Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
876,500,000— Fifteen years after launch, Candy Crush Saga still pulled in $876.5 million in 2025 revenue, even though only 4% of its 81.5 million monthly players ever spend money.
4,000,000 — A container ship paid $4 million to skip the line at the Panama Canal, where Iran war rerouting has pushed wait times past a week and driven the auction price to more than double the prior seven-day average.
20 — Nearly 60 million Americans — roughly 20% of the U.S. population watched Seinfeld in just the first half of 2026, powering Netflix’s five-year renewal of its streaming rights.
Schrödinger’s Philanthropist
Craig Newmark insists he isn’t technically a billionaire anymore, and he isn’t lying, he’s just not quite right either. The Craigslist founder has already given away $550 million and committed to $660 million total, with a goal of hitting $1 billion by the time “AI Craig” takes over after he’s gone. His money flows toward oddly specific causes: military families and veterans through the Bob Woodruff Foundation, tuition-free journalism school at CUNY, Wikipedia’s editor corps, and anti-scam efforts, all chosen because he trusts the people running them more than he trusts himself to lead anything directly. He calls himself a peasant with money, and while that reads like false modesty, it also doubles as an actual management philosophy: know your limits, then fund people who don’t share them. SFGATE (17 minutes)
Death Doulas
Before dying became bureaucratized and shipped off to hospitals, it used to happen at home, surrounded by people who knew what to do. Virginia Chang, a former organic chemist who lost three family members in six brutal months, now works as an end-of-life doula, one of thousands filling a role that barely existed a decade ago: sitting with the dying, coaching families through impossible decisions, and treating death less like a medical event and more like a final act of living. Doulas like her borrow techniques from birth work, applying life review, active listening, and a version of Erik Erikson’s “ego integrity vs. despair” framework to help people find peace instead of panic in their final weeks. As more Americans age into a health system built for curing rather than accompanying, the job of simply staying present at the end has quietly become one of the fastest-growing vocations in the country. The New Yorker (30 minutes)
Net Zero, Kicked Down the Road
Thirty-two years have passed since the first major scientific warning on climate change, and in that time global emissions haven’t fallen, they’ve risen more than 60%. The real culprit isn’t a lack of technology, it’s a term: “Net Zero,” which one climate engineer bluntly calls “Latin for kick the can down the road,” since most of these models quietly lean on carbon-capture tech that doesn’t exist yet at any meaningful scale. Hiding behind imaginary future inventions lets today’s high emitters, including plenty of people working in the climate field itself, avoid the harder political questions about who’s actually responsible and who has to change. The current trajectory points toward 3 to 4 degrees Celsius of warming and centuries of locked-in sea level rise, but history also shows that rapid, radical change is possible when enough people stop waiting on leaders and start forcing the issue themselves. Youtube (10 minutes)
Wonderfully Unordinary
Somewhere in an old Maltese brewery, behind a heavy metal door, sits a two-person office that Crocs claims is the source of every dollar of profit it earns worldwide, from all 150 million customers in 100 countries. It’s not a fluke, it’s a strategy the Big Four accounting firms actively sell, using loans between a company’s own subsidiaries to shift profits out of high-tax countries and into Malta, where a 35% corporate rate can be engineered down to nearly zero. Crocs used this exact playbook after buying HeyDude, routing over $3 billion in trademarks and patents through Malta and cutting its 2023 tax bill by $218.6 million, while its stock has since climbed 54% this year. The scheme only works because the U.S. walked away from a global 15% minimum tax push, and now countries like Switzerland and Singapore are watching Malta’s success and considering copying it. NYT (9 minutes)
Burgernomics
A Big Mac costs $9.04 in Switzerland and just $2.42 in Taiwan, and that gap is basically a 40-year-old economics joke that turned out to be surprisingly accurate. The idea, dreamed up by The Economist in 1986, is that a burger made the same way everywhere can reveal whether a currency is over or undervalued, since converting prices into dollars should theoretically land on the same number worldwide. It rarely does: the Swiss franc is currently overvalued by 45%, the Taiwan dollar undervalued by more than 60%, and these gaps are now the widest they’ve been since the 1990s, driven by post-2021 US inflation, a strong Chinese yuan, and a collapsing Japanese yen. What started as a lighthearted gimmick has spawned over 50 academic papers and 3,000 citations, proving that sometimes the silliest metaphor is also the clearest window into how money really works. The Economist (14 minutes)
Four Voices, One Brain
You are not one thinker, you are four, and the trouble starts when you let one of them run the show. Psychologist Ned Herrmann’s model splits the mind into analytical (the engineer who wants proof), practical (the doer who wants a first step), relational (the empath who reads the room), and experimental (the dreamer who breaks the rules and sees shortcuts nobody else does). Each mode is useless on its own: pure analysis stalls without action, pure execution spins in circles without a destination, pure feeling never gets built, and pure imagination collapses into chaos. The goal isn’t balance so much as access, learning which voice the moment calls for and having the discipline to mute the other three. Postanly Weekly (6 minutes)
The Knowledge
Taxi and ambulance drivers have the lowest Alzheimer’s death rate of any of 443 occupations, roughly 1 in 100 versus 1 in 60 for everyone else, and the reason isn’t driving itself. Bus drivers and pilots, who follow fixed routes, get no such protection, which points to real-time navigation as the actual mechanism: the constant work of locating yourself, tracking a destination, and updating a mental map as the world changes. Brain scans of London cabbies, who must memorize 25,000 streets to earn a license, show measurably more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus, the region Alzheimer’s attacks first, and the effect grows the longer someone drives. Spatial reasoning turns out to be trainable brain armor, which means how we design schooling, careers, and even neighborhoods may quietly shape who keeps their memory into old age. The Conversation (7 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
Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back. -Marcus Aurelius