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!)
Free for ALL Friday
He Might End Up the World’s Most Educated Person
Jamie Beaton has 12 advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford and other top universities, with more on the way. Why? How?
Early in the fall semester of the 2025-26 academic year, Lisa Belkin, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, realized that one of her students, Jamie Beaton, had yet to show up for class.
Beaton, she learned, had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016, picking up a master’s degree in applied mathematics along the way. He had gone on to collect an M.B.A. from Stanford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was followed by a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar — all before age 28.
Attending classes remotely and in person, he earned additional master’s degrees from — deep breath — the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, King’s College London and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“He was a joy to get to know,” Belkin said. “But it was also the weirdest relationship I’ve ever had with a student.”
Link: New York Times
The Most Crucial Step to Better Sleep Is Also the Most Straightforward
Smart mattresses and sleep trackers aside, experts say that the key to feeling well-rested is to simply stick to your bedtime.
You upgraded your mattress. Track your sleep score religiously. Clock a solid eight hours of shuteye a night. But you may be overlooking one of the most important sleep metrics of all: when you actually go to bed and wake up.
Keeping consistent sleep and wake times may be just as important as getting enough sleep—and perhaps even more so, says Eric Zhou, PhD, a sleep medicine clinician-researcher and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
“The body runs on a circadian clock that helps regulate blood pressure, glucose metabolism, hormone release, and even autonomic nervous system activity,” says M. Taruj Ali, MD, a board-certified sleep and obesity medicine physician. “When sleep and wake times keep shifting, those systems are repeatedly being asked to operate at the wrong biological time.”
“Even though you may have slept for hours and hours, you still feel ragged and disoriented when you wake up. That’s because the change in timing throws your body into a spin cycle,” says Zhou.
Link: GQ
America’s Biggest Dating Company Is Betting on Trad Values
Match Group thinks young people want to date using old scripts.
If a dating app existed in the 1950s, you might expect it to look like Upward. On “chivalry mode,” users can establish that the man in a straight pairing will message the woman first. With “marriage timeline,” they can specify how soon they’d like to marry.
This is not, in fact, a glitch in the time-space continuum, the 20th century folding in on the 21st. It’s the newest big project for Match Group, the company that owns an abundance of dating apps, including Hinge and Tinder.
“This is modern courtship in action,” the company’s press release reads. “Women are clear about their standards, men pursue with purpose, and both move toward marriage together.”
Internally, Match calls Upward’s audience the “next-gen traditionalists.” Now the company is betting on them.
Link: The Atlantic (Faith Hill)
Why Helicopter Parents in China Buy Watches, Not Phones, for Their Kids
Children’s smartwatches are hugely popular in China for preteens, with some models offering advanced location tracking
When Jane Ding’s son headed on his first field trip in kindergarten, she was worried he would get lost. So she and her husband bought a gadget that has become ubiquitous for parents across China’s cities: a smartwatch for children.
They sneaked the watch into their son’s backpack because electronic devices weren’t allowed on the field trip. Now he is 8 years old and wears it whenever he goes out to play.
About one in three children age 5 to 12 own a children’s smartwatch in China, and the figure rises to more than half in urban areas, according to state media.
“If he didn’t have a watch, I would be very worried,” said his father, Jimmy Poek, 40. “I’d have to keep him in my sight at all times.”
Link: Wall Street Journal
It’s Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb
In Richardson, a fleet of drones has started to deliver goods quickly. But the noise is drowning out life for some residents: ‘We can’t live like this.’
The sound came out of nowhere. It began as an unnerving high-pitched hum, like a mosquito flying around a dark room at bedtime, and it grew louder as it drew closer.
“There’s another one coming this way!” shouted Eric Anderson from his pool float, pointing to an area above a tall line of trees.
Within a minute or so, an 83-pound drone with six blue arms and whirring propellers appeared in a corner of the sky before zipping over nearby houses, looking like a cross between a mechanical dragonfly and an X-wing fighter, and buzzing like a battalion of bees.
Richardson city officials gave Amazon zoning approval to start the drone delivery service in December as part of the company’s nascent Prime Air program. Now many other parts of the United States can expect their own drone deliveries, a welcome convenience for some, but an invasion for others.
Link: New York Times
Red and Blue America Have Found Something to Agree on: Flock Cameras Must Go
A national backlash against AI-enabled license-plate readers is uniting Trump country and progressive strongholds alike. ‘Nobody wants to be surveilled…doesn’t matter what your political leaning is.’
In the foothills 95 miles south, Republicans in conservative Oconee County, S.C., view the same AI-enabled license-plate readers as a threat to constitutional privacy rights and have even read aloud from the Federalist Papers at tense public meetings.
“Government has got to be restrained,” said Matthew Durham, chairman of the all-Republican Oconee County Council. “It is a 90-10 issue.”
“Appalachian people don’t trust the government for a lot of reasons,” said Kim Roney, a progressive member of the blue Asheville City Council.
“It seems like data centers and Flock cameras are the only things we can agree on,” said Taylor Nicks, 48 years old, who was troubled to learn that the recording device outside his Asheville coffee shop was installed without local input.
Link: Wall Street Journal
The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms
Trump’s advisers have been working for months to move his focus away from baseless theories of election fraud. A group of outsiders is making that difficult.
Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers.
“He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas.
The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario.
When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.
Link: The Atlantic
Backup: https://electionlawblog.org/2026/the-supporters-urging-trump-to-declare-martial-law-for-the-midterms/
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!