Moving to Canada, Chasing Immortality, and Snagging a Pool Chair
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.
By the way thanks for all the kind replies to yesterday’s newsletter, in which I talked about some of the plans for the future of Understandably. It will take a few weeks to roll everything out, and I appreciate your support!
Democrats Joke About Moving to Canada Post-Trump. These People Actually Did It.
Political transplants battle freezing winds and pine for low-fat peanut butter; ‘North America 2.0’
Trump’s first victory helped cement Nathan Sanders’ decision to take an academic job at the University of Toronto. The experience of living in a culture that is both so similar to and so different from America’s has been strange at times.
“It’s like aliens have abducted you and created a virtual reality based on your memories,” said the 51-year-old former Pennsylvania resident. “But the simulation is a little off, and every once in a while there’s a glitch. The money is a different color, and there are pictures of the queen everywhere.”
If DOGE Goes Nuclear
The risk of messing with the wrong computer system.
You may have never heard of the National Nuclear Security Administration, but its work is crucial to your safety—and to that of every other human being on the planet. If Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) hasn’t yet come across the NNSA, it surely will before too long. What happens after that could be alarming.
As recently as yesterday morning, Musk made clear that DOGE will go line by line through the government’s books looking for fat targets for budget-cutting, including those that are classified—especially those that are classified. DOGE employees are bound to notice NNSA, a 1,800-person organization that sits inside the Department of Energy and burns through $20 billion every year, much of it on classified work.
But as they set out to discover exactly how the money is spent, they should proceed with care. Musk’s incursions into other agencies have reportedly risked exposing sensitive information to unqualified personnel, and obstructing people’s access to lifesaving medicine. According to several nuclear-security experts and a former senior department official, taking this same approach at the NNSA could make nuclear material at home and abroad less safe.
What Have We Learned From Centuries of Chasing Immortality?
People, and men in particular, have long mixed solid science and serious quackery in the pursuit of longevity.
Whatever the maximum human life span may be, people appear increasingly determined to find it — in particular men, who are more inclined to favor radically extending life, maybe even indefinitely. Last year, nearly 6,000 studies of longevity made their way onto PubMed, a database of biomedical and life sciences papers; that’s almost five times as many as two decades ago.
Along with the creation of dozens of popular podcasts and a sizable supplement industry, that zeal has led to efforts to preserve organs, search out life-extending diets and even try to reverse aging itself. It’s the same mix of solid science, quixotic experimentation and questionable advice that has, for much of recorded history, defined the pursuit.
Knowing Less About AI Makes People More Open to Having It in Their Lives
People are turning to 'grief apps' to cope with the loss of family and friends. But the new world of death data raises troubling questions.
The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it.
Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
Interestingly, this link between lower literacy and higher receptivity persists even though people with lower AI literacy are more likely to view AI as less capable, less ethical, and even a bit scary. Their openness to AI seems to stem from their sense of wonder about what it can do, despite these perceived drawbacks.
CNN Finds Itself at a Digital Crossroads After Years of Turmoil
When Ted Turner founded CNN in 1980, he stressed how the C stood for cable, making it the first channel to be named after the then nascent TV delivery system.
But more than four decades later, the pay TV business that provides CNN with well over half of its revenue is sinking fast. CNN Chairman Mark Thompson's mission is to adapt to a cord-free future.
Last month, Thompson pressed the reset button by announcing a staff cut of 200 employees on the TV side and a $70-million investment into new products aimed at digital media users. Thompson, a former BBC and New York Times executive, called the moves a response “to profound and irreversible shifts in the way audiences in America consume news."
"One thing we do know about the future, it's not going to be the same money," said one CNN veteran not authorized to comment publicly.
(LA Times)
The Prince We Never Knew
A revealing new documentary could redefine our understanding of the pop icon. But you will probably never get to see it.
Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.
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Edelman manages to present a deeply flawed person while still granting him his greatness — and his dignity.
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Over a year and a half, I had observed as Edelman continued to perfect his film, working to capture the essence of Prince, even as it became slowly, painfully clear that it would most likely never air. The Prince estate had changed hands, and the new executors objected to the project.
Last spring, they saw a cut and, claiming that it misrepresented Prince, entered into a protracted battle with Netflix, which owns the rights to the film, to prevent its release. As of today, there is no indication that the film will ever come out. It has been like watching a monument being swallowed by the sea.
The Cutthroat Game of Snagging a Pool Chair on Vacation
Many hotels have way more people than chairs, leaving travelers with a choice: Devise a predawn battle plan or spend your days wandering the pool deck.
For those who choose to fight for a chair, it isn’t always as simple as waking up early. Night owls leave items on chairs before heading to bed, while others tip pool staff to do the early morning hunt for them. Then there is the long arm of the lounge-chair law. Many resorts have rules about how many chairs one person can save and how long items can be left unattended, and some employ pool-chair police to enforce them.
Brian Pope has a system when he stays at his timeshare at a resort in Aruba.
The 69-year-old salesman rises at 4 a.m., clips a light to his baseball cap and heads out. Each guest is only allowed to reserve two chairs and someone must be present or the items placed to claim chairs are removed by the attendant who patrols at 6 a.m. and 7 a.m.
Pope sets up shop, using his makeshift headlamp to read magazines or do work. It’s pitch black, he said, except for the light emitting from other guests’ phones and laptops—and the moon.
“I’m pretty sure I could go at 6 and find something, but it’s become a game,” he said.
I'm turning off the comments. Thanks everyone. Please let's try to be civil with each other. Thank you.
I don’t know why anyone would want to live forever, I find that a lot more depressing than the thought of eventually dying. Our bodies are not designed to be everlasting.
And people who move to Canada need to stop comparing it to where they came from. You left your former home behind for a reason, so embrace Canada for all it has to offer. And yes, things are more expensive here for several reasons. One is the weaker dollar, another is having to print bilingual labels on everything, which also leads to a lesser variety of products. Sometimes you need to figure out the exchange rate and you will realize it’s not that much more, though.