Well-being

The secret to lifelong friendship is having absolutely nothing to show for it

A Harvard happiness expert's case for the friends who serve zero purpose.

According to Dr. Arthur Brooks, your best friend is useless. Or rather, the best friendships are built on uselessness, and if yours aren't, you might be doing it wrong.

Brooks, who has spent his career studying what actually makes people happy*, traces this idea back to Aristotle, who sorted friendships into three tiers. First, the transactional ones: coworkers, acquaintances, the guy you network with at conferences. Fine, but hollow. Then there are the friendships built on admiration, the people you orbit because they're funny or brilliant or magnetic. Better, but fragile. The moment that shine fades, so does the relationship.

The third type is the one that sticks. In his piece for GOOD, Mark Wales explains that Brooks calls it the "useless" friendship, one with no agenda, no utility, no end goal. What holds it together isn't what either person brings to the table. It's a third thing you both love: a team, a trail, a terrible TV show, a shared obsession that would bore everyone else at the party.

If you don’t like taking friendship advice from long-dead Greek philosophers, take heart, there are at least three major studies that back this up!

* - Nice work if you can get it!

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Health

A family feud over Reese's cups exposes something food companies never want you to Google

The Easter candy in your basket might not be what it used to be.

If I asked you to name the two main ingredients in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, you'd say peanut butter and chocolate. Obviously. You'd say it with the confidence of someone who has eaten approximately 400 of them. But here's something that will ruin your day just a little: you’d be wrong. Not metaphorically wrong. Legally, FDA-standardly, the-ingredients-list-will-not-say-chocolate wrong. At least for some of the recent offerings.

Brad Reese, grandson of the man who literally invented the cup, published an open letter accusing Hershey of quietly swapping real chocolate and peanut butter for cheaper stand-ins in some seasonal products. Think "chocolate candy" and "peanut butter creme," close enough to fool you at first bite, but not the real thing by any legal definition. Hershey's response was essentially: we make adjustments to innovate for fans. Which is a very corporate way of saying ‘yeah… we did that’.

Food professor Jonathan Deutsch explains this isn't a scandal so much as a tradition, one with a name, a playbook, and an entire food science toolkit built around making sure you never notice. Deutsch spent his early career in corporate R&D literally formulating cost reductions for beloved products, so his take is less outrage and more: welcome to the snack industry, apparently it has always been this way.

Previous Results

On Friday, we shared an amazing image from the ongoing Artemis 2 mission, and I asked you how the mission got its name. I love that so many of you got this right! Artemis is the goddess of the moon and Apollo's twin sister. Brilliant! Man, NASA knows how to name things.

• Artemis was the callsign of the Apollo 11 command module (11.6%)

• Artemis is the goddess of the moon and Apollo's twin sister (66.4%)

• The name was chosen in a controversial public vote (7.5%)

• It is a NASA acronym: Accelerated Return To Earth-Moon Infrastructure System (14.4%)

Ideas

Science says you're probably more generous than you think

The data on American giving will surprise you, especially the part about who gives the most.

A new peer-reviewed study has a counterintuitive message for anyone convinced that America's generosity is drying up: it isn't. About 82% of Americans say they give to people in need or charitable causes. Even the least active group in the study still donates at a 77% rate. The country is not, it turns out, as stingy as the doom scroll might suggest.

What the research does find is that not all givers are the same. George E. Mitchell, a professor of nonprofit and philanthropy research, describes how a team of scholars analyzed data from a national survey of 2,569 U.S. adults and identified five distinct generosity profiles. There's the "change-minded hopeful" (42% of Americans) who genuinely want to help but are constrained by income. The "flexible moderate" who'll pitch in when the moment presents itself. The "values-driven skeptic" who gives money but worries charities will waste it. The "frustrated activist" who'd rather march than donate. And then there's the "status seeker," the most generous group of all, who gives a lot, volunteers often, and yes, appreciates being recognized for it.

The researchers aren't judging any of them. Their point is that nonprofits trying to unlock more generosity might do better if they stopped treating all donors like the same person. A frustrated activist doesn't need a gala invite. A skeptic needs receipts.

On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games returned to life in Athens, Greece, after sitting dormant for roughly 1,500 years. Roman Emperor Theodosius I had banned the ancient Games in 393 AD, deeming them a pagan spectacle. It took one passionate French baron, Pierre de Coubertin, to dust them off and convince the world they still mattered. King Georgios I opened the Athens Games before a crowd of 60,000 people, with 241 athletes from 14 nations competing across 43 events, most of them wearing their national street clothes.

The miracle wasn't just that the Games came back. It's that they kept growing into the most unifying sporting ritual on the planet, a rare thing where the world genuinely shows up together.

Which brings us to 2028. Los Angeles is about to host for the third time, following the legendary 1932 and 1984 Games, the latter of which actually turned a profit. LA earned a reputation as the city that figured out the Olympics. Whether that holds is a question the ticketing rollout is already stress-testing. Error messages, a 24-percent service fee that appears like a magic trick at checkout, and a lottery system leaving thousands of locals staring at their inboxes? Not exactly the stuff of opening ceremony dreams. But the Games themselves? Still worth every chaotic click.

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💬 From the group text…

The whole tween-age “6 7” craze is a mystery to me, as it should be. It’s for the kiddies! But it is still a delight to see their faces as this moment comes into being.

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