• storytelling theory or

• a comedy show?

Right, comedy.

My wife and I went to see Laura Ramoso in Manhattan Sunday night. Anyone know her?

She’s a sketch comedian who does imitations—starting with caricatures of her mother, father and mother-in-law, along with several other recurring characters.

I came across her through her Instagram Reels a year or two ago, and I got sucked in. Then, I found myself thinking:

Wait, why am I connecting with this woman’s impressions of people I don’t know? And since I don’t know them, how would I know if her imitations are any good?

Example: Ramoso’s most popular character is probably German Mom, who is in fact based on her real-life German mother.

There’s also Chiara, the Italian Airline Ticket Agent, plus Canadian Mother-in-Law, Italian Dad, and a few others. Here’s her announcement where she pretended she was telling them all she was taking them on tour.

OK, a few more quick things to know before I start pretending to know anything about storytelling theory:

1. Ramoso is on an international tour right now, playing big theaters in cities including Chicago, Sydney and London. We saw her at one of two sold-out shows at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Impressive venues.

2. Finally, her online breakthrough came during Covid, when she started posting her characters on TikTok and Instagram. Things blew up.

3. She was born in Italy, the only child of a German mother and an Italian father. Her mother worked for the World Health Organization, so they lived all over: Cameroon, Azerbaijan, China and Vietnam—before she moved to Canada for college (okay, “university”).

Also, while I’m the one who started looking forward to Ramoso’s humor and text my wife instantly months ago when I realized she was on tour, apparently it usually works the other way around.

Most of the audience were women, and there was a running joke about all the husbands and boyfriends who had been dragged along.

OK, here’s a passage from a recent interview she did, which will serve as our bridge over to my “theory of storytelling” section.

“I remember I did the first German mom video just one random afternoon. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is so ‘my mom’ specifically.

Like, yes, it’s a German mom, but it’s my mom. And I wonder who’s even gonna relate?

But it was kind of a lesson in the importance of specificity in comedy.”

You can tell “specificity in comedy” is important because I put it in italics.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to track down the source of a related line I remembered roughly this way:

“All good stories have one thing in common: unique expression of universal truth.”

ChatGPT was no help; in fact, I’ve apparently been talking about this quote so often and in so many places that it confidently told me that “Bill Murphy Jr. was the person who came up with it.”

But I was sure that wasn’t right, and eventually I think I found at least one source: Robert McKee’s 1997 book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting.

Here’s the quote:

“The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression.”

Pretty similar-ish, I guess.

If I had more time, I’d try to dig up similar sentiments dating back to the Greeks or something. But then again, to paraphrase Mark Twain, if I had more time, I’d also probably write a shorter newsletter.

I first read Story ... well ... (deep breath) ... just before I …

• Quit my lawyer job ...

• Packed everything I owned into a used Kia Sportage that I bought for $9,000 on eBay Motors…

• Headed across the country to become a Hollywood screenwriter …

• Took the “DC to Maine to Toronto to South Dakota to Wyoming to SF to LA” route, because you only get so many cross-country drives ...

• Arrived … drumroll … literally the day before 9/11 ...

• Transformed quickly from an aspiring screenwriter to a guy who thinks: “The defining world-historical event of my lifetime just happened, forget screenwriting, I need find a way to get involved …”

• Meandered, as a result, on a 25-year path (25 years?!!!) that was pretty interesting at times, and took me from LA to Washington to Baghdad to NYC … but had little to do with my original idea, and ultimately …

• Wound up right here, right now: 10:46 a.m. on a Wednesday, writing this while standing at a bar table outside “Bagel Supreme” (run by a very nice person I just met named “Sal”) at a shopping center called Lackawanna Station in Montclair, New Jersey (“the only mall in America made up entirely of independent businesses”).

See? Specificity and details. But also—maybe?—a few universal human experiences.

• Did you ever want to uproot yourself and follow a dream?

• Ever come up with a plan, only to have God chuckle and lead you somewhere else entirely?

• Ever marvel at how time passed so quickly that you (literally or metaphorically) repeated the amount of time you had just said — only this time in italics and bold and followed by a question mark and three exclamation points?!!!

My working theory after all this is that stories are just how we communicate.

And whether your goal in life is to be on stage at places like the Beacon Theater, or just to live a happy suburban existence that leads you to make quick insta-friends like Sal at Bagel Supreme, keep telling stories.

Find the specifics. And search for the universal truths.

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Other things worth knowing …

• ABC News: The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday in an effort to battle back inflation set off by the Iran war — the central bank’s first rate increase since July 2023. Fighting in the Middle East kept global crude prices above $105 a barrel as of Wednesday, a rise of about 50% since the war broke out in late February.

• NBC News: House lawmakers will leave Washington today until after the November midterm elections, after GOP leaders canceled votes set for Thursday. The change in schedule means House members won’t have to vote on an impeachment resolution filed by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth until after Election Day.

• AP | Truth Social: Fencing went up Wednesday around the Kennedy Center in Washington, a day after the Trump-appointed board voted to close it, which came after a federal judge blocked the institution from returning President Trump’s name to the building. Congress has allocated $257 million for renovations, but on Truth Social Trump wrote that if his name is not added to the building, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

• NYT: The European Union has invited Canada to work toward becoming its first “associate member,” a title meant to underscore the nation’s growing closeness to the 27-country bloc as both face deteriorating relationships with the United States. The announcement, made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during a major annual speech on Wednesday, was met with a standing ovation from the room of lawmakers.

• MarketWatch: For decades, the standard career advice was to follow the money. Now, it’s about finding job security. Monster’s recent “2026 Job Security Report” found that more than half of U.S. workers would accept a pay cut for a greater sense of job security, and 61% said they’d give up at least one aspect of their compensation or workplace experience — like bonuses, perks, and other incentives — if it made them feel more secure in their role.

• Chicago Tribune: Former President George W. Bush has a new book of oil paintings coming out in March featuring portraits of political prisoners and dissidents. “The Call of Freedom,” his third collection, will include 44 paintings and biographical sketches of each subject, with a foreword by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky.

• NBC News: Merriam-Webster is giving its dictionary another “glow-up,” adding 1,400 words and definitions including “shapewear,” “looksmaxxing,” and “meme coin.” “The new entries reflect words and meanings that have demonstrated widespread use over time, offering a window into the world today,” it said.

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

We just passed the 35th anniversary of the Web’s public debut (August 1991). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it featured an ugly, annoying “Lose Belly Fat Now!” programmatic ad.

That might be a slight exaggeration, but the Federal Trade Commission has spent literally the past 100 years fighting a quixotic battle against marketers making specious claims about miracle weight loss cures.

All of which inspires some mixed feelings as I share with you the latest news about health, longevity, and being overweight.

First, the surprising good news: Writing in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, researchers say that after analyzing 14 years of data from 6,905 Americans age 65 and older, they discovered that adults who were classified as “overweight” had a lower risk of dying during the study period than their normal-weight peers.

• Specifically, the overweight men tracked in this study had a 46% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to normal-weight men. Men with Class I or II obesity had a 51% lower risk.

• For women, the difference was less pronounced: Overweight women had a 27% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to normal-weight women. Women with Class I or II obesity had a 15% lower estimated risk, although that result was not statistically significant.

But there was one big caveat: belly fat, measured here by waist circumference (WC).

For both men and women, high waist circumference correlated with a 24% higher risk of death during the study period, even after accounting for BMI and the demographic and health factors included in the analysis.

The statistical culprit here could be the way we calculate body mass index (BMI). As the authors wrote in the journal article:

Although BMI is simple and widely applied in clinical and epidemiologic settings, it does not distinguish between fat mass and lean mass, nor does it account for fat distribution.

In contrast, WC reflects abdominal adiposity, which has been shown to be more strongly associated with cardiometabolic risk than BMI alone.

Enter “the obesity paradox.” This is the finding that overweight, and in some cases obesity, can be associated with lower mortality among older adults.

Basically, you spend your whole life hearing that weight gain is bad and unhealthy.

But then, according to studies like this one, you reach a certain age and come away with the understanding that the whole thing flips. In fact, you you might conclude that losing weight is bad and unhealthy.

“BMI and waist circumference provide complementary information about health risk in older adults,” study co-author Bryan Blissmer, PhD, of the University of Rhode Island, said. “Our findings suggest that considering both measures together, rather than relying on BMI alone, may improve mortality risk assessment and support more informed clinical decision-making.”

The study covered the period 2011 to 2024, so the current era of widespread use of highly effective GLP-1 drugs for weight loss came very late in the study period.

So that might be a factor to address in the next study of its type.

And, we’ve seen plenty of prior studies suggesting that belly fat is especially bad for people at any age — although this is the first one I remember to focus specifically on longevity during a time period like this. All of which probably explains the century-old industry trying to convince people that unregulated miracle cures actually exist.

As Richard L. Cleland wrote in a publication of the Food & Drug Law Institute earlier this year: “Since filing its first case in 1926, [the FTC] has initiated at least 268 enforcement actions against companies and individuals.”

The dubious honor of being the first product targeted went to a cream called McGowan’s Reducine. Its makers ran an ad in a magazine called True Romances claiming that it could “literally dissolve excess fat, leaving the figure slim and properly rounded, giving the lithe grace to the body that every man and woman desires.”

As bad as belly fat apparently is, there’s something comforting about realizing that our great-grandparents were fighting the same battle of the bulge all those years ago.

Let’s check back here in another few decades and see what we’re convincing ourselves works by then.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Fox News: Voters don’t believe President Trump will make good on his new promise to send eligible Americans $5,000 dividend checks if Republicans maintain their majorities in the House and Senate this midterm cycle. The dividend proposal would require congressional approval, and it’s unclear where the money would come from to fund the program.

• CNN: President Trump attacked Supreme Court justices as being beholden to “crazed” liberals in a lengthy online screed after the court blocked his plan to execute dramatic changes to mail-in voting ahead of the midterms. These are not the people I interviewed to serve … they are merely a shell of their original selves," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

• Bloomberg: OK, one more story about Trump and then we can move on: Trump has traded more securities than all 535 members of Congress combined since he returned to office — 28,700 trades in the 17 months compared to 22,200 — even as he seeks to pass a stock-purchasing ban for lawmakers that would exclude him from any restrictions, according to a Bloomberg review.

• National Post: A new poll finds that 49% of Canadians support the idea of joining the European Union — something that would be impossible under current EU membership rules, since Canada isn’t in Europe. Still, about 81% support closer integration with the EU, including making it easier to trade, travel, work and study and to cooperate on security.

• The Telegraph: The “pick-up artists” secretly filming women using smart glasses. AI glasses are enabling harassers to record women stealthily, posing a growing threat to privacy and online safety.

• AFP via Yahoo: Authorities in New York announced Monday the seizure of a dozen prominent websites hosting pornographic celebrity deepfakes that featured politicians and actors. An online boom in non-consensual deepfakes is currently outpacing efforts to regulate the technology around the world due to a proliferation of AI tools, including “nudification” apps.

• Futurism: Scientists say that the planet Mercury has been actively shrinking over the billions of years that it’s orbited the Sun. Now, as detailed in a new paper by a team of scientists from the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Space Research, the planet’s shrivelling could be occurring at an even faster-than-expected rate, losing up to 14.5 miles of total diameter since it formed billions of years ago — anywhere from ten to 30 percent more than previously thought.

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My mom used to give us kids some pretty good advice. In fairness to my younger self, I discounted some of it during my tween and teen years, chalking it up to her being a recently transplanted Canadian raising a family in the United States.

I’m talking about things like:

• Say “please” and “thank you.”

• “No problem” is not a substitute for “You’re welcome.”

• Sit up straight! People notice your posture, and it matters.

Sorry for doubting, Mom.

I’ve written here before about how, over time, I’ve developed the zeal of a convert when it comes to saying “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.”

And now, I’m happy to have found scientific evidence that my mom may have been onto something about sitting up straight—and even happier to realize that it comes from Canada’s own McGill University.

Writing in the British Journal of Psychology, McGill researchers said they recruited nearly 200 participants to complete a task on a tablet.

For some participants, the tablet was positioned on a stand atop an adjustable table, encouraging them to sit upright. For others, it was placed flat on a lowered desk, prompting them to hunch over.

The researchers didn’t tell participants that posture was part of the experiment, and most never realized it. They also used video software to measure participants’ actual neck angles.

The task involved inflating a virtual balloon. With each pump, participants could accumulate more points, but if the balloon burst before they cashed out, they lost everything they had earned on that round.

Over the course of the experiment, participants in the upright group took greater risks and tended to accumulate more points.

More upright posture, as measured by neck angle, was also associated with greater feelings of pride.

“The findings do not mean that changing posture can dramatically transform a person’s life,” cautioned Jorge Armony, professor in the departments of psychiatry and psychology at McGill and senior author of the study. “But it does raise interesting questions about whether everyday features of our environment—such as workplace ergonomics—can subtly influence mood and behaviour.”

(“Behaviour.” I love it.)

Look, as much as I love and respect my mom and her advice—especially as I’m now more than a bit older and have had time to appreciate it—I’m not going to pretend that posture is the key to success.

But we have seen that salespeople who mimic their customers’ speech and posture wind up selling more products, all other things being equal.

And even though the Superman pose has its critics, I find that striking it before having to, well, act like Superman pays off.

Maybe it’s the placebo effect? But if it works, who am I to argue?

Thanks, Mom. Turns out you were right.

I probably should have listened sooner, eh?

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP | Reuters: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow development to give safety measures time to catch up, warning that AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet within six to 12 months. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google’s Demis Hassabis said they supported a coordinated industry slowdown.

• CNBC: Trump pushed back, lashing out at Amodei on Truth Social on Monday: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

• WSJ: Saudi Arabia shut down the East-West oil pipeline that had allowed the kingdom to continue exporting crude oil during the Iran war, after it was attacked multiple times by drones fired from Iraq — eliminating what had been a crucial bypass route for Saudi oil exports.

• News Nation via Yahoo: Americans have spent an extra $102 billion on gasoline and diesel due to the Iran war, and the tally is still rising, according to a real-time tracker from Brown University. That’s equivalent to roughly $780 per U.S. household since the conflict began at the end of February.

• DW | WSJ: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Sunday he is pursuing unprecedented closeness with the European Union to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States — but not EU membership. His clarification came after the Wall Street Journal reported he had been exploring whether Canada could become an “associate member” of the bloc, a status the EU would have to create for the occasion.

• Reuters: While on a two-day visit to Ireland over the weekend, Trump backed Irish unity, calling for Northern Ireland to break from the United Kingdom and unify with the Republic of Ireland. “I would love to see it sooner rather than later,” he said. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has ruled out any such referendum.

• NBC News: A second federal judge — a Trump appointee — blocked the administration’s executive order limiting mail-in ballots, saying there is an “increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted” if the rule stands. The Supreme Court is still weighing the administration’s request to overturn a separate order blocking the same rule.

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One of the truly serendipitous events of my life is that my wife and I got together during summer 2012.

This means we just barely missed the advent of Tinder, which had its soft launch in September of that year.

I mean, I did some online dating back in the day, no doubt, but there was no swiping involved. In fact, I still can’t remember whether swipe left or right is good or bad.

Still, I’m all for doing whatever it takes to find the love of your life. Truly, I have the zeal of a convert.

And if that means using LinkedIn as a dating site, so be it.

I’m sorry, LinkedIn? Yes, at least according to the results of a survey reported in The Wall Street Journal recently.

Zety surveyed 1,023 U.S. employees and found that 26% thought it was acceptable to use LinkedIn as a dating tool. Twenty-two percent said they had either reached out or responded to someone on LinkedIn with romantic intent. Also, 12% said they had formed a romantic relationship that started there.

This, despite the fact that LinkedIn’s official policies include this pretty ironclad prohibition against using the site for dating:

“We don’t allow unwanted expressions of attraction, desire, requests for romantic relationship, marriage proposals, sexual advances or innuendo, or lewd remarks.

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, not a dating site. Do not use LinkedIn to pursue romantic connections, ask for romantic dates, or provide sexual commentary on someone’s appearance or perceived attractiveness.”

Personally, I think there’s a big difference between asking for a romantic date and making “lewd remarks.” But then again, I don’t run LinkedIn.

Still, the WSJ leads and finishes with the story of a couple who met on LinkedIn and linked up in more ways than one. Now, they’re looking for wedding venues.

“If it was LinkedIn, so be it,” said Rachel Wong, who met her fiancé, Sam Sawchuck, on LinkedIn. “I mean, he’s been the best connection I’ve ever made.”

And, as the Journal points out—although, again, I have no firsthand experience here—modern dating apps have reached the point of “deepening exhaustion” for many users, who keep looking for other alternatives:

“Singles are trying speed dating, connecting through shared real-world interests and even using spreadsheets to break their dating algorithm. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a public-facing platform with clear headshots and ample information about a person’s path in life—everything dating apps today seem to lack—has become a go-to tool in the modern search for love.”

Another LinkedIn user, Esme Gordon-Craig, a 24-year-old freelance journalist in London, talked about having pitched a colleague on the idea of having a conversation about career paths over drinks.

“He was kind of like, ‘This is a date, isn’t it?’” she told the WSJ. “And I was like, ‘Yeah.’”

For what it’s worth, Gordon-Craig wrote a first-person article last December in which she described herself as “back living at home with my parents, more than £80,000 in student debt, and riddled with panic for the future.”

That sounded familiar. I was once in nearly the same situation—right down to the student loans, adjusted for inflation, looking for love in all the wrong places, and moving back home with Mom and Dad for a bit.

And while I sometimes can’t explain exactly how it happened, the student loans are gone, I’m with the love of my life, and things sort of worked out.

I’m hopeful for the generation behind me that things will work out, too.

As much as LinkedIn can make a lot of us cringe sometimes, if it happens to be part of the solution, more power to you.

Now, someone please remind me whether it’s swipe right or left that’s good. I still mess that up.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: Three Anthropic researchers went public this week with chilling concerns about out-of-control AI, warning it could destroy humans this decade. Calling this unprecedented would be a gross understatement. You basically have the fastest-growing companies in human history warning their products could harm or even destroy humanity.

• WSJ: Top White House advisers have raised privately with President Trump the prospect that the Iran war could drag on through the remainder of his term, U.S. officials said — a message at odds with Trump’s public assurances of a swift victory. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the war will end “immediately” after the November midterms “because they can’t hold out any longer.”

• NPR: Ballot seizures seemed impossible. But judges and officials are prepping for them now.

• Yahoo Finance: Apple debuted its first foldable iPhone on Wednesday, marking the largest overhaul of its smartphone design ever. Called the iPhone Duo and starting at $1,999, the device features a passport-like design that opens and closes like a book.

• CNN via Yahoo: Fossilized eggs of the largest known dinosaurs have been unearthed in an unexpected place.

• LA Times via MSN: L.A.’s “perfect” Mediterranean weather is a birthright. Why did it disappear this summer?

• AP: Ten research teams were honored Thursday at a satirical science awards ceremony hosted outside the U.S. for the first time due to travel concerns. Researchers who studied milk from cockroaches and analyzed soil health using underwear received Ig Nobel prizes. The ceremony shifted to Switzerland after 35 years in the United States over concerns about attendees being able to get visas.

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Honestly, just look on LinkedIn. I say this after reading about a new study in which economists tried to use LinkedIn to trace the history of the U.S. labor market over the past few years.

The problem they ran into is something I think most of us probably already realized: LinkedIn profiles aren’t a self-reported history of work experiences, so much as they’re a constantly revised “retcon,” redone over and over in many cases to present the best possible face to the world.

In “Time Travel on Professional Profiles” (great title, by the way), published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Nicholas Bloom and Gideon Moore of Stanford University and Lisa Simon and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers of Revelio Labs used a dataset of 29,448,462 LinkedIn profiles, and came up with a few key insights for our purposes:

• First, they found that “19.7 percent of established U.S. LinkedIn users retroactively edit the title or description of a job they have already left.”

• Next: “These ‘time-travel’ edits are closely tied to labor market transitions: around such edits, workers are much more likely to change employers as compared to later-editing users.”

• Perhaps unsurprisingly, the specific changes suggest “workers’ beliefs about which skills are in demand. Retroactive edits show sharp post-2022 increases in AI-related language and recent reductions in work-from-home and DEI language.”

• And “LLM-associated writing markers surge after ChatGPT, especially among less-educated groups and MBAs from lower-ranked programs.”

Let’s roll past the sick burn from Stanford professors talking about “lower-ranked MBAs” and instead get to the part of this newsletter where I come clean.

Because heck yes, I’ve gone back and edited and rewritten my LinkedIn profile.

Partly, it’s because the things I’m doing now—Life Story Magic, business consulting, and writing for places like Inc.com and of course Understandably—are very different from what I was doing when I first joined LinkedIn.

I don’t think that’s unfair, as long as it’s truthful. Honestly, I don’t even remember when I first joined LinkedIn.

Anyway, I acknowledge: When I first started thinking about this article, I assumed I’d be writing about LinkedIn changes as a cautionary tale.

Something like, “beware the too-on-the-nose job description from 2015,” or the profile suggesting that someone was thinking deeply about artificial intelligence during the Obama administration.

But as I think about this more, revisions might be more of a feature than a bug.

I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who famously wrote: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

(Yes, I’m enjoying myself quoting both Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the same newsletter.)

Revisions—again, truthful revisions—suggest to me attention to detail and an ability to communicate and change with the times.

In fact, maybe be more wary of people whose profiles look less like a time machine and more like a time capsule.

We all get second acts—and thirds, and fourths, and fifths ones, too.

At least, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

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Other things worth knowing …

• Yahoo News via AFP: Israeli opposition leaders called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unfit to serve after a bombshell report that the UAE had warned him before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Haaretz reported that UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan spoke to Netanyahu a week and a half before the attack and told him that Hamas was planning a major operation.

• Futurism: A journalist has accused Cleveland.com — the online home of The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper — of publishing an article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval. The article was generated by the “Cleveland.com Express Desk,” which “uses AI tools to assist in producing content.” Reporter Kaitlin Durbin said she’d been away on her honeymoon when her employer published the AI article under her name.

• CNN via MSN: Thieves took less than five minutes to steal four paintings from the Renoir Museum in southern France on Tuesday, abandoning two as they fled. The two missing paintings are “Madame Colonna Romano,” worth 2 million euros ($2.32 million), and “Jeune femme au puits,” valued at 200,000 euros ($232,000).

• NYT: A little over a month before Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison, she invited a camera crew into her rented Southern California home: Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian behind “Nathan for You,” and documentary director Lance Oppenheim. That decision turned into a three-year odyssey and a three-hour documentary called “You Can See Everything” that may upend the documentary genre itself. It premieres theatrically via A24 on October 16.

• WSJ: Southwest Airlines is jumping into the airport lounge competition. Four initial lounges are being built, with the first slated to open in late 2027.

• NYT: Every time you drive your car is now a chance to get famous. Dash cams were made for safety — but they’ve inadvertently created a whole new entertainment genre.

• AP: Pretty much everyone on stage at the Metropolitan Opera must audition — even the snake who will briefly take center stage in an upcoming adaptation of a Mozart classic. In charge of deciding who gets the starring reptilian role is Zoe Ziegfeld, a carnival performer-turned-opera actor cast as the snake handler in the Met’s version of “Così fan tutte,” inspired by Coney Island in the 1950s.

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Sailing and bridge and croquet

Today’s story is for Labor Day, and it starts almost a century ago, when a young prospective law student named Elizabeth Brandeis (”E.B” to her friends), had her heart set on Harvard.

Little problem: Harvard refused to admit women to its law school in the 1920s.

They wouldn’t even make an exception for E.B., whose father was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (a Harvard man himself).

Instead, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin law school in 1923. There, she met her future husband, a fellow student named Paul Raushenbush.

“She was brainy and shy, her hair long and dark,” as Michael S. Rosenwald put it in The Washington Post. “He was handsome and outgoing. On hikes and canoe outings, they fell in love romantically and intellectually.”

Sounds lovely. They graduated, married, and both became professors at Wisconsin.

Then, they found their calling.

A few other people

Two more people enter the story here (although not the love affair; that would be awkward):

• John R. Commons: a Wisconsin law professor who had tried but failed to advocate for an unemployment insurance law. E.B. and Paul Raushenbush became his acolytes.

• Philip La Follette, a fellow Wisconsin Law graduate whose late father had been the state’s governor and served in the U.S. Senate, and whose brother was a sitting U.S. senator at the time.

La Follette wanted to run for governor, and he wanted to pass unemployment insurance legislation as part of his platform. So, knowing his friends E.B. and Paul Raushenbush’s work with Commons, he asked them to draft something that could make it through the legislature.

They dove in, and included a key provision that became highly controversial (but survived): the idea that the whole thing had to be funded by employers, rather than employees, so that employers would have a disincentive to cut jobs.

La Follette won the election, and E.B. and Paul’s proposed legislation garnered just enough support. It became Wisconsin law in 1932.

Three years later, when President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act of 1935, that law included a national unemployment insurance policy, too—which was based largely, in turn, on the Wisconsin law.

Sailing and bridge and croquet

“Their story is absolutely staggering to think about right now,” E.B. and Paul Raushenbush’s grandson told the Post. “It was their life’s work to make laws like this available to everyone.”

I find it interesting too. Maybe not, “absolutely staggering,” but it’s family, so we’ll allow it.

Tucked away at the end of all of this however, I find perhaps the most endearing part.

It’s that growing up, their grandson thought of E.B. and Paul not as lawyers or champions of the working class, but for other things: “the simple pleasures they all enjoyed together. Games of bridge. Sailing. Croquet.”

A lot of people who never heard of E.B. and Paul Raushenbush, and who never in a million years thought they’d need to file for unemployment, might agree that they owe them a small debt of gratitude. Labor Day seems like a nice day to tell the tale.

And for the rest of us, a remainder: Everyone you meet has a story! Maybe even a consequential one you knew nothing about.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: An Amazon cargo plane barreled off a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, killing at least five people as it struck vehicles and burst into flames, authorities said.

• NYT: U.S. government investigators have subjected roughly 50 members of the military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions. The tests were conducted in August and appear aimed at not just ferreting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others.

• Axios: Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany won a record 44% in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, leaving a small party with seats that could determine whether it can lead the nation’s first far-right state government since World War II. Germany rebuilt its democracy after Nazi rule with unusually strong safeguards against extremism, but AfD’s breakthrough shows those barriers aren’t stopping Europe’s far right from becoming dominant electoral forces.

• CNN: Volkswagen Group, which sells Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, and VW vehicles, plans to eliminate 50,000 jobs and cut half of its offerings. The German automaker is struggling with headwinds from increasing Chinese competition in Europe and tariff costs on its shipments to the U.S. market.

• WSJ: Carmakers have a new idea to boost EV range: add a gasoline engine. Hyundai, Ford, and Stellantis are planning to introduce larger EVs with gas generators to solve range anxiety.

• Fortune: Some Las Vegas hotels are so desperate for Canadian tourists they’re treating Canada’s dollar as equivalent to the U.S. greenback. “It’s such a big ask right now,” said Vancouver resident Josh Loewen, 45, of the U.S. tourism industry’s attempts to woo Canadians back before a new president occupies the White House. “It’s just a wasted effort.”

• AP: British police have a stout task ahead: recovering 70,000 pints worth of stolen Guinness. Two trailer truckloads of the famously creamy dark beer valued at £115,000 were stolen from a depot near Liverpool. “It is famously said that ‘Guinness is good for you,’ but that is only the case when it has been bought and paid for,” Det. Sgt. Gary McClatchy said. “We will settle for nothing less than the full recovery of all the items stolen.”

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

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

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

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

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

Buy Me a Coffee

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

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

Who reads Understandably

We now have about 110,000 active subscribers.

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

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

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

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

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

We skew a bit older and fairly financially established:

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

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

The audience is almost evenly divided:

• 51 percent women
  48 percent men

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

Politically:

• 41 percent centrist or moderate

• 38 percent liberal or very liberal

• 22 percent conservative or very conservative

What you like

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

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

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

• “7 other things” — 86 percent

• Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday essays — 85 percent

• Big Optimism — 84 percent

• Free for ALL Fridays — 76 percent

• Comments and community — 55 percent

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

Don’t mess this up!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most popular answer: None of these!

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

What happens next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other things worth knowing …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correction/addition!

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

• The Tower Subway: Opened August 2, 1870.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Dart joined the family business.

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

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

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

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

Not long afterward, he walked away from corporate life.

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

That title sounds bureaucratic. The work was deeply personal.

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

More than 30,000 people took part.

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

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

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

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

Nearly 3,000 people were there.

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

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

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

Dart died in 2002 at the age of 71.

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

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

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7 other moments to know from history this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The World Cup is on, and I am one zillion percent into it — and of course it has me thinking about Aristotle.

As I wrote here a while back:

Aristotle argued that everything has a telos — a purpose — and that it achieves its “good” by fulfilling that purpose well. It applies to everything. A pen is better used to write something meaningful than to scrawl nonsense on a bathroom wall. A person with a natural gift for singing flourishes by developing that gift, not by ignoring it or trying to be something else.

You don’t get to your telos by becoming a slightly worse version of someone else. You get there by being a more complete version of yourself.

We recognize that instinctively. We admire it when we see it, even in areas we don’t normally care about.

For a lot of people, that probably describes the World Cup. It comes around once every four years, so for most players that means they get just a handful of chances, even to be in the show.

The World Cup also surfaces many players that even diehard soccer fans know almost nothing about — men from countries and corners of the game that rarely get a global stage.

But we watch them play and something clicks anyway, because we’re watching people doing exactly what they were built to do, on the one occasion that comes along rarely enough to matter completely.

Ergo, Aristotle.

With that in mind, here are a few of the most remarkable stories from this World Cup.

Some involve players born into genuinely brutal circumstances who were eventually recognized for their talent and developed into elite athletes. Others are simply about the roundabout, almost accidental way they ended up on the biggest athletic stage in the world.

Orlando Gill, Paraguay

First among equals: when Gill’s newborn son arrived with serious health complications, the goalkeeper sold most of his equipment and even the jersey he’d worn when he debuted for Paraguay’s Under-19 side to cover hospital bills and buy food. He kept only his goalkeeper gloves.

In the Round of 16 in Boston, wearing those same gloves, he saved two penalties in a shootout to knock out Germany. (Your humble newsletter author was in the stands.)

For Paraguay, a country that hasn’t been to a World Cup in 16 years, it was something like the 1980 Miracle on Ice — and the man who made it happen had been selling his kit on the internet four years ago to keep his family alive.

Alphonso Davies, Canada

Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana after his parents fled Liberia’s Second Civil War. The family lived in a hut not much larger than a minivan; at times they had to climb over corpses to find food.

They were resettled in Canada when Alphonso was five; he learned to play soccer first in Alberta in an after-school program for kids who couldn’t afford other leagues, called Free Footie.

At 17, Davies stood before 200 FIFA delegates and delivered a speech backing North America’s bid to host the 2026 World Cup. Eight years later, he walked onto the pitch as Canada’s captain in that same tournament.

Folarin Balogun, USA

In June 2001, Florence Balogun — a Nigerian citizen living in London — was seven months pregnant and visiting New York City. When she tried to fly home, she was denied boarding because of the advanced state of her pregnancy.

Her son Folarin was born in Brooklyn days later, making him an American citizen by birthright. The family returned to England within weeks.

Two decades later, the US men’s national team launched a sustained effort to persuade Balogun to play for the Americans rather than England or Nigeria. He has three goals in the tournament so far, including the game-winner against Bosnia — plus a controversial red card, but that’s a longer story.

Vozinha, Cape Verde

Vozinha turned professional at 25 and has spent the nearly two decades since bouncing between clubs in Moldova, Angola, Cyprus, Slovakia, and Portugal. He is 40 years old.

When Cape Verde — one of the smallest nations ever to qualify for a World Cup — faced Spain in their first-ever World Cup match last month, Vozinha stood in goal and faced 27 shots. He stopped all of them.

Then he walked off in tears — remembering the grandparents who raised him but who died before he got there, and thinking of his mother, who couldn’t get a visa to the United States in time and watched from home.

Roberto “Pico” Lopes, Cape Verde

Dublin-born defender Roberto Lopes discovered his international soccer future through a LinkedIn message in Portuguese that he assumed was spam and ignored for nine months.

When a follow-up arrived in English, he finally translated the original and learned that Cape Verde wanted him to represent the country of his father’s birth.

Lopes’s mother, Judy, works as a secretary at a primary school in Crumlin. She’d had to fly home to Dublin after the group stage because she needed to get back to work — until Aer Lingus found out and flew the whole family back to Florida for the Round of 16 against Argentina.

Antonio Rüdiger, Germany

During his family’s escape from the civil war in Sierra Leone, Rüdiger’s uncle hid the children in sacks of rice to prevent them from being taken by armed groups.

His mother eventually settled in Berlin’s Neukölln district and raised him there.

Rüdiger is a starting defender for Real Madrid and was one of the most important players in Germany’s squad — past tense because they lost to Paraguay; I was there for that too. He runs a foundation in Sierra Leone focused on education, sport, and healthcare.

Eduardo Camavinga, France

Camavinga was born in a refugee camp in Angola after his parents fled the war in DR Congo. The family made it to France, where he grew up, broke into professional football as a teenager at Rennes, and is now a Champions League winner with Real Madrid.

He and Rüdiger are teammates at club level and both arrived at this World Cup from refugee backgrounds — two of the most decorated players in the world’s most decorated club, with that in common.

Raphinha, Brazil

Raphinha grew up in Restinga, a favela in Porto Alegre. As a teenager he often went eight or nine hours without eating, with only enough money for bus fare home.

He has said that many of his childhood friends were better footballers than he was — faster, more technically gifted — but they were lost to poverty, crime, and drug trafficking.

Raphinha arrived at this World Cup having just led Barcelona to a domestic treble, arguably the best player on earth right now. He knows exactly what it cost just to get here, and it wasn’t only talent.

Awer Mabil, Australia

Mabil’s parents fled South Sudan for Kenya during the civil war. He was born in Kakuma refugee camp. His first football was a rolled-up sock. He played barefoot on dirt. Eventually the family emigrated to Australia.

He went on to score the penalty that sent Australia to the 2022 World Cup, which he described as “the only way to say thank you to Australia on behalf of my family.”

He has since co-founded Barefoot to Boots, a charity that sends football gear to children still living in Kakuma — so they don’t have to play with a sock.

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Other things worth knowing …

• CNN: President Trump beamed with excitement as he boarded his new $400 million Air Force One, a luxury jet gifted by the government of Qatar.

• People: Trump also memorialized Village People lead singer Victor Willis, who died this week at age 75: “He was a great and happy guy who loved that I used … ‘YMCA,’ at my Rallies. … The crowds were, and are, enormous ...”

• CBS: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will be celebrating their nuptials with about 1,000 guests this holiday weekend in New York City after days of speculation about the most anticipated celebrity wedding of the year. The couple plans to start with a rehearsal dinner Thursday evening and a wedding celebration Friday into the early hours of Saturday morning at Madison Square Garden.

• Yahoo Finance: Rhode Island’s new tax on second homes is nicknamed for its most famous part-time resident, Taylor Swift, but the levy will also squeeze owners of saltbox houses on the coast far less grand than the singer’s Holiday House mansion. Under the annual property tax measure taking effect this week, the state will collect $5 for every $1,000 that a vacation home’s value is assessed over $1 million.

• CNBC: PlayStation will end physical disc production for all new games released on its consoles starting January 2028, the company announced Wednesday. New games will be sold either through the PlayStation Store or through retailers in digital formats only.

• NBC News: Ocean surface temperatures hit a record high in June, European scientists warned Wednesday, fueling fears of more dangerous heat waves this summer and deepening concerns over the global climate crisis.

• CNN: Alligators injured three people, one fatally, in a string of separate attacks across Florida over the weekend — the highest concentration of attacks in a single 72-hour period since state records began.

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I’ve cut way back on social media over the last few years — largely because most of my real-life friends have too. Blame the algorithms, blame the business model, blame whatever you want.

But on the comparatively few occasions I do use it, here’s what I’ve noticed about my own behavior:

• I exchange tips and news with neighbors in my town’s unofficial local groups.

• I trade ideas and experiences about skiing in the Northeast with other like-minded folks.

• I talk about soccer — and especially the U.S. Men’s National Team — with other long-suffering fans.

In almost all of these cases, the people I’ve sorta/kinda gotten to know exist to me only as usernames. Whether we’re talking about PAskiguy415 on Reddit or Jane Smith on the local town Facebook group, I have an inch-wide, quarter-mile-deep view into their lives.

But we don’t actually know each other in real life.

Now, a new study from Oregon State University just addressed the underlying core questions these kinds of relationships pose:

• Do online-only connections count?

• Can these virtual relationships do for us what real-life relationships do?

Sorry PAskiguy415. The short answer, apparently, is no.

In fact, for some people, they may make things worse.

Idealization of friendships

Published in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the U.S. Public Health Service, the study surveyed 1,514 U.S. adults between the ages of 30 and 70 in a nationally representative sample.

Researchers divided each person’s social media connections into two groups: people they had met in person, and people they hadn’t.

Adults with higher percentages of online-only connections (people they’d never actually met face-to-face) reported greater loneliness.

Moreover, connecting online with people you actually know didn’t help either. It was associated with neither greater loneliness, but it also wasn’t associated with less loneliness.

Study co-author Jessica Gorman explained the mechanism:

“We know that social media interactions can result in idealization of other people’s friendships with each other, which can exacerbate the effects of social comparison.

This idealization is possibly stronger when those friendships involve people you’ve never met because there is no personal experience to counter that idealization.”

In other words: when you interact with someone online you’ve never met, you fill in the gaps—usually with something rosier than reality.

You don’t see the bad days and the friction that comes with actually knowing someone. The comparison makes you feel worse about your own social life, not better.

‘Happier and healthier. Period.’

None of this would surprise Robert Waldinger, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been running the 88-year Harvard Grant Study of adult development since 2003.

His summary of what decades of data show: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

But, this new study suggests that relationships only matter when people build them on actual shared experiences.

It’s apparently about time in the same room, attention paid in real time — the good, the bad, and the ugly that comes along with getting to know almost anyone in three dimensions.

Quick caveats:

• The study predates the current wave of AI-powered social tools (summer 2023).

• It’s a snapshot, not a longitudinal tracking of the same people over time.

• And, we have our old friend correlation versus causation to consider: Lonelier people may be more likely to seek online connections with strangers to begin with, rather than those connections causing the loneliness.

Most probably, said lead author Brian Primack, it runs in both directions.

People experiencing loneliness “may wish to examine critically their interactions with strangers on social media and to prioritize in-person connections over social media ones, even when those social media connections are considered close.”

All of which leads me to: If you see a middle-aged guy in a throwback 1994 denim soccer jersey going a little bit crazy for the U.S. men’s national team against Bosnia today, say hello.

It might just be CaligiurisLeftFoot from your online group.

And you’d both probably like to meet in real-life.

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Other things worth knowing …

• USA Today: Supreme Court season ended Tuesday as the court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to redefine who is an American, striking down his efforts to limit on birthright citizenship. The 6-3 ruling landed after the justices backed the president in other cases, including last week’s ruling allowing Trump to end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

• Bloomberg: The death toll from last week's twin earthquakes in Venezuela rose to nearly 2,000 on Tuesday, with tens of thousands still missing. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has been in exile, said she was stranded in Panama after authorities refused to allow her flight to land in Caracas.

• Reuters: Happy Canada Day! The Trump administration is expected to formally declare ​on Wednesday that it will not extend the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, starting a decade-long clock to wind down the 32-year-old North American free trade zone. That declaration kicks off a six-year review session, part of a “sunset clause” negotiated by President Donald Trump’s first administration.

• 24WallSt, CNBC: Trump’s personal fortune has nearly tripled since he left the White House in 2021, up to $6.5 billion form $2.4 billion when he left the White House in 2021. Latest jump: about $515 million from the sale of tokens released by the firm World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked crypto company co-founded by members of his family.

• CNBC: Smaller but interesting: Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise — maker of Tasers, body cameras, and policing software — on February 10, just two weeks before ICE posted a notice seeking a five-year, $220 million contract for nearly 18,000 new Tasers. Procurement experts told CNBC that the contract specifications appear to match only Axon’s TASER 10 model.

• AP: Scientists have stumbled on a rare dinosaur fossil from Antarctica, tucked away for decades in a drawer. The bone comes from the tail of a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur called a titanosaur. Scientists haven’t yet identified the species it belongs to. It was discovered in 1985.

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

Today’s post is a low power mode edition, and I remembered it just in the nick of time.

It’s largely about Washington, DC. I lived there in two stints: from 1998 to 2001, and then 2004 to 2012. Overall, I have good memories.

At just under 700,000 people, it’s a medium sized city, a bit smaller than Nashville or Boston. Compare that to 8.4 million in New York or 2.3 million in Houston.

But because it’s the seat of government, it punches far above its weight: universities, museums, restaurants, concerts, bars, sports, embassies.

People come and go constantly, from all over the world. Sure, many are obsessed with work, but it’s a beautiful place in its own way, and I have to say I was never bored.

Plus, as someone told me on my first weekend there in 1998: There’s always at least one February day in DC that’s warm enough to wear shorts.

That turned out to be prophetic and true.

Of my thousands of “Bill when he lived in DC” stories, I’d like to share a surreal vignette. It was brief and beautiful, and it took place almost 15 years ago: Sunday July 17, 2011, a little before 5 a.m.

I know the date because I posted about it on Facebook afterward.

At the time, I was living alone in Southwest DC. Recently divorced (no kids, long story, maybe we’ll get into that some other time).

I couldn’t sleep, so I got out of bed in the very early morning hours, grabbed some not-exactly-clean workout clothes from the hamper, and went for a run.

This will be relevant in a second: I was wearing a shirt leftover from my army days that that had “10th Mountain Division” and “USA” in big letters on the front.

Anyway, I did 6.6 miles on a whim before sunrise that day (I recorded it on MapMyRun): no big deal for me then, but a number that impresses the older version of me today.

Still, I remember that running in DC is amazing.

• I left my apartment in SW …

• Headed north to the Mall to the Washington Monument …

• Then nearly a mile west to the Lincoln Memorial.

• I ran up and down the steps of the Lincoln like I always did, turned past the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, back to the Washington, through the Ellipse, around the White House, and back home.

Something happened in the middle, at the Washington Monument. It’s a really beautiful place if you haven’t been there: a 554 foot tall white tower, surrounded by flags, halfway between the Capitol and the Lincoln.

I’ll quote myself, nearly a decade and a half ago:

Total insomnia so I went for a run at 4:45 a.m. (75F-perfect!) It’s amazing who’s out in DC at that time.

My favorite encounter was two girls apparently still wrapping up last night’s party. [We crossed paths] at the Washington Monument.

One of them pointed to my USA t-shirt and the 56 US flags surrounding the monument and exclaimed with apparent sincerity,

“Don’t you just... LOVE America?!!”

I remember these young women, especially the “LOVE America” one. (Actually more to the point, I don’t really remember them, but I remember writing about them, and I trust my memory then.)

They were both very pretty, Black, way more stylishly dressed and hip than I have ever remotely been in my entire life.

This was my kind of “Bill getting his confidence back after divorce” stage, and I felt pretty cool that they were even talking to me.

I thought a lot about the encounter for hours and days later—I mean, I wasn’t in the habit of posting about every run to Facebook and mapping it out, but I did.

Here I am, all this time later, thinking about it.

It’s just this small, hopeful memory that I hope I can hold onto forever. I suppose it could have been anywhere, but it’s poignant for me that it was there in DC — especially now, just a few days before the 250th birthday.

It’s the idea that you can bump into a stranger, middle of the night, strangest possible place—and you can choose to be positive, choose to focus on whatever small things you have in common, choose to make a connection.

For that matter, as hard as it might be sometimes, you can choose to profess your shared love for this messy, frustrating, beautiful country of ours—and hopefully commit to work hard, and get it on track to stay worthy.

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• NPR: The Supreme Court’s conservative majority took a sledgehammer to much of the federal government’s regulatory structure Monday, striking down almost all the limits that Congress—and the courts—had previously established to protect the independence of regulatory agencies that make up roughly a third of the federal government. The court’s decision reversed a 90-year-old precedent. In a Truth Social post, President Trump called the decision a “BIG WIN,” one of the most important rulings “ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”

• AP: Roughly 146 people including 19 women and seven children who the U.S. deported to Venezuela last week are missing after the Caracas hotel in which they were staying was reduced to rubble after a series of earthquakes, setting off a scramble to find survivors and bodies.

• NYT, Daily Mail: The Court also declined a request by Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump launched into a furious tirade against Carroll afterward. Carroll also sued Trump in a separate 2019 defamation case that resulted in an $83.3 million jury verdict. That figure has since grown to over $100 million with accrued interest.

• AP, Fox News: New Gallup polling finds that 53% of U.S. adults are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American, the lowest reading in the trend dating back to 2001. A separate Fox News poll had more disappointing numbers, finding that fewer than half of U.S. voters say America has made meaningful progress on ideals as liberty, equality, and self-reliance.

• Bloomberg: Ford Motor Co. took an unusually human approach to fixing its stubborn quality problems: It brought back what it calls “gray beard” engineers to help train younger staff and to reprogram the artificial intelligence tools that weren’t getting the job done. Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.

• USA Today: One more Supreme Court story: the Court ruled Mississippi can count late-arriving mail-in ballots, upholding a state law allowing ballots cast by Election Day to be counted if they’re received within five days. Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberal justices in backing the law.

• AP: Joseph McGrail-Bateup, an Australian professional air conditioner cleaner and honorary town crier, has been recognized as the world’s loudest person. Guinness World Records acknowledged the 58-year-old Canberra resident recorded the loudest ever shout by an individual. He yelled “now” at 122.4 decibels. That broke the previous record of 121.7 dB set by Northern Ireland schoolteacher Annalisa Flanagan in 1994.

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The other day, I looked at the cars in our driveway and did some quick math.

My wife drives a 2015 Honda CR-V. I drive a 2014 Ford Explorer. Between the two of us, we’re sitting on 23 years of car.

No car payments, no dealership negotiations—and no particular hurry to change that.

Now, a new report suggests we’re trendier than we imagined.

According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly one million prospective customers have simply left the new car market since 2020. By most industry projections, they’re not coming back anytime soon.

Americans were buying around 17 million cars and trucks last decade; analysts now expect something closer to 16 million this year.

Often overlooked but worth noting: the United States also has between 22 and 26 million more residents now than it did back in 2016.

The average new car now runs $50,000. The average age of cars on U.S. roads is 13 years old, a historic high. So our Honda fits right in, and our Ford isn’t far off, either.

“I don’t want to say automakers are OK with this level of sales,” Ivan Drury of Edmunds told the Journal. “But they kind of are.”

The reason: Selling fewer trucks and SUVs at $50,000-plus is more profitable than selling more of yesterday’s cheaper cars.

About a million buyers seem unimpressed by their math.

One frustrated car shopper quoted in the Journal described walking away in sticker shock. Rather than buy new, he concluded he’d “do what everybody else is doing and just hold on to my vehicle as long as I can.”

Granted, our situation might be different if either my wife or I had any kind of commute to speak of. But, we don’t.

We live somewhere with good public transit into the city, Uber covers almost everything else. For airport runs, rideshare is usually faster and comparable in cost to parking.

I bought the Explorer on a whim after one too many days when we both needed a car at the same time.

The Explorer (used) solved that — and, importantly, I could buy it for cash.

As for the Honda, we bought it when my daughter was little. We didn’t have much time to shop, and it came down to the Honda and a couple of other options.

I spent a day counting how many old Hondas, Toyotas, Mazdas, and other makes I saw still on the road.

Let’s not over-complicate this, I thought; just do what everybody else is doing.

Why haven’t we bought a new car since Barack Obama was president? I’d turn my rhetorical question around and ask: Why would we?

Even as the odometers reach six figures, they’re paid off, they require lower insurance payments than newer cars, and they’re in good shape (knock on wood, that’s all I need is to jinx myself).

Sure, they have a few scratches here and there, but that’s a feature, not a bug — you stop caring when someone dings you in a parking lot.

I have zero concern about, for example, leaving it in the garage at MetroPark for probably 12 or 14 hours next week, when I take Amtrak down to Philadelphia for a World Cup game. Come to think about it, the ticket cost me roughly what a car payment likely would, if I had a car payment.

The Ford is particularly good at the things I actually use a car for: long family road trips, ski weekends, hauling gear.

Also, a middle-aged guy can daydream about someday taking a multi-day ski trip camping out of the back of it, even if that probably won’t happen.

Nothing about a $60,000 vehicle with built-in subscriptions, over-the-air updates, and AI-era data collection apparatuses running in the background makes me want to trade up to that.

Also completely absent: any social pressure to do otherwise.

There was a time — I think this was a real thing, not a myth — when people thought the car in your driveway might have said something about where you’d arrived in life. That feeling seems largely gone, at least in my experience.

Nobody is looking at a 2014 Explorer and drawing conclusions.

If they are, I’m happily oblivious — and that’s probably the better deal anyway.

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Other things worth knowing …

• WSJ Editorial Board: Trump Stages an Iran Retreat: The regime gets financial relief to reopen Hormuz and hold more nuclear talks. “Iran’s new leaders are likely to conclude that Mr. Trump has no desire for more conflict, and they will negotiate accordingly. Congress should scrutinize any final agreement Mr. Trump makes with Iran—and reject it if it props up a regime that still says ‘death to America.’”

• NPR: Britain will ban children under 16 from social media platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, following Australia's lead as the first country to impose such a ban. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal will not be affected.

• CBS News: The FBI disrupted a plot to attack Sunday’s UFC fight night at the White House with explosives-laden drones and gunfire, according to court papers unsealed Tuesday. A 19-year-old Ohio man named in the affidavit, Tycen Proper, allegedly told investigators he intended to “jump-start” a revolution.

• MSNBC: Secret Service officials are angry that FBI Director Kash Patel jumped the gun by publicly announcing the case Tuesday on Twitter (née X) before all suspects were in custody, according to three people familiar with the matter.

• NPR: G7 leaders pushed Tuesday to bring the war in Ukraine back to the top of Trump's agenda at the summit in France, after months in which the Iran conflict overshadowed it. Hours before the summit opened, Russia fired hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at Ukrainian cities, killing 11 people.

• Democracy Now!: A Ukrainian drone strike set Russia's Moscow oil refinery ablaze Tuesday — a facility that normally supplies nearly half the fuel used in Russia's capital. The attack came one day after Ukraine officially began EU accession negotiations in Luxembourg, a process unlocked after Hungary's new government lifted its longstanding veto on Ukraine's membership bid.

• NPR: South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, whose 1974 song "Mannenberg" became an anti-apartheid anthem that reportedly inspired Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment, has died at 91. Ibrahim performed at Mandela's 1994 inauguration; Mandela reportedly called him "our Mozart."

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Earlier this week, I wrote about a major new study linking GLP-1 drugs to significant reductions in depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders — and I mentioned that I’ve been taking one myself for about a year and a half.

It worked. Honestly, this might be the first time I’ve offered a before-and-after photo in this newsletter. And the drug wasn’t the only thing I did; I now spend a lot of time in the gym, and my diet is much better.

But if you haven’t enabled images, the photo above is the difference between me in November 2024 at the nadir, fighting physics to finish a 5K with my daughter, and last weekend, when it was—well let’s just say a lot closer to my long-ago marathoning days.

All of which leads me to a separate study that came out last month, because it got my Irish up.

Researchers at Rice University, publishing in the International Journal of Obesity, studied how people perceive those who lose weight using GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy.

Their finding: people who lose weight on these medications face more social stigma than people who lose the same weight through diet and exercise. In some cases, more than people who don’t lose weight at all. The explanation the researchers point to: a widespread perception that GLP-1 drugs are “the easy way out.”

I have thoughts.

Thank you for the compliment

Allow me to offer a metaphor.

I have a full head of thick hair in my mid-50s, and I didn’t do anything to earn it — genetics, luck, whatever.

But I also don’t have strong feelings about men who are losing their hair. I’m glad they’re trying to explore medical options to address it.

Rogaine exists. Finasteride exists. People make their own choices about their own bodies, and I genuinely couldn’t care less what those choices are.

See what I mean?

The idea that someone who is biologically predisposed to carry more weight should be judged more harshly for using a medical tool to address it than for simply staying overweight strikes me as really weird.

I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you I took a drug for high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

I’d tell you about a knee surgery or a course of antibiotics.

I don’t get why a medication that happens to affect weight and metabolism would be treated differently — or why losing weight with its help would make someone more of a target for judgment than not losing weight at all.

‘The easy way out’

The Rice researchers ran a series of experiments in which participants evaluated people who had lost weight via GLP-1 drugs, via diet and exercise, or not at all.

Across the board, GLP-1 users were rated more negatively.

The stigma compounds if someone stops the medication and regains weight — which is common, because these drugs work while you take them, and stopping them often reverses the effects.

In that scenario, the researchers found, the judgment gets even harsher.

“There’s a narrative that using these medications is ‘taking the easy way out,’” said lead researcher Erin Standen. “And that belief seems to shape how people are judged.”

Caveats: this is experimental research using study participants rating hypothetical scenarios, not a longitudinal study of real-world social outcomes.

You do you

The researchers flag something practical: Stigma around these drugs may be contributing to the spread of misinformation about their risks.

If people are motivated to believe GLP-1 users are doing something wrong, they may be more receptive to exaggerated claims about side effects.

There’s also a more direct consequence.

If someone is on the fence about a medication that a growing body of research suggests can meaningfully improve physical and mental health — and they’re hesitating partly because of what other people might think — that’s a real cost.

I told my doctor when she first prescribed the drug that even without insurance coverage I’d consider paying out of pocket, because I felt like I was buying myself extra years of healthy life expectancy.

She said she wished everyone had that attitude. Heck, I think she was about to hug me, except for things like propriety, and patient-doctor relationships and all of that.

But we hugged in spirit.

As always — or at least as often — I’m not telling anyone what to do.

Using these drugs is a personal decision that involves doctors, insurance, individual health histories, and a lot of factors I’m not qualified to weigh in on.

But if you’ve been thinking about it and the “easy way out” framing has been any part of what’s holding you back — I’d encourage you to set that aside.

The people making that judgment probably haven’t thought very hard about what it actually means.

See you at the gym and the ski slopes, I hope.

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Other things worth knowing …

• ABC News — The House of Representatives on Wednesday adopted a resolution to curb President Donald Trump's Iran war powers by a vote of 215-208 — delivering a major rebuke to the administration's handling of the three-month-old conflict for the first time.

• ABC7 — California primary results: Republican Steve Hilton leads the governor's race with 28%, and Democrat Xavier Becerra is in second with 25%, with Tom Steyer in third at 20% — meaning Hilton and Becerra appear headed to November's general election. Hilton said he "received a message of congratulations" from Trump.

• CBS News — CBS News has fired longtime 60 Minutes correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley one day after he had a tense and confrontational exchange with new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton.

• NBC News — Progressive politicians are sharpening their attacks against tech tycoon Elon Musk, zeroing in on his soon-to-be-trillionaire status days before his company SpaceX’s record-setting initial public offering. Musk will likely become the world’s first trillionaire shortly as soon as next Friday, June 12.

• Bloomberg — SpaceX’s IPO will also likely make President Donald Trump’s already wealthy administration even richer. Ten officials ranging from special envoy Steve Witkoff to Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler reported financial interests in Elon Musk’s rocket company between $9.9 million and as much as $43.8 million, according to the latest disclosures.

• New York Times — The Sun Is Shining on Lisbon: The Portuguese capital is booming with an influx of artists, retirees and visitors drawn to an exciting, affordable culinary scene and an inclusive culture.

• National Geographic — Ten Reasons to Climb Kilimanjaro: Why do 40,000 people a year seek to climb the world’s highest freestanding mountain — a mountain so popular it has become known as “Everyman’s Everest”? Here are the top ten reasons, from the most practical to the most profound.

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In May 1999, I was sitting in the Wang Theatre in Boston watching my sister graduate from Emerson College. Ted Leonsis was the commencement speaker. At that moment, he was a top early executive at AOL and the new owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards.

Leonsis had one word for the graduating class: “internet.” He said it repeatedly, riffing on the famous “plastics” scene from The Graduate:

• Want to start a business? “I’ve got a word for you: internet.”

• Want to be an artist or a writer or a musician? “internet.”

• Want to find meaning and purpose and change people’s lives? “I have just one word for you: internet.”

He talked about e-commerce and music being downloaded rather than pressed onto CDs. Also, he introduced the concept of “viral marketing” before most people in the room had heard the term.

As best I can remember it, the response was mostly polite but a lot of it didn’t really land. There were definitely some jeers.

I was a few years older than most of the graduates, already dabbling in early internet projects on the side while working a full-time day job. I remember thinking, “This guy is spinning gold, and I don’t think the people around me feel it.”

“No disrespect …”

When Leonsis finished, the other honorary degree recipients took their turns.

Alice Hoffman, the novelist, kept it brief but got a massive applause line: “I mean, no disrespect to the internet, but I’m here to speak very briefly on behalf of books.”

Morley Safer of CBS News went further, gesturing directly back at Leonsis on the stage behind him:

I caution you, in spite of what the maestro here said, do not let technology become your master.

Do not be seduced by the siren song of information on call. Much of it is bogus.
For all of its billions of facts on file, it can also be a dank and dark breeding ground for the vicious and mean spirited. It is the new home of the big lie.

Big applause.

Leonsis had a sense of humor. As he returned to the podium to receive his honorary degree, he took the microphone for one last coda: “I’d like to thank the Friars for hosting this roast.”

Flash forward

Why bring up this 27-year-old commencement speech? Three reasons:

• Last month, at the University of Central Florida, a real estate executive named Gloria Caulfield told a room full of arts and humanities graduates that the rise of artificial intelligence is “the next industrial revolution.” The crowd erupted in boos. Someone yelled, “AI sucks!” She turned to the other speakers onstage: “What happened? OK, I struck a chord.”

• A week later, at the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed multiple times while discussing AI — booing that began, by some accounts, before he even reached the lectern. He tried to acknowledge the crowd’s anxiety directly: “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, and that the jobs are evaporating.” They booed that, too.

• At Emory University, Delta CEO Ed Bastian told graduates he had tried using AI to write his commencement address, and it was quick and easy, but it lacked soul and warmth — so he threw it out and rewrote it with pencil and paper. “You want to hear from me,” he told the graduates to applause, “not some algorithm of me.”

Right, but also right

This is not an article where I’m going to say that the example from 1999 proves AI is the future and anyone who objects is a Luddite who will be left behind.

I mean, Leonsis was clearly right, but Safer was mostly on target too.

The internet has created zillions of jobs, revolutionized industries, and changed the world. It has also become a breeding ground for the vicious and mean-spirited.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. If I were sitting in one of those red robes right now, I think I’d be paying very close attention to AI — with both enthusiasm and caution.

I’d hope my attitude would be one of skepticism, but not cynicism, which, come to think of it, is what I learned during my own college education from the Jesuits.

But that’s another graduation. I wrote about that one here.

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Other things worth knowing …

• CNBC: The Department of Justice has permanently abandoned plans for a $1.8 billion fund created to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump against the IRS, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s criminal defense attorney, testified Tuesday. But the other part of the settlement — protecting Trump, his family members, and related business entities remain protected from any tax audits and enforcement actions — remains in effect.

• NPR — A divided D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Trump administration's transgender military ban is unconstitutional, finding the policy was rooted in animus toward a politically unpopular group rather than military necessity. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reply: "See you at SCOTUS."

• TechCrunch — Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, filed confidentially with the SEC for an IPO, jumping ahead of rival OpenAI in what is shaping up to be a landmark public market debut. The filing comes days after a $65 billion Series H pushed Anthropic's valuation to roughly $965 billion.

• CNBC, Washington Post — President Trump tapped Bill Pulte, who leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency and who has served as an attack dog against Trump’s foes, to serve as acting director of national intelligence. Pulte has no known prior intelligence experience. Separately: a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter, Elias Irizarry, has been hired to work inside a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations.

• Bloomberg — More than 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of an IPO that is set to turn many of them into multi-millionaires. Employees in line for IPO windfalls typically seek out their own wealth advisers. The SpaceX group’s push for a kind of collective bargaining has the potential to create a new playbook for startup employees.

• NPR — Former New York congressman George Santos is being investigated over his trading activity on the prediction market site Kalshi. In February, four months after being released from federal prison, Santos posted a video to X saying he would attend Trump's State of the Union address — sending odds on Kalshi soaring. But he didn't show up. What Santos didn't say was that he had already placed bets on Kalshi that he was not going to appear, and made tens of thousands of dollars as a result.

• The Guardian — ‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library.

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I’ve written here before about my long and occasionally expensive relationship with my dermatologist — the product, I’m pretty sure, of Irish ancestry combined with years of swim team and summers spent lifeguarding as a kid.

In fact, I have an appointment with him today. These days I’m pretty religious about sunscreen, which he strongly endorses. Apparently, there’s a catch that I think a lot of people might have missed.

It’s that vitamin D — sometimes called the sunshine vitamin because your body produces it when your skin is exposed to sunlight — is one nutrient that my otherwise sensible SPF habits might be denying me.

Block enough sun, and you may also be limiting how much vitamin D your body makes naturally. You can get some from food — fatty fish, egg yolks, and fortified milk. It’s also in most standard multivitamins.

However, sun exposure is the primary natural source for most people, which means those of us slathering on SPF 50 every morning may be quietly running low without knowing it.

Recently, i came across a new study that made me think about vitamin D levels in a way I honestly never had before.

Poetic justice?

Researchers at the University of Galway followed 793 adults with an average age of 39 — none of whom had dementia — and measured their vitamin D levels at the start of the study.

About 16 years later, the same participants underwent brain scans measuring tau protein and amyloid beta, both of which are biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease.

The study, published in Neurology Open Access, found that those with higher vitamin D levels in midlife had measurably lower tau buildup in brain regions known to be affected earliest in Alzheimer’s, specifically areas tied to memory formation.

The association held up after controlling for age, sex, depression, and other health factors.

“These results suggest that higher vitamin D levels in midlife may offer protection against developing these tau deposits in the brain,” said lead author Martin David Mulligan, “and that low vitamin D levels could potentially be a risk factor that could be modified and treated to reduce the risk of dementia.”

Ironically, the University of Galway is in Ireland, which, given that I’m blaming my Irish ancestry for my dermatologist bills in the first place, feels like a certain kind of poetic justice.

16 years later

The vitamin D measurements were taken when participants were around 39 years old, and the brain scans came 16 years later.

Whatever was happening in those people’s bodies during middle age — the sunscreen habits, the time spent outdoors, whether they thought to take a supplement or whether their multivitamin was doing enough work — showed up in their brains a decade and a half down the road.

Mulligan made the point explicitly: Midlife is when risk factor modification can have the greatest impact on long-term brain health. It’s not in your 70s, when damage may already be accumulating.

The good news is that something as simple as a routine blood test — the kind your doctor can order at your next physical — could tell you whether you’re in the 34 percent with low levels.

If you are, it’s a relatively easy thing to address. A supplement, a multivitamin with adequate D, a conversation with your doctor about the right amount for your situation.

A nudge

The researchers are careful, and you should be too. This is observational research — vitamin D was measured only once, not tracked over time, so there’s no way to know whether levels fluctuated over those 16 years.

Also, the study shows an association, not proof that vitamin D directly prevents Alzheimer’s.

Bottom line: Get your levels checked. Find out where you stand. If you’re low, talk to your doctor about whether it makes sense to do something about it.

Given the alternative — finding out 16 years from now that you probably should have — it all seems like a manageable ask.

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: The Trump administration told Congress it plans to admit up to 17,500 white South Africans as refugees through September, up from an earlier cap of 7,500, citing what it called an "emergency refugee situation." Virtually all refugees admitted to the U.S. over the past six months have been from South Africa, even as millions of people displaced by other conflicts remain excluded.

• NBC News: Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over sitting Sen. John Cornyn ahead of next week's Texas Senate runoff — the latest in a series of moves by the president to reshape the Republican Party in his image.

• France 24: Iranian authorities held mass public weddings in Tehran Monday for couples who signed up to a state-sponsored scheme declaring their readiness to sacrifice their lives in the war against the US and Israel.

• CNN: The Long Island Rail Road strike — the first in more than 30 years on North America’s largest commuter rail system — ended Monday night after three days, with trains resuming at noon Tuesday.

• Reuters: SpaceX is planning to price its IPO as early as June 11 and begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX as early as June 12, according to sources familiar with the matter. The company is targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion and aims to raise approximately $75 billion — which would make it the largest initial public offering in history, nearly double Saudi Aramco’s record.

• NPR: More than a quarter of private colleges — 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year schools, with a combined 670,000 students — are at risk of closing or merging within the next ten years, according to a new analysis. Federal funding cuts, demographic shifts, and declining enrollment are all contributing factors.

• CBS News: Researchers analyzing blood samples from 85 sharks near a remote island in the Bahamas found that about one in three tested positive for caffeine, cocaine, or painkillers. Caffeine was the most common hit — and the first time it has ever been detected in sharks anywhere. “While the detection of cocaine tends to draw immediate attention,” one researcher said, “the widespread presence of caffeine and pharmaceuticals is equally alarming.”

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In the 1970s, a Harvard researcher named Frank Speizer was trying to understand the long-term effects of oral contraceptives. So, he did what a health researcher would do in those days. He asked male doctors to have their wives answer questions about their health.

Immediate problem: many doctors just filled out the forms on their wives’ behalf.

So Speizer and his team tried to think of how they could find a massive audience of women who were medically literate, conscientious, and willing to participate.

Um, hello? replied the entire U.S. nursing profession, metaphorically speaking.

The result: Speizer’s team sent letters to more than 170,000 women nurses in 1976, and 121,700 of them — more than 70% — agreed to answer questions about their health every two years for the rest of their lives.

The result has been one of the most important and productive research programs in the history of public health.

The study that keeps giving

The study is now run by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, with continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health.

A companion study enrolling more than 51,000 men was added in 1986, and some of the findings below draw on that combined dataset.

But the nurses came first. Without their participation, none of it exists. Here’s part of what their 50 years of data tells us: seven simple habits for a longer life.

1. Don’t smoke.

This one has never changed. A 2018 analysis of the combined dataset found that non-smokers lived significantly longer across every demographic studied. Other research has put the average cost of smoking at roughly seven years of life.

2. Maintain a healthy weight.

The same 2018 analysis found that maintaining a body mass index in the healthy range was consistently associated with longer life. Excess weight is tied to inflammation, cardiovascular strain, and metabolic disruption, all of which compound over decades.

3. Exercise at least 30 minutes a day.

Moderate daily physical activity was flagged one as well. Regular movement keeps your cardiovascular system efficient, your muscles functional, and your metabolic health in check. Separate research using the same dataset has found that consistent exercisers function biologically younger than their chronological age.

4. Drink alcohol only moderately, if at all.

The research consistently found moderate drinking — loosely defined as up to one drink per day for women, two for men — to be neutral to mildly beneficial compared to heavy drinking. This finding carries ongoing debate in the broader scientific literature, so maybe treat it as a general signal rather than a prescription.

5. Maintain a healthy diet.

The 2018 analysis defined this as scoring in the upper 40% on a diet quality index — which in practice means prioritizing vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins, and limiting processed foods and added sugar.

6. Vary your exercise, not just the volume.

A more recent analysis of the same dataset, published in BMJ Medicine in January found that people who engaged in the broadest variety of physical activities — walking some days, lifting weights on others, gardening, cycling, playing tennis — had a 19% lower risk of premature death compared to those who exercised the same total amount but stuck to the same routines.

7. Drink two to three cups of caffeinated coffee a day.

Another study published earlier this year in JAMA, also drawing on the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, found that people who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee daily had an 18% lower risk of developing dementia compared to those who drank little or none. Tea showed similar patterns. Decaf did not.

The honest caveat

None of these findings prove causation. People who exercise in varied ways, drink moderate coffee, and eat well may share other traits — stronger social connections, better sleep, lower chronic stress — that also contribute to longer lives.

But after 50 years and more than 100,000 participants, they establish patterns that are very hard to dismiss.

The nurses who answered Frank Speizer’s letter in 1976 are mostly in their 80s and 90s now — or gone.

But they gave the world a cleaner picture of what a longer life tends to look like.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Daily Mail: President Trump’s Justice Department beat the clock and struck a deal to settle his lawsuit against the IRS by funneling $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to his political allies, in a settlement that Democrats are calling the most corrupt act in presidential history. Settling the legal case likely short-circuited a scheduled judicial review.

• CNN: Sen. Bill Cassidy, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after January 6th, has lost his Louisiana primary — the first GOP senator Trump has helped oust. Cassidy: "When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn't turn out the way you want it to. But you don't pout, you don't whine, you don't claim the election was stolen."

• CNBC: New federal disclosures show President Trump made more than 3,600 individual stock trades in the first three months of 2026 — including buying between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock one week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China.

• AP: Commuters navigated a gauntlet of car, bus, and subway routes to get to work Monday after a strike on the Long Island Rail Road — North America’s largest commuter rail system, carrying 250,000 riders a day — entered its third day. Five unions representing more than 3,500 workers walked off over wages and healthcare costs; talks wrapped past 1 a.m. with no resolution.

• CNBC: NextEra Energy will buy Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $67 billion, creating the world’s largest regulated electric utility. Dominion is the utility responsible for powering the world’s largest data center market in northern Virginia — meaning the deal is essentially a bet that AI’s electricity appetite is only getting started.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists in South Korea have discovered that a probiotic bacterium found in kimchi may help the body flush out tiny plastic particles before they build up in organs. In lab tests, the kimchi-derived microbe clung tightly to nanoplastics even in conditions mimicking the human intestine — and mice given the probiotic excreted more than twice as many nanoplastics as those that didn't receive it.

• EW: Shakira is celebrating a major legal victory. Spain's national court acquitted the Colombian pop star of tax fraud and overturned the $64 million fine imposed by the Spanish tax agency in 2021, ordering the country's tax authorities to repay her tens of millions of dollars.

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

I used to run into this as a new dad who also fancied himself a writer, when people would ask me how parenthood was going:

“Oh, it goes so fast!”

“It changes everything!”

“You can’t believe how much you love this little person!”

Finally I came up with shorthand: “All the clichés are true.”

Then I found I said that so often that even “All the clichés are true” became a bit of a cliché.

I bring all of this up today because of Norm MacDonald, the comedian, who in 2013, got some disquieting news: he’d been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

It’s not the absolute worst possible diagnosis you can get, but it carries about a 50% five-year survival rate according to Dr. Wikipedia, and so I suspect it changes your outlook.

Norm didn’t tell anyone outside of a small group of family and his agent, not wanting the news to affect how people treated him.

Among the people he didn’t tell was David Letterman — whose Late Show he’d been on many times, and who was such a fan that he once remarked: “If we could have, we would have had Norm on every week.”

All good things come to an end, and in 2015, Letterman’s show was reaching its finale; each night was like one valedictory after another.

Norm was on the second-to-last night, after Oprah Winfrey. Tough act to follow. His routine stood out, however, and maybe it was because he knew the show wasn’t the only thing operating on borrowed time.

This was eleven years ago tomorrow. Here’s how it ended:

Listen folks — this will be my last time on the David Letterman Show. We all know that David Letterman was the greatest talk show host who ever lived.

But I remember Dave differently. Because the first time I saw him, I was 13 years old, living in Toronto, Canada. I went to a talk show they had there, and David Letterman was the stand-up comedian. He did this joke. I love this joke. It still stays with me as my favorite stand-up joke ever. So I’d like to do it for you:

I was on the street the other day and I saw a garbage truck, and on the back of the garbage truck there was a small sign that said: “Please do not follow too closely.”

Another of life’s simple pleasures ruined by meddling bureaucracy.

And then:

I know that Mr. Letterman is not for the maudlin, and he has no truck for the sentimental. But if something is true, it is not sentimental.

And I say, in truth — I love you.

Letterman was not in fact sentimental, and if you watch the video you can see him getting a bit uncomfortable even as he thanks Norm and says goodnight.

Sure enough, Norm did pass away in 2021.

I’ve been thinking about all of this because now Stephen Colbert’s version of the Late Show is ending.

Colbert lives just a few miles from me (bigger house, which suddenly seems like it relates almost too perfectly to Tuesday’s newsletter), and when I heard the news I thought, that’s too bad.

Then, I realized I hadn’t watched The Late Show in probably a year and a half.

It’s like when a restaurant you liked closes and you feel verklempt, and then you acknowledge you haven’t actually been there in 18 months, so maybe it’s kind of your fault.

Also, I think this is the beginning of the end of late night, which is OK, except to the point that it’s also a milestone on the way to people no longer having shared cultural touchstones.

Jimmy Kimmel is probably going to get axed, and while Jimmy Fallon doesn’t seem to pick as many fights as the others, his show has 1/3 the audience it did just a few years ago.

Once everyone became their own broadcaster, it was probably inevitable. Whether it’s something to cheer or mourn is probably a subject for another newsletter.

In the meantime: Say I love you. Be brave enough to be sentimental.

And remember: All the clichés are true.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios — President Trump flew to Beijing on Tuesday under some of the darkest economic clouds of his political career, leaving behind a country reeling from the cost of everyday life. For now, Trump appears unconcerned, convinced that renewed inflation is temporary and that gas prices will plummet once he ends the Iran war.

• NYT — The race is on at the Justice Department, according to a report, to decide whether to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS before May 20, when a judge wants arguments on whether he should dismiss the case. Besides a potential monetary payment, one option would reportedly require the IRS to drop any audits of Trump, his family members, or businesses.

• America — 45 years ago today (well, yesterday): Attempted assassination of St. John Paul II recalled as turning point in history.

• MSN — Members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle are secretly fed up with the aide who is enabling his unhinged late-night Truth Social rampages. Executive assistant Natalie Harp is reportedly the driving force behind some of his most incendiary content, including a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ, both of which Trump later took down.

• Reddit, but Conan O’Brien — As long as I am writing about Norm MacDonald, here’s his famous “moth joke.”

• Politico — Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were informed this week of a data breach involving the congressional medical office that may have compromised personal information — including their prescription history. It is not clear what foreign or domestic entity conducted the breach and where the sensitive data on lawmakers’ health could end up.

• AFP — ‘I applied to be pope’: Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT. Tom Millar is one of an unknown number of people who have lost their grip on reality while communicating with chatbots, an experience tentatively being called AI-induced delusion or psychosis.

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Long ago, when I was a lawyer for a big government agency and I had to write briefs in scores or even hundreds of similar cases, I often relied on an old friend.

Copy and paste. Control-C and Control-V. (Maybe Command–C and Command-V if you’re on a Mac, as I am now but wasn’t then.)

Basically, I used big chunks of the same documents, the same arguments, the same filings—over and over and over. A few facts would be different; occasionally someone would raise a new issue.

But otherwise, it was pretty much Groundhog Day. My work friends and I shared our briefs with each other, too.

At times, it seemed the whole court system would be more efficient if we could just file one brief, and then refer various judges around the country to it, in case after case after case.

That wasn’t going to happen. Too many people’s livelihoods depended on the duplication. But, it turns out that there’s a single individual who deserves my thanks for making my life a bit more manageable back then.

The man who invented it

His name: Larry Tessler. This is the guy who came up with the idea of “cut, copy, and paste” in word processing in the first place.

Tessler worked for Xerox PARC in the late 1970s, where two experiences stand out:

1. His aforementioned development of “cut, copy and paste,” which came about while he was working on an early, 1970s word processing program called Gypsy. (More details on this from Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo.)

2. His encounter with Steve Jobs, during the latter’s now-legendary tour of the Xerox PARC labs in 1979. This is when Jobs supposedly first was introduced to things Xerox was working on, like (a) graphical interfaces and (b) the mouse, that wound up in Apple products a few years later.

Not long after that visit, Tessler left Xerox and headed to the much-smaller Apple. As Luke Dormehl of Cult of Mac recalled him saying years later:

“It’s funny because Apple was really the trigger for me wanting to leave Xerox, but I’d never seriously considered it as a career option.

Even though I had been pretty impressed by the people who attended the PARC demo, I still thought of them as primarily being a hobbyist computer company.”

Tessler was at Apple from 1980 to 1997, working mainly on two products that are now known more for being groundbreaking than for being successful themselves: the Newton and the Lisa.

Like they say, “pioneers get slaughtered; settlers prosper.”

Typical Apple

Today, Dormehl holds up Tessler as having been typical among the fairly early recruits at Apple: equal parts tech visionary and bearded hippie.

He’d studied computer science at Stanford before working at Xerox. But in between, he’d also helped to found a commune in Oregon.

As you might gather from my use of the past tense in this newsletter, Tessler passed away a few years ago, at age 74.

We take things like “copy and paste” for granted. Heck, I’ve probably used it 10 times while writing today’s newsletter.

But, I once joined a digital media startup where we were dead-set on creating the world’s best proprietary content management system—basically, the software that writers use in order to write and publish their articles.

Our lead developer did a fantastic job. But can you guess what turned out to be the second-most-difficult feature to build from scratch?

Sure enough: Cut, copy and paste.

(Hardest: “Undo,” or “Control-Z,” because building this feature requires taking a virtual snapshot of every change in every document, every few milliseconds.)

Anyway, rest in peace Mr. Tessler. If only we could copy you so easily.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NBC News — The U.S. military is considering officially renaming the war with Iran from “Operation Epic Fury” to “Operation Sledgehammer” if the current ceasefire collapses and President Donald Trump decides to re-start major combat operations, according to two U.S. officials. The intent apparently is to allow Trump to argue that it restarts the 60-day clock that requires congressional authorization for war.

• NPR — As Trump goes to China, what do Americans say about tariffs, Iran and world standing?

• The Hill — FBI Director Kash Patel said he would commit to taking a test about his alcohol use after a testy exchange with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in which each traded accusations with the other. Van Hollen pointed to a story in The Atlantic, which Patel has said is false, to raise questions about the FBI director’s drinking. “When your private actions make it impossible for you to perform your public duties, we have a big problem,” Van Hollen said to Patel during the hearing.

• AP News — Two South Florida police officers claim Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s recent action thriller “The Rip” used too many real-life details in its fictionalized narrative, causing harm to the officers’ personal and professional reputations, according to a defamation lawsuit. Parts of the movie were inspired by a real 2016 case, where police found over $21 million linked to a suspected marijuana trafficker in a Miami Lakes home.

• Politico — Former President Joe Biden intends to intervene in litigation to block the Trump administration’s effort to release 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings of interviews he conducted in 2017 with a ghostwriter who worked with Biden on his memoirs, the Justice Department indicated in new court papers.

• CBS News — A Texas couple whose son died of an overdose in 2025 after using OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool to get information about drugs sued the technology company on Tuesday, blaming the AI platform for his death.

• The New York Times — Hacky sacks are back: Teenagers are booting the game out of the 1990s. “It’s kind of bringing everybody together,” one said.

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Thanks for reading. Today’s was a low power mode edition, and if you already know that, I love you. See you in the comments.

I got one of those “here’s a photo you shared on social media years ago” notifications, and it a photo of a moving truck — the day we moved to our house in New Jersey.

It’s funny how time flies. I’m the kind of person who takes a while to settle and admit that I actually live where I do, long-term. But knocking on the door of a decade, I think this counts.

As much as I sometimes like to imagine my wife and daughter and me taking a giant map of the world and figuring out a new place to live for a while (truly, just give me a beach!), I think the odds are very good that we’ll stay put here a while longer.

We chose our town for a reason: basically that everything we read, saw and experienced told us that it would be a good place to raise a child.

Now, I’m going to turn this newsletter over to all of you in a moment. Because the vast majority of my readers are parents, and I suspect you’ll have some thoughts on this.

But, there’s a study that I read about — gosh, back when we were looking for a place to live — that’s stuck with me, and it probably influenced our choices.

Entitled, “Inequality in Children’s Contexts: Income Segregation of Households With and Without Children,” it ran in the journal, American Sociological Review.

To summarize, just in case you forgot to renew your subscription to American Sociological Review, the study covered choices that wealthy families make in order to benefit their children—-given that theoretically, they could afford to make any choices they want.

The study was framed in a negative light: look how inequitable our society is, and what all these wealthy people are doing to benefit from it.

I read it, nodded my head in pained agreement — and then thought to myself:

“You know, as long as we’re here … um, exactly what are these big choices that wealthy families make? Anything I should try to copy?”

The number-one, most far-reaching conclusion in the study was simple: The wealthiest people make sure to live within the same neighborhoods as other wealthy people.

This has significant ramifications. For one thing, since schools in the U.S. are generally funded on a local level, the kids in the neighborhoods of the better-to-do have access to the best public education money can buy.

Ann Owens, a sociologist at the University of Southern California and an author of the study, told The Washington Post:

“Buying a neighborhood is probably one of the most important things you can do for your kid. There’s mixed evidence on whether buying all this other stuff matters too. But buying a neighborhood basically provides huge advantages.”

Granted, this touches on much bigger questions about what kind of society we want to live in, at large.

And, there’s no way a thinking person can write about this and not mention that years of racial segregation, redlining, and many other less-enviable parts of our collective history might have something to do with how some neighborhoods became wealthy in the first place.

But, if you’re making decisions on the basis of what’s best for your children, it’s hard not to at least pay attention to how the people who could decide to live anywhere, choose to make their homes.

In short, the study also seems to suggest: If you’re not living in the smallest house in your neighborhood, maybe you should consider a smaller house in a nicer neighborhood.

So now I turn it over to you. Did you choose where you live for this kind of reason? Or another? What advice to you have for others — especially young parents, just putting down roots? Please, let us know in the comments.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NYT: President Trump will be joined in China this week by 16 chief executives, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook. The White House distributed a list on Monday of business leaders who are scheduled to be in Beijing with the president. Mr. Trump is slated to depart Washington on Tuesday and hold meetings with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, later in the week.

• AP, WSJ: President Trump on odds of ending the Iran War after the latest Iranian proposal: “I would call it the weakest right now after reading that piece of garbage they sent us. I didn’t even finish reading it.” Trump also proposed suspending the federal gas tax and reducing tariffs on imported beef, to deal with war-related price increases.

• Newsweek: Years of preparations and the promise of a multibillion-dollar economic boost were supposed to make the 2026 FIFA World Cup a summer-long victory lap for the United States. But with only a month until kick-off, hotels remain under-booked, tickets unsold, and travelers unconvinced, leaving the world’s most-watched sporting event at risk of falling short of its most ambitious expectations.

• NBC News: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is defending his family’s new reality show amid a backlash, as critics say the idea of doing a road-trip show over the course of seven months “out of touch” when gas prices are soaring amid the U.S. war with Iran. (One commenter quoted: “Read the room, Mark and Marie Antoinette.”)

• Washington Post: About 25% Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged, compared to 45% who are confident that it actually happened, according to a new survey. Survey respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report.

• The Guardian: Artwork looted by the Nazis has resurfaced in the home of descendants of a notorious Dutch SS collaborator. Portrait of a Young Girl, by the Dutch artist Toon Kelder, is believed to have hung for decades in the home, art detective Arthur Brand said, describing it as “the most bizarre case of my entire career.”

• Wired: I Tried the Best Captioning Smart Glasses, and Only One Leads the Pack: Can’t hear what they’re saying? Now you can turn on the subtitles for real-life conversations.

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

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

"I've tried for years to write about my life, but it never felt like the way I wanted it portrayed. Speaking was so much more natural — you could feel the emotion of those memories in a way the written word can't capture. I wish I'd had this for my parents."
— Dola H., Colorado

If you’d like to give Life Story Magic as a Mother’s Day gift, use code UNDERSTANDABLY at checkout for $100 off our already-discounted rate.

Mother’s Day is this Sunday, just sayin’. Give the gift this weekend, and there’s no expiration on the interview itself.

Reserve Your Place

So lonely

If you’ve spent any time reading about the science of happiness and longevity, you’ve probably run across the Harvard Grant Study — the 88-year research project that has followed the lives of hundreds of men beginning in 1938, including future President John F. Kennedy and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

The clearest message from all those decades of data, according to Robert Waldinger, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been running the study since 2003: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

Waldinger was specific about what loneliness does to the brain.

People who are more isolated than they want to be, he said, find that their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives.

His TED talk on the subject has now been viewed nearly 28 million times on YouTube alone — which tells you something about how many people are thinking about this question.

Now a new study — a large one, tracking more than 10,000 people across Europe for seven years — has added a wrinkle to that story.

10,217 adults

Researchers tracked 10,217 adults between the ages of 65 and 94 across 12 European countries for seven years, using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe — one of the largest long-running studies of older adults on the continent.

Participants answered questions about how often they felt a lack of companionship, left out, or isolated. Their memory was tested regularly via word recall tasks.

People who reported higher levels of loneliness at the start of the study did score lower on memory tests — confirming what Waldinger and the Grant Study have long suggested. Loneliness and weaker memory go together.

Over the seven years of follow-up, however, lonely people’s memories declined at essentially the same rate as everyone else’s.

“The finding that loneliness significantly impacted memory, but not the speed of decline in memory over time was a surprising outcome,” said lead author Luis Carlos Venegas-Sanabria, from the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia. “It suggests that loneliness may play a more prominent role in the initial state of memory than in its progressive decline.”

The damage is real

This study doesn’t contradict Waldinger or the Grant Study. Loneliness is still associated with worse cognitive performance. The damage appears to be real.

If loneliness primarily affects where your memory starts rather than how fast it declines, however, then the most important window for intervention may be earlier than previously understood — before the deficit is established, not after.

The researchers suggest that routine screening for loneliness could become part of cognitive health assessments for older adults.

Given that the Grant Study found more than one in five Americans report feeling lonely at any given time, that’s not a small population to consider.

A few more points to consider

The study has real limitations. Loneliness was treated as fixed — measured at the start and assumed to stay constant — when anyone who has lived through a move, a divorce, a retirement, or a pandemic knows that feelings of isolation can shift dramatically over time.

The study was also conducted entirely in Europe. Cultural norms around social connection vary considerably from those in the United States.

Also, the researchers are appropriately cautious about what their findings mean for dementia risk specifically. This was a study of healthy older adults, not clinical populations — so the conclusions don’t extend cleanly to people already experiencing cognitive decline.

Still, Waldinger’s core message from the Grant Study holds: Relationships matter, probably more than many people act like they do.

If anything, this newer research adds urgency because if loneliness shapes where your memory starts, the time to do something about it isn’t when you notice the decline.

It’s well before that.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: The White House believes it’s close to an agreement with Iran to end the war. Among other provisions, the deal would involve Iran committing to a moratorium on nuclear enrichment, the U.S. agreeing to lift its sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds, and both sides lifting restrictions around transit through the Strait of Hormuz.

• Politico: President Trump’s Justice Department will ask the Supreme Court to let it intervene in Trump’s appeal of the $83.3 million jury verdict in a defamation lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll. DOJ wants to substitute the federal government itself for Trump as the defendant, which would end Carroll’s case, because the United States can’t be sued for defamation.

• MSNOW: The FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation focusing on an Atlantic magazine journalist who wrote a deeply unflattering account last month of Director Kash Patel’s work habits. The journalist, Sarah Fitzpatrick, cited two dozen anonymous sources in a detailed story reporting that Patel’s alcohol consumption and erratic behavior had caused deep concern among FBI officials.

• Miami Herald: Palm Beach County approved a trademark deal with one of Donald Trump’s family companies to rename the county’s airport after the president. The agreement gives Trump veto power over how his image and biographical information is used in marketing materials.

• New Scientist: Gamblers have bet $9 million on how many people will be infected with measles in the U.S. on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket – and there is some evidence that the predictions are accurate enough to be useful for modeling its spread.

• Hollywood Reporter: Ted Turner, the media visionary who forever altered the news business by founding CNN and helped introduce Americans to pay TV by creating cable channels like TNT, Turner Classic Movies and Cartoon Network, has died. He was 87.

• AP: WKRP isn’t dead — as of Monday, it’s living on the air in Cincinnati. The call letters from the fictional radio station featured in a CBS sitcom were adopted by a trio of real “adult hits” stations in time for Monday’s morning drive, and co-owner Jeff Ziesmann described listeners as “stoked.” The show “WKRP in Cincinnati” ran from 1978 to 1982 and starred Loni Anderson, Howard Hesseman, Tim Reid and Richard Sanders.

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