Hi!

I’m taking tomorrow off for the 4th of July, so today’s Weekender is hitting your inbox a day early. And I don’t have anything specific to share about the week that was, so instead, here are some neat things I discovered about America’s greatest Fourth of July tradition: fireworks.

• The Science of Fireworks, courtesy of the Ontario Science Centre. (I realize the irony of choosing a non-US source for this story.) Wonder how fireworks work? This’ll help.
• The Co-Opting Of Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’, via NPR’s “All Things Considered.” As Axios explains, the 1812 Overture is commonly paired with American fireworks shows — which is weird, because the song is Russian, not American. In 2012, NPR talked about this in the 4-minute segment linked above. For more of that history, here’s a 1998 article in the New York Times — the tradition, it seems, only dates back to the 1970s.
• The Evolution of Fireworks, dating back to the year 200, via Smithsonian. They ask a great set of questions, including “although we’ve been lighting fireworks for the last 2000 years or so, modern fireworks were only invented in the 1830s — so, what were they like before then?”
• The economics of fireworks, via Freakonomics’ podcast. I haven’t listened to this yet but I’m told it’s interesting.
• Also via NPR, why it’s really hard to make vibrant blue fireworks. This is from 2013, but if memory serves, it’s still pretty difficult.

Whatever you do this weekend — fireworks or otherwise — I hope it’s fun!

The Now I Know Week In Review

Last Friday: In my Weekender about the New York Times’ Top 100 Movies of the Century (So Far), I had the wrong link to the Times’ list. (Oops. 😳) Here’s the right list.

Monday: This Airport SUX: An airport with an unfortunate three-letter designation.

Tuesday: The Bovine Unity of Milk and Glue?: I didn’t realize, when writing this, that Elmer’s Glue was originally made from casein, a milk byproduct. Now this marriage (literally) makes a lot more sense! Thank you to all the readers who wrote in to share this fact.

Wednesday: Born on the Second of July… or August: Why yesterday may have been America’s Independence Day.

From the Archives: Celebrating Independence with Flying Cars: Don’t like fireworks? This Alaska town can’t use them anyway — sunset isn’t until around midnight — so they came up with a different way of celebrating.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “‘By Chance, Did You Win a Cottage in Ireland?’” (New York Times/gift link, 8 minutes, June 2025). A lot of you shared this with me, and I’m thrilled. A few weeks ago, I shared this story about a woman in Ireland who was, effectively, raffling off her home at the price of roughly $7 per ticket. This is the story of the winner — who actually paid less than that, at least on a per-ticket basis. Per the Times, “Tickets cost five British pounds apiece, and the site was promoting a buy-two-get-one-free offer. On a whim, Ms. Spangler entered, paying $12.67 for three tickets.” And for that, she got a house on 1.75 acres — that’s about 6,000 square feet of land per penny. Pretty good!

2) “Conversations with a Hit Man” (The Atavist, 52 minutes, June 2025). The subhead: “A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then they started talking about a different case altogether.” The Atavist does great work, and this is no exception.

3) “AI is ruining houseplant communities online” (The Verge, 5 minutes, June 2025). The headline was so surprising to me, I couldn’t help but read the article, and it’s a good reminder that just because an AI chatbot dreams it up doesn’t mean it’s real — hardly. Trust, to a degree, but always verify!

Have a great weekend!

Dan