“Low skilled” workers are a myth. “[Minimum-wage jobs are] not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses.” The author, Rachel Moody, is half-right here. I’m not convinced that minimum-wage jobs are not low-skilled. But Moody is right that these jobs are important, and the workers are entitled to dignity and a living wage.
“Once I returned home, I realised the only things that had kept their value were the relationships and conversations I had had. Everything else seemed perishable.” I visited every country in the world without flying. Here are eight things I learned.
Chris Arnade walks Taipei and other parts of China, and reflects on the temples, materialism and pigeon keepers. “Six flights higher is where I found Mr. Li, an especially kind man, who like all pigeon keepers around the world, was giddy to meet someone else who loves the rats with wings.”
The Edmund Fitzgerald sank 50 years ago.
Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” became one of the biggest hits of 1976, “less than a year after the disaster it commemorates.” writes Neda Ulaby for NPR:
The Canadian musician had agonized over writing the song in the first place.
“He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit,” writes John U. Bacon in his new bestseller, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. “But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes … this song – whatever it was – was deeply personal.”
…
“From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes,” Bacon told NPR. “So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century.”
The Trump government says it will use the military against American civilians and is openly preparing to do it. They’re getting ready to steal the 2026 election. This is not some bullshit TikTok conspiracy theory; it’s happening in the open.
Trump’s domestic militia is growing. “The President repeatedly says he’ll use the military against American civilians and is creating special units to do so.”
Trump Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Work to Send Full Food Stamps — “They would rather go door to door, taking away people’s food, than do the right thing and fully fund SNAP for November so that struggling veterans, seniors, and children can keep food on the table."
Today is, of course, not the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end. It’s even too soon to say it’s the end of the beginning.
But it’s a good day. The first day in more than a year that I’ve looked at the news and felt good. That’s enough for today.
Democrats sweep about every election they’re in, particularly Mamdani in New York. Prop 50 passes. And there’s going to be a fourth Mummy movie, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Today has been a good day.
AT&T’s grounded AI strategy defies bubble warnings. My latest on Fierce Network. With executive backing, cross-team collaboration, and a relentless ROI focus, AT&T is proving you don’t need to ride a hype wave to generate value.
Johnny Sheffield, the actor who played Boy in Tarzan movies opposite Johnny Weissmuller 1939-41, retired to San Diego
“Reflecting on their partnership, Weissmuller later said, ‘He was a natural on set, fearless in the water, and always ready to jump into a scene.'”
After Tarzan, Sheffield took the lead in “Bomba the Jungle Boy,” starring in 12 adventure films from 1949-55.
By his mid-twenties, Sheffield retired from acting. He earned a business degree from UCLA, married Patricia Berg in 1959, and raised three children: Patrick, Stuart, and Regina. He worked in real estate, construction, and even lobster importing, quietly shaping a life in Chula Vista far removed from Hollywood’s spotlight.
Son Stuart, his wife, Elaine Lancaster, and their son Draygon Wylde Sheffield-Cassan still live on the family property. “Draygon shares a striking resemblance to his grandfather, including the iconic curly, golden hair.”
Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles made stars of formerly humble tuba players
People long associated the instrument with polkas, elephants, clowns, and players at the back of the band, imprisoned by conductors' preconceived notions of what the horn, and those who play it, were capable of. But today, tuba players have found freedom and, through hard work and focus, they dazzle, unconstrained by others' views.
Who Is the Dapper Louvre Heist ‘Detective’ And Is He Even Real
“‘Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically,’ Melissa Chen, a tech executive based in London, wrote in an X post that has been viewed more than five million times. ‘To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who’s in the middle of divorce. A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.'”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta at The New York Times
(This article ran on Thursday. This morning, French authorities arrested
suspects charged with being the Louvre thieves, according to headlines.)
The secret to happiness is finding life purpose and acting on it
Happiness is not achieved by pursuing happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of finding life purpose and pursuing that purpose.
Dana Milbank reports at The Washington Post:: The best way to achieve happiness is focus on others and how you can contribute to them and their well-being. We need to find meaningful ways to contribute, “and often that will lead to the happiness that you’re seeking,” says psychologist Kendall Cotton Bronk of Claremont Graduate University.
Ask yourself what “the world is missing” and how you uniquely “fill that gap a little bit,” says psychology professor Todd Kashdan, who runs the Well-Being Lab at George Mason University. “The specific purpose doesn’t matter; it’s just a question of ‘what lights you up. Then commit to make a specific regular contribution – particularly time – toward that purpose.”
The contribution doesn’t need to be “a major life-changing allocation of time or energy” but rather “things we can fit into our everyday routines,” says Cornell psychologist Anthony Burrow, who runs the university’s Purpose and Identity Processes Lab.
Milbank writes:
There’s no right or wrong purpose. It could be related to family or work or anything else that gives you meaning and helps you order your goals. It’s not necessarily altruistic (evil people can have purpose) but often is. Your purpose can change over time.
Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House. “Our homes are filled with cameras, microphones, and mobile sensors connected to companies we barely know, all capable of being weaponized with a single line of code.”
‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’
Anteaters evolved independently at least 12 times in the 66 million years since nonavian dinosaurs went extinct.
Ants and termites are good eating and there are plenty of them. They outweigh all other insects, mammals, amphibians and birds combined in the rainforests of South and Central America. And globally, termites alone outweigh all wild mammals by a factor of 10.
The mad king's digital killswitch
Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country’s continued operations, huh?
In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump’s DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE’s roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites.
There’s more: Decades of protectionist tech regulation gives the Trump government control of the world’s cloud applications, networks, tractors, phones, game consoles, medical implants, ventilators and more. “It’s well past time for a post-American internet.”
One of the benefits of using Amazon frequently is that we have a gallery of great photos of the front gate of our house.