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.
60,000 Gazans Have Been Killed. 18,500 Were Children. These Are Their Names.
I know we're starting with something very heavy today. I honestly can't remember a news organization printing something like this.
In mid-July, the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, released the names and ages of those confirmed killed during the war.
The ministry’s list of names is the only official record of the dead. Children fill page after page. More than 900 were killed before their first birthday.
Israel says it tries to minimize civilian casualties. It says Hamas operates in civilian areas, a justification it has used to target homes, schools, hospitals, and tent encampments for the displaced.
(The list begins like this and goes on for thousands more names.)
عمر الدحدوح | Omar al-Dahdouh, 11 years old
راما ابو عيدة | Rama Abu Eida, 13 years old
حلا ابو ستيته | Hala Abu Steita, 7 years old
حمزة أبو زهير | Hamza Abu Zuhair, 1 year old
محمود ابوسلمية | Mahmoud Abu Salmiya, 6 years old
ابراهيم المقوسي | Ibrahim al-Maqousi, 12 years old
...
Note: I think it's important to share this. It's important to remember the as many as as 240 people from Israel during the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres, along with the 1,200 murdered thousands wounded. Here is the current list updated as of the end of June, noting who has been released, who is still presumed in Gaza, and who has tragically died there. (Chabad.org)
Mexico’s Molar City Could Transform My Smile. Did I Want It To?
More than a thousand dentists have set up shop in Los Algodones, Mexico. Their patients are mostly Americans who can’t afford the U.S.’s dental care.
On weekday mornings in late winter, they start to arrive before dawn. They drive in from Arizona or California, catch a shuttle from Yuma, or park their car in a lot in the Sonoran Desert and cross the border on foot. The path for pedestrians follows State Route 186, past a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses offering free Bible courses, along a twisting corridor of razor wire and chain-link fence, through passport control, and into Los Algodones. By noon, more than a thousand people will have walked from the United States to Mexico, in the shadow of the thirty-foot wall that divides them.
They come on bicycles and in wheelchairs, pushing walkers and leaning on canes. They come to be healed or transformed or to put an end to their pain, preferably at deep-discount prices.
In 1969, Dr. Bernardo Magaña, newly graduated from dental college at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, set up shop directly across the street from border control. Within a year, he was treating dozens of patients a day, most of them Americans.
...
Backed by the state government in nearby Mexicali, he cracked down on vice and shuttered the most notorious establishments in town. Year by year, the bars gave way to dental clinics, the partygoers to patients. According to Roberto Díaz and Paula Hahn, who run a website about medical tourism called Border CRxing, Los Algodones now has the highest per-capita concentration of dentists in the world: well over a thousand in a population of fifty-five hundred.
It’s known as Molar City.
Why Gwyneth Paltrow Might Just Be Underrated as an Entrepreneur
It’s easy to make fun of Goop’s founder. But as biographer Amy Odell discovered, Paltrow is a wellness innovator who mastered the Attention Economy, for better or worse.
If you’ve spent five minutes on the internet over the past few days, you’ve likely seen a delightfully campy corporate video from the tech company Astronomer hosted by none other than Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow.
Wearing a crisp, pale-blue button-down and a playful smile, Paltrow gamely tosses off lines such as, “Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.” The tongue-in-cheek response to Astronomer’s CEO-HR scandal works in part because it seems ridiculous coming from Paltrow.
And yet, as journalist Amy Odell chronicles in her new book, Gwyneth: The Biography (Gallery Books), Paltrow always seems to be in on the joke.
She has made a tidy sum building Goop into a global lifestyle brand that people love to make fun of, even as it has unquestionably influenced the growth and popularity of the wellness industry.
Odell:
[W]hen Gwyneth does product endorsements through Goop, the brand she’s endorsing has to make two deals: one with Goop and one with her management and agents for use of her image. As I report in the book, a hefty amount of her income comes from endorsement deals and appearances.
...
Also, Gwyneth knows how to create a viral moment. One person who worked closely with her told me that she didn’t seem to have a sense of herself if she’s not written about—she seems to thrive on being in the news. And a lot of Goop’s business has been driven by controversy and provocation.
‘By Chance, Did You Win a Cottage in Ireland?’
For one American, who spent $12.67 on three raffle tickets in December and then forgot about it, the answer turned out to be yes.
Kathleen Spangler has had a busy year.
Last October, Ms. Spangler, a 29-year-old U.S. Marine Corps officer, applied for her Irish citizenship through lineage on her father’s side. It was approved a month later — fast-tracked because she was pregnant. In February, she, her husband Michael Spangler — 30, also a Marine officer — and their two toddlers transferred from their duty station in North Carolina to Dayton, Ohio. Three weeks later, Ms. Spangler gave birth to their third child. The couple started preparing for graduate studies in engineering.
Amid all these life-changing events, she only vaguely remembered buying a few tickets in an online raffle back in December.
With her new citizenship, she had been browsing Irish real estate sites on Instagram when she saw a post announcing the chance to win a house on 1.75 acres in County Leitrim, a pastoral corner of northwest Ireland. Tickets cost five British pounds apiece, and the site was promoting a buy-two-get-one-free offer. On a whim, Ms. Spangler entered, paying $12.67 for three tickets.
“And then I completely forgot about it,” she said. “Nobody enters these things really thinking that they’re going to win. At least, I don’t. But there’s always a chance, and that’s the fun part.”
Six months later, on May 22, she got a text from a friend asking, “By chance, did you win a cottage in Ireland?”
Ghosting Is Out and Speed-Dumping Is In
Singles who think it’s rude to cut off contact after a dud of a first date are opting for what some consider an overcorrection: the breakup text.
Hannah George was once ghosted by a man she’d been seeing for several weeks. She never wanted to make anyone else feel that way, so she adopted a new approach: texting guys after mediocre first dates to say she wasn’t interested.
Recently, the 24-year-old nutrition assistant in New York was on the receiving end of such a text. A man she’d been out with once sent a paragraph-long message about how he’d just spent time with his family, how it had made him nervous about what he wanted in a relationship and how he just couldn’t be with her.
“I thought it was a little bit too long,” says George. “You didn’t mean this much to me.”
There’s a moment after a dud of a first date—and definitely after a bad one—when the disappointed parties think to themselves: I really hope I don’t hear from that person again. The odds of that are getting slimmer.
Singles are practically racing to let their online matches know that they aren’t a match.
AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates
Companies have long leaned on entry-level workers to do grunt work that doubles as on-the-job training. Now ChatGPT and other bots can do many of those chores.
What do you hire a 22-year-old college graduate for these days?
For a growing number of bosses, the answer is not much—AI can do the work instead.
At Chicago recruiting firm Hirewell, marketing agency clients have all but stopped requesting entry-level staff—young grads once in high demand but whose work is now a “home run” for AI, the firm’s chief growth officer said. Dating app Grindr is hiring more seasoned engineers, forgoing some junior coders straight out of school, and CEO George Arison said companies are “going to need less and less people at the bottom.”
Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, said he decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social-media copy through ChatGPT instead.
Balderaz has urged his own kids to focus on jobs that require people skills and can’t easily be automated. One is becoming a police officer.
Having a good job “guaranteed” after college, he said, “I don’t think that’s an absolute truth today any more.”
As companies hire and train fewer young people, they may also be shrinking the pool of workers that will be ready to take on more responsibility in five or 10 years. Companies say they are already rethinking how to develop the next generation of talent.
AI is accelerating trends that were already under way.
The Caribbean Islands That Give You a Passport If You Buy a Home
Scroll through homes for sale in the Eastern Caribbean and it is no longer just bewitching beaches and a laid-back lifestyle being touted to woo buyers.
More and more property listings are offering a passport too – and political and social volatility in the US is said to be fuelling an upsurge in interest.
Five of the region's island nations – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Lucia – offer such citizenship by investment (CBI) from as little as $200,000 (£145,000).
Buy a home, and you also get a passport that grants the holder visa-free access to up to 150 countries including Europe's Schengen area, and for all but Dominica, to the UK too.
For the wealthy, the islands' absence of taxes such as capital gains and inheritance, and in some cases on income too, is another major draw. And all five of the region's schemes allow buyers to retain their existing citizenship.
U.S. citizens account for the bulk of CBI applications in the Caribbean over the past year, followed by Ukraine, Turkey, Nigeria and China.
"We don't talk politics with them, but the unstable political landscape is definitely a factor. This time last year, it was all lifestyle buyers and a few CBI," said one realtor. "Now they're all saying 'I want a house with citizenship.' We've never sold so many before."
Related: How Do I Tell My Rich Friends to Stop Talking About Fleeing the Country? (The New York Times)
While I cannot imagine the anguish people in Gaza are going through, I think they need to accept their responsibility in where the conflict is today. I know there is a long history of antagonism in that region, but surely it would be better to come to some kind of agreement rather than killing each other.
While I feel for the grads who can't find jobs, they have to accept responsibility for their field of choice. Did they do any kind of investigation to see what the job prospects were going to be? Seems to me the country is screaming for construction workers to build housing far more than they are looking for programmers or engineers. I took a course in secretarial skills way back in the early 1980's when they still had secretaries and it served me well for 40 years, was never unemployed. Would I do the same now? I don't know, it was never really supposed to be my career but it served me well.
And I always thought it was polite to tell someone you were breaking up with them. Won't comment as to the length of the message, but it has to better than being ghosted.
I again repeat I'm not a fan of how Trump does things, however, I'm never surprised how Trump haters take things to nitpick about everything he does while ignoring what has taken place in the past:
Last year, following the Department of Labor’s annual benchmark revisions, which found that U.S. job creation was overstated by 818,000, GOP lawmakers stated that the administration had been “seemingly cooking the books to boost public support” ahead of the election.