Adorable babies
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
By the way: I’m reading through all of the “first childhood memory” posts. Lots of amazing stuff in there. I’ll have something more to say on Monday. Thanks!
And for everyone in the path of Hurricane Helene: We’re thinking of you, stay safe!
Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake
Over the weekend, millions of Americans watched football. They cheered, they ate, and—more than ever—they gambled. The American Gaming Association expects $35 billion in bets to be placed on NFL games in 2024, about one-third more than last year’s total.
If you follow sports, gambling is everywhere. Ads for it are all over broadcasts; more than one in three Americans now bets on sports, according to a Seton Hall poll. Before 2018, sports gambling was prohibited almost everywhere. Now it’s legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia, yielding $10 billion a year in revenue.
Readers may be quick to dismiss these developments as harmless. Many sports fans enjoy betting on the game, they say. Is it such a big deal if they do it with a company rather than their friends?
A growing body of social-science literature suggests that, yes, this is in fact quite different. The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.
Lael Wilcox Rode Around the World and Then Went for Another Bike Ride
American cyclist Lael Wilcox is claiming the record for the fastest woman to bike around the world.
The 38-year-old started her journey in Chicago on May 26 and ended it in Chicago on Sept. 11, riding 18,125 miles over the course of 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes:
"I've just been on a total high. From three days out from the finish, I just got this feeling like, 'I can do this,' and I felt like I was flying. And I'm still kind of riding that wave.
I just had so much fun out there, and it meant so much to me. And, you know, it also felt so good to be coming to the end of it."
Her record has yet to be certified by Guinness World Records, but it would beat by more than two weeks the previous record of 124 days and 11 hours set by Scottish cyclist Jenny Graham in 2018.
Argentina Scrapped Its Rent Controls. Now the Market Is Thriving
President Javier Milei’s fiscal ‘shock therapy’ yields lower rents overall, but some people feel squeezed.
For years, Argentina imposed one of the world’s strictest rent-control laws. It was meant to keep homes such as the stately belle epoque apartments of Buenos Aires affordable, but instead, officials here say, rents soared.
Now, the country’s new president, Javier Milei, has scrapped the rental law, along with most government price controls, in a fiscal experiment that he is conducting to revive South America’s second-biggest economy.
The result: The Argentine capital is undergoing a rental-market boom. Landlords are rushing to put their properties back on the market, with Buenos Aires rental supplies increasing by over 170%. While rents are still up in nominal terms, many renters are getting better deals than ever, with a 40% decline in the real price of rental properties when adjusted for inflation since last October, said Federico González Rouco, an economist at Buenos Aires-based Empiria Consultores.
Milei, a libertarian economist, long warned Argentines that his free-market changes would initially make conditions worse before they got better as he slashed public spending to tame inflation. He said it was necessary to unravel tight economic controls he inherited from the previous, left-wing Peronist government, which implemented price controls on some 50,000 products from food to clothing as part of its Fair Prices program.
“They inherited a disastrous economic situation, and getting out of this mess will take time,” said Alberto Cavallo, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied Argentina’s price controls.
Threatened With Jail Over a Scandal Headlined by Brett Favre
A little more than a year ago, a young reporter named Anna Wolfe was the talk of this town and of journalism for a series of stories that won her the coveted Pulitzer Prize.
She was invited to an exclusive dinner at the Washington home of legendary reporter Bob Woodward. A handful of media suitors reached out to see if she was ready to ditch Jackson and move on to the big time. She had even been offered a free treatment to rid her yard of mosquitoes by a local pest service.
Wolfe, a reporter with Mississippi Today, a nonprofit, online news outlet, won the Pulitzer for detailing a disturbing $77 million welfare fraud scandal in the nation's second-poorest state, a scandal headlined by Mississippi's most famous athlete, Brett Favre.
The reporting described how, with then-Gov. Phil Bryant in office, Favre and a handful of others scored millions of dollars that were supposed to go to welfare families but were instead used on projects that included a college volleyball facility and a concussion drug company.
Instead, not long after the Pulitzers were announced, the former governor sued Mississippi Today for defamation, setting off a battle that not only soured Wolfe's and Mississippi Today's moment but, more troubling to Wolfe, turned the focus away from the scandal itself.
That's because not only has Bryant's lawsuit not gone away despite Mississippi Today's insistence that its reporting is truthful, but the former governor also recently asked a circuit court to hold Wolfe and the news organization in contempt of court. The governor wants all of Wolfe's notes. He wants her emails. He wants her confidential sources. And the judge has ordered, at the very least, that Wolfe and Co. show him what they've got so he can determine its relevance to the case.
Wolfe and her boss, Adam Ganucheau, have said there's no way they're giving up confidential sources. They say they would rather defy the court and face possible jail or, probably more likely, see their news organization get hammered with substantial damages.
What was once a story about poverty, power and Brett Favre, has now become a battle involving the First Amendment.
Don’t Ever Hand Your Phone to the Cops
Digital IDs make it tempting to leave your driver’s license at home — but that’s a dangerous risk.
You should never voluntarily hand your phone to a police officer.
It’s going to become increasingly tempting for the cops to ask and for you to comply, especially as more and more states adopt digital ID systems that allow driver’s licenses and state IDs to be added to Apple Wallet on iOS and Google Wallet on Android.
Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.
You might be thinking at this point: you’ve got nothing incriminating on your phone! And an officer may well come to that conclusion. But they could also find something you didn’t even realize was there. “There are a lot of laws on the books, and if a prosecutor or police officer decides to go after you, are you sure you didn’t do anything?” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told The Verge. “You’re only opening yourself to abuse, to errors, to mistakes. There could be a coincidence that placed you at the scene of a crime that you weren’t even aware of.” Even if you assume most officers are acting in good faith, there are plenty of documented instances of officers abusing their power and facing no legal repercussions. There’s no reason to preemptively hand over something that could be used against you.
There are some minor protections built into Apple and Google’s current systems — you can display an encrypted ID without fully unlocking your phone, and various authorities can scan your ID wirelessly if they have special readers. But you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re searching the web for the technical and policy details of your digital ID system when a cop demands your phone — you’re much better off handing over your physical ID card.
The ‘Law of the Land’ Has Been Replaced
The Dubai International Financial Center shows the future of law and commerce.
The Dubai International Financial Center is home to thousands of companies from around the world. Some of them have organic connections to the emirate; others are merely taking advantage of the center’s business-friendly rules and regulations around tax, immigration, and labor. A third group of businesses have chosen the DIFC not for the office space, or the taxes, but as a home base for legal disputes alone. In the event of a lawsuit, the DIFC is where they want to have their day in court.
That’s because Dubai’s financial center is not governed by Dubai—at least, not in the way most of us understand governance. The enclave is a special economic zone overseen by a board appointed by the city-state’s ruler, with its own bespoke laws drawn up for the benefit of its clients.
The DIFC is also a shimmering shopping center with three hotels, luxury apartment towers, high-end restaurants, clothing stores, spas, beauty salons, and art galleries. There’s even a mosque, open 24/7. The 110-acre compound sits in the shadow of the Gate, a gigantic rectangular structure inspired by the Arc de Triomphe. The Gate looks like the Parisian monument—had the French only chosen to commemorate their war dead with millions of gray Legos. But when you walk through it, you enter a microcosm of a world where we may someday all live. This is a world where boundaries are drawn not just around nations but around people and companies and wealth—a world with new kinds of states and new kinds of laws. Dubai is a test case for where they will take us.
Watch These Cute Videos of Babies (and Learn Something, Too)
A social media account features smiley toddlers, while also offering positive lessons about child development.
Is it possible that on X — the social media site formerly known as Twitter and sometimes called “the hell site” — there remains a font of delight and edification, a place to witness laughter and even love?
The answer, believe it or not, is yes. It is the account of Dan Wuori, an education policy consultant, who posts videos of babies and toddlers figuring out the world, often with parents as loving coaches. Mr. Wuori provides the color commentary, explaining key concepts in child development.
His feed is educational, but also, simply put — “awwwww.”
Links: The New York Times (and Mr. Wuori’s Twitter account)
Regarding Lael Wilcox's new world record for cycling around the world. I did some quick calculator math, and she averaged 167 miles per day. Riding every day, with no breaks. If she took any breaks, the average miles-per-day goes up. I am a recreational cyclist, and if I get a 10-mile ride, it was a good day. Reminds me of when I ran my one and only marathon in 1995. I did it in 4:20; the winner ran a 2:08 race -- less than half the time. There are super-humans among us, and she is one of them. What an accomplishment!
Loved the babies Bill. Good link.
Read about the horrible lawsuit in Mississippi. It should give any writer pause but for heavens sake, keep at it. It’s crap like this that has shut down a lot of locals; that and hedge fund buy outs.
Also enjoyed the story about that monumental bike ride. Just trying to work out the logistics would break my brain. Not only would one have to figure out a route, transportation, lodging, travel costs, but the most fickle of all travel, weather just to name a few. Egads what an accomplishment on so many levels.