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.
Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers
More citizens are replanting overseas, drawn by a quality of life made easily affordable by the U.S.’s enviable salaries. “I wasn’t expecting to be surrounded by this many Americans.”
Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in... Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.
In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language—not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine...
“You don’t face the prospect of your 5-year-old going into a kindergarten and doing an active shooter drill,” said Chris Ford, 41, who works for a Dallas real-estate investment firm while helping run a kids’ baseball league in Berlin, whose roster has doubled in size for each of the past three years. “The wages are higher in the U.S. but the quality of life is higher in Europe.”
Link: Wall Street Journal (Multiple reporters)
It Was Paradise for American Retirees—Until It Became the Center of a Drug War
Mexico’s Puerto Vallarta has been a big destination among the growing number of Americans who retire abroad
The Pacific coast tourist city is home to thousands of American retirees. They include Bill Huebsch, a 79-year-old New Yorker who spends about two months a year in nearby Nuevo Nayarit... Huebsch had just checked out at the supermarket when the store locked its hurricane gates to protect customers from the threat of gunmen from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, who went on a violent rampage on Sunday after the Mexican military killed their chieftain, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera.
Three hours later, the store let customers leave. On his ride home, Huebsch passed trucks and a bus the cartel members had set on fire. “It was shocking,” said Huebsch, who said that while there is violent crime in New York City, the violence in Puerto Vallarta was coordinated and widespread.
More Americans are choosing to spend their golden years abroad, and the violence in Puerto Vallarta is underlining the risks.
Link: Wall Street Journal (Anne Tergesen)
How Jeffrey Epstein Sought to Infiltrate the Justice System
For decades, the financier curated a network of influential people to leverage his fortune and restore his reputation
Jeffrey Epstein didn’t beat the justice system by accident. For decades, the New York financier curated a network of influential people — politicians, business titans, media figures and academics — whom he leveraged to build his fortune and restore his reputation after he had been accused of preying on underage girls in South Florida in 2008.
New documents — made public for the first time — show in greater detail how Epstein tried, and often succeeded, in influencing almost every level of the criminal justice system that threatened to disrupt his sex trafficking and money laundering empire... Records show he tried to cultivate relationships with a coterie of former prosecutors, including: Alex Acosta, the U.S. Attorney in South Florida who approved Epstein’s plea deal; Jeff Sloman, Acosta’s former deputy... Not all of his efforts were successful.
He even enlisted his court-approved sex-addiction doctor, Stephen Alexander, as a back channel to relay messages to government and law enforcement officials he wanted to secretly curry favor with.
Link: Miami Herald (Julie K. Brown)
I Am a 15-Year-Old Girl. Let Me Show You the Vile Misogyny That Confronts Me on Social Media Every Day
An anonymous teenage girl describes the relentless online hatred that has ruined her self-esteem and relationship to being a girl
Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re w**s and need to stop letting so many guys f* them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it... The comments that followed were pure misogyny.
Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals... We’re also “thots” (ws), “community p“ and “bops.”
If I spend even 10 minutes on an app such as Instagram, I will close it, feeling disheartened and unhappy about being a girl. When nearly every comments section on a video of a girl my age is filled with disgusting and objectifying comments about her body from boys, it causes me to feel deeply uncomfortable in my own body... But the worst thing is knowing how much hate there is from men and boys for all women and girls, including me.
Link: The Guardian (Anonymous)
She Was an Orphan Adopted as a Toddler From Iran by a US Veteran. The Administration Wants to Deport Her
A woman faces deportation to Iran because of a bureaucratic error—despite being raised as a Christian by an American Air Force officer
A woman adopted as a toddler by an American war veteran, who he found in the 1970s in an Iranian orphanage and raised as a Christian, is being threatened with deportation to Iran, a country notoriously dangerous for Christians and now on the brink of war with the United States. She is one of thousands adopted from abroad who were never granted citizenship because of a fracture at the intersection of adoption and immigration law.
The woman... received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month ordering her to appear for removal proceedings before an immigration judge in California. She has no criminal record. The letter says she is eligible for deportation because she overstayed her visa in March 1974 at 4 years old.
“I never imagined it would get to where it is today,” said the woman, who believes that, as a Christian and the daughter of an American Air Force officer, deportation to Iran might be a death sentence. “I always told myself that there is no way that this country could possibly send someone to their death in a country they left as an orphan. How could the United States do that?”
Link: Associated Press (Multiple reporters)
‘Profoundly Moving’: Netflix’s Posthumous Celebrity Interview Series Is a Marvel
Famous Last Words is a series of interviews conducted with notable names and only released after their death
Exactly one day after the death of actor Eric Dane, a new show appeared on Netflix. Entitled Famous Last Words, it consisted of an interview with none other than Eric Dane himself... Dane, it transpired, had recorded the interview in full knowledge that he was dying. What’s more, he conducted it on the understanding that it would only be released in the event of his death.
In a room with host Brad Falchuk (and nobody else; the cameras are all unmanned and fixed in position), Dane went about describing how he was coping with late-stage ALS, noting that his battles with drugs and alcohol had left him familiar with the sensation that his inside did not match his outside... And then, seven minutes from the end, Falchuk left the room.
What followed was undeniably powerful. Looking straight to camera, Dane addressed his two teenage daughters, urging them to stay in the present and fight through adversity. “You are my heart,” he concluded. “You are my everything. Good night. I love you. Those are my last words.”
Link: The Guardian (Stuart Heritage)
This Looks Like a Kalshi Insider Bet on Aliens
Someone placed nearly $100,000 on the claim that the Trump administration will confirm alien life exists—with no apparent news to justify it
On Monday night, someone placed a peculiar bet on the prediction market Kalshi. At 7:45 p.m. eastern time, a single trader put down nearly $100,000 on the claim that, by the end of December, the Trump administration will confirm that alien life or technology exists elsewhere in our universe... These were market-moving events: For one brief stretch, the market appeared to think that there was at least a one-in-three chance that the U.S. government will announce the existence of aliens this year.
This week’s mysterious and mammoth bets did not get placed until a few days after this flash of interest had mostly gone away. From February 20 to the night of the 23rd, when the peculiar trades occurred, no further alien news was reported, no congressional hearings were held, and no rumors received significant circulation online. Whatever the Monday-night whales (or whale) knew—or thought they knew—it doesn’t seem to have come from the public-information environment...
When I asked Ben Shindel, an expert on prediction markets, about the trades, he told me that they could have been made by an inexperienced and sloppy trader. “The other possibility is that it’s an insider.”
Link: The Atlantic (Ross Andersen)
The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE
When an unusual opportunity opened in the prediction markets, Alan Cole took his chances. He just needed the government to be the government.
Cole is a 37-year-old tax economist with Ivy League degrees, a mortgage and a young child... But Musk’s boasts and his eager fans brought an unusual opportunity into the burgeoning U.S. prediction markets: People willing to bet that the world’s richest man would transform and shrink the federal government. Cole took the opposite position, one he didn’t see as a gamble at all.
From Cole’s perspective, even if Musk cut government contracts and shrank the federal workforce—which he did—he couldn’t meaningfully dent Social Security and Medicare benefits. And that left no plausible path for cutting overall federal spending. “It’s almost like the government has, you know, 19 elderly employees for every actual employee,” Cole said.
The government published the final 2025 figures Feb. 20. It wasn’t even close. The lowest spending quarter in 2025 was $66 billion above the bet’s target level. Cole collected $470,300, for a profit of more than $128,000, or 37%. “There’s a little bit of that feeling of vindication,” Cole said.
Link: Wall Street Journal (Connor Hart)
The Wildest Ride at Epcot: Keeping Day Drinkers From Getting Trashed
The fan-made ‘Drinking Around the World’ challenge has made the park a draw, but things can go from magical to messy in a hurry
Rusty Featherstone and Willy Donnellon began their most recent trip to Epcot with palomas in Mexico. They chased the cocktails with two Norwegian beers, then moved on to China for some hard hibiscus iced teas. More than eight drinks later, with the challenge complete, both Featherstone and Donnellon were hammered: “I could walk out of there on my own two feet, but I was like, ‘I need to go lay down,’” Donnellon, a 25-year-old content creator, said. “You get pretty f***ed up.”
Drinking Around the World, a fan-made challenge that entails ordering a drink from each of the 11 countries in Epcot’s World Showcase, has existed for decades. But a recent surge of social-media attention has pushed the tradition into the spotlight...
Featherstone and Donnellon have done the challenge several times and documented each of their attempts, amassing tens of millions of views across TikTok and YouTube. They said getting drunk surrounded by vacationing families is a high-wire act that is part of the appeal. “There’s something funnily sobering about the setting,” Donnellon said. “It becomes an internal drunkenness, where if you walked by us, you wouldn’t know. But if you tried to talk to us—game over.”
Link: Wall Street Journal (Connor Hart)
Trump’s Favorite Voter-ID Bill Would Probably Backfire
Congressional Republicans are trying to pass a strict “election integrity” law that seems almost custom-designed to disenfranchise their own supporters
For decades, the politics of voter-ID battles were based on a simple premise: The voters most likely to be screened out by such restrictions were probably Democrats. In 2024, however, that fact stopped being true. Trump beat Kamala Harris among voters who didn’t regularly participate in elections... In other words, the politics of voter ID have not caught up to its new partisan implications.
Republicans’ current voter-ID push seems almost custom-designed to disenfranchise their own voters... This is a high bar. Only half of Americans own a passport, and only five states issue IDs that prove citizenship. Everyone else would need an American birth certificate and a matching ID or a certificate of naturalization... One recent YouGov poll showed that 64 percent of Harris voters reported having a valid passport compared with 55 percent of Trump voters.
Barring some abrupt realignment between now and November, the bill, if passed, would be likely to drive Republicans away from the polls. Yet elected officials appear to believe the exact opposite.
Link: The Atlantic (Marc Novicoff)