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.
Elon Musk’s Anonymous Online BFF Spreads His Ideas and Attacks His Enemies
How a nobody account went from begging for 100 followers to becoming Musk’s most-engaged correspondent on X
An anonymous user of the social platform X shot a plea into the ether in late 2024. “How do I reach 100 followers on X?” the account with the username XFreeze asked.
That post didn’t receive a single like, share or reply, but within months, XFreeze appears to have launched a strategy that propelled the account to become one of the platform’s most visible: Court the man in charge, Elon Musk.
XFreeze rose to become the account Musk engaged with more than any other on X in 2026, according to a Washington Post analysis, by tirelessly praising the billionaire owner of X and his other ventures, including Tesla and SpaceX.
“Musk loves to be glazed, and this person is the doughnut factory,” Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, said of XFreeze.
Link: Yahoo News
Meet the Sad Wives of AI
Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry.
IF I HAD to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. “JUST LOOK AT THIS!” he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. “SEE?!”
See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out.
“ARE YOU LOOKING?” he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am.
THERE’S A STRANGE and under-discussed side effect of the AI boom: what it’s doing to family dynamics. By which I mean: how it’s potentially destroying family dynamics. I’m sure this applies to all kinds of families, gay or straight, rich or poor, with any AI-pilled members. The technology is coming, has come, for us all. But for the purposes of this story, I mostly spoke to white-collar heteros in the Bay Area, because that’s where a certain psychological crisis seems most acute. Often it goes like this: He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI—or feels he must work in AI—and she wants him to do literally anything else.
Link: Wired (Alessandra Ram)
High-Powered Dads Are Spending Less Time at Work, More on Childcare
For the first time in a generation, college-educated fathers are substantially reshaping how they divide time between work and home
Between the three-year period ending in 2019 and the three-year period ending in 2024, college-educated dads boosted time spent on housework and childcare by more than four hours per week, while reducing paid work by six hours, according to new research published on May 13.
“In this group of college-educated men with children, we’re seeing closer to a one for one substitution of less paid work with more housework, which is novel,” said Dr. Ariel Binder, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), who authored the study. “Women really changed their behaviour over the decades leading up to the pandemic, but now this kind of shift in household priority seems to be driven by men.”
“Family life looks very different because women have higher ability to walk away if it’s not the type of lifestyle they want,” said Dr. Misty Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas and former principal economist at the Census Bureau. “I think men are reacting to that.”
Link: Straits Times
Teens Helped Bring Malls Back to Life. Now They’re Getting Banned.
Mall owners resort to banning anyone under 18 unaccompanied by an adult, following waves of teen disruptions at their properties
Darcel Clark was at the Mall at Bay Plaza in the Bronx, N.Y., in February, waiting for her order from the Bed-Stuy Fish Fry when a rowdy group of teenagers suddenly descended on the property.
“They’re recording videos of themselves. I see them running from one place to another,” said Clark. “It was really disturbing.”
Some stores and restaurants locked their doors. By the end of the day police had arrested 18 teenagers.
Mall owners are reacting to a wave of recent disruptions to their properties by taking an extreme measure: They are banning all shoppers under 18 who aren’t accompanied by an adult. Some check IDs at the entrance, while others do spot checks inside the mall.
Link: Wall Street Journal (Kate King)
What We’ve Learned From Nepali POWs in Ukraine
Young men lured to Russia with promises of noncombat work are now prisoners of war — and their letters home offer a rare window into the conflict
According to Nepal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at least 118 Nepali nationals have been killed while serving in the Russian army and 132 remain missing – and about a dozen are now prisoners of war in Ukraine.
In an interrogation video published by The Kyiv Independent, for example, a Nepali prisoner describes how he traveled to Russia in search of work after falling into debt, only to be deployed to the front lines with minimal training. “We came because of money,” he tells someone off-screen, adding that he was captured within weeks of his first combat mission.
In one handwritten letter sent home by a Nepali POW earlier this year, there are no military secrets or battlefield details. Instead, it includes requests for family photographs; promises to send biscuits, tea, “and other small things”; and congratulations on a brother’s wedding.
“This Russian war is silently creating crises for thousands of families in Nepal,” says Kritu Bhandari, a Kathmandu-based activist who has been helping families track down relatives who joined the Russian army. “These are very unlucky people who ended up in this war because of economic hardships, and now, as prisoners of war, their return to their families has become even more difficult.”
Link: Christian Science Monitor (Aakash Hassan)
With Just One Word, Brandeis Is Trying to Change College Shopping
A new tool on the university’s website tells you what the first year “will” cost if you get in
A few weeks ago, Brandeis University quietly introduced a new tool for college shoppers called Faye.
It asks questions like a person would, digests high school transcripts and tax returns, then tells you “what your Brandeis cost will be” if you get in, including both need-based and merit aid.
“Will” suggests certainty. And certainty is decidedly not what colleges offer with the net price calculators that federal law requires them to provide applicants. Those calculators are the tools that lead to sticker shock when an admission offer arrives with an actual price that is far higher than the calculators’ estimates.
The person who signed off on Faye (as in F.A., or financial aid) is Arthur Levine, the Brandeis president. The son of a South Bronx mailman, he was able to attend Brandeis himself in the late 1960s only because a well-off relative helped.
Link: New York Times (Ron Lieber)
They’re Not Saying Someone Should Kill Trump. But They’re Coming Close.
A social media trend has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke — and researchers are alarmed by how mainstream it’s become
Peyton Vanest was fuming about President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know?”
“If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it.”
Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views.
Vanest’s vague plea — posted 18 days before the third apparent attempt on Trump’s life in less than two years — is part of a social media trend that has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke.
Once an unseemly feature of the web’s fringes, deliberately ambiguous chatter about political violence has spread on mainstream platforms over the past year — most often in reference to Trump and Elon Musk, according to a new report from Know Your Meme, which tracks the rise of viral posts. “Somebody should do it” and its online variants, the authors wrote, is wink-nudge shorthand for suggesting that somebody kill a powerful person.
Link: Washington Post (John Woodrow Cox)
The New Harvard Trend? Getting Punched in the Face.
Harvard’s boxing club is drawing new members — and students say it makes them feel more human than anything else in their lives
No one gets punched in the face during regular training at the Harvard Boxing Club. But this was fight night, and the jabs, hooks and uppercuts were suddenly very real.
Amid this commotion, Ryan Jiang, a Harvard University freshman, sat alone on the floor. He was on his phone, watching a sparring video he had found of the boxer he was scheduled to fight that evening, trying to learn something, anything, that could help him in their match.
“He throws a mean right hand, that’s what I’ve learned,” he said ruefully. Mr. Jiang is a self-effacing 19-year-old, weighing about 160 pounds, and studying applied mathematics. He awoke the morning of the fight with a racing heart. “I’ve been nervous all day.”
Modern life — lived on screens or amid the constant distraction of screens — can feel isolating. Muskaan Sandhu, 18, a Harvard freshman, sees boxing as a way to engage with people. “You feel really human,” she said. “You feel a connection with the person you’re fighting. Like we’re in this together.”