Free for ALL Friday!

It's Free for All Friday!

Mar 20, 2026

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.

Why You Should Take a 10-Minute ‘Thinking Walk’

A few years ago, Jenny Martin started taking brief “thinking walks.” The habit was partly born of necessity

A few years ago, Jenny Martin started taking brief “thinking walks.” The habit was partly born of necessity—she has two young kids, a busy therapy practice, and a brain that doesn’t easily quiet down—and partly because the research was becoming too persuasive to ignore. She kept hearing that an active break of just 10 minutes was enough to boost creativity and mental clarity.
“Ten minutes turned out to be a surprisingly honest unit of time,” says Martin, a psychologist and founder of Gemstone Wellness in Chicago. “It’s long enough to let a thought fully form, and short enough that there’s no excuse not to go.”
Unlike walks meant purely for exercise, thinking walks are about unplugging from technology, processing thoughts, sparking creativity, and solving problems.

Link: Time (Multiple reporters)

Queens of Some Bumblebee Species Can Survive Underwater for Days

Scientists put the queens of various species through a simulated flood and discovered that some of them could live through it for up to a week

Bumblebee queens hibernate underground through the winter, often in abandoned rodent holes that may flood during heavy rains. For bees that hibernate in such perilous places, the ability to survive brief submersion could mean the difference between life and death.
Researchers in Canada decided to test how long bumblebee queens could survive underwater. They collected 143 queens from four species and submerged them in tubes of water, checking on them every day for up to a week. The queens’ survival varied by species: Common eastern bumblebee queens could survive an average of about eight hours underwater, while two-spotted bumblebee queens lasted more than five days on average.
The scientists aren’t sure exactly how the queens survive so long without oxygen, but they suspect the cold water may help slow the insects’ metabolism to extremely low levels, allowing them to enter a kind of suspended animation.

Link: New York Times (Emily Anthes)

This Car-Buying YouTuber Became Dealerships’ Worst Nightmare

Tomi Mikula’s videos teaching people how to negotiate car deals have made him a celebrity among frustrated buyers—and a villain to dealers

Tomi Mikula was tired of getting ripped off at car dealerships. So he started making YouTube videos showing people exactly how dealers markup prices, hide fees, and use psychological tricks to extract more money from buyers.
His channel exploded. Mikula now has over 2 million subscribers who watch him walk through dealership tactics step-by-step, share leaked dealer documents, and coach viewers on how to negotiate. Dealerships hate him. “I’ve been banned from probably 50 dealerships at this point,” Mikula said.
His most popular videos involve calling dealerships while recording, asking pointed questions about advertised prices, and catching salespeople in contradictions. “The goal isn’t to humiliate anyone,” he said. “It’s to show people that you don’t have to accept the first number they give you.”

Link: Wall Street Journal (Multiple reporters)

How Japan’s Leader Found Her Voice in D.C. Decades Ago

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi got her start in politics as an intern for a trailblazing Colorado lawmaker

Before Sanae Takaichi became Japan’s first female prime minister, she was a 23-year-old intern on Capitol Hill, working for Rep. Patricia Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat who was one of the first women elected to Congress in her own right rather than to fill a deceased husband’s seat.
It was 1987, and Takaichi had come to Washington on a fellowship program. She was struck by how Schroeder commanded respect in a male-dominated institution, how she balanced motherhood with legislative work, and how she fought for issues like family leave without apology.
“She showed me that women could lead without pretending to be men,” Takaichi said in a recent interview. “That you could be feminine and fierce at the same time.” Takaichi returns to Washington this week to meet with President Trump, now leading a nation that still struggles with gender equality in politics but has made her its leader.

Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)

AI Isn’t Coming for Everyone’s Job

The rise and fall of the player piano indicates a robust demand for human labor that machines cannot replace

About 130 years ago, the job of pianist was automated when Edwin Votey created the first player piano. The machine worked by reading music that was encoded by holes punched into rolls of paper, which in turn directed airflows to levers that depressed piano keys.
By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. Nearly every major pianist of the early 20th century made music for these machines. How could humans possibly compete?
Yet today you are more likely to encounter a piano player than a player piano, despite the job being successfully automated a very long time ago. The automatons have been relegated to museums and the rare curiosity. Pianists can be found any night of the week in hotel lobbies, Italian restaurants, and concert halls.
What has provided musicians with this protection from replacement during a century of competition with increasingly sophisticated automation? As John Philip Sousa argued more than 100 years ago, “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.” In the bloodless language of economics, consumer demand places value on who actually provides certain goods and services.

Link: The Atlantic (Adam Ozimek)

Trump’s Hand-Picked Panel Votes to Put His Face on a U.S. Gold Coin

The proposal had been rejected by members of a separate federal coin committee

President Trump’s handpicked arts commission voted on Thursday to approve a commemorative, 24-karat gold coin bearing Mr. Trump’s image, brushing aside debate over whether the coin violates American tradition. The coin shows Mr. Trump with his fists pressed against a desk and a glowering expression on his face.
Many of America’s founders, including George Washington, were fiercely against taking steps that would make its government officials appear like kings, and that included featuring them on the country’s coins. Only a handful of times in history have people been featured on U.S. currency while they were alive.
The administration’s move to mint official coins with Mr. Trump’s face is also legally aggressive. An 1866 law called the Thayer Amendment states: “Only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and securities.” But the Trump administration appears to be resting its actions in part on the argument that a coin is different from currency or a security.
Members of the bipartisan Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee refused last month to consider the proposed gold coin. “It’s wrong. It goes against American culture and the traditions that drive what we put on our coinage,” said Michael Moran, a Republican coin collector. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

Link: Washington Post (Dan Diamond)

Got it! Here’s just the AI novel story formatted as a regular H3 item with quote blocks:

Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use

Its publisher, Hachette, will not release the novel in the United States and will discontinue its U.K. edition, citing its commitment to “original creative expression and storytelling”

Hachette Book Group, one of the largest publishers in the United States, pulled a forthcoming horror novel on Thursday in a decision that followed widespread allegations online that the author relied heavily on artificial intelligence to write the book.
On Thursday, a day after The New York Times approached Hachette citing evidence that the novel appeared to be A.I.-generated, the company said it was pulling the book from publication. By Thursday afternoon, the novel was removed from Amazon and the Hachette website.
Hachette told The Times that its Orbit imprint decided not to publish “Shy Girl,” which was due out in the United States this spring, after conducting a thorough and lengthy review of the text. Hachette said it will also discontinue the book in the U.K., where it was published last fall and has sold 1,800 print copies, according to NielsenIQ BookData.
“Shy Girl,” about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The cancellation of the novel reveals the challenges the book world is navigating as the adoption of A.I. becomes more widespread and as traditional publishers increasingly look to self-published books as a pipeline for hits, particularly in genre fiction.
Readers and many writers remain ferociously opposed to the use of the technology for writing, which they regard as cheating or a form of theft. And A.I.-generated writing is not always easy to spot. “Shy Girl” received some rave reviews when it was self-published, eventually drawing more than 4,900 ratings on Goodreads, and averaging 3.52 stars.
Still, the tide turned as more readers began flagging what they surmised was A.I. slop, slamming the book for its generic and confusing metaphors and repetitive phrasing. “Really bad,” one reader wrote in a one star review. “Pretty sure this was A.I. generated.”

Link: New York Times (Alexandra Alter)

THE HEAVIER STUFF (shortened summaries—read if you have bandwidth):

Why Is the FBI Buying People’s Location Data? - FBI director Kash Patel revealed the agency has resumed purchasing Americans’ location data en masse, circumventing warrant requirements. Federal law enforcement generally needs probable cause to gather cell phone location histories, but buying such information—usually in bulk from data brokers—can sidestep this requirement. Privacy advocates label the practice unconstitutional. The disclosure has many in Congress asking how the government uses this information to track people’s whereabouts. Link: The Guardian (Multiple reporters)
She Killed a Family With Her Speeding Car. Is Probation Enough? - Mary Fong Lau, 80, drove 75 mph in a 25 mph zone through San Francisco, killing a couple and their two young children (ages 3 months and 20 months) at a bus stop. She was not texting, drinking, or having a medical emergency—just driving three times the speed limit. A judge indicated he intends to sentence her to probation only, citing her age and remorse. The victims’ family, flying from Portugal for a vigil, has collected 12,000 signatures condemning the proposed sentence. The district attorney is asking the judge to reconsider. Link: New York Times (Heather Knight)
A U.S. Citizen Now Runs Mexico’s Top Drug Cartel—and Targeting Him Is Complicated - Juan Carlos Valencia González, the California-born stepson of slain kingpin “El Mencho,” now leads the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. His U.S. citizenship creates legal complications: intelligence agencies face additional procedural hurdles to surveil American citizens overseas, even if they’re running billion-dollar drug empires. The citizenship dramatically raises stakes if Trump follows through on targeted assassinations of drug lords. Valencia González comes from “drug dealer royalty” on both sides—his biological father founded the Milenio Cartel, his mother ran the financial arm of Jalisco. Link: Wall Street Journal (Multiple reporters)

Understandably

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