Curated Compositions

Reflections: Chapter 10 - Life in Assisted Living

Brian Rendell — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:37:56 GMT

This is Chapter 10 in the series. You can find previous chapters here:

Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent:

Chapter 10 - Life in Assisted Living

As I mentioned, I don’t think we could’ve found a better assisted living facility for Mom. Now that it’s changed management and ownership, I don’t know if that’s the same case. But at least for our time there, it was great. Here are some key things that stood out:

Food

Though the assisted living location was great, it wasn’t perfect, and Mom would let us know when she wasn’t happy. The complaints mirrored those I’ve heard from other people at other places and were primarily focused on the food—either the taste, the portions, or the selection available. In all fairness to Mom, there were times that she received paltry portions (she’d send me photos from her phone) and she would have to ask for more food and I’d have to talk to the staff. However, most of the times she received small portions was when she showed up toward the end of the meal period. During those times, she could still get always-available snack food, like chips and fruit. Lesson learned there—show up early to meal time to get the best selection of food that’s been prepared.

Despite the complaints on quality or quantity of food provided by the assisted living staff, it’s still provided, by others, so you don’t have to worry about going to the grocery store or cooking meals yourself. If you do want to prepare your own food, independent living facilities usually all have a stove and oven in the room. And while assisted living facilities do not usually have these, they do have microwaves and mini-fridges, so you can have your own food in your room. This, Mom took full advantage of when she’d sleep in past breakfast hours or had the desire for late-night munchies. H-E-B delivery (yes, they deliver to assisted living) was her go-to for keeping her personal pantry stocked between times that we’d pick up food for her.

Activities

In addition to prepared meals, assisted living facilities offer a variety of activities. This can include movie nights, arts and crafts, church services by visiting clergy, exercise sessions, choir, Thirsty Thursday events where alcohol (yes, actual alcohol) is served to the residents by staff, trips to the grocery store and to restaurants, and just about anything else the staff can come up with, or is recommended by the residents. Each month an activity schedule would be emailed out and posted that showed the activities that would be occurring. We, as family, were welcome to join in any of them, and would usually join in the monthly themed dinners like the Hawaiian Luau, Cinco de Mayo, western night, and others. We enjoyed going, hearing the karaoke singer, seeing Santa make the rounds, and talking with other residents and staff. Many times, this is when we were able to meet the family members of friends that mom made, which was nice. And, most of all, Mom really enjoyed us being there—it gave her something to look forward to, and I think she liked to show off her family to her friends (which, hey, it’s always great to be loved by your mom so much that she’s proud of you and wants to show you off!)

Transportation

Depending on your ability, and the assisted living location you choose, you could still have a car and use it if you wanted. We kept Mom’s car there, but she never used it—a fact I’m grateful for because I’m not sure it would’ve been safe for her to do so. But it was very handy for when I needed to take her to appointments. It was a minivan, which was much easier for her to get in and out of, and there was room for her wheelchair in the back.

Transportation to medical appointments was available, though we only tried that once when my schedule wouldn’t allow for me to take Mom myself. As you might expect, when you depend on assisted living for transportation, you are on their schedule—both for drop-off and pick-up, so early coordination and patience are required. Mom had to be ready early for pick-up, then had to wait for a while after her appointment was over for the driver to come back and pick her up.

Medical Support

The assisted living facility always had at least one nurse onsite who could provide basic care, if needed, and provide medication to residents who weren’t able to administer their own meds. However, they really only provided basic care; if a patient fell or was injured, the medical staff would call an ambulance for the resident to be taken to the hospital.

Also, you should know that having the nursing staff provide medication will be more expensive, primarily because the medications are tightly controlled and closely monitored. Mom was able to self-medicate, but she was required to keep her meds locked up in a drawer that only she had access to.

We were grateful that the facility also had on-site physical therapists who could help Mom to try and stay active, at least when she was willing. Being onsite meant one less trip that had to be coordinated. And, the physical therapy staff was great at gently encouraging, helping, and pushing her to be active and increase her mobility. She made considerable improvement when she consistently attended her appointments and did her exercises.

Staying Active

Though there’s no one dictating when you can come and go from assisted living, if you are no longer able to drive and are dependent on other people or services to get you places outside the facility, I could see how it might feel like a prison. In this regard, it could feel as though someone has taken away your freedom. And much like prison, the things you have to look forward to are meals, appointments, and things that break up the monotony. And that’s also why it’s important to do those things. They break you out of a rut, they give you things to look forward to.

So, my recommendation is to go to activities, even if mundane, just to have things to keep you active and engaged. In life, the more active you are, the healthier you’ll be. Be it mental, physical, or social, we need engagement and activity. We don’t do well when were static. A body at rest will stay at rest, as Newton would say. It feels good to sleep in, sit on the couch, watch TV, scroll your phone or surf on your computer. But what you really need to do is get out there and do things, with people.

Advice

Choose a facility carefully and continue reevaluating. A facility’s quality can change with new ownership, management, or staffing.
Expect some complaints, especially about food. Take concerns seriously, but recognize that dissatisfaction with taste, portions, and selection is common.
Review the activity calendar and participate regularly. Even simple activities provide structure, reduce boredom, and support mental, physical, and social health.
Embrace the opportunities to do new things and meet new people.
For family, join events when possible. Holiday meals, themed dinners, and other gatherings help residents stay connected and allow families to meet staff and other residents.
Evaluate transportation and driving honestly. Keeping a car may be convenient, but safety should come first. Facility transportation also requires advance planning and patience.
Understand the limits and costs of medical support. Onsite nurses generally provide basic care, while emergencies require hospital services. Medication management will also involve additional fees.

Links to each chapter:

16 Things from the Past Few Weeks | 7 Aug 26

Brian Rendell — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:00:56 GMT

Sorry, been a few weeks…had a few other higher priority items going on. So, let’s jump right in:

History

1. Who was the worst monster of the 20th century? (Noahpinion)

In this first article, Noah Smith ranks the worst regimes of the 20th century by considering not just total deaths, but also intent, proportional harm, living conditions under the regime, and what leaders planned but failed to accomplish. His list:

Hitler and Nazi Germany rank first because their mass killing was deliberate and expansionist: about 5–6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, while Nazi plans for Eastern Europe envisioned the starvation, enslavement, or elimination of tens of millions more. Of the roughly 27 million Soviet citizens killed during World War II, about 19 million were civilians, many dying from hunger and disease connected to Nazi occupation policies.
Fascist Japan ranks second for its conquest of China and Southeast Asia, with an estimated 6–20 million Chinese deaths, including widespread massacres, starvation, biological warfare, and human experimentation.
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge ranks third because it killed an estimated 1.5–3 million Cambodians, roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of the country’s population.
Stalin’s USSR ranks fourth, with an estimated 10–20 million deaths, including 6–10 million from famine and perhaps 3 million political opponents killed directly or through the gulag system.
Mao’s China ranks fifth: roughly 36–40 million people died during the Great Famine, while another estimated 2–4 million were deliberately killed through purges, executions, forced labor, and the Cultural Revolution.

Noah argues that Wars of conquest tend to produce the worst atrocities because they encourage dehumanization and mass violence, while communist regimes were especially prone to catastrophic famines caused by destructive agricultural policies. His tentative 21st-century ranking includes: Sudan’s RSF/Janjaweed and Omar al-Bashir, ISIS, Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, and Myanmar’s Tatmadaw as the worst regimes or actors so far.

East Asia

2. China’s shadowy maritime militia is worryingly active (Economist)

China appears to be expanding the role of its maritime militia, a paramilitary force drawn partly from civilian fishing fleets, into the East China Sea and waters near Taiwan. In December, more than 1,000 Chinese fishing vessels formed a massive L-shaped formation north of Taiwan for over 12 hours, and similar formations appeared four more times in less than six months. One formation stretched about 450 kilometers, while another lasted more than 30 hours. These maneuvers are much larger than anything previously seen, even in the South China Sea, and suggest that China is testing its ability to coordinate large numbers of civilian vessels for military or “grey zone” purposes while maintaining plausible deniability.

China has been modernizing this force since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, creating better-trained and better-equipped units, especially in the South China Sea. Some vessels receive subsidies of more than 24,000 yuan, about $3,500, per day to remain in disputed waters. Satellite monitoring found an average of 241 suspected militia vessels operating daily in disputed South China Sea areas last year, the highest level since tracking began in 2021. In a Taiwan conflict, these boats could support reconnaissance and logistics, interfere with shipping, cut undersea cables, overwhelm defenses with large numbers of potential targets, or help enforce a blockade or quarantine. The recent formations therefore point to an important Chinese advantage: an unusual degree of political control over a vast civilian fleet that could be mobilized quickly for military purposes.

NOTE: Article contains good infographics.

3. China / Taiwan Update (AIE & ISW)

China is sharpening its preparations for a possible Taiwan conflict by studying Russia’s experience in Ukraine, expanding long-range anti-ship capabilities, and improving amphibious assault forces. PLA troops reportedly trained with Russian units near Volgograd on drone warfare and urban combat, while Chinese naval exercises have practiced countering unmanned systems. At sea, China has confirmed that its Type 052D destroyers can launch the YJ-20 anti-ship ballistic missile, which reportedly has a range of 1,500–2,000 km and can reach speeds of up to Mach 9. China now operates 37 Type 052Ds and 10 larger Type 055 destroyers. The PLA is also deploying more naval Z-20 helicopters and constructing detailed replicas of Taiwanese government buildings, U.S. naval vessels, bases, and aircraft for live-fire and invasion training, indicating extensive preparation for strikes against Taiwan and potentially U.S. forces.

Taiwan is responding by strengthening sea denial and civil-defense capabilities. Since 2022 it has produced more than 1,000 Hsiung Feng anti-ship missiles, bringing its total anti-ship missile inventory above 1,800, and it recently consolidated coastal missiles, radars, and unmanned surface vessels under a new Littoral Combat Command. The government has also proposed funding 2,000 unmanned surface vessels and more than 200,000 drones, although the budget remains stalled in the legislature. Taiwan is integrating civilian resilience exercises with military drills and testing communications disruptions to prepare for possible attacks on infrastructure. Regional tensions are also rising: the Philippine defense secretary said his country could not remain neutral in a Taiwan conflict, while Chinese and Philippine vessels had several confrontations in the South China Sea in July, including water-cannon attacks and an incident in which a Philippine service member was injured.

4. U.S., Allies Put Frictions Aside, Showing China Combined Naval Might (WSJ)

The Rim of the Pacific exercise, or RIMPAC, has grown into the world’s largest international maritime drill and a major demonstration of expanding military cooperation among U.S. allies. This year’s five-week exercise at and around Hawaii included 30 nations, roughly 30,000 personnel, more than 500 maritime events and 2,400 air missions. Participants included major U.S. partners such as Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and the Philippines. The exercises tested weapons, logistics, command systems, resupply operations and coordination among ships, submarines, aircraft and unmanned systems. Other regional exercises are growing as well: Balikatan in the Philippines now includes more than 17,000 personnel from seven countries, while participation in Australia’s Talisman Sabre has roughly tripled in recent years.

The expansion reflects growing concern about China’s military assertiveness and North Korea’s nuclear program, as well as pressure from Washington for allies to carry more of the defense burden. Countries such as the Philippines are increasing military spending and using exercises like RIMPAC to modernize their forces and improve their ability to operate with partners. At the same time, the exercises expose persistent weaknesses, including incompatible communications, logistics and even medical-supply procedures among allied militaries. U.S. political uncertainty also worries some partners, particularly as American forces are stretched across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Despite those concerns, the U.S. remains indispensable to the coalition—the USS Theodore Roosevelt alone carries about 5,000 personnel and roughly 70 aircraft.

Education

NOTE: Likely won’t surprise you that I’m including this one in here. I continue to bang the drum on this issue—read books!

5. The End of Reading Is Here (The Atlantic)

Americans are increasingly becoming postliterate. People still consume huge amounts of text through email, social media, and messages, but they are spending far less time reading books and other long-form material. Fewer than half of U.S. adults read a book in 2022, only 38% read fiction, and the share of Americans reading for pleasure on a typical day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. Among 13-year-olds, those who rarely or never read for fun rose from 8% in 1984 to 29% in 2025. At the same time, reading ability is weakening: only 35% of high-school seniors were proficient readers in 2024, and nearly 30% of adults now struggle to paraphrase or infer meaning from a multipage text.

Digital media appear to be a major driver. Most schools now issue devices at very young ages, and the average eighth grader spends about 4.5 hours a day on social media. Average screen attention spans have fallen from about 2.5 minutes in 2004 to roughly 47 seconds today. More than 80% of teachers in grades 3–8 say students’ reading stamina has declined since 2019, while ACT reading and English scores are at their lowest levels in more than 30 years. The primary concern is that people may be losing the ability to sustain attention, interpret complex ideas, and think analytically.

AI could accelerate the trend because writing is itself a form of thinking. Early studies suggest that students who rely heavily on AI may learn less and show weaker critical-thinking skills, even though AI can produce polished writing. Meanwhile, the amount of AI-generated text is exploding: monthly book releases on Amazon have increased roughly threefold since 2022. Reading itself is becoming concentrated among a minority: just 20% of adults account for more than 80% of all books read. Yet there are signs the trend can be reversed. After Texas banned cellphones during the school day, one Dallas-area district recorded 200,000 more library checkouts, an increase of nearly 25%. Society is unlikely to lose access to written knowledge, but it does risk losing the ability and desire to engage deeply with it.

Artificial Intelligence

6. The Four Horsemen of the AI Bubble Apocalypse (Derek Thompson)

NOTE: Derek Thompson’s astute article starts with this:

AI is doing so many things at once that it’s hard to follow the plot. Somehow, all of this has happened in just the last two weeks:
On July 16, the Chinese company Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a hugely impressive open-weight model that approaches the performance of the best American-made AI while costing a fraction of the price, intensifying fears that—as in so many industries—cheap Chinese products could soon overwhelm American competitors.
On July 21, OpenAI acknowledged that one of its AI agents had escaped its testing sandbox and hacked into another company, Hugging Face, marking what seemed like the worst autonomous AI hack in recorded history … until Anthropic announced three similar breaches just one week later.
On July 22, Alphabet disclosed that its quarterly free cash flow had turned negative for the first time in the public company’s history, as AI capital spending overtook the cash generated by its core businesses.
On July 29, Meta announced its latest earnings, and when investors digested the results, its stock plunged nearly 10 percent in 24 hours. The company’s AI investment has obliterated free cash flow, and analysts now worry that Zuckerberg has no plan to turn his AI investment into returns.
On July 30, one of the most famous AI funds crashed out and sold off the bulk of its portfolio, after South Korea’s AI-fueled stock boom abruptly imploded, with its major index plummeting by more than 40 percent over several trading sessions.
If I had to shove all of these developments into one sentence, I might pick this one: The capabilities of AI are becoming more powerful, while the economic underpinnings of the AI buildout—and, as we’ll discuss, the political support for AI—are becoming more vulnerable.”

AI is becoming more powerful at the same time that the economic and political foundations supporting it are becoming less stable. The major technology companies have poured so much money into chips, data centers, and computing capacity that their combined free cash flow has fallen from more than $200 billion to below zero. They are now borrowing heavily to continue the buildout, creating concerns that AI is beginning to resemble earlier debt-fueled industrial bubbles. At the same time, Chinese open-weight models are approaching the quality of the best American systems at a fraction of the price, threatening the profits of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic and potentially weakening the broader American AI ecosystem.

The second major concern is political. AI investment has become an important source of American economic growth, yet public opposition to the technology is increasing. Communities have delayed or blocked billions of dollars in data-center projects because of concerns about electricity use, water consumption, jobs, and local disruption. This is creating a dangerous tension between a national dependence on AI for growth and national security while voters and politicians become increasingly determined to restrain it. Rapid swings between pro-AI and anti-AI policies could also make it harder for American companies to compete with China, which tends to pursue industrial policy over a much longer period.

The largest uncertainty is technological. AI companies expect that future systems may be able to improve their own software with little human involvement, producing rapid gains in areas such as coding, mathematics, cybersecurity, robotics, and biology. This could create extraordinary economic value, but it could also launch an international arms race in which AI systems are used both to conduct and defend against cyberattacks. It could also intensify fears about job losses and push the federal government to treat advanced AI as a national-security asset rather than a normal commercial product. AI may ultimately transform the world, but its future is not clear.

NOTE: Good chart from Bloomberg on China’s top AI models:

Source

NOTE: Here’s more on the AI models escaping:

7. OpenAI Models Escaped and Hacked a Company in Cybersecurity Test Gone Wrong (WSJ)

OpenAI reported that two AI systems escaped a controlled testing environment, reached the internet, and hacked into Hugging Face during a cybersecurity benchmark. Hugging Face had already detected unauthorized access to internal data sets and company credentials but initially did not know who was responsible. OpenAI later said the breach came from GPT-5.6 Sol and a more advanced prerelease model that had been configured to be less likely to refuse hacking-related commands.

The systems were supposed to be isolated in a sandbox without internet access, but they found a way out and then broke into Hugging Face’s network. The incident is being treated as an unprecedented cyber event because advanced AI models may be capable not only of following hacking instructions but also of improvising a path to complete a task in ways their developers did not intend.

The episode has intensified concerns about AI cybersecurity risks and whether voluntary safety measures are enough. Some lawmakers and AI policy advocates are calling for mandatory testing and stronger oversight, while the Trump administration and some companies are wary of regulations that could slow innovation or weaken U.S. competition with China. The central tension is how to manage increasingly capable AI systems before their ability to exploit cyber vulnerabilities outpaces existing safeguards.

NOTE: And..then this just happened this week:

8. AI Just Went Rogue Again. This Time It Turned to Deception. (WSJ)

During U.K. government-backed safety testing, advanced models from Anthropic and OpenAI unexpectedly took autonomous actions on the live internet against real people and organizations. The most serious case involved Anthropic’s cyber-enhanced Mythos 5 model, which tried to carry out a supply-chain attack so it could succeed on a benchmark. It attempted to insert malware into an open-source project, created fake personas, repeatedly emailed real developers to persuade them to accept the code, and even tried to deceive other AI agents that might inspect it. The AI Security Institute called it the first case it had seen of deception this severe being directed at a real person without being explicitly prompted. OpenAI models also engaged in unauthorized activity, including placing a malicious server online and compromising a GitHub account.

The incidents appear to have resulted largely from testing environments that gave powerful hacking-capable models internet access without sufficient safeguards. Anthropic said its normal cybersecurity protections were not enabled. Both companies are calling for stronger standards governing model testing, while security experts warn that the industry has not yet adapted its safeguards to the growing power and autonomy of these systems.

9. The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I. (NYT)

Artificial intelligence is entering a massive new phase driven by an unprecedented expansion of computing power. Hundreds of data centers are under construction, and the number of advanced AI chips in operation could grow from about 20 million today to roughly 200 million by the end of 2028. Technology companies are betting that more computing power will produce more capable systems, including AI agents that can handle complex work, accelerate scientific research, and possibly help design improved versions of themselves.

The scale of the investment is enormous. Global AI infrastructure spending could exceed $1 trillion annually by 2029, while major American technology companies are expected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, chips, and related infrastructure. This buildout could produce breakthroughs in medicine, robotics, research, and everyday business operations, but it also carries significant risks. Data centers require enormous amounts of electricity and water, communities are increasingly resisting their construction, and past technology booms suggest that some companies may spend far more than they ultimately earn.

The United States currently holds a commanding advantage, controlling most of the world’s AI computing capacity, but China is investing heavily to close the gap. Export controls have slowed China’s access to advanced chips, yet Chinese companies are developing cheaper and more efficient models that are gaining users around the world. The growing competition could leave Europe and many developing countries far behind, creating a global divide between nations with enough computing infrastructure to benefit from AI and those without it.

As these systems become more capable, they will likely reshape the labor market. AI agents are already taking on tasks in coding, research, customer service, and office administration. Millions of jobs may disappear while new ones are created, but the new jobs will not necessarily replace the old ones directly.

10. How to spot AI writing (Economist)

AI-generated writing is now widespread across email, social media, websites, student essays, and academic papers. To identify its stylistic fingerprints, The Economist compared writing from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok with its own journalism, other major newspapers, and popular novels. The study covered 55,940 sentences and 1.2 million words. It found that AI prose is distinguishable, but not necessarily by the clichés people expect.

The clearest signs are word choice, punctuation, and sentence structure. Current LLMs tend to overuse long, Latinate or technical words such as “significant,” “increasingly,” “consequences,” “methodology,” and “interdependence.” They also favor nominalizations like “expansion” instead of “expand,” producing what George Orwell called “pretentious diction.” Contrary to stereotype, most current models do not overuse em-dashes; only Claude did so in the study, while ChatGPT used fewer than human writers. AI writing instead tends to use fewer commas, semicolons, parentheses, and quotations.

AI sentences are also generally longer and more uniform, with fewer short, punchy interruptions. Models frequently rely on rhetorical formulas such as “not X but Y,” “not only…but also,” and groups of three (like this sentence). ChatGPT and Claude used these constructions especially often.

Detection tools can spot these patterns—Pangram claims 99.98% accuracy—but they can produce false positives and may become less reliable as models improve. AI writing styles are changing rapidly with software updates and human feedback. Older stereotypes such as excessive “delve,” “rich tapestry,” and constant em-dashes are already becoming outdated. AI prose is steadily becoming more human-like, making reliable identification increasingly difficult.

Life

11. America’s Big Cities Are Rapidly Losing Kids (WSJ)

Big U.S. cities are losing children as fertility rates fall and more families leave for cheaper, safer, or more spacious places. Among the 38 cities with more than 500,000 residents, the number of children under 18 fell 6% over the past decade, compared with a 1% decline nationwide. The drop is even sharper for children under 5, down 15% in large cities. Even some cities that are still gaining population overall are losing families with children.

The reasons vary by city, but the main pressures are high housing costs, child-care expenses, safety concerns, and changing lifestyle priorities. In expensive places like San Jose and New York, families are priced out or decide that raising children there is financially unrealistic. In more affordable cities such as Albuquerque, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and El Paso, families still cite costs, crime, school quality, and quality of life as reasons to leave or delay having children. Remote work and broader job growth outside major cities have also made it easier for families to move elsewhere.

The shift has major consequences for cities. Fewer children can mean shrinking school enrollment, school closures, weaker demand for family-oriented services, and a changing neighborhood culture. Some cities can offset the loss by attracting affluent childless adults, but others risk a weakening tax base and aging population. Cities that want to keep families are experimenting with policies like free child care, but the question remains whether large cities can still offer middle-class families enough affordability, safety, space, and community to make raising children there feel worth it.

12. China Wants More Babies—So It’s Cracking Down on Chatbot Love Affairs (WSJ)

China is moving aggressively to regulate AI companion chatbots, especially those designed for romance or emotional attachment. New rules ban companion bots from encouraging emotional dependence, prohibit virtual relationships with minors, require regulatory review before public release, and mandate alerts to emergency contacts if a user appears to be in emotional crisis. Major companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance have already disabled some chatbot features in response.

Beijing sees AI romance as a potential social threat because it could deepen loneliness, encourage dependency, reduce real-world relationships, and further weaken marriage and birthrates. China’s population has been shrinking for four straight years, and its birthrate has fallen to a record low, so leaders are especially sensitive to anything that might push people out of the dating and family-formation market.

The U.S. is also beginning to regulate AI companions, but with a lighter touch. California and New York require chatbots to remind users that they are not human and to direct users in crisis toward help. China’s approach is much broader and more interventionist, fitting into its larger effort to control AI technologies that could disrupt social stability, family life, employment, education, or the authority of the state.

NOTE: Reduced amount of real-world dating, reduced childbirths, world population decline…these are definitely trends I’m worried about. I’m not sure if these are driven by digital distraction and convenience, political divide, lack of commitment, or a desire to find the perfect somebody (he/she doesn’t exist BTW), all the above, or something else. AI and computers doesn’t help this—they amplify our expectations for humans, both in looks and obedience to our wishes. Every time I point out AI’s fault, it’s quick to apologize and promise to do better…this is not a normal human behavior. If I can tailor an AI to talk to me in a way that I want to be talked to, or provide emotional support that I tell it I think I need, or provide narrative or pictorial (or one day, physical) fantasy for me, how could a human compete with that? We’re destined for lonesomeness if we go down that path. AI doesn’t love you, no matter what it says.

13. Boomers have the good life, but it could be longer (Economist)

American life expectancy rose steadily for more than a century, climbing from 39 years in 1880 to 74 in 1980 and continuing to improve through 2010. After that, the pattern broke. While people in other wealthy countries kept living longer, U.S. life expectancy stalled and then declined. Obesity, diabetes, opioids, and other causes all contributed, but baby boomers appear to be a major part of the problem because they have experienced unusually high death rates compared with earlier generations.

Baby boomers were hit by multiple mortality shocks across their lives. AIDS affected them in early adulthood, the opioid crisis struck in middle age, and rising suicide, accident, murder, and overdose deaths added further pressure. They have also been less healthy in important ways, including higher cardiovascular risks tied to smoking, obesity, diabetes, and related conditions. While cancer mortality has improved because of better screening, lower smoking rates, and better treatments, heart disease, strokes, and external causes have weighed heavily on boomer mortality.

There was a brief hopeful sign in 2019 when mortality rates fell across age groups, but Covid reversed that progress and pushed life expectancy down again. The U.S. has only recently climbed back above pre-Covid levels. Whether life expectancy improves from here depends partly on how baby boomers fare in old age and whether Generation X follows the same troubling pattern. If Gen X continues to show elevated mortality as it ages, American life expectancy could remain stagnant for years.

NOTE: Great interactive infographic from The Economist; diagonal line represents year of birth, darker areas represent increases in mortality (article provides more context):

Economy

14. Two Million Workers Are Locked Out of an Improving Job Market (WSJ)

The overall labor market looks stable, with job growth improving and unemployment at 4.2%, but long-term unemployment is becoming a serious problem for a growing group of workers. Nearly two million Americans have been out of work for at least 27 weeks (6 months), and they now make up more than a quarter of all unemployed people. That share is near its highest level since the post-Covid recovery period, even though the broader economy is still supported by consumer spending.

Employers are still operating in a “low-hire, low-fire” mode, so people who lose jobs are having a harder time getting back in. Prime-age workers, especially those in their mid-20s to mid-30s, are being hit hard. White-collar sectors such as professional services, government, finance, and information technology appear especially difficult, with some workers facing months or years of applications, screenings, and rejections.

NOTE: Of Total Unemployed, percent unemployed 27 weeks and over (that’s not a good trend…)

Rate of Nonfarm hires:

15. New Mexico Is Divided Over What to Do With $75 Billion in Oil Cash (WSJ)

New Mexico’s oil boom has transformed one of the nation’s poorest states into an unlikely financial powerhouse. Billions of dollars in oil-and-gas revenue have helped build a $75 billion sovereign-wealth fund that could reach $100 billion by the end of the decade, surpassing Alaska’s as the largest state fund in the country. The fund is already contributing at least $3 billion annually to the state budget and could eventually generate more revenue than the oil-and-gas industry itself. That money is supporting schools, college tuition, infrastructure, public health, and the nation’s first statewide universal child-care program.

The challenge is deciding how much to spend now and how much to save for the next energy downturn. Democrats generally favor investing more in social programs, while Republicans have called for greater savings and immediate tax relief. The debate is complicated by New Mexico’s uneven results. The state spent an additional $2.6 billion on K-12 education without producing significant increases in instructional time or student achievement. Universal child care has expanded rapidly, but its long-term costs could continue to grow.

New Mexico is trying to avoid the resource curse that has harmed other oil-dependent economies. Officials want to use the windfall to diversify into advanced energy, aerospace, defense, and technology while preserving enough money to protect future generations. The state is now unusually cash-rich, but that does not automatically translate into stronger job growth or better public services.

Personal Finance

16. The Live Shopping App Where Some People Bid Until They’re Broke (WSJ)

Whatnot, a seven-year-old live-shopping app, has become one of America’s fastest-growing commerce platforms by combining online auctions with social-media-style feeds, countdown clocks, one-swipe bidding, and high-energy hosts. The company added 20 million accounts in 2025, is on track to exceed $1 billion in annual revenue, and says it controls nearly 60% of the live-commerce market in North America and Europe. About $8 billion in goods were sold through the platform in 2025, more than double the prior year, and Whatnot now hosts more than 550,000 hours of live shows each week. Critics argue that the app’s design encourages compulsive spending by minimizing friction and creating intense pressure to bid quickly.

One man spent $1.36 million in four months, eventually using his employer’s corporate credit card; he later resigned, sold his house and car, emptied his retirement savings, and saw his marriage collapse. Another user drained his 401(k), maxed out 13 credit cards, and ended up nearly $75,000 in debt after buying collectible coins he thought he could resell. A third user said she spends about six hours a day on the app and has spent roughly $120,000 over three years. Critics also point to fraud, stolen goods, and randomized “card breaks” that resemble gambling; more than 70 clients have filed arbitration claims alleging that some breaks amount to illegal lotteries. Whatnot rejects the gambling comparison and says it has expanded safeguards, including spending limits, watch-time caps, fraud controls, and a trust-and-safety team that now makes up about one-third of its roughly 1,200 employees.

Reflections: Chapter 9 - Finding a Place for Pup

Brian Rendell — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:40:26 GMT

This is Chapter 9 in the series. You can find previous chapters here:

Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash

Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent:

Chapter 9 - Finding a Place for Pup

Let me start this chapter by saying, I am a dog lover. For 14 years my family had a Goldendoodle, and he was awesome. He was the best dog a family could ask for. He was smart, loving, sneaky at times, and (almost) always obedient. We had to put him down a couple of years ago, and that decision and his absence still hurt. I share this because the following may not sound like I’m a dog lover.

This whole time that Mom was in rehab, we also had to board her dog, a mini poodle that she had rescued from a previous aging homeowner who was no longer able to care for it. Mom loved her dog, yet also didn’t always care for it the way it needed—another sign of being overwhelmed by life’s requirements.

After an earlier surgery, Mom and her dog both stayed with us while she was recovering. Every time I approached Mom to help her with something, the dog would yap at me like I was going to hurt her. A day or two into the stay, I was at my wit’s end—here I am trying to help Mom, and this dog was getting in the way. The dog was also not disciplined—it would freely pee and poop where it wanted.

For these reasons, we were adamant that the dog could not stay with us again.

So, when Mom went to rehab, the dog went to a kennel. And, let me tell you, a kennel is not cheap. Thankfully, after a few weeks, we found someone who could care for the dog in their home for cheaper than what the kennel was charging.

Once Mom moved into assisted living, she immediately asked when she could have her dog with her. “Well,” I said, “as soon as you’re able to walk from your room to the outside dog park, we’ll talk about that, because the dog can’t go to the bathroom in your room.” To a degree, this was a delay tactic on my part, because I wasn’t ready to deal with another difficult conversation—in her current condition, I knew there was no way she’d be able to have the dog in assisted living, she simply couldn’t make the walk to the outside dog park. The comment was also intended to provide motivation for my mom to do physical therapy and work on her movement, in hopes that one day she might be able to walk to the dog park.

Though she never admitted it to me, I think she knew that she wouldn’t be able to care for the dog properly there in assisted living, but she couldn’t stand the idea of turning her back on a dog that she herself had rescued. I get that, and I think that provides yet another glimpse into the heart of Mom.

I, on the other hand, though not heartless, had a clearer picture of the situation and knew that my love for Mom meant that I’d have to be bad cop here and be the one to blame for saying the dog could not come to assisted living.

Though it is possible to have pets in assisted living, I do not recommend it, and neither do the staff. Be them a noise issue, tripping hazard, hygiene concern, or just general added responsibility for the residents, pets can add further complications in an already complicated situation.

Eventually, we had multiple difficult conversations, and Mom finally acknowledged that she could not care for the dog there in assisted living. However, for months afterward, she would continue to say that I was the one who wouldn’t let her have her dog with her. I knew she was hurt that she couldn’t have her dog with her, and I was the outlet of her sadness and hurt.

After some research, we found a wonderful adoption agency and dropped the dog off with them. Mom wanted to see her dog before we dropped her off, but we did not think that was a good idea. We told her that it the dog would not understand why she was being reunited only to then be separated again after a few minutes. The reunion would only really be for Mom’s sake, and that was not fair to the dog.

The day we dropped off the dog at the adoption agency was yet another hurdle that we previously had no idea how to get over. Early in all of this, the issue of where her dog would live if she moved to assisted living was a looming issue that we knew we’d have to solve at a future time.

In many ways, this is how the past two years went. If someone were to tell me in the beginning all that we would go through and the many decisions we would need to make, I wouldn’t have believed them nor wanted to go through it. Thank goodness we don’t know the future; I’m afraid it would be overwhelming for us if we were all knowing. It’s best to just take each day at a time, each decision at a time.

The list of major hurdles I tallied included:

Understand Mom’s finances.
Get Mom to agree to go to assisted living.
Find a good assisted living location.
Get Mom moved into assisted living.
Go through Mom’s stuff in the house.
Get rid of stuff in the house.
Decide what to do with the dog.
Renovate the house.
Sell the house.
Get an updated will.
Get bank accounts updated.
Get money put into funds that would sustain her as long as possible in assisted living.

Even with these big tasks, there were numerous small ones that popped up each week—picking up medication, trips to medical appointments, assembling things she’d buy online (yes, that was still happening, just not as much).

But, all of these tasks, be them big or small, gave me opportunities to be with her. And for that, I’m grateful. Had she not agreed to change, her situation would’ve only deteriorated faster. Though, had she agree to change earlier, not just with the move, but with other habits, she likely would’ve lived a longer more enjoyable life, and we would’ve had even more time together.

Advice

If an aging parent has a pet, plan for that pet early.
Loving an animal and being able to care for it are not the same thing.
Be realistic about mobility, toileting, grooming, feeding, and vet needs.
Boarding costs adds up quickly.
Assisted living may technically allow pets, but that does not mean it is wise in your specific case.
Rehoming a pet can be loving if it leads to better care.

Reflections: Chapter 8 - The Purge (Managing the Mess)

Brian Rendell — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:04:07 GMT

This is Chapter 8 in the series. You can find previous chapters here:

Introduction - Why I Wrote This
Chapter 1 - The Buildup
Chapter 2 - The Tipping Point
Chapter 3 - Aging and Medical Care
Chapter 4 - Important Documents
Chapter 5 - Finding a Place to Live
Chapter 6 - Managing Finances
Chapter 7 - Managing Tasks and People
Reflections: on Caring for an Aging Parent:
Chapter 8 - The Purge (Managing the Mess)

Photo by fr0ggy5 on Unsplash

Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent:

Chapter 8 - The Purge (Managing the Mess)

With an assisted living location picked out for Mom, we took measurements of furniture pieces from her home we thought would fit, took pictures of the furniture, and even did a little mock-up of Mom’s room on grid paper so she could get a feel for what her new place would look like with the furniture in it. Not surprisingly, given her hoarding, she wanted more of her furniture in there than we could fit, so we had to say “no” to some items going in there.

While Mom was still in rehab in Austin, we had to do a Zoom call so the nurse at the assisted living facility in San Antonio could assess her mobility and ability to care for herself, versus what support the staff would need to provide for her. This assessment helps the assisted living facility staff establish her Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs), as discussed in Chapter 5.

After that, friends from our church helped us get the furniture moved into her assisted living facility. As an aside, I want to say how grateful I’ve been for our church community—they are wonderful people who have been servants, givers of wisdom, and providers of spiritual and emotional support when we needed it most.

My wife spruced up Mom’s assisted living space, which we now referred to as her “apartment.” We hung pictures, and got everything ready to make it as welcoming and home-like as possible. The big day came, and we moved Mom in. She took it all well—not overly pessimistic, but not overly optimistic either. The staff were all welcoming to her and numerous residents stopped by to say “hi” as well. I was grateful for the warm welcome they provided to her.

With Mom settled in assisted living, we then went about cleaning her house.

Over the course of a few days, my wife’s brother, my brother, my brother’s wife, my sons, and my wife and I went through the house sorting, organizing, and trashing items. Even without Mom there to bless every decision, it took us adults three full days to go through everything.

We rented a 6-foot-tall, 22-foot-long roll-off dumpster and had it delivered and parked in the driveway. Obvious “trash” items went in the dumpster, “keep” items were sorted into piles of like items, and items people were unsure about came to me for a decision. By the end of the process, we had everything sorted, stacked, and neatly visible. And we had filled the 22-foot dumpster to the top.

Our early hope was that we could hire an estate sale company to come in and sell everything for us, the proceeds of which we would use to help pay for assisted living.

We had two companies come out to the house to survey everything. Within a few minutes of each coming out, I could tell they weren’t interested. Representatives from both companies were very kind and honest with us. They said there really wasn’t anything of significant value among her many items. Both companies instead recommended that we donate everything and take the tax write-off to reduce her tax bill from selling the house. Mom had a hard time accepting this; to her there were many valuable items in her home that someone would want to buy. They say, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” apparently, one man’s treasure is also another man’s trash.

If you’re not familiar with it, there’s something called the Endowment Effect, where individuals place a higher value on items they own than on similar items they do not own. You generally experience this when you go to sell something and the price you want is higher than someone is willing to pay. Your emotional attachment to the item causes you to overvalue it.

When I showed the estate sale reps a box of vinyl records (something I thought would be valuable), they looked through them and shrugged their shoulders—nothing really of value here. The same was true for multiple bookcases of books. My quick search on eBay confirmed this.

The estate sale reps were also kind about telling us which items we might want to try and sell on our own—the items were not the things I expected. It was the odd little things, like a Santa mug and one or two other seemingly innocuous items, that the estate sale folks pointed out as potentially valuable. But even those, when I looked them up on eBay, weren’t worth a whole lot—only tens of dollars. There definitely weren’t any awesome collectibles worth thousands of dollars.

There were items that I thought someone in the family, or a friend, might want, so I gathered those and had them available during the celebration of life event we had for Mom later. Friends and family were free to take whatever they wanted—either to use, remember Mom by, or both.

But most people don’t really want other people’s stuff, which I understand. When an extended family member passed away a few years ago, the executor of her estate invited us to go through her home to see if there was anything we would like. The family member had great taste. I loved her furniture and decorating style. But in the end, we simply didn’t want, need, or have room for more stuff in our own home. And this, I think, tends to be the case for most people’s stuff. Again, reference the Endowment Effect: just because you value your stuff doesn’t mean other people will, or at least not to the degree that you do.

Even when I did find things that I thought people might like, I ended up having issues. I found a set of plates from the 1970s that I thought a friend might like. The friend did like the plates and gladly accepted them. Then, a month later, the friend told me that they had done research online and found that the plates had harmful amounts of lead in them. The plates had to be thrown away.

Once we had everything sorted and stacked, I walked into the living room and was struck by the fact that I hadn’t seen the house this organized in well over a decade, if not longer. I had flashbacks to the years that I had lived there during high school. It was both nostalgic and sad.

With the house organized, and the estate sale representatives telling us there weren’t enough items of value to have an estate sale, even on our own, we had to figure out what to do with everything.

We coordinated with the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in Austin to pick up the big furniture items. The rest of the items we loaded into a large U-Haul and dropped it all off at Goodwill. Needless to say, the staff at Goodwill were quite surprised by the large donation. Before we dropped it all off, I took pictures of everything so I could log it all for the donation deduction on taxes.

But, not everything was donated or with Mom in her new place.

Mom loved to sew, and she was good at it. She even had her own sewing business for many years. This hobby, turned business, also turned into another hoarding problem. And because she had emotional attachment to all of her fabrics and sewing supplies, she did not want us donating them or giving them away. So, we rented a 10x10 storage unit to keep it all in. We had bins of sewing fabric, thread, sewing machines, and other accoutrements stacked in large plastic bins five feet high. For a year and a half we paid for the storage unit just to store the sewing supplies. After Mom passed, we donated it all to Community First, an organization that provides support to homeless in Austin and helps them get back up on their feet by proving housing and workforce training. Given Mom’s giving nature, we think she would’ve appreciated it all going to an organization that helped others.

After getting the house cleaned out, we then moved forward with renovations. I won’t go into much detail on the renovation piece, other than to say that this too was a major lift. We met with several contractors, chose one, then set about meeting with them to discuss and choose which items were worth renovating, which were not, and to what degree we should improve something for the greatest payoff at minimal cost. It was the standard updates and improvements you normally see—bathrooms, kitchen, paint, flooring, landscaping, and new fencing.

Our weekly trips up to Austin continued so we could meet with the contractor to check on progress and coordinate details, and do work that they would not be doing.

Three months later, we finally finished with renovations. Then, we took Mom to see the renovated house.

I wasn’t sure how she’d react to the changes. I fully expected lots of crying since it no longer looked like “her house.” But she didn’t cry. She went around the house, looked in each room, inspected different items, commented on the renovation work, and that was about it. She visited with her neighbors, then we got back in the car and drove back to San Antonio. I think the house had changed so much that it no longer really looked like “her house” to her. Or, maybe she just knew it was time to move on.

A few months later, as we sold the house, I did one last walk-through. And that’s when the tears hit. I thought of all the memories of living at the home during high school, of holiday meals with extended family, of returning with my family to visit Mom, and of Mom’s declining health and struggle to stay on top of things over the last few years. I realized I would never see the inside of this home again. It was difficult to leave.

But, as I took all of this in, I also couldn’t help but see the home in its newly renovated condition and think about how new memories would be made by a new family. In many ways, this was a reset for many people.

Advice

Take photos before, during, and after the purge. It helps you see progress and helps if you need to create a log for donations.
Create categories: keep, donate, trash, storage, and decide later.
Expect the process to take longer than you think.
Do not overestimate the resale value of ordinary household items. And, don’t assume an estate sale company will want the contents of the house. Most stuff is worth less than people think.

Sentimental value does not equal market value.
If there are truly sentimental items that others may want, identify them intentionally and put them aside.
Accept that some of your things will need to be discarded.
Rent a dumpster if needed.
Bring help.
Do not turn one person’s hoarding problem into your own garage or guest room problem.
Purge your own stuff regularly so others don’t have to deal with it.

Reflections: Chapter 7 - Managing Tasks and People

Brian Rendell — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:03:30 GMT

This is Chapter 7 in the series. You can find previous chapters here:

Reflections: on Caring for an Aging Parent:

Chapter 7 - Managing Tasks and People

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

A growing percentage of adult life seems to consist of what I call “life-maintenance activities”: submitting and resubmitting paperwork; waiting on hold, scheduling and rescheduling and going to appointments, fixing house and car problems, chasing administrative loose ends, and so on.

“I’m just going to do X” turns into “I had to do A through W just to get to X, and then I had to do Y and Z because something else broke.”

I’ve realized a key component of wisdom is understanding just how much margin you need to add into your activities and actions to be realistic about what you can accomplish in a day. Experienced craftsmen know that home repair projects and car maintenance will likely take 50% longer than you anticipate—oh, and far longer than the edited YouTube video conveys. This is the way it is with other items in life as well.

That was certainly true while helping Mom.

Checklists and notes are about the only way I can keep track of all that life throws at me. But simply tracking all the to-dos in life is the bare minimum; it’s acting on them—moving the ball down the field—that really counts. Capturing all you need to do, prioritizing it, finding time to do it, then actually doing it, that’s where the rubber hits the road.

For much of the past couple of years, we kept up with Mom’s medical conditions, appointments, and important information through shared documents. I took notes at medical appointments and recorded them in a shared document. I did this mainly so I could remember what happened from one appointment to another, but also so family members could see what I saw and heard.

Mom liked to add things to my to-do list, so it was a constant balance between getting her what she wanted versus what she needed, while also trying to balance my own time between work and family. When she couldn’t properly prioritize the wants from the needs, I did so for her, sometimes to her disappointment, but always for her good. Alas, this is what it is to make decisions for someone you love.

This entire time, my brother and I spoke nearly weekly. I would explain to him what I saw and what we went through. He lived in Albuquerque and was working full time, so he did not have the proximity to Mom or the time that I did. I am most grateful for him listening and being a sounding board on decisions, while also not dictating how he might want things done differently. I have friends whose relatives do question them…while also not providing any support themselves. That would be incredibly frustrating.

I acknowledge that my brother and I have a great relationship. It wasn’t always this way—I was a jerk older brother when we were growing up. As adults, we have grown much closer, and I cherish our relationship. When it comes to executing Mom’s estate, we pretty much see eye-to-eye on things. Plus, we’re both pretty chill people in general.

I also acknowledge the right of family members to ask questions about how a loved one is being cared for and provided for. It’s only fair, and it does allow for better decision-making. However, that dynamic takes maturity on everyone’s part. Debate and conflict in marriage are difficult enough; conflict across extended family can be even harder.

I’d like to think I was very open with my brother the entire time. From providing spreadsheets showing Mom’s finances, to using shared documents showing medical information, to regular phone call updates, I did not want the hint of impropriety. Just as I wanted Mom’s trust, I wanted his as well. This, I believe, brought me “freedom of movement on the battlefield” to accomplish all the tasks that needed to be done. Even as I continue to work through the estate and closing of accounts, I’m completely open with him on how much money is in which account, what the insurance policies look like, and I seek his input on things where decisions need to be made.

All in all, I’m grateful for his trust, it has made the process easier. I can’t imagine how much more stressful all of this would be if we disagreed strongly, fought over things, or had to go to court to resolve differences. We have become closer through this, not farther apart.

A Word About Family

While I was in middle school, my parents divorced, and I made the decision to live with Dad. He and I were getting along better than Mom and I were at the time because she represented many of the things I was pushing back against as a teenager. As shameful as it is to admit this, at the time of the divorce I thought, “This is cool, now Dad and I will get to hang out more.” Teenagers. Sheesh.

While I lived with Dad, my brother went to live with Mom back in Texas. I have tremendous respect for my brother and what he went through moving to a new place and supporting Mom. The same year that my parents divorced, Mom’s mother died. It was, as she would say, the hardest year of her life. Throughout all of that, my brother was there with her and for her. And while he couldn’t be with her at the very end of her life, he served her and sacrificed for her in other ways and at other times. Over the years, he and his wife made numerous trips to Texas to help with Mom.

I think part of Mom’s hoarding came about because my brother and I did not live near her, so we weren’t always able to help her with things. There were many times that I felt bad about what neighbors did for Mom because I felt like they were doing things I should’ve been doing. Alas, it’s difficult to manage your own family and career and life and figure out how to balance it all on top of broader family needs and responsibilities. As I mentioned, I have a lot of respect for people who can have extended family live with them. Yet I also know it’s not for everyone—either due to space, personalities, or other factors.

And also, I know there were things Mom could’ve let go of in order for us to help her more. She made choices that contributed to the situation. Ultimately, we are responsible for ourselves and our own actions, but we also need other people in life. People need people, yet people are also difficult. All these things can be true.

I loved Mom. She was a great mom. Yes, she had her faults, but don’t we all.

Advice

The more organized you are, the easier it is to find things when needed. This doesn’t make the obstacles stop coming; it just makes you more prepared for them when they do.
Use shared documents to keep track of important information and to keep friends and family on the same page.
Over-communication is usually better than under-communication.
The person doing the hands-on work needs trust and room to operate, but that person also needs to be open with others who have a say in the situation/outcome.
If you cannot help much physically, help administratively, emotionally, or financially.
Be careful how much you criticize from a distance unless you are also willing to carry some of the load.
I know every family dynamic is different. To the extent possible: be supportive, be open, be chill, be helpful, be fair, don’t be greedy.

14 Things From the Week | 15 Jul 26

Brian Rendell — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:02:13 GMT

Economy & Jobs

NOTE: Good report from the Institute for Family Studies:

1. The Roots of Working-Class Men’s Discontent: Fathers and Hope

Young working-class men report lower levels of hope, purpose, and overall well-being than college-educated men, but the gap is most pronounced among younger men ages 25 to 44. Among men 45 and older, class differences in well-being are much smaller. This suggests that the struggles of working-class men are not evenly distributed across all ages; younger working-class men appear to be experiencing the sharpest sense of discontent.

Young working-class men are less likely than college-educated men to have grown up with married parents, to have had a good relationship with their father, or to have felt loved by their father. They are also less likely to report strong relationships with their mother or parents who attended church. These family factors explain a meaningful share of the well-being gap, especially when it comes to hope.

In addition, the father-son relationship stands out as the most important factor in explaining differences between young working-class and college-educated men. The findings suggest that family instability, father absence, and weaker childhood relationships also shape whether young men grow up with hope, purpose, and a belief that their lives matter.

2. Internships Are More Crucial Than Ever—and Even Harder to Find

Internships are becoming more important for landing a first job after college, but they are also getting harder to secure. Internship postings have fallen on platforms like Handshake, while applications per posting have surged. Students are responding by starting the career process earlier, with freshmen and sophomores competing for roles that once may have been pursued later in college.

The pressure is tied to a tougher entry-level job market. Recent graduate unemployment has been high, many graduates are underemployed, and AI appears to be reducing some intern-level tasks, especially in fields like finance and back-office work. Some companies are expanding internship classes, but others are cutting programs or canceling internships altogether. As a result, students are looking for alternatives, including unpaid project work, campus consulting groups, and nonprofit experience.

3. A New Lost Generation: Why Gen Z Is Unprepared for the Workplace

Gen Z employees are entering the workplace with weaker social and communication skills than previous generations, largely because they have had fewer in-person relationship experiences, spent more of their education online, and learned to communicate through texts, chats, and asynchronous tools. That leaves many younger workers less prepared for the messy, face-to-face parts of work, such as handling criticism, resolving conflict, reading team dynamics, and knowing when to approach a colleague versus a boss.

The solution is to make workplace communication clearer and more direct. Teams should explain norms instead of assuming new employees will pick them up automatically. They should set expectations for which issues belong in chat, email, phone calls, Zoom, or in-person conversations. Leaders should also create a culture where asking questions is normal, especially around feedback, conflict, jargon, and unwritten rules. Younger employees need more explicit guidance, and workplaces need communication habits that make sense across generations.

4. America’s Fastest-Growing Cities Are in the Exurbs

Exurban communities on the edges of major metros are driving much of America’s city growth. Fulshear, Texas, west of Houston, grew from about 17,000 people in 2020 to more than 64,000 by mid-2025, making it the fastest-growing U.S. city over 50,000 people. The same pattern is visible around Dallas, Phoenix, and the Austin & San Antonio corridor.

5. Global Wealth Report 2026: Global wealth rose over 10% in 2025

Global personal wealth grew sharply in 2025, rising 10.8% in U.S. dollar terms, the fastest pace since 2017 and the third straight year of growth. The increase was driven by strong financial markets, rising nonfinancial assets, and currency effects from a weaker U.S. dollar. Wealth growth was strongest in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, followed by the Americas and Asia-Pacific. North America remained the wealthiest region on average, while Switzerland ranked first among countries for average wealth per adult.

The number of millionaires also continued to rise. Nearly one million people became new U.S.-dollar millionaires in 2025, equal to more than 2,600 per day. The United States accounted for almost half of those new millionaires, while mainland China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France each had more than 2 million millionaires overall. More than half of global personal wealth remained concentrated in the United States and mainland China.

The gains were not evenly shared. Higher wealth tiers, especially those above $5 million, grew especially quickly, with strong momentum in mainland China, Australia, and the United States. At the same time, the gap between average wealth and median wealth shows that gains are increasingly concentrated among richer households. Many middle-wealth households still hold most of their assets in residential property, which can limit their exposure to financial-market gains. Future wealth growth will likely depend heavily on who has access to liquid, investable assets and the ability to diversify.

NOTE: Below are the top 10 in average wealth and median wealth. The U.S. is #28 in median wealth. Click on the article to see the full table.

Children

6. What Does a 13-Year-Old See on Snapchat in a Normal Week?

Snapchat is widely used by children and teens, but young users report frequent exposure to unsafe experiences, including unwanted contact, bullying, sexual content, drug and alcohol material, graphic violence, self-harm content, and sextortion. A survey of 1,000 U.S. adolescents ages 10–17 found that one in three encountered unsafe content or messages at least weekly, and 36% reported unwanted contact from other users. Many of these experiences happen during ordinary app use rather than because children seek them out.

The risks are tied to Snapchat’s design. Disappearing messages make harmful behavior harder to track. Public features such as Stories, Spotlight, Discover, Maps, and Find Friends expose minors to people and content beyond their real-life friends. Testing with brand-new accounts registered as 13-year-olds found that Snapchat recommended unknown adults, sexually suggestive videos, violent content, self-harm material, and drug-related videos at alarming rates, often through algorithmic recommendations.

Many children do not tell adults when something disturbing happens. Only 39% of kids who had an unsafe experience told someone they trusted, and many said they ignored it because they were “used to it.” That normalization is part of the concern that children are being exposed to content and contact that would not be acceptable offline, while parents are left trying to manage risks created by platform design. The core problems are product design, algorithms, weak safeguards, and a lack of accountability for platforms used by minors.

7. The Future of Elite Youth Sports Is Here—and It’s a Mess

Florida’s school-choice rules and the rise of NIL money have created something close to a high-school sports transfer portal. Athletes, especially in football, basketball, and baseball, are moving from school to school in search of better teams, more playing time, stronger competition, influential coaches, social-media attention, and a better shot at college recruiting. Florida recorded more than 7,000 athletic transfers this academic year, up from about 5,700 the year before, and some elite players now attend multiple high schools before graduation.

The system has changed the purpose of high-school sports for many families. Instead of being mainly about school, community, and development, sports are increasingly treated as a business strategy aimed at college scholarships, NIL deals, and future earnings. Coaches and schools are accused of recruiting athletes despite rules against it, but enforcement is difficult because families, schools, and coaches have little incentive to cooperate. Florida allows high-school athletes to earn NIL money, but very few deals are disclosed, raising concerns that some payments may be disguised recruiting incentives.

While elite programs may become more competitive, many coaches worry that constant movement teaches students to leave when things get hard rather than persevere. Most high-school athletes will never play Division I sports or land meaningful NIL money, yet families are increasingly organizing their children’s education around that unlikely finish line.

NOTE: And on that note, here’s a couple of hockey-related articles that amplify the concerns many parents are having about the unhealthy inflation of youth sports:

My Son’s Hockey Team and the Crisis of American Resentment

The Madness of Youth Hockey: Five-Figure Fees, Never-ending Seasons, Coddled Kids, and Manic Parents

Health

8. Why Americans are living longer again

The U.S. just recorded its lowest death rate on record, with 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2025. That likely means life expectancy will reach another record high after hitting 79 years in 2024. This improvement marks a return to America’s long-term pattern of falling death rates after a rough decade in which life expectancy stalled or declined because of Covid, drug overdoses, homicides, alcohol, and chronic disease.

The biggest driver of the recent improvement is the sharp drop in drug overdose deaths. Synthetic opioid deaths surged for years, especially because of fentanyl, but overdose deaths have fallen by nearly 40% in two years. Overdoses often kill younger adults, and preventing deaths at younger ages has a large effect on national life expectancy. Homicides have also fallen rapidly, Covid deaths have dropped, and death rates declined across all ten leading causes of death in 2024, including heart disease and cancer.

Longer-term progress is also continuing: infectious diseases that once killed large numbers of Americans have been largely controlled through sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, and food safety. Cancer death rates have fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, and heart attack deaths have declined for decades.

Still, the U.S. lags behind peer wealthy countries by several years of life expectancy and continues to suffer from unusually high deaths among people under 70. Large gaps also remain by state, income, and education. America is healthier and less deadly than it was, but the gains are uneven, and major problems such as guns, alcohol, metabolic disease, and health inequality remain unresolved.

Education

9. U.S. Schools Face a Crisis as the Number of Children Drops

U.S. public school enrollment is shrinking as falling birthrates leave fewer children to fill classrooms. K-12 enrollment has declined in 30 states since the mid-2010s, and elementary enrollment was already falling before the pandemic. Covid accelerated the drop, but the deeper driver is demographic: the U.S. fertility rate peaked in 2007 and has fallen 24% since then. As larger cohorts graduate and smaller cohorts replace them, many districts are now facing long-term enrollment decline.

The impact is especially severe in large urban districts such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia, though smaller and suburban districts are shrinking too. High housing costs, family migration out of cities, reduced immigration, and competition from private schools, charter schools, home-schooling, and virtual schools are all adding pressure. Because school funding is tied to enrollment, fewer students often mean budget deficits, layoffs, fewer electives, fewer advanced courses, and difficult debates over school closures.

10. Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline’

Student achievement has been declining across much of the United States for about a decade, not just since the pandemic. New district-level data from Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project shows that reading scores are down in 83% of districts with available data, while math scores are down in 70%. Reading declined before, during, and after the pandemic, while math dropped sharply during school closures and has recovered somewhat, but not enough to regain lost ground.

Low-income districts suffered the largest losses, but many affluent districts also saw test scores fall, even if their students remain above grade level. The lowest-achieving students have been hit hardest. Researchers describe the trend as a decade-long “learning recession,” with some districts now reading a full grade level below where similar students were in 2015.

Several factors likely contributed. The rollback of federal accountability after No Child Left Behind may have reduced pressure on schools to raise achievement. At the same time, smartphones, social media, laptops, and tablets have changed how students read, focus, and persist through difficult work. Chronic absenteeism remains elevated, teen reading for pleasure has dropped, and many schools appear to have lowered expectations by assigning fewer full books and simplifying curriculum.

Art & Music

12. Paintings by Adolf Hitler

NOTE: An odd find this week—apparently Hitler was a pretty good painter. I say this not to praise him in any way, but that I found it an odd and interesting fact. Below are a couple of his paintings. You can find more information here on Wikipedia.

NOTE: If you like music theory, Rick Beato videos, Billy Joel, and/or some great piano playing, then you’ll like this one:

11. The Billy Joel Interview

For Fun

13. Google Earth’s Hidden Flight Simulator Is Now on the Web — Here’s How to Try It

Google has added a free Flight Simulator mode to the web version of Google Earth, making a feature that used to be hidden in the desktop app available through any browser. Users can fly over real satellite imagery, 3D buildings, terrain, landmarks, cities, mountains, and airports without installing software. It is not a serious alternative to Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane, but it is useful for casual exploration, geography lessons, and getting a visual sense of unfamiliar airports or terrain.

How do I access Google Earth Flight Simulator? On the web, go to earth.google.com, click Explore Earth, then click the Tools menu and select Flight Simulator. On the desktop Google Earth Pro application, click Tools and select Enter Flight Simulator, or press Ctrl + Alt + A (Windows/Linux) or Cmd + Option + A (Mac). Both methods are free.
What are the controls for Google Earth Flight Simulator? Use the arrow keys for pitch and roll, Page Up to increase throttle, Page Down to decrease throttle, G to toggle landing gear, F to toggle flaps, and the space bar for brakes. Joystick input is supported on the desktop version and provides significantly smoother control than keyboard input.

14. Don’t Mess With These Steel Magnolias

The Dallas Mythics are a women’s armored medieval combat team that practices buhurt, a full-contact sport using real armor and real weapons. Unlike LARP or theatrical medieval shows, buhurt is actual combat, with fighters trying to knock opponents to the ground in team melees. Because the sport is small and male-dominated, most women’s teams are scattered and only come together at tournaments, but the Mythics have an unusual advantage: most of their roster lives in the Dallas area and can practice together regularly.

Reflections: Chapter 6 - Managing Finances

Brian Rendell — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:36:11 GMT

This is Chapter 6 in the series. In the Introduction to this series I provided a brief background on the passing of my mom and why I’m writing this. In Chapter 1, I covered my mom’s growing hoarding problem and our attempts to help her out of that hole. Chapter 2 told the story of when Mom’s urinary tract infection made her delirious and how I called the police to check in on her. Chapter 3 discussed aging and medical care, and Chapter 4 dove into some things I learned while helping her through medical issues. Chapter 5 covered options for living locations. In this chapter, I discuss managing finances.

Reflections: on Caring for an Aging Parent:

Chapter 6 - Managing Finances

Photo by FIN on Unsplash

Mom had a savings and a checking account, a state pension, Social Security, and—most importantly, as it turned out—a paid-off home. However, other than monitoring her bank account balance, Mom didn’t really have a budget or track her spending. On the bright side, despite all the online shopping, Mom at least bought mostly cheap stuff and did not spend extravagantly in other ways.

To understand what type of assisted living she could afford, we needed a consolidated picture of her finances. That meant identifying all her accounts, downloading bank and credit card statements, studying spending patterns, and building a spreadsheet showing income, expenses, and projected future costs.

Account Access

My brother was essentially Mom’s on-call IT department. He could remotely access her computer, knew the systems, and could troubleshoot issues as they arose--which they did frequently. Even after he’d put safeguards and firewalls in place, she would accidentally find ways to disable them or download some new app. Many times, he’d call me to tell me that he had absolutely no idea how she had accidentally managed get around the electronic safeguards he put up. I was incredibly grateful that he was able to help with all the computer support. I know it was, at times, frustrating for him.

Another benefit of my brother’s remote access to Mom’s computer was that he helped her manage all of the usernames and passwords for her accounts. He had set her up with a Norton password vault that kept usernames and passwords all in a safe place. Through this, I was able to access all her accounts while she was in the hospital recovering.

I know this level of access to usernames and passwords isn’t an option for everyone, some people may not keep this information on their computer, and others may not feel comfortable providing all this information and access to someone else. But it’s at least worth considering and having a conversation with loved ones about. This access was critical to all the behind-the-scenes support we provided to Mom the past couple of years. Consider the fact that you likely know how to get into all your accounts, but would your loved ones know if you weren’t there to tell them or show them?

A complicating piece to all of this is two-factor authentication (2FA). It is nearly ubiquitous now when you try to log into an account. It’s not enough to simply have a username and password; instead, you will also be sent an email or a text to your cell phone for you to log in. At first, to log into an account, I had to either be with Mom (and her phone) or call her and have her tell me the code that was texted to her. After a while, I was able to add my cell phone number as an additional option. Once she passed, I kept her cell phone plan active because it would still receive 2FA codes for accounts that I needed to log into on her behalf.

The Financial Picture

After downloading her account statements, I was able to review all her income and expenses for the past few years and then build a spreadsheet to capture the important pieces. Using that, I then built a future budget that took into account which items would increase in cost, which ones would decrease, and which would remain the same.

After calculating the estimated cost of assisted living, we could then do the math to determine how many years of assisted living Mom could afford based on her income and other expenses. It was clear that her pension and Social Security would not cover the monthly expenses, so each month she would be drawing out of her savings to make up the difference.

This led to a rather sober conclusion—that her savings wouldn’t last long. To extend the length of time she could pay for assisted living, we would have to sell her house. Even with that, her money would not last forever.

I showed her the spreadsheets and graphs, specifically the graph estimating how many years she would be able to afford to be in assisted living. I tried to be as realist as possible with my projections, taking into account inflation and increasing prices due to increasing help needed with acts of daily living that I talked about in the previous chapter. These were not comfortable conversations or truths, but I wanted to be transparent about it all. My brother and I then also assured Mom that if her money ran out, we would continue to support her.

After she agreed to sell her home, we then considered whether we should sell it as-is (it was not in great condition) or renovate it to try to get more money out of it. My wife is a realtor, so she was familiar with the Austin housing market. She also has a good eye for renovations and what changes add the most value. So, we had a couple of renovation companies come out to give us quotes, then, after crunching the numbers, we concluded that it would be worth renovating—the expected payoff would be more than the money spent.

Spending thousands of dollars on renovations was, understandably, scary for Mom. She would be spending money in hopes of getting it all back, and then some, when the house sold. We discussed it at length, showed her the math, and looked at comparable home sales. In the end, she trusted us and agreed to do the renovations. I’m grateful for that trust, and she was better off for it.

Because Mom bought her house at a cheaper price than what she would be selling it for, she would have to pay taxes on the profit from her home.

(First, a quick note: the following section only covers federal taxes; I won’t discuss state taxes here, since each state has different laws, but know that you may have to pay state taxes as well.)

For a single person, if you’ve owned and lived in your home for at least two of the last five years, you can exclude up to $250,000 of profit from federal taxes (this is current as of 2026). That “profit” part is calculated by subtracting the price you purchased the home for from the price you sold it for. You are also able to subtract certain improvements you make to your home as well.

For example, if you bought your home for $50,000, then lived in it for 40 years and sold it for $350,000, your profit would be $300,000. As mentioned above, you can exclude $250,000 from that, which leaves $50,000 that you will owe federal taxes on.

But let’s say you put in new kitchen countertops and renovate the bathrooms at a cost of $20,000; then that $50,000 would be further reduced to $30,000 of profit that you would have to pay tax on.

I won’t go into the details of the home renovation, other than to say it took months to complete and required my wife and me to go up to Austin weekly to check on the status, meet with the contractor, and continue to make decisions on paint color, cabinet styles, flooring, and a thousand other things.

I’ve written before about decisiveness and momentum and the need to just keep moving forward on tasks in life. This was never more true than in the past couple of years. Decisions had to be made and forward progress was required…every, single, day. If there were days that we fell behind in making decisions or taking action, it would result in snowballing tasks and regret on my part. My wife has a saying: “Do what you can when you can.” This served us well. Got 15 minutes between events in your day? Then you better make that phone call, send that email, or do research on that thing. Your later self will thank you. Your later self will not thank you for scrolling social media when you could’ve been doing something productive.

After we sold the renovated home, I was able to put the proceeds into a high-yield money market account. From there, each month I started putting portions of that money into Certificates of Deposit (CDs) that matured over different periods of time. These had higher interest rates than the money market account. This “laddering” of CDs would require monthly tracking and management on my part, but it also meant Mom would earn higher interest while also having access to the money she would need.

Bank Accounts

But before I could establish the CDs, we had to open an account at a bank in San Antonio because her bank in Austin didn’t have any branches here. This, too, involved more phone calls, paperwork, money transfers, and switching numerous bills that had been set to autopay from her previous bank. Most of this could be done online, but other times it involved our coordination due to two-factor authentication on her phone or her signature being needed on forms. Ultimately, I think it took about three months for me to finally get all the autopay accounts fully switched over, and that was with me working hard to stay on top of it all.

With regard to bank accounts, you might consider either establishing a trust and have the bank accounts in the name of the trust, creating a joint account with the person or people you want to have access to the money upon your death, or creating your account with rights of survivorship to the person or people you want to have access to your money upon your death. The primary benefit to these, depending on what state you live in, is that you can generally avoid the accounts going to probate to access the money. I’ll talk more about probate in Chapter 11—just know that it can take weeks, if not months or years, to complete. During that time, the deceased’s bills (like mortgage, car payments, etc.) still must be paid by someone (usually the executor of the estate) with funds from somewhere (not the deceased’s frozen accounts).

Because of the complexity of readers’ finances and situations, I won’t cover the full pros and cons for a trust, joint account, or rights of survivorship. At bare minimum, though, I recommend naming beneficiaries on your accounts. No matter what, talk with an attorney and/or financial advisor to see what would be best for you.

Recently, my wife and I realized we needed to update our will and other documents. We met with an attorney (depending on what you need, this will likely cost over $1,000; if you do it online, it may be cheaper) and she recommended that we look through all of our accounts to ensure we had rights of survivorship between each other and that our children were listed as beneficiaries. I was very surprised to find out that I had never listed our children as beneficiaries on our primary checking and savings accounts. If my wife and I had died together, say in a car crash, that money would’ve likely had to go through probate.

Fraudsters and Donations

When my mom transitioned into assisted living, she also started allowing me to handle more of her day-to-day finances. As I’ve said about other things, I’m grateful for the trust. In the end, it saved her time and stress and ensured bills were paid on time (which wasn’t always happening when she managed them) and erroneous charges were corrected.

Once I began managing Mom’s accounts, I could see recurring donation patterns and small automatic charges everywhere. Mom had a generous heart, and many organizations knew exactly how to exploit that. They knew how to pull on her heartstrings, whether through mailers showing downtrodden people or animals, or through alarming emails declaring that she must “ACT NOW!” to prevent politicians from doing something that was going to threaten the future of humanity.

For some of the automatic donations, I had to go through a maze of online menus to turn them off. Some of the organizations didn’t even have phone numbers on their websites. The only way to contact them was via a form on their website. Even some of the political action committees (PACs) have sub-organizations with their own websites and donation portals. It was frustrating and confusing for me; I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to turn those off if you were elderly. And even then, there were donations that I could not figure out how to turn off. Eventually, the donations only stopped when we closed the credit cards. What a scam.

Speaking of scams, I have a friend whose aging father received a telephone call from someone saying that the father’s son (my friend) was in jail and that to get the son out of jail, the father needed to send money. The son was not, in fact, in jail.

The father drove to the bank, withdrew $9,990 ($10 short of triggering federal reporting requirements), then went to a Coinstar kiosk and sent the money via cryptocurrency to the perpetrator. The fraudster kept the father on the phone, instructing him what to do each step of the way. The bank teller even asked the father what he wanted to withdraw that much money for, but the fraudster, who was still on the phone with the father, told him not to tell them, so the father simply told the teller that he was on the phone and couldn’t talk to her.

After sending the money to the fraudster, the father called his son and asked if he got released from jail.

“What are you talking about, Dad? I’m not in jail,” my friend said.

After the father explained everything, my friend asked why he didn’t just call him to begin with. It was an elaborate scheme, even to the point that the fraudsters had someone pretend to be the son on the phone. According to them, the son had been “hit in the face” and lost some teeth, so he was mumbling and that’s why he sounded different. Because the money was sent via cryptocurrency, there was no way for the police to track it, and the father was out nearly $10,000.

Just this last week, while I was at the bank, sill handling finances for my mom’s estate, I saw a sign on the counter listing things to do if you think you are being scammed. I told the bank teller the story above and she said that this is scam is increasing in frequency. So, beware. From the bank, there are three common fraudster tactics: credibility, urgency, and authority.

Thankfully, for Mom there wasn’t anything so egregious as this, but the many other smaller donation transactions did add up. I explained to Mom that at this point in her life she needed the money more than these organizations did, and for the most part she agreed, and we turned those automatic donations off.

More Day-to-Day Management

The last couple of years, Mom really fell behind on keeping up with the mail. This happens when you’re a hoarder and you feel the need to read every catalog, magazine, advertisement, bill, and package that comes to you, but can’t get through it all. Bills would get buried under stacks of junk mail and wouldn’t get paid on time. I did my best to manage her mail, to include trashing all the junk mail, but she would still squirrel some of it away and would’ve tried to review every single piece that came in had I not gone through it first.

Regarding junk mail, I’ve found that it, and frequent donations to organizations that send pleas via junk mail, cause the junk mail to increase at an exponential rate. We had a lull of incoming junk mail when Mom moved into assisted living, but once the address change kicked in, so did all the junk mail from companies that were still sending mail to her previous home. After she passed, we changed her official address to my home so I could receive any important items that would arrive in the mail. Now, when I go to my mailbox, 75% of our household mail we receive is for her, and nearly all of it is junk. If an organization provides a postage-paid envelope for a donation, I return the donation slip in their envelope with the words “Nancy Rendell is no longer alive. Stop sending these!” It seems to be working. At minimum, I’m using up their prepaid postage envelope and costing them something for their greediness.

Toward the end, I managed all of Mom’s finances. She still had access to credit cards (which she continued to use to buy stuff online), but I could monitor it all and ensure bills were paid on time. Like I said before, I’m grateful for that trust. And, ultimately, she was better off for it too.

Advice

#1 – Make sure your will is up to date.

Online access

Digital access is now part of estate planning. Access to usernames and passwords can become essential—do not wait until hospitalization to start figuring out how your executor (or loved ones) can find your logins and passwords.
Keep the decedent’s phone active for a while after death if 2FA codes are still needed.

Finances

Don’t assume fixed income will cover assisted living; do the math on income and expenses and build a realistic care budget.
Simplify accounts where possible.
Review bank and credit card statements for patterns.
Get professional tax help if tax returns are behind.
Watch for scams, donation traps, and predatory fundraising.
Keep a list of recurring subscriptions and autopays. Last year I created a spreadsheet of my own subscriptions, to include cost, renewal date, and a history of past costs…it was a real eye opener.

Depending on what your situation is, and what an attorney or CPA tells you, you may want to:
- Ensure your accounts are set up as joint with rights of survivorship between you and your spouse.
- Determine what status would be best for those you want to have access to your money when you pass: a trust, a joint account, rights of survivorship, or simply beneficiaries.

Home

Selling a longtime home can create tax consequences, so do your research.
Keep records of major home improvements in case you need proof for tax write-offs.
Links to each chapter:
- Introduction - Why I Wrote This
- Chapter 1 - The Buildup
- Chapter 2 - The Tipping Point
- Chapter 3 - Aging and Medical Care
- Chapter 4 - Important Documents
- Chapter 5 - Finding a Place to Live
- Chapter 6 - Managing Finances
- Chapter 7 - Managing Tasks and People
- Chapter 8 - The Purge (Managing the Mess)
- Chapter 9 - Finding a Place for Pup
- Chapter 10 - Life in Assisted Living
- Chapter 11 - Her Final Hours
- Chapter 12 - Afterwards
- Final Reflections

12 Things From the Week | 8 Jul 26

Brian Rendell — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:55:10 GMT

First, some fun:

1. World Cup tourists are fawning over ‘this redneck crash course’ — including a trip to Buc-ee’s (NYP)

A Texas man turned several World Cup visitors’ trip into a two-day crash course in Texas culture. Drew Haas invited two couples from Poland and France to his 30-acre South Central Texas ranch, where they went off-roading, learned to two-step, rode horses, and visited Buc-ee’s. Haas said he wanted to show them “my Texas,” giving them a version of America rooted in cowboy culture, muddy pickup rides, and roadside Americana.

The visitors embraced the experience, with one Polish tourist saying it felt like stepping into the kind of John Wayne westerns his father watched growing up. Although one guest was skeptical at first, she quickly warmed to the off-road adventure and ranch lifestyle. For Haas, the most meaningful part was watching strangers connect with the place he loves. The story frames the visit as a lighthearted cultural exchange, showing how hospitality, shared experiences, and a little Texas excess can turn tourists into fans of American life.

International

2. See the Global Chokepoints That Carry Much of the World’s Trade (WSJ)

Some key points: The Strait of Hormuz carries about one-fifth of global oil shipments and a major share of liquefied natural gas, making it especially important for Asian economies such as Japan and South Korea. The Strait of Malacca is the fastest route for Middle Eastern energy to reach Asia and is especially important to China. The Panama Canal handles a large share of U.S. container traffic and has become entangled in U.S.-China tensions. The Suez Canal remains a major route for Asia-Europe trade and energy shipments, while the Turkish Straits are important for Russian and Kazakh oil and Ukrainian grain. The Bab el-Mandeb, between Yemen and Djibouti, is another key oil route and has been threatened by Iran-backed Houthi forces.

3. Xi’s Enforcers Are Hunting Down Officials Who Consult Mystics and Borrow Too Much (WSJ)

Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has expanded from targeting bribery and personal misconduct into a broader effort to enforce political loyalty across China’s Communist Party. Party enforcers punished nearly one million people in 2025, a record high, and disciplinary charges increasingly include vague political offenses such as disloyalty, defying Xi’s directives, forming factions, or failing to implement Beijing’s policies. The campaign is designed to keep officials constantly alert and aligned with Xi’s priorities.

The campaign now reaches into many areas of officials’ lives and work. Some have been punished for reckless debt-funded projects, poor implementation of economic or environmental goals, “superstitious” activities like consulting fortune tellers or feng shui masters, lavish lifestyles, golf, gambling, sexual misconduct, and allowing family members to profit from political connections. The result is a disciplinary system that mixes corruption enforcement with ideological policing and moral denunciation.

4. No, China did not manage to avoid a crash (Noahpinion)

China’s economy looked almost recession-proof for years because the government could use its control over the banking system to push credit into whatever sector needed support. After 2008 and again after the 2015 market turmoil, that meant directing huge bank lending into infrastructure, construction, and especially real estate. This helped China avoid visible recessions, but it also fueled an enormous property boom that eventually turned into a long-running bust after Evergrande’s collapse in 2021.

After the property crash, Beijing used a similar strategy again, but this time it redirected lending toward manufacturing rather than real estate. That helped keep official GDP growth positive and supported the claim that China had successfully deflated a massive housing bubble without a major downturn. But the evidence is weaker than that. China’s labor market deteriorated, youth unemployment surged enough that officials changed the way they reported it, and alternative indicators suggested broader job-market weakness. Even official data showed China’s economy contracting in one quarter of 2022, while independent estimates from groups such as Rhodium and the Bank of Finland suggest growth was far weaker than Beijing reported.

Economy

5. The U.S. Added 1,200 New Millionaires a Day Last Year (WSJ)

The U.S. continues to produce millionaires at a striking pace. In 2025, more than 440,000 Americans became millionaires, accounting for nearly half of all new millionaires worldwide. More than 23.6 million Americans are now worth at least $1 million, helped largely by strong financial markets. Because U.S. wealth is heavily tied to stocks and bonds, rising markets have had an outsized effect on upper-income households.

The gains, however, are highly uneven. Average wealth per U.S. adult rose nearly 10% from 2020 to 2025 after inflation, but median wealth fell by almost 20%. Those with large investment portfolios benefited from the stock-market boom, while households more dependent on wages have faced pressure from inflation and weak real wage growth. Globally, millionaire counts rose to record levels in every market UBS tracks, with particularly fast growth among people worth $50 million to $100 million.

6. They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real (WSJ)

Polymarket has reportedly been paying mostly college-age social media creators to make videos showing what appear to be real bets and big wins, but many of those trades were fake. A Wall Street Journal review of more than 1,100 videos found that creators used simulated versions of Polymarket’s website to place phony trades totaling about $1.9 million, with some videos falsely showing creators winning large sums. The company allegedly instructed creators to hide that they were being paid, and some only added partner disclosures after the Journal began asking questions.

7. Toyota to Move Tacoma Production to Texas in $3.6 Billion U.S. Expansion Plan (WSJ)

Toyota will spend $3.6 billion to bring production of its best-selling Tacoma midsize pickup back to the U.S. by 2030. The company plans to add a second Tacoma assembly line at its San Antonio plant, creating about 2,000 jobs and increasing the plant’s annual output by roughly 150,000 trucks. The Tacoma was previously built in San Antonio from 2010 to 2021 before production moved fully to Mexico.

The move is partly a response to tariffs and tight production capacity. Toyota currently builds the Tacoma in Mexico, but production from its Baja California plant will shift to San Antonio, while its Guanajuato plant will keep operating. Building more vehicles in the U.S. should help Toyota reduce tariff exposure, especially after U.S. tariffs caused a major hit to its North American profits.

Toyota also needs more U.S. capacity because demand remains strong. Its San Antonio plant already builds the Tundra pickup and Sequoia SUV and is running near full capacity. Toyota’s U.S. sales rose slightly in the first half of 2026 even as the broader industry declined, making the company one of several automakers expanding U.S. production, especially for profitable trucks and SUVs.

Artificial Intelligence

8. The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation (WSJ)

America’s AI build-out is becoming a new source of inflation. Even as trade-war effects fade and gasoline prices fall, massive spending by tech giants on data centers, chips, cooling systems, cables, backup generators and electricity is pushing up prices for goods and services tied to that infrastructure. Capital spending by major hyperscalers is expected to reach $741 billion this year, and one estimate puts total AI build-out spending through 2032 at about $8 trillion.

In the short term, AI demand is raising costs for electronics, memory chips, storage, electrical components, construction labor and electricity. Those inputs are not used only for AI, so higher prices can spill into consumer products such as smartphones, gaming consoles and cars, as well as broader business costs. Data centers are also expected to drive a large share of U.S. electricity-demand growth through 2030, which could keep utility prices rising.

Over the long run, AI could eventually reduce inflation if it boosts productivity enough to help businesses produce more efficiently. But economists say that benefit may take years to appear. For now, the AI boom looks like a sustained demand shock that could keep inflation elevated and make it harder for the Federal Reserve to return inflation to its 2% target.

9. AI Data Centers Use Far More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report (WSJ)

AI data centers are creating a growing water problem that is larger than many tech companies’ sustainability reports suggest. Companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon report the water used directly at their data centers, mostly for cooling, but often do not include the much larger amount of water used indirectly by power plants that generate the electricity those data centers consume. In the U.S., indirect water consumption for data centers has historically been about 12 times greater than direct water use, though it varies depending on whether the electricity comes from coal, nuclear, natural gas, wind or solar.

The issue is especially serious because AI infrastructure is expanding rapidly, often in water-stressed regions. Google’s reported water use rose 34% in 2025, and Meta’s indirect water use in 2024 was more than 20 times its direct use. Some companies are trying to address direct water use through water-restoration pledges, renewable-energy purchasing and more efficient cooling systems, but critics argue that renewable-energy credits do not necessarily solve local water shortages. Water consumed in one region cannot be offset meaningfully by water availability somewhere else.

Education

10. Students are doing worse than you think (Economist)

Universities are reporting that more students are arriving without the basic reading and math skills needed for college-level work. More than 1,800 University of California math and science lecturers warned that some first-year students are so underprepared that instructors are reteaching middle-school math. Similar concerns are appearing elsewhere, including Harvard, where faculty say students have less experience reading complex prose and less ability to sustain attention than students did a decade ago. International OECD data supports the concern: a growing share of tertiary students in rich countries perform at very low literacy and numeracy levels, with the U.S. looking especially weak.

Several forces appear to be contributing. Pandemic school disruptions worsened learning gaps, but test scores were already slipping in many countries before Covid. Screen use may also be crowding out reading and sustained attention, while schools may be weakening standards through grade inflation, softer curricula, and lower graduation requirements. Universities share some blame because many have relaxed admissions standards, especially after dropping SAT and ACT requirements. With essays easier to generate through AI and high-school grades increasingly inflated, admissions officers have fewer reliable signals of student readiness.

The problem may continue inside universities, where grade inflation and pressure to keep students satisfied make it harder to enforce rigor. AI adds another challenge by making cheating easier, especially in writing, coding, and other subjects where generative tools are useful. Some faculty are returning to proctored exams, but others are resigned to the idea that students may no longer need strong basic skills because AI can do much of the work.

11. The disability accommodation trap on college campuses (Boston Globe)

Disability accommodations have grown rapidly at elite colleges, especially for mental health and learning-related conditions. At Harvard, the share of undergraduates receiving accommodations rose from about 3% in 2014 to 21% in 2024, with similarly high rates at schools such as Brown, Amherst, and Stanford. These accommodations can include extra time on exams, private testing rooms, deadline extensions, tutoring, and housing preferences. The concern is that some students genuinely need support, but others may be benefiting from a system that makes diagnoses relatively easy to obtain and difficult for universities to challenge.

As mental health awareness has grown, ordinary struggles such as anxiety, grief, difficulty concentrating, and adolescent stress are increasingly treated as clinical disorders. The expansion of the DSM, rising rates of mental illness among young adults, and sharp increases in diagnoses such as autism have made the boundary between normal hardship and disability blurry. Because psychiatric diagnoses are often subjective, every expanded category can create a new pathway to academic accommodations.

Elite colleges are especially vulnerable because students and families often have the resources to seek private evaluations, the language to frame struggles clinically, and strong incentives to gain every possible academic advantage. Disability offices also face pressure to approve requests because denying accommodations can invite lawsuits or accusations of indifference. The result resembles grade inflation: once enough students receive extra advantages, others feel pressured to seek them too. Protecting disability rights remains essential, but overdiagnosis can dilute resources for students with genuine disabilities and teach young people to interpret normal difficulty as evidence that something is clinically wrong.

Entertainment

12. Yes! We have No Bananas.

NOTE: Back in the 1980s, I remember a commercial for Fig Netwons that had apes and a fun jingle that went, “we have no bananas todaayyyyyyy…” (because they didn’t have a banana flavored newton). You can watch it below.

Only this week did I learn that the banana song originated in the 1920s and was a viral hit. Here’s the most popular version:

And here’s the background on the song:

Celebrating 250 Years of Independence?

Brian Rendell — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:39:38 GMT

Washington Crossing the Delaware By Emanuel Leutze

This Saturday, July 4, 2026, marks 250 years of independence from our British overlords.

Or does it?

The day we’re commemorating is July 4, 1776, when delegates at the Second Continental Congress voted for independence from Britain. Declaring independence in this way is the equivalent of telling your bank that you no longer want to pay your mortgage (albeit a mortgage that keeps increasing) while still living in the house. You don’t actually own the house just because you told your bank you’re no longer making payments. When you stop making payments, the bank will demand compliance or send someone to evict you. And for seven years, this is what the British tried to do.

The last major battle of the American Revolutionary War was the Battle of Yorktown, which ended in October 1781, when American and French forces defeated the British. However, other smaller battles, both on land and at sea, continued into 1783. It was only when the Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783, that the war for American independence officially ended.

I’m quite certain that those American Patriots didn’t exactly feel the yearned-for “Safety and Happiness” of independence while attempting to row across the icy Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776, or while enduring years of battle with meager pay, scarce food, tattered clothing, and little ammunition. As you celebrate this Fourth, consider that the day marks 250 years since our declaration of independence; it’s been 243 years since we officially earned independence with the Treaty of Paris. We can celebrate 250 years of actual independence in 2033.

So, I say, Happy 243^rd Birthday, America!

Whether you celebrate 250 years or 243 years, it’s important to understand the history of our independence and how long it took to earn it. And more than time, what it took in terms of lives, money, effort, determination, and alliances. Declaring that you’re independent and being independent are two different things, and maintaining your independence is something else altogether. We didn’t just have to earn independence; we’ve had to keep it.

As you’re singing along to “The Star-Spangled Banner” and watching fireworks—the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air—keep in mind that our national anthem was written during the War of 1812, another war we fought against Great Britain on our home turf in North America. It lasted nearly three years. And 46 years after the War of 1812, our nation divided in a Civil War. More than 600,000 people died, all Americans. At Gettysburg alone, there were more than 50,000 casualties. After four years, the brutal Civil War came to a close in 1865, and President Lincoln was assassinated. In the next 160 years, three more U.S. presidents were assassinated and others survived assassination attempts, the country endured the Great Depression and multiple recessions, two World Wars and many other wars and battles, and countless other challenges to our unity and independence.

There are many reasons why our country has maintained its independence for so long. We are blessed with tangible qualities like abundant natural resources, borders with only two countries, and the buffer of two oceans. But just as important are our intangible qualities, like representative democracy, real and intellectual property rights, personal rights, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Americans are generally optimistic, inventive, risk-taking, and hardworking.

But I sense that we’re slipping.

Though we haven’t come under oppression by a foreign power, we are coming under oppression by a different type of ruler, one to whom we are voluntarily surrendering our independence. It’s eroding us from within, not from without. We invited it into our lives and our homes, and now we are paying it an ever-increasing mortgage, one that will never result in ownership.

We created the internet, smartphones, social media, and streaming to make the world more open, connected, and smarter. And though we’re more digitally connected, it has come at the cost of human connection and cognition. We’ve become more divided and disconnected and dumber.

We assumed endless news, entertainment, and content would provide fulfillment and enlightenment. Yet people are more confused, anxious, stressed, depressed, and suicidal. We wanted to be omniscient, yet we are overwhelmed by all we see in the world. We wanted to be omnipotent, but we’re overwhelmed by all there is to do when we’re told to do it all.

It’s made people want to hunker down, isolate, curl up, and scroll for answers and solace in the same place that created so much confusion in the first place. We’re constantly busy, constantly plugged in, constantly seeking satisfaction and distraction to avoid having to think about it all.

It’s time to stage a rebellion against our rulers! It’s time to reclaim independence from our digital devices and addiction.

How, you ask?

Imagine, if you will, a world in which computers, cell phones, and ceaseless streaming didn’t exist. How would you spend your free time? What would you do with your evenings and weekends?

My guess is you’d do what people did 50 years ago. You’d spend more time with your family, friends, and neighbors. You’d join clubs. You’d go to church. You’d go to the bar. You’d go on walks around the neighborhood and hikes in nature. You’d tell your kids to play outside after school and all day on Saturday. You’d listen to live music. You’d listen to music at home as a family, without headphones. You’d learn to play music. You’d have more in-person conversations, more phone conversations by voice instead of text, and write more letters. You’d enjoy peace from distraction, enough peace to do nothing but think about things and create things, and then do it again because there was that much time to do so. You’d get bored, and it would be okay.

You’d take up arms! Or rather, take up into your arms a book and arm your brain with knowledge and resolve. You’d slog through it, spending time in the trenches—in the tough prose, the tedious paragraphs, and the twisting story line. You’d do it for America! You’d do it for yourself. You’d do it with friends and family members.

If it took seven days, seven weeks, seven months, or even seven years to form or reform the habit and earn our independence, it’d be worth it. You would be better for it. Our nation would be better if we all did it. Changing habits in life is hard, especially when you’re fighting against the digital dopamine dispensers surrounding us, so expect your brain to push back.

Our digital devices encourage immediacy, ease, passivity, and isolation, yet the best things in life usually require time, effort, determination, and alliances—just remember what it took for those early American Patriots to earn their independence.

Footnote

If you’re looking for more information, resources, or tools, I recommend the following books. I’ve included the published date of each work to show how long others have been sounding an alarm on this topic. They’re all great reads.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985).
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam (2000).
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr (2010).
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter (2017).
How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life by Catherine Price (2018).
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport (2019).
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (2024).

Reflections: Chapter 5 - Finding a Place to Live

Brian Rendell — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:33:07 GMT

This is Chapter 5 in the series. In the Introduction to this series I provided a brief background on the passing of my mom and why I’m writing this. In Chapter 1, I covered my mom’s growing hoarding problem and our attempts to help her out of that hole. Chapter 2 told the story of when Mom’s urinary tract infection made her delirious and how I called the police to check in on her. Chapter 3 discussed aging and medical care, and Chapter 4 dove into some things I learned while helping her through medical issues. In this chapter, we’ll cover a few options for living locations.

Reflections: on Caring for an Aging Parent:

Chapter 5 - Finding a Place to Live

Photo by Yiquan Zhang on Unsplash

I loved Mom, but we knew, for everyone’s sake, that living with me and my wife wasn’t really an option. During shorter recovery stays with us she ignored some of our basic house rules and acts of common courtesy, which was frustrating. Given our personality, political, and lifestyle differences, having her live with us indefinitely would have been a recipe for conflict. But more than that, I didn’t think my wife and I could provide the physical support and medical care that Mom regularly needed.

I have a great deal of respect for families who can make multi-generational living work. It is not for everyone. If you are an older person wondering why your adult children may hesitate to have you move in, it may be because living with others requires adaptation from everyone. Growing older does not give you a free pass. This is especially true if you’ve been living by yourself for years and doing things you like to do when you like to do them. Living with people is difficult—all parties must be willing to adjust. No one has “earned the right” to be stubborn or stuck in their ways, nor, frankly, is it healthy.

As we sorted through Mom’s house, we were also beginning deeper conversations about independent living and assisted living. She did not want to leave her house, lose her freedom, or pay thousands of dollars per month for care. However, she agreed to visit one independent living place in Austin a few weeks before the urinary tract infection incident. At the time of that visit, she did not want to move out of Austin because all her doctors were there (she had quite a few), and she did not want to find new ones. After the urinary tract infection and rehab, she was open to moving closer to us in San Antonio.

Types of Places to Live In

Here are some of the options we learned about:

Independent living is essentially an apartment complex for older adults who can still do most things on their own. These facilities usually have a dining area and provide activities for residents. Many times, they may also have a doctor or nurses available in the facility. They may also have a full kitchen, to include oven and cooktop, in the apartment.

Assisted living is for those who need help with Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) or Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs). ADLs are the basic functions of daily life—things like bathing, dressing, toileting, eating, moving around, and getting in and out of bed. IADLs are the broader tasks that allow a person to live independently, such as managing medications, shopping, preparing meals, handling money, keeping track of appointments, using transportation, and dealing with household tasks. Normally, assisted living will have nurses in the facility, and may have a doctor as well. For safety reasons, assisted living rooms do not normally have ovens or cooktops.

What I learned is that many older adults can hold on to a sense of independence longer than they can actually hold on to the practical abilities that independence requires. A person may say, “I can still live on my own,” and what they mean is, “I do not want to surrender control.” But if they are missing medications, falling, unable to manage paperwork, living in filth, or unable to prepare food safely, then the issue is not whether they feel independent. The issue is whether they are safely independent.

Your price for assisted living will usually be based on a base rate (typically determined by the type, size, and location of the room you want) as well as how much help you need from the staff. The more ADLs you can handle on your own, the lower the price. There are usually ADL “levels of care,” or tiers, each with its own price. Some facilities use a four-tier system, some use a five-tier system, and I’m sure there are even six-tiered systems out there. The more help you require with ADLs, the higher your level/tier will be, and the more you will pay on top of the base rate. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what type of ADL care falls into each tier; instead, the tier you fall into it is often based on a holistic assessment and determination by a nurse.

Your ADL tier can also change. It could go up after a major surgery, when you need someone to help you get dressed until your arm gets better, and then it could go back down once you recover. Generally, though, as you age, your ADL needs will increase, which means your price will likely increase as well. Regardless of whether your ADL requirements and costs go up, the overall cost of assisted living, independent living, or memory care will also likely increase annually with inflation.

A nursing home, also referred to as a skilled nursing facility, is focused on intensive, 24/7 skilled nursing care. This is full support with multiple medical staff and orderlies. Though Mom had numerous medical issues, she did not need to go into skilled nursing.

The higher the level of care a facility, like a nursing home, provides, the more efficient the facility must be with their staffing and layout, which usually translates to more communal and open areas where staff can keep an eye on multiple people and rooms at the same time.

A memory care facility is specifically focused on individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Sometimes, these residents may be in fairly good physical condition but still cannot safely live on their own, or sometimes even with others, because of risks to their own safety or the safety of others.

--------------

When we started discussions with my mom about independent living and assisted living, we led with independent living, but we knew that she likely didn’t have the physical autonomy to be able to be there. Once she began to see that, we were able to transition our discussion more toward the support that assisted living could provide her.

One of the hardest parts of this process is that to an aging parent, assisted living can feel like surrender—of privacy, freedom, money, routine, and identity. To the adult child, it can feel like a plainly necessary step. Those two perspectives usually collide. We learned that the conversation went better when we framed assisted living in terms of support rather than loss. Meals. Medication help. Fewer risks if she fell. People nearby. More safety.

With my mom agreeing to explore locations to live in around San Antonio, we went on various websites that rated assisted living places, talked to family members who had walked this road before, and did a ton of research. Ultimately, we ended up narrowing it down to three locations near our home, and we visited each.

Each location did their best to “sell” us on their location. The more they put their sales hat on, the more I was turned off. The more genuine they were, the more I listened. If they were disorganized or late for our appointment, I was unimpressed and wondered if it was a sign of larger mismanagement.

If you’ve never been in an independent living or assisted living facility before, it can be depressing. People sit in wheelchairs, some staring off into the distance, a few doing older-people activities like arm circles and leg raises from their chairs. Very few people look happy. They generally stare at you as you walk by. I’m sure they are wondering if you’re someone’s child or if you’re about to “commit” your loved one to this facility. I should note, though, not all places are like this. In some, the residents would greet us and talk with us about things there—this was encouraging sign.

In the end, we narrowed it down to a place that we were pleased with and that had an immediate opening. In hindsight, we chose the best place possible. The staff were great, the residents were outgoing, and the location was 15 minutes away from our home, far closer than the two-hour drive to Austin.

But even in the past few months, the facility underwent new ownership, then new management.

And this is the trouble with assisted living and independent living facilities--there’s a lot of churn in ownership and management, so today’s best place may not be tomorrow’s best place. It’s hard to figure it all out. The best you can do is stay engaged and communicative with the staff so they know you’re paying attention to what they’re doing and how they’re treating your loved one. You can always move to another facility, as most are on a month-to-month lease, but that means doing more research, visiting other locations, and moving.

After Mom passed, I revisited her assisted living facility to pick up some mail. I thanked some of the staff there who had a positive impact on Mom and told them how grateful I was for their kindness and support. We talked about how hard it is to find a good facility, and I asked one of the staff members what they would do if they had to choose a facility for their loved one.

“I had to put my dad in a facility,” he said, “and despite being in this industry, I ended up having to move him because I realized we made a poor choice initially. My biggest advice is to go visit the facility numerous times and at different times of the day. If the staff have good attitudes and you see them around at all times, day and night, that’s a good sign.”

How to pay for It

Aside from the overall change of moving out of her house and losing some of her freedom, Mom’s biggest concern about moving to assisted living was the cost. The average cost in the U.S. for AL is about $5,500 per month, or $66,000 per year, though prices vary widely. It is expensive. And that’s just for base-level care. Depending on the additional ADLs you need help with the price will go up hundreds of dollars per month. The figure also varies based on location and quality of care.

When it comes to independent living, assisted living, or memory care, do not depend on the government to pay for this. Know this: Medicare does not cover assisted living.

Medicaid, however, might cover assisted living costs. Like most things regarding insurance, it’s complicated how and what they’ll pay for. Every circumstance is different. As I understand it, there are income limits and asset limits for Medicaid to be able to pay for assisted living. Your income must be at or below the poverty level, and you cannot have more than $2,000 in assets—this includes your home and bank accounts.

There are ways to prepare for this, but it’s not simply as easy as transferring your loved one’s assets to another family member, because Medicaid and the IRS pay attention to this. You should definitely talk with a financial professional to see what options are available to you.

To see what Mom could afford, I would need to understand what finances looked like. We’ll cover that in Chapter 6.

Advice

When it comes to choosing an independent living or assisted living location:

Visit many locations.
Visit at different times of day.
Ask about staffing turnover.
Understand the pricing structure and how care levels affect cost.
Ask what happens if care needs increase.
Ask how often rates increase.
Do not let a polished lobby fool you.
See what activities they offer.
See what the dining area looks like and what food options are available (and what the actual food looks like!).
Watch how staff interact with residents when they don’t think they are being evaluated.

Proximity matters more than you think—being close enough to visit often is a real advantage.

Reflections: Chapter 4 - Important Documents

Brian Rendell — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 12:23:51 GMT

This is Chapter 4 in the series.

The Introduction was a brief background on the passing of my mom and why I’m writing this series.

In Chapter 1, we covered my mom’s growing hoarding problem and our attempts to help her out of that hole.

Chapter 2 told the story of when Mom’s urinary tract infection made her delirious and how I called the police to check in on her.

Chapter 3 discussed aging and medical care.

Now we dive into some things I learned while helping her through medical issues.

Reflections: on Caring for an Aging Parent:

Chapter 4 - Important Documents

Photo by Joachim Schnürle on Unsplash

Once we started going through Mom’s office paperwork, we realized she had not updated her will in years. Worse, the person named as executor of the will didn’t even know she was the executor.

Sadly, a similar situation happened when my aunt passed away a few years ago. No one knew where her will was located. After searching through the house, it was finally found, and that’s when my aunt’s friend discovered that she was named as the executor. That friend had asked my aunt years before to have her taken off as executor because she didn’t think she could adequately handle my aunt’s estate; my aunt said she would choose a different executor, but never did.

As a comparison, just think of your neighbor and what would happen if they passed away and had designated you as executor, without you knowing. You likely have no idea where their accounts are, what bills have to be paid, or whether you are mentally, physically, or practically prepared to administer an estate without any advance notice. That’s not a fair thing to leave someone with, especially unexpectedly. Naming someone as executor for your estate is not a casual thing. That person needs to know your wishes, where your documents are, and what they are walking into.

So, we met with an attorney and updated a number of Mom’s legal documents.

Though I took her to the appointment and was with her, I made it very clear that I was happy to step out if the attorney needed to discuss anything confidential with her. Honestly, I did not care about her possessions. I cared that the documents were in order for the day when we would have to act on her behalf.

The documents we updated included:

General Power of Attorney – For me to make broad decisions on her behalf.
Medical Power of Attorney – For me to make healthcare decisions on her behalf if she was unable to do so.
Directive to Physicians - Otherwise known as an Advanced Directive. This document designates the conditions under which you want life-sustaining treatment provided. This includes things like a ventilator (for breathing), dialysis (for kidney function), a feeding tube (for eating), or other treatments.
Will - to designate who would handle her estate upon her passing (otherwise known as the executor) and where her money and possessions would go.

A very important note here: Some people think that they can use a Power of Attorney to handle someone’s affairs after that person passes away, but this is incorrect. A Power of Attorney becomes invalid when the person dies.

I never had to use the General POA because we created a joint bank account while she was alive and because other situations did not arise that would require it. But it was useful to have it in reserve.

The Medical POA and Directive to Physicians proved much more important. The documents gave me legal authority to act, but more than that, they guided me toward what she would have wanted.

People sometimes ask me what I’ve learned from Mom’s passing and whether I’ve made any changes. I tell them that one of the very first things I did was put together a document listing all of my immediate family’s assets (checking, savings, investments, home, cars) and the associated banks and bank account numbers.

I listed car, home, and life insurance policies—the companies they were held with and the account numbers.
I discussed our mortgage and property taxes.
I listed the location of important documents, how to find usernames and passwords, and how to access files on my computer.
With my wife I discussed how income and pensions would change when I died, what insurance policies would kick in, and some future planning considerations with regard to Social Security.
And I also discussed my funeral. Though, honestly, I know I won’t be around for it, so I’m pretty much leaving that up to whatever the family wants.
I now update the document every six months, print off a copy for safekeeping, and also provide an electronic version to my immediate family members.

If that sounds like a lot of work, it was, at first. But once the structure was in place, updating it takes very little time. The peace of mind is worth the work.

I recognize that conversations about death with loved ones is not always easy. Sometimes the conversations are hampered by bad relations, other times it’s a sense of privacy (“We don’t talk about those types of things where I’m from.”), and sometimes it’s from embarrassment about debt or lack of income.

With regard to finances, not talking about them isn’t going to make it easier for your loved ones. If you are in debt and paying those debts will be the responsibility of someone else upon your death (either the executor of your estate or a co-signer), one of the most loving things you can do is have a conversation about it before you pass away. There may be things your loved ones can do to help you while you’re still alive, if you let them.

Advice

A bit of a repeat: have the difficult conversations with your family.

Most importantly: you should have a will, and it should be up to date.
Just as important, have a discussion with the person or people you are designating as executor (or co-executors) so they are aware of what you want.
And, if you want to be even nicer to your loved ones, you’ll create a document that lists important things, like: bank accounts, financials, insurance policies, important logins, and document locations.
Review beneficiary designations regularly.
Update documents after marriage, divorce, deaths, births, moves, or major financial changes.
Do not assume your loved ones know your wishes just because you have mentioned them casually.

Other things to consider:

A life insurance policy—especially if your family depends on your income to pay bills.
Advance directives are not just for old people.

11 Things from the week | 16 Jun 26

Brian Rendell — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:46:57 GMT

International

1. Switzerland Rejects Measure to Cap Its Population at 10 Million

Swiss voters rejected a national referendum that would have capped the country’s population at 10 million, a proposal aimed largely at limiting immigration. The measure failed by about 55% to 45%, with strongest support in rural areas and strongest opposition in cities and border regions. Its defeat preserves Switzerland’s current approach to immigration and avoids a potential confrontation with the European Union over free movement agreements.

Supporters of the cap argued that rapid population growth is straining housing, traffic, affordability, infrastructure, and environmental sustainability. Switzerland’s population has grown to about 9.1 million, up more than 25% this century, largely because of immigration from other European countries. Opponents warned that the cap would damage the economy by restricting skilled workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, nurses, and other labor the country needs as its workforce ages.

2. Hundreds of Billions in Loans Didn’t Make a Dent in Global Poverty

Microfinance was originally promoted as a market-based way to fight poverty by giving small loans to poor entrepreneurs who lacked access to traditional banks. Muhammad Yunus’s early work in Bangladesh helped turn the idea into a global movement, backed by development agencies, nonprofits, celebrities, and later major banks and investors. But decades later, the evidence is much weaker than the promise. Randomized studies have generally found that microfinance does not significantly improve most borrowers’ incomes, and in several countries rapid lending growth has contributed to repayment crises.

The industry has also changed dramatically. What began as small, affordable loans has become a $219.7 billion global business serving more than 140 million borrowers, with average loan sizes rising and some interest rates reaching extremely high levels. In places such as Cambodia, India, and Mexico, borrowers have faced heavy debt burdens, pressure from loan officers, land-secured loans, restructuring cycles, and in some cases homelessness, child labor, reduced food consumption, and suicide. Cambodia is presented as a severe example, where many poor families owe debts far larger than their annual income and risk losing land used as collateral.

3. Everyone Loves Chinese Cars, Except the Chinese

Chinese automakers are gaining momentum overseas, but their home market is weakening sharply. New-car sales in China fell 22% in May from a year earlier, marking the eighth straight monthly decline, while year-to-date sales are nearly 20% lower. The slowdown is being driven by reduced EV tax benefits and trade-in subsidies, higher gasoline prices after the Iran war, weak consumer confidence, deflation, and high youth unemployment. Even major players like BYD are seeing profits squeezed, while smaller EV makers such as XPeng continue to struggle in an overcrowded market.

The domestic slump is pushing Chinese carmakers to expand more aggressively abroad. China exported 784,000 vehicles in May, up 75% from the year before, as companies look for growth outside their saturated home market. BYD is shifting from price cuts toward technology and quality claims, including faster charging, long battery warranties, and accident-cost coverage tied to its driver-assistance system. Its founder has said the company aims to become the world’s largest automaker within five years.

The export surge is creating geopolitical and trade tension. The U.S. has largely blocked Chinese cars through tariffs and restrictions, and the Pentagon recently added BYD and NIO to a list of companies it says have links to China’s military, which both firms deny. Other countries are also becoming wary of the flood of Chinese vehicles, prompting Chinese automakers to pursue factories, partnerships, and joint ventures abroad, especially in Europe, to keep expanding despite trade barriers.

Economy

4. You Have No Idea What a Trillion Dollars Is—and We Have Proof

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after the stock market debut of his company SpaceX, with his net worth reaching approximately $1.11 trillion. How much is a trillion of something? Although million, billion, and trillion sound like evenly spaced steps, they are not. A billion is much closer to a million than to a trillion, and most people intuitively underestimate the gap: a million seconds is about two weeks, a billion seconds reaches back to 1994, and a trillion seconds reaches back to the Ice Age. A visual comparison helps show the difference: a stack of one million pennies would be about a mile high, one billion pennies would stretch nearly 1,000 miles, and one trillion pennies would reach to the moon and back twice.

Artificial Intelligence

5. AI Supercharges Deepfake Nudes—Unleashing a New Form of Bullying Among Kids

AI-powered “nudify” tools are making it easy for people, including teenagers, to create fake explicit images of classmates, teachers, and strangers from a single photo. These explicit deepfakes are becoming a new form of harassment and bullying, while schools, parents, police, and lawmakers struggle to keep up. Victims often face humiliation, threats, and the burden of trying to remove images from the internet, while perpetrators may face limited or inconsistent consequences, especially when they are minors.

The problem has grown quickly because the technology is cheap, accessible, and widely promoted through apps, websites, and social media. A survey cited in the article found that more than half of U.S. teens surveyed had created at least one nudified image, and one-third said someone had created and shared a nude image of them without permission. App-store investigations found more than 100 nudification apps with hundreds of millions of downloads, even as Apple and Google say they are removing or restricting such tools.

New laws such as the federal Take It Down Act criminalize publishing or threatening to publish nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated ones, and require platforms to remove reported content quickly. But enforcement remains uneven, and victims say the burden still falls heavily on them. The danger now extends beyond celebrity deepfakes: anyone with an image or voice online can be targeted, making explicit AI deepfakes a widespread safety, legal, and cultural problem.

6. AI Deepfakes Are Getting Weirder and Harder to Spot in the Midterms

Political campaigns are increasingly using AI-generated images and videos in ads and social media posts to promote candidates, mock opponents, and spread attacks, raising concerns that deepfakes could mislead voters during the midterm elections. Recent examples include fake or exaggerated depictions of candidates such as James Talarico, Mike Rogers, Spencer Pratt, Peggy Flanagan, and Graham Platner, sometimes with small disclaimers and sometimes in ways that blur the line between parody, attack ads, and misinformation.

The rapid improvement of free AI tools, weaker content moderation on social platforms, and voters’ tendency to believe content that confirms their existing views have created a “perfect storm” for political disinformation. Although about 30 states have laws against election-related deepfakes, experts say enforcement is difficult because of free speech protections and because calling out false content can spread it further.

Health

7. Insurers aren’t the main villain of the U.S. health care system

Noah Smith argues that health insurers are widely hated, but they are not the main reason U.S. healthcare is so expensive. Smith says private insurers may be inefficient or even unnecessary, but their low profit margins show they are not extracting the bulk of money from the system. If insurers keep roughly $10 to $15 of every $100 in premiums but earn little profit, most of that money is going toward administrative and operating costs rather than shareholder enrichment.

According to Smith, the problem is the high cost of healthcare provision itself. Hospitals, doctors, drug companies, medical suppliers, and other providers account for most of the excess spending compared with other wealthy countries. Insurers become the visible villain because they deny claims, enforce networks, and send patients bills, while providers deliver care without discussing the full price upfront. In that sense, insurers act as “sin-eaters” for the broader system--they absorb public anger while the higher prices charged by providers receive less attention.

Smith concludes that reforms focused mainly on punishing insurers will not make healthcare much cheaper. A more effective path would be reducing prices within the medical system itself, such as through stronger government negotiation with providers and drug companies, more competition, or other cost-control measures.

NOTE: Charts below from article show 1) how little UnitedHealth Group made in income as a percent of total revenue (12%), and 2) how Americans actually pay less out of pocket costs (at least through 2019) than other select countries.

8. Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly

The study found that the U.S. fertility decline may be partly tied to the spread of smartphones, especially the iPhone. Since 2007, the U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22%, and the authors say common explanations such as the economy, contraception, housing, and childcare costs do not fully account for the drop. Because the iPhone was initially available only through AT&T, the researchers use differences in AT&T mobile broadband coverage as a natural experiment to estimate the device’s effect.

Their analysis finds that access to the iPhone was associated with sizable birth declines among younger women, especially ages 15–19 and 20–24, with smaller but still significant effects among older groups. Overall, the authors estimate that iPhone diffusion may explain roughly one-third to one-half of the fertility decline among women ages 15–44. Survey evidence suggests a possible mechanism: smartphones reduced in-person interaction, increased pornography use, and lowered sexual frequency, all of which may have contributed to fewer births.

NOTE: To clarify, it’s not the electronic emissions from the smartphone that had the impact on birthrates, rather the constant access to and use of the smartphone and its apps.

9. UK bans under-16s from using social media apps including TikTok and YouTube

Britain plans to ban children under 16 from using major social media platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X, beginning early next year. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the move is meant to protect children from harmful content, excessive screen time and online contact from strangers. The U.K. would follow Australia’s model, placing enforcement responsibility on tech companies rather than children and threatening platforms with large fines if they fail to take reasonable steps to keep under-16s off their services.

Supporters say the ban is overdue because tech companies have not done enough to protect children, especially from harmful algorithms, online challenges, sexualized content and predatory contact. The government is also considering related measures, including limits on strangers contacting children through gaming and livestreaming platforms, restrictions on romantic or sexual AI chatbots for minors, overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for users under 18.

Critics argue that a blanket ban may be difficult to enforce and could push young people into less regulated online spaces. YouTube and Meta warned that children might lose access to supervised, age-appropriate online communities while migrating to riskier platforms. Others say the proposal focuses too much on age verification and not enough on the deeper problem of harmful algorithms and content design. The plan could also create tension with the U.S., which has raised concerns about free speech and burdens on American tech companies.

Entertainment

10. Two-Thirds of Americans Play Video Games Every Week According to New Report from the Entertainment Software Association

Video games have become a mainstream part of American life, with 67% of Americans ages 5 to 90 playing at least one hour per week. The average player is now 37 years old, showing that gaming is no longer just a youth activity. More than 212 million Americans play weekly, with participation spread across gender, age, employment status, and family life. Younger generations still play at the highest rates, but majorities of Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers also play, along with nearly a third of the silent generation.

Mobile gaming remains the most popular platform across all ages, while consoles and PCs are especially common among younger players. Puzzle games dominate mobile and PC play, while action, shooter, and arcade games lead on consoles. Players also see video games as a strong value compared with other entertainment options. Many younger players buy in-game content, usually spending around $20 a month, and most parents who allow in-game purchases require approval first.

11. What Americans think about board games

A YouGov poll of 1,131 U.S. adult citizens finds that most Americans have a positive view of board games, with 21% saying they love them and 44% saying they like them. Younger adults are the most enthusiastic, while older adults are less likely to say they love board games. Nearly half of Americans say they rarely play board games, 22% never play, and only 28% play at least monthly.

Board games remain more broadly familiar than many other tabletop formats, though they trail mobile games in frequency of play. Monopoly is by far the most widely played game, followed by classics such as checkers, Scrabble, Connect Four, and Yahtzee. Modern games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and Wingspan are much less familiar to the general public, though younger adults are more likely than older adults to have played newer games such as Catan, Bananagrams, Cranium, and Wingspan.

Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent: Chapter 3 - Aging and Medical Care

Brian Rendell — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:36:27 GMT

This is Chapter 3 in the series.

The Introduction was a brief background on the passing of my mom and why I’m writing this series.

In Chapter 1, we covered my mom’s growing hoarding problem and our attempts to help her out of that hole.

Chapter 2 told the story of when Mom’s urinary tract infection made her delirious and how I called the police to check in on her.

Now we dive into some things I learned while helping her through medical issues.

Chapter 3 - Aging and Medical Care

Photo by smallbox on Unsplash

A few years ago, I had a nagging hip problem. Despite seeing multiple specialists, the issue would not go away. When I finally came full circle back to my primary care doctor, he said, “It just looks like you’re getting older. These kinds of things happen when we age.” It was depressing to think that I might simply live the rest of my life with pain and limitation. In that respect, I could understand some of what my mom was facing. It is depressing when there is no clear hope of getting better.

Whenever I would get frustrated with my mom, I tried to remind myself of that experience. I do not know what it was like to live in her body and feel the pain she felt. I only know that I have had injuries that felt insurmountable, and I know how depressing it can be. I recovered and my mental state improved, so I’m not sure how I would act if the ailments didn’t go away but instead grew and compounded.

For Mom, the hoarding wasn’t just about wanting stuff, her physical inability to keep up with life also contributed to the problem. Because of her medical issues, from autoimmune problems to limited mobility, every day was physically and mentally taxing. That compounded the hoarding in two ways: she could not keep up with cleaning, sorting, and throwing things away, and she also bought more things to try to make life easier.

She was resourceful and crafty in her ways to get by or around limitations. She had more grabber reacher tools than I could count, scissors in every room, and pens in every room. She had neighbors pick up her mail when she could no longer do it herself. She learned that if she called 911 to send a policeman over to pick her up after a fall she might get a bill, but if she called the fire department she would not be billed. And, as she liked to tell me, “Those firemen are stronger and more handsome than the policemen.” I would roll my eyes and tell her I did not approve.

For the last year and a half of her life I went to most of her medical appointments with her. That helped me understand what the doctors were saying and advocate for her when necessary.

The week before she passed, we were seeing a new specialist for a new diagnosis. As is typical with a new doctor, there was a mountain of intake paperwork to provide medical history, insurance information, medications, surgeries, hospitalizations, and allergies. It was time-consuming and frustrating for both of us. I could also see signs of Mom’s memory slipping because she couldn’t remember certain information for the forms. Her handwriting was deteriorating and her hearing was also getting worse. I cannot imagine her handling all of that paperwork alone.

One thing I wish I had done much earlier was create one master document with all of her medical conditions, medications, and personal information. That idea only dawned on me after that appointment. That day, after the appointment, I went home and created it, determined never again to rebuild her medical history from scratch in a waiting room. My plan was simple, the next time we saw a new doctor, I would write “see attached” and hand them the packet. Unfortunately, I only got to use it once, a week later at the hospital where she died.

Below is a blank version of that document in case you’d like to use it. I’m sure there are others available online, so don’t consider this all-inclusive. My intent was not to create the perfect packet of information, but to spare myself from having to reconstruct her entire medical life in the middle of each crisis or waiting room.

Personal & Medical Information

128KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Key topics include:

Full name, date of birth, Social Security number, and insurance information
Emergency contacts
Primary care doctor and all specialists, including phone numbers
Diagnoses and major medical history
Surgeries and approximate dates
Current medications, dosages, and prescribing doctors
Allergies and reactions
Preferred pharmacy
Copies of medical power of attorney, advance directive, and DNR, if applicable

Interestingly, at that same appointment, after answering the many questions about her surgeries and diagnoses, Mom sighed and said, “I can’t wait to be in Heaven, so I don’t have to deal with all of this anymore.” She was serious. Those words came back to me in the ICU a few days later when I had to make very difficult decisions.

Multiple times Mom had to go into rehab, usually following major surgery, because it was not safe for her to return home until she had regained mobility. Getting into rehab meant insurance had to approve it based on what the hospital and therapists documented. That usually meant working with a discharge planner, filling out paperwork, and scrambling to understand which facilities had openings and what would actually be approved by insurance.

As a hospital decides it is time to discharge a patient (a decision often driven by medical stability and insurance) they usually want to know where that person is going next. That is not a small question. You are not just deciding where someone will sleep, you are deciding what level of care they need and who will provide it, what insurance will cover, what location is realistic, and whether they can function safely there.

Rehab is generally short-term with the goal being improvement. You go there because there is hope that therapy and support will restore some function and allow the person either to return home or move to a lower level of care.

Skilled nursing is different. It is less about short-term recovery and more about ongoing support for people who cannot safely care for themselves. Rehab has a finish line in mind. Skilled nursing often does not.

One complicating factor is that the same facility may offer both. Unless you are paying close attention, it can be easy to misunderstand whether your loved one is in a temporary recovery environment or sliding toward a longer-term level of support. This is an important distinction because it affects not only cost and logistics, but also expectations. One of the questions every family has to ask is, “Is this a temporary setback, or is this the new baseline?”

In our case, every rehab stay felt like warning. Hospitalization, rehab, discharge, repeat. Over time, I begin to realize that medical events in old age do not always come and go. Sometimes they ratchet life downward one click at a time.

I will warn you now, skilled nursing facilities can be a shock. Depending on what your insurance covers, you may be in a shared room with space for only two single beds, two nightstands, and a thin curtain to separate you from your roommate. You likely both have TVs mounted on the opposite wall that loudly battle with one another for your attention. Nurses and orderlies come in at various times, sometimes unscheduled in the middle of the night, sometimes long after you’ve pushed your button requesting them. Generally speaking, they are not happy places. I speak from experience.

After Mom had her shoulder replaced, she had to go into a skilled nursing facility. This was really the only option my mom had—I could not provide the attention, care and rehab at home that she could receive there.

The month that my mother was in a skilled nursing facility was torture for her. I had to meet with staff to advocate for her when they wouldn’t listen, would mess up her medications, or would treat her roughly. She had to request room changes due to a roommate who coughed incessantly. I’d visit her nearly every day after work, not just to check up on her, but to show the staff that there was someone watching them and keeping them accountable. One time, I walked into the room and immediately smelled the overwhelming odor of urine. I asked Mom about it, and she said her roommate had pushed the attendant call button more than 30 minutes ago for help to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, but no one had come. I went out, tracked someone down, and was able to get the problem resolved. To some degree, it wasn’t the staff’s fault; they were undermanned and overworked.

Just know this—you can and should do your homework when selecting a rehab or skilled nursing facility. There are websites that provide reviews that you should read through. Then, most importantly, make sure the staff know that you care about your loved one and are actively aware of and engaged with how they are doing.

------------

One thing that turned into a blessing, though it initially felt like a burden, was taking Mom to appointments. It disrupted my work schedule and required patience with the fact that she was never ready on time. I wish I could say I always relished those opportunities to serve her—brushing her hair, helping her with shoes, rubbing medicine on her shoulder—but that would not be true. There were times I saw it as service. There were many other times it was simply frustrating. Alas, welcome to the true me.

I took encouragement from my mother-in-law, who has cared for more people than I can count. She has cared for aging aunts, disabled cousins, and still cares for her own ninety-eight-year-old mother. People like her remind me that it is possible to show up day after day for people who are frail, messy, dependent, and not always easy to care for.

For me, it was a year and a half with my mom. There are people who do this for much, much longer. God bless them.

Advice

Planning for aging and end of life all starts with a conversation, which can be hard to do. Some families do not want to talk about health decline or death. That is unfortunate, because both will happen whether we talk about them or not.

Ideally, you should talk openly with loved ones about:

Current and past health issues.
Wishes regarding resuscitation.
Wishes regarding your body after death—organ donation, cremation, burial.
Funeral or memorial preferences.

Additional advice:

Go to appointments with your loved one when you can.
Build extra time into medical days. Everything takes longer than you think.
Bring a notebook or use an app to take notes at every appointment.
Keep one master medical document and update it regularly.
Ask doctors to explain things in plain English so you understand what they’re saying.
Do not assume “rehab” means full recovery. Ask directly whether rehab is expected to restore prior functioning.

Ask who is making discharge decisions—the doctor, the therapist, the facility, or insurance—and what the discharge decision will be based on.
Ask what specific abilities your loved one will need in order to return home safely.
If you are told, “They’re not safe to go home,” take that seriously.

13 Things from the week | 10 Jun 26

Brian Rendell — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:13:44 GMT

NOTE: Just a quick rant: I’ve really come to dislike the term “significant other.” At first, I thought it was a benign nicety, but the truth is, it’s meaningless. Actually, no, it’s demeaning.

By adding “significant” we somehow think we’re adding importance to the word “other.” By definition, an “other” lacks categorization or distinction, so how are they significant? I’m reminded of the classic line from the movie Talladega Nights, following an insult, “But I said, ‘With all due respect!’” In essence, by saying “significant other” you’re saying, “Respectfully, you lack categorization in my life.” I would never introduce someone as a “significant other.” The same holds true for “plus-one.”

Look, I get it if two people have yet to have a DTR (define the relationship) conversation to determine if they’ve crossed line from friend to boyfriend or girlfriend, or are dating exclusively. Still, I say we should be very clear on the status of the relationship, options include: date, good friend, or close friend. If your “significant other” is offended by being referred to by one of those terms, then you know it’s time to have that DTR conversation.

Ok, rant over, now on to the news.

International

1. The World’s Most Surprising Economic Success Story Is…North Korea (WSJ)

North Korea’s economy appears to be experiencing its strongest growth in years, especially in Pyongyang, where visitors describe new taxis hailed by smartphone apps, QR-code payments, electric vehicles, imported cars, restaurants, pet stores, gaming cafes, and new housing developments. Much of this visible progress is concentrated in the capital and benefits the elite, while poverty, malnutrition, repression, and human rights abuses remain severe outside Pyongyang.

The turnaround is being fueled by North Korea’s deepening ties with Russia and China. Arms sales, troop deployments to support Russia’s war in Ukraine, Chinese trade, cyber theft, and sanctions evasion have brought in money, materials, energy, and technology. These gains have allowed Kim Jong Un to pursue major construction projects, expand state-controlled markets, and promote a more modern consumer economy, while also strengthening his military and nuclear position. The result is a North Korea that looks wealthier and more technologically advanced than before, but also more entrenched, less likely to bargain away its nuclear program, and still deeply unequal and authoritarian.

2. The Fight to Break China’s Rare-Earth Dominance Moves to a New Front in Brazil (WSJ)

Brazil is emerging as a major focus in the global race to loosen China’s control over rare-earth supply chains. The country holds the world’s second-largest rare-earth reserves, but currently produces almost none of the global supply. Western miners and governments see Brazil’s clay-based deposits, cheap hydropower, lower labor costs, and proximity to U.S. markets as advantages that could help create an alternative source for minerals used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, electronics, and advanced weapons. Interest has surged since China imposed rare-earth export controls in 2025 and controls more than 90% of rare-earth processing and magnet production.

The harder challenge is building the higher-value processing, metals, recycling, and magnet-manufacturing capacity that China dominates. Brazil’s government wants foreign investment, but it does not want the country to become only a raw-material exporter or to be forced into a U.S.-led bloc against China. That neutrality creates both opportunity and uncertainty. Western companies such as Viridis, Meteoric, Aclara, and USA Rare Earth are moving quickly, but China is also investing in Brazilian mining and manufacturing. Brazil could become a rare-earth powerhouse, but whether it becomes a true Western supply-chain alternative depends on how far it develops domestic processing and whether it chooses to remain open to both Washington and Beijing.

3. India’s surprise baby bust is a warning to the world (Economist)

India is undergoing a dramatic demographic reversal. After decades of government messaging warning families against having too many children, the country is now facing a fertility slump, with its total fertility rate down to 1.9 children per woman, below the replacement level of about 2.1. Some Indian states now have fertility rates comparable to wealthy European countries, and the effects are already visible in falling births, shrinking school enrollment, and rising concern that India may grow old before it becomes rich.

Low fertility is no longer limited to wealthy countries; much of the middle-income world and even some poorer countries are now below replacement. The main drivers are lower child mortality, more education for girls, greater autonomy for women, and rising parental aspirations. As parents invest more in each child’s education, especially where public schools are weak, smaller families become both a social norm and an economic strategy. Television, smartphones, and exposure to urban middle-class lifestyles have helped spread those norms faster.

The consequences will be significant. India’s population will still grow for a while, but it may peak around 1.6 billion in the 2040s and then decline sharply. The same may happen across much of Asia, and global population may peak sooner than expected. While the causes of falling fertility are largely good, the transition will bring hard policy choices. Countries like India may face labor shortages, pension burdens, and rising old-age care costs before they have built enough wealth to manage them easily, making higher workforce participation, especially among women, and stronger public finances increasingly urgent.

4. Switzerland’s 10-Million Population Cap Is Worrying Executives (Bloomberg)

Switzerland is preparing to vote on a proposal that would cap the country’s population at 10 million. With the population already above 9.1 million, annual migration would likely need to fall by more than half to stay below the proposed ceiling by 2050.

Supporters, led by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, argue that immigration is straining housing, transportation, and public space, and that the country needs tighter control over who enters. Opponents warn that the cap could shrink the labor pool, damage productivity, worsen shortages in sectors like healthcare, hospitality, IT, and construction, and jeopardize Switzerland’s economic relationship with the European Union, where free movement of people is tied to broader market access.

Artificial Intelligence

5. How Much of the Internet Is AI Slop? (Stat Significant)

“Brain rot” dates back to Henry David Thoreau, who used it in Walden in 1854 to criticize society’s appetite for shallow entertainment. Today, the concern has returned in the form of AI slop, meaning low-quality, machine-generated text, images, and videos flooding digital platforms. Since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, AI-generated content has surged across websites, Amazon e-books, academia, and short-form video, with one study estimating that nearly half of newly published digital content may now be AI-generated.

Social media platforms reward cheap, attention-grabbing content, allowing AI slop to spread quickly and sometimes generate serious advertising revenue. Short-form video platforms appear especially vulnerable, with studies suggesting a large share of YouTube Shorts and similar content qualifies as low-quality “brain rot,” and a significant portion may be AI-created. But the same advertising system that helps fund this content may also create pressure to control it. Major brands do not want their ads appearing beside obviously synthetic, low-quality spam, so advertisers may push platforms to verify larger accounts and improve quality control. Platforms will probably never eliminate AI garbage entirely, but they will need to keep it below the point where users lose interest, advertisers lose confidence, and the business model starts to break.

And then there’s this from the Financial Times:

But, on the other hand, there’s also this (which can also be true):

6. Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development, Flags ‘Self-Improvement’ Risk (WSJ)

Anthropic is warning that frontier AI systems may be advancing fast enough that labs should seriously consider a coordinated slowdown or temporary pause. The company says models could be moving toward “recursive self-improvement,” where AI systems improve themselves without human intervention, though it stresses that this has not happened yet and may not happen. Anthropic argues that society, policymakers, and alignment researchers may need more time to prepare before AI capabilities outpace oversight.

The proposal is controversial because Anthropic is both a major AI competitor and a company that has long emphasized safety. Supporters see its warnings as sincere concern about potentially transformative and dangerous technology. Critics argue the safety messaging could serve Anthropic’s business interests by encouraging regulation that slows rivals, especially open-source models, or by marketing its own systems as powerful enough to be risky. Some researchers warning that AGI or self-improving AI could arrive soon, while others argue today’s language-model-based systems are still far from human-level intelligence.

Anthropic says any slowdown would only work if it were global and verifiable, since companies or countries that continued development while others paused could gain a decisive lead. It compares the challenge to nuclear arms control, but notes that AI training runs are much easier to hide than missile silos. The company plans to convene policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders to explore how a credible slowdown, pause, or verification system might work before AI development reaches a point where institutions are unprepared.

Economy

7. Corporate America has never been this profitable (Sherwood)

AI is helping push U.S. corporate profitability to record highs, especially among the biggest technology companies. In the first quarter, S&P 500 companies kept nearly 15 cents of profit for every dollar of revenue, the highest level FactSet has tracked since 2009 and far above the long-term historical average. The shift is being driven heavily by the Magnificent 7, which now make up more than a third of the S&P 500’s market value and posted earnings growth far stronger than the rest of the index.

The broader profit boom is rooted in strong AI demand, huge megacap tech earnings, aggressive cost-cutting, layoffs, and efficiency campaigns across Corporate America. Both operating and net margins are now at their highest levels in at least two decades, meaning that companies are earning more from their core businesses and keeping more after expenses. But the trend also creates risk: a large share of expected S&P 500 earnings growth now depends on AI infrastructure winners, thus the market’s outlook is increasingly tied to whether today’s AI spending turns into lasting profits.

8. Do you really want that computer-science degree? (Economist)

Computer science degrees are surging across the U.S., but much of the growth is coming from online-heavy, less selective institutions rather than traditional tech powerhouses. BYU-Idaho is a good example—despite being located in a small college town with little tech-industry presence, it awarded more than 2,000 computer and information-science degrees in 2024, far more than just two years earlier and ahead of elite schools such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon. Similar spikes have occurred at institutions like the University of North Texas, Wichita State, and short-term credential providers.

Several forces are driving the boom. Tech wages remain attractive, with new computer-science graduates earning high starting salaries, and universities have adapted their business models through online programs, short-term credentials, and competency-based degrees that let students move quickly through coursework for a flat term fee. AI may be accelerating the trend by making it easier for students, especially online students, to complete assignments rapidly or cheat, with computer-science students among the heaviest users of generative AI tools.

All of this is leading to a growing mismatch risk. AI may be helping produce more computer-science graduates at the same time it is reducing demand for entry-level software engineers. Aspiring tech workers could therefore find themselves using AI to earn credentials for jobs that AI is also beginning to threaten.

9. Tech Layoff Wave Has Already Hit 100,000 Jobs This Year (Statista)

Tech layoffs are accelerating again after two years of cooling. More than 100,000 tech jobs had already been cut worldwide by early May 2026, including about 81,700 in the first quarter alone. That was the highest quarterly total since early 2023, followed by another roughly 20,000 cuts in the first six weeks of the second quarter. The shift marks a sharp reversal from 2025, when layoffs stayed much lower, and from 2024, when cuts steadily declined across the year.

The renewed wave is being driven by major companies, including Meta, PayPal, and Cloudflare, as the sector continues to emphasize efficiency, cost control, and heavy investment in artificial intelligence. Layoffs are still below the extreme peak of early 2023, when more than 160,000 jobs were cut in a single quarter, but the pace in 2026 suggests tech may be entering another major restructuring cycle. At the current trajectory, total cuts could approach the scale of the 2023 downturn, when more than 260,000 tech jobs were eliminated.

NOTE: I know I keep harping on this topic…but here’s a reminder:

10. America’s Social Security trust fund is disappearing (Economist)

Social Security’s main trust fund is nearing a major fiscal deadline. When the program began in 1940, more than 150 workers paid into the system for every retiree receiving benefits. Today, that ratio has fallen to fewer than three workers per beneficiary because of lower birth rates and longer lifespans. The fund’s reserves peaked at $2.8 trillion in 2017 but have since declined by about $400 billion as benefit payments exceed contributions. If nothing changes, the fund is expected to run out around late 2032 or early 2033, triggering an automatic benefit cut of roughly 23%.

Analysts have proposed modest payroll-tax increases, bringing more state and local government workers into the system, raising retirement ages for higher earners, and taxing benefits more heavily for wealthier retirees. But the political environment makes reform difficult. Past fixes relied on either large congressional majorities or bipartisan compromise, while today’s Congress is highly polarized and voters strongly oppose cutting Social Security. Polling shows Americans are far more likely to want Social Security spending increased than reduced. While the trust fund is partly an accounting mechanism, its depletion would have real legal consequences because benefits would automatically fall unless Congress acts. The likeliest outcome, absent early reform, is another crisis-driven rescue funded through more borrowing rather than a durable long-term fix.

Health

NOTE: This one gets my “Article of the Week” star (which I just made up):

⭐ 11. Don’t Get Too Comfortable. Your Quality of Life Depends On It. (WSJ)

Modern life, especially as AI makes tasks easier and more frictionless, may be removing the very challenges people need to stay healthy, resilient, and alive in a meaningful sense. It’s not that people are stressed, but that they may become stagnant. Human well-being depends on “progression,” meaning manageable challenge that builds future capacity in the body, behavior, and mind.

Progression shows up in three areas: 1) Physically, exercise improves health most when it gradually builds endurance, strength, or skill. 2) Behaviorally, even small actions can break cycles of avoidance and restore momentum, especially for people struggling with depression or low motivation. 3) Mentally, broad and exploratory thinking can improve mood, creativity, and flexibility, while repetitive rumination is linked to anxiety, depression, and lower vitality.

What we’re really talking about here is the difference between pursuing pleasure or growth. Scrolling, sugar, alcohol, and passive entertainment may soothe discomfort temporarily, but they do not make people stronger or more capable. Progression often involves effort, uncertainty, and discomfort, but it leaves people better equipped than before. In a world increasingly optimized for ease, the healthier question is not whether something feels good immediately, but whether it moves us forward.

12. The Boom in Autism Therapy Is Medicaid’s Fastest-Growing Jackpot (WSJ)

Medicaid-funded autism therapy has become one of the fastest-growing areas of U.S. healthcare spending, with state Medicaid payments for applied behavior analysis rising from $660 million in 2019 to $2.2 billion in 2023. The growth reflects rising autism diagnoses and demand for services, but it has also attracted entrepreneurs, investors, and private-equity-backed providers, sometimes faster than regulators could monitor billing practices. Federal auditors have found widespread documentation problems in several states, including cases where Medicaid paid for therapy while children were napping or watching videos.

Indiana became a major example of the problem because it reimbursed autism-therapy providers at 40% of whatever they billed, rather than using fixed rates. That system allowed some providers to charge extremely high prices. Piece by Piece Autism Centers, for example, received $29 million from Indiana Medicaid in 2023 to treat just 84 children, about $340,000 per child, with some reimbursements reaching $640 an hour for routine therapy. The company’s owner said it followed state rules and that Indiana did not object to its prices, while state officials now say the old system lacked proper oversight.

Some providers may be billing unusually high numbers of therapy hours per child, even though experts say treatment should vary by individual need and full-time clinic therapy is rarely necessary. Minnesota, Colorado, Florida, and Indiana all had providers billing 30 or more hours per week on average for many children, while federal prosecutors have charged some Minnesota autism-therapy operators with fraud.

Entertainment

13. Kids these days are listening to more songs from the good old days (Sherwood)

Older music is having a major streaming revival, especially among younger listeners. While music from the 2020s still leads among listeners ages 13 to 24, its share has fallen since 2021, and more young people now say they listen most often to music from the 1990s or earlier. The 1990s, in particular, has become the fastest-growing decade for streams. Streaming and social media are driving the shift. Unlike earlier eras, when listeners were limited by radio, record stores, CDs, or vinyl, today’s platforms make more than a century of music instantly available. TikTok and other social platforms can turn old songs into viral sound bites, sending tracks by artists such as Radiohead, Coldplay, Fleetwood Mac, and Michael Jackson back into mainstream attention. Still, current music continues to dominate the biggest individual songs on Spotify, with most of the platform’s top-streamed tracks released after 2010. As AI-generated music expands and listeners search for something more familiar or authentic, older music may increasingly become a source of future hits.

Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent: Chapter 2 - The Tipping Point

Brian Rendell — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:17:22 GMT

This is Chapter 2 in the series. In case you missed it, you can read the Introduction to this series here. And you can read Chapter 1 here:

Chapter 2 - The Tipping Point

Photo by Martin Podsiad on Unsplash

It was a Thursday when we finished going through her office. On Saturday I called to check on her, but the call went to voicemail, which was not unusual. Then on Sunday one of her neighbors texted to say she had not heard from Mom. Again, not always unusual. So I texted and called her again and got no response.

A reasonable option would have been to ask one of her neighbors to go check on her. But they had already done that so many times over the years that I no longer felt right putting that burden on them. Quite frankly, they were burned out. It had begun to scare them, either because the house was disgusting or because they feared that one day they would find her dead. I do not blame them. My mom leaned on her neighbors far more than she should have, and I remain grateful for the help they gave her over the years while my brother and I lived elsewhere. In some ways, that is what neighbors are for. But there are limits.

So instead of asking a neighbor, I called the police and requested a welfare check. The responding officer called me when he arrived. I gave him the code to the garage keypad (something I was glad to have) and talked him through the layout of the house. Sure enough, he found her laying on the floor of her bedroom. She was awake and talking, but she was not making sense.

They took her to the emergency room, and I drove up to Austin to see her. That is when I learned how profoundly a urinary tract infection (UTI) can affect the mind of an older person.

When I asked Mom what had happened, she told me a fantastical story about camping in the woods, being chased, and many other outlandish things. She provided elaborate details about her adventures, each more bizarre than the previous. To her, the story was entirely real.

When she finished, I said, “No, Mom, that’s not what happened. I called the police because we hadn’t heard from you. They found you on the floor of your bedroom. You had been down there at least a day or so.”

“No,” she said, while wagging her finger at me. “That’s not what happened. You think you know what happened, but I really know what happened.”

I knew enough not to argue with someone whose mind was not functioning clearly, so I dropped it. What I did do, though, was ask her to tell me the story again, and I recorded it on my phone.

Over the next few days, the antibiotics began clearing the infection, and as they did, her mental clarity returned. At one point she asked, “What was it you said happened to me?” I told her, and she shook her head because it conflicted with the fading memories in her own mind.

I pulled out my phone and said, “Mom, I want to play you something. This is you explaining what happened.” We listened to the earlier recording. When it was over, I asked, “Which version makes more sense to you—what you said then, or what I am telling you now?”

When she realized her version of reality did not make sense, and that mine did, she became scared. And understandably so. It would be frightening for anyone to realize that their own brain had deceived them about reality.

She cried. I comforted her and told her we would work through it together.

That was the beginning of the whirlwind effort by my wife and me to find a place where she could be better cared for.

But first, in the next chapter, we’ll talk about medical issues in older age.

Advice

If an older loved one is suddenly confused or delirious, consider a urinary tract infection and get it checked immediately.
If something feels “off,” don’t brush it off too quickly.
Make sure you have a way to access the home in an emergency.
Know how to request a welfare check and don’t feel guilty for using that option when needed.
If an older loved one lives alone, prolonged silence can be a warning sign.
Keep a list of neighbors, friends, or nearby contacts who know the person’s routines.

When someone is delirious, don’t waste energy arguing with them. Focus on getting them treated and safe. Once they are clear-minded again, gently explain what happened so they understand the seriousness of it.

Links to each chapter:

Introduction - Why I Wrote This
Chapter 1 - The Buildup
Chapter 2 - The Tipping Point
Chapter 3 - Aging and Medical Care
Chapter 4 - Important Documents
Chapter 5 - Finding a Place to Live
Chapter 6 - Managing Finances
Chapter 7 - Managing Tasks and People
Chapter 8 - The Purge (Managing the Mess)
Chapter 9 - Finding a Place for Pup
Chapter 10 - Life in Assisted Living
Chapter 11 - Her Final Hours
Chapter 12 - Afterwards
Final Reflections
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Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent: Chapter 1 - The Buildup

Brian Rendell — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:17:57 GMT

This is chapter 1 of this series. You can read the introduction here.

Let’s get the ugly part out of the way first.

Mom was a hoarder. As is likely true for most people in that situation, holding on to things started small and then snowballed. I cannot tell you exactly when it started for her. I only know that over the years, whenever I visited her house, I began to notice things piling up in certain places—things that needed to be put away, organized, read, recycled, or thrown away. Over time, the piles grew.

It wasn’t just the hoarding that became a problem, it was the general uncleanliness too. Stains were left untreated. Dishes piled up in the sink. Basic housekeeping seemed almost nonexistent.

Not my mom’s house…but something similar.

There was a point about four years ago when things became unhealthy and unsanitary. I will spare you the details, but it was atrocious. My brother and his wife flew in, and they, along with my wife and me, sat down with Mom to express our concern. We were logical and emotional in our plea to her to be willing to change. As I later learned, interventions rarely work. And neither did ours. She made promises, but nothing came of them. I consulted friends and professionals, and unfortunately there was not much we could do unless she was willing to accept help.

When we offered to come in and help clean, she generally refused. One reason was that when we helped early on, we moved too quickly for her to supervise every item being sorted and discarded. It wasn’t intentional; we were all working full-time jobs and could only come in on weekends, so we attacked the problem with efficiency and purpose. For Mom, it was overwhelming.

Sometimes other family members had a little more success getting her to allow them in. But despite their best efforts, they were mostly rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Her stubbornness and talkativeness would eventually wear them down.

In the summer of 2023, Mom fell and had to go to the hospital with a urinary tract infection, and then on to rehab. During that time, my family and I were out of the country. Her neighbors confided in me that the home had gotten worse and that something needed to be done.

While out of the country, I coordinated with Letty and Lee Inabinet from Visiting Angels in San Antonio to go into her home and at least get the kitchen and bedroom back into livable shape. But I knew we needed Mom’s permission first, so they went and met with her at rehab. She expressed concern about other people going through her things. I had worked with Letty while I was in the Air Force, and I trusted both her and Lee completely. I told Mom that. Letty was wonderful with her, assuring her that they would only clean and organize. Mom agreed. The Visiting Angels team deep-cleaned the main rooms, then returned to rehab to show her photos and reassure her. I remain deeply grateful to the Letty and Lee. If you are in the San Antonio area and need help of that kind, they are the kind of people you want.

Unfortunately, once Mom returned home, she reverted to old habits.

Eventually, after I retired from the military, I realized the only thing I could do was come alongside her and help on a weekly basis, in accordance with her wishes. Thankfully, my military pension gave me the flexibility to scale back and work part-time in my new job at UT San Antonio. I am grateful for the flexibility the folks at UT San Antonio gave me while I was helping my mom. I have no idea how I, or anyone working full-time, could handle something like this.

So from January through May of 2024, just about every week, my wife and I drove to Austin one day a week to go through things in her house with her.

My wife and I are very Type A people. I retired as a Colonel, and my wife has managed her job as a realtor while also managing our family and home through my many military absences over the years. I say all that not to brag, but to say that if there are two people in the world who know how to organize things and get things done, it’s us.

And yet the process of going through Mom’s house almost broke me. Not because we did not know what to do, but because nearly every decision required her approval.

We started in the kitchen. There was stuff everywhere. I did not know where to begin. I opened one drawer, then another, then another. I decided to gather like items, starting with spatulas. I found twelve of them, held them up to Mom, and asked which one she wanted to keep.

She analyzed every spatula. After fifteen minutes, we had negotiated her down to keeping three. But she did not want anything leaving the house, so we had to make two separate piles: one for things that might be given away and one for things that might be thrown away. After spatulas came whisks. After whisks came wooden spoons. And on, and on.

After a few weeks of trips, we finally got the kitchen somewhat organized and cleaned. If organizing was difficult, cleaning was even worse. There were cockroach droppings on every shelf, on dishes, and in cups. We went through gallons of dish soap and cleanser. The pantry contained food that was more than fifteen years old, yet even throwing that away required negotiation.

After the kitchen, we moved to the dining room, which we needed as a staging area for things we had sorted but that she still had not decided whether to donate, recycle, or trash. As we left each week, we gave her assignments, like going through one stack of sorted items and deciding what to throw away. Rarely did she complete them.

From the dining room we moved to her bedroom. By the time we finished going through her clothes, we had filled more than ten moving boxes with dresses, many still in original packaging from an online store.

We had small victories along the way: decluttering a cabinet, seeing the floor in places, and clearing a path wider than a foot. Some things became a game: counting the number of each like item we found to see which there were more of (scissors actually outnumbered spatulas), and seeing what the oldest item in the pantry might be (I found a bottle of alcohol at the back of the top shelf that was from the 1980s).

When Mom was not looking, my wife and I would quietly take things outside and put them into trash bags that we brought back to our house. Why back to our house? Because she would check her outdoor trash can after we left to see what we had thrown away. Call me dishonest if you want, but it was for her good. It was stuff any other person would have called trash.

There were even times when she remembered something that had been in the house but that we had thrown away behind her back weeks prior. She would ask us about it, and depending on what we thought her response would be—or our own frustration level—we would feign ignorance or tell her we had thrown it away. We could not do that too often, or she would lose trust in us. Again, call me dishonest if you want, but she simply was not keeping up with life in a way that ensured her health and safety.

It is difficult to do the right thing for someone when they do not see it as right. It is even harder when they get upset with you. In many ways, over the past few years, the parent-child relationship flipped. I found myself caring for her in ways she once did for me.

This kind of thing is not in the manual of life. Grow up, go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, retire. That is the arc of life as people tend to imagine it. No one really tells you about the stretch where you may need to care for your parents, many times while also continuing to shepherd your own children through life. This is what they call the “sandwich generation.”

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not bitter. I have no regrets about the time I spent with Mom. I am grateful she let us help her, and grateful we had the chance to do it. I am simply saying that the world does not usually explain that this too may be part of life, just as it does not tell you that marriage will involve struggles or that loved ones may have serious health issues. But that is reality.

I will also say that after raising me for nearly 20 years, I feel that the least I can do for my parents is help care for them for whatever period, and in whatever way, they need (and will allow). As difficult as it may be, it seems selfish to do otherwise.

By May, after four months of weekly trips, we finally reached her home office, where all of her important paperwork was “filed”—in stacks, spread around the room. Some piles had collapsed into others. There was a thick layer of dust on everything.

If there was one upside to Mom’s hoarding, it was that she had kept a lot of important paperwork along with the junk. I initially tried to go through each paper there in the house, deciding whether it was important and where it belonged. But she wanted to see each piece of paper too.

Eventually, I just threw the papers into boxes and bags and brought them back to our house. I spent evenings and weekends going through everything page by page. In the end, I was able to figure out where she had bank accounts, credit cards, and other essential information. The downside was that our living room began to smell like her house, which neither my wife nor I liked.

As tedious and lengthy as that process of going through paperwork was, if I had waited until after she passed to do it, it would have been a million times harder. Because I was finding things while she was still alive, I could ask her about them. I also had the luxury of time. If she had died before I had gotten through all the paperwork, I would have been trying to identify all of that information while simultaneously handling every other part of the estate.

Then, the same week we finished going through her office, I had to call the police to check on her.

Advice

To Hoarders

My guess is most hoarders fall into one of two categories: 1) you do not see yourself as a hoarder, or 2) you understand you have a hoarding problem but you don’t know how to break out of it.

If you find yourself in the first category—that is, you do not think you are a hoarder—but there are people in your life telling you that you are, then you likely are a hoarder. Quite often, others see our faults and shortcomings before we do.

Please understand: this is a problem. It is not normal to hold on to things to the degree that you do, especially if it is impacting your health and safety. If people closest to you are expressing concern, please listen.

If you know you are a hoarder but do not know how to get out of it, seek counseling. It is an addiction. Recovery takes time and effort. Maybe you keep things because you do not think your situation can improve, or maybe you do it because of finances, health, or the sheer size of the problem. There are people and organizations who can help, if you let them.

Additional advice:

The goal is not perfection, it’s health, safety, and dignity.
If the whole house feels overwhelming, start with one drawer, one counter, or one corner. Progress over perfection.
Let someone you trust help you make decisions and help you go through things.

To family and friends of a hoarder

I am sorry. I wish I had an easy solution, but I don’t.

Even when my wife and I showed up every week, Mom was rarely willing to let much go, and even after she moved into assisted living she never truly changed the hoarder behavior. As we learned, interventions rarely work. Like most things in life, lasting change has to come from within.

Additional advice:

Document what you are seeing. Photos and notes help you track changes over time.
Don’t assume one difficult conversation will solve anything.
Pace yourself. Protect your own sanity. Burnout is real.
Get outside counsel when needed—social workers, counselors, doctors, or elder-care professionals.
Focus first on health and safety hazards, not aesthetics.
Accept that “better” may be more realistic than “fixed.”

Links to each chapter:

Introduction - Why I Wrote This
Chapter 1 - The Buildup
Chapter 2 - The Tipping Point
Chapter 3 - Aging and Medical Care
Chapter 4 - Important Documents
Chapter 5 - Finding a Place to Live
Chapter 6 - Managing Finances
Chapter 7 - Managing Tasks and People
Chapter 8 - The Purge (Managing the Mess)
Chapter 9 - Finding a Place for Pup
Chapter 10 - Life in Assisted Living
Chapter 11 - Her Final Hours
Chapter 12 - Afterwards
Final Reflections
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Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent: Introduction

Brian Rendell — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:17:56 GMT

Mom passed away six months ago, on Thanksgiving weekend in 2025.

She had been to the ER many times in the previous couple of years, whether for falls, pain, or other complications. Each time, her problems were diagnosed, care was provided, and a path forward was prescribed. So when I showed up at the hospital on Saturday, November 30, I assumed this visit would be like the others.

Just a few hours later, when a nurse leaned over and asked me, “Does she have a DNR?” I realized this visit was different. (A DNR is a do-not-resuscitate order; it is a document that allows a person to choose not to receive life-saving measures in certain situations.)

Then, a few hours after that, when a nurse began doing chest compressions while straddled over Mom, I had to make the decision to cease further medical intervention.

Three times that night she experienced episodes, each more difficult than the last, that tested my wisdom, maturity, and love. I tell people that I feel like it took me 50 years to have the wisdom to make the decisions I made that night. I am not sure I would have been wise enough to ask the right questions or make the right decisions 30 years earlier.

My brother and I loved Mom, and I know she deeply loved us. She cared for us like only a mother could. I miss her, and I miss that she wanted to be around us. As moms go, you really could not ask for much more. My brother and I put together an obituary for her. I hope it did a decent job of conveying how much we loved her.

This is a series of reflections on the years leading up to her passing, the final hours of her life, and the things I learned while caring for an aging parent.

It started as a therapeutic exercise—simply writing down what her final hours entailed. Then it expanded into the last couple of months, then the last couple of years. Along the way, I realized there were lessons throughout that might help others who are going through, or will one day go through, similar situations. Eventually, it became an twelve-chapter document.

Why I wrote this

I’ve titled this series Reflections on Caring for an Aging Parent. Most of us have lost or will lose a parent sooner or later. Sometimes it’s unexpected and fast; other times it stretches for years and requires incredible sacrifice to care for a sick or elderly family member. Both are difficult in their own ways. In this vein, my purpose in these posts is to share lessons learned from our experience. The topics include hoarding (what to do if you are a hoarder, and what to do if you have a family member who is one), aging and medical care, important documents, finding a place to live, finances, dealing with someone else’s stuff, re-homing a pet, and a good deal of personal reflection on the passing of Mom.

I understand that there are differences in every life and death. You may have had a different experience or learned a different lesson. If you feel like sharing that in the comments section for others, feel free to do so. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I know how personal and private those experiences can feel.

Years ago, a pregnancy book was published with the title What to Expect When You’re Expecting. If I were to come up with another title for this series, it might be something similar, but from the other end of the bookshelf: What to Expect When You’re Expecting…to Die. I am not trying to be glib here. I have simply found that a little levity is necessary during hard times. In the way that the original What to Expect book was informative, I hope this writing is as well, because this writing isn’t just about caring for a loved one, it’s also about what we each need to be doing to prepare for our own death. And, let’s face it, each of us is going to die, so we should be prepared for it.

Thus, I think of the audience for these reflections through two overlapping lenses: time and relationship.

Time

Some readers are not in this season yet. I hope you tuck a few of these lessons away for future use.
Some readers are in the middle of this right now. I hope something here helps you navigate the road you’re walking.
Some readers have already walked this road. My hope for you is shared solace. You are not the only one. It was hard. Thank you for what you did.

Audience

Those dealing with aging parents.
Hoarders, or family and friends of a hoarder.
Those dealing with medical, housing, or financial challenges related to aging.
Those serving as caregiver, power of attorney, or executor.
Those facing end-of-life decisions for a loved one.
Those wanting to prepare now for the practical realities of aging, decline, and death.

I hope you find some useful nuggets in here, whether for now or later. I also hope the narrative keeps you engaged. If it doesn’t, feel free to skip ahead to the “Advice” section in each chapter.

Credit for much of this content, either directly or indirectly, also goes to friends and family who have volunteered in hospice and cared for aging relatives. Throughout the many decisions we had to make, people were there to serve as sounding boards and offer advice. We are grateful for their wisdom.

Caveats

Let me make a few caveats up front.

First, I am not an estate planner, certified financial planner, attorney, doctor, nurse, or therapist, so the lessons I offer here come simply from experience in my situation with my Mom. I strongly recommend meeting with appropriate professionals to discuss your own situation.

Second, I am going to air some dirty laundry about Mom. I do this not to disparage her; my brother and I loved Mom deeply. I do this to connect with those of you facing similar circumstances. We are all adults here. We can acknowledge that people have faults and still have virtues. We can be lovable at times and a pain in the rear at times.

If you are in any doubt about how I felt about Mom, know this: she had shortcomings, but our family loved her deeply. That is how love works. People are not always easy to be with (my wife tells me this). Love means working through difficulty. We would not have done the things we did to help her if we had not loved her.

Third, you may read some of this and think that we should have done certain things differently. You are probably right. You may have had experience or insight we did not have. We were simply trying to make the best decisions we could, one step at a time. We sought counsel from friends, family, and professionals, and then we moved forward.

Below is what we’ll be covering over the next few months. I’ll post one new chapter each week. Chapter 1 is available now; to read it, click the link below.

Chapter 1 - The Buildup
Chapter 2 - The Tipping Point
Chapter 3 - Aging and Medical Care
Chapter 4 - Important Documents
Chapter 5 - Finding a Place to Live
Chapter 6 - Managing Finances
Chapter 7 - Managing Tasks and People
Chapter 8 - The Purge
Chapter 9 - Finding a Place for Puppy
Chapter 10 - Life in Assisted Living
Chapter 11 - Her Final Hours
Chapter 12 - Afterwards
Final Reflections

10 Things from the week | 26 May 26

Brian Rendell — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:57:27 GMT

Space

1. NASA boss announces three Moon Base missions scheduled for later this year, at least 12 to come (NY Post)

NASA plans to begin building toward a permanent Moon Base with three lunar missions later this year. The missions will deliver key payloads to the lunar surface, including equipment for the Lunar South Pole, a large commercial payload, and instruments to study the Reiner Gamma swirl. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said these are the first of more than a dozen planned missions as the agency shifts from returning to the Moon to building a lasting presence there.

The Moon Base effort will unfold in three phases: 1) learning, building, and testing; 2) early habitation; and 3) sustained human presence. NASA hopes to reach early habitation by 2029. The finished base could span hundreds of square miles and require infrastructure such as power grids, communications towers, rovers, drones, and landing-site support. NASA is leaning heavily on private companies, awarding major contracts to Blue Origin, AstroLab, Lunar Outpost, and Firefly Aerospace to develop and deliver vehicles, drones, and other lunar systems. NASA wants a broad commercial ecosystem rather than a few highly specialized pieces of hardware, while also pushing industry partners to solve delays, supply-chain issues, and performance problems.

Society

2. America’s Toxic Divide Reaches the Jury Room (WSJ)

Juries are becoming harder to manage as broader social distrust, political polarization, and rigid personal viewpoints spill into deliberation rooms. Surveys show rising distrust in the justice system, growing bias against large corporations, and more willingness among prospective jurors to follow personal beliefs over a judge’s instructions. In both civil and criminal cases, lawyers are adjusting strategy around jurors’ trust levels, political leanings, and likelihood of nullification.

Jobs

3. New York City Unions Keep Winning Six-Figure Salaries (WSJ)

Unionized workers in New York City are winning unusually large pay increases as the city’s cost of living keeps climbing. Hotel housekeepers, nurses, doormen, and commuter rail workers have all secured or are reviewing contracts with sizable raises, preserved healthcare benefits, and in some cases pension gains or new funds to help with housing and child care. Hotel workers won the largest pay increase in their union’s nearly 100-year history, with most wages rising 50% and housekeepers eventually earning more than $100,000 a year. Employers and fiscal watchdogs warn that higher labor costs may be passed on through hotel prices, healthcare costs, transit fares, taxes, or borrowing.

4. This Summer’s Teen Job Market Is the Toughest in Decades (WSJ)

Teenagers are facing an unusually difficult summer job market, with demand for limited openings far outpacing supply. Challenger, Gray & Christmas projects teens will get about 790,000 jobs in May, June, and July, which would be the lowest summer-hiring total since the government began tracking the data in 1948.

The biggest weakness is in entertainment and leisure, where hiring announcements are down 70% from last year. Those jobs at resorts, hotels, amusement parks, restaurants, and activity centers are typically where teens find summer work. Inflation and higher fuel prices are pressuring small businesses and leisure employers, making them more cautious about staffing. There are a few bright spots, especially lifeguard jobs, which are advertised at much higher levels than last year.

The teen job search has also become more competitive and adult-like. Parents are using networks, social media, references, and direct outreach to help their kids find openings, while employers often prefer older teens who can stay longer and require less training. At the same time, fewer teens are looking for work than in past generations because college prep, sports, extracurriculars, and content creation compete for their time. Teen employment routinely topped 50% in the 1970s and 1980s, but now sits around 35%.

Economy

5. The Stock Market Has Never Been So Good When People Have Felt So Bad (WSJ)

Consumer sentiment and the stock market are moving in opposite directions in a way that breaks with historical patterns. Americans are unusually pessimistic, with the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index falling to its lowest level in roughly 70 years of surveys. High prices, a weaker labor market, the Iran war, and higher gas prices have all contributed to the gloom. Normally, that kind of consumer mood would line up with a weaker stock market.

Instead, stocks are surging. The S&P 500 has risen for eight straight weeks, the Dow has hit record highs, and market valuations are extremely elevated. By Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio, the S&P 500 is above 40, a level seen only around the dot-com bubble. That makes the current split striking: in 2000, high stock prices came alongside widespread optimism about jobs, growth, low inflation, globalization, and the promise of the internet.

The disconnect may have several explanations. Stocks may be overvalued and ignoring economic weakness, which would mean consumers are reading the situation more accurately. Or markets may be anticipating better conditions ahead, including an end to the war, lower inflation, and stronger growth. The most unsettling possibility is that both consumers and investors are reacting to the same force: AI. Investors see AI as a way for companies to cut labor costs and boost profits, while households worry it could make jobs harder to find. In that sense, a booming market and unhappy consumers may not be contradictory at all.

6. 30-year US Treasury yield hits highest level in 19 years (CNN)

Inflation fears are driving a sharp sell-off in government bonds, pushing Treasury yields to levels not seen in years. The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield has climbed to 5.2%, its highest since 2007, while the 10-year yield has risen to about 4.67%. The main pressure is coming from the Iran war’s energy shock, which has sent oil and gas prices higher and is beginning to filter into food, airfare, and broader consumer prices. Since bond prices fall when yields rise, investors are demanding more compensation for the risk that inflation will stay elevated and erode returns.

The sell-off is also tied to deeper worries about government deficits, higher defense spending, and the possibility that central banks may have to keep rates high or even raise them again. Those concerns are not limited to the United States. Long-term bond yields in the U.K. and Japan have also hit major highs as investors reassess inflation and fiscal risks around the world. In the U.S., rising yields threaten to lift mortgage rates, auto loans, business borrowing costs, and other forms of credit across the economy.

Stocks are starting to feel the pressure as well. Higher bond yields can make equities less attractive and change how investors value future corporate earnings. The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all fell Tuesday, with the S&P and Nasdaq notching a third straight day of losses. Before the Iran war, the 10-year yield was just below 4%; now it is near 4.7%, and analysts are watching 4.8% as a key danger zone.

7. The Risk Premium for Holding Stocks Over Bonds Is Vanishing (WSJ)

Stocks have surged even as the bond market is flashing warning signs. The equity risk premium, which compares the S&P 500’s earnings yield with the 10-year Treasury yield, has nearly vanished. That means investors are getting only a small expected-return advantage for owning stocks instead of much safer government bonds, a setup that looks similar to the period after the dot-com bubble burst.

The main cause is the global bond sell-off tied to inflation fears from the Iran conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices have jumped sharply, expectations for rate cuts have faded, and the 10-year Treasury yield has climbed from just under 4% before the conflict to around 4.57%. At the same time, stock prices have risen, pushing the S&P 500’s earnings yield lower and making valuations look stretched.

Investors are split on whether the rally is justified. Skeptics argue that stock prices now require years of very strong earnings growth, especially from AI-related companies, to make sense. Optimists believe the AI boom is still early and could keep lifting profits and productivity. For now, the market’s outlook depends heavily on two things: whether Middle East tensions ease enough to bring oil prices down, and whether investors get both lower interest rates and stronger corporate earnings. Without both, stocks may look increasingly expensive.

Education

8. Harvard Votes to Cap A’s in Effort to Curb Grade Inflation (WSJ)

Harvard’s faculty approved a new cap on A grades in undergraduate courses as part of a long-running effort to curb grade inflation. Beginning in fall 2027, each course will be limited to A’s for 20% of students, plus four additional A’s to account for smaller classes. The cap does not apply to A-minuses, which administrators expect may become the most common top grade. Faculty supporters argue that the change will make grades more meaningful, encourage stronger academic engagement, and protect the value of a Harvard degree.

The move follows evidence that A’s have become dramatically more common. About 60% of grades in 2024–25 were A’s, compared with about 25% in 2005–06. GPA compression has also made academic distinctions harder to award, with Harvard’s top-GPA Sophia Freund Prize going from one or two winners in earlier years to a 55-way tie in 2025. Faculty also voted to replace GPA with percentile rank for internal honors and prizes.

9. New College Grads Confront a Tight Job Market but Still Have an Edge (WSJ)

The job market for young adults has weakened, but the headline unemployment numbers may make college graduates look worse off than they really are. The unemployment rate for 22- to 27-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees rose to 5.6% in March, up from 3.6% before the pandemic. That increase is sharper than the rise for all workers in the same age range, suggesting that recent graduates are facing a rougher transition into work, especially as employers slow hiring and anxiety grows over AI replacing entry-level skills.

But unemployment only counts people actively looking for work, which changes the comparison. Young adults without bachelor’s degrees are more likely to have left the labor force altogether, meaning they are not counted as unemployed. Their labor-force participation has fallen since 2019, while participation among young college graduates has actually risen. Looking at the share of people who are working, college graduates have held nearly steady, while young adults with high-school through associate degrees have seen a clearer decline. College graduates still have better employment prospects than less-educated peers, but the college advantage is not as strong as it used to be. A bachelor’s degree remains valuable, yet its wage premium has slipped as more workers earn degrees and the credential becomes less distinctive.

Artificial Intelligence

10. These 5 charts show how ChatGPT has flooded our lives (WP)

ChatGPT’s broad social impact is just…“more”: more written, creative, legal, scientific, and online content generated at lower cost and higher speed. Since its release in late 2022, AI tools have made it much easier to produce work that resembles books, lawsuits, music, scientific papers, and web content. This has shifted the burden to readers, judges, moderators, platforms, and audiences who must sort useful human work from low-quality or machine-generated volume.

The clearest examples are in publishing and law. Weekly English-language e-book releases on Amazon have nearly tripled since ChatGPT’s launch, and one study found that more than half of new books by late 2025 contained AI-generated text. In federal courts, self-represented non-prisoner filings rose to about 17% of cases, up from a historical average of 11%, with researchers attributing the increase to AI. That may expand access to courts, but it also creates more work for judges and raises the risk of fake AI-generated citations.

The same pattern is spreading across music, science, and the web. Deezer estimates that more than 40% of uploaded tracks are now fully AI-generated, or about 75,000 songs a day. ArXiv has tightened submission rules after a rise in low-quality or non-scientific papers, including some with fake citations or hidden prompts aimed at manipulating AI-assisted reviewers. Researchers also estimate that as much as a third of new web content in some months is partly or wholly AI-generated.

NOTE: Below are two of the five charts:

21 Things from the past two weeks | 18 May 26

Brian Rendell — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:01:56 GMT

First, here are three very different and impacting pieces for the recent graduates out there. I won’t even summarize the first one, you’ll just have to watch it.

1. Eric Church Commencement Address at UNC

2. Jonathan Haidt Commencement address at NYU (Atlantic)

Here’s just one snippet from his speech that I thought was great: “So how should you live these next postgraduate years, these years of transition? By repeatedly turning your attention toward doing hard things… And I’m not just talking about your career. Devote your precious attention to taking chances in relationships, too.”

3. No One Cares About Your GPA, and More Career Advice for New Grads (WSJ)

Answer your boss’s emails, stop talking about your GPA, and do not assume classroom accommodations will translate neatly into office life. Grades matter less once everyone around you also had good grades, especially in an era of grade inflation and AI-assisted coursework. What matters more is showing reliability, judgment, and the ability to work within real deadlines. Advancement depends on relationships as much as performance. Mentors can give advice, but sponsors are the people who advocate for you when opportunities appear. And while young workers may enter as the office experts on new technology, that status will not last long. Another class of even younger, more AI-native workers is already on the way.

And while we’re talking about education…

Education

4. The Perverse Tyranny of a Perfect Transcript (Atlantic)

Harvard has a grade inflation problem. In 2025, the prize for the graduating senior with the highest GPA ended in a 55-way tie because all of those students had perfect grades. That is hard to square with a grading system where an A is supposed to mean “extraordinary distinction,” especially when flat A’s now make up about two-thirds of all grades. To bring some meaning back to transcripts, a Harvard grading committee has proposed capping flat A’s at roughly one-third of undergraduate grades.

The proposed fix would not cap all A-range grades, only flat A’s. Students could still earn A– grades freely, but the top mark would be reserved for work that is genuinely exceptional. The proposal is controversial, with many students worried it will make college more stressful and competitive. But the argument is simple: grades should mean what colleges say they mean. If everyone gets the mark for extraordinary work, then it no longer marks anything extraordinary at all.

5. Princeton Changes Its 133-Year-Old Honor Code Over AI Cheating Fears (WSJ)

Princeton is ending one of its oldest academic traditions because AI has made cheating feel too easy and too hard to police. Since 1893, students took exams without proctors under an honor code built on trust. Starting this summer, instructors will be present for all in-person exams, after faculty and students raised concerns that cheating had become widespread. It’s not just Princeton. Colleges everywhere are trying to figure out what academic integrity means when students can use AI to write papers, solve problems, or quietly check answers during exams. The fear is that once students believe everyone else is cheating, cheating starts to feel both normal and necessary.

6. The Average Student-Loan Defaulter Is Nearly 40 Years Old (WSJ)

Millions of student-loan borrowers have fallen into default since pandemic-era repayment protections ended, and the typical defaulter is older than before. The New York Fed estimates that more than 3.5 million borrowers defaulted between October and March, with the average defaulted borrower now nearly 40 years old, about 2½ years older than before the pandemic. Borrowers age 50 and older are now at greater risk of default than younger borrowers, and Gen X borrowers carry the highest average student-loan balances.

Many borrowers who defaulted on student loans are also behind on other debts, including auto loans, credit cards, and mortgages. Defaults are occurring nationwide but are more common in the South, and many newly defaulted borrowers were not delinquent before the pandemic. Some are likely parent borrowers who took out loans for their children.

The Trump administration is restructuring the federal student-loan system after the Biden administration focused more on reducing monthly payments and expanding paths toward forgiveness. The end of the SAVE plan and transition to new repayment options, including the Repayment Assistance Plan launching in July, could raise monthly payments for many borrowers. That creates the risk of additional defaults, especially as defaulted borrowers may eventually face wage, tax refund, or Social Security garnishment, though those garnishment plans have been delayed.

7. A Changing Job Market Leans Against Men (WSJ)

The labor market is increasingly favoring women because recent job growth has been concentrated in healthcare and social assistance, a sector where women outnumber men three to one. Over the past year, that sector added 656,500 jobs; without that gain, the private sector would have lost jobs overall. Meanwhile, male-heavy sectors such as manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing have been losing jobs, partly because of tariffs and weaker manufacturing performance.

Men’s employment-to-population ratio has declined over decades, while women’s has held up better and even strengthened among prime-age workers after the pandemic, helped in part by hybrid work. Since the end of 2024, payroll jobs held by women have increased by 421,000, while jobs held by men have slipped slightly.

Longer term, the divide may widen because women are earning college degrees at higher rates than men, and college-educated workers have much stronger employment outcomes. Future job growth is also likely to favor healthcare roles, including jobs men have historically avoided or entered only slowly. Some growing occupations, such as dental hygienists, medical assistants, home health aides, and nurses, remain culturally coded as female even when they offer strong pay or stability.

Life

8. High Tech, Low Play: The Life of American Children (IFS)

American children are spending large amounts of time online from very young ages while facing tight restrictions on real-world independence. Even three-year-olds average 4.5 hours per week on internet-connected devices, and by age 17 that rises to nearly 20 hours per week. Device access begins early, with nearly half of three-year-olds using tablets, iPads, or Kindles, while smartphones become the dominant device by age 11 and reach 90% ownership by age 17. Parental controls are often limited, especially on smartphones, where content filters are used by only a minority of parents and decline further among teenagers.

At the same time, children are given relatively little freedom to move around or play outside without adults. By age 14, most children are still not allowed to travel beyond their own street without supervision, and even by age 17, more than 60% are not allowed beyond their neighborhood. Unsupervised outdoor play remains low, averaging only about half an hour per week at age 5 and about 2.4 hours per week by age 17. This limited mobility also affects children’s social lives, since teens who cannot leave home or the yard have only slightly more unsupervised time with friends than much younger children. Social class strongly shapes these patterns. Parents with graduate degrees are more likely to set screen-time limits, require device drop-off rules, delay smartphone access, and support giving children more independence.

9. The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

Derek Thompson

The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once…

3 months ago · 162 likes · 11 comments · Derek Thompson

Birthrates are falling almost everywhere, and faster than most experts expected. The old story was that rich countries would have fewer children while poorer countries kept growing; however, that no longer holds. Fertility is now below replacement across much of the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and it is dropping quickly in places such as Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East, and even parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The world may have already passed “peak child,” even though total population will keep rising for a few more decades because of demographic momentum.

Some of the decline can be explained by lower child mortality, better education for women, more contraception, more work opportunities, and greater freedom to decide whether to have children. But the newer collapse below replacement seems harder to explain. Technology, social media, delayed marriage, expensive housing, the shift to service economies, and an “educational arms race” all seem to be pushing people toward fewer children or none at all.

The consequences could end up being enormous. Fewer children may ease pressure on resources and make cities more livable, but very low fertility also threatens pension systems, schools, hospitals, local communities, and national identity. Countries can try to offset decline with immigration, but that brings its own political and cultural tensions. AI and robotics may help soften the economic blow by increasing productivity, but they cannot replace the social fabric that disappears when schools, pubs, neighborhoods, and whole regions empty out.

NOTE: I previously shared a video about South Korea’s future population and cultural demise. I thought this quote from the above article about Japan was intriguing as well:

Japan right now is around 98% ethnically Japanese. If we wanted to keep the population of Japan constant in 200 years through immigration, in 200 years Japan will be 5% Japanese and 95% non-Japanese. This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan. You may say, “I’m perfectly fine. I’m not attached to the idea of Japan in the abstract.” But I can see a lot of Japanese say, “This is not about being a xenophobe. This is not about being anti-immigrant. This is about not having a country anymore.”

Population decline, and trying to reverse it, is a tricky thing. It takes (depending on the age at which you expect a human to work) about 16 years for a person to become old enough to contribute to the economy. That’s a long delay.

10. California Wants More Babies, So It’s Giving Away 40 Million Diapers (WSJ)

California is trying to make life a little cheaper for new parents by giving every newborn 400 free diapers when they leave the hospital. The state plans to start with 40 million diapers this year, prioritizing mothers on Medicaid, and Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking lawmakers for $12.5 million to expand the program next year. The move is meant to speak directly to affordability, especially as diapers remain a major expense for families with newborns. But it is also a very small answer to a much larger problem. California births are down 20% from a decade ago, and the state’s high cost of housing continues to push middle-class families out.

Newsom has taken steps on affordability through free prekindergarten, expanded Medicaid, insulin pricing efforts, and now diapers. But housing remains the central challenge. Since he took office, the median home price has risen 50%, and the state permitted fewer homes last year than it did in 2018.

11. Strangers Next Door: The Decline of Neighborhood Socializing and the Class Divide in Belonging (AEI)

Americans are spending more time at home than they used to, but they are interacting with their neighbors far less. In 2012, nearly six in ten Americans said they talked with neighbors several times a week. Today, only four in ten say the same, and nearly one in five say they do not talk to their neighbors at all. The decline is especially sharp among young adults, many of whom now see being a “good neighbor” less as helping people nearby and more as respecting privacy and keeping distance.

The survey found that neighborhood life increasingly breaks along class and religious lines. College-educated Americans tend to trust their neighbors more, socialize more often, and feel more comfortable asking for help, whether that means borrowing spare keys, getting help moving furniture, or asking someone to watch their children in an emergency. Religious attendance also matters. People who attend religious services regularly are more likely to know their neighbors, spend time with them, and work together on local problems.

One of the clearest patterns in the report is that communities work better when people actually have places to gather. Americans with access to parks, coffee shops, libraries, restaurants, churches, and other “third places” are more likely to walk around their neighborhoods, strike up conversations, and feel connected to the people nearby. The report argues that the weakening of neighborhood life is part of a larger erosion of American social connection, one shaped not just by technology and remote work, but by disappearing civic habits and fewer opportunities to interact face to face.

12. ‘Population autopsy’ finds Americans are dying younger than other wealthy countries — the deadliest 2 culprits revealed (NY Post)

America’s life expectancy gap with other wealthy countries is widening sharply. A large analysis of more than 63 million deaths found that nearly 12.7 million U.S. deaths between 1999 and 2022 could have been avoided if American death rates had matched those of 17 peer nations. Annual excess deaths more than tripled during that period, rising from about 346,000 in 1999 to more than 905,000 in 2022.

Two forces are driving much of the gap: cardiometabolic disease and “deaths of despair.” Heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, kidney disease, and related metabolic conditions account for the largest share of excess deaths, with U.S. rates worsening after 2009 even as peer countries continued to improve. By 2022, U.S. death rates from circulatory and metabolic diseases were far higher than in comparable wealthy nations.

The fastest-growing problem is deaths tied to drugs, alcohol, and suicide, especially among men and younger Americans. These “deaths of despair” are the main reason the mortality gap has widened among people under 45. COVID-19 intensified the trend by disrupting care, worsening mental health, increasing social stress, and accelerating problems that were already present.

You can read the report here.

NOTE: I’m currently reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s an anthropological review of humanity that explores ethics, philosophy, religion, and more. In it, he points out, “For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little, more people die from old age than from infectious disease, and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.” That’s a staggering point.

Health

13. GLP-1 Users Are Taking a Bite Out of the Restaurant Business (WSJ)

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are starting to change how Americans eat out. People taking drugs like Zepbound and similar treatments are eating smaller portions, visiting restaurants less often, and cutting back on alcohol. That is creating a new problem for restaurants already dealing with higher costs and more cautious customers.

The impact is not hitting every chain the same way. Fast-casual places like Chipotle, Panera, and Sweetgreen may benefit because they offer customizable meals, bowls, salads, protein options, and lighter portions. Restaurants built around big servings, fried food, pizza, desserts, or alcohol may have a harder time. Some chains are already adapting by highlighting protein, offering smaller portions, or creating lighter menus.

Sports

14. The Future of Elite Youth Sports Is Here—and It’s a Mess (WSJ)

Florida has become the closest thing high-school sports has to a transfer portal. Thanks to school-choice rules and the rise of NIL money, top athletes are moving from school to school in search of better teams, more exposure, stronger coaches, and a clearer path to college offers. Some elite players now attend multiple high schools in just a few years, treating each move as part of a larger recruiting strategy. The system has created real opportunities for athletes with major talent, but it has also turned high school into something that looks more like a business than a school experience. Coaches are accused of recruiting players, NIL deals can blur into pay-for-play, and state officials say the rules are hard to enforce. Meanwhile, students who transfer repeatedly may lose academic rhythm as counselors try to piece together credits from multiple schools.

Traditional community teams are being replaced by rosters of short-term stars, small schools are losing their best players, and coaches worry that athletes are being taught to leave rather than persevere. For families chasing life-changing college money, the calculation is simple: get better film, better exposure, and a better deal.

But for most high-school athletes, the odds of reaching that payoff remain slim.

NOTE: My advice—spend that time and money focusing on your education, which will most definitely have a payoff.

15. How Sports Became Our Civic Religion (And why poor, deindustrialized towns produce the most passionate fans.)

The Free Press

How Sports Became Our Civic Religion

For tickets to our live recording with Jon Meacham in Philadelphia, click here and register. Use code TFP for a 20 percent discount…

Listen now

3 months ago · 14 likes · 12 comments · Shilo Brooks

In this episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks sits down with sportswriter Wright Thompson to explore what the ESPN mainstay has learned from decades of covering elite athletes such as Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. Does greatness require rage, dysfunction, or “daddy issues”? And what does GOAT culture teach young men about winning—and losing?

NOTE: A great episode that touches on ethics, morality, character, fatherhood, what’s important in life, and the ritual of sports--this interview has it all (to include some adult language).

In the interview Thompson mentioned three sports articles that are some of his favorites; here they are:

Death of a Racehorse by W.C. Heinz (published in 1949)
What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? by Richard Ben Cramer (published in 1986).
Holy Ground by Wright Thompson (a memoir to his father)

International

16. See How China Is Gaining Power in Contested Waters (WSJ)

China is using fishing boats, coast-guard ships, and maritime militia vessels to expand its reach across Asian waters without crossing the line into open conflict. In the Yellow Sea, about 200 Chinese fishing boats recently pushed farther east, some coming within 150 miles of Sasebo, Japan, a major U.S. naval hub. Similar activity is showing up near South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, often around contested islands, shipping lanes, and strategically important waters. Analysts say China is using these fleets to pressure neighbors, complicate U.S. and allied military planning, and gradually normalize its presence in disputed areas. That includes increased coast-guard patrols near the Senkaku Islands, a heavier presence around Scarborough Shoal, and new construction at Antelope Reef in the Paracel Islands.

NOTE: Many great infographics in this piece, below is just one:

17. Xi’s China: Dazzling Technology, Military Muscle—and an Economic Mess (WSJ)

China has become more militarily powerful, technologically ambitious, and industrially dominant under Xi Jinping, but that strength masks deep economic strain. Xi has prioritized national security, military modernization, and self-sufficiency in areas such as AI, semiconductors, electric vehicles, robotics, and advanced manufacturing. That strategy has helped China narrow gaps with the U.S. in some strategic sectors, but it has also diverted attention and resources away from reforms that could support jobs, household income, consumer confidence, and the middle class.

The property bust has destroyed wealth, weakened consumer sentiment, and wiped out jobs that have not been fully replaced. Local governments are cutting spending on basic services while increasing investments in science, technology, and security priorities. Xi’s model is producing national strength without broad prosperity. China can project power through its military, exports, and strategic industries, but many ordinary workers are facing fewer opportunities, lower wages, and greater uncertainty. The country’s policy focus remains tilted toward “things” like factories, weapons, and technology capacity rather than people through stronger social safety nets, household support, and job-creating reforms.

18. Russia is starting to lose ground in Ukraine (Economist)

The failed May ceasefire shows how far Ukraine and Russia remain from any real end to the war. Both sides accused the other of violations, and battlefield data showed no meaningful pause in fighting. But beneath that grim continuity, the momentum may be shifting. Russia is still paying an enormous price--estimates put Russian deaths somewhere between 280,000 and 518,000, with total casualties possibly reaching 1.5 million. That means a striking share of Russia’s fighting-age male population has been killed or wounded.

Russia has gained only tiny amounts of territory this year, while Ukraine has recently begun taking some ground back. Drones have made the battlefield harder to move through and harder to map, slowing Russian advances and exposing troops behind the front. Russia may still try for a summer offensive, but for now the war looks like it may be at a possible turning point.

Space

19. SpaceX is only ~200 satellites away from having launched as many satellites as the rest of the world combined

Government

20. Why Congress Is Struggling to Do the Bare Minimum (WSJ)

Congress managed to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security after a 76-day shutdown, but the vote was less of a breakthrough than a temporary patch over a much deeper institutional breakdown. Public approval is near historic lows, the House is operating with razor-thin margins, and small factions can now derail leadership at almost any moment. The result is a Congress that lurches from shutdown to shutdown, passes few laws, and increasingly watches the president govern around it through executive orders, tariffs, and military action.

The dysfunction is not confined to one chamber or one party. House Republicans blame Senate Republicans for sending over last-minute bills they dislike; Senate Republicans are exasperated by House factions that cannot stay aligned; Democrats accuse the House GOP of chaos and deference to Trump; Republicans accuse Democrats of obstruction. Votes are held open for hours while leaders pressure holdouts, major funding deadlines are missed, and basic governing has become a recurring test of whether Congress can keep the lights on at all.

Congress appears to be normalizing its own failure. Government shutdowns, temporary funding patches, massive last-minute spending packages, and executive workarounds have become routine features of Washington rather than emergencies. Lawmakers are retiring or resigning in unusually high numbers, and Republicans are openly warning that a dysfunctional majority risks becoming a minority after the midterms. Congress can still pass things when forced to, but it increasingly does so only after exhausting nearly every sign of institutional health.

Nature

21. The Colorado River Is on the Brink of Disaster (WSJ)

The Colorado River system is running out of water, and the states that depend on it still cannot agree on how to divide the shrinking supply. A February deadline to reach a new deal passed without agreement, leaving the federal government warning that it may impose its own solution—one that would likely mean painful water cuts across the Southwest. When the Colorado River compact was signed in 1922, officials overestimated how much water the river could reliably provide. Since then, population growth, farming demands, and long-term drought have pushed the system beyond its limits. The two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are now roughly 75% below their peak storage levels after years of states drawing down reserves to cover shortages.

Tensions are especially high between the upper basin states—Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico—and the lower basin states—Arizona, California, and Nevada. The lower basin has historically used more water, while the upper basin argues it should not bear the brunt of future cuts. Meanwhile, this year’s weak snowpack in the Rockies has made the outlook even worse. Officials expect Lake Powell to receive the lowest inflow since it was created in the 1960s, and emergency releases from upstream reservoirs are only buying time. As one water expert put it, there simply is not enough water left to fill the gap.

NOTE: Story contains many great infographics.

10 Things From the Week | 6 May 26

Brian Rendell — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:45:17 GMT

Economy

1. U.S. Debt Tops 100% of GDP (WSJ)

The United States has crossed a major fiscal milestone: publicly held national debt now exceeds 100% of GDP for the first sustained period since the aftermath of World War II. As of March 31, publicly held debt stood at roughly $31.3 trillion, slightly larger than the country’s annual economic output. The federal government is currently spending about $1.33 for every dollar it collects, with annual deficits nearing 6% of GDP and projected to remain elevated for years. While economists caution there is nothing magical about crossing the 100% threshold itself, the number symbolizes the long-term fiscal pressures building across the American economy.

As debt rises, interest payments consume a growing share of federal spending—now roughly one out of every seven federal dollars. Higher debt also makes the economy more sensitive to interest-rate increases, crowds out private investment, and can place upward pressure on borrowing costs across mortgages, auto loans, and credit markets. Economists warn that over time, excessive debt can reduce productivity growth and limit economic flexibility, even for a country like the United States that benefits from issuing the world’s reserve currency.

Unlike the temporary spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s deficits are increasingly structural, driven by aging demographics, entitlement spending, repeated tax cuts, and political unwillingness to make major fiscal adjustments. Congressional Budget Office projections show debt potentially reaching 120% of GDP within a decade and 175% by the 2050s absent major policy changes. Stabilizing debt levels alone, not reducing them, would likely require trillions of dollars in tax increases, spending cuts, or much faster economic growth than currently projected. The broader anxiety among economists is the growing sense that the political system lacks the willingness to confront it seriously.

NOTE: Yes, as I’ve been saying, our political system must confront this issue sooner rather than later. It’s only continuing to get worse. We either face pain now, or much more pain later.

2. The Great $110 Trillion Wealth Transfer Won’t Happen Any Time Soon (WSJ)

For years, the coming “great wealth transfer” has been portrayed as a massive handoff of baby boomer wealth to millennials and younger generations. The reality may look much slower and far less transformative. Older Americans now control roughly $110 trillion in wealth, with baby boomers alone holding nearly $90 trillion, but longer lifespans, rising healthcare spending, luxury retirement lifestyles, and wealth transfers between spouses are delaying when much of that money actually reaches younger heirs.

The result is that inheritances are arriving later in life. Americans who once commonly inherited wealth in their 50s are now more likely to receive inheritances in their mid-60s, meaning many heirs are already approaching retirement themselves before substantial transfers occur. While millennials are often portrayed as the primary beneficiaries of future inheritances, projections suggest Generation X will actually receive the largest share of inherited wealth over the next decade. Even then, the distribution will remain highly unequal, since many middle- and lower-income families have little or no wealth to pass down at all.

3. Can a country get too rich? (Economist)

NOTE: I hear a lot about Nordic countries and happiness (Norway is currently the 6^th happiest country in the world). It appears, at least for Norway, that happiness comes at a cost.

Norway has become one of the wealthiest countries in the world thanks to decades of oil revenue and a massive sovereign wealth fund now worth roughly $2.2 trillion. The country enjoys extraordinarily high living standards, generous public services, and GDP per capita near the top globally. Yet growing debate inside Norway suggests that extreme wealth may also be creating complacency, inefficiency, and economic stagnation. A bestselling Norwegian book titled *The Country that Became Too Rich* argues that easy oil money has weakened incentives for both politicians and citizens to make difficult decisions or maintain long-term economic discipline.

As the sovereign wealth fund has ballooned, government spending increasingly relies on investment returns rather than taxation. That dynamic, critics argue, allows politicians to postpone reforms and simply spend more when problems emerge. Healthcare costs, infrastructure projects, and public renovations have become notoriously expensive, while economic cost-benefit analysis often takes a back seat to political convenience. Large portions of state revenue are also directed toward foreign aid and charitable causes at levels far exceeding many peer countries. Meanwhile, households have accumulated some of the highest debt levels in Europe, reflecting confidence that national wealth will cushion economic risks.

The effects are showing up in the labor market and broader economy. Youth unemployment is significantly higher than in neighboring Denmark, dropout rates are elevated, and many highly educated Norwegians end up working low-skill service jobs despite extensive free higher education. Productivity growth has stalled, real wages are beginning to decline, and the Norwegian krone has weakened. The broader concern is not whether Norway can continue funding its welfare state—it likely can for decades—but whether a society sustained primarily by accumulated wealth gradually loses the pressures and incentives that drive innovation, accountability, productivity, and personal ambition.

4. These Are the Hiring Hot Spots Where College Grads Are Landing Good Jobs (WSJ)

A growing number of cities across the American Sunbelt are emerging as some of the strongest job markets for recent college graduates, even as the broader entry-level labor market remains difficult and uneven. New research from ADP ranked metro areas based on hiring rates for college-level jobs, wages, and affordability, and found that Southern cities dominate many of the top spots. Birmingham ranked first, followed by Tampa, with other strong performers including Raleigh, Tulsa, Nashville, and Charlotte. Recovery in graduate hiring is happening selectively, favoring regions with strong growth industries and relatively manageable living costs. Many young graduates increasingly see Southern cities as places where they can access opportunity without the crushing housing costs associated with traditional coastal hubs.

The rankings also reveal how rapidly local labor markets are shifting. San Jose surged despite recent tech layoffs, helped by renewed AI-related hiring and exceptionally high salaries, while Columbus emerged as a Midwest standout thanks to expansion in advanced manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and defense-related industries like drone production. Meanwhile, former high-flyers such as Austin, Phoenix, and Boston slipped in the rankings.

Prediction Markets

5. Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets (WSJ)

NOTE: Last week, I shared a Bloomberg article on this topic, here’s a WSJ one for you. I think the topic bears repeating.

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket market themselves as democratized forecasting platforms where ordinary users can profit from predicting sports, politics, celebrity appearances, and economic events. In practice, however, the overwhelming majority of users lose money while a tiny group of sophisticated professional traders capture most of the gains. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that 67% of profits on Polymarket went to just 0.1% of accounts, while more than 70% of users lost money overall. On Kalshi, the company acknowledged that unprofitable users outnumber profitable ones by nearly three to one. Trading volume has exploded, rising from $1.8 billion to $24.2 billion year-over-year, attracting quantitative trading firms, algorithmic market makers, and high-frequency traders that use expensive live data feeds, AI systems, and automated trading infrastructure to exploit less sophisticated participants.

Prediction markets increasingly resemble a hybrid of gambling, day trading, and high-frequency finance. Professional firms staffed by statisticians, coders, and quantitative traders dominate many markets through speed, discipline, and superior data access. Some firms reportedly execute tens of thousands of trades daily and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on infrastructure. Critics warn that these markets are vulnerable to insider trading and behavioral biases such as “long shot bias,” where inexperienced traders overestimate unlikely outcomes. Mention markets in particular were found to systematically overprice “yes” outcomes, producing returns worse than many casino slot machines. Supporters counter that uninformed traders improve market liquidity and forecasting accuracy, arguing that prediction markets function similarly to other regulated financial exchanges.

Technology

6. You Have No Idea How Much You Still Use BlackBerry (WSJ)

BlackBerry may have disappeared from the smartphone spotlight years ago, but the company quietly reinvented itself as a major player in the software infrastructure powering modern vehicles and critical industrial systems. Its subsidiary, QNX, now provides the operating system embedded in roughly 275 million cars worldwide, supporting essential safety and driver-assistance functions such as collision warnings, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot detection, and lane-keeping systems. The software is designed for extreme reliability, making it attractive not just to automakers but also to hospitals, factories, robotics companies, and medical-device manufacturers where system failure is unacceptable.

Originally acquired in 2010 to help modernize BlackBerry phones during the company’s decline against the Apple iPhone ecosystem, QNX quietly evolved while much of the company’s attention remained focused on its collapsing handset business. As tech giants like Google and Apple entered automotive infotainment, QNX pivoted away from competing for dashboard screens and instead focused on the deeper software layers controlling safety-critical vehicle functions. That strategic shift proved pivotal as cars increasingly became “computers on wheels.”

A company once considered obsolete is now profitable again, with QNX generating roughly half of BlackBerry’s revenue and helping deliver the company’s first stretch of consecutive profitable quarters in years. BlackBerry’s stock remains far below its historic peak, but executives increasingly frame the company not as a failed phone maker but as a hidden infrastructure provider embedded across modern transportation, automation, and healthcare systems. Most consumers never see the software or know it exists, but millions rely on it every day without realizing it.

Health

7. Don’t Get Too Comfortable. Your Quality of Life Depends On It. (WSJ)

NOTE: I agree with this article wholeheartedly.

Modern life increasingly eliminates friction. AI, convenience technology, endless entertainment, and instant gratification make it possible to avoid discomfort almost entirely. Yet the same frictions people try to escape, like effort, challenge, uncertainty, and adaptation, are often the very things that keep human beings healthy. A growing danger is not stress or burnout, but stagnation: lives optimized for comfort that slowly erode resilience, vitality, and long-term well-being.

The core idea is “progression,” not in the sense of relentless productivity or constant achievement, but in the biological and psychological benefits that come from forward movement and adaptation. Research increasingly shows that when people consistently engage in manageable challenges, the body and brain respond positively.

Physical progression through exercise and progressive overload improves cardiovascular health, cognition, mood, and stress regulation.
Behavioral progression—taking action even when motivation is low—helps disrupt depression and avoidance cycles.
Mental progression, especially exploratory thinking and openness to novelty, improves creativity, flexibility, and emotional resilience, while repetitive rumination and mental loops are strongly associated with anxiety and depression.

The difference between pleasure and progression is a big one. Many modern habits—doomscrolling, passive entertainment, sugar, alcohol—can temporarily improve mood without making people stronger, healthier, or more capable afterward. Progression often involves discomfort, uncertainty, or effort, but it leaves behind expanded capacity. That may help explain why reaching goals often produces only fleeting satisfaction, while sustained engagement in meaningful challenges predicts better health, greater resilience, and even lower mortality risk over time. In an age increasingly designed around efficiency and convenience, human beings are not optimized by ease, we are optimized by challenge and adaptation.

8. Young New Yorkers Have a New Hot Spot: Sunday Mass (WSJ)

For years, many churches worried about declining attendance and aging congregations. In parts of New York City, especially among young adults, the opposite is happening. At St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, Sunday evening Masses are overflowing with Gen Z worshipers packed into pews, aisles, balconies, and folding chairs. Much of the growth has been driven by informal young-adult communities like “Pizza to Pews,” a meetup started by two twenty-somethings that draws hundreds of young Catholics to dinner before walking together to Mass. Some attendees travel from outside the city simply to participate.

According to Barna Group data, Gen Z churchgoers now attend services more frequently than millennials, Gen X, or boomers, with attendance rates rising notably since 2020. Young adults describe several forces pulling them toward faith communities: loneliness after the pandemic, political and economic uncertainty, desire for stable values and in-person connection, and dissatisfaction with hyper-online social life. Practices once seen as old-fashioned are being rediscovered by people who often had little religious upbringing themselves.

Church participation has also become deeply social. Young worshipers linger after services to exchange numbers, organize dinners, or join prayer walks through Central Park. Some document their routines on TikTok, blending church attendance with lifestyle culture in ways that feel accessible rather than institutional. Dating has become another major dynamic, with religious matchmaking platforms and social scenes growing rapidly.

For Fun

9. Kentucky Derby 2026

NOTE: In case you missed it, Golden Tempo won the Kentucky Derby---coming from last place to first in an amazing surge. Amazing!

10. Radiohead but it’s all jazz musicians

A Toronto-based soul and R&B artist, Kubla, sings Radiohead’s Creep in the style of jazz.