[COPY] Free for ALL Friday!

It's Free for All Friday!

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.

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Real Doctors of New York Spill Their Guts

E.R. doctors want you to know that they are people, too. At an event called Airway, one confessed, “I do not like these big, high stakes, bloody, messy, risky procedures.”

Grace Glassman took the mic. A 56-year-old emergency physician, she launched into a story of the day she was preparing to do a rare and gruesome procedure called a lateral canthotomy.

The patient was an intoxicated male who had tried to hang himself with his bedsheets the previous night. Now he had a bloody mass behind his eyeball. “If people are squeamish, I suggest you get your AirPods out, put them in and you turn up your music now,” Glassman said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Nine doctors were gathered at a Brooklyn Public Library branch in Fort Greene on a Saturday night to tell true stories at an event called Airway. All work in Brooklyn at Maimonides Health, most of them in the hospital’s emergency room. They were taking the night off to try to talk honestly about the pride and occasional inadequacy they felt in their work. In concept, Airway is like the Moth — ordinary people telling everyday stories — but with all the vérité drama of HBO Max’s scripted E.R. show “The Pitt.”

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How Much Will You Save or Lose With Trump’s ‘Big’ Tax Bill?

President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are on the cusp of passing legislation to make permanent trillions of dollars of tax cuts enacted in 2017.

See how your finances — and those of other Americans — would change using this calculator, which was developed in partnership with Penn Wharton Budget Model. The calculator shows the estimated effects of the House-passed bill compared with what people would pay without the bill.

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America’s Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff

O.K., usually I include a quick intro and a snippet of the article in these blurbs, but I think I can do a better job of summarzing this one on my own. In short:

This might be a surprise, but while the U.S. has a very high incarceration rate, the number of U.S. prison inmates has actually fallen from 2009: 1.6 million then to 1.2 million in 2023.

The argument in this article is that almost everyone who serves a long prison sentence in the U.S. has been to prison before. So, the best predictor of whether we'll have a big population 10 or 20 years from now has to do with how many young people we have serving shorter prison sentences now.

Lo and behold, the incarceration rate among younger people 25 or so years ago was lower that it had been 25 years before that. (This sort of makes sense if you consider that the economy was bonkers 25 years ago -- think the days of DotCom 1.0.)

"The prison system is like a badly overloaded tractor trailer—it takes a long time to stop even after the brakes are hit. That tractor trailer is finally slowing down, decades after the “great crime decline” began in the 1990s."

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The Weapon That Terrorizes Ukrainians by Night

How Russia’s terrifying long-range drone program has brought about a deadly new phase in the war.

One evening in late March, Liudmyla Zarutska, a vigorous woman of 80 years, left work and headed to her apartment on the left bank of the Dnipro River in Kyiv, Ukraine. A member of the cleaning staff at the city’s Palace of Children and Youth, Zarutska planned to retire on April 1. Winter’s chill was easing. She had just completed her final Saturday shift and looked forward to life as a pensioner, timed to begin in the warming weather of spring.

No one knows what Liuda did in the hours after [a] phone call [with her son].

Maybe she listened to music. She enjoyed Eric Clapton and Sting, tastes developed in the 1980s when Mykola, stationed in East Germany, brought home a tape deck and cassettes smuggled across the Iron Curtain. Maybe she brewed coffee. When the Soviet Union dissolved, one newfound pleasure was access to quality beans, which Liuda rarely went without. However she passed the time, [her son] suspects she ultimately nodded off on the living-room couch or in her bedroom a few paces away. Either location would explain how she survived the initial impact on her apartment’s roof, minutes after midnight, of a Geran-2 drone.

Geran is one of Russia’s names for its domestically produced line of Shaheds — long-range attack drones of Iranian design. In current form they measure about 11 feet long, weigh more than 400 pounds and dive almost invisibly through night skies in carbon-fiber hulls tinted black. In tiresome Orwellian fashion, “geran” is also Russian for geranium, and the geranium that slammed onto the reinforced concrete ceiling of Liuda’s apartment carried a fragmenting high-explosive warhead enhanced with small tungsten-alloy balls and an incendiary metallic fill.

The momentum behind the strike combined with the warhead’s explosion to breach a five-foot-wide hole into Mykola’s childhood bedroom and blast the metal spheres across the space. ... The room’s concrete walls absorbed the metal. But this weapon’s creators had conceived of multiple ways to kill.

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The Best Small-Business Advice I Ever Got

We asked readers to tell us what counsel has been the most useful in getting their startups off the ground—and keep them running.

There's a lot of good advice in here. Example:

Your most important employee is your bookkeeper. He or she must have an accounting degree. Meet with them weekly. Are you spending more than you’re bringing in? Where’s the money going? Do you really need all of your big-ticket equipment, or services, or consultants? Are you depositing your payroll taxes? We had technical writers placed in Silicon Valley companies, and we had to make federal tax deposits every day, but we didn’t know that!

Also, a CEO often rolls up her sleeves and helps with the work all day (and night). But you are the only one who had the vision, the passion. So you have to take an hour or a day occasionally to take a helicopter view. Ask: How’s it going? What are the weak parts? How can we fix those areas? And, most important, What can we do to grow?

Dorothy Webster, Humble, Texas

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Can Chewing a Hard Piece of Plastic Give You a More ‘Manly’ Jawline?

That’s what the makers of Jawzrsize promise.

Every morning for the past three weeks I have spent five minutes chewing on a smooth piece of plastic the size of a small egg. It's called a Jawzrsize, and, at least according to hundreds of online testimonials and more than a few viral videos, continuing to regularly chew on this thing will grow and sculpt more than 50 muscles in my neck and jaw, leaving me with a sharper and more “masculine” appearance. Which is easy enough to laugh at—but not when you've still got a minute to go and your jaw is burning. It's a real workout—it feels like I'm trying to lift a weight that I'm not quite strong enough for.

I first became aware of Jawzrsize through a video on my Instagram discover page. (It's that kind of product.) In the video, CEO Brandon Harris held forth on the “forgotten value of biting” before chomping down on the product and flexing his neck. It was completely bizarre—and I couldn't help but click for more. When Harris speaks he sounds like Matthew McConaughey after four Red Bulls, quickly shifting between surf-bro philosophy to impassioned sales pitches.

According to Harris, who repeatedly points out that he is not a doctor, the science behind the Jawersize is simple. The soft foods in the current Western diet have divorced us from the way our ancestors ate. That in turn gave us weaker facial features. The resistance that Jawersize offers builds the muscles in the jaw and face through repeated use, resulting in a sort of primal connection to our historical lineage and a more defined and handsome jawline.

I took a picture before I started, and another after three weeks of chewing. If you really squint, my jaw does look slightly more defined in the “after.” Maybe. It might just be the lighting. What I do know for sure is, shortly after starting my facial fitness journey, a co-worker from an old restaurant job hit me up on Instagram to confess a crush. Could that be a coincidence?

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At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers

Sara Burnett went from an introductory course to a world championship in just over a year.

Sara Burnett had initially planned to spend only a few weeks practicing at Blue Element Freediving, a training center in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. The area is popular among free divers, who plunge deep into open water without a scuba tank, hitting depths that would make a civilian’s ears pop upon contemplation. The water is so warm that a diver, squeezed into a thick wet suit, has the not unpleasant sensation of being cooked sous vide.

Burnett, who’s 41, grew up largely in Texas but has rarely been landlocked since: She now lives in St. Lucia, an island not far from Dominica. She started free diving in July 2023, less than a year prior to her visit to Blue Element, and was already reaching the same depths as veteran divers. But she treated the sport like a hobby—she hadn’t considered entering any high-level contests. Then she found out about an upcoming competition at Blue Element that attracts both enthusiasts and elite competitors.

She was still so new to the sport that she barely knew the rules of competitions. Floating on the surface before her first official dive, she asked the judge whether she should submerge before the judge finished counting down or after. “She was like, ‘Read the rule book!’ ” Burnett recalls, laughing. But she performed well during the tournament, reaching 65 meters.

That same judge told her, after she had completed her dives, that she ought to try for the U.S. women’s free diving team. She was startled when she was one of four women chosen for the U.S. team.

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