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
Are You Aging Well? Try These Simple Tests to Find Out.
They can’t guarantee future health, but they can tell you the trajectory you’re on.
While there’s no crystal ball to predict your future health, there are a few basic tests you can give yourself to gauge your current strength, power, cardiovascular fitness and balance — all of which will influence your physical abilities going forward.
These kinds of tests have been associated with longevity and independent living. They’re also proxies for activities that many people want to be able to do in old age, like getting down on the floor to play with grandchildren or traveling and exploring a new city by foot.
Try these four tests to determine where you currently stand. If you don’t perform as well as you might have hoped, don’t worry: A few strength, conditioning and balance exercises, done regularly, can help you improve your score on each one.
Here’s How to Eliminate, Reduce or Negotiate a Medical Bill
There’s an estimated $195 billion of medical debt in America. But just because a medical bill comes in the mail doesn’t mean you have to pay that exact price. This is actually a transcript of a radio show, but we can pull some good strategy from it:
Unpaid medical debt under $500 will not show up on your credit report; unpaid medical debt over that amount won’t show up for a year.
Nonprofit hospitals (and some for-profit) offer financial assistance, known as charity care, but usually don’t advertise it. However, it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Insist on an an itemized bill, and go through every code and service. People make mistakes.
Call the billing office and ask for “the settlement amount”—those words exactly. In other words, “what is the amount I have to pay you today to make this bill go away?”
If there’s anything left to pay, don’t put it on a credit card. Get on a payment plan with the medical billing office, because unlike a credit card, you usually won’t pay interest.
The Best and Worst Airlines of 2025
The winner has spent billions improving its operations—while navigating a corporate shake-up and revising its strategy
You would be forgiven for thinking no airline deserves a crown for 2025. Maybe your flight was canceled during the government shutdown, bad weather wrecked your vacation plans or you sat on the tarmac because of a shortage of air-traffic controllers.
Hurdles big and small are de rigueur for airlines, unfortunately, and there were some high ones to clear last year. United’s chief financial officer this week likened the industry’s 2025 to being hit with multiple asteroids. What separated the winners and losers was how they handled what was thrown at them. (Or caused by them!)
And the best airline is…
In 2025, the clear winner was Southwest Airlines. The largest U.S. domestic carrier by passengers took first place in The Wall Street Journal’s 18th annual airline scorecard for the first time since 2020. After finishing second to Delta in a photo finish for 2024’s rankings, Southwest this time won by a wide margin, and ended Delta’s four-year winning streak.
Budget carrier Allegiant came in second, followed by Delta in third.
In our ratings basement: American and Frontier, which tied for last place. It was a return trip for Frontier.
They’ve Outsourced the Worst Parts of Their Jobs to Tech. How You Can Do It, Too.
Workers say they found these tips to be most useful in saving them time and effort.
Artificial intelligence is supposed to make your work easier. But figuring out how to use it effectively can be a challenge.
The Washington Post spoke to workers to learn how they’re getting the best use out of AI. Here are five of their best tips.
Actually, I’ll give you one of them:
Warm your cold intro
Before pitching a new client or connecting with a new colleague or other professional contacts, use AI to find commonalities to break the ice.
One tech leader interviwed uses Comet, Perplexity’s AI browser, to find commonalities between her and another person based on their LinkedIn profiles and information available on Google.
She once was able to connect to the CEO of a company she wanted to target because Comet told her that he was a pizza lover who once led a pizza company — a detail buried in a podcast. That tasty tidbit provided a way to warm her cold intro.
This can also help when people are trying to meet new contacts for a career switch.
Their Professors Caught Them Cheating. They Used A.I. to Apologize.
Two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said they grew suspicious after receiving identical apologies from dozens of students they had accused of academic dishonesty.
Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.
But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had, according to the professors, Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, an academic pair known to their students and social media followers as the Data Science Duo.
The students got their comeuppance in a large lecture hall on Oct. 17, when the professors read aloud their identical, less-than-genuine apologies from a projector screen, video from that class showed. Busted. The professors posted about it on social media, where the gotcha moment drew widespread attention.
At a time when educational institutions are grappling with the intrusion of machine learning into classrooms and homework assignments, the professors said they decided to use the episode to teach a lesson in academic integrity. They did not take disciplinary action against the students.
Audi Crooks: The Women’s Basketball Force Fans Struggle to Discuss
The Iowa State basketball star gets all kinds of attention and is learning how to handle it.
Twenty minutes after the loss, Audi Crooks is still with her fans. On the court where her then-No. 11 Iowa State Cyclones were upset by Cincinnati, she’s smiling for photos, usually choosing her favorite pose of head slightly bent and hand on hip. She allows a full-grown woman to jump on her back for one picture and signs the No. 55 replica jersey worn by an adult male. She hugs little girls.
They all look up to her — truly, because she’s 6-foot-3 and stands out with a body unlike any other star in women’s college basketball. She has ready feet and soft hands that dangle to the hems of her short shorts. Her elbows power through defenders who stand like statues, and her shoulders handle those who dare to try anything more. Her body has powered her to the spotlight and atop all other scorers in Division I women’s hoops with 26.9 points per game.
It’s a substantial body, put together but not flabby. Still, her frame is one that you wouldn’t expect to belong to the best player on the court. Because of this, her size and her game are challenging common societal perceptions about what we believe an elite athlete should look like. This makes Crooks, a 21-year-old taking her first steps into womanhood, all the more fascinating — and even more challenging to discuss. In a world still too obsessed with judging the shape of a woman’s body, how should fans talk about female athletes and their size?
A Year Inside Kash Patel’s F.B.I.
Forty-five current and former employees on the changes they say are undermining the agency and making America less safe.
When he returned to office last year, President Trump called the F.B.I. a “corrupt” agency in need of overhaul. He had by then been the subject of three F.B.I. investigations: Agents examined his 2016 campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Though all three inquiries took place in part or entirely under Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director Trump appointed, he repeatedly accused the bureau of mounting a partisan attack against him.
To replace Wray, Trump chose Kash Patel, a former public defender and intelligence official who had never worked for the F.B.I. and had spun conspiracy theories about the bureau. Since Patel’s confirmation last February, the F.B.I. has undergone a transformation that has upended its nonpartisan rules and norms, deeply rattling many of its 38,000 employees.
We interviewed 45 employees who work at the F.B.I. or who left during Trump’s second term, as well as many other current and former government officials. Beginning with Trump’s selection of Patel, our sources narrated the events that most troubled them over the last year. Many details of what we learned are reported here for the first time.
It’s all kind of like this:
Human-intelligence agent: “I had 20 years’ experience. I was involved in undercover sensitive operations. The bureau hired me for national security, to prevent threats from Al Qaeda and other groups throughout the Near East — not to sit in a parking lot arresting immigrants.”
Field-office leader 2: “I am a conservative. I believe in tightening our borders. I just had an issue with the execution of it. My counterparts at D.H.S. were constantly getting yelled at, being threatened and fearing for their jobs. That’s not the way to work. They literally had quotas. Each region had to have a certain amount of arrests every single day. It was completely asinine.”
Northwest special agent: “I did not go to law school, go to Quantico and work counterterrorism operations overseas to be doing traffic control for arrest-a-brown-person day.”
A few “free for all” thoughts…
Why on earth should ANYONE be required to show proof of citizenship to someone who isn't required to show proof that they're actually law enforcement?
If we don't have room for immigrants and dreamers, maybe we should get rid of racists and white supremacists and make some room.
I'm not afraid to say it: | actually like immigrants. A lot. I like their food. I like how hard they work. I like that they're different from me. They're fantastic. I know I can't be the only American who feels this way.
If we have billions to expand ICE we have billions to extend healthcare subsidies.
Why isn’t ICE working in Florida, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico…you know, where the borders are. Minnesota and Maine only share a border with Canada.
Why does the DOJ get away with breaking the bipartisan law congress passed - and Trump signed into law - for the full release of the Epstein files? Is that why they don’t have time to investigate Renee Good’s murder?
America is in a sad state these days. If you deport all the “brown people” who is going to clean houses, work at fast food places, look after lawns and gardens, pick fruit and veg and all those other jobs “white people” don’t want to do? There will always be illegal immigrants looking for a better life, maybe the solution should be to make the path easier instead of terrorizing them.
I liked how you had the same story twice. Good on the professors for calling the kids out for using AI instead of their own brains. Always thought you went to post secondary school to learn how to think, not how to cheat.
The four exercises for aging really interesting; I will have to try them!