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.
Free for ALL Friday
25 Ways Travel Has Changed This Century
RIP, MapQuest, anonymity and open seating.
Remember paper maps?
Or carrying a salon’s worth of hair products through airport security?
Cruise ships used to be about sailing and the sea. If you wanted to rent a room, you went to a hotel. People wore hard pants on planes.
Those were such quaint times.
The past quarter-century has been a whirlwind of change. In the world of travel alone, there have been innovations and inventions, sobering tragedies and surprising trends.
As we enter Q2 of the 21st century, our staff discussed the biggest moments and advances that took place between 2000 and 2025. Then we asked industry stalwarts for theirs. The list of 25 is a reminder that the business of travel takes us to places that we couldn’t imagine — and then makes them a given.
Curt Cignetti Has Won Two Bowls at Indiana—and Eaten 500 Bowls at Chipotle
The Hoosiers’ coach transformed one of college football’s worst programs into a national title contender. But, day after day, his burrito bowl order stays exactly the same.
When he took over the team with more losses than any other in college football, Indiana’s players weren’t sure what to make of Curt Cignetti.
But from the very beginning of the most unlikely turnaround the sport has ever seen—long before the Hoosiers won the Rose Bowl and the Peach Bowl and drew within one win of a national title—they quickly realized that their new coach knew a thing or two about another kind of bowl.
Chipotle burrito bowls.
Cignetti, 64, is such a fierce creature of habit—even by the maniacal standards of college football coaches—that he eats the same burrito bowl every single day of every single week, except when his team is traveling. He orders rice, beans and chicken, skips the rest of the toppings, but adds a side of guacamole. His order costs $10.90 before tax and comes in at 750 calories.
And as far as Cignetti is concerned, not having to worry about lunch is simply another way to spend more time worrying about football.
More Gen Z Men Live With Parents in This City Than Anywhere in the US. How Do They Date?
In Vallejo, California, ‘trad sons’ report feeling trapped by family obligations, slim job prospects and the fear of violence – leaving little room for romance.
IAre boys becoming men later? In recent decades, the markers of adulthood have shifted for young American men: they are almost twice as likely to be single, less likely to go to college and more likely to be unemployed.
Most significantly for their parents, they are also less likely to have fled the nest, with the term “trad son” springing into social media lexicon in recent months. In the 1970s, only 8% of Americans aged 25 to 34 were living with their parents, but by 2023, that figure had jumped to 18%, with men more likely to live at home than women, according to a Pew survey.
But not everywhere in the US has the same rates of adults living in their familial home. The living arrangement is least common in the midwest and most common in the north-east. Topping the list was Vallejo, where 33% of young adults live with their parents.
How are they making it work?
Matthew McConaughey Trademarks Himself to Fight AI Misuse
Actor plans to use trademarks of himself saying ‘Alright, alright, alright’ and staring at a camera to combat AI fakes in court.
Matthew McConaughey is taking a novel legal approach to combat unauthorized artificial-intelligence fakes: trademarking himself.
Over the past several months, the “Interstellar” and “Magic Mike” star has had eight trademark applications approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office featuring him staring, smiling and talking. His attorneys said the trademarks are meant to stop AI apps or users from simulating McConaughey’s voice or likeness without permission—an increasingly common concern of performers.
The trademarks include a seven-second clip of the Oscar-winner standing on a porch, a three-second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree, and audio of him saying “Alright, alright, alright,” his famous line from the 1993 movie “Dazed and Confused,” according to the approved applications.
“In a world where we’re watching everybody scramble to figure out what to do about AI misuse, we have a tool now to stop someone in their tracks or take them to federal court,” said Jonathan Pollack, one of McConaughey’s attorneys.
U.S. Citizens Are Joining the Military to Protect Undocumented Parents
Amid an ICE crackdown in her area, an Oregon National Guard recruiter offers U.S. citizens a way to save their immigrant parents.
She believed that the key to being a good recruiter was not just selling the military and its benefits, but herself. Sgt. First Class Rosa Cortez wanted potential recruits to notice the pictures of her smiling children, her college diploma and the awards she had earned in the course of her nearly 20 years with the Oregon National Guard.
Her goal was to “radiate positivity,” she said. “People will see it and want to align with you.”
Lately though, she, along with hundreds of other recruiters around the country, had been offering something else: protection from the government.
In many areas with large Hispanic populations, a little-known government program called Parole in Place has become a refuge of last resort and a powerful recruiting tool.
Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible to enlist in the military. The Parole in Place program, launched in 2013, provides the undocumented parents and spouses of service members protection from deportation, and an expedited pathway to permanent residency.
Its origins trace to May 2007, one of the deadliest months of the Iraq War. Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez’s platoon was patrolling a village south of Baghdad when insurgents attacked and took him captive. His remains were recovered more than a year later.
While thousands of U.S. troops searched for the 25-year-old soldier, his wife, who had entered the United States illegally from the Dominican Republic, was being deported. Amid a public outcry, the Bush administration granted her permanent residency.
Senators Launch a Cross-Party Effort to End Stock Trading by Lawmakers
I feel like this is one of the few things most Americans seem to agree on.
Two senators from opposite parties are joining forces in a renewed push to ban members of Congress from trading stocks, an effort that has broad public support but has repeatedly stalled on Capitol Hill.
Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Republican Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida on Thursday plan to introduce legislation, first shared with The Associated Press, that would bar lawmakers and their immediate family members from trading or owning individual stocks.
It’s the latest in a flurry of proposals in the House and the Senate to limit stock trading in Congress, lending bipartisan momentum to the issue. But the sheer number of proposals has clouded the path forward. Republican leaders in the House are pushing their own bill on stock ownership, an alternative that critics have dismissed as watered down.
“There’s an American consensus around this, not a partisan consensus, that members of Congress and, frankly, senior members of administrations and the White House, shouldn’t be making money off the backs of the American people,” Gillibrand said.
The Cold War Agreement That Opened Greenland to the US Military
Apropos of nothing: In 1951, the U.S. and Denmark signed a mutual defense pact directed by NATO that remains in effect.
Denmark declared its neutrality at the onset of World War II, but Germany still invaded in 1940 and placed Denmark under Nazi occupation. Since Greenland was a Danish colony, there was great concern in the United States that Germany would invade Greenland, too, giving the Nazis a North American base of operations.
“If Britain fell, the Nazis were thinking about how they could expand beyond Europe,” says Zellen, author of Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World. “One of the plans was to get into Greenland, then extend beyond Greenland to grab Labrador and Newfoundland. All that [North American] territory was in play.”
With the Danish government under Nazi control, the Danish ambassador in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, acted on his own and signed a 1941 defense agreement giving the United States broad authority to build airstrips and ports in Greenland and to station U.S. military personnel on the island.
Over the next four years, the U.S. built 13 Army bases and four Navy bases in Greenland manned by nearly 5,800 military personnel. By 1944, American troops constituted roughly 25 percent of Greenland’s population.
In 1951, NATO directed the U.S. and Denmark to negotiate a treaty that would provide for the mutual defense of both Greenland and “the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area.”
What NATO and Denmark didn’t know was that the U.S. had already secretly decided to build a massive U.S. air base at Thule in northern Greenland. The project, codenamed “Blue Jay,” was greenlit in December 1950 as the linchpin of a new U.S. nuclear defense strategy in the Arctic.
“The fear was that a Soviet plane with an atomic weapon strapped to its belly could zigzag its way across the high North Atlantic, pop over Eastern Canada and drop a nuke on New York,” Zellen says. “And so the U.S. wanted to have a presence in Greenland to conduct aerial surveillance of the horizon.”