Environment

D.C. is flushing money down the toilet, but not the way you think

The effort to avoid puns in this story has me pooped.

It wouldn't be news to report that a government is flushing money down the toilet. What if we told you this time nobody's being metaphorical? For the past decade, D.C. Water has been running the strangest side hustle in municipal government, and it involves whatever you did in the bathroom this morning.

Most treatment plants clean the water and pay to haul the leftover solids somewhere else, which costs millions and burns diesel by the truckload. D.C. Water decided that was insane and figured it would sell the stuff instead. But who, exactly, is buying... that? Enter Cambi, a Norwegian company that worked out how to turn that waste into clean-burning biogas, nutrient-rich fertilizer, and most importantly, cold hard cash.

Getting set up to use the system wasn’t cheap, but as Erik Barnes reports, D.C. Water is on pace to break even in just 12 years, eight years faster than they’d planned, having already moved 400,000 tons of the stuff. The product even has an official name, coined by a guy named Joseph Jenkins, and we regret to inform you it's perfect.

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A hairstylist did what the archaeologists couldn't

The Roman mystery scholars botched for centuries, solved in a salon.

For centuries, classicists looked at those gravity-defying updos on Roman busts and made a reasonable call: no real hair could hold that shape, so the sculptures must show wigs. The theory stood for decades, largely because nobody studying it had ever spent a day doing hair.

Janet Stephens had. A Baltimore hairstylist with no archaeology degree, she circled a collection of Roman busts at a Maryland museum and started wondering something no credentialed expert seemed to: how would you actually build that? As Heather Wake reports, the answer had been sitting in the ancient texts the whole time, buried under a single Latin word everyone had been translating wrong.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared a list of 20 skills that Boomers are still proud to have.

Which “outdated” skill are GOOD readers still quietly using? Over 45% of you are still taking notes in lovely, flowing cursive! I’m jealous; I learned to type too young, and my handwriting is a comically catastrophic scrawl.

• Reading an actual paper map (22.3%)

• Remembering phone numbers by heart (4.1%)

• Cursive, and I'm not apologizing for it (45.7%)

• Sewing a button back on like it's nothing (20.3%)

I received dozens of comments on this poll admonishing me for not allowing you to pick more than one answer. I’m sorry! I just write the polls, not the code. It doesn’t let me offer that, but I hear you. Many, maybe most of you would have chosen “All of the above” if I’d offered it. You’re a multi-talented bunch, and I love it.

Ideas

The “butler trick” that makes self-discipline feel less like punishment

It’s about doing something for someone you are very close to.

Self-discipline is a rough thing to master. We say we'll hit the gym every day this week and miss on Wednesday, and then what's even the point on Thursday because we've botched the goal and I can't pull it off now and so it's back to the couch and the Cheez-Its for me... sorry. Sorry! Apparently, this is triggering for me... But, as Mark Wales reports in this story, maybe we've been thinking about self-discipline all wrong. Maybe it isn’t something we do to ourselves, but for someone else.

That “someone else” is Future You, who is apparently out here begging for a little basic respect. Retired U.S. Navy chief Chase Hughes shares a mental switch he calls the “butler” trick: treat your future self like a VIP you’re looking after today. Not a drill sergeant you’re failing. Not a judge keeping score. A person you’re quietly helping.

Hughes’ definition of discipline is simple and annoyingly logical: it’s prioritizing what Future You needs over what Present You wants. But the trick is how you feel about it. Instead of dreading discipline like it’s a scolding, you reframe it as service.

On July 23, 1904, at the sweltering St. Louis World's Fair, a vendor named Charles Menches filled a rolled pastry with two scoops of ice cream and invented the ice cream cone. According to some accounts, anyway. According to other accounts, it was Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian concessionaire who rolled his waffle-like zalabia into a cornucopia when a neighboring ice cream stand ran out of dishes. Also in the running: Abe Doumar, the Kabbaz brothers, Arnold Fornachou, and David Avayou, all of whom sold treats at the very same fair.

Complicating everything is Italo Marchiony, a New York pushcart vendor who had patented an edible-cup mold a full year earlier and claimed he'd been serving them since 1896. His version, though, was more cup than cone, so the pointy classic remains gloriously unclaimed.

Here's what nobody disputes: the 1904 fair made the cone famous, and America never looked back. Great ideas have many parents, especially the delicious ones. 

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