Running drunk
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.
Young Gazans Reach Global Audiences With Videos of Everyday Life in War
I'm going to start with something pretty serious: Displaced young Palestinians are chronicling their wartime routines on TikTok and Instagram, allowing their followers abroad to see a more personal side of the conflict.
I guess I'm old or something, but I almost never use TikTok. That said, it's one of the prime sources of news for people under a certain age.
That's one of the several reasons I was fascinated to get a glimpse of how young people are learning about what life is like in Gaza during the war: By following "day in the life" videos of ordinary teens and 20-somethings who live there.
She Ran the New York City Marathon Drunk. And She'd Do It Again
OK, this is a more playful TikTok-inspired story.
Personally, I've basically stopped drinking and gotten into a healthier lifestyle, and one of my goals is to get back to where I could legitimately consider running a marathon again. (I've done four, but the most recent one was 20 years ago!).
I'm not actually advocating for the path of the woman below, but I can imagine that the social part of this might be quite a bit of fun.
Justine Huang, 26, ran the New York City Marathon drunk — and she has no regrets.
Huang ran the Chicago marathon in October, pushing herself hard to beat a goal time, and she hadn't expected to win a spot in the lottery to run the New York City marathon as well.
So, she decided to run the second race at a more leisurely pace, and drink in the atmosphere -- along with whatever else spectators offered her.
"I wanted to eat all the food I saw and then drink whatever the spectators were bringing," Huang said. "That was my plan going into this race. But I didn't expect how much food and drinks there would be."
She started with candy, then "the first guy handed me, I think, a shot of Hennessy," Huang said. "After that, it got really, really lit."
She blew up on TikTok, and elsewhere.
(NPR)
Becoming Trump Country
Two weeks in the life of Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, one of the many places that shifted to the right in this year’s election.
Reporters and photographers spent two weeks in this area that shifted sharply for Trump, both before and after the election, interviewing regular people. This is really a long photo spread with short interviews with voters; I found it interesting and pretty well-balanced.
$500,000 Pay, Predictable Hours: How Dermatology Became the ‘It’ Job in Medicine
Americans’ newfound obsession with skin care has medical students flocking to this specialty.
Four-day workweeks, double the salary of some colleagues and no emails at night. If those perks sound like they belong to a few vaunted tech jobs, think again. Dermatologists boast some of medicine’s most enviable work lives, and more aspiring doctors are vying for residency spots in the specialty.
“It’s ungodly competitive,” says Dr. Lindsey Zubritsky, a dermatologist in Ocean Springs, Miss., who finished her residency in 2018 and now splits her time between clinical work with patients and her social-media feed, where the “dermfluencer” has three million followers on TikTok and Instagram.
Medical residency applications for dermatology slots are up 50% over the past five years, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, with women flooding the zone. A younger generation of physicians wants better work-life balance than their predecessors and, unlike pressure-cooker medical specialties such as cardiac surgery, dermatology fits the bill.
“It’s one of the only fields where you can work 40 hours a week like a normal person,” says Zubritsky, 36, who has two children and sees patients between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., three days a week.
Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back
As revolutionary new weight-loss drugs turn consumers off ultraprocessed foods, the industry is on the hunt for new products.
For decades, Big Food has been marketing products to people who can’t stop eating, and now, suddenly, they can. The active ingredient in Ozempic, as in Wegovy, Zepbound and several other similar new drugs, mimics a natural hormone, called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), that slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain. Around seven million Americans now take a GLP-1 drug, and Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2035 the number of U.S. users could expand to 24 million. That’s more than double the number of vegetarians and vegans in America, with ample room to balloon from there.
The prospect of tens of millions of people cutting their caloric intake ... is unsettling the industry. Late last year, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food-industry executives had been calling him. “They are scared about it,” he said. Around the same time, Walmart’s chief executive in the United States, John Furner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn. By one market-research firm’s estimate, food-and-drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before.
Ozempic users aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant.
“Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”
Ex-Fiancée Must Return $70K Ring After Failed Engagement, Court Says
Massachusetts’s highest court reversed a longstanding ruling, saying an engagement ring must be returned if the wedding falls through.
After a year of dating that included trips to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Italy, Bruce Johnson bought Caroline Settino a $70,000 diamond engagement ring from Tiffany & Co.
Johnson proposed during a dinner in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 2017. When Settino agreed, other diners at the restaurant applauded.
The next year, Johnson sued Settino, claiming he was the rightful owner of the engagement ring.
Johnson broke up with Settino before they were married, and his lawsuit forced Massachusetts’s highest court to reconsider a 65-year-old ruling that said someone can retrieve the engagement ring they gave their partner only if they weren’t at “fault” for the breakup.
On Friday, Johnson learned he would reclaim the ring after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that, from now on, an engagement ring must be returned to the buyer if the wedding falls through, regardless of who’s at fault.
Genetic Discrimination Is Coming for Us All
The news came four years ago, at the end of a casual phone call. Bill’s family had always thought it was a freak coincidence that his father and grandfather both had ALS. But at the end of a catch-up, Bill’s brother revealed that he had a diagnosis too. The familial trend, it turned out, was linked to a genetic mutation. That meant Bill might also be at risk for the disease.
An ALS specialist ordered Bill a DNA test. While he waited for results, he applied for long-term-care insurance. If he ever developed ALS, Bill told me, he wanted to ensure that the care he would need as his nerve cells died and muscles atrophied wouldn’t strain the family finances. When Bill found out he had the mutation, he shared the news with his insurance agent, who dealt him another blow: “I don’t expect you to be approved,” he remembers her saying.
Bill doesn’t have ALS. He’s a healthy 60-year-old man who spends his weekends building his dream home by hand. A recent study of mutations like his suggests that his genetics increase his chances of developing ALS by about 25 percent, on average. Most ALS cases aren’t genetic at all. And yet, Bill felt like he was being treated as if he was already sick. (Bill asked to be identified by his first name only, because he hasn’t disclosed his situation to his employer and worried about facing blowback at work too.)
For decades, researchers have feared that people might be targeted over their DNA, but they weren’t sure how often it was happening. Now at least a handful of Americans are experiencing what they argue is a form of discrimination. And as more people get their genomes sequenced—and researchers learn to glean even more information from the results—a growing number of people may find themselves similarly targeted.
After all the time you put into training for a marathon, it’s pretty stupid to accept things from people on the sidelines. I am running my 34th and 35th half marathons in the next six months, leading up to my 5th marathon in October, which means hours and hours on the road accumulating mileage. No way am I risking all that time on a drink of something from a stranger on the sidelines.
I am seldomly serious in races as I am past the point of worrying about hitting a time or pace, say hello to most people I pass, give high fives along the way. But I am very careful about what I eat or drink. Digestive issues can quickly sideline a race you just spent four or five months training for. Not worth the race
Being drunk and/or high is the only way I'd ever run a marathon if I could actually run a marathon, which I can't. But I loved the story because when you think of long-distance runners you picture them as so serious. So it was refreshing to see a marathoner lighten up and have some fun!!