It is great to hear from Italian 🇮🇹 food loving comrades that last night - on Spy Wednesday - Nude Pizza entertained Larry Emdur who is currently co-host of The Morning Show alongside Kylie Gillies, and host of The Chase Australia
Holy Wednesday, also known as Spy Wednesday, occurs during Holy Week, the week immediately preceding Easter Sunday. It commemorates the day Judas Iscariot conspired with religious authorities to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. It is a solemn day of reflection before the Easter Triduum
Bile acid and steroid signatures tied to extreme longevity
"Your butt muscle is the best muscle" news for today
“Building your butt muscles will help you stay injury free and independent in midlife and beyond.
- Functional Independence: Strong glutes allow for daily movements like standing up, walking stairs, and lifting, which become difficult with age-related muscle loss.
- Prevention of Injuries: Weak glutes often lead to injury, as other muscles (like hamstrings) compensate, often leading to pain.
- Metabolic & Structural Health: Building muscle mass—particularly in the glutes—acts as a "powerhouse" that helps control blood sugar and increases life expectancy.
- Indicators of Aging: A weak butt often mirrors general physical decline; reinforcing them through exercise like bridges is essential.
- Targeted Exercises: Perform exercises like bridges, squats, and "butt busters".
- Consistency is Key: Just one hour of strength training per week can significantly increase life expectancy.
- Preventative Care: Weak glutes are a sign of inactivity; targeting them can reverse age-related muscle loss.
America has had a long obsession with gluteus muscles. From the “Buns of Steel” workout in the late 1980s to Connor Storrie in “Heated Rivalry,” our culture has spent decades fixated on firm and prominent backsides.
However, experts are increasingly findingthat having a powerful posterior isn’t just about looking good in jeans. The glutes are the largest muscles in our body and are closely tied to stability, balance and aging well. They act like shock absorbers when we walk or climb stairs, and building a strong butt can help prevent and manage back pain at any age and reduce the risk of falling for older adults.
“Glutes are so important” for independent living, said Theresa Marko, a physical therapist in New York and adjunct professor of physical therapy at Touro University. “Do you want to get off the subway? Do you want to get off the toilet?”
If your glutes are weak, your body can overuse your hamstrings and back muscles, which can lead to strains and joint pain or cause you to arch your back while walking or running. Perhaps less obviously, weak glutes can affect how confidently you move, one of the reasons they can lead to more falls, said Constanza Cortes, an assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.
While fear of falling is a complex issue that involves our vision, balance and power, Dr. Dorgo said you need to have good lower body strength to stay upright.
How to tell if your glutes are weak
The size of your glutes is not necessarily an indicator of their strength. The way you move, and how you feel while doing it, is often a better guide, experts said. For instance, if your hips sway side-to-side or you waddle as you walk, that can be a sign of a weak gluteus medius, Dr. Marko said. Slouching, or pain in the hips, knees or lower back can also indicate weak glute muscles.
Weak glutes can make it difficult to get out of a chair without using your arms, squat to the floor or walk up or down stairs, Dr. Cortes said. People with weak glutes will often lean slightly forward while climbing stairs, and they may also rely on the handrail.
Tight hamstrings or calves can also be warning signs as they take over the job of your glutes when you’re walking, running or squatting. Weak glutes can even cause pain as far away as your feet or heels. Discomfort in your hamstring when doing a bridge exercise is a dead giveaway, Dr. Marko said.
How to build strong, functional glutes
The key to building powerful glutes for strength and stability is finding exercises that require them to work alongside the hamstrings, quads, lower back in a natural way, Dr. Dorgo said.
“What they need to do is mimic movement patterns that we would see in everyday life,” he said.
Glute bridges, hip thrusts, squats and deadlifts are particularly useful, experts said. If you already strength train regularly and want to isolate your glutes, clamshells, glute kickbacks, donkey kicks or the hip abduction machine are also good options.
To strengthen your gluteus medius, try monster walks, either with a band or without. Step-ups — which can be performed on a box, bench or stair — are another excellent way to target your glutes, hamstrings and quads. Walking backward, especially up a hill, also works the glutes more than walking on a level surface.
“Glute work is so important,” Dr. Marko said, adding that it doesn’t even have to be hard. “When you’re standing at the stove, try some side leg kicks and some back leg kicks — or just stand on one leg.”
An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of an assistant professor of gerontology who studies fitness and aging. It is Constanza Cortes, not Costanza.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know atcorrections@nytimes.com.Learn more
Let Us Help You Pick Your Next Workout
Looking for a new way to get moving? We have plenty of options.
A Muscle for Longevity: Building your glutes will help you stay injury free and independent in midlife and beyond.
Getting Back to Running: If a brutal season of snow and cold kept you inside, these tips can help you reclaim your run.
Is Your Workout Routine Too Predictable?: Mixing up your routine has big benefits for strength and endurance — while also keeping things interesting.
A Simpler Workout: Combination exercises can help you exercise your whole body quickly.
Workouts for Complete Beginners: Looking for a new fitness routine? Start here.
Pick the Right Equipment With Wirecutter’s Recommendations
Want to build a home gym? These five things can help you transform your space into a fitness center.
Transform your upper-body workouts with a simple pull-up bar and an adjustable dumbbell set.
Choosing the best running shoes and running gear can be tricky. These tips make the process easier.
A comfortable sports bra can improve your overall workout experience. These are the best on the market.
Related Content
This Muscle Is the Unsung Hero of Longevity
Sorting algorithms
tools.simonwillison.net colophon – Watch how different algorithms organize data, step by step. – Explore and compare different sorting algorithms through interactive animated visualizations that display how each algorithm organizes data in real-time. The tool allows you to adjust dataset size and animation speed, run individual algorithms step-by-step or continuously, and race multiple algorithms simultaneously to see which performs best. Each algorithm includes detailed complexity analysis and visual indicators for comparisons, swaps, and sorted elements.
- What is AnythingCounter? A live dashboard that shows real-time estimates of what happens every second in the digital world. You see numbers for AI hallucinations, deepfakes, phishing, e-waste, jobs lost to automation, and more. We take global statistics and turn them into counters that update continuously so you can watch digital activity in real time.
- How are the statistics calculated? We use published yearly or periodic stats from international bodies, research institutes, and cybersecurity reports. Those figures get converted into per-second or per-day rates and shown as live counters. Full sources and how we calculate everything: our methodology page.
- Are the numbers real or estimated? They’re estimates based on real data. We take published statistics and convert them into real-time rates to show the scale of digital activity. Each counter links to its sources so you can check the underlying data.
- How often do the counters update? The numbers tick every second in your browser. The rates behind them come from the latest research and reports we could find; we update those when new data is published.
Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content
404 Media – “After months of heated debate and previous attempts to restrict the use of large language models on Wikipedia, on March 20 volunteer editors accepted a new policy that prohibits using them to create articles for the online encyclopedia.
“Text generated by large language models (LLMs) often violates several of Wikipedia’s core content policies,” Wikipedia’s new policy states. “For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for the exceptions given below.” The new policy, which was accepted in an overwhelming 40 to 2 vote among editors, allows editors to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, which can be incorporated into the article or rewritten after human review if the LLM doesn’t generate entirely new content on its own.
“Caution is required, because LLMs can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited,” the policy states. “The use of LLMs to translate articles from another language’s Wikipedia into the English Wikipedia must follow the guidance laid out at Wikipedia:LLM-assisted translation.”
I previously reported about editors using LLMs to translate Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia editor, Ilyas Lebleu, who goes by Chaotic Enby on Wikipedia and who proposed the guideline said that it seemed unlikely the policy will last because previously the editor community has been divided on the issue. However, Lebleu said “The mood was shifting, with holdouts of cautious optimism turning to genuine worry.”…
The accountability premium
Via LLRX – The accountability premium – A lawyer’s ability to stand behind their legal work is a real advantage over legal AI. But for many clients, paying more to transfer risk to a lawyer is a luxury — and maybe soon, an unnecessary one. Jordan Furlong‘s opening keynote at ABA TECHSHOW March 26, 2026 in Chicago addressed two critical questions facing the legal profession right now: “As AI displaces lawyers from a growing share of legal task performance, what will be left for lawyers to do?” and “How are we going to develop lawyers when we don’t know what we’re training them for, and when we can’t count on law firms to do the training anymore?”
Closed Case: The Law Hegseth Triggered Never Expires
W.H. Lawrence: “Pete Hegseth just stepped into a sequence with no recorded escape. Every modern conviction, from Nuremberg to The Hague to Lyon, began the same way: a man in power, certain the rules did not apply. Every one of them was proven wrong. Nuremberg did not isolate liability to the officer who spoke the order. Prosecutors proved command creates exposure, and senior leadership stood trial because the system produced the conduct. The same framework applies here. Trump set the posture at the executive level, public authorization fixed the record, and military action completed the sequence.
Hegseth entered that record at the Pentagon podium. Trump remains within the same chain of exposure that has governed every modern prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 2441. History records a consistent limit: time may delay judgment and jurisdiction may shift, but accountability continues to accumulate across decades and borders, closing only when death ends prosecution while the record remains intact.
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before reporters on March 13, 2026, and declared “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” during Operation Epic Fury, the declaration did not succeed in terrorizing Iranian military personnel. What the statement accomplished, as a matter of operative law, was criminal liability for Hegseth under existing federal statute, and identical exposure for every service member who acted on that directive. The principle of “quarter,” mercy toward combatants seeking surrender, emerged from medieval chivalric codes in which captured nobility represented ransom value, and that economic calculus calcified into enforceable military convention. The United States became the first sovereign nation to formally domesticate this principle into codified law.
In 1863, at President Abraham Lincoln’s directive, the Lieber Code, formally designated General Orders No. 100, prohibited the execution of prisoners and the wounded, characterized orders to give no quarter as per se violations of the laws of war, and constituted the foundational instrument every subsequent international humanitarian law framework required as its predicate…”