Hi!

If you read last Friday’s newsletter, you already know what today’s is about: the Now I Know Reader Survey! I haven’t done one of these since January 2019, so I’m long overdue to get to know you all better. I think you’ll find it fun: many of the questions are silly.

Take the survey by clicking here.

Thank you to everyone who sent in suggested questions — I took a lot of them but unfortunately, didn’t have room for all of them. There are 19 questions on the survey (if I counted right), and most of them are very short, so it shouldn’t take you more than five minutes. I’ll share all the results here next week or the week after.

I don’t want to say too much about the survey before you get there, but it is wholly anonymous (not that it would matter — do you really not want people knowing who your favorite fictional quartet is?) and it’s 100% politics free unless you think a person’s leftover pizza habits are somehow political. A lot of the “serious” questions will help me grow the newsletter going forward, so please answer them honestly; if you want to lie about your efforts to storm a castle, that’s fine.

Enjoy, and if you need that link again: take the survey by clicking here.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: A Mountainous Problem With Instant Noodles: Don’t spill your broth!

Tuesday: The Pencil That Told Kids To Do Something They Shouldn’t: Directions matter when sharpeners are in use.

Wednesday: The Dirty Lyric Snuck Onto The Radio: Coincidentally, I played poker last night. No dirty lyrics were involved.

Thursday: Alone in the Ocean: The whale with no friends.

Long Reads and Other Things

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

1) “The Worm Charmers” (Oxford American, 21 minutes, June 2024). Here’s the opening paragraph:

A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.

2) “Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia” (Wired, 22 minutes, July 2024). The subhead doesn’t do this justice, but I’ll share it anyway: “She came to the US with a dream. Using platforms like Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash, she built a business empire up from nothing. There was just one problem.” The “problem” is a doozy. Sorry if this is stuck behind a paywall for you; Wired’s is fickle.

3) “Grab Them. Then Stump Them.” (New York Times, 7 minutes, June 2024). If you’ve taken the Now I Know Reader Survey, this will mean more to you than otherwise!

Have a great weekend!

Dan