Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
Before we dive in … two things …
First, for any readers who missed it, here’s my 2026 quotes article! LINK.
Second, the Murphy family watched Raiders of the Lost Ark last night—a 1981 movie set 45 years earlier in 1936. We are now in 2026, which means a movie today set 45 years ago would take place in … 1981!
OK with that … 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.
The Year of the $100 Million House
For the first time ever, every luxury property on the list of 2025’s 10 biggest sales traded at nine figures or more
The U.S. housing market in 2025 was tepid at best. Ultraluxury real estate, on the other hand, was white-hot.
The top 10 residential deals were all above $100 million—up from seven in 2024 and five in 2023, according to data compiled by appraiser Jonathan Miller and The Wall Street Journal. This milestone also topped the eight $100 million-plus deals in 2021, at the height of Covid’s real-estate frenzy.
Deals of this magnitude are no longer a fluke, said Miller, who said since the pandemic there have been an average of 40 sales a year for $50 million or more. “The separation between the haves and have-nots is expanding, and it is being reflected in real estate,” Miller said.
ling together large assemblages, including Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi, who amassed a roughly $250 million compound in Palm Beach, and investor David Hoffmann, who paid $105 million combined for adjacent waterfront properties in Naples.
Such assemblages have investment value since they can be broken up, sold in chunks or rented down the line. But they are also wildly personal for those with the means. “It’s all about control,” said Ryan Serhant, of real-estate brokerage Serhant. “Why let someone move in next door if you can move in next door yourself?”
Here’s Everything Elon Musk Promised in 2025 – and Failed to Deliver
Musk is now infamous for his false promises, but even this is excessive.
By now, everyone knows that Elon Musk is very much an optimist when it comes to making predictions.
That’s the nice way to put it. To be blunt, Musk ... makes promises he can’t keep. For example, everyone now is likely very familiar with his infamous 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal where he said he’d put a man on Mars in 10 years. That was 14 years ago.
Years ago, Musk also touted his proposed Hyperloop train system as a way to quickly transport people between cities; that never came to fruition and was likely a ruse to stop other transit projects.
With 2025 over, Mashable decided to revisit his predictions. Time has run out. What did Musk promise for this year that didn’t come to fruition?
A Scammer’s Guide: How Cybercriminals Plot to Rob a Target in a Week
A handbook found during a police raid on a compound used by a cyberfraud gang in the Philippines offers detailed instructions in Chinese for conducting scams and reveals a blueprint for grooming and deception.
“A woman’s IQ is zero when in love,” it states on its second page. “As long as the emotions are in place, the client’s money will naturally follow.”
The first day’s instructions contain a word-for-word script. A second handbook, seized during another law enforcement operation in the country and reviewed by Reuters, gives tips in English and Chinese about how to conduct romance scams.
This kind of fraud is known as “pig-butchering” because the gangs say targets are led like hapless pigs to slaughter. Advice includes:
Birthday: Taurus Zodiac is recommended as it is considered most compatible with other signs.
Family: Pretend to have been divorced for six years, with a daughter who lives with the ex-wife.
Job: Say you have a managerial position at Chinese state oil company Sinopec but are currently stationed outside the country.
More Student Loan Borrowers Are Shedding Debts in Bankruptcy
I’m long since on record as arguing that student loans shouldn’t be flat-out forgiven in most cases, but they should be dischargable in bankruptcy, instead of being singled out as the one kind of debt that usually follows borrowers to the grave. Now, a new study suggests that distressed borrowers using a simpler bankruptcy process are succeeding.
Student loans have long been perceived as impossible to cast off in bankruptcy. Few borrowers dare to even try.
To do so, borrowers must file a separate lawsuit, enduring a costly, stressful process that came with no guarantees. In some parts of the country, they had to prove that their financial lives were “hopeless” before a judge would be willing to wipe their student debts away.
But a recent analysis has uncovered a significant shift: The vast majority of student debtors who seek discharges in bankruptcy are getting them, in large part because of a simpler legal process that was introduced three years ago.
Borrowers have an 87 percent success rate in dismissing most or all of their loans in bankruptcy, according to the study by Jason Iuliano, a professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. That is up from 61 percent in 2017 and more than than double the rate nearly two decades ago.
“That’s strikingly high when you think about the narrative being it’s impossible to discharge,” said Professor Iuliano, whose analysis was published this month in The American Bankruptcy Law Journal and who has been studying the issue for 15 years.
Suddenly Everyone Is Scared to Dance at Concerts and Clubs
More young partygoers are worrying about looking goofy on camera, prompting some artists to wonder if social media is killing dance.
“Dance like nobody’s watching” was always sound advice for anyone hesitant to let loose at a club, concert or wedding. But in a world where everyone has a camera in their pocket, it’s a tough sell.
The new rule: “Dance like anybody could be watching and that footage will follow you forever,” said Sydney Skybetter, a choreographer and associate professor at Brown University.
Although New Year’s Eve is typically a time of uninhibited revelry, more young partyers are wary of getting down. “There’s a feeling that, if you do something stupid, there’s a chance that you’re going to become a big joke or the next meme,” said Marcos Sandoval-Ramirez, a 21-year-old living in Santa Ana, Calif.
This is the paradox of dancing in the age of short-form video: Even as slick choreographed routines proliferate on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, spawning mimics and viral trends, more concertgoers are standing still.
Prominent artists have started to complain.
They Want to Influence You to Do … Nothing
Boredom, or an approximation of it, is an online trend for young people trying to sharpen their attention spans.
“Life, friends, is boring,” the poet John Berryman wrote in one of his haunting “Dream Songs,” published in 1964.
He may have come to an entirely different conclusion if a small device in his pocket, or on his wrist, had thrummed endlessly with updates, notifications, a change to the terms of service of a rarely used gardening app and slop generated by artificial intelligence.
Life, some have come to believe, is not boring enough.
Seemingly banished in this age of digital saturation, boredom is the unlikely star of a social media fad that has young people sharing videos of themselves doing … absolutely nothing. Some last 15 minutes. Others hold out for hours. It’s all part of a bid to reclaim deteriorating attention spans that incessant alerts and dings have gradually eroded.
Unusual Snowfall Shuts Down One of Earth’s Most Advanced Telescopes in the Atacama Desert
Learn more about the snowfall that shut down ALMA in the Atacama desert, and how researchers worry this could be a sign of climate change.
The arid Atacama Desert in Northern Chile is one of the driest places on Earth, with some areas receiving just 0.5 millimeters of rain per year. That extremely dry weather has made the Atacama a prime site for stargazing, and the desert is home to some of the most powerful telescopes we have at our disposal. But a recent freak snowstorm dusted the desert with flakes and sent one of these scopes into shutdown.