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!)
$150 for Pie? A Humble Thanksgiving Staple Gets Pricey.
This season, bakers are charging three figures for luxury versions that combine elaborate prep and premium ingredients. Not everyone is biting.
Bakers in the 18th century who poured stewed pumpkin sweetened with molasses into a rough, thick crust could hardly have imagined their fellow citizens paying more than $100 for a Thanksgiving pie.
But here we are.
What may be this season’s most expensive pie is built on a crust made with Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. Its apple custard filling is swirled with apple cider caramel. On top, a sprinkle of gold leaf crowns sour cream rosettes. New York magazine declared it the best pie to order this Thanksgiving. A 12-inch version will set you back just $150.
“I was like, you know what? Why don’t we just up the ante and start making pies more complicated, because I knew how to make them more complicated,” said Michelle Kogan, the New York chef who created the pricey pie.
In the Hamptons, New Yorkers can order Lena Kristy’s brown butter apple streusel pie or cranberry pecan pie for $80. Both use jam from her shop, Jamagansett, where her $100 salty blueberry pie went viral over the summer. The ensuing snark prompted her to drop the price to $80.
Even Ina Garten, the patron saint of Hamptons entertaining, is skeptical of a pie that costs that much.
“Unless it’s filled with lobster and caviar, I don’t understand it,” she said in a recent interview about holiday pie. “But then, I’ve also never tried one.”
Link: New York Times
Your Dog Is Too Fat: Why Everyone at the Vet’s Office Is at Each Other’s Throats
Tensions are rising as pets become more pampered, prices skyrocket and vets have to deliver harsh news; ‘she should have a waist’
The verdict is in: Our family dog, Frances, is fat.
During a recent exam, the vet said people ought to continue to weigh about the same as they did in their early 20s, and dogs ought to weigh what they did when they were 1. Frances, it turns out, no longer fits into her college jeans.
My family was more than a little rabid over the news.
Tensions between veterinarians, staff and pet owners are running high. The cost of pet care has skyrocketed. Vet practices face labor shortages. Mom-and-pop clinics are disappearing as private-equity firms and large corporations buy up small practices.
Of course there are plenty of healthy relationships, but many vets these days feel disrespected, like the public sees them as service workers rather than medical professionals—similar to waiters, but instead of appetizers they bring reports of arthritis and intestinal worms. And as pets become ever more elevated members of the family, rolling around town in bespoke strollers and open-rear onesies, owners have come to expect a higher level of service.
Some vets see pet owners with similar dread—people who are happy to spend absurd amounts on boutique doodles but then balk when it comes to paying for a basic office visit. It doesn’t help that certain pet owners are filming their vet visits, at times secretly, like it’s a gotcha video.
From start to finish, mistrust abounds. At these prices, it’s easy to see why.
Link: Wall Street Journal
Why Did She Rack Up $40,000 in Parking Tickets? Fill in the ______.
A New York woman has a distinctive name. She was stunned by violations and fines linked to her BMW convertible.
The next time you are stuck in a dispute with the government bureaucracy, consider Carole Blank Brown and the license plate she had on her red BMW convertible.
The plate read “BLANK,” for her maiden name. It became an issue this spring when she updated the car’s registration to an Upper East Side address she had moved to several years ago.
She soon received two notices about unpaid parking tickets. One, for $65, had been issued in March for a missing license plate. The other, for $95, had been issued in February for blocking a driveway. Both listed the offending license plate number as “blank.”
Ms. Brown, a 70-year-old self-employed lawyer and real estate title agent, was confused. She said that she and the convertible had never been at the addresses where the violations occurred. “This is not my car,” she wrote in challenging one of the tickets.
She called the city’s 311 line and was stunned to learn that more than 400 outstanding tickets totaling more than $40,000 in fines had piled up against her and that only an administrative judge at the Finance Department’s Adjudication Division could resolve them.
Ms. Brown had been pulled into a parking-ticket vortex.
Link: New York Times
The Sudden Demise of the Cybertruck, a Culture War on Wheels
Feelings about the angular, stainless steel pickup run deep.
Cybertruck, we hardly knew you. Or maybe we knew you too well.
Tesla announced on Friday the death of its angular, norm-shattering pickup, a sci-fi stainless-steel origami shark on wheels laden with tons of cultural baggage. It was three years old.
Its end came on the concrete floors of Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, after its creator, Elon Musk, said in a post on X that production will cease this coming summer. The factory was built to churn out 250,000 Cybertrucks a year, but amid a torrent of negative attention from Wall Street analysts, internet meme architects and everyday truck buyers, it produced only about a tenth of that.
Response to news of Cybertruck’s passing has been … polite.
“Cybertruck, I can say this, we will always remember you,” Mike Ramsey, an auto industry analyst at Gartner Inc., said in an interview from Detroit on Friday. “You were the most distinctive vehicle that nobody asked for.”
The sudden demise, after Tesla sunk about $2 billion into development and production, led many people to compare Cybertruck to the ultimate business-school example of a flop, the Ford Edsel. But that’s really not fair. The Edsel sold far more vehicles.
Link: New York Times
The S.S. United States, a Historic Supership, Sinks to the Ocean Floor
The 20th-century ocean liner will become an artificial reef, ending efforts to save a ship that was fast, luxurious and (almost) indestructible.
In its glory days, the S.S. United States was fast, luxurious and all but indestructible. As the ocean liner’s designer, William Francis Gibbs, liked to say, “You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her.”
And he was right, up to a point.
On Wednesday one of the greatest ships to sail the seas made its final journey, 180 feet down to the bottom of the ocean. At 8:59 p.m. Central time, the S.S. United States — a midcentury monument to postwar American technology and ambition — slipped below the waves, opening its next chapter as an artificial reef and diving destination.
Stripped of its signature red-white-and-blue smokestacks — they were removed for a planned museum nearby — the S.S. United States cut a somewhat more low and lean profile than it once did. You could say it looked more like a cigarette boat than an ocean liner, if cigarette boats were as long as three football fields.
Still it was a fitting look, because the ship was the fastest ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
The S.S. United States spent most of the 1950s and ’60s ferrying people between New York and Europe, its shipboard orchestras and cocktail lounges entertaining countless travelers — presidents, royalty, immigrants and vacationers. Marilyn Monroe sailed on the ship. Walt Disney. Duke Ellington. Princess Grace. But its most famous passenger was probably the Mona Lisa, in 1963, when the painting visited America.
The effort to turn the S.S. United States into an artificial reef was led by Alex Fogg, the natural resources chief of Okaloosa County, Fla., which bought the ship in 2024 for $1 million. The county is assembling a menagerie of sunken ships for divers to explore off the coast of Destin on Florida’s panhandle.
Link: New York Times
He Learned He Has 35 Siblings. Here’s How He Aired His Family Secret.
Noam Tomaschoff knew something was wrong when his parents asked him to sit down with them at their kitchen table.
His parents each took one of his hands.
“We are not a hand-holding family,” Tomaschoff said. “I thought someone had died.”
Instead, his parents told him a secret they had planned to keep from their only child — and everyone else — forever: The man who raised him was not his biological father. He was conceived with a sperm donor.
“It was like meeting aliens,” said Tomaschoff, 35, who grew up in Toronto and now lives in D.C. “Your entire concept of reality is now called into question.”
Two months later, when DNA test results arrived, Tomaschoff learned that he had at least 15 half siblings. Since then, he has found 20 others, and he believes there are more.
Tomaschoff shared every new development with two close friends from high school. They decided his DNA discovery could become the premise for a one-man musical.
Tomaschoff’s parents were initially not pleased about the idea of the show, which premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2023, then traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, Montreal and Edmonton, Alberta, before returning to Toronto.
Link: MSN
The Young Women Driving the US Prenup Boom: ‘I Want to Protect Myself’
Zillennial couples say they want ‘radical transparency’ around their finances, bucking the idea that prenuptial agreements are rooted in division
Kai Amos does not know adult life without her fiance, Garret.
They are high school sweethearts who met as teens in Idaho and moved across the country to New York together. They got engaged last year and will be married in September.
Their days hum with the constant buzz of wedding planning: picking vendors, writing the guest list, dress shopping. And also meeting with lawyers; the happy couple are working on a prenuptial agreement, to protect their respective assets should they ever get divorced.
Amos, who is 30, understands the concept has baggage. Her more conservative friends and family back home in Idaho view prenups as something a rich man (and it is always a man) uses to rein in a woman he suspects of gold digging (and it is always a woman, usually younger).
But Amos has capital of her own. She has always been ambitious, and grew up envisioning herself as someone who would “make a lot of money”. She did, working her way up in the advertising department of Amazon before becoming a full-time content creator who is launching a scalpcare line. She has stocks and an investment portfolio. She is no fortune hunter, and she witnessed the pain of divorce negotiations between her parents during their separation.
“I love myself enough to protect myself in worst-case scenarios,” Amos said. “I would rather be having a conversation about what’s fair now, with somebody who loves me, than with someone who hates me because we fell out of love.”
Link: Guardian
The 31-Year-Old Trader Who Called Out Jensen Huang’s ‘China Problem’—and Shorted Nvidia
For six months, no one really noticed Culper Research’s report. All that changed this week.
When Christian Lamarco decided to start his own short-selling firm, he named it in honor of the spies who gathered intelligence for George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
He had watched a television show about the Culper ring, which secretly tracked the movements of British forces almost 250 years ago, and he couldn’t help but see the similarities between his shorting and their spycraft.
Now he’s caught up in his own story involving national security, the president of the United States and spectacular allegations of modern espionage.
Six months ago, Culper Research published a report outlining its case against Nvidia, which had become the most valuable company in the world by making the chips that power the global AI economy.
His investigation raised questions about Nvidia’s business in China and what he called an “uncomfortably close” relationship between CEO Jensen Huang and a woman named Alice Huang, who was an executive at one of the company’s major business partners in Southeast Asia. The 40-page report summarized the firm’s short position in a simple thesis.
“This is not a bet against AI,” Culper wrote. “We are short Nvidia for one reason: the company has a significant China problem.”
At first, nobody paid much attention to the 31-year-old short seller whose research typically focused on companies most people have never heard of. The day his report about one of the most important companies on the planet was published, Jensen Huang touched down in Beijing aboard Air Force One on a state trip with President Trump. The next day, Nvidia’s stock hit a record high.
“Sometimes, people care about what you have to say. Sometimes, they don’t,” Lamarco said in an interview. “I guess in this case, they cared six months later.”
Link: Wall Street Journal
‘No Business Having a Gun’: Some ICE Recruits Had a Record of Red Flags
The review offers the most comprehensive look yet at whom DHS hired when it urged people to apply to “defend the homeland” and offered a signing bonus
One officer in Detroit fired multiple shots at a fleeing teenage suspect, fatally striking him in the back in an incident that led to a $2.5 million settlement with his family.
An Arkansas officer was castigated by his supervisor for showing “unreasonable anger” while on the job, and fired after his boss expressed concern about what he might do “when he faces a civilian who he feels has disrespected him.”
Some officers went viral for embarrassing incidents, including a New York City detective who stole nearly $3,000 worth of high-end champagne at a music festival and a Mississippi officer who said under oath that he couldn’t remember core rights bestowed by the U.S. Constitution.
All of them share one thing in common: They were later hired as federal immigration officers to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Link: Washington Post
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!