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.
How a $3 Grocery Bag Became an International Status Symbol
From Seoul to Melbourne, the canvas carrier is the latest marker of being well-traveled, in-the-know and part of a global conversation.
In London, Holly Davies initially thought her Trader Joe’s tote would go unnoticed. The podcast producer snagged the bag for $2.99 at the grocery store on a trip to Washington, D.C.
Back in the U.K., where she grew up and lives, she figured it would simply be another anonymous canvas carrier. But whenever she spotted another tote in the wild—on the Tube, outside a pub, swinging from someone’s shoulder on a crowded street—she felt a spark of recognition.
“I always make an effort to smile at the person carrying it, which isn’t a super common thing to do in London,” Davies said. “I feel a bit of a kindredness with other Trader Joe’s tote carriers.”
The Trader Joe’s tote, which sells for $2.99 in the U.S., has joined the ranks of geographically specific status bags like those from London’s Daunt Books or Paris’s Shakespeare and Company. In addition to London, they’re being carried in Seoul, Melbourne, Australia, and Tokyo. Because there are no Trader Joe’s stores abroad, the bags are listed on resale platforms like Depop, eBay and Korea’s Karrot market for up to $10,000—with some eBay listings reaching $50,000.
Los Angeles Ends Strange Rite of Passage With New Fridge Law
Starting January 1, landlords must provide tenants with working refrigerators.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a new state law in October mandating landlords supply tenants with a working stove and refrigerator starting on Jan. 1, 2026, it marked the end of a bizarre rite of passage for many moving to Los Angeles.
Unlike most of the country, or even many other cities in California, Los Angeles renters are often responsible for buying and installing their own refrigerators — and with removing them when they leave.
This has led to a robust network of used appliance shops, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace ads, under the table swaps between incoming and outgoing renters, landlords who rent fridges by the month and Reddit queries like, “Quick question: do LA apartments not come with refrigerators?!!.”
Larry Gross, the executive director for the Coalition for Economic Survival, said that research showed that in Los Angeles rent is already at 50 percent of income for many people, and some renters go without fridges at all. Others buy very old or malfunctioning models, he said, which can cost renters even more in the long run if it means spending more money on takeout, replacing spoiled food or the extra electricity used by an inefficient older machine.
10 Life Lessons I Learned Growing Up in an Old House
Thank you, old house, for teaching me what really matters.
I grew up in an 1850s Greek Revival that my parents restored from top to bottom over the course of ten years. When they bought it, it was in such poor condition that the realtor who showed them the house said that they were his only clients who would even get out of the car to look at it. I, for one, am awfully glad they did—that old house was the wisest teacher I have ever had.
Here are 10 of the most valuable lessons it taught me ...
[Well, 3 since I’m including an excerpt, and if this entices you, you have to click through…]
This kind of fraud is known as “pig-butchering” because the gangs say targets are led like hapless pigs to slaughter. Advice includes:
There is Never Any Reason in Life to be Bored
We’re Part of a Bigger Story
The Most Beautiful Things Show Signs of Having Been Loved
How a Teen Girl’s Stolen Photo Sparked America’s First Battle Over Image Rights
Who owns your image? Even in 1902, privacy laws had to grapple with new technology.
When Abigail Roberson, age 17, an orphan from Rochester, New York, set out to get her portrait taken at a local photography studio, she had no idea her picture would become the center of a courtroom battle over the right to privacy and image rights in early 20th-century America.
Months later, while visiting the home of a neighbor, she was stunned to discover her face plastered onto a bag of flour.
She sued flour company Franklin Mills and the Rochester Folding Box Co., which printed the packages and posters featuring her portrait.
In a ruling that would both devastate Roberson and lead to international headlines, the New York Court of Appeals rejected her claim and sided with the defendants’ statement that there was no right to privacy in New York state. Adding insult to injury, the Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alton B. Parker stated that many women would consider the usage of their image in an advertisement as a “compliment to their beauty.” He also noted the image used was a “very good one” that did not libel Roberson.
The ruling immediately gained notoriety, and commentary was often quite biting. Newspapers and government officials sided with Abigail over her anger at the use of her image.
One magazine joked a tobacco company should release a line of “Chief Justice” cigars with Parker’s photo on them.
OnlyFans Models and Influencers Now Dominate U.S. ‘Extraordinary Artist’ Visas
Work permits are increasingly being awarded on basis of online reach, favoring content creators
On the wall of immigration attorney Michael Wildes’s office hangs an enormous photo of Yoko Ono and her late husband Beatles frontman John Lennon — clients of Wildes’s father who defended the couple from deportation.
Decades later, Wildes represented some of the biggest actors and singers of his own generation. But now a growing number of those contacting him to seek visas are social media influencers and models on OnlyFans, the streaming platform for sex workers and celebrities.
“I knew the days of representing iconic names like Boy George and Sinéad O’Connor were over,” Wildes said, as he described the shift towards what he called “scroll kings and queens.”
Elon Musk’s ‘Grok’ AI Generates Thousands of Undressed Images Per Hour on X
Musk’s X has become a top site for images of people that have been non-consensually undressed by AI.
Since late December, X users have increasingly prompted Elon Musk’s Grok, the AI chatbot tied to the social network, to alter pictures that other people post of themselves, for example by removing most clothing.
During a 24-hour analysis of images the @Grok account posted to X, the chatbot generated about 6,700 every hour that were identified as sexually suggestive or nudifying, according to Genevieve Oh, a social media and deepfake researcher. The other top five websites for such content averaged 79 new AI undressing images per hour.
Oh calculated that 85% of Grok’s images, overall, are sexualized.
The scale of deepfakes on X is “unprecedented,” said Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer specializing in online sex crimes. “We’ve never had a technology that’s made it so easy to generate new images,” because Grok is free and linked to a built-in distribution system, she added.
Musk has marketed Grok as more fun and irreverent than other chatbots, taking pride in X being a place for free speech. X did not respond to a request for comment.
Her Brother Pleaded Guilty to the Idaho Murders. Now She’s Ready to Talk.
Since the arrest of Bryan Kohberger in the murder of four college students, a case that captivated the nation, his family has stayed silent. His sister now describes their pain and confusion.
The harrowing news had spread across the country in the fall of 2022: Four college students were found stabbed to death at a house near the University of Idaho campus. Mel Kohberger, who was preparing to start a new job as a mental health therapist in New Jersey, could not help feeling a sense of alarm.
Her brother, Bryan, was living just 15 minutes from the scene of the mysterious killings. Investigators had no suspects. And Bryan was just the type of person who would leave his door unlocked and go out on late-night jogs.
“Bryan, you are running outside and this psycho killer is on the loose,” she remembers telling him. “Be careful.” He thanked her for checking on him and assured her that he would stay safe.
In early December that year, her brother returned to their parents’ home in Pennsylvania for the holidays, and later that month, Ms. Kohberger got a call from her sister, Amanda. Law enforcement officers had burst into the house in the middle of the night, and placed Mr. Kohberger in handcuffs.
“She was like, ‘I’m with the F.B.I., Bryan’s been arrested,’” Ms. Kohberger said. “I was like, ‘For what?’”
The response: “The Idaho murders.” For a brief moment, she wondered if it was a prank. Then a sense of nausea overtook her.
“Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me (Michelle Goldberg, NTY Opinion Columnist) that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.”
Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”
The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”
Why would someone be stupid enough to spend $50,000 on a bag when you could fly to the States and get your own for far less? Some rich people are just stupid.
Old houses can teach you lessons but you need to have the money to learn them. Bringing up to today’s standards is not a cheap endeavour.