers bear for what happens to vulnerable users?

That’s the question real humans need to be asking—no matter how agreeable AI tries to be.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NPR: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that he will resign, paving the way for the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade.

• PBS News: JD Vance described U.S.-Iran nuclear talks in Switzerland Monday as "rocky but productive," saying negotiators had reached some agreements that set a "good foundation" for a deal. Iran's side contradicted him almost immediately, saying it had made no new nuclear-related commitments in the talks.

• AP: Australian authorities announced the discovery of nearly 2.7 tons of methamphetamine buried in plastic tubs hidden beneath three shipping containers in Sydney — one of the largest drug seizures in Australian history. Two Sydney residents were arrested and face potential life sentences.

• NPR: Colombia woke up Monday to a sharp political turn to the right as Trump-endorsed Abelardo de la Espriella held a slim lead in the country's presidential runoff — a result his opponent is challenging. A de la Espriella victory is expected to reverse the agenda of outgoing left-wing President Gustavo Petro on security, economy, and peace negotiations with armed groups.

• Futurism: Not that anyone in power is going to care, but there’s even more evidence that Americans are coming to overwhelmingly loathe AI — despite, or perhaps because, they’re using chatbots more than ever. In a sweeping new poll conducted by Pew Research, only 16 percent of respondents said they believed AI will have a positive impact on society — a number as dismal as the perception of the tech.

• People: Jill Smokler, the founder of popular parenting website Scary Mommy, has died at 48. The New York Times bestselling author and mom of three died on Monday, June 22, after a more than two-year journey with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

• The Washington Post” He made a career of saving animals: 16,000 so far.

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Tell me: Do these situations sound familiar?

• You’re telling a story, and right in the middle of it, the specific word you want simply isn’t there.

• You know exactly what you’re trying to say, but what comes out is “you know, the thing.”

• Someone asks you a question and you pause — genuinely pause — hunting for a word you’ve used a thousand times.

If so, you’re not alone. A new study from Baycrest, the University of Toronto, and York University suggests those moments might suggest more than we realized.

The study, published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, ran two experiments.

In the first, researchers recorded 67 healthy older adults, aged 65 to 75, who had to describe complex pictures aloud.

They also completed standard tests of executive function, the list of mental skills that govern memory, planning, and flexible thinking.

In the second experiment, they expanded to 174 healthy adults spanning ages 18 to 90.

Using machine learning, they analyzed hundreds of subtle speech features across all those recordings. These included things like pauses, filler words like “uh” and “um,” timing patterns, and moments of word-finding difficulty.

Then they compared those features to how people actually scored on the cognitive tests.

The connection was consistent and independent of age, sex, and education. The strongest signal came from speech disfluencies specifically — the pauses and stumbles that happen when a word won’t come.

Those predicted executive function scores across the full adult lifespan, not just among older participants.

“The message is clear,” said senior author Jed Meltzer of Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. “Speech timing is more than just a matter of style, it’s a sensitive indicator of brain health.”

The practical problem with existing dementia screening is that standard cognitive tests are hard to repeat reliably.

People get better at them with practice, which makes it difficult to track whether someone is actually changing over time.

Speech doesn’t have that problem. Everyone produces it every day, naturally, without effort — even though another recent study suggests we’re all speaking a lot less than we used to. It requires no clinical setting and no formal test. It could theoretically be tracked over time, which is what makes it interesting as a monitoring tool.

“This research sets the stage for exciting opportunities to develop tools that could help track cognitive changes in clinics or even at home,” Meltzer said in a press release. “Early detection is critical for any cure or intervention, as dementia involves progressive degeneration of the brain that may be slowed.”

Heather Whitson, a neuroscience professor at Duke School of Medicine who was not involved with the study, noted in other coverage that language difficulty is one of the most consistently observed features across all dementia types.

“Difficulty finding common words is a feature that we look for, and that we know occurs,” she said.

The sample sizes here are modest — 67 people in the first experiment, 174 in the second — and both studies measured participants at only one point in time. The researchers are explicit that longitudinal studies, following the same people over time, are needed before any of this becomes a usable clinical tool.

So, this is promising early work, not a finished answer.

Also, I want to add a note of reassurance before anyone reading this spirals: Everyone stumbles on words sometimes.

A lot of people naturally speak with plenty of “ums” and “uhs” for reasons that have nothing to do with cognitive decline—nervousness, personality, speaking style, the fact that they’re genuinely thinking carefully before they talk.

The researchers here are looking for patterns, measured against an individual’s own baseline over time.

That’s also why a real longitudinal study would be so welcome. A single snapshot of how you speak today can’t tell you much, but how your speech changes over time compared to your own prior speech—that’s where the signal would live.

Oh, and remember that Meltzer specifically mentioned the hope for “cure or intervention” as opposed to just getting warning signs of cognitive decline.

“The single best thing you can do is go on a walk with your friend,” Meltzer told a Canadian television program.

Taken all together, that’s one of those things you might call — oh wait, what’s the word?

Hopeful.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: President Trump’s Iran deal has opened an explosive second front in MAGA’s civil war, waged by hawkish allies who view U.S. concessions as an existential betrayal of Israel. Many of the critics are careful not to attack Trump himself. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called on “the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance,” to come before Congress to defend it.

• Bloomberg: In a little over a week, Elon Musk’s net worth has increased by more than $600 billion. That’s about the combined net worth of the second- and third-wealthiest people in the world — Google guys Larry Page at $317 billion and Sergey Brin at $295 billion. The SpaceX IPO is also “truly subjecting passive investing to an epic test” because ordinary Americans’ retirement and investment accounts are now so dominated by stakes in just a few enormous companies.

• NPR: UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited Port-au-Prince as a new international “gang-suppression force” prepares to deploy to Haiti, where gang violence has killed 2,300 people and led to another 100 kidnappings so far this year.

• NBC News: A Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was abruptly postponed Wednesday after Trump said he was “cancelling it” over a political dispute with Democrats — an unusual intervention into his own nominee’s confirmation process.

• Fox News: Investigators examining Monday's fatal B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base are focusing on the bomber's engines and controllability; the aircraft had been undergoing a radar modernization test mission when it went down, killing all eight aboard.

• ESPN: The four World Cup matches on Tuesday set a new record for the most attended day in the history of the tournament. A new mark of 281,223 eclipsed the previous record of 277,070 set at the 1994 World Cup in the United States, which also featured four matches.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists used genome editing to block red pigment production in lettuce, causing other beneficial plant compounds to build up instead — and the lettuce continued growing normally. Researchers say the technique points toward a new way to engineer produce with boosted nutritional properties without affecting yield.

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One thing to know about me is that I talk to everyone, all the time.

Last summer, my family stayed at a motel on Cape Cod for a few days. On the first morning, we desperately wanted coffee. I remembered there was a pot going all the time in the front office, so I volunteered to go.

That was around 8:00 a.m. At 9:30, my wife came looking for me—and found me deep in conversation with the woman behind the counter:

• How she came to work at a motel …

• Where she was from, other jobs she’d had, how Cape Cod had changed …

• Her relationship with her kids …

I got caught up, as always happens. In fact, I have a business called Life Story Magic (you may have heard of it?), where the entire point is to interview people’s parents and grandparents on video to capture their life stories—because I love having conversations.

It turns out that I am apparently an even bigger outlier than I realized, and that the gap between me and everyone else is only getting wider.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona analyzed audio recordings from 2,197 people between the ages of 10 and 94 across 22 studies conducted between 2005 and 2019, and found something that surprised even them.

Each year during that period, people spoke an average of 338 fewer words per day than the year before.

Over the full span, daily spoken words dropped about 28 percent, from roughly 16,600 to about 11,900.

Published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, the data was originally buried in a larger paper on gender differences in talkativeness. The researchers themselves almost missed it.

Multiply 338 fewer words per day times 365 days. That works out to 123,370 fewer spoken words per year.

That’s roughly the word count of To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, or the first Twilight novel.

Each year, the conversations we’re no longer having would fill a novel.

As I told the researchers in an email (asking to get the full text of their study and taking advantage of a rare opportunity to insert a Dad Joke into a discussion about Perspectives on Psychological Science), their work really spoke to me.

They say they can identify the trend but can’t fully explain it.

Technology is an obvious suspect, since the decline coincides with the rise of texting, social media, and smartphones.

But the fact that older adults are losing words suggests something broader is going on.

My own theories:

• More people are working from home, which eliminates the ambient conversation of offices and commutes.

• Fewer people are going out for lunch, alone or with others.

• Delivery apps remove the need to speak to anyone to get food.

• Add to all that the AirPod effect—the way headphones have made it socially acceptable, or even expected, to be unreachable in public spaces where strangers used to talk.

Do all of those factors combine to explain a 28-percent drop? Does it really matter, anyway?

“When we speak less, we connect less,” those researchers put it. “With every lost word we wear away our connections with others.”

In retrospect, that’s so on-the-nose. Lead researcher Valeria Pfeifer offered a fix at the time: “If each of us just talked to one more person each day, we could reverse this trend.”

You don’t have to get a stranger’s whole life story; leave that to me.

But a few words here and there might make a difference.

A final note, which made me laugh: The Wall Street Journal ended their coverage of this story with the line: “Do you think you’re talking less than you used to? Join the conversation below.”

Good advice, for more reasons than one.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NBC News: The U.S. and Iran have reached an initial agreement to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The deal includes a 60-day negotiating window on nuclear issues, with $24 billion in frozen Iranian funds to be released during that period — and a requirement for the U.S. and its allies to present reconstruction plans for Iran worth at least $300 billion.

• WSJ: An emboldened Justice Department is ramping up efforts to investigate and prosecute more than four dozen of President Trump’s perceived enemies. “The entire premise of this article is laughable — the mainstream media turned a blind eye when Joe Biden weaponized his Department of Justice against his political opponents,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.

• Mediaite: UFC fighter Josh Hokit was slapped with a wave of backlash after he called former First Lady Michelle Obama a man following his match at Trump’s fight night on the White House lawn. Leading up to the event, UFC President Dana White had insisted the event was apolitical and merely a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.

• NBC News: Day 5 of the World Cup produced a string of upsets. Spain — a tournament favorite — was held to a scoreless draw by Cape Verde, the most stunning result of the tournament so far. Saudi Arabia drew 1-1 with Uruguay, and Iran tied New Zealand 2-2 in a match being played in the U.S. on the same day the war with Iran formally ended. The U.S. won its opener 4-1 against Paraguay last week and plays Australia on Friday.

• Inc: Women taking GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy were roughly 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than women who weren’t, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania.

• Science Daily: Beneath our feet lies a vast hidden fungal superhighway — and scientists have now mapped it for the first time. The mycorrhizal network stretching an estimated 68 quadrillion miles connects the roots of most plants on Earth, transferring nutrients and carbon between trees and other plants. Researchers say the map reveals which forests are most dependent on the network and most vulnerable to disruption from logging and climate change.

• MarketWatch: The current wave of spending by the wealthy looks so strong that companies are responding by raising prices and adopting business plans that cater to the elite — a dynamic that will make it difficult to bring inflation down. The tools the Federal Reserve uses to combat inflation typically have a more pronounced impact on low-income Americans.

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Not long ago, my daughter and her friends wanted to go to a playground at a nearby park on a Saturday.

I try not to say her exact age in this newsletter, but let’s just say they’re all are at a stage where they’re old enough to be at the playground by themselves, but maybe not quite old enough to get themselves there unaccompanied.

So, I was on duty. They did their thing on the swings and slides and whatever while I walked a half-mile path around the park six or seven times, working two things:

• My ongoing obsession—taking Life Story Magic from the “cool thing I was doing on the side” stage to the “hey this is an actual business delighting lots of customers” stage. (More to come on all of this soon, probably tomorrow.)

• And, scanning scientific journals and other sources to find interesting things to write about — like, for example, this newsletter.

Lo and behold, I drank two milkshakes with one straw (nicer metaphor than killing birds, I think), and came across a study of Penn State suggests I was also doing something clever for my brain in the bargain, without even realizing it.

Writing in Nature Neuroscience, a team led by Patrick Drew, a professor of engineering science, mechanics, neurosurgery, and biomedical engineering (quick aside: I suddenly feel like I have a thin resume), say they’ve discovered how the brain is linked to the abdomen through a network of veins called the vertebral venous plexus.

When abdominal muscles contract—even mildly, as they do when you sit up, take a step, or walk around a park track—they compress those veins. That compression sends a small wave of pressure upward into the spinal canal, which causes the brain to shift gently within the skull.

Why should we care about this? Because, the theory goes, this is how the brain cleans itself of toxins.

“Our research explains how just moving around might serve as an important physiological mechanism promoting brain health.

When the abdominal muscles contract, they push blood from the abdomen into the spinal cord, just like in a hydraulic system, applying pressure to the brain and making it move…. It is thought the movement of fluid in the brain is important for removing waste and preventing neurodegenerative disorders. […]

[A] little bit of motion is good, and it could be another reason why exercise is good for our brain health.”

Francesco Costanzo, a similarly credentialed professor of engineering science and mechanics who led the computational modeling in the study, offered an analogy—the brain as a sponge:

“How do you clean a dirty sponge?” Costanzo said. “You run it under a tap and squeeze it out. In our simulations, we were able to get a sense of how the brain moving from an abdominal contraction can help induce fluid flow over the brain to help clear waste products.”

One thing to know about me is that I’m all about brain cleaning—at least since I learned that it was a thing.

It’s a niche interest, but fascinating to me, and it first developed after I came across a study (not while walking in a park) that suggests sleeping on your side, rather than on your back or stomach, appears to make glymphatic clearance more efficient.

Mind blown, at the risk of making a terrible pun. I found it fascinating that brain-cleaning could work in such a literal, physical way.

Then earlier this year, I covered another Nature Neuroscience study from MIT and Boston University showing that when sleep-deprived people lose focus momentarily, what’s happening is that their brains are forcing those same cleaning cycles during waking hours.

“If you don’t sleep, the CSF waves start to intrude into wakefulness where normally you wouldn’t see them,” said study co-author Laura Lewis. “However, they come with an attentional tradeoff, where attention fails during the moments that you have this wave of fluid flow.”

In other words, the brain gets so desperate for maintenance that it hijacks your attention to perform it.

Quick caveats:

The researchers in the walking study were working with mice, not humans. They used two-photon microscopy and Micro-CT imaging to watch living mouse brains shift in real time.

It’s hard to imagine replicating that with human beings walking park trails, building businesses, and looking for writing inspiration on their phones.

The team also built computer simulations to model how that movement drives fluid flow, and the physics are well-supported. However, whether the same mechanism operates at the same scale in humans hasn’t been confirmed yet.

So, don’t treat this as definitive proof that a 20-minute walk prevents neurodegeneration. It doesn’t establish that.

Still, it adds to a growing body of evidence that the brain’s maintenance systems are more physical, more mechanical, and more responsive to ordinary daily behavior than most people realize.

So, my daughter and her friend had a great afternoon. My business got a bit more efficient. And apparently, so did my brain.

All in all, a pretty nice Saturday.

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Other things worth knowing …

• WaPo: The U.S. military launched retaliatory strikes against Iran on Tuesday evening after an Iranian drone downed a U.S. Army Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz — the most serious military exchange since the ceasefire.

• CNBC: The Trump family received about $500 million from their crypto venture World Liberty Financial — but the investors who bought in saw steep losses.

• Fortune: OpenAI filed confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC on Monday, joining rival Anthropic — which filed last week — in a race to the public markets. “We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the company said. OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion; Anthropic at $965 billion.

• AP: Apple's WWDC keynote Monday introduced Siri AI — a rebuilt conversational assistant powered by Apple Intelligence in partnership with Google — rolling out to iPhone 11 and newer devices with iOS 27. New features include natural back-and-forth dialogue, on-screen contextual awareness, and a dedicated Siri AI app with conversation history.

• Al Jazeera: Sudan's civil war, now entering its fourth year, has created what the UN is calling the world's largest hunger crisis — with 25 million people facing acute food insecurity and aid organizations warning that famine has taken hold in at least five regions.

• US News: U.S. power consumption hit its second straight record high in 2025 and will rise further in 2026 and 2027, the Energy Information Administration said. Demand is surging in part due to data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, and as homes and businesses increasingly use electricity instead of fossil fuels for heat and transportation.

• NPR: With only days remaining before the U.S. men’s national team opens its World Cup campaign against Paraguay, tickets for the match are not sold out. FIFA dramatically jacked up prices — the most expensive regular seats for the U.S. opener are priced at $2,735, more than the final cost for the 2022 World Cup final, while the cheapest are $1,120.

• AFP via Yahoo: Killing the mood: smartphones are reducing birth rates, multiple studies say.

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Unpopular opinion: Bananas are kind of gross.

I know they’re among the most universally liked foods in America — a YouGov survey of more than 2,200 adults found that 82 percent of Americans like or love them. But I’m in that 18 percent, and I couldn’t change it if I wanted to.

In fairness, I’ve wanted to, especially when I got really into running and every third person you meet wants to give you a banana to restore your potassium.

It’s not the taste. It’s the texture — the way a ripe banana sort of collapses into itself, as if I were to take a bite out of one of my daughter’s Nee-Doh squishies.

Food psychologists apparently have a clinical term for this: the “gel-like matrix” that forms from pectin breaking down during chewing. I just call it unpleasant.

Sure enough, a separate study says roughly one in five people may avoid bananas primarily for textural reasons, which tracks almost exactly with the YouGov numbers. It’s not quite the same as the cilantro-tastes-like-soap phenomenon, which is genetic — and which I also have, for what it’s worth.

Banana aversion is more psychological and sensory, rooted in associations the brain locks in during childhood and then stubbornly refuses to update. Mine have apparently not updated.

The reason I’m oversharing all of this is that a new study just came out of UC Davis that made me feel vindicated in a way I never expected.

Food and function

Published May 24 in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Food & Function, the research found that adding a banana to a berry smoothie reduces the body’s absorption of flavanols — that’s not a good thing — by 84 percent.

Flavanols are natural plant compounds found in berries, grapes, apples, cocoa, and other common smoothie ingredients, and they’re linked to heart and cognitive health. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends 400 to 600 milligrams per day for cardiometabolic health.

The culprit is an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, or PPO — the same one that turns a cut apple brown or darkens the flesh of a peeled banana left on the counter. When you blend a banana with berries, PPO activates and degrades the flavanols before your body ever gets a chance to absorb them.

“We were really surprised to see how quickly adding a single banana decreased the level of flavanols in the smoothie and the levels of flavanol absorbed in the body,” said lead author Javier Ottaviani, director of the Core Laboratory of Mars Edge and an adjunct researcher with the UC Davis Department of Nutrition.

The researchers had participants drink three things: a banana-based smoothie, a mixed berry smoothie, and a flavanol capsule used as a control. Then they analyzed blood and urine samples to measure absorption.

People who drank the banana smoothie had flavanol levels 84 percent lower than the control. The berry smoothie produced levels similar to the capsule.

A second part of the study found the effect may continue after consumption — possibly in the stomach — suggesting PPO activity doesn’t simply stop at the blender.

Mangoes, pineapples, and oranges

If your smoothie goal is to get more flavanols from your berries, grapes, or cocoa, the answer is to replace the banana with a low-PPO ingredient. The researchers specifically recommend mango, pineapple, orange, or yogurt. All of them provide creaminess or sweetness without triggering the same enzymatic reaction.

Bananas aren’t unhealthy. They provide fiber, potassium, and other nutrients, and there’s nothing wrong with eating one on its own.

But they may be the wrong partner for berries when the goal is to maximize what your body actually absorbs.

Granted, this was a small study, and nutrition experts commenting on the research have urged people not to overreact.

A banana smoothie is still nutritious even if some of us find the texture revolting.

Individual digestion and overall diet patterns matter, too.

“This is certainly an area that deserves more attention in the field of polyphenols and bioactive compounds in general,” Ottaviani said.

The team noted that tea — another major source of flavanols — could be affected by preparation methods in ways that similarly change how much your body absorbs.

About the 18 percent

Most of us who enjoy smoothies make them on autopilot. We — well, other people — put bananas in smoothies because it makes them creamy. But there’s only so much time, and the science on what these kinds of habits do to nutrient absorption is still catching up.

Still, for years, I’ve watched other people slice bananas into things and felt like I was missing out on something I should probably want. I’ve tried, but the texture just defeats me every time.

When it comes to smoothies, however, it seems I’ve been doing this right by accident for years. I’ll take it.

Just don’t get me started on mayonnaise.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NPR: Israel and Iran traded long-range missile strikes for the first time since the ceasefire went into effect two months ago — the most significant exchange of fire since the war was put on pause in April. By Monday afternoon both sides said they were halting attacks, but each cited conditions that could lead to a resumption.

• Reuters: The SpaceX IPO roadshow kicked off this week, with pricing set for Thursday and trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX expected to begin Friday. The company is targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion and a raise of $75 billion. Elon Musk will retain about 85% of the voting control through super-voting shares.

• NPR: The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is spreading at an unprecedented pace, Africa CDC warned Monday, with 27 new cases confirmed in a single day.

• AP: As the U.S. prepares for an extravagant celebration of its founding principles, fewer Americans see their country as exceptional. Only about one-quarter of Americans now say the U.S. stands above all other countries in the world, while about two-thirds say a democratically elected government is highly important to the country’s identity — down from 80% in 2021.

• NPR: Pope Leo XIV became the first pope in history to address the Spanish parliament Monday, calling for “moral renewal” in public life and demanding respect for migrants, the unborn, and international law. The American pope received a seven-minute standing ovation, with lawmakers chanting “Long live the Pope!” — a striking scene in one of Europe’s most secular countries.

• ScienceDaily: South Australia’s koala population has grown so large that it may be heading toward a self-made disaster, with forests struggling to support the animals. Researchers say targeted fertility control could prevent widespread starvation — an unusual conservation problem in which there are simply too many koalas.

• UPI: Ontario organized the world's largest game of human foosball ahead of the FIFA World Cup, with participants strapped into rotating poles on a massive field to recreate the table-top game at human scale. No word on whether any of them crashed into each other trying to spin.

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About a year and a half ago, I started taking a GLP-1 drug.

I dropped about 50 pounds — basically all the weight I’d put on during the pandemic and then some. I’ve kept most of it off. Yes, it’s changed my life in ways that go well beyond the scale.

I coach my daughter’s soccer team, and I play on the field as a defender during scrimmages.

I skied constantly last winter (well, constantly by my standards; there’s always some other guy you meet talking about how he did 50 or 75 days). Honestly, it would have been a different and less enjoyable experience at my previous weight if it were even possible.

I’ve become a four-to-five-times-a-week gym regular for the first time in decades.

Has it helped my mental health? Absolutely.

But in truth, I can’t tell you how much of that is the drug directly and how much is everything that followed from losing the weight — feeling better, moving more, doing a lot of things that were frankly getting a bit more difficult.

The second-order effects are unmistakable, but the first-order mechanism? That I can’t fully untangle.

As it turns out, that’s almost exactly the question a major new study is wrestling with.

Nearly 100,000 people

Published in The Lancet Psychiatry, the study tracked nearly 100,000 people with depression or anxiety in Swedish national health registers from 2009 to 2022.

About 22,000 of them used GLP-1 drugs.

Rather than comparing GLP-1 users to non-users, the researchers compared each person’s own periods on the medication versus off it — a within-individual approach that controls for a lot of the variables that usually muddy this kind of research.

During periods of semaglutide use, psychiatric hospital care and sick leave dropped 42% overall. Depression risk dropped 44%. Anxiety dropped 38%. Substance use disorders dropped 47%.

The mechanism nobody fully understands

GLP-1 receptors exist not just in the gut and pancreas but in the brain.

Some researchers think these drugs may be doing something directly neurological — dampening reward-seeking behavior, reducing impulsivity, affecting dopamine pathways.

That would help explain the substance use finding, which is hard to attribute purely to weight loss or improved self-image, but it could also be almost entirely downstream.

If you lose significant weight, feel better in your body, start moving again, sleep better, and do things you couldn’t do before, your mental health can improve for reasons that have nothing to do with the drug’s direct action on the brain.

A few things worth knowing before you forward this to everyone you know. First, all the participants in the study already had depression or anxiety, plus diabetes or obesity. So, it’s possible the findings may not translate to people without those conditions.

Three of the authors disclosed receiving research funding from a pharmaceutical company, though the study itself was funded by Finnish government and foundation sources.

Also, this is observational research — the within-individual design is methodologically strong, but it still can’t prove the drug caused the mental health improvements.

Tens of millions of people are now taking GLP-1 drugs, or thinking about it, or have someone close to them who is.

Most of the conversation has centered on weight, cardiovascular risk, and side effects.

This study suggests there may be a mental health dimension to the conversation that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention.

I can’t tell you whether the improvements I’ve felt came from the drug, the weight loss, the skiing, the scrimmages, or some combination of all of it.

Probably the last one, but whatever the mechanism, I’ll take it.

Anyone want to play soccer?

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: Inside the secret deal to drop Trump’s $10 billion suit against the IRS.

• CNBC: Financial pressures pushed more savers to tap their retirement accounts in the first part of 2026, new data shows — potentially locking in losses during the early weeks of the Iran war. The average 401(k) balance fell by 4% to $141,000.

• NYT: Iceland, rattled by Trump, weighs joining the E.U. The country has long stood apart from the rest of Europe, but President Trump’s threats to Greenland have provoked a reconsideration.

• WSJ: Vladimir Putin’s $26 billion quest for longevity: from mini-pigs and organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia’s president has turned antiaging research into a Kremlin priority.

• The Telegraph: A lack of sleep could be fueling a surge in cancer among the under-50s, according to the largest study of its kind. Insomniacs are up to three times more likely to develop some forms of the disease than those without diagnosed sleep problems.

• WSJ: A famous math problem stumped humans for 80 years. AI just cracked it.

• NY Post: Escort demand surges ahead of NYC and NJ World Cup matches — as a $10,000-per-day sex worker reveals what it’s like.

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Are you having a hard time making a a big decision?

Good news: There’s a simple question you can ask yourself that can guide you through indecision, overcome analysis paralysis, and ultimately help you make better, bolder choices.

The question is simply, “What is the worst that could happen?”

And while some of us probably ask ourselves this question when facing tough choices, that’s not quite enough. Instead, it’s a matter of understanding the emotional and mental processes that lead to indecision, and why focusing on this question works.

To explore the concept, I sat down a while back with Denise K. Shull, a top performance coach with a graduate degree in neuropsychoanalysis from the University of Chicago. Shull has worked with top performers from traders managing multibillion dollar portfolios, and elite professional athletes competing in Major League Baseball, the NFL, and the Olympics.

The theory behind why this question works so well in a structured context, she explained, is that human emotions are predictive, not reactive:

“Our brains are always trying to predict what’s going to happen next. Take, for example, picking up a cup of coffee. If you’re not sure whether it’s hot or cold, it takes a moment for your brain to process the temperature.

But if you know it’s a hot cup of coffee, you instantly feel the heat.

…

It’s not just the prediction of the thing itself, but the prediction of how that thing will make us feel. …

Confidence is essentially a prediction that whatever we’re doing is going to work out, while fear is the belief that it won’t. When you analyze people’s behavior and decision-making in terms of these predictions, you open up a broader understanding of their actions and motivations.”

I should point out here that Shull cited the work of Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University who is the director of Stanford’s Symbiotic Project on Affective Neuroscience.

“Twenty years ago, when I first started in this field, I knew about the importance of emotions in decision-making,” she said. But it was only when I discovered Knutson’s work on anticipatory emotions that everything clicked into place.“

Anyway, let’s see how it works in practice. I asked Shull to share with me the experiences of clients whom she had guided through decision-making processes. Obviously we can’t name them specifically, but I hope the descriptions will suffice.

“My boss might think I’m stupid”

An HR director at a major financial firm wanted to ask for a promotion. He believed he could do the job and that he’d learn whatever he needed to fill in the gaps. But he had a hard time bringing himself to ask for it.

• What was the worst that could happen? He eventually realized he was concerned that his boss didn’t think enough of him, grow angry at him, or think he was “stupid.”

• Result: He realized that the more likely outcome was that his boss might actually want him to step up, and would likely be supportive. And even if this were wrong, how did fear of his boss compare to believing in himself?

“It might not work and I’ll embarrass myself”

A Major League Baseball pitcher talked with Shull about his inability to commit to learning a new pitch that might improve his game.

• What was the worst that could happen? He realized his fear was that he might not learn it or be good at it, and that he’d embarrass himself if he tried throwing it in a game.

• Result: He reminded himself that he didn’t actually have to try the new pitch in a game until he developed confidence in his ability to throw it. The upside was that if he DID develop confidence, it would add confusion for the batters he faced.

“My coach will be angry”

An Olympic snowboarder wanted to sit out a pre-Olympic competition, but was afraid to tell the coach.

• What was the worst that could happen? The snowboarder realized that it was fear of the coach simply being angry.

• Result: The snowboarder determined that the coach would get over it, and that the upside was the extra rest and lack of risk of injury before the biggest race of all was worth it.

“I’ll be upset that I didn’t believe in myself”

A portfolio manager at one of the world’s biggest hedge funds was down on the year, and holding back on a huge trade they wanted to make in December.

• What was the worst that could happen? He could wind up down even further if the trade didn’t work out. But, there was also the other side: What was the worst that could happen if he didn’t make the trade, and it turned out to have been a good one?

• Result: “I will be SO much more mad at myself, and feel SO much more like an idiot if I don’t listen to my conviction and it ends up working out – than I will be if I am wrong.”

Downplay the anticipated emotion

Look, I’m like the shoemaker whose kids are barefoot when it comes to telling other people to get over their anxiety and be more decisive.

But that’s also probably why I’m so open to these kinds of ideas, and so eager to seek out coaches and other professionals who can help work through it.

In short, when you’re faced with indecision, ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen. Then, look for the indications that (perhaps) it’s not your fear of the outcome that stops you from acting, but instead, your fear of how you might feel, if that worst-case scenario comes to fruition.

If you sort of inoculate yourself against that anticipated emotion, you might just be able to make the decision.

Give it a try? Why not? What’s the worst that could … well, you get the idea.

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Other things worth knowing …

• CNN: The U.S. and Iran are closing in on a memorandum of understanding that would open a 60-day negotiating window — during which the Strait of Hormuz would reopen while both sides work out final terms on sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program.

• Bloomberg: As Americans confront a surge in prices at the pump, another inflation wave is headed for the grocery store. "It's going to be a challenging year," said Ricky Volpe, an agribusiness professor at California Polytechnic State University who previously worked at the USDA's Economic Research Service. "Food is going to become less affordable, and consumers should be prepared for it."

• Mediaite: Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said his department is "drawing up" plans to prevent inbound international flights from landing in what he called "sanctuary cities," especially Newark, New Jersey, because of ongoing protests at Delaney Hall, a detention facility holding up to 1,000 immigrants. He said local law enforcement is not assisting federal agents there.

• NASA: NASA awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts Tuesday to Blue Origin, Astrolab, Lunar Outpost, and Firefly Aerospace to build rovers, landers, and drones for the first phase of a permanent moon base near the lunar south pole. "The Moon Base will be America's and humanity's first outpost on another celestial world," said Administrator Jared Isaacman.

• CNBC: Two police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6 sued to block the Trump administration's $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund," calling it "potentially the most corrupt act of presidential power in American history."

• WUSA9: A wave of '90s nostalgia is headed for the National Mall this summer as part of a 16-day celebration marking America's 250th birthday. One of the highlights is a June 26 lineup billed as "I Love the '90s," featuring C+C Music Factory, Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, and Young MC.

• The Telegraph: Restaurants and hotels in Italy have no obligation to serve customers tap water instead of bottled water, Italy's highest court has ruled. The decision came after a long-running legal saga that began in 2019, when a tourist asked for tap water during a stay at a five-star hotel in the Dolomites but was told she had to buy a bottle of mineral water costing €7.

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I’d like to propose a toast, and maybe say a little prayer, for 77 elderly people who agreed to donate their brains to science after they died. Because the fact that they chose to do so might lead to real benefits for the rest of society.

These 77 were part of a group of 290 people who have participated in the Northwestern University SuperAging Program since 2000 — a 25-year investigation into one of the most intriguing groups in neuroscience: men and women over 80 whose memories were as strong as people in their 50s and 60s.

A recent article published last August in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia summarizes what a quarter century of that research has actually found. The picture it paints of these brains is striking.

Meet the super-agers

Super-ager brains generate at least twice as many new neurons as typical older adults — a finding published earlier this year in Nature. Their cortex thins more slowly. In fact, some regions are actually thicker than in people decades younger.

They also have significantly larger entorhinal neurons — cells critical to memory formation — and four to five times more von Economo neurons than their typical peers.

Von Economo neurons are specialized cells linked to social behavior, awareness, and social processing. Super-agers have them in abundance. Most 80-year-olds don’t.

“It’s really what we’ve found in their brains that’s been so earth-shattering for us,” saidSandra Weintraub, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The researchers also identified two distinct mechanisms that lead to super-aging.

“One is resistance: They don’t make the plaques and tangles,” Weintraub shared. “Two is resilience: They make them, but they don’t do anything to their brains.”

So what do these people actually do differently?

Super-agers don’t share a common exercise regimen. Their diets vary. Their approaches to sleep, work, and lifestyle differ considerably across the group.

The one thing they do have in common is that they are highly social, and they report strong interpersonal relationships.

The von Economo neurons — those specialized social-processing cells super-agers have in such abundance — may help explain why in that brains that stay sharpest into old age appear to be literally built for human connection.

Enter the Harvard research

The Harvard Study of Adult Development — the 88-year research project that has followed hundreds of men since 1938, including future President John F. Kennedy — reached essentially the same conclusion from a completely different direction.

Where Northwestern was looking at brain biology, Harvard was tracking life outcomes: health, happiness, and longevity.

After eight decades of data, the study’s director, Robert Waldinger, distilled it to one sentence: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

People who are more isolated than they want to be see their health decline earlier, their brain functioning slip sooner, and their lives cut shorter.

You have limited control over your genes, your Alzheimer’s risk factors, or whether your brain generates von Economo neurons.

However, you have considerably more control over whether you invest in relationships — whether you stay connected, stay engaged, or stay present in the lives of people who matter to you.

“While we can’t guarantee that you’ll never get Alzheimer’s disease if you have a strong social network,” said Lee Lindquist, a Northwestern Medicine geriatrician, “it’s an important part of the lifestyle decisions we can make — like diet and exercise — that can contribute to living better, longer.”

Apropos of nothing, have you made plans with friends recently?

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: Crews are erecting an octagon-shaped cage on the South Lawn that will host next month’s UFC bout, helping mark the nation’s 250th anniversary — and President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. “I have never seen anybody want anything so much as people want those tickets,” Trump said recently of demand to attend the UFC fight, adding, “That’s gonna be something.”

• NYT: A panel of federal judges rejected Alabama’s effort to use a new voting map for the November midterm elections, saying that the districts discriminated against Black people and could not be used so shortly before a vote. The state is likely to appeal the decision directly to the Supreme Court.

• Washington Post: The Trump administration is planning a government-wide nondisclosure agreement barring federal workers from sharing a wide array of “confidential government information,” according to a draft notice posted to the Federal Register. Trump is famous for aggressively using NDAs across his corporate entities, political campaigns, and governmental administrations, requiring employees, contractors, and business partners to sign strict confidentiality contracts with severe financial penalties for breaches.

• Politico: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked the turmoil of Brexit in warning that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s decision to allow a referendum on whether to attempt to withdraw the province from Canada was “a very dangerous bluff.” Carney: “I saw firsthand what happened in the United Kingdom ... They’re still 10 years later trying to undo what people didn’t think they were voting for, but what they ended up having.”

• The Atlantic: The Olympics These Were Not: Athletes at the Enhanced Games were bigger — but not exactly better.

• NY Post: A journalist who has reported extensively on Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious New Mexico ranch says she is “fleeing the country,” claiming she was the victim of a “directed energy weapons” attack over her coverage. The former newspaper reporter compared her condition to “Havana syndrome” — the controversial and still-disputed cluster of neurological complaints first reported by U.S. diplomats stationed in Cuba in 2016.

• The Independent: America’s aging workforce: One in four workers is now older than 55.

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A new report released last month by the Alzheimer’s Association puts numbers on something most people already feel and maybe even fear:

• First off, 7.4 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease. The lifetime risk at age 45 is 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 10 for men.

• Second, in a nationwide survey of more than 3,800 adults ages 40 and older conducted alongside the report, more than two-thirds said they actively worry about developing Alzheimer’s or another dementia. Additionally, 99 percent said they believe maintaining brain health is at least as important as physical health.

• Third, only 9 percent of those surveyed said they actually know a lot about how to maintain brain health.

That gap — nearly universal concern, almost no one knowing what to do about it — is exactly what a new study out of Rush University Medical Center set out to address.

What they studied

Researchers followed 1,939 adults with an average age of 80, none of whom had dementia at the start, for about eight years.

Their goal was to measure something they called “cognitive enrichment” — how mentally stimulating your life has been across an entire lifetime.

They broke it into three stages.

• Early life, before age 18: At this stage they wanted to figure out how often participants had been read to, whether books and newspapers were in their homes, and whether they studied foreign languages for more than five years.

• Middle age, around 40: Here, they looked at income level, access to resources like magazine subscriptions and library cards, and how often participants had visited museums or libraries.

• Later life, around 80: Now, they were looking at the degree to which participants spent their time reading, writing, and playing games, along with retirement income and financial resources.

Each participant got an enrichment score, and then the researchers watched what happened.

The numbers

Over the course of the study, 551 participants developed Alzheimer’s and 719 developed mild cognitive impairment.

However, when the researchers compared the top 10 percent in lifetime enrichment with the bottom 10 percent, the differences were substantial.

Among the most enriched, 21 percent developed Alzheimer’s. Among the least enriched: 34 percent.

After controlling for age, sex, education, and other factors, higher lifetime enrichment was linked to a 38 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s and a 36 percent lower risk of mild cognitive impairment.

Moreover, among those who did develop cognitive issues, the highest-enrichment group developed Alzheimer’s at an average age of 94. The lowest: 88. For mild cognitive impairment, the gap was 85 versus 78.

Enrichment didn’t eliminate the disease for most people, but it delayed it by five to seven years.

A smaller group of participants underwent autopsies after death.

Among those whose brains showed the physical hallmarks of Alzheimer’s — the amyloid and tau protein buildup — those with higher enrichment had maintained stronger cognitive function and slower decline.

Their brain scans showed damage, but those people had functioned better than the pathology alone would predict. Researchers call this “cognitive reserve.”

What counts

I’ve written about related research here before — the birdwatching study showing that expert birders had measurable structural differences in their brains, the reading study finding that sustained engagement with books improved working memory in older adults, and the research on how loneliness suppresses the brain circuits involved in memory formation.

The Rush study pulls these threads together. It’s not one activity that matters so much as a lifetime pattern of engagement — with ideas, with language, with new information — that appears to build something durable inside the brain.

“Our findings suggest that cognitive health in later life is strongly influenced by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments,” said lead author Andrea Zammit of Rush University Medical Center.

Reading, learning, and staying curious appear to build something specific and durable inside the brain, something that holds up even when biology starts working against you.

They probably make you a bit more interesting, to boot.

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Other things worth knowing …

• WSJ: Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered. The pontiff’s encyclical letter—a text that is poised to define Leo’s papacy—reads like a sharp warning to Silicon Valley executives and humanity more broadly about the future of civilization as new technologies rapidly advance. The risk, he said, is that humans will be reduced “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

• AP: Also in the same document, Pope Leo made a historic apology for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.” Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians.

• ABC News: At Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, Trump honored the 13 service members killed in Operation Epic Fury and used the occasion to criticize his Republican adversaries — singling out Sen. Bill Cassidy, Rep. Thomas Massie, and Sen. Thom Tillis by name. He had kicked off the morning with a Truth Social post wishing a "Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military."

• CBS News: Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced Sunday he will not seek reelection, hours after Trump threatened to back a primary challenger against him for voting against the "big, beautiful bill." A source close to the Trump family told NBC News that Lara Trump is "strongly considering" jumping into the race for his seat.

• CNN: Madonna, Shakira, and BTS will headline the first-ever halftime show in World Cup Final history, on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, curated by Coldplay's Chris Martin. The show will clock in at 11 minutes.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists in Germany demonstrated that ordinary WiFi signals can be used to identify people moving through a room — effectively "seeing" through walls using the same radio waves already blanketing most homes and offices. The technique requires no special hardware beyond a standard router.

• Levi Strauss: Last week I shared the story of the actual inventor of blue jeans, Jacob William Davis, who paired up with Levi Strauss mainly because Davis couldn’t afford a patent filing feel. A few readers asked about the marker supposedly placed at the location of Davis’s 19th century tailor shop in Reno, Nevada. To be honest, I forgot about it until yesterday—but then found that Levis Strauss & Co. actually has a page devoted to it on their website.

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You know what I like? I like Big Optimism.

If you’re reading this I’m going to assume you’re familiar with it. It’s the once-a-week feature when I write about things like ...

• The day in 1926 when John Logie Baird demonstrated television for the first time, and nobody understood what they were seeing.

• Or the day in 1960 when Herb Brooks was cut from the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team, forging his desire to lead the team to victory in the 1980 Olympics, as the coach (the Miracle on Ice).

• Or the day in 1968 when Army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Sr. almost single-handedly stopped the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

I try to find things that were momentous or positive or both — but that people didn’t notice on the day they happened.

I like the idea that this is going on all around us all of the time, only we never know how important they are until later.

At this point I have a years-long archive of Big Optimism moments. I can point to almost any date on the calendar and tell you two or three amazing things that happened on that day in history that nobody recognized as important at the time.

In fact, if I ever get a few free days, I’d like turn it all into a book or some other kind of feature.

15% better outcomes

For now, however, I’d like to tell you about a new study out of Harvard University that says making this kind of focused effort to bring more optimism into your life can make your brain a lot healthier as you get older.

A new paper from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, tracked more than 9,000 cognitively healthy older adults for up to 14 years using data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults.

Every four years, participants completed a validated assessment of their dispositional optimism — essentially, the general expectation that things will go reasonably well.

The finding? Every one-standard-deviation increase in optimism was associated with a 15% lower risk of developing dementia, even after controlling for age, sex, education, depression, and major health conditions.

Lead author Säde Stenlund explained that a one-standard-deviation difference is roughly the gap between someone with average optimism and someone who is noticeably more optimistic than average.

Yeah, I know, ‘reverse causation’

Now, there’s a natural pushback on a finding like this — reverse causation.

Maybe people who are beginning to decline cognitively become more pessimistic, rather than pessimism driving decline.

Caveat to that caveat, however: Everyone in the study was cognitively healthy at baseline.

Also, the protective effect held up when the researchers excluded the first two years of follow-up — a standard technique for testing reverse causation — and held across multiple sensitivity analyses.

Optimists also tend to manage stress better, exercise more, sleep better, stay socially connected, and seek out cognitive engagement — all things that independently seem to protect brain health over time.

Or maybe optimism itself isn’t doing the protective work directly. Maybe a sunnier baseline disposition simply builds a cluster of habits that together protect the brain. But in a way that’s a distinction without a difference.

That matters because prior research consistently suggests that only about 25% of a person’s optimism level is genetic. The rest is shaped by environment and habit, so maybe make an effort if you don’t do so automatically.

April 8, 2026

Stenlund’s own recommendation was straightforward: Take a moment each day to write down three things you’re grateful for.

That’s probably a bit easier than scouring the annals of history every day to find fun and obscure moments that foretold positivity, but I enjoy it. Honestly, it grew out of me trying to find ways to be more optimistic and thoughtful without any intention of turning it into a newsletter — or knowing anything more than the average guy about brain health.

The journal article was published April 8.

That means a group of Harvard researchers were basically writing today’s newsletter for me that day, and I had no idea at the time.

See? A fun meta-Big Optimism moment on which to end this newsletter!

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in Beijing Wednesday — just days after Xi hosted Trump — signing more than 40 cooperation agreements and declaring their countries' ties had reached "the highest level in history." In a joint statement, the two warned against a global return to "the law of the jungle" and took aim at Trump's $175 billion "Golden Dome" missile defense plan.

• NPR: Two Chinese tankers exited the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday carrying 4 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil — the first significant oil movement through the strait since the current standoff began, and a sign that some traffic may be resuming even without a formal deal.

• NBC News: A retired Tennessee police officer who spent 37 days in jail — unable to pay a $2 million bond — after refusing to take down Facebook memes about Charlie Kirk’s assassination has settled his lawsuit against Perry County for $835,000. During his incarceration, Larry Bushart lost his job, missed his wedding anniversary, and missed the birth of his granddaughter.

• NPR: Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky lost his primary Tuesday to Trump-backed Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, in the most expensive House primary in American history. Massie, who has represented his district since 2012, pushed for the release of the Epstein files, voted against Trump's tax bill, and criticized the Iran war.

• Reuters: Cuba’s energy minister announced that the country has completely run out of diesel and fuel oil amid a U.S. blockade. “We have absolutely no fuel, and absolutely no diesel. We have no reserves,” he said on state media, as rolling blackouts lasting 20 to 22 hours a day hit Havana neighborhoods and protests broke out in the capital.

• NPR: A federal jury in Oakland took less than two hours to reject Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, finding that Musk had waited too long to file it. Musk had sought up to $134 billion in damages and Altman’s removal, arguing OpenAI had abandoned its nonprofit founding mission. “I can sum it up in one word: appeal,” Musk’s attorney said outside the courthouse.

• Billboard: FIFA announced this week that Madonna, Shakira, and BTS will headline the first-ever halftime show in World Cup Final history, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19 — curated by Coldplay's Chris Martin and produced by Global Citizen. The show will clock in at 11 minutes.

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

About two years ago, I went to see my doctor. Our conversation went like this:

Doctor: “Bill, you need to lose weight.”

Me: “I know, I know. How much do you think I need to lose?”

Doctor: “That depends. How long do you want to live?”

Funny guy, huh? But that one landed, and it marked a turning point. Since then, I’ve made health and fitness a genuine priority in ways I hadn’t since at least before the pandemic.

Slowly but surely, it’s added up. One extra dividend I hadn’t planned on: I’ve had my best ski season since I was a kid. The days on the mountain feel noticeably better than they did when I started.

I assumed that was just the result of being in better shape overall.

A new study suggests, however, something more specific might also be happening in my head. It might give you a new perspective on exercise too.

What the research found

Writing in the journal Brain Research last month, researchers from University College London say they found that the brain benefits from exercise don’t just accumulate; instead, they actually compound as you get fitter.

Led by Flaminia Ronca of UCL’s Institute of Sport, Exercise & Health, the researchers took a group of sedentary, unfit adults and put them through a 12-week cycling program — three sessions per week. At the start, middle, and end of the study, they measured participants’ levels of a protein called BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

BDNF is sometimes described as the brain’s fertilizer. It supports the growth of new neurons and new connections between brain cells. It helps maintain the ones already there.

Exercise is one of the most reliable ways to trigger its release, as little as 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity appears to be enough to get it going.

The crux of the study: Resting BDNF levels didn’t meaningfully change over the 12 weeks. However, the spike of BDNF that followed a single hard workout got significantly larger as participants got fitter.

That increase tracked directly with improvements in aerobic fitness.

Thus, the fitter they became, the bigger the neurological response to each individual session.

On top of that, higher BDNF responses were linked to measurably better activity in the prefrontal cortex — the region that governs attention, decision-making, and self-control — during cognitive tests.

“The most exciting finding from our study is that if we become fitter, our brains benefit even more from a single session of exercise, and this can change in only six weeks,” Ronca said in a press statement.

The compound interest of fitness

People tend to think of a skipped workout as losing one unit of benefit, but this research suggests the math might be less forgiving than that.

What you’re also skipping is an opportunity to build the system that makes the next workout pay more.

Frankly, it also comports with my own experience, and I suspect anyone else who has gone from a “know I should” attitude to a “really hate to miss it” attitude at the gym.

There are some caveats, as always.

Only around 20 participants completed all the required sessions with usable data, which is a small sample. The results show correlation, not proof of causation.

So, treat this as a compelling early signal, not a settled verdict. Larger trials would help.

But, it fits a broader pattern in the research: The adult brain is more adaptable than most people assume, and the habits that support it tend to reward consistency in ways that aren’t always obvious in the short term.

Next up: a study on whether having a doctor with a deadpan sense of humor motivates people to be healthier.

At least it worked for me.

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Other things worth knowing …

• President Trump refused to apologize to Pope Leo XIV on Monday after criticizing the pontiff for his opposition to the war in Iran — and he sought to explain away his now-deleted social media post depicting himself as Jesus by saying he had thought the image was of him as a doctor. (AP; screen capture of the deleted post, so you can decide)

• President Trump’s decision to blockade all Iranian shipments out of or into the Strait of Hormuz starting Monday morning sets up the next great test in the Iran war: Which side can endure more economic pain, Tehran’s new leadership or Mr. Trump himself? Almost everything about how this new turn in the war plays out is likely to look very different than what has unfolded so far. (NYT)

• Rep. Eric Swalwell, a former Democratic frontrunner in the California gubernatorial race, resigned from Congress on Monday amid sexual misconduct allegations. Swalwell announced his resignation in a statement posted to his X account, while still denying some of the allegations made against him in recent days. (CNBC)

• It will be more expensive than ever to attend World Cup matches held in the United States this summer, a trend that has soccer fans in the U.S. and around the world frustrated about who will have access to watch historic clashes on the pitch in person. The 1994 World Cup in the U.S. still holds the record for largest total attendance and average attendance per match. (The Hill)

• So Much for Springtime: The East Coast Braces for Summer Heat: Washington could hit 90 or higher. New York won’t be far behind. But it won’t last long. (NYT)

• Surcharges Are Suddenly Everywhere—And Grumpy Americans Are Paying Up: The add-ons were a feature during Covid and are once again sneaking their way onto bills. ‘I feel like I need to be my own detective.’ (WSJ)

• Wearing formal office wear, reading glasses and leather shoes, an annoyed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. did a few rounds of jumping jacks and jogged briefly outside his office in front of journalists Monday to disprove rumors of his failing health. “I challenge anyone who are saying that I am sick, that they come and exercise with me,” Marcos, 68, told reporters. “You come to the gym with me. Let’s see who can lift the weights better.” (AP)

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

A few weeks ago my daughter and I were driving from New Jersey to Boston to visit family, and we talked about where to stop for food.

“Five Guys!” she suggested. “I’ve been hoping all week that we could go to Five Guys!”

This presented a little problem. I’m normally all for Five Guys on a road trip, but this was a Friday evening in the middle of Lent, when Catholics aren’t supposed to eat meat.

Now, I could probably write a book on my lifelong relationship with the institution of the Catholic church.

But does the world really need that?

For our purposes, let’s just say that one good reason why a 50-something dad might try to show respect and practice the religion he was born into might be so that his daughter will have had the experience of seeing him do it, and be better able to make her own choices later.

Also, wasn’t there something about not having to follow the no-meat rule when you’re traveling? Maybe?

We went to Five Guys, and I felt a little of the ol’ Catholic guilt. But then something happened that made me feel better.

I noticed a woman sitting alone, off to the side, hunched over, with 3 or 4 fully packed bags stuffed under the table.

As we walked by on the way out, I realized she didn’t have any food—just the free peanuts that Five Guys offers while you’re waiting.

So I used a trick my grandfather used to do, only adjusted for inflation.

I took a $20 bill from my pocket, folded it, walked up to her, and said: “I think you dropped this. Maybe you can get some dinner.”

Then I walked away quickly, and my brain did what it always does: it started overthinking everything.

Was that the right way to do it? Did I make her feel seen, or singled out? Did the whole “you dropped this” line actually preserve her dignity, or was that just something I told myself?

Now, writing this, there’s a second layer: does telling the story turn it into something else entirely—like I’m trying to prove I’m a good guy?

Welcome to my world. I don’t have clean answers to any of this.

What I do know is this: if I hadn’t broken the no-meat rule, I wouldn’t have been there at all.

And my daughter wouldn’t have seen me try.

I wrote this for a few reasons.

First, because it’s one of those little vignettes that happens to me now and then, and I realize that if I don’t write it down someplace like here I’ll forget it. Like the time a little girl might have been hit by a car if our refrigerator hadn’t broken the week before.

Second, because I actually wrote a shorter version of this as the opening to an Inc.com article about fast food getting too expensive for some customers. I think it works better here on its own.

But finally, because it’s a real-life version of one of the best rules I learned about storytelling way back when.

Great things can happen when you break the rules. But first, you have to know them.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Pam Bondi is refusing to testify about her handling of the Epstein files despite a subpoena to appear before Congress, on the grounds she is no longer attorney general. So, I guess we’ll never know what happened. (Axios)

• Top-ranked podcaster Joe Rogan claimed Wednesday that President Trump launched the war in Iran to distract Americans from the Epstein files. “Look, the Epstein Files comes out — we go to war with Iran. It’s a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things,” Rogan said. “You give them a new problem to think about.” (Mediate)

• Iran is demanding that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage. “Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush,” Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told the FT. (The Financial Times)

• President Trump is talking about quitting NATO. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt: ‘I have a direct quote from the President of the United States … and I will share it with all of you: “They were tested and they failed ... And I would add, it’s quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people.” (Daily Mail)

• I don’t think I even mentioned Zohran Mamdani more than once or twice in the past year, but this surprised me: Around half of New Yorkers approve of Mayor Mamdani’s job performance as he approaches his 100th day in office, and a clear majority believe the city is headed in the right direction. The survey, conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, is the first high-quality, nonpartisan poll to capture New Yorkers’ views of Mr. Mamdani, 34, since he took office on Jan. 1.

• On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” Jacobs went on to record more than 10,000 concerts, with increasingly sophisticated equipment, over four decades. Now a group of devoted volunteers in the U.S. and Europe is methodically cataloging, digitizing and uploading them one by one. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Stefano Romanello on Unsplash. See you in the comments.

Recently, I wrote about a fascinating Yale study finding that people who hold positive beliefs about aging were significantly more likely to show measurable physical and cognitive improvement over time — in some cases, well into their 80s and 90s.

Shorter version: How you think about getting older shapes how you actually age.

Now comes the uncomfortable flip side of that coin.

A new study out of NYU suggests that if positive beliefs about aging can help you improve, anxiety about aging may be actively making things worse — not just emotionally but also at the cellular level.

The study

Researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health analyzed data from 726 women who participated in the Midlife in the United States (Midus) study, a large national survey tracking health and behavior across adulthood.

Participants were asked how much they worried about things like declining health, becoming less attractive with age, and growing too old to have children.

Researchers then examined blood samples using two “epigenetic clocks” — scientific tools that measure biological aging based on chemical markers on DNA, independent of how old someone is on paper.

The two clocks measure slightly different things:

• GrimAge2 estimates cumulative biological damage over a lifetime.

• DunedinPACE captures the current pace of aging — essentially, how fast your body is aging right now.

The findings, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, were striking.

Women who reported higher levels of aging anxiety showed signs of faster biological aging on DunedinPACE — meaning their bodies appeared to be aging more quickly than their birth dates would suggest.

“Our research suggests that subjective experiences may be driving objective measures of aging,” said lead author Mariana Rodrigues, a PhD student at NYU School of Global Public Health. “Aging-related anxiety is not merely a psychological concern, but may leave a mark on the body with real health consequences.”

Not all worries are equal

One important nuance: Not every type of aging-related anxiety showed the same effect.

Fears about declining health had the strongest and most consistent association with accelerated biological aging. Worries about appearance and fertility did not show a statistically significant link.

The researchers suspect health fears are particularly potent because they tend to be persistent and self-reinforcing.

While appearance or fertility concerns may fade as life priorities shift, health anxiety can create a feedback loop — fear of physical decline heightens bodily awareness, which amplifies the perception of threat, which sustains physiological stress responses over time.

Importantly, the association between health anxiety and faster biological aging held up even after the researchers controlled for sociodemographic factors, menopausal status, and existing chronic health conditions.

When they added health behaviors — smoking, alcohol use, and BMI — the association approached statistical insignificance, one theory being that these kinds of behaviors may partly explain how the anxiety gets under the skin, rather than disproving the connection.

“Our research identifies aging anxiety as a measurable and modifiable psychological determinant that seems to be shaping aging biology,” said senior author Adolfo Cuevas, an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at NYU School of Global Public Health.

In case this study about anxiety actually gives you more anxiety, maybe let’s focus on the word “modifiable” in that quote. It’s a deliberate signal from the researchers that this isn’t a fixed outcome.

The honest caveats

A few important limits worth naming.

First, the effect sizes here are modest — we’re talking about a 0.07 standard deviation increase in biological aging pace per unit of health anxiety.

Second, the study included only women, by design.

It probably won’t break news to suggest that aging anxiety might weigh harder on women, given pressures around appearance and health, and the researchers wanted to examine it in that context specifically.

Whether similar patterns hold for men is an open question.

Finally, this was a cross-sectional study, meaning it captured a snapshot in time. It can show that health anxiety and faster biological aging tend to show up together, but it cannot prove that one is causing the other. Longitudinal research is needed to establish that.

What it means, taken together

By itself, this study adds one more piece to an increasingly consistent picture: The psychological relationship you have with aging isn’t separate from the biological reality of it. They’re connected in ways that are measurable, even if the mechanisms aren’t fully understood yet.

Combined with the Yale findings from a few weeks ago, the direction of the evidence is hard to ignore: positive beliefs about aging appear to improve function, and anxiety about aging may accelerate decline.

Neither study proves the relationship is causal, but they do suggest the same practical implication.

Making peace with getting older isn’t just good for your mood. Your biology, it seems, may be taking notes.

Worth thinking about — ideally without worrying too much about it.

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Other things worth knowing …

• President Trump on Tuesday evening said he will suspend bombing Iran for two weeks, subject to Iran agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The deal came after Trump pledged early Tuesday that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if an agreement hadn’t been reached. What to watch: Iran says (who knows what’s true) that the deal includes an end to all sanctions, and allows Iran and Oman to charge $2 million tolls on ships transiting through the strait. If that last part is true, it could represent a very big new revenue source for Iran that did not exist before the war. (NPR, Times of Israel)

• The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue an American airman who was shot down in southern Iran over the weekend. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and uses artificial intelligence to isolate the signature from background noise. Source who explained it all: “I don’t think people even know this technology is possible.” (New York Post)

• ICE has released the wife of a U.S. Army staff sergeant after she was arrested at the military base where he is stationed. Annie Ramos, 22, wife of Sergeant Matthew Blank, 23, was arrested April 2 when the couple tried to register Ramos as a military spouse before Blank deployed overseas. Ramos, who was born in Honduras, was 20 months old when she was issued an order of removal. (ABC News)

• President Trump’s new homeland security secretary suggested he might withdraw customs officers from the airports in Democratic-run “sanctuary cities,” including many of the busiest airports in the United States, such as JFK in New York, LAX in Los Angeles, and Denver. “If they’re a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” Mullin said on Fox News. (The Times)

• Amazon.com and the U.S. Postal Service have reached a new package-handling agreement, after Amazon threatened to drastically cut back on the number of packages it sends through the struggling agency. The e-commerce giant is the Postal Service’s largest customer, shipping nearly 15% of all the packages, and translating to about $6 billion in revenue for the agency. (WSJ)

• The story behind those mind-bending Artemis II moon images. (USA Today / NASA)

• It was another big weekend for family films, as “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” smashed the box office with a domestic haul of $190.8 million. It is yet another auspicious sign of the continued dominance of family films in cinemas. Although known franchises such as “Super Mario,” “Zootopia” and “Minecraft” have an obvious leg up due to their existing fanbases, original animated films like Sony Pictures Animation’s “Goat” and Disney and Pixar’s “Hoppers” have also had solid runs this year. (LA Times)

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

Today’s newsletter is about neuroscience and memory. First, I’d like to ask three specific questions:

• In the original Monopoly game, which property is statistically landed on most often and why?

• What everyday habit has been shown in sleep research to quietly wreck your memory the next day even if you think you “slept enough”?

• Who was the first male player to score goals in five different FIFA World Cups?

If you immediately felt either intrigued or slightly annoyed by these questions, good. That reaction is part of the point.

Because according to a new neuroscience study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, being able to answer deep, detail-oriented questions like these may literally reshape the brain. It can also potentially help protect cognition as you age.

The research, led by Erik Wing of Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, focused on birdwatching — comparing expert birdwatchers with novices. At first glance, birding might sound like a niche hobby, but from a brain-science perspective, it’s almost the perfect test case.

Serious bird identification demands sustained attention, fine-grained visual discrimination, and a surprisingly heavy load on memory. Experts often learn to distinguish hundreds of species based on subtle features — beak curvature, wing bars, and tail shape — often under time pressure and imperfect viewing conditions.

What the researchers found

Using diffusion-weighted MRI scans along with behavioral testing, the researchers studied 29 expert birders (ages 24 to 75) and 29 matched novices.

Compared with beginners, the experts showed:

• Structural differences in multiple brain regions tied to attention and perception

• Functional activation in those same regions when identifying challenging birds

• Better identification accuracy that tracked with those brain differences

One of the key measures involved how water molecules diffuse through brain tissue.

In experts, diffusion was more constrained in several frontoparietal and posterior cortical regions, a signal researchers interpret as greater structural complexity.

More simply, years of focused expertise appeared to leave a physical signature in the brain. Plus, the data suggested these changes may blunt some aspects of age-related decline in the specific regions supporting expert performance.

So, is birdwatching a magic antiaging pill? No, but it does reinforce something neuroscientists have been circling for years — sustained, effortful learning changes the adult brain in durable ways.

Why birding?

All of this connects directly to earlier research from Wing and colleagues, which I wrote about here a few years back. In that work, expert birders didn’t just recognize birds better. Instead, they also organized new information differently.

When shown unfamiliar species, novices grouped birds by obvious surface features like size or color. Experts, by contrast, sorted them using deeper structural traits such as beak shape or tail configuration.

That difference turned out to matter for memory. People who processed the birds at that more detailed, expert level were also more accurate at remembering them later. One plausible explanation is that the more richly structured your knowledge base, the easier it becomes to “hang” new information onto it.

The bigger takeaway

If there’s a quiet theme running through modern memory science, it’s that memory isn’t primarily about hoarding facts. It’s about building useful mental models of the world.

As UC Davis neuroscientist Charan Ranganath put it, memory helps extract what’s important so you can navigate an uncertain future — not just replay the past. Again, caution is warranted. This new study is relatively small. It shows correlation, not proof that birdwatching itself prevents cognitive decline.

Taken together with years of related research — in music, navigation, athletics, and other domains — the direction of the evidence is getting harder to ignore.

The adult brain remains far more plastic than many people assume. So what should you actually do with this? No, you don’t need to run out and buy binoculars.

The broader implication is simpler and more encouraging. Sustained engagement in any detail-rich, mentally demanding hobby may help build the kind of knowledge scaffolding that supports stronger learning and memory over time.

Birding just happens to be a particularly elegant example, which connects back to those three questions at the top. The answers, in case you were wondering:

• The most landed-on property in Monopoly? Illinois Avenue. When players exit jail, the most common dice rolls (especially six to eight) funnel them there.

• The nighttime habit that wrecks memory? Checking your phone and sleep fragmentation. Even brief awakenings and light exposure can impair the brain’s overnight memory consolidation.

• The male player who has scored at the most FIFA World Cups? That’s Cristiano Ronaldo, with goals in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022.

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Other things:

• President Donald Trump’s iPhone won’t stop ringing, as his number has become the ultimate status symbol and reporters keep finding it. In the two weeks since the U.S. and Israel began military operations in Iran, Trump has done more than 30 cell phone interviews, picking up without screening his callers and conducting brief conversations with ... journalists from outlets from The New York Times to Washington Reporter. (Senator)

• A former Afghan special forces soldier who served for years alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan for years, and who was evacuated by the U.S. with his family in in August 2021, reportedly died in custody less than 24 hours after being detained in Texas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE said that Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, a father of six, had been arrested in a “targeted enforcement action” after allegations of SNAP fraud and theft, which his surviving family denies. (NBC News)

• The National Rifle Association has a new advertising campaign: “BE READY,” urging Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights, and focusing on warnings from government officials about Iranian terror cells and lone wolf terrorists. (The Washington Times)

• Cuba’s national electric grid has collapsed, the country’s grid operator said, leaving around 10 million people without power amid a U.S.-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the island’s already obsolete generation system. (USA Today)

• Some 200,000 immigrant truck drivers began losing their commercial driver’s licenses under a new Trump administration rule that took effect Monday. The rule bars immigrants who are asylum seekers, refugees or recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses. Key point: Those with valid commercial driver’s licenses will lose their driving privileges as their licenses expire, not immediately. (Wash Post)

• Pope Leo met on Monday with an investigative journalist who alleges that Opus Dei, a prominent ‌Catholic organisation with ties to right-wing politicians in the U.S. ‌and other countries, covered up sexual and financial crimes, which the group firmly denies. Opus Dei has a strong presence in Peru, ​where Leo served as ‌a missionary for decades before becoming pope. The group says its ​mission is to spread Christian teachings across the world. (USA Today)

• Many U.S. adults are skipping parenting or having fewer kids – and it’s forcing schools to close. (The Guardian)

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

If you had to choose a single dystopian theme in today’s tech landscape, it might be the recurring allegations that some AI chatbots have encouraged mentally ill users to harm themselves — and sometimes others. A few examples:

• In Greenwich, Connecticut, a widely reported murder-suicide is now the subject of litigation that alleges ChatGPT conversations reinforced a man’s paranoid delusions before he killed his mother and himself.

• In another case, the family of Zane Chaplin filed suit alleging ChatGPT interactions contributed to the teen’s suicide.

• In Maine, a judge found a man not criminally responsible for homicide after what authorities described as delusions that were intertwined with heavy ChatGPT use.

In an especially heartbreaking case, Reuters documented the death of a 76-year-old disabled man who became emotionally entangled with what he believed was a woman inviting him to meet her in New York City — but was actually an AI chatbot.

There are other alleged incidents cataloged publicly, but until now, most of this conversation has lived in the realm of anecdotes, lawsuits, and deeply unsettling headlines.

For the first time, however, there is systematic clinical evidence suggesting a potential signal beneath the noise.

54,000 patients

Researchers in Denmark reviewed electronic health records from nearly 54,000 patients who received psychiatric care between late 2022 and mid-2025.

Their method: search clinical notes for mentions of chatbot use and evaluate what clinicians observed. Out of more than 10 million notes, they found:

• 181 notes mentioning chatbots

• 126 unique patients involved

• 38 patients whose cases were judged “compatible with potentially harmful consequences”

The most common concerns involved:

• Delusions

• Suicidality or self-harm

• Eating-disorder behaviors

• Mania or hypomania

• Obsessive or compulsive patterns

In absolute terms, of course, 181 notes out of 54,000 patients is a small number. However, it was large enough to get clinicians’ attention, especially given the scale these tools are now reaching.

Moreover, the study spans the exact period when AI chatbot adoption was accelerating rapidly from a relatively small base, and the researchers themselves reported that mentions of chatbot use in clinical notes increased over time.

Design tension

The researchers point to what may be the key mechanism: AI chatbots are engineered to be agreeable, responsive, and validating.

For people already experiencing paranoia, grandiosity, or emerging delusional thinking, a system optimized to validate the user can end up reinforcing distorted beliefs instead of challenging them.

I don’t think anyone is going to suggest giving up on them, even if it weren’t already too late for that. And let’s be honest, there have been versions of this dynamic across the modern tech stack:

• recommendation engines that feed you more of what you already believe

• social feeds that learn your emotional triggers

• engagement systems that reward intensity over accuracy

AI chatbots compress that entire feedback loop into a one-on-one conversation that can feel intensely personal.

The limitations

This research doesn’t prove chatbots cause mental illness or establish incidence rates.

If you zoom out, however, the adoption curve is staggering.

OECD data released in January 2026 report that more than one-third of individuals across OECD countries used generative AI tools in 2025.

Among younger users, the numbers are even higher. A Pew Research Center study published in December 2025 found roughly two-thirds of U.S. teens say they have used AI chatbots.

So this report emerges at the exact moment when these tools are scaling to hundreds of millions of users.

And, the Danish researchers have fairly limited recommendations—mainly that mental health professionals should begin asking patients about AI chatbot use, especially in severe conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

But, I think we have some bigger questions to address:

• At what point does maximizing engagement collide with a duty of care?

• At what point does a builder become morally or even legally responsible for what vulnerable users do after using their products?

Anyone feel especially “agreeable, responsive, or validating” after reading that?

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Other things:

• The International Energy Agency has agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil to address the supply disruption triggered by the Iran war, the largest such action in the organization’s history. (CNBC)

• U.S. military investigators believe the United States was responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike that reportedly killed 175 people, mostly children, at an Iranian elementary school—and mostly likely because of outdated targeting data. However, President Trump’s attempts to sidestep the blame for the strike have complicated the inquiry, leaving officials who have reviewed the findings showing U.S. culpability expressing unease. (NYT)

• President Trump’s Department of Justice asked New Mexico investigators to shut down a probe into a ranch owned by convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, according to Rep. James Comer, a Republican form Kentucky: “This whole thing doesn’t make sense. ... Was it because he had powerful friends? Was it because he was an agent? We don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.” (Mediate)

• Attorney General Pam Bondi has moved to an undisclosed Washington-area military base where other Trump administration officials also live, after threats drug cartels and critics of her actions in handling the Epstein case. Among her neighbors: Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Kristi Noem, the exiting homeland security secretary; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (NYT)

• Press photographers who published “unflattering” photos of Hegseth will no longer permitted to take photos inside the Pentagon press briefing room, according to a report. (The Independent)

• The percentage of voters with significant levels of confidence in the Supreme Court has dropped to its lowest point since NBC News began polling on the question in 2000, according to the most recent survey: 22% of registered voters nationally said they have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the high court. Another 40% said they had “some” confidence, while 38% said they had “very little” or “no” confidence. (NBC News)

• OK, we have to end with something a bit more uplifting, at least quirky … Two dozen couples put their relationships to the test on a grassy hill in southern England over the weekend, in the U.K. Wife Carrying Race, one of the country’s quirkiest annual sports events. Teemu Touvinen and Jatta Leinonen from Finland were crowned the winners at 1 minute and 45 seconds. Their prize? A barrel of local ale. (AP)

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

Small issue: She didn’t like the way the headphones felt, so she cast them aside.

And yet, she sat there blissfully watching Puppy Dog Pals as if it were some kind of 1920s silent movie.

We’d sort of lucked into this no-screen-time mode of parenting. We didn’t even have an iPad at the time, and she was basically limited to the odd episode of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

Ah, memories. Of course, then came the Covid-19 pandemic, and all bets were off.

I mention all this because of an interesting study showing that while parenting without screen time for kids these days is basically a Sisyphean endeavor, letting screens babysit comes with a cost.

And, the consequences might not show up for more than a decade.

New research from Singapore tracked 168 children for over 10 years and found that babies exposed to high levels of screen time before age 2 developed brain changes that led to slower decision-making and increased anxiety by their teenage years.

Writing in eBioMedicine, Huang Pei and his team at the National University of Singapore conducted brain scans at three different points — ages 4.5, 6, and 7.5 — to track how children’s brains developed over time.

Children with more infant screen time showed accelerated maturation in brain networks responsible for visual processing and cognitive control.

That sounds like a good thing — faster development, right?

Wrong.

“Accelerated maturation happens when certain brain networks develop too fast, often in response to adversity or other stimuli,” Huang told researchers at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore. “During normal development, brain networks gradually become more specialized over time. However, in children with high screen exposure, the networks controlling vision and cognition specialized faster, before they had developed the efficient connections needed for complex thinking.”

Metaphor: Building a house too quickly gives you a frame that goes up fast, but without a solid foundation. Years later, cracks appear.

The study found that screen time at 3 and 4 years of age didn’t show these same effects. The critical window is infancy — specifically, before age 2 — when brain development is most rapid and vulnerable to environmental influences.

Children with these altered brain networks took longer to make decisions during cognitive tasks at age 8.5. By age 13, those with slower decision-making reported higher anxiety symptoms.

Unfortunately, the researchers estimate that globally, infants spend two to three hours daily on screens. This far exceeds World Health Organization recommendations.

But there’s an encouraging finding buried in the research.

In a related 2024 Psychological Medicine study, the same team found that parent-child reading counteracts some of these brain changes. Among children whose parents read to them frequently at age 3, the link between infant screen time and altered brain development weakened significantly.

“It is not about this specific activity,” lead researcher Tan Ai Peng told The Straits Times. “Rather, it is about doing something together that engages the child.”

Postscript: We had a snow day yesterday out of school, and like lots of other parents we fought the Battle of No Screens a bit.

Key solution: Taking the kid sledding on the giant hill near our house, with probably 100 other parents and kids there too.

I promise you: It was nowhere near as quiet as a silent episode of Puppy Dog Pals.

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Other things worth knowing …

• What else can be done to force President Trump’s Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files? Legal experts weigh in. (The Guardian)

• Another government shutdown is a near-certainty, as key Senate Democrats vowed to oppose a budget deal including funding for DHS and ICE after federal agents shot and killed a Minneapolis man. Separately, TikTok users said videos they posted about the shooting or criticizing ICE were suppressed, days after a deal was finalized to spin off the U.S. business to new investors who are allies of President Trump. TikTok blamed “a power outage.” (New York Times, The Washington Post)

• Fox News: Senior “federal sources involved immigration enforcement” who “support the mass deportation agenda, but have serious hesitations about the way it is being carried out and the messaging that comes with it” say they “believe this is going to end up being what they call a ‘bad shoot.’” After this reporting, the government suddenly demoted Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, returning him to his former job in California with an understanding he will retire soon. (Fox News’s Bill Melugin, on X; The Atlantic)

• Jeson Nelon Presilla Flores, a suspect in a 2022 Southern California jewellery heist valued at $100 million, was deported to Ecuador in December. Prosecutors told the the decision to deport Flores was taken “unbeknownst” to them, and that they “remain eager to prosecute” him in the highly unlikely event he ever returns to the U.S. (The Independent)

• After 80-year bond, Germans find breaking up with the U.S. is hard to do: To many Germans, Americans were saviors after World War II, and they feel especially hurt over President Donald Trump’s disdain for Europe and traditional alliances. (The Washington Post)

• Like digging ‘your own professional grave’: The translators grappling with losing work to AI. (CNN)

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

Yet, I’m terrible at actually getting enough sleep myself. In fact, I just went back and counted the sheer number of times I’ve made reference in this newsletter to the idea of writing it late at night.

Let’s just say there are more than a few. Like here, here, here, and here.

I know I’m not alone. Hence, why a massive new study from Oregon Health & Science University hit me like a splash of cold water.

The findings: Insufficient sleep is one of the strongest negative predictors of how long you’ll live—more than insufficient diet or exercise, loneliness, unemployment or education level. It’s second only to smoking.

Literally every county in America

Researchers analyzed data from all 3,143 U.S. counties over six years, from 2019 to 2025, comparing how much sleep people reported getting with average life expectancy in each county.

They used CDC survey data and controlled for all the usual suspects: smoking, obesity, diabetes, physical inactivity, diet, even access to healthcare.

Across income levels and geographic boundaries, the correlation was clear: Counties where more people slept fewer than seven hours a night had shorter life expectancies.

Andrew McHill, Ph.D., who led the study as an associate professor at OHSU, said he was surprised by the sharpness of the findings.

“I didn’t expect it to be so strongly correlated to life expectancy,” McHill said. “We’ve always thought sleep is important, but this research really drives that point home: People really should strive to get seven to nine hours of sleep if at all possible.”

Sleep matters more

Think about how much emphasis we put on eating right and working out—both important, both things I’ve written about countless times. But according to this study, sleep matters more.

“It’s intuitive and makes a lot of sense, but it was still striking to see it materialize so strongly in all of these models,” McHill said. “I’m a sleep physiologist who understands the health benefits of sleep, but the strength of the association between sleep sufficiency and life expectancy was remarkable to me.”

An outside expert put it even more bluntly. “Sleep is a biological reset for nearly every system in the body,” said Michael Howell, MD, a sleep medicine physician and chief medical officer at GEM Sleep. “Chronic sleep deprivation leads to ongoing stress, inflammation and metabolic disruption, which over time increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, depression and neurodegenerative disease.”

Pick three.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage, I admit, quoting my colleague Jessica Stillman’s pithy article from years ago about the so-called entrepreneur’s dilemma: Work, sleep, family, fitness, or friends: Pick three.

But even though sleep often feels like the easiest, lightest thing we can borrow from, something has to give.

As McHill put it: “We think of sleep as something that may not be as important—’I’ll get it tomorrow, or I can wait till the weekend to catch up on it’—but it really needs to be something that we prioritize on a daily basis.”

The study looked at neighboring counties and found stark differences.

In some cases, a county where 40% of residents slept fewer than seven hours sat right next to a county where only 25% did—and the life expectancy gap was several years.

Of course, that doesn’t mean less sleep actually causes shorter life expectancies; people who sleep less might also be more stressed, have less healthy diets, or be more likely to have fatal accidents.

But even if we can’t prove causation, the correlation is compelling, and it’s hard to ignore.

Take it to heart.

Reading this research, I can’t pretend anymore. I can’t keep being the expert who doesn’t follow his own advice. Seven to nine hours isn’t a luxury, or a nice-to-have.

So I’m taking this one to heart. Heck, I’m even finishing this newsletter at the comparatively reasonable time of 8:20 p.m. Small victories, people!

Still, if you’re like me—sacrificing sleep to get everything done, telling yourself you’ll make it up later—well, maybe it’s time we both listened.

It’s not that sacrifice isn’t worth it; it’s that sacrificing your lifespan might not be.

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A few other things worth the time to read them

• After creating thousands of “undressing” pictures of women and sexualized imagery of apparent minors, Elon Musk’s X has limited who can generate images with Grok. Grok’s account on X started telling users who requested editing that only “paying subscribers” can do so, and advertising a $395 annual subscription tier. (Wired)

• A blunt column in Canada’s largest national newspaper went viral warning of the possibility that President Donald Trump may use “military coercion” against the country. The authors’ advice: Learn from Finland’s defenses against Russia. Expand the civil defense force. Build a national drone strategy, inspired by Ukraine’s example. And think about the unthinkable. (Bloomberg)

• A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, surpassing the 43% measured in 2014, 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, equal shares of U.S. adults — 27% each — identified as either Democrats or Republicans. When pressed, slightly more political independents said they lean toward the Democratic Party than the Republican Party (20% to 15%). (Gallup)

• How IVF has led to a record number of single moms in their 40s. (NPR)

• Self-mutilation and crystal meth: The ‘Chad mindset’ enticing MAGA’s young men. (The Telegraph)

• AI-generated images are complicating efforts to find and capture monkeys on the loose in St Louis. The problem: People keep reporting that the’ve seen or captured the monkeys, posting fake AI-generated pictures online to bolster their claims. (The Independent)

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

It costs almost nothing, takes almost no time, and research suggests people actually trust you more when you practice it.

Guess what happened? Quite a few readers commented and emailed me to say “thank you” for having written it. There’s no irony like polite irony.

This got me thinking about one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, at least during the digital media age. I’d actually forgotten the context slightly so I had to go back and find it.

The hook, tailored to me since I live in the New York City area, was that New York had ranked near the bottom in a list of the most polite U.S. states.

Meh. But, then I read the rest of it.

FreshBooks had gone through thousands of invoices sent by its U.S. small-business customers and counted how often words like *please* and *thank you* appeared.

Then, they grouped the results by state and ranked all 50.

No, this was not a double-blind study in a peer-reviewed journal. It was closer to a publicity stunt. But it made me laugh, partly because the company was Canadian.

I was born and grew up in the U.S., but my mother was born in Montreal.

Growing up, my siblings and I had a funny relationship with Canada: we enjoyed visiting, but we also ribbed my mom about stereotypes, accents, and the idea that Canadians were *extra polite*.

So now here was a Canadian company judging Americans on their manners.

I called a Canadian friend, and he gave me my favorite line that basically assured I was going to write something:

“Just because we Canadians are polite,” he said, “don’t assume that means we’re nice.”

FreshBooks’ co-founder, Mike McDerment, was also game.

He left me a voicemail explaining the project that was, fittingly, extremely polite. At one point, he said he thought Canada’s reputation for politeness came from the fact that people there say “sorry” constantly — sometimes when nothing is actually their fault.

Anyway, ranked all 50 states. I’m not going to run the full list again here, but a few things jumped out.

• New Jersey — where I live — was near the bottom. That felt fair.

• New York and Nebraska were tied, which may be the only context in which that has ever happened.

• Massachusetts finished much higher than I expected. I’ve lived there, gone to school there, and have family there, so I can say that.

• I grew up in neighboring Rhode Island which ranked even higher. We tend to say “please” when we want someone to repeat themselves in Rhode Island; maybe that’s a clue. Anyway: 18 percent polite.

And then there was Oklahoma (”the Sooner State;” had to look that up for this aside, tbh) came in first by a mile.

Nearly half of the invoices FreshBooks analyzed from Oklahoma included polite language.

I had an assistant at the time and we spent a few hours reading to local TV stations, radio hosts, newspapers, politicians, and assorted local celebrities—basically anyone we could find with a platform in Oklahoma—all to try to get people to share the story.

It worked! Regional pride kicked in. TV meteorologists especially shared it on their social media accounts.

In the end, about 300,000 people read that article.

I think people liked it because it was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and because people like to hear good things about themselves, and maybe because we were exceedingly and fittingly polite in our outreach.

Thanks for the chance to share that one!

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A few other things worth the time to read them

• An ICE agent shot and killed a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis Wednesday. DHS Kristi Noem claimed the woman had tried to ram her car into ICE agents; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called that narrative “garbage,” adding: “They are already trying to spin this is action [as] self-defense. Having seen the video myself, that is bull****.” The woman was identified as Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother of a 6-year old child. (Star-Tribune)

• The United States seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker after a weekslong chase on the high seas. The Kremlin, which backs Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, accused the U.S. of violating maritime law. (NBC News)

• New federal nutrition guidelines quietly abandoned a 45-year recommendation on alcohol consumption. The updated guidance drops the familiar “two drinks for men, one for women” framing, while emphasizing whole foods, protein, and less added sugar. (AP)

• Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette will print its final edition on May 3. The paper has served the region in some form since 1786 and has won multiple Pulitzer Prizes, but its owners say it has lost more than $350 million over the past 20 years. (Axios)

• Greenlanders are pushing back against renewed talk of U.S. interest in acquiring the territory, saying the idea ignores both history and reality. (BBC)

• Jay-Z is now the richest musician in the world, with an estimated fortune of $2.5 billion. Beyoncé is close behind at about $1 billion; Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, and Rihanna are also near the top. (PennLive)

• The cost of youth sports continues to climb. In some communities, it now costs $50 just to try out—and $3,000 or more per season to play. (The Washington Post)

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