Mel Brooks at 100

People sometimes call Gogol the father of Russian realism, yet in Dead Souls, especially, he explores the human condition with the unmistakable verve of a comedian—seizing on preposterousnesses hiding in plain sight, piling absurdities atop one another until the tension cannot hold, generally dazzling (and, yes, sometimes confounding) the reader with his originality and playfulness…

Tolkin happens to be the mentor who said of Brooks: “Half of Mel’s creativity comes out of fear and anger. He doesn’t perform, he screams.” This was an era in which a still-unknown Brooks would show up late to the writer’s room—a habit that drove his colleagues nuts—and then get the biggest laughs out of them anyway. He was outrageously funny, and had unbelievable range. One minute he’d be doing an impression of a rabbi, and the next he was writhing around on the floor pretending to be a harpooned whale (a Melville reference, naturally). The playwright Neil Simon, also a writer on the show, called Brooks “the most uniquely funny man I’ve ever met.”…

Mel Brooks gave us, among other comedic gifts, The Producers; Blazing Saddles; Young Frankenstein; Silent Movie; High Anxiety; Spaceballs; History of the World, Part I; and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. You could have been born at any point in time, but here you are, alive when ice cream, antibiotics, and indoor plumbing have all been invented, and Mel Brooks is turning 100. If that isn’t extraordinarily good luck, I don’t know what is.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/long-live-mel-brooks/687730. 3,450 words.

Good news from Fix the News:

Brazil has made spectacular progress on one of its most stubborn public health problems.

In 1996, almost 656,000 adolescent girls gave birth; by 2025, that had fallen to around 276,000, a 58% drop driven by three decades of free contraception. The latest shift came in 2025, when a three-year contraceptive implant called Implanon became universally free nationwide for women aged 14 to 49.

This has made a big difference. Without government assistance the implant costs around $200, almost two-thirds of the monthly minimum wage — and that’s before the doctor’s fee. Some cities, including Campinas in São Paulo, Pinhais in Paraná and Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará, have gone even further, offering implants to girls as young as 11. Despite the howls of protests from traditionalists it’s worked; between 2010 and 2024, births among girls under 14 in Fortaleza fell by more than half.

And an image from my collection:

Seven habits that lead to happiness in old age

Based on the Harvard Medical School’s eighty-year study of people over the decades:

As the participants in the Harvard Study of Adult Development have aged, researchers have categorized them with respect to happiness and health. There is a lot of variation in the population, but two distinct groups emerge at the extremes. The best off are the “happy-well,” who enjoy good physical health as well as good mental health and high life satisfaction. On the other end of the spectrum are the “sad-sick,” who are below average in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction…

Using data from the Harvard study, two researchers showed in 2001 that we can control seven big investment decisions pretty directly: smoking, drinking, body weight, exercise, emotional resilience, education, and relationships. Here’s what you can do about each of them today:

Briefly:

Don’t smoke—or if you already smoke, quit now.
Watch your drinking.
Maintain a healthy body weight.
Prioritize movement in your life by scheduling time for it every day.
Practice your coping mechanisms now. This means working consciously to avoid excessive rumination, unhealthy emotional reactions, or avoidance behavior…
Keep learning. More education leads to a more active mind in old age, and that means a longer, happier life… For example, that can mean reading serious nonfiction as part of a routine to learn more.
Cultivate stable, long-term relationships now… Find people with whom you can grow, whom you can count on, no matter what comes your way.

Each one has more detail in the article. And, “According to the Harvard study, the single most important trait of happy-well elders is healthy relationships.” 1,200 words, easy and clear reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/02/happiness-age-investment/622818/.

More good medical news via Fix the News:

Dementia risk is falling at every age. Across wealthy countries, dementia risk has dropped around 13% per decade since the late 1980s, helped by better blood pressure control, lower cholesterol, less smoking and more education. This feels surprising, because dementia cases are rising as populations age, even as age-specific risk falls. We aren’t as helpless as we think either – a 2024 Lancet commission estimated that up to 45% of dementia could be prevented or delayed by tackling 14 risk factors. Vox

And a pic from my collection:

Three ideas for lowering electricity costs

Compared with the cost of consumer goods, which have been rising rapidly over the past few years, electricity prices are climbing even faster, an estimated 13 percent nationwide since 2022…. In 1890, a kilowatt-hour was $9.48 on average nationwide in today’s dollars; by 1950, it had dropped to 41 cents and, by 1990, to 21 cents. But recently, this century-long trend has reversed in many states; utilities are failing to keep prices low.

(1: Reduce mid-day prices:) In places with a lot of solar, including California, some installations are producing more energy than is being consumed, so some power is being wasted. If people shifted more of their electricity use toward the middle of the day, the grid’s overall costs would go down, because demand would decrease in later hours, when prices are the highest.

And the easiest way to nudge people toward using that midday power is to make it cheaper—or even free… This will give people a reason to charge their electric vehicles, use heat pumps to precool or preheat their homes and water, and store more clean electricity in batteries when cheap energy is abundant.

(2: Reduce prices by removing excess construction:) Legislators could trim these profits directly by more closely aligning utilities’ guaranteed rates of return with their actual costs…. Right now, a utility could make tens of millions of dollars on, say, putting a transmission line underground, because those that operate as monopolies (that is, most of them) can charge customers for almost every dollar spent expanding the transmission-and-distribution system—plus a profit. So more spending equals more profits, a perverse incentive called “gold-plating.”

(3: Charge all taxpayers and/or fossil fuel companies for climate-change-related costs:) As wildfires rip across the West, their damages are being borne by utility customers. This is a major reason that costs in California are so high. To take one example, the 2017 Thomas Fire created $2.4 billion in liabilities for Southern California Edison, which sparked the fire; its customers (myself included) are now on the hook for two-thirds of those costs. (The company, like PG&E, posted record profits last year.)… Passing on these climate costs to ratepayers is not the only way of dealing with them. Hawaii’s legislature decided to limit the local utility’s liability for the deadly Maui fires and to use state funds to compensate survivors. Policy makers can also keep utilities from making a profit on wildfire mitigation and other grid-hardening costs, as California has recently done.

1,300 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/12/electricity-costs-climate/685123/.

Good news from Fix the News:

The disaster that wasn’t: how the capital city of Chad didn’t flood. Sometimes tracking stories of progress means reporting on disasters that didn’t happen. Take Chad: after severe flooding hit the capital, N’Djamena, in 2022, the country cleared and repaired 350 km of drains, deployed 12 mobile pumps and trained a lot a lot of municipal teams and drainage crews.

When even bigger floods happened in 2024, the city remained largely unharmed, and pumps and drainage crews kept water out of neighbourhoods hit hardest two years earlier. Sometimes preparation and policy works, people! World Bank

And a pic from my collection:

Nature photographs (2024)

The organizers of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest have once more shared a preview of some of the Highly Commended images in this year’s competition.

Note, some photos involve animal deaths. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2024/08/wildlife-photographer-year-2024-highly-commended/679646/

#12: A stoat in the snow:

From Fix the News, how Colombia ended its sixty-year civil war: https://fixthenews.com/p/how-to-end-a-war-lessons-from-nobel. 4,300 words:

Everyone thought peace was impossible. All my predecessors failed. But when we began planning very carefully, learning from other peace processes, what worked and what didn’t, we were able to create the necessary conditions for success.

And I think this is a lesson for the rest of the world. In the past 15 years, it is the only peace process in which the UN, which is now under fire, was instrumental and effective. At the beginning of this century, Colombia was considered a failed state. Eighteen years later, it was the country in Latin America with the best indicators in poverty reduction, inequality reduction, environmental conservation, and job creation. The lesson of how this can be done from a position of real difficulty is one that other countries can use. It is possible, through leadership and perseverance.

And a pic from my collection:

AI “voice cloning” scams

Americans lost more than $893 million to AI-related scams last year, including voice cloning attacks along with AI-generated phishing emails, romance scams and other hoaxes, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The article covers how AI voice scams work, and how to protect yourself:

Targets who receive these types of calls should try contacting their loved one through other means, such as via a text message, calling them on another person’s phone or reaching out to someone who would know where they are….

Families or coworkers can also establish a precautionary “code word” that can be used to verify each other’s identity. It should be a word or phrase that only a small group of people know and isn’t discoverable online.

760 words: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/29/tech/ai-voice-cloning-scams-protect-yourself.

Good news from Fix the News:

…Let’s end with a lightning round of undiluted good news from the United States:

Why overdose deaths in the US are falling (it’s not because of the war on drugs).
Florida is closing Alligator Alcatraz ((“the notorious immigration jail in the remote Florida Everglades celebrated by Donald Trump for its harsh conditions.”))
New York has put a one-year moratorium on data centres.
Minnesota just became the first state to ban prediction markets.
Massachusetts school lunch participation has risen by 22% and breakfast by 27% since the state made school meals free for all students in 2023.
Vermont is the first state to ban paraquat, a pesticide linked to Alzheimer’s.
Texas is directing US$1.4 billion in federal funding toward rural healthcare.
Also in Texas (by far the country’s largest energy market), clean energy has overtaken fossil fuels.
Virginia becomes the first southern state to pass paid family and medical leave.
Virginia has also banned the sale and manufacture of certain semi-automatic firearms, joining 11 other states.
Oklahoma becomes the 17th state to ban child marriage. There has been a sea change regarding the issue in the US over the past decade.
Since 2019, 26 states have enacted menopause laws, which run the gamut from mandating insurance coverage for treatments to workplace accommodations.
National suicide rates decrease across most racial groups and youth.

We can argue about some of these, but this is a lot of good news!

And an image from my collection:

What the 18th century can teach the 21st

Although the fact is often forgotten, the American colonists were not the only people who faced a political crisis in the late 18th century. The British people did too. And, ironically, the United States finds itself in a situation today very similar to the one Britain faced back then.

The diagnostic checklist that an attentive observer might have drawn up in Britain in the 1770s seems very familiar. The constitution was out of balance, and the executive—at this time still the King—was accumulating powers and patronage at the expense of Parliament.

…The radicals in Britain pursued two chief goals: reform to the Civil List, and the establishment of universal male suffrage. Both had the purpose of reining in corruption…. Richmond introduced a suffrage bill in 1780. Although it failed, it became the basis for political efforts that built consistently over the next 50 years…. In the end, over the course of nearly a century, there would be four Reform Acts. The last, in 1918, finally delivered universal male suffrage, as well as suffrage for many women. A decade later, the vote was extended to all women.

Of course, this is not exactly the situation we find ourselves in today. But the struggle for government of, by, and for the people was followed for decades, and ultimately was pretty successful. Interesting reading!

2,500 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/18th-century-britain-reform/687221/. If this is paywalled for you, contact me.

Good news from Fix the News (long one, this could have been a post all by itself):

The past year has brought us three Alzheimer’s breakthroughs. For 30 years, Alzheimer’s research has had one song, “Amyloid plaques are bad.” Billions of dollars, two FDA-approved drugs (lecanemab and donanemab), and yet Alzheimer’s patients have only gotten slightly less worse, a little bit slower. But within the last 12 months, three separate teams have said: what if we tried literally anything else.

Indiana University went for an enzyme called IDOL. Everyone assumed it mattered in the brain’s immune cells because that’s where most of it gets made. Wrong floor. Knock out IDOL in neurons and plaques drop, APOE (the gene variant that’s basically a lit fuse for late-onset Alzheimer’s) drops, and the receptors that keep neurons talking to each other go up.

Barcelona, Sichuan and London ignored the neuron, and went for the plumbing instead. The blood-brain barrier has a protein called LRP1 whose job is grabbing amyloid and shoving it into the bloodstream — except in Alzheimer’s, LRP1 jams. They built nanoparticles that act like a reset button. Three injections, and an elderly mouse came out behaviourally indistinguishable from a healthy one.

Bordeaux, Moncton and Inserm went one floor deeper. Forget the neurons, forget the plumbing, look at the power supply. Mitochondria — the engines inside every neuron — start failing before cells die. So the team built an artificial receptor that revs them back up, and memory came back.

Caveat: Mice. It’s always mice. But it looks like the amyloid plaque monopoly might finally be over.

And an image from my collection:

Everyday street safety tips

From Buzzfeed.com, suggestions on staying safe. Some examples:

If you’re ever forced into the trunk of someone’s vehicle, pull out every wire you can find. The driver may be pulled over for a blown taillight or license plate light.
Did you know that your thumb is a powerful thing to use if you’re attacked? You can use it to poke the eyes and throat of your opponent.
‘Head-shirt-shoes.’ I work in large crowds as a security director, and it’s easy to forget what someone looks like because we usually look at faces when something is happening. I tell my team to look for those three things…
When parking in a mall, etc., put a note in your phone with the floor number, floor name, and how many spaces to the door. Then, check your notes before going to the car.

And several more (some of which have multiple tips). Full article: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lizmrichardson/travel-city-safety-tips-street-smarts-may-2026 (1,300 words).

Good news from Fix the News:

AI mapping tools are transforming rainforest investigations. Environmental journalists are using satellite imagery and machine-learning to expose illegal activities across the Amazon. One investigation mapped 3,718 illegal gold-mining sites in Venezuela, including inside protected Indigenous territories. The technology now allows continent-wide monitoring for the Amazon and Congo basins, allowing reporters to track environmental destruction remotely in regions too dangerous or inaccessible for field reporting. Nieman Lab

And an image from my collection:

Vision Zero: Protecting pedestrians

Wikipedia:

Vision Zero is a multi-national road traffic safety project that aims to achieve a roadway system with no fatalities or serious injuries involving road traffic. It started in Sweden and was approved by their parliament in October 1997.

Two articles in The Washington Post discuss how this works and why, in the United States, it tends to not work. (Briefly, drivers and businesses oppose anything that makes driving easier and more convenient, politicians cave in, and if mere pedestrians die, tough noogies.)

How it works: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/interactive/2025/pedestrian-deaths-road-safety-solutions (look for the arrow at the right edge of the screen, or use your arrow keys):

Lower speed limits
Automated speed cameras
Medians so pedestrians have a safe place in the middle of a street
More crosswalks and on-demand crosswalk stoplights
Better lighting
Narrower lanes to slow drivers
Bus lanes between drivers and sidewalks
Speed bumps 15 yards before crosswalks

How it doesn’t work here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2025/pedestrian-deaths-vision-zero-roads (approx 3,200 words). But it does work when governments (and politicians!) commit to it:

Sweden redesigned roads, increased enforcement, put money into expanded public transit networks and required new safety features from car manufacturers. Road deaths were cut by 60 percent, and pedestrian deaths by 65 percent…

Hoboken, New Jersey, focused on removing parking close to crosswalks that made it hard to see people crossing the street. Hoboken has gone eight years without a traffic death.

Good news from Fix the News:

Elephants on farm raids might help us find new medicines. When elephants raid banana and papaya farms, they occasionally skip the fruit and eat only the stems and leaves. Why? Gabonese scientist Steeve Ngama suspected the answer was at least partially pharmaceutical. He and his team collected dung samples from farm-raiding elephants and found that those with parasitic infections were much more likely to eat plant parts with anti-parasitic properties — including banana stems and papaya trees. The implications cut two ways: if elephants are self-medicating, their foraging might help us identify new human treatments, and if stem-raiding elephants can be given medications they might leave fruit farms alone more often. British Ecological Society

And an image from my collection: Introverts!:

Coffee, dementia, and reading scientific studies

We see a lot of stories about scientific discoveries and results. In particular, we see a lot of correlation results: A and B seem to work together. But does A cause B, or B cause A, or both are caused by something else? (In particular, this has been a huge problem in Alzheimer’s research for twenty years.) Here’s an example that a neuroscientist, Richard M. Ransohoff, uses to discuss the issue:

Many people like me — scientists and coffee enthusiasts — were intrigued by a long-term study that found that those who drank multiple cups of coffee a day were less likely to develop dementia.

I’m a neuroscientist who drinks a lot of strong coffee, so that got my attention. And I would love for it to be true. But this was a correlational study, meaning it didn’t (and couldn’t) look at whether caffeine intake actually decreases dementia risk. It reinforced for me the importance of reading the actual study, rather than stories about the study, because scientific researchers are usually pretty candid about the limitations of their work.

Summary: Check out the original papers on important scientific results yourself, paying attention to:

Look at when and where the study was published. Check for signs that it appeared in a “predatory” journal, which is a journal that charges academics to publish and fails to provide peer review and other hallmarks of scientific legitimacy. Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to do research on the research.

Take some time to really read. Scientific studies are not things you can skim or scroll through on your phone. In time, you will be able to get the gist of a study by reading the abstract — but not at first.

Introduction. This tells you what knowledge gaps the researchers were trying to fill.

Skip the methods and statistical analyses. These are highly technical and less useful for laypeople.

Go to the discussion section. That’s where the authors will describe what they found and what they think it means.

Read the limitations section. It’s important, because scientists and their academic editors care deeply about their work not being misunderstood or exaggerated.

Many of the comments to the article disagree with skipping the methods and statistical analyses. A mere 830 words: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/28/coffee-dementia-why-research-studies-are-worth-reading-yourself/. The coffee/dementia study is linked to in the article but is paywalled; this link has the full article.

Good news from Fix the News:

We have the first national-level evidence that the malaria vaccines are working. With the exception of COVID-19, malaria vaccines have seen the fastest rollout in history; they are now in routine use across 25 African countries. Anecdotal data has suggested substantial reductions in severe cases and hospital admissions – but now we have the first official figures, from Burkina Faso, one of the world’s ten highest burden countries. Between 2024 and 2025 malaria cases fell by 32% and malaria‑related deaths by 44%. That’s in a single year.

And an image from my collection:

Butts Arrested in Boob Murder Case

There has been a development in a year-old murder case in Potter Township, Pa. The victim: Samuel S. Boob, 29. The alleged getaway driver has been arrested, Kermit Butts, 26.

I first found this on the ThisIsTrue weekly email, and here’s a link to the specific article: https://thisistrue.com/family-feud/. Details about the case were difficult to find in any well-known news site, but maybe try this: https://thecinemaholic.com/samuel-boob-murder-where-are-mirinda-boob-and-ronald-heichel-now/ (730 words).

Good news from Fix the News:

One-shot gene therapy is helping the deaf hear. The OTOF gene makes otoferlin, a protein the inner ear needs to send sound to the brain. Those born without this gene are deaf… but maybe only temporarily. Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute injected ten OTOF-deaf people with a working copy of the otoferlin-making gene, delivered straight into the cochlea via synthetic virus.

The hearing of all ten improved drastically: on average, the quietest sound they could hear dropped from 106 decibels to 52, roughly the difference between a chainsaw and normal conversation. Children responded fastest; one seven-year-old was chatting with her mother four months after therapy. The treatment has shown no adverse side effects, so the Karolinska team is now looking to try the same setup on different deafness genes. ScienceDaily

And an image from my collection: