Hi!

I did something on Tuesday I’ve never done before — I sent the same email twice. Well, that’s not 100% true — it wasn’t exactly the same email. The first one sent was missing a sentence and a half, which kind of messed up the entire story, so I fixed it and resent an hour or so later. It’s not the first time I’ve made a mistake like this, but it’s the first time I did the double send, and I’d love to hear your feedback as to whether that was the right move.

The error was a simple copy-paste problem — for some reason, when I take articles from my archives and republish them, occasionally, the first few lines don’t copy over. (I have no idea why.) Usually I catch this before publishing, but I didn’t this time. It’s not the first time I’ve made the mistake, and I’ve always let it go. When I first started Now I Know in 2010, the best practice was to not send a second email — it just annoyed people and prompted unsubscribes.

But I think things have changed since. I don’t know why I feel this way — maybe because I’m a reader of other newsletters and have seen other corrections come through? — but in any event, I feel like that’s the way to go from here on out. I ‘ll very rarely, if ever, send an “oops” email because I won’t fix small mistakes like that extra space in the “I’ll” contraction above. But if it impacts the story beyond what I can address in a Friday wrap-up like this one, my inclination now is to fix and resend.

Would love your thoughts either way.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: The Baseball Steroid Testing Loophole of 2003: Not getting tested is the same as being guilty, and that’s a good thing?

Tuesday: When Christopher Columbus Made the Moon Disappear: This goes to the good version of the story.

Wednesday: The Eagles Versus the All-Seeing Eyes: I’ve never been satisfied with the explanations as to why the Great Eagles don’t help Frodo, by the way.

Thursday: A Sly Reason to Do a Movie: This isn’t about The Golden Girls but it does feature Estelle Getty, so I’ll take the opportunity to point out that The Golden Girls is a massively underrated TV show.

Long Reads and Other Things

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

1) “Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea” (The Guardian, 20 minutes, June 2026). This isn’t The Little Mermaid.

2) “You and Me and QVC” (Longreads, 14 minutes, July 2026). A friendship formed over retail-over-TV shopping.

3) “McDonald’s Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I’ll Never Stop Eating There” (Wired, 7 minutes, August 2026). The subhead: “I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program and received an extensive, personalized report that algorithmically predicts my next purchase.” I had no idea McDonald’s had this much data.

Have a great weekend!

Dan