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. (If you do find links that don’t work, let me know!)
Teen Knew She Had a Long-Lost Sister Somewhere. They Found Each Other Facing Off at Softball Game: ‘No Way’ (Exclusive)
Samantha Rensvold, 19, tells PEOPLE she was hesitant to talk to her long-lost sister at first, just in case she was wrong, until learning Kyann Dean’s name
Samantha Rensvold grew up knowing she was adopted — and she eventually found out that she had a younger sister somewhere out there, too. But since her younger sister’s adoption was closed, she had no idea where to begin looking for her.
However, in a twist the 19-year-old student didn’t see coming, the mystery was unexpectedly solved during a softball tournament in Montana.
On Aug. 1, 2025, as Rensvold was in the middle of a game, her teammate noticed that a player from the opposing team bore a striking resemblance to the teen athlete.
“I hadn’t seen her close up yet when my teammate was pointing out to me,” Rensvold recalls, noting that when she did sneak a peek, she was “pretty much in denial.”
“I was like, ‘There’s no way that this would happen to me right now,’ ” she adds.
After the game, Rensvold decided not to speak to Dean, now 18, not wanting to be wrong — but when she got back home, her mother suggested that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take another look at the tournament roster.
Besides how similar they looked, Rensvold says her mom spotted something else right away about the other girl.
“We looked at the roster and she saw that her name was ‘Kyann,’ ” Rensvold says. “My mom knew that that’s what my birth mom named her.”
“So my mom was like, ‘That has to be your sister. That’s not a coincidence,’ ” the teen adds.
Link: PEOPLE
5 Decades After Adoption, St. Louis Man Learns His Father Is a Rock Star
Michael Goessling’s first phone call with his biological father brought a shock: He was speaking to Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers.
The first time Michael Goessling, who was adopted as an infant, spoke to his biological father he asked him what he did for a living.
Musician, said the man, who called himself “Mike.”
Still on the phone, and sitting in his car in his driveway, Mr. Goessling had already begun scouring the internet when Mike mentioned he was on tour and would be performing in St. Louis, where Mr. Goessling lives.
“And I’m looking, and the voice, and it all starts coming together,” Mr. Goessling recalled during a phone interview on Thursday. “I just spit it out: ‘Are you Michael McDonald?’ He chuckled and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m afraid so.’”
That initial conversation between father and son took place in May 2025. Mr. Goessling, 59, has had some time to get used to the idea that his father rose to fame as a soulful lead vocalist of the Doobie Brothers.
For Mr. Goessling, the discovery still feels surreal. During a lifetime of wondering about his biological parents, he mostly longed to be able to tell them he had a good life thanks to the kind and loving couple who adopted him.
“I was always very, very grateful to my birth parents for the choices they made on my behalf and giving me a shot in this world,” he added.
Link: New York Times
Erling Haaland Conquered the World’s Biggest Sport. Then He Came For America.
Norway’s scoring machine on terrifying his opponents—and the surreal World Cup summer that turned him into much more than a soccer star.
ON THE JULY DAY when Erling Haaland boarded a flight home from the best summer of his life, he brought along a furry traveling companion.
The 6-foot-5 soccer star who had just charmed America carried his little friend up the stairs, strode onto the aircraft and wedged him into a business-class seat to cross the Atlantic. Witnessing this spectacle, Haaland’s longtime partner, Isabel Haugseng Johansen, shot him a look—the kind of look you shoot the man in your life when his carry-on is a $750 taxidermied raccoon clutching a liquor bottle in his paws.
“Is he coming with us now?” she asked.
Of course he was, along with the two stuffed squirrels Haaland had also picked up at a Western-themed store in Dallas. The menagerie hardly came as a surprise. Johansen knows that, wherever he goes, Haaland is an absolute maximalist. Beyond all of the goals and all of the trophies, his years of accumulation have ranged from a dozen or so Birkin handbags from Hermès, a suite’s worth of Minecraft-themed products (lamps, T-shirts, flip-flops, a fridge) for marathon gaming sessions with friends and a 16th-century manuscript of Viking sagas, which he bought for $134,000 to donate to his hometown. Necessity doesn’t cross his mind. When Louis Vuitton released a line of leather charms shaped like sea animals, he bought all of those, too.
“Everything I collect kind of has a memory in it,” he says. “It sounds stupid, but it just gives me a kind of joy.”
But nothing in Haaland’s 26 years left him with a more vivid compilation of memories than this summer’s World Cup in North America.
Link: Wall Street Journal
The Former NFL Lineman Who Solved a Decades-Old Math Problem
John Urschel gave up his career with the Baltimore Ravens to study math at MIT
A former NFL player named John Urschel decided to do some light reading this week, and for him that meant leafing through the latest math papers from OpenAI about topics such as the Riemann hypothesis.
“Oh my lord,” he thought. “I was absolutely floored.”
Urschel was blown away by the findings because he happened to understand the hundreds of proofs better than nearly any human on the planet. Nine years ago, he traded the National Football League for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Monday, instead of studying abstract play designs, he was publishing some impenetrable language of his own to prove a decades-old mathematical conjecture.
Urschel’s paper, titled “On the Growth Factor of Random Matrices,” is one in a deluge of AI-assisted proofs that mathematicians have achieved in this new era when they can combine their genius with supercomputing power. But within this community of brainiacs, there isn’t a single person quite like the 35-year-old Urschel. After three years with the Baltimore Ravens, the offensive lineman who was listed at 6-foot-3 and 313 pounds ditched his helmet to become a professional egghead in 2017. And he hasn’t regretted it for a moment since.
“I feel like I bet on myself in a big way,” Urschel says. “I’m living my best life right now.”
More than anything, Urschel is a math guy now—his latest proof is proof.
Link: Wall Street Journal
In Praise of ‘Difficult’ Kids
Feisty children can be exhausting. They also possess a moral fire that deserves cultivating.
In 1996, I was a freshly minted high-school history teacher offering a lesson about the presidential election. Ned, who sat in the back row, was doing what Ned always did: making his classmates laugh. He had a gift for the well-timed quip. His comebacks flew so quickly, it was as if he’d prepared them in advance. Generally, he seemed to invest more energy in entertaining the room than in whatever we were studying.
A few years ago, Ned reached out to me on Facebook. He is now a high-school English teacher. In his message, he recalled in great detail the debates we’d had about the Civil War, the play our class had performed about Vietnam, the days I had assigned students to bring in a newspaper article and explain it to the class—which is when he had started reading the paper. And all this time, I’d assumed Ned hadn’t been paying attention.
Truth be told, in my 30 years in schools, I’ve met a lot of kids like Ned: the ones who won’t stop with the commentary; the ones who raise a hand not to answer a question but to challenge its premise; the contrarians and antagonists who make some teachers quietly miserable. These students can be exhausting. They are also among the most important in any school, and the ones whom educational institutions tend to be the most at risk of failing.
I’ve seen a lot of children grow up—and I’ve come to believe that many of the adults whom we ultimately admire most were not easy teenagers.
Link: The Atlantic
U.S. States Don’t Have Sharia Law. But Bills to Ban it are Still Spiking.
A Washington Post analysis shows a big jump in anti-sharia legislation and public commentary in the past two years.
For the past two years, state Rep. Timmy Ladner has put forward bills “to prohibit the application of Sharia in Mississippi courts.” He plans to try again when the next legislative session opens.
The Republican lawmaker says he is proposing the legislation even though he can’t name any examples of people trying to impose an Islamic precept or Islamic religious law on his state’s legal system, and he suspects that wouldn’t be possible under U.S. law, anyway.
“It’s preventative maintenance,” Ladner said of what he described as a push from his constituents for the bill. “We want to stop it before it has a chance.”
State and federal lawmakers introduced at least 39 bills and resolutions targeting sharia in 2025 and 2026, The Post’s analysis of data from Legiscan found. Six measures in six states passed, many stalled and some remain pending. In contrast, a total of 48 such proposals were introduced from 2010 to 2024.
The legislative proposals in many cases would bar the government — including courts, law enforcement agencies and immigration processes — from recognizing or applying Islamic precepts in violation of civil law. A Tennessee House GOP news release issued after the signing of the “Crush Transnational Repression in Tennessee Act” said “the new law protects Tennesseans from the enforcement of Sharia Law, an Islamic legal system that restricts individual freedoms and human rights.”
Link: Washington Post
Mass Trials Put Hundreds in One Dock in El Salvador
Lawyers warn that the mass trials of people imprisoned during President Nayib Bukele’s gang crackdown are marred by vague evidence and restrictions on a proper defense.
Across El Salvador, hundreds of inmates appear in court by video simultaneously for a single, joint hearing. Some lawyers say that they are first meeting their clients on the same day as their trial. And individual anonymous witnesses are testifying against dozens of suspects at a time, human rights groups say.
More than four years after President Nayib Bukele’s administration arrested tens of thousands of people in a crackdown on gang violence, those detained are finally getting their day in court.
But the trials are unlike anything seen before by most lawyers.
Hundreds of detainees at a time face mass trials that result in near-universal convictions for gang-related offenses, according to a new report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch, as well as four defense lawyers who spoke directly to The New York Times.
The lawyers and Human Rights Watch reported widespread violations of international human rights conventions in these trials.
The lawyers interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from talking publicly about their cases and feared government reprisals. All said their clients had been in detention for at least three to four years before facing trial.
“First it was mass arrests, now it’s mass convictions,” said Juanita Goebertus, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch. “These trials don’t provide redress to victims of gang violence. They are designed to rubber-stamp arbitrary arrests and deliver long prison sentences, in many cases to innocent people.”
Link: New York Times
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!