How to Delete Your 23andme Data
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.
Bonus up top this week: If you haven't already, I highly recommend checking out the amazing and emotional answers some readers gave to two big questions we posed recently:
Meteorologists Get Death Threats as Hurricane Milton Conspiracy Theories Thrive
It's their job to warn residents about destructive storms — but political polarization has made them targets online.
As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, meteorologists are staying awake for days at a time trying to get vital, life-saving information out to the folks who will be affected. That’s their job. But this year, several of them tell Rolling Stone, they’re increasingly having to take time out to quell the nonstop flow of misinformation during a particularly traumatic hurricane season. And some of them are doing it while being personally threatened.
“People are just so far gone, it’s honestly making me lose all faith in humanity,” says Washington D.C.-based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, in a phone interview conducted while he was traveling down to Florida for the storm. “There’s so much bad information floating around out there that the good information has become obscured.”
Cappucci says that he’s noticed an enormous change on social media in the last three months: “Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream and it’s making my job much more difficult.”
Milton Is the Hurricane That Scientists Were Dreading
Climate change set up the Gulf of Mexico to birth a storm this strong, this fast.
As Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm over the course of 12 hours this week, climate scientists and meteorologists were stunned.
NBC6’s John Morales, a veteran TV meteorologist in South Florida, choked up on air while describing how quickly and dramatically the storm had intensified. To most people, a drop in pressure of 50 millibars means nothing; a weatherman understands, as Morales said mid-broadcast, that “this is just horrific.” Florida is still cleaning up from Helene; this storm is spinning much faster, and it’s more compact and organized.
In a way, Milton is exactly the type of storm that scientists have been warning could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, called it shocking but not surprising.
“One of the things we know is that, in a warmer world, the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton might have been a significant hurricane regardless, but every aspect of the storm that could have been dialed up has been.
A Lost Trump Interview Comes Back to Life
In 1989, the yet-to-be-president held forth on strength, friendship, dealmaking, public service and building violations.
By Bob Woodward
One evening in February 1989, my Watergate reporting partner Carl Bernstein bumped into Donald Trump at a dinner party in New York.
“Why don’t you come on up?” Carl urged me on the phone from the party, hosted by Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish American socialite and record executive, in his Upper East Side townhouse. “Everybody’s having a good time,” he said. “Trump is here. It’s really interesting. I’ve been talking to him.”
Carl was fascinated with Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.” Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to join him, in large part, as Carl often reminds me, because I needed the key to his apartment, where I was staying at the time.
“I’ll be there soon,” I told him.
The Trump interview, taped on a microcassette, transcribed and printed, was deposited into a manila envelope with a copy of Trump’s book and eventually lost in piles and piles of records, interview notes and news clippings. I am a pack rat. For over 30 years, Carl and I looked for it.
Last year, I went to a facility where my records are stored and sifted through hundreds of boxes of old files. In a box of miscellaneous news clippings from the 1980s, I noticed a plain, slightly battered envelope — the interview.
Links: The Washington Post (Related: 5 Key Revelations From Bob Woodward’s New Book)
The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird Beliefs
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the U.S. is in “decline” and embraces a cultish tech movement to build “network” societies beyond the reach of nation-states—and he’s got Congress eating out of his hand.
Brian Armstrong has become a familiar face in the U.S. Capitol. The 41-year-old billionaire CEO of Coinbase, the nation’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by a country mile, has regularly traveled to Washington since at least 2018 to lobby members of Congress for friendly regulations for his industry. He was back on the Hill in June, donning a slim black suit—rather than his usual black T-shirt and black slacks—for a 48-hour bipartisan blitz. And it’s safe to say that he has never been more popular there.
That’s not because senators and representatives are suddenly scooping up bitcoins and meme coins and NFTs in some ill-advised bid to diversify their investment portfolios; just two members of Congress reportedly bought cryptocurrencies in 2022 and 2023. But politicians do see dollar signs when someone like Armstrong rolls into town because Washington is suddenly awash in crypto cash. Almost overnight, the industry has become a dominant force in American politics.
The numbers boggle: A Public Citizen study last month found that crypto companies, have raised more than $200 million in 2024—accounting for nearly half of all corporate contributions this cycle. Comapre that to less than $10 million to super PACs over the past two election cycles combined.
Have We Reached Peak Human Life Span?
After decades of rising life expectancy, the increases appear to be slowing. A new study calls into question how long even the healthiest of populations can live.
The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too?
Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.
The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country’s life expectancy is lower.
The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate.
The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone
A surplus of housing inventory and dwindling buyer interest are slowing sales. Hurricanes and extreme weather are making it worse.
Anthony Holmes was part of the great Florida migration. In 2021, he moved from Virginia to a gated suburban community in Tampa.
Now that he has had to leave, Holmes is another victim of a glutted housing market where buyers are increasingly hard to find.
He paid $550,000 for his five-bedroom home and spent another $50,000 on solar panels and interior improvements. When he had to move back to Virginia for work, Holmes expected to sell his house quickly. But since listing it in February, he has had no luck. He dropped the price five times to $583,900 and would be happy simply to break even.
“I can’t unload the thing,” Holmes said. “In eight months, I’ve had zero offers. No one even showed up to the open houses. Nobody.”
Across much of Florida and especially along the western coast, a surplus of inventory and dwindling buyer interest are slowing sales and keeping homes on the market longer. That is cooling off what had been one of America’s biggest housing booms this decade.
How to Delete Your 23andme Data Amid the Company's Turmoil
The company is in trouble and users are worried their data might be sold.
DNA analysis company 23andme has been in trouble lately: data was breached in a 2023 hack, and this September the entire board of directors resigned over disagreements with the CEO. That CEO, Anne Wojcicki, had said she was open to third-party takeover proposals; she only reversed that decision this week. The company is not currently for sale, but nothing about this is looking good—and it’s not clear what would happen to customer data if the company goes under.
Deleting your 23andme data doesn’t necessarily withdraw it from studies, especially since the data was “de-identified,” that is, stripped from your name and personal information. It does mean that your data will not be used in future research projects.
23andme explains its deletion policies as follows:
If you participated in 23andMe Research, your Personal Information will no longer be used in any future research projects. If you asked us to store your genetic samples, they will be discarded. We will retain limited information about you, including records of this deletion request, and other information as required by law and otherwise described in our Privacy Statement.
Regarding crypto's influence in politics, I recommend watching Patrick Boyle's excellent YouTube video from last week on this very topic. He is very critical that such a troubled industry makes up half of all corporate political contributions this cycle.
Something to be optimistic about….
A report from the Labor Department showed that inflation has dropped again, falling back to 2.4%, the same rate as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic. Friday the Dow average jumped 400 points to a record high, while the S&P closed above 5,800 for the first time.
Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long noted that “[b]y just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape.” Inflation is back down, growth remains strong at 3%, unemployment is low at 4.1% with the U.S. having created almost 7 million more jobs than it had before the pandemic. The stock market is hitting all-time highs. “Many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels.” The Federal Reserve has begun to cut interest rates, and foreign leaders are talking about the U.S. economy with envy.