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.
The Genius Whose Simple Invention Saved Us From Shame at the Gas Station
On a rainy day in Detroit, a Ford engineer got confused, then soaked—and inspired. It took decades before he got any credit.
Unless you worked for Ford’s plastics, paint and vinyls division in the 1980s, you probably don’t know the name Jim Moylan.
But you might well know the idea that made this unknown engineer who recently died into one of America’s greatest inventors.
One rainy day 40 years ago, Moylan was headed to a meeting across Ford’s campus and hopped in a company car. When he saw the fuel tank was nearly empty, he stopped at a gas pump. What happened next is something that’s happened to all of us: He realized that he’d parked on the wrong side.
Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t infuriated. He was inspired. By the time he pulled his car around, he was already thinking about how to solve this everyday inconvenience that drives people absolutely crazy. And because the gas pump wasn’t covered by an overhead awning, he was also soaking wet. But when he got back to the office, Moylan didn’t even bother taking off his drenched coat when he started typing the first draft of a memo.
“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.”
The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on.
40 Years Later, a New Look at Lessons From the Challenger Disaster
Christa McAuliffe’s flight as the “teacher in space” lasted 73 seconds. A reporter who witnessed the tragedy returned to the story and found an engineer still trying to spread its lessons.
As high school teacher Christa McAuliffe prepared to be strapped into the space shuttle Challenger, Brian Russell, an official at the company that built the craft’s solid rocket boosters, had just participated in a fateful teleconference from his Utah headquarters.
Like every other engineer in the conference room at Morton Thiokol on that day four decades ago, the 31-year-old Russell opposed launching because the bitterly cold temperature at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center threatened the O-rings that sealed the rocket boosters. Their managers initially supported this view, but Russell listened in dismay as they reversed themselves under pressure from NASA officials and senior company officials and signed off on the launch.
The mission ended in catastrophe for the reason that Russell feared — a story I know well as a reporter who covered McAuliffe and witnessed the Challenger’s explosion. But for those involved in this tragedy, the families of the astronauts and those who approved the launch, much about this story is perhaps even more relevant today than it was on Jan. 28, 1986.
The belief that there are still lessons to learn from the disaster is what led Russell last year to take an extraordinary step that, until now, has received no public notice. He visited NASA centers across the country, telling the Challenger story in hopes that similar mistakes will not occur as the space agency prepares to launch four astronauts on Artemis II, which is scheduled to fly by the moon as soon as February.
Social Media Giants Face Landmark Legal Tests on Child Safety
Starting this week, a series of trials will test a new legal strategy claiming that Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube caused personal injury through addictive products.
Are social media apps addictive like cigarettes? Are these sites defective products?
Those are the claims that Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube will face this year in a series of landmark trials. Teenagers, school districts and states have filed thousands of lawsuits accusing the social media titans of designing platforms that encouraged excessive use by millions of young Americans, leading to personal injury and other harms.
The cases pose one of the most significant legal threats to Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube, potentially opening them up to new liabilities for users’ well-being. Drawing inspiration from a legal playbook used against Big Tobacco last century, lawyers plan to use the argument that the companies created addictive products.
A win could open the door to more lawsuits from millions of social media users. It could also lead to huge monetary damages and changes to social media sites’ designs.
Trump’s High-Stakes Bid to Dole Out $100 Billion More in Tax Refunds
The Republican strategy puts pressure on a shrunken IRS to get cash out quickly—and bets on taxpayers to return the favor in midterm elections this fall
Republicans and President Trump designed their tax cuts for this moment, creating a refund bonanza that will land in Americans’ bank accounts well ahead of the midterm elections.
The annual tax-filing season that opened Monday will produce a cash surge estimated at $100 billion beyond last year’s $329 billion total, and it is engineered to buoy Republicans’ sagging voter approval. Public confidence in Trump’s economic leadership has slumped, and better-than-expected growth hasn’t overcome Americans’ anxiety about the cost of living and a slowed job market.
At stake is whether Republicans can retain narrow House and Senate majorities that give them the authority to control the federal agenda and prevent investigations of Trump.
The tax-policy strategy is simple: Put money in voters’ wallets and get rewarded at the polls.
...
“Hell yeah, that was intentional,” said Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican from New York’s Long Island.
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“We learned,” said Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in 2017. “Even though tax refunds don’t reflect your tax burden, people pay attention to it.”
I Let My Wife Have an Affair. Do I Have to Console Her Now That It’s Over?
I’m including this because I think it might be the most-mocked thing that the New York Times has ever published, at least in my lifetime, and that’s a high bar.
I have been married for many years, and I still love and care deeply about my partner. Over the past year, she had an affair, and I knew about it from the beginning. ... At the same time, I always suffered when she was away with her affair partner and could not find a way to take this easily.
She recently decided to break it off ... I feel relieved.
My question is: Should I feel sorry for my wife? At the moment, I don’t. I understand her feelings and I care about her, but at the same time I feel it is not my job to console her for this particular loss. What do you think about this?
— Name Withheld
Funny how things weave in and out of other stories. In 1986 I was working for Bussman, the once very well known company for making all sorts of fuses. The department I was working in assembled many of the small fuses that were used in the space program. By that time, I had worked on all aspects of assembling those little suckers so it was on that fateful day in ‘86 that I was working on the kick press that capped them. We could listen to radios and as soon as the new broke, there were a lot of us in surprise, shock and tears. We had been thrilled that Krista and Judy had been included. Up until then space flight had definitely been a man’s world. Of course when we got home and watched the explosion on the news, it made things so much more heartrending.
In the aftermath, NASA put out a call for anyone finding parts of the Challenger to please let NASA know. My cousin was living at Atlantic Beach and his habit was to walk the beach every morning early. He found a good sized piece of the shuttle a few weeks after the explosion.
In December that same year, Asheville had a big Light Up the Holidays celebration around the first of December in order to open up the Christmas season. John Denver was the big name who would be coming to town for it. As he was my favorite singer then I desperately wanted to go so we got tickets and had a great time at the concert. At the very end of his concert, a huge screen dropped down behind him and he started this:
https://youtu.be/12pO9h3TRPQ?si=89oH7-kLt5Aiy1qo
Needless to say, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when it was over. As a matter of fact, I’m crying now just listening to the video. Ironic that Denver would lose his life flying his ultra lite plane over the Pacific.
Bill, in reading this, it is a reminder of just how vital a part women played in getting the space race off the ground but it took a movie like HIDDEN FIGURES to show us just how big a part. Women have always been doing great things to make our lives better or to advance our knowledge of this world but with very little recognition. How desperately sad it is that today’s powers that be would see us pushed back into the shadows, unheralded for anything other than being a baby machine.
Will read the other articles this weekend. Going to finish my email and settle in to read my book. I hope you and everyone else here have a good weekend.
Our daughter told us that her car didn’t have that little arrow. Of course she hadn’t actually looked before she said that. Kids. Sheesh.
Car renter’s favorite thing!