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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• 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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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.

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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.

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“Got Life Story Magic for mom's 83rd birthday. I learned so much! Having an artifact like this is priceless. When I saw how excited she was about the interview, it really brought me joy.”
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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 May 11 — and don’t worry, there’s no expiration on the interview itself.

Reserve Your Place

Intermittent fasting

According to the International Food Information Council’s 2025 survey, 15 percent of Americans say they are currently doing intermittent fasting — up from 12 percent in 2023.

Every once in a while, I think I ought to have joined them.

I wrote an article here five years ago (if you were here then, I love you) suggesting it might improve memory — based on a study out of King’s College London — but I still never actually gave it a shot.

As it turns out, it may have been the right call — though probably not for the reasons I would have guessed.

More than 3,000 adults

Researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health tracked more than 7,000 adults between the ages of 40 and 65, collecting data on meal timing, weight, lifestyle habits, and diet.

Five years later, more than 3,000 of those participants came back for follow-up measurements, and the researchers found that two habits were independently linked to lower BMI over that period:

• The first was eating breakfast early in the day.

• The second was extending the overnight fasting window — meaning finishing dinner early and not eating again until morning.

What was not linked to weight benefit: skipping breakfast as a form of intermittent fasting.

Among a subset of men who practiced intermittent fasting specifically by skipping breakfast and eating their first meal after 2 p.m., researchers found no advantage for body weight at all.

That group also tended to have other markers of less healthy living — more smoking, more drinking, less physical activity, and lower adherence to a healthy diet.

“There are different ways of practicing what is known as ‘intermittent fasting,’” explained Camille Lassale, ISGlobal researcher and senior co-author of the study. “What we observed in a subgroup of men who do intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast is that this practice has no effect on body weight.”

Chrononutrition

The researchers place their findings in an emerging field called chrononutrition — the study of not just what you eat, but when, and how meal timing interacts with the body’s internal clock.

The body’s circadian system is built around the rhythms of day and night and the physiological processes that accompany them.

• Eating earlier in the day appears to align better with those rhythms, allowing for better calorie processing and appetite regulation.

• Eating late and skipping breakfast works against that clock, regardless of how long the fasting window technically is.

Thus, a 16-hour fast that runs from 10 p.m. to 2 p.m. the next day may not be doing what people assume.

The same fasting window shifted earlier — finishing dinner at 7 p.m. and eating breakfast at 7 a.m. — appears to be a different thing biologically.

Earlier ISGlobal research connected the same early-eating patterns to lower risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, reinforcing the idea that timing has consequences that extend well beyond weight.

39 million people

The study was conducted entirely in Spain, which has a distinctive meal-timing culture. Dinner is typically eaten much later than in the United States. So, the baseline comparisons may not translate directly.

The research is observational, not a controlled experiment. So, it can’t prove that meal timing caused the differences in weight.

“Recommendations will have to wait for more robust evidence,” said Luciana Pons-Muzzo, one of the study’s lead researchers.

There are roughly 260 million adults in the United States. If the IFIC’s 15 percent figure is right, that works out to somewhere around 39 million people currently doing intermittent fasting.

If even a small portion of them have built their practice around skipping breakfast, this research ought to give them something to think about.

That said, the King’s College study I wrote about five years ago suggested intermittent fasting may have memory benefits that this research doesn’t address.

Maybe I’ll finally give it a try — just not the way most people apparently do it.

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: The ACLU is urging Louisianans to vote in U.S. House races even after Gov. Jeff Landry purportedly canceled them, as legal challenges move through the courts. The House candidates remain on the ballot for early voting; one assumes the point here is to create a record of people trying to vote for the judicial record.

• NBC News: For months, President Trump portrayed the big new ballroom he’s building at the White House as a gift to the nation, courtesy of patriotic private donors. “No government funds,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last November. But, Republicans are now proposing $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to secure the ballroom.

• The Financial Times: Global airlines have cut 2 million seats from their May schedules within the past two weeks, as concerns about fuel availability in the coming weeks intensify. Since the start of the Iran war in late February, the cost of jet fuel has doubled, forcing airlines to raise ticket prices, while the closure of Gulf airports that connected a third of European journeys to Asia has thrown global travel into disarray.

• WSJ: Why the Collapse of Spirit Airlines Means Higher Fares for Everyone: Defunct budget airline had long been a competitive force on lower-cost tickets.

• AP: Alberta separatists said Monday they have formally submitted 302,000 signatures to try to trigger a referendum on the province leaving Canada. It could go on a ballot as early as October, but a “yes” vote would not trigger independence automatically. Negotiations with the federal government would have to take place and Indigenous groups could use the courts to stop independence from happening.

• CNN: White House border czar Tom Homan brushed off critics within President Trump’s base who say the administration is not deporting enough people, promising to “flood the zone” with immigration officers. “For the people out there saying ‘President Trump’s getting weak on mass deportation,’ you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Homan said, referring to such naysayers as “keyboard warriors.”

• KDVR: A spring snowstorm is bringing inches of snow to Colorado, from the mountains to the Denver area and stretching across much of the state. The May storm comes after a warm and dry winter. In February, Denver had no measurable snow, only the second time on record the city was without snow for the month.

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

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Reserve Your Place

Scientists have a term for the slow, smoldering inflammation that builds up in the brain’s memory center as you age: “neuroinflammaging.”

It quietly degrades the cellular machinery that keeps you sharp, making it harder to form new memories, think clearly, and adapt to new situations.

For decades, researchers considered it essentially unavoidable — a tax on getting older that everyone eventually pays.

Now, a team at Texas A&M University just published new research suggesting that may not be true.

“Brain age-related diseases like dementia are a major health concern worldwide,” said Ashok Shetty of Texas A&M’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the research. “What we’re showing is brain aging can be reversed, to help people stay mentally sharp, socially engaged, and free from age-related decline.”

A nasal spray?

The researchers developed a therapy using microscopic biological “delivery parcels,” called extracellular vesicles, loaded with genetic cargo that targets the inflammation pathways driving brain aging.

The surprising thing is the delivery route: a nasal spray, which means the vesicles travel directly into the brain’s memory center by way of the olfactory nerves, bypassing the brain’s notoriously difficult-to-cross protective barrier.

“The mode of delivery is one of the most exciting aspects of our approach,” said Maheedhar Kodali, a senior researcher. “Intranasal delivery allows us to reach, and treat, the brain directly without invasive procedures.”

The entire treatment is just two doses. The findings were published in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles.

In aging mice, the results were striking. Within weeks of treatment, the researchers observed dramatically reduced chronic brain inflammation, recharged mitochondria — the cellular power plants inside neurons — and measurably improved memory and object recognition.

The results held for months. Unlike many studies where outcomes vary by sex, the therapy worked equally well in males and females — something the researchers specifically flagged.

Treated animals recognized familiar objects and detected changes in their environment more like younger animals than their untreated peers.

“We are seeing the brain’s own repair systems switch on, healing inflammation and restoring itself,” Shetty said.

Texas A&M has filed a U.S. patent on the therapy.

“Successful brain aging”

To be clear, this research was conducted in mice, not humans. So, it’s not as if you’re going to go to the pharmacy tomorrow and find this kind of nasal spray on the shelves right next to the allergy medicines.

Plenty of promising animal studies have not translated to clinical success in people, and brain research has a long track record of findings that looked revolutionary in a lab and proved far more complicated in practice.

So, the path from here to a human treatment runs through clinical-grade manufacturing, FDA approval for trials, and collaboration with biotech companies — a process that typically takes years.

That said, it’s worth noting for at least two reasons beyond the “nasal spray” curiosity:

• First, this is the same lab’s second major finding in this area. Their earlier work focused on Alzheimer’s disease specifically. This newer study expands the scope to normal brain aging, suggesting the underlying approach may be broadly applicable rather than disease specific.

• Second, the conceptual shift here is significant. The scientific consensus has long treated brain aging as a one-way street. However, this research, and a growing body of work like it, suggests is that the inflammation driving cognitive decline may be a target, not a given.

“We are aiming for successful brain aging,” Shetty said. “Keeping people engaged, alert, and connected. Not just living longer but living smarter and healthier.”

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Other things worth knowing …

• Axios: The U.S. is using force in the Strait of Hormuz and diplomacy in New York in an effort to break Tehran’s chokehold on the vital shipping lane. Why it matters: Iran has already shown it’s willing to respond with force, putting the two countries on the verge of a return to full-fledged war.

• AFP: A massive land, air and sea search continues for two U.S. soldiers who disappeared while on a training deployment in southern Morocco, amid fears they may have fallen off seaside cliffs and into the ocean. “I can confirm this incident is not related to terrorism but appears to be an accident,” a U.S. official said.

• Fast Company: A viral influencer wants to buy Spirit Airlines and run it like the Green Bay Packers. Could it work? Hunter Peterson wants to turn Spirit, which suspended operations over the weekend, into an airline ‘for the people.’ The internet’s response proves how dire air travel has become.

• Benzinga: Warren Buffett warned that financial markets are increasingly being driven by speculation rather than long-term investing, saying he has “never had people in a more gambling mood than now.” Speaking in a CNBC interview during Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s annual shareholders meeting, the longtime investor criticized the surge in short-term trading behavior, particularly the rise of options trading and prediction-style bets.

• Politico: Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman: As the Pennsylvania Democrat increasingly is isolated within his own party, Republicans are quietly trying to win him over. Trump has made the sell, offering his patented total and complete endorsement plus a financial windfall to the Pennsylvanian.

• L.A. Times: In Bel-Air, a $400-million mega-mansion aims for the national price record.

• NPR: A new bipartisan bill in Congress aims to curb what lawmakers say are predatory collection practices by so-called “claim shark” companies that charge disabled veterans for help claiming benefits. The legislation was prompted by a 2025 NPR investigation of how a Florida company was using auto-dialer software to access a VA benefits hotline meant for veterans, and then sending veterans a bill if their payments increased.

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

I like things that are easy. When I find a study saying the way I sleep, the amount of coffee I drink, or the things I do for fun are actually good for me, I latch onto it.

The same instinct applies in business. So when WalletHub announced that it had studied more than 1,300 small cities across the United States to figure out which ones were the best and worst places to start a business, I pored over the numbers, and I think I found a cheat code hiding in plain sight.

Short version: Go where the people are.

First, the list

WalletHub ranked cities with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 by 18 metrics — everything from the growth rate of small businesses to investor access, labor costs, office space affordability, and commute times.

Here are the top 10:

1. St. George, Utah

2. Fort Myers, Florida

3. Washington City, Utah

4. Bozeman, Montana

5. Greenville, South Carolina

6. Cedar City, Utah

7. Boca Raton, Florida

8. Cheyenne, Wyoming

9. Ocala, Florida

10. Dover, Delaware

A pattern emerges

Once you get past the top section, a pattern emerges that’s hard to ignore.

Florida and Utah cities just keep showing up:

South Bradenton, Florida (No. 11); Lake Worth Beach, Florida (12); Midvale, Utah (14); Palm Beach Gardens, Florida (15); Horizon West, Florida (16); East Lake-Orient Park, Florida (17); Springville, Utah (19); Herriman, Utah (21); Winter Park, Florida (22).

Nine of the next 12 spots belong to either Florida or Utah.

OK, but why?

The short explanation: Both of these states have seen exceptional population growth in recent years. Florida added 467,000 residents in a single year, from 2023 to 2024.

Utah tied Texas for third-fastest-growing state in 2024 at a 1.8 percent growth rate, and it has grown from 2.76 million residents in 2010 to more than 3.5 million today. Over the past 15 years, both states have added residents at roughly three times the national median rate.

Interestingly, they’re growing for different reasons.

• Florida’s growth is largely migration-driven: retirees, remote workers, post-pandemic movers looking for lower taxes and warmer winters. That influx tends to bring capital and consumers.

• Utah’s story is different. The state has the highest per-capita rate of natural increase — meaning births over deaths — of any state in the country. Its growth is younger, more organic, and more distributed across smaller cities rather than concentrated in one or two dominant metros.

Why not Texas? Why not Nevada?

Two other fast-growing states are conspicuously absent from the top of the list: Texas and Nevada. So why don’t they show up here?

The answer is that this was a study of small cities, and while both states have seen enormous population growth, it’s overwhelmingly concentrated in their large metros.

More than 90 percent of Texas residents live in metropolitan counties, and over 95 percent of the state’s population growth from 2020 to 2023 occurred in just 26 metropolitan statistical areas — Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, etc.

Those cities are too large to qualify for this study, and the smaller Texas cities simply aren’t riding the same wave.

Nevada is an even more extreme case. Clark County — home to Las Vegas — accounts for more than two-thirds of the entire state’s population, and 92 percent of all Nevadans live in urban areas.

Utah’s growth, by contrast, is more distributed. The St. George and Washington City corridor in the state’s southwest isn’t a spillover from Salt Lake City — it’s its own genuine small-city growth story.

Not just about where

Plenty of companies serve national or global markets regardless of where they’re headquartered. However, if you can identify a business whose natural market is a growing population segment, you’ve found the same tailwind in a different form.

A few examples worth thinking about:

• Adults older than 65: The U.S. Census Bureau projects this group will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in American history by 2034.

• Pet owners: The American Pet Products Association estimates Americans spent over $150 billion on their pets in 2023, a number that has essentially doubled in a decade.

• Remote and hybrid workers: The share of Americans working from home at least part-time has stabilized at roughly three to four times its pre-pandemic level.

The geographic cheat code and the demographic cheat code work the same way: You’re not fighting the current. You’re letting it carry you.

Why make it difficult?

WalletHub’s full methodology weights business environment, access to resources, and cost of doing business.

But, I keep coming back to the simple version. Business is hard, and starting a business is harder.

There are a hundred things working against you that you can’t control — the economy, timing, competition, and luck.

Population growth is a tailwind: more potential customers, a deeper talent pool, and a market that’s expanding rather than contracting. It won’t save a bad business, but all other things being equal, it improves your odds.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about coffee …

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Other things worth knowing …

• Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in a 6 to 3 decision Wednesday, making it harder for minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark civil rights law. “I love it,” President Trump told reporters after hearing of the decision.

• Politico, Clarion-Ledger, AL.com, Mediaite: Within hours afterward, Florida passed a new congressional map that could help the GOP pick up four more seats, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called for a special session on redistricting, Alabama’s attorney general pledged to “act as quickly as possible,” and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) called on her state’s legislature to quickly eliminate all House districts in the state held by Democrats.

• The Deseret News: Can the U.S. cope with a shrinking population? Statistics show a decline could begin much quicker than perviously thought. (This one is especially interesting to me after above about how Utah — home of the Deseret News — has a growing population.)

• Fox News: Speaking of growing markets, the Pentagon is seeking roughly $55 billion for drone and autonomous warfare programs in its fiscal year 2027 budget, as battlefield conflicts from the Middle East to Ukraine expose a growing problem: cheap drones are increasingly able to overwhelm costly U.S. defenses. The funding request is a dramatic surge from roughly $225 million a year earlier.

• The Wall Street Journal: Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran: The president prefers decisive victories, but none of the available options provides him with a swift exit from the conflict.

• WAMU: The administration is seeking access to the health records of millions of federal workers including their prescriptions, diagnoses, and doctor visits. Reporter Amanda Seitz, who broke the story, says the Office of Personnel Management’s notice makes no mention of removing identifying information: “The names of patients, doctors, and their specific diagnoses could all be available to the federal government.”

• The New York Times: A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons: Scientists shared transcripts in which chatbots described how to assemble deadly pathogens and unleash them in public spaces.

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Ode to Sleepy

When I was an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice long ago, we had some real characters working with us. One of them was a lawyer who kept a pillow and a comforter under his desk.

Every afternoon, he’d quietly close his door, lay down on the floor, and take a nap. He’d get annoyed if anyone woke him up.

The rest of us thought it was somewhere between eccentric and genius, but he was a good guy and very generous in sharing the briefs he wrote and filed in court. I’ll admit it — I was mostly jealous. The idea of stretching out and actually sleeping in the middle of the day, in a federal building seemed like a win.

I’m not going to use his real name here, but let’s just call him Sleepy. Anyone who worked with me back then might know who I mean.

It turns out Sleepy was ahead of his time.

‘Lay on the floor’

Scott Kirby is the CEO of United Airlines, which by available seat miles is the largest airline in the world. He runs an organization of roughly 100,000 people and is responsible for an operation that doesn’t stop, sleep, or really forgive mistakes.

He also takes a 20-minute nap on the floor of his office almost every day.

In a recent interview with McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels, Kirby described the habit plainly.

“Throughout my whole career, when I’m in the office, I’ll close the door and take a 20-minute nap. When I first got to United, people were, like, ‘Oh my God, where do you take a nap?’ I said, ‘I lay on the floor.’”

His team promptly offered to get him a couch. He declined to make a big deal of it.

“When you’re tired, your brain is not 100%. If you’re not 100%, you shouldn’t be making decisions.”

Churchill, LBJ, Edison, and Dali

Kirby’s company goes back a long way (meaning the company he keeps, not United Airlines):

Winston Churchill kept a bed in the Houses of Parliament so he’d never miss his afternoon nap.

He even napped through the Blitz: “Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”

Lyndon Johnson ran what he called a two-shift day. He’d work through the morning, exercise after lunch, change into his pajamas, nap for 30 minutes, then change back and work a second shift that sometimes ran until 1 or 2 in the morning.

Thomas Edison publicly dismissed sleep as a waste of time, claimed he only needed three or four hours a night, and apparently considered napping a character flaw. He also napped constantly, and there are photographs of him asleep in labs, on workbenches, in libraries.

Perhaps my favorite all-time napper however was Salvador Dalí, who approached everything with a certain theatrical commitment.

He’d sit in a chair holding a bundle of keys over a silver plate. When he fell asleep and dropped them, the crash woke him, which he believed translated to a micro-nap deep enough to access his subconscious without letting him slide into REM.

Ah yes, the science

At the risk of prompting you to take a nap right now, let’s just say that there is science on this that’s been piling up for years, and it keeps pointing in the same direction:

• A European study of 90 adults found that even a 20-minute nap improved the odds of a creative breakthrough — with deeper naps producing results in 85.7% of participants, compared to 55.5% of those who stayed awake.

• Harvard Medical School research showed that sleep spindles — brief bursts of brain activity during light non-REM sleep — actually target the specific regions you used during learning. The stronger those spindles, the better performance afterward.

• And, a Rice University and Weill Cornell study found that even 30 minutes of light sleep improved performance on cognitive tasks and produced measurable changes in how neurons fire and synchronize.

Our napping brains are apparently consolidating, refining, and reorganizing — doing work that waking thought can’t replicate.

So what’s stopping you?

Probably the same thing that was stopping us back at DOJ — the feeling that lying down in the middle of the day is somehow an admission of weakness — or else, at least the kind of thing that gets you a goofy nickname and leads to someone else writing about you in an email newsletter two decades later.

But then again: Churchill pushed through some fairly serious things, as did LBJ. Kirby is running the largest airline in the world, and Dalí somehow managed to nap while not crushing that bizarre, trademark moustache.

Here’s to you, Sleepy, for figuring it out while the rest of us were muddling on. The comforter under the desk is starting to look like the obvious move.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The Bulwark: The White House unveiled a radical redesign of new U.S. passports to include a prominent picture of President Trump. The passports, apparently a limited edition to celebrate America 250, will feature a scowling image of Trump superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, along with Trump’s signature in gold.

• Associated Press: King Charles visits Washington with hopes of restoring the US-UK relationship.

• Reuters: Republicans in Congress are pushing for legislation to fund Trump’s White House ballroom project at taxpayer expense. Trump previously had said that private donations would ​cover the estimated $400 million cost.

• Axios: The share of Americans who say their financial situation is getting worse is now 55%, the highest point in 25 years (including during the pandemic and the financial crisis) according to new Gallup data. Last year, the percentage was 53%; in 2024 it was 47%.

• Yahoo Finance: Backers of a proposed tax on California billionaires say they have collected enough signatures to bring the measure to a statewide vote. Unions say the tax would prevent hospital closures and fund public education; opponents say the tax would simply fuel an exodus of wealthy company founders.

• CNBC: The United Arab Emirates is leaving OPEC on May 1. The shock announcement Tuesday comes after the UAE was the target of missile and drone attacks for weeks by Iran (which is also a member of OPEC). The UAE It was the group’s third-largest oil producer in February behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

• The National: Speaking of the UAE, its flag carrier Emirates has shared plans to introduce private en-suite bathrooms on board its aircraft - the first in the world to do so.

• Associated Press: How 2 men claimed an absurd record by driving an old 3-wheel car the length of Africa: They had help from sponsors and crowd funding, and documented the journey on an Instagram page that pulled in nearly 100,000 followers under the title: “14,000 miles, 3 wheels, 0 common sense.”

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

If you’ve been getting something out of Understandably and are in a position to support it, becoming a premium subscriber helps more than you might think. It’s been six years of work I care deeply about, and your support keeps it going.

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Honey, Have You Seen…?

I’m like, big into vibe-coding now, and one of my not-ready-for-prime-time creations is an app I’d previously joked about building forever. It’s called Honey, Have You Seen…?

Open it, type in something you’ve misplaced — your keys, your wallet, the reading glasses that were on your head — and the app responds the way a helpful spouse would:

Could it be in the car? Did you check the counter? Is it in the pocket of the jeans you wore yesterday?

(Also me: Oh my God, I have so much I have to get done today!)

Anyway, it turns out that “honey have you” dynamic may be doing a lot more than helping you find your sunglasses. It might be correlated to a lower likelihood of getting cancer.

Researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami analyzed more than 4 million cancer cases between 2015 and 2022 and published their findings in Cancer Research Communications.

The main question: are married people less likely to get cancer? The results:

• Adults who had never married had substantially higher rates of developing cancer than those who were or had been married.

• Men who had never married were about 70% more likely to develop cancer than married men.

• Women who had never married were about 85% more likely to develop cancer than women who were or had been married.

For some specific cancers, the gaps were even more pronounced.

Of course, getting married doesn’t magically prevent cancer. People who smoke less, drink less, and take better care of themselves may also be more likely to get — and stay — married.

But a few mechanisms are worth taking seriously. The benefit associated with marriage may have less to do with the institution itself and more to do with what it tends to provide — a built-in accountability partner who asks the questions you might otherwise skip.

Married people tend to have stronger social support and more economic stability — plus a partner who notices when something’s off.

The kind of partner who says: You’ve been coughing for three weeks. Maybe call the doctor.

The associations were especially strong for cancers tied to infection, smoking, and alcohol — areas where a partner’s influence could plausibly matter — and stronger in adults over 50, suggesting the effect builds over time.

This study began in 2015, the year same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, specifically so it could include married same-sex couples — hence why it’s one of the more contemporary and inclusive analyses on this topic.

“With the prevalence of marriage decreasing in the U.S., this is something that should be further studied,” said co-author Paulo Pinheiro, a professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

The researchers aren’t in the business of dispensing relationship advice, but the study has a clear practical takeaway.

“If you’re not married, you should be paying extra attention to cancer risk factors, getting any screenings you may need, and staying up to date on health care,” said Frank Penedo, associate director for population sciences at Sylvester.

So the next time your spouse asks where you’ve been and reminds you that you’re two years overdue for a physical, maybe resist the eye roll.

After all — and I say this as someone who built the app — there’s a version of Honey, Have You Seen…? that ends not with your keys, but with people (me!) acting like a grownup and taking care of themselves a bit more than they otherwise would.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The Hill: President Trump and his political allies are pointing to Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner as proof of the need for his planned ballroom on White House grounds. The Department of Justice called on the National Trust for Historic Preservation to drop its lawsuit against the administration over the ballroom in the wake of the shooting. A lawyer from the preservation group said no.

• Yahoo News: UFC CEO Dana White’s description of the chaos at the WHCA: “Tables getting flipped over, guys running in with guns and they were screaming ‘Get down.’ I didn’t get down. It was f*cking awesome. I literally took every minute of it in, and it was a pretty crazy, unique experience.”

• NBC Sports: Kenyan Sabastian Sawe broke the two-hour barrier in the marathon, winning the London Marathon in an unofficial 1 hour, 59 minutes, 30 seconds, shattering the previous record of 2:00:35. The runner-up on Sunday, Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha, ran 1:59:41 in his marathon debut.

• USA Today: A bipartisan group of lawmakers joined forces on a bill to broaden access to a beloved grocery store staple, aptly called the “Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act.” The idea is to let recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) use benefits to purchase the popular cooked chickens. Currently, the purchase of hot prepared foods is prohibited under SNAP.

• The Hill: President Trump endorsed the idea of changing the name of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would give the agency the acronym NICE. “GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

• Defense One: The Pentagon replicated a Ukrainian-style drone attack in Florida. Now it’s changing its counter-drone strategy.

• The Telegraph: No sex please, we’re on Mars! Inside the simulated red planet mission: Six participants live and work under conditions that mirror long‑duration Space expeditions.

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If you’ve been getting something out of Understandably and are in a position to support it, becoming a premium subscriber helps more than you might think. It’s been six years of work I care deeply about, and your support keeps it going.

If it’s not the right time, I understand completely. We’re still friends!

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A few weeks ago, I visited my parents. My dad told me he thought I looked good.

“Have you lost weight?” he said. “What are you now, 150?”

This was one of those funny moments where guessing wrong kind of undermines the compliment. Yes, I have lost a lot of weight — but I haven’t been 150 pounds since probably 8th grade.

Saying that I was down to around 170 sounded a bit underwhelming by comparison — even though I’m proud of what I’ve done.

It’s one thing when your dad guesses your weight wrong, but it’s another thing entirely when your doctor makes a similar mistake — or for that matter, perhaps, if we were to learn that an entire, commonly used but oft-maligned metric might also be getting things wrong.

That’s exactly what’s been happening with the way medical professionals calculate body mass index (also known as BMI), at least if a new study is accurate.

BMI is simply your weight divided by your height squared, so it should be pretty hard to mess up.

But, by definition it doesn’t break down how much of your weight is fat, or where that fat is located in your body, nor does it distinguish between a person who is 200 pounds of muscle and a person who is 200 pounds with very little muscle.

Doctors and fitness professionals have been saying this for decades, but the metric has persisted — in clinical care, in insurance underwriting, in public health policy — largely because it’s free, fast, and requires nothing more than a scale and a tape measure.

The new study, published in the journal Nutrients and being presented at the European Congress on Obesity next month, put that persistence to the test.

Researchers took 1,351 adults — ages 18 to 98 — and compared their standard WHO BMI classifications against their actual body fat, measured using DXA scanning.

DXA, or dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, is the gold standard for measuring body composition, because it directly measures fat, muscle, and bone. The findings:

• Among people BMI labeled as overweight, more than half were in the wrong category when measured by actual body fat — and of those, roughly three-quarters turned out to be normal weight.

• Among people BMI labeled obese, about one in three was actually only overweight. And among people BMI labeled underweight, two-thirds were actually normal weight.

Overall, more than one-third of adults in the study were placed in the wrong weight category entirely.

Caveats:

• The sample in this study was entirely White Caucasian adults in northern Italy, and the researchers cite this as a limitation, since BMI is already known to perform differently across ethnic groups.

• Also, overall rates of overweight and obesity in societies look similar whether you use BMI or DXA at the population level; the researchers say that’s because mismatches for individual people might cancel each other out in the aggregate.

All of this comes at a remarkable moment in weight medicine.

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have upended how millions of people think about and pursue weight loss.

Employers are grappling with whether to cover them, insurers are drawing eligibility lines, and doctors are deciding who qualifies.

Many of those decisions flow, directly or indirectly, through BMI.

If the tool getting used to make those calls is wrong for more than one in three of the people it touches, that’s a big problem.

Ironically, we’re still figuring out the full size of a problem that’s entirely about measuring size.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NPR, CNN: Virginia took a step on Tuesday to counter and possibly surpass President Trump’s national effort to redraw congressional voting maps in favor of the GOP as voters narrowly approved a Democratic-backed constitutional amendment to sideline let lawmakers directly implement a new map.

• The Athletic: FIFA is considering asking President Donald Trump for a full moratorium on ICE raids across the United States during the World Cup this summer. European nations also privately relayed concerns from their fans about potential ICE activity during the tournament.

• The New York Times: The F.B.I. began investigating a New York Times reporter after she wrote a story about Director Kash Patel using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, with government security and transportation. Some Justice Department officials saw the inquiry as retaliation for an article that Mr. Patel and his girlfriend did not like. It was determined there was no legal basis to proceed with the investigation.

• The Independent: Tucker Carlson, increasingly at odds with Trump over the Iran War, has expressed buyer’s remorse over his role in getting the president elected. “Millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now,” the former Fox News star said, adding: “[W]e’re implicated in this for sure ... We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

• Futurism: Chinese Workers Horrified as Bosses Direct Them to Train Their AI Replacements: Why would they choose to dig their own graves?

• WSJ: More young Americans are turning to trade school to pursue in-demand jobs like plumbing and electrical work but encountering something they didn’t expect: hefty price tags. Nationwide, trade and technical school revenue hit $5.1 billion in the last quarter of 2025, up 41% from four years before that, according to federal data.

• NBC News: Elizabeth Smart is adding a new title to her résumé: bodybuilder. The 38-year-old Smart — whose terrifying abduction story is told in the 2025 Netflix documentary, “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart”— revealed the career pivot with a picture of herself on Instagram from a recent bodybuilding competition: “This was a big change for me, it was hard, it pushed me, challenged me not to give up. I am so proud of myself for doing this. I am so proud of my body, and I want to celebrate it,” she wrote.

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

If you’ve been getting something out of Understandably and are in a position to support it, becoming a premium subscriber helps more than you might think. It’s been six years of work I care deeply about, and your support keeps it going.

If it’s not the right time, I understand completely. We’re still friends!

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Earlier this month, I was asked to join a panel in New York City about personal branding for CEOs and entrepreneurs.

We had a good pre-call. Smart people, thoughtful discussion. It was the kind of panel where you look at the other speakers and think, I’m not entirely sure how I ended up here, but I’m glad someone thinks I belong.

One theme kept coming up: authenticity.

One of the other panelists made the point that, especially with Gen Z, people want to do business with companies that align with their values. The idea that you can “walk the line” on social issues and avoid taking a stance is fading. If you try, people will call you out anyway.

So you might as well be clear about what you believe—and build around it. There isn’t much of a second prize anymore for playing it safe.

That sent me back to a philosophy class I took in the 1990s—and then much farther back, to Aristotle.

Long before social media or personal branding, 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.

Think about the Olympics. Sports like gymnastics or figure skating suddenly capture global attention for a few weeks. Part of that is spectacle, but part of it is that you’re watching people pursue the absolute edge of what they’re meant to do, and that’s compelling.

That’s also why I’ve been pushing Life Story Magic so hard this year. It’s a direct use of what I’m actually good at: interviewing people, drawing out their stories, and helping them see that their experiences matter—and preserving them.

That’s a more durable use of those skills than chasing algorithms with a quick-hit article about a menu change at McDonald’s. Not that I’m above that; we all have to make a living.

But one of those things is closer to my telos than the other, and people can sense that.

This is where the branding conversation comes back in. If you’re building a personal brand or a company brand, the most persuasive signal you can send isn’t just building a presence for example on LinkedIn sugesting that you’re “authentic.”

It’s that you understand your purpose and you’re actually pursuing it.

That doesn’t mean everyone will agree with you. They won’t. But trying to be broadly acceptable while not fully committing to anything tends to land nowhere.

The most memorable brands—and the most compelling people—feel aligned. They’re not trying to be everything; they’re trying to be something specific, and to do it well.

Long before anyone imagined the internet, Aristotle was describing an idea that turns out to be pretty useful for anyone thinking about how they show up in public.

Follow me for more 2,400-year-old digital media and branding ideas.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The New York Times: About 1,100 Afghans who aided U.S. forces are being told they have to choose: Return to Afghanistan with their families to live under the Taliban, or be sent to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Aid worker: “This is just them wanting to send these people back to … face certain death. They know that Afghans are not going to accept the D.R.C. Why would you go from the world’s No. 1 refugee crisis to the world’s No. 2 refugee crisis?”

• The New Republic: The Trump administration is considering a bailout for the United Arab Emirates, where President Trump and his family have extensive business ties including a $200 million investment in Jared Kushner’s investment firm and $2 billion invested in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture run by Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. Also, the Trump Organization is building a luxury hotel in Dubai.

• Axios: Workers have never been more dissatisfied with their pay or their ability to get ahead. But the likelihood of moving to a new employer is at multiyear lows. Those are the bleak findings from a New York Federal Reserve Bank survey.

• The Guardian: The U.S. spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others in a 22-point post on X over the weekend, which also called for an end to the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan and exhorted the U.S. to reinstate a military draft.

• CNBC: John Ternus is succeeding Tim Cook as CEO of Apple, with Cook assuming the role of executive chairman on Sept. 1. Ternus, a senior vice president of hardware engineering, will join Apple’s board of directors when he becomes chief.

• The Wall Street Journal: Car Owners Are Revolting Over Tesla’s Self-Driving Promises: An international backlash is growing over outdated Tesla hardware.

• New York Post: The House Ethics Committee published a list Monday of all publicly disclosed sexual misconduct investigations into members stretching back to 1976. In total, fourteen were Democrats and 12 were Republicans.

• CBS News: The wife of active-duty U.S. Army soldier who has served in the military for 27 years, including in Afghanistan, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week in Texas at an appointment at an immigration office. Rivera Ortega has been in the U.S. since 2016 and has legal protection that prohibits her deportation to her native El Salvador, but DHS says it can deport her to Mexico, where she has no ties.

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I regret one thing about the 1994 World Cup in the U.S.: I didn’t go to a single game.

I was young, broke—and honestly not much of a soccer fan yet.

That changed. Living in D.C., I got hooked on early D.C. United games at RFK. I started playing rec league, got cut from teams, and eventually started my own in the old Washington International Soccer League.

I recruited a few JAG Corps guys, one legit former college goalkeeper, and a lot of enthusiasm.

By the 2002 World Cup, I was living in Koreatown in L.A., and both the U.S. and South Korea made runs. It was electric. The 2006 and 2010 tournaments were fun, too.

This became the one global sporting event I actually plan my life around—more than March Madness, more than the Stanley Cup.

Then NBC started carrying Premier League games, complete with early Ted Lasso commercials. I started watching Saturday and Sunday mornings. A couple of years ago, in London, I picked a game for our family trip—the only one I could actually get tickets for—West Ham United vs. Everton—and that was it.

Now I’m a West Ham fan in New Jersey, which is its own special kind of pain; as I write this, I’m about to turn on their Monday match against Crystal Palace to see if they can keep from slipping toward relegation.

These days, it’s even more local. We go to New York Red Bulls games and Gotham FC matches.

And honestly, as much as I love watching, I probably get even more out of coaching my daughter’s team. She’s the youngest kid out there, plays center back, and she’s pretty great—last week she nearly scored from midfield.

When her team finally did score, they all broke into the Macarena right there on the field.

All of which is why the 2026 World Cup, coming to the U.S., should feel like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Instead, it feels like something else.

I used to joke that we had to stay in New Jersey because I was definitely going to the final at MetLife Stadium. Then I looked at prices. Roughly $9,000 a ticket.

I entered the lottery for other games and lost. I did manage to get tickets for a Round of 32 game near my sister’s house in Foxborough.

At the time, I felt like I overpaid, but since then, prices have more than tripled. The cheapest resale ticket is now over $800, including FIFA’s $210 “resale facilitation fee.”

Ah, FIFA. The soccer overlords expect to generate about $11 billion from this tournament—what its president has compared to hosting 104 Super Bowls, and prices reflect that ambition.

And then there’s the part that really pushes this over the top: the cost of getting to the game.

In New Jersey, FIFA’s security rules mean almost no parking at the stadium, pushing tens of thousands onto NJ Transit trains. At the same time, regular commuters won’t be allowed to use New York’s Penn Station for roughly seven hours total before and after the games, some of which fall in the middle of rush hour.

NJ Transit says it will cost roughly $48 million to run these operations. Rather than raise taxes or shift the burden to commuters, the state is passing the cost directly to fans, resulting in a $150 round-trip train ticket.

Even if I’d rather fans (like me) pay for this than taxpayers or commuters who can’t afford the games, we’re past the point of asking, “Is it worth it?”

Who is this actually for?

And yet—here’s the part I can’t shake—I still check the resale market every day. The cheapest game at MetLife right now is Norway vs. Senegal, with tickets going for about $500 each.

I keep wondering if prices will drop. If reality will set in. If scalpers will blink.

It’s still the World Cup. It’s still one of the few sporting events that can stop everything and make you feel like you’re part of something rare.

But that only works if people can actually be there.

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Other things worth knowing …

• The New York Times: FBI director Kash Patel is suing The Atlantic for defamation over an article that claimed that his excessive drinking and unexplained absences were putting his job in jeopardy.

• The Washington Post: Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators.

• USA Today: The penny is already dead. Could the nickel be next to go?

• The New York Times: AI-generated fake influencers have surged on social media in advance of the November elections. Although the quality of some of the accounts edges toward slop … researchers said the comments on the posts suggest that many users believe that the avatars are real people: “Flooding the zone here with tons and tons of videos seems geared to give a false sense of a majority opinion.”

• The Washington Post: We calculated how much Nick Fuentes earns from live-streaming hate: The far-right provocateur has pocketed roughly $900,000 from “fanatical” donors since the start of 2025. Some superfans see him as part of their families.

• The Hill: Senate Republicans who fear their three-seat majority could be in danger in this year’s midterm election are hoping for the retirement of conservative Justice Samuel Alito as an “October surprise” that could change their political fortunes. “If we did have a Supreme Court vacancy obviously that would be a galvanizing issue for Republicans,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is up for reelection.

• Reddit: I tracked every FIFA World Cup 2026 resale listing for a few days. Here’s what’s actually going on.

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Imagine this $ represents not $1, but instead $1 billion.

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That would represent $800 billion, which is roughly what Elon Musk is worth right now, according to Forbes.

I don’t think our minds—or our social or political systems—were designed to process numbers like this.

It’s not just the scale of Musk’s wealth; it’s the speed. By most estimates, he only became a billionaire around 2009, meaning his net worth has increased something like 800-fold in about 17 years.

So what is $800 billion, really?

I went down a rabbit hole trying to find comparisons that make it feel even slightly concrete. It’s more than:

• The combined value of every team in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS — roughly $575 billion total.

• More than 50 times what the entire country spent on the 2024 U.S. federal election — about $15.9 billion.

• Nearly twice the value of every publicly traded airline on Earth — roughly $425 billion combined.

• More than Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Disney, and Nike combined — about $780 billion.

• The same as the total wealth of all of the people listed on the Forbes 400 back around the mid-1990s, adjusted for inflation.

• Roughly the same as McDonald’s, Disney, Boeing, Nike, and Starbucks put together — about $750 billion.

• More than the combined value of every home in Oregon (~$775 billion). Or Minnesota (~$800 billion).

• More than the total household wealth of every single person living in countries like Egypt (~$400–600 billion) or Pakistan (~$300–500 billion).

• Roughly equal to the entire economic output of a G20 country like Turkey (~$800–900 billion GDP).

At some point, these comparisons stop clarifying and start blurring together. Everything becomes “about the size of a country,” or “bigger than an industry,” and the numbers lose meaning again.

But maybe that’s the point.

We built systems—economic, political, even psychological—around wealth differences that made intuitive sense. A millionaire vs. a billionaire already stretches that intuition.

A person worth $800 billion is something else entirely: not just richer, but operating at a scale that starts to resemble institutions, markets, even nations.

And yet, it’s still just one person, represented here by 40 rows of dollar signs, knocking on the door of becoming a trillionaire.

Honestly, I think most of us would be happy with half of that.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NPR: Last year, the White House promised that its One Big Beautiful Bill Act would lead to the “largest tax refund season in U.S. history,” with refunds going up by an average of $1,000. So far, however, average refunds are up $350, while a bipartisan survey finds that 62% of respondents either believe the tax changes harmed them or made no difference. Even among Republicans, only 35% say the changes favored them.

• Politico: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy claims the army captured a Russian position using only ground robotic systems and unmanned aerial vehicles. “For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms — ground systems and drones,” Zelenskyy said. “The occupiers surrendered, and the operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” Zelenskyy added.

• WSJ: After President Trump called European allies “cowards,” a fallback plan to ensure Europe can defend itself if the U.S. departs NATO is gaining traction after getting buy-in from Germany. The challenge is enormous, as NATO’s entire structure is built around American leadership at almost every level, from logistics and intelligence to the alliance’s top military command.

• The Telegraph: In the film Mad Max, an oil shortage leaves Australian society teetering on the brink of total collapse. In real-life, things aren’t quite that dystopian yet Down Under. But with barely a month of stockpiled diesel left and hundreds of forecourts running dry, the anxiety is palpable. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stifled one fifth of the world’s supply of oil. Much of this goes to the Asian refineries that supply Australia. Now, they’re running short.

• NBC News: Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence software, Grok, continues to generate sexualized images of people without their consent, despite his company’s pledge months ago to halt abusive deepfakes after a public backlash and government investigations. A review by NBC News found dozens of AI-generated sexual images and videos depicting real people posted publicly on Musk’s social media app, X, over the past month. The images are similar to ones that sparked a firestorm of criticism in January.

• France24: ‘Listening bars’ bloom as hottest new nightlife trend: “It really makes you listen to every word, every instrument, every note,” Camille Calloch, 31, told AFP as she left a listening session dedicated to British neo-soul star Sampha at “Listener” bar in central Paris. “It’s become one of the ways I enjoy music, along with concerts, my headphones, bars and festivals.”

• CNBC: Allbirds — you know, the shoe company? — made a surprising announcement Wednesday that it is pivoting from shoes to artificial intelligence. Its shares jumped 700%, as the new company, which expects to be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

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Fortunately, the entire U.S. government has been planning for this for me, by arranging last week to have had Artemis II blast off last week and travel around the moon. That makes it the perfect time to visit one of the last times we did this — before I was even born — and what it spawned. Truly, I’m glad to have this chance. See you below.

In the summer of 1966, a man named Stewart Brand—a Stanford graduate, former soldier, and self-described “loafing artist“—set off on a quest.

The Space Race was nearly a decade old, and Brand had been seized with the realization that NASA had yet to release a photograph of the whole Earth taken from space.

He started a public campaign, and hitchhiked across the country promoting it.

Soon enough, NASA did in fact release the first such “whole Earth photo,” taken at the end of 1967, from a satellite called ATS-3. And, Brand was inspired to it on the cover of an idiosyncratic new magazine he started, called the Whole Earth Catalog.

What was the Whole Earth Catalog? Well, it could best be described as—actually, let’s let the late Steve Jobs explain it, as he did in his iconic speech at Stanford University in 2005:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

...

It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Brand only printed 1,000 copies of that first issue, but later issues took off, with more than 2 million copies. And, Jobs wasn’t just citing him and his work out of the air.

“No one was more influenced, or inspired by, Brand, than the founder of Apple,” writes Carole Cadwalladr. “And while many credit Jobs with being one of the most creative agents of change in the late 20th century, Jobs credited Brand.”

But wait, as the old TV commercial used to say. There’s more.

Fast forward to 1994, when Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott headed to Seattle to launch Amazon. Bezos hired his very first employee: Shel Kaphan, whom he later called, “the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com.”

What had been Kaphan’s very first job back in 1968?

Working for Brand as one of the original people on The Whole Earth Catalog. As Brad Stone writes in The Everything Store:

Kaphan (by now shorn of his long locks and beard, balding, and in his early forties) was inspired by what he saw as Amazon’s potential to use the Web to fulfill the vision of The Whole Earth Catalog and make information and tools available around the world.

Later, Kaphan introduced Brand to Bezos, which sparked a relationship that led, among other things, to Bezos’s thematically similar $42 million, “Clock of the Long Now,” designed to keep time for 10,000 years. As Brand explained:

Ideally, [the clock] would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

It’s probably fair to say that the 1967 photo that inspired Brand has since been supplanted in our culture by the Earthrise photo, taken in 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8, and the Blue Marble photo, taken in 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17.

But it was the earlier photo that inspired Brand, and it was Brand who created the catalog and put it on the cover, and the combination was still coming up in the founding stories of two of the world’s biggest companies, 40 and 50 years later.

By the way, in 1966, when Brand set off on his quest to get NASA to release a photo like the ATS-3 one, Steve Jobs was 12. Jeff Bezos was 3.

Something to think about, as we begin the quest to return to the moon, and beyond. There’s no telling what images we’ll create, and who might be inspired by them.

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Other things worth knowing …

• NASA’s Artemis II crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — yesterday surpassed the record for the farthest distance any humans have ever traveled from Earth, reaching 252,760 miles, breaking the mark set by Apollo 13 in 1970. They are now beginning their return home. (NASA)

• The U.S. pulled off a daring rescue of two aviators shot down over Iran, with one crew member hiding in a mountain crevice after climbing 7,000 feet despite being injured, while the CIA launched a deception campaign to buy time. Two Black Hawk helicopters came under fire and two transport planes had to be blown up during the operation. (AP)

• Savannah Guthrie returned to TODAY on Monday for the first time since January 30, one day before her 84-year-old mother Nancy disappeared from her home outside Tucson and authorities said they believe she was taken against her will. “I don’t know how to come back, but I don’t know how not to,” Savannah had said. (TODAY)

• The Associated Press is offering buyouts to an unspecified number of U.S. journalists as it pivots away from newspaper journalism — once the lion’s share of its revenue, big newspaper companies now account for just 10% of its income. AP has seen 200% growth in revenue from technology companies over the last four years. (AP)

• A new study from the Radiological Society of North America found that when radiologists were given no warning, they correctly identified AI-generated fake X-rays only 41% of the time — and even after being warned fakes were present, their success rate only climbed to 75%. “This creates a high-stakes vulnerability for fraudulent litigation if a fabricated fracture could be indistinguishable from a real one,” the lead author warned. (Fast Company)

• South Korea is distributing AI-powered dolls to tens of thousands of elderly people living alone, with sensors that monitor for 24 hours of inactivity and microphones that record daily health check-ins for social workers to review. One caregiver noted that the elderly “don’t tell caregivers or their children some things, but they will tell Hyodol.” (36Kr)

• A content creator named Dallas Little has gamed iTunes using an entirely AI-generated singer called “Eddie Dalton” — who does not exist — landing 11 spots on the iTunes top 100 singles chart and the number 3 album, despite only having sold 6,900 tracks total. “There’s no recording time or musical process involved,” the reporter notes. “He’s typing prompts and pushing buttons.” (Showbiz411)

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Friends, I’m traveling for spring break, culminating yesterday with Easter with family. So we’re on Low Power Mode for the week. Today’s newsletter is “evergreen” as they say, but it originally ran in 2023, and I think it applies today as well. Enjoy!

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last 10 years, especially if you’ve been on social media—and especially Twitter—I suspect you’ve seen the “This is fine” meme.

It involves a comic with a dog sitting at a table with a cup of coffee as the entire room is engulfed in flames. He says, “This is fine.”

People like to post it as a commentary on things that are decidedly not fine in their eyes, but that we’re all living through anyway: political stuff, weather, sports teams, the fact that final exams are coming up in college and they’re not prepared, whatever.

Anyway, the creator of the comic that spawned the meme, KC Green, realized it was now a decade old, so he posted about its legacy: “I made it vague on purpose. Like any good piece of art, people interpret it how they want to.”

It’s kind of serendipitous for me that we have this anniversary, because I’ve had this image pop into my head repeatedly over the past few weeks, based on an author’s description of a common experience.

Her name: Chelsea Banning (not to be confused with Chelsea Manning, by the way), who admitted in a cathartic middle-of-the-night tweet:

“Only 2 people came to my author signing yesterday, so I was pretty bummed about it. Especially as 37 people responded ‘going’ to the event. Kind of upset, honestly, and a little embarrassed.”

Anyway, things worked out for Chelsea. A who’s-who of big-time, successful (wealthy? I think) authors weighed in on Twitter, saying they’d had the same thing happen and even praising her for admitting it to the world:

• Cheryl Strayed: I’m sorry that happened to you, Chelsea. I know how awful it feels, as it has happened to me too. Almost every author I know has had this experience at some point in their career. It isn’t a reflection of you or your work!

• Stephen King: At my first SALEM’S LOT signing, I had one customer. A fat kid who said, “Hey bud, do you know where there’s some Nazi books?”

• Margaret Atwood: Join the club. I did a signing to which Nobody came, except a guy who wanted to buy some Scotch tape and thought I was the help. :)

Now, Chelsea Banning’s book was self-published, and she would end up hearing agents and publishers as a result of her viral tweet that she likely never would have known otherwise.

For what it’s worth, here are a few of my own sad book signing stories. Most of these had to do with the tour for my book about West Point in 2008. If I had known big-name authors would have come to my side, I would have posted about them then!

• Somebody got the idea to put me at a table outside the PX at Joint Base Lewis–McChord. I was between a star wrestler from the WWE who had a book, and the Seattle Seahawks cheerleaders, who had a calendar.

• I did a live event on Georgia public television, but there was a big storm, and only two people showed up to a 200-person theater. My speech was fine, but the scheduled Q&A was awkward with almost no crowd. I wound up posing questions to myself.

• This one has a happy ending. Nobody showed for my reading at a Barnes & Noble near Boston! Then, just before kickoff, my parents walked in. Then, a handful of guys from my old reserve unit showed up. Eventually, “nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd” kicked in, and the room filled up with passers-by.

I know I’m mixing two Internet themes, and sprinkling it with my own experience. But sometimes life gives you a burning house, or a guy who only wants Scotch tape, or a Seattle Seahawks cheerleaders calendar, and you just have to act as if everything were going the way you wish it were:

This is fine. Then, sometimes it is!

Got more examples? They’re welcome in the comments. And, if you ever see an author putting on a brave face at an empty bookstore signing, remember: an angel will get its wings if you sit down for a minute and listen. You don’t even have to buy the book!

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Other things worth knowing …

During Low Power Mode, we usually skip this section. Hope to be back tomorrow. Thanks for reading. See you in the comments.

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