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.
They’re Narcissists, and They’re Proud
Diagnosed narcissists are discovering how to thrive — by doling out advice to other narcissists.
In the winter of 2017, Lee Hammock was at home in Durham, North Carolina, spending the evening blaming his failures and unrealized potential on his 7-month-old son. Hammock has an engineering degree, but, at 32, he was working on the floor in a warehouse. And what he actually wanted to be was an actor.
As his son lay on the floor sobbing, Hammock told him, “See? This is why I’m not successful.”
Hammock’s wife, Delaney, happened to walk in at that exact moment. She was appalled, which he considered another perfect example of how his family was holding him back. He shouted at her until she stormed out.
She yelled from the doorway, “It’s so hard living with a narcissist!”
Later, Hammock Googled the word and found the symptoms.
Today, Hammock has around 3 million followers. He isn’t the only professional or self-aware narcissist. In fact, he’s on the front lines of a growing population. Influencers like “the Nameless Narcissist,” “Recovering Narcissist,” “SpiritNarc,” and, more puzzlingly, “the Bat Wolf” have, through their narcissist-forward content, inspired others to proudly proclaim their NPD diagnosis and seek treatment.
A sub-Reddit for people with NPD currently has about 52,000 members. (It has nearly doubled in size in the past three years.) Across the world, diagnosed narcissists are sharing their stories—and calling for compassion for those suffering from NPD.
My Family Went Off Ultra-Processed Foods for a Month. The Results Surprised Us.
What started as an experiment has become our new diet.
When it comes to the dire effects of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) on health, the scientific evidence is “incontrovertible,” says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian at the Tufts Food Is Medicine Institute. He points to studies linking UPFs to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Alarmingly, around 60% of children’s calories come from UPFs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What’s less clear is which UPFs cause harm, why they do so and what the federal government should do about it.
Amid this debate, I decided to launch a bold experiment with my then 8-year-old daughter: We would try to stop eating all UPFs for one month. Could we do it? Would our bodies and brains notice a difference?
The results proved transformative. Removing UPFs dramatically altered my daughter’s eating habits. It changed mine even more. These effects persuaded my husband, who began the experiment as a skeptical observer, to wean himself off ultra-processed foods, too.
About 10 days in, I noticed a striking shift: I wasn’t constantly thinking about food. Before, I carried around what some call food noise. I had persistent, nagging thoughts about what to eat next. Chocolate? Banana bread? A salty, crunchy snack? Without UPFs, my cravings faded.
My snacking duly plummeted. My daughter’s eating habits followed suit. By the third week, she did something I hadn’t seen in years: She ate a homemade dinner with gusto.
After a month without UPFs, I felt so much better, mentally, that I found I no longer needed willpower to resist them. I simply didn’t want them.
The European Heir Restoring Forgotten American Cars to Glory
An Italian jewelry scion has turned an old drive-in theater in Pennsylvania into a showplace for his collection of domestic vehicles.
The Boulevard Drive-in closed in the 1980s, after about 40 years in operation. But visitors to the site today will notice signs of automotive life. Its hilly landscape has been paved with miles of narrow, curving roads and there is now an old-timey Sinclair Oil gas station on the premises, complete with a glass-tank pump and a sign that flashes the company’s dinosaur logo.
The infrastructure supports what the old drive-in has become: a temple to American cars from the early to mid 1900s.
Called the NB Center for American Automotive Heritage, the private museum was founded about a decade ago by Nicola Bulgari, the 84-year-old vice chairman of Bulgari, the Italian luxury brand that his grandfather started in Rome in 1884.
The NB Center, in which Mr. Bulgari has invested at least $10 million, has about 200 vintage cars from his collection (another 100 are in storage in Italy). Nearly all of the vehicles were built between the 1920s and the mid-1950s, in the middle of America, for the middle of the market. There are Chryslers, Chevrolets, Nashes, Oldsmobiles, Studebakers and, most abundantly, Buicks.
Mr. Bulgari’s car collection may be less famous than Jay Leno’s and less rarefied than Ralph Lauren’s, but it has a distinct theme, something that Ken Gross, an automotive historian, author and curator, said is essential to any good collection.
“I personally think what Bulgari has done is wonderful because many of those cars were, if not neglected by collectors, just not paid much attention to,” Mr. Gross added. “Their restoration gives you a glimpse into some cars that you might not necessarily see anywhere else.”
The Pill That Women Are Taking for Everything From Speeches to First Dates
Influencers have described propranolol as a magic pill that eases nervous jitters in all kinds of settings. Prescriptions are on the rise, especially for young women.
AS ERICA FISHER’S nuptials approach, she’s trying to decide: Should she take a beta blocker before she walks down the aisle? Everyone seems to be talking about the drugs, she says—from her favorite podcast hosts to the nurse practitioner who microneedles her face. “He’s prescribed it to many of his brides, and they’ve had a good experience,” Fisher, a 33-year-old physician assistant in Western Massachusetts, says of propranolol, a popular beta blocker.
Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1967 to treat symptoms of cardiovascular disease, propranolol has become the go-to pill for dealing with all sorts of stressful situations, from public speaking to first dates. Prescriptions are on the rise, up 28 percent from 2020, according to the most recent data from IQVIA, making propranolol—a generic drug that is relatively inexpensive—the fastest-growing pill in the category.
By slowing down heart rate and lowering blood pressure, the drug can reduce the physical symptoms of anxiety, though it has not been approved by the FDA to treat the condition.
Hollywood’s Monkey-Selfie Problem: Who Would Actually Own a Movie Made by AI?
Creatives, executives, and legal scholars are all debating what “intellectual property” even means in the age of machine intelligence: “I’m not seeing a huge amount of clarity.”
In 2011, on an otherwise normal day in Sulawesi, Indonesia, a mischievous macaque named Naruto wandered over to wildlife photographer David Slater’s camera. As Naruto investigated the strange device, he peered directly into its lens and pressed the shutter several times—accidentally capturing a series of now iconic selfies.
Because a monkey had taken the photos, the open-license library Wikimedia Commons declared the images to be in the public domain. But Slater, who created the conditions that allowed Naruto to take pictures in the first place, wanted the copyright. Then PETA got involved, arguing that Naruto ought to own the photos—because if human photographers own the images they take, shouldn’t a monkey have the same rights?
In 2014 the US Copyright Office definitively concluded that “a photograph taken by a monkey” could not be copyrighted. Ultimately, PETA and Slater settled their “monkey selfie” lawsuit, with the photographer agreeing to donate 25% of his profits from the images to wildlife conservation efforts.
So yes, a monkey can’t copyright an image. Who, though, would own a film that was made by a computer program, but based on a human-written prompt—or other creative works completed by nonhuman machines that draw upon human behavior and knowledge?
As this technology becomes increasingly integrated into our entertainment and media pipelines, creatives, executives, and legal scholars are all debating what “intellectual property” even means in the age of machine intelligence.
In other words: Are we the monkey, or is it the AI?
ICE Detentions Roil D.C.’s Already Struggling Restaurant Scene
Restaurant owners say their workers (non-citizens who have applied for asylum or green cards) are being targeted, picked up by immigration authorities while commuting to work.
In the weeks since President Donald Trump’s takeover of D.C. police, restaurant workers have been picked up by immigration officials while walking home after their shifts. They’ve been detained while going to work. Some have even been pulled out of Ubers.
The immigration crackdown has aggravated the city’s already struggling dining scene, leaving restaurant owners scrambling to staff kitchens and keep their doors open in a city where tourism is down and locals aren’t in the mood to celebrate.
The Washington Post talked to more than 20 D.C. chefs, owners and immigration lawyers who shared details about workers who have apparently been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Together, these people shared information about 23 workers — dishwashers, line cooks, food runners, a prep cook and a butcher, many of them from Latin American countries — believed to be in ICE detention or, in some cases, already deported.
“It’s hard to run a restaurant if your employees are afraid to come into D.C. because ICE and federal agents are waiting at Metro stops,” said Paul Haar, managing attorney at the D.C.-based Immigration Counsel.
Epstein's Inbox
A new trove of emails reveals Ghislaine Maxwell's secrets.
For years, Ghislaine Maxwell has tried to distance herself from Jeffrey Epstein. According to her telling, she was a onetime girlfriend turned property manager at Epstein’s luxury homes, yet was not privy to the inner workings of his vast influence machine or sex-trafficking operation.
But hundreds of emails from Epstein’s personal Yahoo account, which haven’t been previously reported, shed new light on Maxwell’s partnership with Epstein.
They also contribute to longstanding questions about her credibility, including her truthfulness in a two-day interview she had with officials from the Department of Justice this summer. (Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after a jury found in 2021 that she recruited and groomed women for Epstein to sexually abuse.)
The emails, part of a cache of more than 18,000 obtained by Bloomberg News, show that Maxwell and Epstein were closer, in many respects, than either publicly admitted. They corresponded about discrediting women who raised allegations against them, including in one exchange where Maxwell said she planned to circulate compromising information on one of Epstein’s sexual-abuse victims.
“Question,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell on May 23, 2008. “Which one do you prefer,,, lewd and lscivious conduct ,, or procuring minors for prostituion.”
At the time, he and his star-studded team of defense lawyers were closing in on a generous plea deal ... Maxwell’s response was matter-of-fact:
“I suppose Lewd and lecivious conduct..I would prefer lewd and lescivious conduct w/a prositute if possible.”
Anxiety is not a bad thing, people need to learn to deal with that feeling and move past it. Hiding feelings with drugs doesn’t make them go away, and they will come back stronger. We are going to end up with generation(s) of adults who don’t know how to deal with anything without some kind of drug, which means they have no idea how to teach their kids to deal with emotions. Maybe we are already there.
Have to admit I only read the summaries in the newsletter and none of the actual articles.
I guess there IS a drug for every little ill. Perhaps there is a drug which makes you immune to ads and endless marketing. MAHA will fail because people will never give up their crutches. Not many people can live without vaccines and drugs. At age 75, I use neither but I am part of the shrinking minority.