Weekend Briefing No. 631
Teens and AI -- Boredom and Creativity -- Becoming a Parent
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
4,000,000 — Lawmakers in 27 states have introduced plug-in solar legislation in 2026, inspired by a first-in-the-nation Utah law, to let renters and homeowners simply plug small balcony solar panels into any outlet — a technology already installed in an estimated 4 million homes across Germany.
600,000 — A study of 600,000 veterans found that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic cut drug-related deaths in half among people with existing substance use disorders, while also reducing overdoses by 39% and suicidal ideation by 25% — suggesting the diabetes medication may quietly rewire the brain’s addiction pathways.
83 — The NFL dominated American television in 2025, capturing 83 of the 100 most-watched telecasts, a stranglehold that gives the league leverage to demand “significant cost increases” when it renegotiates its $110 billion-plus media rights deal — with analysts warning those costs will ultimately be passed to fans.
Teens and AI
Teens aren’t just dabbling with AI. They’re quietly integrating it into the core of their academic lives. More than half of U.S. teens report using AI chatbots to search for information or get help with schoolwork, and about 10% say chatbots assist with all or most of their assignments. The classroom implications are significant. Nearly 60% of teens believe AI cheating is a regular occurrence at their school, with about a third saying it happens extremely or very often. Beyond academics, a smaller but notable share are using these tools for emotional support and casual conversation. On the big picture, teens are cautiously optimistic about AI’s personal impact but more skeptical about its effect on society, with overreliance and job displacement being the top concerns. Perhaps most telling: parents significantly underestimate how much their teens use AI, with 64% of teens reporting chatbot use versus only about half of parents who believe their teen does. Pew Research Center (7 minutes)
Boredom and Creativity
Your best ideas aren’t hiding in your phone. They’re hiding in the discomfort you keep escaping. Creativity scores have been falling since 1990, and the culprit is relentless stimulation. Research shows creativity is three times more predictive of career success than IQ, yet we’ve systematically engineered it out of our lives by filling every idle moment with a screen. The problem isn’t just screen time. It’s that when people try to cut back, they swap one screen for another, never allowing boredom to do its actual job. Boredom is an ancient cognitive signal, one that pulls attention inward, lets the mind wander, and surfaces ideas that focused effort can’t reach. The shower insight, the long-walk breakthrough, the answer that arrives unbidden. These aren’t accidents. They’re what happens when the brain is finally left alone. The fix is simple and uncomfortable: 20 minutes, no input, no escape. Just sit with the itch until something useful emerges. Two Percentage (6 minutes)
Becoming a Parent
You never actually meet your child once. You meet them hundreds of times. Parenthood isn’t a single relationship but a constant series of new ones. A child morphs so rapidly that raising one is less like nurturing a fixed person and more like falling in love with a thousand beautiful strangers over time. Second, parenthood isn’t sacred or transcendent. It’s just a ride in the amusement park of life, but one you were biologically and spiritually built for, which makes it worth taking. Third, and most movingly, becoming a parent gives the people you love an entirely new version of you to know. For those who have lost their own parents, this carries particular weight. A spouse may never know you as a son or daughter, but they will always know you as a father or mother. Every individual is the sum of their relationships, and parenthood simply adds one more profound dimension to that sum. Derek Thompson (6 minutes)
Science’s New Engine
A single AI can read every paper ever published in a field, synthesize insights across disciplines that no human has time to bridge, and run 6,000 biological experiments in the time a human researcher would run 30 — and all of this is happening right now, not in some projected future. The reframe isn’t that AI is smart; it’s that the bottleneck in science was never intelligence, it was bandwidth. Human scientists herd toward high-status problems, can’t hold two literatures in their head at once, and need sleep. AI doesn’t have any of those constraints, which means it’s not augmenting science so much as rerouting it entirely — sweeping the long tail of unsolved problems that humanity just never got around to. Noahpinion (14 minutes)
On Difficulty
Difficulty isn’t a detour from your life — it’s the material your life is actually made of. The reframe is surgical: most people treat obstacles as interruptions to the plan, something to survive and get past. But if difficulty is a guarantee — as certain as death and taxes — then resilience isn’t a backup strategy, it’s the whole game. The person who builds a life around using friction rather than avoiding it compounds differently than everyone else. Sahilbloom (2 minutes)
The End of Mail in Denmark
On December 30, 2025, Denmark delivered its last physical letter. And hardly anyone noticed. The piece uses this quiet milestone to explore something larger: what happens when a society digitizes so aggressively that it forgets to leave an exit ramp. Denmark, a global leader in digitalization, has built a world where missing a notification in your government inbox can cost you over a thousand dollars, where a flawed algorithm can wildly overvalue your home and tax you accordingly, and where 20-25% of citizens struggle to navigate the 100+ digital platforms now required for basic civic life. Physical mail wasn’t just slow correspondence. It was a backup system, a paper trail, a fallback for the digitally excluded. Its disappearance is less a story about nostalgia and more a warning about fragility. A society that has eliminated cash, closed post offices, and moved everything online has made a very large bet that nothing will ever go wrong. The Dial (8 minutes)
The United States of Beauty
From 250 miles up, the United States looks like something between a painting and a dream. This short film transforms a sequence of still photographs taken by astronaut Loral O’Hara aboard the International Space Station into a fluid, cinematic journey across North America, from California to Quebec. The actual orbital pass took just 11 minutes. Here it unfolds at one-quarter speed, set to ambient music, giving viewers time to absorb a perspective most will never experience firsthand. The footage isn’t simply downloaded and posted. Each image is painstakingly restored by hand, with the creator repairing hot pixels, lens dust, window damage from micrometeors, and exposure inconsistencies across the sequence before stitching and animating the frames into something resembling ultra-high-definition video. The result sits at an unusual intersection of science, craft, and art. NASA captured the raw material. One filmmaker spent considerable effort turning it into something genuinely worth watching.Youtube (11 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
I’m a big believer in boredom. All the technology stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too. - Steve Jobs