Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
6,600,000,000 - The Panama Canal reported approximately $6.6 billion in unaudited fiscal 2026 revenue, up 16.6% from the previous year despite continuing concerns about water availability.
7,000 - NASA’s Swift observatory generated some 7,000 scientific papers during its 22-year mission before burning up in the atmosphere on November 4 after a failed rescue effort.
35 - Vermont has achieved only 35% of its Lake Champlain cleanup goal halfway through its twenty-year timetable.
Off the Grid, On Instagram
Robin Greenfield has given up his phone, bank accounts, credit cards and grocery stores. Giving up Instagram is proving harder. The former aspiring millionaire spent a year eating only food he found in the wild, carrying acorn flour and hickory oil between stops where he taught others to forage. He brushes his teeth with a twig and carries his waste in a bucket rather than use flush toilets. Yet his rejection of consumer society reaches more than two million followers through a laptop, camera and a team that edits his videos. The contradiction extends beyond the technology. He wants to prove how little a person needs, but his independence still depends on other people’s generosity. Friends provide places to stay, volunteers help with his videos, and hosts absorb the friction of a lifestyle built around his uncompromising rules. He’s now planning three months offline while canoeing around Florida. Escaping consumer culture is one challenge. Letting go of the audience watching you escape is another. New York Times (17 minutes)
Everything but the Evidence
I finally saw You Can See Everything this week. It’s an intriguing, twisting tale, uncomfortable to watch at times, but definitely worth it. Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz’s critique is that the film makes Elizabeth Holmes’s dishonesty seem more mysterious than the evidence warrants. Two examples stand out. First, Holmes shows Nathan Fielder an unfinished prototype, not the Edison machine Theranos actually used on patients. They debate what the technology could do rather than confront the limitations of the device that delivered patients’ results. Second, Shultz points to SEC findings that Holmes showed an investor financials claiming $108 million in annual revenue when the company had actually earned little more than $100,000. She also withheld audited financial statements from investors. For Shultz, those details undermine the question of whether she believed her own claims: why conceal the records if you think they support your story? His objection is that the film creates ambiguity by leaving out evidence that would make the deception easier to see. STAT (6 minutes)
You’re the Guide, Not the Hero
Most companies make themselves the hero of their newsletter. The result is a lot of announcements and self-promotion, and very little a reader can use. Your subscriber should be the hero. You’re the guide who helps them achieve their goals. Future Forest built a free Newsletter Strategy & Positioning Worksheet to help make this shift. Start with one vivid reader persona, figure out the problem your newsletter solves for them, and then build your angle and positioning from there. Print it out and work through it with your team. Future Forest (Sponsored)
Mothers, Daughters & GLP-1s
Weight-loss drugs are bringing old tensions between mothers and daughters into sharper focus. Longstanding pressures around appearance now come with a new question: if you can change your body, why wouldn’t you? One mother who lost weight on a GLP-1 urged her daughter to try it three months after giving birth. Women who bonded over body acceptance can feel abandoned when a relative becomes thinner. Mothers benefiting from treatment worry about what their children will learn. A personal medical decision can become a family referendum on whose body needs fixing. Harper’s Bazaar (8 minutes)
Solar Wins on Price
Solar power is growing because it has become too cheap to ignore. BBC analysis found that solar generated 13% more electricity than nuclear worldwide over the twelve months through September 2026. The engine is a cycle of manufacturing scale, better efficiency and falling material costs, with Chinese factories driving panel prices to record lows. That changes who can participate. In Pakistan, expensive, unreliable grid electricity has encouraged households to buy their own panels rather than wait for utilities to improve. Solar now provides about 24% of the country’s electricity, compared with less than 2% in 2019. Cheaper batteries are helping move daytime generation into the evening, making solar useful for more of the day. The remaining obstacles are increasingly the systems around the panels: transmission grids, storage across cloudy periods and seasons, and institutions that must adapt. Making electricity cheaply is one achievement. Building a power system that can use it whenever people need it is the next. BBC (9 minutes)
Schedule Room for Wonder
A creative life needs structure that leaves room for things you cannot schedule. C.S. Lewis described an ideal day with four hours of reading or writing before lunch, a long afternoon walk, solitary tea and another stretch of work before dinner. The walk mattered as much as the desk time. Conversation could drown out the sounds and silences that made the countryside worth noticing, so he preferred going alone or with someone who needed few words. His routine also depended on an enviable correspondence policy: just two letters a week. In Surprised by Joy, these habits form a life organized around both concentration and receptivity. Protecting time to work is only half the task. You also need time when you stop producing, explaining and responding long enough to notice what is around you. The schedule creates the conditions for surprise rather than trying to eliminate it. The Marginalian (4 minutes)
The Myth of the Lone Wolf
Men may depend more on romantic relationships because they have fewer other places to turn for emotional support. A review of more than fifty studies and meta-analyses challenges the familiar picture of independent men and relationship-obsessed women. On average, men place more importance on finding a partner, tend to say they are in love sooner and struggle more after a breakup. The underlying problem is less romantic than it sounds. Women generally have more sources of emotional support, while men are more likely to make a partner their main confidant. Losing the relationship can mean losing the person they tell everything to. Household care and encouragement to seek medical attention can deepen that dependence. These are patterns across groups, not a description of every couple. But they expose a contradiction in the ideal of male self-sufficiency: discouraging emotional openness can leave men more dependent on one person. Closer friendships would give men support beyond romance and relieve partners of having to provide it all. Psyche (13 minutes)
Most Read Last Week
The Flipbook of the Rings - More than a thousand artists turn Middle-earth into a hand-drawn flipbook.
Hookup Culture Gets Ghosted - How shifting demographics may be changing who sets the terms in dating.
Your Ten-Minute Life - Where you live shapes your life by making some things easy and others a project.
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
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. - John Stuart Mill