Hi!

Happy Valentine’s Day — and also, happy Friday. It’s been a busy week for me and I don’t have much, if anything, to share in this space this week. (I haven’t even read any reader emails yet… oy.) So I’m going to keep this one short and jump right into the Week in Review in a moment.

One quick programming note, though: Monday is George Washington’s Birthday/Presidents’ Day here in the U.S., and as is my usual practice, I’m taking it off. So there won’t be a Now I Know in your inbox on Monday, but I’ll be back on Tuesday with something new and hopefully fun!

Have a great long weekend and maybe use some of the time to check out one or two (or all three?) of this week’s longreads, shared at the end of this email. See you Tuesday!

Monday: How To Plant Nearly 1,000 Trees an Hour: A world record. And also a strange job.

Tuesday: When Naptime Conflicts With Your Civic Duty?: Why Peter Pan couldn’t get called for jury duty?

Wednesday: The Loophole That Gets You Paid for Riding a Bike: A scam, of sorts.

Thursday: Inked Red Handed: A tattoo gets a man in trouble.

Long Reads and Other Things

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

1) “Stone Skipping Is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It.” (Outside Magazine, 22 minutes, September 2022). I enjoy skipping stones, so this was a fun read.

2) “Little Quebec Was Built to Escape Winter. Now It’s Melting Away” (The Walrus, 11 minutes, January 2025). I live in the suburbs of New York City and it’s cold in February. Many people in the older generation here spend the winter months in Florida as a result. It never occurred to me that many Canadians do the same. Here’s one story about a tiny enclave of French speakers from Quebec who created a wintertime community in Florida, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to last.

3) ”Are You Lonely? Adopt a New Family on Facebook Today” (Wired, 25 minutes. January 2025). The subhead is bittersweet: “A goat farmer in rural Minnesota, estranged from her biological children, finds new purpose as a surrogate grandparent.”

Have a great weekend!

Dan