Hi!

I’m going to ask you to do me a quick favor today:

Forward this email to a friend. Tell them how much you enjoy my newsletter and ask them if they could give it a try too because you think they’ll like it. They can sign up at https://nowiknow.com/

Thanks!

Oh, you want to know why I’m asking? No problem. 😀

A year or so ago, I moved from Mailchimp to beehiiv. I outlined the reasons why, here, but there’s one thing I didn’t talk about much: churning.

If you run an email newsletter — and I obviously do! — there’s a cost involved: you need a company, in this case, beehiiv, to send the emails to everyone for you. (No, you can’t just dump a bunch of email addresses into Outlook or Gmail and hit send, for a lot of reasons.) Those businesses almost always charge you a fee based on the number of people you send emails to. So if people aren’t opening your emails, you want to get them off your email list. They won’t notice anyway, and you don’t want to pay for the privilege of not being read.

Further, spam filters are pretty smart, and they can kind of, sort of tell if newsletters are legit or not by estimating what percentage of recipients open your email. If you’re sending to a lot of people who no longer open them, that’s bad — it makes it less likely that the people who would want to open your emails actually get them. Those are two very good reasons for me to want to get people who aren’t reading off the Now I Know list.

But that’s easier said than done, and while I was using Mailchimp, I didn’t bother. The good news is that I had a comically high number of subscribers, well over 100,000 and sometimes as high as 150,000. The bad news is that I was paying extra for that vanity number and only about 25% were opening the emails. Toward the end of my time on Mailchimp, that became a double problem — the cost to send you this newsletter was increasingly high and I was starting to see issues with delivery. So when I switched to beehiiv, I did two things: first, I purged the list of a lot of people who never opened, and second, I built an automation that asks you to confirm if you’re still interested in reading if you don’t open any emails after a while. (It’s very good at cleaning out bots, by the way.) Today’s email will go to just over 60,000 people and between half and two-thirds will open it within a week. Those numbers are really great, and I’m very happy about them.

But — I really liked that 100,000 number. And I’d like to hit it again someday. That’s where you come in. I don’t know 40,000 people, but each of you knows at least two or three, right? So, help me get back to the six-digit club, if you could. Thanks!

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: How Homer Simpson’s Comical Gluttony Saved Lives: A two-second, passing reference to the Heimlich Maneuver is all it took!

Tuesday: A Whopper of a Way to Pay For Your Wedding: Burger, meet King.

Wednesday: The Man With the Golden Arm: James Harrison, blood donor extraordinaire.

Thursday: The Jigsaw Puzzles Worth Their Weight in Gold?: 1,000 pieces, $10,000 dollars?!

Long Reads and Other Things

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

1) “‘Manly Man Marries Fertile Woman’: The headline that never happened” (North Tama Telegraph, six minutes, August 2023). My bonus fact for Tuesday’s email was going to be about a fun headline from Iowa, which has a town named “Manly” and a woman named “Fertile,” and when a boy from the former met a girl from the latter, we ended up with a great headline: “Manly Man Marries Fertile Woman.” Turns out, the headline never happened, despite a persistent myth in the world of Iowa trivia. This is the story behind that myth.

2) “History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp” (Ex Urbe, 11 minutes, February 2025). The Medicis, a notable family in Renaissance-era Italy, had a hereditary medical condition that caused severe joint pain and mobility issues. As a result, they built what could be considered one of history’s first ramped walkways. Here’s a deep dive into the history and architecture.

3) “Curses! A Swearing Expert Mulls the State of Profanity.” (New York Times/gift link, five minutes, February 2025). The subhead: “Timothy Jay, a scholar in the science of swearing, has a few choice words about why we curse and how to cut back (if you want to).”

Have a great weekend!

Dan