Getting their second wind …
“Many moons I have lived
My body’s weathered and worn
Ask yourself how would you be
If you didn’t know the day you were born”
A Gold Coast family who “ticked every box” for a secure future in Australia has made the extraordinary decision to abandon it all and move to Italy, declaring the relentless cost of living crisis has made the ‘Great Australian Dream’ unattainable.
Krysti-Glory Gallo and her husband Ricardo Parata did everything they were told would lead to a comfortable life.
He went to the park with a sign inviting people to talk about their day. Six years later, they’re still talking.
Fin Colleton spent the early days of the pandemic like many: alone in an empty house, isolated from anyone for months at a stretch. So he made a sign reading “How’s your day going?”, walked to a Philadelphia park and waited.
What could go wrong?
Against the odds, strangers stopped and talked. He returned again and again, each time with a new sign bearing another conversation prompt. People kept stopping.
A sign evolved into chairs; chairs evolved into a table. It became his favorite hobby, then his main source of human contact, then something closer to a calling. Colleton had become a foot soldier in the battle against what the U.S. Surgeon General has likened to smoking 15 cigarettes a day…
These Drivers Are Taking Extreme Measures to Avoid New Car Technology
Wall Street Journal gift article: “…Brett Doyle maintains a meticulous spreadsheet of the latest automotive tech—electronic door handles, massive touch screens, cruise control that automatically goes with the flow of traffic.
It isn’t detailing his dream car. It’s his worst nightmare. “I don’t want any of that,” said the computer scientist living in St. Louis, who sees the technology as a pile of problems waiting to happen. Doyle is part of a vocal minority fighting the auto industry’s obsession with packing new technology into cars.
Call them curmudgeonly roadblocks to progress, or the last beacons of sanity on the road. Either way, they’re pushing back. Some, like Doyle, are rejecting new cars altogether, opting to stick with used models or keeping their older cars running longer than ever. The lifelong gearhead and his teenage sons maintain the family’s four cars—all bought in the 2010s—so they can stay analog as long as possible…”
We > Ultrarich
We > Ultrarich is a public-interest project operated on a noncommercial basis. It presents billionaire and trillionaire fortunes in tangible expressions and personalized comparisons. Wealth is expressed through four lenses — Daily Spending, Physical Size, Purchasing Power, and Compound Interest — and each result is rendered as a shareable color-coded card with a scale reference (when an appropriate one is available).
Designed from the outset for both human and agent reuse, We > Ultrarich has a free, no-auth, computation-only API + MCP server that answers questions like “How much is a billion (or trillion) dollars, really?” with ready-to-quote figures, sentences, and them-vs-you ratios.
It’s built for public use: every result it returns is free for any purpose, including commercial, and licensed CC BY 4.0. There’s no paywall or ads. It’s read-only, rate limited, doesn’t have accounts or request any personal data, and has only basic privacy-first analytics.
All results from our MCP server embed attribution. Learn more in our published OpenAPI Spec, README, and llms.txt files. Ready to put it to work? Our Partners page shows journalists, advocates, educators, and developers how to generate, embed, query, cite, and teach with it.
50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century
The New York Times: “As voted on by 291 crime novelists, editors, booksellers, librarians and other book lovers. See how their ballots stack up. After we at The New York Times Book Review asked hundreds of experts to help us choose the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, we realized that our list was too short.
There simply wasn’t enough room to encompass all of the great work being done across genres like fantasy, romance, horror and thrillers. As we looked to expand our 21st-century literary canon, that last category felt particularly ripe. So we sent ballots to writers of every kind of crime fiction, from legal thrillers to spy novels to cozy mysteries, as well as librarians, editors, critics and Bookstagrammers. What, we asked them, are the 10 best thrillers published since 2000?
Freida McFadden and Lee Child took part. So did S.A. Cosby, Gillian Flynn, John Grisham, Alyssa Cole, Stephen King and hundreds of others. You can too. No doubt you’ll have already read at least a few of these great thrillers and remember some of their shocking twists. But we guarantee you’ll find something new to bring with you on your next vacation, beach-bound or not…”
