Voices

A 7-year-old's stutter disappears the second the music starts

The voice is great, the honesty is amazing.

Here's the thing about social media: you get to pick what people see. Lando, who's seven, can sing. Beautifully, easily, the kind of voice that makes a feed stop scrolling. That alone would've been enough. A clean little corner of the internet where a kid is good at a thing.

Instead, he posts the other videos too. The ones in which his stutter shows. Where words stall, restart, get stuck halfway out. The ones a lot of kids would beg their parents not to film, let alone publish.

As Mark Wales writes, Lando's family calls it the opposite of a highlight reel. No edits, no hiding the hard parts, no curated arc from struggle to triumph. Just a kid showing up as he actually is, and an internet that, for once, is showing up right back.

50,000 followers and counting. A local news segment on the way. And a comment section that reads less like an audience and more like a team.

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Work

Five dog breeds that would absolutely run your company better than your boss

Your next leadership coach has four legs and a favorite tennis ball.

I've been accused of having Golden Retriever energy and... you know... fair. So when Professor Aditya Simha published Learning Leadership from Dogs, a book arguing that five specific breeds embody the exact traits we beg executives to develop, I felt seen.

Simha's lineup includes the otterhound (joie de vivre), the Dutch shepherd (courage, runs toward danger, would absolutely die for the team), and the border collie, who is so smart it becomes a problem. Leave a border collie unstimulated for an afternoon, and it will start herding your children, your shadows, or your laundry. Tell me you haven't worked with this person.

Two more breeds round out the management team, including one for kindness and one for resilience. I’m not telling you which. Unless you’ve got a treat.

I think you should be proud of me! I resisted the urge to AI-generate an all-dogs board meeting!

How far was it paid forward?

Yesterday, we shared a bit of research about the unexpected ways foreign aid gets paid forward.

Paying it forward made me think of those occasional moments at coffee shops when some nice person pays for the person behind them in line, and then it goes on and on.

So, what was the longest "pay it forward" streak ever recorded at a Starbucks drive-thru? I accidentally set this up as a poll, but it was meant to be a quiz. The correct answer? 458 cars in St. Petersburg, Florida, August 2014. That’s the longest confirmed streak. The most popular answer underestimated people’s generosity, and I love that.

• 73 cars (unfortunately starting just before closing time) (21.7%)

• 211 cars (broken by a guy who only had a $5 on hand) (36.1%)

• 458 cars (one Florida morning that turned into an 11-hour shift) (30.1%) ✅

• 612 cars (ended by a Honda Odyssey full of soccer kids) (12.0%)

Well-being

More than half of Americans are worried about sunscreen, but only a third actually know how it works

The bottle in your beach bag is having a PR crisis.

If my name didn't spoil the surprise already, I'm Irish. I turn my monitor brightness down to avoid sunburns. This research on sunscreen grabbed my full and undivided attention in the same way the first inevitable burn of summer is threatening to do any day now.

Recently, the Melanoma Research Alliance polled 2,000 adults on sunscreen. 59% of Americans are worried about what's in sunscreen, and only about a third can explain how it works. More than 80% know long hours in the sun raise melanoma risk. Roughly a quarter say they rarely or never wear it anyway. Half have seen claims online that the ingredients might be harmful. Nearly four in ten don't believe the stuff is safe or effective.

So how does the magic goop actually work? According to this story by Tiffany Miller, it does one of two very unglamorous jobs. The FDA holds it to a stricter standard than Europe does, which is part of why the bottle in your beach bag looks the way it looks. The MRA report walks through the mechanism, the misinformation, and a regulatory shift that could expand what shows up on US shelves.

On May 8, 1886, an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton hauled a jug of caramel-colored syrup down Peachtree Street to Jacobs' Pharmacy, where the soda jerk mixed it with carbonated water and sold the first glass of Coca-Cola for a nickel. The customer pronounced it "excellent." Nine people a day agreed during that first year. Pemberton, a Confederate veteran nursing a morphine addiction picked up from a Civil War saber wound, had originally cooked up the recipe as a non-alcoholic pivot after Atlanta passed prohibition. A health tonic, he insisted. Cures headaches, melancholy, hysteria, and at least a dozen other afflictions of "highly-strung" Southern women.

The name and that famous loopy script? Both came from Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, who reckoned two Cs would look nice on a sign.

Pemberton died broke in 1888 without seeing any of it pay off. His obituary in the Atlanta Constitution didn't even mention Coca-Cola. Fellow pharmacist Asa Candler scooped up the formula for $2,300 (today, around $80,000) and proceeded to build the most recognized brand on earth out of a fountain drink almost nobody bought.

Today, the secret formula sits in a vault at the World of Coca-Cola museum, and the company sells roughly two billion servings a day. Not bad for nine glasses.

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Historians will one day come to believe that the entire internet existed simply to create a place for this clip to exist.

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