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.
I’m wrapping up interviews from the holiday round of Life Story Magic. If you purchased one as a gift, just a reminder—they never expire, and I’m always happy to get it scheduled. I’ll also be kicking off a full Mother’s Day promotion soon.
Embrace Gray Hair and Get Outside: Lessons From Older Male Models
There’s a ‘mini-boom’ in male models in their 50s and 60s. We asked the silver foxes for tips on life, style and aging
Grailing King is part of a mini-boom in older male models—guys in their 50s and 60s. These days, Major Model Management vice president Nadia Shahrik represents an estimated 60 to 75 older men, a marked increase from the 15 or so in her stable a little more than a decade ago. “In the last three years, it’s really picked up,” she said. Ralph Lauren has long used older models in campaigns, but it’s no longer a surprise to see brands like J.Crew and Todd Snyder casting gray-haired fellas in shoots next to men half their age.
For the brands employing them, the fact that these men look their age, complete with lined faces and salt-and-pepper (or just pure salt) hair is the point. Jack Carlson, the president and creative director of J.Press, cast a number of older models in his most recent runway show. In a way younger men can’t, he explained, older models “can almost put on anything and look cool,” he said, provided it’s well-made and fits right. “They just bring a sort of swagger and confidence to every look.”
Their unique career paths have plenty to teach non-models of any age about personal style, self-confidence and how to age gracefully. King’s signature is his Santa-grade white beard. He’d long neglected to grow one, worrying that it would make him look old. But he wore a bit of scruff to one casting appointment and got the job—plus instructions not to shave. Now, he said, “more and more clients like the beard.”
Link: Wall Street Journal (Sam Schube)
Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying
A record number of student loan borrowers are in delinquency and default. Some are making the drastic decision to leave the country and abandon their loans
Amanda Lynn Tully spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life. So, when she graduated in 2017 with a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field, she felt misled. Less than a year after graduating, Ms. Tully made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years.
More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt, and a record number — 7.7 million — have defaulted on their loans, according to recently released data from the Education Department. For some borrowers, moving abroad and out of reach of debt collectors can be tempting. In interviews, people who made this decision cited relieving the psychological burden of student debt as a motivator, as well as having a higher quality of life, even on a lower salary, outside the United States.
Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome. “The payments weren’t even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating,” Ms. Tully said. Michele Zampini, associate vice president of federal policy and advocacy at TICAS, has seen borrowers in similar situations default because of a combination of low earnings and a sense of hopelessness. “The psychological weight of carrying debt is a really widespread issue, even if it seems financially manageable,” she said.
Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)
Number of AI Chatbots Ignoring Human Instructions Increasing, Study Says
Research finds sharp rise in models evading safeguards and destroying emails without permission
AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found. AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute. The study identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.
In one case unearthed in the research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of “insecurity, plain and simple” and trying “to protect his little fiefdom.” In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code “spawned” another agent to do it instead. Another chatbot admitted: “I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong – it directly broke the rule you’d set.”
Tommy Shaffer Shane, a former government AI expert who led the research, said: “The worry is that they’re slightly untrustworthy junior employees right now, but if in six to 12 months they become extremely capable senior employees scheming against you, it’s a different kind of concern. Models will increasingly be deployed in extremely high stakes contexts – including in the military and critical national infrastructure. It might be in those contexts that scheming behaviour could cause significant, even catastrophic harm.”
Link: The Guardian (Robert Booth)
The Troubling Rise of Family Estrangement
As more adults cut off their parents, a researcher calls for closer scrutiny of causes and effects, and suggests paths to reconciliation
In a 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 US adults, nearly 4 in 10 respondents said they “no longer have a relationship with” one or more immediate family members. While polls, social media and news of high-profile celebrity splits highlight the prevalence and pain of family breakups, researchers’ growing but still limited attention has yet to quantify how much they’ve multiplied. There are, however, plenty of potential drivers in today’s divorce rates, political polarization, rising individualism, reliance on therapists and social media memes about toxic relationships, says Joshua Coleman, an author, researcher and psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It’s the kids who are mostly initiating these estrangements. Sociologists use the phrase “the intergenerational stake,” to convey the idea that when you’re raising your children you make a big investment, in part in the interest of furthering your genetic line. That can lead parents to assume that when they raise children, they will be close to them throughout their lifetime. Yet that’s obviously not how it is for most kids. This may help explain why a classic study in 1999 showed that parents of young adult children reported closer relationships and fewer problems than the children perceived.
The impacts are just very unequal. There can be some big upsides for the adult child. Certainly, some parents are hopeless, destructive people because of mental illness or addictions or their own unworked-through traumas. And in general, the adult child may feel the upside of, “Now I’m protecting myself. I’m prioritizing my mental health or my marriage or my identity.” But there’s nothing like that for the parent. For the parent, there is so much shame, loss, grief, distress and social isolation.
Link: Knowable Magazine (Katherine Ellison)
Colleges Are Swiftly Shortening Bachelor Degree Programs to Three Years
Nearly 60 colleges have adopted three-year bachelor’s degrees, a significant shift in higher education
Quinn McDonald planned to spend the typical four years working toward a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. Then he heard about a place where he could get the same degree in three. “It was the idea of being able to save a year” that grabbed his attention, said McDonald — a savings of not only time but tuition. And he could start earning a salary faster than if he spent four years in college. So, last fall, McDonald joined the inaugural class of one of the nation’s first in-person programs approved to award bachelor’s degrees with fewer than the usual 120 credits, at Johnson & Wales University.
That’s an option being made available by colleges and universities with astonishing speed: a new kind of bachelor’s degree muscling into the space between the traditional four-year version and the two-year associate degree. At least one school, Ensign College in Utah, will convert all of its bachelor’s degrees into the new, reduced-credit, three-year kind. Loma Linda University in San Bernardino County has added a three-year degree in global health. Nearly 60 other universities and colleges are planning, considering or have already launched them in some disciplines.
The work of trimming down four-year bachelor’s degrees to fit within three years has prompted nothing less than a rethinking of the purpose of a college education. Most of those debuting three-year bachelor’s degrees have stripped out elective courses from what students have traditionally been required to take. The three-year bachelor’s degrees at colleges and universities that have so far offered or announced them are almost all in disciplines that lead straight to jobs.
Link: Los Angeles Times (Jon Marcus)
Backup: https://archive.is/Yk4xA
How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying
The former senator wants to heal the America he’s leaving behind
When Ben Sasse announced last December that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he called it a death sentence, but he noted that he’d had one before the cancer too. We all do. Sasse served the state of Nebraska in the U.S. Senate for eight years as a high-minded and, by his own account, sometimes ineffectual conservative. Then he quit politics to become the president of the University of Florida, pursuing a different model of civic reform. Now he’s facing mortality.
I believe we’re all on the clock. We’re all dying. So, this is not the scariest thing to me. I’ve always known that we’re going to be pushing up daisies eventually. This is more finite.
[BIG EDIT TO ANOTHER PART OF THE INTERVIEW, BUT I FOUND THIS INTERESTING …]
“I Love Lucy” wasn’t important content, but it was shared content. And it meant that tomorrow morning you had a whole bunch of topics you could go to with your neighbor or your co-worker that was just shared cultural data.
We don’t have any of that anymore. So, in a world where everybody is incentivized to go narrow but deep, there’s not a lot of need to call out B.S. and crazy on your own end of the continuum.
There’s a ton of incentive for both political addicts on the right to find some nut job on the left who did or said something crazy — “They’re all going to grab our guns” — or there’s some nut job on the left who says everybody on the right wants to do this horrible thing to you because they found some idiot on Twitter or on a podcast who said that thing.
The problem with that kind of nut picking is it doesn’t ever solve a problem.
It does create a delusional othering of the rest of your community, but it also takes the whole middle and says: These freaks are not people you should really pay attention to.
Link: New York Times (Ross Douthat)
How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran
In a series of Situation Room meetings, President Trump weighed his instincts against the deep concerns of his vice president and a pessimistic intelligence assessment. Here’s the inside story of how he made the fateful decision
The black S.U.V. carrying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House just before 11 a.m. on Feb. 11. The Israeli leader, who had been pressing for months for the United States to agree to a major assault on Iran, was whisked inside with little ceremony, out of view of reporters, primed for one of the most high-stakes moments in his long career. Mr. Netanyahu headed downstairs for the main event: a highly classified presentation on Iran for President Trump and his team in the White House Situation Room.
The presentation that Mr. Netanyahu would make over the next hour would be pivotal in setting the United States and Israel on the path toward a major armed conflict. Mr. Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic. At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell.
Nobody in Mr. Trump’s inner circle was more worried about the prospect of war with Iran, or did more to try to stop it, than the vice president. Mr. Vance had built his political career opposing precisely the kind of military adventurism that was now under serious consideration. In front of his colleagues, Mr. Vance warned Mr. Trump that a war against Iran could cause regional chaos and untold numbers of casualties. It could also break apart Mr. Trump’s political coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into the promise of no new wars.