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.
Helicopters Rescue Nepal Flood Survivors, With More Than 1,000 Still Missing
Officials said hundreds were killed in Nepal and Tibet. New York Times reporters flew with rescuers to remote Himalayan areas, where shocked survivors described a torrent of mud sweeping away villages.
Emergency workers scrambled across steep Himalayan valleys on Thursday to look for survivors after a devastating flood a day earlier killed hundreds of people and left more than 1,000 missing.
Throughout the day, rescue helicopters in Nepal retrieved bewildered looking residents, some of whom cried after landing at a rescue base. One survivor interviewed by a New York Times reporter in Timure, a Nepalese village, described what sounded like a thunderclap and a breeze, before a wave of muddy water crashed into his home, carrying away his wife and two daughters. “They all died and I lived,” he said.
On Wednesday, a giant torrent of water, rocks and ice swept through the area between Nepal and the Tibet region of China, destroying roads, snapping bridges, toppling buildings and cutting communications.
Scientists said the flood was probably unleashed after a massive rock landslide coincided with the collapse of a glacier high in the mountains on Wednesday morning.
Link: New York Times
(In 2026 we always have to be careful that video and images we share are real, and not AI. But I am as confident as I can be about the videos embedded above.)
Bonus: Scientists don’t yet know exactly what triggered the Nepal flood, but they suspect a glacier collapse and suggest climate change also played a role.(USA Today)
Loving Dolly Was Easy. Understanding Her Was Hard.
We’ve seen a lot of articles about Dolly Parton’s legacy. I appreciated this one.
Loving Dolly Rebecca Parton was easy. She was beautiful, funny and kind. Rumor has it that she was a prankster who could tell a good dirty joke. She was a country music original, a glittering pop star, a scene-stealing actress, a cultural icon and an unparalleled humanitarian. By the final decade of her 60-plus-year career, loving her had become something of a public sacrament. But Dolly didn’t see herself as a saint; she identified as something we needed even more: a writer.
Writing her own story was the most radical, precise way to define herself in a world that kept trying to fit her into a box. She was not simply Southern, not simply country. She was from Appalachia — a place that is just as mythologized, mocked and misunderstood as Dolly was. It’s a place where people are rarely allowed to speak for themselves.
The story Dolly wrote about herself across thousands of songs and performances and books was a counternarrative about Appalachia.
Dolly Parton is the greatest story that Dolly ever wrote.
Link: New York Times
Bonus: How Dolly Parton Stood on Business With ‘I Will Always Love You’ (NY Times)
The Mind-Bending Company That Gets a Million Job Applications—and Rejects 99.9%
Getting an offer from Bending Spoons, which owns AOL, has become harder than getting into Harvard
It’s a company that received 800,000 job applications last year—and made 286 hires. The acceptance rate of top schools is around 4%. At Bending Spoons, it’s below 0.04%.
But rejecting 99.9% of applications isn’t even the wildest thing about the company’s hiring process.
“If people looked under the hood at how we do this, they would think we’re crazy,” said CEO Luca Ferrari. “Hopefully in a good way.”
In recent years, the applications to work at this growing empire have shot up from 110,000 to 360,000 to 800,000. Last year, 60,000 made it past the initial round of screening and took a series of tests designed to measure their reasoning, judgment and speed of learning. That whittled the list down to the 3,300 candidates who were granted interviews.
“A run-of-the-mill interview is almost entirely non-predictive, like tossing a coin,” Ferrari said. “It’s basically completely useless.”
Link: Wall Street Journal (Ben Cohen)
They Confided in ChatGPT. Their Secrets Ended Up in Court.
The Post found a dozen examples of chatbot conversations being swept into criminal and civil legal proceedings.
When a teenage boy identified in court filings as R.K.C. didn’t understand his father, he turned to ChatGPT for help.
“My dad Said that I’m will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar,” R.K.C. said to the chatbot in October 2024, according to court filings. “He said that If that doesn’t make me happy what does. What does he mean.”
The millions of queries Americans pose to artificial intelligence chatbots each day generally stay between them and their AI interlocutors. But R.K.C.’s question and his other intimate conversations with ChatGPT were swept into the public record by defense attorneys responding to a lawsuit he filed in 2023 against Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
R.K.C. is one of a growing number of Americans who have had their private conversations with AI chatbots made public in court. As more people turn to AI for help with work, health issues and for companionship, chatbot operators have become custodians of a fast-growing trove of intimate data that can be sought by law enforcement, or companies or other opponents in civil litigation.
Link: Washington Post (Gerrit De Vynck)
Three Takeaways From Bill Gates’s 5,784-Word Warning on AI: ‘There Is No Plan’
The billionaire philanthropist urges regulation and global coordination to prepare for the likely harms to employment, safety and well-being
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates issued a stark warning about AI’s risks to employment and the human condition, saying that companies were barreling ahead with the technology with no larger plan for the massive upheaval it would cause.
“Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” he wrote in a 12-page essay published to his personal website Wednesday. “Right now, we are not preparing for it. I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately.”
While the move from agriculture to office work took generations, sectors like law, customer service, software and manufacturing will feel AI’s impact over the course of a decade.
On relationships, Gates stressed that AI can be an echo-chamber, which could have profound effects on children. Chatbots are addictive and can be a source of friction-free companionship, and can worsen critical thinking.
“This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills,” he wrote.
Link: Wall Street Journal
U.S. Vaccination Rates Are Plunging. Look Up Where Your School Stands.
Rocked by pandemic politics, the nation’s shield against infectious disease is shrinking.
Before the pandemic, roughly half of counties had kindergarten vaccination rates high enough to prevent measles outbreaks.
After the pandemic, many counties increased their vaccination rates, reaching the recommended level of protection.
But far more lost ground, leaving only about a quarter of the counties with herd immunity in kindergartners.
The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia.
The Post’s findings show that at least 5.2 million kindergarten-age children in the U.S. are living in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold — up from about 3.5 million before the pandemic.
Link: Washington Post (Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert)
A Kitten Was Stolen and Used in an Attempted Bank Robbery. Then Her Luck Changed.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” said Stephanie Stullich, whose nonprofit organization rescued the kitten. “Who would believe it?”
A man wearing a black beanie walked into a Maryland pet store last month, approached a kitten up for adoption and ran out moments later carrying the cat.
Stephanie Stullich, whose nonprofit organization rescued the tuxedo cat the month before, received a frantic call about the theft.
“We’d never had a kitten stolen before,” Stullich said. “So we had no idea why or how — or if we would ever see her again.”
After grabbing the kitten, the thief walked into a PNC Bank near the pet store, approached a teller window while still holding the cat and passed a note that read, “This is a Robbery,” according to court documents.
Prince George’s County police said they arrived on the scene and arrested the man.
A few minutes after getting there, Stullich said she was relieved when a police officer told her the cat was safe inside the bank.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Stullich said. “Who would believe it?”
Link: Washington Post (Kyle Melnick)
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!
I saw a clip of a judge scolding an attorney in court because the attorney cited a case that was completely fabricated by Ai. Good on the judge for knowing it, but that's the point about critical thinking; lose that and you wind up having people in positions that hold other peoples' lives in their hands, making ill-informed decisions.
As for the article about vaccines, all I can say is, the way the Covid vaccines were forced upon us, or we lost our businesses, livelihoods, social standing and more, there is a very big mistrust of all vaccines now. I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just saying, you reap what you sow.
I'd love to read the 'free' article about the kitten, but the NYT insists I create an account. My personal info isn't free and, apparently, neither is the article.
Love the Dolly article. I wasn't a fan of her music per se, but I was a fan of the woman who was so comfortable in her own skin that nothing could touch her. Fun fact: my mother was pregnant with my little sister who, the docs told her was going to be a boy, and they would name Joseph Michael after my grandfather and father respectively. When she was born my parents decided Joseph Michael was not a good name for her, so mom made up the name Jolene. Michelle would be her middle name. A few years later, Dolly came out with that song, and while searching for my sister in a department store, because she loved hiding in the racks, some woman approached my mom and asked what my sister's name was. When mom told her, the woman laughed and said, "that's my dog's name". Mom wasn't impressed, especially because the woman walked away and didn't bother to help this frantic woman search for her child.
Have a great weekend everyone.